THE LIFE OF JESUS

Jesus was born towards the end of Herod’s reign as king of the Jews. Matthew and Luke, the two gospel-writers who give an account of his birth, agree that he was born in Bethlehem. Matthew tells how his parents took him to Egypt to e the danger threatened by Herod, who was disturbed by rumours that a new king of the Jews had been born. When, after Herod’s death, they returned from Egypt, they did not settle in Bethlehem, which lay in the territory now controlled by Herod’s son Archelaus. Instead, they moved north to Galilee and settled in Nazareth. There Jesus grew up from childhood to manhood. Indeed, it was in Galilee that Jesus spent most of his life.

When he was a boy of nine or ten years old, everybody around must have been talking of the revolt which Judas the Galilean had raised against the Romans in Judea. The Galileans were not directly affected by the revolt, nor by the census which sparked it off, for they paid their taxes to the tetrarch Herod Antipas, not to Caesar. But the news must have caused much excitement in Nazareth and other places in Galilee.

The Location of Nazareth. (© Carta, Jerusalem)

 

Nazareth lay rather off the beaten track, but the road from the Lake of Galilee to Ptolemais (Acco) ran a few miles to the north, while the Way of the Sea, connecting Egypt with Damascus and places farther north, passed by not far to the south. From the high ground above Nazareth many of the famous sites in the earlier history of Israel were to be seen.

In the earlier part of his rule, Herod Antipas had his court at Sepphoris, four miles north-north-west of Nazareth. Then, about AD 22, he built a new capital city for himself on the west shore of the Lake of Galilee, and called it Tiberias, in honour of the Emperor Tiberius, who had succeeded Augustus in AD 14. From the name of this city the lake came in due course to be called the Lake of Tiberias.

Jesus is not said to have visited either Sepphoris or Tiberias. But Sepphoris was so near Nazareth that rumours of goings-on at the tetrarch’s court may have formed a background in the minds of Jesus’ hearers when they listened to those parables of his in which kings and royal courts appeared.

 

It was usual for Jews from Galilee to journey to Jerusalem for one or another of a three great festivals of the year—Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles. Luke tells how Jesus at the age of twelve was taken to Jerusalem at Passover, and how, when he went missing, he was found in discussion with some of the “scribes” or experts in the Jewish law who set up “schools” in the outer court of the temple at festival times, when Jerusalem was crowded with pilgrims.

The Early Days of Jesus. (© Carta, Jerusalem)

Before Jesus began his public ministry, John the Baptist appeared. John, the son of a Judean priest, grew up to manhood in the wilderness of Judea where, about AD 27, he called the nation to repent. His preaching was powerful; he drew crowds from all parts of the country. Repentance was urgent, he said, because of the near approach of a person to whom he referred as the Coming One. The Coming One was going to carry out the divine judgment which would mark the end of the present age of wickedness and begin the coming age of righteousness. John’s hearers were invited to show they had truly repented by being baptized by him in the Jordan. This was the setting in which Jesus’ public activity began when he, for purposes of his own, asked John to baptize him and was assured, by a voice from heaven, that he was the Coming One whose way John was preparing. This assurance was confirmed by Jesus’ experiences during the following forty days of fasting and testing. The traditional “Mount of Temptation” where he had those experiences is shown north-west of modern Jericho (due west of Tell es-Sultan).

The Sea of Galilee and Surroundings. (© Carta, Jerusalem)

 

John went further, going into Samaria, and preaching at the well-watered site of Aenon near Salim (probably at the meeting place of the modern Wadi Baida and Wadi Far‘a). But not long afterwards he was arrested in Antipas’s Transjordanian territory of Perea and imprisoned in the fortress of Macherus. There, after a few months, he was executed.

Jesus returned to Galilee, breaking his journey at a place in Samaria called Sychar. There he found some eager hearers among people who had recently been influenced by John the Baptist’s preaching. When he arrived in Galilee, he made his headquarters at Capernaum and began to proclaim the good news that the kingdom of God was at hand. The kingdom of God was not a political organization; it meant the acceptance of the rule of God in the hearts of men and women, according to the principles laid down by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and on other occasions.

Capernaum was one of several flourishing fishing towns on the lake-shore. Others were Bethsaida, just east of the point where the Jordan flows into the lake, and Magdala, famed for its export of salt fish (for which reason it was also known as Taricheae). Other places mentioned in the narrative of his work in Galilee (in addition to his home town of Nazareth, where he met with a very cool reception) are Chorazin, a little way inland from Capernaum, Cana, where the water became wine (probably Khirbet Qana, about 9 miles north of Nazareth), and Nain, to the south of Mount Tabor. On the east side of the lake, at the place now called Kursi, the man possessed by a legion of demons was cured and the herd of pigs, feeding nearby, stampeded down the cliff into the lake.

Jesus Escapes from Herod Antipas. (© Carta, Jerusalem)

 

The Sermon on the Mount was delivered, according to tradition, from the Mount of the Beatitudes, north-west of the lake. The land here forms a natural theatre, from which Jesus’s words could have been heard a long way. Not only in this sermon but also in his parables Jesus explained in practical terms what the kingdom of God meant. The miracles, too—the works of mercy and power which also formed part of his ministry – were further visible signs of the kingdom of God. The way of life to be followed by those who wished to enter the kingdom of God was the way of life to be seen in Jesus himself.

Above all, the kingdom of God took its character from the God whose kingdom it was. Jesus taught his followers to think and speak of God as their Father, the liberal giver of all good things, who shows kindness and compassion even to those who do not deserve or appreciate his gifts. He taught them not only to place utter trust in God but to imitate him by showing kindness to others, even to the point of repaying evil with good. Where in consequence human beings behaved in such a way, the kingdom of God was present already, as it was present in his own person and work.

 

From among his followers, Jesus selected twelve for special responsibility. After instructing them, he sent them out two by two to preach the same good news throughout Galilee. Some weeks later they returned full of enthusiasm at what they reckoned to be a very successful mission. But in their enthusiasm they had roused the suspicion of Herod Antipas, who began to feel that in Jesus he had another John the Baptist on his hands.

 

Jesus’ Last Journey to Jerusalem. (© Carta, Jerusalem)

Jesus took his disciples quickly across the lake, into the tetrarchy of Philip. Even there they were pursued by crowds from Galilee who, after Jesus had fed them with bread and fish near Bethsaida, tried to compel him to become their king. The kingdom of God, as they saw it, was an independent Jewish state, to be set up after a victorious war against the Romans and the Herods. Jesus taught people not to use violence nor return evil for evil. He would not attack the ruling powers with their own weapons. When he taught humility, meekness and self-denial this was indeed more revolutionary than anything the most extreme nationalists could think of. His example of serving others rather than receiving service himself, to the point of giving his life as “a ransom for many”, a new way of resisting oppression.

The Trial and Judgment of Jesus. (© Carta, Jerusalem)

 

The disciples themselves had been influenced by those who supported violence. Jesus therefore took them away into non-Jewish territory farther north, in the neighborhood of Tyre and Sidon. There he gave them the intensive teaching that he thought they needed.

Towards the end of this period they came to Caesarea Philippi. This place was formerly called Panion, but Philip the tetrarch made it his capital and changed its name to Caesarea in honor of the Roman Emperor. (It was called Caesarea Philippi—that is, Philip’s Caesarea—to distinguish it from the port of Caesarea on the Mediterranean.) Here Peter, the spokesman of the twelve, spontaneously declared Jesus to be the Messiah. People were so used to thinking of the Messiah as a political and military leader that Jesus at once began to tell them how different his immediate future would be. He was shortly to go to Jerusalem with them, but instead of seeking armed victory and power there he would be arrested and put to death—and in this way he would complete his task.

On the last journey to Jerusalem, Jesus and his disciples seem to have gone through Transjordan and crossed the Jordan opposite Jericho. From Jericho they went up the steep, twisting road to Jerusalem. On this occasion, Jesus entered Jerusalem in a manner recalling an ancient prophecy where Zion’s king comes to his city mounted on an ass and bringing a message of peace. He was received enthusiastically enough, although the enthusiasm came more from Galilean pilgrims who had reached the city ahead of him than to the Jerusalemites themselves.

Jesus’ Resurrection and Ascension. (© Carta, Jerusalem)

 

The temple-rulers in Jerusalem knew that their privileges depended on continued cooperation with the Roman power, but the common people would have welcomed a deliverer to defeat Rome. Within the next few days it became plain that Jesus had no intention of being that kind of deliverer. He would not even denounce the payment of taxes to the Roman Emperor (which was a token of submission to his rule). He did indeed expel traders from the outer court of the temple, but this was the action of a prophet, not of a rebel leader. Popular enthusiasm for him quickly cooled, but the chief priests, for fear that he might provoke a rising, had already arranged to have him arrested. One of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, had promised to show them where to lay hands on him without danger of a riot.

Accordingly, on the Thursday evening of Passover Week Jesus was arrested, tried early next morning before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and condemned to death for encouraging rebellion and claiming to be “king of the Jews”. The death-sentence was carried out by crucifixion, and it looked as if the movement led by Jesus had gone the same way as other ill-fated movements which were started in Judea under the Romans.

(JW 2:68) (JW 2:178)  (JW 2:492)[

September 7, 2020