The Jesus we meet in the Scriptures is the Jesus of faith.  The men that wrote the books of the New Testament were pro-Jesus.  It can be helpful to examine Jesus from another perspective though - the perspective of his enemies.  When we view only the Jesus of faith we can fail to grasp the full nature of his message.  Understanding his enemies helps to unlock new vistas of understanding.

To the majority of people of Jesus day, he was a self-appointed rabbi from a town called Nazareth in Galilee.  It was known that the Messiah would come from Bethlehem.  It was not common knowledge that Jesus was born there, making acceptance of his claims hard for many.  Galilee was separated from Judea by Samaria:  the people of Galilee tended to be more liberal-minded than the people of Judea because of this distance.  Also, they spoke a dialect which Judeans looked down on because of its coarseness.  It was not without reason that the Pharisees said "Prophets do not come out of Galilee".

Jesus deliberately "broke" the Sabbatical law by healing on the Sabbath.  He dared to forgive sins and acted blasphemously in claiming to be the son of God.  Moreover, he claimed to be of higher rank than Moses and insulted the religious leaders calling them among other things "a brood of vipers", "white washed tombs" and "hypocrites".  It is not surprising that by Palm Sunday the religious leaders had hatched a plan to terminate his existence.   What then was the purpose of Jesus in all this?  

 The answer lies in the message he preached:  "Unless your virtue goes deeper than the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven"; "Do you know why you cannot take in what I say?  It is because you do not understand my language"; "You are from below; I am from above",  "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed . . . ."; "Only those who believe in him will have no cause for shame"; "It is the stone rejected by the builders that becomes the cornerstone - it is the Lord's doing and it is wonderful to see".

Jesus taught a moral system based on the rubric:  "You must love the Lord Your God with all your heart, with all your soul and all your mind, and love your neighbour as yourself.  On these two commandments hang the whole law and the prophets also".  As a corollary to this he taught that "sin blinds".  

St.Paul became the great theologian of God's love, and it is in his writings that we see this idea being given a more elaborate expression.  "Spiritual things must be learned spiritually"; "Why did they fail . . . because they trusted in good deeds rather than trusting in the righteousness that comes from God".  He uses further analogies such as the need to begin one's spiritual journey with milk, then baby food before endeavouring to eat solid food.  "In this way our hidden selves grow strong".