My sweet Lord, my Lord, my Lord,
I really want to see you! Really want to be with you!
Really want to see you, Lord, but it takes so long, my Lord,
My sweet Lord! My Lord, my Lord!
I really want to know you! Really want to go with you!
Really want to show you Lord, that it won’t take long, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!) Hm, my Lord (Hallelujah!) My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!)
Really want to see you! Really want to see you! Really want to see you, Lord!
Really want to see you Lord, but it takes so long, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!) Hm, my Lord (Hallelujah!) My, my, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
I really want to know you (Hallelujah!) Really want to go with you (Hallelujah!)
Really want to show you Lord that it won’t take long, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “My Sweet Lord” (1970)
As I have researched the life and teachings of Jesus, there were things that never made sense to me. But I was so engrossed in ever more deeply studying Jesus’s Gospel words, in blogging and podcasting and answering questions, that for a long time I ignored the things about the life of Jesus that didn’t seem right. Or I accepted the explanations we were getting from scholars, even though I thought those explanations were unsatisfying. There were a number of such puzzles in Jesus’s life, but the two things that most bothered me, and the ways in which most scholars have addressed them, were these:
- Jesus’s lack of a wife. It is clear to anyone who reads the Gospels that Jesus was reared as a well-educated and religiously observant Jew. And in His day, properly brought-up Jewish males were married in their teens, but we can find no evidence that Jesus ever took a wife. Why was that? Some scholars assume that He did have a wife, that perhaps Mary Magdalen was His wife, and even that He likely had children, who were then spirited away to France or somewhere, either with or without their mother, and that some or all of the members of Jesus’s nuclear family survived His crucifixion. Some scholars even assume that Jesus joined His family in exile after His resurrection. But there is no evidence for any of this.
- The “Lost Years.” It would have been assumed that Jesus would begin His teaching mission as a young adult, but the Biblical Gospels tell us that He did not begin to teach in Galilee until the age of thirty. That silent period of young adulthood that lasted for almost a decade is what is commonly referred to as “the Lost Years,” and naturally scholars have wanted to fill those years with some sort of useful activity. The most common ideas put forth have to do with His traveling to India or Nepal, perhaps. He might have networked with Buddhist and Hindu teachers, further learning and perfecting what He later taught. All of which I reject as nonsense! Jesus had things to learn on earth before His teaching phase began, but what He had to learn was only about humankind, so He could better understand and therefore better teach the people around Him. Jesus was born on earth from the Godhead as already a spiritually perfected Being.
As I came to better know Jesus last summer while we worked on material for His website, I tried to develop the courage to ask Him to address some of these questions about His personal life. After all, I had been charged with creating His website, and everyone is avid to know more about Jesus on a personal level. We were discussing His positions on doctrine, and He was comfortable about doing that. And in the process, He was tearing down Constantine’s Christianity without reservation. But Jesus was reluctant to answer questions about His personal life. I had long wondered about John, for example, who was “the disciple that Jesus loved,” and who had leaned back against Jesus’s chest at a banquet to ask Him a question, and had taken other personal liberties with the Lord. When you pair that information with the fact that Jesus never married, you might naturally wonder about their sexual preferences…? But when that thought even barely entered my mind, I got an “if looks could kill” look from Jesus, and He stood up and walked away. Jesus has never looked at me that way either before or since, and I have never thought of asking Him even one more personal question. (And then I remembered that of course John was Jesus’s younger brother from His last pre-Jesus lifetime, the one in which Thomas was Jesus’s older brother, which should adequately explain why John was the disciple that Jesus loved.)
Jesus simply will not address the details of His personal life with me. Nor, I think, will He address them with anyone else. Jesus is private by nature, but more to the point, He considers His personal life to be unimportant. It is only His teachings that matter to Him. And when I ask Him questions in general, He usually won’t say a definitive “Yes.” The most that He will do is to give me a positive vibe. He will, however, say a definitive “No.” And sometimes – as you saw – His “NO” is emphatic! But soon after that if-looks-could-kill moment, I found an article somewhere that suggested that Jesus had been born into slavery. And when I asked Him in my mind whether this could be true, He gave me the comfortable sense that I might profitably investigate that question. Which is as close to a “Yes” as I ever will get from Him.
An open-minded researcher has to admit that the evidence that Jesus was born into slavery is strong. When the idea is first suggested to you, though, everything within you is repulsed by it! At least, that was how I felt. I thought there had to be some mistake. Jesus? If you want to dismiss the whole notion out of hand, all I ask is that you read the rest of this post with an open mind. And with the understanding that Jesus Himself gave me permission to investigate this question. I did the research, and I went from being a repulsed skeptic to becoming someone who is not only personally convinced, but who thinks that we have discovered some interesting new information about the Man Himself. Let’s look together at the evidence:
- Slavery was common in that time and place. But slavery in the area where Jesus lived two thousand years ago was a milder condition than is our image of chattel slavery in the pre-Civil-War American South. And for many of those held in bondage then, it was not a permanent condition. People often sold themselves or their children into servitude for a period of time in order to pay back a debt, or even because they could not otherwise afford food and shelter. The Greek word translated as “servant” generally did mean what we would call a bondsman, or an actual slave, but sometimes it meant just a person hired to do some task; and these people were often bound for a time and not for life. There were, moreover, strict Biblical rules about how “slaves” were to be treated (see, e.g., Exod 21.2-6; Lev 25.10, 38-41; and Deut 23.15,16).
- Jesus’s mother, Mary, identifies herself to the Archangel Gabriel as a slave. She uses the female version of a Greek word which is translated as “slave” whenever it is used for a male (see LK 1:38). And if Mary is a slave, then her child will be born into her same legal status. In which case, insofar as I can determine, Jesus’s status as a slave at birth would have been for life. But when Jesus was four, the Roman Emperor Augustus decreed that those born into slavery as Jesus would have been born into slavery were now to be freed at the age of thirty. And if Jesus was a slave until He was thirty, then that very well explains both why Jesus was not married in His teens, and why He did not begin His teaching ministry until He reached the age of thirty, since He would have been Joseph’s bondsman working as a carpenter during all those “Lost Years.” And while Joseph may not have married Mary, he received and heeded Gabriel’s announcement, and he seems in all respects to have thought of Jesus as his beloved oldest son, protecting Him from the slaughter of the innocents when it happened and educating Him well in preparation for His free adulthood. We really have no complaint to make against Jesus’s nominal father.
- A mere stable is considered to be sufficient shelter for a woman who is about to give birth. We fondly think that the “no room in the inn” story of Jesus’s birth is charming, but in fact it is a sign of Mary’s low status, especially in view of her late stage of pregnancy. Would a free woman of respectable rank have been shuffled off to give birth in a barn?
- Joseph seems never to have married Mary. Jesus from the cross asks His disciple, John, to look after His mother (see JN 19:27), so we know that Jesus is not certain that Joseph will care for his mother after His own death. As indeed apparently Joseph does not care for her, according to a close reading of the Gospel of Luke, since Mary soon moves into John’s household.
- Jesus was oddly despised by His childhood neighbors for speaking with authority at the start of His ministry. After Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, He returned to Galilee. And then comes an astonishing scene that never made sense to me before, in which He speaks in His home synagogue and announces that He is the fulfillment of Hebrew prophesy. And his home-folks promptly try to throw Him off a cliff. Here it is:
14 And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about Him spread through all the surrounding region. 15 And He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all.
16 And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. 17 And the scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to Him. And He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
19 To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”
20 And He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all the people in the synagogue were intently directed at Him. 21 Now He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 22 And all the people were speaking well of Him, and admiring the gracious words which were coming from His lips; and yet they were saying, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” 23 And He said to them, “No doubt you will quote this proverb to Me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! All the miracles that we heard were done in Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.’” 24 But He said, “Truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his hometown. 25 But I say to you in truth, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut up for three years and six months, when a severe famine came over all the land; 26 and yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. 27 And there were many with leprosy in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” 28 And all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; 29 and they got up and drove Him out of the city, and brought Him to the crest of the hill on which their city had been built, so that they could throw Him down from the cliff. 30 But He passed through their midst and went on His way (LK 4:14-30). A presumptuous local boy who had grown up as a slave among them and only just been emancipated might inspire such rage, but surely nothing less!
We all plan our lives on earth before we are born, and that was especially true of Jesus. The Jesus that we know would have planned an earth-life as the poorest of the poor, and in that time and place, that may well have meant that Jesus deliberately chose to be born of a slave mother, and to live as a slave Himself during most of His human life. My Thomas tells us that Jesus was born as God on earth so God could “look through His eyes,” as Thomas puts it, and observe and come to very much better understand humanity. And how much better could God come to understand people when viewing us from the perspective of the least of these (see MT 25:44-46), by spending the first thirty years of Jesus’s life viewing us from the perspective of an actual slave?
That perspective of “the least of these” would have additionally suited Jesus’s purpose as He fine-tuned His teachings in preparation for His active teaching phase. And God could easily have influenced Caesar Augustus’s mind to decree an emancipation at the age of thirty for those born into slavery in plenty of time for Jesus to begin His planned teaching phase when He was thirty. That coincidence of ages seems simply too neat for it actually to have been a coincidence.
So I have come to accept the probability that Jesus did indeed begin and live most of His life as a slave, and He did so by strategic choice, to better serve God’s need to more perfectly understand people. But I think it was also done by personal choice. I slapped my forehead when I realized that! The Jesus that I have lately come to much better know, the Jesus who loves each individual person to the point of obsession, and who as recently as just last week could not stand to see that a member of this community was sad without rushing off to give her a hug, could not have borne the thought of planning a lifetime to be lived among so many slaves unless He was going to be a slave Himself. Jesus has just lived the past seventeen hundred years doing nothing but loving hundreds of millions of Christianity’s victims back into mental and spiritual health, even though He had no part in causing any of their pain!
I get it now. I do. Late last spring, soon after I first personally met Jesus, when I was still trying to get my mind around all the details of knowing Him, I was asking my Thomas a lot of questions. Why did Jesus do this or that, or was this or that really true about Jesus? And the sense I got was that Thomas wasn’t always thrilled about these things either, but I just had to accept what Jesus did, and who He was. And I now realize that Jesus would have had to teach as a free Man. But until the public phase of His life began, He would have wanted to have the same status as the poorest people around Him. He would likely have wanted to be a slave, since He lived where so many people were slaves. And if I had asked my Thomas why that would have been so, since I would certainly never have wanted to be a slave, his answer would have been the same answer that I always got when I asked my Thomas these questions. He would have said simply, “That is why He is Jesus, and you and I are not.”