Introduction

In John 12:21 some Greeks said to the disciple Philip, “We want to see Jesus.” However, they never got to see him because their request was a literary device on the part of the author to set the stage for Jesus' monologue on his glorification (John 12:23–26). As with the Greeks, we can never get to see Jesus or completely understand him. Our sources are not only secondhand and sometimes inconsistent, but they also provide little information about him as a person. Yet, ever since the gospels were written, people have been trying to understand Jesus and writing about him.

For more than 20 centuries scholars, clerics, students, and lay persons have been discussing the person of Jesus and his teaching. There is much said about him not only in formal literary compositions, but also in the media, especially television and movies. And what is said ranges from plausible ideas with a factual basis to other ideas that attract a lot of attention but, in reality, have absolutely no factual support. Some even are disrespectful and disgusting. Three of the most preposterous ideas are that Jesus arranged with Judas to betray him because as the Messiah he had to be betrayed; Jesus and John the Baptist were twin messiahs; and Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a child with her, and the fetus in her womb was the real Holy Grail.