The world we live in is a very different world than the world Jesus of Nazareth was born into. A king ruled over Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. His name was Herod the Great, and he was a savage man who killed his favorite wife because he thought she was cheating on him. He killed three of his sons because he thought they might try to push him off the throne and steal it for themselves. The gospel of Matthew tells a story of how Herod the Great ordered the murders of all the infant sons in Bethlehem under the age …
Jesus of Nazareth
Thanksgiving With Jesus
Americans have been celebrating Thanksgiving for some hundreds of years now, and it’s easy to assume we invented it. But the basic idea of giving thanks to God for a good harvest is an old idea. In the time of Jesus, all Jews celebrated three different harvest festivals every year: Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles. Now it’s true that each of these festivals was not 100% about the harvest. These festivals commemorated other things too. But each festival included a celebration of the harvest as an essential part. Let’s look at each of these. Passover—Celebrating the Barley Harvest Passover is an …
Two Ghost Stories About Jesus
It’s a little-known fact that the Bible tells three ghost stories, and two of them are about Jesus. It’s hard to say how common ghost stories were at the time of Jesus and earlier, but we have quite an ancient ghost story in 1 Samuel, and we have two ghost stories in the gospels. Let’s look at the ancient ghost story first, because it might possibly be related to one of the stories about Jesus. The Ghost of Samuel The first king of Israel was Saul, a very tall man who was chosen king by the prophet Samuel. The usual …
Jesus and the Jewish New Year
There is no doubt that Jesus and his family celebrated the Jewish New Year. They were Jewish, and they naturally celebated all the standard Jewish holidays. And they probably celebrated in Jerusalem. That was a major time commitment, as we’ll see shortly. Several important holy days come in the fall, in the month of Tishrei: Rosh HaShanah (the New Year) on 1 Tishrei Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) on 10 Tishrei Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles) from 15 to 21 Tishrei So the time spanned by these holy days is three whole weeks! Why the New Year Starts in …
What Jesus Did on His Summer Vacation
It sounds absurd to ask what Jesus did on his summer vacation. Except that we know exactly what he did on his summer vacation, because the gospels make that very clear. Jesus Had a Day Job Let’s start by noting the obvious fact that Jesus had a day job. He worked as a “tekton,” according to Mark 6:3. (This is the only verse in the Bible that says what Jesus did for a living.) Note that “tekton” is a Greek word that means a manual laborer in stone, metal, or wood. This has been often translated into English as “carpenter,” but …
On Mount Precipice with Jesus
One of my favorite places in Israel is the site known as “Mount Precipice” in modern Nazareth. Nazareth is built on a hill and overlooks the broad, flat, fertile plain to the south known as the Jezreel Valley. The Jezreel Valley runs east-west, and it makes a natural buffer zone between Galilee in the north and Samaria in the south. Mount Precipice is quite close to the site of first-century Nazareth—it’s a walk of a bit more than a mile. I don’t expect that Jesus came there every day, but I suspect that when he wanted to be alone to …
With Jesus on the Sea of Galilee
Jesus spent an enormous amount of time around the Sea of Galilee. The remarkable thing is that the Sea today looks very similar to the way it did two thousand years ago. Here’s a snip of a map that I drew for my novel Son of Mary, showing the area around the Sea of Galilee where Jesus spent most of his time. (In the book, I call it the Lake of Ginosar, which I think is more likely what the locals called it in the time of Jesus.) A Few Facts About the Sea of Galilee The Sea of Galilee is not …
With Jesus In Nazareth
I live in a small town. The population is about 20,000. I don’t feel terribly isolated, because we’re half an hour from a much larger town of about 200,000. And we’re right across the river from a good sized city of over 600,000. It’s worth noting that my small town is about twice the size of the largest cities in Galilee at the time of Jesus. At the time he began preaching the news of the kingdom of God, the capital of Galilee was Tiberias, with a population of about 10,000. Tiberias was a day’s walk from Nazareth, so Jesus …
Mother’s Day With Jesus
They didn’t celebrate Mother’s Day in first-century Nazareth. But pretend for a moment that they did. How many Mother’s Day cards would Mary have gotten? That’s not an easy question to answer, because we don’t know how many children Mary had. There’s an old tradition that Mary was a lifelong virgin and only ever had one child, Jesus. But not everybody accepts the idea that Mary was a perpetual virgin. This is a church tradition that doesn’t go back to the first century. What does the Bible tell us? What Mark Tells Us The gospel of Mark mentions several siblings …
A Good Friday Meditation
Who told Jesus he had to die? Who told Jesus about the crown of thorns? Was he born knowing he was doomed to the cross? Did his parents tell him his destiny? Did he read it in the prophets? Maybe so. But then again, maybe not. We can’t know for sure how he learned it. Could it be that he discovered his destiny gradually? The same way you and I do, step by step, working it out? We read. We talk. We think. We pray. We listen. Bit by bit, we find our way in the world. The ancient creeds …