Jesus is mysterious because what we do know—what our evidence encourages us to see as the core of who he was and what he did—is so unlike what we know about anybody else that we are forced to ask, as people evidently did at the time: who, then, is this? Who does he think he is, and who is he in fact? Again, people who listened to him at the time said things like, “We’ve never heard anyone talking like this,” and they didn’t just mean his tone of voice or his skillful public speaking. Jesus puzzled people then, and he puzzles us still.
