Excerpt From ‘Jesus. A World History’: A New Book On The Life And Influence Of Jesus

The following excerpt from “Jesus. A World History” is republished with permission. The book, originally in German, is both a biography of Jesus and a historical narrative on the way Jesus changed the Christian faith and many parts of the world by extension. Listen and subscribe to the Religion Unplugged podcast for a conversation between Markus Spieker and executive editor Paul Glader.

Chapter I: In Search of the Hidden God

We slowly feel our way towards Jesus.

And we go far back in time. Very far back.

A long, long time ago in a far away galaxy, possibly the Andromeda galaxy, something tremendous happens. A star, bigger than the sun, burns up. The stardust that then rains through the universe is the material from which life is formed, mainly carbon. It will take some time before the explosion can be seen on Earth.

More than two million years.

That's how many light-years away the Andromeda galaxy is from us. Considering the presumed size of the universe, it’s rather close, though. And in terms of time not that far away either. The dinosaurs, experts assume, have long since disappeared from the Earth's surface at the time of the spectacular star death. About sixty million years ago, a meteorite impact is said to have suddenly put an end to their existence.

We jump ahead into the year six or five before Christ: Oriental astrologers see the celestial sign that we call a "supernova." Of course, they do not know the word "supernova,” nor do they have any idea that the event took place so long ago. They think that they are witnessing the birth of a new star. What makes this star so significant in their view is that shortly before the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Saturn crossed for the third time. This points to something quite extraordinary.

The wise men from the Orient are setting themselves in motion.

This is what possibly happened. What I have described is not fact, but a theory. One of the many attempts to explain the so-called "Star of Bethlehem." Later I will go into it in more detail.

What is beyond dispute: The light of the world is already on its way there before Mary and Joseph and human civilizations in general exist.

God is coming to meet us before we have begun our search.

When a newborn boy cries in the stable of Bethlehem, the search for God in the world has been going on for at least a few thousand years.

And people are still groping in the dark.

Men in a cave: Is anyone up there?

Four hundred years before Jesus will use his parables to teach what is real, the Greek philosopher Plato tries to explain the human condition. He too uses a parable, the famous "cave parable." According to this parable, humans resemble the inhabitants of a cave who know nothing of the world above ground - except for the shadows projected onto the cave wall by the incident light. The shadows symbolize religious myths and philosophical wisdom with which people try to understand themselves and the world. As long as someone who knows his way around above the turf does not descend to them and explain the facts of life, they will remain in darkness.

This chapter is about the efforts of various cultures and people to get to the top and in touch with the highest powers. The chapter ends at the turn of time, point zero between "before Christ" and "after Christ."

After Jesus ascends into heaven, it looks like the door of heaven closes again. The Jesus story is the final one when it comes to divine revelation. In the A.D. era no new big myth will be circulated, no new deity will appear on the scene. There will be another world religion, Islam. But it only combines and repeats ideas and stories that already exist.

The philosophical quest for good is reaching a dead end, too. There will be technical progress and philosophical adaptation to it. But nothing new under the sun when it comes to the discussion about the existence of a divine power. The common variations of the belief in God - polytheism, pantheism, monotheism, agnosticism, atheism - have all been tried to the point of exhaustion.

The time was fulfilled, writes the apostle Paul to the Galatians around the year 50 A.D., a Christian community founded shortly before that in today's Turkey.

The expectation was there.

What was missing was its fulfillment: the divine descent from above. However, this descent is risky, even life-threatening. Even the old philosophers knew that. Plato predicted a bad fate for the wise man who wanted to open the eyes of the cave dwellers. Plato knows that people are not really open to new things. They prefer the fairy tales.

Plato prophesies: The wise man who brings light to men will be crucified by them.

It is quite obvious that people at all times had a sometimes too visionary feeling for the truth. They could not make the light brighter, but they could come a little closer.

Gilgamesh: In the end we are all dead

People have always been religious. This is shown by the earliest traces they have left behind: ruins of temples and graves. Humans are the only living creatures who know about the finiteness of life and are interested in the one who watches over it and in what comes after. They are curious about supernatural powers, gods, or perhaps only one single power from which everything emanates, possibly a single god? This last alternative will prevail among Western intellectuals until Jesus' time. But it is a long way until then.

That there is something up there is beyond doubt for humans from the very beginning. For our Stone Age ancestors it goes without saying that matter does not order and animate itself. What they still have no idea about is the improbability of their own existence. They do not know that the universe is incomprehensibly large, but also very dark and hostile to life. They also have no idea how extraordinary the earth is, this tiny planet, which is almost lovingly prepared for humans. And there is something else that early humans do not know: as unusual as the earth is in the cosmos, the human organism is extraordinary compared to the other almost ten million species in the world. Humans are by far not the largest species, but they have a veritable miracle at their disposal: brains, which, with their almost one hundred billion nerve cells and even more numerous interconnections, are the supercomputers par excellence.