I was very glad when Dr Yussef suggested this title for our dialogue this month. But I was also aware that in choosing this topic we are treading on holy ground, the ground of one another's deepest beliefs. Just as I understand Muslims treat the Qur'an as God's revelation, whole and perfect, so Christians treat Jesus. And the Christian understanding of Jesus is based on our firm belief that the Bible as we have it is not corrupted or inadequate but a record of God's dealings, first with the Jewish people and then with Jews and others at the time of Jesus, through which we can recognise divine truth. I hope, therefore, that we will be able to maintain the respect for one another's beliefs, even when we disagree, that has been such a feature of our dialogues so far.
Christians do not only know Jesus through the Bible. We know him through prayer and worship, through art and music, through the fellowship of our churches and through the strangers we encounter. But our knowledge of him is based on the Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and necessarily so. For it would be very easy for Christians to project their own opinions and beliefs onto Jesus, to make him into a spokesman for our own twenty-first century views. So, like my Reforming ancestors in the Christian faith, I am glad that this dialogue gives me the mandate to go back to the sources of our faith: back to the Bible.
It may seem strange to look for anything about Jesus in the Hebrew Bible; for it is his own Scriptures, the holy book of his faith as a Jew, written centuries before his birth. Yet when his first Jewish followers came to try to make sense of his life and death, and the events thereafter, it was to their Scriptures they naturally turned. Surely, they reasoned, Jesus could not have been left without witnesses in the story of God's people up to that point. How then did his story make sense in the context of the great narratives of creation and freedom, of being chosen and the responsibilities of that choice, to be found in the Hebrew Bible?
The author of John's Gospel - one of the four Gospels, or lives of Jesus, to be found in the New Testament - made a hugely bold statement when he began his book: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God'. For the whole Hebrew Bible begins: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth'. By starting his story of Jesus in this way, John made clear his conviction that before the world began, Jesus - God's Word, God's creative agent - already was; that, rather than being created like every other human being, Jesus is the human expression of God's very essence.
Looking at the whole Hebrew Bible, Jesus' first followers saw other clues to his nature. When in the book of Deuteronomy Moses told his followers that God would raise up for them a prophet like himself from among his own people, some saw a reference to Jesus, who was born into Moses' faith, Judaism. When in the prophecy of Isaiah there are references to God's mysterious suffering servant, whose undeserved punishment will bring all the nations of the earth to serve God, some saw this as a reference to Jesus. Again, the innocent suffering described by the writer of Psalm 22 can be understood in the context of Jesus' crucifixion. The description in the book of Proverbs of the wisdom of God existing before creation can also be seen as a reference to him. Indeed, for centuries Christian thinkers largely saw the Hebrew Bible as a compendium of material describing Jesus, rather than as the Jewish scriptures; to such an extent that it was only in the nineteenth century that European scholars recollected, to their great surprise, that Jesus was not white and Western but Jewish and Palestinian.
Christians today hold different views on the significance of the Hebrew Bible to our understanding of Jesus. While some still see its significance purely in terms of what it can tell us about him, most take it more seriously on its own terms, as the Bible Jesus would have known by heart and from which he would have learned much, as a growing human being, of God and of his own people. Of course, the very idea that Jesus had things to learn about God, rather than, as God, having all wisdom already within him, is something I learn from the Bible about him but with which other Christians might not agree. For the four Gospels or lives of Jesus take different points of view on the exact balance of Jesus' humanity and his divinity.
We don't know for certain exactly when the four Gospels given the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - four people important in early Christianity either because they knew Jesus or because they were close to those who did - were written. But most scholars believe from studying the texts closely that Mark's Gospel was first, written about forty years after Jesus' death, followed by Luke and Matthew, a decade or two later, with John's Gospel the last of the four. It's thought that Luke and Matthew both took Mark's Gospel as a model, then edited it and put in more information from other sources - for example, Mark starts the story with the beginning of Jesus' ministry, while both Luke and Matthew tell of Jesus' birth. John, as I've already mentioned, takes a more meditative approach, starting much further back, at the beginning of creation; often he doesn't mention stories that the other three Gospels have already covered, and the ones he does include show important things he wants to teach his readers about who Jesus is.
But every Gospel wants to tell us in its own way who Jesus is and why he is so important - that's why they were written down, when the eyewitnesses to his life were beginning to die, and his words and deeds needed to be passed on to the next generation who had never known him. People in different settings were interested in different aspects of Jesus' life, so the different Gospels emphasise different things about him. Mark's Gospel sets down the basics in short, sharp sentences: there was persecution, and the writer had to pass on the important things about Jesus before the secret police caught up with him. His picture of Jesus is very human: Jesus gets angry and tired. Matthew's Gospel was written for Jewish Christians, arguing that Jesus was the true fulfilment of Jewish law - that's why in his Gospel Jesus' saying about coming to fulfil, not to abolish the law is given top billing. Luke's Gospel was written for Christians who'd come to faith from non-Jewish backgrounds. It doesn't have Matthew's footnotes about how this or that part of Jesus' life fulfils the Jewish Scriptures, but it does include stories about Jesus dealing with non-Jews from Samaria and from Rome. By the time we get to the Gospel of John, Jesus is seen in such a divine light that his human vulnerability is less apparent.
Each of the Gospel writers had to decide which of the stories they had heard about Jesus to include, in an order that made sense for their particular audience, so there are some differences between them. But the message is always the same. As it says in John's Gospel: if I tried to write down everything Jesus said and did, there wouldn't be enough books in the world to do it. But what I have said is put down so you'll believe that Jesus is God's son, and that through believing this you'll find true life with him.
So what do the Gospels tell us about Jesus? After the stories of his birth which we celebrate at Christmas, they describe how he began his work from God by being baptised - plunged in water to show his solidarity with everyone else making a new start with God. Then for forty days he prayed and fasted in the desert, a time we remember during Lent, the five weeks before Easter, to work out how to fulfil his mission from God. After that, he started to call people to turn away from wrongdoing and be welcomed into God's kingdom, where people are healed and freed, and poor people hear the good news that God has not forgotten them.
Jesus began to gather followers and went from village to village, teaching people about God, healing the sick and bringing back outsiders into community life. Crowds gathered to hear him, and to see the amazing things God's power was doing through him, but the religious authorities didn't approve - he didn't keep all the rules that had been built up over the centuries to keep God's holiness safe, and he challenged the way the authorities controlled who could be forgiven by God and how. After three years of Jesus' offering people this new way to live, he came to Jerusalem, the capital city, at Passover, the festival when the Jews remembered how God had freed them from slavery. As he and his friends shared the Passover meal, he gave it a new meaning: the bread and wine they shared was his body and his blood, his life that would be given for them. But the religious authorities, afraid he would take their own power, persuaded the Romans that Jesus was a security risk, and one of his own followers betrayed him. He was sentenced to be killed by being nailed up on a cross, the Roman punishment for political prisoners, on the Friday we now call Good Friday.
Three days later, on what we call Easter Sunday, he was seen alive by his followers. For forty days he appeared to them, explaining how his new life showed that God's love for everyone could never be stopped, even by death.
That story - and I've missed out so much of it, to give you just a hint of what the Gospels tell us about Jesus! - is by no means all we find about him in the New Testament. Decades before the eyewitness accounts of his life were written down, Christians were already writing to each other about him, and the letters Paul wrote to churches have been collected in the New Testament.
Paul gives us a few sayings of Jesus - for example, that it is more blessed to give than to receive. He gives us the first account of what Christians do at Communion, when we remember Jesus' last Passover meal, written less than twenty years after the event. But he is generally more interested in telling people about the significance of Jesus' life and death than in giving more details. So, for example, he tells the church at Philippi how Jesus, who is in essence God, did not think himself too important to become a human being, but was humble enough to die on the cross for love of us. Speaking to the church in Rome, he assures his readers that their participation in Jesus' own death and resurrection, through their baptism, means that they have left the old life where evil ruled them for a new life in God's love. In his letter to Corinth Paul speaks of the church as Jesus' body on earth - made up of different people, with different gifts, it is still one body, sharing God's life. Writing to the Galatians he tells his hearers that in Jesus' community there is no longer any barrier between Jews and non-Jews, between slaves and free people, between men and women, because all participate in Jesus' life. And in his letter to Colossae he explores Jesus' cosmic significance: he is the one who holds together not only the church but the whole of heaven and earth.
Finally - and again, I'm leaving a lot out! - the book called Revelation describes Jesus at the end of time as not only first but also last, glorious in God's kingdom, worshipped by people of every nation and tribe. And that - in a nutshell - is what the Bible tells us about Jesus.