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Appendix 3
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149 Appendix 3 The Peasant Artisan Jesus and Israelite Traditions Jesus’ relationship to Israelite and Judean traditions has been a matter of great concern in recent scholarship, especially when the Synoptics and the Gospel of John emphasize frequent disputes around them. Peasant studies and economic anthropology urge that the political aims of the uneducated Jesus did not directly involve principled disputes about Judean theology or law. The little traditions of the Galilean villages and towns selectively focused on elements of Torah and prophets that undergirded basic needs and claims for just treatment. Jesus’ political aims were funded by and consonant with basic Israelite traditions. Still, Jesus was more concerned about just treatment than about purity concerns . It is doubtful that ordinary Galileans could meet the rigorous purity strictures of the Pharisees.1 Jesus was free about Sabbath observance and fasting as well when it came to healing or subsistence (Mark 2:23 [gleaning on the Sabbath]; 2:18 [fasting]; 3:5 [healing]).2 He seems to have had serious reservations about Herod’s temple as a contemporary emblem of political religion (much as with the 1. See the general comment of Gildas Hamel, Poverty and Charity in Roman Palestine, First Three Centuries C.E., Near Eastern Studies, vol. 23 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 55: “It was therefore more difficult for poor people to fulfill purity rules. They had to use certain kinds of food whose status was not quite as ‘clear’” in terms of purity rules. Ritual fasting probably made little sense to those with subsistence concerns; Richard L. Rohrbaugh, The New Testament in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Matrix: The Bible in Mediterranean Context (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2007), 30. Fiensy disagrees: Jesus the Galilean: Soundings in a First Century Life (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2007), 177–86. 2. The variant reading at Luke 6:4 in the Western MS tradition (D) is instructive: “On that same day, after seeing a man working on the sabbath, he said, ‘If you know what you are doing, you are honorable; but if not, you are cursed and a transgressor of the law.’” This text implies that working for subsistence need takes precedence over sabbath rest (which is only practical for those with means to carry over to the first day of the week). See John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: 150 The Political Aims of Jesus pagan temples of Caesarea Philippi in Philip’s territory). Herod, of course, had intended it as another megalithic monument to honor Caesar and “Roman prosperity .” As argued in this book, Jesus’ attack on the temple tables was centrally an attack on the temple as a bank and commercial enterprise but also as a place that belied the Power behind the Passover sacrifices. This attack the temple elites (high priests and temple scribes) could not abide. Jesus, without question, saw himself as an Israelite, though he was a bastard and thus of questionable status within Israel,3 and he accepted basic conceptions of God and Israelite justice found in the Hebrew scriptures. Jesus clearly took the Exodus story as central (Q2 11:20). His political concerns echoed those of Deuteronomy 15 and Leviticus 25. Like his contemporary Hillel, Jesus lived by a summary of Torah. He knew the Shema‘ (Mark 12:29-30) and Lev. 19:18. He made at least one pilgrimage to the Jerusalem temple. The Pharisees represented temple or priestly interests in Galilee (Saldarini), especially in terms of temple taxation and political religion, as Josephus’s commission partially demonstrates. Jesus’ work as an artisan might have made detailed observance of Torah problematic ; regardless, post-70 rabbis and Pharisaic Halakah were not yet in ascendancy in Jesus’ day.4 His associations and meals with people of questionable social standing show little concern for purity. His loose attitude about Sabbath observance probably grew out of economic necessity as much as concerns for just action (again, see Luke 6 text variant, which shows that subsistence concern Rethinking the Historical Jesus, 4 vols. (New York: Doubleday, and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991–2009), 4:526–29. 3. m. Kelim 1 (degrees of holiness); t. Meg. 2:7 (bastards); see Jerome H. Neyrey, “The Symbolic Universe of Luke-Acts: ‘They Turn the World Upside Down,’” in The Social World of LukeActs : Models for Interpretation, ed. Jerome H. Neyrey (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991), 279; Jerome H. Neyrey, “Clean/Unclean, Pure/Polluted, and Holy/Profane: The Idea and the System of Purity,” in The Social Sciences and New Testament Interpretation...