Giosuè Ghisalberti

Jesus, the Unprecedented Human Being


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to be legendary and unhistorical.”97 Whether the event took place or not has no bearing at all on the overall significance of the relation of Jesus’ birth with Herod’s monarchical ←50 | 51→rule as himself the proxy king of the Jews. At issue, ultimately, is the first misunderstanding of Jesus, one that will be perpetuated and lead to his arrest and execution. The slaughter of the children of Bethlehem following the birth of Jesus will be essential to his life once he begins his ministry. In his concern for the well-being of children, we notice the extent of his feelings, his care for them; those are obvious. There are also other examples of Jesus’ sayings, challenging for the hearer and much more difficult to understand. When, for example, he tells his listeners that one must become like a child to enter the kingdom of God, they would have been, at least, unsure about his meaning and, perhaps, dumbfounded; they needed to hear much more in order to collect together all his references to children. In the gospels, Jesus will warn others with nothing less than a severe threat: to those who are a scandal to children, “stumbling blocks” while raising and bringing them up, it would be preferable if their life ended, their future nullified. Rather than simply a relationship of protection and care, Jesus provides us with his conception of child development (of socialization and indoctrination) that in some sense prevents the child from being other than a mimetic copy, nothing more than emulation. In the gospel of Luke, there will be a unique biographical experience of Jesus as a twelve-year-old in the Jerusalem temple and a parable of the prodigal son no one has interpreted as autobiographical. Jesus understands himself to be prodigal not in terms of disappointing his father or squandering his inheritance, but to make a distinction between Joseph as his lawful father (legal according to the Roman census) and himself as the father to the man who – to become who he was – had to abandon his family and his home. Jesus had to engender himself as a child from the concept of being the “first-born.”

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