Jesus: What Catholics Believe

By Alan Schreck

What do Catholics really believe about Jesus? Dr. Alan Schreck offers a thorough answer to this question. Jesus is central to everything the Church believes and teaches, yet few people really understand the significance of who Jesus is in their own lives. Dr. Schreck explains when and how Jesus lived, what he taught, his human and divine nature, and how the Risen Jesus continues to act today in the sacraments, through the Holy Spirit, and in his people and ministers. Written in an engaging, straightforward style, this is a book for anyone wanting to know more about Jesus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781635824544

Book preview

preface

It is a humbling task to write about Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians profess is the Christ, the Messiah, the Eternal Son and Word of God the Father incarnate, the Savior of humankind, Creator of the cosmos, and sovereign ruler of heaven and earth. In him are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, of truth, beauty, goodness, and love. Before him every knee in heaven and on earth must bow, and every tongue will (at the end of time) confess him as Lord (see Philippians 2:10–11).

All I say in this book will be woefully inadequate to describe the One whom we will only really know when we are blessed to see him face-to-face (see 1 Corinthians 13:12). And yet Catholics must indeed express what we believe about Jesus, for two primary reasons: (1) because human salvation is found in Jesus alone (see Acts 4:12), and (2) because Jesus commissioned us to proclaim to the world who he is (see Matthew 28:19–20).

This book will not focus on the various positions of modern theologians and biblical scholars (as important and interesting as these may be) but will highlight what all Catholics believe (or ought to believe) about Jesus. I will refer to theologians and biblical scholars at points where this seems helpful or necessary to elucidate Catholic belief.

The authoritative sources of what Catholics believe are Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition as passed on, proclaimed, and interpreted by the living teaching office of the church (her magisterium), which Jesus himself established (see Luke 10:16, He who hears you, hears…). One of the most reliable presentations of these is the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Many things that the New Testament (the Gospels particularly) records about the teachings and actions of Jesus are extreme or challenging, both to his hearers nearly two thousand years ago and to us today. In this book I strive to present these as they are recorded, not watered down. My perspective is that if the biblical accounts do not strongly challenge and convict us (as well as console, encourage, and strengthen us), we are not encountering the real Jesus. I acknowledge that Catholics sometimes differ in their interpretations of particular biblical texts. The church does not normally define precisely the meaning of texts except to clarify or safeguard certain truths that she believes are essential.

For example, texts about the resurrection of Jesus must be understood as saying that the Jesus who was crucified truly appeared alive to his followers in his own glorified, risen body. The risen Jesus was not a ghost, a hallucination, or a symptom of psychological stress. This was not a story that his followers told to give them hope or to make some other subjective point about Jesus’s continued presence with them in spirit, ideal, or memory.

My goal is to present not a set of doctrines but the consummate importance and the power of the encounter that we Catholics have with the almighty and living God in the Person of Jesus Christ. Let us pray that the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of Truth who alone enables us to confess that Jesus is Lord (1 Corinthians 12:3)—will reveal Jesus ever more fully to us.

chapter one

Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?

If one asks a Catholic today what he or she believes about Jesus, it would be understandable if the response was, Which Jesus?

Don’t scholars tell us that it is unclear who Jesus actually was: a revolutionary, a social reformer, a marginal (or radical) Jew posing as a rabbi, a prophet predicting the end times? Aren’t the so-called Gnostic gospels or the recently discovered Judas Gospel just as important in understanding Jesus as are the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Haven’t modern novelists, like Nikos Kazantzakis and even Dan Brown, challenged us to consider Jesus in a different, more human light? How do Catholics sort out all the different views of who Jesus is?

Let’s consider these questions from an historical perspective.

Portraits of Jesus

The vital question raised by Jesus’s Jewish contemporaries was whether he could be the long-awaited Messiah, the Christ. (Both terms mean, one in Hebrew and one in Greek, God’s anointed one.) However, it would be unthinkable for a Jew to think that the Messiah would be God himself, for the linchpin of Jewish belief was that there is one God. Perhaps the Messiah would be an influential rabbi, a prophet, or even a king—but not in any way God or divine. That would be blasphemy and the height of arrogance. The Christian Gospels report that Jesus’s claim to divinity is exactly why the Jewish authorities condemned him.

Most of the Jewish community of Jesus’s day did not even believe that he was the Messiah. His ignominious death by crucifixion after no more than three years of public life seemed to confirm this. Jesus’s followers viewed his resurrection as a sign that he was the long-awaited Messiah of Israel, and it confirmed their growing belief that he was more than an ordinary human person.

Those opposed to Christianity claimed that Jesus was simply a human being who could make mistakes and even sin. If Jesus had followers, it was because his teachings were clear and powerful, and he had strong personal charism and led an exemplary life. But hadn’t one of his own disciples betrayed him and all but one or two abandoned him? And didn’t both Jewish and Roman authorities condemn him to death? This gave rise to many portraits of Jesus as a noble, tragic figure who, for a time, won the allegiance of a relatively small group whose hopes and imaginations he had stirred.

Another, totally different view of Jesus claimed that he was not an ordinary (or even extraordinary) human person but was actually a spirit dwelling in the world in human appearance. As a spirit who transcended the normal realm of human existence, he was able to set his followers free from the bondage of human weakness and inevitable corruption. Jesus was a god, perhaps the one true God (as Christians appeared to claim) who had come to give his followers a gospel—secret knowledge (gnosis in Greek) that would free the human race from the evils of earthly life: pain, suffering, and sorrow.

These were the Gnostics. For them the material universe was the work of a god or demiurge known to be evil because the material order was subject to corruption and death. Their view of Jesus as a pure spirit who only appeared to be human for the sake of presenting his liberating message and knowledge was very appealing, and it eventually became the greatest threat to the faith of the church.

Faith and Reason

So within a few decades of Jesus’s life on earth, there appeared two predominant views of who he was in essence: He was just a human being (though a controversial one, who evoked either admiration or hatred), or he was a spiritual being who only assumed the appearance of a human person (the belief of Gnostics, which came to be called Docetism). These views were influential, but by the middle of the fifth century, at which time most of the Roman Empire had become Christian, they had been substantially refuted (though recurrences of these views, especially Docetism, continued to surface from time to time in the Middle Ages). For a thousand years, when most of Europe was Christian and Christianity spread through many parts of the world, Jesus of Nazareth was understood and proclaimed as truly and fully human as well as truly and fully God.

During the so-called Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many traditional beliefs were questioned and challenged, often with the appeal to reason over and against the acceptance of things by faith. In some ways this was surprising, because some of the great Catholic thinkers of the Middle Ages, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, strongly emphasized the importance of reason. They went to great lengths to show that Christian belief, though holding certain things inaccessible to pure reason or scientific demonstration—such as the belief in the blessed Trinity, the existence of angels, and Jesus’s divine nature—was not irrational but super-rational, that is, beyond the power of reason to determine or discover.

However, one stream of the Enlightenment insisted that it was only truly human and responsible to accept things that reason alone, with all its methods (including those of empirical science), could demonstrate. This led not only to the denial of Jesus’s divinity but also to the study of religious writings (such as the Bible) as purely human works. There is no way (the argument went) that any human work could reasonably be shown to be divinely inspired.

A product of Enlightenment thought that flourished in the twentieth century was a distinction between the Jesus of history (the bare historical facts about Jesus) and the Christ of faith (beliefs about Jesus that have no clear foundation in pure reason or historical fact). The eventual upshot of this is that no one knows with certainty who Jesus really was, since the portraits of Jesus that we have received are colored by the faith of those bearing the message to the world. So when someone asks, Will the ‘real Jesus’s please stand up and come forward? no one can be certain who that real Jesus is.

A Catholic Response

Catholics cannot simply dismiss these questions about the true identity of Jesus. We can respond by addressing three basic questions:

1. What sources do we have about Jesus?

2. Are these sources reliable?

3. How are these sources to be interpreted?

First, then, the sources we have about Jesus may be divided into three categories:

1. Non-Christian (mainly Roman and Jewish) sources

2. Christian sources approved and recognized by the church (canonical sources)

3. Other sources claiming to be Christian but not recognized by the church (noncanonical sources)

The first category (non-Christian sources) includes the writings of some Roman writers (such as Tacitus and Suetonius) and Jewish authorities (Josephus and the Babylonian Talmud). Those sources mention Jesus in passing, only telling us that he existed, that he was executed under Pontius Pilate, and that the faith of his followers caused dissension in various parts of the Roman Empire.

As Fr. Donald Senior has observed, "We have little information about any individuals who lived in the first century ad. And it is perfectly normal that Christians themselves would be the ones to transmit most of the information about Jesus."¹ So the primary sources of information are those passed on by Jesus’s followers.

At first this was through oral proclamation and testimony, but as time went on, accounts of Jesus’s life and teaching were written down and finally compiled into the orderly accounts (see Luke 1:3) that were called gospels. However, not all of these accounts of Jesus’s life and teaching were recognized by Christians as equally reliable.

It would be a serious error to think that the reliability of the Christian accounts of Jesus is only a modern concern. As soon as these accounts began to emerge, the church, and especially her leaders, the bishops, sought to determine which of them portrayed Jesus and his teaching accurately. This was a discernment process done in prayer and trust in the enlightenment and guidance of the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus sent his followers to guide them into all truth (see John 16:13) and to enable them to remember all that he had taught them (see John 14:26). In fact, the church came to believe that certain writings about Jesus were inspired by the Holy Spirit, that is, that they had dual authorship: God, as primary author, and the human writers who consigned to writing whatever he [God] wanted written, and no more (Vatican II, Dei Verbum, 11).

For over three centuries there was lively discussion among bishops and theologians to determine the church’s official list (canon) of the writings that were considered not just accurate but divinely inspired and presenting without error that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures (Dei Verbum, 11). By the end of the fourth century, the Catholic Church had reached universal agreement on twenty-seven writings, the New Testament, which in addition to the already recognized canon of the Old Testament (from the Greek version known as the Septuagint), were the complete divinely inspired, sacred writings of Christianity. All Christian beliefs may be found, at least in seed form, in these writings, and the church understands that no new Sacred Scripture or public revelation (Dei Verbum, 4) can ever be added.

This is based on the belief