How come when he goes back into Nazareth, his own hometown he grows up in, that was very very small. Does a person have to ask him who he is???????????????
Because it's a rhetorical question. When you ask who someone is because you aren't sure, you say something like "who is this?" You don't list the guy's family members by name.
Not to sure if its him or not.
They know exactly who he is, which is why they are described (13:57) as ἐσκανδαλίζοντο and why they describe his family. The point of the story (whether it is historical or not) is quite clear: they were offended that someone they'd known so well was now going around with such wisdom (
sophia) and magical/miraculous things (
ai dunameis). It's not that they don't know who he is, but that they refused to believe someone they'd knew so well his whole life was now doing what he was.
The NT in general only deals with the last week of his life and death
This is not at all true, although it is understandable that one would get that impression.
Historiography (the writing of history; i.e., historical literature) in the classical & hellenistic world can be roughly divided into two types. One is a type of historical narrative of some event (or events), often a war. This is what Thucydides wrote, what Livy wrote, and many others.
The other rough "type" is biographical. It is distinguished from the other type mainly by the focus on a person (obviously), but also the way that the narrative actually corresponds to a real time line.
When historians wrote about wars or the history of a people/culture (e.g., the way Liy did with Rome or Josephus with the Jewish people), the narrative is supposed to match up with the actual chronology as much as possible. That is, events described by the historians take place in a sequence which corresponds to the sequence in which they actually happened.
When biographers wrote about people, this was far less important and quite frequently almost completely ignored except when it couldn't be. The authors of the synoptics play around with the order of their material to suit their needs even though the reason for the name is how closely the three line up. Two gospels have no birth narrative. But all four gospels have the passion narrative near the end and this is also the one place in John where we see much similarity in terms of chronology with the synoptics. There are still differences, of course, but compared to the rest of John here much more is the same.
The reason it seems like the gospels only cover a week is because of the type of literature they are: biographical. The focus on the person (and this is true of biographical literature both before and after the gospels) is what matters, and so in general it doesn't matter whether a particular event described after another in the text actually happened first.
In fact, especially when the focus is on a person who taught and performed "wondrous deeds", the actual context (in terms of setting) given for some deed or saying or parable isn't just inaccurate, but completely made up. For one thing, this is because who instructed others repeated the same things over and over again. That's how teaching in an oral culture works, even today.
So, for example, in Matthew Jesus is treated with scorn in his own village right after he has just told a bunch of parables. Not only is the chronology here wrong, but it could not even in principle be correct, because whatever parables go back to the historical Jesus in some form were repeated over and over again in many different contexts.
One of the reasons it seems as if Jesus was only active for a week in the gospels is because so much of what they contain happened over and over again in many different contexts, but only one of these is described and the context often just made up.
I do believe a few knew about him and his parables, but fame no. We have him according to Gmark going into small villages and having to yell "listen" "listen to me" only after his death when oral tradition was spreading did people say. oh ya, I heard that guy, he said this or I witnessed this or that, and these stories grew when they created a Hellenistic deity.
The oral tradition started while Jesus was still alive. It continued after the gospels were written. The way the gospels present this oral tradition is typical of biography: the setting is for the most part a literary device. A large portion of the oral tradition was Jesus' teachings, which were repeated again and again, some in perhaps a very fixed form, others perhaps not so much. And as for the miracles, the actual contexts
can't be repeated because these are events, so it is quite possible that the original context all the miracles were lost from almost the start. What the gospel authors did was take what was almost entirely a bunch of disjoint material about Jesus, probably often without any setting (i.e., a saying of Jesus without any mention of a single time or place he said it), and weave these into a biographical narrative.
Im not claiming Jesus didnt end up famous, he was, but only in death and the mythology created afterwards.
You've taken the depiction in the gospels, which is in a form that is not designed to give either a realistic chronology for the most part or even a realistic setting for much of what is reported, and used this to infer things about Jesus' activities. In other words, you're concentrating on the single most ahistorical part of the gospels to construct your interpretation of how well Jesus was known.
The problem doesn't end there, however. Because having read into the chronological and geographical context of the gospels' narratives, you have a guy whom nobody really knows being executed, which means we have to disregard just about everything about that execution, because there is no good reason for a nobody to gain the attention of first the Jewish elite and than the Roman elite rather than just be killed.
Finally, now that this nobody is dead and we're left with just a handful of followers, for some reason these followers start
increasing. The single thing most responsible for ending groups which followed guys like John the Baptist or others mentioned in Josephus is they end up killed or executed, and being dead they have no more followers. Here, however, someone whom nobody knew about just died, but what happens with the thousands of other dead nobodies, and even with the influential, well-known leaders of factions, sects, movements, etc., doesn't happen. Just the opposite happens.
Here it comes....... E P Sanders. The Historical Figure of Jesus. Page 21. L23.
