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CONCLUSION 24. Making and Re-Making the Jesus-Sign: Contemporary Markings on the Body of Christ William E. Arnal 1. Recurring Themes: Significances & Undercurrents If the collection of essays presented here is representative—and it appears to be—three issues seem to be broadly characteristic of scholarly "hot spots" in current work on the historical Jesus. They include the "Judaism" or broad cultural context of Jesus, apocalypticism and epistemic neutrality. All three topics are linked in terms of underlying world-views and all are intertwined in the essays collected in this volume. 1.1 The Judaism of Jesus Several of the papers in this collection deal explicitly with that much-debated conundrum of contemporary Jesus scholarship, the Cynic hypothesis. John Dominic Crossan, Burton Mack and John Marshall all address this theme, as do three of the four surveys of scholarship in the second section (Wayne McCready's paper, focusing as it does exclusively on the Dead Sea Scrolls, is the exception). I^eif Vaage, in his concluding remarks on the first section, also devotes considerable attention to this issue. The basic point of the Cynic hypothesis—the essential commensurability of the social dynamics of Jesus' behaviour with that of the Cynics of his day—is not especially radical or shocking. What, then, drives people to excesses of judgment and choler (in one direction or another) about this question? Central to the debate are the implications of this assertion for Jesus' "Judaism" and the "Jewish context" in which he is assumed to have been firmly located. Surveys of the field tend to raise this truism as an objection to the Cynic Jesus; in fact, nearly all the papers in this collection which do not deal directly with the Cynic hypothesis nevertheless feel it necessary to comment on the extent to which Jesus was or was not an "observant Jew." This motif is a major theme of McCready's paper, Sean Freyne's (as much a critique of the Cynic hypothesis as it is a defence of a particular type of "Jewish Galilean" Jesus, the two most frequently serving as symbolic antitheses) and Peter Richardson's closing comments. Markings on the Body of Christ 309 As Freyne makes clear, one of the driving forces behind the strong affirmation of the Judaism of Jesus is the spectre of anti-Semitism, particularly pronounced since the anti-Semitic horrors of Hitler's Germany. Yet advocates of the Cynic hypothesis are hardly open to charges of anti-Semitism. Mack, perhaps its most impassioned advocate, has contributed more to the exposure of anti-Semitism in Christian theology and mythology than many of his critics.1 Part of the phenomenon of talking past each other is a result of considering different types of evidence. Richardson's plea that realia be given more weight as evidence, especially in contrast to over-worked literary materials, serves a substantive, as well as a methodological, end: such an emphasis, he says, based on archaeological evidence (e.g., the possible remains of pre-70 CE synagogue buildings, purification sites or mikvaoth), will suggest reconstructions in which "Jesus will probably tend to become a more observant Jew." Freyne, also focusing on the immediate cultural context of first-century Galilee, arrives at a similar conclusion, placing the "Hellenization" of the Christian movement beyond Jesus both chronologically and geographically. At the other end of the spectrum, Crossan and Mack—and even Marshall, who directly criticizes them—rely on evidence of a primarily literary sort: Crossan on Q and the Didache, Mack mainly on Q, and Marshall on Thomas. There is little dialogue between factions, in spite of the fact that the "Cynic camp" and the "Jewish camp" are operating in direct and deliberate antithesis to one another. The literary evidence on its own simply cannot support the image of an observant Jesus, so must be supplemented with external interpretive devices by those who wish to construct Jesus as an observant Jew. On the other hand, the archaeological evidence does not really pertain, one way or another, to Jesus' comparability to Cynic philosophers, at least as the hypothesis has so far been articulated. So we are left with a very peculiar phenomenon: no one denies Jesus' Judaism, yet it is bitterly contested; the parties do not debate the issue directly, only rarely addressing one another; and not all evidence is considered primary by everyone. Only time will provide the perspective necessary for a retrospective analysis, but a few observations are still worth making now. No one denies...

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