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Seeking the Historical Jesus
Reconstructing the history of the life of Jesus is an extremely difficult task which has occupied scholars for the last two hundred years. We can attempt to sketch some outlines but with awareness that we are dealing with gospel texts that developed over some decades. We are looking at history but through the thick lens of the faith of the early Church.
The first step in a historical construction is to note how little the life of Jesus impacted on the historical records of the ancient world in contrast to the growing Christianity of some decades later, which is referred to by Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny the Younger, all of whom were born after the year 55 CE; therefore, their testimony comes much later than Jesus’ life, although they refer back to events as early as the reign of Claudius (41–54 CE). The only record of Jesus’ life outside the New Testament is one short piece in the books by Flavius Josephus.
Josephus’ section on Jesus is brief; it is referred to as the Testimonium Flavianum. It reads:
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ, and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.
(Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews Book XVIII: 3.3)
This text is the subject of much discussion. Josephus was not in favour with the Jews, whom he had betrayed during the Jewish War, and so his work was handed down by Christians interested in the history of the Jews during the period that Christ lived. Origen is known to have held a copy in the third century. It presents a positive view of Jesus by one whose testimony was considered authoritative and contemporaneous. For this reason, there is much suspicion that the text was either (a) edited or expanded by Christian redactors to include those aspects which are clearly based on Christian belief, or (b) inserted wholesale by them into an existing narrative (certainly the next verse follows on quite logically from the preceding verse). Scholarly opinion is that one of these two is the case, with the majority view favouring (a). Yet, even if all or part of the text was original to Josephus, it does not take up much space in his historical works.1 The section on Jesus is shorter than the one on John the Baptist (Antiquities Book XVIII: 5.2).
There are many clues in the Acts of the Apostles that the Church was fast growing. The story of Pentecost (Acts 2.1–13) suggests a period of successful conversion summarized in this account; Acts 2.47 talks about the expansion of the Church and 4.4 suggests that there were five thousand converts at the time of the arrest of Peter and John. This growth continues in 5.14, and so on (6.1, 6.7, 9.31). The idea that Christianity made great strides in mass events is corroborated by Paul’s testimony that more than five hundred saw the risen Jesus (1 Cor. 15.6), and its growth is illustrated in parable form by the mustard tree, the seed of which is small but the fully grown plant extensive (Matt. 13.31–32; Mark 4.30–32; Luke 13.18–19).
The record of the progress of the Church in relation to the lack of non-Christian records of Jesus strongly suggests that Jesus’ movement was originally quite small. Although the impact of his life was nuclear, there will not have been a large following in his lifetime. This is another indication that, as we have suggested, the truly miraculous events claimed of Jesus are mythical descriptions of what he means to Christians, metaphorical ways of describing salvation. If we take out those, what do we have left?
Jesus in History: The Non-Violent Preacher
Jesus grew up and practised his ministry as a Jewish man of his time, observing the Jewish Torah and its customs. While the cities were multicultural, rural Galilee was predominantly Jewish. We do not know whether Jesus or Mary were literate in the sense that they could read and write fluently, although we may suspect that they might, given Jesus’ teaching, but they were certainly very familiar with the Jewish Scriptures which most rural Galileans knew orally if not in writing.
During Jesus’ lifetime, there was a period of relative peace under Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, who reigned over the one third of Israel that included Galilee from about 4 BCE to 39 CE. He was, relative to other rulers of that time, a successful king who maintained order, and there were few Roman soldiers visible in that region during his reign. He tried not to offend Jewish religious sensitivities. However, Herod Antipas’ rulership was not all harmonious. The people of Galilee will have remembered the many crucifixions by the Romans following the occupation of Sepphoris in Galilee by a certain Judas in about 6 CE. Around twenty years later, Herod Antipas had John the Baptist executed and the gospels tell us that he also plotted against Jesus, who is said to have referred to him as ‘that fox’ (Luke 13.32). Therefore, he was a ruler who aroused indignation, and there was constant fear of revolt by Jews against an authority that they did not recognize: Herod was Idumean, like his father, imposed by Rome, and not regarded as a suitable ruler for the Jewish people. People outside the ruling classes – and that is the great majority – were poor and lived a day-to-day existence. Many continued to follow apocalyptic preachers like John the Baptist.
It is very likely that Jesus practised non-violent resistance to both the Roman occupation and to the Jewish authorities when they appeared to collude with Rome and/or regard their own survival as more important than the spiritual health of the Jewish people. During Antipas’ reign, non-violent resistance was a natural response in a time when the overwhelming oppression and poverty that leads to full blooded revolution was not in evidence.
The practice of what we would now call non-violent resistance is evidenced in the gospels in sayings such as ‘turn the other cheek’ and ‘if someone asks you to walk with him one mile, walk with him two’ (Matt. 5.38–41). Mark Wilde in Crossing the River of Fire shows that these were ways in which subjugated Jews showed their refusal to be bowed down by the Roman military; the story of the Gerasene swine rushing into the sea suggests that Jesus, like other Jews, longed for liberation from the Romans (Mark 5.1–13). The swine were metaphors for the Roman legions as the spirits that possessed them were called ‘Legion’; the boar was a common symbol among the Roman military.
Nevertheless, it is not necessary to move to the conclusion that Jesus was violently opposed to Roman occupation and promoted armed revolution. We know from the history of the Jewish War (66–73 CE) and the Bar Kochba revolt in the following century (132–5 CE) that such a policy was unsuccessful, leading to the destruction of the Temple and the loss of the Jewish homelands. It is an unnecessary step to take to move from the belief that Jesus understood the Roman occupation as damaging and oppressive, to the conclusion that he was part of an armed insurrection. In situations of subjugation by one’s own rulers or foreign powers, there are different ways of responding, which include passivity, collusion, non-violent resistance, and revolution. It might be anachronistic, perhaps, to talk of non-violent resistance based on twentieth-century examples like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Eastern Europe. Yet, in all times and places, non-violent revolution is the most likely to be successful under oppression as opposed to direct violence which, unless it is pragmatic and ultimately successful, plays into the hands of those holding power, giving them a rationale for greater repression.
Non-violent resistance has various implications which makes it a likely fit for how the historical Jesus perceived his ministry:
(a) It attracts condemnation from two groups of fellow countrymen at once: those advocating violent revolution, and those discouraging any kind of resistance, such as the chief priests. This makes sense of the way that Jesus was apparently abandoned and condemned by some fellow Jews as the crucifixion came nearer.
(b) It is the approach that is most likely to gain supporters among members of the dominant culture, that is, it would have been attractive to countercultural elements among the Gentiles. Witness the popularity of Gandhi and Luther King among Europeans and Americans in recent decades. We know that Christianity was adopted at an early stage by Gentile converts.
(c) It is the best option for the more vulnerable sectors of the oppressed culture, the poor and the meek who are praised by Jesus as the inheritors of the Kingdom in the Beatitudes and elsewhere.
One point that could be raised in favour of Jesus as an armed revolutionary is that Jesus had a disciple named Simon ‘the Zealot’, according to Luke 6.15 and Acts 1.13, and also that the name Judas ‘Iscariot’ may imply a member of the Sicarii, the dagger-wielding assassins among the Jewish insurgents. However, this argument quickly falls apart. It would be strange if particular followers of Jesus were given these titles if Jesus and all his disciples were either Zealots or Sicarii (or an equivalent kind of violent revolutionary, as these terms belong to the 60s CE and may be anachronistic for c. 30 CE). It is more likely that Jesus’ movement attracted people from other Jewish groups and that they bore names indicating their origin; the conversion of a person to a different cause can be celebrated in this way. Perhaps they put forward the argument for a violent revolution among non-violent people who disagreed with them. We do not know for sure who these men were, but the names do not in themselves imply anything for the whole movement. It also shows that the gospel writers did not systematically eradicate any mention of insurrectionists among Jesus’ followers, and so their presence was not necessarily an embarrassment, which contradicts any theory that the gospels hid the violent past of Jesus in order to appease the Romans.
There is no convincing argument that can be made that Jesus was originally some kind of violent revolutionary, which would lead to its corollary that the picture of Jesus in the gospels is therefore wholly inaccurate. This is the kind of conspiracy theory that we rejected in Chapter 1.
To say that Jesus was non-violent does not lead to the conclusion that he was continually gentle and mild. If the gospels contain accurate echoes of Jesus’ teaching, we find some very fierce sayings which prophesy a spiritually violent overthrowing of the powers and demons of this world, and the raising up of the poor through divine intervention. This spiritual revolution demanded a response and the choosing of sides.
Jesus in History: The Preacher Restoring Hope and Identity
Jesus was therefore a non-violent preacher and teacher with disciples, one who taught the reality of God’s presence as the answer to the many ills that were befalling the Jewish society under the Romans, Herodians, and Jewish priestly castes. Jesus communicated a powerful message that the God of Israel was a living God intimately involved in the fate of the nation and its people, and could be accessed simply through prayer rather than elaborate ritual. This brought about a radical change of attitude among people who were desperate and downtrodden, giving them meaning and hope. We get a sense of Jesus’ feeling about the hopelessness in Jewish society in Matthew 9.36: ‘When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.’ Oppressive power divides and conquers, but the gospel narratives reveal Jesus’ work of reintegrating people into the community of Israel: the lepers, the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the impoverished. Jesus did not limit his message to the religiously faithful, the ritually clean, or the upstanding and moral; he understood that many of the outcasts of Jewish society were in that position due to the social situation which led to abuses of all kinds.
Biblical references that illustrate the ministry to the outcast include the great banquet of Luke 14.15–24, in which ‘the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame’ are invited. This passage recalls Micah 4.6–7 which refers to the return from the Exile, but which will have served as a proof text for Jesus’ ministry:
In that day, says the LORD, I will assemble the lame
and gather those who have been driven away,
and those whom I have afflicted.
The lame I will make the remnant,
and those who were cast off, a strong nation;
and the LORD will reign over them in Mount Zion
now and for evermore.
If you believe in God, really believe in God, then the things that crush you in life can be overcome, at least internally. Jesus’ positive message of affirmation for the poor may well have resulted in healings and what were then regarded as exorcisms, in cases where a change of heart or outlook led to physical or mental healing (while the more dramatic healings of incurable diseases or raisings from the dead are part of the mythology of the post-Easter Jesus). The gospels are full of symbolic ways of describing in picture form this sense of belief and realignment: the dead are raised, the sick healed, demons exorcized, the poor lifted up in spirit, water becomes wine, and so on.
The transformed society that Jesus encouraged and represented was described as ‘the Kingdom of God’ (or, in Matthew, ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’). Jesus followed John the Baptist in calling for repentance because of the imminence of the Kingdom of God, and this of course is what baptism is: it takes a rite used for the entry of Gentile sympathizers into the Jewish faith and asks Jews to re-enter their own faith in this way. This was probably interpreted by many Jews as an insult. It is unlikely that Jesus regarded baptism as the substitution for circumcision that Paul claimed it to be later; nevertheless, the practice of asking people to radically renew faith does sow the seeds for Paul’s later arguments. Jesus’ and Paul’s ways of understanding baptism were different but not contradictory.
Jesus taught that the Kingdom of God was both ‘among you’ (Luke 17.21) and coming soon as a great judgement of the world. This would fulfil the prophecies of Daniel with the coming of the Son of Man (Mark 14.62, quoting Dan. 7.13) who represented, expressed in modern terminology, humane society. The Kingdom was both in the present, here and there, as it could be found in various instances of positive and healing human interaction, and in an imminent future. Jesus’ own death and resurrection heightened this apocalyptic expectation and it continued into the ministry of Paul, where we see that the first Christians expected the second coming of Jesus. This urgency is also reflected in the gospel parables which discuss the Kingdom and the coming of Jesus as the Bridegroom. We can see an alternative version of this in the book of Revelation. Sanders’ reconstruction of Jesus’ ministry, The Historical Figure of Jesus, suggests that we can be confident of Jesus’ own teaching if those before him, such as John the Baptist, are in agreement with those after him, such as Paul. This is true for the belief that God’s intervention was to occur within a generation. Jesus’ ministry and the teaching of the very earliest Church form the continuous link between John the Baptist and Paul.
Jesus, like Jews both before and contemporaneous with him, saw God’s Kingdom as a restoration of Israel. The twelve disciples were symbols of the twelve tribes of Israel, and they would be the leaders and judges of the tribes (Matt. 19.28), although as servants to them (Matt. 10.26; Mark 10.43). The Son of Man of Daniel’s prophecy would bring a humane kingdom replacing the dominance of the Greeks and Romans, and it would be a Jewish kingdom. However, the means for achieving this for Jesus was a call to conversion among the whole Jewish population anticipating divine action and not via a radical sub-group of revolutionaries.
Jesus’ teaching drew on the prophets, the nevi’im. There is a prophetic challenge to Israel in these books, in which justice and righteousness are indispensable for monotheistic faith and its rituals and festivals (see, for example, Jesus referring to himself as the servant of Isaiah 42.1–4 who establishes justice, quoted in Matt. 12.18–21). This prophetic challenge was, like its forerunners, filled with a strong critical judgement on those who did not understand the imminence of the coming of the Kingdom of God, particularly those who paid lip-service to true faith or gained power and status through religion.
The people around Jesus had a growing understanding that his message was Messianic in nature, and Jesus’ claim to a Davidic lineage would have encouraged that. Jesus was not only the preacher of the Kingdom of God but at the same time the one who was called to be its King. The Kingdom may not have been destined to overthrow the Romans; instead, it was inscribed into people’s hearts, lives, and practices. The situation did not practically allow for the possibility of armed revolution, as the Jews eventually discovered in the Jewish War. Only God could bring about the change that Jewish people desired.
Jesus was, like other groups such as the Essenes, very critical of Jewish leadership, particularly the Temple priests, whom he regarded as abandoning the heritage of Israel in order to survive under the Roman regime. It is interesting that Caiaphas survived as high priest for eighteen years, according to Josephus, when the average tenure under the Romans was much shorter, suggesting that Caiaphas may have been a particularly Machiavellian figure. The high priest held power over everyday life in Jerusalem and its surrounding districts in Judea, the Roman army only being called in when circumstances threatened disorder, particularly during major feasts such as Passover. Therefore, it is quite plausible that the high priest had a hand in the death of Jesus, even if the sentence was carried out by the Romans.
Jesus’ ministry was essentially a rural enterprise except when he visited Jerusalem.2 The New Testament includes no record of him preaching and healing in the cities of the Galilean region, like Sepphoris and Tiberias. It was also an itinerant ministry, and Jesus’ followers travelled light, as we read in Mark 6.8–9: ‘He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics.’ The itinerant mission relied on the hospitality of people in the towns visited, and this continued into the early Church, as we can see in 1 Corinthians 9, when Paul argues that he should receive this hospitality as well as the apostles and brothers of Jesus. It could not have involved a large group, as to be a member required a radical renunciation of wealth, trade, and extended families. This will have been too great a challenge for most people (for example, the rich man of Matt. 19.16–22; Mark 10.17–22; and Luke 18.18–25).
In the rural culture of Galilee, a Messianic theology inspiring a movement that reached out to the poor was born. It is not surprising that many in Israel, even the authorities, saw this as a good thing; they may have welcomed, much as we do today, a movement that was prepared to tackle some of the more difficult problems suffered in the community. Perhaps Jesus’ fieriness and public statements of condemnation took it in too political a direction for some of them; perhaps his brother James, according to the reconstructions of later history an upstanding member of the Jerusalem community known as the ‘Just’, was more moderate, and so he survived for much longer until eventually suffering assassination by an opportunist high priest. We can only speculate on this. Yet, however we conceive of its development, the movement centred on Jesus gave meaning and purpose to the marginalized, as well as much needed funds to the poor and, as we have seen, it was supported and funded, perhaps even initiated, by women of means.
John Dominic Crossan, in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, argues that Jesus’ ministry was subversive of many of society’s boundaries: table fellowship; association (for example, healing and touching lepers); family; class; hierarchy; patronage. According to Crossan, Jesus was a Jewish version of the Cynics in Greek society who likewise abandoned social systems. Itinerancy and minimal baggage were clear ways of marking this refusal to accept the restrictions of social interaction prescribed by the establishment.
Jesus’ ministry was therefore liminal: it remained on the margins of society, as John Meier indicates in the title of his book, Jesus: A Marginal Jew. Liminality is difficult to maintain; in the early Church, Crossan suggests, boundaries and hierarchies began to make their way back into the once radical community. In the same way, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s feminist analysis of the New Testament, In Memory of Her, argues that Jesus’ mission was marked by a radical egalitarianism in terms of gender which had begun to break down by the time that the New Testament was written. Just how far Jesus’ ministry differs in its social outlook from the early Church at the time of writing of the New Testament epistles and gospels is one of the great debates of New Testament study. As we have seen, Paul seems to reflect this original equality in Galatians 3.28 (‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’) in a way that other epistles attributed to him do not.
Jesus was a miracle-worker, like many others in the ancient world; miracles were generally accepted, although there were some sceptics at that time just as there are today. Probably, gossip and high expectation made more of them than an impartial observer would have recorded, and we have seen how much they are part of the mythology of the New Testament. Nevertheless, Jesus must have had a reputation in this respect. Sanders says that Jesus’ miracles were unremarkable in themselves; what was more important is that they were signs of the impending divine intervention. For the New Testament, the resurrection is the proof of Jesus’ divine status, not the miracles. To achieve the glory of the resurrection, Jesus first had to die.
Jesus was one would-be Messiah among many in an era of fervent apocalyptic expectation, prophetic calculations, and popular belief that God was about to act to institute a new kingdom for the Jewish people. Why then was Jesus the one whose legacy survived the catastrophic Jewish wars in which these hopes were dashed? This is a question which requires hindsight or faith, or both. The belief in his resurrection was unique and it resolved the difficult question of death and failure. The way in which Jesus’ message transcended the Jewish nationalist cause, and touched on the human condition for people of all races, attracted great numbers of Gentiles to the movement. Then, of course, believing that Jesus really was the Incarnate Son of God, and the one who sends the Holy Spirit, leads to the conclusion that generations of people keeping his memory and believing in him would be inevitable.
Mary’s Vocation
In terms of the contribution of women to Jesus’ ministry, here is a summary of the arguments that have been developed in this book:
· The downplaying of women in patriarchal texts in that time and culture tells us that the participation of women would have been much greater than the gospels suggest.
· What the gospels do state is that Mary and other women supported the ministry and accompanied Jesus to the cross. Mary and other women acted as inspirers and initiators at important moments in the ministry of Jesus and belief in the resurrection. While we cannot be sure of the historicity of each one of these narratives, there is nothing in the New Testament that contradicts this overall impression, and many passages that support it.
· Mary is often mentioned along with the brothers of Jesus who, it is clear, were leaders in the early Church, working with the apostles; among them, James was foremost and Mary was associated with him in the cross and tomb narratives.
Therefore, Mary was a participant in the life and death of Jesus, and in the resurrection faith. She was not just a passive bystander. However, we should not detach Mary from the other women in the movement as so many devotional and theological writings do. While she, as mother figure in the Jerusalem community, will have had a more prominent role, with that exception what can be said of her is also applicable to them. We have seen how the anointing narratives indicate the importance of women in understanding and declaring the Messianic mission of Jesus.
If we imagine what life was like for Mary as far as a twenty-first-century person can do, then clearly there must have been a period of contemplation and decision for Mary as Jesus entered adult life. He may not have taught the rabbis in the Temple at the age of twelve, but certainly he was a remarkable person to have been able to carry out the ministry that led him to Jerusalem and the cross in the company of his followers, who risked a great deal to travel with him. At some point, whether Jesus was aged twelve or later, Mary must have realized that he had a unique vocation. She may have encouraged this and helped to shape it as he grew. There is nothing in the New Testament to suggest that she did not; the stories of her reflecting in Luke and asking Jesus to undertake the miracle at Cana in John do support a general assumption that Mary was influential in the formation of Jesus’ mission. In other words, there was a memory of Mary in the early Church that allowed the evangelists to create stories around her that were appropriate to her legacy.
The narratives about Mary presented in the gospels of Luke and John show her understanding something of Jesus’ vocation before his mission began and reflecting on the realities of life around her and the possibility that Jesus could make an impact on that reality. Along with the brothers, she participated in Jesus’ ministry, realizing that the mission was dangerous. While this is composed of material that is not necessarily historically accurate, it supports rather than contradicts the view that Mary was influential, and so it may have been true to folk traditions about her.
In Chapter 7, we discovered material in Mark’s Gospel that brings us closer to the life of Mary in history. Mark’s reluctance to allow the mother and brothers any special importance in the passing on of the gospel of Jesus tells us that many Christians in the early Church probably did the opposite, and they may have been those who preferred to adhere to the Jewish Torah. Luke-Acts and John both confirm the memory of the mother (and not the father) and brothers of Jesus as a family unit at the very beginning of the Church. Mary, as Jesus’ mother, was known to the early Church to have been an active participant in the ministry of Jesus, accompanying him on his journey to the cross. As one of the older members of the movement supporting Jesus, and especially being his mother, she must have made a conscious decision to become involved in what was a dangerous undertaking in the society of the time.
The social project of Jesus’ community, in its reaching out to the poor and insistence on non-violent resistance is, to generalize, one that will have resonated with women. This is not to say that men will not also have had the insight that this is the best strategy in an oppressive society. However, in a patriarchal, binary world, the male response is often more head-on: violent resistance, as with those later called Zealots, voluntary exclusion, as with the Essenes, or maintenance of the cultural traditions through compromise and negotiation, as with the priests. These are outward-facing strategies. An approach that is more inward, that is, looking back into the community in order to strengthen and bring unity to it, while following a peaceful avoidance of direct confrontation is, in a patriarchal society, more likely to be the province of females. The success of this strategy will then attract males who, once again bearing in mind the patriarchal world in which all of this was taking place, begin to take control and leadership of the movement as it grew.
In Luke 1.39, we hear that Mary travelled in haste to visit her kinswoman Elizabeth, who lived in the Judean hill country. This would have been a dangerous journey to a country occupied by soldiers, revolutionaries, and bandits. Even if we accept that it might never have happened in history, it would nevertheless be an appropriate metaphorical way to describe the journey made by Mary and the women of Jesus’ community from Galilee to Jerusalem in support of a claimed Messiah. Such an undertaking is most likely to be a historical reality, even if the visitation to Elizabeth is not, and it may have occurred several times because of the various feasts in Jerusalem and the demands of the itinerant ministry of Jesus and his disciples. Membership of the Church community will have been even more dangerous after the crucifixion.
Mary, along with other women and men in the community, must have decided at some point that Jesus’ ministry was worth these risks. Without them, Jesus would probably have been forgotten. He is unlikely to have been able to pursue an itinerant ministry in isolation. Hypothetically, it is possible for a single figure to make an impact, travelling and preaching, relying on local hospitality, but the New Testament makes it clear that this was not the case for Jesus. He was surrounded by a supportive community. We can agree, therefore, that the image of Mary in Luke’s narrative as an exemplar for hearing the word of God and acting on it is an appropriate one for the historical Mary, the original followers of Jesus, and those who came after them in circumstances which included rejection from their own communities and sometimes civic persecution. The sacrifices involved are summed up in the dialogue between Jesus and Peter in Mark 10.28–30:
Peter began to say to him, ‘Look, we have left everything and followed you.’ Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age…’
For all these reasons, ‘Virgin’ might well be an appropriate metaphorical description for Mary. Prominent among a community of women and men, Mary conceived a Messianic mission unlike anything before it and there is no record of her requiring any male mentor: Joseph is a shadowy figure in the birth narratives but then disappears, and Jesus, according to the earliest testimony, was ‘the son of Mary’. But to use a term like ‘Virgin’ as a metaphor for Mary should not result in the suppression of sexuality and the relegation of consummated marriage to a spiritual second best. Neither should marriage be promoted above celibacy; both are different ways of living out one’s life journey. What seems to be the case is that Mary was a married woman with a family, a Davidic family with a unique claim to lead the Messianic movement, and in which the mantle of everyday leadership passed from Jesus to James after the crucifixion. However, belief in the resurrection meant that Jesus was proclaimed the Lord, remaining the spiritual leader of the community through the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Notes
1 Greater detail on Josephus has been given in Chapter 8.
2 There are also the ‘cities’ through which Jesus passed, as mentioned in Luke 8.1, but there is nothing specific included that identifies them.