by Robert W. McDonald

Created on: February 09, 2010

It must be admitted that the available primary sources that specifically mention Jesus of Nazareth (the canonical gospels and the works of Josephus) say very little, if anything, about his political and social philosophy. In this essay I will argue that the positions taken by both the “Jesus was a political / social radical” and the “Jesus was the Messiah” camps are not supported by contemporary accounts of his life.

As a background, all that can be said with a reasonable degree of certainty is that Jesus of Nazareth was born to observant Jewish parents, was raised as an observant Jew, and lived an unremarkable childhood and adolescent life. At about 30 years of age Jesus embarked on a brief public career as an itinerate religious teacher, miracle-worker, and exorcist which earned him a bit of notoriety among the working class Jews of Judea. Although the reasons are not well understood, Jesus of Nazareth was arrested on the orders of senior members of the Great Sanhedrin and was then executed by the Roman military.

The opinions that Jesus of Nazareth taught a radical version of Jewish nationalism seem to be inconsistent with the scant details given in the gospels, particularly so in light of his “Render unto Caesar” comments as recorded in Mathew 22.

The Jews of first century Judea were expecting a political “moshiach” (lit. “anointed one;” the “Messiah”) who, like David, would unify the then-existing various factions of Judaism in common cause to expel the Romans and all other “Gentiles” from their Promised Land and then rule from Jerusalem. These religious / nationalist sentiments were duly noted by Josephus in both his “Antiquates” and “History of the Jewish War.” Nowhere, in the Biblical or the extra-Biblical writings of that era, is there to be found even a suggestion that this Messiah would be the “son of God” or a religious reformer.

The “Jesus as a social reformer” picture also fails when it is recalled that there is no mention in the gospel accounts of Jesus and his disciples of how this small band was able to travel around the countryside without having to support themselves financially. Since it is not mentioned in the gospels, it must be assumed that they did not work at occasional “odd jobs” to earn money to by food and clothing, much less to have money that they would give to the poor. In other words, who was paying the bills?

Most modern Biblical scholars hold that Jesus and his disciples were directly supported by women who had been widowed and received an inheritance from the dead husband's estates. If Jesus and his band of disciples were benefitting from the generosity of those that were supporting their activities, teaching the need for some “social revolution” or a “redistribution” of wealth would have made Jesus into a bigger hypocrite than the “Scribes and Pharisees” that he routinely denounced!

This brings us to the point where we can ask if Jesus of Nazareth was not a political figure, nor was he a social and religious reformer, then who was he? That question, in the absence of documentary evidence, must remain unknown. As noted above, there is so little that can be reliably stated about Jesus of Nazareth that any attempt to define him in the historical context of first century Judea that any opinion will be nothing more than pure speculation.

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