Was Jesus a real person?

I know. This sounds as if I’m attacking religion, but I’m not. I think this question is very important because without Jesus’ birth, ministry, death and resurrection, Christianity would not exist. Even worse, there would be no Christmas. Just kidding!

What we know about Jesus comes from the New Testament, basically from the four Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John. That’s where the problem is because the Bible is not a history book. It’s faith testimony from the people (the apostles and disciples of Jesus) that lived in and were cognizant of the events that occurred in the Holy Land during the period of the first century AD, which stands for Anno Domini, a Latin phrase that means in the year of Our Lord. BC means before Christ.

The Bible was not written as a complete book. What you see is a compilation of books written at various times in the first century AD. The disciples of Jesus’ apostles wrote these books in Greek, the scholarly language of the time. The four gospels and the other books of the New Testament were based on earlier writings that were known and circulated among the early Christians. The Greek documents that were used to come up with translations into other languages are copies of the originals and each of them is known as a codex. The people who copied them inadvertently added things and subtracted things. Eventually, after much had already been done to create a canonical (accepted as being God’s word) list of books by early Christian leaders, Emperor Constantine ordered that specific books should be chosen and added to The New Testament Cannon, which has become the New Testament that we know today, give or take a few changes because of the Protestant Reformation. As you can see, the bible has gone through a lot before it got to what we have in our hands today.

I digress, but I just wanted to let you know the sources for our knowledge of Jesus.

Jesus, or more accurately Jesus of Nazareth, is a real person. All modern scholars of antiquity agree to this. However, the historical Jesus is the subject of much debate mostly because there is very little evidence for his existence, and the reason for this is simple. There were a plethora of characters during the time of Roman occupation of Palestine who claimed to be the Messiah, the Jewish savior that was prophesied by prophets of the Old Testament to be the one who would free the Jews from Roman domination. Jesus was just one of these self proclaimed saviors. For all practical purposes, his life and death were not important to historian of that time. It was only after Christianity became a dominant religion that Jesus became famous, and as a matter of fact, he’s the most famous person in history.

There are many books written about the Historical Jesus. One that I like was written by a Jew, Reza Aslan, called ‘The Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. He attacks this subject from the idea that Jesus was a Jew and how that affected his life and ministry. All of the books about Jesus try to relate what Jesus was like and what he would have faced in first century Palestine.

From just the amount of books and Bible studies written on this subject, there is no doubt that Jesus existed. No person has affected the world in the way that this man from Galilee did. His absence in historical references of the period speak loudly that He existed. No one has found any evidence that He didn’t.

However, the Bible does not convey what he looked like or what he was like as a person. We can only speculate. One thing He was not is a fifteenth century Italian male as most art from that period picture him. He was a Galilean Jew born between 7 and 2 BC and died around 30-36 AD. He spoke Aramaic and might have known Greek and Hebrew. That’s about the extent of it.

Some people think He looked like the man’s image in the Shroud of Turin, which some believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus. The depicted crucified man has a beard and looks plausible for a Jew of that era. Unfortunately, there is no way to verify this belief despite all of the attempts to date the shroud. That’s a fascinating story by itself.

Another possible image is the one that was on Veronica’s veil. Veronica supposedly wiped Jesus’ face with her veil while he was carrying his cross to Calvary and it ended up with an imprinted picture of his face. It turns out that Veronica is not a real person and the current veil that the Vatican has is probably a fake, despite all of the artistic renditions of this important source.

So where does this leave us? I believe that Jesus was a real person and that He did all of the things that the Bible relates, including resurrecting from the dead three days after He was crucified. There is just too much information about this to deny it. His apostles would not have gone to horrible deaths if they didn’t believe that He was the Son of God. They would have relented and revealed that they were faking all of it. That is one reality that convinces me that they were telling the truth. But, this is just my opinion, not proof of anything.

Thanks for reading.