O'Darby III
Active member
This is another nugget inspired the Great Courses series with Bart Ehrman that I'm watching ...
(That's right - I regard my posts as nuggets! Nuggets of what, you'll have to decide for yourself.)
Apart from the NT, there is absolutely no historcal record of Nazareth. It is not mentioned anywhere. Even Josephus, who lived in the first century and whose historical writings comprise thousands of pages, never mentions it.
And yet, we know it existed. Archaeologists have identified and excavated it.
It was a tiny, inconsequential village. There was no school, no synagogue, no publc building of any kind. Only houses for perhaps 200-300 inhabitants, all of whom would've been humble laborers. Jesus is described as a tekton, one who worked with his hands.
So where on earth (or perhaps not on earth) did Jesus acquire his knowledge, his parables, his debating and rhetorical skills, his quirky way with words? His theology was quite different from the Pharisees, more akin to the Sadducees - but the Sadducees were the wealthy elite in league with the Romans. Ehrman insists he couldn't have been an Essene, although it's conceivable John the Baptist may have had some affiliiation.
Jesus was not simply "a bright guy of the sort who might surface anywhere at any time." He was a full-blown sage and rhetorical genius unlike anything that anyone could reasonably have expected to emerge from Nazareth.
One possibility, of course, is that he was God and simply knew everything, including how to fix a 1957 Ford transmission. The fact his family was mystified by the supposed incident when he was 12 and later thought he was out of his mind would suggest he hid his divinity awfully well if that's the answer. Was all of this knowledge, reasoning and rhetorical ability perhaps imparted in some massive cosmic download when he began his ministry? It's very weird.
I have no answer, but I suspect the fabled Missing Years may hold secrets that haven't occurred to most of us. But if that were true, one might have expected at least some hint that he'd spent 15 years studying with a yogi in Tibet to appear somewhere in the NT or the large body of other writings that didn't make it into the NT, some of which specifically concerned the childhood of Jesus (and had him doing things like killing other children who pissed him off!). Very weird, at least to me.
(That's right - I regard my posts as nuggets! Nuggets of what, you'll have to decide for yourself.)
Apart from the NT, there is absolutely no historcal record of Nazareth. It is not mentioned anywhere. Even Josephus, who lived in the first century and whose historical writings comprise thousands of pages, never mentions it.
And yet, we know it existed. Archaeologists have identified and excavated it.
It was a tiny, inconsequential village. There was no school, no synagogue, no publc building of any kind. Only houses for perhaps 200-300 inhabitants, all of whom would've been humble laborers. Jesus is described as a tekton, one who worked with his hands.
So where on earth (or perhaps not on earth) did Jesus acquire his knowledge, his parables, his debating and rhetorical skills, his quirky way with words? His theology was quite different from the Pharisees, more akin to the Sadducees - but the Sadducees were the wealthy elite in league with the Romans. Ehrman insists he couldn't have been an Essene, although it's conceivable John the Baptist may have had some affiliiation.
Jesus was not simply "a bright guy of the sort who might surface anywhere at any time." He was a full-blown sage and rhetorical genius unlike anything that anyone could reasonably have expected to emerge from Nazareth.
One possibility, of course, is that he was God and simply knew everything, including how to fix a 1957 Ford transmission. The fact his family was mystified by the supposed incident when he was 12 and later thought he was out of his mind would suggest he hid his divinity awfully well if that's the answer. Was all of this knowledge, reasoning and rhetorical ability perhaps imparted in some massive cosmic download when he began his ministry? It's very weird.
I have no answer, but I suspect the fabled Missing Years may hold secrets that haven't occurred to most of us. But if that were true, one might have expected at least some hint that he'd spent 15 years studying with a yogi in Tibet to appear somewhere in the NT or the large body of other writings that didn't make it into the NT, some of which specifically concerned the childhood of Jesus (and had him doing things like killing other children who pissed him off!). Very weird, at least to me.
