Jesus of Nazareth is described as the son of Mary and Joseph, and is credited with a miraculous conception by the Spirit of God in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. He was apparently born in Bethlehem c.6–5 BC (before the death of Herod the Great in 4 BC), but began his ministry in Nazareth. After having been baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan (perhaps AD 28–29, Luke 3.1), he gathered a group of 12 close followers or apostles, the number perhaps being symbolic of the 12 tribes of Israel and indicative of an aim to reform the Jewish religion of his day.

The main records of his ministry are the New Testament Gospels, which show him proclaiming the coming of the kingdom of God, and in particular the acceptance of the oppressed and the poor into the kingdom. He was apparently active in the villages and country of Galilee rather than in towns and cities, and was credited in the Gospel records with many miraculous healings, exorcisms, and some ‘nature’ miracles, such as the calming of the storm. These records also depict conflicts with the Pharisees over his exercise of an independent ‘prophetic’ authority, and especially over his pronouncing forgiveness of sins; but his arrest by the Jewish priestly hierarchy appears to have resulted more directly from his action against the Temple in Jerusalem. The duration of his public ministry is uncertain, but it is from John's Gospel that one gets the impression of a 3-year period of teaching. He was executed by crucifixion under the order of Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator, at the prompting of the Jewish authorities, and also perhaps because of the unrest Jesus's activities were causing. The date of death is uncertain, but is usually considered to be in 30 or 33. Accounts of his resurrection from the dead are preserved in the Gospels, Pauline writings, and Acts of the Apostles; Acts also refers to his subsequent ascension into heaven.

The New Testament Gospels as sources for the life of Jesus have been subject to considerable historical questioning in modern Biblical criticism, partly in view of the differences amongst the Gospel accounts themselves (with the differences between John's Gospel and the other three often casting doubt on the former). Form criticism has drawn attention to the influences affecting the Jesus-traditions in the period before the Gospels were written, and when traditions were being transmitted mainly in small units by word of mouth. Redaction criticism has, in addition, drawn attention to the creative role of the Gospel writers. Some scholars have been pessimistic about efforts to reconstruct the life of Jesus at all from our Gospel sources, and have distinguished between the ‘Jesus of history’ and the ‘Christ of faith’, with only the latter being theologically significant for faith. More recent scholars have often attached greater importance to the historical Jesus for Christian faith, and in particular efforts have been made to present a credible hypothesis about the historical Jesus in terms of the social, political, and cultural situation in Palestine in the early 1st-c. Limited references to Jesus can also be found in works of the Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius; and other noncanonical Christian traditions circulated about Jesus, many of which are late and probably spurious.