Galilee, Jesus and The Gospels

This study will provide a general summary of Sean Freyne's Galilee, Jesus and The Gospels: Literary Approaches and Historical Investigations, and will then summarize the book's strongest and weakest points and arguments.

The most important idea presented by Freyne is that studies of Jesus prior to his work have failed to consider the importance of the fact that he was a Galilean: "It is against the background of this neglect of Galilee by both historians and theologians in their discussion of Jesus that the present study attempts to integrate questions of social identity and theological reflection. We shall be attempting (to describe) . . . the social and religious world of first-century Galilee, as well as Jesus' role in that setting, and investigating how much a picture coheres with his identity as this emerges . . . within the New Testament. The suggestion is that the particularity of Jesus' Galilean career is both historically important and theologically relevant" (p. 3).

Therefore, we see immediately that Freyne has provided us with a fresh perspective on the life of Jesus and specific influences on that shaping of that life and on the thinking of the man.

As Freyne writes.that " . . . We know enough to be certain that there were genuine differences --- political, cultural, and religious --- between life in that region and in other parts of first-century Palestine. It is this incontrovertible fact, and the way in which it has worked itself through the reports a

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hose who follow him; their journey is to lead them, not to the center where their Jewish faith has told them God can be encountered, but to bear witness to a new mode of encounter outside the land" (p. 272). The rejection of Jesus by the Jews, according to Freyne, is in part due to his Galilean origins, which is one of his most original and intriguing notions: "As such, (Galilee) stands over against Jerusalem, the holy city whose central role for Jewish hopes is recognized, but which tragically remained unfulfilled because of its rejection of Jesus" (p. 269). Freyne is careful to note that Galileans themselves were not likely cognizant of the role they and their region were playing in the development of Christianity in a Jewish context: "That this re-defining within a particular social setting would eventually lead to a very different vision in which elements of the old would be brought together to create a new system, may have been perceived only dimly by those Galileans who first encountered Jesus . . . " (p. 270). At the same time, to his credit, Freyne is careful not to romanticize the role of Galilee or Galileans in the life and career of Jesus, and he recognizes that there is no such romanticization in the fourth gospe

Category: Literature - G