Editorial Note
Links to other media and further information regarding this topic can be found in the German version of this article.
1. A Special Name
At first glance, Jesus Christ might seem like an ordinary name, consisting of a first name and a last name, just like most names. The given name “Jesus” (Hebrew Yehoshua) means “God helps” (Yeho = YHWH + y(a)sh(a) = to help, to save), and the Latinized surname is based on the Greek translation of the Hebrew word for Messiah and refers to an “Anointed One.” Although hardly anyone with the surname Miller today is actually a miller, it is clear that the name was originally associated with people who worked as millers. While “Anointed” as a surname does not refer to a specific profession, in ancient Israel there were certain offices that were distinguished by an anointing: first the kings, but also the high priests, and in some cases the prophets (cf. art. Prophecy). The anointing performed on God’s behalf was associated with the conferral of a special closeness to God and holiness (cf. art. Holy, The). The people of Israel also awaited the Messiah, endowed by God with special power, who would deliver them from their precarious situation dominated by the gentiles, and this expectation – often marked by eschatological themes – could take on very different forms. The name “Christ” given to Jesus has its origin in this multifaceted context, though it is not immediately clear what exactly it is meant to signify.
To his contemporaries, Jesus was Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary. Although it is likely that his message of the imminent kingdom of God caused quite a stir, it is unclear both who his contemporaries revered and rejected him as, and who he considered himself to be. According to the account of Peter’s famous confession in the Gospel of Matthew, people believed Jesus to be John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the other prophets. When the evangelist contrasts these assumptions with Peter’s confession that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt 16:16), Jesus does not regard this as a particularly clairvoyant insight on Peter’s part, but rather attests to a revelation of God that fundamentally transcends Peter’s capabilities and emphatically commands all the disciples not to reveal this confession about Christ (Matt 16:20 parr.), likely because the depth of what this confession meant had not yet been fulfilled. According to the testimony of the New Testament, there is evidently something very special about this title of Jesus. It describes this one Jesus who stands at the center of the Christian tradition, and at the same time it stands for a confession that neither results from the circumstances of the time nor is it to be understood at all as an insight of our natural reason. We will return to this at the end.
2. The Real Jesus
The Enlightenment leveled the charge against theology that it prescribed an abstract, dogmatically exalted Christ in heaven, superimposed this image onto the biblical narratives – such as those in the Gospels – and thereby obstructed direct access to the humanity of Jesus. To perceive the real Jesus, the New Testament should be read without the Trinitarian and christological dogmas that were established only in the course of church history. This critical objection initially drew on the biblical testimony and was directed against the church’s authoritative, detached claims to doctrine and power. But this objection soon became even more radicalized, as the interpretation of biblical texts came to be subject to certain demands and expectations. Insights derived from the Bible can claim general acceptance only if they satisfy the conditions of understanding set by enlightened reason and the rationality guided by it. The second phase of the Enlightenment explicitly no longer contented itself with reading the New Testament for what it is – namely, the testimony of faith and proclamation by the early Christian confessors of Christ, issued from the perspective of Christ’s resurrection and living presence – but insists that the real Jesus can only be encountered when one looks beyond the documents of faith to inquire about the historical Jesus behind them. Only when Jesus can be consistently understood from what can be made entirely plausible with the aid of analogies can he be convincingly removed from the skepticism directed against him.
2.1 The Historical Jesus
Hermann Samuel Reimarus 
(1694–1768) distinguished between the apostles’ idiosyncratically distorted image of Jesus and Jesus’s own teaching, and he imposed a fundamental skepticism on the reading of the New Testament, making it necessary no longer to derive the criterion for the correct understanding of the biblical testimony from the text itself, but rather to apply it from the outside. For Reimarus, this was the concept of a rational, practical religion, as Jesus had originally advocated.1Cf. Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes (Bd. I und II), ed. by Gerhard Alexander, Frankfurt a. M. 1972. With the help of this criterion, the whitewashing and deliberate stylizations with which the disciples sought to secure the veneration of their master could be exposed, allowing one to focus on the historical Jesus and thus ultimately to orient religious practice toward the real Jesus.
On the one hand, others soon adopted a similarly critical perspective on the biblical sources; however, this did not lead to the consolidation of a specific image of the historical Jesus because the concepts used to reconstruct this image were as diverse as the scholars who reconstructed it. Once the biblical testimony is no longer regarded as a reliable reference for adequate information about Jesus, it inevitably becomes an extrabiblical standpoint from which the biblical text is viewed and which then shapes perceptions accordingly. The expectations placed on a Jesus who is as impressive as possible are then shaped at the discretion of the reconstructors, who extrapolate them for their respective religious perspectives from the presumed challenges of their contemporary experiences. And so, ever since Reimarus , very different personalities have been and continue to be presented to congregations as the real Jesus – personalities that primarily reflect the faces of their respective reconstructors. Dieter Schellong says the following about this: “The ‘historical Jesus’ strikes me as a chameleon: against whichever color he is placed, he takes it on.”2Schellong, Dieter, ”Was sucht ihr den Lebendigen bei den Toten?” Rückfragen zur Suche nach dem “historischen Jesus”, in: Marquardt, Friedrich-Wilhelm et al. (Eds.), Die Bibel gehört nicht uns (Einwürfe 6), München 1990, 2–47, 29, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “Der ‘historische Jesus’ kommt mir vor wie ein Chamäleon: Auf welche Farbe man ihn setzt, die nimmt er an.”
Although the problems that are likely inevitable with these reconstructions soon became apparent,3At the latest with the book from Albert Schweitzer, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung [1906], Nachdruck d. 2. Aufl. 1913, Tübingen 41926. to this day the assurance of the reality of Jesus’s humanity is repeatedly made contingent upon reliable historical verification, as if historicity – in the sense of a tangible factuality – were the decisive guarantee of a reliable access to reality. In 1953, in response to the emerging skepticism, Ernst Käsemann raised the “new quest of the historical Jesus,”4Käsemann, Ernst, Das Problem des historischen Jesus [1953], in: idem, Exegetische Versuche und Besinnungen (Bd. I und II), Göttingen 1964, I, 187–214, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “neue Frage nach dem historischen Jesus.” Käsemann suspects “somewhat secure ground” (German original: “[e]inigermaßen sicheren Boden”) where the Jesus tradition “can neither be derived from Judaism nor attributed to early Christianity” (German Original: “weder aus dem Judentum abgeleitet noch der Urchristenheit zugeschrieben werden kann”) (Käsemann, Problem, 205, translations by Jacob N. Cerone). and it was the Jewish scholar Géza Vermes who then initiated the “third quest,” which is still being discussed today.5Cf. Vermes, Géza, Jesus the Jew. A Historian’s Readings of the Gospels, London 1973. Vermes now understands Jesus entirely in terms of his Jewishness and describes him as a Galilean Hasid (cf. Vermes, Jesus, 60.64.106). These different perspectives each produce their own interpretations of a tradition about Jesus that must be evaluated historically, but they cannot go beyond speculative assumptions,6On this, see Schweitzer, Geschichte; Theißen, Gerd/Merz, Annette, Der historische Jesus. Ein Lehrbuch, Göttingen 21997; Zager, Werner (Ed.), Jesusforschung in vier Jahrhunderten, Berlin/Boston 2014. which is not surprising given that the state of the sources, which stands in the way of this, has not changed. The results of historical research generally lead only to probabilities, even if these may be very high, though in this case, that is hardly to be expected.7See, among other works, the incisive essay by Ernst Troeltsch, Historische und dogmatische Methode in der Theologie [1898], in: idem, Gesammelte Schriften II, Tübingen 1913, 729–753 (https://archive.org/details/gesammelteschrif02troe), accessed on 28.08.2026.
Nevertheless, positivist historical optimism remained undeterred by this. As early as 1835 – around three generations after Reimarus – the young theologian and philosopher David Friedrich Strauß (1808–1874) published his highly controversial book Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus), which opposed both “the outdated supernatural” and, in particular, the “natural approach to the history of Jesus.”8Strauß, David Friedrich, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch betrachtet (Bd. I und II), Tübingen 1835/36, III, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “der veralteten supranaturalen”; “natürlichen Betrachtungsweise der Geschichte Jesu.” Although fundamental insights were presented here that fundamentally call into question the fruitfulness of the quest for the historical Jesus, the theological community has largely preferred to ostracize its author rather than discuss his discoveries. Strauß saw the key to understanding the New Testament portrayals of Jesus in the recognition of their irreducible “mythical” character. The texts are not concerned with an authentic biography of Jesus, but rather present, in the form of poetic legends, “historical frameworks for early Christian ideas.”9Strauß, Leben Jesu I, 75, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “geschichtsartige Einkleidungen urchristlicher Ideen.” The texts surround the no longer identifiable details of this man from Nazareth’s life with a wealth of “pious reflections and fantasies […],” primarily inspired by traditions from the Old Testament “in which all the ideas that early Christianity held about its departed master were transformed into facts and woven into his life story.”10Strauß, Leben Jesu I, 72, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “frommer Reflexionen und Phantasien […] indem alle Ideen, welche die erste Christenheit über ihren entrissenen Meister hatte, in Thatsachen verwandelt, seinem Lebenslauf eingewoben wurden.” Incidentally, with regard to the high expectations placed on the historical Jesus, it must be noted that he could in no case have been more than a “very distinguished personality, yet one subject to the limitations of all that is finite.”11Strauß, Leben Jesu II, 721, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “sehr ausgezeichnete, aber darum doch der Beschränktheit alles Endlichen unterworfene Persönlichkeit.” In the words of Dieter Schellong , this means in plain language that, with regard to the historical figure, it could never be about anything more than a cult of personality, which from a theological perspective could only be regarded as idolatry.12On this, see Schellong, Rückfragen, 14.
Even if we may today have our difficulties with Strauß’s interpretation of the eternal truth of Jesus, which draws on Hegel ,13On this, see Strauß, Leben Jesu II, 729ff. the fundamental question he raises – namely, what insights historical facts can actually provide us about our reality – remains open for us as well. As I said, at best, probabilities can be established on their basis. Certainties cannot be derived from them. In this respect, the apparently unstoppable abundance of hypotheses about the historical Jesus cannot, in principle, have any theologically formative significance, which by no means implies that the investigation of the historical circumstances at the time of Jesus and the origins of the New Testament writings is irrelevant.14Cf. Wengst, Klaus, Der wirkliche Jesus? Eine Streitschrift über die historisch wenig ergiebige und theologisch sinnlose Suche nach dem “historischen” Jesus, Stuttgart 2013.
2.2 The Earthly Jesus
Like the insights of Strauß , the fundamental theological objections raised by Martin Kähler also remained largely insignificant in terms of their historical impact, even though his 1892 lecture “Der sogenannte historische Jesus und der geschichtliche, biblische Christus” (The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic-Biblical Christ) and its expanded version appear to be quite well known. “The historical Jesus of modern writers obscures the living Christ from us.”15Kähler, Martin, Der sogenannte historische Jesus und der geschichtliche, biblische Christus, ed. by Ernst Wolf (ThB 2), München 41969, 16, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “Der historische Jesus der modernen Schriftsteller verdeckt uns den lebendigen Christus.” The living Christ is the subject of the New Testament texts, in which the apostles profess their faith in the risen Christ as the Christ who acts in history. Martin Kähler distinguishes the historical Jesus from the historical Christ attested to in the Bible and guiding the history of the church, who, as the preached Christ, is also the real Christ.16Cf. Kähler, Jesus, 42–44. “We have no sources regarding the life of Jesus that a historian could consider reliable and sufficient.”17Kähler, Jesus, 21, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “Wir besitzen keine Quellen für ein Leben Jesu, welche ein Geschichtsforscher als zuverlässige und ausreichende gelten lassen kann.” “There are no accounts here from impartial observers who happened to take notice, but rather, throughout, testimonies and confessions from believers in Christ.”18Kähler, Jesus, 75, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “Es gibt hier keine Mitteilung aufmerksam gewordener unbefangener Beobachter, sondern durchweg Zeugnisse und Bekenntnisse von Christusgläubigen.” Furthermore, it must be fundamentally borne in mind that “historical facts, which scholarship must first establish, […] cannot as such be experiences of faith”19Kähler, Jesus, 51, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “geschichtliche Tatsachen, welche die Wissenschaft erst klar zu stellen hat, […] als solche keine Glaubenserlebnisse.” in the sense of assurance of faith.
Faith derives its certainty not from the acknowledgment of a historical fact, but from the perception of God’s presence. It defines the apostles’ confession of the Messiah, through which Jesus was recognized in the context of the Old Testament and the history of the promise to Israel so that, by invoking his resurrection, they brought to light God’s active presence, which remains effective even today. Yet this particular description in no way detracts from the concrete humanity of Jesus, in whom this act of God is manifested. As clear and vivid evidence of this concrete yet incomparable humanity, the Gospels each recount, in their own way, specific stories about the earthly Jesus that, in terms of literary genre, can best be compared to legends.20Cf. Schellong, Rückfragen, 17–20. The reality of the humanity they portray is not its historicity – which, given the differences between the Gospels, could offer us only a hypothesis that remains fundamentally contested – but rather it corresponds to the Easter faith’s re-enactment of Jesus’s earthly ministry as his true story, which must be heard anew today.21Here I take up the conceptual framework outlined by Wengst regarding the understanding of the reality of Jesus’s resurrection: Wengst, Klaus, Ostern. Ein wirkliches Gleichnis, eine wahre Geschichte, München 1991. The presence of God in this story in no way diminishes the humanity of the earthly Jesus. Rather, it underscores the radical nature of the motif of the incarnation, through which God enters into the history of real human beings – a history that is as elusive as it is incomprehensible. This is the measure of reality within which the New Testament narratives of Jesus of Nazareth can be adequately understood. From the outset, it is decidedly a theological measure that cannot disregard the particularity of the event to be witnessed and therefore does not subordinate itself to the historicist, profane demands of self-referential reason.
3. Jesus Christ in the New Testament
All New Testament texts presuppose the resurrection of Jesus and argue within the framework of the confession of the living presence of the Risen One as the reality of God’s action unfolding in him. In the life and fate of Jesus, God’s faithfulness is confirmed in that he fulfills his promises – albeit in a surprising way – and casts the perspective of the history of the election into a living light. This fact is concentrated in the name “Jesus Christ,” which signifies both that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ of God and that the Christ of God is this specific human being and not, for example, a half-divine and half-human or a divinely gifted superhuman.22Cf. Schweizer, Eduard, Art. Jesus Christus I, in: TRE 16 (1987), 671–726, 671. All speculations about Jesus’s self-understanding remain vague. What remains decisive is who he becomes for faith, and this is precisely what the New Testament is concerned with in its nuanced consensus regarding the confession about Jesus Christ.23For further reading, see (each with their own emphases), Schweizer, Jesus Christus I, 678–726; Roloff, Jürgen, Jesus, München 32004; Schröter, Jens, Jesus von Nazaret, Leipzig 62017.
It is not the Gospel narratives that come first, but rather characteristic phrases and creedal statements – some of which are formulated as hymns – that announce the coming Lord, the Crucified One, and the Risen One, who, as such, is the Preexistent One. Pauline theology places Jesus Christ entirely in the present and in the church in his footsteps, which is justified in him through his death, whereby even Israel, which does not confess Christ, remains unconditionally included in the salvific-historical perspective that bears the faith.24Cf. Weinrich, Michael, Die eigentliche ökumenische Frage, in: idem, Ökumenische Existenz heute (FRTh 17), Göttingen 2025, 197–243, esp. 209–216. The Gospels recall and bring to mind the life of Jesus within the horizon of God’s action, in which all of history to date is fulfilled and directed toward its completion. Throughout, the focus remains on the discipleship and mission of the disciples (the church), who, due to their insurmountable inadequacy, remain dependent on the presence of their risen Lord. As in no other Gospel, John consistently and explicitly maintains a formative connection between the earthly Jesus and his divine origin, his representative union with God, and his return to the Father. As diverse as the respective circumstances and thus the perspectives of the various New Testament authors on Jesus Christ may be, they are at the same time united in their attempt to give evident expression to the saving, gracious presence of God in the man Jesus and his destiny. Since God becomes reality in Jesus Christ, Eduard Schweizer denotes him “in uniqueness the parable of God,”25Schweizer, Jesus Christus I, 724, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “in Einzigkeit das Gleichnis Gottes.” in which the coming of God (cf. art. Kingdom of God) seeks to become reality for his listeners.
4. Jesus Christ and the Word of God
The confession embodied in the name “Jesus Christ” does not refer to an identifiable fact or a definable state. Whenever God is concerned, all forms of objectification – not to mention appropriation – are impossible. In Christianity, there is a form of piety centered on Jesus in which Jesus is clung to with embraces and made attractive through useful promises for one’s own benefit. Jesus becomes a kind of self-help resource for the individual needs of religious self-realization. The intimacy sought with him follows the script of self-stabilizing forms of piety that are recommended for the decisive utilization of the offer he has prepared. It thus stands in opposition to the fundamental condition of Christian theology that must be upheld: that God is not the gratifying result of our search for him, but rather reveals himself in the act of his self-manifestation through his Spirit, which awakens faith. And so, in essence, it cannot be about our access to Jesus and the performances to be enacted with him, but rather about his access to us and the fundamental transformation of our perception of reality that takes place therein in the light of his resurrection. The name Jesus Christ reveals itself in this event and simultaneously stands for this confession.
The infinite abundance of pictorial and cinematic illustrations created by Jesus cannot obscure the fact that he eludes our images, including the theological images we have formed and continue to form of him. The manifestation of God taking place in him cannot be demonstrated because God cannot simply be encountered somewhere or even established as existing as the result of a proof. God makes himself known by being heard. He is heard because he speaks in his unique action. That is why we pay special attention to the Word of God, precisely because it does what it says and is heard as something happens. When the Gospel of John testifies to Jesus Christ as the incarnation of the Word of God, it makes explicit what, albeit in varying understandings, is implicitly fundamental to all the testimonies of the New Testament, namely that in Jesus Christ, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Israel) causes his Word to be heard and to come to pass among the people chosen from eternity. That is why Jesus Christ stands at the center of the Christian faith, which can only be properly understood in light of its genuine kinship with the faith of Israel (Judaism).
This focus on the essentials was in view at a time when the church, under pressure from National Socialist ideology, was in danger of losing its grounding in its foundational principles. The first thesis of the Barmen Theological Declaration of 1934 states: “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in holy scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.”26EKD, The Barmen Declaration (https://www.ekd.de/en/the-barmen-declaration-303.htm), accessed on 01.09.2026. If Jesus Christ stands here for the full scope of the Christian faith, the issue is neither solely about Jesus as a model for the practice of our piety nor about a problematic deification of a Jew from antiquity, but rather about the full weight of what is to be associated with the concept of the Word of God as God’s active self-revelation. In this context, the incarnation of the Word of God (the earthly Jesus) must be kept just as concretely in mind as, conversely, Jesus of Nazareth must consistently be understood as the Word of God.
We began with the name. When it comes to Jesus Christ, the holiness (cf. art. Holy, The) of God’s name also comes into focus. To uphold the prohibition against images and not to profane God’s holiness, Jews do not pronounce the name of God; yet, to speak of God, they refer to him, for example, with the placeholder “the Name” (HaShem), in the hope that God will continually fill it anew with his vitality. Although Christians pronounce the name “Jesus Christ,” they are nevertheless urged to preserve, for their part, the immeasurable abundance of the holiness of God’s name, so as not to set too narrow limits on God’s vitality through theological overconfidence and their own definitions. Certainly, theology will have to continually come to terms with an appropriate understanding of Jesus Christ. However, it is consistently not its task to help a person from the past and his teaching come to life, but rather to continually direct attention anew to his self-manifestation and the illumination of reality associated with it.27For Karl Barth , this idea of “openness” is the central indication of the methodology imposed on theology: „Essentially dogmatic method consists in this openness to receive new truth, and only in this.“ (Barth, Karl, CD I/2, Edinburgh 1956, 865). See also Weinrich, Michael, Karl Barth, Göttingen 22024, 170–188.
Objectively speaking, it should come as no surprise that fundamental theological problems are raised in the explanation of the name Jesus Christ. Within this framework, we cannot go beyond a prolegomenon to these various questions.