I have been talking about Jesus' life before he was baptized, the so-called "Lost Years."  But how many years was that?  How old was he when he met up with John the Baptist?  And beyond that, how long did his ministry last?  How old was he  when he died? The standard line is that Jesus started his ministry when he was thirty and was executed three years later when he was thirty-three.  But none of the Gospels says all that.  So why is it the common view? It'll take a bit to explain how it's calculated (and a bit more to explain why it's highly uncertain). Only one of the Gospels says about how old he was when Jesus began his ministry.  Luke says that he was “about thirty” years old when he John baptized him (Luke 3:23). This number is not confirmed by any other source and we really don’t know if Luke had special information about this or if he was just guessing. The other three canonical Gospels say nothing explicit at [...]

I continue here with events from Jesus’ life before he started his public ministry that I think we can treat as historical.  (If you need some background on how I’m claiming this information is historical, see the previous post).   His Parents In all our sources Jesus’ parents are assumed to be Jewish.  They, as we’ve seen, came from Nazareth, a small rural village in Galilee, the northern part of what we today think of as Israel.  They are consistently named Joseph and Mary in our sources (for example, independently, Matt. 1:16-18; Mark 6:3; Luke 2:5, 16; 3:23; John 1:45; even rabbinic sources call his mother “Miriam”). In none of our traditions are there stories about Joseph after Jesus begins his public ministry.  It is usually assumed that he had died by then.  The idea that he was already an old man when he became betrothed to Mary is not found until the second century, when it is sometimes used to explain why they never had sex.  But it has absolutely no basis [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the social/cultural/economic/historical context of Jesus lately, and reading a good bit on what we know about Galilee from the time.  I’ll be saying more about all that anon, but I thought this might be a good chance to cover some of the basics on the blog – what do we know about Jesus from the time he was born to the time he was baptized as an adult, which is how he begins his ministry in the Gospels. For stories of his life before that, of course, all we have are Matthew and Luke.  I won’t explain here why I don’t think their accounts of his genealogy and birth can be historical.  I’ve posted on that a good deal before and you can find them on the blog by doing a word search for “virgin,” “Bethlehem,” “census,”  and so on. But both Gospels also have short stories about him as a boy.  Matthew describes the circumstances of his “descent to Egypt” with his family to escape the [...]

I have been arguing that that are many political and social issues that many of us care deeply about that, surprisingly, Jesus apparently did not.  Another passage that illustrates Jesus relative indifference to governmental policies and economic systems is his discussion with Simon Peter about paying the “temple tax,” a story found only Matthew (17:24-27). They have come to the town of Capernaum and some collectors of the “two drachma” temple tax ask Peter if his teacher pays the tax or not. Peter replies that he does, but when he goes back home, Jesus talks to him about it, asking whether kings tax their own children or only other people.  Peter naturally replies that children of the king don’t pay taxes, only others. Jesus agrees:  the ruler’s “children” are exempt from taxes – implication being that God’s children should not have to pay for the running of God’s house any more than a king’s children pay for the running of his palace. Jesus indicates that, even so, they should “not give offense” and [...]