TIME Jesus

IN JUNE, DURING A ROUTINE DIGITIZAtion at Humboldt University in Hamburg, researchers discovered a scrap of papyrus with 13 lines of Ancient Greek. They were able to identify some of the words—“Jesus,” “crowing,” “branch”—and realized they had chanced upon the earliest physical copy of a narrative called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. The Jesus from this Gospel was not the Jesus most of us know. It portrays a 5-year-old Christ child who has molded 12 sparrows out of the clay by a river. When his father, Joseph, finds him and scolds him for “working” on the Sabbath, Jesus claps his hands and says, “Be gone!” And, the text continues, “the sparrows took flight and went away chirping.” If the researchers were excited, the world press was over the top: Here,…

For many of the more than 2 billion Christians around the world, the lack of definitive scientific evidence of Jesus’s life is irrelevant when it comes to the strength of their faith. However, a number of groundbreaking discoveries by New Testament archaeologists and researchers have provided a better understanding of Jesus as a historical person. Because Jesus was a peasant, it is not surprising that he did not leave an archaeological trail. “The lack of evidence does not mean a person at the time didn’t exist. It means that she or he, like 99.99 percent of the rest of the world at the time, made no impact on the archaeological record,” Bart D. Ehrman, author of Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, told the History Channel.…

IN THE ABSENCE OF SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE, the preeminent source for biographical material about Jesus remains the four canonical Gospels of the New Testament—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And as the biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman has pointed out, while the Gospels may be problematic as far as historical accuracy, contradictions, or bias, they offer far more overlapping information about Jesus than any other source, for any figure of his age: “About how many people in all of antiquity do we have four biographies? … Four lengthy narratives. Written by different people at different times and in different places. …None.” Based on these biblical accounts, it is believed that Jesus was born to Mary and Joseph sometime between the years 6 and 4 BCE. (The Christmas story, from Annunciation to virgin…

ACROSS THE U.S. EACH DECEMBER, children dressed as angels, shepherds, and other characters from the Christmas story play out the timeless drama in pageants ranging from the most modest cardboard-camel presentations to near-professional productions playing to thousands of people a week. No performance, not even those working from the scripts and scores provided by Christian entertainment companies, will be exactly like another, because no two 6-year-old shepherds are alike. None will be precisely like the New Testament Gospel accounts, either, a fact that causes concern for almost no one. The really important point for all Christians is being made: God loved us all and came to Earth in the form of a baby, and it was such a miracle that shepherds watched and the fifth-grade angels sang. What more does…

Nothing in the gospels more vividly and dramatically demonstrates Jesus’s divinity than the miracles he performs. They’re inextricably linked with him, part of his identity and eternal mystique. Healing the sick, even raising the dead, mastering the forces of nature, pulling off fantastic physical feats—all told, the New Testament authors credit Jesus with more than 30 miraculous deeds. He is, in modern secular terms, the ultimate superhero, sent to earth straight from the top, a direct extension of God the Father, to deploy his spectacular powers for the cause of compassionate righteousness, lifting the weak and casting out evil. These actions also proved to be Jesus’s undoing. This charismatic and increasingly popular miracle worker was a threat to the rich and powerful and had to be eliminated. By definition, of…

THROUGHOUT THE NEW TESTAMENT, seven different women named Mary appear, but two of them—the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene—stand out for their unique closeness to Jesus. Their stories, intertwined in the biblical narrative, have left an enduring theological legacy and profoundly impacted the Christian faith. Mary, the mother of Jesus, appears in all four Gospels of the New Testament. She is first mentioned in the story of the Annunciation in Luke, when an angel visits to tell her she is pregnant with the son of God. While Christians accept Mary as Jesus’s mother and a woman of faith, Catholics have a unique respect and interpretation of her role. According to Gloria Dodd of the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton, “The study of Mary helps us to…