Jesus is able to heal without intention - just by people touching him... (talk by Robyn Walsh)
Christian Origins and the New Testament in the Greco-Roman Context: Essays in Honor of Dennis R. MacDonald
Luke-Acts shares the Aeneid’s concerns with the blending of ethnic identities as well as
divine legitimization of a new dynasty. He shows that Luke-Acts adapts the logic and of Virgil’s epic at several crucial narrative points in order to position the kingdom of God as the preeminent power over and against the Roman Empire...
“What Has Galilee to Do with Jerusalem?”, he ventures into the Hellenistic and early
Roman history of that tiny region, including reference to the New Testament, 1 Maccabees, and the Hebrew Bible. This contribution demonstrates that although Jesus and his closest followers are all understood to be Jews, their home ground had long been politically and culturally separate from Judea, a fact reflected in its majority-Gentile population. This has profound implications for our understanding of Jesus’s message and the earliest stages of his movement. Riley goes on to position Jesus’s most important teachings within the cultural and philosophical traditions of the Hellenized world.
two-thirds of the land of Israel were in some respects at odds with Judea and Jerusalem. If we divide the land of Israel into three parts, the south would be Judea, the central part Samaria, and the north Galilee. The view from the south looking north illustrates the kinds of differences that existed among these areas. As Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–37) reminds us, there was no such thing as a good Samaritan in the minds of Judean Jews. As for Galilee, in the Gospel of John, when Philip announces that they had found the Messiah, Jesus of ....
Nazareth (a small town in Galilee), Nathaniel answers, “Can
anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46). In a later
scene, when Nicodemus suggests to his fellow Jewish
authorities in Jerusalem that they should at least give Jesus a
hearing, they retort, “Surely you are not also from Galilee,
are you? Search and you will see that no prophet arises from
Galilee” (John 7:49–52).
And what is the problem with Galilee? It is a
hundred miles north of Jerusalem, more or less, and in the
days of no cars that was three or four days of walking. It was
rural and rustic. The Temple, with its strict rituals, and
Jerusalem, with its educated and observant upper classes,
were a hundred miles away. Several of the noteworthy cites
in Galilee were Gentile cities. A number were named after
the Gentile rulers of the empire in Rome: we have the cities
Tiberias, Caesarea Philippi, Ptolemais, and Livia. And that
points to one important aspect of Galilee in the minds of
Judeans: Galilee was largely Gentile in population. The
prophet Isaiah had called it “Galilee of the Gentiles” (Isa 8:23
and 9:1)
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Galilee of the Gentiles,” appears again
many years later in a very curious passage in 1 Maccabees....the Greek overlords of Israel, which occurred between 167 and 164 BCE. ....homeland of Jesus the Jew, but a Jew of Galilee and not of Jerusalem.
Saul the Pharisee was persecuting Jewish followers of Jesus for loosening the requirements for traditional Jewish observances and for accepting Gentiles with their Gentile ways into the people of God. These were Gentiles, just as they were, not converted into Jews, accepted into their communities as members of the people of God.
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we read of the “God-fearers” associated with the
synagogues, Gentiles who attended the synagogues but were
not converts. Yet Jesus takes this association and
participation of Gentiles a major step further.
Jesus certainly believed, as did most of his fellow
Jews, in the one God of Israel who was in fact the one God of
the entire universe, and therefore the one God of every
human being. He also believed, in a view shared by very few
at the time, that every human being had been given by God
an eternal soul.
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The vision of the spiritual life and mission
of Jesus is built on this premise, body/soul dualism, that we
all have eternal souls in perishable and temporary bodies. To
use a later poetic phrase, “We have this treasure in earthen
vessels” (2 Cor 4:7).
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Psalm 24:4: “Those who have clean hands and pure hearts…
will receive blessing from the Lord.” This sounds much like
the beatitude of Jesus: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt 5:8).
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In one example from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus refers to a commandment in the Law as follows: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart”
(Matt 5:27–28)
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Jesus answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20–21).
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"I will put my law within them, and write it in their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:31–33). It was the New Covenant that Jesus saw coming;
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Abraham had believed God and
obtained the promise that in him all the nations of the world
would be blessed. Jeremiah had promised that one day God
would make a New Covenant wherein the Law would be
written on people’s hearts. Jesus saw that day arriving, and
he opened to the Gentiles the door of the blessing of
Abraham for the nations and the New Covenant of religion
from a pure heart. The good things that God gave to Israel,
we may be reminded, were blessings for the whole world.
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Bonz proposes that Luke is directly
imitating Virgil—much like late first-century Latin poets
did—whereas MacDonald claims that Luke’s rivalry with
the Aeneid is mediated through the imitation of Greek
classics, primarily Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. A third
scholar, Aaron Kuecker, compares Luke’s and Virgil’s works
within the framework of social identity theory, applying the
theoretical insights about superordinate subgroup identities
to Virgil’s treatment of Roman identity in the Aeneid and
Luke’s treatment of Christian identity in Luke-Acts. He
observes a significant contrast among the similarities:
Roman identity entails acting with violence toward
outsiders, whereas Christian identity is characterized by
“neighborly love.” 3
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Thomas
Brodie to observe that Septuagintal allusions in Luke-Acts
appear to function in ways that are strikingly similar to
Homeric allusions in the Aeneid. 10
Bonz situates her reading of Luke-Acts as a
“Christian prose adaptation of heroic epic” among first-
century “adaptations” of Virgil’s Aeneid that sought “to
refute the equation of Augustan imperial rule with the will
of heaven, an equation made famou
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Luke “was aware of the Aeneid and shaped his book
to rival it. The affinities between Luke and Vergil thus
pertain… to narrative structure and development, not to
imitations of particular episodes or characterizations.” 17
Knowledge of the structure and content of the Aeneid—
including its own imitations of Homer—was made available
through a number of nontextual media for the general public
in the Roman Mediterranean. Such knowledge was not the
exclusive possession of the literate elite. 18
In Luke and Vergil: Imitations of Classical Greek
Literature, MacDonald explores the remarkable affinities
shared between Luke-Acts and the Aeneid, primarily in
terms of “narrative structure and analogous imitations of
Homer.” 19 Structurally, Virgil’s Aeneid can be read as a
Roman “Odyssey-Iliad”:
the Gospel of Luke
climaxes with the death of Jesus; 21 the Acts of the Apostles
features a number of first-person sea-voyages and includes
a shipwreck. Moreover, Luke’s and Virgil’s narratives both
conclude in Rome and feature the progression of divinely
ordained, kingdom-oriented missions. Within this
framework, MacDonald observes that a number of the
Homeric imitations he identifies in Luke-Acts are
analogously imitated in Virgil’s Aeneid. One example is
Hector’s farewell to Andromache (Il. 6) in Aeneid 2.647–794
and 3.294–380, Luke 24:37–40, and Acts 20:18–38. 22 A second
example—the double portent of Agamemnon’s lying dream
and the sign of the serpent (Il. 2)—will be discussed at length
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Luke’s heroes, “Jesus and Paul, are more powerful than
and morally superior to their Homeric and Vergilian
counterparts, just as Vergil’s Aeneas generally is morally
superior to the likes of Achilles and Odysseus.” 25
MacDonald argues that Luke-Acts can be read as contesting
“Vergil’s Roman appropriation of Greek epic by depicting
the superiority of his heroes—especially Jesus and Paul—to
Aeneas and Augustus.” 26 According to MacDonald, Luke
constructs Christian identity and the significance of Jesus by
comparison and contrast with both the canonical past—
Jewish and Greek—and the ubiquitous present of Roman
self-representation, not least of all in Virgil’s Aeneid.
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Virgil situates his Roman foundation epic at
the imagined point in the ancient past when two people
groups—Trojans and Latins—merged, all the while
providing divine justification for his first-century- BCE
situation. Luke-Acts exhibits a similar theme: the kingdom
of God inaugurated by Jesus expands to include not only
marginalized Jews/Judeans, but also Gentiles, who also
become heirs to the legacy of Israel. Bonz writes, “The
promise of ancient Troy reaches its fulfillment in the creation
of the Roman people, just as, in Luke’s narrative, the promise
of ancient Israel reaches its fulfillment in the establishment
and growth of the new community of believers.” 33 Luke’s
narrative appeals to Israelite prophecies and highlights the
supernatural intervention involved in bringing about this
inclusion.
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Virgil composed a
foundation epic for the Roman Empire, detailing how a
group of Trojan refugees merged with the Latin people and
established the roots of both the Romans and the Julio-
Claudian dynasty itself. Luke-Acts can be read as
functioning similarly, comprising a foundation narrative for
the kingdom of God that details how the kingdom
inaugurated by Jesus expanded to include not only Judeans
but also Gentiles.
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