Christians celebrate Easter Sunday to commemorate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, the miracle that started a global movement with 2.4 billion adherents.
But what if Jesus’ family connections were as influential as ecclesiastic fervor in setting the course for a new religion?
Joan Taylor, an emerita history professor at King’s College London, offers this argument in the just-released “Boy Jesus: Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times” (Zondervan Academic).
She asks whether Jesus’ often overlooked “tribal” roots in Judea and his family’s backstage role in the early church are keys to cracking his story wide open.
“The Gospels are shining a light on what they want to shine a light on,” Taylor told The Post from London. “And it’s as if all of them are saying, ‘Don’t bother about Jesus’ childhood. You know, that’s not what we’re interested in.’ ”
Taylor said that in a world obsessed with tribal clout and family ties, Jesus wasn’t merely a solo act with a divine vision, but part of a full-on family enterprise.
“The whole image of Jesus as part of a family, of this whole family being part of the project, ‘the Jesus project,’ that it wasn’t just Jesus on his own,” Taylor said.
While biblical accounts tend to hype up the best-known Jesus events, such as his baptism in the Jordan River, Taylor suggests the very young Jesus would have had his first hints of destiny at the knee of Joseph, Mary’s husband and the boy’s earthly father.
“It’s more the sense that already his father Joseph has likely planted some kind of seed in his mind that he had this auspicious birth, that there was a weight on his shoulders, that [Jesus] might actually be what everybody expected,” she said, noting the era’s messianic longings. “It was in a time when people were really expecting something to happen after Herod the Great died.”
The New Testament says those expectations were confirmed when Jesus began his public ministry, teaching crowds and miraculously feeding 5,000 followers near the Sea of Galilee.
Taylor said that the pressure on Jesus was also fueled by the times in which he lived.
Jesus was likely born between 4 and 6 BC, at the tail end of Herod’s reign.
While he would not have remembered the family’s flight to Egypt — a move scripture says was designed to escape the mass murder of infants ordered by Herod to squash potential rivals — the young Jesus would have been told about the persecutions.
“Jesus’s family became part of what many Judeans were experiencing, that there was danger, [and] you had to flee,” she said.
Settling in Galilee, the young Jesus soaked up tales of a nation — and a family — on edge. Taylor said, “The wider turbulence of the times would have been communicated to him as a background of what the family [and nation] experienced.”
Taylor maintained that this narrative contrasts with the notion of an idyllic and pastoral childhood for Jesus that many may have inferred from the Gospels’ lack of detail.
She said Jesus’ family stories “give us clues as to why he developed such a radical path of compassion, ultimately in his life and thought outside the box in terms of resistance to Rome.”
Even those who don’t embrace Christianity can learn from Christ’s experiences, she said. Jesus reframed the ethics of his times to include caring for those with whom observant Jews would not associate, such as the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4:7-42.
Jesus, Taylor said, “thought in ways that hadn’t been thought before, and that is one of the most incredible things about him.”
Taylor said her studies convinced her even more of Jesus’ connection to King David’s royal lineage.
The genealogy in Matthew’s Gospel emphasizes Jesus’ earthly lineage as extending back to David, who was also born in Bethlehem and whose descendant was prophesied to rule Israel as the Messiah.
But if she could grab a coffee with anyone from Team Jesus, she’d pick Joseph — the mysterious dad who ghosted his son after Jesus’ teenage Temple visit.
Taylor said she believes Joseph’s “way of interpreting scripture” and understanding his dreams about taking the family to Egypt as “coming from God” were passed on to his children, including Jesus.
Still, not everyone in the Christian realm believes it’s necessary to explore events outside of scripture, saying the Bible’s silence on Jesus’s family life is notable.
“There is simply no way to uncover what has been lost to history,” said Robert A.J. Gagnon, visiting Bible scholar at Wesley Biblical Seminary in Ridgeland, Miss. “Apparently, Jesus himself did not think it important to give his disciples much information about his childhood and development.”
But Craig S. Keener, biblical studies professor at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky., said that while some may not want to fill those gaps, Taylor’s historical explorations provided background for the larger scope of Jesus’ legacy.
“That’s what historians do, right?” Keener said. “We try to put the puzzle pieces together and see where we can connect the dots, so sometimes it can add extra understanding.” And what is more interesting than family!
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