Mwandayi, Towards a new reading of the Bible in Africa – spy exegesisa contending for domination and control for the future of humanity is
mirrored also in the Jesus movement is what I am turning to now.
Espionage and the Jesus Movement
For practical reasons, the term ‘Jesus movement’ is used here in refer-
ence to “the group connected with Jesus during his lifetime, to whose
members of the Gospels usually applied the term disciple (Gk. mathetes,
a grammatically masculine term that is somewhat misleading, since the
group also included women).”^22 After this group, one finds later follow-
ers of Jesus being described historically as well as sociologically as the
Jerusalem early church or the ‘churches of Judea’ as Paul names them
(Gal 1:22; 1 Thess 2:14), and as the messianic churches, that is, those
churches which rose after 70 AD and reflected in the Gospels of Mat-
thew and John.
To understand espionage tendencies in the Jesus movement one needs
first to understand the environment from which this movement arose as
well as the spiritual battle that defined Jesus’ mission. Jesus actually was
born and grew up when there was so much hostility in Galilee towards
the Romans and in particular towards Herod Antipas, the puppet gover-
nor of Galilee. Jesus’ maturation and career coincided, in other words,
with the emergence of Antipas whose reign was symbolized in the
emergence of Sepphoris and Tiberias as administrative centres in Lower
Galilee.^23 Even though the Galilean Jews participated in some aspects of
an urbanized world that was now in their midst, such as trade and
commerce, they still regarded themselves as a distinct group whose
values differed from those of the urbanized centres: Sepphoris and Tibe-
rias. What angered them most was when Herod took away the patrimo-
nial land from most of them and forced them to pay taxes and rents to
the new Herodian rulers based at Sepphoris and Tiberias. Antipas’
reign, as rightly noted by Sean Freyne, had marked the rapid develop-
ment of an agrarian economy along lines that were directly opposed to
the Jewish patrimonial ideal enshrined in the Pentateuch, an ideal that
(^22) E. Stegemann & W. Stegemann, The Jesus Movement: a social history of its first century,
Scotland: Augsburg Fortress, 1999, 187.
(^23) Cf. S. Freyne, ‘Galilean Questions to Crossan’s Mediterranean Jesus’ in W. E. Arnal &
M. Desjardins (eds), Whose Historical Jesus? : Studies in Christianity and Judaism 7,
Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 1997, 68.