Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

CHAPTER 9
The Historical Context
As access to (written) sources and ability to evaluate (oral) tradition are fundamental
for a historical investigation, so also is an appreciation of the context of
the historical figure on whom the investigation seeks to focus. In this case the
historical context is, in the first place, the geographical context of Galilee and
Judea in the early decades of the first century of the common era. 1 The historical
context also includes, of course, the social and political context: Jesus was
an artisan from a Galilean village, and the land had been conquered by the
Romans. But the principal context which needs to be illuminated is the national
and religious context. Central to this investigation, we have already stressed
(§5.5), is the recognition that Jesus was a Jew. Our first task must therefore be to
sketch in what that would have meant. The primary context for Jesus the Jew
was Judaism. 2
9.1. Misleading Presuppositions about 'Judaism'
The description of Judaism at the time of Jesus is beset with problems of definition,
not least those of anachronistic definition. If we are to gain a clear perspective
on the Judaism (of the time) of Jesus, these problems need to be faced
squarely, since otherwise the historical context within which we locate Jesus may
be seriously distorted, and we may be led up a number of false trails.
An older generation of scholarship, both Jewish and Christian, thought in
1. What Renan famously called 'a fifth Gospel' (Life 31).
2. What follows (§§9.1-5) is a revised version of my earlier 'Judaism in the Land of Israel
in the First Century', in J. Neusner, ed., Judaism in Late Antiquity, Part 2: Historical Syntheses
(Leiden: Brill, 1995) 229-61.
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