“What is this? A new teaching - and with authority!
He even gives orders to impure spirits and they obey him.”
“What kind of man is this?
Even the winds and the waves obey him!”
“Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming!
Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
“Who do you say I am?”
Students on a university campus were recently asked: Who is Jesus to you? Among the answers: “a weird guy with a beard”, “the dude who founded Christianity” or “a friend of Socrates”. The character of Jesus does not generally leave people indifferent: some like him, others are angry with the religion that claims to come from him...
In fact, the question of Jesus’ identity regularly arises in the Gospels, the four versions of the story of Jesus’ life that we find in the Bible. People who witness his deeds or words do not fail to wonder about him:
After Jesus delivered someone from an unclean spirit: “What is this? A new teaching — and with authority! He even gives orders to impure spirits and they obey him.” (Mark 1:27)
After Jesus calmed a storm on the lake: “What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!” (Matthew 8:27)
After Jesus told someone that their sins were forgiven: “Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:7)
At one point, Jesus himself asks those around him, “Who do people say I am?” (Mark 8:27). He then puts his closest friends on the spot: “Who do you say I am?” (Mark 8:29)
Those who met Jesus wondered about him. Even his closest friends were confronted with the question of his identity. So it is not so surprising that centuries later, the character intrigues us too.
The greatest resource for discovering more about the character of Jesus is of course the Bible. But the stories we read there can also leave us wanting more.
First of all, because the reality of the New Testament is very different from ours. Nearly 2000 years later, it is very difficult to imagine a world where travel is done on foot or on the back of a donkey, where cell phones and the internet do not exist, where the climate is extremely different (I live in Montreal, Quebec). A society based on community (for the better or for the worse), far from the hyper-individualized Western World that I am familiar with. So there is a time, cultural (and meteorological!) barrier that separates me from the world in which Jesus evolved.
Secondly, because of the way things are told in the Gospels. Jesus spends a lot of time meeting people, but the accounts of these encounters are often very summarized: we read a few hours, a few days at best, often only a few minutes of the life of the person who meets Jesus...
These texts pique our curiosity. They can also leave us with many questions: where does this person come from? How did they get there? How did they feel at the time? What effect did this encounter have on the rest of their life?
It is from these questions that I started the witness series whose stories you can read below (more episodes to come!). Trying to imagine, to fill in the silences of the texts, to answer my own questions.
Note that I don’t pretend that things happened this way. These stories are only an effort of imagination: this is how I imagine things could have happened, what the lives and reactions of these characters could have been like.
Without being a specialist in 1st century Palestine (that is an academic discipline in its own right), I try to stay within the realm of the plausible, of what could have happened in the context of the time. There are no dinosaurs, no atomic bomb, no cars in these stories.
Finally, these texts are monologues (many of them were actually narrated before they were written). Each text begins with an excerpt from the Bible: what the New Testament tells us about the witness in question and his encounter with Jesus. Then the character (and my imagination) takes the floor to tell his or her story, his or her encounter with Jesus. Some people come out of this encounter amazed, others are doubtful or even angry.
In short, they also ask themselves the question: “Who is this man?”
