To attempt to write about the human-ness of Jesus in 1000 words is an impossible task! There is a library of learned works from the third century onwards, dealing with this or that aspect of the humanity of Jesus. The reason for this vast literature is, of course, that people have, from the late first century, differed in what they understood about the person of Jesus.

The New Testament has often been understood in ways that the authors might not perhaps recognise. They were sophisticated writers. While we often look for straightforward statements of a literal nature, they worked with metaphor and allusion, more like the stories of Jesus himself. It was the normal Middle Eastern way of expression so different from the Western nations who always ask the question, 'How is this so?' Even though there was quite a lot of cross-fertilisation between Hebrew and Greek thought, the new Christian movement had strong ties with Jewish thought and faith and worship for some time - at least until the sack of Jerusalem in 70 CE.

I will divide the remaining 900 words between a very brief note about the churches' constitutional understanding of Jesus - the received view, and then the views of many scholars of the New Testament. First of all, the received view.

In the 5th-6th centuries when the orthodox view was hammered out, God was thought of in terms of a deity who was the utterly separated creator of all. There had already been an acceptance of the trinity of 'persons', necessitated by the appearance of Jesus who was thought of as the God-Man who was 'sent' by God on his mission of redemption. To explain who Jesus was they postulated that Jesus had two 'natures' - one human and one divine. All this was very complicated. In fairness there were quite a number of strange ideas about who Jesus was around in the churches - one such view was that Jesus only 'appeared' to be human! Something had to be done to exclude these 'heretical' ideas. Part of the problem had been that Matthew and Luke's narratives of the virgin birth were accepted, literally, and John's - the 'word was made flesh' - was accepted as describing the sending of God's son in human flesh to earth.

In the past half century there has been a resurgence of re-thinking about Jesus and his relationship with the Father. This does not mean that some Christian scholars are now deemed to be 'heretical' in their views. There has been, at least in the Anglican Communion, a willingness to allow people to think for themselves while remaining within the 'fold'. (It was different 350 years ago. Servetus, was a Spanish theologian and physician, cartographer, and humanist. He was the first European to describe the function of pulmonary circulation. He advocated a return to the simplicity of the Gospels and the teachings of the early Church Fathers that pre-dated the development of trinitarianism. For these ideas he was condemned by Calvin and burnt alive on 27th October, 1553, outside Geneva.)

Here are some of the traits of modern thinking about Jesus. All that we know about his life is contained in the gospels and there he is portrayed as a fully human person - one of us. There is nothing to suggest that he was different, humanly, either from his brothers or to the rest of us. And to be fully human he had to be born like every other person. This is the sticking point for many people, who say, "But Matthew and Luke portray Jesus as being born of the Spirit when Mary had not known Joseph!" John also seems to be saying that the divine Jesus, God the Son, was made flesh and dwelt among us. How can we reconcile these views? Simply: both the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke and John's prologue to the gospel, are saying that it was God's initiative that the new era, the new creation, should be spear-headed by the Christ, born of Mary, a Jewish woman whose husband was Joseph, of the tribe of Judah. For on this view, God does work in history and sustains us but does not interfere except when a corner really has to be turned for humanity. And the life, death and resurrection of Jesus was the beginning of the new era for us all, the critical turning point in the mind of God.

So on this view, what happened to the man, Jesus, who has become Jesus, the Lord? Here we need to remember that his teaching - the reason why he was the prophet that should come - was about the rule of God, the kingdom, into which we must all, eventually enter. We may still think in terms of trinity, if we wish, but in the new sense that Jesus' transformation out of death made him the fore-runner, so that he now shares in the divine life with the Father - where he was not before his birth. The life of the divine is the heart of the kingdom and with Father, Jesus and the divine spirit we shall all share when the time comes - the end time - when we shall also be resurrected. And the life of the divine, of God, is not far from each one of us - for,'in him we live and move and have our being.' The value of John's account of Jesus, which many find the most moving, is that he is portraying Jesus in many ways as the glorified Jesus - his humanity doesn't grow up and his death on the cross is already a victory - the Jesus who is known by the Christian community where John is writing from.

We know so little! It is good and necessary to think about the faith we hold in the Father and in Jesus. But in the long run the definitions of the Fathers of the 5th to 6th centuries is speculation. And so is our own thinking. But unless we have some understanding of the gospels which can be re-told to our contemporaries in terms of real life today, we shall be failing as disciples. Not long ago, one of our Anglican theologians was supporting the view that, 'Positive error is altogether excluded from the utterances that Christ makes.' Today that couldn't be affirmed. We have moved on - slowly!

Jesus heard that they had cast [the blind man] out, and having found him he said, "Do you believe in the Son of man?" He answered, "And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?" Jesus said to him, "You have seen him, and it is he who speaks to you." He said, "Lord, I believe"; and he worshipped him. Jesus said, "For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind." Some of the Pharisees near him heard this, and they said to him, "Are we also blind?" Jesus said to them, "If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, 'We see,' your guilt remains." (John 9: 35-41)