Category Archives: New Testament

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Was Jesus from Nazareth or was he from Bethlehem?

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.

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Jesus and elites

Why did Jesus keep running into trouble with elites? The scribes, an educated elite, are judging him in Mark 2:6-7, 16, and the Pharisees, a pious fellowship honoring ancestral tradition criticized him in 2:24 and 3:6. Jesus answers evasively and in riddles and parables designed to delay harsher confrontations till the closing phase of his ministry. In 3:22, Jerusalemite scribes accuse him of acting by Satan; although Jesus still reasons with them, his response escalates to a serious warning. Jesus responds more harshly to the challenges of scribes and Pharisees in 7:6-13, even calling them hypocrites. (In 7:5, as in 2:24, they criticized his disciples, inviting his defense. In 10:11-12, Jesus defends innocent parties divorced by their spouses.)

Jesus’s forerunner, John, suffers under a different elite: the political ruler of Galilee, the tetrarch Herod Antipas, who executes him (6:27).

Yet Jesus also warns his followers against acting like religious elites themselves. When his followers want to exclude someone who acts in his name because the person does not belong to their own group, Jesus stands up for the person (9:38-42). When his followers want to protect Jesus from interruptions by “unimportant” people like little children or blind beggars, Jesus reaches out to those “unimportant” people (10:13-16, 48-52). When some disciples want to become most prominent in the kingdom, Jesus reminds them that true leadership ought not to reflect the world’s ideals of power, but servanthood (10:35-44). Our Lord himself modeled this, coming to serve and to die for us (10:45).

Naturally Jesus’s conflict with elites escalates in the region’s elite location, Jerusalem. He fends off challenges from critics in ch. 12 and reveals coming judgment on the temple (and thus the religious establishment that claims to speak for God) in 13:1-2. And finally the chief priests, who doubled as Judea’s aristocratic leadership, hand Jesus over to the Roman governor for execution. Jesus had already hinted as much in his parable in 12:1-11, where he depicted Jerusalem’s leaders as abusing their rule over God’s people.

Jesus welcomed everyone, but he went out of his way for the lowly, not the rich (10:17-25) and powerful. To the extent that any of us have some social advantages in life, to that extent we must humble ourselves all the more to approach Jesus; it is harder for the wealthy to enter the kingdom (10:23) and easier for children (9:35-37; 10:14-15). If we want to follow our Lord’s example, we need to humble ourselves. When we live by the world’s values of celebrity cults and seeking power over others instead of being servants to all, we miss the very point for which our Lord called us.