Chapter 28 of 404

Ignoring Jewish Environment

In addition to challenging the eschatological content of some of Jesus’ securest sayings (see ch. 17), the noneschatological Jesus suggested by such scholars ignores basic historical constraints such as Jesus’ historical context. Jesus’ radically eschatological predecessor John and his eschatological subsequent followers make a noneschatological Jesus highly improbable.²⁹ Some scholars try to counter this observation by making Jesus an opponent of John’s eschatological approach. Since no extant saying of Jesus repudiates John’s eschatology, they must make this argument by means of inference. They do so particularly by contending that Matt 11:11//Lk 7:28 denigrates John.³⁰ But this interpretation of the saying rests on inadequate understanding of ancient Jewish speech patterns; as we shall argue in our chapter on John the Baptist, this saying simply reflects standard Jewish rhetoric of praising others not by denigrating the point of comparison but by choosing a positive object of comparison.³¹ Later Christians would not likely have conformed Jesus to John (the competition),³² but his own contemporaries sometimes compared him with John (Mk 6:14-16; 8:28) or with Elijah (Mk 6:15; 8:28).³³

Doubting Jesus’ eschatological orientation is just a symptom of the larger problem of insufficient attention to Jesus’ immediate Jewish environment. The older liberal view that the earliest views about Jesus’ identity evolved from a Palestinian Jewish apocalyptist to a hellenistic divine man does not fit all the evidence (see ch. 19), but certainly fits better than the contemporary “Jesus Seminar’s” essential reversal of the sequence, which must assume that later Christians Judaized Jesus.³⁴ Such an approach makes no sense of their world: in view of Roman anti-Judaism and the growing influence of Diaspora Christianity as years passed, inventing greater attachments to Judaism would be counterproductive to the movement.³⁵ Indeed, Paul, an early missionary to the Greek world, shares an apocalyptic worldview with much of Palestinian Judaism as much as two decades before Mark, our first extant Gospel.³⁶ Jesus’ Jewish movement proclaimed a coming eschatological kingdom from the beginning. And apocalyptic and eschatological ideology was largely Jewish in the forms in which we have it in the Jesus movement.

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