9 Things You Think You Know About Jesus That Are Probably Wrong - Salon.com

FRIDAY, FEB 27, 2015 12:30 AM PST

9 things you think you knowabout Jesus that areprobably wrongFor starters, it's unlikely that he had long, flowing hair, and he wasn't necessarily hungon a cross

VALERIE TARICO, ALTERNET

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TOPICS: ALTERNET, JESUS CHRIST, THE BIBLE, CHRISTOPHER DODD, D-CONN., GOD, POLITICS NEWS

(Credit: Wikimedia)

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

Jesus has been described as the best known figure inhistory, and also the least known. If you mentionedthe name “Jesus” and someone asked Jesus who,

you might blink. Or laugh. Even people who don’t think Jesus was God mostly believethey know a fair bit about him. You might be surprised that some of your most basicassumptions about Jesus are probably wrong.

We have no record of anything that was written about Jesus by eyewitnesses or othercontemporaries during the time he would have lived, or for decades thereafter.Nonetheless, based on archeological digs and artifacts, ancient texts and art, and evenforensic science, we know a good deal about the time and culture in which the NewTestament is set. This evidence points to some startling conclusions about who Jesuslikely was—and wasn’t.

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disciples would have been practicing Jews, and all great rabbis we know of were married.A rabbi being celibate would have been so unusual that some modern writers haveargued Jesus must have been gay. But a number of ancient texts, including the canonicalNew Testament, point to a special relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus.The Gospel of Phillip says, “[Jesus] loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kissher often on her mouth.”

2. Cropped hair, not long.Jewish men at the time of Christ did not wear their hair long. ARoman triumphal arch of the time period depicts Jewish slaves with short hair. In theApostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he addresses male hair length. “Does notnature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him?” (1Corinthians 11:14 NRSV). During the 1960s, conservative Christians quoted this verse toexpress their disgust against the hippy movement and to label it anti-Christian.

3. Hung on a pole, not necessarily a cross.For centuries scholars have known that theGreek New Testament word “stauros,” which is translated into English as cross, can referto a device of several shapes, commonly a single upright pole, “torture stake” or even tree.The Romans did not have a standard way of crucifying prisoners, and Josephus tells usthat during the siege of Jerusalem, soldiers nailed or tied their victims in a variety ofpositions. Early Christians may have centered on the vertical pole with a crossbeambecause it echoed the Egyptian ankh, a symbol of life, or the Sumerian symbol forTammuz, or because it simply was more artistically and symbolically distinctive than thealternatives. Imagine millions of people wearing a golden pole on a chain around theirnecks.

4. Short, not tall. The typical Jewish man at the time of the Roman Empire would havebeen just over five feet tall, which makes this a best guess for the height of Jesus. That heis typically depicted taller derives from the mental challenge people have distinguishingphysical stature from other kinds of stature. Great men are called “big men” and “largerthan life.” In ancient times they often were assigned divine parentage and miraculousbirths, and the idea that Jesus was uniquely divine has created a strong pull over time todepict him as taller than is likely. A good illustration of this is the Shroud of Turin, whichis just one of many such Jesus-shrouds that circulated during medieval times and whichbears the image of a man closer to six feet in height.

5. Born in a house, not a stable. The miraculous birth story of Jesus is a late, maybesecond-century addition to the Bible, and it contains many fascinatingmythicelements and peculiarities. But the idea that Jesus was born in a stable was added to theChristmas story even later. In the original narrative, Joseph and Mary probably wouldhave stayed with relatives, and the phrase “no room for them in the inn (gr: kataluma)”is better translated “no room for them in the upper room.” Later storytellers did notunderstand that people of the time might bring animals into their ground floor, as inSwiss housebarns, and they assumed that the presence of a manger implied a stable.

6. Named Joshua, not Jesus. The name Joshua (in Hebrew Y’hoshuʿa meaning“deliverance” or “salvation”), was common among Jews in the Ancient Near East as it istoday. Joshua and Jesus are the same name, and are translated differently in our modernBible to distinguish Jesus from the Joshua of the Old Testament, who leads the Hebrewpeople to the Promised Land. In actuality, the relationship between the two figures isfascinating and important.Some scholars believe that the New Testament gospels aremostly historicized and updated retellings of the more ancient Joshua story, with episodesinterwoven from stories of Elisha and Elijah and Moses. A modern parallel can be foundin the way Hollywood writers have reworked Shakespearean tropes and plot elementsinto dozens of modern movies (though for a very different purpose).

7. Number of apostles (12) from astrology, not history. Whether Jesus had 12 discipleswho were above his other devotees is an open question. The number 12 was consideredauspicious by many ancient peoples, and the fellowship of 12 disciples, who are depictedin Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, likely get their count from the same source as the 12 signs

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12 “legitimate” successors to the prophet Mohammed. But since the Gospels echo thestory of Joshua, the 12 apostles most closely parallel the 12 tribes of Israel.

8. Prophecies recalled, not foretold. Even people who aren’t too sure about the divinityof Jesus sometimes think that the way he fulfilled prophecies was a bit spooky, like thewritings of Nostradamus. In reality, Scooby Doo could solve this one in a single episodewith three pieces of information: First, Old Testament prophecies were well known tofirst-century Jews, and a messianic figure who wanted to fulfill some of these propheciescould simply do so. For example, in the book of Matthew, Jesus seeks a donkey to rideinto Jerusalem “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet” (Matthew21:4). Second, “gospels” are a genre of devotional literature rather than objectivehistories, which means that the authors had every reason to shape their stories aroundearlier predictions. Third, scholars now believe that some Bible texts once thought to beprophecies (for example in the Book of Revelation) actually relate to events that werecurrent or past at the time of writing.

9. Some Jesus quotes not from Jesus; others uncertain. Lists of favorite Jesus sayingsabound online. Some of the most popular are the Beatitudes (blessed are the meek, etc.) orthe story of the woman caught in adultery (let he who is without sin cast the first stone) orthe Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you, which, we are told,sums up the Law and the Prophets).

Which words are actually from Jesus? This question has been debated fiercely byeveryone from third-century Catholic Councils to the 20th-century Jesus Seminar.Even Thomas Jefferson weighed in, but much remains unclear. The New TestamentGospels were written long after Jesus would have died, and no technology existed withwhich to record his teachings in real time, unless he wrote them down himself, which hedidn’t.

We can be confident that at least some of the wise and timeless words andcatchyproverbs attributed to Jesus are actually from earlier or later thinkers. For example, theGolden Rule was articulated before the time of Christ by theRabbi Hillel the Elder, whosimilarly said it was the “whole Torah.” By contrast, the much-loved story of the womancaught in adultery doesn’t appear in manuscripts until the fourth century. Attributingwords (or whole texts) to a famous person was common in the Ancient Near East, becauseit gave those words extra weight. Small wonder then that so many genuinely valuableinsights ended up, in one way or another, paired with the name of Jesus.

The person of Jesus, if indeed there was such a person, is shrouded in the fog of historyleaving us only with a set of hunches and traditions that far too often are treated asknowledge. The “facts” I have listed here are largely trivial; it doesn’t really matterwhether Jesus was tall or short, or how he cut his hair. But it does matter, tremendously,that “facts” people claim to know about how Jesus saw himself, and God and humanityare equally tenuous.

The teachings attributed to Jesus mix enduring spiritual and moral insights withirrelevancies and Judaica and bits of Iron Age culture, some of which are truly awful. Thatleaves each of us, from the privileged vantage of the 21st century, with both a right and aresponsibility to consider the evidence and make our own best guesses about what is realand how we should then live. A good starting place might be a little more recognition thatwe don’t know nearly as much as we’d like to think, and a lot of what we know for sure isprobably wrong.

MORE VALERIE TARICO.

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