Boy Jesus

Please note that due to software, not everything recorded in this transcript will be accurate.

 

Media: ‘Ben-Hur’ clip

John Dickson – Studio:

That was Stephen Boyd and Charlton Heston in the 1959 Hollywood epic Ben-Hur. It’s the ultimate blockbuster. The movie cost USD 15 million to make (a fortune in 1959) and required over 300 sets, 2500 horses, 250 camels, tens of thousands of extras, and ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND costumes! (It’s also the only Hollywood film included in the Vatican’s list of approved ‘religious’ movies!) There’s a reason we sometimes call a significant undertaking “bigger than Ben-Hur!” In the clip, Boyd’s character is Messala, and he’s returned to the city of his childhood – Jerusalem, the capital of Judea. 

The year is AD 26.

Having been shipped off to Rome as a little boy, Messala is now a Roman Tribune, returning to Jerusalem in command of the Antonia Fortress. Messala’s best friend is Prince Judah Ben-Hur ( Heston’s character) – and Messala expects his mate to help him quash any hint of dissent. Spoiler: Judah refuses, the two fall out, and the consequences play out over the next four hours. It’s a brilliant film – it won 11 Oscars, which is still the equal most of all time, alongside Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Ben-Hur is grand, boasts an unforgettable chariot race, and has some nice Jesus cameos – but what’s perhaps overlooked is how well it captures the sense of tension in first-century Judea. It was an extremely unstable region. In the centuries before Jesus’ birth, Judea had been ruled by the Greeks, then the Ptolemies (also Greeks, but from Egypt), and then the Seleucid Empire (also Greeks, but up north and east, what we call Lebanon/Syria and beyond). In 167 BC, the Seleucids were overthrown by the Maccabees – a group of Jewish rebels led by Judas Maccabeus (Hannukah commemorates this ‘Maccabean Revolt’). A mere century later, though, Judea was again under the rule of a foreign power: Rome. Judea was a hugely strategic military and economic region for the Romans. It also acted as a buffer zone against their eastern enemies. But none of that mattered to the locals. Living under occupation – and a repressive puppet ruler – meant that by the time Jesus was born, Judea was a tinderbox waiting to explode. This episode we’re diving into what was happening in the world as Jesus grew from boy to man. And we’re looking at the degree to which we can see the Gospels (now in the NT) as good historical sources, not just for the figure of Jesus but for geo-politics and culture more generally at this time. We’re also going to wonder out loud how Jesus’ upbringing in this tense part of the ancient world might have affected his outlook and teaching. Messala and Ben-Hur may have been epic fictional characters, but they lived in a very real, turbulent place and time.  

I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions  

John Dickson:
Well, Joan, thank you so much for joining us. I want to ask you about the whole idea of backgrounds because your book is focused on the backgrounds of Jesus. Uh, some might ask why worry about the backgrounds when the foreground is so clear?

Joan Taylor:
Thank you for having me here to talk about these things. Yes, context, background. Um, my work as a historian is often about putting things in the context of particular times a long time ago. 

John Dickson – Studio:

That’s Professor Joan Taylor, who I think is the first Kiwi we’ve had on Undeceptions! I’m not 100% sure. Sorry, New Zealand. We’ll try to do better. Joan is Professor Emerita of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism at King’s College, London, and she’s also an Honorary Professor at Australian Catholic University. Her latest book is Boy Jesus: Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times. It’s a seriously impressive work that makes some compelling arguments about the early life of Jesus.

Joan Taylor:
And yes, the plain meaning of the text is there in terms of the, the, what the Bible says, but it implies a whole world and it implies a whole, um, way of seeing. It implies characters, it implies cultures and land. And I think unless you put the stories in context, you are not really understanding them fully. So like stories we hear today, we know exactly where they belong in terms of our world. And these stories were written for readers originally who just knew so much that we don’t. So in order to really understand stories, um, you have to look at this background. You have to look at history, ancient history.

John Dickson:
Okay, so let me ask you then, what are the key backgrounds, um, you know, the intersecting backgrounds? I, I assume to help us get our head around the man from Nazareth.

Joan Taylor:
Well one of the people I really do focus on since you mentioned Herod’s, is Herod the King when he pops up in the gospel of Matthew I concentrate a lot on the gospel of Matthew in the book. Um, it’s just. Herod the king. You, you know who he is. Uh, Matthew also just assumes readers know that Herod is the king and actually that they know that Herod is a problem. Herod is a, we know Herod is a problem ’cause we know the stories in the gospel of Matthew. Um, so Herod as part of culture, uh, world culture, Christian world culture, and the, you know, Herod is, is not a very nice, uh, king, but the, the way he pops up in the gospel of Matthew, it, it is assumed, you know that, and he’s going to do something terrible. He’s the, the pantomime baddy , you know, he, he comes on stage and you expect everyone to go, Ooh, boo boo. He’s, he is, he’s coming on stage and, um. But we don’t really know that much. Nothing very much is said about Herod in the Gospels.

John Dickson – Studio:

We read about five different Herods in the Gospels and the book of Acts: Herod the Great, his sons Herod Archelaus and Herod Antipas, and his grandson and great-grandson Herod Agrippa I and Herod Agrippa II. It can all get very confusing. I often make the point in NT history classes that you have to know some history to read the New Testament, if for no other reason than Luke (especially) expects you to know all the different Herods! He often just calls them ‘Herod’, not because he’s confused, but because he expects you to keep up with who’s who, when and where! Anyway, it all goes back to the first Herod – Herod the Great, who ruled as a Roman client king over Judea from 37 – 4 BC.  Check out our easter episode, ‘Jesus Trials’, for more on all that stuff! Despite being a “King of the Jews”, Herod was perceived as only Jew-ish. His father was from Idumea, south of Judea, and converted to Judaism late in his life and his mum was Arabian. Herod was a big fan of Rome – spent a lot of time there and became friends with all the cool cats – and he also liked Roman taxes, and he was pretty unpopular. But he certainly left his mark. He launched wonderful infrastructure projects, including fantastic renovations of the Temple, and building some vast fortresses, including the Antonia Fortress, as well as the famous Masada complex. But he was also uber paranoid; famously, he had his second wife, Mariamne, and their two sons, Alexander and Aristobulous, executed out of fear of his powerful in-laws, the Hasmoneans.

(By the way, he also had Mariamne’s brother, mother, and grandfather killed, just for good measure).

Just five days before his death, he also had his son Antipater executed, leading the then Emperor Augustus to famously quip that “It is better to be Herod’s pig than son”- though the source for that Augustan quip is pretty late. Herod also killed loads of ordinary citizens if they showed a hint of resistance against him. And he left final instructions to kill some Jewish nobles upon his departure so that, even if Judaea didn’t mourn his death, they would weep on the day of his death. What a guy. The first Gospel readers would have been very familiar with the character of Herod.

Joan Taylor:
He was known in the Greek Roman world as being mercilessly cruel and something of a tyrant. He killed three of his own sons because he was so paranoid about their threat to his rule. He changed his will a few times in terms of succession, but he also targeted anyone in his kingdom that was in any way, uh, a problem to him. Even when he, he started off when he, he first became king in 37 when, when he was actually able to take over rule of, of Judea in 37 BCE, he insisted on an oath of loyalty from his subjects and, um, he, he couldn’t stand any opposition, so he just rooted out opposition when wherever he saw it. And it seems like when he thought about the legacy of the Great King David and what people expected in terms of that legacy and expecting a messiah, an anointed king from the line of David. He was particularly paranoid.

John Dickson:
Did Herod, um, represent a peculiar kind of Jewish rule, or was he really Roman rule extended into Judea or both?

Joan Taylor:
Yeah, good question. Absolutely not Jewish rule. So people think of him as King of the Judeans, king of the Jews. Um. But actually he was a Roman client, king. His father was an Idumean convert to Judaism. Idumea was … the Edumites, they were another nation. And their area actually that had expanded to the south, um, of traditional Judea had been conquered by the Judeans and people had converted to Jewish religion. So that was Herod’s father and his, his mother was an Arab. So ethnically, he wasn’t from any line of Judah. He wouldn’t have the, the tribal affiliation of, of Judah. But the Romans really liked his father. They really liked him and they put a lot of trust in him. And whoever the Romans liked, they could put in charge of one of their imperial domains. And Judea was under the authority of Augustus Caesar in Rome. It was part of the Roman Empire. And only Augustus had the right to appoint kings in the Roman Empire. So Herod was more of a Roman, uh, even though he was king of the Judeans, king of the Jews. He was a Roman client King.

John Dickson:
Did, he feign a kind of Jewish outlook to the people?

Joan Taylor:
In some ways he did and that he did a fantastic amount of building of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and he’s known for his incredible building of the Jewish temple and, and beautifying the temple. Expanding the temple was considered to be a good thing in terms of Jewish religion. However, he also built a number of imperial cult temples for the veneration of Augustus Caesar as a God, you know.

John Dickson:
On the coast, on the coast of Israel, right at Caesarea.

Joan Taylor:
Yes. Caesarea.

John Dickson:
A great big Augustus welcoming everyone in.

Joan Taylor:
Yes, exactly. So that’s what Josephus says. And um, so he’s, he’s plays it both in various different ways. He’s very pragmatic. He’s trying to stay in with Augustus, his great friend and high places in Rome, and also trying to make sure that things run smoothly in Jerusalem and, and there’s no trouble.

John Dickson:
Okay. So let’s zero in on the people that he, that he rules, and obviously the one family that is the focus of your book. Um, you emphasize Jesus and Mary and Joseph as Jews or Judeans. Tell us what you mean by that, because it’s multifaceted and I’d, I’d love my listeners to get a sense of how you articulate that.

Joan Taylor:
Yeah, so Jesus is known as a Jew. Um, there’s been much writing about Jesus and his Jewishness over the last, um, few decades, but I wanted to hone in on this Greek word Ioudaios um, which is often translated as Jew. Um, it actually is, uh, as you say, multidimensional and it includes. It includes, of course, the religious dimension of being Jewish, um, but it also includes being someone who lives in a particular land, Judea. And so Jesus is a judean and living in Judea.Judea had, as I said before, expanded out in, um, the century before Jesus birth, um, under some Judean Priest Kings, the Hasmonean Dynasty, and they had expanded from traditional Judea, which was around Jerusalem, including Bethlehem, that’s traditional Judea. And they had expanded into Edumea in the South and then expanded into Galilee, which was a Syro-Phoenician stronghold, in the century before Jesus. 

John Dickson – Studio:

This is a really complicated part of history that can get very confusing very quickly. If you want to hear more about some of the groups that Joan’s talking about, I’d strongly recommend checking out episode 54, ‘Between Testaments’, and episode 117, ‘Jewish Jesus’ – both with podcast fave George Athas. Back to Joan.

Joan Taylor:
And then there’d been like in any kind of expansion and claiming of territory. Immigration. So traditional Judeans had moved into Galilee, moved into Iduema and and so on. So I, I find that quite interesting in that Jesus is not simply a traditional Judean in terms of being born in Bethlehem, but his family are immigrant Judeans and that they go to this conquered territory of Galilee and become Judeans in Galilee and that that’s part of wider Judea. So he’s got this, this kind of double dimension. And I also bring out the idea that he’s also of the tribe of Judah. And you know, coming from New Zealand, I know how important, uh, tribal identity is for Maori, and it is in very many parts of the world, in indigenous cultures and traditional cultures, the idea that you belong to a particular tribe is a huge part of your identity. So I wanted to bring that out too. And it’s there in terms of the ancestry of Jesus at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, that there is a real sense of, I am, you know, this family is actually a Judaite family. We have this tribal identity from, from Juda.

Media – The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

John Dickson – Studio:

That, of course, was a clip from the 11-time Oscar-winning The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. In that scene, Mithrandir – AKA Gandalf – rebukes Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, for refusing to acknowledge the returning, true King of Gondor – Aragorn. Like the people of Gondor, some in first century Judea still held out hope that God’s promised King – a Messiah of the line of David – would one day appear and restore Israel to its former glory. This had first been prophecised nearly a thousand years before Jesus, in the book of 2 Samuel. It’s why both Luke and Matthew kick off their Gospels with genealogies for Jesus; his Davidic descent was a crucial piece of the puzzle of Jesus’ identity as Messiah. But, weirdly, loads of New Testament scholars are sceptical of Jesus’ Davidic credentials. It’s partly because Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies don’t match up. They both have Jesus descending from David, but they diverge at multiple points. This has led scholars to conclude that the genealogies were inventions to “get” Jesus into the line of David. Joan thinks that’s not great historical analysis!

John Dickson:
I wanna zero in on that because, um, unlike many, um, historically oriented scholars, uh, you, you take very seriously that this was a family descended not just from Judah, but from King David. Um, and, and you do it with. Measured historical craft. So, um, I, I would love to hear what you make of that family memory that we are from the line of David.

Joan Taylor:
Right. Yeah. So it’s absolutely what is stated in the genealogies of Jesus, both in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. In the gospel of Matthew, it said 13 times that he is son of David. He’s descended from, from David, the gospel of Matthew’s very big on it. But before the gospels have written, even with the letters of Paul,  it’s just a matter of fact that Jesus is, is descended from David in the beginning of the book, uh, of, of Paul’s letter to the Romans, he says he’s seed of David and Paul is writing that letter at a time that, uh, James is in charge of the church in Jerusalem. And James is Jesus’ brother.

John Dickson: So we’re talking mid-fifties, right?

Joan Taylor:
Exactly, so we’re, this is very, very early on in terms of our historical evidence. We should look at the letters of Paul for Jesus really before anything, because it’s the earliest evidence and Paul is writing about the historical Jesus as just things people just generally know. He, he doesn’t need to argue anything. It’s just part of the furniture in terms of knowledge and so. He’s not making anything of it in terms of his identification of, of Jesus as Christ. For Paul, Christ is very much this mystical figure as he, he’s much more interested in the divine aspect of of Jesus than he is really in the physical aspect of Jesus, the experience of Jesus counts for him a lot. So when Paul does talk about something that is about Jesus as a body, as a physical being, um, this, this is huge. So to just say that, okay, people made it up because it was convenient ….

John Dickson:
Made it up as a kind of crass apologetics, right? ‘Oh, you know, uh, Jesus had to be Messiah, so, um, let’s make him, uh, descendant of David’. That’s the normal line, right?

Joan Taylor:
That, well, that is the skeptical line among my colleagues who are in historical Jesus studies, and as a historian, you’re taught to be super skeptical about evidence and test it and and so on, but sometimes I feel people just test it too hard and are too – too skeptical, you know, you think, ‘what do you actually need not to be skeptical in this particular case?’. And actually there were different Messiahs around in Second Temple Judaism in terms of expectations. So even though there was the idea of, uh, a great king of the line of David that would rule over Israel and liberate Israel from all the, the, the oppressors. And Ezekiel announces that there is this gonna be great prince of that, of David’s line …. the Dead Sea Scrolls, you’ve got alternative Messiahs. You’ve got a priestly Messiah in the, in another body of literature known as Enochic Literature from this figure called Enoch writing this idea that Enoch has revelations about end times and, and the figure of the heavenly son of man, son of humanity from Daniel seven – that is so much a, an important part of that type of expectation.

John Dickson – Studio:

This Messianic figure in Daniel is pretty cool. Rather than a liberator of Israel, Daniel’s ‘Son of Man’ rules over a universal kingdom. ‘Son of Man’ is really just an idiom for human being, but in this context, it’s saying that a human being would be invested with divine authority to be worshipped by everyone, forever.

Reading

In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority,a glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.

Daniel chapter 7

Joan Taylor:
In our gospels, of course, we get the weaving in of the Son of Man and the Davidic Messiah, but there was no necessary reason for doing that. There was, you didn’t need to do that in terms of expectation. So our gospel writers, early Christians, could have just gone for the Danielic figure without weaving in the line of David, but instead it’s just Jesus is from the line of David.

John Dickson:
And it’s not as if people had, you know, didn’t have any, uh, sense that they came from David, you, you cite other examples of people roughly in the same period who knew that they were from David’s line.

Joan Taylor:
Exactly. So another thing historians say is, “How could anyone have remembered they were from David’s line”? Well, again, you know, Maori in New Zealand remember their lineage very well over many generations back, and it’s part of their identity and they recite the, the genealogy, and this is just what you  do in terms of I identifying yourself. So in, uh, an environment in which memory was not reliant on written records, but was actually reliant on oral recitation it’s not hard to just commit it to memory that a genealogy and, in fact there are, there is now, maybe there wasn’t known, but there is now an ossuary found in Jerusalem, a little bone box where i t’s written at the top of the, of the bone box ‘From the house of David’ on it. So whoever was buried there wanted to be remembered as coming from the house of David. And that’s a, an o from the first century bc

John Dickson:
And it’s really from a personal setting, isn’t it? It’s not, it’s not like propaganda in, in, in that context. It’s in the tomb. It’s really just a family memory.

Joan Taylor:
Indeed, its just a family member, and its only written for the family.

John Dickson – Studio:

Then there’s Herod’s infamous Massacre of the Innocents. According to Matthew, when Herod heard from mysterious Magi about a newborn King in Bethlehem – where it was prophesied the Messiah would be born – he freaked out and “… gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi”. Tons of sceptical scholars have dismissed this because it’s not mentioned in another source. In this case, they think absence of corroborating evidence is evidence of absence. But, as I’m always telling my students, we probably have less than 1% of the writings of the first century. With 99% of the evidence missing, it’s pretty silly (without good external reasons) to make judgments about what’s not reported in the surviving sources. The fact is: this fits exactly with the character of Herod. Joan points to a particularly awful episode from the end of Herod’s life. Here’s a confronting extract from Joan’s book:

Reading

Then Herod’s health began to fail, as he succumbed to an unspecified illness. There was talk that the king was dying. At this cue, there was a popular insurrection and brazen action in the heart of the judiciary and the cult: the Temple itself. Two leading and very popular scholars, named Judas, son of Sepphoraeus, and Matthias, son of Margalus, had a large body of keen young students. Emboldened by news of Herod’s illness, Judas and Matthias indicated to their students that Herod’s erection of a grand golden eagle, symbol of Rome, over the ‘great gate’ of the Temple had long been utterly unlawful: a terrible contradiction of Mosaic law prohibiting graven images and it should be pulled down by those who had courage enough to be martyred. At noon, when there were a huge number of people in the Temple, the most eager of the students swung themselves by ropes down from the roof and began hacking off the Roman eagle with hatchets. The captain of the king’s guard sent in troops to stop this and arrested about forty young men, who were then brought before Herod, apparently now in his winter palace in Jericho. Apoplectic with rage, Herod summoned an assembly of leading men in Jericho and denounced the perpetrators …. he had the scholars Judas and Matthias and the forty students who had taken the action in the Temple burned alive, while others arrested were executed in other ways. Here is another massacre of young men by Herod, now at the very time that Matthew records the massacre of the infants in Bethlehem. This is surely another element of social memory that has informed what is told: Herod massacred youth.

Joan Taylor, Boy Jesus, Chapter 6

John Dickson – Studio:

Then there’s Bethlehem itself. The professional naysayers dismiss this detail from the Gospels. We don’t know where Jesus was born, they say, but not in that traditional town of David. Surely not. Well … stay with us … 

Break 1

Jesus wasn’t born in Bethlehem supercut

John Dickson – Studio:

Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem is one of the most famous stories ever told. But it’s doubted by many scholars. For one thing, the ‘census’ mentioned by Luke as the reason the holy family had to go back to Bethlehem is likely just a mistake, they say! There is no evidence – in the 1% of sources that have survived – that there was a “census when Quirinius was governor of Syria”. We know of a later census under Quirinius, but that’s in AD 6, when Jesus was 10 years old. It can’t be that. So, Luke has just made a little boo-boo in trying to get his hero to be born in Bethlehem. That’s how the story goes. Check out episode 24 of Undeceptions – ‘Bible Mistakes’ – to hear the great Craig Blomberg discuss this particular problem. The fact is: the problem is nowhere near as clear as some folks want it to be. There’s a little Greek adjective “protos” in Luke’s sentence about the census, which can easily be translated this way:

“This was the census before Quirinius was governor of Syria.” 

Or the protos means ‘First’, so it would be translated:

“This was the first census when Quirinius was Governor.”

In other words, Luke knows the census we today know about (in AD 6) but he also knows another one, prior to that, back in 4BC. This would require Quirinius having an earlier governorship, but there’s nothing ruling that out. In other words, there seems to be a motivated rush to find mistakes in the Gospels among some. It’s the mirror image of the motivated rush to prove everything in the Gospels – Christian apologetics, and all that! But the responsible historian is best to reserve judgment when the evidence is so sparse and the issues so unclear. Joan Taylor is one such responsible historian. She avoids both arbitrary scepticism and overeager apologetics. 

John Dickson:
You even take Bethlehem seriously as the birthplace of Jesus. You know, I’ve got, I, I have my 114 historical Jesus volumes just there. Uh, and, and you know, I’ve read them and they’re all nearly all skeptical about Bethlehem. And then along comes Joan Taylor and lays out a pretty serious argument for taking this, uh, as hmm, you know, not proven, but solid.

Joan Taylor:
I think it is really solid. Nowhere in early Christian, um, history is it said that Jesus was born in Nazareth. Scholars read in scepticism about Jesus being born in Bethlehem in at various points and in the Gospels. But I think that. You know, these can be explained. Um, the, at the beginning of, um, the Gospel of John when Philip says, you know, the, the discovery of of, of Jesus coming from Nazareth, the question is, you know, what good can come from Nazareth? And, and actually it relies on this idea that the readers know better that he is actually from Bethlehem. And later on in the gospel of John, it said, well, we know that the, the Messiah is going to be born in, Bethlehem – it, it, it assumes readers go, “aha”. Or these people aren’t as knowledgeable like we are. There’s this, this kind of play with, um, with reader’s true knowledge because, uh, people are express ignorance at certain points throughout the gospel of John. So I think that certain points where people have gone, oh, Jesus is just from Nazareth. There’s no knowledge about Jesus coming from Bethlehem’, um, actually is, is indicating that, um, people did know that.

What the [00:20:00] Gospel of Luke does is have, um, the family in Nazareth before going to Bethlehem. Whereas in the gospel of Matthew, they’re already in Bethlehem and then they go to Nazareth. But again, you know, scholars make all of these assumptions, which is you can either be in one place or another, but you can’t be in both places. You can’t have an identity in Bethlehem or, and also in Nazareth, it has to be an either or. And what I say in the book is an immigrant to Nazareth from Judea would’ve had two identities because immigrants often do have two identities. You have your home place identity, and then if you’ve lived in a another place for a long time, you have that identity as well. And clearly, Jesus as an adult, is known as Jesus of Nazareth. He’s grown up in Nazareth. Wherever he was born isn’t his primary identity, but for the family, in the Gospel of Luke, it’s clear they’ve got property in Bethlehem. Otherwise they wouldn’t have gone to, to Bethlehem for the, the census. That tie to Bethlehem is, is very, very strong.

John Dickson – Studio:

You can still visit Bethlehem today, of course. I take groups there pretty regularly. It’s a bustling Muslim and Christian town. The church of the Nativity was built by Constantine (well, at his pleasure, at least). It is gorgeous. And underneath the church is a cave complex that almost certainly was used in the time of Jesus for housing. There’s a spot you can go to that marks the actual place of the manger … but it’s ‘tradition’, not history. I’m more pumped about the fact that one of the caves underneath the church was definitely lived in by the wonderful ancient scholar Saint Jerome (who should have his own Undeceptions episode). He picked the birthplace of Jesus to do his astonishing work of translating the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of Scripture into the popular or ‘vulgar’ Latin of the day. This would eventually become what we call the Vulgate–the common Latin edition of the Bible that was used for a 1000 years. Anyway, you can go and stand in Jerome’s office—as I do with my groups—where he worked tirelessly for decades on this wonderful gift to the literary world. There’s even an ancient inscription still there that basically says “Jerome was here”! Anyway, that’s just for free! Back to our point. Something else Joan spoke to me about was the role of Jesus’ broader family – both during his early life and also in the early church right through to the end of the first century. It’s a really fascinating part of the interview – but … it’s only for our PLUS subscribers! I feel terrible about that, because it’s an awesome topic. Jesus’ relatives were big players in Christianity for decades. But I don’t make these calls. Send your complaints to Researcher Al and Producer Kaley. If I had my way, I would not at this point say: If you want access to that content, head to undeceptions.com, where you can sign up as a Plus subscriber – link in the show notes. Through careful historical work, we can piece together a picture of Jesus’ childhood world. But there’s a question I’ve often been asked: Is it true Jesus and his family were at one time refugees? 

Media – TEDx Talk on being a refugee.

John Dickson – Studio:

That’s child psychologist Mozhdeh Ghasemiyani sharing her story as part of a TEDx Talk she gave in 2017. Mozhdeh now specialises in treating child refugees for trauma. She’s had first-hand experience. When she was a little girl, her family fled from the Kurdistan region of Iran, going first to Iraq and then eventually to Denmark, where they settled. While she was still a child, she witnessed her mother being shot in the head. For years afterwards, she explained, she would faint at the sight of blood, or if someone got angry, or even in front of ordinary, peaceful soldiers. In this talk, she says that something like 40 per cent of refugees develop PTSD, and she was one of them. But what’s this got to do with Jesus?

John Dickson:
Its controversial in a, in a political context, the idea that Jesus and the family were refugees, uh, in a, in the sort of culture wars. I’m not sure if you’ve, um, heard, heard this debate in the culture wars. You know, some want to claim Jesus as a refugee because they want to, you know, do good to refugees today and others deny that he was ever a refugee, that that’s not the right way to approach it because of course … they want to deny refugees. Can you, can you just give us the historian’s take with, you know, leaving aside the modern politics of it all?

Joan Taylor:
So the story of Jesus as a, a refugee is that the, the family are afraid of Herod. Um, Joseph feels he has to go and is justified then by massacre in Bethlehem. And he takes the family, the mother, and the child, as it said, into Egypt. 

Reading

“An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

Matthew Chapter 2

Joan Taylor:
And I find  the story very interesting because certainly in the gospel of Matthew, it, it’s woven into Joseph’s dreams and, um, scriptural interpretation. And it’s made a lot of, in terms of a paradigm that the gospel of Matthew wants to have of Jesus as a prophet like Moses. So. Jesus goes into Egypt as Moses was in Egypt, and he comes out of Egypt like Moses, and later on in the gospel he gives a sermon on the Mount, which is like Moses receiving the law from God on Mount Sinai. And, and many scholars have really gone into this Moses characterization of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew and then said, ‘well, Egypt, it’s all Moses. Herod is like Pharaoh. And, and the story of Moses. And you know, this is all made up because the, it’s designed to show Jesus like Moses’. But actually we know that if there was trouble in Judea, there were a lot of refugees that fled to Egypt from Judea. It’s not that far away

John Dickson:
We’re talking Alexandria, really, aren’t we?

Joan Taylor:
Well, Alexandria was the place of choice, but we know that there are a lot of Jewish communities in Egypt at that time. And, um, I got quite interested in exploring some of the traditions about the Holy Family in Egypt. I’ve got this great chunk of of stories about Jesus and, and Egypt from early Christian literature and one of the early earliest very earlierst stories is that the Holy Family were not in Alexandria at all, but they were in this place called Hermopolois, which is way south. And you think, ‘why on earth would they have gone to Hermopolis’? But in fact, there is, um, archeological, Payrological, a little tiny bit of papyri from, um, ancient Egypt that talks about “Jews Street” in Hermopolis. So there would’ve been a Jewish community in Hermopolis, um, at the time of, of Jesus in the first and second century. But where they went, we don’t know. But one of the things about this, um, collection of early Christian stories about the Holy Family in Egypt is just how difficult it was for them as refugees and, um, in the ancient world it was tough to be a refugee. It was really hard. People didn’t welcome you. It’s never been a good time to be a refugee, and it certainly wasn’t then. And so to me, what’s interesting is how that experience affected Jesus or might have affected Jesus to be in a position of vulnerability or have family stories about being in a position of vulnerability. And I actually, I. I think that the, the birth narrative we have of the Gospel of Luke, it doesn’t talk about Jesus being a refugee or the family fleeing, but it also has the same kind of theme of vulnerability, of, of displacement. Jesus is born in a place where there’s just a manger, you know, that it’s not a, an animal feeding trough, you know, it’s not a, a proper nice bedroom. Um, so, so that sense of, of Jesus being born in a, a place where, um, things are not quite right, or, or having things that are very dodgy and, and dangerous about his birth, I think is something that is, is very key in all of the, the birth stories.

John Dickson – Studio:

“Dodgy and dangerous” is also how you could describe the region where Jesus grew up – Lower Galilee.  More about that after this break.

Break 2

Reading

These two Galilees, of so great largeness, and encompassed with so many nations of foreigners, have been always able to make a strong resistance on all occasions of war; for the Galileans are inured to war from their infancy, and have been always very numerous; nor hath the country been ever destitute of men of courage, or wanted a numerous set of them; for their soil is universally rich and fruitful, and full of the plantations of trees of all sorts, insomuch that it invites the most slothful to take pains in its cultivation, by its fruitfulness; accordingly, it is all cultivated by its inhabitants, and no part of it lies idle. Moreover, the cities lie here very thick, and the very many villages there are here are every where so full of people, by the richness of their soil, that the very least of them contain above fifteen thousand inhabitants.

Josephus – The Wars of the Jews

John Dickson – Studio:

That’s Josephus, describing Upper and Lower Galilee.

Jesus grew up in Nazareth, a town in Lower Galilee—and it was tough. We might picture him wandering peacefully through the hills, but first-century Galilee, while beautiful, was marked by rebellion and occasional violence. Harvard’s Allen Callahan notes that “Galilee had … a centuries-old tradition of political autonomy under the God of Israel,” making imperial rule difficult. It was exactly the kind of place a character like Messala (back to Ben Hur) would have struggled to govern.

John Dickson:
One of the things, um, virtually all scholars agree with is that He grows up in Galilee, not, not down south. So what did that mean? I mean, did Galilee have its own special ways of being Jewish? And if so, how, how might that have shaped the boy?

Joan Taylor:
Yeah, it did have its own regional identity. It was far from Jerusalem where the main government was, and, the government led by the high priest, uh, and the temple in Jerusalem. So we have religious law coming from Jerusalem and religious lawyers and, uh, scribes coming from Jerusalem to see matters in in Galilee and then going back to, to Jerusalem. And later on in rabbinic literature, there’s somewhat, uh, uh, sort of disparagement of Galileans as not being quite as right on in terms of, um, Jewishness as, um, people in Judea. But, um, it’s a very rural environment. There’s a lot of, of villages, densely packed with villages, quite highly populated. Quite a lot of pressure on land. Um, and people, um, knew that well, they would grow up doing certain trades. Boys would be learning certain trades that were appropriate in terms of their fathers. Girls would learn up, learn how to do all sorts of household tasks and also trades appropriate for women. And, and it was just this quite hand to mouth existence I think overall in, in Galilee it’s not, um, you don’t see anywhere apart from in cities, great wealth in Galilee. Um, anything that’s been done of rural in terms of archeology of rural Galilee is pretty down market. It’s not a, um, a, a wealthy area.

John Dickson:
But it was fertile, wasn’t it?

Joan Taylor:
It is fertile, but then there’s big population. So it making sure that you have enough food is key. And it ties into the fact that Jesus talks about people not having food. “Give us this day, our daily bread” is said to people who we’re not necessarily sure that they were gonna get their daily bread. And we, he hear later on of famines and, and so on that affected Galilee. So it’s a, a rural lifestyle, but it’s also got this … well, Josephus talks about the, the Galileans as being rather warrior-like, you know, sort of macho guys. Um, who, um, in the end do, uh, revolt quite fiercely.

John Dickson:
That’s where the zealots come from, isn’t it?

Joan Taylor:
Well, yes, and, and later on in the, in the sixties, the, the Galileans are, are very

John Dickson:
Well, I’m thinking, I’m thinking of, I’m thinking of, of Judas, of, [00:38:00] uh, Galilee, uh, named by Josephus as the founder of the zealots. 

Joan Taylor:
Exactly. 

Reading

Here was one Judas, a Gaulonite, of a city whose name was Gamala, who, taking with him Sadduc, a Pharisee, became zealous to draw them to a revolt, who both said that this taxation was no better than an introduction to slavery, and exhorted the nation to assert their liberty: as if they could procure them happiness and security for what they possessed, and an assured enjoyment of a still greater good, which was that of the honor and glory they would thereby acquire for magnanimity. They also said that God would not otherwise be assisting to them, than upon their joining with one another in such counsels as might be successful, and for their own advantage; and this especially, if they would set about great exploits, and not grow weary in executing the same; so men received what they said with pleasure, and this bold attempt proceeded to a great height. All sorts of misfortunes also sprang from these men, and the nation was infected with this doctrine to an incredible degree; one violent war came upon us after another, and we lost our friends. 

Josephus, Antiquities, Book 18.

John Dickson – Studio:

That’s where the zealots came from–early in the first century–Josephus calls them the ‘fourth philosophy’ of Judaism. And he’s pretty scathing about them. Their movement eventually led to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, a generation after Jesus. But there was an earlier rebellion before Judas of Gamla. This one happened right about the time Jesus was born, and just down the road from Nazareth where he would grow up in the city of Zippori or Sepphoris (I love taking people there!). 

Joan Taylor:
Judas. Um. He, so the, there are two, the different Judas, but, um, Judas of Galilee, Fala founder of, of this fourth philosophy who were the, the revolutionaries of, um, of the sixties. But before that, there’s this Judas son of Hezekiah who takes over Sephoras. And I think that’s really interesting just in terms of the timing, because he takes over, um, and declares this independence around Sephoras at the time of, of Herod’s death, just after Herod’s death. And then there’s a whole lot of revolutionaries that flare up.

John Dickson:
four, four bc, something like that.

Joan Taylor: Four bc. And, um, Archelaus, Herod’s son is trying to control things and this absolute chaos. Um. People camp out in the Jerusalem temple and demand liberation from Rome, Archelaus massacres them. You know, Josephus says 3000 people are killed. It’s absolute bloodbath. And that makes sense of what we have in the gospel of Matthew with Joseph taking his family back from Egypt because Herod is dead. Going to Judea and then learning that Archelaus is in charge, veering off to Nazareth going, “whoa, I’m going to Nazareth” just at the point when Judas has, has declared independence and Sephoras, which is only a few kilometers away from Nazareth, so Joseph is being good, he, he’s thinking of his safety of his family. He doesn’t wanna be anywhere where the Herodian Dynasty is in charge. And he heads up off to Galilee at that point then we know from Josephus that what happened to Judas is that, um, Quintiles Varus, the leggate of Syria, like a huge president of Syria, takes the most gigantic army down from Antioch, assembles them with Nabataeun forces and, you know, huge number of extra forces with this legion coming down from Antioch and just sweeps down on Galilee from Syria- Phonecia, and utterly quas the, the revolution, um, in Galilee and, and takes Sepphoris, burns it, and enslaves the entire population of, of the city, of Sepphoris. And that would’ve had this ramification out towards all of the villages around Sepphoris and Nazareth is really a satellite town of Sepphoris. 

John Dickson – Studio:

Jesus grew up in what was a recent war zone, where the main city of the region was burnt to the ground. It was rebuilt two decades later—just as Jesus was learning carpentry, by the way—but the story of Sepphoris must have been on everyone’s lips. Here’s Joan in Boy Jesus again, elaborating further on the sacking of Sepphoris.

Reading

While Nazareth was hidden behind a hill and away from any main roads, it would not have felt safe there when the Roman army occupied the heart of Galilee. Sepphoris was only a few miles away. From the hills above Nazareth, the whole horror could have been watched. Loud noises would have carried. The smoke from burning buildings would have been seen and smelt. The inhabitants of Nazareth would have known that the Roman army was inflicting terrible things on the nearby city.  

Joan Taylor:
if I had my novelist’s hat on, I would be thinking this of the scene of Joseph and little Jesus standing on the hill above Nazareth watching Sepphoris burn, you know, and thinking, ‘okay, this is what happens if you defy the might of Rome by military means this is what happens to you’. So even though Galilee had this ferment of, of revolution and, and wanting liberation, that would then go on to massive revolution in the decades following Jesus. Um, there would also have been the sense that, and Jesus grew up in this time where, um, you know, the, this is the lesson to Galilee. This is the lesson, and Sepphoris was was renamed Altercrataus, which is auto crater land, you know, auto crater city, the, the, the, um, the city of the Emperor. So that was what was now then being built in Jesus’ childhood.

John Dickson – Studio:

Jesus came from a devout Jewish family, and from a region that was sometimes simmering with anti-Roman sentiment. We might have expected him to be a fierce patriot against the pagan overlords.  But his vision of loyalty to the God of Israel moved in other directions. 

John Dickson:
How do all these threads, um, come together, as it were in the adult Jesus? I mean, so you give this beautiful background about the upbringing of Jesus, but are you able to put your finger on how that helps us understand. You know, this extraordinary figure who steps onto the world stage and really changes the world?

Joan Taylor:
 When in regard to Jesus’ experience of displacement. I think it as a child and his family, stories of displacement, I think it’s incredible that when he sends out people who are to go off in his stead, um, when he sends out the apostles, the 12, he asked them to, to go into villages without anything, they can carry a walking stick, which is what you would take on a long journey, and you could have sandals, but no second garments. So second tunic, no money and no food. So he’s expecting those who go off in his stead as he would’ve looked himself to arrive in a village and have nothing. And what he says is that, you know, if you are not welcomed, you leave that village, you shake the dust off your feet. You, you don’t  even take their dust away from, from you. You have taken nothing from them. And, um, and ultimately they’re inviting God’s justice, that divine justice by not welcoming you when you go into the the village. So there is His message that that, that they’re supposed to take. But fundamentally, before people even hear the message, they have to be willing to accept these strangers who’ve come into their village with nothing. And I think that’s very profound. So the refugee experience for Jesus, has resonances in terms of how he presents himself and looking for the kindness of strangers. And if you can’t show that kindness, then you’re not even going to hear Jesus’ message. That’s incredible. Um, so I think it is quite a profound paradigm that he uses of the refugee experience in terms of his own mission.

John Dickson – Studio:

Hey – before I ended my interview with Joan, I had one more question for her about a very cool project she did with some of the Monty Python crew. Here it is.

John Dickson:
I have to ask you one more question that’s sort of a bonus question. I dunno where, we’ll, we’ll put it, but can you tell me about the Jesus and Brian project? Because some of our listeners will be very excited that you got to do such a thing.

Joan Taylor:
Well, yes. So this was, um, a good 10 years ago. Um, it was actually Philip Davies who is, uh, uh, who’s now passed away. Um, he and I got together and talked about how wonderful it would be to have a conference on, um, thinking about The Life of Brian in regard to the historical Jesus, because, um. We both thought that, you know, of course Brian is a completely ridiculous film, but there were various things that have resonances in terms of first century Judea and um, in some ways it, it just has the chaos of, of Judea at that time and the Messianic hopes and, and all, all the kind of craziness and, um. And I, yeah, I, I loved, I’ve always liked the life of Bryan. I have to say, when I first, when it first came out, I was one of the people that refused to see it because I thought it was blasphemous. You know, I was, I was one of those people. And then I only finally went to see the life of Bryan with a bunch of, um, of Catholic priestly seminarians and, and Dunedin, and they said, ‘look, you’ve got to see this film. It’s absolutely brilliant’. And I thought, okay, if guys training for the Catholic priesthood really loved the life of Brian, it can’t, it can’t be that bad. And I, and I loved it because there was so many interesting resonances and if you studied anything in terms of, um, the historical Jesus, they point to that all, all the time. You know, the, the sort of or funny things that scholars say, like blessed are the cheese makers, is a, is actually a dig at scholars who think, well, we are gonna explain this much better than what we have in, in the gospels. Philip had phone numbers of the pythons and um, or a couple of them and, um, and John Cleese I got in touch with and he was just fantastic. He was really, really supportive and yeah, I was just. Uh, really fantastic to have them involved in the conference. They were really interested. Terry Jones, um, was really good and supportive as well. So having them involved it just made all the difference assembling people, but that, you know, they were, they’re really historically minded. They really want to know, and John Cleese himself is, is really fascinated by theological questions, quite frankly.

John Dickson:
And yeah, they’re not anti-Christians. I mean, they weren’t back, back then when they did the film and, and they’re not all these years later.

Joan Taylor:
No, they were poking fun at. Films, you know, the great epic films about the life of Christ, which now of course from the benefit of hindsight, look overly staged and overly pompous, um, and just exactly the way they were pointing out.

John Dickson:
Joan Taylor, thank you so much for your time.

Joan Taylor:
Thank you for having me. Thank you.

Undeceptions theme plays