Gospels and Jesus by Stanton Graham;

Author:Stanton, Graham;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2002-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

The shadow of Roman control lay heavily over Galilee. It certainly fomented political tensions and incidents during the lifetime of Jesus, but it is hard to judge the extent of political unrest in the early 30s. We do know that it increased sharply in the three following decades.

The Jewish ritual baths (miqv$$$ot) uncovered in Sepphoris have encouraged renewed interest in the literary evidence for Galilean Judaism at the time of Jesus. There is no evidence that Galilean Jews were less observant than Jews who lived in Jerusalem and Judaea. We do know that the Galileans were fiercely loyal to Jerusalem and the temple.

Most of the recent archaeological discoveries in Galilee and Judaea have been unspectacular, but they have led to fresh appraisals of the literary evidence. From both quarters new light is being shed on the political, economic, social, and religious worlds of Jesus and his followers.

A very wide range of literary and archaeological evidence has been considered in this chapter. Important questions of method have emerged. It is often suggested that since evidence from outside the gospels comes from ‘unbiased’ sources, it should be given preference over the New Testament gospels. But the historian and the archaeologist rarely have access to ‘neutral’ evidence. Evidence of all kinds from outside the gospels has to be assessed critically for it is rarely unambiguous. As we shall see in the following chapter, it is a mistake to suppose that the evangelists’ convictions about the significance of Jesus make their accounts worthless for the historian.

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