![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/719\/2018\/09\/santa-anna-blessed-mother-mary.jpg\")
International Women\u2019s Day seems like a good day to return to blogging about the book I am working on,\u00a0What Jesus Learned From Women<\/em><\/a>. I started this series with Jesus\u2019 mother Mary<\/a>, since unless one denies that Jesus was a human being, we can safely say that he learned from her. By the same token, we can say uncontroversially that Jesus learned from his grandmother and other female ancestors\u00a0at least indirectly<\/em> via the influence they had on Jesus\u2019 parents. But I think we may be able to say more than that, and here I will give just a taste of the kinds of topics I have begun to explore and plan to explore in the chapter in the book about Jesus\u2019 maternal grandmother.<\/p>\nThere is good reason to treat the apocryphal Gospels with skepticism. Indeed, even the canonical Gospels deserve to be approached with a healthy dose! But just as we find that there are plausible details in the background of the Gospel of John\u2019s contrived discourses couched in the author\u2019s distinctive style, and just as I found there to be some tidbits of accurate knowledge about India in the background details of the Acts of Thomas, I think there may be reason to draw a similar conclusion about works such as the Infancy Gospel (or Protoevangelium) of James. There is no particular reason for a later author to be aware of Nazareth\u2019s proximity to Sepphoris, much less to locate Mary\u2019s parents there. And so I suspect that the author of that work may have embedded some known details in his work of historical fiction. If so, then between that and some general things that tended to be true about women in that time and place, we may be able to suggest at least a few things that Jesus is likely to have learned from his grandmother, and from visiting his grandmother (whose name, according to this text, was Anna) in the big city.<\/p>\n
In writing about this, I\u2019ll also need to take another look at the work Ken Dark<\/a> has done in Nazareth. His archaeological<\/a> research<\/a> has led him to argue that there was a cultural divide between Sepphoris and Nazareth<\/a>. In a sense, this might simply be confirmation of what we would have considered inherently probable anyway, namely that a Jewish village would be more monolithic and conservative than a Romanized urban center. If that is the case, it must be emphasized that that doesn\u2019t mean there was no interaction between the city and the nearby village. That would be all but impossible, given the time and location. But it would impact the\u00a0character<\/em> of that interaction in most instances, and perhaps is Jesus\u2019 case specifically. Dark\u2019s work (as well as that of others) also suggests that Nazareth may have been reestablished not long before the time of Jesus<\/a>, probably as part of an effort by Judaea to exert its influence on the Galilee. That has implications for the story of Jesus more broadly, although in ways that may or may not fit in this particular book.<\/p>\n Before proceeding, here are links to two recent blog posts that are also about the Infancy Gospel of James:<\/p>\n It is important to emphasize that the chapter is not going to be exclusively or even primarily focused on a treatment of this extracanonical source and its details. It is probably also important to emphasize that the discussion of Jesus visiting Sepphoris will likely be of interest, and explore an inherently plausible scenario, even if one thinks that there is nothing of any historical value whatsoever in the Infancy Gospel of James.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll also explore the possibility that Jesus learned some approaches to healing from his grandmother, given that women were often the preservers, repository, and transmitters of what we would have to call ancient medical knowledge<\/a>. Jesus used methods of healing that are evidenced from other sources \u2013 spittle and salves, for instance \u2013 methods that blur lines (from a modern perspective at least, but perhaps even in ancient times) between miracle, medicine, and magic<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n