Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict. By James Crossley and Robert J. Myles. Zero Books, 2023
This book takes a materialist approach to the emergence of the Jesus movement, informed by contemporary texts and archaeological findings. It uses critical historical imagination through a lens of Eric Hobsbawm’s ideas on banditry as a form of pre-political (and pre-capitalist) form of peasant resistance. They provocatively describe the Apostles as a sort of politburo to this millenarian movement. They defend their category of peasantry as being appropriate for the economic conditions of the time, and against notions that fishermen and carpenters would be of some sort of relatively privileged class.
They paint a picture of the Jesus movement as an itinerant band with a ‘mission to the rich’. This is evidenced by the Gospel sentiment ‘I have come to call sinners’. The itinerant band was thus supported by wealthy individuals donating to their movement in a form of atonement. The group itself preached that ‘he who is last shall be first’ and a time would come when the wealthy sinners would be overthrown, and the world rid of landlords, tax collectors and unjust kings. The Jesus movement would then rule.
Certainly, as Norman Cohn noted in his book The Pursuit of the Millennium, that was an ideology read into the Gospels repeatedly throughout the Middle Ages as peasant movements led by Beggar Kings and the occasional pseudo-Baldwin would rise up with the promise of the end of work and that landlords, priests and usurers would be put to the righteous sword. ‘A dictatorship serving the interests of the peasantry’ as Crossley and Myles term it.
They trace the material source of this movement to the upheaval in first-century Galilee. Households were being broken up by elite building projects in urban centres. Antipas was the ruler of Galilee at the time, and he was responsible for rebuilding the town of Sepphoris (which had recently been razed by the Romans after it was seized by rebel bandits) and the town of Tiberius. Such building involved taxing peasants, clearing them from the land and drawing labour from the countryside to the city coupled with unemployment when the project was complete. They note that Jesus’ reputation as a carpenter means he was more broadly a builder, and he may have been involved in such building projects.
Amidst such dislocation, then, the Jesus movement was socially conservative, with hardline views on promiscuity and marriage, and it looked to the restoration and observance of a peasant version of the Jewish law (the authors present an intriguing reading of the parable of the good Samaritan as being about purity laws rather than the goodness of the cultural Other in the form of the Samaritan).
Crossley and Myles suggest that this itinerant band, preaching repentance to the wealthy became a form of family in itself, to give stability in a time of trouble. It also may have spent most of its time in the rural parts of Galilee, avoiding such cities as Sepphoris and Tiberius (which might account for any absence of any contemporary textual accounts, other than a couple of mentions in Josephus’ Antiquities). When the Jesus group went to Jerusalem during the Passover festival, it would seem their disruption in the temple was, by this account, as much a stand against idolatry and profaning of the Temple (such as with the erection of a Roman eagle at the Temple gate, or with issues around the symbolism on some of the money used there) as it was about the exploitation and avarice of the moneylenders themselves.
Disruption of the Temple during Passover would not have escaped the notice of the authorities, and it seems there is sufficient textual evidence in the record that Jesus was tried and executed as a bandit/rebel for these actions. As is often noted, given the shameful character of crucifixion, the early Jesus movement would be unlikely to make up such a fate for their leader, suggesting that it was such a known and established fact that they had to stick with it.
A major plank of the argument is around the word ‘sinners’ which the authors argue should be read as a reference first and foremost to the wealthy, but more broadly those without the Jewish law, which would also include foreigners. This mission to the rich sinners also therefore could become a mission to non-Jewish people. This provides a plausible explanation for the ability of the ideas of the Jesus movement to spread on a cross-class basis throughout the Roman empire, gradually losing its regional specificity. Hence why the early movement had to grapple with issues such as observance of the Jewish law.
The chief sources remain the Gospels, however, and the authors spend a lot of time noting the discrepancies between the various accounts, and showing how passages were added to the account that might be influenced by the needs of the movement as it developed and in a sort of dialogue with previous Gospels to overcome barriers: Joseph of Arimathea moves from being a member of the Sanhedrin to being a wealthy follower of Jesus, in order to overcome changes of the account of the role of that body in Jesus’s execution.
All of the extant texts are from after the time of Jesus’s ministry, and the writers show the legend growing with younger texts being more elaborate. They note there is a notional ‘Q’ text that was the original source material of three of the Gospels. The bare bones of the story is that there was a group preaching around the first century, practising baptism and calling ‘sinners’ to repentance, and that their apparent leader was betrayed and executed.
This is a plausible and interesting account of the growth of the Jesus movement that does not rely on a miraculous nor charismatic leader, but looks to the social conflicts of the first-century Near East. Although some of its arguments rest on a certain amount of philological knowledge (such as the meaning of the word ‘sinners’) it is largely accessible and a pleasurable read.
Pik Smeet
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