ANCIENT ECHOES PODCAST: WHY I NO LONGER BELIEVE IN GOD (JESSUP PA)

Written By: Jeric Yurkanin 

To ask, “Who was the historical Jesus?” is to step behind centuries of church tradition, theological debate, paintings, sermons, creeds, and modern cultural assumptions, and return as carefully as possible to the world of first-century Galilee and Judea. The historical Jesus was not born into Christianity, because Christianity did not yet exist. He was born, lived, taught, prayed, worshiped, argued, healed, suffered, and died as a Jewish man within the world of Second Temple Judaism. His language, symbols, Scriptures, prayers, and moral imagination were shaped by Israel’s story. He did not walk around Galilee announcing a new religion called Christianity. He announced the kingdom of God.

Historians cannot prove every detail about Jesus’ life with the same certainty that faith traditions often claim. The Gospels are theological writings, written by believers, shaped by memory, preaching, and worship. Yet this does not mean they are useless for history. They preserve traditions about Jesus that historians can examine, compare, and place within the world of first-century Judaism. When scholars study Jesus historically, they usually begin with several basic points that are widely accepted. Jesus was a real Jewish figure from Nazareth. He lived in Galilee during the reign of Herod Antipas. He was baptized by John the Baptist. He gathered disciples. He taught in parables. He announced God’s kingdom. He was known as a healer and exorcist. He challenged certain religious and social assumptions of his day. He went to Jerusalem near Passover. He caused enough concern among authorities that he was crucified by the Romans under Pontius Pilate.

This matters because crucifixion was not a religious symbol in Jesus’ world. It was a Roman punishment of humiliation, terror, and public warning. Rome crucified rebels, slaves, bandits, and those considered threats to public order. The fact that Jesus was crucified tells us something important: whatever else people later believed about him, his life and message were seen as dangerous enough to get him killed. He was not executed because he told people to be privately spiritual and polite. He was executed in the charged political and religious atmosphere of Jerusalem, during Passover, a festival filled with memories of liberation from empire.

Jesus was a Jewish teacher and prophet. He taught from within the Jewish tradition, not against it. His teachings echoed the Torah, the prophets, the Psalms, and Israel’s hope for God’s justice. When Jesus spoke of loving God and loving neighbor, he was drawing from Deuteronomy and Leviticus. When he criticized hypocrisy, exploitation, and religious pride, he stood in the tradition of prophets like Isaiah, Amos, Micah, and Jeremiah. He was not rejecting Judaism. He was calling Israel back to the heart of its covenant with God: mercy, justice, faithfulness, compassion, and love.

Jesus’ message centered on the kingdom of God. This phrase did not mean going to heaven after death in the way many later Christians came to imagine it. For Jesus, the kingdom of God meant God’s reign breaking into the world. It meant the poor being lifted up, the sick restored, sinners welcomed, enemies forgiven, the proud humbled, and the powerful judged by the standards of mercy and justice. It was both present and future. Jesus could say the kingdom was near, and he could also teach his disciples to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” His vision was not escape from the earth. It was the healing of the earth under God’s love.

The historical Jesus taught that God was compassionate, generous, forgiving, and especially near to the forgotten. In his parables, God is like a father running to embrace a lost son, a shepherd searching for one lost sheep, a woman sweeping the house for one lost coin, a landowner giving unexpected generosity, and a king who judges people by whether they fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, and visited the sick and imprisoned. Jesus’ God was not mainly interested in religious performance for show. Jesus’ God looked at the heart, defended the vulnerable, and exposed the emptiness of outward religion without inward mercy.

This is why Jesus’ teaching about love was so central. He taught, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” He told his followers that people would know they were his disciples by their love. He commanded love not only for friends, family, or people who agreed with us, but even for enemies. This was not weak sentiment. It was a radical way of life. In a world shaped by honor, shame, revenge, ethnic division, purity boundaries, Roman violence, and economic inequality, Jesus called people into a different kind of community. He imagined a people marked by forgiveness instead of revenge, humility instead of status-seeking, generosity instead of greed, and compassion instead of exclusion.

Jesus also warned strongly about money. He did not treat wealth as morally neutral when it was tied to greed, neglect, or oppression. He said no one could serve both God and money. He warned the rich who ignored the poor. He overturned tables in the temple, symbolically challenging a system where worship, money, power, and corruption had become entangled. He blessed the poor and warned those who were comfortable. This does not mean Jesus hated every person with possessions. It means he saw money as spiritually dangerous when it became an idol, when it hardened the heart, or when it separated people from love of God and neighbor.

At the same time, separating the historical Jesus from later church doctrine does not mean attacking faith. It simply means recognizing that doctrine developed over time. Ideas about the Trinity, original sin, atonement theories, church hierarchy, creeds, and later Christian systems were shaped in the generations and centuries after Jesus. The historical Jesus did not speak in the language of later councils. He spoke in the language of Jewish Scripture, parables, prophetic warning, and kingdom hope. He called people to repentance, not merely as private guilt, but as a turning of life toward God’s justice and mercy.

The Jesus of history was not a modern American evangelical, a Roman Catholic bishop, a Protestant reformer, a politician, or a culture-war symbol. He was a first-century Jewish prophet from Galilee who announced that God’s reign was near. He healed the sick, welcomed the outcast, challenged the powerful, forgave sinners, confronted greed, taught love of neighbor, and embodied compassion. He gathered a community around a way of life that was meant to look like the mercy of God in human form.

To recover the historical Jesus is not to make him smaller. It is to see him more clearly. Before he became the center of Christian doctrine, he was a living man walking dusty roads, eating with sinners, touching lepers, blessing children, debating teachers, confronting injustice, and teaching that the greatest commandments were love of God and love of neighbor. That is where any honest search must begin.