Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

approach in the fourth
     group of messianic proof texts envisioning a future king. These texts, primarily Jeremiah
     and Ezekiel, Roberts places at the end of the Judean kingdom, when a restoration of
     the Davidic dynasty was a response to growing existential concerns over the future
     of Israel as a theocracy. The final category deals with the postexilic texts. According
     to Roberts, upon return from exile, the Jews were faced with a destroyed Temple, a
     disgraced priesthood, and no Davidic king. The prophetic texts of Zechariah and Haggai
     dealt with these problems in oracles that placed Zerubbabel in the position of restoring
     Israel’smonarchy and Temple (Haggai 2:20–23; Zechariah 4:6–10). Roberts believes that the
     prophecies regarding the restoration of the crown and the Temple (e.g., Zechariah
     6:9–15) refer solely to the actions of Zerubbabel and are an optimistic response to
     the terrible circumstances that existed in the postexilic period. He also traces the
     later priestly expectations of the messiah to the texts of this period that include
     a restoration of the priesthood under Joshua (Zechariah 3:1–10). Roberts is convinced
     by his study of the messianic proof texts that the idea of a salvific messiah is not
     explicitly stated in the Hebrew scriptures but is rather a later development of Jewish
     eschatology that was adopted by the Pharisees, perhaps in the second or first century B.C.E. , and later incorporated into “normative Judaism.”
CHAPTER FOUR: THE FOURTH PHILOSOPHY
    Some scholars believe that
tekton
means not “woodworker” but any artisan who deals in the building trades. While Mark
     6:3 is the only verse that calls Jesus a
tekton
, Matthew 13:55 states that Jesus’s father was a
tekton
. Considering the strictures of the day, the verse is likely meant to indicate that
     Jesus was a
tekton
, too (though this passage in Matthew does not actually name Jesus’s father). Some
     scholars believe that artisans and day laborers in the time of Jesus should be considered
     akin to a lower middle class in the social hierarchy of Galilee, but that view has
     been disproven by Ramsay MacMullen in
Roman Social Relations: 50 B.C . to A.D . 384
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
    Many studies have been done about the language of Jesus and of first-century Palestine
     in general, but none are better than those of Joseph Fitzmyer. See “Did Jesus Speak
     Greek?”
Biblical Archaeology Review
18.5 (September/October 1992): 58–63; and “The Languages of Palestine in the First
     Century A.D. ,” in
The Language of the New Testament
, ed. Stanley E. Porter (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 126–62. Other
     fine studies on the language of Jesus include James Barr, “Which Language Did Jesus
     Speak? Some Remarks of a Semitist,”
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
53.1 (Autumn 1970): 14–15; and Michael O. Wise, “Languages of Palestine,” in
Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels
, ed. Joel B. Green and Scot McKnight (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1992),
     434–44.
    John Meier makes an interesting comment about the passage in Luke in which Jesus stands
     at the synagogue reading the Isaiah scroll: “Anyone who would wish to defend Luke’s
     depiction of the Isaiah reading as historically reliable even in its details would
     have to explain (1) how Jesus managed to read from an Isaiah scroll a passage made
     up of Isaiah 61:1a, b, d; 58:6d; 61:2a, with the omission of 61:1c, 2d; (2) why it
     is that Jesus read a text of Isaiah that is basically that of the Greek Septuagint,
     even when at times the Septuagint divergesfrom the Masoretic text.” See Meier,
Marginal Jew
, vol. 1, 303. Nevertheless, Meier actually believes that Jesus was not illiterate
     and that he even may have had some kind of formal education, though he provides an
     enlightening account of the debate on both sides of the argument (271–78).
    Regarding Jesus’s brothers, arguments have been made by some Catholic (and a few Protestant)
     theologians that the Greek word
adelphos
(brother) could possibly mean “cousin” or “step-brother.” While that may be true,
     nowhere in the entire New Testament is the word
adelphos
ever used to mean either (and it is used some 340 times). Mark 6:17 uses the word
adelphos
to mean “half brother” when he refers to Philip’s relationship to Herod Antipas,
     but even this usage implies “physical brother.”
    One interesting