Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey, John Dixon here. Before we start the episode, I wanted to ask if you could take a few minutes to complete our 2025 Undeceptions listener survey. We've been doing the show for five years, if you can believe that, and our audience has grown significantly, which we are so grateful for.
And we want to get to know you a little more, what you like, what you think we can do better, and the other things you're listening to. Maybe there's stuff we need to learn from them. Plus, if you finish the survey, you'll go into the draw to win a book pack with some of the books of our excellent recent guests. Head to undeceptions.com forward slash survey. It'll really help us out. Thanks so much. An Undeceptions Podcast.
This is going to be a very difficult province to govern. I'm going to need help. Your help. Your advice. You want my advice? Yes, I do. Withdraw your legions. Give us our freedom. Unfortunately, the emperor is devoted to his empire. He's particularly fond of Judea. Judea is not fond of the emperor. Oh, is there anything so sad as unrequited love?
That was Stephen Boyd and Charlton Heston in the 1959 Hollywood epic Ben-Hur. It's the ultimate blockbuster. The movie cost $15 million to make, which is a fortune in 1959. It required 300 sets, 2,500 horses, 250 camels, tens of thousands of extras and 100,000 costumes.
It's also the only Hollywood film included in the Vatican's list of approved religious movies. I want to see the full list, Researcher Al. Can you find that for me one day? There's a reason we sometimes call a significant undertaking bigger than Ben-Hur. In the clip, Boyd's character is Masala, and he's returned to the city of his childhood, which is Jerusalem, the capital of Judea. It's the year 26.
Having been shipped off to Rome as a little boy, Masala is now a Roman tribune, returning to Jerusalem in command of the Antonia Fortress. Masala's best friend is Prince Judah Ben-Hur, which is Heston's character. And Masala expects his mate to help him quash any Jewish dissent toward the Romans.
Spoiler, Judah refuses. The two fall out and the consequences play out over the next four hours. It is a brilliant film from my vague memory of watching it years ago. It won 11 Oscars, which is still the equal most of all time, alongside Titanic and The Lord of the Rings Return of the King.
Ben-Hur is grand. It boasts an unforgettable chariot race, that I do remember, and some nice Jesus cameos.
But what's perhaps overlooked is how well it captures the sense of tension in first century Judea. It was an extremely unstable region. In the centuries before Jesus' birth, Judea had been ruled by the Greeks, then the Ptolemies, who were also Greeks but from Egypt, and then the Seleucid Empire, they're also Greeks but up north and over to the east, what we call Lebanon, Syria and beyond.
In 167 BC, the Seleucids were overthrown by the Maccabees, a group of Jewish rebels led by Judas Maccabeus. And you may remember that Hanukkah commemorates this Maccabean revolt. A mere century later, though, Judea was again under the rule of a foreign power. Judea was a hugely strategic military and economic region for the Romans.
It also acted as a buffer zone against their eastern enemies. But none of that mattered to the locals. Living under occupation and the rule of a repressive puppet king meant that by the time Jesus was born, Judea was a tinderbox waiting to explode. This episode, we're diving into what was happening in the world as Jesus grew from boy to man.
And we're looking at the degree to which we can see the Gospels, the Gospels of the New Testament, as good historical sources. I don't just mean for the figure of Jesus, but for geopolitics and culture more generally at this time. We're also going to wonder out loud how Jesus' upbringing in this tense part of the ancient world might have affected his outlook and his teaching.
Masala and Ben-Hur may have been epic fictional characters, but they lived in a very real, turbulent place and time. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. MUSIC
This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. You can get discounts on their special Master Lectures video courses and free chapters of many of the books we talk about here on the show. Just go to zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions.
Every episode of Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth... MUSIC
Well, Joan, thank you so much for joining us. I want to ask you about the whole idea of backgrounds, because your book is focused on the backgrounds of Jesus. Some might ask, why worry about the backgrounds when the foreground is so clear?
Thank you for having me here to talk about these things. Yes, context, background. My work as a historian is often about putting things in the context of particular times a long time ago. That's Professor Joan Taylor, who I think is the first Kiwi we've had on Undeceptions. I'm not 100% sure, but I feel like I owe an apology to New Zealand. We'll try to do better.
Joan is Professor Emerita of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism at King's College London, and she's also an Honorary Professor at Australian Catholic University. Her latest book is Boy Jesus, Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times. It's a seriously impressive work that makes some compelling arguments about the early life of Jesus.
And yes, the plain meaning of the text is there in terms of what the Bible says, but it implies a whole world. It implies a whole way of seeing. It implies characters. It implies cultures and land. And I think unless you put the stories in context, you're not really understanding them fully. So like stories we hear today, we know exist.
exactly where they belong in terms of our world. And these stories were written for readers originally who just knew so much that we don't.
So, in order to really understand stories, you have to look at this background. You have to look at history, ancient history. Okay. So, let me ask you then, what are the key backgrounds? You know, they're intersecting backgrounds, I assume, to help us get our head around the man from Nazareth. Well, one of the people I really do focus on is Herod the King.
when he pops up in the Gospel of Matthew, and I concentrate a lot on the Gospel of Matthew in the book, it's just Herod the king. You know who he is. Matthew also just assumes readers know that Herod is the king and actually that they know that Herod is a problem. We know Herod is a problem because we know the stories in the Gospel of Matthew. So Herod is part of
Christian world culture. You know Herod is not a very nice king, but the way he pops up in the Gospel of Matthew, it is assumed you know that and he's going to do something terrible. He's the pantomime baddie. He comes on stage and you expect everyone to go, "'Ooh, boo, boo, he's coming on stage.'"
But we don't really know that much. Nothing very much is said about Herod in the Gospels. We read about five different Herods in the Gospels and the Book of Acts. Herod the Great, his sons, Herod Archelaus and Antipas, and his grandson and great-grandson, Herod Agrippa I and Herod Agrippa II.
It can all get very confusing. I often make the point in New Testament history classes that you have to know some history to read the New Testament. If for no other reason than Luke, especially Luke, expects you to know all the different Herods. He often just calls them Herod, not because he's confused, but because he expects you to know who's who, when and where.
Anyway, it all goes back to the first Herod, Herod the Great, who ruled as a Roman client king over Judea from 37 to 4 BC. Check out our Easter episode, Jesus Trials, for more on all of that stuff.
despite being the king of the Jews. Herod the Great was perceived as only Jewish, if I can say that. His father was from Idumea, south of Judea, and converted to Judaism late in life, and his mum was Arabian, or Nabataean, as we really say.
Herod was a big fan of Rome, spent a lot of time there, became friends with all the cool cats. And he also liked Roman taxes, taxes in general, and he was pretty unpopular. But he certainly left his mark. He launched wonderful infrastructure projects, including fantastic renovations to the temple,
And he built some vast fortresses, including the Antonia Fortress, as well as the famous Masada Complex. But he was also uber paranoid. Famously, he had his second wife, Mariamne, and their two sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, executed out of fear of his powerful in-laws, the Hasmoneans. By the way, he also had Mariamne's brother, mother and grandfather killed, just for good measure.
Just five days before his death, he also had his son Antipater executed, leading the then-emperor Augustus to famously quip that it is better to be Herod's pig than his son. Though the source for that Augustan quip is pretty late. Don't know what to make of it. Herod also killed loads of ordinary citizens if they showed a hint of resistance against him. And...
He left final instructions to kill some Jewish nobles upon his departure so that even if Judea didn't mourn his death, they would weep on the day of his death. What a guy. The first gospel readers would have been very familiar with the character of Herod.
He was known in the Greco-Roman world as being mercilessly cruel and something of a tyrant. He killed three of his own sons because he was so paranoid about their threat to his rule. He changed his will a few times in terms of succession, but he also targeted anyone in his
that was in any way a problem to him, even when he started off, when he first became king in 37, when he was actually able to take over rule of Judea in 37 BCE.
insisted on an oath of loyalty from his subjects, and he couldn't stand any opposition. So, he just rooted out opposition wherever he saw it. And it seems like when he thought about the legacy of the great King David and what people expected in terms of
that legacy and expecting a messiah, an anointed king from the line of David, he was particularly paranoid. Did Herod represent a peculiar kind of Jewish rule, or was he really Roman rule extended into Judea? Or both? Yeah, good question. Absolutely not Jewish rule. So people think of him as king of the Judeans, king of the Jews.
but actually he was a Roman client king. His father was an Edomian convert to Judaism. Edomia was the Edomites. They were another nation, and their area actually that had expanded to the south of traditional Judea had been conquered by the Judeans, and people had converted to Jewish religion. So that was Herod's father, and his mother was a Nabataean Arab. So
ethnically, he wasn't from any line of Judah. He wouldn't have the tribal affiliation of Judah. But the Romans really liked his father. They really liked him, and they put a lot of trust in him. And whoever the Romans liked, they could put in charge of one of their imperial domains. And Judea was under
The authority of Augustus Caesar in Rome, it was part of the Roman Empire, and only Augustus had the right to appoint kings in the Roman Empire. So Herod was more of a Roman. Even though he was king of the Judeans, king of the Jews, he was…
a Roman client king. Did he feign a kind of Jewish outlook to the people? In some ways, he did, in that he did a fantastic amount of building of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and he's known for his incredible building of the Jewish temple. And
And beautifying the temple, expanding the temple was considered to be a good thing in terms of Jewish religion. However, he also built a number of imperial cult temples for the veneration of Augustus Caesar as a god. On the coast of Israel, right? At Caesarea. Yes, at Caesarea. Great big Augustus welcoming everyone in.
Exactly. He plays it in various different ways. He's very pragmatic. He's trying to stay in with Augustus, his great friend in high places in Rome.
And also trying to make sure that things run smoothly in Jerusalem and there's no trouble for him. Okay, so let's zero in on the people that he rules and obviously the one family that is the focus of your book. You emphasize Jesus and Mary.
Mary and Joseph, as Jews or Judeans. Tell us what you mean by that, because it's multifaceted, and I'd love my listeners to get a sense of how you articulate that.
Yeah, so Jesus is known as a Jew. There's been much writing about Jesus and his Jewishness over the last few decades. But I wanted to home in on this Greek word, eudios, which is often translated as Jew. It actually is, as you say, multidimensional, and it includes, of course, the religious dimension of being Jewish, but it also includes being Jewish
who lives in a particular land, Judea. And so Jesus is a Judean and living in Judea. Judea had, as I said before, expanded out in the century before Jesus' birth under some
Judean priest kings, the Hasmonean dynasty, and they had expanded from traditional Judea, which was around Jerusalem, including Bethlehem, that's traditional Judea, and they'd expanded into Idumea in the south, and then expanded into Galilee.
which was a Syrophoenician stronghold in the century before Jesus. This is a really complicated part of history that can get very confusing very quickly. If you want to hear more about some of the groups that Joan's talking about, I strongly recommend checking out episode 54, Between Testaments, and episode 117, Jewish Jesus,
both with podcast fave George Athos. G'day, George, if you're listening.
Who am I kidding? He's got better things to do than listen to us. Back to Joan. And then there'd been, like in any kind of expansion and claiming of territory, immigration. So traditional Judeans had moved into Galilee, moved into Idumea, and so on. So I find that quite interesting in that Jesus is not simply a traditional Judean in terms of being born in Bethlehem.
but his family are immigrant Judeans in that they go to this conquered territory of Galilee and become Judeans in Galilee, and that's part of wider Judea. So he's got this kind of double dimension. And I also bring out the
the idea that he's also of the tribe of Judah. And, you know, coming from New Zealand, I know how important tribal identity is for Māori, and it is in very many parts of the world, in indigenous cultures and traditional cultures.
The idea that you belong to a particular tribe is a huge part of your identity. So I wanted to bring that out too. And it's there in terms of the ancestry of Jesus at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew that there is a real sense of, I am, you know, this family is actually a Judahite family. We have this tribal identity from Judah. You think you are wise, Mithrandia?
Yet for all your subtleties you have not wisdom. Do you think the eyes of the White Tower are blind? I have seen more than you know. With your left hand you would use me as a shield against Mordor, and with your right you'd seek to supplant me. I know who rides with Theoden of Rohan. Oh yes, word has reached my ears of this Aragorn, son of Arathorn. And I tell you now, I will not bow to this ranger from the north.
Last of a ragged house, long bereft of lordship. Authority has not given to you to deny the return of the king, steward. That, of course, was a clip from the 11-time Oscar-winning The Lord of the Rings, Return of the King. In that scene, Mithrandir, aka Gandalf, rebukes Denethor, the steward of Gondor, for refusing to acknowledge the returning king, the true king of Gondor, Aragorn.
Like the people of Gondor, some in first century Judea still held out hope that God's promised king, a Messiah from the line of David, would one day appear and restore Israel to its former glory. This had first been prophesied nearly a thousand years before Jesus in the book of 2 Samuel.
It's why both Luke and Matthew kick off their Gospels with genealogies for Jesus. His Davidic descent was a crucial piece of the puzzle of Jesus' identity as Messiah. But weirdly, loads of New Testament scholars are skeptical about Jesus' Davidic credentials. It's partly because Matthew's and Luke's genealogies don't match up.
They both have Jesus descending from David, but they diverge at multiple points. And this has led scholars to conclude that the genealogies were just inventions to get Jesus into the line of David. Joan thinks that's not great historical analysis.
I want to zero in on that because unlike many historically oriented scholars, you take very seriously that this was a family descended not just from Judah, but from King David. You do it with measured historical craft. I would love to hear what you make of that family memory
that we're from the line of David. Right, yes. So it's absolutely what is stated in the genealogies of Jesus, both in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. In the Gospel of Matthew, it's said 13 times that he is son of David. He's descended from David. The Gospel of Matthew is very big on it. But before the Gospels are written, even with the letters of Paul,
It's just a matter of fact that Jesus is descended from David. In the beginning of Paul's letter to the Romans, he says he's seed of David. And Paul is writing that letter at a time that James is...
in charge of the church in Jerusalem, and James is Jesus' brother. So we're talking mid-50s, right? Exactly. So this is very, very early on. In terms of our historical evidence, we should look at the letters of Paul for Jesus really before anything, because it's the earliest evidence. And Paul is writing about the historical Jesus as just
things people just generally know. He doesn't need to argue anything. It's just part of the furniture in terms of knowledge. And so he's not making anything of it in terms of his identification of Jesus as Christ. For Paul,
Christ is very much this mystical figure. He's much more interested in the divine aspect of Jesus than he is really in the physical aspect of Jesus. The experience of Jesus counts for him a lot. So when Paul does talk about something that is about Jesus as a body, as a physical being,
This is huge. So to just say that, okay, people made it up because it was convenient. Made it up as a kind of crass apologetics, right? Apologetics. Oh, you know, Jesus had to be Messiah, so let's make him descendant of David. Yeah. That's the normal line, right? Well, that is the skeptical line among my colleagues who are in historical Jesus studies. And
As a historian, you're taught to be super skeptical about evidence and test it and so on. But sometimes I feel people just test it too hard and are too skeptical. You know, you think, what do you actually need not to be skeptical in this particular case? And actually...
There were different messiahs around in Second Temple Judaism in terms of expectations. So even though there was the idea of a great king of the line of David that would rule over Israel and liberate Israel from all the oppressors and Ezekiel,
announces that there is going to be a great prince of David's line. The Dead Sea Scrolls, you've got alternative messiahs, you've got a priestly messiah in another body of literature known as Enochic literature from a figure called Enoch writing this idea that Enoch has revelations about end times and the figure of the heavenly
Son of Man, Son of Humanity from Daniel 7. That is so much an important part of that type of expectation. This messianic figure in Daniel is pretty cool. Rather than a liberator of Israel, Daniel's Son of Man rules over a universal kingdom.
Son of Man is really just an idiom for human being, but in this context it's saying that a human being will be invested with divine authority to be worshipped by everyone forever. In my vision at night, I looked, and there before me was one like a Son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven.
He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, a glory, and sovereign power. All nations and peoples of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed. Daniel chapter 7. In our Gospels, of course, we get the weaving in of the Son of Man,
and the Davidic Messiah, but there was no necessary reason for doing that. You didn't need to do that in terms of expectation. So our Gospel writers, early Christians, could have just gone for the Danielic figure.
without weaving in the line of David. But instead, it's just Jesus is from the line of David. And it's not as if people didn't have any sense that they came from David. You cite other examples of people roughly in the same period who knew that they were from David's line.
Exactly. So another thing historians say is, how could anyone have remembered they were from David's line? Well, again, Maori in New Zealand remember their lineage very well over many generations back, and it's part of their identity, and they recite the genealogy. And this is just what you do in terms of identifying yourself.
So in an environment in which memory was not reliant on written records, but was actually reliant on oral recitation, it's not hard to just commit it to memory, a genealogy.
In fact, there is now, maybe it wasn't known, but there is now an ossuary found in Jerusalem, a little bone box, where it's written at the top of the bone box from the house of David on it. So whoever was buried there
wanted to be remembered as coming from the house of David. And that's an ossuary from the first century BC or AD. And it's really from a personal setting, isn't it? It's not like propaganda in that context. It's in the tomb. It's really just a family memory. Indeed. It's just a family member, and it's only written for the family.
Then there's Herod's infamous Massacre of the Innocents. According to Matthew, when Herod heard from the mysterious Magi about a newborn king in Bethlehem, where it was prophesied the Messiah would be born, he freaked out and, quote, gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.
Tons of skeptical scholars have dismissed this event because it's not mentioned in any other historical source. In this case, they think absence of corroborating evidence is evidence of absence. But as I'm always telling my students, we probably have less than 1% of the writings of the first century missing.
So with 99% of the evidence missing, it's pretty silly, without good external reasons, to make judgments about what's not reported in the surviving sources. The fact is, this story fits exactly with the character of Herod that we know from the occasional source. Joan points to a particularly awful episode from the end of Herod's life. Here's a confronting extract from Joan's book.
Then Herod's health began to fail, as he succumbed to an unspecified illness. There was talk that the king was dying. At this cue, there was a popular insurrection and brazen action in the heart of the judiciary and the cult.
the temple itself. Two leading and very popular scholars, named Judas, son of Sepphoris, and Matthias, son of Margulis, had a large body of keen young students. Emboldened by news of Herod's illness, Judas and Matthias indicated to their students that Herod's erection of a grand golden eagle, symbol of Rome, over the great gate of the temple had long been utterly unlawful.
a terrible contradiction of mosaic law prohibiting graven images, and it should be pulled down by those who had courage enough to be martyred.
At noon, when there were a huge number of people in the temple, the most eager of the students swung themselves by ropes down from the roof and began hacking off the Roman eagle with hatchets. The captain of the king's guard sent in troops to stop this and arrested about 40 young men, who were then brought before Herod, apparently now in his winter palace in Jericho.
While others arrested, were executed in other ways.
Here is another massacre of young men by Herod, now at that very time that Matthew records the massacre of the infants in Bethlehem. This is surely another element of social memory that has informed what is told. Herod massacred youth. Joan Taylor, Boy Jesus, chapter 6. Then there's Bethlehem itself. The professional gospel's naysayers dismiss this detail as well.
We don't know where Jesus was born, they say, but certainly not in that traditional town of David. Surely not. Stay with us. The prophecy says this man must be born in the house of David, of David's line in David's town. It means he must be born in Bethlehem. Jesus of Nazareth is well known to have been born in Nazareth.
Jesus probably was from Nazareth. His family was simply from Nazareth because he's called Jesus of Nazareth. And the traditions that got him to Bethlehem for his birth are probably later pietistic traditions that Matthew and Luke later developed for different reasons. So there's this passage in Micah chapter 5, verse 2, one of the Old Testament prophets. It doesn't say the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, but it does say that a Savior will come out of Bethlehem.
And Matthew says that's why Jesus had come from Bethlehem. And so I just assumed that's why. But unfortunately, his parents lived in Nazareth, and so somehow he had to be born there. Is Jesus born in Bethlehem? Yes or no, do you think? No, he's born in Nazareth. He's clearly born in Nazareth. He's Jesus of Nazareth. Okay. So no manger, no stable. You don't think that's plausible? I mean, where are those details from?
Jesus' birth in Bethlehem is one of the most famous stories ever told, but it's doubted by many scholars. For one thing, the census mentioned by Luke as the reason the Holy Family had to go back to Bethlehem is likely just a mistake, these scholars say.
There is no evidence in the 1% of sources that have survived that there was a census when Quirinius was governor of Syria. We do know of a later census under Quirinius, but that's in AD 6, when Jesus was like 10 years old or something. So it can't be that one. So Luke has just made a little boo-boo in trying to get his hero to be born in Bethlehem.
That's how the story goes. Check out episode 24 of Undeceptions, Bible Mistakes, to hear the great Craig Blomberg discuss this particular problem. But the fact is, the problem is nowhere near as clear as some folks want it to be. There's a little Greek adjective, protos, in Luke's sentence about the census, which can easily be translated this way.
This was the census before. Protos can mean before Quirinius was governor of Syria. Or Protos means first. So it would be translated, this was the first census when Quirinius was governor.
In other words, Luke knows the census we today know about, the one from AD 6, but here he's saying he knows another one, one further back, the first census, and that would be one in about 4 BC. Now, this would require Quirinius having an earlier governorship, but there's nothing really to rule that out. In other words, there seems to be a motivated rush to find mistakes in the Gospels, amongst some.
It's the mirror image of the motivated rush to prove everything in the Gospels, Christian apologetics and all that. But the responsible historian is best to just reserve judgment when the evidence is so sparse and the issues so unclear. Joan Taylor is one such responsible historian. She avoids both arbitrary skepticism and over-eager apologetics.
You even take Bethlehem seriously as the birthplace of Jesus. You know, I have my 114 historical Jesus volumes just there. And, you know, I've read them and they're all, nearly all, skeptical about Bethlehem. And then along comes Joan Taylor and lays out a pretty serious argument for taking this as not proven but solid.
I think it is really solid. Nowhere in early Christian history is it said that Jesus was born in Nazareth. Scholars read in skepticism about Jesus being born in Bethlehem at various points in the Gospels, but I think that these can be explained at the beginning of the Gospel of John when
Philip says, you know, the discovery of Jesus coming from Nazareth, the question is, you know, what good can come from Nazareth? And actually, it relies on this idea that the readers know better, that he is actually from Bethlehem. And later on in the Gospel of John, it said, well, we know that the Messiah is going to be born in Bethlehem. It assumes
readers go, "Aha! These people aren't knowledgeable like we are." There's this kind of play with readers' true knowledge because people express ignorance at certain points throughout the Gospel of John. So I think that certain points where people have gone, "Oh, Jesus is just from Nazareth. There's no knowledge about Jesus coming from Bethlehem."
actually is indicating that people did know that. What the Gospel of Luke does is have the family in Nazareth before going to Bethlehem, whereas in the Gospel of Matthew, they're already in Bethlehem, and then they go to Nazareth. But again, you know,
Scholars make all of these assumptions, which is you can either be in one place or another, but you can't be in both places. You can't have an identity in Bethlehem and also in Nazareth. It has to be an either-or. And what I say in the book is an immigrant to Nazareth from Judea
would have had two identities because immigrants often do have two identities. You have your home place identity, and then if you've lived in another place for a long time, you have that identity as well. And clearly, Jesus as an adult is known as Jesus of Nazareth. He's grown up
in Nazareth, wherever he was born isn't his primary identity. But for the family, in the Gospel of Luke, it's clear they've got property in Bethlehem, otherwise they wouldn't have gone to Bethlehem for the census. That tie to Bethlehem is very, very strong.
You can still visit Bethlehem today, of course. I take groups there pretty regularly. It's a bustling Muslim and Christian town. The Church of the Nativity was built by Constantine, well, at his pleasure at least. It is gorgeous, and underneath the church is a cave complex that almost certainly was used in the time of Jesus for housing and
There's a spot you can go to that marks the actual place of the manger. But it's tradition, not history. I'm more pumped about the fact that one of the caves underneath the church was definitely lived in by the wonderful ancient scholar, Saint Jerome, who really should have his own Undeceptions episode.
He picked the birthplace of Jesus to do his astonishing work in the late 4th and early 5th centuries of translating the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of Scripture into the popular or vulgar Latin of the day so more and more people could read it. This would eventually become what we call the Vulgate, the common Latin edition of the Bible that was used for like a thousand years or more.
Anyway, you can go and stand in Jerome's office, as I do with my croops, where he worked tirelessly for decades on this wonderful gift to the literary world. There's even an ancient inscription still there in the room that basically says, Jerome was here.
Anyway, that's just for free. Back to our point. Something else Joan spoke to me about was the role of Jesus' broader family, both during his early life and also in the period of the early church right through to the end of the first century. It's a really fascinating part of the interview.
But it's only for plus subscribers. I feel terrible saying that because it's an awesome topic. Jesus' relatives were big players in Christianity for decades. And I just want you to understand, listeners, I don't make these calls. Please send your complaints to Researcher Al and Producer Kayleigh, right? If I had my way...
There's no way I'd say at this point, if you want access to that content, head to underceptions.com, where you can sign up as a plus subscriber. Link in the show notes. Through careful historical work, we can piece together a picture of Jesus' childhood world. But there's a question I've often been asked. Is it true Jesus and his family were at one time refugees? I remember my little brother...
crying and shouting and being really angry every time my dad would leave the house, because he knew the exact same thing that we all knew: that every time we said goodbye to somebody, there was a huge risk that we will never see them again. I knew the same. So I would hold on to my little brother's hand firmly, and I would pull him close to me, hoping that I would never lose him.
Like millions of refugee children, I grew up never knowing what it meant to feel safe. Fear consumed all of my being. I was afraid every second of my life. Today we know that constant fear... That's child psychologist Moisda Arsemian, sharing her story as part of the TEDx talk she gave in 2017.
Moisture now specializes in treating child refugees for trauma, and she's had firsthand experience. When she was a little girl, her family fled from the Kurdistan region of Iran, going first to Iraq and then eventually to Denmark, where they settled. While she was still a child, she witnessed her mother being shot in the head.
For years afterwards, she explained, she would faint at the sight of blood, or if someone just got angry, or even in front of ordinary peaceful soldiers. In this talk, she says that something like 40% of refugees develop PTSD, and she was one of them. But what's this got to do with Jesus?
Let's go back to one of the early birth stories that is controversial in a political context. The idea that Jesus and the family were refugees in the sort of culture wars. I'm not sure if you've heard this debate. In the culture wars, some want to claim Jesus as a refugee because they want to do good to refugees today, and others deny that he was ever a refugee. That's not the right way to approach it because, of course,
They want to deny refugees. Can you just give us the historian's take with leaving aside the modern politics of it all? So the story of Jesus as a refugee is that the family are afraid of Herod, Joseph, and
feels he has to go and is justified then by massacre in Bethlehem. And he takes the family, the mother and the child, as it's said, into Egypt. An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.
"Get up," he said, "take the child and his mother, and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him." So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night, and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called my son." Matthew chapter 2.
And I find the story very interesting because certainly in the Gospel of Matthew, it's woven into Joseph's dreams and scriptural interpretation. And it's made a lot of in terms of a paradigm that the Gospel of Matthew wants to have of Jesus as a prophet like Moses. So Jesus goes into Egypt.
as Moses was in Egypt and he comes out of Egypt like Moses. And later on in the Gospel, he gives a sermon on the mount, which is like Moses receiving the law from God on Mount Sinai. And many scholars have really gone into this Moses characterization of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew and then said, "Well, Egypt, it's all Moses." And Herod is like,
Pharaoh and the story of Moses. And this is all made up because it's designed to show Jesus like Moses. But actually, we know that if there was trouble in Judea, there were a lot of refugees that fled to
Egypt from Judea. It's not that far away. We're talking Alexandria, really, aren't we? Well, Alexandria was the place of choice, but we know that there are a lot of Jewish communities in Egypt at that time. And I got quite interested in exploring some of the traditions about the Holy Family in Egypt. So I've got this great chunk of stories about Jesus in Egypt from early Christian literature.
And one of the earliest, very earliest stories is that the Holy Family were not in Alexandria at all, but they were in this place called Hermopolis, which is way south. And you think, why on earth would they have gone to Hermopolis? But in fact, there is papyrological, a little tiny bit of papyri from ancient Egypt that talks about
Jews street in Hermopolis. So there would have been a Jewish community in Hermopolis at the time of Jesus in the first and second century. But where they went, don't know. But one of the things about this collection of early
Christian stories about the Holy Family in Egypt is just how difficult it was for them as refugees. In the ancient world, it was tough to be a refugee. It was really hard. People didn't welcome you. It's never been a good time to be a refugee, and it certainly wasn't then. And so,
To me, what's interesting is how that experience affected Jesus, or might have affected Jesus, to be in a position of vulnerability, or have family stories about being in a position of vulnerability. And I actually...
I think that the birth narrative we have of the Gospel of Luke, it doesn't talk about Jesus being a refugee or the family fleeing. But it also has the same kind of theme of vulnerability, of displacement. Jesus is born in a place where there's just a manger. It's not an animal feeding trough. It's not a proper, nice bedroom.
So that sense of Jesus being born in a place where things are not quite right or having things that are very dodgy and dangerous about his birth, I think is something that is very key in all of the birth stories. Dodgy and dangerous is also how you could describe the region where Jesus grew up, Lower Galilee. More about that after the break.
These two Galileans, of so great largeness, and encompassed with so many nations of foreigners, have been always able to make a strong resistance on all occasions of war. For the Galileans are inured to war from their infancy, and have always been very numerous; nor hath the country been ever destitute of men of courage, or wanted a numerous set of them,
For their soil is universally rich and fruitful, and full of the plantations of trees of all sorts, insomuch that it invites the most slothful to take pains in its cultivation. By its fruitfulness, accordingly, it is all cultivated by its inhabitants, and no part of it lies idle.
Moreover, the cities lie here very thick, and the very many villages that are here are everywhere so full of people, by the richness of their soil, that the very least of them contain above fifteen thousand inhabitants. JOSEPHUS, THE WARS OF THE JEWS
That's Josephus, describing Upper and Lower Galilee. Jesus grew up in Nazareth, a town in Lower Galilee, and it was tough. I know we might picture him wandering peacefully through the hills, but first century Galilee, while beautiful and fertile, was marked by rebellion and occasional violence.
Harvard's Alan Callahan notes that, quote, Galilee had a centuries-old tradition of political autonomy under the God of Israel, and that made imperial rule difficult. It was exactly the kind of place a character like Masala, back to Ben-Hur, would have really struggled to govern.
One of the things virtually all scholars agree with is that he grows up in Galilee, not down south. So what did that mean? I mean, did Galilee have its own special ways of being Jewish? And if so, how might that have shaped the boy? Yeah, it did have...
its own regional identity. It was far from Jerusalem, where the main government was, and the government led by the high priest and the temple in Jerusalem. So we have religious law coming from Jerusalem, and religious lawyers and scribes coming from Jerusalem to see to matters in Galilee, and then going back to Jerusalem.
And later on in rabbinic literature, there's somewhat sort of disparagement of Galileans as not being quite as right on in terms of Jewishness as people in Judea. But it's a very rural environment. There's a lot of villages, densely packed with villages, quite highly populated, quite a
People knew that, well, they would grow up doing certain trades. Boys would be learning certain trades that were appropriate in terms of their fathers. Girls would learn how to do all sorts of household tasks and also trades appropriate for women. And it was just this quite hand-to-mouth existence, I think, overall in Galilee. It's not, you don't see...
anywhere apart from in cities, great wealth in Galilee. And the thing that's been done in terms of archaeology of rural Galilee is pretty significant.
down market, it's not a wealthy area. But it was fertile, wasn't it? It's fertile, but then there's big population, so making sure that you have enough food is key. And it ties into the fact that Jesus talks about people not having food. "Give us this day our daily bread" is said to people who were not necessarily sure that they were going to get their daily bread.
And we hear later on of famines and so on that affected Galilee. So it's a rural lifestyle, but it's also got this
Well, Josephus talks about the Galileans as being rather warrior-like, you know, sort of macho guys who in the end do revolt quite fiercely against- That's where the zealots come from, isn't it? Well, yes. And later on in the 60s, the Galileans are very feisty revolutionaries. Well, I'm thinking of Judas of-
Galilee named by Josephus as the founder of the Zealots. Exactly. Here was one Judas, a Golanite, of a city whose name was Gamala, who taking with him Sudduq, a Pharisee, became zealous to draw them to a revolt, who both said that this taxation was no better than an introduction to slavery.
and exhorted the nation to assert their liberty, as if they could procure them happiness and security for what they possessed, and an assured enjoyment of a still greater good, which was that of the honor and glory they would thereby acquire for magnanimity. They also said that God would not otherwise be assisting to them. Then upon their joining with one another in such councils as might be successful, and for their own advantage, and this especially,
if they would set about great exploits, and not grow weary in executing the same, so men received what they said with pleasure. And this bold attempt proceeded to a great height. All sorts of misfortunes also sprang from these men, and the nation was infected with this doctrine to an incredible degree. One violent war came upon us after another, and we lost our friends.
Josephus, Antiquities, Book 18. That's where the Zealots came from, early in the first century. Josephus calls them the fourth philosophy of Judaism, and he's pretty scathing about them. Their movement eventually led to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, a generation after Jesus. But there was an earlier rebellion before Judas of Gamla.
And this one happened right about the time Jesus was born. And it happened just down the road from Nazareth, where he'd grow up, in the city of Zippori or Sepphoris. Oh, I love taking people to Sepphoris.
So there are the different Judases, but Judas of Galilee or Gamala, founder of this fourth philosophy who were the revolutionaries of the 60s. But before that, there's Judas, son of Hezekiah, who takes over Sepphoris. And I think that's really interesting just in terms of the timing because he takes over and declares his independence around Sepphoris.
At the time of Herod's death, just after Herod's death, and then there's a whole lot of revolutionaries that flare up after Herod's death. 4 BC, something like that, right? 4 BC. And Archelaus, Herod's son, is trying to control things, and there's absolute chaos. People camp out in the Jerusalem temple and demand liberation from Rome. Archelaus massacres them.
Josephus says 3,000 people are killed, it's an absolute bloodbath. And that makes sense of what we have in the Gospel of Matthew with Joseph taking his family back from Egypt because Herod is dead.
Going to Judea and then learning that Archelaus is in charge, veering off to Nazareth, going, whoa, I'm going to Nazareth, just at the point when Judas has declared independence in Sepphoris, which is only a few kilometers away from Nazareth. So Joseph is being good. He's thinking of the safety of his family. He doesn't want to be anywhere where the Herodian dynasty is in charge.
And he heads off to Galilee at that point. Then we know from Josephus that what happened to Judas is that Quintilius Varus, the legate of Syria, like a huge president of Syria, takes the most gigantic
army down from Antioch assembles them with Nabataean forces and a huge number of extra forces with this legion coming down from Antioch and just sweeps down on Galilee from Syria, Phoenicia, and utterly quashes the revolution in Galilee and takes Sephoris, burns it, and then
enslaves the entire population of the city of Sepphoris. And that would have had this ramification out towards all of the villages around Sepphoris, and Nazareth is really a satellite town of Sepphoris. Jesus grew up in what was a recent war zone, where the main city of the region had been burnt to the ground.
It was rebuilt two decades later, just as Jesus was learning carpentry, by the way. But the story of Sepphoris must have still been on everyone's lips. Here's Joan in Boy Jesus again, elaborating further on the sacking of Sepphoris. While Nazareth was hidden behind a hill and away from any main roads, it would not have felt safe there when the Roman army occupied the heart of Galilee.
Sepphoris was only a few miles away. From the hills above Nazareth, the whole horror could have been watched. Loud noises would have carried. The smoke from burning buildings would have been seen and smelt. The inhabitants of Nazareth would have known that the Roman army was inflicting terrible things on the nearby city.
If I had my novelist's hat on, I would be thinking of the scene of Joseph and little Jesus standing on the hill above Nazareth watching Sephoras burn. You know, and thinking, okay, this is what happens if you defy the might of Rome by military means. This is what happens to you.
So even though Galilee had this ferment of revolution and wanting liberation that would then go on to massive revolution in the decades following Jesus, there would also have been the sense that Jesus grew up in this time where this is the lesson to Galilee. This is the lesson. And Sepphoris was
was renamed "Auta Cratorus," which is "Auta Crater Land," you know, "Auta Crater City," the city of the emperor. So that was what was now then being built in Jesus' childhood. Jesus came from a devout Jewish family, and from a region that was sometimes simmering with anti-Roman resentment.
We might have expected him to be a fierce patriot against the pagan overlords, but his vision of loyalty to the God of Israel moved in other directions. How do all these threads come together, as it were, in the adult Jesus? I mean, so you give this beautiful background about the upbringing of Jesus, but are you able to put your finger on
How that helps us understand this extraordinary figure who steps onto the world stage and really changes the world. When, in regard to Jesus' experience of displacement, I think it, as a child and his family stories of displacement, I think it's incredible that when he sends out people who are to go off in his stead, when he sends out the apostles, the twelve,
He asked them to go into villages without anything. They can carry a walking stick, which is what you would take on a long journey, and you could have sandals, but no second garment, second tunic, no money, and no food. So he's expecting those who go off in his stead, as he would have looked himself, to arrive in a village and
and have nothing. And what he says is that if you're not welcomed, you leave that village, you shake the dust off your feet. You don't even take their dust away from them. You have taken nothing from them. And ultimately, they're inviting God's justice, divine justice, by not welcoming you when you go into the village. So,
There is his message that they're supposed to take, but fundamentally, before people even hear the message, they have to be willing to accept these strangers who've come into their village with nothing. And I think that's very profound. So the refugee experience for Jesus has resonances in terms of how he presents himself and looking for the kindness of strangers. And if you
can't show that kindness, then you're not even going to hear Jesus' message. That's incredible. So I think it is quite a profound paradigm that he uses of the refugee experience in terms of his own mission.
Hey, here's a little bonus. Before I ended my interview with Joan, I had one more question for her about a very cool project she did with some of the Monty Python crew. Here it is. I have to ask you one more question that's sort of a bonus question. I don't know where we'll put it, but can you tell me about the Jesus and Brian project? Because some of our listeners will be very excited that you got to do such a thing.
Well, yes. So this was a good 10 years ago. It was actually Philip Davies who's now passed away. He and I got together and talked about how wonderful it would be to have a conference on thinking about the life of Brian in regard to the historical Jesus because we
We both thought that, of course, Brian is a completely ridiculous film, but there were various things that have resonances in terms of first century Judea. And in some ways, it just has the chaos of Judea at that time and the messianic hopes and all the kind of craziness that
And I, yeah, I loved, I've always liked The Life of Brian. I have to say when I first, when it first came out, I was one of the people that refused to see it because I thought it was blasphemous. You know, I was, I was one of those people. And then I only finally went to see The Life of Brian once.
with a bunch of Catholic priestly seminarians in Dunedin. And they said, look, you've got to see this film. It's absolutely brilliant. And I thought, okay, if guys training for the Catholic priesthood really love The Life of Brian, it can't be that bad. And I loved it because there were so many interesting people
resonances, and if you studied anything in terms of historical Jesus, they point to that all the time. The sort of funny things that scholars say, like "Blessed are the cheesemakers," is actually a dig at scholars who think, "Well, we're going to explain this much better than what we have in the Gospels." Philip
had phone numbers of the pythons and or a couple of them and and john cleese i got in touch with and he was just fantastic he was really really supportive and yeah i just i
really fantastic to have them involved in the conference. They were really interested. Terry Jones was really good and supportive as well. So having them involved, and it just made all the difference, assembling people. But they're really historically minded. They really want to know. And John Cleese himself is
is really fascinated by theological questions, quite frankly. Yeah, they're not anti-Christians. I mean, they weren't back then when they did the film, and they're not all these years later. No, they were poking fun at it.
you know, the great epic films about the life of Christ, which now, of course, from the benefit of hindsight, look overly staged and overly pompous in just exactly the way they were pointing out. Joan Taylor, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you.
There's a lot going on at the moment for our team at Undeceptions. Check out our new documentary called The First Hymn, available to stream now in the United States and coming soon for Australia and our global audiences. Head to thefirsthymmovie.com for all the info.
As always, you can head to underceptions.com and leave us a question. Now, you can do it by text, but we love hearing your voices. So why not be bold and leave us a voice message so we can put it into one of our next Q&A episodes. Be brave. You'll also find a full transcript of the episode on our website, as well as the show notes with all the links to all the stuff that we've talked about.
And while you're there, please take a few minutes to fill out our 2025 listener survey. We've been at this now for five years and have only done one survey like this in the past. So please get involved. This gives us valuable insights into our audience, what you like, what you think we can do better and how we can make this podcast sing for the next five years. Find the listener survey at undeceptions.com forward slash survey. See ya.
Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Hadley. Alistair Belling is a writer-researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. Lindy Leveston remains my wonderful assistant. Santino Dramarco is chief finance and operations consultant, editing by Richard Humwee. Our voice actors today were Yannick Laurie and Dakota Love. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible.
Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com. Letting the truth out. An Undeceptions podcast.