Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§19.2 Jesus Remembered
We started with Jesus the Jew — Jesus brought up to practise the religion
of his forefathers and living out his mission within and as part of the diversity of
Second Temple Judaism. Nothing that has emerged from the above study of the
Jesus tradition requires us to make substantial or serious modification of that
starting assumption. On the contrary, Jesus' engagement with the traditional priorities
and concerns of Israel's prophets, the repeated indications of influence
from Israel's Scriptures, and the frequent disputations regarding some of the issues
which we know to have featured in the Jewish factionalism of the period all
attest a mission Jewish in character through and through. Alternative suggestions
of the principal resonating contexts for his mission, including that of a generalized
Mediterranean peasant or a wandering Cynic philosopher, wholly fail to
match in depth and extent the number and particularity of the distinctive resonances
with and within first-century Palestinian Judaism. Given the range of
first-century Judaism(s), and not yet looking to the subsequent partings of the
ways between Christianity and Judaism, it is by no means clear that a description
like 'marginal Jew' is appropriate for Jesus during his mission.
Circumstances of Jesus' birth and particularities of his upbringing are beyond
historical reach. But it is clear that Jesus emerged from the circle of John
the Baptist about the year 27. That Jesus was baptized by John is hard to dispute,
and from early on that encounter with John was remembered by Jesus' disciples
as marking out the point at which he was anointed by God for his mission.
Whether Jesus is properly to be described as a disciple of the Baptist and how
long he worked alongside (in partnership or competition with) John also remain
obscure. So far as Jesus' own disciples were concerned, Jesus' distinctive mission
began after John had been removed from the scene.
Again it is clear enough that the bulk of the Synoptic tradition is recalled as
set within Galilee. This evidently involved a lot of travelling round Galilee's
many villages, though to describe Jesus as permanently on the way with his (immediate)
disciples (charismatic vagrancy) is much too exaggerated. Such geographical
specificities as the Synoptic tradition retains are mainly grouped round
the northern part of the lake and readily encompassable in one- or two-day journeys
from a (principal) base in Capernaum. To what extent the much more extensive
Jerusalem mission indicated in the Fourth Gospel is rooted in memory of periodic
visits to Jerusalem (for pilgrim feasts) or of events during his final week
there, or is elaborated from traditions not specific as to location is a question
which likewise remains well short of a firm answer.
In trying to reach back through the memories of Jesus' mission to ascertain
his aim, what motivated him, it remains true that we cannot avoid giving prime
attention to his message of the kingdom/kingship of God. He certainly seems to
have hoped for a 'coming', and a soon coming, of that royal rule. In the context
of Jewish expectation, that must have been heard in terms of God visibly mani-
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