I’m not particularly persuaded by the Cynic Jesus theory but if I thought that Jesus was a Cynic or a Buddhist I would not be too discouraged by the evidence here. If it is true that Jesus was tethrammenos in this place, which was a place of plain, strict rural Judaism, if that’s a fair term, then we can conclude that the influences on him in childhood and first youth did not, to all appearances, include any other than Judaism. But the Jesus presented to us in the days of his ministry was past first youth and it is a natural reading of the reports to think that he had been away for a while. The portrait of the Nazarethians is rather negative: they do not honour Jesus, they cannot imagine that one of their own is really outstanding, they will not react reasonably to the evidence of their eyes, they are a little thuggish. So we are being told, rightly or wrongly, that Jesus was not quite what they were. The nature and degree of his difference from them or evolution away from them remains to be determined but it is a different which the accounts of Jesus’ life ask us to note. The detail in John, that Nathanael, the type of those guileless people who were Israelites indeed, has problems about Nazareth is a bit tantalising.
I’m not particularly persuaded by the Cynic Jesus theory but if I thought that Jesus was a Cynic or a Buddhist I would not be too discouraged by the evidence here. If it is true that Jesus was tethrammenos in this place, which was a place of plain, strict rural Judaism, if that’s a fair term, then we can conclude that the influences on him in childhood and first youth did not, to all appearances, include any other than Judaism. But the Jesus presented to us in the days of his ministry was past first youth and it is a natural reading of the reports to think that he had been away for a while. The portrait of the Nazarethians is rather negative: they do not honour Jesus, they cannot imagine that one of their own is really outstanding, they will not react reasonably to the evidence of their eyes, they are a little thuggish. So we are being told, rightly or wrongly, that Jesus was not quite what they were. The nature and degree of his difference from them or evolution away from them remains to be determined but it is a different which the accounts of Jesus’ life ask us to note. The detail in John, that Nathanael, the type of those guileless people who were Israelites indeed, has problems about Nazareth is a bit tantalising.