The Autobiography of Jesus Christ

The Autobiography of Jesus Christ

Also by Neil Elliott:

The Gods of Life, The Noisy American, My Years With Capone, Her, The Golden Stairway, The Hills of Creation, St. Ludmilla’s, Jesus Tonight! (Play)

The Autobiography of Jesus Christ

as told to Neil Elliott

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2003 by Neil Elliott

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. With the exception of brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, no part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher."

ISBN Number

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America

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Dedicated to Victoria Stagg Elliott and Mark Spratt

Table of Contents

Part One:The Search

Chapter I Land of Canaan

Chapter II I Was Called Yeshua

Chapter III "Don’t cry, mommy. I’ll come back."

Chapter IV About certain things I am never wrong.

Chapter V Both our vices and our ability to deal with them are beyond us now.

Chapter VI "...she thinks I’m God."

Chapter VII ...fish swam on the surface of the water...

Chapter VIII The Messianic Salvation

Part Two The Ministry

Chapter IX My First Sermon

Chapter X Wine at Cana

Chapter XI Born Again / The Samaritan Woman

Chapter XII My First Cure

Chapter XIII On My Own Authority

Chapter XIV The Sermon on the Mount

Chapter XV The Baptist, and Supper with the Pharisees

Chapter XVI "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers...?"

Chapter XVII The Parables

Chapter XVIII The Apostles

Chapter XIX John the Baptist

Chapter XX Feeding the 10,000

Chapter XXI Son of the Living God / Transfiguration

Chapter XXII Judea and The Feast of the Tabernacles

Chapter XXIII The Woman Taken in Adultery

Chapter XXIV The Sabbath / Raising Lazarus

Chapter XXV To Jerusalem

Chapter XXVI The Summing Up

Part Three The Passion

Chapter XXVII The Passover Plot

Chapter XXVIII Casting Out the Moneychangers

Chapter XXIX O Jerusalem!

Chapter XXX Judas and The Last Supper

Chapter XXXI Gethsemane

Chapter XXXII Arrested by the Sanhedrin

Chapter XXXIII Pontius Pilate

Chapter XXXIV I Meet Herod Antipas

Chapter XXXV Scourged at the Antonia Fortress

Chapter XXXVI Stations of the Cross

Chapter XXXVII The Crucifixion

Chapter XXXVIII There Are Those Who Say That I Never Lived

Chapter XXXIX The Miracle and the Sign

Chapter XXXX TheChallenge

Acknowledgement

Sincere thanks to the Lord God for His kind assistance, without which none of this would have been possible.

And thanks for His advice and counsel on events that I did not have a clear picture of.

And thanks for His permission to use any of His Bibles in all translations and revisions.

PART ONE

THE SEARCH

Chapter I

Land of Canaan

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

-- Rabbi Hillel, 30 A.D.,

when asked to distill the Law

into a single sentence.

There are those who say that I never lived.

But who would invent such a story?

What cult would offer you a canon—the Gospels—the four books of which contradict each other at so many points, that they can only be authentic?

My story can only be true.

I walked along the roads of Canaan. In the evenings I might be stretched out on a mat in a small house, or under the stars on a bed of rushes, or in a hammock, tired out and sleeping just like any man.

Yet I said some of the most surprising things.

I was of poor, uncultivated stock, like most men. And yet I remade the basis of all philosophy, and opened up unknown territories of thought.

I was a simple son of a declining people who some thought were mired in religious hysteria, born in an obscure district in a small Roman province.

And yet I spoke with a voice that toppled emperors. I brought a new perspective to a world that was starved for it, undernourished from a want of moral sustenance.

My life is contained in history and yet contains it.

This is a book.

The pages are cut in rectangles, and one edge of the pages is glued together. Then a binding is put around it, and you can write the name of the book on the binding.

This is fascinating to me. Because in my day books were written on long scrolls, some as long as forty yards, and then rolled up and tied with a ribbon.

This is a relatively recent invention. This is only about 500 years old. I suppose most of you are familiar with it. This is really interesting to me. This is wonderfully convenient.

My name is Jesus Christ and I was born over two thousand years ago in a small province of the old Roman Empire at the east end of the Mediterranean Sea known as Canaan.

This province was known variously as the Land of Canaan, sometimes the Land of Judah, but I knew it best as Canaan. Scholars today refer to it as Palestine, but that was a name given to it by the Romans about a hundred years after I was crucified, because the Romans wanted to mock the Jews and they knew the Philistines had been our enemies. So they called the land Palestine, even though the Philistines were long gone.

Canaan had four major districts that figured in my life very prominently. There was Judea, in the south, from which you get the word Jews or Jewish. And I’m going to use that word interchangeably with the word Hebrew. I’m more comfortable using Hebrew, but I know that you are more familiar with the word Jew, so I’ll use these words interchangeably.

Judea also held the capital of our religious faith, Jerusalem, which was a very beautiful city and the center of many pilgrimages from all over the world.

In the north was Galilee, where I grew up, which took its name from galil goyem, meaning, ring of the unbelievers. This was a nickname the Judeans had given to us as a way of looking down their noses at us, because they felt that Galileans were relatively recent converts to the Hebrew faith, and not very devout. Even though we lived in what was actually the old northern kingdom of Israel.

Mine was an old family, but it was true that most of the Galilean families were relatively recent conversions, many of them by the sword under the Maccabees. Nonetheless they were mostly devout.

The Judeans also made fun of the way we spoke. They referred to our dialect as baby talk because they claimed that we slurred our words and spoke in a guttural fashion.

Personally I never noticed.

In the middle, between Galilee and Judea, was Samaria, and the Samaritans were very good Jews, but they only accepted the first five books of Moses, which was the only written Bible at that time. They did not accept the oral histories, or the prophecies, and for this reason they were looked down upon by the Judeans and the Galileans. But the Samaritans were very good and decent people, and very good Jews.

In the east, a fourth district of Canaan, which figured so prominently in my life, was Perea.

Perea was sparsely populated, but many of the Greek cities were in Perea, know collectively as the Decapolis because there were ten Greek cities, and these were administered directly from Rome.

The Greek cities were left over from the empire of Alexander the Great.

When I refer to Greek cities, you must remember that most of the cities in Canaan were very mixed in population. So that a so-called Greek city might actually be thirty percent Hebrew. While a Hebrew city might easily be thirty percent Greek.

Our Hebrew world was heavily enmeshed in the Greek cultural milieu of the eastern Mediterranean. The very word synagogue is a Greek word.

The picture you have of those times is of a very homogenous, monolithic and devout theocracy.

But the true picture of Hebrew Canaan at the time I was born is much more complex.

Many communities didn’t even accept our calendar, but used the Roman calendar because the Roman invasion had made them prosperous. Among the wealthy class, people were very secular and worldly. For example -- southwest of Jerusalem was a coliseum where men and slaves fought, and men fought wild beasts; and not far from that was a stadium where chariot races were held.

Who do you suppose attended these games? Who lived in Jerusalem? Only Jews.

Oddly enough the high priest Jason had introduced many of the Roman and Greek games into the land of Judah. And Herod the Great had even attended the Olympics, and loved the chariot racing best of all. It was he who had built the hippodrome and amphitheatre outside of Jerusalem. And there were other similar structures in all the pagan cities throughout Canaan.

The aristocratic classes also attended the Greek theater. One Hebrew writer, Ezekial, had even written a play dealing with the Exodus which featured a speaking part for God!

So there was a great deal more diversity in our culture than has come down to you. And the reason for that is very simple – who wrote the histories of those times? The rabbis. And of course the rabbis had a very special and religious perspective. Hebrew mercenaries serving in the various armies of the Near and Middle East did not have the opportunity to do much writing.

Much has been made of the great tangle of religious law invented by the high priests and the rabbis to keep the common people in check, but how was all that law to be enforced? If a Hebrew lived in one of the Greek cities, how was he to be arrested if he broke Hebrew law?

Nazareth, the little village I grew up in, was three days from Jerusalem. If someone in Nazareth crossed the high priests, how was he to be arrested?

So as a practical matter, a great deal of our Law was ignored, even where, on paper, it was supposed to carry a death penalty.

I've said that I grew up in Galilee.

Galilee was a very beautiful place. From most vantage points you could see up into the snow-capped peaks of Mt. Hermon, and down towards the blue-green waters of the Mediterranean. It was a beautifully green part of the world, full of rolling hills and forests, and beautiful dun-colored fields.

The most fertile part of this wonderful land consisted of a red alluvial deposit which, when turned over by a plow, left a furrow like an open wound. And when our superb barley was in ear—standing sometimes as high as a man—it was like a purple damask richly embroidered in gold. Only the black-earth region of the Ukraine conveyed such a comparable impression of sumptuous fertility.

But the whole province was fertile and well-wooded, inviting cultivation by even the least industrious, and hence not a single field lay fallow. The richness of the soil, a relatively moist climate, and the precious streams of fresh water coming down from Mt. Hermon, all made Galilee a very special and blessed place.

Everywhere the line of hills was so exquisite, pure and delicate, that it seemed to have been drawn by an artist’s hand. Everywhere the relation of the planes and great distances impressed a delicious harmony. Under the hard blue sky the colors of Galilee blazed with extraordinary richness—the purple of the vineyards, the tender green of the orchards, the pale gold of ripe barley-- and in the eternal sunshine all these contrasting tones melted into one hot glow, the shadows containing violet shades of bronze.

Some scholars (and Hollywood movies) have painted us as impoverished, but in fact we were a very prosperous part of the world. There were about two hundred and fifty villages, all of them well watered and well fed. There were some crops that could be harvested ten months out of the year without any tending at all. Dates fell off the trees into your hands, and there was always a good crop of barley every April so my mother could bake a loaf of bread every day. In the vintage season we pounded the purple grapes with our little feet, and the wine flowed prodigiously. And the Sea of Galilee was always full of fish. The fishermen dragged out the fish in giant nets.

"It is easier to feed a Roman legion from the olive trees of Galilee," said the rabbis, than to raise a child anywhere else in Israel.

So we always had plenty to eat, but nonetheless it was sometimes a little monotonous: bread and fish, fish and bread, bread and fish... so one time I asked my father if we could get some meat to eat.

He said, You want meat? Bite this! And he grabbed his rump. My brother and I laughed like fools.

My father had a rough sense of humor. I wouldn’t repeat here any of his jokes. Especially not the one about how you could tell a camel with one hump from a camel with two humps.

But you already knew from the Gospels that Galilee was a very prosperous and well-fed place. How did you know? As with many things in the Gospels, the clue is both obvious and obscure.

If you remember, when I addressed the people and referred to ...the lilies of the field..., I instructed them to trust in the largesse of the Lord God, and that they shouldn't worry about tomorrow, and that God would provide. That was a typical Galilean attitude, the attitude of one who has never known want.

You also know the principle of gleaning from the Bible, where a poor person or a stranger was allowed to take from the edges of the agriculture in order to make a meal. We never had any problem with that.

We always had plenty.

Chapter II

I Was Called Yeshua

I was called Yeshua.

Yeshua is a very good, old, common Hebrew name. Many boys were named Yeshua. It was a name with a good pedigree. There had been three high priests named Yeshua, and it was the name of a famous judge of Israel who had stopped the sun in its tracks.

One variation of Yeshua was Joshua.

Considering how superstitious my people were with respect to names, it's an oddity of history that more scholars haven't remarked on the fact that, in Hebrew, Yeshua means God saves, or God in salvation.

Jesus is the Greek variation of Yeshua, and Christ comes from the Greek word for messiah, kristos -- Yeshua the Messiah.

My father's name was Joseph.

My father was a very good and decent man who worked hard for us. In addition to helping with the agriculture, he also earned some cash as a carpenter. He had the same tools and did the same kind of work that a carpenter does today. He had a saw, hammer, hand drill, and so forth. Of course he didn't have any electrical tools, but otherwise he did the same kind of work as any carpenter might today. One day he might be making a yoke for oxen, the next he might be building doors and windows for a fine home in Capernaum.

My father traveled quite a bit, all over Galilee and into the Greek cities. The capital of Galilee, Sepphoris, was just four miles down the road from us, and the nearest Greek city was Scythopolis. He traveled around quite a lot.

My father also liked to play cards; that was his hobby. Cards were a Greek game that was frowned upon by the more orthodox, but he liked it. Moreover he could always get a game in Nazareth, our little village. There were quite a few men who liked to play cards.

My father also liked to go dancing with the other men in the synagogue. In those days, men and women did not dance together.

And my father was also well known to be a brawler. You crossed him at your risk. As fast as conflict came towards him, that was how fast he went out to meet it; that was his style. And there was a legendary story told about my father running into some soldiers in the city of Scythopolis who made fun of him and threatened to cut off his beard.

I suppose these were Roman auxiliaries -- probably Syrians.

The soldiers all carried short swords, but my father fought the soldiers with his bare hands.

The soldiers did not cut off my father's beard. And when he was brought before the Greek magistrate, the judge took one look at all these strong, tall young men with their battered faces, another look at my father, and said sarcastically to the soldiers, Go on, get the hell out of my courtroom.

So no one ever cut off my father's beard. He was well known to be a man you did not cross.

But my father loved children. He was slightly hard of hearing on one side, because when he was younger a medical man had made a mistake and poked at something in his left ear, causing some damage. But oddly enough, he could always hear a small child speak. If a child spoke up at my father, he could hear just fine. And he often joked, Being married to your mother it’s probably better that I don’t hear so well.

So my father loved children, but he was a firm disciplinarian, and sometimes he beat me.

He was not abusive; it was always for good cause. Perhaps I stole some little thing, or used language that was not appropriate for a child.

Sometimes when I tell people this, they say, But that's not possible that you stole something, because you are Jesus and you are without sin.

That may be, but you must remember that in our law at that time, a boy was not subject to the Law until he was bar mitzvahed. He was subject only to his parents and their ownership of him. So did I sin, did I not sin -- that's something of a technical question. Not very important.

In any case, it is very difficult for a child to understand all of the moral questions involved in the meanings of right and wrong.

For example, one time I was in the market at Sepphoris with my mother--I must have been five years old or so--and I fancied a little box of small tin stars in a stall in the marketplace. My mother would not buy them, and I surreptitiously put them in my pocket. Later on, when we were home, I showed them proudly to her.

My mother was horrified. The very first thing the next morning, she dragged me back the four miles down the road to Sepphoris to return the stars and apologize to the stall-keeper. He laughed, of course, it was not very serious; but to my mother it was terrible. I don’t think either of my parents ever had an anti-social thought their entire lives.

But you see what I mean. A small child's indiscretion. But my father would have been very angry had he learned of it.

I both feared and adored my father, and I think if anyone had asked me what I wanted most in the world when I was young, I would have said, To know what my father knows. I loved him that much.

And in fact I remember one time--I must have been eight years old or so--when I threw my arms around his legs, looked up at him and said, Some day when I am full grown I am going to change my name to Joseph, so I can be just like you.

He laughed, but I think he was well pleased.

I loved my father that much. And still do.

My mother's name was Mary (probably the last Jewish woman to have that name). That was a very common Hebrew name at