Jesus was a refugee
Joan E Taylor writes about Jesus as a refugee child and considers the influence on his life and teaching of this experience
The unstoppable force of refugees fleeing to Europe has, in various places, hit the immovable object of an attitude that there is no room at the inn. Spaces are filled. Migrants should be kept out, in order to preserve jobs, health and welfare services. In an environment of austerity, where economic cuts have hit people hard, this cold-heartedness in part derives from a deep sense of insecurity.
At this time it is worth remembering that Jesus of Nazareth is, in the Bible, presented exactly as one who would be rejected by such European countries: a refugee child.
A place of refuge
In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus’s (adoptive) father Joseph and mother Mary live in Bethlehem, a town in Judaea near Jerusalem. It is assumed to be their home village. Certain magoi (‘wise men’/astrologers) come from ‘the East’ to Herod, the Roman client king of Judaea, looking to honour a new ruler they have determined by a ‘star’, and Jesus is identified as the one.
All this is bad news to Herod, and Herod acts in a preemptive strike against the people of Bethlehem and its environs. He kills all boys under two years of age in an atrocity that is traditionally known as ‘the massacre of the innocents’ (Matthew 2:16-18).
But Joseph has been warned, beforehand, in a dream of Herod’s intentions to kill little Jesus, and the family flees to Egypt. It is not until Herod is dead that Joseph and Mary dare return, and then they avoid Judaea: Joseph ‘was afraid to go there’ (Matthew 2:22) because Herod’s son is in charge. Instead, they find a new place of refuge, in Nazareth of Galilee, far from Bethlehem.
Jesus’s earliest years were then, according to the gospel of Matthew, spent as a refugee in a foreign land, and then as a displaced person in a village a long way from his family’s original home.
A kind of Moses
Scholars of the historical Jesus can be suspicious of this account, as also with the other nativity account in the gospel of Luke 1-2. It is clearly constructed with allusions to Jesus as a kind of Moses figure: just as Moses was under threat from an evil Pharaoh who killed children (Exodus 1-2), so was Jesus. But while resonances with the scriptural precedent are intended, there is no real need for the author to invent the idea of Jesus being a refugee child somewhere in Egypt to have him being Moses-like.
There is a quote, ‘Out of Egypt I called my son’ (Hosea 11:1), in Matthew 2:15, but the ‘son’ concerned is historical Israel, not Moses and not the Messiah, and it sits uncomfortably with the story. The author of Matthew did not need to build a myth out of such a text.
It seems not then unlikely to me that Jesus’s family, with a lineage traced to the great king David (Matthew 1; Luke 3:23-38; Romans 1:3 and 15:12), opted to flee from Bethlehem, long-standing residence of the kingly line and their original home. In many traditional societies such locations of clans are maintained, even with social disruptions. Archaeology has shown how Herod built a palace complex at Herodion, including his future mausoleum, nicely overlooking the town of Bethlehem. It was as if Herod was breathing down Bethlehem’s neck.
Herod
The first century Jewish historian Josephus portrays Herod as paranoid about any possible threat to his rule. He killed his own sons and had few qualms about killing anyone else’s. As Augustus quipped: ‘I would rather be Herod’s pig than his son’ (Macrobius, Saturnalia 2:4, since pigs are not butchered by Jews).
We know also that Jews fled from many kinds of troubles in Judaea in the third to the first centuries BCE, and that Egypt was one of the places they went to as refugees. Josephus comments on the problematic revolutionaries (and their children) who fled there after the First Jewish Revolt (66-70 CE; War 7:407-19), but they were following a well-worn path.
Many epitaphs and inscriptions, as well as historical sources, testify to a thriving Jewish expatriate community in Egypt, made up of earlier refugees, that could be joined by others. However, just like today, new refugees were not welcome. A letter of the emperor Claudius, written in 41 CE, states that Jews in Alexandria lived in ‘a city not their own’ in which they were ‘not to bring in or invite Jews who sail down to Alexandria from Syria [-Palaestina]’ (P. London 1912; CPJ I: 151).
The kindness of strangers
A remembrance of Jesus’s family in Egypt is preserved in Matariya, in the suburbs of Cairo at Heliopolis, a spot understood to be a stopping place on the holy family’s flight, and it is probably the most important site in the world for anyone wishing to contemplate Joseph, Mary and Jesus as refugees.
For new refugees, as anywhere, life would have been very hard. The first-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria tells us of the consequences of poverty, which could result in enslavement (Special Laws 2:82). Presumably, Jewish charity and voluntary giving through the synagogue would have helped a struggling refugee family, but they would also have been reliant on the kindness of strangers.
The legacy of being a refugee and a newcomer to a place far from home is something that I think informed Jesus’s teaching. When he set off on his mission, he took up the life of a displaced person with ‘nowhere to lay his head’ (Matthew 8:20; Luke 9.58). He asked those who acted for him to go out without a bag or a change of clothing, essentially to walk along the road like destitute refugees who had suddenly fled, relying on the generosity and hospitality of ordinary people whose villages they entered (Mark 6:8-11; Matthew 10:9-11; Luke 9:3).
It was the villagers’ welcome, or not, to such poor wanderers that showed what side they were on: ‘And if any place will not receive you and refuse to hear you, shake off the dust on your feet when you leave, for a testimony to them’ (Mark 6:11).
Joan is professor of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism at King’s College London.
Comments
The Flight into Egypt only appears in Matthew’s Gospel, the most ‘Jewish’ of gospels. The episode may have been a fabrication to engage the sympathy of Jews for whom the Exile in Egypt was (and remains) a key event in the history of the Jewish people. The Torah, which Jesus heard in the synagogue read over a yearly cycle, contains frequent pleas to treat the stranger/sojourner with justice, and reminders of their own experience as exiles, for example Exodus 23:9 “You shall not oppress a stranger; you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The experience of exile has always been woven deep into the fabric of Judaism.
By redesau on 1st October 2015 - 14:51
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