Yeshua ben Yosef

Which Jesus do you follow? Do you have an image of him in your mind when you pray or sing a worship song? Is it a Jesus from your childhood memories, perhaps the gentle brown-haired Jesus at the Da Vinci table? Is it a mystical Jesus, perhaps with a glowing heart and halo? Is it a baby Jesus, a richly adorned ecclesiastical Jesus, or perhaps the forlorn battered body on the cross? Or is it a Jesus restyled to fit in with your own culture? A white Jesus, a black or brown Jesus, an oriental Jesus? Why am I asking, does this really matter?

In one way it doesn’t matter, after all doesn’t the Second Commandment prohibit the use of images, or specifically idols that can be revered or worshipped?

You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; (Exodus 20:4-5)

But we have imaginations and sometimes it helps us to fix our mind on something visual when contemplating the Divine. It’s when we take it one step further that we can hit problems.

Yassar Arafat, the PLO leader and ex-President of the Palestinian Territories, once said, “Jesus was the first Palestinian Shahid (Martyr)”. What he has done here is to wrench Jesus away from his true historical setting and place him into a false one, also attributing a false role to him. This is subtle propaganda for political purposes, but it sows seeds into minds.

In the Jewish Talmud, there’s another twist on Jesus. In one account he is known as

Yeshu ben Pandera, Yeshu son of Pandera. Pandera was meant to be the name of Mary’s lover, a carnal dig at the Virgin Birth. A curious embellishment is the insistence that Mary was a women’s hairdresser, though this is likely to be a mistranslation, caused by a literary variation of “Chinese whispers”. Pandera, sometimes called Stada as a nickname, was thought to be a Roman soldier. This whole scenario of course was a complete fabrication, a reaction to the bad things that were being done to Jews at that time in the name of Jesus.

Then there was the Jesus of the Nazi lunatic, Hitler. This Jesus was a blonde-haired Nordic type, of Aryan ancestry, without a drop of Jewish blood in his bloodline. What a surprise!

You’ve met the counterfeits, now meet the true Jesus in his true historical setting …

Picture the scene. It’s two thousand years ago, in a small village called Nazareth, in the Galilee region of what is now the Land of Israel. You see a little boy playing in the backyard among the wood piles and shavings. His father, Yosef, is in the workshop next to the yard and his mother, Miriam, is busy cooking. His name is Yeshua ben Yosef. You know him better as Jesus, son of Joseph.

It is time for lunch and his mother calls him. If Miriam had called him by the name ‘Jesus’, two things would have happened. Firstly, he would have carried on playing, not recognising the name and secondly, the neighbours would have been astonished at Miriam’s bad attempt at Greek, a feat which was about as likely as your average cockney walking up to a pub landlord and asking for a pint of beer in his best classical Latin. If she’d added the epithet ‘Christ’, the situation would have been even more dramatic, because not only would he have continued to ignore her and the neighbours been astonished at her Greek, but she would also have been stoned to death for assigning a forbidden and blasphemous title to her son. That is because ‘Christ’, is the English translation of ‘Christos’, the Greek translation for the Hebrew word ‘Mashiach’, which means Messiah, or ‘anointed one’. And no Jew would dare to make a claim to that title. Well, not until this particular boy became a man and embarked on his life’s mission.

Yeshua (Jesus) was a nice Jewish boy, of whom any mother would be proud. He was born in Bethlehem, as the Christmas cards show us, in very humble surroundings. After birth he had been circumcised and consecrated at the Temple and, by all accounts, had the typical childhood of one from a poor family in a Galilean village. And how do we know they were poor? “No room at the inn” was certainly a clue but the clincher was the “pair of doves or two young pigeons” that they sacrificed to the Lord after the birth. This was the pidyon ha-Ben, the redemption of a boy. It’s an acknowledgement that every first-born boy belongs to God and all parents must “buy him back” by making a sacrifice. This rule dated right back to the time of Moses, when the first-born boys of the Israelites were spared from the Angel of Death on Passover night. Joseph and Mary were too poor to offer a lamb sacrifice and so were permitted to offer up the birds as a cheaper alternative.

They were poor but must have been devout Jews. Not all families made the annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but Luke 2:41 tells us:

Every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover.

For poor people this was exceptional and tells us that God indeed made the correct choice in parents for Yeshua. Another clue is in the song, The Magnificat, sung by Miriam (Mary) when she visited her relative Elizabeth. This song alludes to no less than thirteen Hebrew scriptures, telling us that, even at a relatively young age, the mother of Yeshua was fully conversant with the Judaism of her day.

For the next article in this series, click here.

For the previous article in this series, click here.

You can reach Steve with any comments or questions at the Saltshakers Web Community website.

Who is the real Jesus? Which Jesus do you follow?