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 about Jesus which have come to us, that provides the distinctive point of view of the present study" (p. 30).
Freyne divides his book into two sections, according to the categories of approaches taken by scholars studying the life of Jesus---the literary and the historical approaches. Therefore, the major ideas of the bulk of the book are overviews of others' ideas and reflections on them made by the author.
With respect to the literary approaches, on...