The Great Name
So we come to Christ.
Honestly, I’m not going to write much about Him. There are a number of reasons for that. For one thing, He is a difficult topic. There are so many different interpretations of who He was, what He meant, and what He did.
And, honestly, scholars know strikingly little about Him. We have the Bible, of course, but precious little outside that. We haven’t any references to Him during his lifetime in Roman records--which is odd. The Romans were great keepers of records. You would have thought that they’d have left somewhere an account of his trial and execution. But, no. They didn’t. There’s nothing but silence.
About the image: "The Body of Christ Supported by Angels, 1587” by the painter and engraver, Hendrick Goltzius (1587). This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the National Gallery of Art. Please see the Gallery's Open Access Policy., CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81663061
It is only later that we finally have references to Jesus in non-Biblical texts. The Roman-Jewish historian Josephus mentions him as a religious leader in his book “Antiquities,” which was written sometime in the 90s CE, or not that long after Christ’s life and death.(1) Then, a bit later, around 116 CE, the Roman historian Tacitus also writes about Christ, albeit not admiringly. He didn’t much care for Christians.(2)
Still, neither of these is really conclusive, and neither date from the time of Jesus himself. So, it’s hard to say. Did he even exist? I have friends who are certain he didn’t. On the other hand, I also have friends who believe in Jesus...as Christ...with absolute certainty. One of them once told me that if, somehow, his belief in the physical world could be obliterated ...if someone could prove to him that we do, indeed, live in the Matrix...he would be unmoved. The world might be a fraud, but Christ was real. Christ was his rock, his fortress, and his ultimate reality.
I suppose it is a question of whether you value Learning or Faith the most.
Me? Well, I guess I try to be somewhere in the middle. I am a rationalist, and a secularist. No one with my background and my parentage could be otherwise. Yet, within that heritage of doubt, there is a hint of the spiritual. My father was a physicist, but he also told me that you cannot really be an atheist because you cannot logically prove a negative.
I try to extend that line of thought to include the world’s imponderables. Thus, I believe that a photon is both a particle and a wave. Why can’t I similarly believe and disbelieve in the divine?
But getting back to Jesus...when he finally does appear in the Bible, his message is reasonably standard for the time. We all know it. He preaches a kind of enlightened faith, taking the best of Judaism and, perhaps, combining that with certain Hellenistic concepts.
We know that he spoke surprisingly little about the afterlife. His focus seems to have been on the here and now. He was concerned with Heaven, yes, but he was more interested in teaching his followers how to live *today,* in the real world with all its imperfections. And his directives were quite simple -- feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, defend the innocent, and be kind to one another.
It is profoundly sad, I think, that that part of his message is so often lost, so that Jesus the Good Shepherd, caring for his flock, is replaced by a titanic ogre, more akin to Antichrist than Christ, more interested in war and destruction than in humanity.
Well, be that as it may...
One thing we do know about him, without doubt...
He talked about Angels.
More to come.
Footnotes:
1. This gets complicated. Josephus mentions him twice in the book. First, in Antiquities 18.3.3, we find, “At this time there was a wise man called Jesus… a doer of wonderful works...he was the Christ… he appeared to them alive again on the third day…” The general betting is that this passage was later modified by Christian apologists and that in Josephus’s original there was no reference to his being “Christ” or to the resurrection.
Second, Josephus refers to Jesus again in Antiquities 20.9.1 where he talks about the execution of James the Just, the leader of the church at the time, and “the brother of Jesus who was called Christ...” Again, as I understand it, scholars generally believe that this quote is authentic and was never modified by later writers.
2. Tacitus ( 56 – c. 120) writes about the great fire of Rome which the population thought the Emperor Nero might have started. To draw attention away from himself, Nero blames the Christians: “But neither human help, nor imperial munificence, nor all the modes of placating Heaven, could stifle scandal or dispel the belief that the fire had taken place by order. Therefore, to scotch the rumor, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue.”
Copyright©2026 Michael Jay Tucker
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