Religion: Many Things to Many Men

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JESUS once asked his disciples, "Who do men say that I am?"

Even they argued uncertainly about the answer—until the Resurrection. In the nearly 2,000 years since, conflicting answers about the nature of Jesus have never stopped coming in. In the past century alone, some 60,000 books have sought to explain Christ. In one of the latest, Journalist William Emerson Jr. complains that in different centuries and cultures people have always concocted "the sort of Jesus they could live with." He then goes on to create a gee-whizzy, headline-seeking Christ who traveled the revival circuit. -

The traditional view of Jesus is founded on the New Testament and the theological debates that enlivened the first three centuries of the Christian era. A series of church councils early condemned two extreme views: 1) the idea that Jesus was merely a man, and 2) the belief that he was a God who only appeared to be in human form. The orthodox consensus, of course, was that he was both truly man and truly God. Beyond that basic tenet, however, different cultures through the ages have invariably given Christ different characterizations. The medieval church saw him as the ideal knight in the spiritual guidebook Ancrene Wisse, and later as Christ the King—a connotation that happened to fit in nicely with the papacy's temporal claims.

Writers in every era have remade Jesus in the image that suited their personal or literary needs. In Milton's Paradise Regained, Christ is an intellectual who disdains "the people" as "a herd confus'd, a miscellaneous rabble who extol things vulgar." The 19th century skeptic Swinburne had a character say of Jesus, "O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath." D.H. Lawrence equated the Resurrection with Jesus' awakening sexual desire. In the 1960s, S.G.F. Brandon saw the Nazarene as a sympathizer of the 1st century's Zealot guerrillas.

Artistic interpretations have varied as widely. The painters of the Byzantine era produced a formidable otherworldly Christ; in the Middle Ages he became the stern ruler at the Last Judgment. Gradually, a more human Jesus appeared. Rembrandt scoured the Jewish quarter to find models. By the 20th century, Picasso was painting Jesus as a bullfighter.

While the artistic images of Christ varied, the basic theological view of Jesus as both God and man remained largely unchanged for 1,300 years. Then the empiricism of the 18th century Enlightenment began eroding belief in the supernatural. The New Testament was described as a hodgepodge that revealed much about St. Paul and the early church but little about the real Jesus. In the 19th century, Albrecht Ritschl, a leader of liberal theology, totally rejected the deity of Jesus, and Historian Bruno Bauer denied that the human Jesus had ever lived. In Rudolf Bultmann's 20th century view, the "Christ of faith" returned, but the "Jesus of history" was inaccessible. The pendulum is still swinging. Bultmann's disciples have since decided that some of Jesus' actual words and works can indeed be determined through research. Quite a few reputable scholars now believe that the New Testament account is reliable history.