Spending a Year with Jesus

SpendaYearwithJesus tells the story of Jesus’ last year day-by-day.

The biblical record provides rich primary source material. With some study of first-century time and space, a natural sequence of events emerges from the details to yield a cohesive account of Jesus’ human experience.

As in any ancient history, there are gaps in the record of Jesus’ last year. We can conclude logically that the Jesus’ experience in the gaps connects to the patterns recorded in the Gospels, to human experience in general, and to those unique experiences in Jesus’ first-century time and space.

In terms of human experience in general, we know he ate and slept, for example. In terms of specifics, we can refer to ancient sources such as the writings of Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Mishnah as well as archeological studies.

In addition, climate, demographics, topography, as well as agricultural cycles provide a rich context in themselves for deducing events and movements. For example, traveling in the rain or gathering a crowd at the peak of harvest season are both quite unlikely.

Filling in the gaps from the available archeological, historical, and geographical data allows us to meet Jesus in his space and time.

Filling in the gaps also exposes the assumptions that we continuously project onto the past from our own imaginations (such as science-fiction devices to leap through time or space from big event to big event).

I invite you to spend a year with Jesus day-by-day in the hill country of Israel. He was human like us, and like us his context was critically important to his activity and message.