The so-called Third Quest of the historical Jesus has been marked by a variety of portraits. Jesus has been depicted as a rabbi, a sage, a prophet, a philosopher (perhaps even a Cynic), a holy man and a Messiah. What lies behind these discrepancies is a lack of consensus about context and differing assessments of source materials. The present chapter will treat three important areas of Jesus' background: (1) context, (2) family and (3) formation. Of special interest will be the extent of the Jewishness or Hellenisation of Galilee in Jesus' day and the question of how well trained in Scripture Jesus was.

CONTEXT

Galilee of the early first century ad was profoundly Jewish, though a thin veneer of Graeco-Roman culture was present. Agriculturally rich and strategically situated, Galilee was a region over which the Roman Empire maintained firm political control, alternately through client rulers (viz. the Herodian dynasty) or through the direct administration of Roman governors. Galilee measures some 69 km from north to south, and some 49 km from east to west. Although most of this territory ranges in elevation from 600 m to 1200 m above sea level, Lake Gennesaret (or popularly Sea of Galilee), some 21 km in length (north to south) and 5–11 km wide, is situated about 215 m below sea level. In the time of Jesus the lake supported (and still supports) a thriving fishing industry (cf. Strabo, Geog. 16.2; Pliny, Nat. Hist. 5.15; Josephus, J.W. 3.506–508; Mark 1.16–20 parr.; Luke 5.1–10; John 21.1–11).

The perennial question of Jesus' significance for humanity has occasioned much discussion and assumed new dimensions in recent years. It is accentuated by the UN Declaration on Human Rights that no human being may be persecuted or discriminated against on the basis of religion. There is a growing tendency to see Jesus as one among the many prophets of world religions: Moses, Mohammed and Buddha, to name but a few. At the same time, Jesus has always been recognised and is increasingly being accepted by peoples of every tribe, language and nation as God's unique agent of human salvation, 'the Savior of the World' (John 4.42). Others again contest this Christian claim, holding that the teaching of their prophets is equally a good road to God. Thus, as prophesied by Simeon, Jesus continues to be a sign that is contradicted, as out of many hearts thoughts are revealed (Luke 2.34-35). What is it that makes him so attractive to people of every race and nation, across cultural, sex and religious boundaries, and yet such a bone of contention?

Friends and enemies have a unique power to define who we are. They locate us socially, within the world of what other people do. That localising capacity of friendship and enmity is not merely a matter of their exposing the extrinsic coordinates of who we are in terms of birth, status or education. Our relationships to friends and enemies express who we are and seek to become, as we engage or reject the kinds of behaviour, thought and feeling others represent to us.

JOHN THE BAPTIST AND HIS CIRCLE

Jesus’ relationship to John the Baptist presents the strongest case in point. Certainly the most influential figure in his life, John gave Jesus the focus on purity that, in one form or another, became an emblematic feature of his activity. Jesus did not simply meet his teacher in adulthood (as a superficial reading of the gospels would suggest), but apprenticed himself to him as a youth.

Josephus’ famous report about John in Antiquities 18.116–19 is a flashback, related to explain the opinion among ‘some Jews’ that the defeat of Antipas’ army at the hands of Aretas, the king of Nabataea, represented divine retribution for his treatment of John. What Josephus does not say, but the gospels do attest (Mark 6.18–29; Matt 14.3–12; Luke 3.19–20), is that John had criticised Antipas for marrying Herodias, who had been married to his brother Philip. Josephus’ account dovetails with the gospels, in that he gives the details of Antipas’ abortive divorce from Aretas’ daughter in order to marry Herodias (18.109–2). Josephus also explains that this was merely the initial source of the enmity with Aretas, which was later exacerbated by a border dispute that preceded the outbreak of hostilities (18.113).

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JESUS’ JEWISHNESS

The theme of the present chapter is more pervasive than appears at first sight. Although Jesus’ Judaism seems only one among his many aspects treated in this volume, it relates to almost all of those other aspects.

Not only can the plain facts of his life be supposed to make historical sense only when seen within first-century Jewish society. More importantly, we can hope to understand how his disciples came to see him as Son of God and Messiah only if, like them, we try to interpret his life and work in the framework of Jewish history and of Jewish views of history. Jews of the period ‘read’ the events of history alongside Scripture, and the significance of particular happenings would be expressed and measured by their correspondence with the sacred verses. This was also the spiritual and historical context of Jesus and his disciples, and it is in this context that they must be understood.

Put the other way around, if we would isolate Jesus from Judaism to start with and see his relationship to it as something accidental, the relation between the historical and the theological perception of his person would of necessity become very problematic. Precisely this is what has happened during the past two centuries, as other chapters show in detail. Historical criticism sought a ‘historical Jesus’ strictly separate from the ‘kerygmatic Christ’, the subject of Christian faith. The corollary was that the subject of faith had nothing to do with human history. It seems to become clearer and clearer today that this asphyxiating dilemma is reduced to a historical problem of manageable dimensions if we start at the other end and consistently consider Jesus and his earliest believers within their Jewish context.

This chapter follows up the overview of the previous chapter by focusing on the message and miracles of Jesus. These themes may seem to be an awkward pairing: whereas the teaching of Jesus is generally considered to be readily accessible and of continuing relevance, the miracles raise problems for the modern mind. For Jesus himself, however, message and miracles were interrelated, as they were for his opponents.

When the imprisoned John the Baptist sent his disciples to ask Jesus about his role and his intention, Jesus told them to tell John what they had heard and what they had seen, and then elaborated by couching his reply with phrases taken from Isaiah. This key passage (to which we shall return) links together the message and miracles of Jesus:

“At Your Age,” a relatively unknown 1929 short story published in the Saturday Evening Post, contains all the trademark elements that F. Scott Fitzgerald's readers had come to expect by the end of the Jazz Age: there is a handsome, sympathetic hero embarrassed by his conventional, middle-class background; an irrepressible flapper whose flamboyant petulance symbolizes the frivolity of youth; a contemptuous, vain rival who steals the girl away with a flashy car; a doting, dull mother flummoxed by her daughter's anti-traditionalism; and even talk of petting parties, those scandalous teenage necking extravaganzas that This Side of Paradise first brought to public attention nearly a decade earlier. And yet “At Your Age” departs from the familiar Fitzgerald formula in at least one significant way. Unlike Amory Blaine, Dexter Green, or Jay Gatsby, Tom Squires loses the girl not because he is too poor, but because he is too old. At fifty, Tom is attracted as much to Annie Lorry's age as to her beauty or social status. She is for him a veritable fountain of youth, revivifying memories of “the warm sureties” of his own adolescence and reintroducing him to “the very terminology of young romance” (Price, 288). The pathos of the story arises from Tom's belief that age is a mind set, not a chronological measure. “I am not old,” he assures himself. “At fifty I’m younger than most men of forty” (Price, 278). But when Annie betrays him with a swain thirty years his junior, he is stunned by the foolishness of his Ponce-de-Léon pretensions. Chastising her in a parental tone, he realizes “with a shock that he and her mother were people of the same age looking at a person of another.” By story’s end, Tom resolves to act his age: “He had lost the battle against youth and spring, and with his grief paid the penalty for age’s unforgivable sin – refusing to die” (Price, 291).

In the very young Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), the driving engine was an impulse toward lyricism and extended evocative description - what the fledgling author thought of as “poetic” language, often included for its own sake. In his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), the driving force changed. The more seasoned young author began to concentrate on objective circumstance and the forward motion of narrative, but the book was less rich in the signature Fitzgerald element of extraordinary evocative power. In his third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), Fitzgerald's genius, luck, and artistic experience succeeded brilliantly in combining the impelling energies of the first two books. His structural method was the presentation of each concrete event within a progression of related events, a series of meals and parties, by means of hauntingly evocative patterns of language that intricately reflected events upon each other - themes that Fitzgerald called “elaborate and overlapping blankets of prose.” In the process of combining lyrical description with objective circumstance he mastered the connections between themes and narration. He discovered how to build a story out of tightly controlled and intricately woven patterns to express ideas. The expression itself grew from his remarkable power with evocative language.

In an all-too-brief professional career of approximately twenty years, Fitzgerald wrote 178 short stories, most of them for sale to commercial magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. Thirty-nine of these stories were collected in four separate volumes, one accompanying each of the four novels which Scribners published during Fitzgerald's lifetime: Flappers and Philosophers (1920) was the companion volume for This Side of Paradise (1920); Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) for The Beautiful and Damned (1922); All the Sad Young Men (1926) for The Great Gatsby (1925); and Taps at Reveille (1935) for Tender is the Night (1934). In addition, he wrote a play, The Vegetable, published by Scribners in 1923, and scores of nonfiction pieces, many of which appeared in commercial magazines during his lifetime. At the time of his death he was working on an elaborately conceived novel, The Last Tycoon,which was published posthumously in 1941 as a fragment with Fitzgerald's own notes. When he was not writing for publication, Fitzgerald wrote about his life and about his observations on life in his ledger and in his notebooks, both of which are now available in book form. In spare moments he wrote letters - letters to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribners; letters to his literary agent Harold Ober; letters to literary acquaintances, friends, and family - letters, often about his writing, which now fill four substantial volumes. Above all else Fitzgerald was a writer, a literary artist, who early shared with Edmund Wilson his immodest goal of becoming “one of the greatest writers who ever lived” (Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, 70).

During the peak of his contemporary popularity, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived abroad - mostly in France - for five years and eight months, much of that time pursuing a frenzied social life that impeded his literary work. His European travels included lengthy stays from May 1924 through the end of 1926 and then from March 1929 through September 1931, as well as a five-month sojourn in mid-1928. On foreign shores he experienced misery and elation: his wife Zelda's romance with French aviator Edouard Jozan; completion, publication, and celebration of his third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925); new friendships with Ernest Hemingway and with Gerald and Sara Murphy; innumerable alcoholic binges and embarrassments; false starts on a fourth novel and increasing self-doubts; domestic rivalry and acrimony; Zelda's first nervous breakdown and treatment; his hotel life and fugitive magazine fiction. Only after returning to the US did Fitzgerald publish Tender is the Night (1934), a work that despite its flaws plumbs the paradoxes of desire more profoundly than did Gatsby. Understandably, Tender has preoccupied scholars and biographers seeking insight into the author's life abroad, for its thinly veiled treatment of the Fitzgeralds' domestic calamities, set against the crazy violence of post-war Europe, reveals much about the author's own identification with expatriate culture. But the many short stories set at least partly in Europe likewise merit closer attention, less for their biographical connections than for their representations of the American migration to Europe after World War I.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known as a chronicler of the 1920s and as the writer who, more than any other, identified, delineated, and popularized the female representative of that era, the flapper. Though it is an overstatement to say that Fitzgerald created the flapper, he did, with considerable assistance from his wife Zelda, offer the public an image of a modern young woman who was spoiled, sexually liberated, self-centered, fun-loving, and magnetic. In Fitzgerald's mind, this young woman represented a new philosophy of romantic individualism, rebellion, and liberation, and his earliest writings enthusiastically present her as an embodiment of these new values. Although she is often seen now as a mere fashion of the bygone Jazz Age, the flapper should be regarded as one of the great authentic characters in American history. A virtual emblem of American modernity, she and all she stood for were envied, desired, feared, and emulated throughout much of theWestern world, and it was Fitzgerald's particular version of the flapper that “women imitated for more than four decades” (Solomon, Ain't We Got Fun?, 22).

Fitzgerald’s early and widely publicized association with the flapper, however, has led many readers to misconstrue and to oversimplify the author’s portraits of women and of relations between the sexes. It is important to understand that, almost from the start, Fitzgerald was ambivalent toward his “creation,” fearing that the flapper embodied not freedom but moral anarchy and lack of direction. Increasingly he used her as a symbol not only of a new order, but also of social disorder and conflict. As he wrote to Edmund Wilson in May 1925, “If I had anything to do with creating the manners of the contemporary American girl I certainly made a botch of the job” (Life in Letters, 110).

The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, seems to speak directly to its current audience about love and existential freedom. Yet the ideas we bring to the story may not be the ideas that the story brings to us. The book was written before most of its readers were born. It inhabits a different world, with barriers between men and women, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, rich and poor, capital and labor, educated and half-literate. It was a more defined and morally harder world then: at no point in the novel does Daisy Fay Buchanan ever appeal to the transcending authority of love, or Jay Gatsby to that of equality. Social judgment matters more. Daisy knows that life has many things more permanent than love, and Gatsby knows, or Fitzgerald knows for him, that equality is only a political virtue.

Part of the meaning of the text can be explained by sources, influence, background. Research on these things has concentrated on three broad issues: the novel’s development from Fitzgerald’s earlier writing about love and money; the influence of other writers like Joseph Conrad and T. S. Eliot; and its powerful retelling of the story of Scott and Zelda. Fitzgerald’s own “Winter Dreams” (1922) and “‘The Sensible Thing’” (1924) are both about men who need money, in love with women inaccessible without it. The first of these stories “examines a boy whose ambitions become identified with a selfish rich girl.” Part of it was absorbed into The Great Gatsby: “Indeed, Fitzgerald removed Dexter Green’s response to Judy Jones’s home from the magazine text and wrote it into the novel as Jay Gatsby’s response to Daisy Fay’s home.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald will be remembered primarily for his novels and stories, but during his twenty years as a professional writer, he also produced an important and revealing body of work in the form of articles and essays and correspondence. The very best of these - the autobiographical pieces written in the 1930s - command the lyrical magic and emotional power of his most lasting fiction. And even at their least meritorious, in the advertisements for himself Fitzgerald composed as a beginning author, these articles reveal a great deal about the way he wanted to present himself to his readers. Read chronologically, they trace the rise and fall of his career from the publication of This Side of Paradise in March 1920 to his final years in Hollywood.

In accepting This Side of Paradise for publication, editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribners asked Fitzgerald for a photograph and some publicity material. “You have been in the advertising game long enough to know the sort of thing,” Perkins added (Dear Scott/Dear Max, 21). In fact, Fitzgerald had worked only four months for the Barron Collier agency in New York, from March to July 1919, but he did understand how promotion could help sell books and was eager to cooperate in the enterprise. In a letter presented at the American Booksellers' Convention and included on a leaf added to several hundred copies of the novel, he began to establish a public personality designed at once to shock and attract his audience.

While Fitzgerald's experiences in Hollywood during the last years of the 1930s contributed heavily to the planning and writing of The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, a glimpse at the novelist's earlier life and work suggests that this novel was almost foreordained. Fitzgerald had been interested in, maybe fascinated by, movie-making from a very early period in his life. He wrote film treatments and scripts and, in addition, used what he knew about Hollywood in several of his short stories as well as in The Beautiful and Damned and later in Tender is the Night. He had mixed feelings about film as an art form during these years, and yet was convinced of its power over its audience. With the advent of talking pictures, he mulled over the possibility - and felt sorrow - that someday it might replace the novel. In 1936, he wrote: “I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion” (Crack-Up, 78).

This gloominess reflected the beliefs of Oswald Spengler in his Decline of the West, a work Fitzgerald referred to a number of times in his writing. In addition, Fitzgerald’s statement was written during a period of despondency. His writing during his last years in Hollywood suggests, however, that his pessimism about the future of film may have been wavering. Even though he planned to kill off movie man Monroe Stahr at the end of The Last Tycoon, he portrayed Stahr as a man who did not totally believe in “the tritest thought” and “the most obvious emotion.”

The histories of composition for F. Scott Fitzgerald's first two novels, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), resemble each other very little. This Side of Paradise was an inspired cut-and-paste job, a merging of bits and pieces of a failed novel (called “The Romantic Egotist”) with some short stories, a handful of poems, and a one-act play. Fitzgerald assembled the book during the summer of 1919 in a desperate attempt to prove himself as an author and as a prospective husband for Zelda Sayre, his golden girl. He produced the manuscript in a rush of improvisation, revised it quickly, submitted it to Charles Scribner's Sons in the early fall of 1919, had it accepted, and saw it into print the following spring.

The Beautiful and Damned, by contrast, was a carefully planned piece of literary composition. After a false start that produced “May Day”(1920), one of his finest stories, Fitzgerald settled down and wrote The Beautiful and Damned from start to finish. He sought advice about the novel from his friend Edmund Wilson and from Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribners, and he took their suggestions seriously, revising and polishing throughout. The narrative was serialized in Metropolitan Magazine beginning in September 1921, then published in book form in the spring of 1922. The Beautiful and Damned readsmuch more like a conventional novel than does This Side of Paradise. The narrative is coherent; the characters are consistent (as they are not in This Side of Paradise); and the themes are carefully articulated throughout. That does not make The Beautiful and Damned the better book: it lacks the verve and energy of This Side of Paradise, but it makes up for its deficiencies by providing readers with a blueprint for character types and moral questions that would preoccupy Fitzgerald for the rest of his writing career.