I repeat the question of the title, “Was Jesus from Nazareth or was he from Bethlehem?” only to point out the absurdity of the forced-choice question. Recently someone posed to me the supposed dilemma of Jesus being from Nazareth or from Bethlehem. Since Jesus was Jesus “of Nazareth,” they suggested, he could not be from Bethlehem. Initially, the “contradiction” struck me as so absurd that I could only laugh.

Whatever your belief about Jesus being from Bethlehem (I do accept his birth there), this is specious logic. It is a contradiction only to the kind of person who would assume that if a person is smart they cannot also be healthy, or if they eat broccoli they cannot also eat spinach. It is a forced choice between alternatives that could sometimes be complementary instead of contradictory.

Both Kentucky and Illinois claim Abraham Lincoln as their own (and for that matter Indiana and Washington, DC, may have some claim to him as well). Lincoln was born in Kentucky, but Illinois is the “land of Lincoln” because he spent so much of his political career there.

Once the question was posed to me, I asked my son where he considered himself to be from. He was born in Congo (where he spent three years), but spent seven formative years in Philadelphia before we moved to Kentucky. So he can say, “originally from Congo” but that he “grew up in Pennsylvania.” I asked my daughter, also born in Congo, but living in Kentucky since she was eleven. Sometimes she says she’s from Congo and Kentucky; sometimes she just says she’s from Kentucky. In Congo, my wife would say that she was from Dolisie (the city that became her own) or from Mossendjo (where her parents hailed from). Yet she was born in neither place.

The Gospels are clear that Jesus grew up in and spent most of his pre-ministry years in Nazareth. People thus knew him as “Jesus from Nazareth.” This has no bearing on whether he spent any time somewhere else, especially in his earlier childhood before he was known to the generation that knew his Nazarene origins.

Some questions are so poorly informed and poorly framed that they offer little more than distractions.