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Catholicism - An Introduction: Jesus Christ

by Peter Stanford

Jesus Christ, Christianity teaches, was born of a virgin mother, Mary, in Bethlehem, grew up in Nazareth, and only began his public life of teaching and healing in AD 30. Three years later he was crucified. He was, according to the Churches, the Son of God, and three days after his death rose from the dead before ascending into heaven.

Jesus’s life, suffering and death have been a hugely influential force in world history, yet he wrote nothing down – or nothing that has survived. There is independent evidence, unconnected with Christianity, that Jesus did exist. Two Roman historians, Tacitus and Pliny, and the Jewish chronicler, Josephus, record him as a religious teacher living in Palestine.

The main source for details of Jesus’s life and teachings are the four gospels (a word meaning ‘good news’) in the New Testament of the Bible. They form the rock on which Christianity was built and continue to inform both the pronouncements and teachings of Christian leaders and the images and other representations of Jesus created by writers and artists.

Though they describe the events of Jesus’s life, they are not, to take the word as it is typically understood today, gospel – i.e. infallibly true in every respect. For a start, they were written decades after Jesus’s death and the oldest manuscripts we have of them – other than tiny fragments – only go back as far as the third century. Moreover, they all offer different – often strikingly different – accounts of the basic details of Jesus’s life, even down to where and when he was born.


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