Who was Jesus, the man?
His story is perhaps the most famous on Earth. Yet how much history is really known about the man at the center of Christianity is a subject of much debate, with scholars in agreement over some elements of Jesus of Nazareth’s life and hotly divided on others. There are no “eyewitness” accounts written about Jesus during his lifetime, so historians have to rely on interpretations of the four main canonical gospel texts, mostly scrawled several decades after his death. Untangling the man from the myth is a delicate undertaking, but should be of interest to those of all faiths, said Tobias Hagerland, a doctoral candidate at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. “I think it’s natural for human beings to ask questions ‘why’ something happened, and those arenot exactly the questions dealt with in the Gospels,” said Hagerland. “It could be of interest both to Christian believers and to critics of that religion to know which aspects of Christianity are rooted in historical facts and which are
His story is perhaps the most famous on Earth. Yet how much history is really known about the man at the center of Christianity is a subject of much debate, with scholars in agreement over some elements of Jesus of Nazareth’s life and hotly divided on others.There are no “eyewitness” accounts written about Jesus during his lifetime, so historians have to rely on interpretations of the four main canonical gospel texts, mostly scrawled several decades after his death.
