When he came to the village of Nazareth, his boyhood home, he went as usual to the synagogue on the Sabbath and stood up to read the Scriptures…. The people in the synagogue were furious. Jumping up, they mobbed him.
LUKE 4:16, 28–29
It was what Jesus said that got him in trouble.
Without actually using the m word, he managed to make it clear that he was the Messiah whom God had promised to send. That would have been tough enough for the home folks to believe, because they knew Jesus was a carpenter, not a king. But he also invoked God’s holy Word to make his “blasphemous” case. Then he refused to back up his claim. No Messiah-proving miracles. He would neither put up nor shut up.
When the home folks expressed their doubts about his incredible claim, he gave them a short course in Jewish history that sounded a tad like a parable. The moral: God would eat pork with a pagan before he’d share a meal with the likes of you Nazareth Jews.
Hometown boy or not, Jesus sounded as if he had grown up into a false prophet. Jews knew what to do with false prophets: “The false prophets or visionaries who try to lead you astray must be put to death…. In this way you will purge the evil from among you” (Deuteronomy 13:5).
Stoning criminals was the typical form of execution in this land lumped with more than its fair share of stones. But instead, they decided to throw him at the stones. They’d dump him over a cliff at the edge of town, like a sack of garbage.
It’s impossible to know exactly when this sermon took place. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke each tell the story; yet only Luke, reporting the episode in the greatest detail, placed it at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry—right after the Temptation.
Luke probably wasn’t following a chronological timeline, many Bible experts say. After all, he reported that this story came after Jesus had taught and healed people “in Capernaum” (Luke 4:23). Perhaps Luke put the story up front as a literary technique—foreshadowing:
1. Jesus’ rejection in Nazareth foreshadowed his later rejection by the Jewish nation.
2. Jesus’ mistreatment as a prophet at home foreshadowed that he would suffer the fate of many Jewish prophets. He would die at the hands of his own people.
Whatever the timing, at some point in his ministry Jesus found himself addressing the hometown crowd during a Sabbath-day synagogue service.
This is the oldest known report of what took place during ancient synagogue services. But to fill in some of the detail, scholars turn to the ancient teachings of Jewish rabbis in writings such as the Mishnah.
The Mishnah wasn’t written until about AD 200. But it preserves teachings and history passed on by word of mouth from centuries earlier. This includes reports about how the Jews worshipped in the synagogue. By the time of Jesus, the Jews had been worshipping in synagogues for perhaps five centuries. So the worship rituals were well established.
It took at least 10 men to get a synagogue up and running. During each service, the Jews would:
• Recite the closest thing they had to a creed: Deuteronomy 6:4–9. It’s called the Shema (“hear”). And it begins, “Listen, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.” It’s the Jewish version of Christianity’s Apostles’ Creed—a statement of core beliefs.
• Recite a collection of prayers. (To read some prayers from this collection, see “How Jews Prayed in Jesus’ Day,” page 131.)
• Read a passage from the Law—one of the first five books of the Bible. This was read in the Hebrew original and translated into Aramaic, the most popular Jewish language at the time. The Jews had picked up Aramaic during their exile in Babylon (modern-day Iraq).
• Read a passage from the Prophets.
• Sing psalms and other songs of worship.
• Listen to a sermon about the Bible passage.
• Close with a benediction.
In later centuries, the Jews selected the Bible passages ahead of time—cycling through the entire set of readings every three years. But it’s uncertain whether they used this cycle in Jesus’ day. Many Bible experts say Jesus probably selected the passage himself, rather than providentially coming to Nazareth just in time for this particular reading.
Jesus read two passages from the prophet Isaiah. If ever Jesus had a mission statement, this is it: “The Spirit of the LORD is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free, and that the time of the LORD’s favor has come” (Luke 4:18–19, paraphrasing Isaiah 61:1–2; 58:6).
When Jews in ancient times read these two passages from Isaiah, they believed the prophet was talking about the Messiah. Based on many passages in Isaiah and in other books of prophecy, the Jews understood that God would send his special servant to save the Jewish nation from their oppressors and restore the glory of Israel.
Jesus’ first zinger in the worship service came after he read that passage. It was apparently his preamble to a sermon he never got to preach: “The Scripture you’ve just heard has been fulfilled this very day!” (Luke 4:21).
Translation: “The Messiah is here. And it’s me.”
There had to have been a pause—a moment for the audacity and sheer chutzpah of Jesus’ statement to sink in.
Once it did, the deeply offended crowd scoffed, “He’s just a carpenter, the son of Mary and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon. And his sisters live right here among us” (Mark 6:3).
Carpenters got no respect—not when it came to matters of the brain. Carpenters and other laborers who depended more on their backs than their brains were considered essential to the community, but too lowbrow for high thought.
Consider a few examples from ancient history:
Peg the philosopher. A few decades after Jesus, a carpenter’s son dared to step into the academia of Athens. He became a philosopher in a city famous for philosophy. His name was Secundus. But they called him Peg. As in “dumb as a wooden nail.” He never made the big time, though one of his students did: Herodes Atticus. Herodes later disowned Peg as his mentor.
Too dumb to understand smart people. One book in the Apocrypha, a collection of Jewish books written between the time of the Old and New Testaments, joins the ancient crowd in demeaning workaday grunts. After admitting that “no city can get by without them,” the writer goes on to say they’re so busy with their business that they don’t have time to study and seek wisdom. This lack of wisdom is why “they don’t sit in the chair of a ruler or a judge. They don’t even understand the decisions a judge makes. Nor can they talk intelligently about lofty ideals such as discipline or judgment” (Sirach 38:32–33 AUTHOR’S PARAPHRASE).
Nothing special about wood. Celsus was a philosopher in the AD 100s who attacked Christianity and demeaned what he saw as a wood theme in the religion: “Everywhere they [Christians] speak in their writings about the tree of life…. I imagine because their master was nailed to a cross and was a carpenter by trade. Maybe if he happened to be thrown off a cliff … there would have been a cliff of life” (Against Celsus, book 6, chapter 34).
A Christian scholar named Origen wrote a rebuttal in his book Against Celsus. But instead of defending Jesus’ calloused hands, Origen seemed to consider it an unwinnable debate. He simply said that Celsus didn’t know what he was talking about: “Celsus appears to me to confuse matters which he has imperfectly heard.” End of discussion.
Nazareth continued its attack on Jesus by saying he’d grown up right in front of their eyes—as if that disqualified him as the Messiah.
The implication is funny, because they dissed themselves without realizing it. They actually sounded as if they agreed with the disciple Nathanael, who, after hearing that the Messiah had come from Nazareth, replied, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from Nazareth?” (John 1:46).
Apparently not.
Jesus replied with an old saying that doesn’t seem to fit the context: “You will undoubtedly quote me this proverb: ‘Physician, heal yourself’—meaning, ‘Do miracles here in your hometown like those you did in Capernaum’ ” (Luke 4:23).
What made Jesus think the proverb “Physician, heal yourself” meant he should perform miracles?
This particular proverb wasn’t one that people quoted word for word. It was a general idea that shows up in several ancient Greek and Jewish writings—each time expressed in a different way.
Here’s one version of it from an article written in the AD 100s: “You seem like a pharmacist coughing—while trying to sell us a sure-fire cure for coughing” (Apology for “On salaried posts in great houses”).
If we apply the idea behind this criticism to Jesus’ situation, it’s as if he’s anticipating that the Jews are about to say something like this: “You seem like a carpenter trying to tell us you’re the Messiah. We’ve already seen your woodwork, so show us your miracles.”
In other words, put up or shut up. How can a physician heal others if he can’t heal himself? How can a pharmacist cure the cough of others if he can’t cure his own cough? How can a carpenter be the Messiah if he can’t do anything more miraculous than frame a doorway?
Perhaps Jesus knew that no amount of miracles would persuade these people. So he essentially told them they weren’t worth the trouble. And he did it in a way that suggested their ancestors weren’t worth the trouble, either. Ancestors of the Jews
• mistreated prophets. In what became the first time on record for Jesus to identify himself as a prophet, he reminded the worshippers that the Jews had a long history of rejecting their homegrown prophets. Ancient Jewish writings report that King Manasseh ordered Isaiah sawn in half. King Zedekiah ordered Jeremiah thrown into a muddy pit. Amos, Hosea, and a long line of other prophets wasted their words on deaf ears.
• got bypassed by the miracle workers. Drawing from one of the lowest spiritual moments in Jewish history—when evil Ahab and Jezebel reigned—Jesus reminded the hometown folks of miracles that two prophets had done for non-Jews. Elijah, during a three-and-a-half-year drought, miraculously provided flour and olive oil for a widow living in what is now Lebanon. And Elisha cured a Syrian soldier from leprosy.
Here’s the clincher—the spark that lit the riot. Jesus said the prophets performed these miracles for the unchosen, unholy, Gentile “dogs”—as some Jews described non-Jews—even though “there were many widows in Israel” and “many lepers in Israel.”
The force of these words might have translated into something like this: “God would prefer the companionship of a flea-bitten Gentile dog to the sorry company of you or your mother.”
For the benediction, the Jews escorted Jesus to a nearby cliff.
Somehow, he escaped: “He passed right through the crowd and went on his way” (Luke 4:30). Perhaps he slipped away in the confusion. Or maybe it was a miracle—the only one he felt they deserved.
JEWISH CRIMES TO DIE FOR
There are two dozen capital offenses preserved in the laws of Moses—the four books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
There’s no indication that the Jews regularly imposed the ultimate penalty in each case. In fact, there are many instances in which they didn’t punish the offender at all. One of the more famous examples was when some Jewish leaders brought to Jesus a woman caught in the act of adultery. With Jesus’ help, she walked.
Nazareth Jews tried to execute Jesus for the crime of being a false prophet.
Criminal by nearly any standard
• Murder (Exodus 21:12, 14)
• Sacrificing a child to an idol (Leviticus 20:2)
• Kidnapping (Exodus 21:16)
• Lying to convict a person of a capital offense (Deuteronomy 19:16–19)
• Failure to control a violent animal that ends up killing someone (Exodus 21:29)
• Ignoring the verdict of a judge (Deuteronomy 17:12)
Bad kids
• Hitting either parent (Exodus 21:15)
• Persistent disobedience toward parents (Deuteronomy 21:18–21)
• Showing disrespect toward either parent (Exodus 21:17)
Spirit world
• Witchcraft (Exodus 22:18)
• Consulting with mediums or spirits of the dead (Leviticus 20:27)
Sex sins
• Sex with an animal (Leviticus 20:15)
• Raping an engaged woman (Deuteronomy 22:23–24; rape of other single women drew a fine and a shotgun wedding)
• Adultery (Leviticus 20:10)
• Incest with mother or stepmother (Leviticus 20:11)
• Incest with daughter-in-law (Leviticus 20:12)
• Marrying a mother and her daughter (Leviticus 20:14)
• Homosexuality (Leviticus 20:13)
• Priest’s daughter becoming a prostitute (Leviticus 21:9)
• Nonvirgin passing herself off as a virgin to get married (Deuteronomy 22:20–21)
Breaking religious laws
• False prophecy (Deuteronomy 13:5)
• Worshipping idols (Deuteronomy 13:6–9)
• Using God’s name disrespectfully (Leviticus 24:16)
• Working on the Sabbath day of rest (Exodus 31:15)