Context and overview – Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus, c. AD 93–94, a source for the chronology of Jesus. The Christian gospels do not claim to provide an exhaustive list of the events in the life of Jesus. They were written as theological documents in the context of early Christianity rather than historical chronicles, and their authors showed little interest in an absolute chronology of Jesus or in synchronizing the episodes of his life with the secular history of the age.

• One indication that the gospels are theological documents rather than historical chronicles is that they devote about one-third of their text to just seven days, namely the last week of the life of Jesus in Jerusalem, also known as the Passion of Christ,
• Nevertheless, the gospels provide some details regarding events which can be clearly dated, so one can establish date ranges regarding major events in Jesus’ life by comparison with independent sources.

A number of historical non-Christian documents, such as Jewish and Greco-Roman sources, have been used in historical analyses of the chronology of Jesus. Almost all modern historians agree that Jesus existed, and regard his baptism and his crucifixion as historical events, and assume that approximate ranges for these events can be estimated.

What is the real age of Jesus when he died?

How old was Jesus when he died? – Jesus was born around 4 B.C. and was crucified in A.D.30, according to the PBS FRONTLINE show “From Jesus to Christ.” Britannica cites his birth year as ranging from 6 to 4 B.C, and has the same death year as Frontline.

• In general, Jesus’ age at death is heavily contested by scholars, according to “Dating the Death of Jesus” by Helen Bond and published online by Cambridge University Press in 2013.
• Some cite Jesus’ death as happening on 14th of Nisan, which would be “Friday April 7th 30 or April 3rd 33,” based on a scholar’s timeline preference, but Bond does not subscribe to the specificity of those dates.

Depending on which calendars or accounts of Jesus’ final days people use, it is difficult to find one specific answer on when Jesus died and as a result, how old he was. However, Bond makes the case Jesus died around Passover, between A.D.29 and 34. Considering Jesus’ varying chronology, he was 33 to 40 years old at his time of death.

How many years did Jesus live?

What did Jesus do for 30 years?

Jesus’ ministry started with an act of humility The students in Weekday Religious Education will be studying the life of Jesus Christ this semester. Won’t you step into our classroom and study with us as we learn about the example Jesus left for us to follow and the gift He promised us? During Jesus first 30 years, He did no miracles and preached no sermons.

At 30, He left Nazareth and went to a place along the banks of the Jordan River. Someone was there getting the Jewish people ready for their Messiah, the Promised One. Everyone was excited about this very strange person. His name was John and he said he was preparing the way for the coming Messiah, the ruler of Israel, God’s people.

John didn’t have a pulpit or a building, he just stood at the banks of the river where he preached and baptized many people. He preached a powerful message of repentance. They called him John the Baptist. He wore simple clothes made from camel’s hair and a leather belt.

What year was Jesus born?

What is known about the birth of Jesus according to the Bible? – The Bible recounts the life of Jesus and his birth. So there is little valid information about the actual date of Jesus’ birth. What emerges from the two biblical traditions of Luke and Matthew is:

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Judea. Herod the Great was king in Israel at the time of Jesus’ birth. But he actually died already in 4 BC and not in the year 0, so the period from 7 to 4 BC can be considered as the time of Jesus’ birth. Jesus’ parents were called Mary and Joseph, who were engaged at the time of his birth. According to the Bible, the birth of Jesus was a virgin birth by the action of the Holy Spirit.

Where was Jesus buried?

Church of the Holy Sepulchre – A diagram of the modern church showing the traditional site of Calvary and the Tomb of Jesus The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a church in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, It contains, according to traditions dating back to the fourth century, the two holiest sites in Christianity: the site where Jesus was crucified, at a place known as Calvary or Golgotha, and Jesus’s empty tomb, where He is believed by Christians to have been buried and resurrected,

Who helped Jesus carry the cross?

Station VIII : Jesus is helped by Simon to carry His cross – MacKillop College Werribee 21 They compelled a passer-by, who was coming in from the country, to carry his cross; it was Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus.

How many children did the Virgin Mary have?

When Catholics call Mary the “Blessed Virgin,” they mean she remained a virgin throughout her life. When Protestants refer to Mary as “virgin,” they mean she was a virgin only until Jesus’ birth. They believe that she and Joseph later had children whom Scripture refers to as “the brethren of the Lord.” The disagreement arises over biblical verses that use the terms “brethren,” “brother,” and “sister.” There are about ten instances in the New Testament where “brothers” and “sisters” of the Lord are mentioned (Matt.12:46; Matt.13:55; Mark 3:31–34; Mark 6:3; Luke 8:19–20; John 2:12, 7:3, 5, 10; Acts 1:14; 1 Cor.9:5).

When trying to understand these verses, note that the term “brother” (Greek: adelphos ) has a wide meaning in the Bible. It is not restricted to the literal meaning of a full brother or half-brother. The same goes for “sister” ( adelphe ) and the plural form “brothers” ( adelphoi ). The Old Testament shows that “brother” had a wide semantic range of meaning and could refer to any male relative from whom you are not descended (male relatives from whom you are descended are known as “fathers”) and who are not descended from you (your male descendants, regardless of the number of generations removed, are your “sons”), as well as kinsmen such as cousins, those who are members of the family by marriage or by law rather than by blood, and even friends or mere political allies (2 Sam.1:26; Amos 1:9).

Lot, for example, is called Abraham’s “brother” (Gen.14:14), even though, being the son of Haran, Abraham’s brother (Gen.11:26–28), he was actually Abraham’s nephew. Similarly, Jacob is called the “brother” of his uncle Laban (Gen.29:15). Kish and Eleazar were the sons of Mahli.

Ish had sons of his own, but Eleazar had no sons, only daughters, who married their “brethren,” the sons of Kish. These “brethren” were really their cousins (1 Chr.23:21–22). The terms “brothers,” “brother,” and “sister” did not refer only to close relatives. Sometimes they meant kinsmen (Deut.23:7; Neh.5:7; Jer.34:9), as in the reference to the forty-two “brethren” of King Azariah (2 Kgs.10:13–14).

No Word for Cousin Because neither Hebrew nor Aramaic (the language spoken by Christ and his disciples) had a special word meaning “cousin,” speakers of those languages could use either the word for “brother” or a circumlocution, such as “the son of my uncle.” But circumlocutions are clumsy, so the Jews often used “brother.” The writers of the New Testament were brought up using the Aramaic equivalent of “brothers” to mean both cousins and sons of the same father—plus other relatives and even non-relatives.

• When they wrote in Greek, they did the same thing the translators of the Septuagint did.
• The Septuagint was the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible; it was translated by Hellenistic Jews a century or two before Christ’s birth and was the version of the Bible from which most of the Old Testament quotations found in the New Testament are taken.) In the Septuagint the Hebrew word that includes both brothers and cousins was translated as adelphos, which in Greek usually has the narrow meaning that the English “brother” has.

Unlike Hebrew or Aramaic, Greek has a separate word for cousin, anepsios, but the translators of the Septuagint used adelphos, even for true cousins. You might say they transliterated instead of translated, importing the Jewish idiom into the Greek Bible.

1. They took an exact equivalent of the Hebrew word for “brother” and did not use adelphos in one place (for sons of the same parents), and anepsios in another (for cousins).
2. This same usage was employed by the writers of the New Testament and passed into English translations of the Bible.
3. To determine what “brethren” or “brother” or “sister” means in any one verse, we have to look at the context.

When we do that, we see that insuperable problems arise if we assume that Mary had children other than Jesus. When the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and told her that she would conceive a son, she asked, “How can this be since I have no relations with a man?” (Luke 1:34).

From the Church’s earliest days, as the Fathers interpreted this Bible passage, Mary’s question was taken to mean that she had made a vow of lifelong virginity, even in marriage. (This was not common, but neither was it unheard of.) If she had not taken such a vow, the question would make no sense. Mary knew how babies are made (otherwise she wouldn’t have asked the question she did).

If she had anticipated having children in the normal way and did not intend to maintain a vow of virginity, she would hardly have to ask “how” she was to have a child, since conceiving a child in the “normal” way would be expected by a newlywed wife.

1. Her question makes sense only if there was an apparent (but not a real) conflict between keeping a vow of virginity and acceding to the angel’s request.
2. A careful look at the New Testament shows that Mary kept her vow of virginity and never had any children other than Jesus.
3. When Jesus was found in the Temple at age twelve, the context suggests that he was the only son of Mary and Joseph.

There is no hint in this episode of any other children in the family (Luke 2:41–51). Jesus grew up in Nazareth, and the people of Nazareth referred to him as “the son of Mary” (Mark 6:3), not as ” a son of Mary.” In fact, others in the Gospels are never referred to as Mary’s sons, not even when they are called Jesus’ “brethren.” If they were in fact her sons, this would be strange usage.

• Also, the attitude taken by the “brethren of the Lord” implies they are his elders.
• In ancient and, particularly, in Eastern societies (remember, Palestine is in Asia), older sons gave advice to younger, but younger seldom gave advice to older—it was considered disrespectful to do so.
• But we find Jesus’ “brethren” saying to him that Galilee was no place for him and that he should go to Judea so he could make a name for himself (John 7:3–4).

Another time, they sought to restrain him for his own benefit: “And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for people were saying, ‘He is beside himself'” (Mark 3:21). This kind of behavior could make sense for ancient Jews only if the “brethren” were older than Jesus, but that alone eliminates them as his biological brothers, since Jesus was Mary’s “first-born” son (Luke 2:7).

• Consider what happened at the foot of the cross.
• When he was dying, Jesus entrusted his mother to the apostle John (John 19:26–27).
• The Gospels mention four of his “brethren”: James, Joseph, Simon, and Jude.
• It is hard to imagine why Jesus would have disregarded family ties and made this provision for his mother if these four were also her sons.

Fundamentalist Arguments Fundamentalists insist that “brethren of the Lord” must be interpreted in the strict sense. They most commonly make two arguments based on Matthew 1:25: “nd he did not know her until (Greek: heos, also translated into English as “till”) she brought forth her firstborn son.” They first argue that the natural inference from “till” is that Joseph and Mary afterward lived together as husband and wife, in the usual sense, and had several children.

Otherwise, why would Jesus be called “first-born”? Doesn’t that mean there must have been at least a “second-born,” perhaps a “third-born,” and so on? But they are using a narrow, modern meaning of “until,” instead of the meaning it had when the Bible was written. In the Bible, it means only that some action did not happen up to a certain point; it does not imply that the action did happen later, which is the modern sense of the term.

In fact, if the modern sense is forced on the Bible, some ridiculous meanings result. Consider this line: “Michal the daughter of Saul had no children till the day of her death” (2 Sam.6:23). Are we to assume she had children after her death? There is also the burial of Moses.

1. The book of Deuteronomy says that no one knew the location of his grave “until this present day” (Deut.34:6, Knox).
2. But we know that no one has known since that day either.
3. The examples could be multiplied, but you get the idea—nothing can be proved from the use of the word “till” in Matthew 1:25.
4. Recent translations give a better sense of the verse: “He had no relations with her at any time before she bore a son” ( New American Bible ); “He had not known her when she bore a son” (Knox).

Fundamentalists claim Jesus could not be Mary’s “first-born” unless there were other children that followed him. But this shows ignorance of the way the ancient Jews used the term. For them it meant the child that opened the womb (Ex.13:2; Num.3:12). Under the Mosaic Law, it was the “first-born” son that was to be sanctified (Ex.34:20).

• Did this mean the parents had to wait until a second son was born before they could call their first the “first-born”? Hardly.
• The first male child of a marriage was termed the “first-born” even if he turned out to be the only child of the marriage.
• The Holy Family Fundamentalists say it would have been repugnant for Mary and Joseph to enter a marriage and remain celibate.

They call such marriages “unnatural” arrangements. Certainly they were unusual, but not as unusual as having the Son of God in one’s family, and not nearly as unusual as having a virgin give birth to a child. The Holy Family was neither an average family nor should we expect its members to act as would members of an average family.

• The circumstances demanded sacrifice by Mary and Joseph.
• This was a special family, set aside for the nurturing of the Son of God.
• No greater dignity could be given to marriage than that.
• Backing up the testimony of Scripture regarding Mary’s perpetual virginity is the testimony of the early Christian Church.

Consider the controversy between Jerome and Helvidius, writing around 380. Helvidius first brought up the notion that the “brothers of the Lord” were children born to Mary and Joseph after Jesus’ birth. The great Scripture scholar Jerome at first declined to comment on Helvidius’ remarks because they were a “novel, wicked, and a daring affront to the faith of the whole world.” At length, though, Jerome’s friends convinced him to write a reply, which turned out to be his treatise called On the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Mary,

1. He used not only the scriptural arguments given above, but cited earlier Christian writers, such as Ignatius, Polycarp, Irenaeus, and Justin Martyr.
2. Helvidius was unable to come up with a reply, and his theory remained in disrepute and was unheard of until more recent times.
3. So, if it is established that the “brethren of the Lord” were not Jesus’ brothers or half-brothers through Mary, who were they? Prior to the time of Jerome, the standard theory was that they were Jesus’ “brothers” who were sons of Joseph though not of Mary.

According to this view, Joseph was a widower at the time he married Mary. He had children from his first marriage (who would be older than Jesus, explaining their attitude toward him). This is mentioned in a number of early Christian writings. One work, known as the Proto-evangelium of James (A.D.125) records that Joseph was selected from a group of widowers to serve as the husband/protector of Mary, who was a virgin consecrated to God.

When he was chosen, Joseph objected: “I have children, and I am an old man, and she is a young girl” (4:9). Today, the most commonly accepted view is that they were Jesus’ cousins. Of the four “brethren” who are named in the Gospels, consider, for the sake of argument, only James. Similar reasoning can be used for the other three.

We know that James the younger’s mother was named Mary. Look at the descriptions of the women standing beneath the cross: “among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee” (Matt.27:56); “There were also women looking on from afar, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome” (Mark 15:40).

Then look at what John says: “But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene” (John 19:25). If we compare these parallel accounts of the scene of the crucifixion, we see that the mother of James and Joseph must be the wife of Clopas.

So far, so good. An argument against this, though, is that James is elsewhere (Matt.10:3) described as the son of Alphaeus, which would mean this Mary, whoever she was, was the wife of both Clopas and Alphaeus. But Alphaeus and Clopas are the same person, since the Aramaic name for Alphaeus could be rendered in Greek either as Alphaeus or as Clopas.

• Another possibility is that Alphaeus took a Greek name similar to his Jewish name, the way that Saul took the name Paul.
• So it’s probable that James the younger is the son of Mary and Clopas.
• The second-century historian Hegesippus explains that Clopas was the brother of Joseph, the foster-father of Jesus.

James would thus be Joseph’s nephew and a cousin of Jesus, who was Joseph’s putative son. This identification of the “brethren of the Lord” as Jesus’ first cousins is open to legitimate question—they might even be relatives more distantly removed—but our inability to determine for certain their exact status strictly on the basis of the biblical evidence (or lack of it, in this case) says nothing at all about the main point, which is that the Bible demonstrates that they were not the Blessed Virgin Mary’s children.

• Taken from Catholic Answers.com NIHIL OBSTAT : I have concluded that the materials presented in this work are free of doctrinal or moral errors.
• Bernadeane Carr, STL, Censor Librorum, August 10, 2004 IMPRIMATUR : In accord with 1983 CIC 827 permission to publish this work is hereby granted.
• Robert H.

Brom, Bishop of San Diego, August 10, 2004

What was Jesus’s full name?

Jesus’ name in Hebrew was ‘Yeshua’ which translates to English as Joshua. So how did we get the name ‘Jesus’?

How heavy was Jesus cross?

Story highlights – The true cross phenomenon begins with Emperor Constantine, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. Could fragments of a tree survive millennia? Or are they fragments of forgery that speak to our need to believe? CNN — In July of 2013, the oldest of Jesus relics stories rose again when Turkish archaeologists discovered a stone chest in a 1,350-year-old church that appeared to contain a piece of Jesus’ cross.

“We have found a holy thing in a chest. It is a piece of a cross,” said excavation team leader Gülgün Köroğlu, an art historian and archaeologist. At the time, she thought the chest served as a symbolic coffin for a holy person’s relics – ones connected to Jesus’ crucifixion. And then, silence. The latest relic of the cross on which Jesus had died stalled out because, as Köroğlu later said, the box that had contained allegedly holy objects was now – mysteriously – empty.

The latest episode of the “true cross,” a powerful identifier for the faith of more than two billion people, is symbolic of the pitfalls in the hunt for Jesus relics. To say something smacks of the “true cross” can mean it’s a matter of divine certainty or of utter fraud.

• Could fragments of the true cross of Jesus really be among us today? Could fragments of a tree survive millennia? Or are they fragments of forgery that speak to our need to believe? The true cross phenomenon begins with Emperor Constantine, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity.
• He sent his mother Saint Helena (c.246-330 CE) to find Jesus objects in the Holy Land.

When Helena traveled to Jerusalem in 326 CE the city was still suffering the destruction caused by the last Jewish War in 132-35 CE. After defeating Israel, Roman Emperor Hadrian built a pagan temple over Jesus’s tomb near Calvary – a grave insult to the new religion.

1. Helena ordered this pagan temple torn down and began to dig beneath it to find relics related to Jesus.
2. Her workers found three different crosses – a discovery directly relating to the Gospels, which tell us that Jesus was crucified along with two criminals.
3. The historian Rufinus (c.340-410) reveals that in order to discern which cross was Jesus’, Helena had a dying local woman brought to the site.

The ill woman touched two of the crosses, but nothing happened. Then she touched the third – and she recovered. The true cross of Jesus had been revealed. Helena carved it up, leaving some of it in Jerusalem and transporting a chunk to Europe where it seemingly multiplied, so much so that Protestant reformer John Calvin said: ” if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big ship-load.

Yet the Gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it.” But was Calvin exaggerating to support his own reforms to Catholicism? How could we ever know what the true cross was made of, or looked like, since neither the Gospels – nor the Romans – bothered to tell us? Enter science. In 1870, French architect Charles Rohault de Fleury catalogued all known fragments of the true cross.

He determined the Jesus cross weighed 165 pounds, was three or four meters high, with a cross beam two meters wide. If all these bits of the cross were cobbled together, he reckoned, they wouldn’t amount to a third of the cross on which Jesus died. And based on the fragments he was allowed to examine by microscope, de Fleury concluded the true cross was made of pine wood.

1. Later, four cross particles were also microscopically examined – part of ten pieces of the true cross, accompanied by documentary proofs from Byzantine emperors.
2. These fragments came from grand European churches: Santa Croce in Rome, Notre Dame in Paris, and the Cathedrals of Pisa and Florence.
3. But scientists discovered that they were all made of olive wood.

So now the question became: Was the cross of Jesus made of olive wood or pine? One of the perplexing realities for archaeologists is a lack of residual wood from the massive record of Roman crucifixion. Despite the fact the Romans killed tens of thousands of people through crucifixion – and as many as 500 a day during the siege of Jerusalem from 66-70 CE – the only piece of evidence connected to this terrible punishment was discovered in 1968, when archaeologists found the heel bone of a crucified man with the nail still intact.

In the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Israel Hershkovitz, who teaches anatomy and archaeology at Tel Aviv University, said that the heel bone of the crucified man was found in a Jewish burial tomb in a northern suburb of Jerusalem, near Golgotha – the hill where the Romans crucified people. The man, whose ossuary, or burial box, identified him as Yehohanan, was in his mid 20s when he died on the cross.

His good teeth and lack of heavy musculature meant that he most likely came from a wealthy family, for most crucifixion victims were far too humble to wind up in tombs –save for Jesus, who was put in one by the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea. Others buried in the same tomb as Yehohanan had connections to the Temple, so it’s possible that he was killed by the Romans for some political transgression.

1. Yehohanan was cut down from the cross with a 4.5-inch nail still in his right heel bone, and with part of a board still attached to the head of the nail.
2. Hershkovitz believes that the relative shortness of the length of the nail reveals much about Roman crucifixion methods.
3. The nail was too short (to go through) two heel bones, so sure enough each foot was hammered separately to the cross.” Hershkovitz is convinced that crosses were not made from olive trees because the people depended on the olive tree for food and wouldn’t be slashing them down to make crosses.

More importantly, for the purpose at hand, they wouldn’t be suitable because of the structure of the tree itself. Olive trees don’t grow tall and straight, it branches everywhere, and there are a lot of holes in the wood, making it difficult to support the nails against the weight of the victim.

1. The olive tree is the least appropriate tree.
2. We have different type of local oaks that better serve the purpose.” Today there are even more “true cross” fragments on display around the world: on Mount Athos, in Rome, in Brussels, in Venice, in Ghent, in Paris, in Spain, in Serbia – and even in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, where a fragment of the true cross came along as part of the family chapel imported there and rebuilt by Theodore Boal for his French bride.

If you want your own sliver of the cross on which Jesus died, eBay offers several choices – with some having original wax seals preserving “integrity” and some having documents attesting to their authenticity. Mark Goodacre, a professor at Duke University’s Department of Religion, says that this continued emphasis on the genuineness of true cross fragments is often at the expense of the cross’s meaning.

How big is Jesus love?

Discuss –

What is the BIGGEST thing you have ever seen or can think of?

Do you think God’s love for us is bigger than that?

What is the TALLEST thing you have ever seen or can think of?

Do you think God’s love for us is taller than that?

What is the LONGEST think you have ever seen or can think of?

Do you think God’s love for us is longer than that?

How DEEP do you think the ocean is?

Do you think God’s love for us is deeper than the ocean?

The answer to all of these questions is YES! God’s love for me and for you and for everyone on earth is bigger and taller and deeper than ANYTHING we have ever seen or can think of! In Psalm 108:4 it says that God’s love goes higher than the heavens and his faithfulness reaches to the clouds! Whoaaa, that’s really up there! Isn’t that crazy?! God’s love for us is taller than the tallest mountain on earth! It’s deeper than the ocean! That’s really, really, really, REALLY deep!!

If God’s love is sooo big and sooo deep, do you think it could ever run out?

That’s a big fat NO! God’s love could NEVER run out. It doesn’t matter what you do. You could do a bunch of good stuff. You could do a bunch of bad stuff. It wouldn’t matter. God will still love you with a BIG and DEEP love! And God did something really amazing to show us how much he loves us.

Do you know what it was? Read John 3:16 for the answer.

God loved the world and everyone in it soooo much that he sent Jesus die for our sins. He gave up his only son because he loves us so much. That’s a whole lot of love, don’t you think?! I do. So this week, take a look around you. Find the tallest building.

Did Adam and Eve speak a language?

Middle Ages – Traditional Jewish exegesis such as Midrash says that Adam spoke the Hebrew language because the names he gives Eve – Isha and Chava – only make sense in Hebrew. By contrast, Kabbalism assumed an ” eternal Torah ” which was not identical to the Torah written in Hebrew.

Thus, Abraham Abulafia in the 13th century assumed that the language spoken in Paradise had been different from Hebrew, and rejected the claim then-current also among Christian authors, that a child left unexposed to linguistic stimulus would automatically begin to speak in Hebrew. Umberto Eco (1993) notes that Genesis is ambiguous on whether the language of Adam was preserved by Adam’s descendants until the confusion of tongues, or if it began to evolve naturally even before Babel.

Dante Alighieri addresses the topic in his De vulgari eloquentia (1302–1305). He argues that the Adamic language is of divine origin and therefore unchangeable. He also notes that according to Genesis, the first speech act is due to Eve, addressing the serpent, and not to Adam.

In his Divine Comedy (c.1308–1320), however, Dante changes his view to another that treats the Adamic language as the product of Adam. This had the consequence that it could no longer be regarded as immutable, and hence Hebrew could not be regarded as identical with the language of Paradise. Dante concludes ( Paradiso XXVI) that Hebrew is a derivative of the language of Adam.

In particular, the chief Hebrew name for God in scholastic tradition, El, must be derived of a different Adamic name for God, which Dante gives as I,

What did Jesus call God?

New Testament – Latin inscription of Philippians 2:10 : “At the name of Jesus every knee should bow”, Church of the Gesù, Rome. While the Old Testament has a wide variety of names and epithets that refer to God in Hebrew, the Greek text of the New Testament uses far fewer variants.

1. The essential uses of the name of God the Father in the New Testament are Theos (θεός the Greek term for God), Kyrios (i.e.
2. Lord in Greek) and Patēr (πατήρ i.e.
3. Father in Greek).
4. The Aramaic word “Abba” (אבא), meaning “Father” is used by Jesus in Mark 14:36 and also appears in Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6,

In the New Testament the two names Jesus and Emmanuel that refer to Jesus have salvific attributes. The name Jesus is given in Luke 1:31 and Matthew 1:21 and in both cases the name is not selected by humans but is received by angelic messages with theological significance, e.g.

The statement in Matthew 1:21 “you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save his people from their sins” associates salvific attributes to the name Jesus. Emmanuel, which appears in Matthew 1:23, may refer to Isaiah 7:14, and does not appear elsewhere in the New Testament, but in the context of Matthew 28:20 (“I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”) indicates that Jesus will be with the faithful to the end of the age.

According to Ulrich Luz, the Emmanuel motif brackets the entire Gospel of Matthew between 1:23 and 28:20, appearing explicitly and implicitly in several other passages, setting the tone for the salvific theme of Matthew. The names of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit are inherently related in the New Testament, e.g.

• With Jesus’ instruction to His disciples at the end of the Gospel of Matthew ( 28:19 ):”make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”.
• The Greek word pneuma, generally translated spirit, is found around 385 times in the New Testament.

The English terms Holy Spirit and Holy Ghost have identical meanings, with the former having become the usual term in the 20th century. Three separate terms, namely Holy Spirit, Spirit of Truth and Paraclete are used in the Johannine writings, The “Spirit of Truth” in used in John 14:17, 15:26 and 16:13,

Does Jesus know English?

Among his many languages, Jesus spoke Greek, says Harry Mount During the First World War, a pacifist teacher appeared at a British military service tribunal. “I want to turn the other cheek,” the teacher said, “if you don’t mind me translating from the Greek of the New Testament.” “Greek?” the blustering Colonel Blimp of a tribunal chairman replied.

• You don’t mean to tell me Jesus spoke Greek.
• He was British to the backbone!” Jesus may not have spoken English but he was certainly quite a linguist.
• In 2014 in Jerusalem, Pope Francis had a good-natured disagreement about Jesus’s language skills with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.
• Jesus was here, in this land,” Netanyahu said.

“He spoke Hebrew.” “Aramaic,” said the Pope, laughing. “He spoke Aramaic, but he knew Hebrew.” They were both right. Jesus’s first language was Aramaic – still spoken in places in the Middle East, including Maaloula, near Damascus, the town battered in the Syrian civil war in 2013.

Until the war broke out, Melkite Greek Catholic and Orthodox Christians had lived happily alongside Sunni Muslims for centuries. In Nazareth, Jesus spoke Aramaic’s Galilean dialect. Jesus’s last words on the cross were in Aramaic: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus read Hebrew from the Bible at the synagogue in Luke 4:16.

He chatted, too, with a Syrophoenician woman, who would have spoken Phoenician. And he was also very familiar with Greek. Greek played a crucial role in Christianity. It’s tempting to think of the New Testament as a story of the Holy Land – of a Jewish Jesus in a Middle Eastern country, controlled by Latin-speaking Romans.

But Jesus and his disciples used the third-century BC Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew of the Old Testament, translated by 70 – or, in Latin, septuaginta – Hebrew scholars. The New Testament – which Oscar Wilde said was the most beautiful book he’d ever read – was written in Greek, even if it was composed under Roman rule.

Whatever languages Jesus spoke, his words in the New Testament were written in Greek – including lines now more familiar in Latin. “Noli me tangere” – “Don’t touch me!” – Jesus said to Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection. In fact, the Greek of John 20:17 reads “Me mou haptou”.

A better translation is “Stop clinging to me.” Greek was spoken by senior administrators in the Roman Empire. Julius Caesar’s last words weren’t “Et tu, Brute?” They were “Kai su, teknon?” – Greek for “Even you, my child?” Ancient Greek was the native language of Roman citizens such as St Paul, from Cilicia in south-east Turkey.

Early Christians were largely Greek-speaking, too. That’s why, to advertise their faith, Christian martyrs in ancient Rome scored the catacombs on the Via Appia with fish symbols. The Greek for fish is ichthus, the acronym for Iesous Christos Theou Uios Soter – “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour”.

When Christianity reached these shores centuries later, it was still wrapped in Greek clothes. At a Roman villa in Chedworth, Gloucestershire, built in the fourth century AD, the coping stone around a basin is inscribed with a Chi and a Rho, the first two Greek letters of Christ’s name. Greek continued to frame the terms of religious discussion in Europe over the next 1,200 years.

William Tyndale’s first English translation from the Greek of the New Testament in 1526 echoes down the ages today in the unlikeliest of places. When Islamic extremists murdered the soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich in May 2013, one of them screamed: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” He was unwittingly echoing Tyndale’s 1526 translation from the Greek of Matthew 5:38.

Bob Dylan also borrowed from Tyndale’s Greek translation in The Times They Are a-Changin’: “And the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a-changin’.” Tyndale’s translation of Matthew 20:16 read: “So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.” When I travelled in Odysseus’s footsteps around the Mediterranean four years ago, I felt almost as close to the Bible as I felt to Homer.

There are three primordial roots to Western European thought – classical, New Testament and Old Testament – and ancient Greece is at the heart of the first two. In a talk to the English Speaking Union in Houston in 1977, Margaret Thatcher, then Leader of the Opposition, echoed the point.

How do we know Jesus age?

Year of Jesus’ birth – The date of birth of Jesus of Nazareth is not stated in the gospels or in any secular text, but most scholars assume a date of birth between 6 BC and 4 BC. Two main methods have been used to estimate the year of the birth of Jesus : one based on the accounts of his birth in the gospels with reference to King Herod’s reign, and another based on subtracting his stated age of “about 30 years” from the time when he began preaching ( Luke 3:23 ) in “the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar” ( Luke 3:1–2 ).

What year was Jesus actually born?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The date of birth of Jesus is not stated in the gospels or in any historical sources, but most biblical scholars generally accept a date of birth between 6 BC and 4 BC, the year in which King Herod died. The historical evidence is too incomplete to allow a definitive dating, but the year is estimated through three different approaches:

• analysing references to known historical events mentioned in the nativity accounts in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew,
• working backward from the estimation of the start of the ministry of Jesus, and
• astrological or astronomical alignments.

The common Christian traditional dating of the birthdate of Jesus was 25 December, a date first asserted officially by Pope Julius I in 350 AD, although this claim is dubious or otherwise unfounded. The day or season has been estimated by various methods, including the description of shepherds watching over their sheep.