Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels: Literary Approaches and Historical Investigations 0800620895

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GALILEE . JESUS I

THE GOSPELS LITERARY APPROACHES AND HISTORICAL INVESTIGATIONS

SEAN FREYNE

SEAN FREYNE .-;;.

Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels LITERARY APPROACHES AND HISTORICAL INVESTIGATIONS

FORTRESS PRESS PHILADELPHIA

GALILEE, JESUS AND THE GOSPELS Literary Approaches and Historical Investigations

BOUNDARIES & SETTLEMENTS FIRST CENTURY C.E.

GALILEE

Damascus.

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DECAPOLIS

Copyright

© 1988 by Sean

Freyne.

Indexes by Helen Litton First Fortress Press edition 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, Fortress Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Freyne, Sean Galilee, Jesus, and the Gospels. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Galilee in the New Testament. 2. Galilee (Israel}-History. 3. Jesus Christ-Person and offices. 4. Bible. N.T. Gospels-Criticism, interpretation, etc. 5. Jews-History-168 B.C.-135 A.D. 6. JudaismHistory-Post-exilic period, 586 B.c.-210 A.D. I. Title. BS2545. G34F74 1988 226' .067 87-45890 ISBN 0-8006-2089-5 3228D88

Printed in Great Britain

1-2089

Contents Abbreviations Introduction Chapter One Jesus the Galilean: Problems and Prospects 1. Current Trends in Gospel Studies 2. The Galilean Perspective of the Gospels and Studies in the Historical Jesus 3. Outlining an Approach

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Part One. Literary Approaches Chapter Two Mark and Galilee: Location, Characters and Plot 1. Location: Mark's Depiction of the Galilean Social World 2. The Religious Situation of Galilee, an Essential Ingredient of Mark's Plot 3. Jesus and his Movement in Galilee: the Main Character's Origin and the Outcome of the Plot (i) Galilee and the Breaking Down of Barriers (ii) Galilee and an Itinerant Ministry (iii) Galileans and aNew Understanding of the Kingdom Chapter Three Galilee as Portrayed by Matthew and Luke 1. Matthew (i) The Galilean Social World (ii) Religious Attitudes in Galilee (iii) Jesus and his Movement in Matthew's Galilee 2. Luke (i) The Galilean Social World (ii) Religious Attitudes in Galilee (iii) Jesus and his Movement in Luke's Galilee

33 34 41

51 54

59 63

69 70 70 75

82 90 91 96 103

vi

Contents

Chapter Four Galilee and Galileans in the Fourth Gospel 1. Galilee and the Journeys of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel 2. Galilee within a Jewish Religious Perspective 3. The Reception of Jesus in Galilee Part Two. Historical Investigations Chapter Five The Social World of Galilee 1. Political Realities and Jesus' Galilee 2. The Organisation of Galilean Social Life 3. The Economics of Galilee: Resources and their Control 4. Culture-The Galilean Ethos and the Gospels

116 117 125 128

135 136 143 155 167

Chapter Six Galilean Religious Affiliations in the First Century 1. Galileans and the Temple 2. Galileans and the Land 3. Galileans and the Torah Excursus: The Galileans in Rabbinic Literature

176 178 190 198 213

Chapter Seven Jesus and His Movement in Galilee 1. Jesus and the Temple 2. Jesus and the Land 3. Jesus and the Torah

219 224 239 247

Epilogue Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels

269

Bibliography

273

Index of Ancient Sources Subject and Name Index

292 300

ABBREVIATIONS Standard abbreviations are used for the biblical books, apocrypha pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, tractates of the Mishnah, Tosepta and Talmuds. The Loeb translation of Josephus is used. AASOR Annual of the American School of Oriental Research AGFU Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Fruhjudentums und Urchristentums ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der Romischen Welt. Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung, ed. H. Temporini and W. Haase, Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 1972Babylonian Talmud b Biblical A rchaelogist BA Biblical Archaeology Review BAR Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research BASOR Bulletin of the John Rylands Library BJRL Biblische Zeitschrift BZ Catholic Biblical Quarterly CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series CBQMS Compendia Compendia Rerum Judaicarum ad Novum Testamentum Expository Times ET English translation E.T. Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses ETL Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen FRLANT Testaments History of Religions HR Harvard Theological Review HTR Hebrew Union College Annual HUCA Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible IDB Israel Exploration Journal IEJ Jewish Antiquities ].A. Jewish War ].W. Journal of the American Academy of Religion JAAR Journal of Biblical Literature JBL Journal of Jewish Studies JJS Journal of Peasant Studies JPS Jewish Quarterly Review JQR Journal of Religion JR Journal of Roman Studies JRS Journal for the Study of Judaism JSJ Journal for the Study of the New Testament JSNT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament JSOT Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion JSSR Journal of Theological Studies JTS Mishnah M Novum Testamentum NT New Testament Studies NTS Yerushalmi (Palestinian Talmud) y Palestinian Exploration Quarterly PEQ Proceedings of the Irish Biblical Association PIBA Revue Biblique RB Revue Qumran RQ

V11l RScR RSR SANT

SBL

SJOT SJT T TDNT TZ YCS ZDPV ZNW ZTK

Abbreviations Recherches de Sctences Religieuses Religious Studies Review Studien zum Alten und Neuen Testaments Society of Biblical Literature Scandinaviar. Journal of Old Testament Scottish Journal of Theology Tosefta Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, E.T. 10 vols. ed. G. Kittel and G. Friedrich, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 1968Theologische Zeitschrift Yale Classical Studies Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina- Verein Zeitschrift fur die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Zeitschrift fur Theologie und Kirche

INTRODUCTION IT is surely significant that the only occasion on which the adjective raA-lA-alOe;, 'Galilean', is used in the gospels to describe Jesus is during his trial (Mt 26:69), and then by a maid-servant of the high priest, residing in Jerusalem. One detects a mild note of disparagement in her comment to Peter on the same occasion: 'You are one of them surely, for you are a Galilean' (Mk 14:70; d. Lk 22:59), with a reference to their Galilean accent in Matthew's version of the exchange (Mt 26:73). It is not that the evangelists seek to disguise the Galilean origins and career of Jesus; quite the contrary in fact, with over sixty references to the region in the gospel narratives about him. Josephus could extol the natural fertility of Galilee, the province which he himself was to govern briefly at the beginning of the first revolt. Yet, to call somebody 'Galilean' had definite pejorative overtones, at least from the point of view of first-century Jerusalem orthodoxy, it seems. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the Fourth Gospel, when the Jerusalem Pharisees seek to discredit one of their own number, Nicodemus, who sought a fair trial for Jesus, with the taunt: 'Are you also a Galilean?' In the context this is equivalent to being 'ignorant of the law and accursed' an 7:45-52), or to what was equally disparaging, being a Samaritan an 8:48). Josephus extols not merely the countryside, but also the courageous and unselfish character of its inhabitants, as he is about to take over command of the province, yet he cannot disguise entirely his true feelings about Galileans-feelings that are shared by his fellow J erusalemites of the priestly and aristocratic classes. In his Jewish War he reports the advice given to the masses by the Jerusalem leaders as they were about to avenge a Galilean pilgrim who had been killed by Samaritans on his way to a Jerusalem feast: 'Take pity on your country and sanctuary, as well as your wives and children,' they urged. 'All these were threatened with des-

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Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels

truction for the purpose of acquiring justice for a single Galilean' U. W. 2:237). . The rabbinic sources are no more flattenng, though of later composition and with their own axe to grind against Galileans in general, as the scribal schools wer~ pushed northwards, especially after the Bar Cochba .revol~ III th.e second century. Galileans are quarrelsome, dublOus III theIr knowledge and observance of halachah, and generally not very trustworthy. Not that Galileans are thought of as non-Jews, and the epithet 'Galilee of the gentiles' is never us~d to explain their inferiority, as perceived from the perspectlves of the temple aristocracy or the scribal schools and their adherents. One wonders if the stigma attached to the description 'Galilean' as it is encountered in the sources from the Second Temple period can explain the fact that Galilee plays suc~ a small part in the vast amount of writing about Jesus, both ancient and modern. There has been little attempt to examine seriously the Galilean context of Jesus' life, and even less attention has been paid to the kind of Jewish faith and practice one was likely to encounter there. In modern times Emil Schiirer's influence on subsequent treatments is easily documented. Since, according to him, Galilee had been judaised by the Hasmoneans as late as 100 BeE, one could not expect to find there a genuinely Jewish ethos, but rather a mixed population with a syncretisic religious mentality, as Walter Bauer wrote in 1926. Thus the ground had been prepared for Walter Grundmann's book, Jesus der Galilaer und das Judentum, (Leipzig, 1941), in which he argued that as a Galilean, Jesus was not a Jew! If historians of Jesus have made little serious effort to explore the Galilean roots of his career, Christologians also have paid little attention to this dimension, even in their quest for the historical Jesus. As long as the high, Chalcedonian Christology remained unchallenged, there was little interest in the social and cultural context of Jesus' earthly ministry. True to the spirit of the age, the nineteenth-century liberal q~e~t tended to romanticise the Galilean setting of Jesus' mIllIstry, as well as the simple, unspoiled character of his Galilean fisher friends. Bultmann's lack of interest in the historical Jesus and the Jewish .:oots of early Christianity

Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels 3 created a climate of scepticism in New Testament studies in which questions about Galilee and Galileans were quite ~nfash~onable, and this state of affairs was naturally reflected m Chr~stology also. The so-called new quest for the histot:ical Jesus, maugurated by Bultmann's pupils, did not rectify this situation with its desire to show the continuities between his kerygm.a and that of the early church in rather abstract categones. It is against the background of this neglect of Galilee by both historians and theologians in their discussions of Jesus that the present study attempts to integrate questions of social identity and theological reflection. We shall be attempting as full a description as possible of the social and religious world of first-century Galilee, as well as Jesus' role in that setting, and investigating how such a picture coheres with his identity as this emerges within the narrative accounts about his life within the New Testament. The suggestion is .that the particularity of Jesus' Galilean career is both historically important and theologically relevant. The approach will be both literary and historical. Insights and methods from various disciplines are increasingly brought to bear on the New Testament writings, since today, with a heightened hermeneutical awareness, many scholars have come to recognise that no one perspective can exhaust the possibilities of our texts, or adequately uncover their varied fields of reference. Such a pluralism of approaches has, of course, its own dangers. Keeping up with the latest trends can easily lead to anarchy, and some controls are called for. This remark may help to explain at the outset the decision to allow a literary approach to the gospels (Part One) to take precedence over the more usual historical investigation (Part Two), as the first step. Hopefully, a critical reading of the gospels may set a more realistic historical agenda than might otherwise be achieved. I am indebted to many people for assistance of various kinds throughout the period of research and writing of this book. Critics of my previous study of Galilee as well as colleagues at Trinity College and elsewhere, with whom I have been able to discuss certain aspects and issues, will recognise their contribution to the discussion at various

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Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels

points. The Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung financed a study leave in Tiibingen, during which I had many helpful conversations with Professor Martin Hengel. A generous grant from the Arts and Economic and Social Sciences Research Fund of Trinity College made a visit to Israel possible. On that trip I received invaluable assistance from Professor Gideon Foerster of the Department of Antiquities, and from his field staff in Galilee, as well as from Dr Dan Urman of Beersheba University. A two-month visiting Professorship in the chair of Judeo-Christian studies at Tulane University, New Orleans, afforded freedom from normal departmental chores and made possible the completion of the first draft. A complete second draft was achieved while enjoying the hospitality of my parents-in law, Joan and Ron Todd, on th~ Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. However, as the work draws to a close, I am most deeply conscious of the invaluable support, encouragement and helpful criticism I have received from my immediate family-Gail, my wife, and my daughters Bridget and Sarah. I trust that by dedicating my efforts to them they will have some inkling of how much they mean to me in my work and in my life.

CHAPTER ONE

Jesus the Galilean: Problems and Prospects JUST over a decade ago I began research on what for me was a very new field of enquiry, namely, the study of Jewish faith and life as these are expressed in a particular region, Galilee, during the Second Temple period. The suggestion was Martin Hengel's that there was need for a monograph which would collect the literary and archaeological evidence from antiquity for a region which at different times and in different ways had been the home of both the Gospel and the Mishnah. His magisterial study, Judentum und Hellenismus (Tiibingen, 1973), provided a broad framework for understanding and interpreting social realities, cultural affiliations and religious beliefs and practices. In first-century Galilee, as indeed in all of Palestinian Judaism of the Second Temple period, these aspects of life were inextricably bound together. Previous discussions of Galilean life had dealt with such issues mainly in the context of studies of Jesus and his movement and a number of stereotypes were repeatedGalilee as the hotbed of Zealotism; Galilee as a province seething with social and economic unrest due to exploitation; Galileans as lax in the matter of Torah observance and given to an apocalyptic outlook. Ernst Lohmeyer's study, Galillia und Jerusalem (Gottingen, 1936), may be taken as both typical and influential in this regard. On reflection it was not difficult to recognise the source of some at least of these positions so securely held. An apologetic Christology, especially one imbued with liberal values, required a setting for Jesus' life that was the polar opposite of all that Jesus was held to have affirmed, since discontinuity with his environment was seen as support for his claims to uniqueness. A view of the religion of Second Temple Judaism as debased and

6

Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels

sterile was also an essential ingredient of the picture. When these biases in the scholarly portrait of Galilee were recognised, it seemed to me that the evidence was capable of a rather different interpretation. Yet the question of how to depict Jesus and his movement from an inner-Galilean perspective remained a live one. In my previous study, Galilee from Alexan.der th~ G:eat to Hadrian. A Study of Second Temple Judatsm (WIlmmgton/Notre Dame, 1980), the gospels were used as one set of evidence among others for documenting the situation. Indeed when viewed from the point of view of the objectives of that larger project it was apparent that they gave us a very limited picture of Galilean life, even though the story is firmly anchored to the region. Despite this awareness of how thinly the gospels describe Galilee, the project of focusing on their portrayal of Jesus and his movement in that setting seemed a worthwhile one for several reasons. In the first place it afforded the opportunity to test again some of the conclusions of my previous study, taking account of new evidence, mainly archaeological, as well as the criticisms and suggestions of scholars interested in the field. Besides, such an enterprise posed wide-ranging questions of methodology concerning the nature of the gospels and the hermeneutical concerns of those interested in the history of Jesus. By explicitly raising these issues at the outset it is hoped that my own presuppositions will be made clear and that some definition may be given to the most adequate way to conduct a study of Jesus in Galilee. 1. Current Trends in Gospel Studies It is impossible not to be struck by the variety of approaches that are current in New Testament studies today, particularly in regard to the gospels. Even if we ignore the structuralist stance which for the present at least seems to be somewhat on the wane, one can readily recognise two very different trends in the recent past, each to some extent building on the older approaches of form and redaction criticism. On the one hand there are the social world approaches that can be seen as a development of the interest in Sitz im Leben of classical form ~.riticism. These now range

Jesus the Galilean: Problems and Prospects

7

from the descriptions of the total life-situation to the more theoretical application of various social-scientific models to that world. On the other hand, modern literary approaches to the gospels may be viewed as the extension of the better insights of redaction criticism, with its focus on authorial intention and the unity of the completed work. Again the range of approach is quite varied-from the more conventional analysis of plot, character and. situation, to full-blown reader-response criticism as employed by such critics as Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman and Stanley Fish. Initially at least, the insights of both approaches seem to be so divergent that no reconciliation would appear possible between them. The former is concerned with the extra-textual referent, whereas the latter concentrates totally on the intratextual, fictional world. So different in fact are the concerns of each approach that the practitioners of the one often seem unaware of the aims of the other. In truth, however, both approaches have their strengths and their limitations, a brief consideration of which is the necessary first step in clarifying the stance of the present study. Writing in 1975, Jonathan Z. Smith outlined four related but quite separate activities in the social description of early Christianity. 1 These were: i) a description of the social facts given in early Christian materials; ii) the achievement of a social history of some phase of early Christianity; iii) an analysis of the social organisation of early Christianity in terms of the social forces that led to its rise and organisation, and iv) an interpretation of early Christianity as a social world-that is, as a world of meaning that provided a plausible structure for those who chose to inhabit it. To these levels of social analysis John Elliot has added a further onesociological exegesis-in which the methods and modes of analysis proper to sociology are brought to bear on a specific text. 2 In this way he proposes an eventual construction of the total social world of early Christianity, with the social worlds of each of the New Testament writings providing the building 1. See 'The Social Description of Early Christianity', Religious Studies Review, 1(1975) 19-25. 2. See Home for the Homeless. A Sociological Exegesis of 1 Peter. Its Situation and Strategy, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981, 7-13.

8

Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels

blocks for such a construction. Elliot is particularly concerned about the explicit use of theoretical models in this task, either in exploring social worlds descriptively or in testing a particular hypothesis against the gi~en data: I~ is only by aiming at such a level of methodologIcal sophIstication, he maintains, that various conceptual models can be tested against the available data and real advances take place by the choice of the most suitable one for analysing the data to be explained. 3 In general it must be said that social world approaches have made us much more aware of the fact that, early Christianity was not just a movement of ideas, but rather one in which new social configurations were to emerge with implications that were economic, social and political as well as religious and theological. Sociological theory does not have to be explicit in order to make it possible to do social history, yet, as Elliot points out, the very selection and organisation of various phenomena implies some conceptual model, and the effort to make this explicit does help towards an awareness of the perspectives one is in fact highlighting and enables a critical examination of these. Besides, a conscious use of models will help as a heuristic device in framing new questions that can assist in uncovering obscure or hitherto unnoticed aspects of our texts and the movements that gave rise to them, and to which they in turn contributed. Rigid adherence to theory has its own pitfalls, however, since it can lead to a desire to force the evidence into a mould for which it is not entirely suited and the consequent distortion of the evidence. A flexible approach seems called for therefore, given the nature of our sources, their distance in time from us and the partial evidence they provide about life in the ancient world. There must be a constant interplay between theory and evidence, and a readiness to abandon a particular theoretical model if it does not fit the evidence we do have. As a result it would seem that most sociological approaches to the New Testament will be descriptive rather than hypothesis-testing. 3. For his most recent discussion see 'Social-Scientific Criticism of the New Testament. More on Methods and Models', Ser::eia 32(1986) 1-33, especially 3-9.

Jesus the Galilean: Problems and Prospects

9

Sociological exegesis as described by Elliot and others is concerned with individual texts. Yet its perspective is different from that which operates in literary and hermeneutical studies of the New Testament. In social world/historical studies texts are treated as windows, through which, by ~eans ?f inference from their semantic, structural and paradIgmatIc aspects and by means of comparison with social structures and modes of interaction similar to those which they exhibit, a picture emerges of the social world they are intended to address. 4 Literary approaches, on the other hand, stress the creative moment of a text's production. In narrative texts a fictional world is created that functions as a mirror in which we encounter our own world-view, irrespective of whether or not the world of the text refers to a real world or not. Inevitably, the stress is on the author's creativity rather than on the referent of the text in the real world. This tension between real and fictional social worlds is not the only one existing between the two approaches to the New Testament. As previously mentioned, there is quite a range of approaches to be found as we move full circle from a detailed consideration of the author, through preoccupation with the text, to a concern, finally, with the reader's creative role in the production of the text. At this point we would seem to be at the opposite pole to social world/historical approaches with their emphasis on the real author's intentions and the referential nature of the text. 5 Among reader-oriented approaches to the New Testament reader-response criticism is the one currently most in favour. 6 This approach has applied to the phenomenon of the act of reading a basic insight in Paul Ricoeur's seminal article, 'What 4. See Elliot, Home for the Homeless, 1I. 5. For a general discussion of the issues involved see my article, 'Our Preoccupation with History. Problems and Prospects', Proceedings of The Irish Biblical Association, 9(1985) 1-19. 6. This is apparent from the emergence of a special seminar dealing with readerresponse criticism in S.N.T.S. the most influential society for the study of the New Testament. For a general orientation see E.V. McKnight, The Reader and the Bible, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986; R. Fowler, 'Who is the Reade~ in Reader-Resp,onse Criticism?', Semeia 31(1985) 5-26. S. Moore's as yet unpubhshed doctoral dissertation, 'Narrative Homiletics: Lucan Rhetoric and the Making of the Reader', Trinity College Dublin, 1985, is in my opinion the most sophisticated application of the method to an individual gospel, as well as being a highly impressive dIscussion of the theoretic basis for the approach.

10

Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels

is a Text? Explanation and Understanding'/ namely, .that texts are not oral discourse that happens to have been wntten down. Ricoeur draws our attention to the 'benign deceit' of texts which lure us into thinking that we are listening to a recorded dialogue between a real author and a real reader. Yet as he reminds us, the one (the author) is absent to the oth~r (the reader) in the act of reading, and the same applies in the act of writing. The situation, therefore, is much more complex than we often suspect, and reader-response criticism provides us with a number of helpful constructs in order to better comprehend the phenomenon. 8 Thus on the textproduction side the implied author and narrator, as distinct from the real author, emphasise the fact that the latter can distance his/her own personal characteristics from the narrative work being produced, thus underlining its fictional character as a telling rather than a showing. On the textreception end the narratee and ideal reader constructs again help to emphasise the distance between the real reader and the real author and the need for the active involvement of the reader with the text in the act of reading, in order to capture all the instructions, hints and other guides to reading that are to be found within the text and addressed to an ideal reader. Thus the essential contrast between textuality and orality is highlighted. One feature of narrative texts in particular is the ubiquitous and omniscient narrator's presence and privileged insights into character, motivation and plot outcome. These are shared with the ideal reader in subtle ways, thereby highlighting the creative and fictional dimensions of such texts, no matter how 'historical' we deem them to be. Many will question the advisability of using techniques that were developed in the context of the modern novel and its criticism for the study of ancient texts. This is particularly true because, as R. Scholes and R. Kellogg have pointed out in their influential study, The Nature of Narrative (New 7. Reprinted in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. J. Thompson,

~ambridge: Univ. Press, 1981, 145-65. See further my colleague, W. Jeanrond's

Important study, Text and Interpretation as Categories of Theological Thinking, E.T. Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1988. 8. For a succinct but useful recent treatment see S. Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, London and New York: Methuen, 1983; also W. Booth The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago, Univ. ~ress, 1961.

Jesus the Galilean: Problems and Prospects

11

York, 1966), there. ha~ been a remarkable development over the la~t few centunes In the management of point of view in narrative because of the opportunities that that genre affords narrative artists in combining empirical and fictional techniques of narration. At the same time these critics maintain that the modern novel should be seen as one stage of a much larger history of narrative, reaching back to earliest mythological narration. 9 As ancient narrative texts, our gospels can be seen as part of that history, indeed representative of an important and creative stage of its development within the Graeco-Roman world. In different degrees all the gospels can be shown to have combined both the empirical (in the sense of the historical and mimetic) and the fictional (in the sense of the didactic and romantic) aspects of ancient narratives, before these had become separated into discrete forms. 1o There is, therefore, both a historical and a didactic dimension to all four, even though it is the empirical perspective that dominates. Thus, Luke consciously veers towards the historical, differentiating between the past of Jesus and the present of his own day as is clear from the prologues to both his works, whereas Matthew, with his treatment of the main character as both model and teacher of the community, even in the present, is more concerned with the mimetic and didactic dimensions of narrative. Yet neither dimension is entirely lacking from any of the gospels. The modern novel has attempted to recapture some of these dimensions of ancient narrative before they became entirely discrete forms in terms of history and romance. The techniques that have been developed to uncover its sophisticated form may, therefore, not prove unhelpful in gospel studies also, provided they do not exclude any of the various dimensions and perspectives of our texts as unworthy of further investigation. That is not to suggest that one can uncritically adopt the social world of the text as the real social world of the historical characters that are portrayed within the narratives. To do so would be naive historicism in the light of our modern historical consciousness and our awareness of the 9. See The Nature of Narrative, 241f. 10. Ibid., 12-14.

12

Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels

nature of the sources. tt Yet, equally, we cannot a priori exclude the possibility that some realistic featu~es of t~e narrative dimension of our texts may have a genu me contnbution to make in recovering the presumed actual world behind those texts. This contribution may not be the result of first-hand knowledge of the actual situation based on information, either personal or received. Yet it must be recognised that an accepted convention of all realistic narrative writing is the attempt at verisimilitude, which arises from the desire to be as convincing as possible, admittedly from a particular point of view, to an ideal reader. This striving for verisimilitude is not the same as reporting facts, but it will be based on the author's own life experience and the probabilities inherent in the situation being described, as these can be presumed to be shared by an ideal reader .t2 Faced with the issues of fact and fact-likeness, modern studies, based on form and redaction criticism, have for the most part approached the gospels as stratified layers of tradition that can, through the use of proper criteria, be stripped off and dated after the manner of an archaeological dig, until eventually bed-rock Jesus tradition is arrived at. However, this approach labours under the increasing doubts about what constitute adequate dating criteria, especially the one of cultural dissimilarity.13 In addition, such an approach has a deliberate bias against the editorial seams which are presumed to be worthless in terms of historical reconstruction, for anything but the final redactional level. Yet in the perspective of narrative criticism these very seams, which are usually utterances of the narrator, give reliable commentary for the ideal reader as the narrative progresses. It must be assumed, therefore, that such transitional passages are highly significant for the author/narrator and that careful attention will have been given to all aspects of their constructon. Foremost among these narratorial markers are the geographi11. See N. Petersen, Literary Criticism for New Testament Critics, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978. 12. For a suggestive discussion of verisimilitude in narrative and the motivation of t~e author see S. Chatman,Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and Ftlm, Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978,48-53. 13. See !vi. Hooker, i? 'Christology and Methodology', NTS 17(1971) 480-88; she has pOinted out the mhere?t weaknesses of..the dissimilarity criterion.

Jesus the Galilean: Problems and Prospects

13

cal and other topographical references in the text and on the . f ' , assumption 0 a far greater degree of conscious verisimilitude t?an. is curren~ly regarded a~ likely, these passages become sI.gmfi.cant pomters for testmg our hypothesis about the hIstorIcal value of some, at least, of the realistic features of our gospel narratives. 2. The Galilean Perspective of the Gospels and

Studies of the Historical Jesus As mentioned in the Introduction, attention to the fact that Jesus was a Galilean does not feature very prominently in the various studies about him, either theological or historical. Some consideration of this curious omission in a representative selection of both approaches may help to clarify the aims and methods of the present study further. Though the necessity and possibility of the quest for the historical Jesus continues to be at the centre of Christo logical discussion, it is obvious that the shadow of Bultmann's scepticism still lingers on. Consequently, it is the fact of Jesus' life, not the 'how' or the 'why' that is considered important. When those whom Schubert Ogden, in his important study, The Point of Christology (London, 1982), calls 'revisionist Christologians' have ventured further it has usually been to explore the inner life of Jesus and his relationship with God. Consequently, there has been little concern with the social and religious implications of his movement, insofar as these have manifested themselves publicly in a specific cultural setting. Ogden has exposed the weaknesses of such an approach, both historically and philosophically, insisting that the real point of Christology has to do with the meaning of ultimate reality that Jesus disclosed and the consequent different understanding of human existence that was implied, both individually and politically. Yet Ogden and others, e.g. David TracyI4 believe that because our documents are already the product of early Christian faith in Jesus, their earliest recoverable layers give us access only to the first Christians' existential-historical understanding of Jesus and not to the 14. See his The Analogical Imagination. Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism, London: SCM, 1981,233-41 and 259-65.

14

Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels

empirical historical facts, w~ich in ~heir view ~an never be recovered. Once Ogden's phIlosophICal categorIes are translated into those of a religious system, what he is calling for is an approach to Christian faith that examines the way in which the Jesus movement has reinterpreted the central symbols of Judaism and the consequent new way of life that emerged. Unfortunately, Ogden relies on the exegetical work of Willi Marxsen, who represents the post-Bultmannian position that even our earliest witnesses to Jesus are faith-inspired, and are therefore inadmissible for historical investigation of Jesus. However, a broader social world approach, such as that adopted by Gerd Theissen and others, moves beyond the historical scepticism resulting from a narrow form critical approach by focusing on the symbolic patterns and their functioning in a particular social milieu. Continuities and discontinuities of symbolic expression and behavioural attitudes are detected much more easily against the backdrop of that wider pattern of social change, and the proper historical inferences, both for Jesus and the movement that continued a certain way of life in his name, can be drawn with greater security. is In short, Ogden's statement about the point of Christology, once it is translated into the language of symbolic systems, can serve usefully to frame our question also, except that we now wish to include a particular placeGalilee-and a particular time-span-the public career of Jesus of Nazareth-in attempting to describe the specific expression of ultimate reality that Jesus' career manifested in that setting and the concrete implications for living that were involved for those who experienced him. At the other end of the spectrum in terms of the J esus-ofhistory debate are such liberation theologians as Leonardo Boff, Jan Sobrino and Juan Luis Segundo. 16 While sharing ~gd~~'s I:0litical concerns, their starting point-explicit or ImplIcIt-IS the concrete experience of marginality because of the oppression and poverty of many people in the third world 15 ..1 ~ave in ~~nd.here the work of G. Theissen in particular, Sociology of Early Palestzman Chrzstz:tmty, E.T. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978. 16. See, respect1ve~y, Jesus Chri~t Liberator. A Critical Christology for our Times, E.T.New Yo~k: