Last year I began but did not finish a series with a piece entitled “Iesous Christos: Messianism Between Jews and Christians, Ancient and Modern.” In it I made the case for what the most basic shape of the earliest kerygma about Jesus was among his intra-Jewish followers, and considered some historical contrafactuals that might seem, on the basis of what we can know about Jesus from Paul and the Gospels, more probable afterlives for his movement than either a messianic sect of apocalyptic Judaism or a Greco-Roman collegium, philosophical school, and mystery cult. This piece will rehash some of that: I still buy my own argument in that piece, though I would rephrase some things, and I have more I would like to say about how Christians got our Christology, and what that implies for the possible future significance Jesus may prove to hold for both Christians and non-Christians in the future.
The astute reader will notice that here I have chosen to speak of Christology’s development in “faces,” where before I spoke of God’s in “phases.” It is not that I mean to pursue a less linear approach here, but that the character of Jesus’ development follows a somewhat distinct trajectory, one entangled with but also independent of the development of the Abrahamic God, who was achieving something of an expression of philosophical equilibrium as Jesus’ reception was in its early days. Broadly, the faces I mean to invoke here are the historical Jesus, the kerygmatic Jesus, the dogmatic Jesus, and the cosmopolitan Jesus. The reader will notice that each of these is in some way a perceived or received Jesus: none is Iesus ipse, either the Jesus of history, or the present Jesus, or the future Jesus (if present and future Jesus there be). The man himself we know only by his reception and mediation, unless or until we should see him as he is and be made thus. Christology is not Christ, just as theology is not God; we engage in Christography, like theography, to be self-aware about our evolving consciousness of each, and should not confuse our language for the reality it means and signifies. That is not to say that our language does not matter: what we believe and how we express it in cult, myth, scripture, reason, and mysticism is our access to that about which we speak. But there was once and, Christians hope, will be again a time where words fail us in beholding the Beloved directly; in the meantime, we try to speak as truly as possible, and doing so requires that we know how we have spoken in the past and may do so in the future.
I begin with the historical Jesus. This may seem an odd choice: “the historical Jesus” in scholarly parlance is a thoroughly modern reception of Jesus, using methods and data that were not apparent to premodern thinkers. The historical Jesus is an abstraction that scholars make about who Jesus was on the grounds of how he is depicted in the surviving kerygmatic portraiture of the New Testament and Early Christian writings, read against the cultural backdrop of the Mediterranean, Near Eastern, Greco-Roman, and above all Jewish worlds in which he lived as we can reconstruct them from textual study and archaeology. Not all of this evidence was available to premodern people; and even if it had been the way that premodern people tended to think about their sources would not likely have resulted in the historical Jesus of modern scholarship. It is not that there were no precedents: in some cases, modern scholars still use the criteria and rules of engagement laid down by ancient scholars of texts and ancient historians, such as those derived from the Hellenistic scholiasts or the historiography of Thucydides. But the post-Enlightenment world has inherited a methodological skepticism that is irrevocable, and rightly so, in the natural and social sciences, proven again and again for its efficacy as a guide to the meaning from original contexts onwards of ancient texts. So even if there were ancient Jews, Christians, and Pagans interested in the facts about Jesus—and there were—they did not do exactly the same kind of thing modern scholars do. Nevertheless, the kerygmatic Jesus is therefore already an attempt at the historical Jesus: the impulse to recount who Jesus was stands behind both, though they diverge at the point of trying to make a case for who Jesus is now. And crucially, the primary evidence that historians use to craft their image of the historical Jesus is the variety of kerygmatic portraits in the New Testament. The historical Jesus and the kerygmatic Jesus are inextricably linked.
The historical Jesus is defined by four fundamental features: Jesus existed; he was a Jew; an apocalyptic and social prophet of first-century Galilee and Judea; and he was crucified by the Romans. More strong evidence exists to establish the existence of Jesus than does for many other figures of antiquity whose existence classicists and historians generally do not question. We have his mention in seven authentic letters of Paul, a contemporary though one he did not personally meet; and we have the four Gospels, all probably written within seven decades of Jesus’ death, the earliest of them (and the primary source for two others) probably just around four decades later. These documents are hard to describe: they are not pure biographies, even by ancient standards, but they are also not simply myth or legendarium; they are written generically like Greco-Roman bioi but also like other ancient textual genres, and they have a rhetorical point meant to inspire in the readers the faith of the authors. We also have one mention of Jesus from a non-believing source in the first century: the Testimonium Flavianum of Josephus, which has almost certainly been interpolated by Christian scribes but from which a kind of basic description of who Jesus had been and what his significance was can still be gleaned. The picture these sources present amounts to the following. Yehoshua, Yeshua, or Jesus of Nazareth was probably born sometime between 6 and 4 BCE, in the final years of the reign and life of Herod the Great (r. 37-4 BCE), the Idumaean client king of the Roman Senate and later the first emperor, Augustus Caesar, over Judea and surrounding territories (basically, the formerly independent Hasmonean kingdom). This date comes from the Gospel of Matthew; the alternative, from Luke’s Gospel, has Jesus born the year Quirinius was governor of Syria in 6 CE. There are reasons to think Luke has his dates wrong: the census he describes as the occasion for Jesus’s birth in Judean Bethlehem (where he is also born in Matthew, but the reason is different: Matthew thinks that’s where the family lives) did not happen the way he describes or that year. Also, it presents us with a Jesus that is just 20 years old at the beginning of Pontius Pilate’s career as procurator of Judea (26-36 CE) and 30 years at its conclusion. There are three related problems with this. First, the Gospels independently witness to the idea that Jesus is around the age of 30 at the time of his baptism by John and public ministry: Luke tells us that this is Jesus’ age (Lk 3:23), and John tells us that Jesus’ interlocutors doubted his authority on the grounds of his age being lower than 50 (so why not 30, if Jesus was in his 20s? Jn 8:57). Third, the Gospels disagree about the length of Jesus’ ministry: the Synoptics suggest a single year, while John suggests three. Scholars generally agree that John is more likely to be correct here, as three years allows Jesus more time to build a movement large enough to attract the attention of aristocratic priestly adversaries in Jerusalem and Pilate, who must have crucified Jesus prior to 36 when he ceased to be governor. This places Jesus’ death probably somewhere between 28-30 CE, when Jesus is around 33. This is quite a lot to be able to say about someone who lived and died two millennia ago—certainly enough to confirm that they at least existed.
Jesus was a Jew (Heb: yehudi; Grk: Ioudaios), ethnically and religiously. Specifically, Jesus was a Galilean Jew of the first-century, practicing at least the form of Jewish piety common to his environment and recognizable in Samaria and Judea as Jewish in the mainstream. While we can say virtually nothing about what Jesus looked like, we can say with confidence one thing about his body: his penis was circumcised like that of every other Jewish male. He kept some form of kashrut, the dietary restrictions commanded by the Torah; his day ended and began at dusk, and from Friday evening to Saturday evening he observed Shabbat, at home and at synagogue. There, at synagogue, he went each week for communal reading of Torah and Prophets, oral interpretation, community affairs, and prayer. His praying life is difficult to reconstruct, as is Second Temple prayer more generally, but it seems likely that it consisted at least of a twice daily repetition of the Shema, and possibly the chanting of psalms keyed to different occasions. In what language did he do this and other things? Scholars generally agree that Jesus could speak Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Near East before Greek (because of the Persians) and after it (in the form of Syriac). Scholars also tend to assume that Jesus would have been able to speak at least some colloquial Greek, which he likely would have needed for his peasant’s occupation in Galilee: the whole region had been Hellenized since Alexander the Great conquered it, and non-Jews filtered in and out of the region and its cities constantly together with Jews, all of whom could reliably be expected to speak Greek. Jesus almost certainly knew little to no Latin; the official language of the Romans, certainly spoken by Roman soldiers and government officials, but not yet a cosmopolitan language of sophisticated culture or common encounter, relatively few first-century non-Roman people bothered to learn it (again, everyone spoke Greek). Could Jesus speak Hebrew? Older scholars insisted no, on the grounds that Hebrew was dead as a spoken language by the first century. More recent scholarship finds this implausible: we know that Mishnaic Hebrew was a colloquial language, and what archaeological evidence we have of Semitic languages in the first century is Hebrew.1 Some work has been done to suggest that the Semitisms of the New Testament are more explicable by reference to Hebrew than to Aramaic. It is at least certainly possible that Jesus spoke Hebrew, at least as a language of prayer, and in congregational worship. Could Jesus read or write? Scholars debate this, too, sometimes quite emotionally, because Jesus is depicted reading at synagogue in the Gospels (e.g., Lk 4). The evidence seems to suggest that the ancient world generally was illiterate, apart from those wealthy and leisurely enough to afford an education; perhaps Jesus learned to read for participation in synagogue or certain trade transactions, but many scholars have found it unlikely.
Worship happened both at home, at synagogue, and away. For festivals, when possible, Jesus went up to Jerusalem to worship God by animal sacrifice, especially for the pilgrim feasts of Sukkot, Pesach, and Shavu’ot. Given that Jerusalem is around a 4-5 day journey by foot from Nazareth, it can be safely assumed that if Jesus and his family ordinarily made it to Jerusalem for the pilgrim feasts, they spent around a month each year traveling on foot away from home. This number is bigger if one assumes that Jesus also traveled to nearby Galilean towns for work, as seems all but certain, like Sepphoris: if he worked in Sepphoris each day, Jesus walked a minimum of six hours a day six days out of most weeks out of the year. He would have been lean from food scarcity, but hardy from a life of labor and occupational exercise; more given to the spirit of ordinary workmen and their interests, in all likelihood, than those of the scribes, philosophers, and theologians in his own day and after. Jesus’ Jewish life was a vibrant and tangible one: multilingual, conditioned by natural scenes, cycles, and seasons, full of physical activity and physical worship.
Jesus’ remembered sayings and activities seem to qualify him a bit further among the sectarian divisions of ancient Judaism in Palestine. He is like the Essenes, insofar as he seems to have apocalyptic and messianic beliefs, but is not like them a regular ascetic or separatist; he is much more like the Pharisees, insofar as he, like they, is engaged in halakhic interpretation of the ritual, ethical, and judicial commands of the Torah and frequents synagogues in villages, towns, and cities, where the Pharisees tended to congregate after they fell out of Hasmonean favor.2 He is relatively unlike the Sadducees, as a peasant (a tekton, a constructional day-laborer) who believed in apocalypses, angels, and resurrection. It is unclear how much Jesus shared with the later first-century zealots; some scholars periodically try to argue that Jesus was a military insurgent, but the evidence that survives seems more to point in the direction that Jesus led a nonviolent movement which expected divine intervention in Judea. Jesus’ Judaism was probably, like that of many people, culled from a variety of communally and personally meaningful sources; scholars seem generally agreed that it was most deeply impacted by his encounter with Yohanan or John the Baptizer, an apocalyptic prophet of social justice baptizing in the Judean desert for repentance and forgiveness of sins on the grounds of an imminent eschaton. With John, we have not only the New Testament but also, again, Josephus, who tells us, culturally translating for his Greco-Roman audience, that John preached piety toward God (eusebeia) and justice (dikaiosyne) towards one’s neighbor; the Gospels present John very clearly as an apocalyptic prophet preaching an imminent eschaton. Scholars seem generally agreed that Jesus came into John’s orbit, potentially into a circle of his disciples; how long he spent with John is unclear, but what is clear is that the Evangelists make a concerted effort to establish a narrative about the character of their relationship, probably implying that John’s disciples constituted a rival movement that Jesus’ were unable either to fully disown or to completely displace for several decades. Jesus adopted, in broad outline, John’s imminentist eschatology, and took it beyond the Jordan River to the towns, villages, and synagogues of Galilee and Judea.
Jesus’ prophetic mission is asserted by the Gospels to have begun after John’s arrest. The Gospels attribute Jesus’ prophetic mission to a revelation—whether privately or publicly experienced the Evangelists disagree—about Jesus’ status as God’s beloved son, together with the descent of the divine spirit upon him, at his own baptism; people have profound religious experiences of this sort all the time, and thinking that Jesus experienced something of the sort with John does not exceed the limits of methodological naturalism appropriate to history. Something had to have happened that would have propelled Jesus, a Galilean peasant and day-laborer, to abandon his home and livelihood for John’s company and commission; and perhaps, too, the Matthean and Johannine accounts, in which John in some sense recognizes Jesus’ calling and status, reflect some memory of Jesus’ own commission by John. It is difficult to say with any kind of certainty. What is more certain is the content of John’s and Jesus’ message: “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has drawn near; repent, and believe the gospel” (Mk 1:15). The irruption of the Kingdom of God into the world as preached by John and Jesus drew on a number of biblical and extrabiblical themes, centering, apparently, on the themes of the restoration of Israel, final reckoning and reconciliation with the gentiles, and cosmic renovation through resurrection and final judgment; and like most imminentist apocalyptic movements, Jesus, like John, called for large-scale adoption of a particular ethical program inspired by the Torah.
One of Jesus’ most direct descriptions of the Kingdom as he envisioned it in the Gospels comes in Matthew 19:28: “In the rebirth (Grk: palingenesia), when the Son of Man sits on his throne of glory, you who have followed me will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” Jesus seems to have expected a renewal of Judea’s fortunes involving the restoration of biblical Israel, united under a single monarch—something that had not been a reality for nearly 1,000 years by the time Jesus allegedly spoke such words, as the united monarchy of Israel and Judah had dissolved in 922 BCE under Rehoboam, and the Northern Kingdom of Israel had been destroyed and its people exiled by Assyria 200 years later in 722 BCE. This is the sort of golden-age, millenarian, restorationist thinking that happens in many different societies: Jesus the Jew is talking about the dream of his people coming true. The international and cosmic events which would attend this eschatological restoration were, for Jesus, surely secondary to this primary object of hope.
Who was the “Son of Man”? The figure is an apocalyptic character from the Book of Daniel, specifically the vision of Daniel 7:9-14, where he is probably the Archangel Michael, ascending to heaven as the celestial patron of the people of Israel to receive an eternal and universal kingdom from the “Ancient of Days” (God) as vindication and recompense for the oppression of Israel by foreign kingdoms. The character had a long literary afterlife in apocalyptic Judaism: in the Parables of Enoch, for example (1 Enoch 37-71), he is a preexistent and eschatological judge and king, combining qualities of still other figures from Jewish prophetic and sapiential texts (like the Davidic messiah and Lady Wisdom). In the Synoptic Gospels, when Jesus speaks of the figure, appears, at least in the first half of each of them, to speak about someone else; it is possible that the historical Jesus indeed either openly preached about or at least started out preaching about a separate, heavenly Son of Man who would come to save Israel from the gentile nations at the end-time, someone other than himself. But in the Synoptics, Jesus begins to more clearly self-identify with the Son of Man, at least in the literary artistry of the Evangelists, after the Petrine confession and Passion predictions which are the midpoint of their common narrative. It may well be that Jesus came, over the course of his ministry, to think of himself as the earthly incarnation of the Son of Man, or that he would be revealed as the Son of Man in the future; it certainly seems unlikely that Jesus taught that his disciples would be elevated to positions beneath the Son of Man without leaving at least an equivalent position open for himself in the eschatological future. But if Jesus identified in this way, he did not publicize it openly; neither did he make use of titles like “messiah” (Heb: mashiach; Grk: christos), “Son of God,” or “king” in his public preaching. Indeed, the Synoptic Gospels portray Jesus actively attempting to silence such acclamations; the so-called “Messianic Secret” may reflect a Jesus who did not think of himself as messiah, or it may reflect a Jesus who tactically chose silence in light of what talk of “messiahs” and “kings” would lead to at Roman hands. In some ways, the latter seems probably more likely than the former: if Jesus thought of himself as once and future Son of Man, he likely also self-identified as messiah, albeit clandestinely, and not as a fundamental point of his public preaching.
Did Jesus think of himself as divine? Historically, people often come to conclude that they are divine, even in cultural settings where this stretches or breaks the limits of a society’s religious consciousness; and this often happens, too, in response to the kinds of altered states of consciousness in moments of personally meaningful religious experience like those attributed to Jesus and those who followed him.3 If Jesus thought of himself as divine, it was likely to be in the qualified sense of divinity of the Son of Man, and it may well have been a future status Jesus expected to hold, at the eschaton: the junior divinity, judging and ruling on behalf of the supreme God.4 If Jesus held a messianic self-consciousness, his expectations may also have been, or have included, something much more mundane and intrahistorical (on which see below), to which his exalted apocalyptic language alluded. But again, all of this is speculation on what Jesus is likely to have privately believed; publicly, he self-presented as a prophet, the final herald of the Kingdom.
What did Jesus expect from those who heard his message of the imminent kingdom? Jesus’ halakha is in many ways unremarkable given what we know about the Judaism of the period, but certain elements, inspired by Jesus’ apocalyptic urgency, are unique. Jesus called, among other things, for a radical redistribution of wealth and forgiveness of debts, as though the final and greatest jubilee year had broken forth upon Judea.5 It is possible, but unclear, that this inspired Jesus’ public action in the Temple in Jerusalem, which is more likely (John is right here) to have happened either early in Jesus’ ministry or on an annual basis rather than just in his last year.6 If Jesus did such an action, it likely did connote something of Jesus’ wider economic protests against the Roman and aristocratic exploitation of the Judean peasantry, though it also may have evoked certain Jewish eschatological suspicions of a future destruction and rebuilding of the Temple. As with much in the life of Jesus, it is hard to say.
Jesus’ apocalyptic and social prophecy also appears to have had a dimension of charismatic and miraculous thaumaturgy to it. Most scholars are comfortable saying that Jesus was publicly perceived to be a healer, an exorcist, and a wonderworker, things that ancient people across the Mediterranean and Near East often associated with holy men and magicians; whether Jesus could really do these things stretches the philosophical limits of history as a method. The important thing is that he engaged in activities that people perceived to be efficacious in these ways; and given the divine qualities and magical powers asserted of sacred kings in antiquity, across the Near East and in the Mediterranean, this public perception, added to the specific content of Jesus’ message, likely fueled expectations of his own messianic identity among the populace of Galilee and Judea.
For three years or so, Jesus traveled, preached, performed his works of healing, and stirred hope for the Kingdom. In the leadup to his final Passover, he went up to Jerusalem with his disciples. In the Gospels, Jesus is aware that he is going to his death; whether the historical Jesus expected this or not is unclear. It could be—it sometimes happens—that people become by some form of premonition convinced of their impending death; perhaps this happened to Jesus. Perhaps, alternatively, Jesus expected that when he went up to Jerusalem, the Kingdom would break into history and God would fulfill the promise of his prophetic career. Perhaps, more mundanely, Jesus and/or his followers expected that he would be acclaimed king in Jerusalem. This last option need not have been the grounds for a bloody revolt, either, at least in theory. Rome’s interest was in peaceful provinces that paid their taxes and submitted to Roman rule; this was often more easily accomplished through local rulers who could manage the customs of the subject people and had their respect. Judea was a hotbed of unrest in the first century, and governed by procurator rather than the normal administrative system of the province of Syria whence that prefect was derived; perhaps the Romans would welcome the opportunity to restore peace to a region once competently managed by Herod the Great, if the people publicly expressed their desire for Jesus as king, provided that he could or would submit to Roman rule?
This did not, of course, happen. Jesus was crucified by the Romans; as Paula Fredriksen argues, this is the single most defensible fact about Jesus, the thing that Paul and all four Evangelists, and all later pagans who mention Jesus, agree on. The Romans reserved crucifixion, moreover, for seditionists, implying that Pilate did indeed pick up on the royal aspirations of Jesus’ followers for him; but curiously, Jesus alone of his followers was crucified, implying that Pilate likely did not see Jesus as the leader of a violent movement.7 The titulus Christi witnessed by all the Gospels-Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum--reinforces this picture: the Roman military rule of Judea saw Jesus not so much as a political threat, per se, as a political idea best put down hard. One wonders, given the later history of the region, if it would not have been better to simply elevate the Galilean prophet to the status of client king and been done with it.
The Gospels suggest that Pilate’s co-conspirators in Jesus’ execution—which must have been an almost unnoticeable affair in the chaos of Passover Week in Jerusalem—were the high priest, the priestly aristocrats, and the other elders and leaders gathered in Jerusalem. These are, effectively, the wealthy, indigenous elites that cooperated with Roman occupation, usually at the expense of the Judean peasantry, but also, it should be admitted, for the sake of the preservation of the Jerusalem Temple and some degree of Jewish autonomy under Roman supervision. Jesus’ death is another collateral, not only of the Roman imperial machine, but also of the intra-Jewish political rivalry between elites and populist interests. However briefly, Jesus was an object of popular interest and aspiration; this was the real character of his danger in the minds of Judea’s elites. That Jesus is more likely to have had a three-year career than a one-year career implies that Judea’s elites and Pilate alike knew that he himself constituted or fomented no specific such threat: otherwise, Jesus would likely have died much sooner, but had he done so, it is hard to believe he could have or would have built the movement he must have to attract attention at all.
To these four facts of the historical Jesus we may add a fifth: his followers believed that they had encountered him alive again shortly after his death. Just as with the reality of Jesus’ miracles, scholars, in holding that his followers believed him alive again after death, do not thereby assert the veracity of his resurrection; only that it is what his disciples earnestly believed. It is to some degree impossible to explain the continuation and organization of his movement in the wake of his death, especially as a messianic movement, apart from the disciples holding this belief. Ordinarily, messianic candidates cease to be such at death; no matter what sort of messiah an ancient Jew did or did not believe in, death was an easy and universal contrafactual to anyone’s claim to be one. All other such brigandage movements in first-century Judea died out with their leaders; why did Jesus’ survive, and why did it profess him as messiah, especially when he himself did not actively seek to court such acclamation at least until the last week of his life? On what grounds would anyone believe the titulus Christi as truth rather than the cruel joke that Pilate meant by it?
Resurrection (Heb: tequmah; Grk: anastasis) was a general expectation of many, but not all, ancient Jews.8 Those who did believe in it often understood it differently as well. For some, resurrection would mean a future translation from mortal flesh and the underworld to a heavenly state of blissful existence, perhaps in an angelic body or serving in a celestial or cosmic Temple; for others, resurrection meant a very literal, fleshly return of soul and body together, a reconstitution of the human person as they previously existed during their lives, on a cleansed and renovated earth.9 Other Jews may or may not have conflated belief in resurrection, especially into an angelic or heavenly body, with belief in the immortality of the soul.10 Not all Jews required resurrection to speak about an afterlife, and not all believed in a personal afterlife, or at least not a meaningful one; conversely, non-Jews could speak in terms of resurrection as well. Corporeal immortalization was not the exclusive intellectual property of Jews: Greeks and Romans spoke of their heroes, like Asklepios, Herakles, and Romulus/Quirinius assuming divine bodies at or after death, in which they now resided in the heavens.11 What exactly the first followers of Jesus meant by professing his resurrection thus mapped onto a complex set of cultural beliefs about postmortem existence and glorification for the righteous, theioi andres, "divine men," heroes, and demigods held by both Jews and non-Jews, and our sources are not agreed. Paul, the earliest follower of Jesus whose written work we possess, is clear that he believes Jesus arose as a pneuma, a “spirit,” that is to say, in a divine body substantiated by subtle, fiery air, the same stuff of stars (thought divine by the ancients) and the divinized bodies of great heroes. In Mark and Matthew at least, it is quite possible that this is the state of Jesus’ risen body, which is not presented for view in Mark and is not handled, but only worshiped, in Matthew; in Luke and John, Jesus is intentionally presented as more corporeal than spirit (pneuma; Lk 24:39), and his still-healing wounds are presented for palpitation to doubting Thomas (Jn 20:24-27).12 What happened to Jesus? The earliest belief of his followers of which we have record is clearly that he was metamorphosed into a divine, spiritual being (1 Cor 15), and exalted to heaven, receiving the Divine Name, YHWH and therefore universal lordship as cosmic emperor (just like other ancient kings that received divine names upon taking the throne; Phil 2:6-11).13 The experience of Jesus' resurrection must have convinced his followers that they were right to think him messiah and that Pilate was, ironically, right to crucify him as "King of the Jews": evidently, God had seen fit to vindicate him, implying he was neither a false prophet, and that if falsely accused, his fidelity had merited the grant of the titles implied. It is from here that the kerygmatic Jesus is derived.
Continuandum in parte secunda.
See the essays in Randall Buth and R. Steven Notley, eds., The Language Environment of First Century Judaea, Jewish and Christian Perspectives 26 (Leiden: Brill, 2014). There are a few important reasons to abandon the Aramaic-only hypothesis, some having to do with how the academy inherited this idea in 19th century scholarship and some having to do with epigraphic and textual data. Crucially, the evidence suggests that Ἑβραϊς/Ἑβραϊστί means, specifically, a Hebrew speaker, not an Aramaic speaker, for which Συριακή/Συριστί existed (see Randall Buth and Chad Pierce, “Hebraisti in Ancient Texts: Does Ἑβραϊστί Ever Mean ‘Aramaic’?*”, 108).
The most recent and best introduction would be Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine, eds., The Pharisees (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021).
See, e.g., M. David Litwa, Becoming Divine: An Introduction to Deification in Western Culture (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013).
For more on this picture of the divine, see Peter Schafer, Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 17-64.
See Richard Horsley, The Prophet Jesus and the Renewal of Israel: Moving Beyond a Diversionary Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 66-157. Roman A. Montero, All Things in Common: The Economic Practices of the Early Christians (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2017).
Paula Fredriksen is probably right, too, to suggest as she does that if Jesus did perform the Temple action it likely would not have been able to attract the attention the Gospels give it: thousands of people were in the Temple complex every day, and all the more so at Passover, as were the animals they brought or sold for sacrifice; it would have been loud, crowded, and too sensorially overwhelming to notice Jesus turning over the tables of moneychangers in one of the entryway porticoes.
This is Fredriksen’s excellent and correct argument, in both Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) and When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
See C.D. Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism, 200 BCE-200 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism, 19-43.
Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism, 107-130.
See Litwa, Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 141-180.
See the arguments on these points in Candida Moss, Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity (New Haven: yale University Press, 2019), 1-40.
See Litwa, Iesus Deus, 181-214.
I have to say, I like that you don't try to push one specific vision, pious or impious, of the historical Jesus, but rather lay out the various possibilities suggested by modern scholarship. The close link between the historical and kerygmatic Jesus is helpful, because much like modern historians, it seems like even Jesus's followers didn't quite know what to make of him, and thus we get four different interpretations of his life and ministry by the early 2nd century. One of my Sisyphusian endeavors is trying to get evangelicalism (which is the world I grew up in and still have some affection for) to unapologetically embrace redaction criticism, and accept that having four Jesuses may actually be better than having one.
Editing comment: towards the end, palpitation should be palpation.