Did I Think I Was a King?

Words to Know

Messiah / Christ — the anointed one. A king.

Genealogy — a family tree, used to prove someone’s descent.

Census — an official count of people, usually for taxes.

This is the most careful lesson in the book. You are getting both sides.

First, remember what the word means.

From Lesson 2: Christ means anointed, which means king.

By my lifetime, most people used it to mean a coming king from the family of David who would drive out the occupier and restore the nation.

How would anybody know what “most people” thought? From what got written down in the two centuries around my life. A Jewish poem from about fifty years before I was born, Psalms of Solomon 17, prays for God to raise up the son of David to purge Jerusalem of foreigners. ¹

It meant a man on a throne in Jerusalem, with the soldiers gone. It did not mean God. It did not mean a heavenly being who existed before the world was made. And it did not mean somebody who dies for your sins.

Go deeperWhat the Dead Sea Scrolls and the gospels expected

The poem is not the only witness. The library found in caves by the Dead Sea at Qumran, copied in the same period, is also waiting for anointed figures, and it expects two of them: an anointed priest and an anointed king. Both are men.

Your own gospels report the street version of the same hope. When I rode into Jerusalem, the crowd shouted about the coming kingdom of our ancestor David (Mark 11:10). ¹

That is a large claim, so here is how to test it.

Somebody will hand you Isaiah 53, the servant who is wounded for our transgressions, or Daniel 7:13, one like a son of man, coming on the clouds. Read them. Then check one thing: does the passage use the word? Messiah is a Hebrew word, mashiach, and it means anointed. Neither passage contains it. Where the word does turn up, it is on kings and priests, and once on a foreign emperor, Cyrus of Persia, for sending my people home (Isaiah 45:1).

And I will hand you the one that cuts against me. Daniel 9:25–26 does use the word, and says that an anointed one will be cut off. What that difficult passage describes is argued over, but it is there. ²

Here is the honest shape of it. The picture you were raised on — one figure, promised in advance, who is God, and who dies to pay for sin — was assembled out of these separate passages afterward, by people trying to explain something that had already happened to them. In Unit Two you will watch them do the assembling.

Go deeperThree more passages to test

Isaiah 53 and Daniel 7 are the two you will hear most often, but they are not the only ones. You will also be handed Psalm 110, Isaiah 9:6 and Zechariah 12:10. Read those three as well, and ask each one the same question.

None of them contains the word either. Across all five passages you will find a wounded servant, a heavenly figure, a king, a child and a pierced one, and not one of them is called the anointed one.

The people who are called anointed are easy to list: Saul, David, Solomon and the high priest, and then Cyrus, the foreign emperor.

Daniel 9, the passage that does use the word, sits inside a difficult prophecy about the city and its ruin. I would rather you heard about it from me than from somebody who is angry at this book. ²

Now the evidence that I was acting the part.

I picked twelve men. Remember Lesson 4: twelve sons, twelve tribes. Ten of those tribes had been gone since Assyria carried them off in 722 BC (2 Kings 17:5–6). A restored nation with all twelve tribes back was one of the great hopes. So a man deliberately appointing twelve is acting out the restoration of the nation, in public, where everyone can see. And I told them they would sit on twelve thrones (Matthew 19:28).

I rode into the capital on a donkey. I arranged for the animal in advance (Mark 11:1–10). There is an old prophecy about a king entering the city on a donkey (Zechariah 9:9), but the earliest account does not quote it; Matthew and John do, writing later. So either I arranged the entry to act out that prophecy, or later writers found the verse that made sense of it. Serious people hold both. What is in the earliest account is what the crowd did. They spread their cloaks on the road, which is what you do for a king.

Go deeperWhy twelve, and how the donkey was arranged

The ten lost tribes had been gone for about seven hundred years when I picked my twelve men. Nobody in Galilee would have mistaken twelve chosen men for a study group. The number itself was the message.

The donkey was set up just as carefully. Read Mark’s account again and notice the instructions I gave, and the words my followers were to say if anyone asked why they were taking the animal (Mark 11:1–6). An entry arranged that carefully was meant to be seen.

I made a scene in the Temple.

This is the single most important thing I did, and it is the reason I was killed (Mark 11:15–17).

You met the Temple in Lesson 4: the largest institution in the country, a treasury and a tax authority with a claim on every grown man. Two trades worked in its outer court, both for sensible reasons. The Temple tax had to be paid in one particular silver coin, so pilgrims had to exchange their money, for a fee. And a pilgrim who had walked a hundred miles could not bring a lamb with him, so animals for the offerings were sold on the spot.

What I did was drive out the sellers and the buyers and turn over the money changers’ tables and the seats of the men selling doves. Then I quoted two prophets at them: my house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers (Mark 11:17; Isaiah 56:7; Jeremiah 7:11).

In festival week, in the busiest courtyard in the country, I interrupted the exchange and the supply. That means I interrupted the sacrifices, and the Temple’s income, and the arrangement the priestly families lived on. Nobody in charge had to wonder what it meant.

Go deeperThe size of what I interrupted

Your church may mention this scene without ever explaining it. The Temple was not a chapel. It was the biggest employer in Jerusalem, and at festival time it killed and processed animals on an industrial scale. Every grown man in the nation owed it a half shekel a year, paid in that one silver coin.

Mark adds a detail most readers skip: I would not let anyone carry goods through the court (Mark 11:16). That is not a man tidying up a place of worship. It is a man shutting down the central financial operation of a nation, in its busiest week, in front of a crowd.

My own followers expected a government. Two of them asked to sit at my right and left when I came into my glory (Mark 10:35–37). That is a request for cabinet positions. And after I was killed, two of them walking away said the saddest sentence in your Bible: we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel (Luke 24:21). Had hoped. Past tense. They thought the plan had failed, because the plan they signed up for was the liberation of a country.

Rome agreed with all of this. They wrote my crime on a board and nailed it over my head. It said King of the Jews (Mark 15:26). That is not a religious statement. It is a criminal charge.

Now the other side, which is just as real.

I almost never said the word. Go looking in the earliest gospel for a plain sentence where I announce it. You will have trouble. When Peter says it, I tell my followers to keep quiet (Mark 8:29–30). That happens over and over. When it was put to me directly, I dodged. The Roman governor asks: are you the king of the Jews? The answer is you say so (Mark 15:2). That is not a yes. It is not a no either. When a crowd tried to make me king by force, I left (John 6:15).

And the two birth stories do not agree.

The two gospels that tell my birth tell it differently. In Matthew, my family seems to already live in Bethlehem. In Luke, we live in Nazareth and travel to Bethlehem for a registration.

Luke ties that registration to Quirinius, the Roman governor of Syria, whose census Josephus dates to AD 6 (Luke 2:2; Josephus, Antiquities 18.1–2). But Matthew and Luke both place my birth in the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BC. That is a gap of about ten years. Many solutions have been proposed. None of them has convinced the people who study this for a living. ³

Both also give a family tree, a genealogy, to prove I descend from David. They give different names for my grandfather: Jacob in Matthew 1:16, Heli in Luke 3:23. And both trace the line through Joseph, who, in those same two gospels, is not my father (Matthew 1:18–25; Luke 1:34–35).

Nobody has ever put the two pages side by side for you. You can do it tonight.

Go deeperThe birth stories and family trees side by side

Mark and John say nothing at all about my birth. They begin with me as a grown man. Only Matthew and Luke tell the story, which is why those two are the pair to lay side by side.

In Matthew, the wise men find the child in a house in Bethlehem (Matthew 2:11). The family then flees to Egypt and afterward settles in Nazareth as a new home. In Luke, the family lives in Nazareth, goes to Bethlehem only for the registration, and then returns home (Luke 2:4; Luke 2:39).

Both gospels place the birth under Herod the Great (Matthew 2:1; Luke 1:5), so the ten-year gap is not one writer’s slip. No child is born both before 4 BC and in AD 6. ³

The family trees differ in more than the grandfather. They run through different sons of David, and they count different numbers of generations.

I am not telling you this to hurt you. You have been asked your whole life to believe these books agree in every detail, and comparing the two pages takes about ten minutes.

So what is the honest answer?

Here is mine, and I will mark it as mine.

I behaved like a man acting out the restoration of my nation. I picked twelve. I rode in on the donkey. I turned over tables at the Temple. I did those things on purpose and in public, and I knew how they would be read.

And I was careful with the word itself, because the word came with an army attached, and the kind of king people wanted was not what I was trying to be. I let other people say it. When a Roman official put it to me, I neither claimed it nor denied it.

Did I think God was about to turn the world over through me? Yes. I said so constantly.

Did I think I was going to sit on a throne with an army? No.

And now the hinge of everything that comes next.

We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.

Sit with those men on that road. Their teacher has been executed by the government as a political criminal. In their world, a crucified messiah was not a tragedy. It was a contradiction. A messiah who gets killed by the empire has not done the thing a messiah does.

Everything that becomes your religion starts in the days after that. Something happened to those people, and I will be careful here.

What they came to believe spread fast. About twenty-five years after my death, Paul quotes a short formula he says he received, listing who saw me (1 Corinthians 15:3–8). A quoted formula is older than the letter that quotes it. People were already reciting it within a few years. ⁴

Some of them died and did not retract. Much of what you have heard about how the apostles died is late legend. What is documented: James son of Zebedee was executed around AD 44 (Acts 12:2), and my brother James was killed in Jerusalem about AD 62, recorded by Josephus, who was not a Christian. ⁵ Nobody is recorded as taking it back, but that is an argument from the absence of a record, and an absence is weak evidence.

And the movement did not end. Your own New Testament names two that did: Theudas and Judas the Galilean. Both gathered followers, both were killed, and both movements scattered (Acts 5:36–37). This one grew, fast, in the place where the killing happened.

Every historian agrees there is something to explain. They do not agree on what.

And I am not going to settle it for you. I told you at the start I would say so when the evidence ran out. It runs out here.

What I can tell you, and what Unit Two is about, is what those people did next.

Go deeperHow the early evidence is established

Paul gives a second clue to how early this was, next to the formula he quotes in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8. In another letter he says he went up to Jerusalem and met Peter and my brother James face to face (Galatians 1:18–19). He heard it from the people who were there, within a few years, and not from a legend that had generations to develop. ⁴

My followers also said it where it could be checked: in Jerusalem, the city where the execution had happened.

The deaths are better documented than the lesson has space to show. James son of Zebedee was executed by Herod Agrippa (Acts 12:2). The record of my brother’s death is in Josephus, Antiquities 20.200. Peter and Paul died at Rome under Nero, and a letter written from Rome about AD 96 already refers to their deaths as known (1 Clement 5). ⁵

The silence cuts both ways. If somebody had taken it back, that might not have been written down either.

Theudas and Judas the Galilean are not only in Acts. Josephus tells both stories as well (Antiquities 20.97–98; 18.4–10), so the pattern of a killed leader and a scattered movement is confirmed outside the Bible.

You believe one thing. Somebody at your work believes another. It cannot be settled from where you are sitting.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Matthew 1:1–16 and Luke 3:23–38, side by side.

You will find: two different family trees, with different names for my grandfather.

Then look up: Luke 24:21. Notice the tense.

The Short Version

• Messiah meant a political king, not a heavenly savior.
• I acted the part in public — twelve men, the donkey, the Temple.
• But I never plainly claimed the word, and I dodged it when a Roman asked.
• My followers expected a government. After I died they had to explain a crucified king. That is where your religion begins.

Think About It

1. Why would the earliest writers record my followers asking for cabinet jobs, if it made them look bad?
2. Does it change anything for you that the two family trees disagree? Why or why not?