Jesus

Whatever you currently think about Jesus, the actual historical figure is worth looking at directly. Most people in Western cultures — religious or not — carry a mental image of him that is mostly cultural and very vague. The person in the original first-century documents is more specific than that, considerably stranger, and harder to dismiss casually.

This section of the site is for people who want to look at him carefully. You do not have to be religious to read it. You do not have to believe anything before you start. The pages below lay out, in plain language, what is actually known about him historically, what he himself is recorded as claiming, what his earliest followers said about him, and why those claims have continued to hold standing for two thousand years.

A few things up front

• Jesus existed. This is not a religious claim; it is a historical one. Effectively every working historian — Christian, atheist, agnostic — accepts that Jesus of Nazareth was a real person who lived in first-century Palestine, taught publicly in Galilee and Judea, gathered followers, and was executed by the Roman government around 30 AD. The debate is not about whether he existed but about how to explain what happened.
• Christianity makes a very specific claim about him. Not just that he was a great teacher. The original Christian claim, present in the earliest documents, is that he was God in human form, that he was killed for that claim, and that he was seen alive three days after his death. The whole tradition stands or falls on those claims.
• The most direct way to investigate him is to read about him. Four short biographies of his life — called the gospels — were written by his followers within decades of his death. The shortest one (called Mark) takes about ninety minutes to read.

The pages in this section

The questions below are the ones people most often ask when they actually start looking. None of them assume you have decided anything yet.