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33 Questions About Jesus.
What the Gospels say about his life, and the years they skip. Each short answer starts with the record. Each one links to a full page with the verses and the scene from The Nazarene that tells that moment.
Part one: Jesus as a child
1.What was Jesus like as a kid?
The Bible gives us only a few lines about Jesus as a boy. It says he grew strong and wise, and God's grace was on him. Everything else about his day-to-day childhood is left for us to imagine.
2.Did Jesus go to school?
The Gospels never say Jesus went to school, but Luke shows him reading the scriptures out loud in the synagogue as a grown man (Luke 4:16 to 17). How and where he learned is something nobody knows for sure.
3.Did Jesus play games as a child?
The Gospels never show Jesus playing as a boy. They do show that he noticed how children played. Kids in his world played games just like kids today, so it is easy to picture him joining in.
4.Did Jesus ever get in trouble as a kid?
The only time the Gospels show Jesus upsetting anyone as a child is when he stayed behind in Jerusalem at twelve. His parents were scared and upset. Beyond that one story, the Gospels are quiet about his boyhood.
5.Did Jesus know he was God as a child?
Nobody knows exactly what Jesus understood about himself as a boy. The Gospels give one clue. At twelve, he called the Temple his Father's house, and Luke says he kept growing in wisdom after that.
6.What language did Jesus speak?
Jesus spoke Aramaic in daily life, the common language of Jewish people in Galilee in his time. He likely knew Hebrew from the scriptures too, and may have known some Greek.
7.What happened when Jesus was 12 in the Temple?
Luke says that at twelve, Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem after Passover, and his parents found him three days later in the Temple, listening to the teachers and asking them questions. It is the only story from his childhood that the Gospels tell.
8.Where did Jesus grow up?
Jesus grew up in Nazareth, a small village in Galilee in the north of Israel. Matthew and Luke say he was born in Bethlehem, and Matthew says his family spent time in Egypt before settling in Nazareth.
9.What was life like in Nazareth when Jesus was a boy?
Nazareth was a small farming village in the hills of Galilee, with maybe a few hundred people. Families worked the land, kept animals and lived in simple stone houses. A big city called Sepphoris stood just a few miles away.
10.What did Jesus do as a teenager?
The Gospels say nothing about Jesus as a teenager. The best clue is that his hometown later called him "the carpenter," so he most likely spent those years working with his hands in Nazareth.
11.Who were the wise men who visited Jesus?
Matthew calls them "wise men from the east." They came looking for a newborn king and brought gold, frankincense and myrrh. Matthew gives no number and no names, and he doesn't call them kings. Those details came later.
Part two: The hidden years
12.What did Jesus do from age 12 to 30?
The Gospels tell us only a little. After his visit to the Temple at twelve, Jesus went home to Nazareth, lived with his family, and grew up. By the time he began to teach at about thirty, his neighbors knew him as a carpenter.
13.Why doesn't the Bible talk about Jesus in his twenties?
The Gospel writers chose to focus on the last few years of Jesus's life, his teaching, his death, and what came after. They skip from age twelve to about thirty and never say why. His twenties are a quiet stretch that nobody wrote down.
14.What are the lost years of Jesus?
"The lost years" is a name people give to the time between Jesus at twelve and Jesus at about thirty. The Gospels say almost nothing about those eighteen years. They were lost to the written record, and that is all the phrase really means.
15.Did Jesus have brothers and sisters?
Yes, the Gospels say he did. Mark and Matthew name four brothers, James, Joses, Judah and Simon, and say he had sisters too. Some churches read these as cousins, or as Joseph's children from an earlier marriage.
16.Did Joseph die when Jesus was young?
The Gospels never say when Joseph died, and he drops out of the story after Jesus turns twelve. Many Christians have long believed he died before Jesus began to teach, but no Gospel says so.
17.Was Jesus a carpenter?
Yes, as far as the Gospels tell us. The people of his hometown called him "the carpenter" and "the carpenter's son." The Greek word means a builder who works with his hands, most often in wood.
18.What was Jesus's job before his ministry?
He worked with his hands. The Gospels say the people of Nazareth knew him as "the carpenter." That is the only job the record gives him before he began to teach at about thirty.
19.Did Jesus have a normal life before he started preaching?
It seems so. When he began to teach, the people of his hometown were shocked, which tells us he had lived among them as an ordinary working man. They knew his trade, his mother, and his brothers and sisters.
20.Why didn't Jesus join the Zealots and fight Rome?
The Gospels never tell of rebels asking him to join them. They do show him turning away from force. When a crowd wanted to make him king, he walked away from them. One of his twelve closest followers was called Simon the Zealot.
21.Did Jesus ever fall in love or almost marry?
The Gospels never mention a wife, and they never tell of a romance. Whether he ever loved someone or came close to marrying, the record does not say.
22.Did Jesus travel to India?
No. Nothing in the Gospels or the historical record says Jesus went to India. The idea comes from a book Nicolas Notovitch published in 1894, and historians who looked into it found that it did not hold up.
23.Did Jesus travel before he started teaching?
The Gospels do not say. They are silent about his life between age twelve and about thirty, so nobody knows whether he traveled. Far Country is a novel, and it imagines that he did.
24.Why did Jesus wait until 30 to start teaching?
The Gospels never say why. Luke tells us he was "about thirty" when he began and leaves it there. People have offered thoughtful guesses, but nobody knows for sure.
25.When did Jesus start his ministry?
Luke says Jesus was "about thirty years old" when he began to teach. Most historians place that start somewhere around AD 27 to 29. It began after John baptized him in the Jordan River.
Part three: His public life and the end
26.Why did Jesus refuse to be made king?
John's Gospel says that after Jesus fed a great crowd, the people meant to take him by force and make him king. He slipped away to the mountain alone. Later, on trial before Pilate, he said his kingdom was not of this world.
27.Who were the seventy disciples Jesus sent out?
Besides the twelve apostles, Jesus chose seventy more followers and sent them out in pairs to prepare the towns he planned to visit. Only Luke tells this story, and he does not give their names.
28.Why did Judas betray Jesus?
The Gospels give more than one answer. Matthew shows Judas asking the chief priests what they will pay. John calls him a thief. Luke says Satan entered him. Matthew also says that afterward Judas was sorry and tried to give the money back.
29.What happened on the third day?
Early on the first day of the week, women came to the tomb with spices. They found the stone rolled away and his body gone, and they were told he had risen. John adds that Mary Magdalene met Jesus himself in the garden and knew him when he said her name.
Part four: Knowing him now
30.Is Jesus still with us today?
Jesus promised he would not leave his friends alone. He told them the Father would send the Spirit of truth to live in them, and he said, "I am with you always." Acts tells how that Spirit came on them at Pentecost.
31.What did Jesus believe about God?
Jesus believed God is a Father who loves us and knows what we need before we ask. He prayed to God as Father, even on his worst night, and he taught his friends to begin their own prayers with "Our Father."
32.Did Jesus ask us to worship him, or to follow him?
Both are in the Gospels. People knelt before him, and he let them. But when he called someone, the words he used were "Follow me." He asked for people to walk with him and live the way he lived.
33.Can you leave church and still follow Jesus?
Many people who have stepped away from church still pray and still love Jesus. The Gospels show him going to the synagogue, and they also show him meeting most of the people in his story out in ordinary places.
Keep going
The people of the story, twelve portraits of the people around him in the Gospels.
Novels about the life of Jesus, and where The Nazarene fits.