48 pages • 1 hour read
Gerd TheissenThe Shadow of the Galilean
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Political and Religious Upheaval
Content Warning: This section includes discussion of antisemitism.
The Shadow of the Galilean demonstrates that Jesus, the historical figure, did not exist in a vacuum. Regardless of one’s perspective on Christianity, historical sources indicate that Jesus was a real man who was born in Roman-controlled Palestine around 4 BCE. He was Jewish, and he grew up in the political and religious landscape of first-century Palestine. He accumulated followers with a message of radical nonviolent resistance to oppression, and he was later crucified after causing a disruption in the temple in Jerusalem. Gerd Theissen’s text explores the discussions that were happening in various Jewish sects around this time. Many Jewish people believed that Judaism was in need of some reform, and some sects believed that the Messiah would be arriving imminently to usher in a new era of prosperity. Jesus was not the only person hailed as the Messiah at this time, but he was the one whose message had the greatest lasting impact.
Roman control of Palestine was quite repressive at this time, partly because Pontius Pilate did not understand Jewish law and philosophy, and he frequently made decisions that angered his subjects. The Romans, Theissen argues, wanted Judaism to be more like their own religion and the religions of other subject peoples. They wanted to be allowed to sacrifice at the Jewish temple and participate in Judaism as a display of friendship and as a way to exert control over their subjects. Because Judaism was a closed religious practice with strict laws, Romans struggled to interact with their Jewish subjects effectively, and resistance movements were common. Jewish people were not (and are not) a monolith, and resistance thus took different forms.
Theissen explores two major forms of resistance to Roman rule: that of Jesus and his followers, and that of the Zealots. Jesus advocates for nonviolence, encouraging his subjects not to resist evil but to dismantle the distinctions that separate oppressors from those they oppress. By doing so, he believes, they can usher in a new era of universal brotherhood and peace. The Zealots, a Jewish sect, find this approach wholly unpersuasive. They believe that the only way to free their people is to violently overthrow Roman rule. Jesus’s death did not have a dramatic political impact in the short term, but it did lead to the gradual development of Christianity—a religion that would ultimately spread across much of the world. In this way, Jesus’s more conciliatory approach can be seen as more effective than the militant approach of the Zealots, whose movement was swiftly stamped out.
Morality and Culpability
Theissen’s text explores complex moral questions that do not have easy answers. The first is the question of how best to resist oppression. Andreas, the book’s narrator, disapproves of both Jesus’s nonviolence and the Zealots’ militant opposition to Rome. He is uncomfortable with major changes to the status quo, instead hoping for more gradual reform. His political perspective pushes him to ask Pilate for a few concessions that could alleviate some of the rebellious energy among the Jewish people. That these concessions do not come to fruition suggests the futility of such half measures. The Roman Empire demands to be the sole center of power, and as such it will always be at odds with its Jewish subjects. No meaningful reforms take place, and Rome continues to oppress its Jewish subjects for centuries after Jesus and Andreas’s lifetimes.
Interestingly, amongst all the moral questions that characters raise in this text, not one of them objects to slavery. Andreas travels with his two enslaved workers, and no one he meets suggests that his enslavement of these men is wrong—emphasizing that while certain issues of justice were on people’s minds in ancient Palestine, other issues like slavery were simply not yet up for discussion. Even Jesus, who seems to value people in a radical way, does not mention slavery in this text.
The last few chapters of The Shadow of the Galilean are preoccupied with the question of who is responsible for Jesus’s death. Andreas feels personally guilty even though he is not directly responsible. At every turn, he has chosen the path of least resistance—looking for compromises that will allow him to soothe his conscience while preserving his peace and safety. In the aftermath of Jesus’s death, he worries that his eagerness to avoid the wrath of the Roman oppressors himself makes him complicit.
Theissen’s narrative emphasizes that Pontius Pilate, as the Roman governor in charge of Jerusalem, ultimately bears sole responsibility for Jesus’s death. The execution is an act of political oppression carried out against a perceived threat to imperial power, and all questions of complicity on the part of Jesus’s Jewish contemporaries are secondary. Andreas functions here as a representative of the moral complexity that comes with living in the shadow of an oppressive empire. The empire’s violence is so all-encompassing that it implicates anyone who simply tries to survive within it.
Historiography and the Ethics of Narrative
The Shadow of the Galilean is a work of fiction, but it is not a novel in the traditional sense. Instead, it is a thorough investigation into the historical person of Jesus, using a narrative framework to make it accessible to a wider audience than traditional scholarship typically reaches. Theissen is very clear about his approach, and he cites his historical sources throughout the text as though he were writing nonfiction. Andreas is specifically designed to be the perfect protagonist for Theissen’s needs. As a first-person narrator, he is restricted to his own perspective and to the information available to him. He often engages in open-ended conversations with others whose perspectives differ from his own. In these ways, he is very much like a contemporary historian. He is able to address complex issues without being dogmatic in his conclusions. He leaves room for ambiguity and for the many things that cannot be known after 2,000 years.
Andreas is fictional, but he is designed to represent the reality of his time and place. People like Andreas probably did exist in Jesus’s time, and they may have had conversations similar to the ones in this text. Andreas represents a lot of what is known about Jewish life in Palestine at the time. Plausibility is really the best that most scholars hope for when they examine Jesus as a historical figure. There is simply not enough surviving information to make firmer claims about exactly who Jesus was, what he said, what he believed, and what happened in his life. This uncertainty about Jesus is not necessarily a religious issue for Christians, as the Gospels provide a fairly complete doctrinal examination of Jesus’s life. However, it is an issue for historians, both religious and secular, who want to paint a picture of Jesus as a historical figure. The uncertainties that Theissen raises are important to keep in mind for anyone making specific claims about the events of Jesus’s life.
Theissen emphasizes his historiographical approach through his letters to Dr. Kratzinger. He is careful to acknowledge his failings, respond to criticism, and answer questions that scholars, Christians, and lay readers might have about his methods and conclusions. Like Andreas, Dr. Kratzinger is fictional, but the letters still serve a narrative and critical purpose, allowing Theissen to dramatize an argument he is effectively having with himself about the ethics of fictionalizing the life of a historical figure.
