The Incomparable Impact of Jesus

Author: Stan Guthrie
September 07, 2023

Lists of history’s most influential people are as common as dirt and vary widely. For some, Muhammad
has had the most impact. For others, it’s Martin Luther King Jr. or Aristotle. But no such list can be
considered credible if it does not have Jesus at or near the top—and indeed most of them do.

As the renowned Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan wrote, “Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries. If it were possible, with some sort of super magnet, to pull out of that history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how much would be left?”¹

 It is no wonder that much of the world still counts the years by the life of Jesus: BC*—before Christ—and AD—anno Domini—in the year of our Lord.

In Who Is This Man?: The Unpredictable Impact of the Inescapable Jesus (Zondervan, 2012), John
Ortberg notes that the impact of the Galilean began during his lifetime and continues growing in ever
larger concentric circles. Ortberg sharply contrasts the revolutionary life and teachings of Jesus and the ancient world on everything from the dignity and worth of the individual, to how we treat our enemies, the relationship of religion to the state, and even the meaning of marriage—just to name a few.²

While the American Founders believed that it is “self-evident” that “all men are created equal,” it was not so in the long millennia leading up to Jesus, who was known as a friend of sinners, widows, and outcasts. And it is hardly practiced even today in parts of the world outside of His benign influence. As Dinesh D’Souza notes in his book What’s So Great about Christianity, “Christians were the first group in history to start an anti-slavery movement. The movement started in late eighteenth-century Britain, spread to other parts of Europe, and then gathered force in the United States.”³

Respect for women is woven deeply into Christianity’s DNA. Jesus welcomed one Mary, a woman, as a
student. Another Mary was the first eyewitness to His resurrection. Historian Rodney Stark says, “The
Gospels frequently report women among those traveling with Jesus, and women often appear in Acts as well as in Paul’s letters—frequently they are upper-class women. … [W]omen were especially attracted to Christianity.”⁴

Jesus’ influence extends to education. He taught His followers to know the Scriptures, and early
missionaries translated God’s Word into countless tongues so that the people—or at least their
leaders—could read it. As a result, the Bible—which tells the story of the King and His kingdom from
beginning to end⁵ —has been translated into more languages than any book in history.

In the ninth century, two Orthodox missionaries from Greece, Cyril and Methodius, brought the good
news to the Khazars, a Slavic people living between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, and later to the Moravians of eastern Europe. “In order to do this,” Jonathan Hill writes, “they had not only to learn the Slavic language but also to find a suitable writing system for it. Cyril adapted the Greek alphabet to suit Slavic, and this is why modern Russian is still written in an alphabet that looks a little like Greek, and which is called ‘Cyrillic.’”⁶

Christianity was the wellspring from which the world’s great universities appeared, first in Bologna, then in Paris. Peter Abelard (1079-1142) sought to stand on the shoulders of giants such as Augustine to, in the words of Tom Holland in his magisterial book, Dominion, promote the idea that “God’s order was rational and governed by rules that mortals could aspire to comprehend.”⁷

And while today some pundits today attempt to paint Christianity as anti-science, many if not most of
the early scientists were Christians, including Nicholas of Cusa, Galileo, Pascal, and Kepler. As Stark has argued, “The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians.”⁸

Then there are the innumerable soup kitchens, churches, hospitals, and orphanages founded to the
glory of Christ. We could explore the impact of Jesus in everything from philosophy, civil rights, literacy, democratic government, capitalism, and even in the movements that have emerged to combat the Christian faith, including secularism, communism, and atheism.

But perhaps the best way to conclude this brief survey is to acknowledge that Jesus is not merely a
limitless fountain of social change. He is a living and resurrected Lord to millions upon millions of people, past and present, rich and poor, educated and uneducated. What other figure of history has turned so many sinners into world-changing leaders, such as Chuck Colson, John Newton, Florence Nightingale, Martin Luther, and William Wilberforce? Jesus is without peer in terms of His influence, in ways large and small.

As Ortberg reminds us, “It is in Jesus’ name that desperate people pray, grateful people worship, and
angry people swear. From christenings to weddings to sickrooms to funerals, it is in Jesus’ name that
people are hatched, matched, patched, and dispatched.”⁹

That is impact—incomparable impact.

*Or the increasingly accepted BCE (Before Common Era).

---

Stan Guthrie, NCC’s minister of communications, is author of All That Jesus Asks: How His Questions Can Teach and Transform Us. Copies are available from the author.

^{_____________________________________________________}

¹ Jaroslav Pelikan, The Illustrated Jesus through the Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 114.
² John Ortberg, Who Is This Man? The Unpredictable Impact of the Inescapable Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 2012).
³ Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great about Christianity (Carol Stream: Tyndale House Publishers, 2007), 74.
⁴ Rodney Stark, The Discovery of God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 320, 322.
⁵ See Stan Guthrie, God’s Story in 66 Verses: Understand the Entire Bible by Focusing on Just One Verse in Each Book (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2015).
⁶ Jonathan Hill, What Has Christianity Ever Done for Us? How It Shaped the Modern World (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 13.
⁷ Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 242-243.
⁸ Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2007), 71.
⁹ Ortberg, Who Is This Man?

BACK