Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict

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We are trusting God’s plans for St John’s and excited to discover how he might be looking to use us for His Kingdom in our community. We are a conservative evangelical church with a long history of faithful Bible teaching in the coastal town of Whitehaven in beautiful West Cumbria. More generally, if the Jewish historian Josephus is the chief witness for the Galilean world of “excessive taxation, discontent, banditry, warfare and violent reprisals”, his own motives for painting this picture for the Romans should be more closely examined. Some readers may be irritated by the retro-fitting of 19th and 20th century language to a first century setting (the Twelve Disciples are referred to as the Jesus Movement’s “Politburo,” and the desired millenarian outcome as a “Dictatorship of the Peasantry,” for instance).

The claims of hyper or “servant” masculinity and the downgrading of the Movement’s radical inclusion of women needs far more substance to stand up than they provide here. 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. When John’s shorthand term for the Jewish authorities in the Passion narrative as “the Jews” is described as a “chilling ‘fascist-like’ tendency”, the reader may be forgiven for assuming that the authors slip too readily into a Marxist perspective. The book is sound in its scholarship, reasonable in its conclusions, yet provocative enough that it will hold an array of readers' interests.

Tensions flared up considerably when the movement marched on Jerusalem, and Jesus was willingly martyred for the cause. From the outset, this book seeks to place the “Jesus Movement” within its wider economic and social context.

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. Being born and raised in this artisan rural working stratum, Jesus and his immediate family would have felt the full force of the economic dislocations and displacements caused by the massive Herodian building schemes at Sepphoris and Tiberias. Crossley and Myles have recaptured the mind-blowing excitement generated by the original quest to distinguish the Jesus of history behind the myth. 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. This book moves on from the Third Quest for the historical Jesus, so focused on seeing Jesus as a great innovator within a particular cultural, religious and societal context.The popular appeal of the movement was due in part to a desire to represent the values of ordinary rural workers.

Copious and informed material information by way of well-wrought and well-written biographical narrative. Despite being written from a perspective that questions many of the traditions of the Christian faith, it is respectful in its approach, reasonable in most of its assessments, and simply enjoyable to read.Written for a broad audience, it understands the Jesus movement and rise of Christianity without resorting to the usual Great Man view of history and instead pursues a history from below.

Whether you are an academic of the field, a lay Christian, or clergy, you should be reading this volume and seriously considering it. Tensions flared up considerably when the movement marched on Jerusalem and Jesus was willingly martyred for the cause. As of yesterday, my co-author James Crossley and I submitted the final author-approved manuscript of Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict to our publisher Zer0 Books .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 provides an important refocusing and reprioritizing of earlier Scriptural studies as seen through the lens of historical materialist analysis. 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.