What is Jesus? & Who was Jesus?

What is Jesus? Before you jump to an answer, please look at the question again. I didn’t ask – Who was Jesus? 

If you have been reading my articles and newsletters, then you know that since 1984 I have been engaged in research focused on answering the second question. Since that time a tremendous amount of information about the historical Jesus has come forth.

The first question, however, is not about the Jewish man who taught in Galilee, Samaria and Judea. It is about what Jesus means to many people today. Jesus, for many, means life after death, hope, community, forgiveness, happiness, right values, and truth.

The more we learn about the historical Jesus, Yeshua the Mashiach, the greater the gap becomes between him and the theologies our churches taught us about Jesus Christ.

One of the great challenges facing us today is how to reconcile “what Jesus is” with the information about “who Jesus was.” At the extremes, some have chosen to leave the religion that taught them about what Jesus is, while others have chosen to ignore the information about who Jesus was. Most are living somewhere between those two extremes.

A lifetime of beliefs, ideas, memes, emotions, experiences, etc., are woven together to create our individual “spiritual realities.” New information doesn’t simply “unweave” those things and produce a new and functional reality. In many cases, long held beliefs may be lost, but nothing replaces them. I know a growing number of people who know much more about what they don’t believe than what they do believe.

In 1984 when I first encountered information the Jewish Jesus it was through a book. For the next decade I took classes at the University of Texas at Arlington, spent many hours at area university libraries, purchased many books for our library, traveled to seminars and filled up hundreds of legal pads with thousands of notes.

If you use the internet or watch programs aired on public television channels, the History Channel, Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, etc.; then you have been exposed to more information about the Jewish Jesus in the past year than we could generated from twenty years of intense research. The challenges today are not how to find information; it is how to filter out massive amounts of useless information to find the facts.

It is obvious that many people and institutions have a vested interest in the decisions people make on this subject. Their influence, power and wealth is directly at risk. Information produced by sources with a vested interest must be examined with that factor in mind. The potential loss of money and power has determined the decisions that have been made by people for as long as history has been recorded, so I have no doubt that human nature hasn’t changed recently.

We are the first generation to face the spiritual challenges created by the “information age.” Unlike those who lived before us, we do not live in a world in which access to information was controlled by a small group and a limited number of sources. Our world is a world of instant access to an almost an infinite number of sources and the ability to instantly communicate with people around the world. The new reality is greatly influenced by Google, FaceBook, Twitter, cell phones and televisions with hundreds of channels. The “good old days” are over.

One of the major challenges of this generation is to learn how to live in the “information age” without becoming a nation of isolated “lone rangers.” You have probably heard the famous military strategy – “divide and conqueror.” Is the greatest threat to our survival the decisions made by those within, instead of the depraved acts of terror of those outside?

I believe that how we deal with the two questions above – What is Jesus? & Who was Jesus? – will be a major factor in determining the answers to two other very important questions – What is America? & Who is an American?

I would appreciate your comments? I would also like to hear how you have dealt with this situation.