Palestinian Environment
Palestinian Environment
The criterion of Palestinian Jewish environment makes far more sense than the criterion of dissimilarity, and frequently cancels it out.232 A sort of “similarity” criterion is thus more in vogue today: whatever situates Jesus in the continuum between contemporary Judaism and the movement that emerged from him offers the likeliest portrait of Jesus.233 The Third Quest tends to highlight Jesus’ Jewish environment,234 but sometimes to the neglect of the movement that emerged from his teaching; a “continuum” approach seeks to integrate both contexts.235 Noting Jesus’ continuity with his environment also allows one to highlight areas of his discontinuity (genuine dissimilarity) more accurately and in a more nuanced manner.236
In its negative form, one would use this criterion to reject the authenticity of anything in the stories about Jesus that cannot plausibly fit in Jesus’ environment, e.g., the idea that the temple was no longer standing (a post-70 development). 237 This does not mean that Jesus never said or did anything dissonant with his environment (his death on a Roman cross likely suggests significant dissonance regarding something). Others of his contemporaries, too, differed from the mainstream of their environment in various ways. But as we shall see in later chapters, a significant proportion of gospel tradition fits Jesus’ own Galilean environment better than it fits the later urban and probably mostly Diaspora churches that provided the dominant first audiences for our Gospels.
We should note, of course, that Greek culture transformed Palestinian Judaism, but Palestinian Judaism exerted little influence on Greek culture. We thus regularly read Palestinian Jewish sources in light of their Greek context, and should not be surprised to discover Greek elements in the early gospel tradition. The passing on of these traditions and writing them down for Diaspora audiences would only increase such elements. When we find distinctively Palestinian Jewish features in the tradition, however, we must recognize these as marks that the tradition originated in Jewish Palestine. Palestinian Jewish features need not guarantee that a saying must have inevitably originated with Jesus, but they do take us back to the earliest circle of witnesses for Jesus, greatly increasing the probability that the saying is authentic.
The direction of hellenization (or at least more hellenistic ways of recounting matters) should have increased in later sources, and on average Palestinian elements should be earlier. As we noted in ch. 2, the older liberal view that the earliest christology evolved from a Palestinian Jewish apocalyptist to a hellenistic divine man does not fit our evidence adequately,238 but certainly it comes closer to fitting it than does the contemporary “Jesus Seminar’s” frequent apparent reversal of the sequence, which assumes that later Christians Judaized Jesus.239 This later Judaization of less Jewish material makes no sense in view of Roman anti-Judaism and the growing influence of Diaspora Christianity as years passed.240 Our earliest Christian sources support a Palestinian Jewish foundation for the movement: though writing to mixed churches in the Diaspora that may have struggled with his message, Paul shares an apocalyptic worldview with much of Palestinian Judaism as much as two decades before Mark wrote.241