One certain fact about Jesus is that he lived on Earth about 2000 years ago. He grew up in a working class family (his adopted dad was a carpenter) in a country under military occupation (by the Romans) and as an infant was a refugee in Egypt after threats to his life were made by the government. However he spent most of his early life in the north of modern Israel and no one took much notice of him until he was in his thirties.
At that time he gathered around him a rag-tag bunch of people (known as his disciples) including a terrorist sympathiser (zealot) and a Roman collaborator (tax-collector), and started an extraordinary 3 years of teaching about God and how people should behave. He became hugely popular with ordinary people because of the accessible stories he told about God and how He loves us and the miracles he performed. Those in power dispised him because he claimed to be the Son of God by forgiving people and when they tried to catch him out, Jesus showed them up as cold hearted hypocrits again and again. His teaching came to an abrupt end when he was arrested on trumped up charges and executed, but it was after that when he changed the whole world.
After 3 days he rose from the grave (surely his biggest miracle!) and appeared to his frightened disciples, starting with the women. They were not expecting this, and one didn’t believe at first. Then this rag-tag bunch of ordinary people, the disciples, told everyone what had happened & performed miracles themselves after being filled with the Holy Spirit.
Jesus’s followers spread throughout the Roman world and were horribly persecuted before the Good News about Jesus became the offical religion of the Roman Empire about 300 years later, and remains the official religion of the United Kingdom.
Could a nutter claiming to be God have acheived this? No, we do not think so. We accept Jesus’s claims about himself and his teaching.
You can read about the story of Jesus and his teaching yourself in the Bible using the links above, or the book of Luke is a good place to read the whole story. When he was asked what the most important lesson was …
27 He said, “That you love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence—and that you love your neighbour as well as you do yourself.”
Luke 10:27 The Message (MSG)
Much more could be said, countless books have been written online and in print, you can find a selection of articles about Jesus on this page. Being a follower of Jesus, a Christian, doesn’t mean you have no doubts, it does mean you have enough faith to accept Jesus as the Son of God however improbable others think that is. This isn’t anti-scientific or intellectually weak; you don’t have to understand quantum mechanics to admire the beauty of the natural world or feel love. You can see the change the Jesus and his followers caused, have faith and be assured of life to the full.
If you have any questions, please get in touch.
