BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Boy Jesus

New book examines the history and archaeology of Jesus’s early years

Boy Jesus: Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times

By Joan Taylor
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2025), xvi + 340 pp., 16 color plates, 12 b/w figures; $29.99 (hardcover).
Review by James W. Barker

Travel back in time to witness the early life of Jesus. Joan Taylor’s Boy Jesus vividly reconstructs the historical background of Jesus’s birth and childhood. Taylor thoroughly engages the details of the gospel stories while supplementing the biblical accounts with the archaeological record. A helpful timeline along with many detailed maps and colorful figures complement Taylor’s crisp prose as Joseph, Mary, Jesus, and even King Herod come to life.

The opening chapters address the multifaceted meaning of the Greek word Ioudaios. The word means “Jewish” regarding religion and ethnicity, “Judean” regarding geography, and “Judahite” regarding ancestry. Even though it’s always the same Greek word in the Gospels, Taylor often highlights how one connotation may be more pertinent at one point or another. For example, Herod the Great was “king of the Jews” because he was Rome’s designated ruler over the territory of Judea and Samaria. However, Herod was not a “Judahite” who descended from the patriarch Judah or, by extension, King David. Taylor calls attention to Herod’s descent from the Idumeans, who converted to Judaism, but it might have been helpful to point out that Herod himself was fully “Jewish” in terms of religion, since he was not a convert himself.

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Throughout the book, Taylor finely threads a needle pertaining to memory and historicity. Taylor avoids any dismissiveness in claiming that the gospel stories of Jesus’s early life are simply made up. At the same time, Taylor grants ancient authors creative license in their storytelling, although there were constraints as to how much could be invented outright. Overall, Taylor accepts Matthew’s birth story as most accurately retelling Joseph’s memories. According to Taylor, Luke’s opening chapters were not originally part of the Gospel. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that Luke could preserve some of Mary’s treasured memories. As even later accounts, the Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas increasingly stretch the imagination. Yet even those texts could convey kernels of truth, such as Jesus’s being born in a cave, working in carpentry, and receiving some education.

Taylor’s expertise in archaeology definitely makes the book worth reading. It is chock full of fascinating historical details, the majority of which come from Taylor’s own painstaking research. Many of her findings are not well known, even by biblical scholars. For example, King Herod’s destruction of Davidic genealogical archives and desecration of David’s tomb accentuate the inherent danger in hoping for a Davidic messiah. Similarly, after the death of Herod, the Roman governor of Syria named Varus waged war to subdue Judean territory. Taylor compellingly explains how these were much more volatile and violent times than previous scholarship has acknowledged. One takeaway is that the holy family’s flight to Egypt is far more historically plausible than many scholars admit. Moreover, the family’s refugee status would have affected how they thought about themselves and how others thought of them.

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The Gospels devote only a few pages to any of the events before Jesus was approximately 30 years old. Taylor’s book covers those stories in great detail, but all the more impressively she elucidates the historical background—much of which would have been known by the earliest readers of the Gospels.

Although I typically prefer footnotes to endnotes, endnotes were the right choice for this book. In the notes, Taylor astutely guides inquisitive students and scholars through a century of differing viewpoints. Yet there are no footnotes to detract from her careful observations and explanations, so the ten chapters (240 pages) of main text can suffice for readers who prefer to rely solely on Taylor.

Boy Jesus will no doubt become a significant and lasting contribution to our historical understanding of the turbulent world in which Jesus was born and raised.

James W. Barker is Associate Professor of New Testament at Western Kentucky University. His areas of interest include early Christianity and the relationship between the various gospel accounts of Jesus’s life.

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