← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Boy Jesus: Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times Featuring Joan Taylor
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If you ask any Christian about the life of Jesus, you're likely to get a version of one of the Gospels of the New Testament. 90% of the story would concern the final few years of Jesus life, with a brief mention of his birth in Bethlehem to a virgin and then the subsequent flight to Egypt. Historians don't often talk about what Jesus childhood and adolescence may have looked like, but my guest today is a welcome exception to that rule. Dr. Joan Taylor joins me to talk about her new book, Boy Jesus Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times.
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C
Welcome to Ms.
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B
Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. Hello everybody and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. As I said in my introduction today I am thrilled to be joined by Dr. Joan Taylor to talk about the early life of Jesus and her new book Boy Jesus Growing Up Judean in turbulent times. Dr. Taylor is Professor Emerita of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism at King's College London and Honorary professor at Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, Australia. Her many publications include the Essenes, the Scrolls and the Dead Sea, what Did Jesus Look Like? And Women Remembered Jesus, Female disciples written with Dr. Helen Bond. Dr. Taylor, thank you so much for joining me today.
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C
Thank you for inviting me.
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B
I'm thrilled. It's going to be a lot of fun and for those watching or listening, if this conversation is interesting to you, Dr. Taylor's book is now available to purchase in Europe and the U.S. so if this sounds like fun, go buy it, take a look and investigate all of this evidence and thrilling writing for yourself. I do want to make a quick housekeeping note before we get started. We're trying something a little bit new on misquoting Jesus. Today's episode is going to be the first of a two part special on this topic. Dr. Taylor's work has challenged some very widely accepted consensus among scholars that we can know very little about Jesus early life. And I think it's probably going to promote a lot of healthy academic debate, which is something that is really essential to move scholarship forward and deepen our understanding of the past. So the second part of this episode, which should really release in a month or two, will examine what current academic consensus is on these questions and ask why consensus exists in the first place. So all of our preliminary things out of the way. Dr. Taylor, I wanted to start by asking you what prompted you to write a book on Jesus priest ministry life.
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C
Right. Well, I have taught the historical Jesus for years and years and years, both in New Zealand and King's College in London. And I was completely part of the consensus in that. I jumped over all of the birth narratives about Jesus and didn't really think about anything in terms of his childhood. And as time has gone on, particularly as I've learned more about Judean history, thinking a lot about Philo of Alexandria and also Josephus, I've worked on them at great length. I started to think a lot about what it would have been like for Jesus growing up in a time which was extremely turbulent, when things were far from settled, when there were all kinds of challenges for Judeans. And that led me down the path of just investigating the birth narratives again and thinking about, well, you know, dismissing them all as entirely fantasy, as I had done before, is fine. You know, that's. The people do have this consensus that it's a legendary construction. There's a lot that is constructed in them. But then there's a question of should we think in terms of binaries, of either completely false or completely true? Is it possible to go into those first narratives and think about whether there are bits of memory that might be contained, even though they're incredibly shaped in the form that we have them? So there's that, but even more just the situation of Judea at the beginning of the first century, end of the first century bce, the last days of Herod the Great. Just looking at that time alone tells us something about what Jesus would have experienced being born into that environment, growing up into that environment. And also I suppose I wanted to push back on the idea that we've just got a. A Jesus who is somehow divorced from his family, that Jesus actually grew up within a family, within an environment, you know, in a time and the Family of Jesus seems to have gone on in terms of the early church as something that was. The family itself was important to the Judean churches. So all of these things were starting to come together in my mind. I was just thinking there's a story that hasn't been told. Somehow we've bypassed it. And indeed we are directed to do exactly that by the Gospels themselves. So even though we know that the Nativity accounts of Matthew and Luke and they're meshed together every time we have Christmas and nativity plays, in fact, both the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John are basically telling us, don't even think about Jesus as a child. Don't think about his family very much. Just think about him as an adult. And I feel like we march along their path. We go, okay, all right, we're just going to think about Jesus as an adult. That's all that we can know about Jesus. But yeah, I think we can, we can investigate further.
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B
And would you say that this has been the scholarly consensus of historians that actually all you can know about Jesus is that little part of his adult life?
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C
Absolutely, this is the consensus. But we have to think about who we are when we make up our minds in a particular way. What kind of assumptions do we have ourselves? We have to self scrutinize. And I think a lot of our assumptions come from a very Western way of seeing the great men of history, frankly. And they tend to be configured as very singular guys. I'm using men quite consciously here. And there's a Western idea about what counts in terms of memory and how memory is shaped as well. Now I, you can hear from my accent, I'm. I'm a New Zealander and, and I feel like I, I've had two experiences that have, have fed my critique of, of Western ways of thinking. One of them was when I went to Africa when I was a young mother. My husband worked in human rights in Africa and we lived in the Gambia for some time. And I was interested in how people told stories and families and what families meant. And it was often the old women of a community were very much the storytellers. So that's very interesting. But then also in New Zealand, in terms of Mori, there's a long tradition of oral storytelling and that then finally was written down by Westerners, the colonizers who came to New Zealand. But Mori still hold on to that oral story tradition and things are passed down over the decades, over the centuries. So I think in the Western historical tradition there's a very great suspicion of Orality. Yet we are in a world, in the ancient world in which it's oral telling that counts for everything and even something written down. Isn't that fixed? It still has the character of an oral telling where, as you see in the Gospels, it can be modified in the next telling, the next written piece, because that's what they do in terms of oral telling. But it doesn't mean that you distrust the orality and only things that are written down count for anything. We have to expand our view and think in terms of how memories arise, how they're shaped, how they're passed on. So what's happened really for me methodologically is I've got more interested in memory studies, the work of Tom Thatcher and others, Chris Keith, thinking about how what we've got in the Gospels as a result of a certain chain of passing on memory, and it's very tricky to work out what is a kind of memory nugget in the middle of the telling because it is so shaped.
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B
Thank you. That's a really fantastic kind of theoretical, I think, underpinning for us to start from now when we're thinking about Jesus and who he was and how he would have experienced the world kind of before the accounts that we really get in the Gospels. How do you think that his identity as a Judean, Galilean, Jew would have influenced his experience?
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C
Yeah. So in the book, I start off in the first chapter really exploring what this term means, the Greek term. And it has different dimensions. It's very hard to just sort of cluster them all and worship one. Jesus is a Eudyos. He's identified in the story of meeting the Samaritan woman at the well in the Gospel of John as a different from a Samaritan. She identifies them as such. Now, what does that mean? It means a Judean. It means someone who has a connection with the land of Judith, Judea. So I wanted to bring that forward a bit in terms of the identity of Jesus so that he is connected with a land. And again, that comes from something of what I've learned in terms of mori understanding of connection of land being very important in terms of many cultures. So is not just that he's got a religious identity of being a Jew. And we know a lot about his religious identity. So many scholars have written about Jesus as a Jew ever since Gaze of her Maisch's brilliant book, Jesus the Jew. But Judeanness hasn't, I think, been written about so much. And that implies culture. It implies the narrative of land feeling connected with land and place both Jerusalem as a holy city and as you'll see in the book, anyone who reads it, I think Jesus was a Bethlehemite in that his family came from Bethlehem originally. He was connected with that particular town and it's there in so much of the early Christian tradition. But the identity of Judean, the land, culture, identity I think is really vital. But also the tribal identity, Judais also connects you with an ancestral heritage of being from the tribe of Judah. And that is a tribe that is described a great deal in terms of scripture and the origins of, of the tribe is there. But there would have been all sorts of other oral traditions that have now been lost as well, storytelling about ancestors and so on. So it's that connectivity with the past ancestrally that I think is important there and would have been important for anyone growing up in that time. And also land. And in terms of Galileanness, in terms of his identity as a Galilean, I actually see that as more of an immigrant identity. Again, you know, I think of how immigrants, both of us, have had the experience of immigration. And when you're an immigrant, you have a place in two worlds. You don't just inhabit one world. You belong to your place in terms of your current identity, but you also have a connectivity with your past. Your strong sense of this is where I come from. And I think that we can see that in the Nativity account of Luke, there is this kind of Nazareth, Bethlehem sort of toing and froing. But that makes sense to me. You don't have to choose between thinking about, oh, was Jesus a Galilean or was he a man from Old Judea, a Bethlehemite or a Nazarene? He's actually both in terms of his identity, because his identity as a Galilean is an immigrant one.
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B
Thank you. That's fantastic explanation of all of the kind of different facets of identity that we're working with here. And the other one that you go through in some detail in the book is just Jesus as a descendant of King David and jointly with that as King of the Jews. Now in, in the book you make it very clear that you think this is a very plausible identity, self identity for Jesus and for his, for his family. Could you explain why you think that this isn't a later invention by the Gospel writers? And in conjunction with that, would there have been many people in Israel who would have self identified as having this same heritage as being directly descended from King David?
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C
Right. So this is one of the things that I just absolutely thought was Part of the spin to say that Jesus was a descendant from David, that was very convenient. It was part of the Gospel claim that he was the Messiah and the Messiah was the descendant of David, great king from the 11th century century BCE, everyone was expecting a messiah like David. And then I started to think, because I would do a lot of work in the Dead Sea Scrolls as well. Well, actually in the Dead Sea Scrolls, as also in Enochic literature and the literature of Enoch and similar literature to first Enoch, that's not really important at all. And for a messiah in that there is a messiah descended from David, a royal messiah, that's great. But you could be another kind of messiah in the Dead Sea Scrolls, you could be a priestly kind of messiah. And they were looking for that. And the Enochic literature has the Son of Man or Son of humanity as a far more important figure, much more heavenly figure. And what it seems to me is like that if you look at the Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Mark is grappling with the fact that, oh yeah, Jesus was the son of David, but actually, let's make sure everyone knows he's really the Son of God, the Son of man, who is going to suffer and go on this journey and be glorified at the end. And so the real story of the Gospel of Mark is not that he's the descendant of David, but he's this other kind of Messiah. And the fact that he's descended from David is sort of, by the by, we've got it as in the tradition, but we're not going to make a big deal out of it. In the Gospel of Matthew, it is made much more of a big deal right from the very beginning with the genealogy. And you know, he's called son of David 13 times in the Gospel of Matthew. So the Gospel of Matthew does want to say that. And it's there in the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, but it's there widely in early Christian literature and, you know, in the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, it's in the Didache, it's just part of the furniture about Jesus. And yet it's also something that as time goes by in Christianity, isn't very important because Jesus, Son of God, God the Son in the end, in terms of the Nicene Creed. So we march down this road in which Jesus physical descent starts to count less and less as we go on. So then the question is, why would they really have made it up if they could have chosen to go with these different kinds of Messiahs? From the outset, actually within Judaism, they didn't need it. As to how many people thought they were descended from David, that's a question. And it was thought that nobody did. No one remembered. And the idea that Judah Hanassi, rabbinic teacher, was descended from David was probably just a claim. Hillel was supposed to be descended from David. It's probably just a claim, but actually two things really. One is that if people claimed to be descended from David, that was still important, important for their identity. And ultimately we can't say whether Jesus was or he wasn't. But it does seem to be something that was important in terms of his identity, in terms of what his family thought. And that goes on in terms of the early tradition. But also there was a lovely little ossuary found, a small bone box found outside Jerusalem, give at Hamtah, which has on its top from the house of David, that the person who was buried in that bone box was someone who claimed to be from the house of David. So people were at that time claiming exactly that. And in the Mishnah, there's even a job description for those who are descended from David, that they're supposed to bring wood to the altar in Jerusalem. So there might not have been many people descended from David in the first century bce, but to say that there were, you know, there was no one descended from David or no one could care about their ancestry again, you know, ancestry is so important for so many cultures. It just isn't that important. In, in modern Western culture, we can't recite our ancestry. But for Mori in Aotearoa and New Zealand, it's very common to be able to recite your ancestry back centuries. That is part of the oral tradition. It's part of what you grow up with. And to doubt that people could do that and had no idea who their ancestors were, especially if you were descended from David. It just seems like a lot of our skepticism comes from our own little mental boxes rather than really thinking about how life was like in the ancient world.
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B
That's really interesting. Thank you. So if, if Jesus did have this family identity as having been descended from David, and this wasn't necessarily unusual, if not super common, do you think that's. That identity would have. That his understanding maybe of himself as a direct descendant of David would have impacted his life at all?
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C
I think when I look at what Herod the Great was up to in terms of the memory of David, anyone who was descended from David, who was of the family of David, the line of David, would have felt absolutely terrified and what Josephus says is that Herod in his final years became increasingly paranoid and was prepared to kill members of his own family. He killed three of his own sons. It's just extraordinarily brutal, the final years of Herod's life. And this is the time span we have for Jesus birth and both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus is born sometime in the final years of Herod the Great. And I think there's a general feeling that's probably right. That's probably when Jesus was born. So if we just put Jesus as a descendant of David in that mix, you know, forget about everything else in terms of the nativity accounts, what we've got is Herod going in and desecrating the tomb of David in Jerusalem. Josephus describes it several times over. It's absolutely shocking that Herod would go in to this incredibly emulated king's tomb where there's expectation, there's hope, there's, you know, this is the great king of Israel and Judah. He goes in at night with a band of people and steals the remaining treasure that was sealed inside this tomb in the middle of Jerusalem. And this terrible incident happens and fire bursts through from the inner part of the tomb when he goes into actually looking at the coffins or sarcophagi of David and Solomon. But the story is told of Herod doing this abominable thing in terms of the memory of David. And there's also a story told by Julius Africanus where Herod burns the records, the official records of the noble families of Judea. Josephus himself talks about having official records of his Hasmonean lineage. He's been quite proud of those records. So such things might very well have existed. We don't need to be super skeptical about that. But Herod also builds his tomb complex and a great palace fortress on this hill of Herodium looking over the town of Bethlehem. And the town of Bethlehem was connected with the Davidic, the Davidic family. Micah chapter five has a prediction that a ruler of Israel would rise from Bethlehem. And lo and behold, Herod's built his tomb, you know, on a hill, huge, great thing, 25 meters high, like a great white finger standing up on the side of the hill of Herodian overlooking Bethlehem. So that's archaeology for you. And just thinking about that positioning of Herodium, as it's called, the Herod's palace and Bethlehem, you get the sense that Herod had trouble with something going on in Bethlehem, some memory, because Bethlehem was David's city and there was some Connection of hope with David's city. So there's stuff going on, we can't necessarily pinpoint everything neatly and say oh yes, Jesus definitely was from the line of David. But I want to question our assumption that we just need to sweep it all aside as having no credibility at all.
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B
That leads really nicely onto my next question. How do you think that actual historical events can be uncovered from what seem to be semi legendary accounts? So things like we have in the Gospel of Matthew, how do you peel back those layers and try and ascertain what may well be rooted in history and what is probably added later?
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C
That's a really good question and it's incredibly difficult. And I think all we can do is follow a few threads and make an argument as well as we can. And this is the academy, this is scholarship that we do our best in terms of a particular argument. And sometimes we're in making that argument we're testing our own presuppositions, we're testing our own ways of thinking from former years as it has been for me. But say for example the massacre of the innocents there it is in the Gospel of Matthew. And I tend to think of the Gospel of Matthew as the earliest account, the memory account and then the Gospel of Luke coming later and shaping things in a new way. So I'm not going to think too much about the Gospel of Luke because we're starting to get further along the track of liberty in terms of how stories are told. The husband of Matthew I think is quite early place it in the 80s of the first century. Gospel of Matthew is knocking around at the same time that Jesus family members were leading Judean churches. James his brother brother was in charge of the Judean church and killed in about 62. But that those stories are knocking around. So if you imagine an environment in which stories are told but then they're reshaped and reshaped as they're told. Massacre of the innocents the story in the Gospel of Matthew is that Herod is so angry really about the child Jesus being born in Bethlehem. The the magi, the wise men from the east have arrived and departed and there's the whole story of the gift from the wise men. But there's this, this motif of people coming from the east coming to Jerusalem, causing an uprising in Jerusalem, upsetting Herod and Herod doing this abominable thing of massacring children in Bethlehem. Well, Josephus tells a story in which in 40 BCE Parthians who were the enemies of Rome and we remember Herod as The Roman client king, he's put there by Rome. The Parthians are the big enemy. He's supposed to hold on to control of Judea. The Parthians come to Jerusalem in 40 BCE with their chosen king to put on the throne of Judea and Jerusalem, Antigonus Mattathias. And he is part of the Hasmonean dynasty. He's a. He is royal in terms of his ancestry, but not Davidic. He's placed there. And Herod has to flee Jerusalem. He flees Jerusalem. I was thinking, well, how does he flee Jerusalem? He would have had to have left by going south on the road right past Bethlehem. And he goes to this position a little bit south of Bethlehem, south east of Bethlehem. And there local Judeans from the area of Bethlehem attack him. And he successfully, with his particular guard, has success in this battle and massacres them. So they are utterly massacred. The presumably young men from Bethlehem are massacred by Herod at this place. And it's actually there, very close to that place, that Herod builds Herodium, his palace fortress, where he would situate his tomb overlooking Bethlehem. So there was, according to Josephus, a massacre of people from Bethlehem by Herod, but it's chronologically in a different place. It's 40 BCE rather than 4 BCE or 6 BCE. So this is where I think, okay, there's memory here. There's something here in terms of family story that has been told and then passed on and then retold by the churches in a way that makes sense. And in terms of the Gospel of Matthew, it justifies where why Joseph Jesus father flees to Egypt. And it's mixed up with Joseph's dream and scripture interpretation. He's a master of prediction. He's able to understand what he should do before things happen. But actually, if you were off the line of David and the final years of Herod, if I were going to advise anyone from the line of David in the final years of Herod, I would say get out of there. Because Herod is crazy and he could do this sort of thing before he would do it again. And that in itself would justify why anyone would want to flee.
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B
Thank you. That's a really helpful way, I think, to tie historical events to the narrative we have and talk about how the memory of what happened could be reflected in and changing in the story that remains to us. So if that's how we deal with things like the legendary accounts of Matthew, what sources or how do we use additional sources, non biblical sources, to understand things like how life in Galilee was at this time and how people in the area lived.
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C
Galilee has been such an interesting place for so many archaeologists and historians over the last few decades. They've really explored Galilee. And I think the Galilee of Jesus is really being opened up a great deal. So, as I said, I see from the Gospel of Matthew, the story of Joseph wanted to bring his family back to Judea. And then being it's too dangerous in Judea at that time, all sorts of terrible things are happening in Judea. But when they go to Galilee, just at the time when Archelaus is in charge in Jerusalem, doing awful things or massacring people in the Jerusalem temple, there's a freedom movement in Galilee under Judas. This revolutionary called Judas, who is situated. Situated in Sephora. And Sephora is only a few kilometers away from Nazareth. So I see it's a remarkable thing that Joseph is said to go to Galilee just at the point when there's a revolution against Rome. And certainly Joseph is presented as someone who is not on the Roman side. He's fearful of Herod as the Roman client king. So there's been wonderful excavations in Sephora and that's taught us a little bit more about the city. But actually most of what has been excavated is the time later than the first century BCE and early first century ce, because the town, according to Josephus, the Romans came in and utterly destroyed things in Sephoris and enslaved the entire population if they didn't kill the men of the population. So I think this would have been very significant for Jesus and his family to see Sephorus burn with the Romans quashing the revolutionary fervor under the revolts under Archelaus. But Galilee itself, we can learn a lot about how densely it was populated. This wasn't a place where you go because it's a nice rural idyl. There was a place where there was this freedom movement happening just at the time. Of course, according to the Gospel of Matthew, the family relocate there, but then life there wouldn't have been very easy because it's not easy for any kind of immigrant coming into an area that's not well to do. And if Joseph was a carpenter, it was a case of finding a place where he could work and set up a trade and establish his family in that trade. So Nazareth would have been like many other rural places, villages in Galilee, very close to other villages, because we now know Josephus was correct. There's over 200 villages and quite a small parcel of land in Galilee. And both Philo and Josephus indicate that Judea and Galilee in particular was incredibly populated. It was really dense. So we have to imagine Jesus family, Jesus as a child growing up in a place where there's a real pressure of population on land, there's a great deal of poverty to. Jonathan Reed has done great work on looking at Galilee at this time, situating Jesus within a Galilee that struggled with a lot of health issues. Life expectancy was not high, lots of children who would have died early on. So Jesus located there is part of a community, community who had had this recent very fierce revolt against Rome, wanted independence. Josephus describes Galileans as being rather macho warriors. You know, they were, you know, ready to, to revolt. And he, he himself knew Galileans well because he was a leader of revolt at the beginning of the big, the great revolt fought against Rome in the late 60s. So Josephus can tell us a lot about Galilee and just the feeling of what it was to be a Galilean.
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B
What do you picture Jesus own life being like as an immigrant, a Judean Jew settling in Galilee with his parents and siblings. What would day to day life have been for him?
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C
So day to day life would just have been the usual rural lifestyle of a Judean boy. That the Judean world of Galilee was an immigrant world, that Galilee had been colonized by the Judeans of the south only a hundred years earlier. It was formerly Syrophoenician for centuries. So I think it is important to see Jesus as part of an immigrant. He is a recent immigrant from Judea. But actually Judeans in Galilee generally were not long established in Galilee and they would be mixed with those who had converted to Judaism from the former Syrophoenicians. But this world was one in which you just. It's a patriarchal world. As a boy growing up, you would have followed your father's craft and trade. A carpenter was not high class, an elite person. So Jesus would have not been super educated in terms of literacy. He would have been looked down upon upon by the Scribal elite in Jerusalem as we see he is really in the later story of Jesus tackling the issues of the Scribal elite and the Pharisees and the Sadducees. So he would have had some education at home. Sons were supposed to be educated by their fathers in Torah and all things in terms of living their lives. And there would also have been some kind of synagogue education. But you know, this is Nazareth. This is a little rural village. It's not high status synagogue like in the cities. So yes, an education in Scripture would have been important. But I Do I do see Joseph as being very, very important in Jesus life, that he. The little window we have to Joseph in the Gospel of Matthew, in the Nativity account, is that he was adept at scriptural interpretation and dream interpretation. There was something that mattered to him. He had an education good enough for him to be able to do that. And that kind of predictive art for Josephus is associated with the Essenes, you know, the elite philosophical school of Judea. As Josephus sees the Essenes, they're the masters and the arts of prediction. In the Gospel of Matthew, we have that mastery commanded by Joseph. He sees an angel and dream he can read Scripture and know what he. He should do. So I think that sort of thing would have been passed on to Jesus. And indeed, Jesus comes out, you know, from the time of John the Baptist onwards, he seems to be able to do that. He. He arrives fully formed with an ability to read and interpret Scripture and have a visionary experience that will enable him to know what is right. This visionary scriptural blend, which is absolutely the kind of predictive method we know from Josephus and also from the Dead Sea Scrolls. And there's no reason given in terms of, you know, Gospel of Mark doesn't want us to know anything about his childhood. It's just, you know, Jesus knows how to do this. Wow, amazing. You know, Son of God, of course he would. But actually, I think it's that relationship between Jesus and his father Joseph that would have counted a lot in terms of his education.
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B
Do you see the rest of Jesus family or the wider family unit as shaping not only his life, because we are all shaped by the families we grow up with, but also shaping his own ministry when he becomes an adult and strikes out on his own.
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C
Yeah, so this is absolutely crucial that Jesus was part of a family. And when Jesus goes to Nazareth in the Gospel of Mark and encounters disbelief in Matthew in Nazareth, when the people of Nazareth, who might be wider family members, not his immediate family, but wider family members, encounter him, they're not going to believe anything. They think, who is this guy? And point to in Matthew, son of the carpenter. His mother Mary, his. His brothers, James, Joseph, Simon. His sisters are with us, Jude, his sisters with us, unnamed sisters, later remembered as being called Mary and Salome, which I think is very interesting. So they know they're his family members and it's never said, you know, they're his cousins, they're his children, Joseph's children by a previous marriage. And that's very much the Christian tradition that wanted to separate Jesus from his family and make sure that Mary was a perpetual virgin. And all of that we have in Christian tradition. But in, in the Gospel of Mark and Gospel of Matthew, they're just his family members. They are there and their, their names are given because they are remembered by the early church as being important. So in Eusebius, we have mention of them leading the churches, especially James. And James is clearly a very, very important figure to Paul. When he goes to Jerusalem, he has to meet James. You can see in the first in the letter to the Galatians that Paul sits very uncomfortably with both James and with Peter. And I tend to think that the Pauline tradition that has actually established the church, the Pauline tradition, would like to marginalize the family members of Jesus, James in Jerusalem and the other brothers and cousins who lead because it doesn't quite fit with the Pauline tradition concept of what counts for Jesus. Paul himself. You're talking about ideas about the Messiah. Paul very much goes for the more heavenly Messiah, the Son of God. You know, the revelation of the Son is what counts for him. So the fact that he happens to mention that Jesus is seed of David in Romans at the beginning of Romans accounts for a lot because it really didn't count for Paul. That's not, not important to him. But what didn't count for Paul either is the fact that there were other members of Jesus family who were also from this family of David. So they were in Jerusalem, they were in Judea. But Paul felt like he had a direct calling from Jesus and that was what counted much more for him.
- [46:21]
B
That's really interesting. I've never considered before how very divorced Jesus is and has been by writers from his family grouping as a whole. That's fascinating. I have one more question before we wrap up for today. Why do you think that historians and you yourself, as you have said previously, are so skeptical of our ability to know really anything about Jesus early life?
- [46:54]
C
I think that there's good reason to be skeptical about the nativity accounts. They are very, very shaped. And also I think they're infantilized for us with nativity shows and they're trivialized every Christmas. And so we've got all of that cultural baggage making us particularly suspicious at all if we are historians. But I think that there's a, a suspicion about them partly because they are. Both Matthew and Luke are highly constructed pieces in terms of what they want to gong. You know, they're sort of like gong, oh, with the Gospel of Matthew, oh, Jesus came out of Egypt like Moses gong. You know, Jesus is a lot Like Moses, the sort of Herod is a lot like Pharaoh, the story of Moses, gong, you know, all the way through. And when we think historically anything like that, we think, oh, you know, you're trying too hard, you're trying too hard. But we don't need to think in terms of either or that's the danger. Sometimes we think because it's constructed, there can be no memory at all in it. And what I want to do is say, yeah, it's constructed, but there might very well be memories. Not necessarily. They're not going to validate every aspect of the story by any means. And in the book, you'll see, I think the story of Matthew is actually validating the fatherhood of Joseph. And that then became a problem for the church. And so the tweaks in the manuscript tradition, even to make sure that people didn't think that. But still, you know, there's something there. There's something of memory there. And we can find it in the retelling of the Gospel of Luke. And we can find, you know, if we're thinking about this memory nugget of displacement, for example, we see that going through Interlude, and we see it going through into early apocryphal writings like the Protevangelium of James. There's something about displacement and fear. So that little nugget going through that makes sense if we put it in the context of the times, in terms of what Josephus describes Herod doing and what it would be like really, to be from the family of David in that environment.
- [49:40]
B
Well, Dr. Taylor, thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed the book and it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you.
- [49:47]
C
Thank you for having me. Thank you.
- [49:49]
B
Absolutely. Now, if people are interested, as I said, the book is available to buy. It is called Boy Jesus. My copy right here. Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times. And we didn't get a lot of time to really delve into the archaeological evidence and information that's provided in there, but there's a lot both of, like, textual resources that we spoke about some and a lot of archaeological data. So for those who'd like a bit more of a concrete read into history, this is an excellent book for you audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Misquoting Jesus will be back next week, as will Bart, so make sure you join us then. Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next time Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.