Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Jesus Christ: Historical Materialism, Class Conflict, and the Jesus Movement

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED May 22, 2023 Professors James Crossley and Robert J. Myles join Breht to discuss their fascinating work  "Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict". Together, they discuss their application of historical materalism to the life of Jesus, the difficulty of studying and sourcing the ancient past, the gospels and what they offer (as well as how they differ from one another), the mode of production and major classes of Jesus' era, John the Baptist and his ideological influence on the Jesus Movement, Jewish Millenarianism, Jesus' crucifiction, the Jesus Movement after Jesus' execution (and purported resurrection), and much more!    Robert's website: https://www.robertjmyles.com/ James' website: https://censamm.org/about/people/crossley ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. I have a wonderful episode for you today based on a wonderful and fascinating book that I came across, put out by zero books. It is called Jesus, A Life in Class Conflict, and it is written by James Crossley, based out of the UK, and Robert Miles, based out of Australia. I have them both on to discuss this wonderful work. In the first 30 minutes or so, we discuss historical materialism, the methodology of historical materialism as applied to the life of Jesus Christ, the fact that such an analysis has really never been done, while there have been Marxist attempts to sort of cover the topic of Jesus

or engage with it, an actual thoroughgoing historical materialist analysis of the life and times and material conditions of Jesus. I'm not aware that one exists other than this book. which makes this book not only incredibly unique, but I think incredibly important. And I would love to see more sort of historical materialist analysis of major religious figures from different traditions as well. But this one was, when I came across it,

I knew I had to have them on, and this discussion does not disappoint. So for the first 30 minutes or so, we discuss historical materialism, how they apply it to deep history. This is ancient history. There's not historical, like there are for World War I and World War II or whatever, it's much harder to try to extract

objective truth from deep, deep history. So we talk about the difficulties in that, the way that they approach those difficulties and try to solve them. We talk about the Gospels and whether or not they're sources of legitimate history or the differences between the Gospels when it comes to historical sort of sourcing, et cetera. So that's the first 30 minutes, and then after that we get into the story itself from Jesus' childhood all the way through to his crucifixion and the legacy of the Jesus movement. We challenge a lot of people's presumptions about who Jesus was, what the Jesus movement was,

what it was trying to accomplish. It is just a fascinating and deeply educational conversation, hopefully, but certainly book. And I absolutely loved it. very, very excited to share this with you today. And as always, if you like what we do here at Rev Left Radio, you can join our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. In exchange for $5 a month, you can get access to three bonus Patreon exclusive episodes every month and more, including the main way you can get a hold of me, because as this podcast

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But without further ado, here's my conversation with James and Robert on their newest. book, Jesus, A Life in Class Conflict. Enjoy. I'm James Cressley. I'm professor of, well, I'm professor of things to do with religion and history. I've got the two parts of what I do. One is I work on the English radical tradition. from, well, probably from the 14th century to the present.

But the other half of me is I work on the historical Jesus. I've worked at University of Sheffield, University of St. Mary's in London, and I currently work for the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and millinarian movements and for MF in Oslo, Norway. Hi, I'm Robert Miles. I'm a senior lecturer at New Testament at Wooliston Theological College, which is a college of the University of Divinity in Australia. My writing mostly focuses on the historical formation of the early Jesus movement

and the socioeconomic realities within that context. But I'm also very much interested in the life of the Bible and religion in 21st century contexts, particularly within the world. political contexts and I suppose the life of the Bible within contemporary capitalism as well. Well, it's a real honor to have both of you here today. As I was saying before we started recording, that this book feels like a book I've always wanted to exist and didn't know I wanted to exist until I came into contact with it. I find it absolutely fascinating. We'll get into it, of course, but it really is a work of historical materialism, making sense of the life and times

of Jesus Christ through the lens of Marxist historical materialism, which, which I think is so bountiful when it comes to what can be generated and the insights that can be sort of extracted from that analysis. So I'm really, really happy to have you both on. I loved the book. Again, the book is Jesus, a life-in-class conflict put out by zero books. Highly, highly, highly recommend any listener that's interested at all in historical materialism or in Jesus or in Christianity to check this book out. But let's go ahead and get into it with a sort of orienting question for both of you. Can you kind of talk about why you wanted to write this book and what you kind of hoped to achieve with it?

I mean, me personally, I've been working on historical Jesus. I mean, it was really why I got into doing doctoral work and post-doctoral work was really all driven by the question of who Jesus will. I've been working on historical Jesus questions probably for on and off in some way, over the past least 25. years, I think. And I've published some technical stuff over a long time. But my community has also gone in a different direction. It's related, I think. But as I said in my introduction, I've also worked on English political history as well. But I've done a lot on the historical Jesus. And I continue to do quite a lot on the historical Jesus. And what I hadn't felt I'd done is a proper life of Jesus. And, there were plenty of lives of Jesus out there but for me coming at this from a materialist perspective there was not really

there's no real serious life of Jesus, full on life of Jesus from a materialist perspective there have been Marxists, there have been anarchists, there have been people with similarish kind of perspectives coming at the historical Jesus but a full on life a full scholarly life of Jesus

I don't think properly existed and I wanted to do that and I wanted to make sure that was done. So that was and I've long been kind of interested in the English Marxist tradition

and the people like Eric Hobsbaum, Robinie Hilton, Christopher Hillton, Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson and people like this. And their focus obviously was on Britain and the transformation from feudalism to capitalism

and what may come next. And whilst there were people who worked on the ancient worlds, some very good people who worked on the ancient world, it was never, these are the kinds of questions about the relationship between a figure like Jesus and Christian origins to the modes of production.

We're not, there's work done there, and there's some good work done there. But not really a full-blown analysis of a life in this kind of context. And it's much more difficult to do this with the ancient world in some ways. I mean, you can talk about feudalism, and you can talk about capitalism,

and you can make some pretty useful generalisations about what those economic systems are. But the ancient world gets a bit messier and it's not quite as straightforward. Yeah, I think the work of ancient historians can contribute a lot to this and the relationship between individual figures and their economic context. So that's what drove me to get involved and write a book on the historical Jesus. I suspect Roberts aren't wholly dissimilar. and the work we've both done overlapsed pretty significantly in terms of our interests, but I'd better let Robert describe Robert's motivations.

Yeah, thanks. I think similarly to James I've been working in the field for a number of years now, not quite as long as James, but I first got into the study of the Bible, the academic study of the Bible when I was at university, went through and did my PhD, and it was actually during my PhD that I started to get more and more interested in

Marxism and historical materialist approaches but of course my my focus discipline is New Testament, New Testament studies and this discipline I think this academic discipline

is like many modern academic disciplines shaped and influenced sometimes in subtly and unknowingly ways by kind of bourgeois ideology or modern capitalist assumptions. And of course, this is often a problem when you're looking at the ancient world where this was not a capitalist society that these events are purported to have taken place in. And so what a lot of my work has focused on is how to try and read across cultures, I suppose,

to try and read across, to put it in Marxist terms, different modes of production. Texts produced in an entirely different social formation or mode of production. How do we do that? In terms of historical Jesus research, you know, this has been going on for a couple hundred years, this investigation into, you know, what does the sort of the earliest evidence say about who Jesus, the person the historical figure who walked, talked, and breathed in first century Palestine was. Who was that person? And there's been a lot of, you know, technical arguments and a huge body of research. And it's also a very contentious discipline. But as James was saying,

no historical materialist view of this that's written by, you know, scholars like ourselves who are pretty well immersed within this field. And as well, body of research, yet exists. Not quite in the format that we've put together in this book, Jesus is a Life and Class conflict. And one of the severe limitations, and I think, you know, this really gets at the point about why did we want to write this book, is that historical Jesus research tends to adopt the great man view of history. So the idea that, you know, historical change is generated by the singular genius

of innovative great individuals or entrepreneurs perhaps entrepreneurs of thought thought leaders and whatever and Jesus seems to continually have been cast in this light within academic historical critical research on the historical Jesus whereas we're wanting to turn this on its head

by drawing on the tools of historical materialism to say that, well, great men are but the products of the social conditions that were built, you know, both before and during their lifetimes, they are, they may be conduits for popular movements and so on, but historical change doesn't just happen simply by the individual exploits of great men. And so we wanted to really, you know, broaden our lens and to try and understand the historical Jesus as both a product of the class conflict, of his time and also to take view of the wider popular movement, what we call the early Jesus movement that he was a part of. And that would have also shaped him in his own ideas and teachings. Yeah. So this is an incredibly unique book and that is the first attempt to apply

Marxist historical materialism to the full life of Jesus, even though other Marxists have attempted to use Marxist methodologies to approach the subject. But that's why I found this book, unique and interesting and that's what both of you are saying in your own ways and of course the great man of theory as many of my listener great man theory of history as many of my listeners will know is the sort of you know error is the is the thing that is solved by a more robust historical materialism and there are few people in the history if if anyone that that plays into the great man theory more than jesus christ i mean we can talk about certain political figures like a hitler or something and some people will have a little easier a job

sort of attempting to make sense of like oh if hitler didn't exist the nazi movement as a whole probably still would have it just wouldn't have been a different figure but jesus stands even above the most you know notorious um political figures in history as a sort of divine figure and that i think pushes people in direction of great man theory even more but what you guys do is situate jesus as a product of his material conditions and situate him in the not only the material conditions but the active movements and class conflicts of his time, which is so, so fascinating. So let me go ahead and ask you this, because given that this work is a work of historical materialism, it's obviously important to try and grasp Jesus as an actually existing historical figure, but that in and of

itself can be difficult and even controversial. So, you know, some atheist, for example, will claim that Jesus didn't even exist. There was no historical figure named Jesus, and it was just an amalgamation created after him. And, you know, other people, will make other claims about whether or not he existed. So did he even exist? And how do we know? Well, this is, there's, yes, is the short answer to that. The longer answer is, it's complicated.

Within mainstream biblical studies, I mean, it's pretty much accepted that Jesus existed. When you get to, there's certain challenges, and I don't mean this necessarily derogatory, derogatory, whatever. that more to the flinges, you do get some challenges to this idea. But the main kind of conferences, journals and things like this, this is usually the standard working assumption. And it is an assumption in some ways. Now, the problem is, I think scholars over many decades get used to the idea, you know, you no longer have to justify why this figure exists

because you kind of all assume it. And sometimes scholars get some fair, and unfair criticism for having this kind of view from outside and online and things like this. But it is quite helpful, I think, to go back to basics and explain what you mean by the historical Jesus. And what scholars typically mean by the historical Jesus is this figure who walked, was active, did what he did in Galilee and Judea, you know, somewhere around the year 30, as distinct from the presentations of him in the Gospels and the early Christian proclamation of him.

So sometimes, and this has been criticised, but I still think it's a useful distinction to make. The distinction is made between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Now this can break it down and can be, you know, people try to make it a more complex thing and all this, but it's a very useful working way of thinking about it. and scholars will differ in the level of the Jesus of history that they think could be reconstructed

from, you know, the Gospels tells all sorts of useful information and we can reconstruct something like a stylish version of his teaching as an adult and so on and so forth through to the more sceptical ideas that, you know, the Gospels have worked over this stuff so heavily that we can't know very much. I think it's... Some of the challenges from outside to questions of history has to have been interesting because I think, like I said just before,

it can help you re-fairnly think these things. And for me, when I work on other areas of history, and particularly my modern areas of history, and when I see the levels of uncertainty with far more data, it made me a lot more skeptical about what we can know about the historical figure of Jesus or maybe brought out some of my assumptions more.

And some schools have developed criteria for trying to establish whether this saying or this act was happened or didn't happen and things like this. But it's really, it's almost impossible in many cases to say whether this or that sane event or whatever happened. I mean, the best we can do is get behind, is to think what were the sort of ideas that predated the Gospels that were particular to? Galilee and Judea around that time that were different from the emerging Christian movement

and I think we can do this in it in several instances we can talk about broad themes that were early and that's why and it's actually quite helpful I'm not a complete skeptic in this sense I just think we I'm skeptical in the sense I don't think we can ultimately prove a lot of the details I mean I don't think we can disprove a lot of the detail either so I would say things like the earliest perceptions of Jesus,

the earliest material we have about Jesus would involve, for instance, ideas of this figure was an interpreter of the details of Jewish law and Jewish purity law, which didn't, a lot of which didn't have really any interest

for this emerging Christian movement that was concerned with non-Jews or Gentiles. But it's material that's often particular to Galilee and Judea. So whether Jesus engaged to me with the Pharisees over details of hand washing or the details of the Sabbath, it's certainly possible, possible.

I can't prove it. But I could, I think I'd be much more confident saying we have, the earliest material we have about Jesus involves questions of the details of how you observe the Sabbath or how you wash your hands before the bird meal or should you wash your hands before meals and things like this. So I think we can make, we've got to work in terms of generalisations. And there are other things, such as the idea of,

and we might come on to this, the idea of rich people repenting and turning from their ways. A lot of this is about returning to the commandments, to the Jewish commandments and engaging in social justice, in ways that were not areas obvious for a new movement that's trying to encourage non-Jews, where it's not necessarily about a return to the commandments, it's about other ideas about changing ways.

That's a bit vague, but my basic point is that we have to talk about themes and what are the earliest themes that are associated with Jesus. And this is why I think it's also doubly helpful because it gets us away again from the Great Man theory that this is not, the earliest material might not come from Jesus, but it could come from the kind of movement around it. It's a product of the movement around him. Is it a product of, for instance,

and I think we can do a bit of this, the agrarian-galalian world, the Galilean peasantry, does this stuff make sense in that kind of context as distinct from, say, some of the material from Paul, some of which comes from urban settings and things like this?

And so it's those kinds of it. So we can talk more generally about communities and people or Jesus movement as we keep using the phrase. Robert? Yeah, I think just to reaffirm what James is saying, and then to add something to it, I think, yes, that's absolutely right that, you know, in our book, we're skeptical about what we can know about the historical Jesus with confidence. However, we're focused on, you know, what were, or arguing for,

what were the earliest themes and ideas that can be associated with him and his movement, and we've got certain arguments and ways of getting back to that early material, some of which James is kind of outlined there, hopefully. But I think also it does raise, again, a broader question to do with class and class conflict and historical materialism and this kind of approach to doing historical analysis. And that's really how we talk about non-elite figures, through history, particularly in ancient history or kind of the pre-modern period where so few sources, evidence of the lives of the non-elite actually exist in history compared to, you

know, the lives of kings and queens and great leaders and so on. And given that kind of dearth of evidence that we have or the data that we have, generally speaking for the lives of non-elite people, you know, how do we actually reconstruct their lives? We have to ask some pretty serious methodological questions about this. Otherwise, we risk erasing the non-elite from history altogether. I mean, that really is a serious risk, that if we say, well, you know, there isn't enough evidence for these non-elite figures through. history, whoever we may be talking about, does that mean that they didn't exist? And I think we just need maybe, my view, is we think, you know, a little bit of methodological humility

when it comes to talking about non-elite people in history. Yes, of course, we're not going to have the same kind of evidence and be able to come to the same kind of more certain conclusions that we might be able to about certain elite figures. But that doesn't mean non-existence, right? And, you know, to talk about Jesus specifically, I think we actually have quite a lot of good evidence for a non-elite person of his time and place. And I think that is itself interesting and warrants investigation. And that's really what gets me interested in this whole area. Yeah, that's fascinating stuff. And of course, you know, the Gospels play an essential part in trying to understand the life of Jesus. I think if you ask an average Christian,

you know, how do we go back and try to understand Jesus and his story and his time and place? Many of them would point immediately or at least think immediately, oh, the Gospels, of course. But they themselves have, as you guys point out, inconsistencies. They were written by different people at different times. They rely on different sources, et cetera. So how should we understand and relate to the Gospels as sources of historical events and what important differences exist between the Gospels and their authors. Yeah, this is the heart of the issue of trying to reconstruct who the historical Jesus is and what we would call, say, the earliest material about it.

There's, I mean, I've got a fairly traditional view, and I think I'd probably speak for both of us here, in that John's Gospel is less useful than the other Gospels for reconstructing the historical Jesus. There has been some attempts to rescue John's Gospel. but I think it often comes from a place of driven by conservative Christianity, which is fine, but it could also be wrong. But the reasons are, and I think it reflects later ideas about Jesus from the end of the first century, maybe the turn of the second century. So we get in John 5 and John 10,

these stories about Jesus claiming he's equal with God, and the opponents who are called the Jews, or translated as the Jews in most English translations, want to kill him for it. And this looks like it's later Christian polemic trying to justify developing high ideas about Jesus that were not there in the other Gospels in Matthew, Mark and Luke. And if these ideas were earlier,

Rye would be have been left out. And the simplest explanation is that they're developed later by figures like the people are person responsible for John's Gospel. So the best sources tend to be, well, almost always come from Matthew, Mark and Luke. And these are called the synoptic gospels because there is clear literary dependence between them. Narts gospel is almost certainly the earliest gospel. And then there's theories about what other sources might behind it. the most common one is that there is

an more or less an independent source that gets labeled Q, a shorthand, whether this is a lost gospel or a shorthand for disparate sources, depends on the scholar. So the standard model would be that there's Mark and there's Q as the two main earliest sources, and Matthew and Luke use them. There are challenges to this theory,

but the standard one is that Mark is the earliest is pretty much widely accepted by critical scholars today. And so, I mean, we more or less take on something like the model of Mark and Q as the two earlier sources, with independent sources feeding into Matthew and Luke as well. So this can be quite useful when you start looking at themes, topics, issues that occur independently, say something, you might get the theme of the reversal of rich and rich, Pua in Mark's Gospel, you might get another theme of reversal of Rich and Pua

in a Q or independent source, which are the two different stories, but they've got the same kind of ideas going on. So that might point to an independent theme that predated the Gospels. Now, there's a lot more work that has to go into, but that's the kind of

things you can do. Or again, to go back to the question of law and purity and things like this, we get stories about law and purity and independent. sources, some of which have got, I think, some fairly obvious Aramaic backgrounds to them little bits and pieces. And so you can collectively start bringing these sources, these little bits and pieces together. You can see where do they make sense, where might they have originated from, and then try to explain how they got into the Gospels and things like this. But the key

thing is you can start using these to reconstruct bits and pieces of themes and details that predated the Gospels themselves and were inherited by Mark, by Matthew. you and by Luke. So it often has to be done on a case-by-case basis or a theme. I prefer a thematic basis. So you might look at a text in Mark's Gospel and a comparable text in Luke's gospel or whatever and try to explain how these seemingly obscure themes come to be in the gospels. And some of the time is simply because they're early themes that resonated in Galilee and they were not going to get rid of them in a hurry because they're associated with Jesus

and then they have to be reworked and developed and made sense of for a new and emerging audiences for the gospel writers. But you also said something that was quite important, I think, is that we have four gospels. We can guess where they were written. We can make some guesses about authorship, but I mean, even some of the best guesses about authorship,

I mean, take Mark's gospel, for instance. I don't know who wrote Mark's gospel. Some people think he was a figure called Mark, and we don't really know that much about that figure anyway. The two best guesses for where Mark was written at Rome, on the one hand, and Syria or Galilee on the other, I mean, they're two quite different parts of the world, and you realize how much speculation there is about the sources themselves.

So we, I mean, it's pretty good, considerate it's the ancient world, the sources we've got, But anyone who's familiar working with more recent history, if medieval history, but certainly modern history, obviously, we just don't have the level of material to do a full-on biography in the modern sense. Robert, would you like to add anything? Yeah, I think just one thing I'd like to add is that some of the more recent scholarship on the Gospels themselves has been focused on the genre of the Gospels. and I think sometimes some Christians perhaps of a more conservative bent will just assume that the Gospels are kind of like newspaper reports of the events or what have you but I think that's to kind of misgenre misgenre the Gospels themselves

which scholars have said are appeared to be very similar or quite like a form of Greco-Roman biography, which were themselves kind of the ancient versions of Great Man presentations. So they tend, these sorts of writings tend to adhere to certain literary conventions that, although, you know, are very interested in depicting their figures within certain events and so on,

tend not to be so interested in putting them in correct chronological order, for example, but also that they often accentuate the individual importance of these figures as great men. So in order to do this historical materialist reading or this kind of history from Brulow, we have to actually really account for that genre, of the Gospels themselves and the way in which that shapes the material that they're presenting. You know, added into that is that these Gospels are kind of written after the fact when, you know, Christianity is already becoming this movement, spreading around the Roman Empire, and they are very much concerned with proclaiming Jesus as the Christ, the, they're caught up in the, you know,

as a grand theological claims that are being made by the movement and presenting the life of Jesus in a way that that you know gives context a background to those claims so we we it's not an easy task to to you know figure out uh what material um uh kind of would be you know strictly historical in the sense that we're talking about of of going back um to some of the earliest themes associated with the early Jesus movement. Yeah, so that genre point is really important. Let me go ahead and kind of summarize some of the stuff that both of you said, and let me know if I get this more or less right.

Chronologically speaking, the gospel of Mark seems closest to the actual events in question. And then there's this other source, independent source, that is labeled Q, that are kind of, you know, the main sources from which then Luke and Matthew, chronologically after Mark, draw from to create their Gospels, which are very, you know, sort of similar in various ways. And then it seems that a period of time passes, and then there's the Gospel of John, which is much more, perhaps, you know, religious, less historical base. There's more ideology, perhaps, coming into it. And so that makes John, perhaps, if we're going to rank them slightly less reliable than the other ones, Mark's slightly more reliable. And of course, you're also triangulating with whatever other historical sources you

can find. So I believe Josephus, I think he's a Roman historian. Correct me if I'm wrong, but he seems to be outside of the Christian movement, outside of the Jesus movement, commenting on it as well. And so you can kind of use that as another source. Is that more or less correct? Yeah, I think the broad outline is correct. I think I've made a couple of qualifications. One is Josephus may have a report of Jesus. This is the extent of which he's disputed. But even so, I think Josephus is of minimal use for the historical Jesus himself because, like, with Tacitus or someone, a Roman historian who mentions the movement, the movement already exists at this point and it's just a report in some ways on who this founding figure was. So it's not of any particular use in, no additional use for material or anything like that, I don't think. Quite when, I mean, it's possible, for instance, that John's gospel was written close in time to Luke's gospel, for instance.

And you could still make the argument, I think, that Luke retains more material of use for understanding the historical Jesus. John, I would be hesitant to use the words, no, I would not be hesitant to use the word ideology, or more, I would be hesitant to use the word more religious. what I would say is there are ideological it's just that one's early ideology one's later ideology if I can put it that way

so it's a chronological thing in a way so they've got their own religious concerns as did Jesus but John reflects later ideological and religious concerns

than the others or to put it another way we are more likely to get the earlier ideological and religious concerns from Matthew Mark and Luke but really

I mean, I'm quibbling with details there. The gist of what you say is pretty much right. Okay. Wonderful. Yeah, that's incredibly interesting. And now we've sort of gotten the context and the methodology taking care of. We understand that this is a work of historical materialism. We grappled with some of the difficulties of trying to find good historical sources going that far back.

We've talked about the Gospels. So now let's get into the basically the story itself, the bulk of the book, which is Jesus, his movement, and the conditions in first century, Palestine. So let's start with this question. What mode of production existed in Jesus's time? What were the major classes, the dominant political structures, and how was class conflict sort of manifesting at this time? The mode of production is quite difficult question when it comes to the ancient world, especially when you go to the eastern Mediterranean, because it's not all quite developed in the same way as other parts of the Mediterranean, for instance.

A strong case can be made for the sustained use of slavery and slavery being a dominant mode of production. I think this is entangled with other important developing modes of production. So I'm not sure if we can always talk about an overarching one that explains everything.

These things develop in different times and contexts and settings. But I think what we can say with a bit more certainty is in in Galilee, Judea, in the Eastern Mediterranean, you have a model where the, and put this crudely, but it's a useful working model where the aristocrats in the towns, in the urban centres, extract surplus from the countryside. And that's pretty normal and have been for some time,

so why would it make things different? Well, what is happening in Galilee, and we'll come to Judea and a minute, but what's happening in Galilee where Jesus was born and raised is that there were two major urban developments as he's growing up so the just up the road an hour's walk away was Sephirus which was raised to the ground around the time Jesus would have been born and rebuilt and up towards the Sea of Galilee was Tiberius

and these urban centres extract resources from the countryside to be built. There was a bit of a debate, and it's a very misguided debate, and I think it's been pretty badly framed in many ways in historical Jesus studies and in studies of Galilee. It's about the standard of living, I mean, some historians will say some really kind of, I think, kind of really careless things about saying there was there's no sign of revolt everything's were good people's lives

were improved there was creation of employment and things like this on the other hand you get a kind of crude vulgar Marxist model is that this was a special era of oppression and the Jesus movement was the reaction against it I think we tried to be a lot more nuance than that in that for some people this would have led to some improvements

material improvements in life for others it would not some would have been opportunist and so on and so forth. But what we do get, and this is a really interesting passage in Jilsefus, and this is where Jilsefus, the Jewish historian, a Jewish Roman historian, writing from him, is helpful because he explains the building of Tiberius, for instance,

and that people, aristocrats wouldn't have been given, or certain people were given gifts of land, other people possibly removed from the land, and this is a significant upheaval as Jesus is growing up. will be losing their traditional household patterns. This is quite a dramatic change for the lives of people, and this is clearly sometimes for the worst. And in Judea to the south, where Jerusalem was,

there's a massive rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple, again, takes resources and labour and so on from the countryside, and there are other urbanisation projects as well. and again these things have different effects on different people but this provides a context for different competing material and ideological interests in the eastern Mediterranean and helps us explain and I think we'll come on to why the Jesus movement and merge when and where it did

and some of the claims and concerns it made and why it had a degree of popularity when and where it did. Robert? Yeah, I'll just add a couple of things to that just to flesh it out. I think one thing that lays behind this urban development that's going on in Galilee is the Roman imperial situation that kind of casts a long shadow over the whole region. So in the lifetime of Jesus, you know, the Roman Empire is the largest and most expansive political and imperial entity that has had ever existed up until that time and all of

Palestine was under either indirect or direct control of Roman power depending on which part you were looking at and these urbanization projects and Sephirus and Tiberius in particular but also elsewhere in Judea that had been going on under the herods who were aristocratic from an aristocratic family of the area but who had been installed as kind of puppet kings or lackeys of the Roman power that backed their own these urbanisation projects were very much trying to integrate the region into this broader imperial economy effectively to be able to, you know, extract more wealth from the surrounding countryside.

In the case of Tiberius, which was built on the foreshore of the Sea of Galilee, it enabled better connected elites to kind of dominate the lake economy, the fishing that was going on on the lake economy, which would have had an impact on, you know, smaller family-based fishing cooperatives, such as some of the male disciples who were named within the gospel material. So it would have created all sorts of interesting changes and upheavals for some as well, both economically and socially. And, you know, just to kind of reinforce that idea of the Roman power that was sitting behind all of this, Tiberius itself was named after the Roman Emperor at the time, Emperor Tiberius, you know, just to reinforce that point. some of the archaeological remains from the rebuilt Sephirus

showed that it was quite highly, you know, Romanized in its architecture and these urban environments would have had populations that were full of wealthy cosmopolitan Jews from the Jewish population, but perhaps also from elsewhere, but who were seduced by the delights of Roman culture, So, you know, as well as there being a kind of class conflict erupting here, this could also be coded in different kind of cultural understandings as well between, say, a clash between Roman ideas and Jewish ideas or in other ways as well that I hope we get to explore. Yeah, so that's the background sort of economic and political context in which, you know, Jesus was born. So with that in mind, can you kind of talk about Jesus' childhood and the broader context into which he was born and raised and sort of how that shaped him as an individual?

Yeah, we can see a little bit. This is where the Gospels are very limited in what they can tell us. I mean the stories of Jesus' birth and infancy we might be able to pick up little details here and there and hints here and there of where he's from and so on but they're kind of obviously fairly fantastical stories as well so we have to be more creative in thinking about well what kind of education would he have had and things like this

so he would have probably got standard Jewish stories about the heritage of the history the law, the traditions and so on from synagogues which may have simply been just a gathering in the village not necessarily a strict building or may have been

a strict building that was a synagogue but a gathering of some source where this would have happened it's not entirely clear that he would have learned to read there is a fairly convincing argument I think that he could have been illiterate

and it's striking that when you go from Mark's Gospel and see what Matthew and Luke do to Mark's Gospel in Mark 6 there is an attempt to make Jesus a more scribal figure someone shifting the emphasis away from his background as an artisan or labourer or something like this we know that he I think we're probably on fairly safe ground by saying that he was brought up as a labouring figure we know the usual phrase is carpenter

it's probably broader than that as a agricultural worker well no sorry I mean more something like a labouring figure could work with stone or wood or just generally and artisan might be a useful label to cover that

and so we can paint those kind of general pictures he probably would have been expected to run the household as the grew older as the oldest male and things like this and this is why it's quite interesting in the gospel tradition that the breakdown of household

and the creation of an alternative household is a theme we find independently in different source material that it probably reflects some of the breakdown of this in Galilee as he's growing up so we could do things like that we can talk about Jesus' upbringing, but as for the specifics in terms of like a sort of hard biographical account, not so much, not really. Yeah, anything to add to that, Robert? Yeah, I can

just add, so in the Gospels and the four Gospels, only two of the Gospels, Matthew and Luke, contain infancy narratives, what we call infancy narratives, you know, of the kind of the birds and And the stories that most people will be familiar with from the nativity story or the Christmas story. But that nativity story is itself a compilation of those two stories in Matthew and Luke, which are when you look at them side by side, completely different. They also are kind of added later to the material, right? like there's no there's no infancy narrative in mark mark gospel of mark begins with jesus's adult organizing so what that means is i think as james has rightly said with you know

we can only sort of speak in vague or broad terms we can say well he was probably you know associated with a small village of nazareth he probably um worked uh as a as a tectonic carpenter or builder or construction labor or something like that. But I think also we can fill in some of these gaps by using a bit of historical imagination, by placing Jesus and as compatriots within some of the upheavals that were happening as a consequence of those urbanization projects

that we were just talking about. So in the building of Tiberius and the rebuilding of Sephirus, the effects that this would have had on the countryside and, you know, for inhabitants of small villages like Nazareth where the character of social and labour organisation was being changed, there would have been increased demand on their labour for certain, and competition as well, which would have led to all sorts of changes, including, you know, the creation of landless peasants.

So peasants needing to be moved on to make way for all these building projects or for other reasons to support the infrastructure of these urban centers. You have the influx of kind of precarious day laborers with insecure work, increasing levels of indebtedness to landlords, familial breakdowns due to underlying pressures, banditry was something that would rise up often in response to these, and I think also, you know, just the prospect of destitution and kind of itinerancy as a consequence of being displaced from traditional life patterns was a very real prospect that, you know, if these things, things weren't being experienced by Jesus and his closest associates, he would have been aware of

these things happening to other people within and other families within his vicinity within the countryside of Galilee. So this is a broader context of urbanization, of displacement. This has impacts on culture, on society, on the family structure and family formation. So this is a time of, you know, upheaval, of change, and it is disorienting to many. people for obvious reasons, you know, not unlike many other periods in human history of dramatic shifts and change in the sort of political, social, and economic tumult that that can create. So this is the broader context in which Jesus is born and raised. And of course, we have some, you know, gospel, you know, discussions of the early life of Jesus,

as limited as they are. We have the sort of fairy tale version in our heads of the nativity scene and the three wise men. You know, most everybody in the Western world will be familiar with that. but a lot of the details are obviously going to be missing and so we're going to have to sort of, you know, deduce from general trends in the society at the time of what his life, his early life was probably like. So that's all really, really important and interesting stuff. I find it endlessly fascinating and just trying to triangulate in on, you know, the details of this one person's life who historically, source-wise, we have very little to go with, but we do know the general dynamics of what's happening at that time.

So with all of that in mind, you focus next on a really interesting figure, and this is one that I would love to learn more about, and I really loved your work on in the book. Because in chapter three, you focus on John the Baptist as a sort of famous millenarian figure and a sort of ideological mentor, if you will. So who was John the Baptist, and what role did he play in the life of Jesus? Well, John the Baptist seems to have been a particularly popular prophetic style. millinarian style figure of the time. A number of these seem to have popped up in the first century, and we may come to the question of millinarianism in due course. But he is one who arguably was, at the very least,

as important in the popular imagination as Jesus, if not more important, for many at the time. And he, without trying to get into too much of the details, he clearly predicts some dramatic supernatural intervention in the imminent future that it's there is an overlap with Jesus and the Jesus movement maybe to the point that they were even active side by side but not necessarily in conflict one another

it does seem to a John the Baptist movement does seem to have had a significant influence on Jesus and the Jesus movement in the in the sort of general apocalyptic and millenarian terms certainly, and the call for people to change the ways and things like this. John likewise is a product of his time. It's interesting that he's remembered as the whole countryside. It's an exaggeration doesn't matter of Judea going out to see him. We also have an independent stuff on John the Baptist from Josephus,

which is particularly important because it's not got the more elaborate explanation for his death as you get in the Gospels, which is a fairly gossipy story about his head getting cut off and the blame put on certain women. In Josephus, it's a fairly brutal, typical account of how you deal with these kinds of figures, how Rome would have dealt with these kind of figures, how local rooms would have dealt with these kind of figures, and that is you've got a figure out there in the wilderness with a significant following

and what do you do with them or you kill them and you can ask questions later or you may not even bother to ask. But this, John the Baptist was killed by Herod Antipas he was the local ruler and this seems to have been a particularly controversial decision it wasn't simply just another prophet that was killed he seems to have been a particularly popular prophet

that a lot of the Jewish populists were very unhappy that he was killed and when Herod Antipas lost a battle they said this was punishment for how he treated John the Baptist so he was a popular figure and the fact that he was killed for being a popular figure wasn't unusual and it's an important context for understanding Jesus that I think where I would agree

or where we might agree with certain conservative scholars here is that that Jesus almost certainly did predict would have predicted the very likely possibility he would be killed I don't think it's just simply the gospel writers looking back and fitting this into the life of

Jesus to explain why he died I think is very likely that Jesus knew that his actions would lead to his death, because it's exactly what happens to any kind of figure who has a following in certain contexts, and if he was active at Passover, he must have had some awareness that he could die like John the Baptist. So with John the Baptist looming there in the background, you've got the idea of not only the influence of things like Apocalypsism and Milinarianism, but you've also got the looming over your shoulder that death. You know, you could,

Jesus and his closest followers were putting their lives on the line by having a following in this kind of context and they would have known it. Yeah, and Robert, you can add anything you want but also maybe if you can also throw in some of the and so far as you know what they are, the ideas that John the Baptist were promoting

that were so dangerous to the ruling class. Yeah, yeah. I think just, yeah, following on exactly what James was saying, The usefulness of looking at John the Baptist's movement is because he was wanted, you know, in terms of constructing this life of Jesus and the early Jesus movement, was that John was another one, or the movement associated with John the Baptist, was another one of these popular first century Jewish social movements that, like the early Jesus movement, was emerging as a kind of symptom of wider socioeconomic upheaval. or at least the perception of deeply felt crises. And within that kind of context, these social movements, these Jewish social movements

often took on what James has referred to as this millinarian or apocalyptic thinking, which was particularly widespread within that context of the time. And it was a way of, I suppose, both, you know, threatening and dreaming about a time that, you know, could happen imminently or soon when divine forces, when supernatural forces, God would come in and intervene and the current power brokers of society, the current elite who were in power, would be cast aside and a new age or a new kingdom would be inaugurated. And so John the Baptist and his movement is quite clearly, it seems, promoting this idea of a coming judgment when these things will happen.

And it seems that the early Jesus movement adopts this kind of thinking as well. But, you know, this also is an opportunity to talk about some of the other interesting popular social movements in the first century, which again are kind of similar, both similar and different to what the early Jesus movement were doing, what John the Baptist movement were doing. So there's also, we find out from Josephus and also actually the Book of Acts and the New Testament has references to a popular first century prophet known as the Egyptian who combined this idea of super natural intervention and an age to come with violence of violence of, version, such as overthrowing the city of Jerusalem. And, you know, Josephus, interestingly, kind of dismisses this figure as a charlatan and a false prophet. He gathers this massive popular following of something like 30,000, and according to Josephus,

they fall for his propaganda. I should point out that Josephus was, you know, writing from an aristocratic class position, right so he's often quite dismissive of these popular movements but he's still useful as a historical source in this way because he's because he still mentions them right even if he's he's scathing of them and another one another movement that that cropped up around this time was this popular movement associated with the figure of thudus who led a movement to the river jordan where he announced that he would separate the river thereby allowing people to passed through it. And, you know, again, this is this is one of these millinarian type social movements

because it envisages radical transformation of the current age into a new age through dramatic actions and divine intervention. And in this case, Thudis was tapping into well-known Jewish traditions about Moses parting the Red Sea to deliver his people to freedom. So, And, you know, as James mentioned, these popular movements or the leaders identified with these popular movements would often die. You know, they would be killed because of the perceived threat that those in power would view them with. So Fudus eventually loses his head. and it's interesting that actually the book of acts, although, you know, with this early Jesus movement is trying to show how the Jesus movement is different in some way, it actually

suggests still that there were some authorities in Jerusalem who saw the new Jesus movement as comparable to the Thudis movement. So from, you know, the perspective of the elites in power, they couldn't often distinguish between these different millinarian groups propping up here, there and everywhere, responding to the social and material conditions of their time and place. Famously, as James mentioned with John the Baptist, he has a conflict with Herod, at least according to the Gospels. He, you know, as James rightly put it, it's a kind of gossipy to count. but the criticism was to do with the loose sexual morals or the loose morals of those elite and power of Herod, you know, in their castles, blandering around or whatever,

and that's what really got them in trouble. So, you know, power can crack down on these movements, I think almost as a matter of process and then, you know, possibly ask questions about it later. Yeah, absolutely. I was kind of thinking, you know, in the American context, the sort of, like you were talking, James and Robert, were both mentioning this idea that, you know, these other figures like John the Baptist and previous figures were killed. It was a matter of routine to kill figures like this. Jesus certainly knew that in so far as he was another one of these Jewish millinarian movements that he was almost certainly slated for some sort of death and execution at some point. Here in the U.S. in the Black Liberation Movement in the civil rights era, figures like Malcolm X, like Fred Hampton, like Martin Luther King Jr. I think they too also knew in one way or another. Malcolm X and Fred Hampton's case, they explicitly said in so many terms, like it's almost certain that they're going to kill me.

Or Fred Hampton would talk about, if I die, it's not going to be because I slip on ice or I get in a plane crash. It's going to be because the power structure comes and kills me. And sure enough, they all were killed one way or another. and there was a sense in which they all knew it to varying degrees and it puts you in a very interesting mindset if you know

that your revolutionary agitation has gotten to such a point that death is almost certainly coming from the powers that be and then what that does to how you proceed from there it's a fascinating sort of psychological thing but yeah but for those that just

just to reiterate what both of you said millinarianism is a sort of apocalyptic the end of some the end is coming maybe not the end of everything but the end of the current order of things it would it would be sort of synonymous with divine judgment it will overthrow the current state of affairs and usher in a new era a new world if you will and that of course is going to be incredibly annoying at the very least to the powers that be um to go around and and sort of rabble rouse on this idea that the fundamental features of the current social order

unjust, God's judgment is on the way, and a new dawn is coming. Of course, they're going to want to sort of shut these figures up. So that is a broad, even more context into, you know, even more insight into what eventually coalesces as the Jesus movement. You've talked about the Jesus movement as opposed to simply Jesus, because of course, as historical materialist, we're talking about these broader social, economic, political conditions out of which these movements and these individual leaders or figures emerge. So can you talk a little bit more about the Jesus movement, which you refer to interestingly as a sort of vanguard party of sorts in your book,

maybe discuss its revolutionary, as well as its reactionary aspects, which I found quite interesting, and what its general aims and sort of tactics were? It's, again, one of the reasons why we think of movement, because it has to have some kind of cultural credibility among the peasantry for it to work. So, and this is where we have, I think, what we might label conservative elements.

I mean, a lot of more supposedly radical scholarship on the historical Jesus over the past, over the 20th century and before, I've tried to really emphasize, particularly, well, actually, particularly since the 60s, I've really tried to emphasize how morally playful Jesus was and things like this. But on issues of sexuality, gender,

and so on. And some of this is good scholarship, but some of it goes too far, I think, in claiming that Jesus was, you know, something like a post-1960s radical that we would all be familiar with, whereas I don't think that would, we just simply wouldn't have made any sense in first century Galilee. And this is why there's a big emphasis, as we know from movements at the time or from the populace at the time, on inherited tradition. the Jewish law, the commandments and things like this. And as Robert mentioned before, some of the criticisms of the Herodian court

is about perception of loose morals and things like this. So there is that element of conservatism, if that's even the right phrase, to the Jesus movement, and one that's probably so necessary for it to be culturally credible. But it's also a movement, that's promoting dramatic and significant social upheaval at the time. So there is this promise of the present existing order

that will be cast aside and a new order put in its place. And again, it's hierarchical because it's coming from the peasantry, is working with peasant categories, and it's a form of utopianism that's still hierarchical rather than the sort of playful egalitarianism that some post-1960s scholars would like to have. So those are the sort of

ideas that are coming out of this, this tension between whatever, conservatism and radical change. And the vision, the millinarian vision, is fantastical in one sense. It's not one that does resolve the problems on the ground. There is a

kind of conservatism also in its revolution attitude, in the sense that it's the idea of something like repeating a golden age or pushing towards an ideal context where there would be an ideal king, where there would be judges, where God would rule, where there would be an accompanying empire and things like this. And this is why, I mean, some people I don't think will like it. We use the language of vanguard and so on. I mean, it's kind of a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there is a serious point behind it in that

It is, in one sense, it's reaching for trying to, there is a clear, strong awareness that there's something profoundly wrong with the world. Yeah, at the same time, its solution is one that's fantastical. It can only be resolved in this fantastical vision of the future and can't quite grasp to something else. And in one sense, why would it be able to? I mean, it's coming from a context where we haven't got the full development of socialist ideas or the equivalent. and it's a form of utopianism, I think, grounded in a peasant context which is still fairly parochial, still traditional and all this. And that's not a criticism as such.

This is why I think a historical materialist perspective is important because it takes seriously the material conditions in which this stuff arises rather than romanticising it or making it anachronistic. And that's why I think we use the words like Vanguard and Dictor, of the peasantry because it is the idea that there will be a rulership on behalf of the peasantry but it's also one that's fantastical as well it doesn't quite get

to the stage where the contradictions will be resolved or where injustice will be wiped out it replicates a system of power that it already knows and it hasn't got really yet we've got they haven't got the potential for the new to

grow out of the holes I don't think yeah I think I think just adding to that that with a few specifics the kind of intoxicated on this this millinarian

worldview where God is going to intervene shortly at the end times and install this new age, bring about this new age and kind of write the wrongs of all Palestine as they're being experienced by the non-elite in that society. The Jesus movement, the early Jesus movement, develops this, I think quite clear manifesto, at least in its early

stages, which is that, and this is what we argue in the book, that the rich and the wealthy, those largely responsible for the material changes affecting Galilee and Judea, those behind the building projects or benefiting from these urbanization projects will need to surrender their well, preferably to the Jesus movement, or they will face severe divine wrath at the coming judgment. So, and alongside this is this promise that the socioeconomic hierarchies within Palestine are going to be reversed at this end time. the first will become last and the last will become first quite literally so as james was saying it doesn't kind of do away with hierarchies and this is perhaps one of the the areas where

it's not quite as revolutionary as we might like it's revolutionary but to a point so this new world that it imagines is still a world with with a kingdom and lords and people in power who rule autocratically, except that this time you're going to have a new king or an ideal king, such as Jesus in charge, who's going to rule on behalf of the God of Israel in favor of a different empire, an empire not backed by Rome, but backed by God, the kingdom of God or the kingdom of the heavens. Yeah, and I think it's really important just to say, like, and this is totally in line with historical materialism, like, this is what we should expect. This is of the time.

This is of the concerns of those people at that time. And there's this very deep temptation that we all suffer across the political spectrum today that we have of imposing our current political ideals on Jesus and his movement to sort of lend credibility to our ideas. There's like this liberal, hippie, pacifist and sandals version of Jesus. There's this, as you taught, this Che Guevara socialist revolutionary version. I see it all over in America, this, I think millions of Americans believe that Jesus was as this family values oriented, conservative, that, you know, didn't like gay marriage and stuff. And you can even see like the more intense versions of like blood and sword fever dream fascists trying to claim Christianity in the life of Jesus for themselves. and their political movement, but we often forget how much our politics today are shaped by things like the Enlightenment, like the French Revolution.

These are, you know, 2,000 years before these things even happen is what we're dealing with in first century Palestine. And so we should always be very skeptical, even as tempting as it may be, skeptical of any impulse to try to impose any sort of modern political ideal on Jesus and his movement. But one thing you do talk about that I found very interesting, especially in light of certain political topics today, is that the Jesus movement, and correct me if I'm wrong, but there were certain accusations of them being effeminate. And there's these issues of masculinity and this reclamation of masculinity. This, of course, is a very patriarchal time, as of course we should expect it to be. But can either of you talk a little bit more about these sort of accusations of effeminacy and the issues of masculinity and how they were sort of wrestled with,

resolved within the Jesus movement itself? Yeah, I mean, this is part of why we emphasize the issue, the context of the breakdown of households and things like this, because if you're no longer the man running the household, what are you doing? You're no longer fulfilling your lotted role. And I think some schools have made a convincing argument that the Jesus, movement were the recipients of allegations that they were effeminate, and for these precisely reasons, socially castrated, as one scholar put it.

Now, I wouldn't leave it there. I mean, there is an alternative family that you get with the Jesus movement. You know, these are my brothers and sisters. And so there's clearly, they use the language of family to talk about what this movement is. because again, it's the language of the time. It's the language that it's known. And where I think we differ from some of the so-called queer readings

of the gospel tradition is that, yes, we think there is this kind of family that probably did get mocked. But also, the movement seems to have taken these ideas very seriously. And against some scholars, we don't think that this was a, this was out, you know, somehow got rid of the father figure. in fact he included the sort of super father figure God of the father is the dominant father figure in this new family movement

so it's playing it's a sort of competing about masculinity and femininity and we argue that the Jesus movement also played this game accusing its opponents of being the women of the masculine ones you're the feminine ones and this is part of a wider discourse in the ancient world, which is about domination, conquering and so on and so forth,

you know, about the claims to be who's the masculine one, who's the effeminate one and things like this. So, I mean, Robert might want to talk about the clothing issue here, but we've even got passages which do have Jesus talking about the way John the Baptist's clothes compared to what we think is the effeminate clothing. or what we don't think is the effeminate clothing but what we think that Jesus and the Jesus movement would have thought of

as the feminine clothing of the ruling elite. So it's this sort of claim and counterclaim about who are the masculine ones, who are the effeminate ones that I think runs right through the story of the Jesus movement

from its beginnings right through to the crucifixion at the end, which again is again competing ideas. Was suffering beatings and crucifixion? Was this Jesus being made effeminate by his captors? I'm sure that people did think of it like that.

Was it also seen as Jesus being able to take a beating like a man, so to speak? I'm sure that that was a live idea of masculinity at the time as well. So it's not a question of Jesus taking on these claims and playing around with them. It's It's Jesus moving taking on these claims and making counter to claims about who's got the rightful claim to be in the masculine movement here. Yeah, Robert, anything to add to that? I mean, just to reaffirm that in the Roman world in particular, gender was a huge concern and it was, and it was, as James mentioned, understood in ways that could be coded like politically and across class lines.

and in ways that, you know, if we bring our attention to it, we, I think, can understand because gender is once again, you know, quite a major concern in our time. But in terms of how it was understood in that world, it was heavily patriarchal, but there wasn't as such a kind of feminist critique against patriarchal power. So these ideas could be negotiated and to negotiate with the powers of the day, you know, you would also be stepping into the terrain of gender discourses. Just to give one example that we flesh out a bit in the book, the Roman Empire itself, when it would, when its elite authors would talk about its military exploits around the empire or expanding the borders of the empire, it would talk about, you know, defeating and emasculating its subservient nations. So this whole kind of, you know, active Rome versus passive, defeated, conquered, humiliated nations was understood often in this gendered way.

And there are visual depictions of this as well. We include a relief that shows the, in the book that shows the emperor, Claudius, like pinning down. female figure who is meant to embody the nation of Britannia being conquered by Roman power. So these sorts of ideas were understood in, you know, kind of gendered violent type ways. Also, crucifixion itself was a form of kind of gendered violence, punishment, where the victim, often from a, or usually from a subservient conquered peoples of the Roman Empire, and it was a Roman punishment, I should point out, at that time, administered by the Romans, intent to display their bodies and kind of ritually humiliate them.

They're fully exposed and their, you know, penetrating. by nails and so on and so forth. It's really meant to humiliate and shame and this was understood in a kind of gendered way. So for the Jesus movement to engage in this world as a popular movement, it would, as James has already indicated, on the one hand, was getting labeled, it seems, as being kind of socially castrated or effeminate eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom, perhaps. But it it ironically kind of embraced some of these ideas and tried to turn them on its head, while at the same time asserting its own masculine credentials, often through this redefinition of terms. So you have these ideas about dying, in wider Jewish texts of the time, dying a glorious death as this display.

of masculine bravado and so on and so forth, this could be, you know, an assured way to divine victory and all of this. So this stuff is quite complicated and it doesn't always go in one direction. But I suppose the point that James was trying to make and was making and we definitely flesh us out in the book is that just because the Jesus movement is playing with these ideas, negotiating these ideas to do with gender, doesn't necessarily mean that it's overturning the dominant discourse. It's really more a negotiation of broader power structures, and it doesn't do away with the dominant prevailing patriarchal gender conventions.

It simply tries to redefine them for its own purposes. So the idea of masculine male power being associated with, the right to rule and all of that still seems to be something that the early Jesus movement subscribed to. So again, this is one of the perhaps more conservative, what we would call conservative aspects of what was otherwise a revolutionary movement promoting radical social and economic changes. So we don't, we think that, you know, there's this traditional idea that or view that Jesus was primarily had this mission to the poor, that his message was primarily directed to the poorest of society. But we actually turn this on

its head and suggest that Jesus actually, or the early Jesus movement, had a mission to the rich. The Gospels state unambiguously that Jesus came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance and in the book we develop an argument as to why the common understanding of sinners as kind of downtrodden societal outcasts is actually wrong. Looking at a range of Jewish texts from across over a thousand years actually of Jewish texts, there's quite a consistent meaning of what this term means, sinners, it actually meant in ancient Judaism at its kind of basic level, lawbreakers, those who break the mosaic law or the Torah and who act as if there was no God. And in any of these texts, whenever the socioeconomic status of sinners is mentioned,

it's always in reference to them being oppressive or exploitative rich people. So we think that when the gospel texts are talking about Jesus, for example, dining with tax collectors and sinners, he's referring here to rich sinners, those who are perceived to be possibly responsible for or benefiting from these urbanization projects in Galilee and Judea. And it was, you know, to these people that Jesus was able to associate through his recruiting, say, Levi, the tax collector who would have had networks to some of these rich sinners. And it's seen or presented within the gospel material as scandalous precisely because these were wealthier corrupt individuals, regarded popularly as lawbreakers oppressing their own people

and so this message to the rich the mission to the rich was to try and convince them to change their ways to give up their wealth preferably to the movement to keep it going and to call them to repentance before God would come in and it would be too late and God would smash

an upturned society and, you know, they would be suffering a not-so-great fate. Yeah, so there you see the Jesus movement sort of widening its circle of concern and compassion to include even the people that are on the wrong side of the fight trying to convince them to kind of, you know, turn over their wealth and join the side of the good,

but even just giving them that option was sort of seen as scandalous. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah, I think it is exactly correct. and just to add really that this forms part of the networks that help the movement spread beyond just the local in a way

it looks like the early movement has these networks with not just the peasantry but with people with greater wealth with even perhaps if you believe Luke's gospel to the royal call it or to the aristocratic court itself if we take Mark's gospel there are women with resources providing for them

so this may have been a failed mission in one level to the ridge but it was also one that helped the movement spread beyond its parochial origins and a movement after Jesus's death yeah I just find that endlessly fascinating at just how these debates were taking place at the time the fact that they're still

so salient they're still so at the forefront of our political struggles to this day, although the details and the forms that these arguments take are very different, of course. On our sister podcast, Red Menace, we're working through Frederick Engels is on the origin of the family

private property in the state. And that's a historical materialist account of the family and its formations and importantly patriarchy. And of course Engels makes this argument that with the rise of class society, which certainly you know, Jesus' world was a class society

world, that's the introduction of patriarchy, pre-class society. There were many examples of sort of matriarchal societies, and patriarchy really only, at least this is the argument that Engels is making, we can argue about it, debated, etc., but that patriarchy emerges with the emergence of class stratification in society. And so it's very interesting to think about patriarchy at this time in the context of Angles' work on the development in the sort of historical materialist analysis of patriarchy rising. But yeah, I just found that part of the book in particular to be really interesting. And of course, this is just an interview. If you are at all interested with this stuff, you can dive much, much deeper with the book, which I'll link to in the show notes

so people can find it. And I highly recommend it. A couple more questions for you. I do want to be very respectful of James's time. I know that we're all on different time zones here from every edge of the Anglosphere, apparently. We're having this conversation. So a couple more questions for you. And this is a big question. You can take it in any direction you want. But in chapter 9 titled Passover in Jerusalem, you talk about the entering of Jerusalem, the temple, the last supper, the defection of a comrade referring to Judas, etc. Can you kind of talk about and maybe summarize this part of the story? Yeah, it's, I mean, this is, the last week of Jesus is one that, there's another one of these ones, it's very difficult to disentangle from the rewriting, the, the, the, the, the importance of Jesus' death for the emerging Christian movement and things like this.

But we can, we can do some things with it, and, and, and, uh, and, uh, and we can probably make some generalisations about early material. So, for instance, we can imagine what Passover was like at the time in Jerusalem. It would have been heaving, it would have been absolutely packed, and it's a celebration of the exodus and escape from Pharaoh and effective, you know, freeing of the slaves and things like this. So that's the narrative that's there at Passover. So it's a narrative that's in a context with a lot of people present, huge crowds so the potential is there for this to spark off and all sides knew the potential was

there for this to spark off romans jewish leaders uh jewish populace and things like this so those tensions are always potentially there and this sort of thread runs throughout that story and i think it's a bit is particularly important and we see jesus making some sort of disturbance in the temple and it's kind of it's interesting what happens is that he doesn't get arrested immediately because of the supportive crowd. There is a group around him who are clearly interested and signed up to what the Jesus movement are about, because if you do get rid of a figure who might be another John the Baptist, you may have a serious riot on your hands.

From what we can tell, the action that Jesus does in the temple where he turns over the tables of the money changes and dove sellers, is one I think that's, economic in its target, whether it's targeting the price of doves, which would have been the animals for the poorer people to sacrifice with and potentially escalating costs, or money changes, which is obviously focusing on the money itself. As a side issue, the money may well have had, looks like it would have had an image of Assyrian God on it, which could quite easily be perceived by the Jesus movement as idolatrous and things like this. But it's also, of course, the money, the one level will be going through the tributary

system through the temple and beyond to pay the higher ups in that sense. You can put it like that. So there's a lot of stake in a way and there isn't the immediate attempt to kill Jesus. It looks like it's been done fairly covertly. when the opportunity is right, who knows whether this was the real explanation, but it's about as good as we've got, so it's certainly possible.

And when we compare it with John's Gospel, it's not this action in the temple that leads to his death. It's the raising from the dead of this figure called Lazarus. So this is another example where we can see John's Gospel, that I don't know if there's any way that that could be historically accurate, whereas I could see something like this temple action being a perfectly reasonable explanation for why Jesus ends up on the cross. It's another case of this millenarian figure, this figure with a following,

doing something that causes just a bit too much worry for the ruling class. So the story as well of Passover, the final Passover, I mean, there is a bit of a tendency now, I think, in liberal scholarship, to try to disassociate Jesus from having a Passover meal. it's sort of well-intentioned, it's often designed to say that, to, he's always got a contemporary implication that Christians are trying to sort of steal Jewish ideas about Cedar and Passover and things like this. And that's, that's another question as far as I'm concerned, because I think whatever modern Christians do about Passover and so on, I think it's, I think what we get

in March's gospel, the earliest account of this, is a Passover meal. And, Lots of the assumptions about Passover are there in the meal. It's not, incidentally, the traditional 13 or whatever of the famous picture. It's, if he read Mark's gospel carefully, it does look like there's a sizable crowd in a room with the 12 disciples and a wider group of disciples. And it follows roughly what we know about Passover meals at the time. and Jesus interprets his death in a martyrdom, in terms of a martyrdom, in terms of traditions about the value of a martyr's death for the salvation of Israel and things like this. The stuff we get in Mark's Gospel, I think, is, again, it's not that heavily Christianized at times when it comes to the martyrdom.

It looks to me as if this is focusing on Jewish salvation, Jewish redemption and things like that is, rather than a wider group of non-Jews and things like this. And he's looking to a time when the kingdom will come and there will be a new empire or a new theocracy established in the not too distant future. And I think this generally is to why Jesus gets put to death. He's got the following. He's predicting that the Roman empire will come to an end.

It doesn't really matter that he's going to expect God to do it. From the perspective of Roman power, there's your threat, there's your reason. You don't have to think, well, you know, well, was he a real revolution who's going to overthrow Roman power with swords and all this? Well, they don't care about the niceties of things like that. Fine, killing. And it's interesting, if you look at the story of Jesus being put to death, it's, he's got a, he's serious armed guard, he's killed with insurrectionists or bandits or whatever, however you want to interpret the word. he's killed as an insurrectionist as a bandit as someone who could have led a physical revolution in the here and now

even if he was thinking God or God's agents would supernaturally intervene in the not too distant future to change things in the perspective of the ruling class they do not care about disentangling the niceties about whether this you know how how this person thinks Rome's going to come to an end this person is anti-Roman anti-imperial in whatever sense, whether he thinks it's going to be a supernatural theocracy or whether he thinks there's going to be an armed uprising or whatever. They don't care about those kinds of niceties, and that's why he ends up in a Roman cross. Just like John the Baptist

died because he had a following. There's no indication John the Baptist was going to lead a violent insurrection against the ruling class. He thought probably like Jesus that it would be a divine supernatural intervention, but they don't ask those kind of questions. Why would

they waste their time with a theological niceties of these movements. You put them to death. That's just the way the Rome function. Powerfully, powerfully said. All right, so all of this inevitably results in the crackdown on the Jesus movement and as James was mentioning, obviously,

the crucifixion of Jesus. Of course, what happens after the crucifixion is absolutely crucial for the next 2,500 years of human history. So can you talk a little bit about the crucifixion, what happened after? and how the Jesus movement evolved after Jesus' death? Yeah, I think Robert can speak more about the burial. But as I said, he ends up being killed as a bandit, as an insurrectionist,

and in one sense, the movement should have ended there. As I said earlier, there's already networks in place for the movement to spread anyway, independently, if you like, of his death, there are women who provide for him, it seems women of some means. There are the networks involving tax collectors and fishing. So at some point also, this gets taken up as a scribal movement,

which helps it spread. So this is already taking place sort of almost, not independently of the crucifixure, but it's happening sort of organically around it. The, after his death, people believe that they saw the risen Jesus. Now, I've expressed, you know, some general skepticism towards what we can know, but curiously, some of the best early material we have is about witnesses to the risen Jesus.

So Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 is a, he's part of a tradition of people claiming to have seen the risen Jesus. and I think this this is actually this is I think it's true in one sense not that I'm making no claims about the supernatural whatever behind it but I'm thinking people do have visions

people did have visions or claim to have visions and they claimed to have seen the risen Jesus I think that's as one of the base facts we can actually say now I'm not in the game and I couldn't care less about assessing its supernatural validity or not. But it does help the movement continue in one sense that people believed that this figure of Jesus had survived death and continued. So, and this seems to have been

a number of the early followers and people who had not followed Jesus in his lifetime experiencing, are claiming to have experienced a vision or experience of Jesus. So everything's sort of now in place for this movement to continue and survive. It's a combination of these claims to have seen Jesus and the networks that are helping this movement spread. Intentionally are not interesting. I mean, it's whether it bore resemblance to what Jesus would have wanted is another question, and perhaps in many ways it didn't. But it's, so it's already spreading out to the, beyond its parochial Galilean context. And then it gets into

people come to Passover people come to Passover to Jerusalem from wherever and then they'll go back out to wherever they came from so already networks are developing to help spread this movement and networks are very important for the spread of any movement political, religious or whatever and the movement then can

according to the book of Acts and I think there may be some truth in this synagogues provide an important means around the Roman Empire for this movement to spread and that's an obvious one where anyone with Jewish, any Jewish person with connections to the Jesus movement one of your first pot of cold would have been

synagogue workplace would be the other one heads of households have been points of contacts in different cities around the Mediterranean. So there's a sort of pre-existing Jewish networks and connected to them a work networks and things like this for the movement to spread.

And I think this is where we can make some of the sort of unintended consequences of some of the mission and some of this idea of the mission to the rich is important because it was to the sinners as Robert said and it's to people who are perceived to be acting beyond the law and so on and it was a word also used for non-Jews for Gentiles so that already gives you sort of gives them justification for talking to people beyond normal Jewish context

and we do know that there were Gentiles attracted to some degree or other to Judaism. There were Gentiles who were associated with synagogues and have varying degrees of affiliation and connection and sympathies and so on. And once you've got interested non-Jews attending synagogues and coming into contact with this meeting and a kind of ideological justification for this movement to engage further, these people will go away, they'll go back to their other work networks,

They'll go back to the families and they won't necessarily be interested in Jewish ideas about avoidance of pork, about Sabbath and so on and so forth. So very rapidly over the first decade or so, you've got people attracted increasingly to this movement who are no longer that interested in the details of Jewish law. And that's when Paul can come in and start talking about justification by faith, why these people are justified not by the traditional law of Judaism but by faith. And this is when the movement is sort of the beginnings if you like of a non-Jewish movement. And by the time we start

getting to John's Gospel, I mean this is perhaps a more controversial point but we're not alone in making this. This is why ideas of Jesus being equal with God start to really take off and being take off in distinction from Judaism. It's the Jews who

are becoming the opponents at this point in Christianity and setting the scene for the construction of a Christian identity that's not Jewish and the, you know, the dark history that can accompany that. Again, I'm not blaming John's Gospel or whatever for creating anti-Semitism or something, but obviously these stories have a very significant reception history. This idea of constructing Christianity is something that is potentially not Jewish. And the idea that Jesus is the God, in distinction from the God of the Jews and the

things like this. Well, I mean, it becomes a lot more complicated, obviously, but those kinds of things start to emerge, I think, towards the end of the first century and into the second century. And eventually, this movement can keep spreading through these big networks across the Roman Empire and becomes the religion of the Empire after a few centuries. And so all that language of theocracy and empire and so on can get reappropriated. for an actual Roman Empire and for a history of Christian power later on in feudal Europe and so on and so forth.

But at the same time, those tensions between these kind of reactionary elements, if you like, well, perhaps we shouldn't even be calling them reactionary elements, and more revolutionary impulses, they don't go away. There are still all these stories about the reversal of rich and poor and so on, and with Christianity, I mean, the language and religion of empire and then the language and religion of feudal Europe in the long run, it's also the language of opposition to it.

So we get peasant uprisings and revolts and so on in medieval Europe, with explicit reference back to some of these gospel texts, these more seemingly economically radical gospel texts. And likewise, when we get into the era of capitalism, Christianity takes on the same kind of role of, justifying the emergence of capitalism but it also gets absorbed and taken up in certain socialist circles as well

as opposition to capitalism or something that could be, you know, in certain socialist circles it would be, let's extract the best bits from Christianity to try to envisage a new socialist world. So there's those kind of, that's the sort of longer bigger picture. There's your

historical materialism for you, if you like. The transformation to feudalism and then to capitalism and what lies beyond. Yeah, that is so interesting. So this movement that was a Jewish millinarianist movement at the time, and he towards the end of his life, he sits down

with these sinners, which as Robert was talking about, the translation is lawbreakers, breaking the Torah law and the corrupt, rich people on the other side of this struggle, he sits down with them, and that's sitting down with these sinners, these lawbreakers, also sets a sort of precedent

for that movement to be able to appeal on some level to Gentiles, and that allows it to grow beyond merely Jewish communities to become a much bigger thing. And then with the subsequent development of feudalism and then capitalism, you see both sides of historical development using the Jesus story, the Jesus movement, the Bible as a whole, to sort of justify its claim. I mean, of course it becomes what started as an anti-Roman empire movement becomes the ideology of the empire. And then with capitalism, you have, and even with abolition in the U.S. of slavery,

You had people pro abolitionists and those who wanted to maintain slavery, both arguing from the Bible, both using the Jewish story. Absolutely fascinating. Yeah. Anything you want to add to that, Robert? Yeah, I think just right back to those moments following Jesus' death and what's become the Easter celebration through the Christian tradition, Christians would see this as of primary. importance in terms of what, you know, started the movement and, and some Christian scholars, well-known Christian scholars, such as N.T. Wright, evangelical scholars, he's even said that the resurrection was, and he uses quite political language, he says it's the day that the, the day that the revolution began, this truly decisive event in world history when Jesus' associates find is coming back to a life a new commissioning that subsequently changed world history.

We kind of make a bit of fun of this perspective, not out of disrespect to it, but precisely because we think that it completely misses the broader historical materialist points that James is getting at there in terms of the broader socioeconomic factors that were all entangled with these religious factors that help the movement to spread, which I think, you know, we need to be looking at these, from whatever religious perspective we're looking at, so long as we're looking at it from a historical materialist perspective, these broader forces are important. But I think also it's worth stressing that even expectations of resurrection within first century Judaism

were not unprecedented or unique to the Jesus movement. So as a kind of singular cause as to why the Jesus movement might spread and survive, I don't think this would have been enough. In the first century, many Jews were apocalyptic Jews, fueled by millinerian fervor, believed that the righteous would be, would rise at or before the end times. And it seems that the Jesus movement had this ready-made millinarian framework in mind through which they, were able to interpret these experiences or visions of a post-morten Jesus that they had, that James mentioned. So Jesus's associates could draw on these pre-existing ideas within the Jewish tradition about righteous martyrs being raised back to life.

And in fact, this aligned to and confirmed their expectations of, of this imminent divine intervention and reversal they had been promoting. The in-breaking of God's kingdom. And so, you know, in the earliest account that we have of this, which is actually still quite late, it's not until the 50s that we have the first surviving written account of, or explanation of this evidence for resurrection, as James mentioned in Paul's first letter to the first letter to the Christian,

Corinthians chapter 15, but he talks here about, you know, this resurrection as being proof that God's kingdom is breaking in and it's going to lead to, quote, the destruction of every ruler and every power. And Jesus will now be installed or as soon to be installed as king, quote, so that the name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bend, right? Some really potent political stuff that's being wrapped up with this talk of resurrection, at least in its early stages. The whole tradition about an empty tomb is an interesting one, and I think we're quite, I think, ambivalent or agnostic perhaps from a critical, historical point of view, what we can say with confidence about the tradition of an empty tomb.

It actually, it may enter the tradition a bit later. We only see it coming in in the Gospels. Paul, if we take Paul's letter to the Corinthians as the earlier source talking about the resurrection, Paul seems to simply imagine Jesus being raised and glorified in ascending to heaven. There is not a kind of separate ascension that happens later. Rather, Jesus appears to Jesus's associates, the raised Jesus appears to Jesus' associates

almost from heaven, as it were. There's the narrative accounts that we get where Jesus' resurrection appearances are fleshed out a bit more, so to speak, come from, well, the earliest ending that we have of Mark Mark doesn't actually have any of these resurrection appearances. It simply ends with an empty tube.

And so we have resurrection stories in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and John. And they're completely different. They're expressing this truth or this belief in different ways to different effects. And they're pointed to something that I think is much more interesting. and much more mysterious than, you know, what could be kind of nailed down in a, with kind of historical precision, as it were. So I just wanted to end on that point that, you know, for the critical historian, I think this whole idea of resurrection is really intriguing and interesting,

but we're quite limited in terms of what we can actually say about it, despite it being such, I think, an important question, particularly for those who are interested in the life of Jesus and particularly those coming from a Christian perspective. Yeah, well, well said, and there's so much more I want to talk to you both about and I would love to have you back on the show to dive deeper into some of this stuff to talk about, you know, so many different dimensions, even more topical stuff. I really do love the book.

I love talking with both of you as a sort of way to wrap this conversation up. And I thank you so much for your very generous time coming on and spending two hours at this point talking to me about this wonderful book. But as a way to wrap this up, what do you hope people take away from this book? And you can also say anything else you want to say, any last words, etc. I mean, it's an interesting question because we've kind of got two different audiences in a way for this book. one is historical Jesus scholarship or biblical scholarship as we know it and one is a wider let's just say left audience or something like this so it's it's trying to bridge those two in a way and what I hope to do was to for biblical scholars well for both really is to see historical materialism in action as something serious that the whole great

man view of history has failed we need to start understanding the class conflict we understand it seriously not in a vulgar way we need to understand the economic context seriously and we need to understand the connections with those bigger historical pictures

that I was talking about before you know not just simply a portrait of this figure but also what are the longer term implications of this figure unintentional or not so and in always in relation to modes of production, economic context, class conflict, social world, and things like this.

So I was hoping that would be done. And for a wider left audience is, I don't think, I think there's a lot of confusion about religion on the left, certainly in the UK, and I'd imagine both in Australia and in North America too, and lots of misunderstandings about it but this should be another normal part of historical research actually for any historian

whether they're left or not but if you've got materialist Marxist interests or whatever this is a serious subject and you've got to take it seriously and there should have been much more of this done before and hopefully there'll be much more of it done in the future amen to that Robert

I just affirm everything that James just said, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding or lack of information and misinformation that spread about the origins of Christianity and the historical Jesus. On the one hand, we encounter that almost daily because of our professional jobs as academics working in this field. But equally, I do get frustrated at the, you could make that claim equally about Marxism within contemporary society as well, that there's a lot of disinformation and this kind of bogeyman word of Marxism is spread around in a really misinformed way. And frustratingly, for us, that's happened quite a bit within the field of biblical scholarship itself. And so, you know,

that on the one hand there is that audience that we are talking to people who are interested in this kind of material and showing the robustness of a, historical materialist take that it doesn't just mean a kind of romanticized lefty Jesus necessarily, which Marxist readings of Jesus are often caricatured as. But equally, I think, it's to take some of the wealth of research and knowledge that we actually have about class conflicts in the ancient worlds and kind of using the figure of Jesus, the popular and well-known figure of Jesus, to be able to communicate that history of class struggle to a broader left audience as well,

those who are wanting to find out something about what life was like and how class and class conflict was experienced in a completely different society to our own, one that at oftentimes will seem strange and unusual and that, you know, not, not, we're not kind of writing a programmatic manifesto of, well, Jesus did this, and so we should do this too. I think the kind of the dialectical approach that we take to this material and the subject is much more interesting than that. It's, okay, yes, there may be some lessons that we might be able to learn from this, but it's not. But this is part of that ongoing conversation of the history of class struggles as they inform class struggles today. We look at this broad sweep of history and we see the movements that have been successful and not been successful and how material conditions have generated different responses and how we can draw inspiration in different and sometimes contradictory ways from these movements that have gone. on before us.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's why I knew that when I came across that book, that the projects that were engaged in here on Rev Left and the podcast that we do outside of Rev Left, and your work is very much entangled in that we come from a, you know, principled and hopefully sophisticated Marxist position, but we take religion seriously. We do episodes on Buddhism, on Islam, on Christianity. We study figures within these movements. We see religion as a terrain of struggle that we.

we can actively engage with, and I think the historical materialist analysis of Jesus' life fits in with that broader project. So the book is Jesus, A Life in Class Conflict. I'll link to it in the show notes. Cannot recommend it more. I highly, highly, highly recommend it to anybody listening. Thank you, James and Robert, so much for not only this wonderful work, but for being so generous with your time, for coming on the show, and discussing it at length with me and my audience. I would love to have you back on any time in the future. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you.

Thank you, Brett. And there's some great summaries in there. Yeah, thank you so much. And we're better than none. You're too kind. Yeah, it's an absolute pleasure to be given this opportunity. So thank you so much. Thank you for listening.

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