Jesus Christ,

Jesus Christ,

or,

Who Caused the Millenium Bluff

(as well as the Millenium Bug)

Jesus Christ (between 8 and 4 BC-c. AD 29), the central figure of Christianity, born in Bethlehem in Judaea. The chronology of the Christian era is reckoned from a 6th-century dating of the year of his birth, which is now recognized as being from four to eight years in error. Jesus is believed by the great majority of Christians to be the incarnate Son of God, and to have been divinely conceived by Mary, the wife of Joseph, a carpenter of Nazareth. The name Jesus is derived from a Greek rendering of the Hebrew name Joshua, or in full Yehoshuah (“Jehovah is deliverance”). The title Christ is derived from the Greek christos, a translation of the Hebrew mashiakh (“anointed one”), or Messiah. “Christ” was used by Jesus' early followers, who regarded him as the promised deliverer of Israel and later was made part of Jesus' proper name by the Church, which regards him as the redeemer of all humanity.

The principal sources of information concerning Jesus' life are the Gospels, written in the latter half of the 1st century to facilitate the spread of Christianity throughout the ancient Western world. The Epistles of St Paul and the Book of Acts also contain information about Jesus. The scantiness of additional source material and the theological nature of biblical records caused some 19th-century biblical scholars to doubt his historical existence. Others, differently interpreting the available sources, produced naturalistic biographies of Jesus. Today, however, scholars generally agree that his existence is authenticated, both by Christian writers and by a number of Roman and Jewish historians.