(This was written in response to the article "Choose Your Own Savior" on Slate, on another website. Just in case you were interested.) 

The Slate article has raised some eyebrows, but it would be shrugged at by just about any mainstream seminarian. The search for the historical Jesus v. the Jesus of faith is one that began in earnest in the 19th century, was revived in the early 20th, and now has staged something of a comeback in the so-called "third wave" of historical Christology. Believers and non-believers alike have added plenty of pages to the study of the historical Jesus in recent years, but nearly all of them acknowledge that the practice is perhaps one level removed from sheer speculation, at best.

The primary difficulty here is twofold: first, the historical Jesus is almost impossible to apprehend; though he is one of the most written-of historical figures, there is very little objective (i.e., non Christian) information extant about him. Second, history teaches us that our ideas about who Jesus "really" was and what he "really" meant are as varied as the ages and personalities that make statements about him.

The truth is that nobody knows exactly what the historical Jesus was really all about. The Gospels paint an extremely complex portait of a very intelligent, witty, charismatic, and disturbing person. They make clear that nobody, including the disciples, completely understood Jesus's mission, and close readings of the Gospels and other New Testament sources show that Jesus was repeatedly misconstrued in his own lifetime. Within thirty years of Jesus's death, there were already at least two versions of Christianity vying for priority in the Middle East and Asia Minor: the Pauline church, which is the one that eventually settled into Orthodoxy, and the Jerusalem church, headed by Jesus's brother James, who remained practicing Jews and were not interested in creating a new religion. There were probably others as well, (such as the "Johannine" church that composed the fourth gospel, etc.).

The emphasis that you see on the "risen Christ of faith" versus the "historical Jesus" is a theological distinction. In the early 20th century, theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth made the distinction between the two in order to point out that it was the risen Christ that Christians worship and proclaim, and not the historical personage who is, in many ways, unknowable. They believed that these two visions of Jesus constituted entirely different modes of understanding reality and that the historical view was not relevant to faith.

Currently, there are scholars who believe that you can have both: N. T. Wright, for instance believes that the historical Jesus has intrinsic meaning for Christians, but this conclusion involves something of a revision of what Christianity is all about.

All of those distinctions, however, are separate from the main thrust of the Slate article, which is really about contemporary images of Jesus. Throwing the historical Jesus into the mix really muddies the water. The fractured Jesus imagery pointed out by the Gibson film et al are all representative of the ways in which the Christ of faith has been interpreted by culture, and have little to do with any historical scholarship regarding Jesus or who he really was. The thing about Jesus--the Jesus of faith, at least--is that he refuses to define himself in human terms. When asked who he is by his disciples, he responds, "Who do YOU say that I am?" and that question has been echoing down the imagination of Christendom ever since. Because the gospel narratives are almost utterly devoid of biographical information about Jesus (there is no recorded physical description of him, for instance), there has been much leeway in the intervening 2,000 years to color him according to fashionable hues.

Regardless, whether we imagine Christ as a rough-and-tumble bad boy Savior come to wage war against the forces of Satan, or as a meek lamb of God or anywhere in-between, these images don't say much about Christ or about Christianity. They say a lot about the people who dream them up, but they are, for the most part, irrelevant in matters of faith. What his true motives were, whether he believed himself to be the Son of God and God himself, whether he considered himself the Messiah, these questions lose some urgency when viewed through the lens of Christianity, because Christianity has attributed these aspects to him whether he would have agreed or not.

In other words, the Christ of faith is a mythologized version of the historical Jesus, and our contemporary images of Jesus--religious or not--are merely our modern takes on that myth. The underlying spirituality, sense of community, and sense of connectedness with God that characterize Christianity are informed by those images, but are ultimately separate from them. And that, I think, is what has allowed Christianity to blossom from an obscure Jewish cult into one of the most significant religious movements in the history of mankind. Jesus is in there somewhere; not knowing exactly where isn't the stumbling block that it might seem.