Sorry bud, wrote about almost a two page reply that vanished.
I've had that happen more than once. I hate it.
Not everyone was starving. but many were very hungry, and that's even mentioned in the gospels.
I was addressing your argument which states that as situations were to bleak all around, Jesus couldn't have supported a following.
false
it flourished under Hellenization after Jesus death where it failed in Judaism due to his death.
Hellenization is a bad name for a period, or is a name for a process.
Side note, the cultural differences between Hellenistic Judaism and Israelite born and bred Judaism are vastly understudied. Hellenization and the socioeconomics are just now coming out in a better light.
Not like you think. Around the turn of the 20th century and into much of the first half, a good many of the "big names" like Bultmann, Helmut Koester, J. M. Robinson, and others followed a tradition which had been developing since before Frazer: the Palestinian tradition was lost to us and all that remained was the hellenistic corpus with some bits of information we could extract.
Of course, this was before much of archaeology was even around, let alone anthropology, social scientific study of religion, the massive increases in evidnce thanks to recovered papyri, and decades of work digging up clues as to the nature of this "hellenism".
Meyers and Strange began their excavations and interpretations in the academic environment of the 70s. Sean Freyne was perhaps most responsible for getting other scholars (including Meyers) to re-evaluate the evidence. He went back to his first work, from 1980, and looked again at the evidence (old and new) ending up with
Jesus: A Jewish Galilean (2004). Chancey's first monograph on the subect
The Myth of a Gentilte Galilee came out shortly earlier, but he followed it up with his later 2005 (and even wider) study on Greco-Roman cultural influences on Galilee during Jesus day.
At the same time, an increasing number of volumes, books, papers, etc., were coming out looking at the issue from the perspective of the social sciences.
A major player here was Crossan. But he made the same mistake Bultmann and others had by trying to understand first century Galilee and the Roman empire using social stratification theories developed in the 50s & 60s. These were not meant for the cultures Crossan et al. described with them, and better and better sociological models based on the assessment of a much wider understanding of Jewish, Greek, and Roman dynamics.
So influential was Freyne here that in 2009 the
Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism published
A Wandering Galilean: Essays in Honour of Sen Freyne.
The other major contributer to archaeology was Chancey, whose monographs were hardly his only contribution to the debate. Malina's groundbreaking work
The Social World of Jesus and the Gospels did what Crossan did not: construct a social model based on research, work, and theory directly related to our about the 1st century mediterranean.
On the other hand, work done in classical studies (among other fields) was increasingly showing how bad a model the idea of hellenization was to understand the years after Alexander the Great and before the fal of Rome. Fitzymyer had already done excellent work on the Jewish influence on the NT (e.g., his 1974
Essays on the Semitic Background of the New Testament (
SBL Sources for Biblical Study 5)).
More recent work was made possible by improvements within linguistics, comparative linguistics, and archaeological finds. Maurice Casey devoted a great deal of work which I find overly-optimistic but which is valuable nonetheless to show certain limits even on the NT (written in Greek), let alone the tradition it developed from.
Which brings us right to orality studies. Bultmann's work was already too questioned decades ago, and the adoption of the Oral-Formulaic approach wasn't much better. However, once again comparisons between like groups (e.g., Birger Gerhardsson's use of rabbinic models, the increasing understanding of the politics & socio-cultural elements of reading, writing, and orality; etc.).
He didn't need economic support. he may have liked a roof over his head for the night but that's about it.
1) That IS economic support.
2) I gave you the most recent, up-to-date work on this issue as well as the context in which the current models were developed. If your understanding differs, at least point out what the basis for it is.
Stopping the Hellenistic commerce and taxation would stop feeding the Roman machine that kept them oppressed.
No, it wouldn't because among other things "hellenic" means "greek". Also, until you have something cited in response to the work I quoted, then you are simply giving your opinion about an extremely complex issue without letting anyone know your basis for it.
He figured out a peaceful way to beat the Romans at their own game
The fight with the romans was ideological. The tensions were religiously based, not economic.
He traveled around with no money and survived on the hospitality of others, not charging for health care but hoping to sit at a dinner table to bend ears.
For someone who thinks we can't rely much on the NT, you are certainly reading into what it does not say.
You know as well as I do 12 apostles is a OT reference, and that 3 following him would also not look threatening.
Because the romans were so up on Jewish scriptures they'd instantly recognize a guy preaching with 12 disciples was more threatening. I'm sure the torah was required reading for the Roman soldier.
The reason Jesus had 12 was because of it's Jewish significance. It would be seen as such by contemporary Jews, not Roman authorities.
This was regarding the proper use of tekton. I use Johnathos Reed and Patterson here.
Here's what Reed
actually says: "In fact, some scholars have suggested that since Nazareth was so close to Sepphoris, Joseph and maybe even Jesus might have worked on its construction projects; their occupations are traditionally translated as carpenters, but the Greek word tekton more broadly refers to one who works with his hands and includes stone masons and the like (Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3)."
Once again, those who worked construction (wood or stone) were not the social misfits and dirt poor individuals it seems you think.
to have shaped stone, repaired houses, or even worked in the fields.
There is a difference (well-known, actually) between a skilled laborer/craftsman, and an unskilled: "But when they became landlessa dreadful plight in an agrarian society
unless one knew a craft..." from "Ancient economy and the New Testament" in the volume
Understanding the Social World of the New Testament
Patterson says that being a tekton means Joseph owned no land and was a step below that of a normal peasant.
Now we go beyond the Gospels
We go beyond the gospels into a tiresome repeat of earlier socio-economic models. Which is why he doesn't cite much of anything.
Nor does the depiction in these little over-simplified articles have much to do with at least Reed's academic work.
But only for Hellenistic Jews, for Israelite born and raised Jews is was horrible.
"All Judaism was Hellenistic Judaism, but not all Judaism was affected by Hellenism in the same ways or to the same extent. In making this point, I am not trying to turn back the clock to the pre-Hengel period. As Hengel rightly demonstrated, the idea that we can dichotomize Judaism into Diaspora/Hellenistic Judaism and Palestinian/non-Hellenistic Judaism is clearly wrong." from
Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus
You are
vastly over-simplifying the cultural, economic, political, etc., in your model.
Nothing you have cited is a study on Galilee (economic or otherwise). It's mostly wiki articles and similar types of articles. J. L. Reed give one portrayal in that article intended for general audiences, and a far more sophisticated on in his scholarship.
The Son of Man has no place to lay his head,
One of the most contentious areas of historical Jesus/NT research over the last century or longer has been the proper interpretation of "son of man".
You want to guess about the nature of a socio-economic model you've developed without any reference to any works relevant to this, nor have you dealt with the archaeological findings, but you wish to "guess" here. When it comes to Jesus' fame, the fact that he inspired more literature than just abougt anybody we know, the fact that it is impossible to explain anything about the early Jesus movement without positing Jesus was well-known (a fact supported by, for example, that Josephus even knew of Jesus' brother), and so on, isn't enough. But pure, utter speculation about the socio-economic dynamics of first century Galilee can be exrapolated from two articles.
Your misreading Reed on this.
How do you know? Do you have that volume?
