The Lost Years of Jesus
The Historical Jesus in 50 Questions: Part 2
This is the second part in my crash course, ‘The Historical Jesus in 50 Questions’. In the first instalment, we explored the sources for Jesus’ life. Now I turn my attention to the period before Jesus’ ministry began. The so-called ‘lost years’ have been the subject of endless speculation and sensationalist claims. Here I address what can we say about Jesus’ early life – his family, profession, education and upbringing – from a more sober, historical perspective.
11. What do we know about Jesus’ family?
Our earliest biography of Jesus, Mark’s gospel, fleshes out what we know about Jesus’ family by making passing reference to his brothers and sisters. As we might expect from an ancient text, only the men are named – James, Joses, Judas and Simon. In this context, Jesus is unusually identified by his matronym, ‘Son of Mary’. Jesus’ father is no longer in the picture, but later gospels call him Joseph. The most probable explanation for why Joseph does not appear in Jesus’ ministry is that he had passed; by one scholarly estimate, the average lifespan of a Galilean man just was twenty-one. Remarkably, James went to lead the Jerusalem church and is attributed a New Testament epistle, like his brother Judas. (This latter point often escapes notice, with the diminutive ‘Jude’ distinguishing Jesus’ brother from his more familiar betrayer.)
12. Were Jesus’ siblings his blood relatives?
The second-century Infancy Gospel of James imagines that Jesus’ siblings were in fact sons and daughters of Joseph’s previous marriage. This is the origin of the Catholic dogma that Mary was a perpetual virgin. Many scholars have a problem with this source, due to its legendary character. Yet there may be some truth to this point in the narrative, insofar as it seems unlikely that Mary had at least seven children. Mixed families were common in antiquity, in part due to childbirth fatalities. Thus, some scholars suggest that the James’ point about Mary’s perpetual virginity is actually an outworking of the memory that Jesus’ siblings were his own. Yet how many of Jesus’ siblings were not blood relatives is difficult to say. Notably, Matthew implies that Mary was not a perpetual virgin, but consummated her marriage to Joseph.
13. Was Jesus’ family special in some way?
There does seem to have been something peculiar about Jesus’ family, in that it gave rise to not one but two major religious figures: not only Jesus, but his brother James. For some scholars, this is evidence of a Jesus ‘dynasty’. I also believe we can say with some confidence that Jesus was recognised as being of the line of David, a point already attested in Paul (Rom. 1:3). We know that some Jews from around the time of Jesus traced themselves to David, and so it is not surprising that Jesus’ family did so as well. Interestingly, Jesus’ hometown, Nazareth, finds its root in the Hebrew NZR meaning ‘shoot’. Some have therefore speculated that this community, formed of migrants from Judea, may have seen their re-population of Galilee in the north as a sign of the reconstitution of Israel. If so, Nazareth may have been an allusion to the coming ‘shoot’ of David, a community waiting for the son of David to arise.
14. Did Jesus ever get married?
It is not completely out of the question that Jesus was once married. Even though the sensationalist claim that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalen is unattested in our early sources, marriage was held in great esteem in Jewish culture and most men got married. There is reason to think, however, that Jesus proved an exception to the norm. Jesus lauds those who were ‘made eunuchs for the Kingdom of God’ and relativised the importance of family relations for spiritual ones. There is also no mention of a wife or children of Jesus in early Christian literature. While this is an argument from silence, it convinces most scholars that Jesus was a lifelong bachelor.
15. What was life like in Nazareth?
In one of his earliest epithets, Jesus is frequently called ‘the Nazarene’, an allusion to his hometown. Under the spell of German Romanticism, many nineteenth century lives of Jesus understood Nazareth as an idyllic Galilean hamlet – the perfect context for the amiable Jesus they went on to construct. Yet life in Nazareth would have been far from easy. Most people in Nazareth would have lived at or just above subsistence level, doing what they could to survive. It is sometimes thought that Jesus might have found work in Sepphoris, a Greek-style city less than 5 miles from Nazareth. But if there is something we know archaeologically about Nazareth, it is that it took ritual purity and Judaism very seriously. Despite their close proximity, there seems to have been little contact between rural Nazareth and its urban ‘Greek’ neighbour.
16. Was Jesus a carpenter?
In Mark, the Greek word tektōn is often translated ‘carpenter’, but this is overly precise. A tektōn refers to some who worked with hard materials, including wood and stone, while still distinguishing Jesus from a stone-mason (a lithologos) or stone-cutter (lithoxoos). A better translation might be ‘craftsman.’ What exactly this involved is difficult to say with precision. Some speculate that Jesus was a boat-builder, which might explain his connection to the Sea of Galilee. Perhaps more likely is that Jesus was involved in constructing houses. Houses in Galilee were typically made of stone, with wood working required for their doors and beams. What is important to emphasise, however, is that a tektōn was a ‘lower class’ profession. When the townspeople of Nazareth ask, ‘is this not Jesus, the tektōn?’, they do so with some surprise: a construction worker should not be teaching them in the synagogue!
17. Did Jesus learn to read and write?
To what extent Jesus was literate is a hotly debated issue. The reasons usually put forward to doubt his literacy are two-fold. First, the vast majority of people in first-century Galilee and Judea were illiterate, due to the lack of schools and the costs associated with education. Typically, only elites could afford the leisure (otium) to learn. Second, there is nowhere in the gospels which compels a historian to accept that Jesus was literate. Jesus does read from a scroll in Luke, but here the evangelist is redacting Mark’s account. On the other hand, Jesus regularly quotes scripture and asks his opponents, ‘have you not read?’, the force of which would be considerably tempered if he was not perceived as being able to read himself. It is also possible that Jesus was an exception to the norm, and received some education at home, in addition to hearing the Scriptures read aloud at the synagogue. As we noted above, Jesus’ family might have been somewhat exceptional. It is important to bear in mind, however, that literacy was a matter of gradation. It surely would have been helpful for Jesus to have had some basic literacy for his business. Even if this literacy did not extend very far, Jesus may have given some people the impression of being literate.
18. What languages could Jesus speak?
While the gospels are written in Greek, the primary language spoken in the Levant, including Galilee, was Aramaic, a sister-language of Hebrew. This is why the Gospels, especially Mark, sometimes translate Aramaic for their readers. We have phrases like talitha koum (‘little girl, get up’), Jesus’ cry of dereliction (‘eloi eloi lama sabacthani’) and the term abba (‘father’), which is picked up in Paul. The more controversial question, on which scholars are divided, is whether Jesus would have also known some Greek as a second language. In favour of this suggestion, some scholars have pointed to the presence of Greek loanwords in (later) rabbinic literature, the presence of Greek inscriptions and texts in Palestine, and the close proximity between Nazareth and ‘Greek’ Sepphoris. Yet none of this evidence is unambiguous. An elite educated Jewish writer like Flavius Josephus learnt Greek – but even he struggled (Ant. 20.263–264). My estimation is that Jesus had limited knowledge of Greek. He may have also known some Hebrew, providing his contact with the scriptures, read aloud in the local synagogue, was with Hebrew scrolls, rather than an Aramaic targumim (‘translations’).
19. Was Jesus a child prodigy?
In apocryphal texts such as the The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is presented a Wunderkind, a child already imbued with the wisdom and miracle working that would later define his ministry. There, Jesus is found to be a somewhat recalcitrant child prodigy; he bests his school-masters, makes a bird out of clay and even murders (and resurrects) another boy. Historians find no truth in these tales. Yet it is interesting to consider why they might have been told. In ancient life-writing, it is common to present the child or young man as already possessing the qualities that would show up in their adult life. Even Luke’s infancy narrative presents a twelve year old Jesus amazing the teachers in the Temple with his questions, which has a parallel with the education of King Cyrus of Persia in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. Whatever we make historically of this story, it raises the question of to what extent the young Jesus knew of his future mission. Unfortunately, we cannot pontificate on this with any certainty.
20. Was John the Baptist Jesus’ teacher?
It is now common place for historians to describe John the Baptist as Jesus’ teacher. But what is meant by this varies. A maximalist version of the idea states that many of Jesus’ teachings were derived from John. The problem with this is that the evidence of John’s teachings in our early sources are very sparse, and the teachings they do share could be attributed their common milieu. A more modest version of the idea is that Jesus was baptised by John and could appeal to John’s authority as a grounding for his own (Mk. 11:30). How much time Jesus spent with John is unknown, and what exactly he derived from John’s ministry is difficult to say. But what is fascinating is that John’s gospel seems to let slip that Jesus himself was a baptiser (3:22). If this is the case, it might be appropriate to see Jesus initially as a “franchisee” of the baptist’s movement. At some point, however, it seems that the two parted ways. Jesus did feel the need to adopt the baptist’s ascetic lifestyle. He also painted a more positive vision of the imminent future: not only one in which the axe was laid at the root of the tree, and the fire was coming, but in which all were called to feast in the Kingdom of God.
Recommended Resource:
Joan E. Taylor, Boy Jesus: Growing up Judean in Turbulent Times. Zondervan, 2025.
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