Even though Jesus is alive and well in his church, we don’t get to live alongside him like his first disciples did. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are more than enough to become Jesus’ disciples, and yet, many of us long for more details to help us know Jesus better.
In Boy Jesus, Joan Taylor provides us with that. Not ponderings, but expertly researched
historical and contextual details that help us make informed guesses about what Jesus’ childhood was like, how he interacted with his family, and how his community helped him prepare for his ministry.
Here are four things Boy Jesus helps us do to know Jesus better:
Peel back the layers on what it means that, “Jesus was Jewish.”
While this is probably an obvious statement for most people who open the Bible, the layers of what it actually means are sometimes obscure to us today. Taylor reveals three dimensions of Jesus as a Ioudaios, the Greek word used in the New Testament that English translates and abbreviates to “Jew”:
- Jesus was a “Jew,” which refers to his ethno-religious identity
- Jesus was a “Judahite,” which refers to his tribal heritage as a descendant of one of Jacob’s twelve sons, Judah
- Jesus was a “Judaean,” which refers to the region of Judea, where he lived. All these dimensions represent different facets of identity, and all of them are important for understanding how Jesus saw himself and the world.
Flesh out Jesus’ relationship with his human father, Joseph.
Our connections with our parents are the most foundational relationships of our lives. While the gospels give us some insight into Jesus’ relationship with Mary (e.g., Luke 1-2; John 2:1-12 and 19:25-27), Joseph is hardly mentioned at all outside of Matthew 1-2. Taylor makes the case that it was Joseph who gave Jesus the imagination to call God “Abba.” Jesus needed the model of a loving, protective, intimate earthly father to know God the way he did.
Appreciate the fullness of Jesus’ vulnerability from the moment he was born.
The nativity stories in both Matthew and Luke repeat themes of displacement, unsafety, instability, and social marginality. It’s not just that Jesus was born to a lowly social status, though this is important, too. Taylor makes clear that Jesus was also born into trauma: civil unrest, economic instability, and paranoid political power that certainly affected him in personal and tangible ways. The fuller picture of the historical context of Jesus’ birth helps us better appreciate how vulnerable God chose to be as a human, and how deeply Jesus relates to the spectrum of our traumas and challenges today.
Discover how Jesus understood his own role as “the Son of David.”
Blind Bartimaeus refers to Jesus as the Son of David (Mark 10:46-52, Luke 18:35-43; Matthew 9:27-31), as do the crowds when Jesus enters Jerusalem (Matthew 21:9). Both Matthew and Luke make it clear that Jesus is descended from David. But Jesus never refers to himself with that title. Taylor explores how the story of Jesus’ lineage would have been passed down to him and how it would have affected his perception of himself and his role in the world.
Reading Boy Jesus is like watching home videos of your best friend’s childhood from before you knew them. It doesn’t change who they are, but it broadens and deepens your understanding of them. More importantly, Taylor’s research grows our tenderness and intimacy for Jesus by giving us a fuller sense of who he is as a child, and by extension, who he is as a man.