Thursday, August 15, 2019

Craig Keener on Sayings Reflecting Jesus' Environment in the Synoptic Gospels




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)