The Story of Jesus

A Mosaic

Roy A. Harrisville

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725281042
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This book, written for college and seminary age students, is the distillation of reflection on the life and career of Jesus of Nazareth for over three decades. Such reflection needs no legitimizing since preoccupation with Jesus of Nazareth continues in one form or another till the present day. The arrangement of the pieces and fragments which make up the "mosaic" in part pursue the usual chronological order as appears in most editions of the Bible. But the interpretation of events within each sequence are this author's own.In discussion with early or contemporary scholars, the text may reflect agreement or disagreement, but assumes the right to and responsibility for a specific point of view.As indicated, the book is a "mosaic," comprised of pieces and fragments. It in no way intends to match the often massive attempts at describing Jesus of Nazareth that have been published over the centuries. Like a mosaic, it will show wear and tear, but it will be sufficient to indicate to the reader precisely whose face appears amid all those fragments and pieces, and enough to awaken reflection on his life and career.

Part One

Beginnings

The Conception and Birth of Jesus

The Gospels of the New Testament vary widely in their introductions to the life and career of Jesus. Matthew begins with Jesus’ genealogy, reaching back to Abraham, then follows with the holy family’s flight to Egypt and its return, intersected by the massacre of the innocents. Luke opens with a series dealing with the birth of the Baptist, the prediction of Jesus’ birth, the encounter of the Baptist’s mother, Elizabeth, with the mother of Jesus, the song of Mary (the Magnificat), John’s naming and the prophecy of Zechariah, the presentation of Jesus in the temple, the tracing of his genealogy to Adam, and the return of the family to Nazareth. John, in a radically different fashion, opens with a difficult and extended prologue concerning the Logos manifest in the flesh. None of these details appear in Mark, who opens his Gospel immediately with the baptism of Jesus. The result is that for the narrative of Jesus’ conception and birth we are entirely dependent on Matthew and Luke.

According to these two evangelists, the parents of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, hailed from Nazareth, a town in that portion of Israel called Galilee, supposedly inhabited by the tribe of Asher in its northernmost, and by the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali in its southernmost part. Galilee, the so-called “Northern Kingdom,” was conquered by Assyria in 721 BC and from then on subjected to Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman rule. Unlike the Judeans, members of the so-called “Southern Kingdom,” conquered by the Babylonians in 586 BC, Galileans were not subject to transmigration, removed from their homes and ultimately mixed with their foreign conquerors. In Galilee, the situation was reversed. Invasions by foreign troops led to influence in language and custom that would give to the area the name “Galilee of the Gentiles.” In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus is described as “son of Joseph from Nazareth” (John 1:45). The reference need not reflect an alternative tradition to that of the virgin birth in Matthew and Luke but merely an accommodation to a principle dominant in Judaism according to which the child was named after the father, putative or no. At any rate, Matthew and Luke describe the conception of Jesus as a divine activity; an event initiated by the Spirit of God. I take the reference to contain both judgment and affirmation. Judgment insofar as the male, the active agent in human history, has no role to play in the event of Jesus’ conception and birth. Joseph is in the background, and beyond the initial references to his discovery of Mary’s condition, or the angel’s announcement that her pregnancy has not come about by way of human initiation, he entirely disappears from the scene. According to speculation, Joseph was elderly when Jesus was conceived and born, while Mary was not yet a teenager. So be it. Further, the event denotes affirmation insofar as it indicates choice of what in that period was certainly the passive instrument of human history as the agent of revelation, as “Mother of God.” An army of scholars has urged that admitting to the “biological curiosity” of the virgin conception and birth defies logic, and some feminists have suggested that the activity of the Spirit in Mary’s conception hides connotations of rape. More, ancient mythology is filled with stories of the births of heroes and conquerors entirely apart from sexual activity. And while I agree that affirmation of the event as the New Testament describes it does not make me a Christian, I affirm the ancient creedal confession “that he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.” It is true that explicit witness to the Virgin Birth in the New Testament is extremely rare, occurring only in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Further, in the formula quotation of Isaiah 7:14 which Matthew uses to indicate the event as fulfilling prophecy,1 the Hebrew term (almah) which he translates “virgin” (parthenos) can simply be translated “young woman,” presumably of marriageable age. To add to the difficulty, in Judaism the text from Isaiah 7 is never interpreted messianically. But who can say whether or not the remaining Gospel witnesses assume what is explicit in Matthew and Luke, or that with his formula quotation Matthew does not intend referring to a radically new event? At any rate, however rare, according to the witness of Matthew and Luke, thus of the Church for two millennia, the event of God’s taking on flesh in Jesus Christ requires the particular sign of his extraordinary birth, and, if that extraordinary birth is not the cause or condition of the event, it is nonetheless inseparably connected with it. The field of scholarship is strewn with attempts to separate the one from the other, the event from the sign. And while I do not doubt that Jesus Christ could have been born by natural means, I affirm this “biological curiosity” precisely for those intimations of judgment and affirmation cited above. Judgment on human planning and proposing and initiating signaled in the relegating of any human positive activity to the fringes of saving event, and moving affirmation of the passive to its center, are a theme threading throughout the entire biblical account. There will be more than one Joseph warned away from attempting a contribution to the divine event, and to the annunciation or announcement of the coming of deliverance, more than one will only be able to answer: “Let it be with me according to your word,” an answer echoed in Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane: “Remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want” (Mark 14:36). Finally, however nuanced, Matthew and Luke cite the event of Jesus’ birth as an act of God alone. As Luther writes:

Once more the word has its way—since God promises blessing on all heathen in Christ—that Christ could not come from one man or man’s work, for fleshly work (which is cursed) does not allow for what is pure blessing and blest. Therefore this blessed fruit had to be the fruit of only one female body, not of a man—even though the same female body comes from a man, and indeed from Abraham and Adam—so that this mother is a virgin and yet a truly natural mother, but not by natural ability or power, but by the Holy Spirit and God’s power alone.2

And while I’m not insisting here that all this be taken for gospel, perhaps, when I’ve finished with the story, the reader may at least understand why I do so.

At any rate, Jesus was conceived in Nazareth of Galilee, a town of little consequence, as compared, say with Sepphoris to the north, a rich, deeply cosmopolitan center under Greek influence, sacked for its weapons by the rebel Judas in 4 BC. To this day the old city of Nazareth has little to commend it, with automobiles minus their wheels stacked behind fences, and the main street with a ditch in the middle to allow animal feces to spill away from the town. The birth itself occurred in Bethlehem of Judea, risen to prominence after the anointing of David, second king of Israel, and together with Hebron a capital city of the “Southern Kingdom,” conquered by Babylon, and later under Hellenistic and Roman rule. According to the biblical account, Jesus’ parents had traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem, responding to a census conducted for tax purposes by the current governor of Roman Syria, Quirinius, and while there Jesus was born. Curiously, the biblical account also assigns Jesus’ birth to the year of Herod the Great’s death in 4. BC But however indeterminate the year of Jesus’ birth, the manner, the how of it is clear. He was born in what I and my schoolmates were accused of having been born in when acting crudely—in a barn. If he had been a Julius or an Augustus room would have been made for him, whatever the cost to someone else. And, if indeed, he belonged to the Davidic line, for which reason he was at times called “Son of David,” it was a line that had long petered out and been ignored. The ozone surrounding Jesus’ conception and birth literally reeks with poverty and want. A pregnancy out of wedlock and birth in a spot reserved for four footed beasts scarcely trumpet the coming of a figure about to turn the world upside down. Compare these lines:

While they were there [i.e. in Bethlehem], the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

with these lines, penned by the celebrated Latin poet Virgil (70–19 BC) over a noble Roman’s offspring:

. . .enter upon your high honours—the hour will soon be here—dear offspring of the gods, mighty seed of a Jupiter to be! See how the world bows with its massive dome—earth and expanse of sea and heaven’s depth! See how all things rejoice in the age that is at hand!3

Tradition assigns the visit of the wise men to the manger as simultaneous with that of the shepherds, to the point where the crèche is overcrowded. Beyond referring to them as magoi the evangelist Matthew neither names them nor identifies their profession, though the term itself was in use since the 6th century BC to denote the devotees of Zoroaster involved in any number of pursuits including astrology, alchemy, and dream interpretation. Johann Georg Hamann, friend and later opponent of Immanuel Kant, describes the reason for the Magi’s visit as an illusion „long obsolete,“ or as a „saga“ to which they held as to a prophetic word. Adhering strictly to the narrative sequence in Matthew’s Gospel (2:1–18: visit of the wise men, flight to Egypt, massacre of the infants) Hamann writes that the mothers who had to mourn the bloodbath of their children at Bethlehem would have sighed over the inconsiderateness and inquisitiveness „of these foreigners,“ and describes the newly born King of Israel as taking flight because he was „betrayed by his worshippers to Herod the ruling Anti-Christ, a liar and murderer from the beginning.“4

The Prologue in John

As in Mark, the birth narratives are omitted by the Fourth Evangelist, with the exception of his reference to the Baptist, and replaced with a “Prologue,” intended to describe the event of Christ from the time before time. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1) Any attempt to render that line ‘and the Word was divine” comes a cropper on the rule that the anarthrous noun, that is, the ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One Beginnings
• The Conception and Birth of Jesus
• Part Two The Begininings of Jesus’ Ministry
• Part Three Schooling the Disciples
• Part Four The Passion
• Part Five Summary
• Appendix
• Questions for Reflection
• Bibliography