A SCEPTICAL ATHEISTIC BIBLE READING – THE GOSPELS – JESUS LEAVES NAZARETH
Matthew has Jesus return from The Wilderness to learn of the arrest of John The Baptist. Jesus commences his ministry right away. He travels the Near East practicing miracle healings and gains some positive reaction from this. The sick travel in to find him in hope of a cure. But where is Jesus? The man of Nazareth has now moved away to Capernaum. The question to ask here is why?
Exactly where Jesus lived and stayed throughout his ministry is unclear. Once he left the parental care of Mary & Joseph, he seems to have had no fixed home of his own, moving nomadically, depending on the hospitality of followers and town’s folk, or sleeping out in the open air. His carpentry work (he seems to have taken after his pretend father in this field) would have sustained him before he became a full time prophet. After that, he depended on alms, charity & good will. Though the Apostles roamed widely, Jesus stayed close to Galilee for much of the early part of his ministry.
Matthew attributes the move from Nazareth to Capernaum to a desire to fulfil a prophecy given in Isaiah. This exposes the very central problem with such prophesies. If I wanted to be a religious leader and found documented prophetic references to one being seen in Belgium, I would only have to head there on the next flight and make my presence known. Jesus seems to have practiced such a tick the boxes approach to being seen as the Chosen One. He may well have been surrounded by many others trying to be seen fulfilling the prophesies in a similar fashion.
An alternative reason for Jesus’ rapid departure from his hometown is given in Luke, and presents Jesus in quite a dark light. His preaching was not always popular, and not everyone who saw him was immediately filled with a sense of divine wonder. In Nazareth, an audience he tried to preach in front of openly rejected him. Jesus starts off well enough, quoting a familiar Old Testament prophesies from Isaiah predicting the coming of the Son of God. Jesus then spoils it all by announcing that the time has arrived, in effect, openly declaring he to be the Son of God they are all hoping for.
The audience in Nazareth are astonished, sceptical and angry. It’s understandable. That no one believes him. His approach is too direct. Jesus is soon identified as the son of Joseph, the Carpenter (suggesting that periods of absence have made him a partial stranger in town).
Jesus tries to control the direction their angry heckling will take, by suggesting that they will shout ‘physician heal you’, in effect, hoping they will call on him to heal the sick in Nazareth as he has already been seen doing in Capernaum. He probably hopes to perform or stage a similar healing on home turf now. (Visiting Capernaum first may have been from a suspicion that the home crowd might be a tough one. Maybe Jesus saw how other would-be messiahs were treated there by the sceptical towns-folk).
The Nazarenes don’t rise to his bait. His opportunity to show off with a few healings is thwarted. Jesus retorts that prophets are always rejected in their hometowns, and how those prophets got revenge by offering no assistance to their towns-folk in times of need. He tells them how Elijah offered no assistance during a famine in Israel, and Elisha didn’t help out when a leprosy outbreak occurred there either. The message is clear here – Jesus is telling Nazareth that if they don’t believe in him, he won’t help them out in times of hunger, earthquake, plague, etc. Nazareth stands rejected by its most famous son for not taking his fame as read from the outset. Jesus shows a remarkable lack of understanding of crowd dynamics here, and clearly has not studied books on how to win friends and influence people.
The crowd are deeply incensed. The shove Jesus out of the synagogue and take him out of town completely, turning into a lynch mob. They take him to a nearby cliff, intending to throw him over it, but Jesus manages to break free and escape. He returns to Capernaum – his mission in Nazareth has failed.
Whether Mary or Joseph (if he was even still alive at this stage) knew of this event or witnessed it is unclear.
We have already had brief, vague reports in the Gospels of Jesus gaining renown throughout the land, with people even pouring in from abroad specially to see him, so the lack of knowledge about him in Nazareth seems strange, unless the fame achieved is somewhat exaggerated at best by the Gospel authors. Jesus fared no better announcing his Godly status in Nazareth than I would fare strolling into my local church to declare myself the Son of God. I’d expect ridicule, anger and possibly even arrest, possibly even to have my sanity questioned. Jesus had miracles to fall back on and often uses these party tricks to overcome scepticism. He had a special fondness for any believing without seeing a cure or wonder, but nevertheless, he preaching was not universally accepted or welcomed.
Jesus seems to learn from this initial blunder. He is very discreet about who he openly announces his divinity to in future, though his claims to be The Son of God incarnate would still destroy him in the end.
© Copyright. Arthur Chappell
