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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009
The importance of an awareness of the wider social context of any movement or individual is widely acknowledged, and does not need arguing. It constitutes a necessary criterion of the adequacy of any historical account. Yet there does not seem to have been any significant development in our critical appraisal of it among other criteria, and we still fail to produce agreed results. As a check on how things stand with other historians we may take, as a typical current survey, C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions. McCullagh makes a distinction that I have myself made before, but he makes it rather more elegantly. It lies in a contrast between the explanatory ‘scope’ and the ‘power’ of an historical account. An historical reconstruction may have a very wide scope, appearing to include all the data that is conventionally allowed to be relevant, and thus seem very persuasive. But the question remains to be asked, what power has it to exclude competing explanations?
[1] McCullagh, C. B., Justifying Historical Descriptions (London: CUP, 1984)Google Scholar; a check on Tosh, J., The Pursuit of History (London: Longman, 1984) added littleGoogle Scholar; for my own earlier work, we Downing, F. G., The Church and Jesus (London: SCM, 1968).Google Scholar (The contrast made here between ‘construction’ and ‘reconstruction’ is there phrased differently.)
[2] Downing, F. G., The Church and Jesus, 150–9, and references there. Neither McCullagh nor Tosh suggest any way round this impasse.Google Scholar
[3] Bultmann, R., Jesus and the Word (ET) (London: SCM, 1958) 49Google Scholar; cf. McNamara, M., Palestinian Judaism and the New Testament (Dublin: Veritas, 1983) 174–7.Google Scholar
[4] Barth, K., Church Dogmatics 1 i (ET) (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1936) 188Google Scholar; Derrett, J. D. M., Jesus' Audience (London: DLT, 1973) 56Google Scholar; Gerhardsson, B., The Origins of the Gospel Tradition (London: SCM, 1979)Google Scholar; Chilton, B., A Galilaean Rabbi and his Bible (London: SPCK, 1984).Google Scholar
[5] Daube, D., The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism (London: Athlone, 1958).Google Scholar
[6] Vermes, G., Jesus the Jew (London: Fontana, 1976)Google Scholar; Jesus and the World of Judaism (London: SCM, 1983).Google Scholar
[7] Harvey, A. E., Jesus and the Constraints of History (London: Duckworth, 1982) ch. 3Google Scholar; Riches, J., Jesus and the Transformation of Judaism (London: DLT, 1980) ch. 6 and p. 213, n. 1.Google Scholar
[8] Sandmel, S., The First Christian Century in Judaism and Christianity (New York: OUP, 1969)Google Scholar; Neusner, J., Midrash in Context (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983)Google Scholar; Alexander, P., ‘Rabbinic Judaism and the New Testament’, ZNW 74 (1983) 237–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
[9] Sanders, E. P., Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM, 1985) 8 etc.Google Scholar; see further, below, on the ‘criterion of dissimilarity’, n. 24.
[10] Hengel, M., The Charismatic Leader and his Followers (ET) (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1981) 20–4.Google Scholar
[11] Riesner, R., Jesus als Lehrer (Töbingen: Mohr, 2 1984) 287–98.Google Scholar
[12] Robbins, V. K., Jesus the Teacher (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984)Google Scholar; the quotation is from ‘Mark 1. 14–20: An Interpretation at the Intersection of Jewish and Greco-Roman Traditions’, NTS 28 (1982) 221.Google Scholar
[13] Robbins, Jesus the Teacher, insists on the ‘distinctiveness’ of the Markan structure of narratives about Jesus the teacher, 107–9, 115, etc. It is only at this point that I find any serious ground for disagreement.
[14] See the previous note.
[15] As in my ‘Cynics and Christians’, NTS 30 (1984) 584–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and further in a collection of comparative texts for ‘Q’, Matthew, Mark and James, that I hope to produce in the next year or two.
[16] Tiede, D. L., The Charismatic Figure as Miracle Worker (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Holladay, C. H., Theios Aner in Hellenistic Judaism (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977).Google Scholar
[17] Celsus, in Origen, contra celsum, is our earliest, and Plotinus next, neither suggest a pagan origin. Though the world-despair of Gnosticism would be particularly repugnant to pagan critics of ‘superstition’, it is so unimportant – or uninstanced – as to receive no mention. (I see that Murphy-O'Connor, J., St. Paul's Corinth (Wilmington: Glazier, 1983)Google Scholar, also notes nothing to suggest gnosticism in texts relating to Corinth); nor in fact in any of the archaeological finds (less likely to be indicative).
[18] Pliny, , Natural History 29Google Scholar; Dio, , Discourse 32 14. See n. 22 below.Google Scholar
[19] Lucian, , Alexander the False Prophet; Justin, Apology II 6: others fail.Google Scholar
[20] Theissen, G., ‘Wanderradikalismus’, ZTK 70 (1973) 245–71.Google Scholar
[21] Malherbe, A. J., Social Aspects of Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 2 1983), and articles there listedGoogle Scholar; also his Moral Exhortation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986) p. 13.Google Scholar
[22] ‘In first century Greco-Roman culture, not only physicians but also political leaders, prophets, magicians and philosopher-teachers were known for healing people of physical ailments’: Robbins, V. K., Jesus the Teacher, Apollonius and Iarchus (and referring to n. 86, p. 123).Google ScholarTheissen, G., The Miracle Stories of the Gospel Tradition (ET) (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1983)Google Scholar and Kee, H. C., Miracle in the early Christian World (New Haven: YUP, 1984)Google Scholar, cite more, but with considerable repetition, and from a long time-span. Even so, there are very few ‘healers’ as such. The conventional generalisations about healers have themselves very little power or warrant.
[23] As an almost random check one may note Mark 6. 1–29 in the commentaries. Whatever the origin of Jesus as ‘tektōn’, it could only suggest a Cynic teacher; his response, ‘a prophet is not without honour …’ is parallelled only in pagan sources, but among those, mostly Cynic; health is a major Cynic concern, though not – in our sources, as noted – healing; the mission charges, as aheady seen, are all variations on a Cynic agenda; repentance in the sense of change of mind and life-style is a frequent Cynic demand; the market-place gossip about Herod and Salome disparages them in a typically Cynic way; the rebuke for marital misconduct is matched by two Cynic critics of Titus' relationship with Bernice, critics respectively scourged and beheaded (Dio Cassius 65 15. 5).
[24] For a discussion of the limitations of this criterion, we my The Church and Jesus. It may have scope within any given large-scale hypothesis, but it has no objective force between hypotheses, when the wider context is itself in question.
[25] Rajak, T., Josephus (London: Duckworth, 1983) 62 ff.Google Scholar, and my own discussion, ‘Ears to Hear’, in Harvey, A. E. (ed.), Alternative Approaches to New Testament Study (London: SPCK, 1985) 98.Google Scholar
[26] Fischel, H. A., Essays in Greco-Roman and related Talmudic Literature (New York: Ktav, 1977)Google Scholar and ‘Studies in Cynicism’, in Neusner, J. (ed.), Religions in Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 1968).Google Scholar
[27] Liebermann, S. in Fischel, H. A., Essays, 331.Google Scholar
[28] See my ‘Cynics and Christians’, 584.
[29] Batey, R. A., ‘Jesus and the Theatre’, NTS 30 (1984) 570.CrossRefGoogle ScholarWifstrand, F., in L'Eglise ancienne et la Culture grecque (Paris: Ed. du Cerf, 1962)Google Scholar, emphasises the large number of philosophers originating in south Syria, but supposes there would have been no contact. Jesus' explicit instruction in Matt 10. 5 (cf. Rom 15. 8) to avoid Gentile areas hardly implies that cultural segregation was the norm.
[30] The Charismatic Leader, 34.
[31] As indicated in n. 15, I have assembled and hope to be able to order and publish material that will afford more weight to the suggestion that popular Cynic preaching formed an important part of the context of some early Christian talk about Jesus; that will then, I hope, give at least a little more power to my suggestions about Jesus himself. The collection will have some such title as The Christ and the Cynics.
