The Galilean Ministry

The public story begins with Jesus queueing up with everybody else. Mark says it flatly: he came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan. Mark has already told us in 1:4 what John's baptism was, a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and he makes no attempt to explain why the one he has just called the Son of God is standing in that line.

The later writers are less relaxed. Matthew has John try to stop him, and gives Jesus a sentence of explanation: 'Let it be so now,' and 'It is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness in this way.' Luke reduces the baptism to a subordinate clause and puts the emphasis on Jesus praying afterwards. John does not narrate it at all; the Baptist simply reports having seen the Spirit descend. Whatever else is going on, the tradition is handling this episode with care, and the care increases over time. That pattern is one of the reasons historians of almost every persuasion treat the baptism as bedrock. Nobody invents a problem for themselves.

What happens at the water is where the Gospel writers put their weight: the Spirit descending, and the voice. 'You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased.' The sentence is stitched from Psalm 2:7, the enthronement of the king, and language close to Isaiah 42:1, the servant in whom God delights. Sonship and servanthood are welded together in one line at the start, and the whole rest of the story runs along that weld.

Then the Spirit that has just descended drives him into the desert. Mark's verb is violent, the same verb he uses for casting out demons, and his account is three sentences long: forty days, tempted by Satan, with the wild animals, and the angels ministered to him. Matthew and Luke give the three temptations at length, in different orders. Reading them as tests of the sonship just announced makes sense of all three: use it to feed yourself, use it to be seen, use it to take the kingdoms without the cross. Each temptation is an offer of the destination without the road.

Mark gets the first four disciples into the story in five verses. Simon and Andrew are casting a net, James and John are mending one, and in both cases the sequence is the same: he sees them, he calls, they leave, they follow. The immediacy is Mark's style rather than a claim that they had never met him before, and John 1:35-42 gives a longer runway, with Andrew first attached to John the Baptist and bringing his brother.

Something is worth pausing on in the calling. In the pattern that later becomes standard in rabbinic Judaism, a student sought out a teacher. Here the teacher does the seeking. The comparison needs care, because the fully formed rabbinic institution is later than the first century and we should not read it back wholesale, but within the world of the texts the initiative sits in an unusual place, and the Gospel writers seem to know it.

Notice also who is in the group. Fishermen, who were not destitute but were not scholars either. A tax collector, Levi in Mark 2:14, employed in a trade that made a man a collaborator. Simon called the Zealot in Luke's list, whatever that label meant that early. A group containing both a tax collector and a man nicknamed for revolutionary zeal is not a group that would form by itself.

And notice who is around the edges. Luke 8:1-3 names Mary called Magdalene, Joanna the wife of Chuza who was Herod's household manager, and Susanna, and says they were ministering to them out of their own means. The movement had a funding base, and part of it was women, one of them connected to the court of the man who had executed John the Baptist.

Matthew gathers three chapters of teaching onto a mountain. Luke has a shorter version delivered, in his own words, on a level place after Jesus came down. Whether these are two sermons, one sermon reported twice, or two collections assembled by two writers from a shared body of teaching is a question the synoptic problem decides, and it is not decided here. What matters for a survey is that the two versions are close enough to be the same material and different enough to be worth comparing.

The comparison is instructive at the very first line. Matthew 5:3: 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.' Luke 6:20: 'Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.' Matthew has a third-person description and an inward qualifier. Luke has a second-person address and no qualifier at all, and he follows his four blessings with four woes that Matthew does not have. Neither is a softening of the other. Matthew is asking what kind of person receives the kingdom; Luke is asking who in this room is hearing good news.

Then come the six sayings in Matthew 5:21-48 that all run the same way: 'You have heard that it was said' followed by 'But I tell you'. The formula is the thing to notice. He does not say, thus says the LORD, which is how a prophet speaks. He does not cite a chain of earlier teachers, which is how a scribe argues. He sets his own word alongside the Torah and intensifies it, and he does it six times in a row without justifying the right to do so. Whatever conclusion you eventually reach about the claims Jesus made, this is the kind of material out of which the question arises.

The sermon has resisted every attempt to make it manageable. It has been read as an impossible standard designed to drive you to grace, as an interim ethic for a short time before the end, as a rule of life for a community, and as instruction for the disciples rather than for everyone. Each reading is trying to solve the same difficulty, which is that the text says love your enemies and does not add a clause telling you when this does not apply. A teacher should present the main readings and should be honest that the sermon's ability to break every frame we put round it may be the point.

Your students will be asked whether the miracles happened. They deserve better than bluster, which pretends the question is settled, and better than embarrassment, which quietly reclassifies every healing as a psychosomatic event and hopes nobody notices. Here is a way to do it that concedes nothing dishonest and claims nothing unearned. Start with what is actually granted by historians of any faith or none. It is widely accepted that Jesus had a reputation in his own lifetime as a healer and an exorcist, and that this reputation is among the best-attested things about him. E. P. Sanders, who writes as a historian and not as an apologist, includes among his list of nearly indisputable facts that Jesus was a Galilean who preached and healed. Geza Vermes placed him within a recognisable class of Galilean charismatic holy men. Morton Smith argued that he was seen as a magician. These three would disagree with one another and with most of your students about almost everything else, and they agree on this: people came to him because of what they believed he could do, and they kept coming.

Then note what the hostile sources concede. Josephus, in the passage we will examine closely in the next lesson, calls him, in the Greek's own phrase, paradoxon ergon poietes, which this course renders 'a doer of astonishing deeds', and the phrase is one of the parts of that passage least likely to be a later Christian addition. The Babylonian Talmud at Sanhedrin 43a says he practised sorcery and led Israel astray, and although that text is centuries later and may be reacting to Christian claims, the shape of the charge is the same shape found inside the Gospels themselves. Mark 3:22 has the scribes saying that by the prince of the demons he drives out demons. Across friendly and hostile sources alike, the dispute is over the source of the power, not over whether anything happened. That is a genuine historical observation, and it is worth more than a dozen slogans.

Now the limit, stated as plainly. That a man had a widespread reputation as a healer, and that people reported cures, is a historical claim that the evidence supports well. That a specific reported cure was a suspension of ordinary causation is a different claim, and history as a discipline is poorly placed to establish it. Historians reason from what usually happens; an event is judged probable partly because things like it are common. By that method the most unusual event in a set of possibilities will never be the historian's preferred explanation, whatever the testimony. David Hume made the underlying point in 1748: a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence, and testimony to a violation of a law of nature must always be weighed against the uniform experience that establishes the law. This argument has been attacked, notably by the philosopher of science John Earman, who argued in 2000 that Hume's reasoning is muddled once it is put into probability terms. Both the argument and the attack are live.

So teach the question at two levels and keep them apart. At the historical level, say what the sources show and what they do not, and note that the nature miracles in particular are attested differently from the healings and exorcisms and should not be defended as a single block. At the level of belief, say the honest thing: whether you accept a miracle report depends heavily on what you already think is possible, and that is true of the believer and the sceptic alike. Nobody comes to this question from nowhere. A student who can say that clearly, and then say what they themselves believe and why, has done something harder and more durable than winning an argument.

One last detail to keep you honest. Mark 6:5 says that in his home town he could not perform any miracles, except to lay his hands on a few of the sick and heal them. Matthew, retelling it, writes that he did not do many miracles there. Mark wrote could not. (The Greek word behind miracles in both verses is dynameis, acts of power.) That sentence is in the earliest Gospel, it is hard to imagine anyone inventing it, and any account of the miracles that has no room for it is not an account of these texts.

Mark stacks five conflict stories between 2:1 and 3:6 and ends the run with the Pharisees plotting with the Herodians how they might kill him. That is chapter three of sixteen. Whatever the ministry was, it produced organised opposition fast, and a survey should be able to say why.

Look at what the five stories are about. He tells a paralysed man his sins are forgiven, and the scribes ask who can forgive sins but God alone. He eats with tax collectors and sinners, which in that setting is not merely friendliness but a statement about who belongs. He does not make his disciples fast. His disciples pluck grain on the sabbath, and he says the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath. He heals a man's withered hand on the sabbath, in a synagogue, having first asked a question nobody would answer. Each episode is about authority, and in each one he places his own authority where his opponents expected to find either God or the Torah.

A word of caution about the Pharisees, because a careless teacher will do real damage here. The Pharisees were a lay reform movement concerned with extending the holiness of the temple into ordinary life, and they were widely respected. They did not run the temple; the chief priests and the Sadducean aristocracy did. They are not a stand-in for legalism, they are not a stand-in for Judaism, and treating them as either has an ugly history. The polemic is heaviest in Matthew, written after the destruction of the temple in AD 70, when the Pharisaic tradition was the main surviving alternative for Jewish life and the argument had become a family quarrel. Say this to your students before you preach a single Pharisee text.

What the conflict tells you is what the ministry was claiming. The message summarised in Mark 1:15 is that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is near. In a land under Roman occupation, with Herod Antipas ruling Galilee as tetrarch, whom Mark 6:14 loosely calls king and who had already killed one popular prophet, announcing that God's reign was arriving was not a devotional sentiment. It was an announcement with a public edge, and everyone involved seems to have understood that.