Who was Jesus?

Matthew and Luke place the birth in Bethlehem of Judah, in the days of king Herod. But the place he grew up in, and was known by, is another: Nazareth, a village in Galilee that the Old Testament never mentions once. The town’s reputation surfaces in the fourth Gospel, in Nathanael’s first reaction to hearing the name — and it is recorded without retouching.

The household has names. His mother is called Mary; Joseph appears as her husband and is the one who gives the boy his name, which under the legal practice of the time established him as father. When Jesus returns to Nazareth as an adult, the neighbours identify him by the whole family: they name James, Joseph, Jude and Simon, and mention sisters as well, without naming them. How that kinship is to be understood is the point at which Catholics and Protestants read differently, and both readings are set out at the foot of this page, side by side.

There is a trade, too. Mark calls Jesus himself the carpenter; Matthew, in the parallel scene, calls him the son of a workman. The two renderings sit in the same edition, and together they show the reach of the single Greek word behind them: it names the building craftsman in general — work in wood and in stone — and not only the joiner at his bench.

Between childhood and the Jordan, the text is sparing. Luke keeps one episode from when Jesus was twelve, in Jerusalem, during Passover, and then the return to Nazareth. From the end of that chapter to the start of the public ministry, the Gospels tell us nothing.

All four Gospels begin Jesus’ public ministry at the same point: the baptism administered by John, in the river Jordan. That is an unusual thing for a piece of propaganda to include, because the scene calls for explanation — and Matthew records John’s own objection before telling it.

Mark narrates the episode in three verses, with no scene-setting: he comes from Nazareth of Galilee, he is baptized, and on coming up from the water he sees the heavens opened. Luke adds the one indication of age the New Testament gives for this moment, and gives it carefully: about thirty years.

After the river comes the wilderness, and after the wilderness the preaching in Galilee begins. Mark sums up its content in a short sentence placed right at the opening of his book: the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has drawn near.

The central subject of Jesus’ preaching, in the first three Gospels, is not himself: it is the kingdom of God. He announces it as something that has come near rather than as a distant promise, and almost everything he teaches is organised around it.

His preferred form is the parable. Mark goes so far as to record that he did not speak to the crowds without a parable, and that he explained everything privately to the disciples — the format is chosen, then, and not an accident of style. These are stories of field, house, work and money, addressed to people who lived by those things.

The content has a declared address. In Luke’s version of the beatitudes, Jesus lifts up his eyes to the disciples and speaks in the second person, about the poor, those who are hungry now and those who are weeping now. It is not a description of virtues: it is a list of situations.

And there is the programme, which Luke places at the very start of the public ministry. In Nazareth, on a Sabbath, Jesus rises to read, is handed the book of Isaiah, reads a passage and returns it. Then he sits — the posture of one about to teach — and says that this scripture has been fulfilled in their hearing, on this day. The passage is among the main ones, at the foot of this page.

The Gospels narrate healings, deliverances and signs in great number, and present them less as displays of power than as the announced kingdom beginning to happen. When John the Baptist sends from prison to ask whether he was indeed the one expected, the answer he receives is precisely a list of what was taking place.

But the habit that draws the strongest reaction in the texts is a domestic one: who he ate with. To share a table, in that setting, was to declare belonging — and Jesus ate with tax collectors, men whose trade meant collaborating with the Roman occupation, and with people publicly classed as sinners. The objection to this is recorded in more than one Gospel, and in Luke it is the sentence that opens a run of three parables in a row.

The group travelling with him is also described in more detail than is usually remembered. Besides the Twelve, Luke names women who went along — Mary, called Magdalene, Joanna and Susanna — and says plainly that they were supporting the group out of their own resources. One of them is married to a steward in Herod’s household, which places that circle socially better than any generalisation could.

The opposition does not begin in Jerusalem, nor at the end. Already in Mark’s third chapter, after a healing performed on a Sabbath inside a synagogue, the text records that Pharisees and Herodians took counsel on how to destroy him. The stated ground is Sabbath observance, and the background is authority: he taught without leaning on the usual chain of authorities, and listeners remark on that from the first chapter onward.

The tension rises when he reaches Jerusalem. In the days before Passover, Jesus enters the temple and interrupts the trade operating there — he overturns the moneychangers’ tables and stops anyone carrying goods across the court. It is not a gesture against the temple as such: the sentence he cites while teaching is about the house of prayer for all nations. But it is a public act, in the most sensitive place in the city, in the fullest week of the year.

Midway stands the scene at Caesarea Philippi, which the first three Gospels place as the hinge. Jesus asks the disciples who people say he is, hears the answers, and then puts the question to them. It is immediately after Peter’s answer that he begins to speak openly about what lay ahead — and from there the whole book moves toward Jerusalem.

This page does not describe the execution. The crucifixion and the resurrection are here because they are the centre of everything that followed, and leaving them out would be telling a different story — but the scene itself, with all its violence, stays with the biblical text, which any reader can open for themselves.

The facts are these. Jesus goes up to Jerusalem for Passover, is arrested at night, is questioned before the authorities of the city and is handed over to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. It is Pilate who passes sentence, and the penalty applied is crucifixion, which Rome reserved for slaves and for those it counted a threat to public order. That Jesus was crucified under Pilate is, along with his baptism by John, among the few facts about him that historians of any conviction treat as firm.

The accounts make clear that he is not taken by surprise. Mark records three moments in which Jesus tells the disciples what was coming, and all three end the same way: after three days he would rise again. The first of them follows straight on from the conversation at Caesarea Philippi.

What the Gospels tell of the third day begins with women going to the tomb at first light, carrying what they had prepared. They find the stone rolled back and the body absent, and receive the announcement in a single sentence. None of the four describes the resurrection itself: they narrate the before and the after, and stop at the door. That restraint is among the most striking features of these chapters.

Then come the encounters. The best told is the one on the road to Emmaus, in Luke: two disciples walk along talking with someone they do not recognise, hear the Scriptures opened to them, and realise who it was only at table, at the moment the bread is broken. It is the scene the New Testament offers to anyone asking what changed — and it is also the beginning of what the disciples went on to proclaim in Jerusalem a few weeks later.

Two non-Christian sources from the first and second centuries mention Jesus, and it is worth knowing exactly what each one says and does not say.

The first is Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian who wrote the Jewish Antiquities around the year 93. He mentions Jesus in two passages. One is brief and concerns the execution of James, identified as the brother of Jesus who was called Christ; that passage is accepted as authentic by the great majority of scholars. The other is longer and has reached us in a form containing statements of Christian faith that a Jewish author would not have written — the prevailing reading today is that an original mention was there and was reworked by later Christian copyists. Recording that is more useful than quoting the passage as though there were no discussion.

The second is Tacitus, the Roman historian, who around the year 116 explains where the name of the Christians in Rome came from: from Christ, executed in the reign of Tiberius by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate. Tacitus had no sympathy for the group he was describing, which makes his record all the more valuable as outside testimony.

It matters to be exact about how far these sources reach. They do not confirm the Christian confession, and that is not what is asked of them. What they support is more modest, and it is not little: that Jesus existed, that he lived when the Gospels say he lived, and that he died in the manner and under the authority they indicate.