Cosmopolitan Image of Jesus Bolstered by Digs Near Nazareth

Archeological excavations at an ancient urban site in Galilee about four miles from Nazareth are reinforcing a growing view among religion scholars that Jesus may have been much more cosmopolitan than usually supposed.

The hilltop excavations are at Sepphoris, the capital of Roman-occupied Galilee for most of the 1st Century.

Although Sepphoris is unmentioned in the New Testament, the Gospels indicate that Jesus was raised in the small village of Nazareth. The Gospel image of Jesus as a man of the countryside was fueled by his many proverbs and parables about seeds and plants as well as by the identification of his first disciples as fishermen.

“Most people associate Jesus’ travels in Galilee with rural life and unlettered people,” said Eric M. Meyers of Duke University, who co-directs one of two projects at the site in Israel. “But Galilee is an enormously cosmopolitan urban area,” Meyers said.

James F. Strange, director of the other project, says people are fooled by “romantic” images of Jesus. According to Strange, one reason that Christianity spread so fast was that it moved within an urban network “from the very beginning.”

Greek Culture Strong

Indeed, digs near Sepphoris in the past revealed Jewish burial catacombs with 80% of the inscriptions in Greek, indicating that Hellenistic culture was strong in the Jewish city.

Recently renewed archeological work has uncovered Jewish ritual baths as old as 100 BC. located close to Roman buildings. The baths and certain artifacts suggested to Meyers and other scholars that devout Jews, Romans and, eventually, Christians enjoyed a “pluralistic” society in which various religious expressions were tolerated.

Significantly, the archeological assessments coincide with independent literary studies by some New Testament scholars who contend that Jesus himself probably understood and spoke Greek, the cross-cultural language of the period. It marks a shift from the dominant presumption in biblical scholarship that Jesus spoke only Aramaic, the conversational language among Jews.

“The shift is clearly taking place. It probably will be a short time before it surfaces and everybody has to acknowledge it,” said Burton Mack, who teaches at both Claremont Graduate School and the School of Theology at Claremont.

As for the teaching language of Jesus, Mack said, “I feel much more comfortable about Greek. There doesn’t seem to be any hard evidence for Aramaic.” Mack also has concluded that Jesus resembled a Hellenistic sage more than he did a Jewish religious reformer.

Intent on Change

Mack said that the typical scenario has been that the historical Jesus was a Jew out to change Judaism. The Gospels depict Jesus in frequent arguments with Pharisees, scribes and elders, but many mainstream New Testament scholars have said those “controversy stories” were created by the early church, which was fighting such battles and needed to show how Jesus would have answered Jewish critics.

“The more cosmopolitan and pluralistic that (1st Century) Galilee becomes (in research), the less chance you have to argue that what Jesus was about was a reformation of Judaism,” Mack said.

The dovetailing trends in archeology and New Testament studies may have minimal significance for conservative churches, which tend to regard the Gospels as faultless reports of what Jesus said and did, and need no corrective analysis.

But the shift has implications for mainstream biblical scholarship and, potentially, for mainstream churches. Critical scholarship often tries to evaluate which Gospel teachings most likely go back to the historical Jesus and to determine to what extent each narrative picture of Jesus--wisdom teacher, exorcist, messiah, divine man, among others--arose from the evolving beliefs of the early churches.

Still Open to Debate

Nevertheless, what archeology can tell scholars specifically about Jesus is limited and subject to debate, most scholars say.

An impressive sight at Sepphoris is what remains of a 4,000-seat, open-air theater. But was it standing there when Jesus was living in Galilee in the early 1st Century? (His Crucifixion is usually dated around AD 30.)

Leaders of the two projects at Sepphoris disagreed over the dating this month in a seminar during the American Academy of Religion-Society of Biblical Literature joint annual meeting in Boston.

Strange, an American archeologist directing the principal excavation of the theater, said in interviews by telephone that he went back to Israel this fall to look again at pieces of pottery which he said had been used as “fill” material underneath many theater seats. Strange said he found pottery shards ranging in age “from the 7th Century BC all the way to the turn of the era.”

Strange , dean of arts and letters at the University of South Florida, said he previously had thought some 2nd Century pottery was uncovered during that part of the excavation in 1983. But not finding any in his review, Strange came away convinced that the theater was built in the first part of the 1st Century.

Arrives at Different Date

However, Eric Meyers said in an interview that he believes that the theater was not completed until the second half of the 1st Century, thus after Jesus’ lifetime.

“We are at loggerheads on that,” said Meyers. “We do not accept the Strange dating.”

Both men are experienced archeologists, and they dug together from 1970 to 1981 at a synagogue site at Meiron, Israel. Meyers is better known in the field and is editor of Biblical Archeologist, the leading journal in that field.

The most spectacular discovery at Sepphoris last summer was made by the joint U.S.-Israeli project co-directed by Meyers; his archeologist wife, Carol, also a Duke professor, and Ehud Netzer of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Uncovered in the ruins of a Roman banquet hall was a well-preserved, artistically advanced floor mosaic. The mosaic probably was fashioned in the late 3rd Century and, consequently, has no implications for studies related to the historical Jesus. But its quality is receiving acclaim as one of the finest examples of mosaics for that region and that period. The mosaic testifies to the continuing reputation of Sepphoris as a center of culture, Eric Meyers said.

Meyers added that Galilee was highly urbanized and exposed to Hellenistic culture regardless of whether or not the Sepphoris theater was finished in the first half of the 1st Century.

Yet, the theater is a bone of contention for Eric and Carol Meyers also because a New Testament scholar has cited Strange’s research on the Sepphoris theater to support a theory that Jesus was familiar with the antics of stage actors.

When Jesus denounces “hypocrites” for their public display of piety in the Gospel of Matthew (Chapter 6), Jesus is really using the Greek word hypokrites in its primary meaning as “stage actor,” says Richard Batey, of Presbyterian-related Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn.

In Matthew, Jesus urges followers not to “sound trumpets” before them when they give alms, “as the hypocrites do,” not to stand like the hypocrites when they pray so that others will look and not to fast like the hypocrites who “look dismal” and “disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by men.”

Discovered in 1931

Writing in the international journal New Testament Studies, Batey said that Jesus’s use of the word was a “critique of religious leaders who like actors put on a performance for public adulation.”

The theater at Sepphoris was discovered in 1931 by American archeologist Leroy Waterman, who dated it was at least as old as the 1st Century. That was disputed later by another archeologist who said that the cut of certain stones indicate that it had to be 2nd Century. But Strange said, “The evidence shows now that massive repairs were made in the 2nd Century but that it was constructed around the time of the birth of Christ.”

At best, Batey said, the evidence is still only circumstantial that Jesus would have been familiar with actors and the theater if the Sepphoris structure existed at that time. But Batey added that he did not see how “someone could say that Jesus could grow up within an hour of a major city and never visit there.”

The mere proximity of Sepphoris to Nazareth should prompt New Testament scholars to look at some of Jesus’ sayings in a new light, Batey said. He cited Matthew 5:14 as an example: “A city set on a hill cannot be hid.”

Robert Gundry of Westmont College in Santa Barbara, asked about Batey’s hypotheses, said he thought there were “real possibilities” in them.

Gundry, author of a major commentary on Matthew, said that the Gospel author was himself a Hellenistic Jew and could have been responsible for Jesus’ utterances reflecting a knowledge of the stage. For instance, Jesus in Matthew uses the word “hypocrites” much more than he does in the other Gospels, but Gundry said he does not think it is all coming from Matthew rather than Jesus.

“Whenever you get a word like ‘hypocrite,’ which has a Greek tone, a good body of New Testament scholarship would rule it out as far as the historical Jesus is concerned,” Gundry said.

“On the other hand, it needs to be said that with our increasing knowledge of the Hellenization of the 1st Century and with the kind of closeness to Nazareth of Sepphoris, a very Hellenistic center,” Gundry said, “it becomes increasingly possible that Jesus himself knew Greek, spoke Greek and used the Septuagint,” the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures.

The New Testament Gospels were written in Greek, but much of biblical scholarship in Germany and Great Britain has assumed that Jesus taught in Aramaic and that his words were translated into Greek by the early churches.

Another American New Testament scholar who has challenged that notion of an Aramaic-teaching Jesus is Robert W. Funk of Sonoma, Calif., organizer of the nationwide Jesus Seminar voting on the authenticity of Gospel sayings.

“I have argued that there is good evidence that the Jesus tradition took shape in Greek and not in Aramaic,” Funk said. “Aphorisms and parables were designed for the ear, not the eye. If that’s the case, then on the basis of sound patterns and alliterations we have to say the tradition took place in Greek.”

Proponents of an exclusively Aramaic-speaking Jesus have cited as evidence a number of sayings that contain Semitic expressions.

But both Funk and Claremont’s Burton Mack said that is probably the consequence of being bilingual. “It’s a universal phenomenon to mix things up a bit, to use a turn of phrase in another language,” Mack said.

Mack contended that scholarly resistance to seeing Jesus primarily as a wisdom teacher may be derived from the desire to see Jesus as a Jewish reformer.

The resistance to Jesus as a Hellenistic-influenced sage might also be reinforced, Mack said, by the current Jewish-Christian dialogues in which Christian participants tend to emphasize the Jewishness of Jesus over other aspects emerging from literary and archeological studies.