Jesus of Nazareth
I haven’t been spending as much time as usual thinking about business recently. Reading historical annual reports, listening to business podcasts, and searching for investment opportunities normally takes up quite a bit of my time. This is all in an effort to understand how businesses work. Companies are always changing - new ones are formed and old ones fade away. It seemed like an endless game that was intellectually stimulating, and one that you could keep getting better at with age. Something else has captured my attention lately though. The Bible seems to keep jumping to the top of my list whenever I have time to sit down and read.
When studying companies or their leaders, I always enjoyed reading the original source material. Instead of just reading in biographies about the businesses Warren Buffett or Henry Ford created, I found myself more excited by reading the annual reports of their businesses from the early days many decades ago. The Bible is the ultimate source material, and its history is on a complete other level than these annual reports I’ve been tracking down.
At the very least, it is highly likely that there is wisdom to be found within books that have survived thousands and thousands of years. If you try to read a newspaper from last year or even last month, it probably won’t be very useful to you. It might even make you laugh. Yet, somehow these books that were written in ancient times are still so practical even to this day. There is a reason these books have survived.
There is one burning question that is stoking all of this reading. Who was Jesus of Nazareth?
I’ve always found it exciting to study the great characters of history. It is incredible what people like John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Napoleon, or Winston Churchill were able to accomplish, and it is interesting to see how they lived their lives. All of these people looked up to another man though, and he achieved far more greatness than they ever could.
Throughout all of history, no one has influenced the world like Jesus. Almost 2,000 years after his death, a large percentage of planet Earth believes in his teachings. There are roughly 2.4 billion Christians in the world today who believe Jesus is the Son of God, while there are about 1.9 billion Muslims who believe Jesus was the Messiah and one of the greatest prophets. 4 billion is a ridiculous amount of people. Very few people are remembered 100 years after they’ve passed away, and it is pretty difficult to have much of an influence over even a single person. Just watch me try to get my kids to take a bath - then watch me try to convince them to get out of the bath a short time later. 2,000 years and 4.3 billion people is just an outrageous statline. No one else in history has come remotely close to those kind of numbers.
What could be more intellectually stimulating than investigating what kind of man could influence so many people for so many years?
In the past, I was guilty of taking the facts about Jesus for granted. I had no sense of wonder around that incredible statline I referenced earlier. Looking back, I think it’s because I separated religion from the “real world”. There was church, and then there was day-to-day life. They were two different buckets.
I went to a Catholic school growing up, which was a great experience. We had religion class every day. Jesus was talked about in religion class, but not within a class like world history. Looking back, this seems absurd. I don’t blame the Catholic school for the world history curriculum, they were probably following a program that would allow us to get diplomas and move on to college. Why wouldn’t a historian be interested in the life of Jesus given his unprecedented influence on the world even to this day? I understand that there would be debate among historians on the facts of his life. All the more reason to study this man seriously. The overwhelming majority of scholars believe Jesus was a real, historical person. Bart Ehrman, a New Testament scholar who happens to be an atheist, put it like this:
“He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees, based on certain and clear evidence.”
Luckily for us, there are many sources on the life of Jesus written near the time he was alive. We have letters written by Paul the Apostle starting around 15 years after the death of Jesus. Scholars believe that the Gospel of Mark was written 30 to 40 years after Jesus’ death, and the other gospels followed just a few decades later. These Christian biblical sources are so interesting because they were written by people who actually had firsthand knowledge of Jesus, his family, his friends or his followers. They were written during the lifetime of eyewitnesses. For comparison, the first Buddhist texts were written many centuries after the life of the Buddha. The Quran, which talks about Jesus quite a bit, was written by the Islamic prophet Muhammad around 600 years after the death of Jesus.
The lessons of Jesus are timeless - they still apply to this day more than ever. No man has ever influenced the world as much as Jesus. Much of western society was built on principles from Christianity. Who was this man? Why did his message resonate so clearly? What can we learn from him? People have looked up upon the life of Jesus for 2,000 years, and I expect this to continue to be the case in the future.
I started a new substack page to write about anything I find interesting or inspiring during my study of the Bible. I’d been considering it in the back of my mind for some time. Writing helps me learn the material better, which is why I started writing about business and investing in the first place. I keep coming across valuable lessons and inspirational material in the Bible, and I don’t want to forget these lessons. The Bible is so deep and vast that I need some sort of system to retain what I’m reading. I’m sure that much of what I write will be from others I’ve learned from along the way. My goal isn’t to be original. I just feel like the Bible is an endless world of knowledge and I want to try to start grasping at it one piece at a time. I am nowhere close to being qualified to write about religious topics, but that is a common theme in the Bible. Jesus’ message first goes through shepherds, fishermen, and tax collectors as opposed to the religious elite of that time.
I’ve started to appreciate the incredible wisdom in the Bible. I am just getting started and just scratching the surface. The church I go to just finished a year long journey through the book of Genesis, and this really helped open my eyes. I had been dismissive of the Old Testament in the past, and didn’t really understand how it fit with the Gospels. Now I finally am starting to appreciate the wisdom, beauty, and depth of the book of Genesis. It’s almost like that unlocked the rest of the Bible to me in a way. There is plenty I am confused about, and I know that I’ll never have all the answers. But what an exciting journey ahead diving deeper into the Bible.