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The most enigmatic person in the history of Western civilization was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he lived cannot be escaped. Western culture has even arranged time itself according to before or after the time when Jesus lived. The influence of his life has been unavoidable for over two thousand years, yet, little to nothing is known about his actual life. Exactly who was this man?

This observation is nothing new. Quite the contrary, the quest and search for the historical Jesus has been going on for several centuries and in earnest since the eighteenth century. The myriad of writings on the subject is overwhelming. One can discover with a trip to any theological library, or better yet with several clicks of a mouse, a plethora of theories, analyses, and conjectures about the historical Jesus.

Yet among all the scholarship and words, all we really know about the man, Jesus of Nazareth, beyond what is in the Bible and other religious texts, is that he lived, had a brother named James, and was crucified by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate for insurrection. We know these things primarily from two brief extrabiblical references, one the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus,1 and the other the Roman historian Tacitus.2 All else we know about Jesus comes from people who believed him to be the Messiah to the Jewish people and/or the Christ of Christianity—God in the flesh. In most cases these “believers” are quite up front about making a case for their beliefs.

Conversational Stories

The following pages are not a search for the historical Jesus or a critique of traditional Christian belief, but rather a different perspective on how we may experience both through conversational stories. Conversational stories are the stories we tell as we share experience of our lives within the give and take of conversation. These stories often lie just beneath the surface of crafted stories told about someone rather than by them. As we imaginatively unveil events and personal experiences behind and within the artistically construed stories told by and about Jesus in the Bible, a different perspective on Jesus emerges.

In the South, where I am from, storytelling is as natural as breathing. Having been born into, nurtured by, and participated in a storytelling family and culture, I find my conversations usually center on, or eventually come around to, stories. The majority of these are not made-up tales but recollections of actual life experiences.

Conversational stories are personal. Most stories are about the one telling the story, either directly or indirectly. We have a tendency to tell our own stories.

It is conversational because one story usually leads to another. This may even be the essence of what makes a “good” story, that it elicits a story within the life of the listener.

Now, imagine personal, conversational stories in the life of Jesus, as he walks along a path with his disciples, or shares a meal with them, or as they sit under a night sky wondering, remembering, and telling their own stories. Imagine these stories then becoming what we now know as the parables and teachings of and about Jesus.

By imagining some of Jesus’ parables and teachings as his own stories we open a window that allows a glimpse into what may have been actual experiences in Jesus’ life, telling us more about who he was as a person, giving us more insight into how he became the mysterious, mythical person who changed the world.

As the enigma of a mythical Messiah and Christ fades, we realize we know more than we know we know, and discover a more human Jesus hidden within his own story.

When I was studying biblical Greek in seminary our professor, Wayne Merritt, ended most classes with a phrase of encouragement as he smiled wryly and looked out at confused faces and glazed eyes. “You know more than you know you know.”

I offer these same words of encouragement to you as we look at a few familiar parables, teachings, and stories by and about Jesus. By making a slight shift in perspective and viewing these experiences and events as if they were actually life events of Jesus, a portrait of the man Jesus begins to appear. Then our own stories begin to emerge from Jesus’ story and we really do know more that we know we know.

Primal Story

Regardless of all the things we do not know about the historical Jesus, one thing is certain. Jesus was a storyteller. He told stories in response to questions, stories when teaching, stories about the past, stories about the future, and even stories about other stories. In the gospels his stories were rarely if ever abstract, but rather grounded in human experiences and told with the purpose of communicating some aspect of compassion, love, power, abandonment, greed, generosity, suffering, death, grace, patience, and forgiveness.

There is also a dynamic at work in the gospels in which Jesus and his stories are the main subject of a story told by someone else who has their own purposes and perspectives. The gospels, both canonical and noncanonical, all have their own passions and prejudices encumbered with vested interest in presenting Jesus and his stories in a way as to promote particular presuppositions.

What is now known in biblical scholarship as narrative criticism evolved out of this dynamic of identifying and exploring the elements and craft of storytelling in the Bible and other texts. However, before and behind the formal study of biblical stories are the stories themselves both individually as narrative units and collectively as meta-narrative which can also be understood as “primal story,” the story from which other stories grow.

In his book The Bible Makes Sense, Walter Brueggemann expands on previous assertions of German Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad and English New Testament scholar C. H. Dodd, that the Bible has its roots in two primal narratives—the exodus and the resurrection. Brueggemann says a primal narrative is “the most important story we know, and we have come to believe it is decisively about us.”3 He goes on to say that “von Rad has made it clear that these assertions come behind and before any reasoned theology or any apologetic concern to justify faith to outsiders.”4 In other words, the primal story is contained in every other story, past and present, and is the portal through which every other story is filtered.

Primal stories (yes, we can and do have more than one) are so powerful that they shape everything happening afterward. Primal stories also change the past by becoming a lens through which we see and reimagine everything prior to their telling. The future emanates from the primal story and the past leads up to it.

We All Have Primal Stories

The Bible is not the only place we find primal stories. We all have primal stories in our lives and communities that literally define who we are: death, birth, marriage, divorce, a love affair, achievement, failure, sickness, injury, epiphany, and abandonment. The list is endless, as are life’s experiences.

In order for people to really know who we are it is important for us to tell and hear our respective primal stories. The same is true for our knowing Jesus. The way we come to really know the person Jesus is through his stories and particularly his primal stories.

A Man Hidden in His Own Story

Of course Jesus never actually says, “This is the central story of my life from which the past and future emanate.” However, if we accept the premise that the parables and teachings of Jesus are his personal tales, we now have a collection of stories in which we can identify topics, themes, and characters. Also, the detail and care with which a story is told is usually an indicator of that story’s importance to the teller. By observing and exploring all of Jesus’ stories and teachings we begin to see common elements and can then imagine one or more of these stories as the source from which all the others come.

Emerging from the whole of Jesus’ stories and teachings are several common elements, including but not limited to healing, forgiveness, persistence, faith, kindness, fairness, generosity, and love; all grounded in compassion, but not compassion as mere empathy. Rather, the compassion described of Jesus in the gospels, splagchnizomai, which literally means “to be moved in the bowels,” the bowels believed to be the seat of love and pity. One can imagine splagchnizomai as intense, visceral emotion akin to suffering that is prompted by another’s suffering. In numerous stories of healing Jesus is reported to have splagchnizomai toward the individuals as well as crowds of people who are made whole.

Such compassion opens up vistas of hospitality, liberation, regeneration, and new life. Jesus, being fully human, can be assumed as not unlike most people in that he would have told stories which came from his own experiences, passions, prejudices, and perspectives of compassion.

A Note to the Reader

The reimagined story that follows is drawn from parables and teachings attributed to Jesus, as well as events recorded in the four gospels. The actual Scripture passages from which the story emerges appear in the appendix in approximate order of reference.

There are no chapter titles or numbers but rather pauses between stories within The Story, indicated with the Hebrew word Selah that is used throughout the Psalms and is believed to mean “pause and consider.”

I’ve written this story as an invitation for you to reconsider and reimagine both the humanity and divinity of Jesus. My invitation goes out to people who are not familiar with the Bible stories and have only heard them through other sources. It also goes out to many who have rejected traditional interpretations of the stories as religious dogma. I also extend the invitation to many people who are so steeped in the stories that they have become cliché.

Even the most clever storyteller or writer of fiction can never totally disguise or deny their personal influence on the story. And most of us have had the experience of someone beginning a story with, “I know a person who . . .” when in fact that “person” is the one telling the story. Why not imagine the same when Jesus says, “Once there was a man traveling on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho? . . .”

Selah

1. Wikipedia.com, s.v. “Josephus on Jesus.”

2. Wikipedia.com, s.v. “Tacitus on Christ.”

3. Brueggemann, The Bible Makes Sense, rev. ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 23–26.

4. Ibid, 24.