The Back Story of Jesus
Before the Beginning
Jesus was a born a Jew into Rome’s vassal kingdom of Israel some two thousand years ago. But every story has a back story, and the back story of Jesus goes back further than anyone else’s. According to the Bible, it goes back to the beginning—no, before the beginning. In the words of John’s Gospel, Jesus is identified with “the Word” who was in the beginning with God; indeed, he was God. (Or by the name God uses to refer to himself in the Hebrew Scriptures, he was Yahweh.)
In Genesis, “the Word” is the way in which God creates the world and all things. God speaks, and then stuff is. So John’s claim is that before becoming flesh as a man, there was a personality who stands behind Jesus’ history, a creative, divine personality to whom we owe our existence.
The back story of Jesus, however, does not end there, leaping forward straight from his existence as the creating God to his enfleshment as a created man. In between is a whole history that he orchestrates ... and that he plans to enter into.
The Human Race Downward
That back story is full of dark threads as well as bright ones. There is the happy creation of the first man and woman—and the sad story of their rebellion against their creator, drawing the human race into death and corruption. As much as we may not like to recognize the validity of such a story, the truth is that from experience, we can scarcely deny its truth. Even the best people we know—even ones we tend to see only in the best light—have “little evils,” disturbances under the surface that we usually choose to ignore.
The rebellion of Adam and Eve resulted in their expulsion from the beautiful garden which God had originally given them, but even so, God did not abandon them. He made himself available to them and provided ways for them to approach him.
Even so, things got worse. While the first man and woman returned to embrace and serve Yahweh, many of their descendants went deeper and deeper into rebellion. Which is a pretty familiar pattern, if you think about it.
The Story of Israel
We cannot retrace the whole back story of Jesus here. That would involve retelling the entirety of what we now call “the Old Testament.” But we should know at least why Jesus was born a Jew rather than, say, Han Chinese, or Nubian.
In a world that was growing increasingly dark, God singled out a particular man named Abram. Not only was Abram to father nations (among whom we count Israelites, Arabs and others); he was also told that “all the families” of the earth would be “blessed” in him. (How they would get to be “in Abram,” God didn’t really say. Paul tells us quite a bit about that, especially in his letter to the Galatians.) In connection with all of this, God changed Abram’s name to Abraham, “father of a multitude.” He also promised to give Abraham’s descendants their own chunk of real estate—the “land of Canaan,” which roughly corresponds to what we now know as Palestine.
In the years and generations that followed, God spoke especially to Abraham’s descendants, sending them prophets (men who spoke on his behalf to others, and correspondingly spoke to God as his human counselors) and even rescuing them from slavery in Egypt at the hand of Moses. Through Moses too, God entered into a sort of marriage covenant with Israel at Sinai, bringing the people into vows to uphold his laws.
Sadly, Israel wasn’t all that faithful to that marriage covenant. Usually, most of the people were worshiping “gods” from other nations instead of Yahweh. Things finally got so bad that just as he had expelled the first man and woman from the home he gave them, God expelled the Israelites from their home in Palestine too. First the Assyrians decimated northern Israel and the people were scattered; and then, the Babylonians conquered the southern people (mostly consisting of the tribe of Judah, i.e. Jews) and deported them to Babylon and elsewhere.
Just as Adam and Eve could no longer enjoy the intimacy with God they had while in the garden of Eden, now Israel could no longer enjoy the closeness with God they had through the temple, or the other blessings they had in Palestine. Indeed, the temple itself—the ornate, beautiful heart of ancient Israel and its life with God—was destroyed.
Yet once again, just as God kept working with Adam and Eve after expelling them from the garden, he kept working with Israel after expelling them from their land. He sent them prophets, gave them leaders, and kept them safe. And then, after 70 years, he actually sent a handful of them back to the land God had promised Abraham, and provided a way for the temple to be rebuilt—even if in much more modest form than the one that had been destroyed.
Over the next several hundred years, the story of Israel remained a mixed bag. A significant number of Jews migrated back to Palestine, but by far the majority of Israelites remained scattered around the Roman world and the Middle East. As for Israel itself, it enjoyed only very brief periods of relative independence, but on the whole was almost always under the thumb of the powerful empires of the time: first Babylon, then Medo-Persia, then Greece, and finally Rome.
It is into this story, a story in which humans had embraced and served everything and everyone other than their loving creator; a story in which Israel had failed to be Yahweh’s faithful bride; a story in which God’s promises to Abraham looked to have run aground; and a story in which Rome’s Caesar claimed to be “lord and savior”—it is into this story that Jesus was born.