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 wrath of Herod, which evidently happens a couple of years after his birth, since the wisemen have been following a star for a year or two in order to find him (Matthew 2:1-23).  And Luke famously recounts the “Home Alone” episode of Jesus as a a twelve-year old in the temple, inadvertently left behind in Jerusalem for three days after his parents headed back home to Nazareth (Luke 2:41-52).  I don’t take any of these accounts to be historical either.

But there are other things we can say almost certainly are historical.  How do we decide?  How can we determine the difference between the legends and the history?

As you know, historical scholars apply standard criteria to deal with ancient sources to determine what probably happened and what appears to be either exaggeration or invention.  I won’t go into any length here, but just look these up in a word search and you’ll see fuller explanations for them in earlier posts, where I both describe them and justify them.  Here I’ll simply say these are the same criteria any historian uses in trying to separate fact from fiction in accounts of past events or people, whether trying to reconstruct the life and actions of George Washington, Marco Polo, Socrates, or most anyone else.  New Testament scholars tend to give them rather definitive names (which in the end cause about as many problems as they solve):

  • Independent attestation (sometimes called multiple attestation): if there are a number of sources that relate the same event independently of each other, that makes it more likely historical than if only one source gives it. The more the merrier.
  • Dissimilarity: if there is a story that runs contrary to the perspective/beliefs/assumptions/views of the persons telling it, then they probably didn’t make it up and so it’s more likely something that actually happened.
  • Historical Credibility: if a source claims something that simply couldn’t have happened (e.g., that Thomas Jefferson got very upset with his microwave) then … it didn’t happen.

Scholars also, of course, consider the dates of the sources, what is known about their authors, the general reliability of claims when they can absolutely be checked against established historical data, the plausibility of what is said (if Alexander the Great is said to have force-marched his army 300 miles in two days, one would be justifiably dubious), etc.

So with that said, what can we say with relatively high levels of probability about Jesus’ life before he was baptized?

Here is what I say about it all in my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford University Press, 1999).  Most of these are not much debated among Gospel scholars.  I have edited the discussion a bit for blog purposes.

This will take two posts; this one has just two of the opening points that seem pretty obvious but nonetheless need to be noted (even obvious facts are important!)

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Raised in Nazareth

Jesus is said to have come from Nazareth in all four Gospels (Matt. 4:13; Mark 1:9; Luke 4:16; John 1:45), and is sometimes actually called “Jesus of Nazareth” in other ancient sources (for example, Acts 3:6).   That is to say, the tradition passes the criterion of independent attestation with flying colors.  Moreover, Matthew and Luke had to go out of their way to explain how it was that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, since everyone knew he came from Nazareth [I explain that earlier in my book].  To this extent, the tradition passes the criterion of dissimilarity (that is, neither Matthew nor Luke was comfortable with it).

 

Even more significantly, with respect to dissimilarity, it is difficult to imagine why Christians would have wanted to make it up. Nazareth was a little, unknown, and completely insignificant village.  Modern archaeologists estimate its size at around 1500-2000 persons in Jesus’ day.  It’s not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, or even in the writings of Josephus, who was in charge of the Jewish military operations in Galilee and had a lot to say about the region in his many volumes of writings.

What would be gained by claiming that Jesus came from a small one-horse town like Nazareth (cf. John 1:45)?  If you wanted to speak about the powerful messiah of Israel, surely you’d have him come from the center of power, Jerusalem, or possibly Bethlehem.  There is little doubt that the tradition of Jesus coming from Nazareth is so firmly entrenched in the tradition precisely because it’s historically accurate.  Jesus grew up in an out-of-the way rural village.

 

Born and Raised a Jew

There’s probably no reason to belabor the point that all of our sources portray Jesus as Jewish – he came from a Jewish home, he was circumcised as a Jew, he worshiped the Jewish God, he kept Jewish customs, followed the Jewish law, interpreted the Jewish Scriptures, etc.  Despite some wild claims by modern ideologues, for example, some Nazis who would have preferred that Jesus was a blond, blue-eyed Aryan (seriously: some of the greatest NT scholars in the world in the 1930s were devoted Nazis), the tradition of Jesus’ Jewish origin and upbringing is firmly entrenched in all of our traditions at every level.