The Truth

What is truth? I went to Webster.
TRUTH
sincerity in action, character and utterance: the state of being the case: Fact : the body of real things, events and facts: Actuality : a transcendent fundamental or spiritual reality: a judgement, proposition or idea that is true or accepted as true: the property of being in accord with fact or reality: fidelity to an original or to a standard.
-in truth: in accordance with fact: actually.

What is the truth of Jesus? How can we know? The best that I can do is to look to those with great minds who earnestly sought the truth and spent many years researching for answers. My understanding is that the best of these reached agreement on some basic conclusions which Albert Schweitzer wrote about in "The Quest of the Historical Jesus".
Jesus expected the coming of the supernatural kindom of God in his own time. But it didn't come. This is the problem of Jesus. Historians agree that Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah, but Christians have agreed to hold as truth that he was/is. This has caused a painful conflict in my head.
I have comforted myself, however, with words of St. Paul: "We can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth" (2 Cor. 13:8). Since the essential nature of the spiritual is truth, every new truth means ultimately something won. Truth is under all circumstances more valuable than non truth, and this must apply to truth in the realm of history as much as to other kinds of truth. Even if it comes in a form which piety finds strange and at first difficult, the final result can never mean injury; it can only mean greater depth. Religion has, therefore, no reason for trying to avoid coming to terms with historical truth.

Okay, most of that last paragraph is not my own words, but the words of Albert Schweitzer. I figure they hold more credibility coming from him than from me. He continues on with a bit of a rant against 'piety', which I want to include to get it off my own chest, and hopefully have my reader gain understanding about where I'm coming from.

"How strong would Christian truth now stand in the world of today if its relation to the truth in history were in every respect what it should be! Instead of allowing this truth its rights, piety treated it, whenever it caused her embarrassment in various ways, conscious or unconscious, but always by either evading or twisting or suppressing it. Instead of admitting that new elements toward which she had to advance were new, and justifying them by present action, she proceeded with artificial and disputable arguments to force them back into the past. Today the condition of Christianity is such that hard struggles are now required to make possible that coming to terms with historical truth which has been so often missed in the past.

In what a condition we find ourselves today merely because in the earliest Christian period writings were allowed to appear, bearing quite falsely the names of apostles, in order to give greater authority to the ideas put forth in them! They have been for generations of Christians a source of painful dissension. On one side stand those who in face of the abundance of material for judgement, cannot exclude the possibility of there being in the New Testament writings which, in spite of their valuable contents that we have learned to love, are not authentic; on the other are those who, to save the reputation of the oldest Christian thought, try to show this to be not proven. And meanwhile, those on whom the whole guilt rests were scarcely conscious of doing anything wrong. They only followed the custom which was universal in antiquity and against which no further objection was raised, of maintaining that writings which were said to express the ideas of any particular person were really written by him.

Because, while I was busied with the history of earlier Christianity, I had so often to deal with the results of its sins against the truth in history, I have become a keen worker for honesty in our Christianity of today."

Dear Albert goes on to embrace the essential spiritual and ethical truth of Christianity. Accepting the historical truth of Jesus takes nothing from his powerful, transforming message of love. In fact, freeing Jesus from dogma would make his message acceptable to a much wider audience.