A Most Influential Man

 

Approximately two thousand and twenty-five 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 fifteen.  That was the age that people got married.  We can get some idea that she was that young by noting that thirty-three years 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”. It was actually a form of census taking. 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.  Based on the fact that Jesus was Jewish, you have to wonder how so many Christians are anti-Semitic.