Hello and welcome to the John Markormus Teachings podcast. My name is Yinka Darsen and I'm your host.

Each week we feature teachings by John Mark or other voices in the formation space and it's great to

have you with us. It's Easter and so as we celebrate Jesus's resurrection, we wanted to share one of John Mark's

Easter teachings. In it, John Mark explores the person of Jesus and how the ripple effects

of the resurrection have transformed human history and is still influence in our lives today.

Here's John Mark.

Who is Jesus?

That is the question that our society keeps coming back to year after year after year.

After upwards of two millennia now of Western European history, after the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and the sex abuse scandal, the Catholic

Church, and the rise of secularism and the phenomenon that is Kanye West. And even in an urban,

secular, progressive city like Portland, we just can't get away from the question, who is Jesus? Was Jesus a teacher and

no more, kind of the first century equivalent of a yappy self-help guru? Or was he more like a

political revolutionary, subversive kind of anti-establishment voice, more like a Che Guevara but with a Bible.

Or was he more religious?

Was he God but in the avatar of a human body?

Everybody has a theory and at times it's hard to tell truth from fiction.

So to start off tonight on Easter Sunday evening, let's have a run at the question, who is Jesus? Well, if you

know anything about the New Testament, do you know that the first four writings in the New Testament

are called Gospels? And essentially, a gospel is a first century biography of Jesus of Nazareth.

And the four Gospels form the nucleus of the New Testament as a whole. And when you

read the four Gospels, you really quickly come up with a synthesis with a brief sketch of who exactly

Jesus was in three parts. First off, Jesus was a teacher or a rabbi in Hebrew. That was what people

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