Jesus, A Jewish Galilean: A New Reading of the Jesus-Story

Jesus, A Jewish Galilean: A new Reading of the Jesus-Story. By Sean Freyne. London, UK: T&T Clark, 2004. Pp. xiii + 212. Paper, $24.95.

This book is a welcome contribution to historical Jesus scholarship from one of the deans of contemporary Galilee studies. Two earlier books by the author focused respectively on historical Galilee and Galilee within the canonical Gospels.

Freyne here takes a "long view" of the subject. By this, he means relating his thinking about Jesus of Nazareth to traditions of the Hebrew Bible. He is critical of what he sees as an over-emphasis in contemporary work on the criterion of dissimilarity, and prefers instead Cerd Theissen's criterion of historical plausibility. This results in a depiction of Jesus as a "Jewish Galilean," and Freyne generally follows the line of E. P. Sanders in seeing Jesus as a promoter of "restoration eschatology" (e.g., in choosing twelve disciples to represent a new Israel or in wanting a new temple). Moreover, reading Jesus through themes of the Hebrew Bible presents some novel perspectives. Seeing Jesus as something of a natural ecologist in Galilee, thinking about his commitments to "all Israel" in the light of differing Israelite conquest stories, or pondering his concern about the Jerusalem temple in light of the Zion traditions of Isaiah is certainly worth scholarly contemplation.

Freyne effectively incorporates archaeology into his picture of the historical Jesus. Also, the book engages other important scholarship and is valuable in identifying matters of sharp debate within the field. Freyne clearly situates himself within those debates, but produces a synthesis that still has several significant problems.

First, the Jesus of this story is too much an "intertextual Jesus." By downplaying tradition criticism, Freyne not only opposes efforts such as the International Q project or the work of John Dominic Crossan, but too simply characterizes the historical Jesus through the typological procedures of Judean scribalism. Since recent tradition criticism has shown that early written pictures of Jesus ("stories") grew out of scribal elaborations of brief traditions, it is unlikely that the historical Jesus can be neatly identified with the Great Tradition of literate Judean scribes. Freyne is helpful, though, in suggesting the post-exilic maskilim ("wise") as possible carriers of Jesus traditions. Sorting out their perceptions from Jesus' self-understandings remains a significant difficulty.

Second, while social perspectives abound in the book, insights of social theory are allowed only limited influence in the book's interpretations. Peasant studies, for instance, ought to be more significantly involved in shaping Freyne's sensibilities about historical plausibility. Given the highly-restricted scope of ancient literacy or education, it is unlikely that an illiterate peasant Jesus would be so schooled in Hebrew Bible themes or "self-interpreting" in the way that Freyne suggests.

Third, Freyne does not deal entirely successfully with politics--a key variable in contemporary Jesus-interpretation. The best chapter of the book arguably is Chapter 5, "Confronting the Challenges of Empire." Here Freyne effectively situates the historical figure of Jesus within the force fields of Roman provincial realities and Galilean politics. Any credible modern account of Jesus must be able to do this, and Freyne presents a nuanced picture. Yet, the chapter is out of sync with much else in the book. In his efforts to avoid past mistakes in characterizing the Galilean Jesus--for instance, the tendency of earlier French and German scholarship to see Jesus as "anti-Jewish" or even "anti-semitic"--Freyne probably goes too far in the other direction. One does not disserve Jesus or ancient Judaism to point out that the northern and southern monarchies in the Hebrew Bible were political enemies for centuries. Even in the southern tradition, Micah clearly hated Jerusalem. Moreover, the Qumran library shows the depth of animosity in Jesus' own time toward Jerusalem elites. Certainly Mark and Q read Jesus more within a northern Israelite (prophetic) frame. Since Freyne rejects Horsley's view that Israelites survived the Assyrian conquests in Galilee and then endured Hasmonean colonization in the first-century BCE, Jesus by inference must derive from (pro-Hasmonean) Judean "settler-stock." This understanding cannot, however, be allowed to obscure the issue of agrarian class dynamics. If the political dimension of Jesus' historical activity is properly to be understood, Jesus the peasant Galilean clearly stands in tension not only with the Herods, but also with central elite political interests of Judea (which is the true import of the conflicts with Pharisees). Further clarifications are surely needed about the early first-century link between Galilean and Judean politics.