Welcome back everyone to our fifth session of Alexio Bible study on Jesus, where we study the biblical and historical evidence for Christ.

Up to this point, we've been looking primarily at the Gospels, the origin of the Gospels, the genre of the Gospels, the date of the Gospels, the historicity of the Gospels.

And now that we've got established that there are good reasons to believe

that the gospels are ancient biographies of Jesus,

written by eyewitnesses or companions of the apostles,

that intend to give us an historical account of what Jesus actually did and said,

and that they were written within the lifetime,

the living memory of the events. Once we've established those historical foundations, we can now

take up the question, well, who is Jesus according to these four gospels? What do they say

about who he claimed to be? And what do we make of that claim?

And so the first thing we want to look at when we're answering the question about Jesus' identity

is the issue of his messiahship.

Was Jesus of Nazareth, in fact, the Messiah, the anointed one, the long-awaited king of Israel.

Because someone may at this point, you know, object or raise the question, okay, so maybe

the four Gospels agree that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah. But how do I know that he

was the Messiah? I mean, haven't other people claimed to be the Messiah?

Didn't other Jews in the first century act as if they were the Messiah? And the answer is,

well, yeah, there were some other people. There was a man named Thudis, a man named the Egyptian,

who performed actions and sayings that made it look as if they were a new Moses or a new Joshua.

In the early 2nd century AD, there was another Jewish figure called Bar Kochpa,

which in Hebrew means son of the star, who actually proclaimed himself to be the Messiah.

What's the difference between Jesus of Nazareth and these other claimants to

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