Transcript

Who is Jesus Christ?

Many, many people have asked this question, and it's a fundamentally important one.

I hope that every person asks it, that every person comes to encounter Jesus Christ himself.

It's a central part of this program, of course, asking this question.

We're devoting three sessions to the person of Christ.

This session today is about how to answer that question in our contemporary context, and especially in view of the historical study of Jesus.

And yet, notice that I did not begin by asking the question, Who was Jesus?

but Who is he?

That's because as Christians, we believe that Jesus is alive, existing in the present tense.

Now, of course, history necessarily brackets this truth of faith.

According to the historical method, a scholar will study the Jesus of history as a figure in the past.

This can be an important and a very helpful thing.

After all, Jesus did live in a concrete historical moment in time.

He lived in the first century AD in Palestine.

Many people met him.

Many heard what he said, witnessed the miracles he worked.

Some of them passed on their eyewitness testimony to others, and some of that was written down in the various documents that came to be known as the New Testament, primarily made up of some letters and what are called Gospels.

But the sort of conclusions that this kind of investigation produces is limited.

Think, for example, about what we read in the Gospels.

Many people encountered Jesus during His earthly life, and most of them knew more about Jesus and the times in which He walked about in Galilee and Jerusalem than today's historians do.

Yet only some of Jesus' listeners discerned something deeper about His identity that caused them to become His disciples.

As Christians, we want to come to know Christ Himself according to His deepest identity and to be capable of bringing other people to encounter Him in the same way.

Consider the case of the confession of St. Peter at Caesarea Philippi, which we read in chapter 16 of Matthew's Gospel.

Who do you say that I am?

Jesus asks.

And Peter says, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.

To which Jesus responds, Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.

So, the true identity of Christ is not knowable by flesh and blood, by normal human means.

It requires a supernatural revelation.

And this identity of Jesus, that He is the Son of the living God, is obviously of the highest importance.

If it's true, then it changes everything about the way we look at him.

Now, if not every person who heard Jesus preach came to know this truth, neither can it be directly known by purely historical study.

So while history is very important, it's not sufficient of itself to bring us to know the deepest true identity of Jesus.

Rather, a revelation, and hence faith, is necessary for that.

At the same time, history does have some very important things to teach us, and it can help us to know Jesus, whom we've already encountered by faith, even better.

For example, with the tools of history, we can gain a more complete picture of the events depicted in the Gospel texts.

We can strive to understand the historical context in which they happened, the significance for His contemporaries of the things Jesus said and did.

And we can also study the history of the scriptural text itself, its authorship, how it was edited, its sources, its meaning for its original hearers or readers, and so forth.

And all of this can be very useful.

I would even say it's necessary.

It helps us make sure that we are really understanding the message that Jesus brings us in the sense in which He meant it and in which the Apostles received it.

But at the same time, sometimes history can be misused in the study of Christ.

Some historians say, for example, things like, The Gospels themselves have internal inconsistencies in their chronology event- of events, for example, and even worse, they're written as religious texts with an agenda.

They're false or mythologizing about the figure of Jesus, and so you can't trust them.

You can only trust what we historians can verify using the historical method about this ancient figure, Jesus of Nazareth.

And some historians and others will go even further.

They might say, We can use other historical sources to go back behind the Gospels to discover the hidden truth about Jesus that the Gospels are distorting or covering up.

Now, to reply to these sorts of claims, I'd say three things.

The first is this.

These arguments assume that Jesus is only truly knowable as a historical figure in the past, as a man of the past .

and they assume that the perspective of faith does not help you know Him as He truly is.

But this, of course, is highly doubtful, even as a matter of history.

In fact, the earliest testimonies to the person of Jesus, that is, the most historically reliable sources as a matter of history, they are the Gospels and the letters of St. Paul.

There's, in fact, very little other historical evidence that is better than those sources.

Virtually all other historical sources about Jesus, things like the so-called Gnostic Gospels, maybe the Gospel of Thomas or Mary Magdalene, these were written much later than the texts of the New Testament, and not by eyewitnesses to His life.

Moreover, the New Testament texts were not written for the purpose of setting out a kind of chronology of Jesus' life, or the kind of report you'd read in a newspaper.

They're not trying to be merely historical documents.

They recount true events about what truly happened in history, but their point is not to tell us whether Jesus went to Jerusalem on this date or on the other one, but something else.

Listen to how the Gospel of St. John puts it in Chapter 20: Now, Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book.

But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, you may have life in His name.

So we shouldn't be upset to discover that the Gospels sometimes differ on small points of historical detail.

It's a bit like if four different friends of yours told your life story in four slightly different ways.

That wouldn't be surprising, even if all four of them knew you very well.

In fact, what the four Gospels do very strongly and clearly agree on is that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, the Savior of the world.

Or to put this another way, the faith claims made about Jesus by the New Testament are at the core of the New Testament.

If a historian tries to filter out these faith claims, in effect, he will distort and even falsify the historical data itself.

Because above all, what those sources are trying to communicate is that Jesus is Lord, the Christ, the Son of the living God.

So, this brings me to the second point I wanted to make.

You can learn certain things about Jesus by studying history, even very important things.

But pure history can only tell you about a sequence of events, and in the end, cannot tell you what is the inner identity of Jesus or the true meaning of His life.

You can only know those things through faith.

In this sense, what faith teaches about Jesus doesn't obscure, rather it illuminates what we know about Him from history.

So, the historical investigation of the Scriptures is important for the Christian.

Our faith depends on the real historical events of the life of Christ.

They really happened.

But pure history will always yield something incomplete unless it is incorporated into faith and adjusted for it.

And so in the end, we could say faith presupposes and incorporates history, and history points us to the witness of faith of those who follow Jesus.

Now, there is a third big-picture point that I want to end with.

From the perspective of the Catholic faith, it's a mistake to read the Bible purely as a collection of ancient documents.

Rather, we hold that Scripture is divinely inspired.

That is, God is truly and primarily the author of sacred Scripture.

Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, human authors composed the books of Scripture.

They really did write them down, and they wrote them in such a way that the human authors' intellect and activity was taken up and strengthened by the light of divine grace.

So, the Bible is therefore rightfully understood as a unified whole, even though the many different books were written at different times and by different individuals.

The true author is God, and this is why we claim that in truth, the whole Bible is speaking about Christ.

Now, this is precisely how Jesus taught His own disciples to read the Old Testament.

Do you remember the story about Jesus' appearance on Easter Sunday evening to the two disciples as they walked along the road to Emmaus?

You can read about it in Chapter 24 of Luke's Gospel.

These disciples are discouraged.

They're depressed.

They had followed Jesus only to see Him crucified and killed by the Romans on the preceding Friday.

And now, on Sunday, they're leaving Jerusalem, maybe headed back to their homes.

And Jesus meets them on the road and walks with them, though they didn't know it was Jesus.

And He asks them about what they were speaking about on the way, and they say, Jesus of Nazareth, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered Him up to be condemned to death and crucified Him.

But we had hoped that He was the one to redeem Israel.

And Jesus replies, Oh, foolish men and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.

Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into His glory?

And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.

That's what we read in Luke's Gospel.

That is, Jesus Himself taught them that the Old Testament Scriptures spoke about Jesus, and this is precisely the way the Church reads the Bible as a whole.

This is the Jesus proclaimed by the Catholic Church.

He is the Son of David and the fulfillment of the Old Testament.

He is the one whom prophets and patriarchs foretold, who lived and taught in a historical moment, and who rose from the dead.

He really rose.

This man is true God, our Lord, and our Savior.

And that is something we'll discuss more in our next session.