Name: The Life of Jesus
Uploaded: 2026-03-18T11:34:18.000Z
Duration: 34 min 25 s
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Jesus was, in terms of his influence, the most important human being in history.

He is also the most written about and discussed.

Basic passive voice

The earliest surviving document dealing with him was circulated in the 50s of the 1st century AD.

Within a half a century of his death, four biographies written in Greek had been published and all have come down to us, meaning they survived.

Since then, entire books about him have been published in growing quantity and and in all languages.

Today There are over 100,000 printed biographies of Jesus in English alone.

The religion which commemorates Jesus teachings, death and resurrection was well established in half a dozen countries by A.D. 50.

The first Christian place of worship dates from about A.D. 50.

And now nearly 1 million chapels, churches, basilicas, abbeys and cathedrals include many of the largest, most remarkable and beautiful buildings ever erected.

in cultural and moral respects especially Jesus life and the faith it created are the central events in the history of humanity.

So far we have considered the influence of Jesus as man, but

It is futile for us to inquire about the nature of Jesus and God and his pre existence from the beginning, since since that is unknowable, let alone the future which is still hidden from us.

What we can do, however, is write about Jesus the Man.

The problem with writing about the life of Jesus the Man is not so much the paucity of sources as their abundance and the difficulty in reaching behind the written text to the full meanings of sayings and episodes.

The sketch that follows reflects many years of reading and historical study.

My objects have been clarity and brevity and my desire is to convey the joy and nourishment that I receive in following Jesus footsteps and pondering his words.

That is an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Jesus A Biography from a Believer.

So I want to immediately jump into some background that Paul gives you and I which will help understand the society, the really the world into which Jesus was born into.

He says it was harsh, cruel, violent and unstable.

It was also materialistic and increasingly wealthy.

Rome was in the process of transforming itself from a republic into an empire.

Rome now occupied all of Italy and Spain, as well as Greece and Egypt and what we now call Turkey.

Between 50 to 60 million people came under its laws 50 years before Jesus was born.

Julius Caesar had added the whole of Gaul, which would be modern France, to the Roman Empire.

The expanding empire was based upon muscle rather than technology, thanks to about 15 million slaves who constituted one third of its population.

And whose life was summed up by Aristotle in four work, punishment, and food.

As you probably already know, I'm a huge fan of Paul Johnson's writing.

I've read and made podcasts on a bunch of biographies that he's written, like on Winston Churchill, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Socrates, Mozart, Picasso, Disney.

I'll leave all those linked in the show notes in case you want to check out those other episodes.

But one of the things I love about his writing is the way he's able to use contrast to drive home a point.

And you see that here because he's going to compare who is ruling the area in which Jesus is going to be born into with really the main lessons that Jesus the man taught.

And so he talks about the ruler at this time being Herod the Great.

For more than 30 years, this astute financier had made himself the richest individual in the entire empire, but

he was still subservient to the rulers of Rome.

He made himself master of the ancient kingdom, and he was the greatest builder of his age.

So he built shipping ports, he rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem, he built a bunch of public baths and aqueducts and what we would call today shopping centers in more than a dozen cities.

He had numerous wives and concubines and sired many children.

He was suspicious and cruel, and he slaughtered over 40 of his wives.

He killed over 40 of his wives, children, and close relatives.

And this is the contrast point that I was referencing earlier.

The last year of his life was the year of Jesus's birth.

Jesus was most constantly referred to as Jesus of Nazareth, Nazareth being this small Galilean town that he grew up in.

He's estimated to be born somewhere around 4 BC Nazareth at this time was home to many small workshops and craftsmen.

One of these craftsmen was Joseph, who was a carpenter.

Joseph was a prosperous tradesman, or the way you and I would talk about that is he was a good entrepreneur.

And then he takes as his bride as his wife, Mary.

This is a description of Jesus's childhood.

There was much praying, and the Jewish feasts and practices were meticulously observed.

Every year at the feast of Passover, they went up to Jerusalem to make a sacrifice in the temple.

So by the time that Jesus is 12 years old, they think that he's old enough to wander around Jerusalem by himself, exploring.

They usually do this trip with a bunch of other people.

So a few days later, they wind up leaving and heading back home.

They get about a day's journey away when they realize that Jesus was not in their group, that he was lost.

And this frightened Mary because she realized that he was left behind in what they called a holy and wicked city.

On the third day they find him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the elders, both hearing them and asking them questions.

And it says, and all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and his answers.

And it is in this exchange where we get Jesus's first recorded words.

His it says Mary rebuked him for his thoughtlessness.

And she said, son, why have you treated us so?

We have been searching for you in great distress.

Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?

So there's a couple interesting things here.

this is really what we'll talk to a lot talk a lot about, is the fact that the way to think about Jesus is think about him as a teacher.

In his teachings, he uses questions a lot.

There's over 300 different questions just in the four Gospels alone.

It is interesting that the first recorded words that we get from Jesus is actually in the form of a question.

And then after this, Paul Johnson writes, it is striking that these first recorded words of Jesus are of peace.

With his entire life and mission, he must be about God's business.

And that is the extent of what we know about Jesus's childhood.

The gospels then Skip the next 18 years of Jesus life and they don't pick back up until he's being baptized by Saint John John the Baptist.

It is a somber and unwelcome fact that for more than half of Jesus's life we know absolutely nothing about what he did or where he went or how he lived.

All we know is that his story picks up around.

He's around 30 years of age and it's very clear that he's a man of wide knowledge.

We must assume that Jesus was self taught in many respects.

His words and concepts betray absolutely no sign of academic deformation or the impress of a system being an autodidact.

He was dismissed by his critics as uneducated.

And so there's examples where the educated or the ruling elite hear him speak and they say stuff like this, how did this man get such learning without having been taught?

Jesus possessed broad knowledge, especially of trade and agriculture.

This is made clear by his confident and expert references to those practical matters in his sayings and parables.

Jesus had a huge range, one reason why so many people love to listen to him.

But I suspect that his knowledge reflected actual experience.

The death of Joseph, which occurred during his missing years, led to the breakup of the Nazareth household.

His mother Mary went to live with one of her numerous family.

At that point, it would have been natural for Jesus to leave home and seek experience in a wider world.

But Paul makes the point that this is just his opinion based on his readings and studyings because he says there is no means of knowing what he did.

This then is what we know of Jesus birth and childhood and what we can reasonably guess about his life from 12 to 30.

At that point he began his ministry and entered the full glare of evangelical record.

And so in part because we have the most documentation.

But this is also what I want to focus on the most, which is what was Jesus teaching, what did he believe and what did he go around teaching up until the time of his death?