Jesus: A Biography From a Believer. (3 page)

Some few people could see into this future, as is recorded in Luke (1 : 13-23, 59-65). He writes that Elizabeth’s husband, Zacharias, was skeptical when the angel Gabriel told him that his elderly wife was pregnant with the future John the Baptist, and as punishment was struck dumb. But when the child was born and taken to be circumcised, Elizabeth refused to name him after his father and insisted he be called John. Her neighbors and cousins protested: “There is none of thy kindred that is called by this name. And they made signs to his father, how he would have him called.” To their astonishment, Zacharias “asked for a writing table, and wrote: saying, His name is John. And they marvelled all.” More remarkable still, “his mouth was opened immediately, and his tongue loosed, and he spake, and praised God.” But, as with so many incidents in the story of Jesus, this happy tale is overshadowed by the threatening world surrounding it. News of the remarkable birth must have spread and reached Herod’s ever-suspicious ears. An ancient tradition, published by the early fathers, such as Origen, says Herod had Zacharias slaughtered “between the temple and the altar.” So he is venerated as an early martyr.

There was another old priest who did duty at the Temple called Simeon. Luke says he was “just and devout,” firmly believing in the coming Messiah. Indeed, he had had a revelation “that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord’s Christ” (2 : 25-26). When Mary and Joseph came to the Temple for Mary’s ritual purification after giving birth and for Jesus’s circumcision—both according to Judaic law—the old man was present and took the child into his arms, blessed God in thanks, and said, using poetic words which have echoed down the generations (2:29-32):

But, continues Luke (2 : 34-40), turning to Mary, the old man also said, on the somber note which alternates with the joyous tone of those early episodes in Jesus’s life, “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; . . . ([and] a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” He was joined by an old woman called Anna, described by Luke as a “prophetess” and “a widow of about fourscore and four years,” who “served God with fastings and prayers night and day.” She, too, recognized the child as the Redeemer. The forecasts and warnings of Anna and Simeon joined the other words which Mary treasured in her heart. She did not fail to note that, expanding the prophecies, her child would be “a light of the Gentiles”—indeed the entire human race—and not just Jews, and that his sacrifices would pierce her like a sword. As “the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom,” she must have spent many anxious hours pondering his destiny and the atrocious pain, as well as joy, it would bring her.

She told Luke of one striking episode (2 : 42-51) which confirmed her hopes for him but puzzled her understanding. She, Joseph, and the child formed a close trio, well termed “the Holy Family” in Christian devotion. There was great piety in their home at Nazareth, much praying, and the Jewish feasts and practices were meticulously observed. Every year at the feast of Passover, they went up to Jerusalem to make a sacrifice in the Temple. This testifies to Joseph’s success in his trade, and the comparative affluence in which they lived, for the long and expensive journey meant that Joseph was away from his work for many weeks. In this annual pilgrimage they had many “kinsfolk and acquaintance.” When Jesus was twelve, they thought him old enough to wander about by himself, exploring. The Temple, rebuilt by Herod on a gigantic scale, was a vast labyrinth of courts, rooms, and corridors, and Jerusalem itself a major city of palaces and forts, and a warren of houses. When the time came to leave, “Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem; and Joseph and his mother knew not of it.” They assumed he was with their friends in the convoy of mules and donkeys and had gone “a day’s journey” before, suddenly frightened, they realized he had been left behind in the holy and wicked city.

Luke records that after three days of frantic searching “they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.” Here speaks an adoring mother’s pride, no doubt, but the next exchange she remembers is rather different and unexpected. She rebuked Jesus for his thoughtlessness: “Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.” He replied, “[W]ist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” Luke adds: “[T]hey understood not the saying which he spake unto them.” It is striking that these first recorded words of Jesus are of a piece with his entire life and mission: he must be about God’s business. And though Mary, by courtesy, refers to Joseph as his father, Jesus already knows and believes his Father is God, and says so, without any attempt at concealment.

Mary, Luke adds, “kept all these sayings in her heart.” But it is at this point that the stories she related of Jesus’s conception, birth, and childhood cease abruptly. Jesus went back to Nazareth with Mary and Joseph, “and was subject unto them.” Luke then skips the next eighteen years of Jesus’s life and moves to his baptism by St. John. The other evangelists are likewise silent. It is a somber and unwelcome fact that for more than half of Jesus’s life we know absolutely nothing about what he did or where he went or how he lived.

We can be sure he was well instructed. Virtually all clever Jewish children were, if circumstances permitted, and Jesus came from a comfortable home. We know he could read, for his deep and, still more, his skeptical knowledge of the scriptures is evidence of constant study of the texts from an early age. By age twelve he was perfectly capable of taking part in a learned discussion of their meaning. We know he could write, too, though there is only one recorded instance of his doing so. This was the occasion when he stopped the puritanical but hypocritical Jews from stoning to death a woman taken in adultery by writing their own sins in the dust. The fact that he performed this difficult feat, and that his writing was instantly read and understood, argues that he had an unusually clear and readable hand, almost the hand of a professional scribe, one might think. But no writing by Jesus has survived. Nor do we know what he read, apart from the scriptures.

What we do know, from the records of his sayings, is that he was a civilized, cultured, educated man who chose his words with great care and precision, with delicacy, accuracy, and tact—all indications of wide reading in secular as well as religious literature. My belief is that he was familiar with Latin and Greek, as well as his native Aramaic and the Hebrew he spoke and read as an educated observant Jew. His habitual poetic turn of phrase, though natural to him (as to his mother), was also, I suspect, acquired by steady reading of poetry, much of which he had learned by heart. This poetry, I think, included not just Hebrew texts like the book of Job, which is full of poetry, and the religious songs we call the Psalms, but the treasury of Greek poets that circulated in the empire by this time. I believe Jesus could have recited passages from Homer and Euripides, possibly Virgil also. But this is mere deductive supposition.

We must assume that Jesus was self-taught in many respects. His words and concepts betray absolutely no sign of academic deformation or the impress of a system. He repudiated such things, just as he hated legalism in moral teaching. His was an imagination unsullied by the classroom or lecture hall. Being an autodidact, he had never attended such places, and so was dismissed by his critics as uneducated. John reports that the Temple Jews, amazed at his teaching there, sneered, “How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?” (7:15). We can only guess where the young Jesus found his books to study. But written materials of all kinds were never rare in the Jewish world, even in a country town like Nazareth.

What is less conjectural is that Jesus was a man of wide knowledge, especially of trade and agriculture. This is made clear by his confident and expert references to those practical matters in his sayings and parables. Jesus had a huge range, one reason why so many loved to listen to him, often picking up approvingly a reference to their own calling. But I suspect his knowledge reflected actual experience. The death of Joseph, which occurred during his missing years, led to the breakup of the Nazareth household; Mary went to live with one or another of her numerous family or clan, which included a sister and grown-up children, sometimes referred to as Jesus’s brothers, or brethren.

At this point it would have been natural for Jesus, who had evidently chosen not to carry on Joseph’s workshop as a carpenter, to leave home and seek experience in a wider world, so as to carry on, in due course, his “Father’s business” more efficiently. There is no means of knowing what he did. One suggestion is that he became an Essene. But his teaching and behavior are so foreign to what we know of this sect from the Dead Sea Scrolls that it can be ruled out. Nor is it likely he belonged to any other religious sect, of which there were many. Zealotry of any kind was foreign to him. He bore none of the psychological stigmata of the professional cleric, monk, or anchorite, being moderate, disliking religiosity and strict observance, moving easily and enjoyably with men and women of all degrees and temperaments, and shunning solitude, except for prayer. He was a convivial and collegiate spirit, always seeking companions and new friends.

All this argues wide experience of different callings. I think Jesus may have deliberately moved from one job to another, to acquire knowledge not just of work but of diverse men and women. That is one reason he delayed beginning his mission until he was thirty. He must certainly have been involved in agriculture, about which he knew much. I believe he was for some time a shepherd. Sheep and their care are so pervasive in his sayings, and the nature of the Good Shepherd so central to his teaching, that I think this calling had a special place not only in his experience but in his affection. Those rough men who crowded round his crib at birth made him, as it were, an honorary shepherd for life. His experience as a shepherd would also help to explain his love of high places for important moments in his life, and his habit of punctuating his normal conviviality with periods of solitude for prayer.

This, then, is what we know of Jesus’s birth and childhood, and what we can reasonably guess about his life from twelve to thirty. At that point he began his ministry and entered the full glare of evangelical record.

T
HE LAND IN WHICH Jesus began his ministry was prosperous but unsettled and far from tranquil, seething with rumors of miraculous events to come, liable to sudden gatherings of popular masses, tinder-dry and explosive, difficult to govern. Both its Roman rulers and the puppet kings and high priests to whom they delegated some power put keeping the peace above any other public object. They were particularly wary of spiritual rabble-rousers in the Jewish tradition of prophets. There were probably over three million Jews, over a million in Galilee alone, and about 10 percent of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire were affected by Jewish teaching in some way. Judaic monotheism, with its doctrinal certainties and detailed moral teaching, was popular among serious, civilized people everywhere. The trouble with Judaism was that it was very ancient, over a thousand years old, and its law, though well adapted perhaps to the needs of a primitive desert people, was often meaningless to a sophisticated, increasingly urban, and commercial community in the first century AD—and a huge and daily burden. It had never been fundamentally reformed and was administered and enforced by priests and scribes who constituted closed elites, whose jobs were often hereditary, and who resisted change with fanaticism. They were also quite capable of placing themselves in cynical alliance with the Roman authorities to prevent reformers from arousing the multitudes.

Judaism in the time of Jesus, then, was ripe for reformation like Christendom in the early sixteenth century. The question was: should it take violent and secular form to restore the Jewish kingdom as it had existed under David and the Maccabees? That is what some of the fundamentalist Jewish sects, such as the Essenes and the Zealots, advocated. They were eventually to get the upper hand in Jewish opinion a generation after Jesus’s death, leading to the Great Revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem. The alternative was a spiritual revolution, the replacement of the unreformed law of Moses by a New Testament based on love and neighborliness, which could be embraced by all classes and all peoples.

That was the idea toward which Jesus’s cousin John, son of Elizabeth, was moving. He had seen a vision in youth, and he knew that he had a special task to perform. To prepare himself he had lived for many years in the desert and adapted to it. He “was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey” (Mk 1: 6). All four evangelists knew a lot about John, recognized his importance in the life of Jesus, and gave space to his mission accordingly. It is likely they had a common source briefed either by John himself or by one of his closest disciples (Mk 1:2-9ff.; Mt 3:1-15; Lk 3:2-22; Jn 1: 6-34). John was essentially a humble man. He knew he was not the Christ, who the prophets foretold would come as a savior and a redeemer. He repeated many times the words of Isaiah: “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord.” He knew that the Christ was coming: “He it is,” he said, “who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose.”