A stress test for the strong homogeneity thesis

Abstract

Over the last 30 years, there has been an attempted return to a particular way of framing and interpreting the primary Jesus narratives. This approach contextualises Jesus against the backdrop of the wider religious world. Proponents claim that the primary Jesus data was culled from a wide pagan template or common stock of ubiquitous religio-mythic concepts. I refer to this position as 'the strong homogeneity thesis'. Though this way of assigning literary causation and activity to the Gospel tradents has been largely rejected by scholarly community, it has been offered recently by some academics. In what follows, I offer a new way of evaluating this thesis that tends to avoid the shortcomings associated with past and present efforts to establish this way of explicating the Jesus tradition.