Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict

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Before you go, please support great working-class and pro-people journalism by donating to People’s World. To mention just two detailed points: the presentation of the movement as “tough, muscular, hard, and manly” hardly fits Peter’s reaction to Caiaphas’s servant-girl.

Seeing such portraits as romanticized and overly idealized, the interest here is on the social and economic forces that produced the Jesus movement. An expert panel discusses the introduction of Prayers of Love and Faith and blessings for same-sex couples. There needs to be more study, not of history as a science, but of the genres of historical writing and their way of asserting the truth, or, rather what truth they mean to assert.Bringing a wealth of knowledge on the social, economic, and cultural conflicts of the time, Crossley and Myles uncover the emergence of a fervent and deadly serious religious organizer. Fr Henry Wansbrough OSB is a monk of Ampleforth, emeritus Master of St Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and a former member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. Without such testing, it remains unclear that the Jesus movement was a product of class-conflict and agrarian unrest. We are a conservative evangelical church with a long history of faithful Bible teaching in the coastal town of Whitehaven in beautiful West Cumbria.

Tensions flared up considerably when the movement marched on Jerusalem and Jesus was willingly martyred for the cause. Both books start with a review of the classic three quests for the historical Jesus, the first emerging from the European Enlightenment and culminating in Albert Schweitzer (1906); the second (between the two World Wars) pioneered by the studies of Bultmann and Dibelius and characterised by the attempt to establish criteria for the historical Jesus; the third led by Géza Vermes’s insistence on the Jewishness of Jesus and bolstered by new archaeological discoveries, such as that of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947.In so doing, the authors speedily debunk the “Great Man” myth and demonstrate the large number of similar grouplets in a Palestine that was being convulsed by serious dislocations. For many young men of the time, there were only two realistic responses: banditry or hitching themselves to a prophetic itinerant movement.

But is Mark’s story his way of showing that Antipas is a foolish victim of a pretty girl’s charm (Esther 5. Of the three last words of Jesus on the cross offered by Mark/Matthew, Luke and John which is historical or does that not matter? Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict will henceforth provide an easy answer whenever friends and family request a recommendation for an accessible but reliable book about the historical Jesus. The movement’s popular appeal was due in part to a desire to represent the values of ordinary rural workers, and its vision meant that the rich would have to give up their wealth, while the poor would be afforded a life of heavenly luxury.Crossley and Myles offer a vivid portrait of the man and his movement and uncover the material conditions that converged to make it happen. I can think of no better introduction to the historical Jesus for the general reader, no clearer statement on the legacy of the Jesus movement in the sweep of subsequent history, or a more worthy challenge to contemporary scholarship on Jesus and the rise of Christianity. Myles have painstakingly examined many of the mainstream interpretations of the life, teachings, and execution of Jesus. Tensions flared up considerably when the movement marched on Jerusalem, and Jesus was willingly martyred for the cause.