Who was Jesus of Nazareth? For hundreds of years, Christians have answered that he is God’s Son, fully God, and also fully man. The classic formulation is found in the Nicene Creed (325 CE), which affirms that he is “of the essence of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.” The creed goes on to explain that he “came down and was incarnate and was made man.”
However, the language of the Nicene Creed is not the language of the Bible. Words such as “essence” and “substance” appear to owe more to Greek philosophers than to the fishermen who were among the first followers of Jesus.
The task of this book is to explain what the first three canonical Gospels teach us about who Jesus is. Even the subtitle of this book, the Christology of the Synoptic Gospels, shows the difficulty in undertaking this task without being influenced by the church’s theological tradition. The word “Christology” does not occur in the Bible; it is the kind of word one would use for something that is the object of study, not a word one would use with respect to a person one knows well (whether by acquaintance or reputation). The evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, did not write “Christologies”–they wrote Jesus biographies. Such biographies will, of course, tell us a lot about what the authors believed about what kind of person Jesus was, but to explore those beliefs we need to use a rigorous method.
