Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict

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Both books start with a review of the classic three quests for the historical Jesus, the first emerging from the European Enlightenment and culminating in Albert Schweitzer (1906); the second (between the two World Wars) pioneered by the studies of Bultmann and Dibelius and characterised by the attempt to establish criteria for the historical Jesus; the third led by Géza Vermes’s insistence on the Jewishness of Jesus and bolstered by new archaeological discoveries, such as that of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. One of the ways James connects his interest in these two periods is through his focus on how people understand and negotiate historical change. His work on political rhetoric, for instance, looks at how the social, economic, and geopolitical upheavals have led to distinctive ways of constructing what the Bible and religion "really means" Similarly, his work on first-century Palestine looks at how socio-economic changes in Galilee and Judea intersected with traditions associated with Jesus and how these were then interpreted, ignored, rethought, modified, adapted, and so on. For many young men of the time, there were only two realistic responses: banditry or hitching themselves to a prophetic itinerant movement. This volume greatly accomplishes such a task, and does so in a thoroughly compelling way. Of all the Marxist works I have read on the origins of Christianity and on Jesus (Machovec, Kautsky, Kalthoff, Lenzman, Kryvelev, Robertson, Mongar, Chiakulas, etc.) this is perhaps the most fully engrained, and truly Marxist (historical materialist) analysis of Jesus and his life, and, personally, I think that as far as biographies of Jesus are concerned this is probably the best they can get.

I think that this volume is, perhaps, going to go down as one of the most notable biographies of Jesus to have been published. I consider it a strong corrective to the works of past scholars like Sanders, who consistently framed Jesus as this special and unique individual. Some readers may be irritated by the retro-fitting of 19th and 20th century language to a first century setting (the Twelve Disciples are referred to as the Jesus Movement’s “Politburo,” and the desired millenarian outcome as a “Dictatorship of the Peasantry,” for instance).TWO books about the historical Jesus, taking diametrically opposed positions. The former is written by a distinguished Christian scholar, formerly Director of the prestigious Farmington Institute for Christian Studies, and seeks to show that the Gospel accounts are basically historically reliable. The latter is written from a Marxist viewpoint, presenting Jesus not as “a Great Man of history”, but as a religious organiser, formed by and emerging from the peasantry of Galilee and Judaea, the vanguard of a new political party with its own politburo, a dictatorship to serve the interests of the non-elite peasantry, but also with a mission to the rich. James Crossley (MF Norwegian School of Theology and Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements) will present his new book co-authored with Robert J. Myles (Wollaston Theological College, Perth, Australia)

As of yesterday, my co-author James Crossley and I submitted the final author-approved manuscript of Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict to our publisher Zer0 Books . There needs to be more study, not of history as a science, but of the genres of historical writing and their way of asserting the truth, or, rather what truth they mean to assert. It is often the message rather than the details of the story which is important and, therefore, inspired. Several times, Watson uses as an example the hat worn by Napoleon at Waterloo. What is important from the biblical point of view is not which hat he wore, but what the author wishes to convey by mentioning it, nor whether skeletons rose from their tombs at the death of Jesus (Matthew 27.52) rather than the message that this conveys.

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Crossley and Myles locate Jesus’s class position as that of a tekton. Being born and raised in this artisan rural working stratum, Jesus and his immediate family would have felt the full force of the economic dislocations and displacements caused by the massive Herodian building schemes at Sepphoris and Tiberias. This combination produced a millenarianism that was both ideologically focused on right behaviors, and adroitly pragmatic enough to embark on a sustained “mission to the rich” to swell its numbers and financing. Crossley and Myles have recaptured the mind-blowing excitement generated by the original quest to distinguish the Jesus of history behind the myth. Although Jesus scholarship has struggled to let go of the fantasy of a man who dropped from the sky, this book places Jesus firmly on his feet, a product of his agrarian class and imperial repression. Crossley and Myles have found Jesus: in the Galilean dirt under his fingernails.