When I first saw the Head of Christ in the Detroit Institute of Arts, I was not expecting to meet anyone. I had walked through rooms lined with enormous canvases—grand visions gilded in gold and legend—works that wanted to impress upon me the inevitability of the divine. But here, in a quieter gallery, I came face-to-face with a man.
The figure emerged from darkness into a soft, earthly light. His hair fell loosely around his shoulders, his garment was the brown of work clothes rather than the white of heavenly robes. His eyes met mine—not in judgment, nor in benediction, but with the steady regard of one who knows what it is to live under strain. There was no halo, no burst of glory, no triumphalism. Only the weight of presence.
I realized, standing there, that this was not the Jesus I was raised with. My childhood faith had given me a Christ already transfigured, divine from the outset, his humanity little more than a theological clause. Here, however, I saw a man who could have been my neighbor, a fellow traveler under the same sun and dust.
Albert Schweitzer, in The Quest of the Historical Jesus, wrote:
“He comes to us as One unknown… He commands, and to those who obey him… He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship.”
Schweitzer’s Jesus is not a safe icon behind stained glass but a man embedded in the grit and trial of human life. The Detroit portrait seemed to share that conviction, stripping away the mythic sheen so that flesh and weariness could show through.
My own journey away from Christianity has been long enough that I no longer look for the Christ of miracles or the cosmic redeemer enthroned in heaven. Yet I have not shed my respect for the figure at the center of it all. The man beneath the myth still draws me—not for his divinity, but for his courage, his defiance, his tenderness.
James Baldwin once observed:
“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
For me, the Christ in Detroit was God discarded, yet humanity retained. Larger, freer, and—if only in the shared recognition of our mutual mortality—more loving.
Later, as I watched The Last Temptation of Christ, I realized this was the same pull I felt in Kazantzakis’s and Scorsese’s visions: Jesus as a man wrestling with himself, torn between the demands of God and the gravity of his own humanity. It is a Jesus who could sweat in fear, falter in resolve, or dream of another life entirely—and still be worth following, not as a savior, but as a companion in the long work of being human.
When I left the Detroit Institute of Arts, the face from the Head of Christ stayed with me—not as a devotional image but as a quiet reminder of the man beneath the myth. Today, as I watched The Last Temptation of Christ and recalled reading Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel years ago, I realized that the painting and this story speak the same language. They are both acts of reclamation, bringing Jesus down from the unreachable heights of doctrine and setting him again in the dust and sweat of human life.
The controversy surrounding The Last Temptation—both the book and Martin Scorsese’s 1988 adaptation—has always centered on the same perceived offense: that Jesus is shown as a man who struggles. Kazantzakis gives us a Christ who wrestles with fear, doubt, lust, and the burden of an unwanted destiny. Early in the novel, he frames the tension at the heart of his portrayal:
“The dual substance of Christ—the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God… and the torment of God seeking to conquer man.”
This is no sanitized saint. Here is a Jesus who flinches under the weight of his calling, who is not immune to the pull of an ordinary life. Scorsese’s film captures this in scenes where Jesus, played by Willem Dafoe, admits to fear, to uncertainty, even to wanting to abandon the path laid before him. It is not weakness for its own sake, but the depiction of moral courage as something born in struggle, not inborn perfection.
Watching it today, I found that my sympathies had shifted since the first time I encountered the story. When I read the novel years ago, I was still close enough to my former faith that this deeply human Jesus felt like a challenge to orthodoxy—an intrusion into the neat order of the creed. Now, outside the faith, I find him profoundly compelling. His faltering steps and conflicted heart feel more honest than the unyielding certainty of the divine Christ.
There is a scene in the film, late in the story, where Jesus is shown the life he might have had—a wife, children, the ordinary rhythms of human existence. It is his “last temptation”: to live without the cross. And yet, he returns to it, not because he is invulnerable, but because he has chosen. The power of this moment lies in the fact that his choice is costly, rooted in the full knowledge of what he is giving up.
In this way, Kazantzakis’s Jesus resembles the man in the Detroit painting. Both are approachable, not because they are morally easy to emulate, but because they live in the same register of human possibility. They feel the same hungers, carry the same doubts. The difference is not in their essence but in the way they face those trials.
For me, this humanized Christ is far more relatable than the omnipotent savior of my youth. The Jesus of The Last Temptation is not unreachable; he walks the same roads we do. His holiness is not a state of being but a way of moving through the world—a way that involves resistance, sacrifice, and an unflinching gaze into the depths of his own limitations.
It strikes me that whether on canvas or on film, this Jesus remains radical. He does not tower over us as an untouchable icon. He stands among us as a fellow human being, inviting us not to worship from a distance, but to walk alongside him, to wrestle with what it means to bear the weight of our own choices.
If the Head of Christ in Detroit and The Last Temptation of Christ give us a vision of Jesus rooted in humanity, then Paul Ens’s Minimal Witnesses hypothesis offers a plausible historical scaffolding beneath that vision. It is, in its own way, another act of stripping away—removing supernatural claims to see what remains when we look for Jesus in the historical record.
Ens’s hypothesis begins with a simple premise: Christianity arose not from a single, dramatic, verifiable event witnessed by hundreds, but from a small network of early followers whose experiences and testimonies—naturalistic in origin—were gradually amplified through oral tradition, theological reflection, and literary creation. As Ens writes:
“Stories about Jesus spread through person-to-person evangelism… Details were embellished or invented to eliminate obstacles to belief… Greek-speaking individuals… began documenting the circulating stories.”
One of the boldest aspects of Ens’s model is its reframing of Paul’s own conversion. Rather than treating it as an encounter with a physically resurrected Jesus, Ens suggests it may have been a visionary experience, possibly triggered by guilt and cognitive dissonance after persecuting early Christians:
“Paul… experienced a non-veridical vision of the allegedly-resurrected Jesus… his persecution… may have caused him profound guilt and cognitive dissonance… could have triggered a psychotic break… Paul’s conversion… may have served as a coping mechanism.”
This is not to diminish Paul’s influence, but to place it within the bounds of human psychology—a space where visions, convictions, and transformative experiences are not necessarily supernatural in origin.
Bart Ehrman, who published Ens’s piece on his own site (while clarifying that the views were Ens’s alone), has consistently made a related point: the extraordinary claims about Jesus require evidence beyond what history can supply. As he has said:
“Any other scenario—no matter how unlikely—is more likely than the one in which a great miracle occurred.”
Yet Ehrman also affirms a baseline of historical reality:
“Jesus certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees.”
It is in this tension—skepticism toward the miraculous, acceptance of the man—that I find the intellectual home for my own post-faith perspective. The Ens model and Ehrman’s scholarship clear a path through centuries of theological growth, allowing me to imagine a historical Jesus who lived, taught, and inspired—not because he was God incarnate, but because he was compelling in his humanity.
This aligns almost perfectly with what I saw in Detroit and on screen in The Last Temptation. The man in the painting, emerging from shadow into a modest light, is not a miracle-worker in the act, but a presence that holds your attention. The Jesus in Kazantzakis’s novel and Scorsese’s film is not a divine automaton fulfilling prophecy, but a man wrestling with his calling. And the Jesus of the Minimal Witnesses hypothesis is a remembered figure, refracted through the hopes and imaginations of a small group who knew him, or believed they did, and whose stories became the foundation of a faith.
To believe in such a Jesus requires no supernatural leap. It asks instead for a recognition that human beings—through memory, story, and conviction—can give enduring life to the image of a person. In that sense, history, art, and film are not rivals to theology but parallel forms of witness. They testify not to an empty tomb, but to a life that still stirs imagination and conscience centuries later.
Leaving a religion is rarely as simple as rejecting a set of beliefs. For many, including myself, it is the slow dismantling of an entire interpretive framework—the worldview in which you learned to make sense of yourself, your purpose, and your place in history. Psychologists who study religious deconversion often note its parallels to bereavement. The loss is not only intellectual but existential: a severing from community, ritual, and the comforting order of a story in which your life had a divinely appointed arc.
In the early stages, I felt the familiar markers of grief—denial that I had truly changed, anger at the betrayals and hypocrisies I had witnessed, bargaining through half-measures of belief, and eventually a hollow kind of sadness. Acceptance came later, but it was not the acceptance of finality. Rather, it was a recognition that something of the old faith would remain in me—not as creed, but as cultural and emotional inheritance.
This is why encounters like the Head of Christ in Detroit, The Last Temptation of Christ, and the historical frameworks of Paul Ens and Bart Ehrman resonate so deeply. They offer me a way to engage with Jesus without returning to belief. The man I see in these portrayals is not enthroned in heaven, yet neither is he erased. He remains in the human register, walking the same roads we do, facing the same fears, and choosing—at great cost—what he believes to be right.
Kazantzakis captures this inner conflict with rare clarity:
“Every moment of Christ’s life was a conflict and a victory. He conquered death by struggling, by being in agony, and by persisting to the end.”
For someone who has left behind the supernatural scaffolding of faith, this Jesus is not diminished; he is more relatable. His courage is not the inevitability of an omnipotent being fulfilling prophecy, but the courage of a man who could have turned away—and didn’t.
In psychological terms, part of leaving faith is reassigning meaning to its symbols. The cross becomes not the instrument of divine atonement but the emblem of human endurance in the face of injustice. Communion is no longer the literal body and blood of Christ but a ritual reminder of the bonds forged in shared memory and commitment. And Jesus himself shifts from the role of savior to that of companion—an example, not an intercessor.
James Fowler, in his stages of faith development, describes a point where one moves from reliance on external authority to an internalized, reflective faith—or, for some, a secular equivalent. At this stage, figures like Jesus can be reinterpreted not as literal mediators of salvation but as archetypes of moral courage and compassion. The Detroit portrait, the human Jesus of The Last Temptation, and the historical reconstructions offered by Ens and Ehrman all fit this pattern.
I have not returned to the pews, nor do I expect to. But I have found a way to stand before the figure of Jesus—not as a subject kneeling before a king, but as a traveler pausing to acknowledge another who has walked this difficult road. In art, in literature, and in history, I can meet him on equal ground.
The theologian Frederick Buechner once wrote:
“Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.”
I no longer believe that hand belongs to God. But I have learned that there is still value in the reach—in the longing for something larger, more loving, more just. And if, along the way, I find the face from Detroit looking back at me, I will not turn away. Not because he is my savior, but because he is a reminder that humanity, in all its fragility and courage, is worth remembering.