JESUS CHRIST

The most popular calendar in use throughout the world today is known as the Gregorian or Western calendar established in 1582. It is based on the assumption that Jesus Christ was born on the year 1. Those years before the birth of Jesus are designated as BC and those years following his birth are designated AD.
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Dinoysius first proposed the use of BC and AD around 525. It took many centuries before all Christian Western countries finally adopted the system, but it was finally incorporated in the Gregorian or Western calendar. In English, BC refers to “Before Christ.” However, AD does not refer to “After Death,” as many assume. Rather, AD represents the Latin words, Anno Domini which mean “year of the Lord” or more properly “Anno Domini Nostri Iesus Christi” (the year of our Lord Jesus Christ), referring to the birth of Jesus Christ. (more…)

Tacitus’ Annals is best known for its account of the great A.D. 64 fire in Rome. Nero, looking for scapegoats, capitalized on the growing unpopularity of the Christians and their own expectation of a destruction of the world “by fire,” opening them to the charge of arson. He initiated a local and brief persecution that resulted in the murders of many Christians. Regarding the Christians, Tacitus wrote briefly, “For this purpose he punished, with exquisite torture, a race of men detested for their evil practices, by vulgar appellation commonly called Christians. The name was derived from Christ, who in the reign of Tiberius, suffered under Pontius Pilate, the procurator of Judea. By that event the sect, of which he was the founder, received a blow, which, for a time, checked the growth of a dangerous superstition; but it revived soon after, and spread with recruited vigor, not only in Judea, the soil that gave it birth, but even in the city of Rome” (Annals 15:44).

Cornelius Tacitus, born about A.D. 56, was from a relatively new senatorial family. His early political career was under the Flavian emperors Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. He successfully survived the senatorial purges of Domitian’s reign, even holding high office under him, and he then received the suffect consulship under the “good” emperor Trajan. After this time, he proceeded to a productive literary career, writing a biography of Tacitus’ father-in-law, an ethnographic study of the Germans, a treatise on oratory, and two noted historical works, both of which survive only in fragments.

The first of these, Histories, began with the civil war that followed the fall of the emperor Nero and also traced the rise of the Flavians. It contains important information about the Jewish revolt, recounting Vespasian’s early command of the Roman reconquest of Judea and his own proclamation as emperor by his legions while serving there. Histories then proceeds to describe Titus’ siege of Jerusalem, although Tacitus’ account breaks off before its conclusion.

Tacitus’ second historical work, Annals, covers an earlier period, that of the Julio-Claudian emperors after Augustus. The surviving portions cover parts of the reigns of Tiberius and Nero. Many of the new senatorial families of the empire created a nostalgic attachment for the “free republic” before Augustus, and Tacitus was no exception. He grudgingly admired Augustus, but he was critical of his successors and focused on conflicts between the emperors and the senatorial class. He had a particular antipathy for Tiberius, who reminded him uncomfortable of Domitian, whose reign was unpopular with Tacitus and other senators.

Most scholars agree that Josephus wrote about Jesus Christ in his book, Jewish Antiquities (see Antiquities 18.3.3). However, because Christians preserved his writings they argue that Christian scribes to support their claims about Jesus tampered with the original report that spoke of Jesus as Messiah and of the resurrection.  That Josephus was a believing Jew who did not become a Christian seems to support this interpretation of the data. Additionally, no early Christian writers quoted from Josephus to support their claims that seems to suggest that the original composition did not include the confessional elements of the text that has been preserved.  Nevertheless, because most of the text in question is characteristic of his style, except those parts that have been questioned, is seems probable that that portion is original to Josephus. The following is the preferred reading of the text by many scholars:

After this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man. For he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who receive the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and among many of Greek origin. And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so. And up until this very day the tribe of Christians, named after him, has not died out.

Joseph ben Matthias ha-Cohen, commonly known as Josephus, was a Jew, born in A.D. 37 to an aristocratic priestly family. His native language was Aramaic, although he would have known Hebrew well, and all of his surviving writings are in Greek. At different times, his religious interests led him to study or affiliate with the Sadducees, Essenes, and Pharisees, the three major Jewish factions. A general during the early days of the Jewish revolt of A.D. 66-73, he was captured by the Romans at the siege of Jotapata in Galilee and promptly changed sides, becoming a client of the future Flavian emperor Vespasian, receiving Roman citizenship, and taking the name Flavius Josephus.

His literary works include Jewish War, Jewish Antiquities, Against Apion, and an autobiography. The first two are frequently read by students of the Bible because of information they provide about Jewish history and events surrounding the life of Christ and the apostles. Jewish War, however, is primarily a work of classical historiography and must be evaluated as such. In it, Josephus sought to explain why God allowed the Romans to defeat the Jews and destroy the temple. In retrospect, Josephus saw the rebellion as largely the result of the actions of political revolutionaries whom he saw as little more than bandits who were hostile to Josephus’ own class, the Jewish aristocracy. Josephus also sought to defend his own patrons, the Flavian emperors Vespasian and Titus, suggesting, for instance, that when Titus captured Jerusalem in A.D. 70, he wanted to spare the temple, but a Roman soldier, acting on his own, threw a burning brand into the sanctuary. The famous last words that Josephus put in the mouth of Eleazar on Masada is a typical rhetorical speech, and the suicide of the Zealots there has parallels in Greek and Roman historiography.

In later years, Josephus felt the need to defend the reputation and status of the Jewish people. Jewish Antiquities seems to be a subgenre of history sometimes called “apologetic historiography,” a type of history writing that seeks to defend and explain its subject to a larger, dominant culture. In it, Josephus stresses the antiquity of the Jewish people and the nobility of their traditions. Later sections of this work that cover some of the same material found in Jewish War often represent these episodes very differently. Consequently, although many readers today tend to accept his works uncritically, we must remember how his works changed over time as a result of changing political and personal circumstances.

A Targum (plural Targumim) is an Aramaic translation and/or paraphrase of the Hebrew Bible. They are known from the Medieval period, but with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the twentieth century which included some Targumim (4QtgLev, 4QtgJob, 11QtgJob, and 6Q19), scholars have turned their attention to these important texts in an effort to discover something about how Jews living in the first century BC and first century AD interpreted the biblical text.

All four gospels agree that Jesus Christ was born prior to the death of Herod the Great (died March 13, 4 B.C.) and died when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea (A.D. 26-36). The challenge facing any reconstruction of Jesus’ life, the duration of which lasted almost exactly thirty-four years, is allowing sufficient time prior to Herod’s death for the early events of Jesus’ life to have taken place while at the same time having a death date of Friday on the day before Passover (Matthew, Mark and Luke) or the day of Passover (John).

Historically, scholars have assumed that the Christians assimilated their celebration of Jesus Christ’s birthday to either the celebration of the Roman winter festival of Saturnalia, the natal day of sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun) at the winter solstice, or the birthday of the Eastern god Mithras, whose birthday was celebrated on December 25. For centuries, scholars have suggested that pagans who had converted to Christianity were reluctant to leave behind their older traditions and practices and subsequently adapted or even invented the date for the celebration of Jesus Christ’s birth to correspond to earlier pagan celebrations.

The first lists of Christian celebrations given by the church leaders Irenaeus (A.D. 130-200) Tertullian (A.D. 160-225) do not mention the birth date of Jesus Christ, and Origen (A.D. 185-254) disparages those who place emphasis on calculating Christ’s birth date. In the second century, Clement of Alexandria (A.D. 150-215) referred to Egyptian Christians who celebrated the birth of Christ in late May and others who were followers of Basilides who celebrated Jesus’ birthday on January 6 (Stromateis 1.21).

The tradition of celebrating Jesus’ birth in January or midwinter appears to be quite ancient. Eastern Orthodox Christians have celebrated the date of Jesus Christ’s baptism, called epiphany, on January 6 or 10 since the first century, and though the date of the Epiphany was never really disputed, some later Christians conflated the two dates of Epiphany with the date of Jesus’ birth.

Some ancient manuscripts contain an erroneous reading in Luke 3:22 that may explain, in part, the conflation of the two dates. That version of Luke 3 quotes the Father as saying to Jesus Christ, “Thou art my beloved Son; this day I have begotten thee, ” which indicated to some early Christians that Jesus’ baptism date (January 6 or 10) was also his birth date. The early January celebration of the date of Jesus’ birth and a mid-spring celebration of his birth date have equal claim to being the first dates celebrated by Christians. For unknown reasons, the spring celebration never caught on in mainstream Christianity.

The shift from celebrating Jesus’ birth in January to celebrating it on December 25 can be traced only as far back as the early fourth century A.D. What forced the shift from a January celebration to a December celebration is now unknown, but it became the predominant practice for all Christians, both in the East and in the West, by about A.D. 350. Therefore, the earliest celebration of Jesus’ birth may have been a winter celebration in January-but almost certainly not originally on December 25.

Jesus of Nazareth, a phrase occurring seventeen times in the New Testament, has identified a small, unwalled town in southern Galilee with Jesus for all time. Located some fifteen miles west of the Sea of Galilee and twenty miles east of the Mediterranean Sea, Nazareth had a population between two hundred and four hundred people at the beginning of the first century. An obscure town, Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament, by Josephus, or in the Talmud. It is situated in the hills four miles southeast of Sepphoris, Herod Antipas’ early capital.

Nazareth’s archaeological record indicates that the inhabitants exploited the soft limestone in the area to build basements, cisterns, grain storage facilities, and olive and wine presses, reflecting its main economic enterprise-agriculture. Nazareth had no palaces, bathhouses, or paved streets, indicating that the people lived in humble homes that spread across a south-facing slope. It was an all-Jewish village that was most likely settled during the Hasmonean expansionist period just before Jesus Christ’s birth.

In direct contrast to its first-century political and economic obscurity, Nazareth plays a significant role in the Gospel narratives. In Nazareth, the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and announced the birth of the Messiah (Luke 1:26). Joseph and Mary returned there sometime after Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem (Matthew 2:23). From Jesus Christ’s youth until he was thirty years of age, Nazareth was Jesus’ home. Finally, it was the place Jesus chose to announce the fulfillment of messianic prophecy concerning him (see Isaiah 61:1-2) as he began his ministry (Luke 4:16-30).

Bethlehem (Hebrew for “house [or place] of bread”) was the birthplace of King David (1 Samuel 16:1-4). An unwalled village about five miles south of Jerusalem with little more than a hundred persons during the Herodian period, it was, nevertheless, the prophesied place of the Messiah’s birth (Micah 5:2-4). Joseph, Mary, and perhaps their parents were possibly born in Bethlehem before migrating north into Galilee. Matthew and Luke mention Bethlehem in the birth narratives (Matthew 2:1, 5-6; Luke 2:4, 15). The phrase “because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7) may better be rendered “because there was no space in the room,” indicating that Joseph and Mary may have found shelter in a relative’s home at the time.

Although the New Testament does not mention a cave, a second-century source states that Jesus was born in one. Many homes in Bethlehem were built in front of caves, so we can easily envision Joseph and Mary seeking appropriate privacy in a home’s back area that was used for stabling and storage. Matthew indicates that they remained in Bethlehem for some time, as Jesus Christ is not described as an infant but as a child when the Wise Men visited him (Matthew 2:11-14).

The last mention of Bethlehem is found in John when some of those listening to Jesus Christ said that Bethlehem is the birthplace of the son of David (John 7:42). Thereafter, Bethlehem disappears from the New Testament record.