BEFORE

To my surprise, in recent decades the amount of attention the general culture gives to the historical Jesus has been increasing. Every year as Easter approaches, there are numerous media features about Jesus. This past Easter, Newsweek religion editor Lisa Miller explained that “Easter is . . . a celebration of the final act of the Passion, in which Jesus rose from his tomb in his body three days after his execution. . . . The Gospels insist on the veracity of this supernatural event. . . . Jesus died and rose again so that all his followers could, eventually, do the same. This story has strained the credulity of even the most devoted believer. For, truly, it’s unbelievable.”1

In his article “Myth or History: The Hard Facts of the Resurrection” for The Times (UK), Geza Vermes poses this question: “At the heart of the message of Christianity lies the resurrection of Jesus. The chief herald of this message, St. Paul, bluntly proclaims: ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.’ How does his statement, reinforced by two millennia of theological cogitation, compare with what the Gospels tell us about the first Easter? Is it myth or does it contain a grain of history?”2

Nanci Hellmich reported in USA Today that “Two researchers analyzed the food and plate sizes in 52 of the most famous paintings of The Last Supper and found that the portion sizes in the paintings have increased dramatically over the past millennium.”3 The popular press has a lot to say about Jesus.

And of course, they aren’t the only ones. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the subject of Jesus is its own genre, featuring carefully researched biographies, scholarly textual commentaries, historical criticism, speculative fiction, antimythologies, and everything in between.

Into this seemingly inexhaustible current of words and thought about Jesus, I gingerly lay this volume. It is an extended meditation on the historical Christian premise that Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection form the central event of cosmic and human history as well as the central organizing principle of our own lives. Said another way, the whole story of the world—and of how we fit into it—is most clearly understood through a careful, direct look at the story of Jesus. My purpose here is to try to show, through his words and actions, how beautifully his life makes sense of ours.

A True Life Story

If we want to investigate that life, to discern whether Jesus really did live and die and rise again, to know if the Easter story contains even “a grain of history” or perhaps even the key to history, we need to go to the Gospels, the historical documents that tell Jesus’s story. These Gospels are named after their authors: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Much of the recent “Jesus genre” consists of argument over whether the Gospels are reliable records of Jesus’s life. Two hundred years ago, some scholars began to propose that the Gospels were oral traditions embellished with many legendary elements over the generations, and were not written down until more than one hundred years after the events of Jesus’s life.4 These claims have convinced many people over the years that we cannot know who Jesus really was. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and English author George Eliot lost hold of their Christian faith largely from reading the skeptical Life of Jesus Critically Examined by David Strauss, and each year thousands of students find their beliefs shaken in the same way by the typical undergraduate course in “the Bible as literature.”

There is a countermovement going on, however. One hundred fifty years ago it was confidently asserted that no Gospel existed before the third decade of the second century A.D. But over the past century the evidence has become overwhelming that the Gospels were written down much earlier, within the lifetime of many of the eyewitnesses to Jesus’s life and death.5 This has led to “faith reversals,” as in the well-publicized cases of Anne Rice and A. N. Wilson. The biographer Wilson wrote Jesus: A Life in 1992, which presupposed the thesis that the Gospels are nearly entirely legendary. Yet in 2009 he revealed how he had returned to Christian faith after years of atheism and of writing books assaulting Christianity.6 Novelist Rice had lost her faith in college, but when she began to read the work of prominent Bible scholars, she discovered that:

The whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if he knew about it—that whole picture which had floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years—that case was not made.7

Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses makes, I think, the most conclusive argument that the Gospels are not long-evolving oral traditions but rather oral histories, written down from the accounts of the eyewitnesses themselves who were still alive and active in the community.

Bauckham cites extensive evidence that for decades after Jesus’s death and resurrection the people who were healed by Jesus, like the paralytic who was lowered through the roof; the person who carried the cross for Jesus, Simon of Cyrene; the women who watched Jesus being placed in the tomb, like Mary Magdalene; and the disciples who had followed Jesus for three years, like Peter and John—all of these participants in the life of Jesus continually and publicly repeated these incidents in great detail. For decades these eyewitnesses told the stories of what happened to them. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote down these accounts and so we have the Gospels.

Bauckham also observes that the Gospels are too counterproductive in their content to be legends. For example, it is astonishing that in the very foundational documents of the Christian church we would have a record that one of the greatest leaders of the church, Peter, was an enormous failure who even cursed Jesus in public. The only credible source for the account of Peter’s denial and betrayal of Jesus would be Peter himself: No one else could have known the details we are given. And no one in the early church would have dared to highlight the weakness of its most revered and significant leader with such candor—unless that very weakness was an important part of the story. And unless, of course, the accounts were true.

The Gospel of Mark

For the purposes of this book, I sensed that the best way to explore the life of Jesus was not to make a survey of all the Gospels, but to examine a single, coherent narrative: one that focused intently on the actual words and actions (especially the actions) of Jesus. This led me to the Gospel of Mark.

Who was Mark? The earliest and most important source of an answer comes from Papias, bishop of Hierapolis until 130 A.D., who said that Mark had been a secretary and translator for Peter, one of the first twelve of Jesus’s disciples or followers, and “wrote accurately all that [Peter] remembered.” This testimony is of particular significance, since there is evidence that Papias (who lived from 60–135 A.D.) knew John, another of Jesus’s first and closest disciples, personally.8 Bauckham’s volume demonstrates that, indeed, Mark mentions Peter proportionately more than any of the other Gospels. If you go through the book of Mark, you’ll see that nothing happens in which Peter is not present. The entire Gospel of Mark, then, is almost certainly the eyewitness testimony of Peter.

There is another reason to base our life of Jesus on the Gospel of Mark. Mark does not read like a dry history. It is written in the present tense, often using words like “immediately” to pack the account full of action. You can’t help but notice the abruptness and breathless speed of the narrative. This Gospel conveys, then, something important about Jesus. He is not merely a historical figure, but a living reality, a person who addresses us today. In his very first sentence Mark tells us that God has broken into history. His style communicates a sense of crisis, that the status quo has been ruptured. We can’t think of history as a closed system of natural causes anymore. We can’t think of any human system or tradition or authority as inevitable or absolute anymore. Jesus has come; anything can happen now. Mark wants us to see that the coming of Jesus calls for decisive action. Jesus is seen as a man of action, moving quickly and decisively from event to event. There is relatively little of Jesus’s teaching in the Gospel of Mark—mainly, we see Jesus doing. Therefore we can’t remain neutral; we need to respond actively.

The King and the Cross

You may know King’s Cross as a railway station in London, England, one that has been immortalized in the Harry Potter books. But it’s such a perfect encapsulation of the meaning of Jesus’s life that I couldn’t resist borrowing it for the original title of this book.

You see, the Gospel of Mark has one more feature that makes it ideal for our purposes here. Mark’s account of Jesus’s life is presented to us in two symmetrical acts: his identity as King over all things (in Mark chapters 1–8), and his purpose in dying on the cross (in Mark chapters 9–16).

This book’s structure is in two parts (“The King” and “The Cross”), each consisting of several chapters, with each chapter exploring a key part of this story told in Mark’s Gospel.

All books are selective in what they include, including the Gospels themselves; John concludes his own Gospel with the words “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written” (John 21:25). I have chosen to focus on a number of specific texts in Mark that I believe best trace the narrative of Jesus’s life, or expand on the themes of his identity or purpose. This means a handful of well-known passages aren’t addressed in detail in this book.

I trust that you will find the figure of Jesus worthy of your attention: unpredictable yet reliable, gentle yet powerful, authoritative yet humble, human yet divine. I urge you to seriously consider the significance of his life in your own.

Our True Life Story

Although I was raised in a Christian church, it was only in college that I found vital, life-changing faith in Jesus. One of the vehicles of that spiritual awakening was the Bible, especially the Gospel accounts in the New Testament. I had studied the Bible before. When I went through confirmation classes in my church, I had to memorize Scripture. But during college the Bible came alive in a way that was hard to describe. The best way I can put it is that, before the change, I pored over the Bible, questioning and analyzing it. But after the change it was as if the Bible, or maybe Someone through the Bible, began poring over me, questioning and analyzing me.

Not long after this happened to me, I came across an article in a magazine entitled “The Book That Understands Me,” by Emile Cailliet, professor of philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary.9 In his college days in France, Cailliet had been an agnostic. He graduated from university without having ever actually seen a Bible. Then he served in the army during World War I. “The inadequacy of my views on the human situation overwhelmed me,” he wrote. “What use . . . the philosophic banter of the seminar, when your own buddy—at the time speaking to you of his mother—dies standing in front of you, a bullet in his chest?”

Then a bullet got him as well, and he began recuperating during a long stay in a hospital. Reading literature and philosophy, he began strangely longing—“I must say it, however queer it may sound—for a book that would understand me.” Since he knew of no such book, he decided to prepare one for himself. He read widely, and whenever he found a brief passage that particularly struck him and “spoke to my condition,” he would carefully copy it down in a leather-bound pocket-size volume. As time went on and the number of quotations grew, he eagerly anticipated sitting down and reading it from cover to cover. He expected that “it would lead me as it were from fear and anguish, through a variety of intervening stages, to supreme utterances of release and jubilation.”

One day he went out to sit under a tree in his garden to read his precious anthology. As he did so, a growing disappointment came over him. Each quote reminded him of the circumstances in which he had chosen it, but things had changed. “Then I knew that the whole undertaking would not work, simply because it was of my own making.”

Almost at that very moment, his wife appeared after a walk with their child in a baby carriage. She had with her a Bible in French that she had received from a minister she had met on her walk. Cailliet took it and opened it to the Gospels. He continued to read deep into the night. The realization dawned on him: “Lo and behold, as I looked through them [the Gospels] the One who spoke and acted in them became alive to me. . . . This is the book that would understand me.”10

Reading that article, I realized that the same thing had happened to me. Though as a youth I had believed that the Bible was the Word of the Lord, I had not personally met the Lord of the Word. As I read the Gospels, he became real to me. Thirty years later I preached through the book of Mark at my church in New York City, in the hope that many others would likewise find Jesus in the accounts of the Gospels.

This book is inspired by those sermons, and it is offered with the same aspiration for the readers.