Rev Left Radio - Jesus Christ: Historical Materialism, Class Conflict, and the Jesus Movement

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

Professors James Crossley and Robert J. Myles join Breht to discuss their fascinating work "Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict" put out by Zero Book.  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   Robert's Twitter: @robertjmyles   Robert's Substack: https://robertjmyles.substack.com/   James' work on John Ball and the English uprising of 1381: https://johnball1381.org/     Outro music: "All My Tears" by Ane Brun   Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

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. 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, you know, deep history. This is ancient history. There's not historical sources 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, etc. 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. So I'm 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 Rev Left 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 has grown, it's become more and more difficult psychologically and just practically for me to respond to everything. I don't like social media, so I'm not on there a lot. I don't check DMs.

On Patreon, I do check every single comment left on every single post and I try to respond to as many as possible on Patreon. So it's also not only a great way to get bonus content, but it's a great way to get a hold of me. And while I don't check every Patreon, message. I do check every Patreon comment. And you also are allowed to ask questions for Patreon episodes, get early releases. I'm even thinking of maybe uploading some of the outlines I have for episodes so you can see the questions that I plan on asking, et cetera. Just try to give as much back as possible for those who financially support the show and make it possible. But for those who can't support the show, just liking and sharing the episode can do a great

deal of help for us and leaving positive reviews on your preferred podcast app is another great way to help the show. 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 a 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, millinarian movements and for MF in Oslo, Norway. Hi, I'm Robert Miles. I'm a senior lecturer in 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 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 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 books. 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 at least 25 years, I think. And I've published some technical stuff over a long

time. But my career 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. well I 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 for on life of Jesus from a materialist perspective there have been Marxists they've been anarchists there have been people with similar-ish 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 that was done. So that was, and I've long been kind of interested in the English Marx, the British Marxist tradition, and the people like Eric Hobbesbaum, Romney Hilton, 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 and very good people who worked on the ancient world it was never these kinds of questions about the relationship between a figure like Jesus and Christian origins to the modes of production were not there, there's work done there and there 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

we can 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 it gets a bit messier and it's not quite as straightforward yeah I think a lot 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 overlapped pretty significantly in terms of our interests, but I'd better let Robert describe Robert's motivations. Yeah, thanks. I think similarly to James, 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 my focus discipline is new testament new testament studies and um this discipline i think this academic discipline it is like many modern academic disciplines shaped and uh influenced sometimes in subtly and unknowingly ways by kind of bourgeois ideology or modern capitalist assumptions um and of course this is this is often a problem when you're 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, and how 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 as james was saying um it no historical

materialist uh view of this that's written by by um you know scholars like ourselves who are pretty well immersed within this field um and this body of research um yet exists not quite in the format that that we've put together in this book jesus a life and class conflict um 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, 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, you know, 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 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 conflicts 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 incredibly 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 error, is the thing that is solved by a more robust historical materialism. And there are few people in the history, if anyone, 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. I just wouldn't have been a different figure. But Jesus stands even above the most, you know, notorious 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 historic,

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, more to the flinges, you do get some challenges to this idea. But at 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 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 criticized, 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

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 skeptical

ideas that 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 to have been interesting because I think like I said just before it can help you

refair and rethink 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 is 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 several instances. We can talk about broad themes that were early. 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 that this figure was an interpreter of the details of Jewish law and Jewish purity law, which we didn't, a lot of, 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 plausible, 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, just 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 some, social justice in ways that were not ever as obvious for a new movement that's trying to encourage non-Jews where it's not about necessarily about return to the commandments,

it's about other ideas about changing new 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 this might 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 Galilean 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

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 what were 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 another 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 the lives of kings and queens

and great leaders and so on that and given that kind of dearth of 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 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, 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 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 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, etc. 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 or 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. 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 a 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 earliest 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 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 thing. 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, 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 are probably... 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, I mean, it's pretty good, considering 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, you know, 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, the Gospels themselves, which scholars have said are, appear 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, you know, the individual. importance of these figures as as great men. So in order to do this historical materialist reading or this kind of history from Brello, we have to actually, you know, 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

Christianity is already becoming this movement, spreading around the Roman Empire, and they are very much concerned with proclaiming Jesus as the Christ, they're caught up in the grand theological claims that are being made by the movement, and presenting the life of Jesus in a way that gives context and background to those claims. So it's not an easy task to, you know, figure out what material kind of would be, you know, strictly historical in the sense that we're talking about of going back 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 is 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

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 Loop 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 quibling the 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' time? What were the major classes, the dominant political structures? And

And how was class conflict sort of manifesting at this time? The motor 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 the 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 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 had been for some time. So why would it make things different?

Well, what is happening in Galilee, and we'll come to Judea in 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 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 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, things were good, people's lives were improved, there was creation of employment and things like this. On the 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 try 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 Josephus, and this is where Josephus, the Jewish historian, a Jewish government historian, writing from him, is is helpful because he explains the building of Tiberius for instance and that people

aristocrats wouldn't have certain people given gifts of land other people possibly removed from the land and this is a significant upheaval as Jesus is growing up people 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. 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 emerged 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 urbanisation 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 back their own. These urbanisation projects were very much trying to integrate the region into this broader imperial economy, effectively to be able to 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 are 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, that was sitting behind all of this. Tiberius itself was named after the Roman emperor at the time, Emperor Tiberius, just to reinforce that point.

Some of the archaeological remains from the rebuilt. Cephyrus showed that it was quite highly 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. ideas or in other ways as well that I hope we get to explore. Yeah. So that's 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's 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 the this is 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 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, the history, the law, the traditions and so on, from synagogues, which would have may have simply been just a gathering in the village, not necessarily a strict building or may have been,

but 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 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 uh so we can we can paint those kind of general pictures he probably would have been expected to run the household um um as as as the as the 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 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 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, 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 worked as a tectonic carpenter or builder or construction laborer 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 his 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 labor organization was being changed, there would have been increased demand on their labor for certain and competition as well. which would have led to all sorts of changes including 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 centres 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, a very real prospect that if these things weren't being experienced by Jesus and his closest to 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 gospel 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 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 millinarian 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, the details, he clearly predicts something dramatic, some dramatic supernatural intervention

in the imminent future. 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 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 kinds of figures, how local rules 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 conservatives 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 millinarianism but you've also got the looming over your shoulder that you know you could you Jesus and his closest followers We're 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, the usefulness of looking at John the Baptist's movement is because he was. 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 in. 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 ofversion, 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 vast 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 still mentions them, right, even if he's scathing of them. And another movement that cropped up around this time was this popular movement associated with the figure of Thudis, who led a movement to the River Jordan, where he announced that he would separate the river, thereby allowing people to pass. through it. And, you know, again, this is this is one of these millenarian 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. 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 insofar as he was another one of these Jewish millenarian 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, you know, 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 you know 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 apocalypticism this 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 to go around 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 and this is where we have

I think on certain what we might label conservative elements I mean a lot of supposedly radical scholarship on the historical Jesus over the past over the 20th century and before I've tried to really emphasize, 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. Some of this is good scholarship, but some of it goes too far, I think, in claiming that Jesus was

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 That element of conservatism, if that is even the right phrase to the Jesus movement, and one that is 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 prayer of ideas that are coming out of this, this tension between, whatever, conservatism and radical change.

And the vision, the millinarian vision is fantastically, in one sense. It's not one that does resolve the problems on the ground. There is a kind of conservatism also in its revolutionary 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 some people, I don't know, think we'll 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, yet 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 dictatorship of the peasantry because it is the idea that it will be in 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 hasn't got really yet. We haven't got the potential for it. the new to grow out of the oils I don't think

yeah I think just adding to that that the with a few specifics the kind of intoxicated on this this millinarian

worldview where you know God is going to intervene shortly at the end times and install this new age bring about this new age and kind of

of right the wrongs of 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. And alongside this is this promise that the socio-economic 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 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, you know, 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. So 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 and resolved within the Jesus movement itself yeah i mean this is this is part of why we 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 uh you're no longer fulfilling your your lotted role and

and I think some scholars have made a convincing argument that the Jesus movement were the recipients of allegations that they were effeminate and for these precise 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 again, 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 got 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, you know, accusing its opponents of being the, you know, women of the masculine ones. You're the effeminate ones. And this is part of a wider discourses 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 the what we think is the effeminate clothing or we don't think it's 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 Jesus movement taking on these claims and making counter 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, as James mentioned, understood, in ways that could be coded politically and across class lines and in ways that if we bring our attention to it,

we I think can understand because gender is once again 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

you know 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 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 a female figure who is meant to embody the nation of Britannia being conquered by Roman power. So these sorts of ideas were understood in

kind of gendered violent type ways. Also crucifixion itself was a form of kind of gendered violence, punishment where the 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 they're penetrated by nails and so on. 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 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 uh or view that jesus was primarily had this mission to the poor that um his message was primarily directed to the poorest of society um but we actually uh turn this on its head and suggest that jesus actually or the early jesus movement had a mission to the rich uh the gospels state unambiguous 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, 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 wealthy, 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 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 is this forms part of the networks that help the movement spread beyond just the local in a way the 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, and the state, and that's a historical materialist account of the family and its formations and of 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 releases the argument that Engels is making, we can argue about it, debated, et cetera, 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 nine 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 importance of Jesus' death for the emerging Christian movement and things like this. But we can do some things with it, and we can probably make some generalizations 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 the 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. Jewish leaders, 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 particularly important. And we see Jesus making some sort of disturbance in the temple,

and it's interesting what happens is that he doesn't get arrested immediately because of a 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... 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

in 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. 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 millinery,

figure, this figure with a following cause 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. And I think it's sort of well-intentioned. It's often designed to say that he's 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 another question as far as I'm concerned.

Because I think whatever modern Christians do about Passover and so on, I think what we get in March 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 mart'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 what roughly what we know about Passover meals at the time and jesus interprets his death in a marth in terms of how 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 mart'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 this, rather than a

wider group of non-Jews and things like this. And it'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

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, he's got a 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. things. In the perspective of the ruling class, they do not care about disentangling the niceties about whether this, you know, 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 that why would they waste their time with a nice 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 crucifixion, but it's happening sort of organically around there. 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 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 or 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 or not interesting.

I mean, whether it bore a 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, I mean, you just think of Passover. People come to Passover from 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 call 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 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 the 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, it 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. People, 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 the, 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 avoiding to park 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

is you start getting 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 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 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 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 becoming 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 radically 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 again to try to envisage a new socialist world. So there's those kind of that's the sort of longer, bigger picture that, you know, 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, you know, 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-ab 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 on, just right back to those moments following Jesus' death and, you know, 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 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 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 this imminent divine intervention and reversal they had been promoting. the in-breaking of God's kingdom and so 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 letter, the first letters to the 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 the 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 stage 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' associates, the raised Jesus appears to Jesus' associates almost from heaven, as it were. there's the narrative accounts that we get where Jesus's resurrection appearances are fleshed out a bit more so to speak

come from well the earliest ending that we have of 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 what could be kind of nailed down 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 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. And one is a wider, let's just say, left audience or something like this. So it's trying to bridge those two in a way. And what I hope to do was 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're understanding 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 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, It's, 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, that 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 oftentimes will seem strange and unusual, and that we're not kind of writing a programmatic manifesto of, well, Jesus did this, and so we should do this too. 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, you know, this is, this is part of that ongoing conversation of the history of class struggles as they inform class struggles today. You know, 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 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, than 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 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. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. There's some great

summaries in there. Yeah, thank you so much. And we're better than mine. You're too kind. It's an absolute pleasure to be given this opportunity. So thank you so much. Absolutely. When I go, don't cry for me In my father's arms I'll be The wounds this world left on my soul Will all be healed And I'll be old

Sun and moon will be replaced With the light of Jesus' face And I will not be ashamed For my Savior knows my name It don't matter Will you bury me I'll be home and I'll be free It don't matter

Anywhere I lay All my tears be washed away Gold and silver Blind the eye temporary reaches life Come and eat from heaven's store Come and drink and thirst no more So eat not for me, my friend

When my time below does it For my life belongs to him Who will raise the dead again It don't matter where you bury me I'll be home and I'll be free It don't matter anywhere I lay All my tears be washed away

All my tears be washed away Thank you. Thank you.