ABSTRACT
The scholarship that appears to have been singled out for special criticism as producing a non-Jewish Jesus has tended to be work in which Jesus is associated with Cynicism, or with peasant movements, or in which his Galilean context is given especial emphasis. One of the more disturbing aspects of the scholars' work is its focus on the Galilee as the immediate context of Jesus' activity. The Galilean identity of Jesus is used in two main ways: through the ideological separation of Galilee from Judea, such that Galileans are imagined to hold religious views that distance them from, especially, Jerusalem; and in the claim that Galilee's chequered history makes it unlikely that it was populated predominantly by ethnic Judeans during Jesus' lifetime. Richard Horsley's, a chief scholar, view is that Galilee cannot be assimilated to Judea: it has its own history, the course of which was often quite independent of developments to the south, in Judea and Jerusalem.
