Comments on The Schooley Files: Getting the Cultural Context of Jesus Right

Hi Keith, that was a very good read, thanks for th...

2009-03-27T12:45:00.000-04:00

Hi Keith, that was a very good read, thanks for the link. If I was going to guess, I'd say there is a good chance that the emergent teacher was Rob Bell. He has a chapter in "Velvet Elvis" on the Jewishness of Jesus, and also mentions sandal dust, prayer shawls, etc. In the footnotes Bell quotes his source as Ray Vanderlaan. Vanderlaan made a video series a while back on Jewish history entitled "That the World May Know".

I enjoyed Bell's book and also the Vanderalaan video series. I love learning new history. However, it sounds like they may not have all of their facts straight. This is good to know. :)

Hi Mich,

Thanks for stopping by. I'm not su...

2009-03-27T02:44:00.000-04:00

Hi Mich,

Thanks for stopping by. I'm not sure which "speaker" you are referring to, but I'm guessing that the facile analysis is my own, in the penultimate paragraph.

Here's why we can't simply say "Jesus was a 1st century Jew who was immersed in Jewish, Roman and Greek culture": it's a gross oversimplification of the historical situation. Jesus was immersed in the three cultures (as well as other Middle Eastern cultural influences), but to different degrees and in vastly different ways. Despite Jesus' conflicts with the Pharisees, he actually has more in common with that group than with any of the other Jewish sects. And the Pharisees developed as a group in reaction to the progressive Hellenization that followed the conquests of Alexander the Great. Their very name means, "Separated." This reaction, of course, bespeaks influence, but one has to give due weight to opposition to the influence.

Similarly, the Roman influence is undeniable (and the New Testament makes no effort to hide it), but it was the influence of an oppressive conqueror. Palestine was a thorn in the Empire's side, culminating in the catastrophe of AD 70, precisely because the Jews did not roll over and let themselves be Romanized. Saying that Jesus was immersed in Roman culture is a little like saying Nelson Mandela was immersed in Afrikaner culture--there's a sense in which it's true, but the bald statement would be entirely misleading.

So to "privilege one of these cultures at the expense of the others" is not merely the result of an "Enlightenment mindset": it is to take seriously the complexities of the cultural situation. Moreover, it is more necessary for a modern Western interpreter to adjust to the Jewish, ancient Middle Eastern context, than it is to adjust to the Greek or Roman contexts, because many of our cultural presuppositions arise from Greco-Roman philosophy and culture. It is natural for us to read Scripture with Greco-Roman eyes; it is unnatural for us to make the cultural shift to first-century Middle Eastern Judaism, which is why it is so important to do so.

Nice post--but isn't the analysis a little too fac...

2009-03-26T17:58:00.000-04:00

Nice post--but isn't the analysis a little too facile? Why do we have to seperate Jewish from Roman and Greek? Isn't one of the main points of Historical Jesus scholarship that it is an Enlightement mindset that wants to privilege one of these cultures at the expense of the others? Here your speaker seems to want to say Jesus is Jewish and any hint of Roman or Greek culture must be banished. But isn't this just continuing the previous scholarship which wanted to banish Jesus' Jewishness and call hime a Greek Platonist or a cynic?

Instead, can't we say Jesus was a 1st century Jew who was immersed in Jewish, Roman and Greek culture?

Hi Jc_Freak,

Getting info from the Talmud i...

2009-03-25T12:09:00.000-04:00

Hi Jc_Freak,

Getting info from the Talmud is a tricky business, because although it attained its final written form somewhere around AD 500, it is based on far older oral tradition. So certainly some information gained from it is valid. But those five centuries were very tumultuous for Jews, especially considering the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, and the rise of Christianity.

What this essay makes me want to do is to read the two books that Dr. Burge recommends. I should mention, however, that Burge is problematic for me; I was disappointed in his commentary on John. He pays lip service to John having written the fourth gospel, but for him, this means that John wrote the first draft of something that went through extensive revisions through many hands and eventually ended up as the gospel we have. He also approves of a cut-and-paste approach to the fourth gospel, believing that various sections are severely disordered. As Donald Carson notes in his commentary, how are we to discern the difference between a "final redactor" who found some reason to arrange the materials in the form we now have them, and an original writer who could have decided that this was the best form to put them in from the beginning?

I think I have a guess as to who that speaker was....

2009-03-25T09:21:00.000-04:00

I think I have a guess as to who that speaker was. Its a teacher that I like a lot who has resisted being within the emergance conversation, but tends to gravitate towards that way of thinking. He does admit that he gets those thoughts from the Talmud.

I'm interested in seeing this essay though. thanks for the link.