Sayings
Reflecting Jesus’s Environment
Ancient novels usually reflect the
environment of their authors far better than the environment in which the story
is set. This tendency is true also of many later apocryphal gospels; for example,
the Gospel of Peter’s Jewish priests waiting in a burial plot makes no sense in
Jesus’s original environment. The Gospel of Thomas’s closing image of a woman
being saved by becoming male (Gos. Thom. 114.2-3) fits Philo’s Platonic
Alexandrian milieu far better than that of Jesus.
By contrast, many of Jesus’s reported sayings
in the Synoptics (and for that matter, some in John [e.g., John 7:37-38])
address a setting that fits Jesus’s particular geographic or chronological
milieu, even though these Gospels, too, are written or a later audience.
Granted, Jesus’s milieu is also the milieu of Jesus’s disciples, but the
important point is that most such sayings do reflect an early milieu. Jesus’s
disciples were the tradents with the most direct and complete memories of Jesus’s
ministry, and their memories are those most likely to be directly accurate.
These features likely reflect an origin far earlier than Mark’s roughly our
decades after Jesus was on the earth. Following are just a few examples to
illustrate the point:
· The Pharisees’ question about
divorce (Mark 10:2; Matt 19:3) reflects a debate that extant sources attribute
to Pharisaic schools in Jesus’s generation (see m. Git 9:10; Sipre Deut.
269.1.1).
· Jesus plays on current Pharisaic
debates about purity regarding the inside or outside of cups (Matt
23:25-26//Luke 11:39-41).
· Jesus’s warning that it would be “measured”
to one as one measured to others echoes a specifically Jewish tradition (Matt
7:2//Luke 6:38).
· Jewish teachers often employed
the phrase “to what shall I/we compare?” (Matt 11:16//Luke 7:31), especially to
introduce parables (e.g., M. ‘Abot 3:17; Sukkah 2:10; t. Ber. 1:11; 6:18; Sanh.
1:2; 8:9).
· The first half of the so-called
Lord’s Prayer (Matt 6:9-10//Luke 11:2) corresponds closely to the language of
some early Judean prayers.
· Later Jewish teachers, not likely
influenced by Jesus, could depict what was also impossible as a large animal
passing through a needle’s eye (Mark 10:25).
· In gospel tradition, Bethsaida
always retains its pre-30 CE name (Matt 11:21//Luke 10:13; Mark 6:45; 8:22;
John 1;44; 12:21), rather than its new civic name (Julias), which was common
after 30.
Many characteristic features of Jesus’s style,
such as story parables, “Amen” and “Son of man” are also distinctively Jewish.
Meanwhile, more than in the settings of many later rabbinic parables, the
settings of the majority of Jesus’s extant parables reflect an agrarian
environment. (Because later Christians did not take up their style, Jesus’s
parables are accepted as authentic more often than some other features of the
Jesus tradition). (Craig S. Keener, Christobiography:
Memory, History, and Reliability of the Gospels [Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 2019], 492-93)
