A figure of Jesus stands wrapped in plastic, its familiar contours visible beneath a covering that keeps it protected and out of reach. Looking at Xavier Ferrer Chust’s photograph, I find myself thinking about how we have handled Jesus’ humanity: something to preserve in doctrine while shielding it from too much contact with ordinary life. We affirm that he was fully human, then grow uneasy when that humanity begins to resemble our own.
Somewhere along the way, many of us inherited a Jesus whose humanity came with an asterisk. He inhabited a body, but we were discouraged from imagining too much about what inhabiting that body involved. His humanity was an essential doctrine and a potentially dangerous subject.
Jesus was human, we were told. But suggest he might have been sexually aroused, loved someone who didn’t love him back, regretted something he said over too much wine, or lost his temper and owed someone an apology, and suddenly you’ve crossed a line. We could imagine God becoming flesh more comfortably than Jesus actually inhabiting his.
Those scenarios are speculative, and some conflict with traditional Christian beliefs about his sinlessness. I am not offering them as historical discoveries. What interests me is how quickly the possibility of an ordinary human experience begins to feel like an accusation.
That discomfort exposes something about the relationship between holiness and humanity. We insist Jesus was fully human, then defend his significance by distancing him from experiences we recognize in ourselves. The person held up as the revelation of divine love becomes someone whose standing appears to depend on remaining untouched by much of human life.
As a former pastor, I recognize this reflex from the inside. I once worked within a theological framework that had elaborate explanations for Jesus’ humanity, yet left surprisingly little room to wonder about the person who lived it. Before we decide which experiences would disqualify Jesus from being Jesus, it helps to ask how the stories we have about him came to be—and how much of his life remains beyond our reach.
The gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death. Common scholarly estimates place their composition between roughly 65 and 100 CE, although the dates vary by gospel and remain debated. Their authors drew on oral traditions and earlier written material, with Matthew and Luke making extensive use of Mark. We encounter Jesus through stories that had already passed through remembering, retelling, worship, and interpretation.
The familiar names attached to these texts do not settle the question of authorship. Traditional attributions remain disputed, and the relationship between the writers and eyewitness testimony is more complicated than four disciples independently recording what they personally observed. Recognizing that complexity gives us a more honest starting point for reading them.
The writers were also editors and interpreters. They chose material, arranged events, developed themes, and presented Jesus in ways that expressed their convictions about his significance. Matthew and Luke’s different treatments of material found in Mark make that interpretive work visible. The resulting accounts preserve memories while giving those memories a particular shape.
I don’t understand why this should automatically count against them. If I offered a brief account of your life to honor your memory, I would make choices, too. Your two nightmare divorces, that trip to Vegas, and the afternoon you went off on the cashier at Target might receive less attention than your generosity toward a struggling friend. My account would reveal something about you, along with something about what I believed deserved remembering.
That analogy has limits. We have no basis for assuming the gospel writers possessed a collection of embarrassing stories and deliberately suppressed them. We do not know everything they heard, what they considered reliable, or what had already disappeared from circulation. Missing information gives us grounds for humility, not permission to manufacture the biography we would prefer.
Still, the missing years deserve acknowledgment. Most of Jesus’ childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood remain outside these narratives. Whatever significance we find in the gospels, the person whose life occasioned them lived through far more than their pages contain.
It would be inaccurate to say the gospels erase Jesus’ humanity. Their Jesus experiences hunger, fatigue, grief, anger, and anguish. He weeps at a friend’s tomb, becomes exasperated with his disciples, shares meals, attends a wedding, and recoils before his approaching death. These are features of the texts themselves, rather than modern efforts to make him more relatable.
The difficulty often arises in the reading. His anger receives an explanation that protects it from any resemblance to ours. His grief becomes evidence supporting a doctrine. His terror in Gethsemane becomes a scene we hurry through because we know how the story ends.
A religious interpretation is entitled to ask what these moments mean theologically. But something is lost when interpretation moves so quickly that the experience itself scarcely registers. We know what the tears signify before allowing ourselves to encounter a man crying.
Consider the difference between reading Gethsemane as the necessary prelude to a saving death and attending to someone who does not want to die. The second reading brings us close to a familiar human reality: loving life while facing something we cannot escape. It asks us to remain with dread before resolving it into purpose.
The question becomes more difficult when Jesus serves as the standard against which our experiences are judged. If his fear is holy because it serves a divine plan, while ours reveals insufficient faith, then the resemblance disappears precisely where it might have offered companionship. We are left admiring his humanity while distrusting our own.
There are Christian traditions that have taken his vulnerability seriously and found profound solidarity there. My concern is with the religious habits that praise incarnation while treating ordinary creaturely existence as something spiritually advanced people should increasingly overcome. Within those habits, becoming holy begins to resemble becoming less available to being human.
Sexuality makes this tension especially visible. Introduce the possibility that Jesus experienced sexual attraction, and some readers hear an attempt to degrade him. Yet attraction belongs to the bodily lives of countless people who are trying to live responsibly, love faithfully, and treat others well.
Experiencing desire does not dictate how someone responds to it. Attraction leaves questions of consent, circumstance, commitment, and responsibility fully intact. Treating the experience itself as contamination prevents those questions from receiving the attention they deserve.
The same problem appears elsewhere in our emotional lives. Anger might disclose an injury or become an excuse to injure someone else. Fear might help us recognize danger or narrow our world until we scarcely inhabit it. An honest relationship with experience requires enough room to investigate what is happening before a verdict arrives.
Religious formation sometimes reverses that process. A feeling is classified as evidence of spiritual failure, and the person learns to conceal or condemn it before understanding it. Someone struggling with resentment rehearses forgiveness while remaining unable to name the conditions producing the resentment. A person ashamed of sexual desire becomes preoccupied with suppressing it, with little support for developing a responsible relationship to it.
This is where the discussion reaches beyond Jesus. The experiences we refuse to imagine in a revered figure often reveal the experiences we have difficulty permitting in ourselves. Our theology becomes a map of where we are allowed to exist.
The point isn’t that Jesus needed a hangover or a broken relationship to qualify as human. It is whether we are able to approach his humanity without treating intimacy, vulnerability, and complexity as threats to his significance. A life does not become less worthy of attention when we acknowledge the conditions under which it was lived.
In my work in existential health, I am concerned with how people inhabit their lives in relation to meaning, identity, mortality, belonging, and self-trust. Those relationships are shaped by what people have been taught about the legitimacy of their own experience. Someone who regards their inner life as an unreliable witness begins the work of living at a considerable disadvantage.
An idealized religious figure sometimes becomes an internal supervisor. Instead of helping a person engage life with greater honesty and responsibility, the figure monitors whether they are becoming acceptable. Every feeling becomes a test, and every unresolved struggle threatens to expose a deeper inadequacy.
Imagine someone who needs distance from a demanding relationship but has learned to measure love by endless availability. They are exhausted, resentful, and increasingly absent from their own life. Yet the suffering becomes further evidence that they need to love more selflessly, because the model before them appears never to require the boundaries they desperately need.
The consequences extend beyond discomfort. If a person repeatedly overrides their perception of harm in order to remain good, their ability to discern and respond weakens. They become skilled at explaining why they should endure what they no longer know how to evaluate.
Self-trust, as I understand it, includes the willingness to examine our perceptions and revise our judgments. It also requires taking our experience seriously enough to bring it into that examination. We cannot develop discernment by treating everything arising within us as suspect until an authority approves it.
A more humane relationship with Jesus would leave room for this development. His story might help someone ask what love requires in a particular situation, rather than provide a mechanism for silencing the question. Reverence would deepen responsibility instead of replacing judgment.
There is another danger here, especially for those of us who have left traditional Christianity. We might replace the untouchable religious Jesus with an equally convenient figure who endorses everything we have come to believe. A modern, psychologically fluent Jesus who shares all my conclusions would still be a projection.
The historical Jesus belonged to a first-century Jewish world whose assumptions, conflicts, and possibilities differed from mine. Taking his humanity seriously requires acknowledging that distance. He does not owe me the comfort of being a contemporary thinker in ancient clothing.
I also want to leave room for encounters with the gospel stories that unsettle my preferred reading. A Jesus who exists only to confirm my freedom would be little more useful than one who exists only to enforce my obedience. Either version would keep me from meeting something beyond my own arrangement of the world.
This is one reason I no longer need to resolve every question about him before finding meaning in his story. Historical inquiry deserves rigor, and the limits of its evidence deserve respect. My personal relationship with these texts includes a different question: what becomes visible in my own life when I read them attentively?
That question does not turn interpretation into a free-for-all. A reading that excuses domination, encourages self-erasure, or denies someone else’s humanity should face scrutiny. We remain responsible for what our interpretations do in the world, including the suffering they teach us to overlook.
I would now be careful about claiming that Jesus described himself through the fully developed formulations Christianity later adopted about his divine and human natures. The gospel portraits, the historical questions, and the subsequent doctrines require more care than a single sentence allows. They should not be collapsed into one straightforward claim.
My own use of the word divine has also changed. I no longer use it to name an exclusive status that places one person in a separate category of existence. It points, for me, toward our shared rootedness in the ground of being: the existence none of us authored and in which all of us participate.
That is a philosophical and spiritual understanding I bring to the conversation. I do not present it as a historical conclusion about what Jesus secretly meant. Its value rests partly in the relationship with life it makes possible and the responsibilities it helps me recognize.
Within that understanding, bodily existence needs no apology. Dependence on others belongs to our condition, as do limits we did not choose and losses we cannot prevent. Meaning develops within these circumstances, through the ways we respond and the forms of life we build together.
This does not make everything humans do sacred or worthy of approval. Cruelty remains cruelty, even when its causes are understandable. Our shared existence gives us stronger reasons to confront harm because no one’s life is disposable, including the lives injured by someone else’s search for fulfillment.
What falls away is the assumption that our humanity constitutes the original problem. The work becomes learning to live responsibly within it, with enough honesty to acknowledge what we feel and enough care to consider what our actions make possible for others. There is considerable moral demand in that work without adding shame about being a creature.
These questions belong to the larger inquiry that led me to write . After years of examining what we were taught to believe about God, I have become increasingly concerned with what those beliefs taught us to permit or forbid in ourselves. Leaving a doctrine behind does not automatically undo the habits of self-abandonment formed around it.
A person might stop believing in divine judgment while continuing to live under constant internal prosecution. Someone else exchanges religious perfection for the demand to become completely healed, self-aware, or psychologically optimized. The vocabulary changes while life remains something they expect to enter once they finally qualify.
Existential health asks us to examine the terms under which we are trying to live. Who are we required to become before we feel entitled to belong? What happens to our judgment when acceptance depends on overriding it, and how much of our brief existence is spent preparing to deserve the life already underway?
These questions also require attention to the world around us. Self-trust is difficult to sustain in relationships that punish honesty, and belonging demands more than an individual’s willingness to reach out. People need material support, trustworthy relationships, and communities where participation does not depend on disappearing into an approved identity.
Jesus remains meaningful to me within that inquiry. I encounter a story concerned with bodies that hurt, people whose standing has been denied, tables where belonging is contested, and the risks of confronting religious and political power. I also encounter interpretations of that story that have helped people endure injustice they should have received support to resist.
Holding both realities requires more care than either defending Christianity wholesale or dismissing everything associated with it. I want to ask what helps people participate more fully and responsibly in their lives, and what teaches them to surrender those lives to someone else’s authority. That question follows me well beyond religion.
I hold space for Jesus in my heart because his story continues to open a searching conversation about being human. I find meaning in the at…
