Approximately two thousand and twenty years
ago a baby was born. He would be named
Jesus, although people have since called him Christ, The Messiah, The Saviour,
the Redeemer, the Holy One or The King.
This baby must now be considered the most influential man in the history
of Europe, North and South America, Australia and New Zealand, and large swaths
of Africa. His influence has directed
the laws and customs of all of these places. But what about that famous birth?
In that time, old age was much younger than
we are used to. Disease, infection and
injury without modern medication meant that the average death mostly came in
the 40s and even younger. A man was
middle aged when he was 25.
It is important to remember the conditions
when Jesus was born. Judea was a province of Rome and was ruled by a Roman
ruler, at the time it was Herod.
However, to the Jewish people, local administration was carried out by
the Jewish leaders. There were two
antagonistic groups of such leaders: The Liberals and . . . er, the Republicans
and . . . er, the Pharisees and Sadducees.
They had been vying for power for over a hundred years and this caused
considerable turmoil among the Jews of Judea and to the Jewish religion. It is interesting to note that the time of
Jesus’ birth, the Jewish people were a dispersed group. As traders, emigrants, refugees and
administrators, they were prevalent in most of the known world. It has been estimated that less than
twenty-five percent of Jews actually lived in Judea. This is the world that
Jesus entered.
Let’s start with his parents. Joseph, his father, we are told was a
carpenter in the town of Nazareth. As a
carpenter, he would have been a respected member of his community and well
known. His trade would have made him
what we would call today, middle class.
He was neither a poor nor a rich man.
We are told that he traced his ancestry to King David. We are also told that he was older than
Mary. Mary is described as a young
virgin. In that time, that would put her
age at about thirteen to sixteen. That
was the age that people got married. We
can get some idea that she was that young by noting that thirty-three later,
when Jesus was crucified, she was still with him. If she had been in her twenties when Jesus
was born, she would have been very old and perhaps deceased; unlikely to have
followed Jesus to Jerusalem.
The well-known story of the conditions at
Jesus’ birth, how he was born in a stable and slept in a manger are quite
plausible. The family had travelled from Nazareth to Bethlehem to “be
taxed”. This was a Roman decree that
applied to all of the Roman Empire. This
was long before the days of Holiday Inns and Best Westerns, and Expedia
advanced reservations. When you travelled, you took your chances that there
would be someplace where you could get a meal and a place to sleep at
night. Bethlehem was not a large town,
perhaps only a few hundred people, and the places available to rest would be
very limited; perhaps one or two inns. There
was no Bethlehem Hilton. But with the taxation decree forcing many people to
travel to their family home, any town would have been sorely tested to
accommodate everyone that needed a place to stay. Jesus’ family were probably not the only ones
that night to stay in places like stables, barns and even in the open. Some later accounts state that the “stable”
may, in fact, have been a cave, perhaps used to house animals or to store grain
and animal feed.
Jesus had a mission. He started that mission when he was about
thirty years old, certainly not a young man for those times. He became preacher or teacher (rabbi in
Hebrew) in his country of Judea where he preached to his fellow Jews. His mission seems to be to reform Judaism
from the turmoil and strictures it was saddled with at that time. Perhaps he hoped to put a more human face on
the religion. Jesus was born a Jew and
he died a Jew, condemned ironically enough by his own people. Why?
Probably because Jesus was not the Messiah that the Jewish people
wanted. They would have wanted a warrior king, like David, to rid them of the
Romans and their other adversaries.
Jesus did not envision Christianity.
That was done by Paul.
