Historical Jesus in the context of "Historicity of the Bible"

Jesus (c. 6 to 4 BC – AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, and many other names and titles, was a 1st-century Jewish preacher and religious leader in the Roman province of Judaea. He is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. Most Christians consider Jesus to be the incarnation of God the Son and awaited messiah, or Christ, a descendant from the Davidic line that is prophesied in the Old Testament. Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically. Accounts of Jesus's life are contained in the Gospels, especially the four canonical Gospels in the New Testament. Since the Enlightenment, academic research has yielded various views on the historical reliability of the Gospels and how closely they reflect the historical Jesus.

According to Christian tradition, as preserved in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus was circumcised at eight days old, was baptized by John the Baptist as a young adult, and after 40 days and nights of fasting in the wilderness, began his own ministry. He was an itinerant teacher who interpreted the law of God with divine authority and was often referred to as "rabbi". Jesus often debated with his fellow Jews on how to best follow God, engaged in healings, taught in parables, and gathered followers, among whom 12 were appointed as his apostles. He was arrested in Jerusalem and tried by the Jewish authorities, handed over to the Roman government, and crucified on the order of Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judaea. After his death, his followers became convinced that he rose from the dead, and following his ascension, the community they formed eventually became the early Christian Church that expanded as a worldwide movement.

The historicity of the Bible is the question of the Bible's relationship to history—covering not just the Bible's acceptability as history but also the ability to understand the literary forms of biblical narrative. Questions on biblical historicity are typically separated into evaluations of whether the Old Testament and Hebrew Bible accurately record the history of ancient Israel and Judah and the second Temple period, and whether the Christian New Testament is an accurate record of the historical Jesus and of the Apostolic Age. This tends to vary depending upon the opinion of the scholar.

When studying the books of the Bible, scholars examine the historical context of passages, the importance ascribed to events by the authors, and the contrast between the descriptions of these events and other historical evidence. Being a collaborative work composed and redacted over the course of several centuries, the historicity of the Bible is not consistent throughout the entirety of its contents.

Assyrians (Syriac: ܣܘܪ̈ܝܐ, Sūrāyē / Sūrōyē) are an ethnic group indigenous to Mesopotamia, a geographical region in West Asia. Modern Assyrians share descent directly from the ancient Assyrians, one of the key civilizations of Mesopotamia. While they are distinct from other Mesopotamian groups, such as the Babylonians, they share in the broader cultural heritage of the Mesopotamian region. Modern Assyrians may culturally self-identify as Syriacs, Chaldeans, or Arameans for religious, geographic, and tribal identification.

The ancient Assyrians originally spoke Akkadian, an East Semitic language, but subsequently switched to the Aramaic language and currently speak various dialects of Neo-Aramaic, specifically those known as Suret and Turoyo, which are among the oldest continuously spoken and written languages in the world. Aramaic (language of the Arameans) was the lingua franca of West Asia for centuries and was the language spoken by Jesus. It has influenced other languages such as Hebrew and Arabic, and, through cultural and religious exchanges, it has had some influence on Mongolian and Uighur. Aramaic itself is the oldest continuously spoken and written language in the Middle East, with a history stretching back over 3,000 years.

The historicity of Jesus is the debate "on the fringes of scholarship" and in popular culture regarding whether Jesus historically existed or was a purely mythological figure. Mainstream New Testament scholarship ignores the non-existence hypothesis and its arguments, as the question of historicity was generally settled in scholarship in the early 20th century, and the general consensus among modern scholars is that a Jewish man named Jesus of Nazareth existed in the Herodian Kingdom of Judea and the subsequent Herodian tetrarchy in the 1st century AD, upon whose life and teachings Christianity was later constructed. However, scholars distinguish between the 'Christ of faith' as presented in the New Testament and the subsequent Christian theology, and a minimal 'Jesus of history', of whom almost nothing can be known.

There is no scholarly consensus concerning the historicity of most elements of Jesus's life as described in the Bible, and only two key events of the biblical story of Jesus's life are widely accepted as historical, based on the criterion of embarrassment, namely his baptism by John the Baptist and his crucifixion by the order of Pontius Pilate. Furthermore, the historicity of supernatural elements like his purported miracles and resurrection are deemed to be solely a matter of 'faith' or of 'theology', or lack thereof.

The quest for the historical Jesus consists of academic efforts to determine what words and actions, if any, may be attributed to Jesus, and to use the findings to provide portraits of the historical Jesus. Conventionally, since the 18th century three scholarly quests for the historical Jesus are distinguished, each with distinct characteristics and based on different research criteria, which were often developed during each specific phase. These quests are distinguished from earlier approaches because they rely on the historical method to study biblical narratives. While textual analysis of biblical sources had taken place for centuries, these quests introduced new methods and specific techniques to establish the historical validity of their conclusions.

The enthusiasm shown during the first quest diminished after Albert Schweitzer's critique of 1906 in which he pointed out various shortcomings in the approaches used at the time. The second quest began in 1953 and introduced a number of new techniques but reached a plateau in the 1970s. In the 1980s, a number of scholars gradually began to introduce new research ideas, initiating a third quest characterized by the latest research approaches. Since the late 2000s, concerns have been growing about the usefulness of the criteria of authenticity and proclamations of a more expansive and genuinely interdisciplinary Next Quest.

The baptism of Jesus, the ritual purification of Jesus with water by John the Baptist, was a major event described in the three synoptic Gospels of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). It is considered to have taken place at Al-Maghtas (also called Bethany Beyond the Jordan), today located in Jordan.

Modern biblical scholars view the baptism of Jesus as a historical event to which a high degree of certainty can be assigned. Along with the crucifixion of Jesus, biblical scholars view it as one of the two historically certain facts about him, and often use it as the starting point for the study of the historical Jesus.