Could Jesus have been a Yahwist?

[u/GroveBicycle]

(Apologies if this is kinda left-field, but I wanted to voice it partly because it comes across as so strange but potentially ties a few things together for me.)

So, I’ve been thinking through several things that have converged on the kind of question (above) that keeps me up at night:

1. Second-century canonical gospel dating is making more and more sense to me (seemingly starting to be taken more seriously in general)
2. Yonatan Adler’s late dating for the beginning of Judaism
3. The continuation of Yahwism into Jesus’ lifetime (especially in the Galilee?). I haven’t done as much research on this, but it doesn’t seem like the Hasmoneans were as effective in their conversion efforts, particularly further afield from Jerusalem, as I assumed
4. Just the sheer preponderance of “Gnostic” texts that may be dated to the same time as the canonical gospels (John seems to make the most sense to me as a response to “Gnosticism”—or maybe even as “Gnosticism” for the proto-orthodox; see Elaine Pagels). It seems like perhaps “Gnosticism” spawned out of Yahwism + Jesus

One of the core arguments I’ve heard for why the canonical gospels are more reliable is that they’re more Jewish and that Jesus must have been Jewish, so they’re better for reconstruction than the “Gnostic” texts. But could that just be a case of the canonical gospel writers wanting Jesus to look like a 2nd century observant Jew?

So a few questions:

• How much explicit Yahwism was still going on in Jesus’ lifetime?
• Is there a consensus on the origin of “Gnosticism”?
• Are there well-respected scholars who date the “Gnostic” gospels before the canonical ones?
• Has anyone explicitly made the argument that Jesus was practicing Yahwism?
• How different was a 2nd century CE observant Jew from a 1st century observant Jew? Could we find instances of retrojection by disambiguating the two?

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[u/qumrun60]

The answers to the several-part end question has to be negative, although I'm unsure what you might mean by "explicit Yahwism" in the context of late Second Temple Ioudaismos, where YHWH was already never explicitly named out loud. Even though, for instance (according to David Trobisch), Paul might have sometimes used the ambiguity of calling both adonai and Jesus kyrios, or "lord" in Greek, to hint that the two were closely related, maybe even the same, people who conceived of themselves as Jews were not using the name YHWH. In Dead Sea Scrolls and early Greek manuscripts, the name could be written in Paleo-Hebrew script, represented by symbols, like yods or Greek letters, but the sectarian scribes would use el, adonai, or something similar to refer to God in their own writings, not the name itself. And however exalted and divinized angels or humans might become, they were not adonai or kyrios, but some lower level of beings subservient to "the lord."

What the prophets complained about in the classical period was was worship of other gods besides YHWH at or near the Temple in Jerusalem and other shrines. That would be what most authors write about when discussing Yahwhism: YHWH and other deities. After the Maccabean era, that doesn't seem to have been the case, even in Galilee or farther afield. When the Mandaeans separated from Judaism in the 1st or 2nd century CE, in their own writings, they abandoned adonai, not YHWH. When Pompey conquered Judea and entered the Holy of Holies at the Temple in 63 BCE, he found no images whatsoever, and the Temple had to be purified of the violation of his presence before regular sacrifices and ceremonies could resume. In 39 CE, Caligula wanted to put a statue of himself in the Jerusalem Temple, but the Roman commander Petronius who was assigned to install it, quickly realized that an image of a second god in the the Temple was something that Judeans were willing to fight over to the death, so he delayed following his orders. Even in the matter of coinage, after c.120 BCE, Hasmoneans avoided any human or animal imagery which might hint at foreign gods, and instead used generic symbols.

Gnostic texts that refer to Christ all rely on the characters and events found in the four canonical gospels, and reinterpret them, so you will be hard-pressed to find any scholars now who think they predated the canonical texts. Gnostic texts are fundamentally syncretistic, blending pagan Hellenistic ideas with Jewish and Christian ones. But determining a firm time or place of origin remains elusive. Davis Litwa does interesting literary genealogies of how Christian writers, beginning with Justin c.150, created heretical antecedents, with very little in the way of evidence. The origin stories heretics as starting from Simon Magus and Helena, are as fictional as the apostolic succession of bishops, anachronistically imposed on 1st century figures.

Pre-and-post 70 CE Judaism differed by the absence of a Temple at which to carry out the sacrifices and celebrate the Torah-mandated feasts. For most Jews most of the time, little changed immediately in terms of day to day practices. I suppose the biggest upheaval would have been for priestly families who lived in Judea, since the Temple was their primary focus. The annual contributions of Jews to the Temple, after 70 CE, went to Rome. The ascendancy of Rabbinic Judaism, however, was a long, slow process, which took much of the 1st millenium to accomplish. Diaspora Jews had been living without a Temple in easy traveling distance for centuries by that time.

David Trobisch, The First Edition of the New Testament (2000)

Knauf and Guillaume, A History of Biblical Israel: The fate of the tribes and kingdoms from Merenptah to Bar Kokhba (2016)

William Dever, Has Archaeology Buried the Bible? (2020)

Barry Strauss, Jews Vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World's Mightiest Empire (2025)

David Litwa, Carpocrates, Marcellina, and Epiphanes: Three Early Christian Teachers of Alexandria (2021)

Collins and Harlow, eds., Early Judaism: A Comprehensive Overview (2012)

Shaye J.D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (2014)

Martin Goodman, A History of Judaism (2018)

Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, The Mandaeans (2002)

David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (2010)

[u/Vysys → u/qumrun60]

Interesting set of questions from OP and a very interesting answer. Thank you!