The story of Jesus of Nazareth

Research: Historicity of Jesus

First of all, it should be pointed out that the term "the term "history" derived from the Greek ἱστορία (history) which means investigation, and has the same root ιδ- as the verb ὁράω (orao, "to see," a verb with three roots: ὁρά-; ιδ-; ὄπ- ). The perfect ὁίδα, òida, of this verb literally means "I have seen," but, by extension, "I know."

In practice, it refers to and, as a result, to know after having experiencedThe same meaning is also found in the root of the Latin verb video (v-id-eo) and in the Greek term "idea").

I would also add that a presupposition of historical research is, in addition to the critical sense, intelligence, in the literal sense of the Latin term: intus lĕgĕre, that is, to read within, deepen, maintaining the ability to consider the set of facts and events.

Therefore, having made this clarification, How should we approach the "problem" of the story of Jesus of Nazareth from the point of view of historical research?. Jean Guitton (1) a French Catholic philosopher who has dedicated his life to research on the figure of the Nazarene, has developed three possible solutions:

1. CritiqueJesus of Nazareth really existed and the origin of Christianity is a historical phenomenon, whose approach, however, must reject all miracles and inexplicable facts.
2. MythicalJesus of Nazareth never really existed. Everything that has been written and said about him is the invention of a group of fanatics.
3. Solution of faith: Jesus of Nazareth not only existed, but everything narrated in the Gospels and in the canonical writings of the New Testament corresponds to the truth.

Three simple questions about the story of Jesus of Nazareth

Did Jesus really exist?

To this first question we can already answer quite clearly: yes. Therefore, we can rule out the mythical hypothesis, that is, that he is the fruit of someone's imagination, given the meticulous study around him and his time, especially in recent decades, in terms of biblical hermeneutics, historiography, archeology, linguistics and philology. (2).

Was it really that important?

No doubt about it! The first thing to say is that our era, the "Christian" era, is calculated precisely from his birth, "after Christ". Moreover, there are many who, even if they do not believe in Jesus as God and even if they are the most unyielding opponents of Christianity, affirm that the message of Jesus Christ has no equal in history.

• "God on the cross, do you still not understand the terrible thought behind this symbol? Everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is divine. All of us hang on the cross, therefore we are divine".
  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, Proyecto Espártaco, 2001, p. 47.
• "If you look at a child as a human being, despite the lack of elementary social and cultural relations, this is only due to the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition and its specific conception of the human person." Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth. Philosophical Papers, Cambridge, 1991. Translation by me.
• "Christianity was the greatest revolution ever achieved by mankind: so great, so wide and deep, so fruitful in consequences, so unexpected and irresistible in its implementation, that it is not surprising that it seemed or may seem like a miracle, a revelation from above, a direct intervention of God in human affairs, which from it received an entirely new law and direction." Benedetto Croce, Perché non possiamo non dirci cristiani, Centro Pannunzio, Torino, 2008 (p. 14).Translation mine.

Who was Jesus of Nazareth?

Difficult answer! To answer, we can only try to apply the criteria of what has been called the Third search (Third Quest) on the "historical Jesus" and limit ourselves to observing and analyzing data already dealt with by giants in this field, by which I mean the Italians Giuseppe Ricciotti and Vittorio Messori, the Israeli academic (Jew) David Flusser, the German Joachim Jeremias and another illustrious German, Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI.

The exponents of this Third Research start from a presupposition formulated by Albert Schweitzer: one cannot ideologically reject everything that has a miraculous character in the Gospels and in the New Testament.discarding it because it does not conform to the canons of enlightenment rationalism.

In addition, as Benedict XVI adds in his book Jesus of Nazareth (3)The limits of the historical-critical method consist essentially in "leaving the word in the past", without being able to make it "current, of today"; in "treating the words with which it intersects as human words"; finally, in "dividing the books of Scripture even further according to their sources, but without considering as an immediate historical fact the unity of all these writings known as 'Bible'".

Therefore, we could state that the basic assumption of the third solution suggested by Jean Guitton, the of faith, is not so much to believe by force, but to leave open the possibility that what is written in the sources used is true..

Nomen omen

Our journey in the story of Jesus of Nazareth cannot begin with anything other than his name, for nomen omen, especially in the world from which Jesus himself comes, that of ancient Israel. In Hebrew, the two names Jesus and Joshua are identical in pronunciation and spelling: יְהוֹשֻׁעַ, i.e. Yehoshu'a, whose meaning is "God saves."

Jesus was a Jew and part of the tribe of Judah, even though he lived most of his life in Galilee. And, according to the Gospels, he was descended from King David through of his father José. A paternity that, for Christians, is putative, since for the latter Jesus was born of a virgin named Mary, who became pregnant by the work of the Holy Spirit (For Christians, God is one, but He is also triune, and this Trinity is composed of three persons of the same substance: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.) after the announcement of an angel, when she was already engaged to Joseph.

Where: the world of Jesus

Where was Jesus from?

I overheard some people say that he was an "Israeli"; others, however, replied that he was a "Palestinian". Neither term is correct, as Israelis are citizens of the current state of Israel. (and they can be Jews, Arab Muslims or Christians, etc.).); the Palestinians, on the other hand, are the modern, Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the region now known as

Jesus, therefore, was not an Israelite (if anything, Israelite), but not even Palestinian, since, at the time, Palestine was not so called. This name was attributed to it by the emperor Hadrian only from 135 AD, after the end of the third Jewish War, when the ancient province of Judea, already stripped of its Jewish inhabitants, was renamed, out of contempt for them, Syria Palæstina.

Palestine proper was, until that time, a thin strip of land, roughly corresponding to the present-day Gaza Strip, where the ancient Philistine Pentapolis, a group of five cities, was located; a state inhabited by a population of Indo-European language historically hostile to the Jews: the Philistines.

At the beginning of the first century AD, what had been the ancient Kingdom of Israel, later divided into two kingdoms, that of Israel and that of Judah, was no longer an independent state and was divided between Judea, Israel and Judah. (where Orthodox Judaism was the strongest)The other two historical regions, Galilee and Samaria, were also subject to Rome and governed by a praefectus.

In the latter, a central plateau of what is now known as Palestine, lived the Samaritans, descendants of Asian settlers imported by the Assyrians in the 5th century B.C., at the time of the conquest of the Kingdom of Israel. The notables of that area, in fact, were deported by the Assyrians, while the proletarians remained in the place and mixed with the newcomers, giving rise to a cult that was initially syncretic but then refined becoming monotheistic but in contrast to the Jewish one. If the Jews considered themselves legitimate descendants of the patriarchs and custodians of the Covenant with Yahweh, of the Law and of the cult professed in the Temple of Jerusalem, the Samaritans considered, on the contrary, that they themselves were custodians of the true Covenant and of the cult and had their own temple on Mount Gerizin, near the city of Shechem.

Galilea

This was an area with a mixed population (it still is in the State of Israel today: half Arab and half Jewish).: Jewish towns and cities (such as Nazareth, Cana) were located next to cities of Greek-Roman, i.e. pagan, culture. (e.g., Sepphoris, Tiberias, Caesarea Philippi).

That part of the population of the region that was of Jewish faith and culture, was denigrated by the inhabitants of Judea, who boasted of being purer and more refined than the rude and quarrelsome Galileans. Several times, with respect to Jesus, we read in the Gospels, that "nothing good can come out of Nazareth or Galilee".

Among other things, not only the Gospels, but also the few remaining rabbinical writings of that time tell us that the Galileans were also mocked for their way of speaking. Hebrew and Aramaic (lingua franca spoken throughout the Middle East at the time, including by the Israelites after the deportation to Babylon beginning in 587 B.C., the year of the conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of the first temple by Nebuchadnezzar). like all Semitic languages, have many guttural letters and aspirated or laryngeal sounds. And the Galileans pronounced many words in a manner considered amusing or vulgar by the Jews.

For example the name of Jesus, יְהוֹשֻׁעַ, Yehoshu‛a, was pronounced Yeshu, hence the Greek transcription Ιησούς (Yesoús), and later the Latin Jesús and the Spanish Jesús.

Galilee, however, was a vassal kingdom of Rome and was ruled by Herod the Great, a king of pagan origin literally placed on the throne by Augustus, to whom he was practically a subordinate. Herod, known for his cruelty but also for his cunning, had done everything possible to win the sympathy of the Jewish people. (and also everything to keep it away) who never accepted it, especially since he was not of Jewish blood.

Among other things, he had enlarged and beautified the Temple in Jerusalem, which had been rebuilt by the people of Israel after their return from Babylonian captivity. Work to complete the structure was still in progress while Jesus was alive and was completed only a few years before A.D. 70, when the sanctuary was razed during the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans led by Titus.

Next to it, further to the northeast on the eastern shores of Lake Galilee, a confederation of ten cities (the Decapolis) represented a Hellenized cultural island.

The land and the "fellow citizens" of Jesus

Continuing with the story of Jesus of Nazareth, it should be remembered at this point that in Israel, at that time, Judaism was by no means a uniform bloc. The main sects, or schools, were the following:

• Sadducees (Hebrew: וֹקִיםצַּדּ, ṣaddōqīm); they took their name from the founder of their sect, Ṣaddōq, and constituted the priestly class and elite of the time. They were wealthy religious functionaries, assigned to service in the temple, who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead or in the existence of angels, demons, and spirits. Moreover, for them the only law to follow was the written law, contained in the Torah (תוֹרָה), i.e. the first five books of the Bible (Pentateuch).
• Pharisees (Hebrew: פְּרוּשִׁים, perūšīm, meaning "separated"); they were pious observers of the law, accustomed to concentrate even on the minutiae of the law itself, which for them was not only the written one (Torah)but also and above all the oral halakhah (הֲלָכָה), which extended to the most varied actions of civil and religious life, and thus ranged from the complicated rules for the sacrifices of worship to the washing of dishes before meals. The Pharisees were very similar to the ultra-orthodox Jews of today, of whom in practice they are the forerunners; they defined themselves as "separate" since they considered themselves opponents of everything that was not purely Jewish, that is, of themselves. Suffice it to say that they called the townspeople הָאָָרֶץ עַם (‛am ha-areṣ, people of the earth, to despise them.).
• Herodianswhose sensus fidei is not entirely clear but whose loyalty to King Herod was well known. They must also have been very close to the Sadducees, since the latter were the most power-prone elite of both Herod and the Romans, firmly determined to maintain the privileges derived from the status quo.
• The doctors of the lawor write (Hebrew: סופרים, ṣōfarīm). They progressively codified everything about which it was possible to legislate. For example, at the time of Jesus, the most debated issue in the two main rabbinical schools of the great teachers Hillel and Shammai was whether it was permitted to eat an egg made by a chicken on Shabbat. (Saturday).
• Zealots, whose name in English derives from the Greek ζηλωτής, Zealots, but who in Hebrew were called יםנאק, qana'īm: both terms, Greek and Hebrew, mean "followers" and refer to the zeal with which this group adhered to the doctrine of Judaism, even in a political sense (among the disciples of Jesus there is one called Simon the Canaanite, an attribute that does not refer to his geographical origin, but to his belonging to the group of the Qana'īm, that is, the Zealots).. They were called sicarii by the Romans, due to the daggers. (sicæ) hidden under the cloak with which they killed those found violating the precepts of Jewish law.
• Essenesnever mentioned in the Jewish or Christian Scriptures but spoken of by Flavius Joseph, Philo, Pliny and others. They constituted something like a religious congregation, concentrated in particular around the Dead Sea, near the oasis of Ein Guedi. (the village of Qumran, which we have already mentioned above, which they called Yaḥad, meaning community).. They lived in celibacy, rigidly separated from the rest of the world, and rejected the cult of the Temple and other Jewish sects as impure. To join them, it was necessary to complete a novitiate, followed by royal affiliation. They were literally fanatics of ritual purity. (numerous ritual baths have been discovered at Qumran).They were also averse to women. There was no private property among them and it was forbidden to keep weapons. It has been hypothesized that both Jesus and John the Baptist were Essenes, but this clashes with the universality of their message. (open, among other things, to women, which, we said, was inadmissible for the Essenes themselves)..

These, therefore, were the great groups into which the Judaism of Jesus' time was divided. After the great catastrophe of 70 and 132 A.D., the only ones that survived, from a doctrinal point of view, were precisely the Pharisees, from whom modern Judaism descends.

It must also be said that the people, the common people, although sympathetic to a great extent with the Pharisees, were considered by the latter, as we have already emphasized, as execrable.

It is precisely those people who are mocked by the entire priestly, spiritual and intellectual elite of Israel that John the Baptist will address first and then Jesus. And it will be precisely those people who will first believe in the message of the Nazarene, against whom, instead, the Pharisees, the scribes and the Sadducees, who were enemies among themselves, will unite.

Waiting for a messiah

The very particular complex of ancient Israel is the cauldron in which simmers a very particular and devout expectation. Who are you waiting for? To a deliverer, to an anointed by the Almighty God that, as he had done with Moses, God himself would rise to free his people from slavery and foreign domination. This time, however, so it was believed, his reign would have no end, for this (מָשִׁיחַ, Mašīaḥ in Hebrew and Χριστός, Christós in Greek: both words mean "anointed," as anointed by the Lord as king from Saul and his successor David). would have been only a prophetbut, as is well explained in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the expectations of the Essenes of Qumran, a shepherd-king and a priest.

This expectation becomes, in the years immediately preceding the birth of the Nazarene, increasingly anxious: alleged messiahs flourish everywhere and, with them, revolts systematically repressed in blood (remember that of Judas the Galilean, in the years 6-7 BC).but also pious communities flourish, which, by virtue of a very precise prophecy, await the advent of a liberator..

We know, however, that at that time of great stability for the Roman Empire, but of fervent expectation for the people of Israel, everyone's attention, in that small corner of the world, was focused on the imminent arrival of Libertador: Had it always been like this? Actually, the wait for a world ruler had lasted several centuries. The first reference is in the book of Genesis (49, 10)  (4). Over time, therefore, the idea of an anointed one of the Lord who would rule over Israel intensifies and becomes more and more preciseThis anointed one, this Messiah, would have been a descendant of Judah, through King David.

Daniel, the last prophet of the Old Testament

However, in 587 B.C. the first great disappointment occurred: the capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed the temple, plundered the sacred furnishings, deported the population of Judea to Babylon and put an end to the dynasty of kings descending from David. And there, however, a prophet arises called Danielthe last prophet of the Old Testament, who prophesies that the Messiah would indeed come. In fact, theirs is called Magna Prophetia: in it (chapter 2) it is proclaimed that:

• God of heaven will establish a kingdom that will never be destroyed or given to another people, but will stand forever and tear all these kingdoms in pieces.

Not only that: in chapter 7 it is specified that the one who is to come will be "as a Son of man". (in the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel intended for the Jewish communities in Palestine, Jesus uses a similar expression, "son of man", used in all other Scriptures only once by Daniel)..

In ch. 9, however, the prophecy is also realized in temporal terms:

• Seventy weeks have been decreed for your people and your holy city to put an end to their transgressions and sins, to ask forgiveness for their iniquity, to establish righteousness forever, to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to consecrate the most holy place. Understand well the following: There will be seven weeks from the promulgation of the decree ordering the rebuilding of Jerusalem until the arrival of the chosen prince.

As we see, the prophecy just quoted is extremely accurate. However, the exact translation of the Hebrew term שָׁבֻעִִ֨ים (šavū‛īm, "šavū‛" indicating the number 7 and "īm" which is the masculine plural ending). should not have to be "weeks". (rendered עותשבו, šavū‛ōt, where "ōt" indicates the feminine plural ending).but "setenarios": in practice, seventy times seven years. Jesus' Jewish contemporaries understood the passage correctly.

Therefore contemporary researchers could not understand the exact calculation of Daniel's times.: ¿When did the seventy and seventy-year count begin? Well, recent discoveries at Qumran have allowed scholars like Hugh Schonfield, a great specialist in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, to demonstrate that not only were the Hebrew scriptures already perfectly formed in the first century of our era and identical to those we read today, but also that the Essenes, like many of their contemporaries, had already calculated the time of the Magna Prophetia. For them, the seventy seventy years (490 years) were counted from 586 B.C., the year of the beginning of the Babylonian exile, and culminated in 26 B.C., the beginning of the Messianic era. So much so that, since that date, as evidenced by archaeological excavations, there has been an increase in construction and housing activities in Qumran.

That is why it was not only the Jews in the land of Israel who harbored an expectation that filled them with hope and leavening.. Tacitus and Suetonius, the former in the Historiæ and the latter in the Life of Vespasian, also report that many in the East, according to their writings, expected a ruler to come from Judea.

A star in the East? The famous "comet"

It is precisely the East that provides us with another useful element to understand why the messianic expectation was so fervent between the two epochs before and after Christ, namely, the fact that other cultures also awaited the advent of this "dominator" that had been heard of even in Rome..

Babylonian and Persian astrologers, in fact, expected it around 7 or 6 BC. (5) Why exactly at that interval? Because of the rising of a star, we know from the Gospel of Matthew (chapter 2).

But did a star really emerge?

The astronomer Kepler seems to answer this question first, since, in 1603, he observed a very luminous phenomenon: not a comet, but the approach, or conjunction, of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation Pisces. Kepler then did some calculations and established that the same conjunction would occur in 7 BC. He also found an ancient rabbinical commentary, in which it was emphasized that the coming of the Messiah should coincide precisely with the moment when that same astral conjunction occurred.

Nobody, however, gave credit at that time to Kepler's intuition, also because at that time it was still thought that Jesus was born in the year 0. Only in the eighteenth century another scholar, Friederich Christian Münter, Lutheran and Freemason, deciphered a Commentary on the book of Daniel, the same of the "seventy seventy years", which confirmed the Jewish belief already brought to light by Kepler.

However, it is necessary to wait until the century to clarify what happened to this astronomical phenomenon observed by Kepler.The publication of two important documents:

• The Planetary Table, in 1902, an Egyptian papyrus in which are accurately recorded the planetary movements and in particular, by direct observation, the conjunction Jupiter-Saturn in the constellation of Pisces in the year 7 BC. It is defined as very bright;
• The Sippar Star CalendarThe Babylonian astronomers reported the movements of the stars in the year 7 B.C., a year in which, according to Babylonian astronomers, this conjunction would have occurred three times (May 29, October 1 and December 5), while the same event usually occurs once every 794 years.

Since, therefore, in the symbolism of the Babylonians Jupiter represented the planet of the rulers of the world, Saturn the protective planet of Israel and the constellation of Pisces was the sign of the end of time, it is not so absurd to think that the magi (6)  of the East expected, having had the opportunity to foresee with extraordinary accuracy, the advent of something particular in Judea.

In Bethlehem of Judea: why here?

Bethlehem is now a city in the West Bank and there is nothing bucolic or nativity-like about it. However, if we go back to the time of the story of Jesus of Nazareth, two thousand years ago, it was actually a small village of a few hundred souls.

Is this precisely where Jesus was born, even though his family lived in Nazareth?

Later we will mention the census on behalf of Caesar Augustus, which is one of the answers to this question. Moreover, in Bethlehem, small but known for being the homeland of King David, should, according to the scriptures, have been born the messiah awaited by the people of Israel.(7). In addition to the time, therefore, both the Israelites and their eastern neighbors also knew the place where the "deliverer" of the Jewish people would come into the world.

It is curious to note how the name of this locality, composed of two different terms, means: "house of bread" in Hebrew (בֵּֽית = bayt or beṯ: house; לֶ֣חֶם = leḥem: bread); "house of meat" in Arabic (ﺑﻴﺖ = bayt or beyt, house; لَحْمٍ = laḥm, meat); "house of fish" in the ancient South Arabian languages. All the languages mentioned are of Semitic origin and, in these languages, from the same three-letter root, it is possible to derive many words linked to the original meaning of the root of origin. In our case, that of the compound name Bethlehem, we have two roots: b-y-t, from which Bayt or Beth is derived; l-ḥ-m from which Leḥem or Laḥm is derived. In all cases Bayt/Beth means house, per Laḥm/Leḥem changes meaning depending on the language.

The answer lies in the origin of the populations to which these languages belong. The Jews, like the Arameans and other Semitic populations of the northwest, lived in the so-called Fertile Crescent, which is a large area between Palestine and Mesopotamia where it is possible to practice agriculture and, consequently, they were a sedentary people.

Their main source of sustenance was, therefore, bread, along with the fruits of the earth's labor. The Arabs were a nomadic or semi-nomadic population of the northern and central part of the Arabian Peninsula, mainly desert. Therefore, their main support came from hunting and livestock, which made meat their food par excellence. Finally, the southern Arabs lived on the southern coasts of the Arabian Peninsula and their main food was fish. From this we can understand why the same word, in three different Semitic languages, has the meaning of three different foods.

Consequently, it can be noted that Bethlehem has, for different peoples, an apparently different but in reality univocal meaning.The house of bread, meat or fish, as it would indicate not so much the house of bread, meat or fish, but rather the house of true nourishment, the one we can do without, the one on which subsistence depends, the one without which it is not possible to live.

Interestingly, Jesus, speaking of Himself, said, "My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink." (Jn 6:51-58) (Gv 6:51-58). This linguistic comparison is an example of how philology can make a significant contribution to approaching the figure of the "historical Jesus" and understanding his place in his cultural context.

We come, however, to another point: beyond the philological and exegetical speculations,.

Was Jesus really born in Bethlehem?

History has told us that as early as the middle of the second century, St. Justin, a native of Palestine, wrote about the cave/stable of Bethlehem, the memory of which had already been passed down from father to son for several generations. Even Origen, an author of the 3rd century, confirms that in Bethlehem itself Christians and non-Christians knew the location of the cave itself.

 Why do we talk about "memory"?

Because the emperor Hadrian, with the intention of erasing from memory the Jewish and Judeo-Christian places in the new province of Palestine, after the Jewish Wars, wanted to build, from 132 onwards, pagan temples exactly on top of the places where those of the ancient faith of the region were located. (8). This is confirmed by St. Jerome (9)author of the first Latin translation of the entire Bible, the Vulgate, the Vulgate (Jerónimo lived in Bethlehem for 40 years) and Cyril of Jerusalem (10).

As in Jerusalem, in the place where the sanctuaries were located to honor the death and resurrection of Jesus, Hadrian had statues of Jupiter and Venus erected. (Jerusalem had been rebuilt in the meantime under the name of Aelia Capitolina)., In Bethlehem, a forest sacred to Tammuz, or Adonis, was planted over the cave where Jesus was born.

However, it was thanks to Hadrian's stratagem of damnatio memoriæ that pagan symbols became clues to find traces of buried sites, whose memory had always been preserved. Thus, the first Christian emperor, Constantine, and his mother Helena managed to find the exact points where the primitive domus ecclesiæ were located. (11)that lThey later became churches where the memories and relics of the life of Jesus of Nazareth were venerated and kept.

You can read the second part of this research on the Life and preaching of Jesus of Nazareth.