JESUS is the man who made the West. What kind of man was he?

Is he relevant to a modern world shaken by crises of meaning?

He is lord and saviour.
But this church Jesus is not remotely like the existential hero portrayed in the first Gospel, that of Mark. This is the earliest recording of Jesus' life and the most potent telling of his story.

Mark's Jesus is a lonely, restless, mysterious stranger. His mission is dark and obscure. Everything he tries fails.

By the end there is no God, no loyal followers, just torture by crucifixion, climaxing in a colossal death scream. The story closes without a resurrection from the dead. There is just an empty tomb and three women fleeing in terror.

Jesus, as he is commonly identified and understood, is a creation of Christianity, the religion founded in his name. Western civilisation and its culture are deeply and pervasively Christian, from the architectural authority of the great cathedrals to the Renaissance art of Donatello, Raphael and Nicolas Poussin to the high poetry of John Milton and John Donne to the Passions of Bach.
Yet much of this seems like a past that has been lost.

The social influence of the churches has been in relentless decline for two centuries. Its influence over family life and morals, the cogency of public pronouncements by bishops, the reputation of priests, even the ceremonial control of births, marriages and funerals: all have dissipated.
The modern West is overwhelmingly secular and humanist in its habits, tastes and beliefs.

Even in the partial exception -- the US -- only 20 per cent of the population regularly attends Christian churches.
The waning of Christianity as practised in the West is easy to explain. The Christian churches have comprehensively failed in their central task: to retell their foundation story in a way that might speak to the times.

They have failed at what the ancient Jews called midrash, the art of reworking stories to bring them up to date.
The church Jesus is a wooden residue of tired doctrine about a benevolent and omnipotent lord God up above, the Trinity, the forgiveness of sins, holy communion, resurrection from the dead and so forth, little of which has cogent mainstream resonance.
This is not a recent problem.

From the outset, the churches have practised a systematic negation of the Jesus of the first-written Gospel. Placing Mark second after Matthew in the official Bible may even have been a way of hiding it.
The consensus is that Mark wrote first, at about AD70.

He provides the definitive telling of the story that governs the three Gospels that follow: Matthew, Luke and John. As American critic Harold Bloom puts it, Mark invented Jesus: The Marcan highly individual and mysterious Jesus has become normative.
It is a sign of the cultural and psychological maturity of the modern West that individuals have come to make their own judgments about what they find plausible in answer to the three big questions of meaning: Where do I come from?

What should I do with my life? What happens to me when I die?
In the end, the highest authority has become the individual's conscience.

The vast majority has turned its back on the churches, and has come to roll its eyes dismissively at Christian doctrine. Mark's existential Jesus would approve.
Churches have a necessary logic that must be obeyed if they are to survive.

They are communities of individuals. To bind those individuals together into a cohesive whole, and make them dependent, they must build a body of moral laws -- Thou shalt nots -- then proclaim, ritualise and sanction them, punishing those who break them.
Churches are ethical institutions.

To gain legitimacy, they are in need of a charismatic foundation figure who was a moral teacher.
Mark's Jesus is not remotely like this: he is not interested in ethical teaching. Worse, he identifies all churches with the withered and stony-hearted.

He exposes their nature as innately driven to suppress truth. Truth is their mortal enemy.
This conflict comes to a head over sin.

As if to confirm hostilities, church Christianity has distorted Mark's text, through skewing the translation in a direction to suit itself. It has falsely projected the image of a moralistic Jesus, preoccupied with sin. The Greek word used by Mark and translated as sin -- hamartia -- means, at its root, missing the mark , as in a badly aimed spear throw, or as one variant, in Aristotle's usage, character flaw .

Mark's Jesus is concerned with the righting of being, or the restoring of a character that is out of balance. This is an issue of being, not of morals.
Churches are not the only groups Mark targets.

A church is one example of human community. It is not inherently different from others, whether family, club, society, school, company, suburb or town. It is merely representative.

Mark's Jesus teaches that the person is the locus of truth. His perspective is individual-centred and anti-tribal. Whatever the virtue and necessity for human wellbeing of community -- most commonly in the form of family -- that is not where a person will find who he or she is, or what is meant to be.

Indeed, group traits and attachments have to be stripped away.
The sociological signs are that the modern West has entered a post-church era. It seeks its answers to the big questions outside the stone walls and, especially in everyday life, in the secular world.

Its new altars are modest and obscure, at home, at work, in sport and in nature.
However, without the security of community or institution to provide boundaries and direction it is all the more in need of a teacher. So it is time to return to the beginning, before the churches were built, when there was Jesus alone, and his story.

We are haunted by the truth we suspect lies behind things. On the surface, events and their emotional currents fill the mind. These are the things that happen between birth and death: people encountered, children raised, jobs performed, homes built, schedules and pastimes, achievements and failures, loves and griefs.

Many such threads weave the cloth of an individual life.
The imagination is full with the promise of such a truth: that it might tap into the source of vital energy, injecting the zest and dynamism that is lacking; that it might bring illumination to a life and provide the key to what it is all about, bestowing meaning.
Conversely, without such a truth, or truths, life sinks into routine, lacklustre in mood, absurd in content, ultimately futile.

Without these truths, we might be on the wrong train, at the wrong time, going in the wrong direction. So we fear, but are not sure. The truths are our signposts.

So we explore ancient sites seeking some timeless authority: a blurred inscription in stone, a sculpted face, a special place with sacred presence. So we plunge into romance, dreaming that the other might be the one. So we form families in the hope of redemptive cosiness, and steadfast belonging, or a new generation that will rise higher.

So we search for a central life activity -- a vocation -- for work that is more than a profane job. So we build nations, cities and institutions imagining that if we get the form right, then what we have made will be more than bricks and mortar, a sort of perfection that will endure.
In a modest way we have similar dreams about a memo, an essay, a well-decorated, clean or orderly room, and especially a performance at sport.

When reality strikes back, as it inevitably does, much of this turns out to have been illusion. It's an illusion that manifests for a while, before popping like a soap bubble. However, if redemptive illusion is all there is, the truth about human life, the whole truth -- if we are honest -- is, as Nietzsche put it, that it swings between the absurd and the horrible.

There is nothing more. Here is the starting point for the Jesus story. The modern West's most influential literary work -- Hamlet -- orbits around the question: To be or not to be?

Truth, it implies, is to do with the nature of being. And many today do seek a richer conception of the self, the site where it is imagined that important truth dwells. Hence the wide appeal of Eastern philosophy, with its greater emphasis on inner consciousness, and the prevalence of theories and therapies that promise the self more understanding of its own nature.

European philosophy itself, in the 20th century, swung back to focus on being, with Martin Heidegger the leading figure. This was a return to the beginning. At the historical start of Western culture, in classical Greece, the inscription carved in stone over the entrance to the sacred oracle in Delphi commanded: Know thyself!

The essence of each individual living human -- the I -- holds the secret. What each person really wants to know dwells here: Who am I?
The West has one supreme teacher on being.

Only one has fathomed its depths. Through the grand course of Western culture, from Homer to us, most is to be learned about the I from Jesus. His way of putting it was: I am.

This teaching is not abstract like philosophy. The philosopher, at most, supplies a body of dictums that may be pondered sagely, but fails to engage viscerally with the foundation of the self. But what does Jesus mean by I am ?

His teaching comes in the form of a story. As such it is down-to-earth and graspable. It speaks through the narrative account of the life of one man and his own wrestling with what he confronts.

It compels us to engage with his experience and what he learns, to walk in his shoes.
What he learns is initially a sequence of negations: he learns who he is not. He discovers that his identity does not derive from his family, from where he comes from, his trade, his moral beliefs, his cultural and religious background or even his own special powers.

Early assumptions he makes about his mission in life turn out to be wrong.
From this base point, having stripped away the normal contours of self, Mark lets the story take over. It is one that he deliberately encrypts, as he uses the subtext to undermine surface meanings as they progressively appear before the bewildered reader.

Mark employs tactical enigma as his working method, forcing the reader who becomes absorbed by the story to desperately try to make sense of what is going on. Through this process of shedding normal understandings, Mark's Jesus becomes of particular interest today.
He has a singular affinity with a post-church, secular and individualistic culture.

The traditional lord God up above, ruling omnipotently and benevolently, disappears, as he has for most people who inhabit the modern West.
Also waning for the human individual is reliance in times of personal suffering on family, church and other forms of community and ritual. This Jesus is not moralistic, preachy or even particularly pious.

And, throughout the first half of his story, he has little idea of what he is doing or where he is going.
For the reader, what comes to be known is known only obscurely, glimpsed as if through a glass darkly . Whatever clarity comes does so at the climactic ending.

Mark's life of Jesus is a difficult text. Given the momentousness of the story and its impact over two millenniums, who should expect it to be otherwise?
In an age that tries to make most things quick, easy and comfortable, it is right that the big story should sound a different key.

It may just be that what is difficult, and remorselessly challenging, to the point of confronting the reader with dark enigma, is what is necessary.
Truth is mythos. This is the axiom that underpins the book I have written presenting Mark's story and interpreting it.

Mythos was the classical Greek understanding of culture, as a body of timeless, archetypal stories from a long time ago.
This is myth in the sense of charged narrative about larger-than-life, even semi-divine, figures whose lives set the pattern for the way things human have been ever since, and always shall be.
Homer's Iliad showed the way.

Mythos is not myth in the sense of the merely fictitious, tales that project events that did not really take place.
Much biblical scholarship since the mid-19th century has been in search of the historical Jesus, and in particular what he actually said.
The academic quest for the historical Jesus is paralleled by tourists or pilgrims visiting the city of Jerusalem today.

Their expectation of finding the actual sites where the key events happened is satisfied by ruins, churches, gardens, streets and tombs that mark the spot.
All are fanciful. Many, like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, are ludicrously fake.

The example of the Via Dolorosa, marked out by the Crusaders, is typical of this exercise in historical futility.
There is negligible chance that this street, supposedly marking the path Jesus trod carrying his cross from the place of trial to execution, is genuine. The trial probably took place at Herod's palace, on the opposite, west side of the city to where the Via Dolorosa starts.

And the crucifixion might have taken place almost anywhere in the densely built rabbit warren of alleys that comprises the northern part of the Old City today, or even beyond.
The one plausible parallel is that Jesus found Jerusalem a cold, hostile, unholy city, occupied by zealous, moralistic clerics, squabbling religious sects, money-grubbing merchants and dense, swarming crowds. The Old City in modern Jerusalem is not so different.

One commentator has condemned the quest for the historical Jesus as idolatrous. And indeed, such a quest is not only largely futile but it searches for truth where it does not dwell, in the sort of material evidence that is studied in a science laboratory. We know Jesus only through his story, as mythos.

There is negligible historical evidence about this man apart from what is contained in the four Gospels, stories themselves criss-crossed with internal contradiction about facts of person, time and place.
Two of the most eminent literary critics, both secular men, have acknowledged the superiority of Mark's Gospel as a work of literature. Bloom has written: A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J writer, the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark and Allah of the Koran.

Bloom added later that whoever composed Mark is a genius still too original for us to absorb .
British critic Frank Kermode devoted a book to Mark, The Genesis of Secrecy, which has been more useful to my study than all the biblical scholarship taken together. Kermode explores how story works, through textual analysis of what is arguably the most cryptic important narrative in Western culture, Mark's life of Jesus.

Why, it may be asked, yet another book on Jesus? For two millenniums this story has been told and retold, interpreted and reinterpreted many thousands of times in writing, painting, sculpture, drama and music. The Bible -- that is, its Jesus sections -- is by a vast margin the most published and written-about work in the West.

The justification is simple. We cannot live without mythos, without answers to the three big questions. As indigenous Australians put it in relation to their own quite different mythos, the Dreaming, if you lose contact with the founding archetypal stories you wither and die.

It is only the conjoining of an individual's story with the Dreaming parallel that inspires life, transforming it out of profane ordinary time and its banal routines.
Jesus is the core of the Western Dreaming. His presence is vital to our civilisation and its individuals.

He is known by his story. Mark composed the first and most compelling version. It is time to retell the original Gospel and reflect on it in the context of today.

My principal aim has been to restore the story, which is like an old master, the painting grimy with stained varnish and the encrustations of time. The hope is to introduce new viewers, in a new time, to the splendour of the work; and to suggest that those already familiar with it take another look.
Above all, my hope in retelling the story is to suggest new readings, and reveal what this man had to say.

The existential Jesus speaks today. He does not spout doctrine; he has no interest in sin; his focus is not on some afterlife. He gestures enigmatically from within his own gruelling experience, inviting the reader to walk in his shoes.

He singles out everybody's central question: Who am I? The truth lies within individual identity, resounding in the depths of the inner self. The existential Jesus is the West's great teacher on the nature of being.