Jesus (11 page)

The pious tradition of the location of the workshop may have no foundation, but Jesus's youth, adolescence, and young adulthood in this town do. He was known during his public ministry as “Jesus of Nazareth,” and he spent most of his life here.

Yet oddly, between his birth and his entrance into public ministry there is only one incident from his life mentioned in the entire New Testament. When Jesus was twelve years old, his family went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover. On the way back, as Luke tells us, Mary and Joseph realized that the boy was not with their traveling party. This is not as callous as it may seem. It was natural in a group of pilgrims that included extended families for a parent to assume that the child was with another relative. Frantic (“in great anxiety,” says Luke), Mary and Joseph rushed back to Jerusalem where they found the twelve-year-old in the Temple, calmly speaking with the Jewish teachers there. “Why were you searching for me?” says the precocious boy. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?”
²

With that vignette Luke offers us a glimpse not only of Jesus's intelligence, but also of his natural affinity for the religious world. His attraction to the Temple may be similar to a young student gravitating to a particular musical instrument or a certain sport. “Of course I would be here,” he seems to say to his parents—and to us. “Where else would I be? I love it here.”

From that point until his baptism at age thirty the Gospels offer a single sentence to describe his life. After Jesus is found in the Temple Luke writes: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” What a sentence! One verse encompasses eighteen years. The time between Jesus's being lost in the Temple and his baptism by John at the Jordan River is cloaked in mystery and is often referred to as the “Hidden Life.”

That elision can be frustrating for believers who want to know as much as they can about Jesus. His birth is afforded more Gospel lines than his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood combined. But again, the Gospels were not written as historical documents (that is, as we understand biographies today), but as faith documents. Consequently they are not concerned as much with Jesus's youth as with his public ministry. So that part of his life remains almost totally obscure.
³

Nonetheless, running through the history of Christian spirituality is a strong current of devotion to the Hidden Life. And in Catholic circles, the person most closely associated with the Hidden Life is also, not surprisingly, associated with Nazareth. Charles de Foucauld, a nineteenth-century French aristocrat and soldier who abandoned a life of privilege for an austere existence in the North African desert, may be fairly called the Apostle of the Hidden Life.

Born in 1858 to a noble family, the Viscount Foucauld squandered an immense fortune and entered the French military in 1881. After being posted to Algeria, Charles was dismissed for “indiscipline and notorious conduct,” in this case taking a prostitute with him and passing her off as his wife. When his regiment was posted in Tunisia, he rejoined them. The viscount's time in the military would be short-lived, but his sojourn in North Africa awakened a lifelong interest in the region. After permanently resigning from the army, he undertook an exploration of Morocco under the auspices of the French Geographical Society.

The piety of the local Muslims sparked in Charles a new interest in his Catholic faith, which led to a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There he became fascinated with the spirituality of Jesus's Hidden Life. It dawned on him that the “life of Nazareth,” the ordinary existence that Jesus led before his public ministry, could be followed by every person as a path to holiness. So Foucauld gave away all his possessions and entered a Trappist monastery in Syria; he later moved to Nazareth to work as a gardener at a monastery of Poor Clares, a women's religious order. But this still did not satisfy him, so he returned to North Africa, where he lived among the Tuareg people in Morocco. There Charles hoped to found his own religious order, whose members would embody the spirituality of the Hidden Life. Though greatly respected by the locals, he was killed by Tuareg rebels in a botched looting in 1916.

Seemingly Charles “failed” in his life, but after his death several religious orders, including the Little Brothers of Jesus and the Little Sisters of Jesus, were founded on his inspiration. During my time working in Kenya, I came to know a community of Little Sisters who lived down the street from the Jesuit community in Nairobi. Their lives consisted, as Charles would have hoped, in doing “ordinary” work—as maids and factory hands, farmers and cleaning women—and spreading the Gospel in everyday circumstances.

During our visit to Nazareth I was delighted to spy on our map a tiny rectangle marked “Charles de Foncauld Monastery.” Was this (misspelling and all) the convent where he had worked as a gardener? It was only a few blocks from the Basilica of the Annunciation, so after peering at the ruins of Nazareth, George and I set out to find it. After losing our way several times, I stopped at a souvenir shop and asked the owner, who spoke French, if she could direct us to the Charles de Foucauld monastery.

“Mais oui, le grand philosophe!”
she said. The great philosopher, Michel Foucault. Evidently shopkeepers are well-read in Nazareth.

When I said, “
Non, non. Charles
,” she shook her head.

“Le monastère?”
I asked hopefully.

“Ah,” she said, and motioned vaguely down the street.

A formidable stone wall running the length of the block surrounded what appeared to be a monastery. I wasn't sure if this was the Poor Clare monastery where Charles had lived or a men's religious order that had named their monastery after Charles. There was no sign, but we rang the rusty doorbell beside a stout wooden door set deep into the stone wall. No answer. We went around the corner, walked down a hill, and rang the bell at a high metal gate.

“This is a school,” said the caretaker who opened the gate only a crack. “The monastery is up there.”
⁴

We returned to the original entrance, knocked again, and waited again. “
Tant pis!
” George said. Too bad. But I wanted desperately to gain access.

Many of us wish that we could gain access to the story of Jesus's years in Nazareth. But like those monastery walls, the New Testament keeps that part of Jesus's life hidden from view.

I am fascinated by the Hidden Life. On the one hand, it is marvelously mysterious: we know very little about what Jesus did during the years in Nazareth. At the same time, it's not an insurmountable mystery. We have plenty of solid biblical, archaeological, and historical studies that can tell us a good deal about life in first-century Nazareth. And recently there has been a veritable explosion of findings about ancient Galilee. As a result, there is a surfeit of books about the level of influence of Roman and Greek culture on Galilee, the sociological and economic situation at the time, first-century Jewish religious practices, what the archaeological finds say about family life in the region, and, more broadly, daily life in Jesus's time.

But there's another reason I'm drawn to the Hidden Life, and it's similar to what attracted Charles de Foucauld: In Nazareth Jesus's life was most like our own. None of us is going to be preaching and performing miracles—at least not as Jesus did—but all of us live everyday lives, as Jesus did in Nazareth, being taught and cared for by our parents, loving and squabbling with our families, playing with our friends, learning what it means to be an adult, and in time earning a living. Was Jesus any less the Son of God when he was doing ordinary things? No.

But what
was
Jesus's life like during his thirty years in Nazareth?

T
HERE ARE A NUMBER
of superb scholarly studies on life in ancient Galilee and, more specifically, first-century Nazareth, then a tiny town in southern Galilee. Drawn from archaeological research and a variety of historical sources, together they paint a picture of a largely agrarian society, populated mainly by the lower classes and the poor, in the midst of an abundantly fertile region. Even during our pilgrimage to Galilee in the blazing heat of late August, the area was dotted with gnarled olive trees, tall date palms, and all manner of crops. During the wetter months, the landscape bursts into colorful bloom—or so we were told! The Jewish historian Josephus, writing a few decades after the time of Jesus, described one strip along the Sea of Galilee's northwest shore as the most productive parcel of land in all of Israel.
⁵

Despite the fertile land, though, the region of Galilee on the whole remained, as archaeologist and New Testament scholar Jonathan L. Reed describes, “on the fringe of the Roman Empire, both geographically and politically.”
⁶
Roman roads avoided it until the second century. So it was something of a backwater. As for Nazareth, most scholars estimate that anywhere from two to four hundred people lived there in Jesus's day.
⁷
Thus, Nazarenes lived in a backwater of a backwater.

Today the ruins of the houses in Nazareth are scant, but the archaeological evidence has revealed small dwellings built with local stones (basalt or limestone) that were stacked roughly atop one another. The floors were of packed earth and the roofs thatched, constructed over beams of wood and held together with mud. Two or three homes were clustered together around an open courtyard, where much of the cooking would have been done. Also in the courtyard might be a common cistern and a millstone for grinding grain. Animals might have been penned here as well. When I worked in Jamaica as a Jesuit novice, I saw similar arrangements: in the poorer parts of Kingston, families lived in small houses clustered together around a “yard” where common activities were performed.

In Nazareth, the small rooms that were closed off were used for shelter, sleep, sex, and, as the theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ, notes in her book on Mary, “giving birth and dying.”
⁸
Evidence from the rooms points to little privacy for the inhabitants, but a great sense of community. Needless to say, in such a tight-knit community Jesus would have been very well known—his friends, his habits, his ways of speech, his likes and dislikes. This insight will become important later on and explains the expressions of shock from the people who knew him: “Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us?” say the crowds in Matthew's Gospel.
⁹

What kind of food was prepared in the open-air courtyards? The diet in Nazareth at that time would have been mainly grains, vegetables, and some fruits, along with olives and olive oil from the plenteous trees in the area, with the occasional drink of milk or cut of meat if the family had access to animals. Salted fish was an occasional luxury. A stew of lentils and a few seasonal vegetables might be ladled onto some pita bread for a meal, along with some welcome fruits and cheese or yogurt.
¹⁰
A decent but not always reliable water source was situated at the edge of the village, at a place now called the Well of Mary.

Garbage and sewage would often have been tossed outside the house into alleyways between the small couplings of homes, much as it is today in parts of the developing world. During my time working with the Jesuit Refugee Service in Nairobi, I saw how those living in the city's slums were forced to live without water and toilets. They likewise had no choice but to deposit their garbage and sewage in small canals that ran through the slums. These foul streams and rivulets, which had to be stepped over every few feet, overflowed during the rainy seasons and stank all times of the year. It is one of the most pitiable aspects of life for those who are desperately poor.

Clothing in the Nazareth of Jesus's time would have been simple. Most men would have worn a loincloth, a tunic, and a cloak made of either linen or, most likely, wool, probably colored in some way. Women would have worn similarly simple clothing. All of the material for clothing would have been spun, woven, and sewn by the women of the town, with the wool taken from the flocks of sheep that grazed on the nearby hills.
¹¹

In her aptly named book
Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit
, a fascinating study of the details of Jewish daily life in Galilee and Judea in the time of Jesus, Jodi Magness, an archaeologist and professor of early Judaism, reminds us that Westerners tend to view the ancient world through a “highly sanitized lens.” In even the most sophisticated cities conditions were “filthy, malodorous and unhealthy” by contemporary standards. “If we could be transported back in time,” writes Magness, “it is unlikely that most of us would survive exposure to the widespread dirt and diseases, to which we lack immunity.”
¹²

As a result, the quality of the health of the inhabitants of Nazareth was far below modern standards. John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, scholars of the historical Jesus, sum up the conditions in the town during Jesus's time in a sobering few sentences:

Many of the few hundred inhabitants of Nazareth, most belonging to extended families, depended upon farming to feed themselves and pay taxes, using the method of “polycropping,” or diversifying plantings to avoid becoming overly dependent on a single crop. The area was perfectly suited for the Mediterranean dietary triad of grain, olive, and grape. Larger families helped with the work on the farm, but it was not a secure living; one drought or paltry harvest could mean famine. Elizabeth Johnson summarizes the ways to earn a living: laborers were “peasants who worked their own land, tenant farmers who worked land belonging to others, and craftspersons who served their needs.”
¹⁴
In that last category of craftspersons, we can include Joseph and Jesus.