Digital Logos Edition
In his latest book, Sean Freyne draws on his detailed knowledge of Galilean society in the Roman period, based on both literary and archaeological sources, to give a fresh and provocative reading of the Jesus-story within its Galilean setting. Jesus, a Jewish Galilean focuses on the religious as well as the social and political environment and examines the ways in which the Jewish religious experience had expressed itself in Galilee. It examines the ways in which the Jewish tradition in both the Pentateuch and the Prophets had constructed notions of an ideal Galilee. These provided the raw material for Jesus' own response to the issues of the day, from which he fashioned his own distinctive views of Israel's restoration and his own role in that project.
Although Freyne is in touch with all recent scholarship about the historical Jesus, he brings his own distinctive take on the issues both with regard to Galilean society and Jesus' grounding in his own religious tradition. His Jesus is both Jewish and yet distinctive in his concerns and the ways in which he responds to the ecological, social and religious issues of his own time and place. Freyne seeks to retrieve the theological importance of Jesus' own message, something that has been lost sight of in the trend to present him primarily as a social reformer, while acknowledging the dangers of modernizing Jesus.
“At the outset it is important to realize that Galilee was not the only theatre for Jesus life and ministry. Some recent studies have tended to minimize or even ignore his Judean roots and subsequent ministry, basing themselves on a perceived opposition between Galilee and Judea/Jerusalem, and in the process ignoring the leads suggested by the Fourth Gospel, which depicts Jesus as a companion of John the Baptist in the Judean desert and concentrating his ministry on Jerusalem, with Galilee functioning as a virtual place of retreat (Jn. 4:1–2, 45).” (Page 7)
“Meier makes the helpful distinction between the ‘real Jesus’ (problematic though that term is with regard to any past figure) and ‘the historical Jesus’. This latter is a modern construct which may, by the use of modern scientific methods, ‘give us fragments of the real Jesus’.” (Page 3)
“Perhaps the most shocking example of such a manipulation of the evidence was Walter Grundmann’s suggestion in his 1941 study that Galilee was pagan (heidnisch) and that ‘with greater probability, Jesus was not a Jew’” (Page 6)
“Yet these voices were drowned out by the noises emanating from the Jesus Seminar with its deliberate use of the mass media to popularize their work on the historical Jesus.” (Page 11)
“suggest that ‘Jesus-historians have been reading sociology too reverently and texts too suspiciously’.” (Page 17)
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1 rating
J.R. Woods
2/17/2013