Jesus
Jesus, also referred to as Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, and by various other names and titles, was a 1st-century Jewish preacher and religious leader in the Roman province of Judaea. He is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. Virtually all Christians consider Jesus to be the incarnation of God the Son and the awaited messiah, or Christ, a descendant of the Davidic line prophesied in the Old Testament. Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically. Accounts of Jesus's life are contained in the Gospels, especially the four canonical Gospels of the New Testament. Since the Enlightenment, academic research has produced various views on the historical reliability of the Gospels and the extent to which they reflect the historical Jesus.
According to Christian tradition, as preserved in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus was circumcised at eight days old, presented at the Temple in Jerusalem at forty days old, baptized by John the Baptist as a young adult, and, after 40 days and nights of fasting in the wilderness, began his public ministry. He was an itinerant teacher whom his followers believed to possess divine authority in interpreting Jewish law. Jesus often debated with other Jews about how best to follow God, engaged in healings, taught in parables, and gathered followers, 12 of whom he appointed as his apostles. According to the New Testament accounts, he was arrested in Jerusalem and tried by the Sanhedrin, handed over to the Roman authorities, and crucified on the order of Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judaea. After his death, his followers became convinced that he rose from the dead, and the community they formed eventually developed into the early Christian Church, which expanded into a worldwide movement.
Christian theology includes the beliefs that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, was born of a virgin named Mary, performed miracles, founded the Christian Church, died by crucifixion as a sacrifice for atonement for sin, rose from the dead on the third day, and ascended into Heaven, from where he will return. Christians commonly believe that Jesus enables people to be reconciled to God. The Nicene Creed asserts that Jesus will judge the living and the dead, either before or after their bodily resurrection, an event associated with the Second Coming of Jesus in Christian eschatology. The great majority of Christians worship Jesus as the incarnation of God the Son, the second of the three persons of the Trinity. The birth of Jesus is celebrated annually, generally on 25 December, as Christmas. His crucifixion is commemorated on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday. The world's most widely used calendar era—in which the current year is AD —is traditionally based on the approximate date of the birth of Jesus.
Mainstream Judaism rejects the belief that Jesus was the awaited messiah, holding that he did not fulfill messianic prophecies, was not lawfully anointed, and was neither divine nor resurrected. In contrast, Jesus in Islam is considered the messiah and a prophet of God, who was sent to the Israelites and will return to Earth before the Day of Judgement. Muslims believe that Jesus was born of the virgin Mary but was neither God nor the son of God. Most Muslims do not believe that he was killed or crucified, but that God raised him into Heaven while he was still alive. Jesus is also revered in the Baháʼí and Druze faiths, as well as in Rastafari.
Name
A typical Jewish person in Jesus's time had only one name, sometimes followed by a patronymic phrase of the form "son of ", or by the person's home town. Thus, in the New Testament, Jesus is commonly referred to as "Jesus of Nazareth". Jesus's neighbours in Nazareth referred to him as "the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon", "the carpenter's son", or "Joseph's son"; in the Gospel of John, the disciple Philip refers to him as "Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth".The name Jesus is the English transliteration, through Latin Iesus, of, which is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew name Joshua. The Hebrew/Aramaic name was common among Judean Jews at the time of Jesus's birth, although by that period it had been shortened to יֵשׁוּעַ from יְהוֹשֻׁעַ ; the contraction had already occurred in later biblical books such as Nehemiah, where Joshua is referred to as Yeshua.
The name means "God saves" in Hebrew, literally "Yahweh saves", from the root ישׁע and the noun יְשׁוּעָה. The Gospel of Matthew asserts the etymological significance of Jesus's name explicitly in the prophecy of the angel to Joseph about his birth: "you will call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins".
The fact that Moses' successor Joshua bears the same name as Jesus in the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic has been given theological significance by commentators, as a parallel is often drawn between the two leaders and the etymology of their shared name : Joshua leads the Jews into the Promised Land, while in Christianity Jesus is understood to save both Jews and Gentiles from their sins.
Jesus Christ
Since the 1st century, Christians have commonly referred to Jesus as "Jesus Christ". The word Christ is not a given name but was originally a title or office, meaning "The Messiah". The term derives from the Greek wikt:Χριστός, a calque of the Hebrew word wikt:מָשִׁיחַ, transliterated into English as messiah. The Hebrew term means "anointed", from the verb מָשַׁח, “to rub with oil, to anoint”. In the Septuagint, the Hebrew word was rendered into Greek as χριστός, meaning “anointed”, from the verb χρίω, “to rub with oil, to anoint”. In biblical Judaism, sacred oil was used to anoint certain exceptionally holy people and objects as part of their religious investiture.Early Christians designated Jesus as "the Christ" because they believed him to be the Messiah whose arrival is prophesied in the Hebrew Bible. In post-biblical usage, Christ came to be viewed as a name—one part of "Jesus Christ". The term Christian, meaning a follower of Christ, has been in use since the 1st century.
Life and teachings in the New Testament
Canonical gospels
The four canonical gospels are the foremost sources for the life and message of Jesus. Other parts of the New Testament also include references to key episodes in his life, such as the Last Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:23–26. Acts of the Apostles refers to Jesus's early ministry and its anticipation by John the Baptist. Acts 1:1–11 provides more detail about the Ascension of Jesus than the canonical gospels do. In the undisputed Pauline letters, which were written earlier than the gospels, Jesus's words or instructions are cited several times.Some early Christian groups had separate descriptions of Jesus's life and teachings that are not included in the New Testament. These include the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Judas, the Apocryphon of James, and many other apocryphal writings. Most scholars conclude that these texts were written later and are less historically reliable than the canonical gospels.
Authorship, date, and reliability
The canonical gospels are four accounts, each attributed to a different author. The authors of the gospels are generally regarded as pseudonymous and are attributed by tradition to the four evangelists, each associated with Jesus or his close followers: Mark by John Mark, an associate of Peter; Matthew to one of Jesus's disciples; Luke to a companion of Paul mentioned in a few epistles; and John to another of Jesus's disciples, the "beloved disciple".According to the Marcan priority hypothesis, the first to be written was the Gospel of Mark, followed by the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Luke, and the Gospel of John. Most scholars agree that the authors of Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source for their gospels. Since Matthew and Luke also share some content not found in Mark, many scholars infer that they used another source in addition to Mark.
One important aspect of the study of the gospels is the literary genre under which they fall. Genre "is a key convention guiding both the composition and the interpretation of writings". Whether the gospel authors set out to write novels, myths, histories, or biographies has a significant impact on how their works ought to be interpreted. Some studies have suggested that the gospels ought to be seen as a form of ancient biography. Although not without critics, the view that the gospels are a type of ancient biography represents the consensus among scholars today.
Concerning the accuracy of the accounts, viewpoints range from considering them inerrant descriptions of Jesus's life, to doubting their historical reliability on various points, to regarding them as providing very little historical information about his life beyond the basics.
Comparative structure and content
Matthew, Mark, and Luke are known as the Synoptic Gospels, from the Greek σύν and ὄψις, because they are similar in content, narrative arrangement, language, and paragraph structure, and can readily be set side by side for synoptic comparison. Scholars generally agree that it is impossible to find any direct literary relationship between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John. Many events—such as Jesus's baptism, crucifixion, and interactions with his apostles—appear in the Synoptic Gospels, but incidents such as the transfiguration and Jesus's exorcising demons do not appear in John, which also differs on other matters, such as the cleansing of the Temple.The Synoptics emphasize different aspects of Jesus. In Mark, Jesus is the Son of God whose mighty works demonstrate the presence of God's Kingdom. He is portrayed as a tireless wonder worker and the servant of both God and humanity. This short gospel records relatively few of Jesus's words or extended teachings. The Gospel of Matthew emphasizes that Jesus is the fulfilment of God's will as revealed in the Old Testament and the Lord of the Church. He is presented as the "Son of David", a "king", and the Messiah. Luke presents Jesus as the divine-human saviour who shows compassion to the needy. He is depicted as the friend of sinners and outcasts, who came to seek and save the lost. This gospel includes well-known parables, such as the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.
The prologue to the Gospel of John identifies Jesus as an incarnation of the divine Word. As the Word, Jesus is described as eternally present with God, active in all creation, and the source of humanity's moral and spiritual nature. In this gospel, Jesus is portrayed as not only greater than any past human prophet but greater than any prophet could be: he not only speaks God's Word; he is God's Word. In the Gospel of John, Jesus reveals his divine role publicly and is depicted as the Bread of Life, the Light of the World, the True Vine, and more.
The authors of the New Testament generally showed little interest in establishing an absolute chronology of Jesus's life or in synchronizing the episodes of his life with the secular history of the age. As stated in John 21:25, the gospels do not claim to provide an exhaustive list of the events of Jesus's life. The accounts were primarily written as theological documents in the context of early Christianity, with timelines as a secondary consideration. The gospels devote about one third of their text to the last week of Jesus's life in Jerusalem, referred to as the Passion. They do not provide enough detail to satisfy the demands of modern historians regarding exact dates, but it is possible to draw from them a general picture of Jesus's life story.