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
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Of course what we totally lack is access to Jesus’ personal psychology. By what process does the son of a Galilean day laborer come to believe he has some special place in God’s coming kingdom?
I’ve been reading Nicklesburg’s well regarded commentary on the Book of Enoch for Hermeneia, and he discusses the possibility of an apocalyptic “Enochian” version of Judaism, seeing itself standing in opposition to the Temple establishment, centered in northern Galilee, around Mt Hermon. Now this text predates Jesus considerably but it is interesting to speculate on the possible survival in Galilee of an apocalyptic Judaism in Jesus’ day that might have influenced his thinking.
This falls to where the influences led Christians to think their odd thoughts on sexuality. Extremists among them will yell out that marriage is for procreation, and procreation is something good with biblical basis (go forth and multiply) and they’ll use that to claim homosexuality is wrong, but then they think that the act that leads to procreation is sinful. As far as I know, this is not a view within Judaism, so it must have come from elsewhere. In fact, it seems that Judaism does and had taught that nonprocreational sex was required whenever either the husband or wife wanted it, save the period after menstruation or birth. It doesn’t seem to be from mainstream Roman culture either. So where did it come from?
Short story: sex came to be seen as sinful (or a necessary evil) when Christians started emphasizing the importance of asceticism, the need to focus completely on spiritula things rather htan physical pleasure — starting already with the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians!
I also want to ask where the idea of abortion being a sin came from, before the early Christian texts. Where did they draw upon there? YHWH can be called an abortion god based upon Numbers 5:11-31 where he mandates abortions and then performs them through a curse. Jewish teachings are that first breath is the breath of life where the soul – a part of YHWH – enters the body and leaves upon death with the last breath. I listened to a Jewish mystic teaching of the importance of H appearing twice, the only Hebrew consonant which is only breath. Yet, this is absent in Christianity which thinks only Adam had received the breath of life. They even seem unconcerned with Exodus 21:22-4’s proper interpretation, given that if a pregnant woman is hit in such a way today that there is a near zero chance – a medical miracle necessary – that fetus survives. 3000 years ago, certainly it was a zero chance and the further harm applies to the woman who has a 10% chance of death in that situation today. That’s how Judaism interprets it for sure. So what preceding ideology made Christians ignore the Bible?
Within Judaism at the time it was debated whether abortion was murder or not (even though the Hebrew Bible certainly indicates not). The Christians came to emphasize it, though, because they wanted to stress their far superior morality to pagans, and they did so by pointing out that Pagans agreed that murder (of sentient human beings) was wrong; Christians agreed, but THEY did not practicie infanticide or even abortion, so they took life much more seriously than pagans.
I knew I heard the moral superiority thing somewhere but couldn’t place it and couldn’t find it searching online. I probably heard it from you saying it somewhere – too many podcasts for me to keep track. I guess I need to look a bit harder.
Bart, could you comment on the cultural/social context that superstition, magic and all manner of spiritual forces were part of the social features and mindsets inherent when Jesus lived? Seems to have been very strong, helped contemporaneous authors develop their stories and helped the stories gain acceptance; e.g. Mark 5:24-ff. “At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, Who touched my clothes?” Also, this feature is present in many non-canonical documents.
Yes, that’s right. It’s a very different mentality than we (most of us) have today. Instead of asking “are miracles possible?” people asked “which superhuman power did that miracle?” Only with the Enlightenment did that older view that there were other invisible powers in the universe come to be seriously challenged.
If Jesus’ brother James became a leader in the early church why is there no more information about his early life? You’d think James would have had to field a lot of those questions.
One reason would be that James didn’t write anything. And the only surviving author we have who knew James was Paul, who has very little interest in Jesus’ life, let alone his early life. We do, of course, have the Proto-Gospel of James, and that was one attempt to fill in some of the gaps (along with the Infancy Gospel of Thomas — another brother, Jude Didymus Thomas)
Off topic. You’ve suggested that Ignatius and Polycarp’s writings put a dating ceiling for gospels around 110-115 CE — [1]. But if the Hadrianic dating is used for Ignatius and the late Marcionite window dating is used for Polycarp’s writings then the ceiling is gone. C.J. Cornthwaite’s recent video claiming the 70 to 90 dates are a house of cards, [2], makes a compelling case for second century dating of the gospels. Perhaps Mark’s gospel is referring to other events like the Fiscus Judaicus Scandal, Domitian’s reign of terror, or Dominus et Deus erecting a statue of himself, when discussing disasters in the temple. It seems that the dating issue should be revisited. What do you think?
[1] https://ehrmanblog.org/why-date-the-gospels-after-70-ce/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYMgxhYSmiw
It’s possible, but I don’t find the evidence compelling.
One thing that I’ve noticed both in Christianity and in secular society is that people tend to think of all sex, and anything that can be understood under the heading of sex, to either be All wrong or All right. Sex is one of those words, like spirituality or intelligence. Intelligence can be good or bad, negative or positive. So can spirituality, and spirits can be either negative or positive, harmful or helpful.
Mary, and Joseph for that matter, could not have been good, pure, or sinless if they had ever had sex. Sex, any kind of sex, even in love and marriage, is considered sin. In the 1925 Scopes trial (the monkey trials), the leading biblical authority at the time, Matthew Harrison Brady, stated that sex was the original sin. It isn’t. The OS is said to be eating from the tree of good and bad/right and wrong.
I recently read that in the noncanonical Gospel of Philip, the marriage chamber is considered to be holy, special, and sacred.
Does the way we regard procreation and the procreative act affect the way we regard each other, ourselves, and all of humanity as well?
Yes, they probably are intimately connected.
There’s a verse in Ezekiel that says, “A child is not responsible for their parents’ sin, and a parent is not responsible for their child’s sin”. How does this compare to original sin being passed down to everyone?
There’s also a verse in one of the Pauline letters that states, “If one of the parents is a believer, then the children are born without original sin and are born ‘ clean ‘. ”
There are two threads running through the bible. One states we are created in the image of God, and everyone is good and a child of God. The other states that we are all sinful, so sinful that we deserve the death penalty and need a human sacrifice to redeem us.
How harmful is the bible when it tells children that they are so awful that they deserve the death penalty? This is before they are old enough to have done much of anything. If a child actually believes this about themselves and that this is the word of God, how well are they going to do and survive in this world?
What kind of people does this attitude towards humanity turn out?
Helen, I think the ascetic movement promoted what you cite. This developed when religious philosophers began to consider matters of ‘spirit’ more pure and godly than matters of ‘physical body’. A very flawed perspective yet it became popular among certain groups.
Certainly ancient middle-eastern culture included men having sex with spouses, concubines and prostitutes. I’ve tried to make sense of Jacob loving Rachel but despising Leah – yet he repeatedly had sex with her. Also, the fact that this is a story which reflected contemporaneous cultural norms, not actual history, means these norms were understood by the listener without further explanation.
That said, I do agree with you that a lot of Christians have a very flawed view of intimacy and sexual activity.
I keep wondering whether Jesus may have been regarded, at least by some people, as illegitimate.
Several things seem suggestive to me. Paul says nothing about the virgin birth, and neither does Mark. In Mark 6:3, Jesus is called “the son of Mary” rather than the son of Joseph, which seems unusual, especially since people in biblical and Jewish tradition were normally identified through their fathers. John 8:41 is also striking: “We were not born of sexual immorality.” It almost sounds as though there may be an implied insult directed at Jesus. At the same time, outside Matthew and Luke, Joseph can sometimes be referred to quite naturally as Jesus’ father.
None of these points proves illegitimacy by itself. But taken together, do you think they make it historically plausible that there was an early rumor or suspicion that Jesus had been conceived outside a socially accepted relationship, and that Matthew’s and Luke’s virgin-birth traditions may in part represent a theological response to that problem?
I have also read that some have even suggested that Mary may have been a prostitute or sex worker, although that strikes me as taking the speculation quite a bit too far.
Yes, it is sometimes (increasingly?) thought (not the majority view at all, but sometimes mentioned by various scholars) that Jesus was born out of wedlock. It would explain a lot, esp. that John passage, which does seem to suggest (as do probably the virgin birth stories themselves) that there were at least rumors about his conception and birth.
I’d say there is almost zero evidence that Mary was a sex worker. She lived in the small hamlet of Nazareth, population probalby around 400, and highly observant Jewish, based on archaeological finds. (As you might imagine, they didn’t exactly uncover a red-light district).
Romans 1:3 tells us that Jesus was a descendant of David. Could this environment (growing up believing he came from Davidic/royal ancestry while living in economic poverty) have influenced Jesus’s self-understanding and teaching? I wonder if that tension contributed to themes such as “the least will be the greatest,” “blessed are the poor,” and “woe to you who are rich”?
Also, do you think (given its strong Semitic characteristics/resonance with scripture) the Magnificat preserves some connection to Mary? Its themes strikingly anticipate Jesus’ later message: the proud are scattered, the powerful brought down, the lowly raised up, the hungry filled, and the rich sent away empty…
If Jesus’ family believed they carried royal lineage without royal power, then Mary’s declaration, “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly,” takes on a particularly personal resonance.
If the Magnificat substantially reflects Mary’s perspective, then I could easily imagine Jesus growing up hearing from his mother that the hierarchy by which the world is ordered is not necessarily the hierarchy by which God orders the world. Perhaps that environment helps illuminate his later teachings about the poor, the humble, the rich, and the Kingdom of God…
I wish we knew about Jesus’ views of his ancestry. If we include matrilinear descent as well as patrilinear, almost certainly every Jew in Israel was descended from David. And no I don’t think the Magnificat goes back to Mary: it is filled with ideas that are distinctive to Luke and his interest in how Jesus is to be understood (the emphasis on the poor, the humble, the outcast, etc.)
While most Jews in first century had ties to David, there’s a difference between “David’s in my tree” and belonging to royal Davidic lineage. Most Jews would also have ties to Aaron, still, Josephus appealed to his priestly lineage for status/hereditary claims. If Romans 1:3–4 preserves a pre-Pauline confession (perhaps originating in an Aramaic), then very early Christianity was already proclaiming Jesus as Davidic- making it plausible Jesus himself understood his messianic identity partly in terms of royal lineage (a view he couldve encountered through upbringing).
If Luke created Magnificat because it reflects his theology, why does it look so much like pre-Christian Jewish Scripture and piety (especially Hannah’s song/Psalms)? If Luke were retrojecting his mature Christian theology onto Mary, why does it lack explicitly Christian ideas (Jesus=Messiah, Gentile mission, repentance/forgiveness, etc.)? Instead, Mary speaks of Yahweh, Israel, Abrahamic covenant, mercy, Scripture.. Its conceptual world is thoroughly Jewish.
A more plausible model is Israel’s traditions → Mary → Jesus → Luke, with Luke emphasizing and arranging themes that were already rooted in Jesus+Scripture. The song’s intensely personal character also makes sense if it reflects Mary’s experience: God choosing a poor/insignificant woman and using her to fulfill covenant promises.
I believe that it’s in the gospel of Luke that Jesus is reported to have gone to his hometown and taught in the synagogue early in his ministry. A number of sources have indicated that Nazareth was such a backwater town that it didn’t even have a synagogue.
Which is a true statement?
Does having a synagogue indicate that there was at least one person in town who could read, because he would have been able to read from the Jewish scriptures?
How would attending synagogue on a weekly basis have affected Jesus’s upbringing and understanding of things?
Yes, archaeologists have dug up Nazareth. It was a small and poor place. (Lots of small villages didn’t have synagogues, so it wasn’t unusual that way)
Whenever I think about the life of Jesus, my mind goes to the novel Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore. Both funny and moving, it includes multiple traditions about Jesus, although many times they are treated with a twist. Have you read it?
My students told me for years I should!
“After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.”
Could the author of Luke have simply made up the story about a 12-year-old conversing with religious teachers out of the blue? Maybe he did, but I wonder if the story, although perhaps not historically accurate in itself, might have been inspired by some known activities of Jesus in his early life. Given his boldness and apparent extensive knowledge of Scripture, I can visualize him as a youth, in any free time he had, hanging around pestering and questioning local religious leaders about Scripture, perhaps even learning to read in the process. Any thoughts?
I’d say either he made it up or he heard it as a story someone else made up. I don’t think there’s any way it’s historical.
There is a book in circulation that claims that Jesus ran away from home as a youth and joined a caravan that went to India, where a number of Jewish families had gone to escape the Roman oppression. They adopted him and educated him Jewish religious beliefs and reading both scripture and the books that were available in their large Jewish settlement. He did various tasks over the years to earn his keep.
Evidentially, this community had also developed the conviction that God would soon come to kill all the Romans, and when that happened, they would all return to live in Israel. Also, Jesus was a wise person, and read quite a bit. When he was in his 30s Jesus decided that God would come very soon to eliminate the Romans, that he was meant to be the future ruler of the restored Kingdom of Israel, so he decided to return, get a following, and be ready.
There is no poof that this happened, but it does answer the question of how Jesus was able to draft and memorize all the sermons he preached.
Bill Steigelmann
If Jesus was the first-child born in the family, then he would be
If you’re interested in finding out more about modern forgeries of Gospels like this, check out ch, 8 of my book Forged where I talk about some of them.
Dr. Ehrman,
The book I wrote about was about the time when Jesus was a teenager until he was in his 30s and returned to Palestine to begin his ministry there. It has nothing to do with a forgeries of the gospels. As you wrote in your August 30th Blog above, there is nothing in the Bible or any other ancient document that addresses what he was doing during this period. I was was talking about a book that speculates that Jesus lived in India during this period. In fact, I believe the book’s title is “Jesus Once Lived in India.” The book shows that there is a close similarity of some of the known teachings of Jesus that we find in the Bible with statements that Buddha taught 500 years before Jesus lived.
It seems likely to me that Jesus left the turmoil of living in a small house that had 4 or more young siblings running around, with stressed parents, as soon as he was able. There is nothing in the Bible that says he showed any affection for his mother when he was an adult, or spent any time with her.
Bill Steigelmann