The name Jesus has two referents. On the one hand, Jesus refers to a human figure of the past: Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean Jew of the first century. On the other hand, in Christian theology, devotion, and worship, the name Jesus also refers to a divine figure of the present: the risen living Christ who is one with God.

Dr. Marcus Borg is the most popular liberal voice on Jesus, and best-selling author of Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time.

These two referents have been variously named in the history of Jesus scholarship. The first is commonly spoken of as "Jesus of Nazareth" or "the Jesus of history" or "the historical Jesus." The second is "the Christ of faith" or "the biblical Jesus" or "the canonical Jesus." My own preferred terminology is "the pre-Easter Jesus" and "post-Easter Jesus."

By the pre-Easter Jesus, I mean of course Jesus during his historical lifetime: a Galilean Jewish peasant of the first century, a flesh-and-blood figure of the past. This Jesus is dead and gone -- a claim that does not deny Easter but simply recognizes that the "protoplasmic" Jesus isn't around anymore.

By the post-Easter Jesus, I mean what Jesus became after his death. More fully, I mean the Jesus of Christian tradition and experience. Both nouns, tradition and experience are equally important. The former includes the Jesus of the developing Christian tradition in its pre-canonical, canonical, and ultimately creedal stages. The latter is the Jesus whom his followers (in the first century and in the centuries since) continued to experience after his death as a living, spiritual, and ultimately divine reality. As the Jesus of Christian experience, the post-Easter Jesus is an experiential reality, not simply an article of belief.

Both the pre-Easter and post-Easter Jesus are the subject of this book. How they are related to each other will be treated in later chapters. For now, I want to emphasize the importance of making the distinction between the two. When we don't, we risk losing both.

Such was my experience. I didn't know the distinction when I was growing up in the church, and so I combined everything I heard about Jesus into a single image: stories from the gospels, texts from the rest of the New Testament, doctrinal statements from the creeds, affirmations from Christian hymns and preaching. My uncritical synthesis generated what might be called "the composite Jesus."

I thus thought of Jesus as a figure of history as more divine than human. That's because I took it for granted that he was all of the things that the New Testament and the creeds say about him: Son of God, Word of God, Wisdom of God, messiah; very God of very God, begotten before all worlds, of one substance with God, the second person of the Trinity. And I took it for granted that he knew all of these things about himself.

Moreover, I thought of him as having the mind and power of God. It was because he had a divine mind that he knew things and could speak with authority. Because he had divine power, he could do spectacular deeds such as multiplying loaves and walking on water.

But note what had happened: I lost the historical Jesus as a credible human being. A person who knows himself to be the divinely begotten Son of God (and even the second person of the Trinity) and who has divine knowledge and power is not a real human being. Because he is more than human, he is not fully human. As the South African scholar Albert Nolan has remarked, we consistently underrate Jesus as a figure of history. When we emphasize his divinity at the expense of his humanity, we lose track of the utterly remarkable human being he was.

Less obvious but equally important, I also lost the living risen Christ as a figure of the present. Because I had uncritically identified the divine Jesus with the human Jesus, Jesus as a divine figure became a figure of the past. He was here for a while, but not anymore. For thirty years, more or less, Jesus a divine being walked the earth. Then, after he had been raised from the dead, he ascended into heaven, where he is now at the right hand of God. He will come again someday -- but in the meantime, he is not here. Jesus had become for me a divine figure of the past, not a figure of the present.

Thus failing to distinguish between the pre-Easter and post-Easter Jesus risks losing both. When we do make the distinction, we get both.

My lenses for seeing Jesus

How we see Jesus is to a large extent the product of the lenses through which we see him. So I turn to describing the lenses -- the intellectual factors -- that most affect how I see Jesus and Christian origins. Four are most important.

Related Links Redefining Jesus for the 21st Century Hear Marcus Borg in The Forum discussing how understanding Jesus as a "man" can lead you to a more authentic Christian life. Meeting God Again In an interview with GraceOnline, Marcus Borg examines the idea of "God," focusing for example on how images of God have become cultural role models, and how God can be understood as a transcendent force. Jesus Under the Bodhi Tree Marcus Borg discusses the parallels and similarities of Jesus and Buddha, and Christianity and Buddhism. What can the two traditions learn from each other?

The first lens is the foundational claim of the modern study of Jesus, and this has already been described. Namely, the gospels are the product of a developing tradition, and they contact both history remembered and history metaphorized.

The second lens is the study of ancient Judaism. Like most scholars, I emphasize Jesus' rootedness in his own tradition. Jesus must be understood as a Jewish figure teaching and acting within Judaism, or we will misunderstand what he was about.

The third lens is the interdisciplinary study of Jesus and Christian origins, especially the social world of Jesus. A recent development with great illuminating power, it is one of the central features of the current renaissance in Jesus research. John Dominic Crossan most fully embodies this approach, and I have learned much from him.

My fourth lens in the cross-cultural study of religion. To the interdisciplinary approach of Crossan and others, I add studies of religious experience (its varieties and effects) and types of religious figures known cross-culturally. I emphasize especially ecstatic religious experience and the nonordinary states of consciousness associated with it. Indeed, to the extent that my own sketch of Jesus is distinctive within the discipline, it is because of the weight that I give to ecstatic religious experience and its effects.

From The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions,, HarperSan Francisco, 1998.