How do we know about Jesus of Nazareth? What can we say for sure about him?
Our basic knowledge of Jesus comes from the four Gospels, written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and Acts of the Apostles and a little from the letters of St Paul.
Our basic knowledge of Jesus comes from the four Gospels, written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and Acts of the Apostles and a little from the letters of St Paul.
There are a few other gospels like the Gospel of Thomas which tell of Jesus, but they were not accepted as reliable by the people who put the Bible together about 100 years after the death of Jesus.
Apart from the Christian New Testament, Jesus is mentioned in the writings of a Jewish historian called Josephus and in the Muslim Koran.
We can be sure that Jesus was a real human being and not just a storybook character like Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy because there were so many people following him and telling stories of his life so soon after he died.
At the time of Jesus, writing was not as common as it is today. Only educated people could write, not working people. There were no books as we know them, no TV or radio, CD’s or tape recorders.
All stories had to be kept in the mind. One person would tell them to another; mothers and fathers would tell stories to their children, stories of their own family history, stories of important people in the country’s history. The story of Jesus was told.
Eventually, quite a few years after Jesus died, people thought it would be good to get the story of his life down on paper (they used scrolls). If they didn’t important things about Jesus might be forgotten, or people might start inventing stories of the life of Jesus or adding to the stories to ‘improve’ them. The gospel of Thomas has a story of Jesus when he was a boy making birds out of clay and then breathing life into them. The people who put the New Testament together thought some of these stories were probably not true, so this gospel got left out.
Mark wrote the first and shortest Gospel we have.
Then Luke set to write the history down for someone he knew called Theophilus. (The name Theophilus, means ‘a person who loves God’)
John, who was the last to write a gospel, said that he only put in a part of what Jesus said and did because if he wrote everything he didn’t think the world would be big enough to hold all the books it would need!
John knew that Matthew, Mark and Luke had written the story of Jesus before him, so he only put in the stories he felt were important or that the others had left out.
If we take all the gospels together we can certainly say that Jesus was a great teacher who had large numbers of people following him at times. He had 12 special helpers we call Apostles. He went around Galilee and the Jerusalem area teaching, curing people of sickness, forgiving sins, feeding the hungry. He was eventually taken prisoner by the High Priest and put to death on a cross by the Roman Authorities. After three days he was seen again by his followers.
Working it out
1. Have you ever told a story about what happened to you and ’embroidered’ it a bit to make it sound better?
2. What do we call the section of the Bible devoted to Jesus Christ?
3. How many books are there in the New Testament?
4. Go to www.google.com and search for ‘bible translations online’ – how many different translations of the Bible can you find? Find the Christmas story (Luke 2:1-20) in two translations how does it vary – are the words different? (You might try the Good News Bible TEV and Jerusalem or New Revised Standard Version and King James Version)
