Jesus

Jesus is the first-century Jewish teacher and healer from Nazareth in Galilee whom the New Testament presents as the Christ, the Son of God, and Lord, and around whom the whole Christian faith is organized. The name Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew and Aramaic Yeshua (Joshua), and Christ is not a surname but a title, the Greek Christos used to translate the Hebrew mashiach, "anointed one." The related name Immanuel, "God with us," is applied to him in Matthew 1:23, and the word Christian in early usage names his followers rather than him (Acts 11:26). Historically, it is firmly established that a man named Jesus was crucified under the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate in Judea around AD 30, and that within a very short time his followers were proclaiming him raised from the dead and spreading his movement across the Mediterranean world.

The Gospels show him speaking with an authority the text treats as ultimate. In John 7:37 he stands on the last and greatest day of the feast and cries out, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink!" and in John 11:25 he tells Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will still live, even if he dies." Many readers have heard in such sayings an echo of the divine name, though that is an interpretive reading of the text rather than something the Gospel states outright. What the text does plainly show is a figure who claims to satisfy thirst, to give life beyond death, and to be the one through whom God is known.

The letters apply the same titles to him while describing what he does for those who belong to him. He is "the image of God" (2 Corinthians 4:4), and "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8); being "in Christ" makes a person "a new creation" (2 Corinthians 5:17). His grace is sufficient and his power is "made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9), his followers do everything "in the name of the Lord Jesus" (Colossians 3:17), and God's purpose and grace were "given to us in Christ Jesus before times eternal" (2 Timothy 1:9). Believers are adopted "through Jesus Christ" (Ephesians 1:5), called "by Christ Jesus" to eternal glory (1 Peter 5:10), and it is "through Jesus Christ" that God works in them what is pleasing to him, "to whom be the glory forever and ever" (Hebrews 13:21).

Christian traditions differ over how to state who he is. The mainstream of historic Christianity, expressed in the creeds of Nicaea and Chalcedon, confesses one person in two natures, fully divine and fully human, co-eternal with the Father; the Oriental Orthodox churches, while rejecting Nestorianism, prefer a "one incarnate nature" formula and regard Chalcedon differently, and the Church of the East preserves its own Christological language. Unitarian and unitarian-leaning bodies, ancient and modern, honor Jesus as God's Son and Messiah without confessing him as co-equal with the Father, and other groups hold distinctive views about his pre-existence or status. How a reader weighs these confessions is a matter of tradition and conviction rather than something the texts above settle by themselves.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.