Jesus Christ

Jesus of Nazareth, known to his followers as the Christ or Messiah—"the anointed one"—was a Jewish preacher in the Roman province of Judaea born sometime between 6 BC and 4 BC and executed around AD 30 to 33 in Jerusalem. The window arises because the Gospels place his birth in the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BC, while also tying his ministry to the prefecture of Pontius Pilate, AD 26 to 36. According to the Gospel tradition he grew up in Nazareth in Galilee as the son of Mary and the carpenter Joseph. Around the age of thirty he was baptized by John the Baptist and began an itinerant public ministry. The center of his message was the arrival of the kingdom of God, restated in two great commandments: love of God and love of neighbor. He worked within Jewish law but reframed it through the purpose of human flourishing, which placed him in tension with Pharisaic and Sadducean teachers over Sabbath rules and ritual purity. He taught largely in parables, sought out the poor, tax collectors and women on the social margin, and was credited with healings remembered as miracles. He chose twelve apostles and, after a final Passover meal, was arrested following the betrayal of Judas, tried by the Sanhedrin, and crucified by order of the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate. This is roughly where the scholarly consensus on the historical Jesus ends. Resurrection experiences reported by his disciples became the seed of a new movement, which through the missions of Paul of Tarsus and others spread from Jewish renewal into the Hellenistic world. The doctrine of his nature as "true God and true man" was formalized at the fourth- and fifth-century councils, accompanied by repeated condemnations of rival views. Modern biblical scholarship since the Enlightenment has worked to distinguish the historical Jesus from the Christ of faith, and disagreements over this line remain a central problem in the field.