I have enjoyed watching THE BIBLE on the HISTORY CHANNEL and
especially the episodes about Jesus, perfectly timed for HOLY WEEK.
I guess
what I enjoyed the most is seeing how producers and directors choose to portray
Jesus in the stories about him in the Bible; in most cases they were true to
Gospel accounts but it was how the actors (and their director) portrayed the
actual characters that made it so very interesting.
The biggest question in many people’s minds or at least the
people that study the subject, is why with all that Jesus did, the thousands of
people he spoke to, the many miracles he performed, with all what went on at
this time, why was there nothing written about him or what he did by historians
etc.; the only accounts we get are from the Gospels which are not history
books.
After all, we have non-Gospel accounts about Pontius Pilate,
John the Baptist and even James the Just, Jesus’ brother, but nothing about
Jesus himself.
I will have to define “nothing” a little better.
It could be that Jesus’ time on earth was very short (30
years); not enough time to garner attention from historians. Also, Jesus did
not really cause historic events that would be noticed by historians; his
impact would come later as Christianity was invented and spread around the
world.
The “only” reference to Jesus, that we have, is one by
Josephus (37-100 AD) who wrote a history of the Jews which actually included a
reference to James the Just “whose brother was Jesus; the so called Christ; a
mention somewhat in passing.
The reason Josephus did not write anything about
Jesus was because there was nothing to write about Jesus; his brother James did
more to garner a historian’s attention.
I guess it seems strange that with the strength of
Christianity in our world today nothing was written about the so called founder
of the religion that bears his title CHRIST-TIANITY.
This lack of “outside” evidence of Jesus has created a group
of people who doubt that Jesus even existed. They basically call Jesus a myth
created by the inventors of Christianity starting with St. Paul.
There is no doubt that Jesus was “mythicized” by the Gospel
writers to the point of declaring Jesus a god even though his own apostles did
not believe that but a person called Jesus is believed to have existed by most
Biblical scholars even scholars that are not really religious but objective
historians.
During this Holy Week with all those movies and specials
about Jesus on TV it is easy to get caught up in those stories as if they were
history but alas they are but stories albeit with a kernel of truth in some of
them…
on a later blog I will go into why we believe that Jesus
did actually exist and is not merely a myth.
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