This post was adapted from Who Is Jesus? by Greg Gilbert.
What Do You Think?
Who do you think Jesus is?
Maybe you’ve never really given it much thought. In a way, that’s entirely understandable. After all, we’re talking about a man who was born in the first century into an obscure Jewish carpenter’s family. He never held any political office, never ruled any nation, never commanded any armies. He never even met a Roman emperor. Instead, for three-and-a-half years this man Jesus simply taught people about ethics and spirituality, he read and explained the Jewish Scriptures to Jewish people, and if the eyewitness accounts of his life are to be believed at all, he also did some pretty out-of-the-ordinary things.
But then again, Jesus also ran bitterly afoul of the authorities of his day, and not long after he started his public ministry, he wound up being executed on a cross by one of Rome’s many provincial governors—a kind of imperial middle manager for “the people who had the real power.”
On top of that, all this happened some 2,000 years ago. So why are we still talking about him? Why is this man Jesus so … inescapable?
Give Jesus a Chance
Regardless of what you personally think about him, surely we can agree that Jesus is a towering figure in the history of the world. One respected historian put Jesus’ influence like this: “If it were possible, with some sort of super-magnet, to pull up out of that history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how much would be left?” That’s a good question, and the answer is probably, “Not much!”
“But it’s not just that Jesus is inescapable in some distant, historical kind of way. He’s also inescapable in a much closer way than that. Think about it: You probably have at least one or two acquaintances who would say that they are Christians. Maybe they even go to church regularly and sing songs about—or even to—Jesus. If you press them on it, they might even say that they have a relationship with him, and that their lives in one way or another are organized around him.
Not only that, but your city is likely dotted with “church buildings of various kinds.” Some of those buildings probably have thriving communities of Christians who gather in them on Sundays. Others probably aren’t even churches at all anymore. But the point is that everywhere you look, if you’re paying attention, you’ll see reminders of this one particular man who lived about two millennia ago. And all of it presses the question on us: Who is he?
It’s not an easy question to answer, mainly because we haven’t managed to come to any society-wide consensus about who Jesus really was … or is. True, very few people doubt his existence anymore. The basic facts of his life—where and when he lived, how he died—are all pretty well agreed upon. But there’s still massive disagreement, even among people who call themselves Christians, about the significance of his life and death. Was he a prophet? A teacher? Something entirely different? Was he the Son of God, or just an unusually gifted man? And for that matter, who did he think he was? His death at the hands of the Romans—was that part of the plan all along, or did he just get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time? And then there’s the biggest question of all: After he was executed, did Jesus stay dead like the rest of us do, or did he … not?
