The four gospels collected in the New Testament of the Bible tell the story of the carpenter’s in first-century Palestine who was crucified but miraculously rose again from the dead. These accounts of the actions and teachings of Jesus Christ are the rock on which Christianity is built, and they continue to inform the lives of an estimated 2.1 billion Christians around the globe; in other words, just under one in three of the world’s population.
Christianity teaches that Jesus was the son of God, made human in order to redeem the sins of the world. Two of the gospel writers, Mark and John, begin their accounts with Jesus already an adult and being baptized by his cousin, John. The other two, Matthew and Luke, instead start with the familiar tale, recalled by Christians each Christmas, of Jesus’s mother, Mary, and her virgin birth (her husband Joseph, the carpenter, was not Jesus’s real father), and of the child being visited in a Bethlehem stable by shepherds and three kings from the East guided to the place by a star.
The main focus of all four of the gospels, though, is the last three years of the 33 that Christians believe Jesus spent on earth. During this time he left his home in Nazareth and traveled around what is today known as the Holy Land, preaching initially in synagogues and later at vast open-air gatherings. In the process he assembled a core group of 12 male apostles, led by a fisherman, Simon, whom he renamed Peter, as well as a wider crowd of disciples.
Although they overlap on a number of events, each of the four gospels contains details not found in any other, and each has its own distinctive style. Mark’s is the shortest; it presents Jesus as a man of action and is written with little linguistic ornament. It is also believed to be the earliest of the four, dated around CE 70. Matthew’s, by contrast, written toward the end of the first century, gives more space to explaining the actions that are merely cataloged in Mark. It was intended primarily for a Jewish audience and links Jesus back to the prophets, kings and patriarchs of Israel. Luke’s gospel is the longest of the four and is poetic in tone. It contains many more stories and images and was written, it is believed, around the end of the first and start of the second century. John’s text contains entire sections unlike anything found in the other three; lengthy passages in which Jesus tries to explain who he is and why he has come into the world. It may have been the work of several authors, and has been dated between 100 and 125 CE.
Parables and miracles In the gospels, Jesus favors two main teaching methods—parables and miracles. His parables are memorable stories drawing on an everyday agricultural life that would be familiar to his audience, but also containing a broader moral point. It was a way of getting his message across to a population that was largely uneducated and therefore unlikely to respond to theological abstractions.
“Apart from Christ we know neither what our life nor our death is.”
Blaise Pascal, 1662
Jesus’s miracles—curing the sick and dying, and in at least two cases bringing the dead back to life, as well as walking on water, casting out demons, and making a few loaves and fishes feed a crowd of five thousand—demonstrated that he had powers greater than that of any mere man, and thus were the tangible proof for those who witnessed them that he was indeed the son of God. They recall the many stories in the Old Testament—known to Jews as the Hebrew scriptures—of miraculous cures brought about by divine intervention.
“There is in every miracle a silent chiding of the world.”
John Donne, 1649
Sermon on the Mount Jesus’s exact message to believers is much debated among the various branches of the Christian family. Its central features, however, are beyond dispute. In his parables, he describes how the world should be; the loving, sharing, caring, compassionate values it should embrace, rather than those it actually does. He talks about these values many times, most notably in the Sermon on the Mount, an episode that takes up three of the 28 chapters of Matthew’s gospel. This sermon includes the words of the Lord’s Prayer, repeated regularly by all Christians, plus Jesus’s version of the Golden Rule of treating others as you would want to be treated, his instruction “do not judge and you will not be judged,” and the Beatitudes, which begin: “Happy are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” With these words, Jesus is identifying himself explicitly with the marginalized and the dispossessed, an impression reinforced later in the gospels when he tells a rich young man to “go and sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”
Independent evidence of Jesus
Aside from the gospels, there are three other independent historical sources that mention Jesus’s life and death. At the end of the first century CE and the beginning of the second, two Roman historians, Tacitus and Pliny, and the Jewish chronicler Josephus all described him as a religious teacher living in Palestine. Tacitus includes the following just after an account of the great fire in Rome that occurred during Emperor Nero’s reign in CE 64: “Nero fastened the guilt of starting the blaze and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius [CE 14–37] at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.”
Passion and death Jesus’s teachings, and his increasing popularity, worried many in the Jewish establishment at the time. They saw him as a threat to their own authority, and so they conspired with the Roman colonial powers to have him put to death. The last week of his life, according to the gospels, was spent in Jerusalem. It began triumphantly, with people welcoming him into the city as the savior of Israel from foreign domination, but ended with his trial and his death by crucifixion—an ordeal collectively known to Christians as his Passion.
The gospels tell that three days after his death, on Easter Sunday, Jesus rose from the dead. By his death and resurrection he had, it is taught, redeemed the sins of humankind, and after entrusting his mission on Earth to his apostles, who were to become the first leaders of the Christian Church, he ascended into heaven in glory to rejoin his father.
the condensed idea
Jesus Christ is the son of God
| timeline | |
|---|---|
| CE 1 | Jesus born in Bethlehem |
| CE 30 | Begins public ministry |
| CE 33 | Put to death |
| CE 70 | First of four gospels written |