ETS 2003, Atlanta, Georgia
Excavating Jesus or Inventing a Jesus?
11
evidence utilization, researchers are always forced to select from the universe of phenomena
and this selection tends to reflect the theory he has in mind, the kinds of assumptions which
are implicit, if not explicit, in the original conceptual model.
42
The universal and unwaver-
ing opinion in social science critical methodologies is that Jesus` ministry was a sociological
phenomenon wherein he championed a socio-political cause. Elliott is representative of this
viewpoint:
Early Christian evidence in the New Testament indicates, however, that the Jesus
movement related not so much to the needs of the system as to the needs of the people,
particularly the displaced, dispossessed and marginalized. Its own interests and activi-
ties focused not on saving the system but those trapped and crushed by the system.
43
Reed expresses the same model for understanding the backgrounds to Jesus` ministry in
another book, noting,
The economic structures introduced [by Herod Antipas] by the need for higher rates of
return and taxes burdened the villagers and rural in habitants with increased demand for
taxes in kind. This sustained the ruling and social elites` need to live in more luxurious
Greco-Roman style and consume, albeit in modest amounts, imported goods. At the
same time, the peasantry was pushed out of a mode of self-sufficiency in their agricul-
tural practices to cash crops, and some were even driven off the land altogether. Marked
social inequities were increasingly accentuated and visible in Galilean culture, between
the urban elites and the rural land-holders and between the land-holding and the landless
peasants.
44
In Excavating Jesus this social science model of the New Testament era is combined with
archaeological research to do the excavation with less than satisfactory results for those
with a high view of Scripture.
42
Ibid., p. 9.
43
Ibid., p.
44
Reed, Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus, p. 178. Of course Reed nowhere discusses why increased poverty
was the necessary outcome of Antipas` urbanization instead of the creation or expansion of a middle class. He
also bases all of these observations/conclusions on the archaeological record that he claims shows a signifi-
cant shift in demographics, as Galilee was urbanized under Antipas` rule at the turn of the common era (177).
These assertions again underscore his unwarranted pronouncement of certainty of his historical reconstruction
based on limited evidence.