Middle Eastern culture
The Historic Jesus
Early in the year I shared with you that I’ve set myself a challenge for 2025 to try to get to grips with who Jesus of Nazareth was in the historic context of his time and place. I ploughed through the first seven books in my pile with relative ease. NT Wright and Marcus Borg‘s The Meaning of Jesus gave me a harder run for my money, as I reported at the time.
Now it’s the turn of Kenneth Bailey. Wow! I’m sitting at the feet of a master of Middle Eastern culture with impeccable credentials; a man who grew up in, as well as lived and worked in the area much of his life (1930-2016), not only a prolific author and lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies, but also an ordained Presbyterian minister to boot!
Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes – which I’ve just finished reading – is in a league of its own, I suspect. Bailey begins rather provocatively by taking apart the ever-popular oh-so-familiar Christmas stories of Jesus’ birth. If you’ve swallowed the old traditions from your youth up – donkeys and inn-keepers and precipitate births etc – prepare to have the rug unceremoniously whipped from beneath your feet. It’s a clever way of grabbing our full attention without doing too much damage. Though I’d heard many different challenges to the birth stories before, somehow I found Bailey’s perspective put me in the mood to have all my preconceived ideas on other topics and my supposed knowledge challenged. I could see from the outset that Western eyes and minds in general have obscured important aspects of Jesus’ life and ministry – for most of us. But if we’re to understand who Jesus really was, and what he was all about, we need to take off those Western glasses and get the dust of the Middle East in our eyes. And boy, he’s the man to guide is through that journey.
He writes beautifully and so compellingy. Everything is clearly organised and laid out. And though there’s plenty of evidence of scholarship and wide reading in the references and footnotes, he doesn’t allow his great learning to bog down the text. Instead he focuses on one topic at a time, drawing out clear points of biblical exegesis and the significance of what these ancient books have to tell us. He’s selective: covering Jesus’ birth, the Beautitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, dramatic actions of Jesus, and his relationship to women, with more than half the book devoted to the parables.
I found it both fascinating and illuminating. How could I ever have assumed we Westerners could adequately interpret these books without insider reference to the ancient and foreign culture in which it was all enacted? With his own extraordinary background, this author has the skill to understand Middle Eastern texts and interpreters that very few other scholars could attempt, and in his hands the stories come alive and assume proportions and details and meaning hitherto unseen. The book seems to me to end rather abruptly but perhaps that simply leaves the reader looking for more.