A Brief Introduction to the Historical Jesus

Would it shock you to know that the Jesus most of us grew up with, who some of us once said “saved us,” and with whom some of us had a “personal relationship” — is completely made up?

The Jesus Christ of Christianity, who came to the world proclaiming he was the Son of God, made of the same substance of the father, who was crucified by the Jews, (1) resurrected from the dead, and will return some day — is a total fairy tale.

That Jesus — the Christ of faith — bears little to no resemblance to the actual person, the itinerant, apocalyptic preacher known to historians and bible scholars as the historical Jesus.

Today I want to discuss the main differences between the two men, these two “versions” of Jesus — and what it means to people who want to actually follow him.

How We Actually Know Jesus

Despite what the church has been insisting for centuries, the Bible is not a historically reliable biography of one of the most consequential human beings who ever lived.

The four gospel accounts of Jesus’s life — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — were written decades after his death, by authors who were almost certainly not who the church later claimed they were. (2) The names attached to those gospels were added later, by communities trying to give their version of Jesus greater authority. The actual writers were anonymous, and what they recorded may or may not bear any resemblance to what Jesus actually said or did. (3)

To be fair — it’s actually quite a human dilemma. Can you remember with perfect accuracy what someone said and did eighty years ago? Could you put their exact words in quotation marks — the kind we use in modern writing to indicate someone actually said this, word for word? Of course not. Neither could anyone else. And yet that’s essentially what we’re being asked when told that the Bible is the literal, infallible, “Word of God.”

What a modern reader needs to understand — at least one who cares about the historical record — is that what survives in the Bible is, at its core, theological propaganda. The gospels were produced by communities who already had a particular interpretation of Jesus’s life, death, and meaning.

They had inherited differing, sometimes competing written and oral stories that had been circulating for generations. They added material, edited other material, and quietly omitted still more — all in service of making their theological argument. This isn’t an accusation; it’s how ancient writing worked. But it does mean we have to read these texts with our eyes open.

Whether or not you accept their theological conclusions is entirely up to you, and frankly — it doesn’t matter to me in the least. But for those of us who want to look at the history, who want to follow what Jesus actually said and did rather than what later believers decided he must have meant, the challenge becomes reading the gospels like a detective: sifting through layers of community memory, theological agenda, and storytelling tradition to find what is likely historically true, and what was likely modified — or invented outright.

The good news is that this work has been going on in earnest for over a century. Beginning roughly 150 years ago, scholars at some of the world’s leading universities began analyzing biblical texts using the same rigorous tools they’d apply to any other ancient document — examining internal logic and consistency, cross-referencing external sources like archaeology and non-Christian writings, and identifying biases and contradictions that reveal what the original authors were trying to accomplish.

This is far from an exact science. The scholarly inquest is less about proving what is true than ruling out what isn’t. And that’s actually quite powerful. We can say with reasonable confidence — for a whole cascade of reasons — that Jesus almost certainly never called himself the Son of God, nor said “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

Those statements come almost entirely from the Gospel of John, the last of the four gospels to be written, composed somewhere between sixty and sixty-five years after Jesus’s death. The scholarly consensus is strong: John’s gospel represents later Christian theological development — a community’s soaring convictions about who Jesus had become for them — not a record of what the man from Galilee actually said in the streets and hillsides of Roman-occupied Palestine.

You can choose to accept what that community believed. But it’s not the historical record.

What We Know For Sure About Jesus

So what do scholars actually agree on? Probably more than you’d expect.

There is an overwhelming consensus among historians — believers and skeptics alike — that Jesus of Nazareth was a real person. He was a first-century Jew, born somewhere between 4 BCE and 6 CE, who grew up and conducted his public ministry in the region of Galilee, in what was then a Roman-occupied backwater of the empire. He almost certainly came from the peasant class — not the romanticized poverty of stained glass, but the grinding, precarious poverty of a rural laborer’s family living under a system designed to extract everything it could from them. He was executed, almost certainly by crucifixion, ordered by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, somewhere around 30 CE.

As religious scholar Reza Aslan puts it with blunt efficiency: there are only two hard historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth upon which we can confidently rely — that he was a Jew who led a popular Jewish movement in Palestine at the beginning of the first century CE, and that Rome crucified him for doing so.

That’s not nothing. That’s actually everything.

Because here’s what tends to get stripped out of the Sunday school version of Jesus: the Roman Empire wasn’t a backdrop. It was the central fact of daily life for Jesus and everyone he knew. By the time Jesus was preaching in Galilee, the region had been under imperial domination for the better part of a century. This domination created a life of relentless hardship for the working poor. Local rulers extracted what they needed from the peasant class to pay Rome’s tribute, on top of whatever they took for themselves. It was extraction nested inside extraction, all the way down. This was the world Jesus was born into, preached into, and ultimately died inside of.

Understanding this context doesn’t just add color to the Jesus story. It completely changes what his teachings mean. When Jesus preached what he called the Kingdom of God, he was doing so in a landscape where imperial rule was enforced by constant violence, where local religious authorities were in bed with the occupying power, and where ordinary people were being slowly squeezed off their land and into desperation.

His Beatitudes — ”Blessed are the poor,” “Blessed are the hungry” — were not spiritual metaphors for the comfortable. (4) They were incendiary words spoken directly to people who were materially poor and literally hungry, promising a world turned upside down. The kingdom he proclaimed, scholars widely agree, was an earthly vision of radical reversal: the hungry fed, the debts canceled, the powerful dethroned.

This is also why he was killed. Jesus didn’t die because he made theological claims that offended religious sensibilities. He died because he was perceived — correctly — as a threat to the social order that kept Roman rule stable.

Crucifixion was Rome’s signature method of execution for rebels and those who disturbed the imperial peace. It was deliberately public and deliberately degrading. Whatever else you want to say about the cross, historically speaking, it is the Roman Empire’s verdict on the man from Galilee.

So here’s where that leaves us. The historical Jesus — the real one, the one scholars can actually reconstruct from the evidence — was a poor Jewish peasant who spent his ministry confronting the economic and religious powers that were crushing ordinary people, and who was executed by the most powerful empire on earth for the trouble. That’s not a fairy tale — it’s a revolution.

The question worth sitting with — the one I keep coming back to — is this: what would it mean to actually follow that man? Not the cosmic Christ of the creeds. Not the personal Savior of the altar call. But the one who looked at the hungry and the indebted and the cast-out and said: yours is the kingdom.

That’s the Jesus this movement is trying to find its way back to.

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FOOTNOTES:

1. The claim that Jews crucified Jesus represents one of history’s most consequential and deadly distortions of the historical record — one that has fueled antisemitism for two millennia, from the Crusades to the Holocaust. Crucifixion was an exclusively Roman form of execution, reserved specifically for those Rome considered threats to imperial order. The progressive exoneration of Pilate across the gospels — moving from a reluctant accomplice in Mark to an explicit proclaimer of Jesus’s innocence in John — was a deliberate theological development, shifting blame onto “the recalcitrant Jews” in ways that served the emerging church’s political need to make peace with Rome. The historical Pilate, as described by the Jewish historian Josephus, was a brutal governor who “had sent thousands to the cross” and showed no mercy or deference to Jewish sensitivities. The notion that he was manipulated into executing an innocent man by a Jewish crowd is, at best, theological storytelling and, at worst, the foundation of centuries of Christian antisemitism.
2. According to accepted Biblical scholarship, Mark, the earliest gospel, was written around 70 CE, roughly four decades after Jesus died. Matthew and Luke followed fifteen to twenty years after that, around 80–85 CE, with both authors drawing heavily on Mark as their primary source — indeed, ninety percent of Mark appears in Matthew, and two-thirds in Luke. John, the last of the four, was written around 90–95 CE, more than sixty years after the crucifixion.
3. As Bart Ehrman notes, the authors never actually identify themselves; the books circulated anonymously for decades before anyone attached names to them, and the first certain attribution of these texts to these particular authors comes a full century after they were produced. Far from being the uneducated, Aramaic-speaking peasants from Galilee who actually followed Jesus, the gospel writers were highly educated, Greek-speaking Christians living in other parts of the Roman Empire, writing for communities with specific theological agendas. The names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were attached later, precisely to lend authority to accounts that would otherwise have had none. For the fullest and most accessible treatment of this question, Bart Ehrman’s Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium and Marcus Borg’s Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary are both excellent starting points for general readers.
4. The two versions of the Beatitudes — one in Matthew, one in Luke — are not identical, and the differences are theologically significant. Matthew’s version, found in the Sermon on the Mount, lends itself easily to a spiritualized interpretation, the kind that has historically allowed comfortable Christians to read these words as metaphors for inner humility rather than material deprivation. Luke’s version, found in the Sermon on the Plain, is starker and more direct — no qualifying phrases, no softening. Luke then immediately follows the blessings with a set of “woes” that remove any remaining ambiguity. The scholarly consensus, reflected in the work of both Marcus Borg and Bart Ehrman, is that Luke’s version is likely closer to what Jesus actually said. Matthew’s community appears to have spiritualized the Beatitudes, smoothing their economic edges for an audience that may have been more socially mixed or prosperous. The Lukan version, by contrast, preserves the raw material meaning that would have landed like a thunderclap in the ears of first-century Palestinian peasants who were, in fact, materially poor and literally hungry. As Reza Aslan puts it, the Beatitudes are above all else a promise of impending deliverance — predicting a new world order in which wealth would be redistributed and debts canceled. That is not a spiritual metaphor. That is a political program.