Foreword

If Jesus was all he claimed to be then our quest for someone to guide us to the truth is over: we have found who we are looking for. If he is not, then either we must look elsewhere or we must admit that any search for meaning is doomed. Everything hinges on Jesus and his claims.

The imporTance oF Jesus

Let’s begin. Jesus was a man from a low social background who was born over two thousand years ago into a despised race at the edge of a vast empire. He travelled no great distance, held no public office and left no writings. In the briefest of careers, barely three years, he trained twelve disciples from equally unpromising backgrounds, infuriating the religious leadership of his day and being publicly and shamefully executed. To say that he had an undistinguished life would be an understatement.

And yet . . .

• About a third of the world’s population today consider themselves to be followers of Jesus.

• Although it may prefer to overlook the fact, Western culture is firmly rooted in the Christian faith centred on Jesus. The emphases on such things as truth, honesty, the value of every individual and a concern for the poor and weak, can all be traced back to the ethical teachings of Jesus. • The followers of Jesus are not restricted to a single culture, social level or language but occur in their hundreds of millions in every inhabited continent. • Jesus’ teaching has proved to be extraordinarily durable.

Throughout the last 2,000 years it has frequently found itself in opposition to great powers, brutal regimes and influential ideologies. Such bodies have often sought to erase the faith yet, when the dust has settled, the empire or the kingdom is gone and Jesus’ teachings and his followers remain. • English, the most commonly spoken language in the world, has been enormously influenced by Christianity. Three texts have moulded it: the Authorised Version or ‘King James’ Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and the works of Shakespeare.

The first two are, of course, Christian while the third frequently dwells on Christian themes and ideas. Whenever you utter such commonplace phrases as ‘a prodigal son’, ‘turning the other cheek’, ‘not casting stones’, ‘love your neighbour’ or

‘judge not, lest you be judged’, you repeat the words of Jesus. • Millions of people from every culture, race and background can testify that believing in Jesus has transformed their lives. • Jesus arouses astonishing devotion and commitment. Indeed he is quite literally worshipped; a phenomenon that would be idolatry unless, as mainstream Christianity has always believed, you hold to the astonishing idea that, in this Jesus, God became one of us. And Christianity claims that on the third day after he was killed and buried, Jesus appeared alive in the flesh to his followers. From the very beginning, human beings have known three sad and unchallengeable things about death’s grip on humanity: it is universal, inevitable and irreversible. Yet if Christians are correct, Jesus broke that rule. Astonishingly, utterly unique amongst the untold numbers of the dead, this Jesus is talked about in the present tense by billions. If we can indeed say not just that Jesus lived but that he lives then how we think about everything changes. It’s not just that death is no longer final but, beyond our greatest hopes (or, possibly, worst fears) Jesus is alive and active in the world and one day will judge the human race. That’s a claim whose truth definitely needs investigating.

TruTh, FaiTh and The supernaTural

We live in a world where terms such as ‘alternative facts’ and even ‘post-truth’ are thrown around and where some people think it’s possible to ignore what you don’t like simply by calling it ‘fake news’. Faced with such ideas it’s tempting to believe that either truth doesn’t matter or that it is infinitely flexible. However attractive such views may seem they are, of course, nonsense. The truth of the matter is that truth matters and it can’t be changed just because you don’t like it. Every time you catch a plane, take medicine or drive over a bridge you rely on the fact that pilots, doctors and engineers operate on the basis of what they know to be true, not what they wish was

true. The whole edifice of science and technology is based on things being either true or false and you won’t hear the phrase ‘post-truth’ being used in any laboratory. Truth exists.

Yet if truth does exist it’s undeniable that today people do seem to hold lightly to it. The result is an extraordinary paradox. On the one hand we see widespread scepticism about what is claimed to be truth by any authority, whether scientific or religious. On the other there is an astounding credulity when it comes to mysteries, theories and conspiracies. We are in an age when an ‘alternative viewpoint’, even if unsupported by facts, seems to compel more support than ‘the traditional view’, even if it is defended by an entire library of facts. The Internet must take some of the blame. There was a time when to promote an idea it was necessary to persuade someone to take the costly risk of publishing it in a book; a process that normally involved the checking of facts. Today anybody can publish anything and anybody does. The Internet has democratised knowledge in the worst possible way: now you don’t need to know anything to be an expert!

Truth matters, and certainly so in the case of Jesus. The Bible claims that he is someone who controls our eternal destiny and demands our allegiance. How we live – and certainly how we die – hinges on the truthfulness of that claim.

Yet if modern culture is wrong to downplay truth it does have reasons for doing so. One source of the disfavour towards truth is a widespread certainty that there is more to the universe than can be described by cold scientific facts. ‘There must be more than this!’ was a powerful advertising catchphrase for the Alpha Course that echoed a near universal sentiment in twenty-first-century minds. The reality is that faith of all sorts, whether as religion, spirituality or simply superstition, is everywhere and seems to be becoming more widespread. There is a reason for this: human beings have hungry hearts and all the tricks and trinkets offered by the modern world leave us unsatisfied and malnourished. The result is that progress has produced a mind-set that is more open to the possibility of the supernatural – and hence the Bible’s view of the way the world works – than many people expected. Now of course the major reason that some people consider the Gospels to be fictional or fictionalised is because they do not believe in anything beyond what they normally see or feel. The idea that there might be the possibility of unusual events beyond the understanding of science – things that we might call supernatural – is ruled out. On the basis of this belief (something that is in fact an act of faith) any account that mentions such things as angels, miracles or resurrections must automatically be untrue. We devote a whole chapter to the miracles of Jesus and discuss and defend the idea of the supernatural there. Here let’s just simply say that Jesus was an extraordinary and unique man and if what we label ‘the Laws of Nature’ can be broken by anyone then this was the man who could do it.

Views oF Jesus: TradiTion and iTs alTernaTiVes

This book is all about Jesus and we need to acknowledge at the start that there are a vast number of different understandings of who Jesus was (or is) and what he means (or doesn’t). Even if we do not always refer to them, these differing views form the backdrop to what we write in this book. At a very basic level we could divide these views into two: the traditional and the alternative.

The ‘traditional’ view

Let’s start with the ‘traditional’ or ‘mainstream’ view of Jesus which is what we believe and defend in this book. This view, held by almost all Christians across all denominations through nearly twenty centuries, is that Jesus was in some special, unique way, God; that he died but a few days later rose bodily from the dead and is still alive today as the Lord and Saviour of the human race. And as believers in traditional Christianity we consider the Bible is a trustworthy record of who Jesus was, what he did and what he said. (There’s a certain logic in linking these two views: after all, if God did go through the effort and agony of becoming human in Jesus then it would seem, well, careless not to have ensured a reliable record of what happened.)

Nevertheless, it’s important to point out that our commitment to tradition extends only to our views of who Jesus really was and is.