Christians celebrate Easter Sunday to commemorate Jesus’ resurrection from among the dead, the miracle that began a global movement with 2.4 billion adherents.
But what would happen if Jesus’ family connections were as influential as ecclesiastical fervor when establishing the course for a new religion?
Joan Taylor, Emerita History professor at King’s College London, sacrifices this argument in the newly released “Child Jesus: Growing Judean in turbulent times(Zondervan academic).
She asks if the “tribal” roots of Jesus in Judea and the role of his family in the primitive church are key to breaking his history.
“The gospels are shining on what they want to shine,” Taylor told Post from London. “And it is as if they were all saying:” Don’t worry about Jesus’ childhood. You know, that is not what interests us. ” “
Taylor said that in a world obsessed with tribal influence and family ties, Jesus was not simply a solo act with a divine vision, but part of a complete family business.
“The whole image of Jesus as part of a family, or this whole family is part of the project,” Jesus’ project, “that it was only Jesus on his own,” Taylor said.
While biblical stories tend to promote the best known Jesus events, such as his baptism on the Jordan River, Taylor suggests that the very young Jesus would have his first signs of destiny in the knee of Joseph, the husband of Mary.
“It is more the feeling that his father Joseph has probably planted a child of seeds in his mind that he had this auspicious birth, that there was a weight on his shoulders, than [Jesus] Actually, it could be what everyone expected, “he said, pointing out the messianic stretching of the time.” It was at a time when people really expected something to happen after the great died. ”
The New Testament says that these expectations were confirmed when Jesus suggested his public ministry, teaching crowds and miraculously feeding 5,000 followers near the Galilee Sea.
Taylor said the pressure on Jesus was also fed by the times he lived.
Jesus was probably born between 4 and 6 a. C., at the end of Herod’s reign.
Although he would not have remembered the flight of the family to Egypt, a move says that the Scriptures were designed to escape from the mass murder of babies ordered by Herod who crushed the possible rivals, the young Jesus would have told The Persecutions his leg.
“Jesus’ family became part of what many Jews were experienced, that there was danger, [and] You had to flee, “he said.
Accommodating in Galilee, the young Jesus absorbed stories of a nation, and a family, to the limit. Taylor said: “The broadest turbulence of the times would have communicated to him as a background of what the family [and nation] Experienced. ”
Taylor argued that this narrative contrasts with the notion of an idyllic and pastoral childhood for Jesus that many may have inferred from the lack of details of the gospels.
She said that Jesus’ family stories “give clues about why she developed such a radical path of compassion, ultimately in her life and thought out of the box in terms of resistance to Rome.”
Even those who do not embrace Christianity can learn from the experiences of Christ, he said. Jesus reformulated the ethics of his times to include the care of those with whom the observers Jews would not be associated, as the Samaritan woman in the well in John 4: 7-42.
Jesus said Taylor, “he thought so that he had a bone before, and that is one of the most incredible things of him.”
Taylor said his studies convinced him even more or Jesus’s connection with the real lineage of King David.
The genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew emphasizes the earthly lineage of Jesus as extended to David, who was also born in Bethlehem and whose descendant was prophesied to govern Israel as the Messiah.
But if I could have coffee with someone from the team Jesus, he would choose Joseph, the mysterious father who ghosts his son after the visit of the adolescent temple of Jesus.
Taylor said he believes that the “way of interpreting the Scriptures” of Joseph and understanding his dreams of bringing the family to Egypt as “coming from God” was transmitted to his children, including Jesus.
Even so, not all in the Christian kingdom believe that it is necessary to explore events outside the Scriptures, to say that the silence of the Bible in Jesus’ family life is remarkable.
“There is simply no way to discover what has legs to history,” Robert Aj Gagnon said, visiting the biblical scholar of the Wesley Biblical Seminary in Ridgeand, Miss. “Apparently, Jesus himself did not believe that it was important to give the disciples a lot of information about his childhood and development.”
But Craig S. Keener, professor of Biblical Studies at the Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky., He said that although he may not want to fill those gaps, Taylor’s historical explorations provided a history for the greatest reach of Jessus.
“That’s what historians do, right?” Keener said. “We try to build the pieces of the puzzle and see where we can connect the points, so sometimes you can add an additional understanding.” And what is more interesting than the family!
