Jesus of Nazareth - Sunrise Memorial Gardens - Wellsville, MO - Statues of Religious Figures on Waymarking.com

County of statue: Montgomery County
Location of statue: MO-19, Sunrise Memorial Gardens, 3 miles S. of Wellsville
Artist: Unknown

" The central figure in the foundation of Christianity was Jesus of Nazareth. In the earliest of his biographies, we have glimpses into a radical Jewish teacher from humble origins who drew on Pharisaical teachings. We also have glimpses of a Jewish shaman who cured the sick and cast out demons along the lines of popular Jewish practice. For some of his contemporaries, Jesus seemed to have been regarded as the Messiah, or "Anointed One," meaning that he was the king anointed by Yahweh to deliver Israel from its enemies. For the Christians following Paul, Jesus was the crucified and risen God that served as a prelude to the final judgement and destruction of the world. For these early Christians, Jesus was the Christos, Greek for "anointed one," but this was God himself incarnate. For the last biography of Jesus, that ascribed to John, Jesus was the logos, the divine plan or pattern of the universe made flesh in its completeness

"The texts through which we come to know of Jesus of Nazareth are the Gospels, a set of four canonical texts outlining the life and sayings of Jesus. The first three of these Gospels—whose authorship is attributed to Mark, Matthew, and Luke—recount events and sayings in very similar and parallel ways; these are called Synoptic gospels after the Greek word meaning "that which can be seen at a glance." The fourth gospel, attributed to John, is a theological work vastly different from the other three.

"This legitimizing process continued when the religion entered the Greek world. The Greeks associated divinity with miraculous stories and miraculous birth—from the Greek world would arise, for instance, the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin, even though the virgin birth of Jesus contradicted the earlier placement of Jesus as a descendant of David through Joseph.

"Ultimately the Jesus who emerges from the gospels is concerned with preparing the Jews for the last event in history and who actively preaches that human beings can enter individually into a correct relationship with God through both faith and trust in God and through an active, ethical concern with both the material well-being and the suffering of others. Onto this template, Paul of Tarsus would add a new emphasis—Jesus as a dead and risen god co-extensive with God himself." ~ Richard Hooker