Jesus has been described as the best known figure in history, and also
the least known. If you mentioned the name “Jesus” and someone asked
Jesus who, you might blink. Or laugh. Even people who don’t think Jesus
was God mostly believe they know a fair bit about him. You might be
surprised that some of your most basic assumptions about Jesus are
probably wrong.
We
have no record of anything that was written about Jesus by eyewitnesses
or other contemporaries during the time he would have lived, or for
decades thereafter. Nonetheless, based on archeological digs and
artifacts, ancient texts and art, and even forensic science, we know a
good deal about the time and culture in which the New Testament is set.
This evidence points to some startling conclusions about who Jesus
likely was—and wasn’t.
When an ancient papyrus scrap was found in 2014 referring to the wife of Jesus, some Catholics and Evangelicals
.
But unlike the Catholic Church, Jews have no tradition of celibacy
among religious leaders. Jesus and his disciples would have been
practicing Jews, and all great rabbis we know of were married. A rabbi
being celibate would have been
. But a number of ancient texts,
, point to a special relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. The
says, “[Jesus] loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on her mouth.”
2. Cropped hair, not long.Jewish men at the time of Christ did not wear their hair long. A Roman triumphal arch of the time period
depicts Jewish
slaves with short hair. In the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the
Corinthians, he addresses male hair length. “Does not nature itself
teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him?” (1
Corinthians 11:14 NRSV). During the 1960s, conservative Christians
quoted this verse to express their disgust against the hippy movement
and to label it anti-Christian.
3. Hung on a pole, not necessarily a cross.For
centuries scholars have known that the Greek New Testament word
“stauros,” which is translated into English as cross, can refer to a
device of several
shapes,
commonly a single upright pole, “torture stake” or even tree. The
Romans did not have a standard way of crucifying prisoners, and Josephus
tells us that during the siege of Jerusalem, soldiers nailed or tied
their victims in a variety of positions. Early Christians
may have centered
on the vertical pole with a crossbeam because it echoed the Egyptian
ankh, a symbol of life, or the Sumerian symbol for Tammuz, or because it
simply was more artistically and symbolically distinctive than the
alternatives. Imagine millions of people wearing a golden pole on a
chain around their necks.
4. Short, not tall. The
typical Jewish man at the time of the Roman Empire would have been just
over five feet tall, which makes this a best guess for the height of
Jesus. That he is typically depicted taller derives from the mental
challenge people have distinguishing physical stature from other kinds
of stature. Great men are called “big men” and “larger than life.” In
ancient times they often were assigned
divine parentage and
miraculous births, and the idea that Jesus was uniquely divine has
created a strong pull over time to depict him as taller than is likely. A
good illustration of this is the
Shroud of Turin, which is just
one of many such Jesus-shrouds that circulated during medieval times and which bears the image of a man
closer to six feet in height.
5. Born in a house, not a stable. The miraculous birth story of Jesus is a late, maybe second-century addition to the Bible, and it contains many fascinating
mythic elements and
peculiarities.
But the idea that Jesus was born in a stable was added to the Christmas
story even later. In the original narrative, Joseph and Mary probably
would have stayed with relatives, and the phrase “no room for them in
the inn (gr: kataluma)” is
better translated “no
room for them in the upper room.” Later storytellers did not understand
that people of the time might bring animals into their ground floor, as
in Swiss
housebarns, and they assumed that the presence of a manger implied a stable.
6. Named Joshua, not Jesus. The
name Joshua (in Hebrew Y’hoshuʿa meaning “deliverance” or “salvation”),
was common among Jews in the Ancient Near East as it is today. Joshua
and Jesus are the same name, and are translated differently in our
modern Bible to distinguish Jesus from the Joshua of the Old Testament,
who leads the Hebrew people to the Promised Land. In actuality, the
relationship between the two figures is fascinating and important.
Some scholars believe that
the New Testament gospels are mostly historicized and updated
retellings of the more ancient Joshua story, with episodes interwoven
from stories of Elisha and Elijah and
Moses. A modern parallel can be found in the way Hollywood writers have reworked Shakespearean tropes and plot elements into
dozens of modern movies (though for a very different purpose).
7. Number of apostles (12) from astrology, not history. Whether
Jesus had 12 disciples who were above his other devotees is an open
question. The number 12 was considered auspicious by many ancient
peoples, and the fellowship of 12 disciples, who are depicted in Da
Vinci’s
The Last Supper, likely get their count from the same
source as the 12 signs of the zodiac and 12 months of the year.
Astrotheology or star worship preceded the Hebrew religion, and
shaped both
the Bible and Western religions more broadly. One might point to the 12
Olympian gods or 12 sons of Odin, or the 12 days of Christmas or 12
“legitimate” successors to the prophet Mohammed. But since the Gospels
echo the story of Joshua, the 12 apostles most closely parallel the 12
tribes of Israel.
8. Prophecies recalled, not foretold. Even
people who aren’t too sure about the divinity of Jesus sometimes think
that the way he fulfilled prophecies was a bit spooky, like the writings
of Nostradamus. In reality, Scooby Doo could solve this one in a single
episode with three pieces of information: First, Old Testament
prophecies were well known to first-century Jews, and a messianic figure
who wanted to fulfill some of these prophecies could simply do so. For
example, in the book of Matthew, Jesus seeks a donkey to ride into
Jerusalem “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet”
(Matthew 21:4). Second, “gospels” are a
genre of
devotional literature rather than objective histories, which means that
the authors had every reason to shape their stories around earlier
predictions. Third, scholars now believe that some Bible texts once
thought to be prophecies (for
example in the Book of Revelation) actually relate to
events that were current or past at the time of writing.
9. Some Jesus quotes not from Jesus; others uncertain. Lists
of favorite Jesus sayings abound online. Some of the most popular are
the Beatitudes (blessed are the meek, etc.) or the story of the woman
caught in adultery (let he who is without sin cast the first stone) or
the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you,
which, we are told, sums up the Law and the Prophets).
Which words
are actually from Jesus? This question has been debated fiercely by
everyone from third-century Catholic Councils to the 20th-century Jesus
Seminar. Even
Thomas Jefferson weighed
in, but much remains unclear. The New Testament Gospels were written
long after Jesus would have died, and no technology existed with which
to record his teachings in real time, unless he wrote them down himself,
which he didn’t.
We can be confident that at least some of the wise and timeless words and
catchy proverbs attributed
to Jesus are actually from earlier or later thinkers. For example, the
Golden Rule was articulated before the time of Christ by the
Rabbi Hillel the Elder,
who similarly said it was the “whole Torah.” By contrast, the
much-loved story of the woman caught in adultery doesn’t appear in
manuscripts until the fourth century. Attributing words (or whole texts)
to a famous person was common in the Ancient Near East, because it gave
those words extra weight. Small wonder then that so many genuinely
valuable insights ended up, in one way or another, paired with the name
of Jesus.
The person of Jesus, if indeed there was such a
person,
is shrouded in the fog of history leaving us only with a set of hunches
and traditions that far too often are treated as knowledge. The “facts”
I have listed here are largely trivial; it doesn’t really matter
whether Jesus was tall or short, or how he cut his hair. But it does
matter, tremendously, that “facts” people claim to know about how Jesus
saw himself, and God and humanity are equally tenuous.
The
teachings attributed to Jesus mix enduring spiritual and moral insights
with irrelevancies and Judaica and bits of Iron Age culture, some of
which are truly awful. That leaves each of us, from the privileged
vantage of the 21st century, with both a right and a responsibility to
consider the evidence and make our own best guesses about what is real
and how we should then live. A good starting place might be a little
more recognition that we don’t know nearly as much as we’d like to
think, and a lot of what we know for sure is probably wrong.
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