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In this conclusion to part I, Tom Lee continues his focus in endeavouring to provide an overview as to how Jesus "fitted the cultural scene" of his time.

The Invention of Christianity and the Papacy
The first 500 years
by Tom Lee
Setting the Scene for the arrival of Christianity Part 1.6
Further discussion of where Jesus fits in the schema of his time

General attitude to women and Jesus' attitude to women…

Jesus reached out to people pushed to the margins, not just those caught in ritual impurity or who were sinners, but to others, too. While one has to be careful not to caricature first-century Judaism's view of women, one can say that it was a strongly patriarchal culture. It is clear, however, that Jesus included women in his ministry and counted them among his disciples to a degree remarkable among his contemporaries. He seems to have treated women and men as equals and partners. According to all four gospels, Mary of Magdala is the only person described as being present at both the cross and the tomb. She is the first to meet the risen Jesus, the woman whom the early church fathers referred to as "the apostle to the apostles". She was downgraded by the later patriarchal church, trying to diminish women's authority and status. She was identified by Pope Gregory the Great with the prostitute who washed Jesus feet and wiped them with her hair.

Jewish law normally required that a rabbi be a married man, but there is nothing in the gospels to indicate whether Jesus was or wasn't. Among the Jews of his time it would usually have been taken for granted, needing no comment. Nowhere is it stated that Jesus or any of his apostles was celibate. But if Jesus had a wife that participated in his activities she would almost certainly have been named and clearly identified as "wife of."

Mary Magdalen as portrayed by Perugio 1490CE

Jesus seemed to oppose the magic of equivalence that dominated the Law of Moses: "You shall pay a life for a life, etc." Other strictures and specifications continue in Leviticus; indeed it contains little else, and reads like a punitive instruction manual for the priestly class. Amid the exclusionary litany it is a shock to find the inclusive injunction "And you shall love your fellow man as yourself". This is what Jesus espoused and taught.

Where the Torah tried to regulate fair punishment so that punishment wouldd not exceed injury, Jesus forbade any form of punishment or violent retaliation, enjoining his followers to refuse to retaliate in the face of provocation and violence. He advocated nonviolent resistance to oppression and imperial domination. His followers were to offer no violent resistance to one who did evil. Violence in response to violence could only lead to further violence, he taught. But he didn't advocate passive resignation or indifference to evil. Quite the contrary. He taught and practiced active and steadfast non-violent resistance to every form of violence and injustice.

Language…

Jesus spoke Aramaic, a Semitic language that derives from Aram, the name of the highlands of Syria and Mesopotamia. The Aramaic people were nomads who began to settle in northern Israel, which included Galilee, after the fifth century BCE. It had become the common speech in Galilee and throughout Palestine among most Semitic people when Jesus grew to manhood. Hebrew had become an academic language generally confined to the educated – priests, scribes of the Law and judges – whereas Aramaic was used by the masses, as well as those engaged in commerce and trade. Additionally, colloquial Greek – the Greek of daily life and the streets – which is called Koine – was in common use also. It is unlikely that Jesus or his disciples could not understand or speak Greek.

Galilee was Israel's non-Semitic province, contact with which was almost uncleanness for the perfect Jew. It was alien to Jerusalem and cut off from Judaea physically by Samaria. Most of the people of the area were not Greek, but many Jews aped Greek culture. Galilee had been added to the Jewish state by conquest and forcibly converted to Judaism, but more than half the population remained faithful to pagan gods and Greek culture, rejecting Jewish prohibitions of certain foods and in sexual matters. For many Gentiles, sin was a novel and exclusively Jewish concept.

Sexual mores…

Greek sexual attitudes had not noticeably changed since the time of the Greek poet Meleager, a half-century before Jesus' time. He lived at Gadara, the town where Jesus is reputed to have driven devils from a possessed man into a herd of swine. Meleager's collection of poems appeared about 60 BCE, and reveal him as proudly and unrepentantly bisexual. Writing of a handsome woman called Cypris and her son he writes, "Whither shall I incline, to the boy or to his mother? I will tell you for sure even Cypris herself will say `The bold brat wins.'"

Although many Jewish settlements were established in the area during the reign of Herod the Great, pious Judeans remained suspicious of the orthodoxy of Galileans. Ten Greek cities formed the so-called Decapolis in Palestine, bringing Jews and Greeks into close contact, socially as well as commercially. King Herod the Great even served as President of the Olympic Games. It was not such a noble event. Tom Perrottet describes it in his book The Naked Olympics as "the Woodstock of antiquity."

The Games, while taken seriously, were also where Greeks gathered for a five-day debauch, unashamedly displaying their hedonistic libidos. An energetic prostitute could earn a year's wages in the course of the tournament. Thessalonian peddlers sold love potions made from horse sweat and minced lizard, while others peddled pennyroyal and silphium (a giant fennel from Cyrene in Africa); both plants used for preventing conception, initiating menstruation and causing miscarriages. Aristophanes mentioned pennyroyal in his plays, secure in the knowledge that his audience understood its abortifacient properties.

Pentathletes competed naked to the accompaniment of flutes, the ancient equivalent of stadium rock. The festival offered beauty pageants and Homer-recitation contests, numerologists and fire-swallowers, and such culinary delicacies as roasted sow's womb. Athletic events also fuelled a thriving pickup scene: a message etched into the wall of a stadium at Nemea reads, "Look up Moschos in Philippi – he's cute." Modesty was not a virtue. Sex in public was not attended by shame or guilt (except in cases of adultery or incest). Privacy was not a requirement in Graeco-Roman society where men and women often bathed together and squatted side by side in the latrines.

In language he knew they would understand, St. Paul in his letter to the Philippians described the route to spiritual transcendence as a running race, using the same language the Greeks used to describe Olympic sprinters. "I have not yet won, but I am still running, trying to capture the prize for which Christ Jesus captured me. All I can say is that I forget the past and I strain ahead for what is still to come; I am racing for the finish, for the prize to which God calls us upwards to receive in Christ Jesus." And in 1 Corinthians he writes: "All the runners at the stadium are trying to win, but only one of them gets the prize. You must run in the same way, meaning to win. All the fighters at the games go into strict training; they do this just to win a wreath that will wither away, but we do it for a wreath that will never wither. That is how I run, intent on winning; that is how I fight, not beating the air. I treat my body hard and make it obey me, for, having been an announcer myself, I should not want to be disqualified."

Paul's preaching often needed backup epistles, especially to the proverbially infamous nouveau-riche Greek seaport of Corinth, where enthusiastic Christians believing that they had already secured salvation, indulged in "Corinthianizing," all kinds of self-glorification, arrogance, uncharitableness, violence, drinking bouts and intercourse with sacred prostitutes.

In Israel, characteristic Greek ideas and practices were powerfully felt, attracting particularly members of the aristocracy and the upper classes. The biblical ordinances were not upheld and the Sabbath was desecrated as Jewish youths stripped themselves for Greek athletic games, despite derogatory badinage and innuendo about their mutilated penises from the uncut Greeks and Romans. Machismo had become more important than religion and abdominal showmen were all the rage.

Confusion over the names of Jesus's supporters…

According to the Gospel of John, a couple of John the Baptist's followers, Andrew and John, the latter possibly the one known as the beloved disciple, left the Baptist to accompany Jesus. The Gospels attributed to Mark and Matthew make Simon, known as Cephas or Peter (both of which mean `Rock'), the first called and Andrew is his brother. But there is no certainty about the order in which the twelve apostles were called, or even who they were. The Gospels contradict each other giving different lists of names, only some of them common to all four evangelists. The gospel writer's identities are also a mystery. Apostolic names were added to each of the gospels at a later date, to gain them greater authority.

Jesus did not hike about Palestine solely with his twelve apostles. It is clear from the Gospels that he had a traveling company of both sexes that may have numbered some sixty or seventy people, including at times his mother, his four brothers and two sisters, and his uncle, aunt and cousins on his father's side.

Traditionally Jesus' father, Joseph, died while Jesus was in his teens and so, presumably, Jesus became head of the family, earning his living as a carpenter/builder as his father had before him.

The two earliest Gospels, Mark and Matthew, very clearly regard the brothers and sisters of Jesus as the children of his own mother Mary, Jesus being described as her first-born. Mary was probably no more than twelve when she conceived. Amongst the Jews girls were normally married at that age. It was accepted that from the moment the bodies of boys and girls were able to conceive, nature was very clear that it wanted those youngsters to make babies of their own, developing a reproductive itch that needed to be scratched, making the impulse almost irresistible.

If a girl hadn't found a spouse by twelve and a half the parents were panicked that she may succumb to the blandishments of a seducer. The unmarried state was generally frowned upon and certainly was not a lifestyle to be admired. "Be fruitful and multiply" was God's instruction. Fecundity was encouraged and applauded. There is no reason to believe that Joseph was any more than a teenager at the time of his betrothal to Mary.

The final Church version of the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 1, verse 16, "and Jacob was the father of Joseph the husband of Mary; of her was born Jesus who is called Christ" should be set against the wording attested in some ancient Greek manuscripts and in the old Latin and Syriac translations, which read: "and Joseph, to whom the virgin Mary was betrothed, begot Jesus."

Had Joseph not acknowledged Jesus as his son, Mary may well have been stoned to death for adultery, in accordance with Jewish law. Such a sentence was not carried out in the way it has been portrayed in numerous movies. The Talmud lays down the procedure in gruesome detail. The stoners were to be elevated twice a man's height above the culprit. The stone dropped was to be so heavy that two men were needed to lift it. The victim was to be first laid face down, and then turned over. If these two drops accomplished by the main accusers did not kill the person, the criminal was to be stoned by all Israel "For it is written: the hand of the witnesses shall be first upon him to put him (or her) to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people." If the adulterous woman was the daughter or wife of a priest the penalty was to be burned to death. The penalty for male adultery in Leviticus was also death, but rarely enacted. As with latter-day Islam, the woman was usually regarded as the seducer and the only one to incur blame.

It was largely a young company that journeyed with Jesus; many of the men in their early twenties and in some instances traveling with their wives and children, and one or both parents. They were a wandering band with so many names in common that distinguishing nicknames were necessary like Simon known as Rocky and Simon the Zealot, Stormy John and John the beloved, Judas surnamed Iscariot because there was another Judas Twin (shortened to Jude in the English language to further distinguish him), Shorty James and James the Thunderer, and Thomas (which also meant Twin).

Where Luke and Acts have Jude [the brother] of James, as the eleventh apostle, Matthew and Mark list Thaddeus. Hence, it appears that Thaddeus was another name by which Jude was distinguished from the infamous Iscariot. And a few other manuscripts call St. Jude "Lebbeus", rather than Thaddeus. Some scholars speculate that originally one of these names appeared in Matthew and the other in Mark, since both names can mean `courageous,' and may have been a nickname for Jude.

Several wealthy women were followers and sustainers of the group, and almost certainly accompanied them at times, Mary Magdalen being the most prominent of them.

Galilee was thickly populated and, in its southern valleys, was a fertile grain and fruit-producing region, as it still is. The Sea of Galilee supported prosperous towns and villages actively engaged in fishing, boat-building, farming and exporting. The province was crossed by busy trade roads running to the ports of Tyre and Sidon in Gentile Phoenicia (now Lebanon), and in the other direction to Damascus, the chief inland city of Syria. The Galileans were therefore much more exposed to the outside world than the Judeans.

Jesus, in whose name the Christian message was eventually proclaimed, was born during the reign of Caesar Augustus, first emperor of the new Roman regime. From the beginning Christianity had the Roman Empire as the main sphere of its activities and of its formative arguments and internecine conflicts, and its remarkable achievement after some three centuries as a persecuted superstition was to be adopted as the state religion of that Empire.

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PART 5.1 | PART 5.2 | PART 5.3 | PART 5.4 | PART 5.5 | PART 6.2 | PART 6.3 | PART 7.1
PART 31.1 | PART 31.2 | PART 31.3 | PART 31.4
Acknowledgements | Bibliography

PHOTO CREDITS: The image of the Rising Sun used in the headline and footer graphics graphics was taken by Ines Mad. Linz, Austria and sourced through stock.xchng.
Clicking on the other images will take your to the original source of the image.

Tom Lee is an Australian, now semi-retired in Phoenix, Arizona, who has had an illustrious international career as an actor, writer, and broadcast commentator. He does not claim to be a professional theologian, nor an historian, but he undertook this study because, like many of the people who are attracted to what we're doing here at Catholica Australia, he was simply inquisitive about the history of Christianity and trying to better understand what he had been brought up to believe. In a sense, his book is a one-man journey seeking to better understand who Jesus was and what his own faith was about.

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©2008 Tom Lee (Star Concepts LLC) 15633 N. 17* Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85023-3409

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