The Carpenter's Son

A Proletarian Reconstruction of Jesus of Nazareth

Christian Chiakulas

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532695094
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Who was Jesus of Nazareth? Buried beneath two thousand years of theology and dogma lies a real historical person who founded a movement that evolved into the largest religion in the history of the world. But is it possible to know what he really said, did, and believed? This book applies the Marxist conception of history to the study of the historical Jesus. It focuses on class, material conditions, and textual analysis to extract the authentic sayings and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth. The implications are far-reaching for followers of Christ wishing to base their faith in reason and science. They also offer guidance and inspiration for modern activists and revolutionaries wishing to challenge the same unjust systems of power that Jesus faced in his own lifetime.

Chapter 3

Practice

Jesus Christ was a man that traveled through the land, hard working man, and brave. He said to the rich: “Give your goods to the poor!” So they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

—Woody Guthrie

The Basic Narrative

Before diving too deeply into textual analysis of all the little pieces, it’s a good idea to step back and consider the whole. The Synoptic Gospels present a relatively simple threefold narrative framework for the life and ministry of Jesus—(1) his miraculous birth in Bethlehem (absent from Mark, of course); (2) his public ministry as an adult in Galilee; and (3) his death in Jerusalem and resurrection three days later. In other words: birth, life, death.

What can we say about this narrative framework? The Passion Narrative of Jesus’s death and resurrection will be taken up in a later chapter, while the content of his life and public ministry will form the bulk of this one. That leaves only this small section for the birth/infancy/adolescent narratives.

The story is familiar: Joseph and his betrothed, Mary, who have not consummated their marriage yet, are visited by an angel who tells them that Mary will bear the Son of God, even though she is a virgin. They leave their home in Nazareth for Bethlehem, Joseph’s ancestral home, so that he can participate in a census. While there they are forced to sleep in a manger where Mary gives birth to Jesus. They are attended by shepherds and visited by three wise men from the east, who followed a miraculous star to the birthplace of the Son of God. Then Herod, having met the wise men and learned of the birth of the Son of God, declares that all male babies born during this time be executed. Joseph and Mary flee to Egypt, and after Herod’s death return to their home in Nazareth.

It’s a nice story for Christmas, but none of that is how it happens at all. That familiar summary actually contained elements from both Luke’s and Matthew’s birth narratives, combined into one. Examining the texts side-by-side, however, reveals stark and utterly irreconcilable differences.

The “massacre of the innocents” where Herod decrees that all male babies under the age of two be slaughtered is found only in Matthew, while the census is found only in Luke. Matthew has Joseph and Mary living originally in Bethlehem and moving to Nazareth after the death of Herod and return from Egypt; Luke has them living originally in Nazareth and only going to Bethlehem for the census. Only Luke has the manger; only Matthew has the wise men. Both gospels give genealogies for Jesus, but these genealogies are wildly different. Luke’s gospel focuses on Mary, as well as Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist; Matthew’s gospel focuses on Joseph.

There are other minor discrepancies, but in general what is important to note is that the birth accounts are different in all but four elements: Mary, Joseph, virgin birth, and Bethlehem. So what exactly are we dealing with here?

At first glance, the fact that these narratives appear only in Luke and Matthew may lead one to assume that the birth narrative came from Q. This is extremely unlikely, however; Q was almost certainly a sayings gospel like the Gospel of Thomas, containing no narratives whatsoever (not counting possible framing devices such as “Jesus said to . . .”). Moreover, the complete lack of textual parallelism other than the four most basic elements makes it very likely that we are dealing with two independent elaborations upon a common tradition.

Of the four elements of this possible tradition—Joseph, Mary, Virgin Birth, Bethlehem—the first two are the simplest to explain. Jesus’s parents are named as Joseph and Mary because those were his parents’ names. Mary is mentioned elsewhere, and with the knowledge that Jesus’s brothers (especially James the Just) were leaders in the early church it is no stretch to think that their names would have been familiar to many if not most Christians.

Bethlehem is also relatively simple. Our earliest source (Paul) describes Jesus as “Christ”—messiah—as does our best non-Christian source, Josephus (recall this was almost certainly in neutral terms, as in Jesus was called Christ). In Jewish thought the messiah has to come from Bethlehem51 because it’s the city of King David and the messiah is a Davidic archetype. However, the synoptic account is clear about Jesus coming from Nazareth, which presented a problem for early Christians trying to convince other Jews that Jesus was the Messiah. So Matthew and Luke independently created stories explaining how Jesus could have been born in Bethlehem even though he came from Nazareth.

That leaves only one element, the most important one. The virgin birth is an interesting case, because it seems to defy Jewish convention that is otherwise fairly well-honored in the gospels. There are many examples from the Hebrew bible of miraculous births, however they all involve elderly, infertile women’s wombs being opened by God and then being impregnated by their husbands. Mary, on the other hand, is a young virgin impregnated by an act of God.

Much is made of a supposed “prophecy” in the Hebrew Bible from Isaiah 7:14 which reads, “Behold, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.” When the Hebrew Bible was translated into the Greek Septuagint (the version the authors of Matthew and Luke knew), the Hebrew almah meaning “young woman” was translated into the Greek παρθένος (parthenos), which can mean “virgin.” However, in the original Hebrew, it has no connotations with virginity, and if you bother to read past Isaiah 7:14 it becomes abundantly clear that the prophecy does not refer to a distant messiah but rather to a situation within the book of Isaiah.

Still, it is unlikely that Matthew and Luke both independently created virgin birth stories based on this mistranslation. Luke shows very little interest in having Jesus directly fulfil prophecies from the Hebrew Bible, and it is highly implausible he would have done so just for that element. More likely is that this tradition was already developing in the late first century and that each gospel author incorporated it into their own account, combining it naturally with the other elements of Jesus’s birth.52

So what can we make of these elements, historically? The names of Jesus’s parents tell us just that, which isn’t very helpful (although his mother was probably named after Miriam, the Hasmonean princess executed by Herod the Great [her husband] in 29 BCE. She was well-loved by the Jewish people and her name became very common after her death).

The birth in Bethlehem is more useful. What it tells us is that by the late first century, some early Christians felt the need to invent narratives to bolster Jesus’s messianic credentials. Remember, we know that these narratives were invented because none of our earliest sources (Q, Mark, Paul, Thomas) make any mention of them. Beyond that, they are suffused with apologetics.

The birth narratives are also not historically feasible. Luke, for example, gets the date of the census under Quirinus wrong, placing it while Herod and Augustus were still alive (in reality it took place long after both were dead). Luke is using the memory of a census from nearly a century earlier as a narrative device to suit his purposes. Likewise Matthew narrates a fictitious story about Herod massacring babies; while we know that Herod was a brutal man, Josephus certainly would have mentioned...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Foundation
• Historical Context
• Practice
• Theory
• Passion
• Resurrection
• The Good News
• Bibliography