Greenness in the New Testament

Abstract

The Jewish thought-world which influenced Christ and the first Christians was holistic. The Bible and extra-biblical literature picture God as rejoicing in His creation. If we are properly to understand Jesus and his first followers it is necessary to understand that thought-world, including ancient mythologies which predate the Exile and were still current.It is now commonly accepted that during Jesus’s lifetime there was, even in Palestine, a varied spectrum of Jewishness, including different degrees of adherence to the Jerusalem establishment. Not everybody acclaimed Jesus’s execution, and the conduct of persons like Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea and Jesus’s own Galilean disciples (the women particularly) suggests pluralism. It has been suggested that it may have been not the gentiles but disaffected Galileans who first accused Jews of deicide or Christicide.'According to the gospels Jesus understood his mission in terms of a cosmic conflict with fallen angels who tormented human beings. There is a remnant of this ancient mythology in Genesis 6:2 ‘The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose.’ Christ and his contemporaries still lived in a world peopled by angels—good as well as bad. This mythology also included memories of ancient Jewish kingship. The good king moved between heaven and earth, maintained cosmic order, and was in conflict with the fallen angels and their monstrous offspring. The king, God’s holy one, preserved the integrity of creation: humans, animals, plants, their habitats and the elements. Our best account of this mythology, so important for understanding Christ and his ecology, is almost certainly in 1 Enoch.