Jesus of Nazareth

Joshua or Yeshua of Nazareth (Hebrew: Yeshúa'; Aramaic: Yēšū') typically known in English as Jesus (Greek: Iēsoûs), was a Jewish religious leader of the early first century AD. Jesus is considered the founder of Christianity, the largest religion in the world, whose followers revere him as a divine being. Although attested in some contemporary documents, including the works of Josephus, Tacitus, and Suetonius, the most significant source for Jesus's life and beliefs are the four canonical Gospels, traditionally known as the Books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and included in all modern versions of the Christian Bible. These books existed among an abundance of works purporting to tell the story of Jesus's life and teaching and were not selected to become standard until at least the late 2nd century AD; as such, their reliability is highly disputed.

Christians refer to Jesus with the full title Jesus Christ, meaning "Jesus the anointed one", an assertion that Jesus was in fact the Messiah, an apocalyptic figure in Second Temple Jewish thought who was to become the divine king of a revived Israel and establish justice. The vast majority of modern Christians also hold that Jesus was one member of the "Trinity", a tripartite but singular conception of God, making him simultaneously the Son of God and God himself incarnate.

For centuries, secularist and materialist Bible scholars have considered the Gospels to be contradictory and unreliable witnesses and have attempted various methods to discern reliable evidence from the text about the real Jesus. Such views were embraced by the Enlightenment and became standard among educated people by the 18th century: Thomas Jefferson, for example, famously created a Bible which had all religious claims about Jesus removed and focused on his social teachings. 19th century criticism of Christianity relied heavily on criticism and analysis of the Gospel record, as in the works of Young Hegelians Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer. Modern scholars almost universally agree that the Gospel of Mark is the oldest and likely most reliable representation of the thought of Jesus Christ. In Mark, Jesus advocates for social reform, criticizes the existing religious practices of the time, and calls himself the Messiah, but never claims to be God. Study of the nature of Jesus's life and ideas, as well as the social movement he led, tends to diverge from Christian doctrine and the stories presented in the Gospels. However, different scholars emphasize different elements of the Gospel message — apocalypticism, radical egalitarianism, iconoclasm, or yet other aspects — as the authentic teaching of Jesus, considering conflicting evidence secondary and inauthentic. One of the most famous of these schools of thought is represented in the Jesus Seminar and its successor projects which view Jesus as a traveling sage and faith healer rather than a prophet.

Since at least the Enlightenment era, scholars have occasionally criticized the view that Jesus existed and instead argued that Jesus was a mythical figure borrowed from other traditions or completely invented. Bruno Bauer revived this view, attacking not only the Gospels but the Pauline epistles as specious. Since the 2010s, this view has regained marginal popularity among laymen, particularly in the Western atheist movement, as well as among a handful of scholars, including Richard Carrier, Robert M. Price, and Thomas L. Brodie.