The Penny on the Table
Somewhere around the year 30 of the Common Era—the precision is false but the range is not—a group of men who had been sent to entrap an itinerant Galilean preacher in an act of sedition against Rome produced a small copper coin and asked him whether it was lawful to pay tribute to Caesar. The question was a trap of elegant simplicity: say yes, and you lose the crowd; say no, and you lose your head. The preacher, who had been teaching in the precincts of the Jerusalem Temple for perhaps a few days—the sources disagree on the timeline but converge on the tension—asked to see the coin. Whose face was on it? Caesar's, they said. Then give to Caesar what is Caesar's, he replied, and to God what is God's.
The brilliance of the maneuver, as Adam Gopnik noted in the New Yorker, was that it turned the question back on the questioners "in mock-innocence." The answer is a tautology that resolves nothing: What exactly belongs to Caesar, and what belongs to God? The question hangs there still. It has been hanging for two thousand years, and every generation—every empire, every revolution, every tax code—has attempted to answer it, and every answer has proved provisional. The man who posed that non-answer was executed shortly thereafter by the Roman state, on charges the coin trick had been designed to provoke. His body was likely left for dogs. Within three centuries, the Roman Empire would worship him as God.
This is the paradox at the center of any honest encounter with Jesus of Nazareth: the most consequential life in Western history is also one of the most poorly documented. We have no writings from his hand. No contemporary mentions him while he is alive. The language he spoke—Aramaic, a Semitic tongue with a raspy guttural music—is not the language in which any of his words survive. Everything we possess was written decades after his death, in Greek, by people who never met him, shaped by the catastrophic destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, an event so apocalyptic for first-century Judaism that it is difficult to separate its trauma from the texts it produced. The Gospels are not biographies. They are, as Bart Ehrman has written again and again in a series of lucid, quietly devastating books, "testaments of faith, not chronicles of biography, shaped to fit a prophecy rather than report a profile."
And yet. Something happened. Someone was there. The hole in the historical record has the exact shape of a man, and the absence is itself a kind of evidence—because the movement that followed was real, was enormous, was world-altering, and it required a point of origin. As the scholar Reza Aslan put it, "It is a miracle that we know anything at all about the man called Jesus of Nazareth."
By the Numbers
The Galilean
c. 6–4 BCEApproximate year of birth, Bethlehem or Nazareth
c. 30 CEApproximate year of death, Jerusalem
~1–3 yearsEstimated duration of public ministry
12Core disciples, representing the Twelve Tribes of Israel
4Canonical Gospels written 40–90 years after his death
2.4 billionChristians worldwide who revere him as God incarnate
0Words written in his own hand
The Village No One Had Heard Of
Nazareth in the first century was not a place that mattered. The village does not appear in the Old Testament, not in rabbinic literature, not in Josephus's exhaustive chronicles of Jewish Palestine. The Gospel of John preserves an insult that reads like a proverb: "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Archaeological surveys conducted by Professor Ken Dark of King's College London over eighteen years of fieldwork—published in
Archaeology of Jesus' Nazareth—have revealed a settlement of perhaps a hundred Jewish families clustered on a limestone hillside in Lower Galilee, a community of peasant farmers and quarry workers whose household pottery, pointedly, was all of Jewish manufacture. No imported Greco-Roman wares. No trace of pagan worship. The residents of Nazareth, Dark concluded, observed Jewish purity laws more strictly than their neighbors in cosmopolitan Sepphoris, only four miles away, and consciously separated themselves from that city's Hellenized culture.
This matters because it demolishes a persistent romantic notion—that the young Jesus, walking to Sepphoris as a laborer, would have encountered Greek philosophy, Roman theater, the cosmopolitan intellectual currents of the Mediterranean world. Dark's evidence suggests the opposite. The cultural fault line between Nazareth and Sepphoris was real and rigid. The boy who grew up in that hillside village grew up in a devoutly Jewish enclave, sealed off from the wider Greco-Roman world by choice.
His father, Joseph, was a tektōn—the Greek word has been rendered "carpenter" for two millennia, but it could mean stoneworker, builder, general craftsman, or day laborer. The ambiguity is irrelevant to the economic reality: the family worked with their hands. They were not destitute—some of Jesus's later disciples owned fishing boats and houses—but they were not prosperous. They occupied the vast middle of Palestinian Jewish society: people who could pay their taxes, make an annual pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem, and let their land lie fallow in the sabbatical years, but who had no cushion against catastrophe.
Of Jesus's childhood and early adulthood, we know almost nothing. Luke offers a single anecdote—the twelve-year-old astonishing the Temple scholars with his learning—and then silence. Nearly three decades of a life, vanished into the limestone and dust of a Galilean village. The "missing years," as scholars call them, are missing because no one was watching. He was nobody.
The Desert, the River, the Voice
He appears, fully formed, at the edge of the Jordan River, sometime around the year 28 or 29 CE. He has come south from Galilee—a journey of several days through the hill country—to find a man named John, who is living in the desert, eating locusts and wild honey, and performing ritual immersions in the river. John the Baptizer, as some scholars prefer to call him, giving a better sense of the flat-footed active form of the original Greek, was an eschatological prophet of the type that first-century Palestine produced with startling regularity. He preached that the end of the present age was imminent, that God would intervene catastrophically in human history, that a day of judgment was at hand, and that people had better repent while they still could.
John's baptism was not a gentle pastoral sacrament. It was a prophetic act of purification for the coming conflagration—a public declaration that you had turned your life around, that you were ready for the fire. And Jesus submitted to it.
This single act—Jesus allowing himself to be baptized by John—is considered by virtually all serious New Testament scholars to be historically authentic, and for a reason that reveals the strange, inverted logic of Gospel criticism. The criterion of embarrassment holds that details which the early Church would have preferred to suppress, but which were too well-established to deny, are probably true. And Jesus's baptism by John was deeply embarrassing to the developing theology of Christianity. If Jesus was the Son of God, why did he need to be purified? If he was sinless, why did he submit to a ritual for sinners? If he was the star, why was he playing a supporting role? The fact that all four Gospels include the baptism—and then scramble, in different ways, to explain it away—is powerful evidence that it actually happened.
Mark, almost surely the oldest Gospel, composed sometime around or after 70 CE, handles the moment with characteristic bluntness. Jesus is baptized. The heavens tear open. A voice speaks: "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased." But notice the pronoun: you. In Mark, the voice speaks to Jesus, not about him—as though informing a man who does not yet know his own destiny. Some early versions of Luke go further, quoting Psalm 2: "You are my Son; today I have begotten you." Only Matthew turns the declaration outward, announcing to the world what Mark had whispered to one man.
The differences are not trivial. They are the fossil record of a theology in formation, a community of believers working backward from what they believed about the risen Christ to reconstruct what must have happened at the river.
The Era of Apocalyptic Expectation
To understand what Jesus was doing—and what he thought he was doing—you have to understand the world in which he did it, and that world was on fire.
Palestine in the first century was part of the Roman Empire, governed through a patchwork of client kings, tetrarchs, and prefects who maintained order on behalf of a distant emperor. Herod the Great had ruled Jewish Palestine as Rome's "friend and ally" from 37 to 4 BCE, a period of grand construction projects and savage paranoia. When he died—probably in the year most scholars believe Jesus was born—his kingdom was carved into pieces, and the carving went badly. His son Archelaus proved so incompetent that the emperor Augustus deposed him in 6 CE and replaced him with a Roman prefect, a minor aristocrat backed by roughly three thousand soldiers recruited from nearby Gentile cities. During Jesus's public career, that prefect was Pontius Pilate, who governed from 26 to 36 CE with a reputation for brutality that even the Romans considered excessive.
The daily governance of Jerusalem fell to the high priest, Caiaphas, who held the office from approximately 18 to 36 CE—an unusually long tenure that tells you he was good at the difficult work of mediating between a hostile populace and a foreign occupier. He and Pilate collaborated for a decade. They must have understood each other well.
Into this powder keg, a succession of would-be messiahs, prophets, preachers, and revolutionaries marched with depressing regularity. Reza Aslan, in
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, catalogs them with grim precision: Athronges, a shepherd who crowned himself King of the Jews in 4 BCE and was cut down with his followers by a Roman legion. Theudas, who gathered four hundred disciples before Rome captured him and severed his head. The mysterious figure known only as "the Egyptian," who raised an army in the desert and watched as nearly all of them were massacred. Judas the Galilean. Simon of Peraea. Hezekiah the bandit chief. "The Samaritan," crucified by Pontius Pilate even though he raised no army and posed no military threat whatsoever—evidence that the authorities had become so anxious about messianic fever that any hint of sedition was a death sentence.
The common denominator was crucifixion. Rome reserved this punishment almost exclusively for sedition—crimes against the state. The procedure was deliberately, theatrically horrible: the victim was stripped to remove all dignity, paraded publicly, whipped until the flesh opened, then nailed or bound to a wooden cross and left to die over hours or days, often with legs broken to hasten the end in a blaze of agony. The corpse was typically left for scavengers. Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, tells us he once begged Roman commanders for three of his friends to be taken down after hours on the cross; only one survived.
This was the death that awaited anyone who claimed to be the Messiah. And Jesus, whatever else he was, claimed—or allowed others to claim on his behalf—exactly that.
The Feaster and the Table
What was new about him?
The question is the engine of two thousand years of scholarship, and the answers are necessarily partial, contested, provisional. But a few things come through the thicket of textual uncertainty with a force that feels irreducible.
John Dominic Crossan—Irish-born, Servite-trained, a former Catholic priest who left the order in 1969 to marry and pursue academic freedom, co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, and perhaps the most provocative historical-Jesus scholar of the late twentieth century—built his reconstruction of Jesus around a single, surprisingly mundane observation: the man liked to eat.
The sharpest opposition in the Gospels is between John the Faster and Jesus the Feaster.
In Crossan's reading, developed most fully in
The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, Jesus's table manners were the most radical element of his life. First-century Mediterranean Jewish society was organized by rules of commensality—who eats with whom, at whose table, in what order—that encoded every social hierarchy the culture possessed. To eat with someone was to declare parity with them. It was an act of recognition, of inclusion, of status.
Jesus violated these rules systematically and, it seems, joyfully. He ate with tax collectors and prostitutes. He dined with people of different social ranks, which would have scandalized Romans, and with people of different tribal allegiance, which would have horrified observant Jews. His most incendiary dietary pronouncement—"What goes into a man's mouth does not make him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean"—would have been shocking to any pious Jew or Muslim then or now. He fed the multitudes rather than instructing them how to fast. He turned water into wine at a wedding in Cana. And in the end, he established his most enduring ritual—the mystical union of bread and wine, body and blood—at a table, over a meal.
He was not a hedonist. He was not an ascetic. He was something harder to categorize: a man who believed that the sacred could be located in the most ordinary human act, and that the boundaries separating clean from unclean, worthy from unworthy, insider from outsider, were not just wrong but blasphemous.
The Parables That Never Quite Close
His teaching style was distinctive and, by all accounts, electric. The Gospels preserve it in enough detail that a consistent voice emerges even through the static of decades of oral transmission, translation from Aramaic to Greek, and theological redaction.
He was epigrammatic. He was enigmatic. He was frequently irritable. He had what Gopnik calls "a wild gaiety" about his moral teachings and "a brash, sidewise indifference to conventional ideas of goodness." His parables—the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Mustard Seed, the Workers in the Vineyard—are stories that set up clear narrative expectations and then violate them. The dutiful son gets nothing; the wastrel gets a feast. The last hired are paid the same as the first. The good neighbor turns out to be the despised foreigner. The tiny, insignificant seed produces the largest plant in the garden.
These are not morality tales. They are disruption devices. They aim to unsettle, to overturn the listener's assumptions about merit and reward, about who is in and who is out. As the literary critic Frank Kermode argued in his pioneering 1979 study The Genesis of Secrecy, the Gospel of Mark in particular reads as "an intentionally open-ended story, prematurely closed, a mystery without a single solution."
— Gospel of Thomas
That compressed exhortation—preserved in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas—captures something essential about Jesus's teaching that the more elaborate canonical Gospels sometimes obscure. Too much fussing about place and ritual and home and where exactly you're going to live is unnecessary. Be wanderers. Be dharma bums. The kingdom of God is not a location. It is a posture.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, in his immense history Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, points out that Jesus continually addressed God as Abba—Father, or even Dad—an informality that remained startling among prophets. And the expression translated in the King James Version as the solemn "Verily I say unto you" is actually a quirky Aramaic throat-clearer, something like Dr. Johnson's "Depend upon it, Sir." The historical Jesus, stripped of later theological accretion, sounds less like a divine oracle and more like a brilliant, impatient, slightly exasperated teacher—a man who could not believe how slow everyone was to understand what seemed to him perfectly obvious.
In Mark, this impatience is palpable. "Do you have eyes but fail to see?" he snaps at his own disciples. He is no Buddha. He gets annoyed. The fine English actor Alec McCowen used to perform the entire Gospel of Mark as a one-man show, and his Jesus came alive as a recognizable human type: the Gandhi-Malcolm-Martin kind of charismatic leader of an oppressed people, verbally spry, occasionally shifty, given to defiant enigmatic paradoxes and pregnant parables that refuse to resolve.
The Kingdom and the Cliff
The problem—the intractable, fascinating, maddening problem—is that this same man who told these luminous stories also preached the imminent end of the world.
"Some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God," Jesus announces in Mark 9:1. This is not metaphor. It is not coded language. It is a straightforward prediction that the cosmic order would be overturned within the lifetime of his audience. Paul, whose letters predate the Gospels, believed the same thing—his earliest letter indicates that the Lord will return before most people then alive have died. The shift from Paul's "most" to the Gospels' "some" tells its own story: by the time the Gospels were written, the expectation was beginning to fade, because people were dying and nothing was happening.
The prediction was wrong. This is the cliff at the edge of every reconstruction of the historical Jesus, the fact that polite theology tiptoes around and that honest scholarship cannot avoid. He said the end was near. It wasn't. Everything that followed—every church, every creed, every cathedral, every crusade—was built on what Gopnik calls "an apology for what went wrong."
The seemingly modern waiver—"Well, I know he said that, but he didn't really mean it quite the way it sounded"—is not a later innovation. It is built into the foundation of the faith. The retreat to metaphor begins with the very first generation of believers. If the Kingdom of God did not arrive in the literal sense Jesus appears to have meant, then he must have meant something else: that the kingdom was interior, or spiritual, or eschatological in a different way, or yet to come, or already here in some invisible form—anything other than what the words seem so plainly to have meant.
And yet the apocalyptic prophet and the wisdom teacher are not as contradictory as they first appear. Reza Aslan argued on NPR's Fresh Air that Jesus must be understood within the matrix of first-century Jewish eschatological expectation, where religion and politics were inseparable: "Simply saying 'I am the messiah' was a treasonable offense. If you are claiming to ring in the kingdom of God, you are also claiming to ring out the kingdom of Caesar." A charismatic prophet, Gopnik observes, is precisely "someone whose aura of personal conviction manages to reconcile a hard doctrine with a humane manner"—and the history of oppressed peoples is full of such figures who oscillate between the comforting and the catastrophic, the apocalyptic and the pastoral, the fire sermon and the love feast.
Malcolm X preached violence and millennial revenge, fueled by a racial mythology involving a hovering UFO—and was also a community builder who refused to carry weapons and ended, within the constraints of his faith, as a kind of universalist. Within three decades of his martyrdom, he was the cover subject of a liberal humanist magazine. About the same span of time that separates the Gospels from Jesus.
The Week That Broke the World
Sometime between 29 and 33 CE—most scholars favor 30 CE—Jesus traveled to Jerusalem to observe Passover. What happened in the next few days is the most narrated sequence of events in the history of Western civilization, and almost none of it can be verified.
What seems nearly certain is this: he entered the city in a manner that was interpreted, by his followers and by the authorities, as a messianic claim. He went to the Temple—the spiritual center of Jewish life, the house of God on earth—and caused a disturbance. The Gospels describe him overturning the tables of the money changers and driving out the merchants, an act of symbolic violence against the Temple establishment that Aslan rightly identifies as political dynamite: "In a time of apocalyptic expectation, to march into the Temple and claim it for God is to declare yourself God's emissary. And that can't go unanswered if you are Rome."
He was arrested. He was brought before the high priest, and then before Pontius Pilate. The charge, reconstructed from the overlapping and contradictory Gospel accounts and from Roman legal practice, was almost certainly sedition—claiming to be "King of the Jews," a title that was at once religious and political, messianic and treasonous. Joseph Weiler, the NYU legal scholar who has taught a seminar on the trial of Jesus, called it "arguably the most famous trial in Western civilization," noting that at least four hundred books have been written about its proceedings alone.
Pilate sentenced him to crucifixion. This is one of the few facts about Jesus's life that virtually every scholar, believer and skeptic alike, considers historically beyond dispute. As Aslan told The Nation: "If you know nothing else about Jesus except that his life ended on the cross at Golgotha, you know enough to understand who he was and what kind of threat he posed to Rome."
The director Paul Verhoeven—who, improbably, is a member of the Jesus Seminar—imagined an opening scene for a Jesus bio-pic that captures the context with brutal efficiency: a man being nailed to a cross, screams of agony, two companion crosses in view, then the camera cranes out to reveal two hundred crosses and two hundred victims. The year is 4 BCE. It is not the end of the story but the beginning—the mass execution of Jewish rebels, the Roman death that awaited anyone who stepped out of line. Jesus would have grown up knowing what those crosses looked like. He would have known what was waiting.
The Cry
In Mark, the earliest account, the death scene is harrowing and austere. There is no theology of atonement, no cosmic significance spelled out, no resurrection appearance. There is a man dying badly on a cross in the Palestinian sun, and there is a cry:
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Later evangelists edited the cry, softened it, explained it as an apt quotation from Psalm 22—which it may have been, but that does not diminish its desolation. In Mark, it is the last intelligible thing Jesus says. The subsequent verses that show him risen were apparently added later; the original Gospel ends with an enigmatic empty tomb and terrified women who "said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid." That's it. That's the ending. A mystery left inside, never to be entirely explored or explained.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
The cry matters because it means that Christianity begins with a failure of faith. His father let him down. The promise wasn't kept. The kingdom didn't come. And everything that followed—Paul's theology of resurrection, the Gospels' narrative of divine sacrifice, the creeds and councils and cathedrals—was an attempt to answer a question that the man on the cross asked and never got answered himself.
The Empty Tomb and the Full Church
What happened next is the dividing line not just between belief and unbelief but between two entirely different ways of reading history.
The disciples became convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead. Paul, writing in the 50s CE—within two decades of the crucifixion, and well before any Gospel was composed—states flatly that Christ "appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive" (1 Corinthians 15:5-6). Paul is not reporting secondhand legend. He is citing people he claims to know personally, and daring his audience to check.
Whatever one makes of the resurrection—literal, metaphorical, hallucinatory, theological—the belief in it is an irreducible historical fact, and the movement it generated was real. Within a generation, communities of Jesus-followers had spread across the eastern Mediterranean. Within three centuries, Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire. Within two millennia, 2.4 billion human beings would organize their spiritual lives around the proposition that a Galilean day laborer was God incarnate.
The mechanism of that transformation is the subject of Philip Jenkins's Jesus Wars, which traces the seemingly absurd theological controversies of the early Church councils—was Jesus homoousian (same in essence) with the Father, or homoiousian (same in substance)?—and reveals them as power struggles in which "words are banners and pennants: who pledged to whom was inseparable from who said what in what words." It wasn't that they really cared about the conceptual difference. They cared about whether the Homoousians or the Homoiousians were going to run the Church.
The twoness at the heart of the Christian story—the historical Jesus and the theological Christ, the wise rabbi and the cosmic Lord, nice Jesus and nasty Jesus, the feaster and the judge—is not a problem to be solved. It is the engine of the faith. As Gopnik writes: "All faiths have fights, but few have so many super-subtle shadings of dogma: wine or blood, flesh or wafer, one God in three spirits or three Gods in one." The two figures—the suffering man and the remote Pantocrator—spin around each other throughout history, and their irresolution is what gives Christianity its discursive dynamism.
The Evidence Beyond the Text
Outside the New Testament, the historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth is thin but not nonexistent, and its thinness tells you something about his social position. He was not the kind of person the Roman world documented. He held no office. He commanded no army. He wrote nothing down.
The earliest non-Christian reference comes from the Jewish historian Josephus, writing around 94 CE—roughly sixty years after the crucifixion. In a brief, almost offhand passage in his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus mentions "James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call messiah," who was condemned to stoning by a fiendish high priest named Ananus. The phrase "the one they call messiah" is clearly derisive; Josephus is not endorsing the claim. But the passage is significant because it assumes the audience already knows who Jesus is. As Aslan noted in his Reddit AMA: "The passage proves not only that 'Jesus, the one they call messiah' probably existed, but that by the year 94 CE, when the Antiquities was written, he was widely recognized as the founder of a new and enduring movement."
The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around 116–117 CE, provides the second major non-Christian reference. Describing Nero's persecution of Christians after the fire of Rome in 64 CE, Tacitus notes that "Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus." The passage is written in Tacitus's characteristic compressed Latin and drips with contempt for the "mischievous superstition"—but its hostility is itself a mark of authenticity. No Christian forger would have described the faith that way.
Early Christian writers who were not yet distant from the apostolic generation—Clement of Rome (circa 70–96 CE), Ignatius of Antioch (circa 110 CE), Polycarp (circa 110–140 CE), the latter said to have been taught directly by the original apostles—all attest to a historical figure who lived, taught, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and was believed to have risen. These are not disinterested sources. But the explosive growth of the movement within a single century is itself a kind of evidence. As Lawrence Mykytiuk of Purdue University notes, "Jewish rabbis who did not like Jesus or his followers accused him of being a magician and leading people astray, but they never said he didn't exist."
The Man Behind the Myth
E.P. Sanders—the Duke University religion professor whose
The Historical Figure of Jesus remains one of the most rigorous and readable scholarly accounts—framed the challenge this way: we cannot recover the precise words Jesus spoke or the exact details of his daily life, but we can reconstruct with reasonable confidence the world in which he lived, and from that reconstruction, a portrait emerges.
The portrait is of a man who was Jewish to his core—who worshipped in synagogues, preached from Jewish scripture, celebrated Jewish festivals, made pilgrimage to the Jewish Temple, lived and died within the theological and political horizons of first-century Judaism. "The single most important thing to remember about Jesus," Aslan said in his Reddit AMA, "is that he was a Jew. Now that seems obvious but if it's true then it means that everything he said or did must be viewed in its Jewish context."
He was an eschatological prophet who believed the present age was ending. He was a wisdom teacher whose parables still astonish. He was a social radical whose open table and indifference to purity laws constituted a profound challenge to the existing order. He was a healer—the sources are unanimous on this point, even if the mechanism is debated. He was a man of enormous personal magnetism who inspired in his followers a devotion so intense that it survived his public execution and transformed itself into a global religion.
He was also, by his own apparent admission, wrong about the timeline. The end did not come. The kingdom did not arrive. The world went on.
And here is the deepest paradox: the wrongness did not kill the movement. It catalyzed it. The failure of the literal prediction forced a creative theological response—the development of a Christology, a soteriology, an ecclesiology—that proved infinitely more durable and adaptable than any fulfilled prophecy could have been. A prediction that comes true is done. A prediction that fails requires interpretation, and interpretation requires community, and community requires institution, and institution endures.
Philip Pullman, the novelist, tried in The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ to separate the two strands—the wise teacher from the cosmic redeemer, the human Jesus from the divine Christ—by literally splitting them into twin brothers. The effort is elegant and sincere and finally impossible. "This fixed, steady twoness at the heart of the Christian story," Gopnik writes, "can't be wished away by liberal hope any more than it could be resolved by theological hair-splitting. Its intractability is part of the intoxication of belief."
The Argument That Never Ends
W.H. Auden, the greatest Christian poet of the twentieth century, and William Empson, the greatest anti-Christian polemicist of the same period, were exact contemporaries, close friends, and nearly interchangeable specimens of slovenly English intellectualism. Auden chose Christianity for the absolute democracy of its vision: "There is, in it, neither Jew nor German, East nor West, boy nor girl, smart nor dumb, boss nor worker." Empson, beginning in the 1940s, became the most articulate critic of a morality "reduced to keeping the taboos imposed by an infinite malignity," in which the reintroduction of human sacrifice as a sacred principle left the believer "with no sense either of personal honour or of the public good."
They were both right. That's the point.
Reza Aslan, who converted to evangelical Christianity at fifteen, lost his faith in graduate school, returned to Islam, and then spent twenty years studying the historical Jesus with obsessive scholarly rigor, put it simply on Reddit: "If your faith is strong, then nothing I say should be able to shake it. So relax. Pick up the book. Debate its arguments. But don't be afraid."
The argument is the reality. The absence of certainty is the certainty. Authority and fear can circumscribe the argument, or congeal it, but they cannot end it. The impulse of orthodoxy has always been to suppress the wrangling as a sign of weakness. The impulse of modern theology is to embrace it as a sign of life. The deeper question—the one that has been asked since the morning the tomb was found empty—is whether the uncertainty at the center mimics the plurality of possibilities essential to liberal debate, or is an antique mystery in a story open only as the tomb is open, with something left inside that can never be entirely explored or explained.
Thomas Jefferson compiled his own New Testament, with the ethical teachings left in and the miracles cut out. Albert Schweitzer, the great polymath, concluded his 1906
Quest of the Historical Jesus with the image of a failed apocalyptic prophet who died in disappointment—and then spent the rest of his life serving that prophet's memory in a hospital in equatorial Africa. John Dominic Crossan, the former mendicant friar, reconstructed Jesus as a nonviolent radical confronting Roman oppression and then spent decades arguing that the resurrection was metaphor, not fact—and the argument itself became a kind of ministry. Rudolf Bultmann insisted we could know virtually nothing about the historical Jesus and then wrote one of the most influential books about him ever published. The man keeps escaping the categories designed to contain him.
Aslan, when asked on Reddit what would happen to religion if aliens arrived on Earth, answered without hesitation: "We would simply absorb their reality into our religious traditions the way we have done with every major scientific breakthrough." He might have been describing the history of Jesus scholarship itself—an endless process of absorption, reinterpretation, and reinvention that has been running, without interruption, since the morning after the crucifixion.
Beyond the words, beyond the scholarship, beyond the theological warfare and the archaeological digs and the two-thousand-year argument about the nature of the divine, there is still that scene at the river—a man walking into the water, not yet knowing what he would become, submitting to a ritual that implied he needed to be cleansed. In Mark, the heavens tear. In history, nothing visible happens. A nobody from a village no one had heard of is washed in a muddy river by a desert hermit, and the world before that moment and the world after it are not the same world. On the far bank, the wilderness. Ahead of him, the road, the crowds, the parables, the table, the garden, the cross. Behind him, just the water, closing over the place where he had stood.
