Jesus - an audio journey
Jesus - an audio journey
Edward Stourton presents a journey in the footsteps of Jesus. Four programmes, showing four completely different understandings of Jesus, explore the man, his image and his message.
Galilee
Jesus the Jew
This first episode looks at the essentials of what can really be said about Jesus with any degree of historical certainty and places him in the context of the wandering charismatics and faith healers who were about at the time.
It also explores how his Jewish roots were gradually airbrushed out of theology, culminating in Nazi theologians who produced a Bible excised of all references to Judaism and who portrayed Jesus as an Aryan.
It's only really modern scholarship, if you want to call it that, that's begun to say "Well hold on a minute. He was not a Christian, He was not born a Christian, he didn't live a Christian - He didn't even know what the term 'Christian' meant. Jesus was a Jew."Mark Goodacre
Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem
Jesus the God
With the crucifixion we move from the historical Jesus to the Christ of faith. But how aware was Jesus of his destiny? And at what point does Jesus the Messiah break away from his Jewish roots?
All the lines converge back on the fact that there must've been an empty tomb... and that there must've been sightings of some sort of em, a being, a figure, a person who they knew to be Jesus, and who they knew to be not a ghost. They knew all about ghosts and visions and so on - that, that wasn't anything out of the ordinary. People had that sort of experience. This was different - this was bodily, but it was a transformed body. It wasn't a resuscitation - they believed Jesus had gone through death and out the other side, into a new physical body, which was now equally physical - only if anything more so rather than less so. He wasn't a ghost, He was alive, and the only way I can make sense of that as a historian is by saying that it actually happened.Tom Wright, author of Who was Jesus? and The Resurrection of the Son of God
Rome
Jesus the King
When the Roman Emperor Constantine had a vision of Jesus just before his victorious battle for Rome it was arguably one of the most important moments in the history of the West.
It was the start of the process whereby Christianity would go from a persecuted minority to the official religion of the largest Empire the world had seen. But how did that change Jesus and His message?
We wanna say "Come on guys - live in the real world. Things have moved on. Take all your ideals and translate them into the new world" - and that's what the Christians struggled to do.Tom Wright, theologian and Bishop of Durham
Christ, a historical Christ that you have referred to as a Jewish peasant, was not in the forefront of their minds. They were thinking of Christ as Saviour and Christ who died for our sins. This is what Christ was to them at that time. And in fact their concentration was in all of the phases of His Passion.Iris Carulli, art historian
Kerala
Jesus the Guru
This final journey in the footsteps of Jesus reaches what could be one of the oldest Christian communities in the world; in Kerala on the southwest coast of India, where in around 52AD the Apostle Thomas is said to have landed with the news of the Gospel.
But it's also the place where the Jesus who is so much a part of European culture meets new worlds and new cultures and where the belief that he has a message for all humanity is really tested.
In our western, traditional understanding of Jesus, the person of Jesus is very much objectified. He's the Lord, the Saviour, the great, divine Tao whom we worship in liturgy for instance, whom we listen to as the great saviour and teacher...
Reflecting on the mystery of Christ in India... Jesus Christ the sub-divine subject of our being more than an object of worship. This becomes very clear when we compare the traditional, western, Christian understanding of Jesus Christ which emphasises then 'I - Tao' relationship and the Indian vedandic approach where an 'I -I' relationship. In oth...in other words er, er Christ is my true self within me - this is the Vedantic Christology.
Sebastian Painadath, Jesuit priest in Kerala