Jesus and Identity

New Testament scholarship lacks an overall interpretive framework to understand Judean identity. This lack of interpretive framework is quite acute in scholarship on the historical Jesus, where the issue of Judeanness ("Jewishness") is most strongly debated. A socio-cultural model of Judean ethnicity is developed, being a synthesis of (1) Sanders' notion of covenantal nomism, (2) Berger and Luckmann's theories on the sociology of knowledge, (3) Dunn's "four pillars of Second Temple Judaism" and