Our childhoods shape who we are for the rest of our lives.
Our relationships with our parents are foundational for how we form bonds with others. Our connection with our ancestors can shape our dreams for the future. The customs and values of the town we call home can influence everything from what dishes we serve on holidays to which policies are the highest priorities for us during election seasons.
It is with good reason that one of the first questions we ask someone when we meet them is, “Where are you from?” Even though the answer doesn’t tell us everything, it gives us a starting point for understanding who a person is now.
So, where was Jesus from? And how do we, 2,000 years and many cultures and languages removed, make sense of the answer to help us better understand Jesus in adulthood?
- Jesus had a mom and dad with personalities and commitments that shaped him.
- Jesus had younger siblings who followed him around, and maybe even relied on him.
- Jesus had a weighty lineage that could be traced all the way back to King David and Judah, one of the twelve sons of Jacob.
- Jesus was born in Bethlehem during the reign of a paranoid and violent king.
- Jesus grew up in Nazareth under Roman colonization and amid whispers of revolt.
Getting to know Jesus the boy is a significant piece of understanding Jesus the man. But, besides the birth stories in Matt. 1-2 and Luke 1-2 (with a short story about 12-year-old Jesus at the Temple at the end of Luke 2), we have nothing in the Bible that addresses Jesus’ formative years. At least, not directly.
What we can do is use context clues from the gospels, Paul’s letters, ancient historians like Josephus, and archaeological discoveries to paint a fuller picture of what Jesus’ childhood was like.
Jesus’ Family
In many societies, especially those in the modern West, where we normalize and celebrate individualism, we often imagine Jesus as quite singular, solitary, and set apart. We might even impose individualistic narratives on him, like that he discerned and accomplished his mission alone or that he “pulled himself up by his bootstraps.”
But the truth is that Jesus was fully human, and like all humans, Jesus — his birth, identity, perspectives, priorities, and sense of purpose — did not emerge from a vacuum. He was heavily influenced by the people around him, and, being from a more collectivist culture than many of us alive today, it makes sense that the people around him would shape who he is.
Jesus’ Parents
First, we have Jesus’ parents. Much has been written about Jesus’ mother, Mary, since we hear from her at Jesus’ birth and glimpse her relationship with Jesus as an adult. The song Mary sings when she is pregnant with Jesus (Luke 1:46-55) reveals how well-versed she is in the Bible, and we can assume she passed that wisdom to Jesus. She also seems to know of Jesus’ power even before his ministry has begun at the wedding in Cana (John 2:1-12), and she ends up following Jesus all the way to the cross, presumably as one of his disciples (John 19:25-27).
Less has been written about Jesus’ relationship with his (human) father, Joseph. Besides his brief appearance in Matt. 1-2, Joseph is not mentioned at all in the Bible, and most scholars believe he probably died before Jesus started his ministry. However, that doesn’t mean that Joseph had little impact on Jesus’ formative years.
If we read Matt. 1-2 from Joseph’s perspective, we can see that Jesus would have been immersed in stories about his own birth and childhood, not just from Mary, but from Joseph, too. Joseph understood Jesus to be his own son, conceived miraculously before he and Mary consummated their marriage. He did everything, including flee his homeland, to protect his wife and infant son when their lives were threatened.
Having a model of protective, intimate, parental love from both his mother and father may have helped Jesus articulate a compassionate and present God, who is close enough to refer to as “Abba,” Father, and in whom Jesus urged us to place our unequivocal trust.
Jesus’ Siblings
The New Testament also gives us glimpses of Jesus’ relationship with his siblings: James, Joses, Simon, Jude, and his unnamed sisters. Because Jesus was the oldest, it is likely that Jesus was responsible for helping with his younger siblings in childhood, and depending on the age gap, also for caring for them after Joseph died.
While John 7:1-5 tells a story where Jesus’ brothers were skeptical of his ministry, Acts and Paul’s letters (1 Cor. 15:7; Gal. 1:18-19) tell us that Jesus’ brother James became not only a disciple of Jesus, but one of the most important leaders of the church after Jesus’ ascension. It is James who makes the final judgment at the pivotal Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:13-21; Gal. 2:1-10), where the Jewish leaders decided that Gentiles did not need to convert to Judaism to follow Jesus.
Because of James’ leadership in the early church, it is reasonable to guess that we have the stories of Jesus’ birth and childhood thanks to his siblings. They would have told their family stories repeatedly as they talked about Jesus. Caring for his younger siblings during his formative years and navigating his relationship with them over the course of his ministry would have been immensely formative for Jesus’ character and priorities.
Jesus’ Ancestries
It was not only Jesus’ immediate family that shaped and influenced him. Communities of the ancient world were far more tight-knit than what many of us experience today, especially in the modern West. Ancient communities also felt far deeper connections to the people of the past. It’s not just where a person was from, but who a person was from that defined how they saw the world — and how the world saw them.
Jesus as a Descendant of David
Stories about our birth and early childhood provide each of us with a sense of identity, belonging, relationships, and expectations. One of the defining elements of Jesus’ early life is that he was born into the royal line of David. It is unlikely that this sort of heritage would have or could have been invented, since genealogies were closely remembered and orally tracked in the ancient world, and since Jesus’ siblings were around to correct any outright fabrications.
As a descendant of David and first-born son, Jesus would have felt an immense weight. First, being in the Davidic line was a liability. King Herod, who was from a family who converted to Judaism, was verifiably terrified of losing his power, and he was willing to kill, including his own sons and countless innocent people, to keep it.
To compound that reality, having David in his ancestry would have provided Jesus with a sense of destiny, especially since there was the lingering promise from God of future leadership from David’s line. People believed there would be a king-Messiah from the descendants of David who would save Israel from oppression. This expectation weighed heavily on Jesus and influenced how other people perceived him. When he rides into Jerusalem on the donkey at the end of his ministry, it is with this identity-marker that the crowds greet him: “Hosanna to the Son of David!” (Matt. 21:9).
This means Jesus was not only rooted in Jewish Scriptures as a story he could learn from; he was born into a family and a context where the story of Jewish Scripture was his story.
Jesus as a Jew, Judahite, and Judean
While many are familiar with the idea that Jesus was Jewish, we are not always familiar with the dimensions of what that actually means. Jesus was a Ioudaios, which is the Greek word that the New Testament uses as a rendering of the Hebrew word Yehudi. Our English word, “Jew,” is a contraction derived from these terms. To be a Ioudaios, for Jesus, was tridimensional:
- Jesus was a “Jew,” in terms of his ethno-religious identity. To be Jewish in this sense meant identifying with a specific ethnic group that saw itself as chosen and called by God in a unique way. It also meant worshipping the one true God, under the guardianship of the Law and with a special focus on the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus was a born Jew, not a convert to Judaism, which heightened this identity for him. This dimension of Ioudaios is a theological and philosophical outlook, which means it would have shaped everything about how Jesus saw the world.
- Jesus was a “Judahite,” in terms of his tribal heritage as a descendant of one of Jacob’s twelve sons, Judah. For those of us from the West, we probably have a hard time understanding the importance of Jesus belonging to a “tribe,” but in many indigenous cultures, tribal belonging remains an important part of identity. For Jesus to be able to trace his lineage back to a founding ancestor would have provided him with a sense of rootedness within his community and a shared history with his neighbors. In addition, the story of the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) is largely the story of Judah, as a tribe, within the broader tribes of Israel (e.g. Gen. 35:22; 42:13,32; 49:28; Ex. 24:4). This story would have been told to Jesus over and over, at the family dinner table as much as in the synagogue. It was the story that belonged to him, his family, and his community.
- Jesus was a “Judaean,” in terms of his physical regionality in the area known as Judea. As the ancestral land assigned to his ancestor Judah, Jesus would have felt a deep emotional tie to the land through his heritage. He would have been tangibly and intimately familiar with the landmarks mentioned throughout much of the Bible. As a native resident of the land, he would have spoken their language (Aramaic), dressed in their clothes, eaten their food, danced to their music, and felt most at home among their architecture and art.
Being Judean also means that Jesus would have experienced firsthand the violence and unrest that took place in Judea in the first century, too.
Jesus’ Traumas
Identity is about selfhood developed through social interaction. It governs how we relate to others and the world. It includes gender, ethnicity, culture, heritage, family, tribe, race, socio-economic class, occupation, politics, nationality, place, religion, physicality, sex, sexuality, parenthood, relationship status, age, ability/skill, and more.
One’s identity can also be linked to life experiences, and trauma is especially formative for a person’s perceptions of themselves and the world. Consider, for example, how survivors of crime, abuse, wars, health crises, or environmental disasters are shaped by their experiences.
As we consider Jesus’ formative years — where and who and what shaped him in his early life — we must include trauma. Before Jesus turned 12, he endured the threat of violence, escaped a horrific massacre, was hunted by political powers, lived as a refugee in a foreign land, and immigrated back to his own home, where political unrest and economic instability reigned.
Herod’s death and Jesus’ family’s move to Nazareth did not end the threats to Jesus’ life before he even began his ministry. There is a well-attested cultural memory of resistance to Roman rule in Judea during Jesus’ childhood. Rome met these rebellions with extreme violence.
Sociopolitical turbulence, imperial atrocities, and terrible pain and suffering at the hands of the Roman Empire defined Jesus’ childhood — and the hopeful expectations of his community as he grew up.
As we flesh out Jesus’ childhood, we get a fuller picture of how Jesus, having taken on human form, became the teacher, leader, and Messiah that we get to know in detail — and meet personally — in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Adapted from Boy Jesus: Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times by Joan Taylor.
Dr. Joan Taylor, a world authority on the history and literature of the first century AD, draws both on the latest archaeological findings and on the historical clues to be found within ancient texts of the period. The result is a book that brings the story of Jesus’ childhood clearly and vividly to life as never before, while also pointing to the many ways in which Jesus’ experiences as a child are likely to have influenced his life, attitudes, and actions as an adult.
Joan Taylor is Professor Emerita of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism, King's College London, and Honorary Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. Her recent books include The Essenes, the Scrolls and the Dead Sea (OUP, 2012), What Did Jesus Look Like? (Bloomsbury, 2018) and (with Helen Bond) Women Remembered: Jesus' Female Disciples (Hodder, 2022).
Falon Barton is the Campus Minister for the University Church of Christ at Pepperdine, focusing primarily on the spiritual formation of emerging adults. She is a freelance editor and an adjunct professor for college classes on the Bible, religion, and spirituality. She has her Doctor of Ministry from the Hazelip School of Theology at Lipscomb University, as well as an MA in Religion and BAs in Journalism and Hispanic Studies from Pepperdine University.
