Jesus After the Critics

Quests for the “historical Jesus” are as old as Christianity itself. The claims of Jesus’s earliest followers and the strange communities to which they gave rise were so extravagant that outsiders quite reasonably wanted to know what the fuss was about. Who was this Jesus, this man whom people worshipped as God? When Christianity did not go away but flourished and even came to dominate parts of the world, the question became more pointed: Not “Who was Jesus?” but “Who was Jesus ­really?” It was a way of asking whether Christian ­churches, with their dogmas, hierarchies, heresy-­hunting, and elaborate rituals—their religion—might have gotten it all wrong. Had they blown one man’s life radically out of ­proportion? Read Full Article »