Who Is Jesus Bible Study Pdf
The short answer
If you're looking for a "who is Jesus" Bible study — whether as a PDF, a printed guide, or something to read on your phone — you're asking the question the whole New Testament was written to answer. Its central claim is startlingly direct: in Jesus, God revealed the plan he had been keeping in reserve for the world. Not a set of ideas about God, but a person. And the plan came to its climax not in a lecture or a law code, but in a death and a resurrection.
Jesus' own announcement was that "the kingdom of God" was arriving right then, in the present moment. This wasn't what people expected. Many were hoping for a national rescue, a political victory, a visible triumph. What they got instead felt, at first, like the collision of those hopes with something immovable. The crucifixion looked like the end of the story. But Easter morning reassembled hope in a new shape, and it became clear — so the first Christians insisted — that this had been God's intention all along. Christianity begins at exactly that point.
There's a second question hiding inside the first one, though: how does studying the Bible actually introduce us to this Jesus? Bonhoeffer offers a bracing answer. We can't reconstruct a purely historical Jesus and then build faith on top of the reconstruction, as if enough research could prove the Bible is God's word. History alone can't deliver that. Instead, we come to know the historical Jesus through the risen one, who bears witness to himself in the pages of Scripture. And that witness reaches us through an ordinary, humanly written, humanly read book. Bonhoeffer says believers should stay sober about this — read the Bible with every honest tool we have — while trusting that through this fragile book, God meets us as the risen Christ.
What scholars say
Wright answers the 'who is Jesus?' question by locating him at the heart of the New Testament's claim about God's unveiled plan, while Bonhoeffer addresses the 'how do we meet him?' question — arguing that faith finds Jesus not through historical proof but through the risen Christ's own witness in the ordinary pages of Scripture.
“At the heart of the New Testament is the claim that God unveiled his secret plan for the world in the person of Jesus himself, and supremely in his death and resurrection. Jesus announced that ‘the kingdom of God’ was bursting into the present moment. It didn’t look like what people had expected. Indeed, to some people it felt more like a train rushing towards them on the same track, crashing into them and smashing their hopes to bits. But when hope put itself together again on Easter morning it became clear that this really was what God had had in mind all along. And that’s where Christianity began. That moment is the one we now look back to as the start of it all.”
“To be sure, thinking historians will also recognize that this book concerns especially strange, profound things, that one glimpses figures of special dimensions, and so on—otherwise they would be poor historians, and just as bad as historians if they believed that with such statements they can prove the Bible as the word of God…. There is no historical access to the person of Jesus that would be obligatory for faith. Access to the historical Jesus is possible only through the resurrected One, through the word of the risen Christ witnessing to himself…. In addition, we must maintain that the witness of Jesus as the resurrected One is none other than what is passed down to us by the Bible. Even as believing people, we remain sober and objective. We must read this book of books with all human methods…. But through the fragile Bible, God meets us as the resurrected One.”
What it means for you
Two practical takeaways for your own study. First, expect Jesus to surprise you. If your picture of him fits comfortably inside your existing hopes and politics, the Gospels will keep unsettling it — that's part of how the kingdom announcement works. Let the disruption do its job.
Second, don't wait until you've resolved every historical question before you read. Bonhoeffer's counsel frees you to study honestly — asking hard questions, using every tool available — without pretending scholarship alone can hand you faith. Open the text expecting not just information about Jesus but an encounter with him. That changes Bible study from research into relationship.
In context
This is a topical study rather than a single passage, so the "context" is the New Testament itself. The four Gospels narrate Jesus announcing God's kingdom in first-century Palestine, colliding with the expectations of his contemporaries, and dying on a Roman cross — before the resurrection accounts reframe everything that came before. The letters and Acts then work out what it means that this crucified and risen man is the center of God's plan. Any "who is Jesus" study ultimately traces this arc: announcement, apparent defeat, resurrection, and the community that formed around it.