I just realized that posting all that just placed me higher up in the "crackpot" index. cool! But I do think that this kind of scholarship should be looked into by anyone who wants to consider the early Jesus movement, which I conceive of as a movement of Judeans who followed the lead of a Galilean Judean named Jesus.Ben C. Smith wrote:Your research on this has obviously been quite impressive, David.
I know this is an assumption that needs to be proved, but it seems that if Jesus was universally accepted as a Judean, although one who happened to reside in Galilee, I can assume about him that he should have a Judean orientation of some kind. And yes, I do think that the prevailing Judean POV was expectation of realizing a blessed messianic age to come, so I am willing to entertain the thought that Jesus held such-like notions.
I don't know if he had put himself out as the anointed prince (messiah), or only spoke about what he thought this figure would be like, but he seemed to have a following among other Judeans, and I suspect also among some gentiles of the region extending up into lower Syria. What about a future blessed messianic age, for Judeans, would attract gentiles? I think a desire to participate in it is what motivated these gentiles, an idea that Jesus had not apparently forbade or perhaps even encouraged.
There is certainly a big difference between that kind of Galilean-Judean Jesus and the gentile oriented Jesus Christ of the Gospels, so this movement had to have exhibited several stages of development between the 30s and the 60s CE. But radical itinerancy caused by severe economic stress imposed on peasants by the evil Roman exploiters seems a little forced. I would expect that the war of 66-73 CE had far more influence on the transition than did the socio-economic pressures of evil proto-capitalists on the common peasants of Galilee.
Many of those proposals on the nature of radical itinerancy are now treated as if established fact, and used freely as assumptions. I am not suggesting that economic inequality was not present, but do question what those economic relations really looked like.
DCH