the limits of variety 187
God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from
the dead’.^42
The resurrection is key to the continuation of his movement after
Jesus had suffered a shameful and agonizing death through crucifixion.
Nothing in the earlier history of Judaism had prepared for this. Even in
the stories about Jesus’ own career, the raising of Lazarus from the dead
had not been believed to imply anything special about Lazarus. It was
believed of some select biblical figures, notably Enoch and Elijah, that
they had never really died, but the notion at the heart of Paul’s message,
of the central significance of death and resurrection, was new within
Judaism.^43
This was not the only novelty in the new movement which sprang up
within weeks of Jesus’ death around the year 30 ce. Jesus’ followers
began to proclaim that Jesus had been sent by God to redeem all human-
kind, that his death had been a necessary part of the inauguration of the
Kingdom of God, and that, crucially, a belief in the power of Jesus, now
exalted to God’s right hand, would prepare any who turned to him for
salvation in the judgement to come and for eternal life. Jesus had lived
among peasants and craftsmen and taught in the small village commu-
nities of the hills of western Galilee. These were modest settlements with
olive and wine presses and storage facilities for grain hollowed out in
the limestone. Jesus had eschewed (it seems) even the small Greek cities
of Galilee such as Sepphoris, which lies only a few miles to the south of
Nazareth. He had reached out to a wider Jewish following only in the
context of infrequent visits to the holy city of Jerusalem. But within a
very few years after his death teachings about him, and inspired by him,
were to reach to the other end of the Mediterranean.
Disentangling the beliefs of these early followers of Jesus in the sur-
viving Christian texts from the overlay of later doctrines is not always
easy. In the eyes of later gentile Christians who had passed through a
process of shedding Jewish practices, the Jewishness of Jewish Chris-
tians was often suspect. Any Christian who was believed to take the
Torah too literally was vulnerable to a charge of being a Jew. Since most
of our evidence comes from gentile Christian sources, it is hard to know
how much their ethnic origins mattered to the Christians who had been
born Jews and wished to combine their new faith with the old.^44
It is probable that some of Jesus’ followers gathered after the cruci-
fixion of their leader in Galilee, where a ‘young man, dressed in a white
robe’ told them that the risen Jesus would be sighted. But for the first
decades after 30 ce both Paul’s letters and the narrative in the Acts of