One of the most helpful things we can do in getting back to the context of Yeshua’s life is to try and see him in the categories of the day. Yeshua was not a rabbi in the modern sense, someone who went to seminary and who led a synagogue and met with the board and so on. He certainly was not a priest or pastor in the modern sense. He was not a philosopher, a cynic, or a sage either.

To really understand him, we have to get back to the categories in which he would have been viewed in first century Galilee and Judea as well as how he might have been viewed by Romans and Greeks.

In my 2004 book, Jesus Didn’t Have Blue Eyes, I considered Yeshua as rabbi, teacher, prophet, wonder-worker, and Messiah. In a recent commentary on the gospel of Mark in the famed Hermeneia series, often regarded as the ultimate in critical scholarship, Adele Yarbro Collins discusses Jesus as prophet, Messiah, and teacher. I find her work on this topic to be insightful, a different view than what has often been presented before.