2,000 years ago, in a remote part of the Roman Empire, someone was
born who would change the history of the world. Jesus.
He was seen from the very beginning as this extremely radical revolutionary
figure that was going to bring more change than they had seen since the time of the prophets.
After a life of wandering through the hills and villages of Galilee and Judaea,
preaching and healing, Jesus was betrayed, arrested and brutally put to death.
Jesus's death on the Cross was
hugely difficult for the early Christians.
It was extremely embarrassing to say that they were followers of a leader who had been crucified.
But in the years after his crucifixion,
Jesus's story was written down by his followers to explain his
extraordinary life and death. These four Gospels would
later form a major part of the Christian Bible and enable his
message to be spread all over the world.
It's just extraordinary to come here now and see these crowds, who come
from all over the world, still being drawn by the power of that
moment that would change everything.
This is a very exciting find.
We have people who are still so sceptical
that they claim there's no Nazareth in the first century.
But for hundreds of years, scholars have been trying to look behind the Jesus of the Gospels,
the divine Christ of faith, to uncover the historical figure,
a Mediterranean Jew who lived and died as a man
and, according to his followers, was resurrected from the dead.
This is absolutely mind blowing.
I mean, they knew what we call the laws of nature just as much as we do.
They knew that dead people stay dead.
In this series, using the very latest archaeological, historical and theological research,
nine of the world's leading Biblical experts will re-examine the Gospel accounts of Jesus's life
to uncover the true meaning behind the 2,000 year-old story of Jesus.
This is a story too improbable not to be true
because it's not what you'd make up if you're starting a new world religion.
Right in the heart of one of Britain's largest cites is a library
that contains the oldest known piece of the Christian New Testament anywhere in the world.
When you study the New Testament you've got dozens, and in fact hundreds, of manuscripts
from the first three or four or five centuries,
including some of these tiny fragments
that go really back very close, within 60 or so years,
of when the documents were originally written.
And no other texts from the ancient world have any documentation remotely like that.
So we're on much more solid ground with the New Testament than any other book from antiquity.
This fragment of papyrus is believed to have been written
within just 100 years of Jesus's death.
It contains a few lines describing Jesus's encounter with the Roman
Governor in Jerusalem as he is condemned to death on a cross.
'The manuscript itself happens to be part of the 18th Chapter of John's Gospel and where we see Jesus talking
'to Pontius Pilate, this is the representative of the Kingdom of God
'confronting the representative of the Kingdom of the World.
'And what are they going to talk about? Well, what do you think? Kingdom, power and truth.
'And he says to Jesus, "So, are you some kind of a king?" And Jesus says, "Well, you call me a king,"
'he says, "but this is why I was born and this is what I came into the world for,
'"that I might bear witness to the truth." And then Pilate
'says his famous answer, "What is truth?"'
Ever since that question first appeared
in the Christian Bible, scholars have searched for an answer to help them understand the story of Jesus
contained in the Gospels.
The Christian Bible as we know it today is made up of the 39 books of the Old Testament,
Hebrew scriptures written
between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, and the 27 books of the New Testament.
At its heart are the four Gospels
of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
the narrative stories
of the life of Jesus, first written down in the century after Jesus's death.
'I think what we can say
'is not necessarily we've got these early manuscripts, therefore it must all be true, but we've got these'
early manuscripts which point back like a set of signposts from different roads all
leading to the same city and, because the manuscripts are slightly
different here and there, we can see that these traditions have diverged,
but they've diverged from a common source and we can go back very close
to that common source and say again
and again this is actually what John or Paul or whoever wrote.
It's wonderfully sharp, hard evidence of that, by comparison
with all the other texts that we know from the ancient world.
Most biblical scholars today agree that the best way to understand the Gospels,
and particularly what they say about Jesus, is to try
and understand the life and times in which they were composed, the outlook of the people for whom they
were first written and the world in which those stories took place.
In this series we want to uncover the original meaning of the story of Jesus, to investigate
the Gospel accounts of his life, not through the eyes of a 21st century reader, but through those of the
people for whom those stories were first written almost 2,000 years ago.
"In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God
"to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph
"of the house of David.
"And the virgin's name was Mary."
The Jewish first century world into which Jesus was born, and
when the accounts of his life were first compiled,
was far more religious than today and full of expectation as to a coming Messiah, someone
who would liberate the people from all their troubles.
The stories about Jesus's birth were full of suggestions
that he was that saviour.
There's a lot of dispute over the historicity of the infancy stories, how much one can one can say there's
historical truth in them and how much not. Some people are more optimistic
and some people are more sceptical and a lot of it comes down to
people's presuppositions about whether miraculous things can happen.
Dr Simon Gathercole is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge
and an expert in the study of the New Testament.
He believes the writers of the Gospels wanted to tell their readers who they believed Jesus really was,
and that right from the start of his life he was destined to change the course of history.
The message of the Gospels of course is that this particular Jesus Christ is the Son of
God who went on to die and rise again and bring salvation to the world
So this isn't mere history, it's not less than history, but it is history with a message.
At the time the Gospels were first compiled in the 1st century, what we
would call modern Israel and Palestine was a part of the Roman Empire.
This meant that for Jews, their Holy Land was under Pagan rule.
And in Caesar's Empire, the Emperors were thought of as gods who could do no wrong.
For the Gospel writers, the extraordinary story of
Jesus's birth, life and death was a direct challenge to that world.
For them, Jesus was the true God, not Caesar.
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke were probably both written in the sort of 70s,
80s AD perhaps, and those times were significant because Emperors at that time in the Roman Empire had just
started being called sons of God.
And so when we read in Matthew's Gospel and Luke's Gospel both the
infancy narratives call Jesus the Son of God,
those with their sensitive political antennae up
would perhaps be struck by the fact that Jesus is the true son of God
and so perhaps a challenger to the Emperor.
Modern sceptics often point to the differences
in the four Gospel accounts of Jesus's life as evidence of their falsehood.
Many biblical scholars see these differences as simply alternative points of focus, a
way of telling the same core story, but from a different point of view.
Our traditional infancy narrative is actually a conflation of
the two separate accounts in Matthew's Gospel and Luke's Gospel.
And they contain some similar incidents and some different incidents.
'So in Matthew's Gospel,
'Joseph is perhaps the leading figure.
'It's Joseph who receives the message from the Angel.
'On the other hand, when we come to Luke's Gospel, Joseph is scarcely mentioned at all.
'The attention is all on Mary and on Mary's family.'
"The book of the genealogy
"of Jesus Christ, the son of David,
"the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac,
"and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers."
Jesus's family history was very important to his followers.
Both Gospel writers provide us with a detailed genealogy
dating back hundreds of years, but rather than being a literal
guide to Jesus's ancestors, they contain a message as to who
they believed Jesus really was, the long-awaited Jewish Messiah.
First of all, amongst several peoples,
genealogies per se are important. It's part of your past,
you should know where you've come from, as well as where you're headed to.
The whole idea that the son of a simple carpenter
from Nazareth... But if you say he is a descendant of David, then it's
different, because there had been the tradition that the Messiah
would be a descendant of the royal house of David.
So the genealogy there is very, very pertinent.
David is the crucial kingly figure in the Old Testament, the model of an ideal king.
The first divinely approved King of Israel. And so he becomes
the template that the New Testament authors draw on when they want to describe Jesus as an ideal king.
Jesus is the second David, if you like, the son of David.
Matthew's Gospel is arranged in three blocks of 14 ancestors, and this number 14 is probably
significant because numerically, it can refer
to the name David.
The Hebrew letters...
Four plus six plus four makes 14.
And so Matthew's genealogy shouts to us that Jesus is David, David, David, the son of David.
Luke's Gospel is rather different in having a genealogy which goes back not to David, but actually to Adam.
And so Luke is perhaps using his genealogy to present the fact
that Jesus is not a narrowly Jewish Messiah...
He is a Jewish Messiah, but he's not one who is only for Israel,
but he's someone who has come for all the descendants of Adam.
So Luke has a more universal outlook in his genealogy.
"And the angel said to her,
"Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have
"found favour with God. And behold,
"you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call him Jesus."
The miraculous conception in Matthew's Gospel and in Luke's Gospel is vital
to the drama. First, that it is an action that comes about purely by
'divine intervention, it does not come about by the natural human means.
'And so salvation is said to be entirely of God.
'On the other hand though, it is a real conception and so he is a real human being.
'And so we see the two sides of Jesus's identity, that he is truly man but also divine.
'As the line in Matthew's Gospel puts it, that he's "Emmanuel", which in Hebrew means "God with us."
'He's truly God, but he's also truly with us.'
When the early Christians read these infancy narratives in Matthew's Gospel and Luke's Gospel,
they probably took them literally and probably assumed that these
things did really happen to Jesus.
But they certainly wouldn't stop there.
'They wouldn't think of that as the primary point,
'they would think of these accounts
'as telling them how
'Jesus was God's son. So we see the fulfilment of prophecy all the way through these infancy narratives.'
Genealogies as well. And these things tell us,
told the early Christians, that Jesus didn't just come out of a clear blue sky,
but he was planned by God to have come at this particular time.
"And you, o Bethlehem in
"the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah.
"For from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people, Israel."
Geography is important here, because Bethlehem is a crucial town in the Old Testament.
It's a small town and politically and economically insignificant,
but it's famous by association with David.
David's father, Jesse, was called Jesse of Bethlehem and so David may have been born there.
He certainly came from there and lived his early life there. And crucially as well, he was also
anointed as King there. Then we have, developing out of that, a prophecy that
a ruler will come out of Bethlehem who will shepherd Israel.
And this is the prophecy that Matthew picks up on, the prophecy of Micah, which Jesus is then said to fulfil.
Over the centuries, historians and scientists have debated the Star of
Bethlehem and have tried to come up with a rational explanation.
A comet or a planet, or even a previously unknown supernova.
But none has proved totally convincing.
Many scholars now believe the star is more of a symbolic device, a
biblical metaphor that would have had particular meaning to 1st-century Jews.
The Star which leads the Magoi, the three wise men so-called, to Jesus, is significant as an
indicator, another indicator of Jesus's supernatural identity, Jesus's heavenly nature.
And it alludes I think most particularly to a prophecy in the
Old Testament in the book of Numbers where we're told that a star will come out of Jacob.
The prophecy of Balaam in the Book of Numbers...
"A Star has arisen from heaven."
But is The Messiah the anointed King?
of course, the anointed King is a kind of Star, or the son of a Star.
All these metaphors are very pertinent metaphors and it's very natural they were being used.
This star also connects up with something in Luke's Gospel where we're told in quite similar terms
that Jesus is like a light, he's the day spring, the day star that comes
from on high and this again is a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, this time from the book of Isaiah,
in which the light from on high will come and shine on those in darkness.
"And behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them
"until it came to rest over the place where the child was."
The incident with the so-called three wise men is a fascinating one and it's
one which has been particularly embroidered and romanticised in later Christian history.
So we don't even know from Matthew's Gospel whether there were three of them, they certainly weren't
'three kings, they're not described particularly as wise men, they're described as "Magoi" and "Magoi"
'in Greek are really astronomers or astrologers, people who use the stars for perhaps magical purposes.
'The shepherds also appear on the scene
'in Luke's Gospel and in some ways the point of the shepherds is that'
the message of Jesus is not just for the elites and priests and the nobles,
but also for very ordinary shepherds.
According to one of the Gospels, as soon as he was born, Jesus was in danger.
Not only was he portrayed as a potential challenger to the
Roman Emperor, but closer to home, he was also depicted as a rival to the King of the Jews - Herod.
"Now when they had departed, behold an angel of the Lord
"appeared to Joseph in a dream and said,
"Rise take the child and his mother,
"and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell
"you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him."
Of all the characters in the birth stories, King Herod is one of the
few for whom we have alternative contemporary historical sources.
We know that he existed at the time of Jesus' birth, that he
was the King of Judaea, a client kingdom within the Roman Empire.
Today, the ruins of his winter palace, Herodion,
still overlook the town of Bethlehem.
'In the last decade of his life Herod was an old man.
'So there were a lot of people around waiting for him to die.
'So that last decade of his life is filled
'according to Josephus with lots of suspicion on both sides and lots of conspiracies'
real or imagined, and accordingly lots of people getting killed
by the old King who was afraid
of conspiracies around him.
In that context you have to understand the Gospel story which talks about Herod being afraid of
yet another competitor coming along for the crown of the Jewish kingdom.
According to the Gospel stories, Herod was so incensed by Jesus as
a possible rival to his throne that he ordered his troops to massacre
all the male babies in Bethlehem.
'I think the story as you have it is probably something with no claim to historical truth as having happened,
'but rather reflecting an antipathy to Herod which
'in this case takes the form of, well let's compare him to Pharaoh.'
And just as Pharaoh presided over the persecution of Jewish boys at the time when a redeemer of the
Jews was born according to the book of Exodus, namely Moses, so too if a new Moses is going to come along,
he better have his Pharaoh who tries to kill him as well.
So it became very convenient to focus on Herod as Jesus's opposite number.
And if one is very, very good then the other has to be very, very bad, that is the way these things work.
Egypt is ,of course, in New Testament times the old enemy of the nation of Israel.
Israel had been captive in Egypt for hundreds of years.
They'd been slaves there, they'd been oppressed there.
So for Joseph to take Mary and Jesus there
means that things had got really desperate in the land of Israel under the murderous rule of King Herod.
But it's also a response to prophecy because in the book of Hosea there is a prophecy which
is picked up by Matthew's Gospel
about God's son coming out of Egypt.
So again Jesus is depicted, as in this case,
unwittingly fulfilling prophecy.
I think the purpose of the Gospels is to tell the readers and the believers about the
life and death and resurrection of a redeeming figure and one of the things that you are entitled
to expect in ancient stories about such heroes is something miraculous about their birth.
So whether it's a miraculous
salvation from a very great threat as you have in Matthew or whether
it's being born as the result of an extraordinary prophecy as you have in Luke, one way or the other
the point of the infancy stories is to ensure that from the very first
moment, this redeeming figure has been underwritten by God.
After Jesus's birth, the Gospels are almost completely silent about what happened next.
We are told that his family returned to Nazareth
but there is only one story about his childhood in Galilee.
It has led to a lot of wild speculation as to what Jesus was doing during those years...
how he might have travelled all over the Middle East and Egypt
and even as far as India and Tibet to study with Eastern mystics.
There is one area of biblical research that can take our knowledge of the
past beyond the written sources and help to explain Jesus's lost years
and the world in which he grew up.
I think there is a gap in terms of the narration about Jesus's life
really because it didn't serve the interests of the Gospel writers.
They were trying to write something else so they don't
mind putting in miraculous birth in at least two of them.
And Luke doesn't mind putting in the story about Jesus being around 12 to show he's precocious.
John starts off with creation
so then they are trying to get us to the ministry apparently.
So they just simply jump ahead to the ministry.
So we are left to surmise that he grew up more or less like everyone else in Galilee.
Now what archaeology does for us is show us what that might look like.
Professor James Strange is one of the world's leading biblical archaeologists.
For the last 30 years he has been excavating one of Galilee's most
important 1st century cities, Sepphoris.
Professor Strange believes that because Jesus's home village
of Nazareth was just two hours' walk away, he could very possibly
have visited and worked here.
Well, here we are on the main road of Sepphoris and people would be streaming in from behind me towards
Tiberius, they would have been coming from Nazareth, from ancient Garis, from other places.
'They're coming here to buy, to sell, to look for a physician, whatever it is they need.
'They come in, sometimes because they're curious, but sometimes they're looking for work,'
so this, this is going to be an ideal place to do exactly that.
"Is not this the carpenter's son?
"Is not his mother called Mary?"
Hidden away in the Gospels, in a description of Jesus as
he begins his ministry in Galilee, is a single verse that provides a few clues as to Jesus' early life.
Traditionally Jesus has been described as a "carpenter",
but a more accurate translation of the original Greek word "tekton"
would be a "general builder".
Jesus and his father and presumably his brothers then, as a tekton,
means a family that is understood to be working with their hands
and they have all the skills and knowledge they have to have to work with wood and to work with stone.
So this is fundamental to living here.
That makes Jesus and his family ideal for such a
place as this when it's undergoing construction for the first time.
During Jesus's childhood, Sepphoris was undergoing a major building boom
under the local King, Herod Antipas.
For Jesus and his brothers, this would have been an ideal place to have looked for work.
Well, five, six kilometres away is ancient Nazareth itself,
where Jesus lives with his father and his brothers and sisters and mother,
so it's not at all out of reason that he would be here with his father as the eldest, looking for work.
So I think of this as an ideal place to contextualise Jesus as a
jobbing builder who builds projects for anything from houses
or as small as an ox yoke all the way up to working on frameworks
and doing stone-cutting for large buildings.
We can see the 1st century cut stones reflected everywhere we look.
"Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon?
"And are not his sisters here with us?"
The Gospel accounts appear to suggest that Jesus had an extended blood family.
In fact, in the 1st century Jewish world in which he lived,
not having any brothers or sisters would have been very unusual.
But over the centuries, the idea of Jesus having
a close family has posed a problem for some Christian denominations.
We understand from scripture that Jesus came from an extended family.
It was not simply Joseph, Mary and Jesus living in the household,
but there were siblings, at least four more brothers whose names we
know and at least two more sisters and maybe more, unfortunately we don't know their names.
According to Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians, Jesus's mother,
Mary, was a perpetual virgin, and that after giving birth to him she had no further children.
So they believe his brothers and sisters are not blood relations of Jesus.
'The traditional explanation for the brothers of Jesus, for example, in the Greek Orthodox church and
'the Roman Catholic church has been that Joseph was a widower and he had children from his first marriage who
'became the step brothers of Jesus and that would put Jesus as the only child of Mary.
'In the Protestant tradition they see these children
'as being the biological children of Joseph and Mary born after Jesus.
'So in whatever way you want to explain it though,'
we understand that Jesus doesn't grow up as an only child.
When Jesus was growing up, Nazareth was just a small village
of less than 500 people but today it is a huge city in modern Israel.
No remains of the ancient village had ever been found
until two years ago, when an extraordinary find was uncovered near the centre of the city.
Well, around 2009, some builders were trying to build something here and when they drove the foundations down
they discovered something they thought would be of interest to archaeologists.
So that's exactly what they did.
They called in the archaeologists so that they could check this and when
they went down far enough they found they were in a 1st century house.
This is a very exciting find. We have people who are still so
sceptical that they claim there is no Nazareth in the first century.
So it's a wonderful confirmation that we were not mistaken. There really is a 1st century Nazareth.
According to the archaeologists it was a very simple building,
single storey, made of mud and stone with two rooms and a courtyard.
They also found clay and chalk vessels that were known to be
used by Galilean Jews at that time, an indication that the house was lived in by a devout Jewish family.
'By looking at the Gospel of Luke, for example, we can see that Jesus
'was born into a Jewish family that was religiously observant.
'They were pious people, they prayed, they went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and it was their custom.'
They circumcised him on the eighth day, they announced his name, they
'paid the redemption price of a new born son and so the picture we get
'of Jesus's family is a family that is deeply embedded in its Jewish identity and its Jewish tradition.'
Well, religion in the first century is not a separate category, it suffuses your life, you know.
The modern idea of religion as being some aspect of your life is very, very modern or post modern for some.
So in the first century it is a sort of a given.
You know there is a God in the universe that God has made all that there is.
'Jesus brought a message that he learned in his own childhood.
'His classroom was the streets of a Jewish town and he watched shepherds
'with their sheep and goats, he watched farmers in the field as they spread grain, he watched fathers
'with their children and he thought about these things that he observed.
'They became the images that he would later use in his parables
'so that when he launched his public ministry
'and he spoke to everyday people on the street -
'tax collectors, sinners, women he could speak to them about God in language that they understood.'
Well, the lost years of Jesus from 12 to 30,
I think he's a fully fledged member of his family and of his village.
We would expect him to then, as a first born son, to be married,
but he's not.
We would also expect him to, if something has happened to Joseph, for example, since Joseph
disappears in the narrative, if he was killed in an accident or just died of an infection,
then it falls upon Jesus to stay home and take care of his mother. He didn't do that.
'We would not expect him to have detailed knowledge of Jewish
'traditions, temple traditions and scriptures themselves.'
But he apparently does
and so we're confounded each time we make this prediction about Jesus.
We're very good about predicting what we would find if we dig in an environment like Sepphoris,
we're much less successful in predicting what Jesus would turn out to be.
Most biblical scholars consider Mark to be the earliest Gospel
probably written about 40 years after Jesus's death.
And it begins not with the story of Jesus's birth or his early life,
but with the account of one of the most enigmatic and misunderstood people in the New Testament.
A person who had a profound influence on both Jesus and Christianity -
John the Baptist.
Dr Joan Taylor is an expert on John the Baptist
and believes the later Church downplayed his real significance in Jesus' life story.
'The whole story of Jesus,
'the whole story of the Kingdom of God,
'the beginning of Christianity, begins at this point here at the Jordan River.
'It's just extraordinary to come here now and see these crowds, these tourists
'who've come from all over the world, still being drawn by the power of that moment,'
that moment when Jesus came to John the Baptist and something happened that would change everything.
"In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan.
"And when he came up out of the water,
"immediately he saw the heavens being torn open
"and the Spirit descending on him like a dove.
"And a voice came from heaven,
"You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased."
Now, all the other Gospel writers wanted to re-write that story.
It just sounded so much, it just sounds so much like John is the top
guy and Jesus is this man who is in need of repentance
and comes to John looking for a new life.
That's kind of what John was calling people to experience.
So they made him safe. Matthew makes him safe in
that John the Baptist says to Jesus, "I should be baptising you.
'"Why do you come to me?"
'Luke has the baptism in that Jesus is baptised with everybody else,
'but then he has Jesus experiencing his vision after he's baptised,
'so he detaches it from John.
'And then in the fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John, John is all the
'time pointing to Jesus and saying you know, "Behold the Lamb of God. Go after him."'
According to other contemporary 1st century sources,
John the Baptist was a major religious leader,
but today in mainstream Christianity
he is seen as the forerunner.
His importance is only that he was the prophet
who prepared the way for Jesus.
John the Baptist as you know is the last one among the Prophets of the Old Testament
and he's the first person
mentioned in the New Testament.
Practically the Gospel of Luke
starts off with the birth of John the Baptist...
Mm hm.
because John the Baptist is a type of watershed between the Old Testament and the New Testament.
He is known as the forerunner of Jesus Christ.
But John is really inferior to Jesus in that account, isn't he?
He's related, but he's down there.
Jesus is the man.
Well John, in John's Gospel, in St John's Gospel, you know, we have these words of John the Baptist.
"He should become greater and I have to become lesser."
A lot of what was known about John the Baptist in the first century has been lost
because it was not convenient for Christianity to remember too much.
There are little clues here and there about what John was really up to, but in a way we have to bracket out
what scholars call the apologetic texts, which make John safe, which
give him a meaning that is very secondary to Jesus's meaning.
Archaeologist Dr Shimon Gibson has spent a life time investigating the
many biblical locations connected with John the Baptist.
He is convinced he has now identified a new site never before filmed.
"John was also baptizing at Aenon near Salim
"because water was plentiful there
"and people were coming and being baptized.
We're on top of Tel Shalem, which is identified as
Salim, and you can look all the way round you.
That's towards the north towards Bet She'an.
We have the Trans Jordanian Mountains over there.
And then at the foot of this Tel, we have a very large spring complex.
It's one of 13 or so, sort of springs in the vicinity
and this one is identified as Aenon.
Look, I've even got a map here. Let me just show you.
Here you can see we're standing here.
- Right. - And look at all these blue spots.
They all represent sources of water.
Well, I can see the blue spots. They're absolutely everywhere all around us.
The site is part of an old Israeli army fort that dates back to the
late 1960s when Israel was still at war with its neighbour Jordan.
No excavations have taken place here.
It's a site that hardly anybody comes to
and indeed, probably this is the first time that it's being filmed.
And what was surprising for me, on the slope over there,
I came across pottery, which dates from that period.
According to the Gospels, John the Baptist preached a
baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,
which for 1st Century Jews was a revolutionary concept.
Jews did immerse in water, but for reasons of ritual purity.
For John, baptism meant something very different.
It's interesting to notice that it's not only about the ritual value of purity,
but also at least in the case of John the Baptist, about atonement.
If you want to be atoned, if you want to be answered by God, acceptance, I would say,
you have first to clean your
'heart to bring you into a new,
'a new status in front of God, I would say.'
'So that's why in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew he challenges people
'who come to him and he says,
'"You brood of vipers. Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?"
'It's a very kind of provocative statement.'
'And the Jordan River is a great river for that.'
The River Jordan had a huge symbolic importance for 1st century Jews.
According to the Old Testament, it was here where their ancestors
led by Joshua had first crossed into the Promised Land.
And you know, all those parallels work very well.
You imagine oneself enter into the land.
You imagine oneself enters into new identity.
- You imagine oneself enter into new self perception and so on. - Right.
Joan Taylor is convinced that if you examine the Gospel accounts carefully,
they reveal how close John and Jesus really were
and that in fact Jesus may well have been part of John's movement.
One of his disciples.
'The other thing that I think is very important about
'John the Baptist that tends to be downplayed in most of the traditions about him is that he was a teacher.
'And that particular element of John is only really preserved in the Gospel of Luke.'
'All the other gospels, all the other early Christian writers,
'want to forget about that, because it's Jesus who is the real teacher.'
For Joan Taylor, the original Greek of the New Testament reveals
more clues as to the nature of the relationship between John and Jesus,
and how John may even have been the originator of the Lord's Prayer.
"Now, Jesus was praying in a certain place and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him,
'Lord teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples.'"
There are some interesting possibilities in terms of
overlap between the teaching of Jesus and the teaching of John,
and one of the most interesting places...
is in connection with the Lukan Version of the Lord's Prayer.
And that word, "just as", "kathos", is kind of striking
because it's ambiguous whether or not Jesus replies and gives them
a new prayer, you know, "As John taught his disciples to pray, I now give you a new prayer",
or, in fact, identically the prayer John the Baptist taught his disciples.
And it's just so peculiar that there is that ambiguity, given the tendency to minimise John.
It's clear from all the other contemporary historical sources
that John was an important religious figure in Galilee and Judaea in the 1st Century.
So much so, that he became a threat to the local king - Herod Antipas.
Remember that there are thousands of followers.
I mean, he was really a force to contend with.
He was the guy that Herod Antipas hated and feared.
And it's the expansion of his strength, roughly about 28 CE,
that really puts the fear into Herod Antipas, and that's it.
He's got to get rid of him.
The Gospels also contain the story of John's death.
How he was thrown into prison by Herod Antipas after he had
spoken out about Herod's marriage to his brother's former wife,
and how, in order to placate his wife, Herod had John beheaded.
For Joan Taylor, John is an absolutely crucial figure in the story of Jesus.
The man who started him on his mission to change the world.
Jesus experienced something absolutely profound here at the Jordan River,
and he also felt that this was a momentous beginning himself.
It's a visionary experience, and it's inner.
It's something that he himself experiences,
and then the only way anyone would have known about it is if he had told them,
"This is what happened to me." And it validated him.
He was now Son of God,
and he was also given the power of prophecy.
The Holy Spirit is the prophetic spirit,
so he has the authority now to preach his own mission.
In the Gospel accounts, it was only after John the Baptist's execution by Herod Antipas
that Jesus began his own ministry.
He started wandering the villages and towns of Galilee,
preaching his message to the people.
He also gathered around him a group of followers - his disciples.
He recruited them from among the ordinary people of Galilee -
fishermen, farmers, workers, even tax collectors.
Some were also women.
Jesus also performed a series of acts that form one of the most contentious aspects of his life -
a set of miraculous deeds that are still hotly debated today.
Were these miracles actual historical events,
or just symbolic figurative acts?
Any modern person in a scientific world is, is going to ask,
you know, are these miracles legit?
Or are they rather really a case of early Christian myth making,
that early Christians admired and revered Jesus so much that eventually the stories
about Jesus became magnified and he became this worker of great deeds.
Well, your opinion on the question of whether miracles did happen or not
is really a religious question.
Either you believe that such things are possible or you say, "No, we know better.
"These aren't the kind of things that happen", and you discredit them.
Dr Greg Carey is an expert in the early followers of Jesus.
He believes Jesus' miracles have a sound basis in historical fact
because he is convinced they were widely believed by the people at that time.
For the Bible, a miracle is something dramatically unusual that happens.
So unusual and maybe beneficial or revelatory
that people would interpret it as an act of the gods, some sort of divine intervention.
The New Testament uses a couple of different words for miracle.
It uses "dunamis", which simply means a powerful deed, a mighty accomplishment of some sort.
And "semion", which indicates a sign, something that reveals something about Jesus' nature.
On the one hand, they're a benefit for people,
especially the healing miracles, but even occasionally, a nature miracle - such as turning water into wine.
But the other dimension of the miracles is that they reveal something about Jesus.
We are on a hill...
with the ruins, the ruins of an ancient site.
It's called by the Arabs, Khirbet Kana.
And that's a very similar name to Cana,
Cana from the New Testament, the place of the miracle of...
transferring the water to wine.
And that's why it was identified by some scholars
as the place of the miracle.
According to the Gospel account of this famous miracle, a large wedding party was suddenly disrupted by
the wine running out, and Jesus was asked by his mother to intervene.
People gathered from the nearby villages.
Nazareth is just three miles away, four miles away from here as the crow flies, and people gathered
from villages, this is why you have to do it for a few days, because people are coming from far away,
and what reflects from the story
in the Bible is a simple life.
So suddenly, the wine was finished.
The key part of the story occurred when Jesus told the servants to fill six stone jars with water
and then to draw some out and take it to the Master of the Feast.
"When the Master of the Feast tasted the water now become wine,
"and did not know where it came from,
"though the servants who had drawn the water knew."
The Gospel of John, though, concludes the story not just
by saying, "Oh, everyone says this is an amazing miracle",
but by saying this was the first of Jesus' signs and the Gospel of John is trying to say that
Jesus has the power to bring vitality and abundance, that living water will flow within them, because of Jesus.
And that alludes to Biblical prophecies that wine would flow down the hills of Israel like water.
There's a suggestion that Jesus is the one who brings life.
That's a part of this miracle.
At the site of Khirbet Kana, archaeologists have found
a cave that they believe was used by early Christian pilgrims, who wanted
to re-enact the famous miracle of turning water into wine
and somehow share in its life-giving benefits.
This was probably the beginning of the natural cave, but then, when Christians identified this place,
they took this cave and changed it, transferred it into a sacred place.
What they did here is only some kind of
demonstration of the miracle itself, or to bring people in to see
the exact place where the miracle really happened.
So they would've re-enacted, in some sort of ritual way, the miracle, you think?
I assume so.
This is a great example of what pilgrims are doing when they're coming to a holy site.
The miracle stories are an essential part of
how the Gospels present Jesus and how early Christians understood Jesus.
It's the case in the modern world that many people like to think of Jesus as a great moral teacher.
But for the early Christians, it was just as important
that Jesus could bring wholeness and wellness to people.
The healings, for example, don't simply restore people to health,
but they also restore people to their full place in society.
They're no longer marginalised by their disability or by their uncleanness.
The second reason these stories are essential, though, is that they're all revelatory.
He's the bringer of life and the bringer of vitality.
But the miracles often are interpreted in terms of stories
from Israel's past, or interpreted in terms of the great deeds that God has performed with Israel.
This theme of abundance occurred throughout Jesus' miracles.
The Gospels record two instances where he intervened to create miraculous catches of fish.
The first occurred early in his ministry, when Jesus was calling his first disciples.
He told some fishermen that if they went out into the deep water and cast their nets, they would land
a huge catch of fish, so much so that it would fill their boats.
The catch of fish is interesting, because this is people's livelihood.
It's a story that suggests not only that Peter, and then James and John, will be followers of Jesus,
but also that their work will be effective and abundant in its success.
Greg Carey believes that because of a modern cynicism about miracles, many historians have downplayed
their importance in Jesus' life story.
It used to be that scholars would rationalise the miracle stories of Jesus.
For example, one scholar famously suggested that, that the story
of Jesus walking on water involved an illusion
that Jesus was actually walking in a very shallow place and the disciples just thought he was walking on water.
And I think the reason that scholars interpreted miracles
that way, of course, being modern people, rationalistic, being of a scientific age,
is that they tended to regard ancient people as superstitious or naive.
But the reality is the ancient people were suspicious of miracle stories themselves
and they knew when something truly unusual was happening.
So, chances are that what we really have with the stories of Jesus
is that, in his own time and place, he did have a reputation as a miracle worker.
Miracles and miracle-makers were a regular part of life for 1st century Jews.
The Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, is full of miraculous deeds that
people would've been very familiar with during Jesus' lifetime.
Every revolution in religion has to look like a natural continuity.
That's the way to do it, so that's why it was very important to present
Jesus as one of the prophets,
and if you look at the stories of Moses for instance,
Moses crosses the Sea of Reeds.
Of course, Jesus doesn't have to
split the waters, he can walk upon the water, that's one example.
You have also stories about bringing people back to life.
Elijah does it, Elisha does it, so Jesus will do the same thing.
There are contemporary accounts from Jewish sources
of rabbis who wandered the land performing miraculous deeds.
One of the most famous was called Honi the Circle Drawer.
His grave is still a shrine for Orthodox Jews today.
In this area, we never have enough rain,
and year after year you have drought in this area
and Honi was the guy who could force God, you know, to give us some rain.
He drew a circle, stood within it and told God that he would never leave
this circle until God let some rain fall.
And indeed, God listened to him, because the relationship between Honi and God was like a relationship
of a father, God the father and Honi the son, in a way quite similar to the relationship of Jesus and God.
Like Honi, some of Jesus' most famous miracles involved his power over nature,
something that would've been very familiar to 1st-century Jews,
steeped in the traditions of the Old Testament.
"And Jesus awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, 'Peace.
'Be still.' And the wind ceased and there was a great calm."
This is interesting as Psalm 107 says that when the storms come up and make people out on the sea afraid,
God simply commands the waves to be peaceful and still. And they do.
So when Jesus does this, in the Gospel of Mark, the disciples say, "What sort of man is this?
"Even the wind and the sea obey him."
But readers of the Hebrew Bible know the answer.
This is the man who's doing the things that only the God of Israel can do.
Jesus' reputation as a miracle-maker clearly grows through the Gospels.
More than 35 of his miracles are detailed and they frequently drew huge crowds.
But one of the most dramatic was performed to just three
of his closest disciples, when he was transfigured, revealed, as the Son of God.
"And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like
"the sun, and his clothes became white as light.
"And behold, there appeared to them, Moses and Elijah, talking with him."
Greg Carey believes that for 1st-century Jews the transfiguration would've
had another symbolic significance in aligning Jesus with some of the most famous Old Testament prophets.
Moses, who represents the Torah, the law of Israel, and Elijah, one of the foremost of the prophets.
Moses and Elijah have in common in the traditions of 1st-century Judaism that both of them escaped death,
that both were taken up into Heaven rather than died.
So that, in the transfiguration of Jesus, you have a story that not only is dramatic, but beyond that,
connects Jesus with the traditions of Moses and Elijah
and it also, in some ways, foreshadows that this Jesus,
though he will die, he's just told his disciples that he would suffer death,
that resurrection awaits.
For 1st-century Jews, Jesus' miracles were not only believable,
they were a crucial part of being a successful rabbi and religious leader.
The way Jesus performs the miracles in the Gospel stories is interpreted as a sign that he is God's agent.
He speaks on his own initiative and people respond and say,
"What sort of man is this, who's able to make the sea calm?"
What the Gospels are trying to communicate is that Jesus acts
on his own initiative, that he is the agent of God's coming reign.
There's a story that Matthew and Luke share, that John the Baptist
sends disciples to Jesus and says, "Are you the one who's to come or should we be waiting for another?"
And Jesus responds by telling them, "Well,
"the lame are walking, the blind are having their sight restored."
That's the answer to the question, that in the coming of Jesus, the reign of God is breaking into
the world and it does so by bringing wholeness to people and communities.
According to the Gospels, Jesus was now established as a rabbi who could perform miracles and exorcisms.
After John the Baptist's death, he had formed his own small movement
and been revealed to his closest disciples as the Son of God.
So now he could begin to spread his new teachings among the peoples of Galilee and Judaea,
a dangerous message that would soon bring him into direct conflict with the ruling powers.
In the next part, we will see how the Gospel story of Jesus
reached its climax, resulting in the founding event of Christianity -
his death and resurrection.
I'd call Jesus a revolutionary.
He did what revolutionaries do, he challenged the structures of power.
The Roman soldiers were professional killers and especially they were
good at killing people who were rebel leaders, which is how they saw Jesus.
This was torture and we refuse to take it seriously.
He is what Dorothy Sears calls, "The man born to die."
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