Jesus and the Jewish Festivals by Gary M. Burge

Author:Gary M. Burge [Burge, Gary M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-310-41742-2
Publisher: Zondervan Academic
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

JESUS AND TABERNACLES

We possess only one record of Jesus visiting Jerusalem at Tabernacles (John 7–9). He was living in Galilee (no doubt Capernaum), and his family was on its way to the feast. His brothers did not believe in him (7:5) and were urging him (cynically perhaps?) to display his powers in Jerusalem during the feast. Jesus declined. And instead, he traveled there alone that year.

This was also a dangerous period for him. On his previous visit to Jerusalem, the leaders there threatened his life after he healed a paraplegic man on the Sabbath (John 5:18). Now the coming festival made those same leaders look for him when they saw the other members of Jesus’ family (7:11). Public opinion about him was sharply divided—some thought he was sincere, others thought he was fraudulent. But because the authorities had formed severe opinions about him, most people stayed out of the coming fray (7:13 – 13). The word was out: if the authorities got a chance, they would kill him (7:35).

Sometime during the middle of the Feast of Tabernacles, as Jesus was teaching in the temple, he was interrogated by those same threatening authorities. John’s account of this is abbreviated, and I imagine that the debates recorded in his gospel took many hours to unfold. But John summarizes them nicely. The leaders pursued three lines of argument.

First, how could Jesus teach with authority when he did not have the appropriate schooling? This was a problem. Jesus no doubt had the usual schooling natural to all young men, but formal schooling was over by the time he was twelve or thirteen. Advanced schooling was available in the oral law—and many young men moved to Jerusalem to study under the great rabbis of the day (Hillel, Gamaliel, or Johanan ben Zakkai perhaps). The apostle Paul did this (see Gal. 1:14; cf. Acts 22:3), but Jesus did not. Nevertheless for the next twenty years he attended regular synagogue gatherings, debating finer matters of the Scriptures. Yet Jesus made a remarkable claim during the feast in John 7. His teaching was not from a human teacher, but from God himself (John 7:16). This aligned him with the prophets, inspired directly by God, and yet he was capable of debating the minutia of the law with exacting precision (7:14 – 21).

Second, the authorities wanted to know where he came from. Jesus was known as “the prophet from Nazareth” in Galilee (Matt. 21:11), and for some, Galilee was an unlikely origin for the Messiah (John 7:41). He should come from the south, from Judea where Bethlehem is located (7:42). Some were dubious about anything that came from Nazareth (1:46), and later when the apostles were interrogated in Jerusalem, their Galilean heritage made the authorities fail to take them seriously. Still others held to the superstition that this Messiah would simply “appear” in Judea mysteriously (7:27). Jesus rejected all of these. His origins were important, but they were not what anyone expected: Jesus’ origins were in God himself (7:29).

Third,

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