Jesus and the world religions

Abstract

If we start from where we are, as Christians of our own day, we begin amidst the confusion and uncertainty which assail us when we try to speak about Jesus, the historical individual who lived in Galilee in the first third of the first century of the Christian era. For New Testament scholarship has shown how fragmentary and ambiguous are the data available to us as we try to look back across nineteen and a half centuries, and at the same time how large and how variable is the contribution of the imagination to our ‘pictures’ of Jesus. In one sense it is true to say that he has been worshipped by millions; and yet in another sense, in terms of subjective ‘intentionality’, a number of different beings, describable in partly similar and partly different ways, have been worshipped under the name of Jesus or under the title of Christ. Some have pictured him as a stern law-giver and implacable judge, and others as a figure of inexhaustible gracious tenderness; some as a divine psychologist probing and healing the recesses of the individual spirt, and others as a prophet demanding social righteousness and seeking justice for the poor and the oppressed; some as a supernatural being, all-powerful and all-knowing, haloed in glorious light, and others as an authentically human figure living within the cultural framework of his time; and he has been pictured both as a pacifist and as a Zealot, as a figure of serene majesty and as a ‘man for others’ who suffered human agonies, sharing the pains and sorrows of our mortal lot… And each of these different ‘pictures’ can appeal to some element among the various strands of New Testament tradition.