The Jesus you learned about in Sunday School doesn’t exist

Written by Dan Foster and published in Medium.com 6/6/2021

Dan FosterFollowJun 6 · 10 min read

When I was a kid growing up in the church, we sang a hymn that described Jesus as “gentle Jesus — meek and mild.” It left me with the conception of Jesus as a cooperative, compliant, docile, passive, and largely timid figure. Now that I think about it, projecting this image of Jesus was probably part of some strategy to teach ten-year-old me how to behave.

Be well-manned and nice.

Jesus was nothing like that.

In fact, Jesus was — in a cultural, social, and religious sense — a real trouble maker. Do yourself a favor. Open the Bible and discover who the real Jesus actually was. You might just have some misconceptions destroyed.

You see, somewhere along the line, we create a ‘Jesus’ in our own image and began to impart that image to the world. But, unfortunately, the reality is that the Jesus you learned about in Sunday School probably doesn’t exist.

If you grew up in the church, then I can’t speak for your experience. But, here are ten things that they didn’t teach me about Jesus in Sunday School — that have reformed my understanding of who Jesus actually was:

1. Jesus was not white

I want you to do an experiment for me. Go to google and do an image search on “Jesus.” The pictures that appear in your search results represent what people think Jesus might have looked like. What do you notice?

Yes, that’s right!

More often than that, Jesus is imagined as a blond-haired, blue-eyed, white guy who, to be honest, would comfortably fit the physical requirements of Hitler’s Aryan race.

Except he was a Jew.

Awkward.

And because Jesus was a Jew, he almost certainly had Jewish features, such as olive skin, brown eyes, and black hair. Yes, Jesus probably looked more like that Middle-eastern man who lives in your neighborhood — you know the one who you treat as an object of suspicion and scorn — the one you speak of when you complain to your other white Christian friends about how Arabs are overrunning the country. Yeah, that guy — he looks more like Jesus than you do.

2. Jesus was a common name

If you walked through the streets of Jerusalem in 30AD looking for Jesus and decided to do that by yelling out his name at the top of your lungs — “Jesus! I’m looking for Jesus! Has anyone seen Jesus!” — chances are you would find a Jesus, but maybe not the one you were looking for.

Many people shared the name. Jesus’s given name, commonly Romanized as Yeshua, was quite common in first-century Galilee. In fact, archaeologists have unearthed the tombs of 71 Yeshuas from the period of Jesus’ death. The name also appears 30 times in the Old Testament in reference to four separate characters — including a descendent of Aaron who helped distribute grain offerings (2 Chronicles 31:15) and a man who accompanied former captives of Nebuchadnezzar back to Jerusalem (Ezra 2:2).

What is more, Yeshua is better translated into English as “Joshua.” How many Joshuas do you know? Probably lots!

3. Jesus was a refugee

I don’t know how refugees are treated in your country, but in my home country — much to our shame — we tend to lock them up in detention centers for months on end until we establish whether or not they have a good reason for claiming refugee status. If not, we send them back to their own war-torn country.

Yet Jesus was a refugee.

Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph, had to flee the nation of Israel to the relative safety of Egypt because of state-sanction infanticide. The whole gruesome episode can be found in Matthew 2:13–15:

“An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod.”

King Herod, who was about as crazy as they come, killed every child under the age of two, just in case one of them might happen to one day threaten his own rule. Jesus — and presumably some other — managed to escape.

4. Jesus had a day job

After the death of King Herod, Jesus and his family finally returned to Israel where Jesus did what other young men in first-century Palestine did — he became an apprentice in the same trade as his father — starting at the age of thirteen (the age when Jewish boys were considered to be men).

Since Jesus didn’t start his public ministry until he was thirty, that means that Jesus spent a good 17 years working in an ordinary dawn-til-dusk day job. He became a carpenter. You could imagine he became very good at making things after so long in the trade, and perhaps it would not be uncommon to find some “Joseph and Sons” furniture somewhere in Jerusalem.

Needless to say, by the time he steps into public life, Jesus was well and truly ready for some long-service leave.

5. Jesus had brothers and sisters

Yes, Jesus was part of a family unit. Although he was the first-born child, Mary and Joseph would go on to have other children as well. We do not know exactly how many, but the Bible mentions four brothers named James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon, as well as an undisclosed amount of sisters (Matthew 13:53–56).

If you thought the dynamic in your family was difficult, can you imagine what it must have been like for Mary and Joseph with one of their children claiming to be the Son of God? Needless to say, Jesus was viewed as the black sheep of the family, and on at least one occasion, Jesus’s Mother and Brother rock up to where Jesus is teaching to try to pull him into line. (Mark 3:31–35).

Make no mistake, Jesus’s siblings were a little embarrassed by Jesus’s antics, and, as far as we know, none of them followed or believed in him while he was alive. However, all of them became believers after his death, which argues the case well for a resurrected Jesus. Jesus’s brother, James, was particularly scathing of Jesus in his life, but then went on to become the first bishop of Jerusalem, wrote the Epistle of James, and eventually surrendered his body as a martyr for the faith. That’s quite a transformation!

6. Jesus liked to party

No doubt, part of the embarrassment that Jesus’s siblings felt towards him was related to the company that he kept and the events that he attended. Jesus was known as a man who enjoyed a drink, especially in the company of those who others thought a bit disreputable.

Matthew 11:19 says, “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and people say, ‘Look at him! He eats too much and drinks too much wine. He’s a friend of tax collectors and other sinners.”

Tax collectors, prostitutes, criminals, and the ancient equivalent of religious extremists (known as zealots) — they were all part of Jesus’s inner circle. He was unashamed to be seen with them. He would visit their homes, share food at their tables and love them without pretense.

7. Jesus was homeless

Jesus said of himself, “Foxes have holes. Birds have nests. But the Son of Man has no place to lay His head.” (Matthew 23:10–12). After Jesus stepped away from his day job as a carpenter and began to teach and ministry, he left behind his home and the creature comforts thereof.

After that, Jesus relied largely on the hospitality of others who welcome his message. In his travels, Jesus and His disciples regularly found lodging in the large home of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus at Bethany, near Jerusalem; and it is apparent from reading the Gospels that many people offered Jesus the hospitality of their homes. Some Bible scholars believe Jesus lived in a house at Capernaum with Simon Peter and his family (Matthew. 8:14–15; 17:24–27).

8. Jesus broke social taboos

Jesus did not pay much respect to social, cultural, or religious traditions. He was much more interested in reaching, serving, and helping people, and if that meant dispensing with tradition, then so be it.

There are lots of different taboos I could include here. I have already mentioned the fact that the kinds of people that Jesus associated with were considered improper for a good Jewish Rabbi. However, his treatment of women was particularly striking.

In Luke 10, Jesus allows a woman called Mary (there seemed to be so many different Marys in those days!) to sit at his feet while he taught. On the surface, this might seem degrading to her, but it was actually the elevated position that a disciple would sit in, in relation to a Rabbi. She was being treated as an equal with the men! The fact that many women were part of Jesus’s ‘in-group’ was culturally ground-breaking.

Then, in Luke 7, a woman comes to Jesus and weeps in repentance at his feet, washing his feet with her tears and drying them with her hair — in the company of the Pharisees no less! In those days, women were not even supposed to speak to Rabbis, let alone touch them. This was scandalous! And yet, Jesus lovingly picks her up off the floor and restores her.

There in John 4:1–30, there is a story of the brief interaction between Jesus and a Samaritan woman. Not only is she a woman, but she is also a member of a racial group that Jews typically despised. Yet, Jesus starts a conversation with her and treats her with a kind of grace that she would never have experienced before.

I could go on and on. Jesus never let a cultural expectation get in the way of an opportunity to love.

9. Jesus was a criminal

Let’s be perfectly clear. Jesus was executed as a criminal. He managed to achieve that feat by repeatedly and deliberately breaking the religious laws of the day — at least in the eyes of the religious leaders. What Jesus actually did was violate the interpretations that religious leaders had developed around certain biblical commands. To put it simply, he broke the laws that the Pharisees had invented to make people keep the laws.

The religious leaders in Jesus’s day believed in strict observance of what was known as the Sabbath Day. God ordained the Sabbath Day to be a day of rest — a good idea if you ask me.

However, the religious leaders took this good and life-giving concept and burdened people with many absurd regulations to make sure that people were truly resting — from how far you were allowed to walk before it was considered ‘work’ to how much you were allowed to carry to what food you were allowed to prepare. Even boiling water was outlawed on the Sabbath.

So, you can imagine the outrage when Jesus broke the Sabbatical Laws on multiple occasions. In fact, Jesus performed at least 7 of his miracles on the Sabbath Day. Rather than rejoicing at the fact that people were being healed, the religious leaders were incensed that Jesus had dared participate in the ‘work’ of healing people on the sacred day of rest. Jesus challenged them by saying: “Which is the right thing to do on the Sabbath day: to do good or to do evil? Is it right to save a life or to destroy one?” They had no answer for him, but inwardly they seethed.

Jesus refused to stop doing good just because it was a particular day of the week — and for that, he was considered a law-breaker.

10. Jesus was killed by religious people

“Their lives are not good examples for you to follow. They tell you to do things, but they don’t do those things themselves. They make strict rules that are hard for people to obey. They try to force others to obey all their rules. But they themselves will not try to follow any of those rules.” Matthew 23:3

This was Jesus’s warning to the people about the religious leaders of his day. It’s a fairly honest and brutal assessment about the kind of spiritual leaders Jesus was dealing with. It cost him his life.

Jesus was handed over to be executed by the good, Bible-carrying, church-attending, rule-observing, spiritual leaders of his day — make no mistake.

Perfectly human, perfectly God

So, what do we learn about Jesus from these ten things we forgot? When I look over this list, I am struck by his humanity — his familiarity with the common struggles of people.

We are talking about a man who, as a child, fled his homeland as a refugee. We are talking about a man who experienced a difficult family dynamic and all kinds of sibling rivalry. We are talking about a man whose hands were calloused by working the tools of his trade for many, many years. We are talking about a man who knew what it was to be misunderstood, despised, and rejected. We are talking about a man who knew pain, suffering, and death. So, ultimately, we are talking about a man who can and does relate to our lives — even today.

Not only am I struck by Jesus’s humanity, but I am also amazed at how he managed to navigate all of the challenges of being human in a way that revealed his divine nature.

He rejected the man-made religious systems and structures of his day and instead brought a kind of grace and compassion that was truly divine. He demonstrated an other-worldly ability to heal, forgive, restore, love, and accept people as they are. If Jesus’s chief goal was to reveal the loving nature of God to humanity, then I dare say he achieved that and more.