A Toll of “Ferment”

I am wondering about a notion that might rightly complicate any consideration of historicity when addressing first-century Christianity.  As an amateur, I can at least share what I believe is a common experience of neophytes in the field of biblical criticism.  That is, we are invariably introduced to the Judea of Jesus as a time and place of great “ferment” (at least that’s the term I recall most.)

Tragically, first-century Judea saw suspicion, oppression, tension, treachery, rebellion, zealotry, mania, and cruelty—almost beyond belief.  Certainly neither I nor anyone else can justifiably forget that backdrop when postulating about the mindset of (individually) undocumented and (collectively) marginalized people who enshrined coalescing beliefs into the gospels and epistles.

If a hitherto undiscovered collection of heterodox Maoist writings came to light, which had been shared by a small group of young men who died in the mid-1940’s, those writings could be subjected to the same scholarly analysis as any other body of thought.  What would not be so sober, of course, would be shunting aside a simultaneous discovery that those men were survivors in their teens of the Rape of Nanjing, and they had subsequently known little but war before their early deaths.  Who can say what phantasms might seize them?

I don’t think any reasonable proponent of the historicity of Jesus will deny a similar consideration.  Some of the historicity argument entails “It is less likely that so-and-so believed this…; it is more likely that so-and-so believed that….”  Thanks to the work of Bible scholars, we know that this “likelihood” argument is never more suspect than when speaking of first-century Judea.