The Life of Jesus

Jesus was, in terms of his influence, the most important human being in history. He is also the most written about and discussed. The earliest surviving document dealing with him was circulated in the fifties of the first century AD. Within a half a century of his death, four biographies written in Greek had been published and all have come down to us, meaning they survived. Since then, entire books about him have been published in growing quantity and in all languages. Today, there are over 100,000 printed biographies of Jesus in English alone. The religion which commemorates Jesus' teachings, death, and resurrection, was well established in half a dozen countries by AD fifty. The first Christian place of worship dates from about AD fifty, and now nearly 1,000,000 chapels, churches, basilicas, abbeys, and cathedrals include many of the largest, most remarkable, and beautiful buildings ever erected. In many ways, and in cultural and moral respects especially, Jesus' life and the faith it created are the central events in the history of humanity. So far, we have considered the influence of Jesus as man, but I believe that he was and is God too. It is futile for us to inquire about the nature of Jesus and God and his pre existence from the beginning, since that is unknowable, let alone the future, which is still hidden from us. What we can do however, is write about Jesus the man. The problem with writing about the life of Jesus the man, is not so much the paucity of sources, as their abundance, and the difficulty in reaching behind the written text to the full meanings of sayings and episodes. The sketch that follows reflects many years of reading and historical study. My objects have been clarity and brevity, and my desire is to convey the joy and nourishment that I receive in following Jesus's footsteps and pondering his words. That is an excerpt from the book I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is Jesus, a biography from a believer, and it was written by Paul Johnson. So I wanna immediately jump into some background that Paul gives you and I, which will help understand the society, the really the world into which Jesus was born into. He says it was harsh, cruel, violent, and unstable. It was also materialistic and increasingly wealthy. Rome was in the process of transforming itself from a republic into an empire. Rome now occupied all of Italy and Spain, as well as Greece and Egypt, and what we now call Turkey. Between 50 to 60,000,000 people came under its laws. Fifty years before Jesus was born, Julius Caesar had added the whole of Gaul, which would be modern France, to the Roman Empire. The expanding empire was based upon muscle rather than technology, thanks to about 15,000,000 slaves who constituted one third of its population and whose life was summed up by Aristotle in four words, work, punishment, and food. As you probably …