The Life of Jesus

**David Senra** (0:00)
Jesus was, in terms of his influence, the most important human being in history. He is also the most written about and discussed. The earliest surviving document dealing with him was circulated in the 50s of the first century AD. Within a half a century of his death, four biographies written in Greek had been published, and all have come down to us, meaning they survived. Since then, entire books about him have been published in growing quantity and in all languages. Today, there are over 100,000 printed biographies of Jesus in English alone. The religion which commemorates Jesus' teachings, death and resurrection, was well established in half a dozen countries by AD 50 The first Christian place of worship dates from about AD 50, and now nearly one million chapels, churches, basilicas, abbeys, and cathedrals include many of the largest, most remarkable, and beautiful buildings ever erected. In many ways, and in cultural and moral respects especially, Jesus' life and the faith it created are the central events in the history of humanity. So far, we have considered the influence of Jesus as man, but I believe that he was and is God too. It is futile for us to inquire about the nature of Jesus and God and his pre-existence from the beginning, since that is unknowable, let alone the future which is still hidden from us. What we can do, however, is write about Jesus the man. The problem with writing about the life of Jesus the man is not so much the paucity of sources as their abundance and the difficulty in reaching behind the written text to the full meanings of sayings and episodes. The sketch that follows reflects many years of reading and historical study.
My objects have been clarity and brevity, and my desire is to convey the joy and nourishment that I receive in following Jesus' footsteps and pondering his words.
That is an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Jesus, A Biography from a Believer, and it was written by Paul Johnson. So I want to immediately jump into some background that Paul gives you and I, which will help understand the society, really the world into which Jesus was born into. He says, it was harsh, cruel, violent and unstable. It was also materialistic and increasingly wealthy. Rome was in the process of transforming itself from a republic into an empire. Rome now occupied all of Italy and Spain as well as Greece and Egypt, and what we now call Turkey, between 50 to 60 million people came under its laws. Fifty years before Jesus was born, Julius Caesar had added the whole of Gaul, which would be modern France, to the Roman Empire. The expanding empire was based upon muscle rather than technology, thanks to about 15 million slaves, who constituted one third of its population, and whose life was summed up by Aristotle in four words, work, punishment, and food. As you probably already know, I'm a huge fan of Paul Johnson's writing. I've read and made podcasts on a bunch of biographies that he's written, like on Winston Churchill, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Socrates, Mozart, Picasso, Disney. I'll leave all those linked in the show notes in case you want to check out those other episodes. But one of the things I love about his writing is the way he's able to use contrast to drive home a point. And you see that here because he's going to compare who is ruling the area in which Jesus is going to be born into with really the main lessons that Jesus the man taught. And so he talks about the ruler at the time being Herod the Great. For more than 30 years, this astute financier had made himself the richest individual in the entire empire, but he was still subservient to the rulers of Rome. He made himself master of the ancient kingdom, and he was the greatest builder of his age. So he built shipping ports. He rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem. He built a bunch of public baths and aqueducts, and what we would call today shopping centers in more than a dozen cities, but he was also a monster. He had numerous wives and concubines and sired many children. He was suspicious and cruel, and he slaughtered over 40 of his wives. He killed over 40 of his wives, children, and close relatives. And this is the contrast point that I was referencing earlier. The last year of his life was the year of Jesus' birth. Jesus was most constantly referred to as Jesus of Nazareth, Nazareth being the small Galilean town that he grew up in.
He's estimated to be born somewhere around 4 BC. Nazareth at this time was home to many small workshops and craftsmen. One of these craftsmen was Joseph, who was a carpenter. Joseph was a prosperous tradesman, or the way you and I would talk about that is that he was a good entrepreneur. And then he takes as his bride, as his wife, Mary. This is a description of Jesus' childhood. There was great piety in their home. There was 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. So by the time that Jesus is 12 years old, they think that he's old enough to wander around Jerusalem by himself exploring. They usually do this trip with a bunch of other people. So a few days later, they wind up leaving and heading back home. They get about a day's journey away when they realize that Jesus was not in their group, that he was lost and this frightened Mary because she realized that he was left behind in what they called a holy and wicked city. And for three days, they cannot find him. On the third day, they find him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the elders, both hearing them and asking them questions. And it says, and all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and his answers. And it is in this exchange where we get Jesus' first recorded words. It says, Mary rebuked him for his thoughtlessness. And she said, Son, why have you treated us so? We have been searching for you in great distress. And this is Jesus' reply. He said, why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my father's house? So there's a couple of interesting things here. One, depending on the translation, and this is really what we'll talk a lot about, is the fact that the way to think about Jesus is think about him as a teacher. In his teachings, he uses questions a lot. Depending on the translation, there's over 300 different questions just in the four gospels alone. It is interesting that the first recorded words that we get from Jesus is actually in the form of a question. And then after this, Paul Johnson writes, It is striking that these first recorded words of Jesus are of peace with his entire life and mission. He must be about God's business. And that is the extent of what we know about Jesus' childhood. The gospels then skip the next 18 years of Jesus' life, and they don't pick back up until he's being baptized by St. John, John the Baptist. And this is what Paul Johnson writes, It is a somber and unwelcome fact that for more than half of Jesus' life, we know absolutely nothing about what he did or where he went or how he lived. All we know is that his story picks up around, he's around 30 years of age, and it's very clear that he's a man of wide knowledge. 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. Being an autodidact, he was dismissed by his critics as uneducated. And so, there's examples where the educated or the ruling elite hear him speak and they say stuff like this. How did this man get such learning without having been taught? Jesus possessed broad 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 people loved to listen to him. But I suspect that his knowledge reflected actual experience. The death of Joseph, which occurred during his missing years, led to the breakup of the Nazareth household. His mother Mary went to live with one of her numerous family. At that point, it would have been natural for Jesus to leave home and seek experience in a wider world. But Paul makes the point that this is just his opinion based on his readings and studies, because he says there is no means of knowing what he did. This then is what we know of Jesus' birth and childhood and what we can reasonably guess about his life from 12 to 30 At that point, he began his ministry and entered the full glare of evangelical record. And so important because we have the most documentation, but this is also what I want to focus on the most, which is what was Jesus teaching? What did he believe? And what did he go around teaching up until the time of his death? So the little background here is that Judaism in the time of Jesus was ripe for reformation, just like Christianity was in the early 16th century. The alternative teaching that Jesus did at this time, this is what it was about. The alternative was a spiritual revolution, one based on love and neighborliness, which could be embraced by all classes and all people. So John the Baptist was also teaching the need for reformation. Some people believe that John the Baptist was Jesus' cousin. Paul is one of those people that believe that John the Baptist was Jesus' cousin. There is some people that dispute that. But in any case, what's not for dispute is that John was also teaching the need for reformation, the importance of being baptized, was also drawing huge crowds and the attention of authorities. What is also not in dispute is that he played a large role in the mission of Jesus. You could almost interpret it like John's life mission was to help launch Jesus' mission. And so Jesus requested that John baptize him. And this is why Jesus was adamant that he must go through the ceremony of renewal. He was stressing the universality of the sacrament, the need for every human being to wash off the stains of the past and to become fresh and new and clean. It was the actual as well as the symbolic beginning of his mission. The baptism of Jesus was also the culmination of John's own mission because John is speaking out against the authorities and the powerful of his day. History shows that speaking out against the powerful in any age is dangerous and life-threatening. And as a result, John is going to get arrested and then he is going to be beheaded. And so then Paul combines all the different sources and study he did to give us an overview of Jesus. He said, there's no reliable evidence of what Jesus looked like. But there are certain traits that are repeated over and over again. So Jesus was observant, detail oriented. Several people commented on the intense eye contact that he would do. He was confident, decisive, charismatic. The authority that he exercised was there from the beginning. He did not need to acquire it. It was innate. And one of the first important acts that Jesus did was choose the 12 apostles. So the apostles were a group of 12 individuals chosen by Jesus to be his closest followers and witnesses to his teachings. Jesus knew he was starting something new. And as you and I have discussed in other contexts a ton of times before, the first and most important step when starting anything is recruiting the people who are going to help you on your mission. And so not only are they going to help him on his mission and help spread his teaching, but they also keep him physically safe. So before he had the 12 apostles, he begins teaching and the people in Nazareth immediately become violent because remember, what he is teaching is in direct conflict with what they believe. And so here's a summary of that. The Nazarenes react with violent anger. A mob physically ejects Jesus from the synagogue and takes him to a nearby cliff. Their intent is lethal, so they're trying to throw him off a cliff to his death because he is teaching something that conflicts with what they already believe. There is a lot of lessons of human nature in this story, timeless lessons of human nature in this story. And so Jesus is able to escape, and it says, it was there that he chose his first followers, sturdy fishermen, strong and resourceful, to stand around him and protect him when his words angered the self-righteous orthodoxy. And there's a standalone line that Jesus says that I feel has a lot of wisdom in it. No prophet is acceptable in his hometown. Let's go to what Jesus was telling the 12 apostles. Jesus insisted that the group come with him full time. This mission is only for the fully committed. That is the note I left myself as I'm reading all this. And then I went and actually defined it. The definition of committed. Feeling dedication and loyalty to a cause, activity or job, wholeheartedly dedicated. That is exactly what Jesus demands. Jesus was adamant that the men he called must put their mission first. He admitted that his work would cause dissension within their families. Jesus stressed the absolutist nature of a vocation to serve him. It involved painful choices. Jesus had just narrowly escaped death at the hands of angry bigots and was never in any doubt about the danger of his mission. The 12 people he picked were special. They had particular functions and were given powers to carry them out. They were the earliest people enlisted in Jesus' mission. He would sometimes give them nicknames or rename them. I just thought this part was funny. James and John were brothers whom Jesus called the Sons of Thunder because of their enthusiasm. Thus was Jesus' mission prepared for and organized. What was his object, at whom was it aimed, and what were its methods? Again, this is not very different than the other people that you and I have studied on the podcast, where we're trying to figure out, like, what are they trying to do? What's their object? Who were they trying to do it for? Who was it aimed at? And what were their methods? How did they accomplish the goal they set out? And of course, how recruiting a team of special people to help you with your mission is of utmost importance. And so, there's a couple of examples spread over a few pages that I think are really important to spend some time on. And it's this idea that starting anything, starting anything requires an act of faith. Jesus wanted to convince you or to persuade you through reason, and he hated to be looked at like some kind of holy magician, I think, is the term that Paul Johnson uses later in the book. And you'll see this through some of his actions, which I'll get to in one second. Hopefully, this makes sense in a minute. Jesus makes it clear that it is preferable that men show faith by listening to the truth and by accepting it and following it rather than by waiting for signs and miracles to convince them. Jesus taught that the truth was reasonable, that goodness made sense, that to follow his teaching was a rational thing to do. And he'll demonstrate this because there's a lot of examples. Like, I was asking myself this question as I was reading this, like, why did Jesus repeat his desire to keep any kind of healings private? And there's example after example. So I'm just going to go over a bunch of pages and I just pulled out a bunch of individual sentences that show you this. Jesus charged them that they should tell no man. Another example, as a rule, when moved to cure, he took trouble that no one knew. He told them, do not go into the town nor tell anyone in the town. He preferred to cure the afflicted away from public view. Another example, Jesus straightly charged them saying, see that no man knows this or knows of this.