The "Jesus before Easter" is usually referred to as the "Jesus of history", and the "Jesus after Easter" as the "Christ of faith". Both ways of reference are appropriate, though the former is preferable in my estimation.

It keeps together links between history and the identity of Jesus, in a way that the latter does not. With the latter, one may have the impression that after Easter Jesus had nothing whatever to do with history.

In fact, as we have seen, it was the recollection of his followers plus their reflective interpretation of his life that made possible the understanding of his significance by later generations.

But what was Jesus like before interpretation? It's impossible, of course, to have a complete picture. We simply have no unfiltered access. This does not mean we have nothing. Some affirmations are possible, and together they conspire to give us a clear picture of him.

I don't mean a fair picture of his actual appearance - if there is still any interest in such preoccupation. Since the 70s, the standard picture of Jesus as Caucasian, on which Western culture was brought up, has been permanently laid to rest.

What remains? Jesus was a Jew, and though Jews today come, so to speak, in all colours, and sizes, most likely he was swarthy, as aboriginal Jews tend to be, and of medium height.

Of greater interest is his character. What kind of man was he? About this, some things can be said with reasonable accuracy. I follow the New Testament scholar Marcus Borg here because I agree substantially with most of what he says.

Jesus - Jewish mystic

First of all, Jesus was a Jewish mystic. The word "mystic" tends to convey the impression of specialised and rarefied holiness. Not your run-of-the-mill, Sunday-Mass-going holiness.

Mystics are thought to be people who barely touch the earth, who do so only because they have to eat and perform bodily functions like the rest of us. After that, we and they part company.

In fact, quite the opposite is the case. It may surprise us to know that mystics among us are far more numerous than we realise, and that they are found in very ordinary places, like church on Sunday morning attending Sunday Mass.

The reason why we don't know them or know them more than we do, is that mysticism inclines to humility. Those who are will not tell you. So you have the odd situation where the ones from whom you could hope to learn something most are the ones most disinclined to make themselves the centre of attention.

A mystic is someone for whom God is vividly real and immediate. God does not have to be imagined, because nothing is more real than He. Compared to God, everything is insubstantial. Not insignificant, just insubstantial.

Mystics are thus neither scornful nor dismissive of existence. They simply know something of greater reality and value.

There is little doubt that Jesus was such a person. This is why he was able to speak of God with such intimacy and directness. In his life he himself enjoyed the immediate access he recommended to his followers.

Jesus - healer

Jesus was also a healer. It is disconcerting to consider how much of his ministry was spent in healing, and how disproportionately different it was in that sense from ours. "More healing stories are told about Jesus," Borg remarks, "than about any other figure in the Jewish tradition. He must have been a remarkable healer."

We have today a greater appreciation of healing as a democratic gift of the Spirit, which many people not only have but have always had. I underline "always", because before the advent of the Charismatic movement, Catholic healers tended to be regarded as figures of suspicion. That is all now gladly gone.

Jesus - wisdom teacher

Jesus was also a wisdom teacher. Such teachers teach a path or a way of life. Jesus spoke of his way as "the narrow way". It was, if one may use Scott Peck's phrase, "the road less travelled", beyond the broad way of convention and habit.

For Jesus, the way meant death and resurrection, an inner process of spiritual-psychological transformation, where an old identity is shed and a distinctively new way of being is born. The new way means new life, radically centred on God and lived in freedom under His Spirit.

Jesus - social prophet

Jesus was also a social prophet, in the Jewish tradition of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Micah. His voice and theirs were godly voices of protest against the economic and political injustice of the dominant systems of their day.

In his time, Jesus called the new order the Kingdom of God , that is, the state of things that would ensue if God were king and not the kings and rulers of the world. This was the critical vantage point not only of his social protest but of all his preaching.

Finally, Jesus set something in train. It has been polemically said: "Jesus preached the Kingdom; it was the Church that came." There is a non-polemical way to understand this, but it will take us beyond the limits of this article.

It is sufficient to say that the impact of Jesus' life was so life-altering, it changed his followers, who were in turn driven to change the world. It's foolish to see in later Church history a second Fall from the Eden of Jesus' days.

For us Westerners, the "good ole days" are always in the past. Revelation holds - and Jesus himself underlined - that greater, life-altering days are still to come.