Theissen and Merz rightly note that local, Palestinian Jewish coloring pervades our Gospel accounts about Jesus.3 This color suggests that this material originated not in the Diaspora (or, given its often Galilean and rural character, even in Jerusalem), but most likely during Jesus’ ministry, circulated among his earliest Galilean followers. As the Israeli scholar David Flusser noted, “The early Christian accounts about Jesus are not as untrustworthy as scholars today often think. The first three Gospels not only present a reasonably faithful picture of Jesus as a Jew of his own time,” but “portray him quite plausibly as a Jewish miracle-worker and preacher”4 rather than as the object of the church’s proclamation.
No one would have invented Jesus’ Galilean background. Such a background was obscure to most people in the Diaspora, and Judean critics could employ it as a matter of scorn. This was true partly because of the urban/rural divide in antiquity; Jerusalem and the urban centers where Jesus’ movement first spread in the Diaspora would not be predisposed to appreciate the intellectual or cultural world of the Galilean countryside.5 This contrast even supports the rural, Galilean features of Jesus’ ministry by way of the positive use of the “criterion of dissimilarity,” since after Jesus’ disappearance his movement spread quickly from Jerusalem to other urban centers with less use for rural tradition.
Further, some Judean rabbis questioned Galileans’ observance of the law.6 As we shall note below, their perspective stems especially from prejudice;7 nevertheless, it suggests that inventing an origin in Galilee would hurt the Jesus movement in Judea. According to the rabbis, regional differences helped determine whether one could trust that food had been properly tithed.8 As we shall note, Galileans tended to be loyal to the law — but not always to Pharisaic interpretations of the law. In any case, the urban Jerusalem and Diaspora branches of the Jesus movement would hardly have served their own cause by inventing a rural Galilean background for Jesus.9
If Jesus was from Jewish Galilee, we may also assume Jesus’ Jewish culture and ethnicity.10 Although a de-Judaized Galilee appealed to “Aryan Christians” who wanted an Aryan Jesus,11 Jewish sources always portray Galileans (in contrast to the force-converted Idumeans) as full, genuine Jews.12 Archaeological surveys indicate that Galilee became heavily populated only after the Hasmonean conquests, suggesting Judean settlement there.13
In our earlier chapter responding to the “Cynic Jesus” thesis, we noted the Jewishness of even the Galilean city Sepphoris, and still more the countryside around it.14 Granted, Gentile cities abounded around Galilee15 and social intercourse occurred.16 The Upper Galilee had robust commercial ties with Tyre.17 But Gentiles did not predominate,18 and Greek cultural influence was far less in Galilee’s villages than in urban Jerusalem before 70 CE.19 Whereas the Upper Galilee included both Jewish and Syrian elements, lower Galilee was nearly completely Jewish by the time of Josephus.20
Whereas the Lower Galilee may reflect more hellenized art and speech due to its contact with larger cities,21 it has been questioned whether it was appreciably more hellenized in other respects.22 The theater of Sepphoris seated only five thousand, hence at most half of Sepphoris’s own population; it was not intended for, nor did it likely attract, Galilean villagers.23 I suspect that some scholars have overstated the case against hellenization, but their emphasis offers a welcome counterbalance to portraits of rural Galilee that in principle virtually equate it with Athens or Corinth.24
What is preserved about Jesus’ own ministry reinforces still further this connection with a traditional Palestinian Jewish context. Jesus himself restricted his ministry almost entirely to the Jewish parts of Galilee, apparently avoiding even the two more hellenized Jewish cities Tiberias and Sepphoris.25
