Jesus, the Rebel

            When trying to determine who Jesus was, from a historical perspective, scholars say that we can only know bits and pieces. We know that Jesus was someone that others considered important, as they told/wrote stories about him and passed them on through generations. From the stories, we can suppose that he was someone that was considered a prophet by some, a teacher by others, and yet a magician by even others.  Scholars suggest that he was a charismatic, free-spirited, rebellious holy man.

            He must have been charismatic to have such a large following that seemed in awe of him. He would have been considered rebellious or free-spirited in that he debated the Pharisees and suggested that there was a better way to follow than what the Jews had been practicing. He went against the norms in the stories told about him, working on the Sabbath, disrupting the market at the temple, and challenging the religious minds of the day. He was considered so much a rebel, that he was even executed by the Roman government for what seems to be the squashing of a potential political revolt.

            There are limits to what we can know about Jesus, as the stories given about him in the Gospels have an obvious bias to them, and the bits written about him from non-biblical sources do not add much, and perhaps have their own biases. We can try our best to extrapolate who he might have been, or what he might have been like by reading these stories and trying to imagine them set in the time they were written and how others may have perceived him, but mostly it would be conjecture. What we can know is that it appears that a man named Jesus lived in the early years of the Common Era and that he was a force to be reckoned with in his day, enough so that people felt strongly enough about him to immortalize him in story and build a religion around his memory.

Rembrant's Jesus

Written 2/2/12 for my Birth of Christianity class