Article
Creed
Migration
7 min read

I wrote Jesus was a child refugee, I got called crazy

Digging into history uncovers uncomfortable truths.

Joan is Professor Emerita of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism, King’s College London. 

A red sandstone statue of Jesus as a child.
A Victorian statue of Jesus as a child.

As a historian of Jesus, I have sometimes been asked to comment on the question 'what would Jesus do today?'. I have sometimes responded. In September 2015 I wrote a guest post for the Jesus Blog, titled Jesus was a Refugee. It was on the story of baby Jesus’ escape to Egypt with his parents, as written in the Gospel of Matthew, which I conclude is historically true. It is interesting to me, because I want to understand what informed Jesus’ teaching as an adult. 

I am not a theologian, a priest or a pastor. I have spent my academic career carefully working out what is true or false in terms of the many stories of the ancient past. So, when I discuss anything, it is after years of study, collegial discussion and discernment. Historians like me know that our ancient accounts come from particular people at different times, telling things with particular points of view. They don’t seek to tell the whole truth, but they shine a light on what is important to them. They can tweak, spin, modify or drop what is not essential to them, and we see this process unfold in retellings. In what I do, I am as analytical about biblical stories as I am about anything else, recognising that I too am located in a particular time and place, with my own capacity to see or not see. With biblical stories this is both rewarding and challenging because to me they are also Scripture, in that they inform my faith, spirituality and practice. 

But this is a world in which sharing of expertise can go up in a puff of public pushback. 

I wrote at the height of scaremongering about Syrian refugees who were fleeing to Europe to escape the dangers and devastation in their country and, given its relevance, the post was picked up on other sites. On Bible History Daily, there was a furious reaction in comments. People asked whether – even if Jesus was a refugee – his experience could be mapped on to issues of the contemporary world, which are so very different. Some commenters insisted that Jesus and his family could not be aligned with economic refugees like Mexicans or bogus refugees who were actually Muslim terrorists. More stingingly, I was told I was crazy, a professor of b******t and I was blaspheming for even suggesting that Jesus was a refugee.  

That Jesus was a refugee has actually been recognised as part of his life from the very beginning of Christian tradition, and contemporary theologians like Barnabas Asprey can well explore what this means for faith. But it seems that some people were alarmed that I was diminishing Jesus by associating him with people they considered reprehensible.  

My job is to understand Jesus in his own world. If I do it properly, people may well find resonances with today. But I do also understand that it is a tricky thing to map Jesus onto contemporary circumstances, especially contentious ones. Over a hundred years ago the philosopher and physician Albert Schweitzer critiqued the 'quest of the historical Jesus' as a whole as covertly creating a liberal model of Jesus. He commented that the 'historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma'. If we met Jesus today, he would seem completely alien to us. So, we do have to be careful when we look to him in our arguments concerning current issues. Yet, Schweitzer also put a lot of trust in the words of Jesus, because his 'spirit, which lies hidden in his words, is known in simplicity, and its influence is direct. Every saying contains in its own way the whole Jesus.' 

So where do we go with this? What did Jesus say? Frankly, Jesus’ ethos was utterly uncompromising. "Woe to you who are rich … woe to you who are well-fed now" (Luke 6:24-25), he said. There are a decent number of Jesus’ statements that suggest people who were economically struggling should be fed and welcomed, and those with wealth should share what they have with the have-nots. Jesus said to a rich man that he should "go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me" (Mark 10:21). Following Jesus was not about becoming destitute, but about joining a community of disciples who saw each other as one big family of siblings. In this group resources were shared (Acts 2:44-45 and 4:32-37). This is beyond philanthropy. And Jesus didn’t talk about the worthiness of the poor; the problem was not with the poor, it was with the rich.  

There’s a big question then in how to use Jesus as a model for ethics. To use Jesus as a model, you have to see the bigger picture of the whole movement he created, within an ancient context, a movement that does not exist any longer in its original form. Was Jesus a refugee? By calling anyone a refugee, in antiquity, I mean someone who flees their home to a place of refuge, to escape danger or disaster. As for my particular 'blasphemy', I reiterate it. Jesus was a child refugee: Jesus’ family fled from the danger of the Roman client king in Judaea, Herod, and escaped to Egypt. In classical Christian doctrine, this is not at all thought of as diminishing Jesus. It made Jesus one of us, in all our human hardships. 

I think he turns things around, radically, so that the life of the wandering refugee is actually a paradigm for action. 

Curiously, the fears expressed by the commenters on my post mirror ancient attitudes to poor, foreign people. Later apocryphal stories of the holy family in Egypt present them facing continual hostility from Egyptian townsfolk and attacks by robbers. These tales reflect an actual situation in which incoming foreigners, for whatever reason, were not welcome. For refugees, it could be a life of vulnerability.  In the second century, the anti-Christian writer Celsus scoffs that child Jesus in Egypt worked for hire because of his poverty (Origen, Contra Celsum 1:28). 

Egypt itself was not a totally safe place to be Jewish. Under the Roman prefect Flaccus (38-39 CE), soon after Jesus, there were riots and pogroms against the Jewish population of Alexandria, as the historian Josephus records (War 2:487-98; Ant. 18:257-60). In 41 CE the Roman emperor Claudius cautioned the long-settled Jewish population of Alexandria that they lived in 'a city not their own', and they were 'not to bring in or invite Jews who sail down to Alexandria from Syria[-Palestine]' (CPJ I:151). Later in the first century (70-73 CE), there were many Jewish refugees fleeing dangers in Judaea by going to Egypt (War 7: 407–419). Hundreds of these men, identified as troublemakers by the Romans, were killed, along with their families. I explore this and much more in my new book, Boy Jesus: Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times. The life of a refugee was hard, and Jesus would have been told his parents’ stories about what they endured. 

This is what is so interesting to me, because we know from contemporary studies of trauma that this would have had an impact on Jesus. There is received trauma resulting from the suffering, persecutions, hardships and distresses of parents and grandparents. 

So how are these experiences reflected in Jesus’ sayings? I think he turns things around, radically, so that the life of the wandering refugee is actually a paradigm for action. Jesus, in his mission as a teacher and healer, identified himself as a displaced person: "Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the son of humanity has nowhere to lay his head" (Matt. 8:20), he said. Jesus was itinerant, and he entered villages with nothing, offering healing and looking for kindness (food, shelter). He asked those who acted in his stead to go out without money or extra clothing, essentially to walk along the road like destitute refugees who had suddenly fled from home, relying on the generosity and hospitality of the ordinary people whose villages they entered (Mark 6.8-11). And it was precisely the villagers’ welcome or not to such people that showed what side they were on when it came to divine justice: "And if any place will not receive you and refuse to hear you, shake off the dust on your feet when you leave, for a testimony to them" (Mark 6.11).  

If the sayings of Jesus show his spirit, time and again this spirit rests with the experience of the marginalised, the displaced, the persecuted, the sick and the poor. I say this as a historian, thinking of Jesus in his own time. How that sits with contemporary issues remains a question. To what extent can people of modern times, with all our baggage of private ownership, debts and anxieties about our jobs and livelihoods, share in Jesus’ ethos? In answering it, I suspect few of us will feel comfortable, whatever side we think we are on.  But taking out the logs in our own eyes, rather than the specks in someone else’s, has never been easy. 

 

Boy Jesus: Growing Up Judaean in Turbulent Times, Joan Taylor, SPCK Publishing.

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Explainer
Creed
Identity
Leading
6 min read

Why read Martin Luther today?

Innovative ideas around identity shaped the world around him.

Robert is professor emeritus of Systematic Theology at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.

A head and shoulder painting of Martin Luther against a red background
Luther, by Cranach the Elder.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Tensions build as the German election approaches. Money is flowing, bargaining going on behind the scenes. (We are talking the election of 1519 here). There is the favorite, Karl—they called him Carlos in the Spanish dominions he had  inherited from his maternal grandparents, Ferdinand and Isabella—, grandson of the German emperor, Maximilian of Austria, and there is the challenger, the King of France, Francis I, and there is the wild card, the duke of Saxony, one of the seven electors who would elect the next emperor, Frederick, called the Wise.  Frederick had no imperial ambitions, and he tipped the election to his distant cousin, the then young man we call Charles V.  Two years later, that gave Frederick the leverage to win a hearing for his most prominent professor at the pride of his heart, his new university in Wittenberg, Martin Luther. 

Charles regarded this Augustinian friar, who had been excommunicated at the beginning of 1521 by Pope Leo X, as a dangerous heretic.  He wanted to declare Luther a criminal, open for execution on the open road by whoever might find him and run him through.  Frederick advised the young emperor not to treat a German subject like that, so Charles arranged for Luther to come to the imperial diet in Worms in May 1521 to recant.  Luther explained to the emperor that he really could not recant since his writings contained many truths.  He continued, “I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.”  Later reports say that he added the words, “I cannot do anything else. Here I stand. God help me!”  Whether he said “here I stand” or not, that is what Martin Luther did at Worms and continued to do for the next quarter century until his death. 

Upon what was he standing?  As a “doctor in Biblia,” a “teacher of the Scriptures,” Luther had taken up the latest methods of the so-called humanist movement for exploring ancient texts in their original languages.  Jurists turned to Justinian’s Code in sixth century Latin. Physicians were reading Galen’s medical advice in ancient Greek. Theologians immersed themselves in the Bible in Hebrew and Greek.  Luther had put the tools of these methods to use as he lectured in the 1510s on the Hebrew Psalms, and then the apostle Paul’s letters to the Romans and to the Galatians.  There he found a new way of viewing himself, the God whom he found speaking to him in the pages of the Bible, and his fellow human creatures.  He used the world “righteousness” in the way we might use “personal identity” today.  He heard from the biblical writers a different way of identifying who he was at his core by listening to God’s regard for him.

Just as our DNA is a gift, not something we have to work to earn, so Luther’s core identity came from outside himself.

Luther certainly did not deny that human performance helps give each human being a variety of identities as we go about what he saw as callings from God in our exercise of responsibilities in our homes, in our economic life, in our societal networks and political structures.  He believed that in these spheres of life we are active in shaping the way other people view and identify us.  But at his core, Luther found the person behind the masks of his everyday life to be unable to perform everything that would make him the good person he wanted to be, the good person he thought God wanted him to be.  Just as our DNA is a gift, not something we have to work to earn, so Luther’s core identity came from outside himself.  It came as a gift from God, his Creator.  He received it passively, and his trust in the God who gave him this passively bestowed identity set his entire life in order.  Because he trusted God to be his support and to justify who he was, he felt freed to perform his responsibilities toward other human creatures actively. 

Luther believed that on his own he had not been able to trust God, to love him and give him proper respect.  Like the modern psychiatrist and philosopher, Erik Erikson, Luther believed that trust forms the basis of human personhood and personality.  He saw that his trusting some Absolute and Ultimate formed his character and enabled him to function as a human being.  He recognized in the God presented by the Old Testament prophets of Israel and the New Testament evangelists and apostles the ultimate and absolute person, who approached the human creatures who had turned their backs on him by becoming one of them as Jesus of Nazareth.  In the mysterious ways of the Creator, Jesus’s death covered the transgressions and offenses, the mistakes and failures, of all human beings, and in his resurrection God gave new life, a new identity, true righteousness to those who trust in him. 

Luther found that message liberating.  It freed him from being imprisoned in a cycle of always insufficient attempts to be the person he wanted to be to please his Creator.  He rested in the unconditional love of this Creator, who had come face to face with humankind as the rabbi from Nazareth, crucified but back from death itself.  That freed Dr. Luther to be bonded to those within his reach who needed his care and love.  He need not manipulate them by doing them the good he needed to make himself look good in God’s sight and feel satisfied with himself.  He now could do them the good that they truly needed.  That gave his tempestuous spirit a sense of joy and peace. 

He lived out a rather peaceable life under the ban of church and empire, but safely ensconced in the lands of his Saxon electors.  Family life brought him much joy.  His judgment that God had given human beings the gift of sexuality for companionship and support as well as procreation made him uncomfortable with his own vows of celibacy, but not so uncomfortable that he would have married had not a nun named Katharina von Bora, who had left the cloister, laid claim to him.  Together they created a bustling household with their six children being raised in the cloister where Martin had lived as an Augustinian Brother, large enough to house students and guests from places far from Wittenberg.  Katharina served as his counsellor and theological conversation partner as well as the efficient manager of this ever-changing parade of co-inhabitants of their home. 

Music filled their home.  Luther’s firm tenor voice and his lute and his flute led family and visitors in evenings of song, sometimes giving voice to hymns he had written.  His sense of tone and rhythm coupled with sensitivity to the fine points of spoken and written speech made him a scholar of great skill and a translator who “looked into the mouths” of the people in the marketplace and render the Bible in their tongue.  His curiosity stimulated or at least supported colleagues at the university across the disciplines, including a botany instructor who took students the woods to look at leaves and colleagues in mathematics and astronomy who were playing with the new calculation of the heavens by Nikolaus Copernicus. 

Luther’s lively engagement with life and his dramatic search for peace in the pages of the Bible produced a man who enjoyed life despite his struggles with “melancholy,” a widespread disease of his time, and the threats of violence to his person that never disappeared.  His robust wrestling with the biblical texts provides even today stimulating, even provocative reading for anyone, who is looking for the heart of the matter, the matter of self and life. 

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Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

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