Whose Historical Jesus?

5. The Galilean Jewish Jesus: Context

5. The Galilean Jewish Jesus: Context William E. Arnal The title of Sean Freyne's paper is eminently descriptive. It signals his use of the methodology on which he has built his reputation, i.e., the careful social, cultural and economic description, and analysis, of Roman Galilee. The title also signals the rather novel element of this paper: the effort to bring that scholarship to bear on the reconstruction of the historical Jesus, particularly that offered, recently and with considerable impact, by John Dominic Crossan.1 The basic crux of this juxtaposition is the contrast between the generality with which Crossan situates Jesus in a broadly "Mediterranean" environment and the specificity with which Freyne is able to describe the particular locale in which Jesus surely lived and taught. The contrast is indicative of two larger trends or currents in historical-Jesus (and, generally, New Testament) scholarship. On the one hand, there is the "Jewish Jesus," a historical Jesus understood in terms of his location in a firstcentury Jewish religious context. Proponents of this current (Geza Vermes and E. P. Sanders come immediately to mind) tend to equate Judaism (and Jesus, as a Jew) with the insulated image of this religious tradition conveyed by both rabbinic and intertestamental Jewish elite literature. On the other hand are those who, without denying that Jesus was in fact a Jew, minimize the extent to which this observation helps us to understand him, and seek instead to contextualize him within a broader Roman, Hellenistic or Mediterranean milieu. Freyne's work to date locates him within the first current, while Crossan falls squarely within the second. A Jesus whose relevant historical context is Galilee—and even more specifically, Galilee as reconstructed and described by Freyne—will emerge distinctively as "a Jew." A Jesus whose relevant historical context is the entirety of Roman antiquity, as is Crossan's, will be less so. The "Jewish Jesus" controversy in recent scholarship has some methodological corollaries. Typically, those who adopt a more cosmopolitan or Hellenistic Jesus will make greater use of extra-canonical early Christian writings, especially the Gospel of Thomas, while proponents of a more circumscribed Jewish Jesus tend to rely more exclusively on the synoptic gospels for their data. The debate also raises the rather venerable issue of the dichotomy between "Judaism and Hellenism." Both parties in the dispute, to be sure, acknowledge that first-century Judaism was very much part of the Hellenistic world and strongly influenced by it, so a strict dichotomy will no longer do. But different implications are drawn from this conclusion. For Jewish Jesus proponents, the Hellenization of ancient Judaism means that we 1 See especially John Dominic Crossan's The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991). 62 Whose HistoricalJesus? cannot rule out "Greek-sounding" conceptions as inauthentic when they appear in the teachings or behaviour of first-century Jews such as Jesus. For those who advocate a broader cultural milieu for Jesus, this Hellenization indicates that we cannot reify "Judaism" and consequently treat it as a contextually-significant culture-in-itself within the larger context of the Roman Empire. The reader will also note that the arguments surrounding "apocalypticism," a burning issue in several of the papers in this volume, are not irrelevant to this debate. Freyne's paper is an effort to breach the boundary between these two currents, and to take seriously the portrait of Jesus offered by Crossan, with the critical qualification that it be supplemented and revised by situating Jesus within his specific historical context: first-century Galilee. In a paper that, in exemplary fashion, touches clearly on nearly all the issues endemic to this debate, two of Freyne's critiques of Crossan merit special attention. The first of these is Freyne's charge that Crossan does not pay sufficient attention to the activities of the Galilean tetrarch Antipas, whose activities—including especially the founding (or re-founding) of two major urban centres in Galilee (Sepphoris and Tiberias) just prior to the emergence of the early Jesus movement—must have had a direct and immediate bearing on Jesus and his original audience. The second striking point made by Freyne—it is not exactly a critique—is the suggestion that the "Cynic" Jesus favoured by Crossan is a more plausible figure in an urban rather than a rural environment. This consideration leads in turn to the suggestion that it is the (urban) composers of Q, rather than Jesus himself, who are responsible...