Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What Was Jesus's Everyday Life Like? | Who Is Jesus?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. Right now, we are asking, who is Jesus? Have you ever wondered what a day in the life of Jesus was like? What did he do? Who did he interact with? What was his story?

Starting point is 00:00:24 Who were the power players in his community? Did he have any influence? Or was he just another nameless peasant in the mob? Sometimes we get so fixated on Jesus' divinity. I think we actually forget about the fact of his humanity. And so on our last episode, Keith pointed out that if we want to have a relationship with Jesus, we need to see it as a cross-cultural relationship with another human person. Jesus spoke a different language than you.

Starting point is 00:00:52 He lived in a different culture. He lived in a different time. Now, of course, Jesus does all the work that he needs to do in order to have a cross-cultural relationship with us. but shouldn't we return the favor? Don't we want to understand Jesus on his own terms, not just on our terms? Well, on today's episode, I want to give you a flavor of Jesus's life. What were his days like? What was his culture like? But let's just start with his job, because like most people, he spent most of his day working. But back in those days, work was really a family affair. So Jesus learned his trade from his adoptive father, Joseph, and he probably also worked alongside his brothers. Now, we know from the Gospels

Starting point is 00:01:31 that Jesus' dad was still alive when he was a young man, but by the time that Jesus' ministry had started, Joseph was probably already dead. He doesn't show up anywhere else in the Gospels. And so there's a good chance that Jesus was actually the lead financial supporter of his family, starting maybe even in his teens. He very well had to train his brothers in their trade so that they could go on working. So what did the Jesus family do? Well, the Gospels tell us in Greek that he was an architect. Now, architecton in modern parlance is really just a construction worker, not an architect, even though that's where the word architect comes from. Now, unfortunately, in most of our English translations, architecton gets translated as carpenter. And while it's probably true that

Starting point is 00:02:17 Jesus did work with wood, wood was a really valuable commodity in Galilee. There just weren't lots of trees. And so if you were a normal construction worker like Jesus, you probably spent most of your time working with stone. And so Jesus was really really a really. closer to a stone mason than he was to a carpenter. Now, regardless, we can be pretty certain that he worked on both large and small-scale construction projects. Back when I was in Israel, I visited Sephora. And this was a largely Greek, so non-Jewish town, which was located near Nazareth, where Jesus grew up. Now, its stone buildings, its houses, its amphitheaters, believe it or not, they were actually built during the time of Jesus' life. And a lot of scholars think it's very likely that

Starting point is 00:03:00 Jesus traveled to Sephora's every day in order to work and get a paycheck. It would have been the nearest place where a construction worker like him could have found regular work for years. I find this funny because one of the critiques that academics like Bark Airmen used to level at the Gospels was that Jesus seems to know too much Greek culture for being in everyday Galilean uneducated Jew. One great example. Jesus likes to use metaphors which are actually taken from the Greek theater. So how did this Jew ever hear? hear about a Greek theater. Surely he couldn't have, and that tells us that the Gospels are unreliable, right? Wrong. Since the discovery of Siphoris, these questions that people ask,

Starting point is 00:03:40 they've all been silenced, because as it turns out, Jesus lived and probably worked in a very nearby Greek town. It's possible that Jesus actually helped build the Greek theater in Siphoris. Is it possible that sometimes he stuck around and watched a performance? Did you learn something of Greek philosophy and rhetoric there, I think there's actually probably a pretty good chance that he did. But when you imagine Jesus, I want you to imagine a guy who had a family. He had a mom, dad, brothers, maybe even some sisters. I want you to imagine him leading his brothers on the four-mile walk to Sephora every day and then the four-mile walk back to Nazareth. I want you to imagine them there working from sun-up to sundown, constructing buildings, mostly out of stone.

Starting point is 00:04:27 Jesus would have had calluses on his hand. He might have even had a few broken bones that never healed quite right. He was strong enough and he was skilled enough to construct buildings out of stone and maybe even theaters, but that's not all that we know. What we also know about Jesus is that he was a Jew. And Jews really seemed to prize literacy far more than other cultures did. For example, in the Greco-Roman world, reading and writing was really only for the elites and bureaucrats and maybe some people in the mercantile class.

Starting point is 00:04:58 The vast majority of Greco-Roman people couldn't read, they couldn't write. But first-century Jews, they were deeply committed to scripture. And so what we've learned from archaeology is that you didn't have to be a Jewish elite to learn how to read and write. Poor Jews, just like Jesus, they were actually able to attend schools inside of the local synagogues. And in these schools, the teachers there would teach boys, really only boys, how to read and how to write in Hebrew. This training involved memorization, the copying of scrolls,

Starting point is 00:05:30 and it was so intense that many students actually memorized the first five books of the Bible, and committed students, probably like Jesus, they memorized the entire thing. And so when you imagine Jesus, you've got to imagine a walking Bible. And this becomes evident whenever you read his teachings, and not just because he's constantly quoting from the Hebrew Bible. That would be just very basic rope memory. You can tell that he's a walking Bible because he's constantly alluding to it. He's echoing it. He's retelling it. It's like he's so thoroughly synthesized the Hebrew Bible into his consciousness that the Hebrew Bible, it just comes out of his pores. He sweats it. He bleeds it. He acts it. He includes it in his stories and his teaching and his thoughts,

Starting point is 00:06:13 maybe even without realizing it. Apparently Jesus was known to be a really great student and a great reader and writer because when he returns to his synagogue in his hometown in Nazareth, he's immediately invited up to read from the Hebrew scroll and then to sermonize on it, ad hoc off the cuff, you know? So this was a guy who was respected for his Bible knowledge. But we can't let that take away from the fact that Jesus held a relatively low social status. He was a day laborer. There were days where he probably went hungry because he couldn't get a paycheck. There were probably hard months where work dried up. Sometimes our picture of Jesus is so spiritualized that we forget that he spent his life

Starting point is 00:06:53 doing what most of us do. And that means that what most of us do really is valuable. Our family lives, our work lives, all of it. He shared that exact same kind of life. And so when you imagine Jesus, you do have to imagine someone who was like you in many ways, who understood a hard day of work. Imagine someone who went through the loss of a dad. Imagine someone who loved to read and to memorize scripture.

Starting point is 00:07:18 Imagine someone who had calluses on his hand and a mind at work. Jesus was a real person with a real life, real family, real job, just like you are a real person with a real life and probably real family and a real job. When we imagine Jesus, we need to understand that he spent most of his life, the vast majority of it, doing the things that we did, and that that shaped his message and his understanding of, what the kingdom of God is. And it shapes our understanding of it. It tells us that if our Lord and our Savior would come and do those exact kind of things, there must be an innate value, an innate

Starting point is 00:07:55 goodness to them. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.

Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What Was Jesus's Everyday Life Like? | Who Is Jesus?

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