Becoming Christ: The Birth of Jesus the Anointed

Listen or Read. Your Choice.

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We’re starting the New Year with a new subject – Jesus the Anointed. I hope everyone noticed that the website’s full name is “Becoming Adam, Becoming Christ.” The first half of that equation describes how God used evolution to create humanity, but when we chose evil rather than good, we were alienated from him. “Becoming Christ” is the Lord’s answer to our predicament. Jesus offers a second chance to everyone, a “new birth” into the life of the Spirit. We can choose to remain spiritually dead, or we can choose to follow Jesus and become like him.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Intellectual certainty doesn’t come first. The “abiding” – or “living out” – of Christ’s word as a disciple comes first, and from that lived experience comes confidence in Jesus and the truth of his teaching. Follow, and you will know. The proof is in the pudding, not in reading the recipe.

With that, I hope you enjoy this audio sneak preview of my forthcoming e-book, The Anointed. The introduction follows, but the story itself is podcast only for now.

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Living in a predominantly Christian culture, all of us – even those of us who don’t identify as Christian – think we know who Jesus is. We grew up decorating Christmas trees, singing carols, and watching Charlie Brown specials. Many of us attended church as children; others were dragged there as adults by well-meaning friends or relatives. People knock on our doors to “witness” to us, promise us on TV that Jesus will solve our financial problems, and accost us on the street with invitations to “accept” Jesus into our hearts. Our politicians vie for Jesus’ endorsement, our athletes credit him with their victories, and, of course, we suffer the daily parade of social media posts purporting to inform us of Christ’s opinion on every political issue of the day. We are so saturated with God-talk and Jesus-speak that it obscures our vision like a fog.

Consider this my small contribution toward dissipating that fog. Christianity can’t be understood apart from Jesus, but few of us seem inclined to dust off the Bible, if we own one, and discover him for ourselves. In any case, why should we? We already know the story. We’ve absorbed it by osmosis.

We are so saturated with God-talk and Jesus-speak that it obscures our vision like a fog.

Such vague, second-hand knowledge of Jesus is not confined to the atheist, the agnostic, the skeptic, or the seeker; it extends across vast swaths of those who say they are his followers. Exacerbating the problem is that when people do attempt to read the gospels, they encounter numerous barriers. Should they make it past the uninviting “Bible format,” they still must grapple with a foreign culture 2,000 years removed.

My intent, then, is twofold: to present the story of Jesus in a new context, and to remove barriers that prevent people from understanding that story. To that end, I’ve paraphrased the four gospel accounts into one narrative that sounds and feels like a modern biography, making it more accessible to present-day readers.

To see Jesus afresh, we must enter his story and view him through the eyes of those who first encountered him; we must attempt to see as they saw and hear as they heard. We gain such access through the door of “historical context” – the political, economic, social, and cultural factors that influenced the writing of the gospels.

When we read historical documents such as the Bible through the lens of our own time, the picture becomes distorted, no matter how many times we’ve watched The Prince of Egypt and Ben-Hur. For example, nowadays we hear “Christ” and automatically associate it with our contemporary notions of Jesus, which may or may not be accurate. For that reason, I have exchanged the familiar “Christ” for the unfamiliar “Anointed,” which is the English equivalent. The change forces us to pause and think: “Christ” was not originally a proper name, but a title with a meaning rooted in the Hebrew scriptures, a title that kindled a host of expectations in its original Jewish audience. Israel was firmly in the grip of messianic fever in the first century. The range of popular beliefs about the Messiah ran the gamut, but they primarily centered on earthly and political hopes for a king from the line of David who would defeat Israel’s enemies and rule the world. Jesus spent his entire ministry challenging the expectations, traditions, and prejudices of his first audience. If we read his story without questioning our own preconceived notions, we will misunderstand his meaning as badly as his contemporaries who could not question theirs.

Jesus spent his entire ministry challenging the expectations, traditions, and prejudices of his first audience.

All of us have experienced bumping into people we know at a store, a ballgame, or a concert, yet we don’t immediately recognize them and cannot even recall their names, even though we know that we know who it is. The reason, almost always, is because we have encountered them in an unfamiliar context. Simply transposing what is familiar into a different setting disrupts our established thought patterns and causes us to reconsider what we thought we already knew.

My hope is that readers of this book will consider Jesus from a fresh perspective, perhaps discovering in him a revelation of God that slices through the fog of our present culture like a knife, revealing one who is worthy to be loved with all the heart, with all the mind, with all the soul, and with all the strength.

Tagged as: Life of Christ, Historical Jesus.