On a typical Sunday in Singapore we will find Christians gathered in congregations of varying sizes and colours and related to different historic denominations and independent movements. Almost every major hotel has at least one function room for Christian worship and almost all the Christian schools have assembled Sunday worshippers. We find all sorts of people - men and women, old and young, rich and poor, liberals and fundamentalists, modern and conservatives, traditional and contemporary, citizens and foreigners, educated and illiterate, executives and workers, able-bodied and physically handicapped, and only one straight and gay like us here. The amazing thing is that we come together because of this one person – Jesus of Nazareth whose birthday we celebrate every Christmas nearly two thousand years ago.

Here we are in Free Community Church reputed and yet trying hard to be the most inclusive Church with people from all sorts and conditions respecting and affirming one another as God’s people despite our differences. In a peculiar minority situation in which we are being rejected and despised, stigmatized and marginalized, tyrannized and victimized, oppressed and persecuted, we have a closer affinity with one like us, Jesus who was born in a lowly manger and found no place in the regular inn.

Up in this attic and in the shadow of the majestic converted movie theatre now known as the Fairfield Methodist Church whose lay leader a medical doctor recently had exhorted the congregation to pray and exorcise the territorial spirits of this church and a Chinese temple nearby. We are perceived to be a source of spiritual virus infecting his Church and the Chinatown community. Yes we are being prayed over and preyed upon.

Have we misinterpreted the Gospels and misrepresented the historical Jesus? The challenge for every Christian congregation is how faithful we are to Jesus and His teaching. Both friend and foe admit that Jesus is a historical person born at a certain time and in a definite place on this earth. Not in 1 CE but probably in 4 or 6 CE. Not in Bethlehem more likely in Nazareth. Certainly not on December 25th. Undeniably Jesus lived and laboured in Galilee, died and crucified in Jerusalem. These are the bare historical facts that are indisputable. History deals with facts and even such recordings are interpreted especially in the dim past where there is no registry of births and deaths and no oral or visual recordings. All these festivities and mysteries have garlanded and festooned the simple birth of a simple baby in the simple village.

Followers of Jesus since the ancient past have accumulated voluminous history of beliefs about Jesus all claiming to be based on historical facts. A whole generation after the death of Jesus, the faithful and inspired theologians began to write down what they remembered and heard about the life and teachings of Jesus. They searched the ancient Jewish Scriptures for the prophecies which believed were fulfilled in Jesus birth. What they wrote was not history remembered by prophecy historicized as a scholar, John Dominic Crossan, puts it cryptically and succinctly. Beginning with Paul and then those who wrote the Gospels, their writings form the core of the New Testament. Even in Biblical times the Gospels of Mark, Mathew, Luke and John have given their interpretations of the life and teachings of Jesus for different audiences before them – four different portrayals. It must be acknowledged that Paul was writing letters to congregations that he had established or visited and addressing specific issues and advising them to resolve local disputes. He did not write for posterity and for inclusion into Holy Scripture. Strangely enough, his was the earliest Christian writing but he wrote very little about the historical facts of Jesus but much on theological beliefs about him.

The early Church fathers and subsequently the Christian theologians of all stripes and ability have written down their reflections and interpretations of this baby Jesus and His mission and they have filled the theological libraries of today. I go into the Trinity Theological College every three weeks and marveled at the stacks and stacks of books of distilled from the research and wisdom of the men and women of faith down through the centuries. I check out eight to ten books each time and I can never hope to keep up with the scholarly writings which will never end. New Testament scholars are engaged continuously in what is called the Quest of the Historical Jesus – an attempt to discover and discern who this Jesus of History is and how He is related to the Christ we faithfully profess – The Christ of Faith. Is the Christ we confess in faith a product of our intellectual or theological mind and akin to the Jesus who lived in history? After all we claim that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. What exactly is the way of life that Jesus lived on earth. The birth of Jesus whom we celebrate has a distinctive life and this baby Jesus grew up to be the adult Jesus and we are to pattern our lives to that of Christ. Will the real Jesus stand up. Let us get real with Jesus of Nazareth this Christmas.

I have been ploughing through a book “The Jesus Debate: Modern Historians Investigate the Life of Christ” by Mark Allan Powell, a New Testament scholar. In the flyleaf are these questions that he dealt with in the book: Who was Jesus? What can we know about his life, his teaching, his politics, his personality? What impact did he have on the people and culture of his day? Why is he regarded by so many as the most important figure in history? Powell then reviews the works of reputable scholars who are pursuing this research. He isolated their differences of interpretation and identified what they hold in common. Lesser minds like mine and maybe yours will have to sift through all these contrasting views and common perceptions and discern what is meaningful for us about Jesus.

Most of us come to some understanding of Jesus through our own reading of the Bible and much of it is built upon what we have learnt in our churches. The Biblical scholars through a more thorough study of the Bible have provided us with their findings. Good teachers and preachers will have to base their messages from reliable scholars whom God has guided in their research work. No doctor will dare to heal unless they have learnt their skills and acquired the knowledge from medical researchers who have devoted time and energy to study the diseases that plague the human body. You just do not go to any doctor but one that is adequately trained from a respectable medical institution to entrust your body for him or her to examine. In the same way you have to place your religious and spiritual life in the hands of those who have studied the Scriptures and lived their lives in close encounters with Jesus. Scholars read the same texts of the Bible that we do. But they do much more and researched the context of those texts and extract deeper meaning from those writings in their quest for truth and have a clearer picture of who this Jesus is. We cannot just depend upon ourselves although we believe that the Holy Spirit will guide us in our casual and uncritical reading of the Biblical text. If we are smart we will have to depend upon the learning and wisdom of more able and talented scholars. I am always thankful to God for my spiritual mentors when I sat at the feet of my pastors and seminary professors and through the writings of theologians. I never cease to read and to learn in my continuing quest and thirst for the truth. I wish the same for each one of you to keep yourselves always open to new insights.

Scholars have made a clear distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. It is obvious that historians study history to get to know Jesus who lived and involved in ministry in dusty roads in the villages in Galilee. The Christ of faith emerges from theological reflection and religious devotion in the seminaries and monasteries. The New Testament has a mixture of historical facts relating to Jesus and theological beliefs about Christ. We need to know the difference between facts and beliefs. It is important that our theological beliefs must be grounded on historical realities. Otherwise, Jesus can be used to support any belief that we hold. That is why it is necessary for us to know who this Jesus is in history.

We turn primarily to the four Gospels which are more biographical in nature. One would naively think that harmonizing the four different Gospel versions of the life of Jesus would give us a complete picture of Jesus. But there are differences of recording and interpretations and the pieces do not fit easily with one another like in a jig-saw puzzle to get one portrait of Jesus in the end. The scholars since the nineteenth century began to write hundreds of lives of Jesus based on their study of the Bible and non-Biblical historical documents. Some of their writings on the life of Jesus is like a reflection of their own faces at the bottom of a deep well!

Some see Jesus as the King of a new kingdom on earth which God will install after the people were being freed from Roman domination. Jesus is depicted as the prophet of End-time with a dramatic intervention of God for the restoration of Israel and becomes the true Messiah. Jesus was also viewed as a charismatic Jew and just a reformer of Judaism. Others project Jesus as a social prophet concerned with the injustices in society or even as a social revolutionary. There are those who regard Jesus primarily as a Jewish sage or a simple philosopher rather than a prophet. Then there are those who sense that Jesus is a religious mystic filled with the Spirit.

In spite of the various perspectives of the life of Jesus there are some common commitments of these historical scholars. They are certain on things that Jesus said and did in his day. What they know as historical facts has a bearing of the nature of their beliefs or faith.

There is fresh appreciation of the historical fact that Jesus was Jewish and had a respect for the Jewish Bible. Even in his time there were diverse forms of Judaism. The Dead Sea Scrolls revealed the Essene community that opposed the Temple hierarchy because the High Priest did not come from the traditional priestly line. They form an alternative to the prevailing religion of the Jews. Led by their Righteous Teacher they abandoned Jerusalem and established a traditional ascetic community beside the Dead Sea and regarded themselves as the true Israel. They lasted for about 200 years as an alternative Jewish religious community known as the Essenes. They came to an end in 70 C.E.

There is this diversity and rivalry of these Jewish religious parties. Crossan maintains that “Jesus was representative of an inclusive stream of Judaism that stood in contradiction to the more conservative (and exclusive) variety that ultimately became identified as rabbinic Judaism.”

Jesus was deeply influenced by Greco-Roman culture. Although he grew up in the peasant village of Nazareth and learnt the trade of a carpenter he lived in this suburb of the new Roman city which was built by Herod – called Sepphoris. It was a Greco-Roman city planted in Galilee and became the center of non-Jewish culture. Portions of Jesus teachings show the influence of Greek and Roman thinking.

Jesus was described as religious and spiritual person and immersed in Jewish mysticism. From his life and teaching people regarded him as a holy man and that he spoke and acted with a sense of spiritual authority. He was regarded as one called by God to be prophet like one of the ancient prophets in their religious history. When he prophesied about the Kingdom of God, some believed that the kingdom is in the here and now and others only in the coming future and towards the end of history.

We must account for the fact that the common people were in a long period of suffering. Jesus was living in the rural community among the agricultural people and familiar with the extent of their difficulties when they had to pay double taxation to the Roman powers and to the religious hierarchy in the Temple. Most were living below the poverty line and were on a subsistence level. No wonder they yearn for freedom from captivity, liberation from oppression and deliverance from hardship.

Realistically they cannot rely only on God’s intervention in history to overthrow the Roman authority. Jesus was seen as one who helped the people to deal with their life in the cruel and evil world rather than to wait for divine intervention. Jesus taught them to improve the lot of the people in the real world through acts of concern, caring, and compassion. The course of history has proven that the end time that the people even then two thousand years ago expected then did not happen and God did not bring it about.

Scholars do not view Jesus merely as a religious figure detached from the real world but one who was also engaged in the social and political issues of his day. It is a matter of the degree of emphasis one places on them for the line between religion and politics is never clear even now in the Middle East and in the United States more recently.

In Jesus time there were revolutionary movements and revolts opposing Roman power. At the death of Herod in 4 C.E. the discontent and resentment of the Jewish peasantry led to a large scale peasant uprising. The people breathed dissension in the air and heard opposition cries during the time of Jesus’ ministry. Various movements arose trying to win the hearts and minds of the peasantry. There were the social bandits or what we know now as the Robin Hoods. There were those who claim to be prophets and messiahs of a new order. It was a situation of political ferment and social unrest. Different groups campaigned for change and competed for the support of the peasantry in their struggles against the Roman Imperial Power and Jewish religious establishment. Into this situation Jesus finds himself leading his comparatively small community of followers.

And then the Zealots appeared on the violent revolutionary scene. The massive rebellion of the Palestinian Jewish people against Roman domination lasted for a period of four years leading to the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. and the devastation of the land of Palestine.

Jesus was seen as a real threat to the political system in his mission and message and that was the reason why he was executed. He was not a violent revolutionary in the sense that we know now. His was to challenge the existing order with an alternative society. He called for a more compassionate society. He advanced toward a more inclusive society. He promoted more equality and rejected the policy of separation between the clean and the unclean, the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural. Jesus had a number of parables about the rich and the poor and about the plight of the peasants and their debts. It was a message of social transformation that became a threat to the ruling powers. It was a message that addressed the fears and hopes of the people.

Above all he called for a spiritual renewal and appealed to the people to live according to God’s will and purpose. He was concerned with the Kingdom of God or God’s rule in the new transformed social order. Faith is more than a private personal matter related to the individual believer. Jesus is more than the Christ whom we believe died for our sins and we are therefore forgiven people. Jesus is more than a Savior whom we believe will save us and usher us into heaven. It is more importantly the life on earth to live and that is what Christmas celebration is all about – the coming of this one significant life of Jesus on earth for humankind. In the words of the Magnificat sung by Mary:

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden.
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me and holy is his name.
And his mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm,
he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
he has put down the mighty from their thrones,
and exalted those of low degree;
he has filled he hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent empty away.
He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity for ever.

This is certainly a revolutionary message from Mary and turning things right side up. We like Mary have to ponder all these things in our hearts.

When an editor of a secular magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, was writing an article about the historical Jesus some years ago he spent a day interviewing several scholars about their quest of the historical Jesus. “At times”, he says of that exhausting day. “I had the distinct impression of being present of some sort of clinical procedure.” That is to say he as a hardened skeptical journalist felt that the scholars were dissecting the Jesus tradition each examining a part of it. At the end of that day as he departed from the building he was met outside by a Salvation Army band at Christmas time playing “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” He confessed when he heard the music “I must say it was quite a thrill.”

The last verse of that beautiful Christmas carol sings out:

O Holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray
Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels, the great glad tidings tell;
O Come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel.

Your prayer is to discover and know Jesus in a personal way.

Crossan in all honesty admits that he did not find a Jesus whom he liked or disliked and that in fact he found one whom personally he is unable to follow. He imagines this conversation with the historical Jesus:

I’ve read your book (The Historical Jesus) Dominic, and it’s quite good. So, now you’re ready to live my vision and join me in my programme?

I don’t think I have the courage, Jesus, but I did describe it quite well, didn’t I, and the method was especially good, wasn’t it?

Thank you, Dominic, for not falsifying the message to suit your own incapacity. That at least is something.

Is it enough, Jesus?

No. Dominic, it is not.

Are we willing and courageous enough to follow Jesus and do what Jesus would do in our contemporary life?

Marcus Borg understands that God or Jesus is no longer a concept or an article of belief but become an element of experience. He wrote:

“Believing in Jesus does not mean believing doctrines about him. Rather, it means to give one’s heart, one’s self at its deepest level, to the post-Easter Jesus who is the living Lord, the side of God turned towards us, the face of God, the Lord who is also the Spirit.”

The portrait of Jesus is necessary and important for each one of us in our personal faith and for the confession of the Church. We have to paint it ourselves from what we can gather from history. Luke tells us that the baby Jesus “grew and became strong filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him (2:40).” Then after he appeared at the Temple at the age of twelve and returned to Nazareth, “Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man (2:54).” If we can learn more about who is this Jesus and identify with His way of life, then our lives will be more meaningful and enriching. In the background the hymn “O Little Town of Bethlehem” can be heard as we continue our quest. Like the legendary Three Wise Men from the East we must search diligently for the Child so that we may come to worship Him