ABSTRACT
This chapter situates Jesus of Nazareth especially within the pre-70 ce realities of Roman Galilee. Both Josephus and the Mishnah subdivide Galilee into Lower Galilee, Upper Galilee, and the valley of Tiberias. The understanding of the context of Jesus of Nazareth has been enormously enriched in the past forty years by interdisciplinary engagement with comparative social sciences. All of these scholarly conversations involve assumptions about how power and culture were related in the early Roman empire and in Roman Galilee. Homomorphic macro-models become necessary to highlight important general features of the agrarian social world. The significant Galilean elites at that time, of course, derived from the Herods and their clients and the Jerusalem priestly elites and their clients. All contemporary Jesus scholars concede that Jesus' central concern was expressed through the metaphor 'Kingdom of God'. The 'Jesus movement', it seems, takes form and shape in the post-Easter period in Jerusalem.
