Whether you believe in him or not, Jesus of Nazareth lived a humble life and died an executed criminal 2,000 years ago. He was an historical figure who appeared during a time of great tumult in what is now northern Israel. The Gospels tell us that for the first 30 years of his life he was just another carpenter who probably made his living working on the construction of a new Greco/Roman city, Sepphoris, just a few miles from his home. In Sepphoris he would have been exposed to a multicultural world where he likely would have conversed in Greek as well as in his native Hebrew and Aramaic. He may have come into contact with traders and travelers from as far away as Rome, India, Egypt and Asia Minor.

He was a devout Jew, at a time when Jews were oppressed within the Pax Romana. At some point he encountered John the Baptist, a wilderness seer. He became an apocalyptic preacher and miracle worker at a time when such preachers and miracle workers were a dime a dozen. It was not unknown for the rich and powerful to proclaim themselves to be a God, as did Caesar Augustus, nor was it uncommon to attribute to them the ability to perform miracles. What was unusual was for a poor man to speak and act as though he might share some aspect of divinity.

His family worried about this change in his career path. He acquired followers and traveled throughout the Galilee, largely keeping to smaller towns and villages. After three years of wandering he went to Jerusalem for the Passover season, caused a riot at the temple, and was arrested, tried and executed by the Romans.

What followed were stories about a miraculous resurrection, a deification, and the creation of a religion that now counts a third of the world’s population as its members. Little or nothing about the precepts or structure of that religion was laid out by Jesus during his short life. Almost all of it came to be based on the telling and retelling of the stories of his life, and the interpretations that came after.

And so, the centuries rolled by. Christianity broke away from being a splinter sect of the Jewish faith and even turned against it. Gentiles persecuted and later embraced the new faith as the story of yet another dying and reviving God found resonance with the pagans. The Catholic and Orthodox churches rose and split and split again in the midst of the Reformation.

One day in 1945 an Egyptian man was digging for some clay to make pottery when he uncovered 16 large jars. When he broke into one of them, he found books bound with gazelle hide that were obviously ancient. He brought them back to his wife who burned some of the texts to cook her meal that evening.

Eventually the surviving texts made it an antiquities dealer in Cairo. When scholars finally got the chance to assess what had been discovered they found that these were additional Gospels not included in the Christian Bible, the so-called Gnostic Gospels. Written in Greek probably 400 years after the death of Jesus and perhaps 200 years later than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, these Gospels tell a very different story.

There is no proclamation of a virgin birth. No Star of Bethlehem. No angels, No crucifixion. No resurrection.

What they record are hundreds of statements (logia in Greek) that begin , “And Jesus said…”

Some of these sayings are the same as the parables in the New Testament. Some are utterly confounding. They seem to portray Jesus as a kind of mystical philosopher.

Now in the season of Advent, for Christians a season traditionally devoted to introspection preceding the celebration of the Christmas holiday, it is appropriate to think about the difference between what we think we know and what we believe about a man who lived and died 2,000 years ago. Through the study of the historical Jesus, we can appreciate the diversity of the different forms of Christianity that arose following the death of a man whose belief in an alternative to the brutal rule of Rome came to represent a larger desire for a changed world and the birth of new religion. There is still much that the study of ancient documents and archaeology can teach us.

But we should never lose sight of the fact that a simple man preached forgiveness and non- violence, mercy and generosity for the poor, empathy and respect for women, kindness for the strangers in our midst, and hope for a better, more peaceful world. Christians and non-Christians alike, we can all take something from those teachings in a world where they are still largely unrealized.

David Parrella lives in Buckland.