"At that time": what the daily life of Jesus and his first disciples teaches us

How do we imagine Jesus? Too often young, blond, charismatic like a Hollywood star. We then imagine him perpetually engaged in long journeys, besieged by huge crowds and taken up with his mission. Above all, iconography and also Catholic theology give us back the image of a Jesus who is more divine than human, with the thought perennially turned to his destiny as Savior. A Jesus essentially passing through the Earth, waiting to take back his rightful place at the right hand of the Father, in the highest heavens, to use a doctrinal formula.

What we have said is the result of a narrative that has settled over the centuries and has built an imaginary that is not entirely false and fallacious, but certainly distorted and illusory. More simply: reductive and guilty of distancing the man Jesus, his earthly life from us. This imaginary leads us to forget that in the Christian faith it is God who becomes human in order to be able to move freely and unconditionally among human beings like him. In short, in Christianity there cannot be the divinity of Christ without his humanity, without his corporeality and finiteness.

This seems to us to be the decisive message proposed in these Easter days by a volume that has just arrived in bookstores and with a title that is certainly evocative for anyone of us who has ever set foot in a church and listened to the reading of a passage from the Gospel: "At that time" (Solferino, 2023, euro 17, pp. 256. Also Ebook). The subtitles on the cover warn that we are dealing with a daily history of the origins of Christianity and a volume that recounts the events from Jesus to Saint Paul through the numbers - and not those of the verses, mind you - of the New Testament. It could not have been otherwise since the author, Roberto Volpi, is a long-time statistician, used to thinking about figures, quantities, percentages and statistics. However, Volpi did not want to make a volume of curiosities or amaze readers with who knows what cabalistic revelations. As a good statistician he relied on numbers to have a solid and habitual basis for him with which to start his reasoning and then deepen, thus managing to leap back in time and find himself in the Galilee of almost two thousand years.

And what do the figures evoked by Roberto Volpi say that is so important? Meanwhile, Jesus, at the time when the preaching narrated by the Gospels begins, was no longer a boy for a long time. Indeed, being over thirty he was not even a young man by the standards of an era in which the average life span rarely exceeded three decades. He was a grown, mature man who had long meditated on his choices, including that of not marrying and dedicating himself entirely to preaching and to God. He was a grown man and for this reason he could speak in public having the authority of maturity, a factor fundamental given the value that ancient societies gave to the experience accumulated over the years. Still on the subject of numbers, even in the most exceptional cases, let us forget the enormous crowds from stadiums or concerts of today listening to Jesus. The figures evoked by Volpi speak of a Palestine inhabited by tens of thousands of people, in which even Jerusalem was anything but a metropolis. Ergo, Jesus very often preached to crowds who sat around him and in which he could easily recognize the faces of individuals. He had a direct relationship with his audience and he was as far away as could be imagined from a sort of holy man who observes his followers from afar.

They are only brief hints of what is proposed in Volpi's book, but they make us understand how much more can be discovered about the figure of Jesus, about his person and his deeds. In short, Volpi wants to provoke us in some way. It seems to tell us: if these concrete evidences narrated by the Gospels escape us, despite the data, they escape us because we are used to a distracted, repetitive, stereotyped reading. But then how much of Christ's real message escapes us, how distant do we keep ourselves from the essence of early Christianity? From this point of view, "In that time" becomes a useful tool for rediscovery and study. By highlighting - but it is only one example among many - how the majority of the population of Jesus' time was made up of young and very young people, we underline the attention that the Messiah shows for the little ones, for children in a era in which childhood was ignored and until the moment one became an adult one counted for nothing. In short, it shows the Christian revolution in the way of understanding relations with the weakest, with the excluded - how many sick people does Jesus meet? -, between men and women given that the female presence among the followers of Christ was anything but limited. Volpi's book, noting the everyday life and ordinariness of the life of a Jesus who moves between villages in the Galilee not far from each other, consumes the food that everyone eats and like everyone else, he blurts out and gets annoyed with his companions and also with his mother , Mary, recalls the undeniable exceptional nature of the Gospel Good News. A Good News that has been questioning all of us, believers and non-believers alike, for two thousand years.