The cosmopolitan nature of the Roman Empire in the first century C.E. reached even to the province of Syria-Palestina, which included Judea and Galilee. Yet it seems clear that the historical Jesus and the New Testament came from a Jewish context, not a Hellenistic one. Peter Schäfer, Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies at Princeton University, describes the current scholarly consensus regarding the Jewishness of Jesus:1 That the historical Jesus was a Jew, that his followers were Jews and that the Gospels as well as the letters written by the apostle Paul are Jewish writings, firmly embedded in first-century C.E. […]