Jesus Christ who is he? In this article I want to conduct a brief objective investigation into whether Jesus even existed and his influence on the world. Let’s start with the first question, did Jesus exist? For many people, the Bible is not an authoritative source of information, and therefore, it is believed that everything written there is a lie or fiction. But Jesus’ existence is mentioned not only in the Bible, but also in the writings of other authors and historians of that time.
Let’s start from one of the most popular Roman historians of that time Tacitus. In his work Annals, he had described a Great Fire in Rome (64 A.C), after which Emperor Nero blamed Christian for fire, then he wrote more about Christians and that they came from word Christ which is a title that translated into anointed, one or messiah. You can read this in Annals, XV, 44.
Another mention of Jesus we can see in the work of Pliny the Younger, XCVII To THE EMPEROR TRAJAN, where he challenged the faith of the Christians of that time, by asking them who is their god and if they were Christians in general. If they did not commit that, they were punished with the death penalty. These are only a few authorities of that ancient time, and there were many more. Some of them are Flavius Josephus, Suetonius and The Talmud. A historian of ancient civilizations Michael Grant once said that we have a mass of historical characters which are based on a small piece of information and their existence was never questioned, so why can’t we accept that Christ was a real person too? Well the answer to this question is based on the modern perspective of religion and generalization, so if one part is not connected with what the majority thinks is right, this idea becomes initially wrong even when there are true facts. Now we have found out Jesus was a real historical figure, and left a huge mark on history, how huge is this mark?
One of the most obvious ones is Jesus’ religion Christianity, which now has about 2.4 billion followers and a lot of different branches. Christianity has played a major influence on world history and the formation of culture in many countries. Some of the most popular events are the Crusades, which were initiated by western Europeans to conquer Jerusalem, and spread Christianity around the world (of course there were also economic and political purposes). Another major event is the Great Awakenings in the United States which changed people’s culture and encouraged missionary work around the world.
Our calendar is also one of the legacies of Jesus, which was introduced in 1582 and starts approximately from the birth of Jesus. Jesus has also helped to develop different religions, for example Islam or Judaism. In Islam, Jesus was presented as one of the great prophets and played a very important role in the development of Islam itself. As it was mentioned earlier, a lot of people are considered Christians. Based on religion, many have a traditional moral set, which has caused a lot of cultural wars to happen in the modern world, especially in the U.S. For example, the same-sex marriage question, LGBTQ, abortion, and gender topics are controversial topics between some Christians and secular Americans.
Jesus played a crucial role in our world. The debate on whether he existed can continue, but it is clearly an issue of faith. What cannot be debated is that Jesus did change the world.