Chapter 37 of 404

Pagan Origins Again

Mack is not alone in suggesting a Gentile context for much of the Jesus tradition. For example, another scholar charges that modern scholars usually prefer a Jewish setting for the gospel materials due to ecumenical and apologetic motives: that is, a Jewish setting is useful for Christian-Jewish dialogue and for “defending” the Jesus traditions.¹⁹² Many scholars using Jewish sources would be surprised to find their work characterized in such terms. (Many historical scholars lack strong ecumenical commitments, and even more lack apologetic interests. Some indeed profess no religious faith.)

In any case, this scholar considers his own alternative less “biased”: some of the purported sayings of Jesus make better sense, he thinks, from backgrounds in Cynicism, gnosticism, or Hellenistic mystery religions.¹⁹³ While later sources did create some Jesus-sayings relevant to their setting (particularly clear in gnosticism), and Gospel writers reworded and reframed sayings for their own audiences, we shall argue later in the book that we possess a great abundance of gospel material that makes the best sense in a specifically Jewish context.

We will treat gnostic materials in ch. 4, and have treated Cynic parallels (the most plausible of the three suggestions) above. As we have suggested, a background in mystery cults suffers from the same drawbacks as the Cynic proposal: these cults are far removed from Jesus’ milieu.¹⁹⁴ They were also less publicly accessible than knowledge of Cynics, even in urban settings. Jewish people did not need to appeal to Gentile mystery cults for their concept of “mystery,” which already appears long before Jesus’ day in Daniel and possibly 1 Enoch,¹⁹⁵ as well as in Qumran Scrolls dependent on them.¹⁹⁶ Today, even most works on early Diaspora Christianity place little emphasis on the mysteries, because their secretive character made them less relevant for informing discourse shared with any not initiated to the mysteries.¹⁹⁷

To conclude this section, I return to the problem of any portrayal in which the earliest Jesus movements’ context was hellenistic and Jewish ideas (like Jewish eschatology or messiahship) entered later. Does it not make more sense to start from the Galilean Jewish framework of Jesus and his first disciples and regard non-Jewish ideas as the later adaptations? (Jesus’ ministry also developed in the context of the prior ministry of the Jewish prophet John, attested in the Jewish historian Josephus.)¹⁹⁸ After all, even Paul, working in a Diaspora environment, recognizes that Palestinian Jewish apostles (whose prominence rested on their association with Jesus) with conservative Jewish sentiments or constituencies dominated the Jerusalem church (Gal 2:9-12). The Jesus movement originated in Jewish Palestine, not in the Diaspora, and Jews would hardly have adapted a pagan cult (that happened to exalt a Galilean Jew!). Pagan anti-Judaism was common enough that hellenizers would not have made their message more Palestinian Jewish (e.g., more eschatological), hence less acceptable in the Diaspora, to commend it to their audiences! Clearly a Palestinian Jewish context makes the most sense for Jesus of Nazareth, as we shall argue more fully in following chapters. We shall also argue that the substance of a large amount of the tradition preserved about Jesus in the Synoptics reflects that same context rather than a later one.

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