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

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.