The Galilean Jewishness Of Jesus:  Retrieving The Jewish Origins Of Christianity, by Bernard J. Lee

While reading this book there was something that nagged at me and bothered me about it.  There was a sense of a lack of integrity about the way that the author was going about the study of the Jewish origins of Christianity, a belief that the beliefs and practices of the early church amounted to a road not taken in the Church’s adoption of a non-biblical Hellenistic tradition in later generations, and a decided disinterest in changing his own practices in light of understanding the truth of the Jewishness of Jesus Christ and the early Church of God.  And besides that the book itself is filled with an extreme degree of phoniness in terms of its jargon, its fondness for theological fads and fashionable poses that demonstrate the author to be more of a trend chaser than someone who studies the Bible and ancient history in order to learn from it and grow from it.  Rather the author strikes one as someone who is complacent to know the past and to know that things could have gone differently but not interested in changing in light of a better understanding of the roots of Christianity.  And that is a great shame.

This book is first volume of three and after reading the author’s turgid prose in this mercifully short book I have no interest in completing the series.  The book as a whole consists of three chapters with numerous smaller sections that takes up 150 pages.  The author begins with a preface and introduction that demonstrates the author to be well-read and interested in questions of counterfactual history.  After that there is an opening chapter that looks at early Christianity from the point of view of it being a historicist conversation involving questions of empricism and rationalism, and generally the author takes an intellectualizing approach to the whole subject.  The second chapter looks at what Galilean Jewishness means, pondering the extent of Hellenization of Galilee and sociopolitical matters relating to the rise of the zealots and matters of ambiguity and religion.  Finally the author concludes with a chapter that looks at Jesus as a Jew as well as the perspective of other Jews, including the Pharisees, and the perspective of the imaginary Q text used by Matthew and Luke, as well as a list of various texts consulted for this volume to demonstrate that the author did sufficient reading.

By and large this book feels like an extended exercise in intellectual wankery.  The author appears to want others to feel impressed that the author understands the Jewish origins of Christianity and the context of Jesus Christ within the second temple Judaism of his time.  The author wants the reader to be impressed with the name of books and their authors that he drops, to show that he is a cultured and sophisticated textual critic.  But in majoring in the minors, the author fails to grasp the straightforward notion that the point of understanding the past, whether it be about the Bible or anything else, is for that knowledge to shape one’s behavior in light of what one knows.  Mere knowledge acquired for the point of showing off oneself as intelligent and knowledgeable without that knowledge having an influence on one’s character and behavior is mere window dressing and puffery, and if there is one thing this book has too much of it is puffery of all kinds.  The author seems to believe that simply by acknowledging that Jesus Christ was a Torah-observant Galilean Jew one is able to come to terms with Judaism and with the mistakes of the past in rejecting aspects of the law that are foreign to Christians like the Sabbath and holy days and clean and unclean meat, all of which were conspicuously kept according to the biblical command by the earliest believers.  Sorry, that isn’t sufficient.