As we walk through the life story of Jesus of Nazareth, we will see that what can be said with “complete confidence,” does not mean that everything else is merely doubtful.
Part 1: A Child is Born, a Son is Given
By Robert Stackpole, STD
In this weekly web series, Dr. Robert Stackpole, emeritus director of the John Paul II Institute of Divine Mercy, leads us step-by-step through the life of the Founder of Christianity, from Bethlehem to Galilee to Jerusalem. Along the way, we pause to consider in-depth the historical debate over the gospel stories of the virginal conception and nativity of Jesus, his message of the Kingdom, his embrace of persecution and death on the Cross, and his glorious bodily resurrection from the dead. Finally, we plunge into the great mystery of the Incarnation, and show how it actually shines through the whole gospel story from beginning to end.
A long time ago, in a remote country of the mighty Roman Empire, in an obscure village, among an outcast race of people, a child was born. In fact, he was born to a poor peasant girl and a carpenter who had no bed for him at first but a manger in a cattle stall. They named their infant son “Jesus.”
After his birth in the town of Bethlehem, Jesus and his family fled their own country, which was then under the tyrannical rule of King Herod, and lived in Egypt for several years as refugees (Herod had been placed on the throne of Palestine by the Roman Emperor, but he was not descended from the authentic lines of the kings of Israel — in reality, his claim to rule the Jewish people rested solely on brute force).
After Herod died, Jesus and his family returned to their native land and dwelled in the region of Galilee, in a remote mountain village called Nazareth. The boy’s father died sometime after his son’s twelfth birthday.
Historical evidence
Those are the facts about the parentage and childhood of Jesus that are most accessible to the historian, and that can be stated by historians with complete confidence. That may not seem like much, but remember that historians have to rely on evidence that can be corroborated by other pieces of evidence. For some parts of the life story of Jesus, that kind of evidence is not available to us.
As we walk through the life story of Jesus of Nazareth, however, we will see that what can be said with “complete confidence,” does not mean that everything else is merely doubtful.
Looking at the evidence from the New Testament and other ancient sources, many other things can be stated about the life story of Jesus as “probable” or even “strongly probable.” And of course, the perspective of faith (in the divine inspiration of the New Testament, for example) can tell us even more!
But here in this series, we are looking solely at what human reason, using the normal tools of historical research, can establish for us. And as we shall see, they can establish that our Faith is not built merely on myth, legend, fantasy, or wishful thinking, but on a solid bedrock of historical fact.
The stars align
During the time of the birth, infancy, and youth of Jesus, the Mediterranean world prospered under Roman law, and the peace secured by the Roman legions. In fact, there were said to be signs in the heavens of the favor of the gods upon the Empire. A conjunction of the paths of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation of Pisces (a conjunction which happened three times in the year 7 BC), for example, may have been interpreted at the time as a celestial celebration of the reign of the great Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus.
Yet astrologers in Persia, well to the east, must have interpreted this rare meeting of stars in the night sky in a different light: for according to their ancient lore, although Jupiter was the star of the world ruler, Saturn was held to be the star not of Rome but of Palestine, and the constellation of Pisces (the last of the signs of the zodiac) was the constellation representing the last age of the world. As one historian puts it: “When Jupiter meets Saturn in the constellation of the Fishes, that signifies: there will appear in Palestine in this year the ruler of the last days.” [1]
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the gospel writer St. Matthew tells us that around that time “wise men” from the east arrived in the capital city of Palestine, asking, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East, and have come to worship him” (Mt 2:2).
In his book Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, Pope Benedict XVI commented on recent scholarship regarding the star and the coming of the wise men:
Naturally, attempts have been made to establish more precisely who they were. The Viennese astronomer Konrad Ferrari d’Occhieppo has shown that in the city of Babylon — which had once been a center of scientific astronomy but was already in decline by the time of Jesus — there was still “a small group of astronomers who were gradually dying out … Earthenware tablets, covered in cuneiform signs with astronomical calculations … are clear proof of this” (Dern Stern von Bethlehem, p.27). He goes on to say that the conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation of Pisces in the years 7-6 B.C. — now believed to be the actual time of Jesus’ birth — is something that the Babylonian astronomers could have calculated, and it may well have pointed them toward the land of Judea and to a newborn “king of the Jews.” [2]
Slaughter of the Innocents
The extraordinary events taking place in the heavens, and the arrival of the wise men with their portents of a new-born king of the last age of the world, inevitably led King Herod to grow fearful for the security of his throne. Not only in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, but also in an ancient Jewish apocalyptic text written between 6 and 15 AD titled The Assumption of Moses, we find reports that Herod tried to remove the infant Messiah from the scene by slaughtering all the children two years old or younger in Bethlehem, the ancestral town of the royal house of David.
In Matthew the report is clear and explicit (Mt 2:16-18), and it is given as the reason why the parents of Jesus fled with him from Bethlehem in the middle of the night and escaped to Egypt. But in The Assumption of Moses it takes the cryptic form of a prophecy (about things that had already happened in the past), including a prophecy that an “insolent king” (Herod) would rule after the Hasmonean dynasty had ended, and, amongst other crimes, would execute judgment upon the Israelites just as the Egyptian ruler Pharaoh had done long ago (when Pharaoh tried to slaughter all the Israelite baby-boys, see Exodus 1:22).
The Assumption of Moses puts it this way: “and he [Herod] will cut off their chief men with the sword and will destroy them in secret places, so that no one may know where their bodies are. He will slay the old and the young, and he will not spare. Then the fear of him will be bitter unto them in their land. And he will execute judgement on them as the Egyptians executed upon them.” [3]
In fact, this kind of behavior fits with everything historians know about King Herod. New Testament scholar Scott Hahn writes:
He was homicidal, insecure to the point of paranoia, and he had no compunction about killing people. …He murdered one of his wives and three of his sons. He slaughtered the Jerusalem priests whose scriptural interpretations made him anxious, and his other sporadic purges claimed victims by the hundreds. What are a few dead infants and toddlers to such a man? [4]
Next: Part 2: Jesus Called God His “Abba,” Father
Notes
[1] Ethelbert Stauffer, Jesus and His Story (SCM, 1960 edition), p. 37. The magi and the star may be a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, although Matthew does not seem to have realized it (otherwise he would have been sure to quote the prophecy in his gospel, as he did so many other Hebrew prophecies fulfilled in the life and death of Jesus). The Gentile prophet Balaam proclaimed in Numbers 24:17-19: "I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not nigh: a star shall come forth out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel; it shall crush the forehead of Moab, and break down all the sons of Sheth. Edom shall be dispossessed …. By Jacob shall dominion be exercised." Balaam was called a magos by the Jewish biblical scholar Philo of Alexandria, a near contemporary of Jesus, and according to the Dead Sea Scrolls this prophecy in Numbers concerned the rise and reign of the Messiah — and, in fact, King Herod was an Edomite — so the early Christians recognized that in the coming of the magi to Bethlehem the successors of Balaam were following the star long foretold in order to witness the fulfilment of the words of their predecessor. See Eusebius (ca. 310 AD), Demonstration of the Gospel, 9.1.
[2] Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives (New York: Image Books, 2012), p. 94. Wait: wasn’t Jesus born at the beginning of the first year, AD? How then could Pope Benedict say that the star of Bethlehem probably appeared in 7-6 BC? Actually, historians now know that the monks who made the original western calendars made a few mistakes. For example, we now know that king Herod probably died as early as 4 BC, so Jesus’s actual birthday would have occurred before that date.
[3] Stauffer, Jesus and His Story, p. 38-39.
[4] Scott Hahn, Joy to the World. (New York: Image Books, 2014), p. 137-138.
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