TMOC 5: Background

(Offered as the proposed fifth chapter to our Open Source book, The Mind of Christ.)
In Western minds, there are two concepts typically regarded as mutually exclusive: God’s sovereignty and human free will. At the very least it requires mental gymnastics to imagine a division of labor, who gets to decide what. In the Hebrew mind, there is on conflict. That is, the apparent conflict is a logical error, sometimes referred to as a category error, or context error.
In the Hebrew mind, spirit is spirit and flesh is flesh. The natural world and virtually everything belonging to it yields, in theory at least, to a clinical examination and description. Western logic is primarily concrete and the language is descriptive. Hebrew minds have no problem with that, but spiritual matters are in a different category. They cannot be known by the intellect, and our best hope is to use parables to indicate something about those matters in terms of what it demands of us, but no clinical description is possible. Spiritual logic is symbolic, and the language is indicative. Hebrew language is thus notoriously imprecise, and any precision in expression is an abstraction from symbolic terminology.
So it is you as a human experience free will to choose a great many things, and the Bible asserts this very thing and saddles us with moral accountability, even as it asserts God is the sovereign Initiator of all things. The two are categorically separate. The only overlap is morality, expressed as Divine Justice. God reveals Himself via His moral imperatives for us. We experience Him directly only on the spirit level, but our minds are left working with imperatives, written by His Presence upon our souls as convictions. How we manifest those convictions will vary with the context, but they are a logic in themselves.
The human life and character of Jesus, of all people in human history, was shaped by God. He was entirely ordinary in every sense except He was born with a living spirit, whereas every other human is born spiritually dead. Thus, while Jesus had the normal collection of human abilities and intelligence, He was morally precocious. Random humans unaware of this would simply remark He was unusually mature for His age.
But that He passed through the same formative experiences as any other human cannot be denied. We won’t struggle here with explaining how to harmonize the Gospels, nor pick overmuch at biographical minutiae. Rather, we will outline significant biographical factors.
Matthew and Luke together tell us, in effect, Jesus was the legitimate royal heir to the throne of David. In practical political terms it meant nothing. The dramatic and twisted tale of Judean history during the Intertestamental Period is too complicated for our purpose here, but the Davidic Dynasty had long been set aside by the time Jesus was born. However, it did have some significance in the political imagination of people who were aware of it. Jesus didn’t take Himself that seriously, and never raised the issue, simply assumed it where it mattered.
Both His parents were of the royal clan. His father was around thirty, His mother about half that age, as was common in those days. We know Joseph possessed a high moral character, and a strong piety. He and Mary had some clue to their son’s future, but weren’t sure what to make of it. His parents decided not to move from the historic clan home of Bethlehem district after He was born. We know Herod tried to have Him killed there. Given the king’s infamous paranoia and brutality, we can assume, given his order to slaughter the dozen or so infants aged two years or less in that area, Jesus was probably about half that age when His parents fled to Egypt.
They most likely would have stayed in the Jewish community at Alexandria. Because they lingered until Jesus was about six, the age when linguistic facility has usually developed past the formative stage, He would have had an Alexandrian accent to some degree. People who had traveled, particularly among the educated classes, would have noticed that. He could not avoid knowing some Greek, at least understanding if not speaking it. The Alexandrian Jews were deeply proud of their classical Greek scholarship. Jesus would have heard quite a few other languages, including the local Egyptian, and would be familiar with the deeply pagan influences on the Alexandrian Jews.
Upon returning to Palestine, they went to Galilee to avoid Herod’s heir. Galilee was the country bumpkin region in Hebrew society, with its own distinct habits and accent. His father was a builder; our modern term “carpenter” is much narrower than is implied by the Greek word tekton. If we judge from Jesus’ parables, it would appear He was more a stonemason than anything else. The village of Nazareth was just a few miles from a very large government building project during that time, so it makes sense.
A lad at his Bar Mitzvah (typically age 12) able to engage the Temple rabbinical scholars for several days in deep discussion would naturally be steered into rabbinical studies. This was in addition to learning a trade, but would have taken progressively more of His time as He aged. At that point in history the Talmud was still a collection of oral traditions, so while He would have learned them, He would have buried His eyes in Scripture. He quotes an awful lot from Isaiah. At the same time, the ancient Hebrew approach was not totally eclipsed by Hellenism, but confined mostly to an aging minority of scholars, marginalized to small rural academies. Apparently Jesus learned quite a bit from at least one of these, because His debate performances show a powerful ancient Hebrew mystical bent, quite politically incorrect.
By the time of the Wedding in Cana, He was well established as a ranking rabbi, albeit a maverick. When the time came to announce His calling and mission, the opposition was the establishment. That’s because His mission was to accomplish everything Israel was supposed to do, but failed. She was supposed to be a light to the nations, entrusted with God’s personally edited collection of ancient narratives, His one package of unassailable revelation. Instead of taking that message to the world, they squandered all their energy puffing their unique status, treating it as a fragile thing in itself to be guarded and protected, instead of a weapon of universal moral conquest. In essence, the religious leaders had completely abrogated the Covenant by perverting it into an excuse for the most awful abuses. Jesus was sent to correct all that, with the sure knowledge doing so would kill Him.