Abstract
Despite scholarly consensus that Judaism was well and truly Hellenized by the time of Christ, the temptation remains to identify ‘Jewish’ and ‘Hellenistic’ traits within earliest Christianity. Runar Thorsteinsson observes that ‘this “Jerusalem vs. Athens” distinction is highly misleading and results in some very unfortunate invitations to anachronism’ (p. 1). He argues that few scholars have fully applied the extent of Hellenistic influence within Judaism to the person of Jesus: ‘the closer one gets to the person of Jesus, the stronger the grip of the traditional Judaism/Hellenism divide’ (p. 1).
This book is Thorsteinsson’s attempt to rectify this oversight. He bemoans the ‘reluctance among some scholars to bring philosophy in as a relevant aspect of New Testament exegesis’ and highlights the need for ‘research that is open-minded not only towards a “theological Jesus” but also towards a “philosophical Jesus”’ (p. 2). He is careful to make clear that the Jesus with which he is concerned is not the historical Jesus, but the Jesus encountered on the pages of the synoptic gospels. He rightly defends this restriction because it is ‘a more methodologically sound and thus more promising approach’ (p. 5). This means that he can avoid difficult, and potentially unanswerable, questions about the relation between the historical Jesus and the Jesus within each text.
He focuses on the question ‘what is the significance of Graeco-Roman philosophy for the early Christian understanding, narrative, and image of Jesus?’ (p. 7). The first chapter describes this Graeco-Roman philosophical tradition and description of philosophical sages within it. The following chapters seek to analyse the Jesus found in each of the synoptic gospels to see whether gospel writers make use of any philosophical tropes in their image of Jesus. In Mark, for example, Thorsteinsson finds comparable material concerning ‘ascetic appearance, abandoning one’s family, attitudes toward material possessions … Jesus and the philosophers as messengers of God, the wisdom of Jesus, the philosopher’s emotions, and the philosopher’s suffering and death’ (p. 179). These subject areas are common to his subsequent chapters on Matthew and Luke.
He finds that only Jesus’ emotions present a significant departure from the philosophical tradition, claiming that in Mark and Matthew Jesus is presented as more emotional than the ideal philosopher sage. He argues that the absence of emotion in Luke suggests that Luke ‘made use of Graeco-Roman discourses portraying the philosophical sage’ (p. 177). However, this might equally be explained by Luke’s being the most literary of our synoptic authors.
This volume is an important contribution to an underexplored area of study. It lacks sufficient engagement with other instances of philosophical influence within the Judaism of Jesus’ time. Such engagement, especially Josephus’s presentation of the various sects of Judaism within the philosophical schools, would help make the case for any philosophical influence on the evangelists more convincing. It is possible that Thorsteinsson has demonstrated that philosophical material has shaped the presentation of Jesus in the gospels. It is much harder to see that he has proved that the purpose of this presentation ‘was to show that Jesus was not only on a par with the philosophers, he was superior to them’ (p. 184).