Was Jesus Just a Wandering Philosopher?

What should I think of claims that Jesus was just a wandering philosopher who was imaginatively transformed after His death into a legendary, wonder-working “god-man”?

Some unbelieving scholars have recently tried to explain the rise of Jesus worship in the apostolic church with the hypothesis that its first members were mostly Galilean Jews who had been profoundly influenced by Hellenistic paganism. Hellenistic pagans at that time were polytheistic and had many “god-man” traditions, including the cult of the Roman Emperor.¹ Large numbers of pagans lived in the vicinity of Galilee. According to this hypothesis, Jesus was a Hellenized Jewish teacher who adopted the lifestyle of a wandering cynic philosopher.² After His death, His paganized disciples honored His memory with stories that portrayed Him as a mythological miracle worker and “god-man.”

It is true that as the result of Alexander the Great’s conquests (335–323 bc), the influence of Greek (Hellenistic) culture and language had spread throughout Palestine. However, the influence of Hellenism on most Jews was only superficial. From the beginning of Greek rule, the upper classes had the most to gain by adapting to the politically dominant culture and were naturally the most influenced by it. About two centuries before the time of Jesus’ ministry, Hellenized Jewish leaders attempted to replace Israel’s traditional temple worship with pagan ritual,³ triggering a civil war (166 bc).⁴ Rather than accepting the pagan assimilation of their Hellenized leaders, most Palestinian Jews rallied around the Maccabee family and thus defeated the Hellenizers, cleansed the temple of pagan ritual, and gained independence from Seleucid Syrian overlords. The Maccabees established Jewish independence for a hundred years (164 –63 bc).

Following the Maccabean period, Hellenistic influence on Palestinian Jews could only be superficial. There was an impassioned Jewish reaction to any form of pagan religious aggression or interference. In his Antiquities, Josephus described the suicidal fervor of a large group of Jews who “exposed their necks” to the swords of Pilate’s legionaries rather than allow him to bring Roman standards into Jerusalem (circa ad 26). Knowing that he would have to commit a massacre on a vast scale to bring these standards into the city, Pilate backed down. Anne Rice includes a memorable fictional account of this event in a passage from her novel The Road to Cana.⁵

Although Jewish upper classes were proficient in Greek, the Jewish masses still spoke Aramaic. When Hebrew was translated into the vernacular for synagogue worship, it was translated into Aramaic, not Greek. Even though there were numerous Greek-speaking Gentile cities in the vicinity of Galilee, there was a profound cultural divide between Jew and Gentile. First-century archaeological evidence from Galilee—including that from Sepphoris, one of two prominent cities built in Galilee on the Hellenistic model in that period—shows that a majority of the Jewish population was highly observant of ceremonial laws.⁶ Israeli historian Yaacov Shavit summarizes the archeological evidence:

It seems right to claim that the Jews of Palestine of that time lived within the Hellenistic world, but were not an integral part of it. The Jewish village (or city) was different from the Hellenistic village (or city): it contained no temples, altars, or idols . . . it had no gymnasium or stadium. The daily routine, the rhythm of the year, public life, the historical consciousness, the legal system—all these were palpably different in essence and form. There were no mixed marriages, laws of impurity and purification effectively separated or determined clear lines of demarcation between populations. . . . Jewish life was distinctive and separate from the life of the Gentile neighbors. (Athens in Jerusalem: Classical Antiquity and Hellenism in the Making of the Modern Secular Jew)

The Jews of first-century Palestine—including Galilean Jews—were still radicalized. Pressures to conform to Hellenistic cultural expectations only made them more deeply committed to preserving their traditions. In fact, Jewish nationalistic fervor was rising, and eventually the Jews would soon begin defying Rome in the same way they defied Seleucid Syria under the Maccabees. Far from being a semi-pagan population of nominal Jews who might produce a peripatetic cynic philosopher and then transform him into a mythological god-man in the course of a generation, Palestinian Jews of the first century were awaiting a Messiah who would fulfill prophecy in a predefined way.⁷

Rather than fulfilling traditional Jewish expectations, Jesus came forward as Messiah and died on a Roman cross. There was nothing about the first-century Jewish mindset that would encourage idealization of a misguided messiah. He would be viewed as a false messiah, not mythologized as a god-man.

It truly is astonishing that the first generation of Christians declared Jesus to be the Son of God rather than viewing Him as a failed messiah. Something extraordinary must have happened. Something like the story recorded in the Gospels.⁸

1. Some of these “divine men” were Hercules, Asclepius, Aeneas, Osiris, Alexander, Pythagoras, and Apollonius of Tyana. Back To Article
2. The Cynics (Greek: Κυνικοί, Latin: Cynici) were an influential group of philosophers from the ancient school of cynicism. Their philosophy was that the purpose of life was to live a life of virtue in agreement with nature. This meant rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, health, and fame, and by living a life free from all possessions. As reasoning creatures, people could gain happiness by rigorous training and by living in a way which was natural for humans. They believed that the world belonged equally to everyone, and that suffering was caused by false judgments of what was valuable and by the worthless customs and conventions which surrounded society. Many of these thoughts were later absorbed into Stoicism. (Wikipedia) Back To Article
3. In 167 bc, Jewish sacrifice was forbidden, Sabbaths and feasts were banned, and circumcision was outlawed. Altars to Greek gods were set up and animals prohibited to Jews were sacrificed on them. The Olympian Zeus was placed on the altar of the Temple. Possession of Jewish scriptures was made a capital offence.
   

   After Antiochus issued his decrees forbidding Jewish religious practice, a rural Jewish priest from Modiin, Mattathias the Hasmonean, sparked the revolt against the Seleucid Empire by refusing to worship the Greek gods. Mattathias killed a Hellenistic Jew who stepped forward to offer a sacrifice to an idol in Mattathias’ place. He and his five sons fled to the wilderness of Judea. After Mattathias’ death about one year later, his son Judah Maccabee led an army of Jewish dissidents to victory over the Seleucid dynasty in guerrilla warfare. The term Maccabees as used to describe the Judean’s army is taken from its actual use as Judah’s surname. (Wikipedia, “The Maccabean Revolt”) Back To Article

4. . The war has long been interpreted as a war of national liberation, although some modern scholars argue that the king was in fact intervening in an internal civil war between the traditionalist Jews in the country and the Hellenized Jews in Jerusalem. According to Joseph P. Schultz: Modern scholarship on the other hand considers the Maccabean revolt less as an uprising against foreign oppression than as a civil war between the orthodox and reformist parties in the Jewish camp. These competed violently over who would be the High Priest, with traditionalists with Hebrew/Aramaic names like Onias contesting with Hellenizers with Greek names like Jason and Menelaus. Other authors point to possible socio-economic in addition to the religious motives behind the civil war.
   

   What began in many respects as a civil war escalated when the Hellenistic kingdom of Syria sided with the Hellenizing Jews in their conflict with the traditionalists. As the conflict escalated, Antiochus took the side of the Hellenizers by prohibiting the religious practices the traditionalists had rallied around. This may explain why the king, in a total departure from Seleucid practice in all other places and times, banned the traditional religion of a whole people. Other scholars argue that while the rising began as a religious rebellion, it was gradually transformed into a war of national liberation. (Wikipedia) Back To Article

5. , Finally the whole town shouted for the men to tell the story.
   

   “Six days,” declared Jason, holding up his fingers so that we might count. “Six days we stood before the palace of the Governor and demanded that he remove his brazen and blasphemous images from our Holy City.”
   

   Shouts of wonder and approval rose in a soft roar.
   

   “ ‘Oh, but this would give injury to our great Tiberius,’ the man told us,” Jason cried. “And we to him, ‘He’s always respected our laws in the past.’ And understand that for every day we remained firm, more and more men and women came to join us. Understand that Caesarea was overflowing! In and out of the palace of the Governor went the men who presented our petitions, and no sooner were they dismissed than they returned and presented them again, until at last the man had had his fill of it.
   

   “And all the while soldiers had come pouring in, soldiers taking up their stands at every gate, at every door, and all along the walls that bounded the pavement before the judgment seat.”
   

   The crowd gave a loud roar before he could go on, but he gestured for quiet, and continued.
   

   “At last, sitting there before the great mass of us he declared that the images would not be removed. And giving the signal brought his soldiers to full arms against us! Swords were drawn. Daggers lifted. We saw ourselves on every side surrounded by his men, and we saw our deaths right in front of us—.”
   

   He stopped. And as the crowd murmured and shouted and finally roared, he gestured for quiet again and came to the finish. . . .
   

   “On the ground, we threw ourselves,” Jason cried. “On the very ground, and we bowed our heads, and we bared our necks to those swords—all of us. Hundreds of us did this, I tell you. Thousands of us. We bared our necks, all of us, to a man, fearlessly and silently, and those who were left to speak told the Governor what he already knew, that we should surely die—all of us, to a man, as we knelt there!—before we would see our laws overturned, our customs abolished.”
   

   “And what did the great Roman Governor do in the face of this spectacle?” cried Jason. “At the undeniable sight of so many ready to give their lives for the protection of our most sacred laws, the man rose to his feet and ordered his soldiers to put away the weapons they held at our throats, the blades flashing in the sun everywhere before him. ‘They shall not die!’ he declared. ‘Not for piety! I will not shed their blood, not one drop! Give the signal. The soldiers are to remove our ensigns from within the walls of their sacred city!’ ”
   

   Cries of thanksgiving filled the air. Prayers and acclamation. People went down on their knees in the grass. . . . Fists were in the air, people were dancing again, and the women were sobbing now, as if only now could they sink down onto the grass and let their full fear flow from their hearts and into the arms of one another. (Anne Rice, The Road to Cana, pp. 106-108) Back To Article

6. While the style of the pottery in Sepphoris is Hellenistic, the pottery remains of the ancient city testify to the religiously Jewish nature of its inhabitants. In the Jewish purity system, certain types of vessels could become ritually impure, but stone vessels could not. It is now recognized that their presence—or absence—can be used as a Jewish identity marker. More than a hundred stone vessels have been recovered at the Sepphoris excavations, and this strongly suggests the population was religiously Jewish. So too, the archaeological evidence indicates that the Jews of Sepphoris continued to honor levitical prohibitions on eating pork and continued to practice ritualistic bathing. . . .
   

   All the archaeological evidence for a significant Gentile presence in Sepphoris dates from after the Jewish revolt in ad 66-70, and most of it is after the Jewish revolt of 135—thus after both Jesus and the rise of Christianity. (The Jesus Legend, p. 115, citing Chancey and Meyer, “How Jewish Was Sepphoris?” pp. 25-27) Back To Article

7. Prophecy about the Messiah was not a sideline issue. It was of the greatest importance to the Jews. The advent of the Messiah was integral to the fulfillment of their hopes as a people. The greatest rabbis pored over passages considered to apply to the Messiah. From a Christian perspective, it is striking—and should be instructive—to see how poorly the Jews anticipated the manner of Messiah’s coming. All Jews, whether Jesus’ followers or His enemies, expected Messiah to be a miracle-working military hero who would establish Jewish authority over the world and inaugurate a universal reign of peace and justice. The idea of Messiah suffering and dying without achieving their expectations of national glory wasn’t considered. It would be inconceivable for Messiah to be killed by His enemies, much less nailed to a cross in shame. Jesus’ disciples held this view right up to His arrest and execution (when they fled in panic and disappointment). To unbelieving Jews (including Saul of Tarsus prior to his encounter with the risen Messiah on the Damascus road), the crucifixion of Jesus provided conclusive evidence that He was an impostor. Back To Article
8. The clear evidence of the rapid speed with which devotion to Jesus arose within the early Christian communities counts against the Hellenization thesis. For example, consider the evidence associated with Paul and his letters. Most scholars agree that Paul wrote his epistles between the end of the fourth decade and the beginning of the sixth decade of the first century. Already in Paul’s letters we have evidence that Jesus is being thought of and worshiped as divine in a sense similar to Yahweh-God himself. But in actuality, Paul’s letters push the date of such devotion to Jesus even earlier than Paul himself. For example, what appears to be the remnant of a pre-Pauline hymn about Jesus, one already reflecting a high Christology, can be detected in Philippians 2:6-11. Larry Hurtado highlights the implications of such hymns:
   

   The singing/chanting of such odes is one of several phenomena that demonstrate the remarkable and innovative nature of early Christian worship, in which Jesus was programmatically included in the “devotional pattern” of early Christian circles along with God, and in ways otherwise reserved for God. I contend that this incorporation of Jesus into the devotional pattern as a subject and recipient of corporate devotion is perhaps the most significant religious innovation that marks earliest Christian worship, especially in the context of Second Temple-Jewish religious tradition which formed the immediate matrix out of which earliest Christianity developed.

   Again, the evidence associated with Paul pushes things even earlier when one considers, first, that Paul’s conversion most likely took place within a few years of Jesus’ execution, and, second, that its seems quite likely that the reason the zealous, pre-Christian Paul was persecuting the early Jewish-Christian movement had to do, among other things, with “his outrage over their claims about Jesus and their reverence of him.” All of this provides evidence that, shortly after his execution, Jesus’ early Jewish followers were recognizing and worshiping him as divine, yet within a creational monotheistic context.

   This evidence for the seemingly immediate rise of a very high Christology among Jesus’ earliest Jewish followers is supported by what can now be recognized as solid evidence for eyewitness tradition within the early Jesus tradition, rooted in remembrances of Jesus’ pre-Easter Palestinian ministry. Thus it appears that we can trace the pattern of identifying the risen Jesus with, and worshiping the risen Jesus as, in some sense the very embodiment of Yahweh-God back even to the immediate Palestinian Jewish followers of Jesus. In the words of Richard Bauckham: “The earliest Christology was already the highest Christology.” (The Jesus Legend, pp. 96-99) Back To Article