Jesus... But Not As We've Known Him

by Lynette Woods



"Since you don't know who I am, you don't know who My Father is. If you knew Me, you would also know My Father." (John 8:19)

One of the first things we learn as we begin to know Christ is that we have to unlearn many things. This includes things we have believed about who Jesus is.

In 2003 I wrote the article "Building... But Not As We've Known It" where I looked into the common belief that Jesus was a carpenter and discovered that instead He was a builder who worked with stone. A book I read recently, "The Jesus Discovery" by Dr Adam Bradford, affirmed this and reveals even more misconceptions that can result from our Western mindsets.

The author says that the accounts of Jesus' life (by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were proving to the people of the day that Jesus was truly the Son of God - they already knew who Jesus was as a man. We, on the other hand, are in the opposite position: we know Jesus as the Son of God, but have largely lost sight of Jesus as the Son of Man....

Why Did Jesus Need to Be Baptized?

Alfred Edersheim

Theories abound on the reason that Jesus submitted to baptism. After all, if He was sinless as the New Testament claims, then His baptism must have held some ulterior motive. Perhaps John and Jesus plotted or conspired together to gain attention for Jesus's ministry; perhaps Jesus came as a representative of the sinful human race; perhaps He submitted to baptism as foreshadowing His death and resurrection; or perhaps His baptism made the act of baptism work for everyone else.

Each of these theories, however, misses a few key elements. For example, we have no evidence that John or Jesus spoke prior to the time of the baptism, even though they were cousins. John lived in the wilderness and only knew what sign to look for. But most of all, John's baptism was not primarily a baptism of repentance (the turning away from sin). Instead, the submersion in water identified the person with the coming Messianic Kingdom.