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APPENDIX B: HISTORICAL FACTS<br />
ABOUT JESUS<br />
Here’s a few background facts about Jesus. For those of you who<br />
find a ‘factual’ approach a bit dry, think of it like a journey up a<br />
mountain – starting with a climb up as we look at Jesus’ life, before<br />
descending into a dark valley with Jesus’ sufferings and death, then<br />
coming up again with the empty tomb, reaching a glorious and wide<br />
summit with the post-resurrection appearances. (The journey then<br />
continues the other side with the growth of the Church, in anticipation<br />
of looking up to an even greater summit when Jesus comes again!)<br />
FACT 1: JESUS WAS A REAL AND<br />
EXTRAORDINARY HUMAN BEING<br />
It’s important that we begin here. In a recent UK survey (2022), the<br />
number of adults who believed that Jesus was a real human being fell<br />
from 61 per cent in 2015 to only 54 per cent in 2022, with 28 per cent<br />
considering him to have been a mythical or fictional character. 1 This<br />
popular trend is at odds with historians, among whom there is almost<br />
near universal scholarly agreement that Jesus Christ was a real<br />
person who lived and walked in a real place (modern-day Israel), at a<br />
real time in history. Moreover, there is similar agreement that there<br />
was something quite extraordinary about Jesus.<br />
Throughout history, Christians and non-Christians alike have<br />
celebrated the uniqueness of Jesus:<br />
Napoleon: ‘Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and myself founded<br />
empires; but upon what did we rest the creation of our genius?<br />
Upon force. Jesus Christ alone founded his empire upon love; and
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