The person of Jesus Christ.

Summarise the person of Jesus Christ.

-Jesus took aspects of the Jewish faith & made them his own, attracting followers & starting a movement that soon afterwards became a seperate religion.

-As Christianity spread, the nature of Jesus was explored, challenged & defined carefully.

-By the year 451, Jesus was acknowledged by Christianity as fully God & fully human. This made Jesus different to other inspiring preachers & different to other prophets.

-Jesus’ teachings are summed up in the way he turned the society he lived in upside down: he spoke of a God of love, not punishment & a God who welcomes everyone, even outcasts.

-In some ways, it could be argued that Jesus was more of a prophet than anything else, but he was certainly a teacher & some might argue a teacher of wisdom. His work with outcasts & the poor makes some consider him a liberator.

-In modern theology, the quest for the historical Jesus was very important during the 20th century. This quest aimed to find out who the Jesus of history was & how similar he was to the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels. This quest also asked questions about who Jesus thought he was & whether he thought his relationship with God was similar to, or different from other ppls.

Jesus as the Son of God.

-The phrase ‘Son of God’ meant diff things to Jews & Gentiles at the time of Jesus. For Jews, it tended to mean someone specially chosen by God, perhaps w angelic or supernatural aspects.

-For Gentiles, it was a way of saying someone was divine. For jesus to be known as Son of God in the NT was a way of saying all of this at once to both audiences.

-The special nature of his conception & birth seem to show Jesus as being very literally the Son of God. At his baptism & transfiguration, God specially calls Jesus his son, but Jesus doesn’t seem to use the title of himself.

-Some think that this was bc the idea of him being divine was written into the texts later, whereas others think that this is bc Jesus didn’t want to attract unnecessary attention from the religious authorities.

Jesus’ knowledge of God.

-Jesus calls God Abba or Dad but spends time in prayer. It seems from some of the Gospel accounts that he didn’t see himself as equal to God.

-In John’s Gospel, there are a number of sayings of Jesus that begin ‘I am’, written in Greek in the same way that the Greek version of the Old Testament referred to the unspoken name of God.

-This seems to be a clear indication that Jesus was referring to himself as God, although some point out that John’s Gospel was written a long time after the other Gospels & so the point may have been John’s own addition to the Jesus story to match the theology of early Christianity, rather than reflecting historical truth.

Define divinity.

-The divine aspect of Jesus - the part of Jesus that is God.

Jesus’ miracles.

-Jesus’ miracles seem to suggest that he had God’s power in a special way. The New Testament talks of miracles as works of power & great wonder.

-John’s Gospel uses the word for a ‘sign’ to describe the miracles, suggesting that these are signs that point to Jesus’ divinity.

-Magicians were commonplace at the time of Jesus & some think that on their own miracles don’t specifically show Jesus to be divine.

-Unlike the magicians, however, Jesus didn’t perform miracles as tricks to make ppl believe - after his miracles he often asked ppl not to talk about what had happened.

-Also, miracles such as the calming of the sea showed Jesus performing actions that only God was thought to be able to do, which points further to Jesus’ divinity.

Jesus’ miracles in the Bible.

-Mark 6:47-52= Jesus walks on water - a miracle story that helps the disciples to understand what they had previously witnessed when he fed the 5000. When Jesus identifies himself to the disciples he uses the special ‘I am’ phrase to help them understand: Jesus’ power comes from his identity as God.

-John 9:1-41= Jesus first performs a miracle, healing a blind man. This convinces the man that Jesus’ power comes from God, but the authorities don’t accept this. Jesus uses this event to explain to the authorities that it isn’t just physical blindness that he is here to heal, but spiritual blindness - the blindness that makes them not realise who they are dealing with.

Jesus’ resurrection.

-Jesus’ resurrection was enough proof for the disciples of the truth behind Jesus’ message & authority that they began a new religious movement.

-The Gospels make an effort to show Jesus as having really died & really been buried, only for that tomb to be found empty with the grave clothes discarded.

-Paul’s letters, written before the Gospels, speak of Jesus’ appearances to his followers but not the empty tomb, making some thinkers suggest that the resurrection shouldn’t be taken literally.

-However, the literal truth of the resurrection event is central to Christian belief.

-The emphasis is that Jesus, as God, raised himself from the dead to show that, for humans, death isn’t the end.

-It is the ultimate sign for Christians that Jesus came to earth both as human & divine: he died but broke through that barrier & therefore is a special intermediary between God & humans; he knows what it is to be human but also shows that God is completely in control.

-As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:17, ‘if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile'; you are still in your sins’.

Jesus as a teacher of wisdom.

-Jesus’ sayings were often similar to those in the book of Proverbs. One of the examples of wisdom literature in the OT & his one-liners gave insight & were memorable to those who heard them.

-Jesus’ parables were stories that were designed to catch the attention of his contemporaries & to think diff ab the world around them.

-In Christianity, Jesus’ wisdom comes from the fact that he is God as well as human. His experience of the world is completely different to ours.

-Some argue that encounters with heaven such as at his baptism or transfiguration might have given him the wisdom that he communicated in his teaching, but for others, this direct access to God would be more of a sign that he wasn’t human, simply divine.

-Jesus, in challenging the Judaism of his day, wanted ppl to take responsibility for their actions but to get their priorities right: e.g he said that Sabbath was made for humans, not the other way around - the Sabbath Law needed to be kept in perspective.

-Religion & morality help humans get to God - purity is ab what is on the inside, not what rituals are being followed.