Is Being a Contemporary an Advantage?

Kierkegaard writes quite a bit about the contemporaries of Jesus, or those who lived at the same time as Jesus in his human form. During Kierkegaard’s time, many people believed that they had been somewhat gypped by the fact that they could not live alongside Jesus. In their minds, those who lived with Jesus had the advantage of seeing him, and thus faith was not as hard. Kierkegaard refuted this by saying that those who were contemporary with Jesus had to see the raw humanity, which would actually make it more difficult. After all, Jesus looked like a normal person, and was actually probably not that attractive. Thus, everyone who saw Him would have to be able to accept that God, the ultimate Being, looked just like they did. This is extremely hard to do. What they really saw was not God, but just another human; it was a purely historical event.

However, Kierkegaard does point out that the contemporaries did have one slight advantage, to help alleviate the burden of seeing a human claiming to be God. The one advantage is that they did not have to worry about fleshing out rumors surrounding the events. They could know exactly what happened, but only the physical events. They still had to have the same faith to realize that all the events taking place were at the hands of God.