Is the "Jesus" in the Gospels the Same "Jesus" Who was Born to Mary?

Alternatively titled: What if the character called "Jesus" in the Gospels is different (in some ways) from the Jesus of literal history?

An Understandable Hesitancy

For the first 25 years or so of my life I believed/assumed that Christ was Jesus’ last name. Maybe not exactly his last name per se, but more or less part-of or synonymous-with “Jesus.”

I’m guessing many (most?) people still think this, and that’s why the other day I wrote an article all about:

• where the term Christ came from,

• how it eventually got applied to the miracle working Rabbi from Nazareth, and

• why over time it became basically another way to say “Jesus.”

If you’ve never heard this before then I can understand why you might have initial hesitancy to go there. It’s scary to open the door to the mere possibility that your longstanding beliefs about Jesus or the Bible might benefit from being changed, corrected, or expanded.

And that fear makes sense. No fear-shaming here.

After all, in order to get to a place where you understand and accept that “Jesus” and “Christ” are two different (albeit connected) terms, it first requires you to consider that the human being known as Jesus—who grew up and did some intriguing, radical, and controversial rabbi-type-things, and eventually was executed by the state—may not be exactly the same figure presented to us by the Gospels.

😳😳😳

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Now this would be the point in the conversation when 20 year old evangelical me would’ve freaked out because I was conditioned to think that the Bible is always literally true and historically perfect.

In my evangelical days, we were warned that if anything (even one small thing!) in the Bible is ever shown to be “not true,” then therefore the entire thing cannot be trusted!

And if that be the case then, well, we might as well become murderous, adulterous, drunkards.

Spoiler alert: I did indeed stop believing in the inerrancy of Scripture and so far have not murdered anyone, nor become adulterous, nor have I sunk to the bottom of the bottle. Turns out, my sense of ethics and morality have remained intact even if my commitment to everything in the Bible being literally and historically accurate has not!

In fact, breaking free from the fear based closed-mindedness of believing the Bible must always be interpreted literally and historically was (and remains) the biggest act of faith I’ve ever done. This is why I tell people, when they leave evangelicalism or do some kind of deconstruction, that it is not a sign that you’ve lost your faith.

Rather it’s a sign that your faith is working as it ought.

You can let go of your panic-infused death grip on the Bible as needing to be a perfect, always-correct, exacting account of everything in its pages.

You’ll be okay.

You may even be more than okay.

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The Gospels are True (and Some of it Happened)

What then are the Gospels if they’re not perfect biographical accounts of the life of Jesus?

Lots could be said on this but for today what if we just think of them as a well crafted combination of stories and sayings that encapsulated how the earliest Christians came to believe that Jesus was the Christ.

As I wrote the other day, this seemed to be the main thrust of the disciple’s first sermons:

"Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ." -Acts 2:36

and,

"Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ." -Acts 5:42

It’s more than likely that the Gospels include things that may or may not have actually, historically, literally happened, but nonetheless represent what early Christians believed to be true about Jesus, his message of the Kingdom, and God’s unfolding plan for creation.

Of course this is hard for you and me to wrap our minds around because we live in a post-Scientific Revolution world. We equate “truth” with “facts” and we honestly struggle to comprehend any other approach to reality. For us, something can only be considered “true” if it is verifiably a “fact.”

But that hasn’t been the case for most of humanity’s existence.

In fact, the world of the Bible is a world in which things are absolutely believed to be true, while also at the same time folks would not have batted an eye if it was revealed to them that a thing didn’t actually happen. If there had been a nanny cam to record the time frame when supposedly Noah built an ark to save a small remnant from a global flood, or, when Jonah spent time in the belly of a fish, or even when it was said that Jesus walked on water, it’s possible that the footage would reveal something different than what the biblical accounts tell.

And yet I don’t think this should rattle our confidence that the meaning, the message, and the truthfulness of the story remain solid.

It’s not about whether or not those kinds of things did or did not happen. Most days I remain agnostic about such questions.

At the risk of redundancy (a risk I’m never not willing to take) the point I’m making is that the power, the value, and the meaning held within the story is not dependent on it actually happening or not.

Which means (and I hope you can hear this) that there is a way to make a distinction between ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ.’ And making such a distinction might actually be a wise thing to do

I’m not saying we totally separate them. Obviously not. The two are linked.

But they are also not the same thing.

And that idea can open up a pathway in which we see what it might mean to be a follower of Jesus and a worshiper of Christ.

Alright, I suppose that’s a good place to stop. I try and make these articles not too long so I’ll pick this up again soon.

For now it is enough to simply ponder that part of moving from the beginning stages of the simplicity of Christianity into the deeper, more complex stages of Christianity, includes this openness to the idea that the Gospels are absolutely true…

and,

some of it actually happened.

Which means (for me anyway) that it’s logical to expect there to be some—I want to be careful how I word this—flourishes added to the descriptions of and stories told about Jesus.

Yes, perhaps a certain miracle happened in real life exactly as is described in the Gospels.

Or… perhaps…

The story of the miracle happening was a way for the early church to make a theological claim about who they believed Jesus was.

Namely, the Christ.