WAS JESUS A PHILOSOPHICAL CYNIC?[1]
 
Bruce Griffin

 

The last two decades have seen a renaissance in the study of the historical Jesus. Books, articles, and monographs have flooded into the scholarly scene at an unprecedented rate. This renaissance appears to be related to demographic shifts in the composition of the biblical studies guild. For the study of the historical Jesus has never been a simply disinterested search for history. For most of the last two hundred years, the quest for the historical Jesus has been a project heavily tied to the Enlightenment in general and the German Enlightenment in particular. The great names in the early searches for Jesus such as David Friedrich Strauss were by no means neutral historians; they were looking to use historical methods to construct a Jesus that could be used on behalf of the perceived apologetic needs of the German Enlightenment, whose opponents included orthodoxy, especially in its Catholic and Jewish forms.

Thus for most of the last two hundred years, the shape and character of the quest for the historical Jesus have been heavily influenced by the agenda of German liberal theology. In the nineteenth century, the quest was launched, producing a series of portraits reflecting the shifting needs of the theology of the times.[2] In the early 1900s, for apologetic reasons, German liberal theology called for the quest to be abandoned, and it was. In the 1950s, for equally apologetic reasons, liberal theology sought to have the quest resumed, and it was. What was sometimes called the New Quest for the historical Jesus that arose after the 1950s was still intellectually indebted to the agenda of the German Enlightenment. For the New Quest still maintained the criterion of dissimilarity: the decision that the only historically certain evidence about Jesus was the evidence that fitted neither into the world of Judaism nor that of orthodox Christianity. The criterion of dissimilarity thus served the ideological agenda of a German Enlightenment that had decided at the outset that scholars would not be permitted to find a historical Jesus who bore any relation either to Judaism or later orthodoxy.

By contrast, the quest that has arisen over the last two decades constitutes the first wide-scale departure from the pattern of the previous two centuries. Following World War II and the publication of Divino Afflante Spiritu, Catholic scholars began to enter the biblical studies guild in large numbers, and within two decades of Vatican II soon made up a very large fraction of biblical studies professionals. Jews, who had previously been excluded from the Western universities or marginalized within them, also became a major presence in the profession. Finally, evangelical Protestants, benefiting from the rising educational levels of the post war period, also began to make serious contributions to academic scholarship.

The result of these changes is an ethnically and theologically diverse academic community whose study of Jesus is no longer tied to the apologetic needs of liberal theology. Rudolf Bultmann’s famous dictum "I do indeed think that we can know almost nothing about the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either"; has been discredited—not because biblical scholars have become less critical but precisely because they have become more so: there is no longer a need to perpetuate the liberal theological myth that Jesus is somehow more difficult to research than Julius Caesar, Tiberius, or any other figure of the ancient world.[3] The criterion of dissimilarity has been discredited and shelved.

In the new scholarly environment, a variety of proposals are competing for the most appropriate model by which to understand Jesus. By far the most dominant method has been to proceed from the understanding that Jesus was first and foremost a Jew, to reconstruct first century Judaism, and then to position Jesus within his Jewish world. This is the approach taken by nearly all the most respected works on Jesus in recent years, and it expresses an interfaith perspective on how Jesus research should be done: examples of this approach can be found in the liberal Protestant E.P. Sanders, the Catholic John Meier, the moderate evangelical N.T. Wright, and the Jewish historian Geza Vermes.[4]

But emphasis on the Jewish background to Jesus is not the only approach. The Hellenistic world and the Roman Empire which ruled Palestine in Jesus’ day are also absolutely essential, and some authors have preferred to stress the Roman and Hellenistic framework over and against the Jewish. This has led to proposals that see Jesus not as a Jewish prophet, but as a teacher of wisdom, a sage with greater similarities to the philosophers of the Cynic school than to any purely Jewish model.[5] In Britain, F. G. Downing has written extensively on this issue, but the most controversial studies have come from American scholars.[6] In 1987, Leif Vaage completed a dissertation at Claremont Graduate School in which he argued that the sayings of Jesus found in the material common to Matthew and Luke, usually believed to derive from a source designated as Q, showed strong similarities with the lifestyle advocated by the Cynics. In 1994, Vaage published a book based on his dissertation entitled Galilean Upstarts: Jesus’ First Followers According to Q, in which he continued to advocate the Cynic thesis as the best explanation of Q.[7]

Vaage’s work was subsequently taken up by Burton Mack, a professor of Claremont School of Theology. In 1988, Mack published Mark: A Myth of Innocence; here Mack argues that Mark is a thoroughly unreliable source, an example of early Christian mythmaking, and that to the extent that the historical Jesus can be recovered, he looks like a Cynic wisdom teacher along the lines suggested by Vaage.[8] This argument was continued in Mack’s The Lost Gospel: the Book of Q and Christian Origins in 1993.[9] Mack defended Q as the most reliable source for the reconstruction of the historical Jesus. Q in turn was believed to have gone through three different revisions or redactions before it was used as a source for Matthew and Luke. Mack here was relying on the brilliantly argued work of John Kloppenborg who believed that Q originally consisted of a collection of wisdom sayings that were subsequently expanded by a collection of sayings focussing on judgment and eschatology; before Q reached its final form with addition of miscellaneous other material.[10] Although Kloppenborg did not draw the conclusion that the wisdom material was authentic and the eschatological sayings were inauthentic, Mack believed that this was in fact the conclusion to which Kloppenborg’s study pointed.

Moreover, Mack argued that the omissions of Q, the material that was not present in Q, was of decisive significance for understanding Jesus:

[The] story of Q demonstrates that the narrative gospels have no claim as historical accounts…The first followers of Jesus did not know about or imagine any of the dramatic events upon which the narrative gospels hinge. These include the baptism of Jesus; his conflict with the Jewish authorities and their plot to kill him; Jesus’ transfiguration, march to Jerusalem, last supper, trial and crucifixion as king of the Jews; and finally his resurrection from the dead and the stories of an empty tomb. All of these events must and can be accounted for as mythmaking in the Jesus movements…[Mack 1987, 247] Mack in effect was arguing that the emphasis on ancient Judaism that had been at the core of other reconstructions of Jesus was basically a serious mistake. The Jewish emphasis ignored the Hellenistic influence on first century Galilee, and involved an insufficiently critical reading of the gospels, especially Mark, to the exclusion of our best source for reconstructing Jesus, namely Q: Q is the best record we have for the first forty years of the Jesus movements. There are other snippets of early tradition about Jesus, but they all generally agree with the evidence from Q. As remembered by the Jesus people, Jesus was much more like a Cynic-teacher than either a Christ-savior or a messiah with a program for the reformation of second-temple Jewish society and religion. [Mack 1993, 247] But by far the most impressive presentation of the model of Jesus as Cynic came from John Dominic Crossan.[11] Crossan, a former Catholic priest teaching at the Catholic DePaul University outside of Chicago, integrated Vaage’s insights into a comprehensive study of Jesus using cross-cultural anthropology, intensive study of Greco-Roman history, and an original analysis of the primary sources of the Jesus tradition itself. Crossan in his 1991 book The Historical Jesus concluded: The historical Jesus was, then, a peasant Jewish Cynic. His peasant village was close enough to a Greco-Roman city like Sepphoris that sight and knowledge of Sepphoris are neither inexplicable nor unlikely. But his work was among the farms and villages of Lower Galilee. His strategy, implicitly for himself and explicitly for his followers, was the combination of free healing and common eating, a religious and economic egalitarianism that negated alike and at once the hierarchical and patronal normalcies of Jewish religion and Roman power. [Crossan 1991, 421-22; italics original] This emphasis on Jesus as a radical egalitarian inevitably raised questions as to whether Crossan was reading back a late twentieth century democratic ideal into first century Palestinian politics. Crossan insisted he was not, but was rather seeing in Jesus a first century expression of an egalitarianism that was part of the utopian peasant dream that could be seen at other times and places in Mediterranean anthropology. Questions were also raised as to whether there was any solid evidence for placing Cynics in first century Palestine. For Crossan, direct attestation of Cynics in Roman Palestine was not really the point. In 1994 he wrote a popular study of Jesus, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, in which he stated: We have, in the final analysis, no way of knowing for sure what Jesus knew about Cynicism, or whether he knew about it at all. That, however, is not really the point. Maybe he never even heard of the Cynics and was just reinventing the Cynic wheel himself. But the differences as well as the similarities between Jesus and the Cynic preachers are instructive even if not derivative. Both are populists, appealing to the ordinary people; both are life-style preachers, advocating their position not only by word but by deed, not only in theory but in practice; both use dress and equipment to symbolize dramatically their message. But he is rural, they are urban; he is organizing a communal movement, they are following an individual philosophy; and their symbolism demands knapsack and staff, his no-knapsack and no-staff. Maybe Jesus is what peasant Jewish Cynicism looked like. [Crossan 1994, 122] Crossan’s basic indifference to whether there was direct historical contact between the Cynics and the Jesus movement was mirrored in an article by Leif Vaage. Vaage drew on work by the sociologist of religion Jonathan Z. Smith to argue that what was important in comparison was analogy rather than genealogy; that is, the point of comparing religions was not necessarily to reconstruct direct lines of historical causation, but rather to try to understand the nature of specific religions, to assess the social factors that led to their creation, to analyze the human needs that these religions were trying to meet.[12] As with Crossan, Vaage was willing to abandon if necessary any historical link between the two movements, while insisting that the early Jesus movement was more like Cynicism than anything else.

In order to believe that the Jesus movement was more like Cynicism than anything else, one needs to find ways to eliminate from Jesus’ life and preaching anything resembling apocalypticism. Since the term "apocalyptic" and its cognates are the focus of extensive discussion within biblical studies, I will use "apocalyptic" here as the adjective form for a message that prophesies either imminent national disaster (as N.T. Wright); or the supernatural transformation of the universe by God in which Israel is liberated, evil is ended, death is eliminated, and all humans face the judgment of God (Dale Allison). For Crossan, Mack, and Vaage, the apocalyptic sayings of Jesus are not authentic to Jesus’ career, but are later creations of the early Christian movement.

Crucial to the elimination of the apocalyptic sayings was the tripartite division of Q pioneered by John Kloppenborg. This division of Q has received extensive support from some scholars specializing in Q. But it has received serious criticism from others, and outside the circle of Q specialists it has frequently been seen as evidence that some Q specialists have lost touch with essential scholarly rigor. The idea that we can reconstruct the history of a text which does not exist, and that must itself be reconstructed from Matthew and Luke, comes across as something other than cautious scholarship. But the most serious objection to the proposed revisions of Q is that any attempt to trace the history of revisions of Q undermines the credibility of the whole Q hypothesis itself. For despite the fact that we can identify numerous sayings that Matthew and Luke have in common, we cannot prove that these sayings come from a single unified source; Q may be nothing but a convenient term for a variety of sources shared by Matthew and Luke. Therefore any evidence of revision of Q counts as evidence for disunity in Q, and hence for a variety of sources used by Matthew and Luke. Conversely, any evidence for unity in Q - which must be established in order to see Q as a single document - counts as evidence against the proposed revisions. In order to hold to a threefold revision of Q, one must pull off an intellectual tight-rope act: one must imagine both that there is enough unity to establish a single document and that there is enough disunity to establish revisions. In the absence of any independent attestation of Q, it is an illusion to believe that scholars can walk this tightrope without falling off.

Without the threefold revision of Q, we are left with a Q which includes both wisdom sayings and apocalyptic sayings, and the heart of the case against Jesus as a prophet with an apocalyptic message vanishes. Burton Mack tried to buttress the case for a Cynic first edition of Q by correlating this first edition with evidence for the extensive Hellenization of first century Galilee. If Galilee was more Hellenistic than Jewish, then the relevance of Jewish material for Jesus would diminish.

The question of the Hellenization of Galilee is a subtle and complex issue. The distinguished scholar from Tubingen Martin Hengel has emphasized the difficulties involved with disentangling Hellenism and Judaism. Palestinian Jews had lived under Hellenistic rule or in close contact with Hellenistic culture since at least the time of Alexander the Great in the 300s BC. The Hellenistic influence on Galilee was profound, and Hengel himself was quite open to the possibility that Jesus may have had contact with Cynics: "Why should not the craftsman Jesus, who grew up in the neighborhood of Sepphoris, have made contact with Cynic itinerant preachers, especially as he himself spoke some Greek?"[13] This is quite possible. Although there is no documentation of Cynics within Galilee itself at the time of Jesus, our sources for the ancient world are far too incomplete to rule out a Cynic presence. Of Jesus himself, we know effectively nothing of what he did until he was baptized; there is no evidence of where he might have lived or whom he might have met prior to his conversion. While the gospels do not expressly mention trips to major Hellenistic cities; he did work extensively in Bethsaida, which became a Hellenistic polis in AD 30, right around the beginning of Jesus’ career. The Gospel of John records a major incident in the vicinity of the polis Tiberias; Joanna, who travelled with the twelve, was also from Tiberias. At present it does not seem safe to use the gospels as evidence for where Jesus did not go. Even if we knew that Jesus avoided the Hellenistic cities, the gospels tell us nothing of why Jesus did not go there; hence antipathy to Hellenism would be a questionable inference from the fact that Jesus did not visit Hellenistic cities.

None of this, however, gets us very far toward a Cynic-style Jesus movement. Richard Horsley has concluded that the archaeological evidence from Galilee indicates that traditional village life was collapsing under the economic pressure of Roman imperialism; and in this context the radical individualism of the Cynics was not a viable alternative.[14] If Horsley is corrrect, then to concede as Crossan does that Jesus "is rural, they are urban; he is organizing a communal movement, they are following an individual philosophy"; is more or less to surrender the usefulness of the Cynic/Jesus comparison on both levels: on the level of genealogy, there is no direct evidence of contact between Jesus and Cynics; on the level of analogy, Jesus’ program focussed around strengthening rural villages as communities is serving a very different function than a Cynic program that meets the needs for personal urban self-expression. Both may well be "egalitarian", but their egalitarianism would be different enough in nature to constitute a difference in kind.

Finally, at a more detailed level, Q does not offer convincing evidence for Hellenization. It is true that Q is thought to be originally written in Greek. But the content of Q shows little contact with the culture of Hellenism: there is no reference to Greek poets or art or literature. Q does use the word hypokrites, which may indicate knowledge of Greek theatre. Otherwise, the world of Q is the world of Judaism and the Hebrew Bible: we hear of the law, and the prophets; we hear the names of Abel, Abraham, Barachia, Beelzebul, Bethsaida, David, Jacob, Jerusalem, Jesus, the Jordan, Jew, Isaac, Israel, John the Baptist, Jonah, Capharnaum, Chorazin, Lot, Nineveh, Noah, Pharisees and Sadducees, Rabbi, Sidon and Tyre, Sodom and Gomorra, Solomon, and Zachariah. We do not hear mention of Cynics or Stoics or Epicureans or Pythagoreans; we do not hear mention of Homer or Hesiod or Plato or Vergil or Cicero. The strongly Jewish cultural context may be due to the fact that Jesus was a regular of the synagogue where Scripture was read aloud regularly; Hengel notes that Cynics complained that they could not get a hearing with Jews because the Jews were always listening to the reading of the Bible.

All of the above problems with the Cynic hypothesis are drawn from the evidence of the sayings of Jesus. But a decade ago E.P. Sanders suggested that a more secure way of investigating the historical Jesus was to focus not on Jesus’ sayings but on his acts. Sanders proposed that there were a series of "almost undisputable facts" about what Jesus did. A good hypothesis for understanding Jesus ought to be able to explain these facts better than competing hypotheses. It will be helpful then to test the Cynic hypothesis against a selection of "almost undisputable facts" about Jesus. To sharpen the investigation, the Cynic hypothesis will be contrasted with the hypothesis associated with Ben Meyer and N.T. Wright of Jesus as the organizer of an apocalyptic community.[15] Meyer and Wright draw parallels between Qumran’s teacher of righteousness and his temple made of humans, which saw itself as the replacement for the temple in Jerusalem; and Jesus whom they also believe to be organizing a counter-temple movement. I shall apply this analysis to three ‘Areas’ or known events of Jesus’ life.
 

Area 1: the baptism of Jesus. This is not something that the Cynic hypothesis can explain; it is something that the Cynic hypothesis must explain away. If makes no sense for a Cynic to be baptized at the hands of an apocalyptic prophet such as John the Baptist. Mack tried to argue that Jesus was not in fact baptized by John the Baptist. Crossan recognized that Jesus’ baptism by John was not something likely to be invented by the gospel writers because it was a scandal for the early Christian communities, for it implied Jesus’ inferiority to John. Crossan argued instead that Jesus later repudiated John’s movement and their apocalyptic expectations: "I am telling you, no one born of a woman is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he." Luke 7:28/Matthew 11:11. But far from repudiating apocalyptic expectation, this saying can equally well be read as a heightening of apocalyptic expectation over against John’s community. Moreover, Jesus is recorded as rebuking the high priest for not accepting John’s baptism in Mark 11:27-33 only a few days before the crucifixion; this suggests that Jesus continued to believe in John’s message right up until the end.

Although it cannot be explained by the Cynic hypothesis, Jesus’ baptism by John fits well into the idea of Jesus as the leader of a new temple. Accepting baptism for the forgiveness of sins through John implies that the temple in Jerusalem was no longer able to provide atonement for Israel. Every early Jewish baptismal group of which we have definite evidence is known to be alienated from the temple to varying degrees. It would follow logically from his baptism that Jesus saw himself as the leader of a new temple made of humans to provide the atonement that the Jerusalem temple failed to provide.

 

Area 2: Jesus’ mission in Galilee. a) The mission instructions in Q. While not everyone would accept the mission instructions as authentic, advocates of the Cynic hypothesis do. Vaage reconstructs Q to read: "Take neither money nor bag nor sandals nor staff; greet no one." Luke 10:4/Matthew 10:9-10. Vaage notes that of the five elements in this instruction (1:no money; 2: no bag; 3: no sandals; 4:no staff; 5:no greeting), three have clear parallels in Cynic mission practice: no money, no sandals, and no friendly greetings. But there is an even better parallel from the Mishnah Berakoth 9.5:

A man should not behave himself unseemly while opposite the Eastern Gate [of the Temple] since it faces toward the Holy of Holies. He may not enter into the Temple Mount with his staff or his sandal or his wallet, or with the dust upon his feet, nor may he make of it a short by-path; still less may he spit there. Thus Jesus’ mission instructions, far from being derived from Cynic practice, can be read as an enacted parable of the Jesus movement as a new temple. This explains why the disciples are instructed to shake the dust off their feet before those who reject the message: those who reject the message are outside the temple, while those who accept it are inside the temple and cannot carry the dust of unbelievers with them (Mark 6: 11; Luke 10:11; Matthew 10:14).

The concept of the Jesus movement as a new temple made of humans also explains Jesus’ words in the mission passage in Luke 9:59-60: "let the dead bury their dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God." There was only one person in Judaism who was allowed to forgo the responsibility of burying his dead parents: The high priest was forbidden to defile himself for his parents or leave the sanctuary (Lev 21.11-12). Jesus here uses hyperbole to make the point that his followers are the true priests of the new temple of God.

b) Jesus’ healing ministry. Crossan argues that the healings constitute another aspect of the Cynic program of radical egalitarianism. Crossan writes that Jesus "healed the poor man’s illness by refusing to accept the disease’s ritual uncleanness and social ostracization."[16] This might be so, but there is simply no evidence that Cynics ever tried to perform healings. By contrast, miraculous healings are strongly associated with the apocalyptic expectation of the Qumran community which saw itself as a new temple:

Heaven and earth will obey his anointed ones. Nothing in them will turn aside from the commandment of the holy ones…[God] releases the captives, open the eyes of the blind, lifts up…he will heal the slain and will resurrect the dead, and will announce the good news to the humble. (4Q521)[17] Jesus virtually cites this passage verbatim in his response to questions from John the Baptist as to whether he is the messiah (Luke 7:22-23; Matthew 11:4-6). This fits well with Jesus as the messianic leader of a new temple, but poorly with Jesus as Cynic.

c) Jesus’ table fellowship. Crossan draws heavily on anthropological studies showing that table fellowship serves to map a society’s social boundaries. Once an anthropologist can identify who is eating with whom, almost everything else about a society’s social structures can be inferred. Crossan argues that Jesus’ open table fellowship is the expression of a radically egalitarian Cynic program. While Crossan is certainly correct about the egalitarian implications of Jesus’ meals, the contradiction between Jesus and Cynic practice could not be greater. The Jesus movement shared meals together; Cynics begged food from strangers. Crossan notes in a recent article: "But I cannot emphasize the point too strongly: Commensality is not almsgiving, almsgiving is not commensality."[18] But this means that there is no legitimate comparison to make between Jesus and the Cynics.

There is, however, a very valuable comparison between Jesus and Qumran. Qumran table-fellowship constituted a rehearsal of the end of days when the priestly messiah would come and stretch his hand out and bless the wine and the bread. Jesus similarly regularly used banqueting imagery to express his eschatological hope, and his words at the last supper may well reflect imagery from Qumran. Here again, the Cynic analogies are useless, but the comparisons with a community that saw itself as a new temple are strong, particularly Jesus’ Last Supper.

 

Area 3: Jesus’ execution in Jerusalem. . There is widespread agreement that Jesus’ protest in the temple did not seek to cleanse the temple but rather symbolize its coming destruction. There is also increasing consensus that Jesus’ demonstration in the temple was the event that led to his arrest and execution. Why did Jesus commit an act so violent and so risky? Crossan tries to explain this in terms of Cynic egalitarianism: "the economic and social egalitarianism [Jesus] preached in Galilee exploded in indignation at the Temple as the seat and symbol of all that was nonegalitarian, patronal, an oppressive on both the religious and spiritual level."[19] This is a weak explanation: Jesus did not stage protests in Tiberias and Sepphoris, which were also symbols of nonegalitarian, patronal, and oppressive rule. And in Capernaum Jesus was not leading riots against Herod’s tax-collectors, he was sharing meals with them. The Cynic explanation does not explain very much.

But if Jesus was the leader of a counter-temple movement, then Jesus’ career moves on a logical trajectory from the river Jordan, where he was baptized into a new temple movement by John the Baptist; to Galilee where Jesus’ mission instructions are an acted parable of the temple of the new community; to Jerusalem where Jesus’ proclaims the new temple and the coming destruction of the old. The view of Jesus as the leader of a new temple made of humans provides a consistent explanation for why he was baptized, how he worked, and why he died. That this new temple proclaims an apocalyptic hope fits in well with the structure of early Christianity as an apocalyptic community; a conclusion reached on sociological grounds by scholars such as John Gager and Norman Cohn.[20]

 

Conclusion

Jesus as a first century Palestinian Jew spent his entire life under the political domination of Rome and the cultural influence of the Hellenistic east. Vaage, Mack, and Crossan have correctly raised questions as to what effect this had on Jesus, and how Jesus’ ministry might have responded to these pressures. Hellenism and Judaism cannot be seen as separate and mutually exclusive categories, and the exploration of their interaction is a worthy project. But drawing analogies between Jesus and the ancient Cynics explains relatively little either of what Jesus said or did. Far more helpful are the proposals of Meyer and Wright to see Jesus as the organizer of a new temple along the lines of the teacher of righteousness and the Qumran community. A valuable future task might be to explain the differences between Jesus’ temple community and Qumran community in terms of their differing approaches to Hellenization and Romanization.

 

Bruce W. Griffin (BS, Liberty University; Graduate Studies at Wheaton College, Illinois; Diploma in Jewish Studies) is a D.Phil. student in Classics at Lincoln College, Oxford.

 

Reference:

[1] Much of the research for this article was part of my dissertation for the Diploma in Jewish Studies program at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the University of Oxford, 1995, "The Claremont School: A Critique"; the dissertation was supervised by Geza Vermes. At the time, some were referring to a "Claremont School": see, for example, N.T. Wright , The New Testament and the People of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 1., London: SPCK, 1992; 68fn50. Since then James Robinson of Claremont Graduate School has distanced himself from the Cynic Jesus ideas, and the title is now something of an anachronism: see, e.g., Robinson’s Afterward to Birger A. Pearson, "The Gospel According to the Jesus Seminar," the Institute of Antiquity and Christianity, Occasional Papers No. 35; Claremont: 1996; "Building Blocks in the Social History of Q," in Reimagining Christian Origins: A Colloquium Honoring Burton L. Mack, ed. E.A. Castelli and H. Taussig, Valley Forge, Pa.: TPI, 1996; 87-112.

[2] Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, London: A. & C. Black, 1910.

[3] Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958; 14. For the point that there is more literary evidence for Jesus than there is for the Emperor Tiberius, under whom Jesus was crucified, see A.N. Sherwin-White, Roman Law and Roman Society in the New Testament, London, 1962.

[4] E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985; The Historical Figure of Jesus, London: Penguin, 1993. John Meier, A Marginal Jew, Vol. 1, Rethinking the Historical Jesus; Vol. 2. Mentor, Message, and Miracle; New York: Doubleday, 1991, 1994. N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996. Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew, London: Collins, 1973; Jesus and the World of Judaism, London: SCM, 1983; The Religion of Jesus the Jew, London: SCM, 1993.

[5] For studies on Cynics and Cynicism with an extensive bibliography, see The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, ed., R.B. Branham and M.-O. Goulet-Caze, Berkely: University of California, 1996. M.-O. Goulet-Caze, ANRW 2.36.4 (1990) 2720-2833. For extensive bibliographies on the current debate on Jesus and Cynicism, see Paul Rhodes Eddy, "Jesus as Diogenes? Reflections on the Cynic Jesus Thesis", JBL 115 (1996) 449-469; and C.A. Boyd, Cynic Sage or Son of God? Wheaton, IL: BridgePoint, 1995.

[6] F. G. Downing, Christ and the Cynics: Jesus and Other Radical Preachers in First Century Tradition, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1988; Cynics and Christian Origins, Edinburgh: T &T Clark, 1992.

[7] Leif Vaage, Q: The Ethos and Ethics of an Intinerant Intelligence, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1987; Galilean Upstarts: Jesus’ First Followers According to Q, Valley Forge, Pa: TPI, 1994.

[8] Burton Mack, Mark: A Myth of Innocence, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988.

[9] Burton Mack, The Lost Gospel: the Book of Q and Christian Origins, San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993.

[10] John Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.

[11] John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: the Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991; Jesus: a Revolutionary Biography, San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994; "Jesus and the Kingdom: Itinerants and Householders in Earliest Christianity" in Jesus at 2000, ed. Marcus J. Borg, Oxford: Westview Press, 1997.

[12] Leif Vaage, "Q and Cyncism: On Comparison and Social Identity" in The Gospel Behind the Gospels, ed. R.A. Piper, Leiden: EJ Brill, 1995; 199-229. Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990.

[13] Martin Hengel, The ‘Hellenization’ of Judaea in the First Century After Christ, London: SCM, 1989; 44.

[14] Richard Horsley, Archaeology, History, and Society in Galilee: the Social Context of Jesus and the Rabbis, Valley Forge, Pa.: TPI, 1996.

[15] Ben F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus, London: SCM, 1979; and Christus Faber: the Master Builder and the House of God, Allison Park, Pa: Pickwick Publications, 1992. See Wright 1996 above. While Meyer and Wright have very different uderstandings of "apocalyptic", they both oppose the decidedly non-apocalyptic constructions of the Cynic Jesus.

[16] Crossan 1994, 82.

[17] Translation: Edward M. Cook, Solving the Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994; 166-67.

[18] Crossan 1997, 37.

[19] Crossan 1994, 133.

[20] John Gager, Kingdom and Community: the Social World of Early Christianity, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hll, 1975. Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993.

 
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