To understand the story of Jesus, it’s helpful to ask what his job title was. If you asked a modern Christian, they’d probably say something like this: The job title of Jesus was to be the Messiah, which is the same thing as the biological Son of God, which is the same thing as the Second Person of the Trinity.
But if you asked Jewish people in the first century, you’d have got a whole range of answers. Here is a list of a number of job titles that the New Testament tells us that Jewish people in the first century actually assigned to Jesus:
- The Carpenter
- Son of Mary
- Son of Joseph
- Prophet
- Physician
- Rabbi
- Teacher
- Son of David
- Mashiach
- King of Israel
- Son of God
- Son of Man
That’s a long list! I may have missed a few, but you can see that people described Jesus in a lot of different ways. What can we learn about Jesus by looking at these titles?
I think we can at least see a progression in how people thought about Jesus, and that tells us something about his personal story.
The Carpenter
The gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke all tell variations on a story of a time when Jesus visited Nazareth. At this time, he had already started to get famous, but the hometown people weren’t really having all that. As far as they were concerned, Jesus was the guy they’d grown up with. The carpenter, the son of Mary and Joseph.
Being a carpenter was not a high-prestige job at that time. We know this, because we have records over the next few centuries of opponents of Jesus who slammed him as “just a carpenter.” This was not as bad as if he’d been a tax-farmer or a pimp or a tanner. Those were the dregs of society at that time. But a carpenter was a regular guy, not somebody who would normally even know how to read, much less be a celebrity.
The term “son of Joseph” is a fairly neutral term. People who called Jesus the son of Joseph were saying that they accepted Jesus as being legally the son of Joseph. Which suggests that Joseph did in fact accept Jesus as legally his son.
But there were some questions on that. The gospels of Matthew and Luke say that Jesus was NOT the biological son of Joseph. And there is some evidence in the New Testament that some of Jesus’s enemies thought he might be the son of some other man.
As an example, Jesus is sometimes called “son of Mary.” It’s possible that they meant no insult here, since it might mean that Joseph was dead and Mary was his only surviving parent. But it’s entirely possible that people meant that Jesus was called “son of Mary” as a snide way of saying he was NOT the son of Joseph. We can’t really know for sure, but I lean toward this interpretation.
In any event, the hometown of Jesus gave him a very cool response according to Mark and Matthew. And in Luke’s story, they tried to kill him, which is downright cold.
In those stories, Jesus points out that a prophet is not without honor except in his own country. Which is to say that Jesus thought of himself as a prophet. So let’s look at that.
The Prophet
Lots of people in the time of Jesus thought of him as a prophet. They had plenty of reason to call him a prophet, because he did exactly the kinds of things that were expected of prophets. He laid hands on people for healing. He performed exorcisms. He castigated the rich and powerful. He gave messages of warning to his nation.
Furthermore, a prophet was exactly the kind of job title that a poor man could aspire to. Some of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible were quite poor. Some of them came from small towns. (The prophet Jonah came from a village quite close to Nazareth.)
Throughout the gospels, we see stories in which Jesus or his followers or fellow Jews referred to Jesus as a prophet. But of course they also thought of him in other terms also. Because Jesus didn’t have just one job title, he had many.
The Rabbi
We have quite a few stories in the gospels in which Jesus is call Rabbi. Or Teacher. For our purposes, these are the same thing.
Let’s be clear that in the first century, there was no such thing as an ordination ceremony for rabbis. That came later in history, and nobody in the time of Jesus would have thought that Jesus was ordained or needed to be ordained.
And yet it is rather peculiar that Jesus was called a rabbi, because the usual way to become a rabbi (or a sage or a teacher or whatever) was to study with a rabbi. And the usual place to do that was Jerusalem. A promising young man who lived outside of Jerusalem would have to live in Jerusalem for years, studying with one of the rabbis. Eventually, he would be recognized by all as a sage, and he might start taking on students of his own.
Jesus shows almost no signs of doing that. We have one story in Luke about him talking with various sages for a few days when he was twelve years old. It seems very plausible that he might have wanted to live there and study with a famous sage. (The great Hillel was probably still alive when Jesus was twelve, and there were many others available, including the equally famous Shammai and Hillel’s grandson Gamaliel.)
But for whatever reason, Jesus did not study with a sage. It may be that his family lacked the money to send him to Jerusalem. Or maybe he was needed at home to help support the family, if Joseph died early. Instead of studying with a sage, Jesus worked as a carpenter (more correctly, he was a tekton, a worker in stone or metal or wood). And that should have made it impossible for him ever to be called a rabbi.
And yet, sometime around the age of thirty, Jesus launched his career as a roving prophet. And somewhere in this time period, people began calling him Rabbi or Teacher. How could that happen?
We don’t know. The gospel of Matthew presents Jesus as teaching a way of life in which Torah mattered very much, and yet Torah observance was much less complicated than the usual way of following Torah. So this might account for the title of Rabbi that Jesus picked up. But we’re guessing here. We don’t have enough information.
Son of David
So far, none of these job titles explain how Jesus ended up on a cross. To understand that, we have to look to another set of job titles that give us a very good explanation.
Mark, Matthew, and Luke all tell stories in which Jesus is called the son of David. Matthew and Luke give genealogies in which David is listed as an ancestor of Jesus. Especially in the final week of Jesus’s life, we see gospel stories in which Jesus is called out as the son of David.
And by “son of David,” they mean “Mashiach” (in English, Messiah), a Hebrew term that means “the anointed one.” In Jewish tradition, both kings and high priests were anointed as a sign that they were chosen by God to take office. So the claim that people were making of Jesus was that he was the king of Israel.
And that was a dangerous claim. Rome ruled over Judea. It sometimes used Jewish kings or rulers from the Herod family—Herod the Great, his sons Antipas and Philip, his grandson Agrippa I, and his great-grandson Agrippa II. But these were Jewish kings of the right sort—client kings of Rome, placed in the job by Rome, and answerable to Rome.
Those who called Jesus Son of David or Mashiach or King of Israel meant that he was NOT a client king of Rome. He was the one chosen by God to break the back of Rome. And this means he was the “Son of God.”
It’s useful to remember that the term “Son of God” in Jewish culture for many centuries was a synonym for “King of Israel.” Psalm 2 was the psalm used for the coronation of kings in ancient Judah. It explicitly says that God himself installs the king, and on that very day, calls the king his “son.” The King of Israel was the representive of his people before God, and the representative of God to his people.
So when people in the time of Jesus called him the “Son of God,” they were not talking about biology. They were saying that Jesus was the anointed king of Israel. The story in Mark 14 in which Jesus is tried before the high priest ends with Caiaphas asking if Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the Blessed One. Jesus says that he is. In the next chapter, Caiaphas takes him to Pilate, who asks Jesus if he is the king of the Jews. These are the same question, and Jesus gives the same answer.
And in all four gospels, the sign put on the cross was some variant of “King of the Jews.” That was the criminal charge for which he was executed.
Son of Man
There’s one other job title we see that Jesus and others regularly assign to him—“Son of Man.”
New Testament scholars have debated the meaning of this term for a long time, and it’s not a settled question.
Some scholars think that “son of man” is just another way of saying “a mortal, a regular guy”. In the book of Ezekiel, the angel regularly refers to Ezekiel as “ben adam,” meaning “son of man” or “human.” And certainly some sayings of Jesus fit this meaning rather well. “The son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”
But some scholars think that “Son of Man” is a reference to an angelic warrior. They point to the term “Son of Man” in Daniel 7 and in the apocalyptic literature between 200 BC and AD 200, foretelling a time when an angelic warrior, the “Son of Man” will come down from heaven to end the current age and usher in the Age to Come. And certainly some sayings of Jesus fit this meaning rather well. “At that time, people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.”
It’s above my pay grade to decide which of these meanings is correct. If the combined wisdom of New Testament scholars can’t settle the question, then it’s not for me to choose one side or the other. My own kindergarten-level understanding of the question is that each meaning make sense in some passages and not in others. So make of that what you will.
The Story of Jesus
Looking at the various job titles of Jesus, I see a progression, starting with a very normal job and ending up with quite a high job.
When Jesus was a boy and young man, he was a carpenter, the son of Mary and Joseph, possibly also a “son of adam”. At the beginning of his public career, he established himself as a prophet and a healer. As he became more well-known, people felt comfortable calling him a rabbi and a teacher, despite the fact that he had not taken the usual route to that title. Near the end of his life, there’s a strong emphasis on Jesus as the son of David, the Mashiach, the king of the Jews, the Son of God. And somewhere in here, people began thinking of him in the most exalted terms, as the Son of Man, a divine warrior king second only to God, the executor of God’s judgment.
I think that makes good sense of the data we have about Jesus. Note that this says nothing really about whether Jesus was the biological son of God. Even Matthew and Luke don’t speculate on a biological explanation for the origin of Jesus. In later centuries, Greek theologians asked questions about that, and came to various answers. In the twentieth century, when people learned about DNA, some have asked scientific questions about the biology of Jesus. But those are not questions the New Testament writers thought about.
For the authors of the New Testament, Jesus was the carpenter/prophet/teacher/son of David/son of Man, along with the many synonyms for those job titles that I’ve covered above. The victory of Jesus was no military victory. It was a victory over Sin and Satan and Death and Sacrifice. That’s the story the New Testament tells. And it’s the story I’ve been working on in my Crown of Thorns series.
