Who was Jesus - really?

I’ve just celebrated Easter the traditional British way – by eating chocolate and relaxing at home with the family. Not by going to church – although I was brought up in the Anglican faith, I don’t subscribe to its teachings. However, I am fascinated by the way historical – and current – truth is manipulated to ‘tell the story’ so among other things I’m interested in who or what the historical Jesus actually was, and what really happened in those few days that spawned the Christian Easter festival.

There are four basic schools of thought, which can be summarised as follows:

1. Jesus was the divine Son of God who died on the cross and three days later miraculously came back to life.
2. Jesus never actually existed – the story of his life is a fictional mish-mash of elements taken from myths of other dying-and-rising vegetation gods.
3. Jesus lived in Palestine around 2000 years ago: he was variously (according to different theories) an itinerant preacher; a Jewish freedom fighter; an Essene / Theraputeae teacher who had inherited knowledge from ancient mystery religions; the recognised true King of the Jews. He was crucified and died.
4. As 3), but by chance or design he survived the crucifixion, either because he was never on the cross, or he was taken down still alive.

1. is of course the traditional church teaching and the core of Christian belief. Any deviation from this would seriously undermine the position of every Christian sect.

2. The evidence for this is the scarcity of references to Jesus in any contemporary documentation outside the Gospels, and the possibility that the few references there are – the most substantial being from the Roman writer Josephus – are of dubious provenance, and could have been inserted into existing text later to ‘prove’ Jesus existed. It is also true that just about all the ‘supernatural’ elements of the Jesus story can be found in the lives of pagan gods.

3. This covers several different, and conflicting, theories, including suggestions that Jesus was part of a dynasty going back to King David, and stretching forward to our own day; that he was married – perhaps to Mary Magdalene – and fathered a family; that his true purpose was freeing Palestine from the Romans; that he was forced into assuming the role of leader by Jewish pressure groups… the truth is the evidence is so scarce, and even within the Bible itself (which only represents a small proportion of the gospels written about Jesus, selected to represent the orthodox church view) contradictory, that is it virtually impossible to prove any one theory.

4. Again, various theories suggest that ‘Team Jesus’ planned a fake crucifixion, doing a deal with the Romans, and either a substitute was crucified in his place or he was allowed to be removed from the cross alive. Evidence for the latter idea is that he died suspiciously rapidly for what we have to assume was a fairly healthy man – most crucifixion victims took days if not weeks to die; Jesus apparently took three hours. Then there is the sponge soaked in ‘vinegar’ held to his mouth shortly before he ‘died’ - possibly some form of coma-inducing drug? The two ‘angels’ seen in his tomb could, it is suggested, have actually been healers who attended his wounds and looked after him as he came round after his ordeal – and this theory also explains how he was able to appear to his followers after his ‘death’. Of course, it opens up room for more ideas about how he might have spent the rest of his life.

All fascinating, and I have an open mind – though I do tend to believe he existed and I rather like the crucifixion survival theory in its different forms. Probably we’ll never know – after 2000 years, however much circumstantial evidence there is, final proof is unlikely to emerge, at least in a public forum. But I would suggest that of all the four basic theories, the most unlikely is No. 1 – the one all Christians are required to believe.