Who was Jesus of Nazareth?
No army, no writings, no office. A Galilean preacher executed as a criminal — and two thousand years later, 2.4 billion people follow him.
Last updated: October 2026
He wrote nothing, held no office, commanded no army, and died a criminal’s death outside Jerusalem around the year 30. Yet no life in history has proved more consequential: two thousand years on, nearly a third of humanity follows Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus of Nazareth is the most influential figure in Western history, and also one of the hardest to recover as a historical person. He wrote nothing that survives, he held no office, and he commanded no army. What is known about him comes from texts written by his followers, the Gospels, and from a handful of references in non-Christian writers. Historians who study him therefore work with a distinctive problem: separating the beliefs of the movement he founded from the life of the man who founded it. The picture that emerges from that work is widely shared among scholars, whatever their personal beliefs, and it is the picture this entry presents.
The broad outline is not seriously disputed. Jesus was a Jewish preacher from Galilee, in what is now northern Israel, who lived in the first century CE, was baptised by John the Baptist, gathered followers, taught in parables and sayings, and was executed by crucifixion in Jerusalem under the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius. His followers reported that he had risen from the dead, and their proclamation of that belief became the foundation of Christianity, which grew from a small Jewish movement into the world’s largest religion. Everything beyond that outline, including the details of his teaching, the exact chronology, and the nature of his claims, is a matter of evidence and interpretation, and scholars debate it vigorously.
Two points of method matter. First, the Gospels are not biographies in the modern sense. They are proclamations of faith, written decades after Jesus’s death, in Greek, by authors who never met him, and they select and shape their material to persuade readers. Second, they are nonetheless the best evidence available, and they preserve a great deal of material that historians judge to be early and authentic, including sayings and stories that embarrassed the early church and would not have been invented by it. The scholarly task is to read these texts critically, compare them with each other and with what is known of first-century Judaism and Roman rule, and reconstruct what can be known with reasonable confidence.
Jesus was born in the last years of the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BCE, which means that the traditional date of his birth, year one of the Christian calendar, is a few years too late. The calendar error comes from a sixth-century monk, Dionysius Exiguus, who miscalculated. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke say he was born in Bethlehem, the town of King David, and raised in Nazareth, a small village in Galilee. Historians generally accept Nazareth as his home, since it is the less convenient claim: nobody inventing a messiah would have given him an obscure hometown. His mother was Mary, and his father, or legal father, was Joseph, described as a tekton, a word often translated as carpenter but meaning more broadly a builder or craftsman who worked in wood and stone.
Galilee in the first century was a Jewish region under Roman rule, administered through Herod Antipas, a son of Herod the Great, who ruled as tetrarch. It was a land of villages, farms, and fishing towns around the Sea of Galilee, and its people spoke Aramaic, with Greek as the language of administration and trade. The Temple in Jerusalem stood at the centre of Jewish religious life, and the Jewish population was divided into groups with different views: Pharisees, who stressed the law and the traditions; Sadducees, who were associated with the Temple priesthood; Essenes, who withdrew to the desert; and Zealots, who resisted Rome. Jesus’s teaching grew out of this world, and it is best understood as a Jewish teaching, addressed to Jews, in Jewish categories.
Almost nothing is known of Jesus’s life before his public ministry, which began when he was about thirty. He was baptised by John the Baptist, a popular preacher who called Jews to repentance and baptised them in the Jordan River. The baptism is one of the facts historians treat as most certain, precisely because it was awkward for the early church: it implies that Jesus submitted to another man’s rite, and a movement inventing a biography would not have invented that. After the baptism, according to the Gospels, Jesus began to preach in Galilee, gathering a circle of twelve close followers, called apostles, and a wider group of men and women who travelled with him.
The heart of Jesus’s teaching, as the Gospels present it, was the Kingdom of God, the coming rule of God on earth, which he announced as near at hand. He taught that God would set the world right, that the last would be first, and that the poor, the mourning, and the persecuted would be blessed. The Sermon on the Mount, in the Gospel of Matthew, gathers this teaching into its most famous form: the Beatitudes, the command to love one’s enemies, and the Golden Rule, to treat others as one would wish to be treated. The teaching was ethical and eschatological at once, a call to live now as though the Kingdom had already arrived.
Jesus taught largely in parables, short stories drawn from everyday life, about farmers and fishermen, lost sheep and prodigal sons, wedding guests and vineyard workers. The parables are widely regarded as the most authentic layer of his teaching, because their style is distinctive and because they do not serve the later church’s theological arguments. Their meaning is often deliberately indirect: they surprise, they reverse expectations, and they leave the listener to work out the point. The parable of the Good Samaritan, in which a member of a despised group is the hero, and the parable of the Prodigal Son, in which a father welcomes back a son who has wasted his inheritance, are among the most retold stories in the world.
Jesus also acted in ways that provoked controversy. He ate with tax collectors and sinners, people whom respectable religion avoided, and he healed the sick, including lepers and people regarded as possessed, on the Sabbath, the day of rest, in defiance of strict interpretations of the law. He attacked the religious establishment, accusing the Pharisees of hypocrisy and the Temple authorities of corruption. He drove money changers from the Temple courts, an act that, in the Gospels, sealed his fate. Whether he claimed to be the Messiah, the anointed king awaited by Jews, is one of the most debated questions in the field. The Gospels present him as the Messiah, and as the Son of God, but historians debate how much of that language goes back to Jesus himself and how much was applied to him by his followers after his death.
The end of Jesus’s life is the best-attested part of it. According to the Gospels, he travelled to Jerusalem for the festival of Passover, shared a final meal with his disciples, the Last Supper, and was betrayed by one of his own, Judas Iscariot, who identified him to the Temple authorities. He was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, questioned by the high priest Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, the Jewish council, and then handed over to Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judea, who alone had the authority to execute. Pilate, after questioning him, sentenced him to crucifixion, the Roman punishment for rebels and slaves. The execution took place outside the walls of Jerusalem, at a place called Golgotha, the place of the skull, and his body was laid in a tomb.
The date of the crucifixion is usually placed around 30 or 33 CE, during the prefecture of Pilate, who governed Judea from 26 to 36 CE. The Gospels differ on details of the trial and the timing, and historians debate whether the Jewish authorities or the Roman governor bore the greater responsibility. What is clear is that crucifixion was a Roman act, carried out by Roman soldiers, and that the charge, as recorded on the cross, was that Jesus claimed to be King of the Jews, a political claim that Rome treated as sedition. The Romans crucified thousands of people in Judea in the first century, and from the Roman perspective Jesus was one more troublesome preacher in a restless province.
The non-Christian evidence, though thin, confirms the outline. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around 116 CE, records that Christus suffered the extreme penalty under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the 90s CE, mentions Jesus twice in his Antiquities, once in a passage about James, the brother of Jesus, and once in the longer Testimonium Flavianum, a passage that is partly authentic and partly expanded by later Christian copyists. These references do not add much detail, but they matter, because they show that Jesus was known outside Christian circles within a century of his death, and that the basic fact of his execution under Pilate was not a Christian invention.
What happened next is a matter of faith for Christians and of history for scholars, and the two must be kept distinct. The Gospels report that, on the third day after the crucifixion, the tomb was found empty, and that Jesus appeared to his followers, alive, in a series of encounters. Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and that the resurrection is the central event of their faith. Historians, as historians, cannot verify a resurrection, and they do not try. What they can say is that the early followers of Jesus came to believe, very soon after his death, that he had been raised, and that this belief transformed a defeated movement into a missionary one.
The transformation was rapid. Within a generation, the followers of Jesus, led by Peter, James, and John, were proclaiming the resurrection in Jerusalem and beyond. Paul of Tarsus, a Pharisee who had persecuted the movement and who never met Jesus in life, became its most effective missionary, carrying the message to the Gentile, non-Jewish, world of the eastern Mediterranean. Paul’s letters, written in the 50s CE, are the earliest Christian documents that survive, and they show a movement already spreading across the Roman Empire, arguing about whether Gentile converts had to follow Jewish law, and concluding, under Paul’s influence, that they did not. That decision, more than any other, made Christianity a world religion rather than a sect of Judaism.
The Gospels were written in the decades that followed. Mark, the earliest, is generally dated to around 70 CE, the year the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. Matthew and Luke, drawing on Mark and on other sources, are generally dated to the 80s or 90s, and John, the most theological of the four, to around 90 to 110 CE. The New Testament also contains the Acts of the Apostles, the letters of Paul and others, and the Revelation. The canon, the list of books accepted as scripture, took centuries to settle, and the Gospels that were not included, such as the Gospel of Thomas, preserve other traditions about Jesus that scholars continue to study.
Christianity grew in the Roman Empire despite periodic persecution, because it offered a community, a moral code, and a hope of life after death that appealed across classes. The conversion of the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century, and his Edict of Milan in 313, which granted religious tolerance, changed everything. Christianity became the favoured religion of the empire, and in 325 the Council of Nicaea, convened by Constantine, defined the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, that Jesus was fully God and fully man, a doctrine that remains central to most Christian churches. The churches later split, between East and West in 1054, and between Catholic and Protestant in the sixteenth century, but all of them trace their lineage to Jesus of Nazareth.
Today, around two point four billion people identify as Christians, roughly a third of the world’s population, and Jesus is a figure of reverence in other traditions as well. In Islam, Jesus, known as Isa, is a prophet, born of the Virgin Mary, who performed miracles and who will return at the end of time, though Islam does not accept the crucifixion or the divinity of Jesus as Christianity teaches them. In Judaism, Jesus is regarded as a Jewish teacher of the first century, not as the Messiah. In secular culture, his teaching on love, forgiveness, and the dignity of the poor continues to be quoted by people who do not share Christian belief.
The historical Jesus remains elusive, and that elusiveness is part of his significance. He left no writings, no empire, and no institution. He was executed as a criminal in a provincial town, and his followers were, by worldly standards, nobodies. Yet the movement they founded reshaped the calendar, the art, the law, and the ethics of much of the world. Whether one approaches him as a believer, as a historian, or as a curious reader, the question he poses is the same one his followers asked: who was this man, and why did his life change the world?
This entry draws on the four Gospels and the letters of Paul, the references to Jesus in Tacitus and Josephus, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the standard works of historical Jesus scholarship, including the studies of E. P. Sanders, John Meier, and Geza Vermes. Christian beliefs are presented as beliefs, and the dating of the Gospels follows the scholarly consensus described in those sources.