(*) "What do you mean, perhaps?", I can already hear someone saying. "As a good Judean ..." Except that Jesus was not from Judea, he was from Galilee, in the northern part of what is now Israel, and had once been Israel, but at one point, had ceased to be. A Sunday school reminder ... Israel had split into two kingdoms, that of Judea in the south (with Jerusalem as its capital), and the remnant of Israel in the north. The northern kingdom was conquered, assimilated and resettled.

While today the Samaritans (the remaining descendants of the ten northern tribes) belong to one of the most conservative of Judaic sects (rejecting all but the Torah - Genesis and the books of Moses - as scripture), the settlers in their lands were notorious (in the eyes of the Judeans) for their mixing of Pagan with what we might now term "Jewish" belief. (The very name Jew is a later corruption of the name Judean, and would not have been used by the Northerners. The fact that we use it is a reflection of the relative oblivion the northerners sank into. Only 500 Samaritans remained alive a decade or so ago, as compared to 17 million Jews.) After the original resettlement inflicted by the Assyrians, beginning in 722 BC, repopulation continued during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. As of the time of Jesus, a highly mixed, and frequently non-monotheistic population around Galilee resulted.

Consequently, it is not altogether obvious that Jesus would have been raised in anything resembling what we would consider Rabbinic Judaism, or that his God, would have been that of Abraham. Certainly, that of his later followers in Judea, where he went to teach, would have been, but whether this would reflect the master's original wishes, or simple a recasting of his teachings in terms of local belief, is a perfectly sensible question to ask. Perhaps it is significant that the local priesthood in the South was less than happy to receive him, as we often see in the gospels. We should be on the guard, though, against the facile argument that monotheism would imply Judaic derivation. At least one branch of Hinduism today provides an excellent counterexample to this assumption.

(1) The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic, W. Ward Fowler, 4th reprinted edition, copyright 1933, MacMillan and Company, pp.268-273

(2) Fowler doesn't mention this. I'm looking for a reference.

(This footnote page is part of our introduction to Christo-Hellenism).