There’s no birth certificate, but the Roman Empire decided in the fourth century that on December 25, I should say Happy Birthday, Jesus.
Who am I to argue?
The party is grand (though perhaps toxic to needle-bearing trees), and between the day off, the fat guy in red, and the presents, I’ve been fully on board.
But time brings questions, especially to tortured writers.
And as my birth certificate approaches nearly five decades of peri-solar orbits, the desire to interrogate has intensified.
What is the real story of Jesus, beyond the allegory?
To help answer the question, I started by doing what all Americans do—I turned to Fox News.
Former anchor Bill O’Reilly, with the help of Martin Dugard, has become quite the historian, writing illuminating yet approachable works on tragic figures—think Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and, of course, Jesus.
Killing Jesus is an approximately historical account of the life and death of Jesus, written like a thriller and focused on the political realities—courtesy both the Roman Empire and the Jewish hierarchy—that contributed to the rise and fall (and rise again?) of the Anointed One.
Some key lines include:
Who Jesus actually was and what actually happened to him are emotional subjects that often lead to contentious discussion.
…While the internet is a treasure trove of information about the life and times of Jesus, the information on most sites is contradictory, depending upon one’s theology; hearsay is often quoted as truth; or information proved to be completely wrong, once double- and triple-checked against other sources.
We do not address Jesus as the Messiah, only as a man who galvanized a remote area of the Roman Empire and made very powerful enemies while preaching a philosophy of peace and love.
…There is no doubt that Jesus of Nazareth is the most famous being the world has ever known.
To this day, the body of Jesus of Nazareth has never been found.
The book, as expected, has been a commercial success, though not free from criticism. Nonobjective, oversimplified, and sensationalist are terms that have been used to describe the work.
As such, I decided to take a more academic approach, delaying my Happy Birthday, Jesus greeting until I had engaged with a text of scholarly merit.
Elaine Pagels is a historian of religion and a professor at Princeton University.
Her most famous work is The Gnostic Gospels, a look at early writings about Jesus that were eventually rejected by the Church.
In Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus, she focuses on the key questions surrounding the life of the Chosen One, teasing apart the historical from the theological and attempting to explain why the stories that define the latter might have been introduced in the first place.
Some key lines include:
…None of the narratives now called “gospels” were written during Jesus’ lifetime. Instead, they were written anonymously, some forty to sixty years after his death. What I thought were their authors’ names had been added about a hundred years after they were written…to lend them credence.
My own experience as a historian has made me cautious. We do not know which episodes were made up, and which might be based on actual or visionary experiences.
…Church leaders had to launch a huge effort to pull all four gospels together, as if they tell a simple story—even if all the wrinkles are not ironed out perfectly flat.
…What keeps the stories of Jesus alive amid the twists and turns of history? As I see it, they give us what we often need most: an outburst of hope.
Ultimately, after a couple weeks of digging, I stopped looking for the answer to my question.
After all, coming from a family whose resume includes Catholic school, church weddings, and a Christ-centered university, did I really need one?
Happy Birthday, Jesus.
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