Varn Vlog: Robert J Myles on New Testament Class Conflict and Jesus

[Music] foreign [Music] blog and today I'm talking to Dr Robert J miles and we are keeping the J in there because it's easier to find it's working to do that we are talking about his edited volume a class struggle in the New Testament from uh Fortress academic Lexington books 2019 and his co-authored work with James Crossley uh from zero books Jesus alive and class conflict and the context around that one of the things I guess people probably ask you the most is why is there remarks instead of Divinity School [Laughter] uh why not it's my question that's fair I mean I'm sure yeah I mean I'm sure plenty of people ask that uh including Within the Divinity School itself um but you know I I mean I I was interested in in this kind of area the the relationship between Marxism and Christianity and and uh particularly my own field of New Testament studies um I've been interested in both fields for as long as I've been interested in both Fields um I developed this interest at around the same time and uh yeah it's a it's a weird story I don't know how I ended up in a Divinity School um I started out at a at a secular Public University uh both in terms of my study all my study was done there and uh my first few teaching jobs were at public universities uh where I'm from in Australia and New Zealand religious studies and theology uh doesn't exist that much anymore Within non-religiously Affiliated universities which is a bit of a shame I think so when academics like myself are looking for jobs we're basic we basically in this part of the world will end up at theological colleges or Divinity schools we have a pretty robust uh private sector here in the states that is nominally religiously Affiliated including most of the IVs so um so there's I think maybe there's a little bit more of that here one of the things that I find amusing though is we always used to make fun of people who went to Harvard and got Harvard Divinity School stuff because it usually meant that you couldn't get into any of the other programs right so I wouldn't know about that uh uh but uh my interest in religious studies actually pre-days my interest in Marxism by about a decade I became interested in this in high school and one of the things that I liked about um your Collective volume and your co-authored work is that you do contextualize this historical Jesus um phenomenon and um you even periodize that you talk about the the first Quest the second Quest the third Quest and now we're kind of beyond that there's also and I'm going to bring this up uh there's a trend not so much in Academia but in like para academic circles uh in the last decade and a half that was picked up by some leftists to be Christ mythicist um and so we can talk about that too um but how how do we contextualize uh historical Jesus studies and and point out that it actually does have a a relationship to Marxism going all the way back to the Young aliens um yeah I mean historical Jesus research kind of like Marxism is a both products the enlightenment the European Enlightenment and when uh when historical Jesus studies started you know when it got going it was very much a kind of a cipher for um political discussions so uh given the particularly in Germany given the the relationship between uh the church and state um in the attempt to create a kind of a human Jesus who stood apart from uh the the church as Jesus or the Christ of Faith as it were that was proclaimed by the church there was there was a kind of political negotiation going on as well that you know we can reconstruct this figure using the the tools of the the the natural world The Sciences and so on which was all part of this Enlightenment project and I think you know there were a lot of um uh crossovers there equally so um it was driven very much by the interest in biography and again this was something that um various Enlightenment intellectual Figures were quite interested in um about kind of biography and and um historical biography because it was part of this broader intellectual process of creating individuals individual persons who uh could themselves you know fundamentally own property have rights and so on and so forth so you know they go to the the most important historical figure that they know and attempt to reconstruct them as this um individual person who uh you know is I think wrapped up in all of those uh various threads one of the things about your book um and and you're in James book I should not cut him out of the equation is it doesn't some things that I'm actually not used to although I am reminded of the work of EP Sanders a lot when I read it um and people who focused in on the nature and politicization of the apocalyptic movement and and uh in Judaism are well you shouldn't say apocalyptic Movement we should say apocalyptic movements plural um what prior uh historical Jesus Scholars did you find most enlightening for your own work that's a good question I mean this is a a huge sub-discipline with you know possibly hundreds of people having having written important works on it and um and collectively James and I have have I think read you know a lot of this work and there are these these fundamental figures who've come up particularly over the last several decades like EP Sanders as you mentioned um including a number number of others I've always been interested in some of the more marginal figures within the discipline who have done important work but it probably didn't get noticed or get the same kind of profile as as the likes of your um EP Sanders or John Dominic Crossing um even uh NT Wright and some of these other major figures from a kind of a generation ago so I'm thinking of helvin moxness wrote a really interesting book He's written a couple of books on the historical Jesus um one of them putting Jesus in his place works more with gender and spatial Theory and you can definitely see some of his work on on gender is influential in our book um on the historical Jesus particularly as gender intersex with class that's something that we're interested in exploring he also wrote another book called Jesus I can't remember the exact title I think it was Jesus in the rise of nationalism and it was here that he uh was one of the pioneers of of contextualizing historical Jesus research as not only this product the enlightenment but part of the the the nation building and kind of Bourgeois Elite cultural cultural production of uh particularly Germany at the time that this whole project started started to get going so that's a really fascinating book um it it puts um it really attempts to put historical Jesus research historically within an ideological context and that's the kind of work that I've always been interested in I've known James Crossley for about uh about 15 years almost 15 years now and one of the things that uh got me interested in meeting him to begin with was some of his earlier work as well so he's been writing on historical Jesus for for longer a lot longer than I have and um he's got a couple of books where he contextualizes historical Jesus research in a um and this is the more contemporary stuff so the stuff of the the the late 20th century earliest early 20th century um contextualizing this work in terms of its ideological context uh so he's got two books that do this Jesus in an age of Terror and Jesus in an age of neoliberalism um and very much showing how historical Jesus research which um particularly in the Contemporary era it has both an academic audience but also very much a a popular audience um a popular audience and a kind of mass marketability in a way that you know other biblical figures don't like no one's going to read a book about um uh over Dyer or something like you put that out it's not going to sell potentially millions of copies but some historical Jesus books do very well and often they are aligned to uh particular um Market interests right so in writing our book we were both aware of that and trying to avoid it so we haven't actually I mean although we are very open about coming from uh you know a leftist perspective and using the tools of historical materialism um to write this book it doesn't doing that for us doesn't mean that we're just romantic projecting this romantic kind of um first century Che Guevara Jesus or something like that who uh um is because that that seems to be the this tendency within historical Jesus research that um whatever the predilections of the uh of the author they kind of reconstruct this Jesus and their own sort of image and this has been actually a long Trope of historical Jesus research going back right back to the the stuff that was going on uh in the in the 18th and 19th centuries as well yeah I was actually thinking that I was thinking about like that the radical school that comes out of the explicitly comes out of younger aliens after a bucket to the Bauer Brothers Etc and that's a crypto um kind of left liberal is almost anachronistic but it's kind of what it is um debate around all sorts of things and the development of the Prussian State like it's it's the crypto debate right um I mean and and his uh a really famous author from about 100 years ago Albert Schweitzer famously came up with the term the liberal lives of Jesus to talk about all these biographies that um I think did exactly that um I think often it within my own discipline of biblical studies people aren't quite aware of of what that label actually entailed and I think you're absolutely correct that it's it's connected to this much broader intellectual current liberal intellectual current of of the Enlightenment um rather than a kind of um uh you know like the liberal Jesus or the conservative Jesus or that kind of thing I think it's it's it's a much bigger idea connected to uh kind of liberal philosophy and and Classical liberalism of the human person and also you know yeah at um how that intersects economically as well with um liberalism being a kind you know an ideological part of the ideological fabric of of capitalism and so on it's it's interesting um this is another thing that your book kind of reminded me of but I found it a lot more substantive than um I knew you're probably familiar with someone like Robert Price who politically is a reactionary um uh but was very good on pointing out how much of the historical Jesus research was basically ideological reconstructions to fit some narrative or another and he was absolutely correct about that his next jump it you know that there's no reason to assume there's a historical Jesus at all seems unfounded but that critique that he gave of the historical Jesus Remember about 20 years ago now um does seem still pretty sound um I mean it's not I mean that idea the first part of what you just said is not particularly unique to to him no um and I think of uh I mean there's a there's another really interesting book from around the same time actually um uh what's it called the symbolic Jesus by William Arnell and uh I think basically makes that same point in a really interesting way that that kind of discourses of of the historical Jesus in the Contemporary period are investing in this this figure of the historical Jesus as this kind of symbolic authority figure to authorize particular ideas in the present and this is often operating in the at this uh unconscious or not conscious level um or and maybe sometimes it is happening at the conscious level you know that sort of irrespective of um the point um so yeah I don't see how that necessarily you would go from that to you know you'd leap from that to a kind of Christ mythicism um I in terms of our book I think we kind of bypass this whole issue because we're not um kind of hard empiricists in the sense that we think that we've got it it sort of comes down to the the the the nature of of dealing with the ancient world and viscosity of of um information we actually have about anybody with the exception of the elite so for most people in human history we don't have the the abundance of resources you know of information to to kind of prove their existence or disprove their existence um uh and most of the the writings that we have about the ancient world um and it is focused on the lives of the elite um equally uh the archaeological record tends to um preserve what's durable rather than what's makeshift you know preserve um what's Monumental um and so on and so this means that the lives of the non-elite through history um they don't leave a massive imprint so it for the kind of for the historical materialist or the Marxist historian it it raises some massive mythological questions about what do we do about this to say that someone didn't exist because we don't have this abundance of evidence um I think um is to kind of jump the gun and it also risks erasing the the poor in the non-elite from from history altogether um but equally I think in the case of Jesus I think that we do have quite a bit of decent evidence we've got a lot of sources part of the problem is that the sources are all particularly biased because like any Source actually um but the bias of our sources is that they are we're mostly working with the gospels which make up which part of the New Testament and the gospels are not written as factual historical um accounts as such rather they are proclamations uh proclamations of faith based on on telling people about the the life of um uh this person Jesus Nazareth who they also believe to be the Christ so I think careful investigative work of these sources is required the way that we frame the the issue is to say that we're looking for the earliest Traditions so the earliest Traditions themes ideas about the historical Jesus and also um the the broader historical Jesus movement that he was a part of and I'll come back to talk about that in a second um and so you know this takes um sometimes as I said careful work and there's certain arguments that you can form to try and figure out which Traditions that are preserved within the gospels and sometimes other sources go back earlier closer to the time of the early Jesus movement most of our the gospels were written from probably around 70-ish to um the late first early second century so if the Jesus movement was active around the late 20s early 30s you know you've got few Decades of development embellishment where this movement has already kind of begun to transform and develop certain ideas and so by the time of the writing of the gospels at least um there's a mixture of both what we might consider historical material or material going back much earlier as well as material that has developed in the in the interim period so one thing I actually know a bit about that that I always have taken as a problematizer for the early Jesus movement as how late it takes the also forming at the same time rabbinic movement um to fully see the Jesus movement as separate from itself um uh in the earliest rabbinic writings we have around Christians they're not called anything other than basically weird Jews um in Hebrew until probably about a hundred years later yeah 100 120 years after what we consider would have probably been the act the active moment of Jesus movement and all this is post uh uh no destruction of the temple effectively so it is to me that that makes um some claims kind of interesting because the Jewish writings about Jesus which are much later I think people will try to use them as authoritative sources I'm like well the comments from like yeah yeah someone's like between 600 and a thousand depending on what volumes you're dealing with and it's compilation Etc I mean even if you're dealing just with them I mean similarly though you know you've got you've got material and you've got a combination of earlier material that's been passed down as well as light and materials so use it I think that some rabbinic sources are useful in terms of our project but for the most part it's not they're too they're too late they're too influenced by later developments including that the the um the later uh kind of what's maybe wrongly called The Parting of the ways or whatever where Judaism and Christianity become uh distinct separate uh religions um yeah no you're absolutely right in terms of the early Jesus movement is a Jewish movement thoroughly within Judaism um Jesus and others Paul did not see themselves as beginning a new religion or anything like that um and this development happens much later and in fact I think there's only two sources within the New Testament the book of Acts and another source that even uses the word Christian uh so um but I think in in the New Testament by the end of the first century some of the sources written at that time you do start to see this distinction between um uh I suppose the the the Jesus Movement by that stage um coming into conflict with other uh Jewish groups in a way that um uh lays the foundation for that later parting so one thing I want to ask of you because this is actually important to your to you and uh and James's book um is the fact that the writers of the gospels were Greek speakers who were familiar enough with Aramaic to include a lot of Aramaic phrases um there's only a few there's only a handful of Aramaic phrases but yeah point taken yeah yeah I mean there are arguments that I don't buy by some some Errors By some Aramaic Scholars who claim that the it seemed like their phraseologies particularly in Matthew that's in like the bar of America but it's a stretch um one of the things I was going to ask you though I while this is a thoroughly Jewish movement is it of any import to the context into the class struggles that we're looking at this is a hellenized Jewish movement at least in the fact that it's dominant it's speaking the dominant language of the Empire speaking the dominant language of trade um and I asked that because it's actually also relevant to who you think the mission was to um um yeah I mean that's a really good question so we we would say that the earliest Jesus movement was um uh an intra-jewish movement in the sense that its mission was entirely to um initially to uh other Jews Within Palestine um it used the language of the Jewish tradition um and Concepts from the Jewish tradition to to formulate its own ideas again I can go into a bit more detail later on about this um and it's only later after after Jesus's death and as the movement begins to spread um and in fact spread rapidly around the The Wider Roman Empire or into various Urban environments far outside of Palestine that it begins to bring on board Gentiles and non-jews and this changes the the some of the characteristics of the early Jesus movement and in fact this is one of the ways that we think we can distinguish between some of the earlier and later Traditions so for traditions that seem to be entirely focused on um uh Palestine and um envisage that the movement is only for for practicing Jews um we think that that you know that's a good sign that these Traditions come from an earlier time in the movement whereas ideas that uh appear to be much more sort of maybe Universal or inclusive of non-jews uh come from this this later point in in the development of the movement and and that shift happened really quickly so um the letters of Paul uh some Paul the Apostle he right that I think there's 13 letters in the New Testament which are attributed to this figure and um uh many of them most of them are addressed to Christ assemblies in major uh Roman cities including Rome Corinth and so on um and the and the it seems that the the um Christ assemblies themselves were made up of mixture of Jewish and non-jewish followers of Jesus now those letters the earliest is probably dated around 50 CE they were written between 50 to 60 so um uh it's already sort of 20 years after but still they're early and by the so so anything that suggests a kind of solely um Jewish movement focused purely on kind of the the what's going to happen in Palestine and so on um must be from well before then so this is one of the reasons why we think that's it's good evidence for that material being earlier potentially going back to the early Jesus movement or the time of the early Jesus movement so one thing I think we have to do when we talk about like the class analysis of Galilee at the time is it's it's actually I mean it's simple in that most people are a peasant at subsistence or even lower levels um but it's complicated in that you have competing levels of Elites both within the Jewish society and outside of it and I I think your book actually does kind of deal with some of this complication and and the language of empire being adopted seemingly kind of has a double movement one against you know to invert the the Roman hierarchy in the Roman Elites which they're dealing with but also in a way to not give Credence to say something we might see and said you see in Judaism or something like that which is the kind of prior um Priestly and monarchical is both correct but also it brings up medieval connotations uh but still um monarchical context it's not pulling back to that exactly either um and your argument about basalea and the kingdom of God being specifically which you really should translate it as the Empire of God right like that's it it's the same word some Scholars have yeah I mean it's the same word that would have been used to refer to um uh Rome's Empire um it's a different yeah I mean the the idea of Translating that to kingdom of God um comes from the first English translations in medieval Europe right or um many of England so uh that's where that language has kind of come about and it stayed and and that translation hasn't really been updated some Scholars have argued that it should be translated as Empire of God um uh we suggest uh another translation could be dictatorship of God or dictatorship of the peasantry in the sense of um the the fact that this is not just a religious idea but also a political one and um in uh in the ancient world um well I mean the the distinction that's often upheld between religion and and politics is itself This Modern construction right and I think that's like that's just fundamental to to everything we're doing I mean it's actually a really fundamental Point within um New Testament studies as well that's kind of how I start off you know my first lecture in an introductory course is to just say this whole distinction that you're operating with that what we're dealing with is religion um and it it's not involved with um politics or it kind of you know these are categories that we are imposing on these texts that the texts themselves do not assume um the root word that we use to make the word religion religio uh does not have the same no no no absolutely not and and also religion has now become something that's very um like it's become privatized right and so again we can think about that and and Scholars have written about this um in terms of of of how this has happened through the period of of capitalism um you have this uptick in kind of individual expressions of of um religion as being something not public but private or best done and private it's about inward personal uh spirituality and so on and it's not to say that it was never about this but it's about the way in which it's Being Framed the way in which the focus suddenly is on someone's individual salvation rather than a kind of collective salvation and salvation itself is understood in this weird kind of spiritual individual sense rather than in a collective sense and that doesn't really speak true to the biblical narrative particularly if we think of um what the concepts of Salvation would mean for uh Jews in the first century who are themselves under um occupation whether directly or indirectly by the Roman Empire who historically you know have read stories heard stories about um the the Passover the the the God of God who liberated their ancestors from Egypt The God Who returned um their people from Exile and Babylon and all this kind of stuff you know these are stories of political Liberation that are understood religiously and and equally um major political figures were also religious figures so um and again this is a very well established Point within um within scholarship that uh Caesar Augustus himself you know you go and you read some of the ancient biographies of Herm and they're talking about whom as as the pontifex uh Maximus the height you know the equivalent to the high priest of Roman religion is also um the Son of God um divinized himself so um bringer of of peace all this kind of stuff so all this language that um that has a lot of overlap between what we would call religion and politics these things seem to go hand in hand and I think similarly the the early Jesus movement understood their world in this way so they were they were thoroughly immersed in this religious World an idea that they understood also politically and they understood their their political world and their economic World um through this lens of uh the Jewish Heritage and culture yeah I for me I come from a Jewish back I actually come from a mixed Jewish Catholic background so like the idea that like salvation is not particularly individual um that's clear in Jewish scripture uh the meshiach is clearly you know a political category which is why most Jews no longer really care about it except for some very specific sides of cultural products use Etc um I mean we we talk about this as a as part of the of the modern world and I think in this sense it's both true and and there's the enlightenment comes out of Europe and this means that it's specifically Christian and our understanding of what secularism is and all that as well and your book is really good on that but you to me those are like basic religious anthropology basic religious points right um it's surprising because you like but I I feel like it's really important to to lay that out there because a lot of people who are not particularly familiar with the field um and even some people who are familiar with the field will still operate as if religion is this thing that stands apart from and is separate from um everything else uh or other aspects of culture and I think that um particularly when it comes to studying ancient religions what we call ancient religions you know this this is really problematic because it stops us from seeing some of these connections um some of the most interesting parts of the beginning of year and James's book I I really liked the focus on uh what is actually indicated by like tales that we get about Jesus about where in the class formation he was what kind of relationship he had to literacy Etc you point out that the Greek word that we translate as Carpenter and well I have a pretty good grasp of Hebrew I have no grasp of Greek um uh uh has a much broader implication than Carpenter and Carpenter is not a peasant profession anyway in this time period so what can we make from that you know uh from these hints about the nature of the very beginning of the Jesus movement what class was it really coming out of I think before getting there I do want to make one more comment because I think it it nicely segues between what we've talked about before and and this and this is just to say that I think one of the distinctive aspects of our life of Jesus is that we are trying to avoid the kind of the great man view of history that has tended to dominate this field so we're we're most um historical Jesus studies talk about Jesus adopting this familiar great man view of History where um kind of History happens because of innovative singular great individuals and their their genius or whatever it is their ideas actions and so on whereas you know we've the the critique of this is to flip it on its head and to say well uh great men are about the products of the the social conditions of their time and place and so this is really our starting point um and I think link to that is why we choose to talk more about the Jesus movement the broader Jesus movement that he was a part of that he emerged out of um and which formed him as a significant figure within you know later on to become a significant figure within this movement um so we prefer to talk about that you know in a much more generalized sense rather than to say oh well this individual person Jesus um had these particular life experiences and we know this for a fact and so he would have thought in this particular way and did these particular things and so on no it and this is one of the ways in which I think we can kind of bypass the the mythicist arguments as well um that also were focused on on the importance of you know proving or disproving in this case um a great man of History um so with that uh uh caveat I I can then talk about um Jesus the individual uh and his upbringing to say you know there's not too much that we do know about his upbringing other than he was probably located in Nazareth which is um a very small uh Village um focused on agricultural production um and uh the gospels themselves identify Jesus as a tectone which the tradition is translated as Carpenter but as you point out has a much broader meaning I mean it could mean that he works with um works with various materials stone or wood as a builder or a you know or doing kind of carpentry work but um maybe construction worker or something like that would be a a more interesting translation um I think given where he's from and the kind of trade that he's involved in um and uh some of the the earliest people that he Associates with uh fishermen and so on um we can see him as aligned with uh the the broader peasant classes most of whom were were engaged with the the agricultural production of of the land um or in the case of fishing of of the water um and uh importantly this needs to be connected to uh some of the broader economic dynamics of Galilee at the time um where there were a couple of major urbanization projects that were going on as Jesus was growing up and uh slightly before the the early Jesus movement began to kind of organize its its initial response um so this this was the construction of sephorus which is about six kilometers from Nazareth um and then in about 19 CE um here at Antipas founds the city of Tiberius named in honor of the Roman Empire Emperor at the time who you know uh kind of pointing to the the Imperial backing of of this whole political Dynamic there and the Tiberius was built on the um Sea of Galilee and enabled um so so the construction of both these cities importantly put massive pressure on the surrounding environments to uh produce more to in order to sustain them uh so farmers agriculturalists would have to um produce more than simply enough to eke out their own subsistence living but to support this influx of people within to say sephorus and Tiberius and then Tiberius given its strategic location on the Sea of Galilee enabled better connected Elites to really dominate the fishing economy so I think it's really important that we see um that the you know the first people that um the gospels associate with this early Jesus movement um as being prominent members of this early Jesus movement are four fishermen who are located as based in the small fishing fishing Village at Capernaum um and you know there's interesting stories within the New Testament about um well interestingly often the the associated with the miraculous whenever kind of fish or fishing is is noticed so I've mentioned so um including one Miracle story where the disciples have been out fishing all night and then uh they've caught nothing you know um and to me this this you know this is a very speculative argument but it speaks to um a situation where uh uh the the the the there's a there's an imbalance within the the um uh the the lake uh in terms of fishing productivity and so on and it means you know it's it's suddenly become hard work and that it it's a problem that seems to be that it could only be fixed by some kind of divine intervention so Jesus comes as a miraculous catch of fish um and to me that's just really interesting it it points to um uh and again I'm not talking about the kind of the literal historicity of these events but rather the the kinds of ideas that um were generated by this underlying changing uh historical material situation yeah I think this is this is interesting to me because the first the Jesus Movement we have records of outside of what we have here is from about what a century or two later and we see it popular amongst a kind of I would say a marginalized upper an upper middle class for these are approximate words they're anachronistic but Elite women soldiers uh the kinds of people who are could be marginalized in Roman society but we're not really part of like say the Galilean peasantry but that's a later development it just that's the people we have absolutely absolutely I mean um we can see some we can see where some of the stuff begins in terms of the the early Jesus movement and I'll talk about this in a second um we think that although it was a movement of uh and for the peasantry um they also had a mission to the rich and I'll come back to that in a sec but yeah I mean the the by later in the first century the movement has has really um as it's expanded has drawn in people from a number of different class positions um and and backgrounds and I mean you know in in many ways we've got to explain how this movement that starts off as this kind of ragtag bunch of of um uh mostly um peasants within Galilee ends up several centuries later becoming the religion of of the Roman Emperor and ultimately the religion of Empire itself um so some of these trajectories are there from from the beginning but um certainly uh the the more uh as time went on it it would have had more and more well-connected um uh Elites especially outside of uh Palestine when the movement was in Palestine so I'll talk about the mission to the rich now um we make an argument within the book that um the admission to the poor as it's kind of commonly framed or commonly understood would not have gone far enough for this movement to actually do anything uh or even survive and um there are I mean you mentioned before that the elite woman being attracted to to this movement and in fact there is evidence within the gospels of some of Jesus's earliest followers being Elite woman who actually provide for uh some of the the men when I say Elite women I mean maybe relatively Elite so maybe slightly better off than um the male fisherman disciples and so on at least they would have had enough resources to support uh some of the movement abandoning work for whatever reason and and traveling around the countryside um but we also um uh look at this the the the translation of uh this word um sinners and the gospel State uh unambiguously that Jesus came not to call the righteousness but Sinners to repentance and the the kind of the conventional um understanding or misunderstanding of this term Sinners is that it refers to kind of downtrodden societal outcasts um uh and um uh but actually the this translation or mistranslation is is completely wrong um within ancient Judaism Sinners refers to law Breakers those who have not upheld the the Commandments um those who um have strayed from the Mosaic law um I mean also uh and who act as if there's no God and I think because of that meaning it could also sometimes in some texts be applied to non-jews so the Gentiles or the the Gentile Nations could sometimes be described as as nations of Sinners and so on um and um interestingly in uh work that that James had done earlier um in a previous book where he painstakingly looked through over almost a thousand years of ancient Jewish texts he found that um whenever that there is a consistent meaning in this term um the one that I've just identified and whenever the socioeconomic status of Sinners is mentioned it's always with reference to them being exploitative rich people who are needlessly oppressing the poor which uh is in line with um the Mosaic law understanding of of justice and so on and so um the gospels talk about Jesus associating with both tax collectors and sinners famously he he sits down to dine with tax collectors and sinners um and this is seen as scandalous and the reason that Cena's scandalous is precisely because he was sitting down to dine with wealthy corrupt individuals seen as law Breakers oppressing their own people the combination of tax collectors is interesting here because tax collectors and we know that there was at least one tax collector who was one of the this Inner Circle of The Twelve who gets named Levi or Matthew the tax collector these people would have had some of these connections to wealthier individuals Within uh Galilee um those responsible for um and benefiting from these urbanization projects as well so um uh this is why we think you know this is really good evidence for this kind of what we call it this mission to the rich um that uh the early Jesus movement were through their networks of tax collectors and so on approaching wealthy people and asking them to repent to hand over their wealth preferably to the movement to fund it or risk terrible consequences on on the coming day of judgment your book actually clarified something to me when I when I hit that that I'd never had gotten before um I I like I mentioned I can read Hebrew and and Qatar means means to fail um you almost never you're right you almost never hear it referred to um just general like you know the poor the cursed Etc there are words for that in Hebrew um uh particularly the totally Outcast like the mass murder Etc um and in Greek the word is high Martia which is it's the same word as tragic flaw right like literally the same word if you're reading Aristotle um and I was like how in the hell did uh uh tragic flaw get associated with the down and out in that way I mean I guess bad outcomes but it never made sense to me and and uh what your book pointed out as my inclinations there are actually correct that that it doesn't make sense and that's probably like I am speculating here but I'm guessing that's a medieval sort of conflation not not an ancient one um I mean part of the the process of this this change of the meaning of the term happens because um because of this transition of the movement to uh a movement inclusive of non-jews so um as the the move and we go we go into this a little bit in the final chapter of the book uh where we kind of indicate that um suddenly you know when we're talking about sinners will we can't necessarily be talking about um uh well if non-jews are now part of the movement right like this whole question of who is a sinner um I think becomes a bit more more um prescient perhaps and then you know as someone said to me once when I was explaining this they're like oh but Robert uh we're all Sinners and you know and it's like well yeah that that meaning comes from the the the the idea of the movement spreading Beyond uh just Jews so that um if Gentiles who are of course Sinners within uh their ancient Jewish idea um or world view um then yeah I suppose in one sense we're kind of we all are sinners in need of redemption and so on you know so it it universalizes the message to it to a greater extent you also point out in John and this doesn't directly seem related but it is kind of related is the change of the language around the kingdom of God like basilia I think you say basalea is not used in John it does appear but um there's the famous phrase uh my kingdom is not of this world so where is the the first three gospels um uh Matthew Mark and Luke which we referred as the synoptic gospels because they're very similar in many ways um and uh Mark of of those three was was uh probably the the earliest um and these three gospels talk about the kingdom as a kingdom for this world um I think in a very tangible sense uh whereas as the tradition develops and particularly in in John's gospel um the the the the the the what what kind of matters is actually a spiritual um Enlightenment or salvation in the here and now and the kingdom is is described interestingly as as I said uh kind of not of this world and um again this is a really interesting development that happens uh through um through the first century in particular towards the end of the first century is um we we say that the Jesus movement or the earliest traditions of the Jesus movement were um were millenarian uh um the early Jesus movement was this very uh immersed in this kind of end times um ideas within the the which they had drawn from the um their own kind of cultural uh Jewish Traditions um but within this understanding millinarianism would refer to the sort of expectation of Destruction radical transformation of the the current world order into an age to come and so this is specifically meant the kind of the handing over of the um the political institutions of this world of the Roman Empire and so on over to the the Jesus movement this would be the kingdom of God or the Empire of God or the the dictatorship of God um led by uh or on behalf of the god of Israel and and the co-regent Jesus and so on and so many of the New Testament texts um including some of the gospels and and the Book of Revelation is big on this actually as well um uh imagine this this handing over um from one age to the next in the this sort of way they thought that this was going to happen imminently it didn't happen imminently and in fact already by the writing of Paul's letters and say first Thessalonians which is the earliest book in the New Testament that we actually have dated to around about 50 or whatever so 20 years into this movement less than 20 years into this movement it's already late and people are concerned about when when is this going to happen how come it hasn't happened yet you know there's a lot of anxieties about it Paul Still Remains this Ardent apocalypticist the end times are at hand we are living in the the the the time right before the the final end the day of judgment and so on the Mark's gospel Matthews gospel absolutely massively um uh see things in this way but then some of the later New Testament texts um and I think John is a great example of this um uh change this idea from um a uh a dualism between the sage and the age to come um for John it's about accessing the divine within this age in the here and now um and um uh some of the other later texts um uh I think as well do do have different ways of kind of negotiating this uh this failed apocalyptic moment that never quite came and of course you know um uh by the time this movement becomes a religion in a world religion and then we've had you know almost 2 000 years of this uh Christianity there's there's been reinterpretations of what the um what some of the the end times and apocalyptic kind of ideas could could mean or what they do mean um and alongside that we've also seen occasional kind of uh millenarian and apocalyptic movements uh which draw inspiration from some of those early ideas which is still contained within some documents of the New Testament yeah one of the things that I found interesting about your book as well um you were in James's book make sure I always mentioned secondary um is that you go into this to gender and there's been a lot of use particularly of like second and third sensory fragments we have about women are Gnostic texts from the third and fourth Century um uh which try to read a kind of proto-feminism into the early Jesus movement I think even in the case of Gnostic Tech that's kind of a it's a stretch I mean I I think one thing I'll I'll point out just there I I don't think you're wrong but I um but I would Nuance it a little bit and I would say that um earliest what we call earliest Christianity was incredibly diverse there wasn't this kind of um some Scholars refer to um like a proto-orthodoxy which is um uh what would later become the the to Define orthodox um not Eastern Orthodox but Orthodox Christianity in like the fourth and fifth century like Imperial Christianity by the time uh Christianity becomes very much aligned with Empire and it's and it stamps out some of these other so-called Gnostic movements and and various Divergent forms of Christianity um but uh it seems that proto-orthodox Christianity was just one of the interpretations or movements within this emerging religious movement that sat alongside many others there wasn't a kind of um especially after the the the the initial organizing of the early Jesus movement which was very much focused on the imminent 10 times and and responding to the social material upheavals in Galilee and Judea by the time the movement spreads beyond that and it's got um a different kind of of message there's various power groups and and factions um trying to to figure out what to do now what what it actually means to say follow Jesus Within These different environments I think Paul is already doing this and and reveals this diversity because he's oftentimes responding to um the the influence of other Christian missionaries who have come in and are teaching a different gospel right um so the proto-orthodox movement um was one that was particularly um patriarchal um it was one that I think would allow the Christian message to be fairly compatible with the Roman Imperial world so some of the later texts in the New Testament such as the Pastoral Epistles uh first second Timothy and Titus they're probably second century texts they're written in the name of Paul but most Scholars would say that they weren't written by Paul because they reveal this very kind of late development within early Christianity where Christianity has become um or is becoming a a movement based on um certain Creeds and doctrines so you know you'll know if people are on site or not because they'll subscribe to this kind of box of of uh belief they're very interested in in structure and the offices of various leaders within the church so they Define the roles of of Bishops and elders and deacons each having various domains of responsibility but also certain prescriptions of gender and so on but this is part of and on a trajectory of a struggle that intersects with gender and class that I think we can see happening much earlier as well so um the early Jesus movement was not um at the time of Jesus was not we we don't think it was a proto-feminist movement or anything like that I think that would be very anachronistic to say that Jesus was for all uh intensive purposes uh much like any other kind of peasant of his time uh in the sense that life was very Village focused it was based around the patriarchal household this was the the central kind of microcosm of of life and I think we see some of these what we call traditional ideas coming through within the Jesus movement but alongside interesting more radical ideas where gender could be kind of played with and shifted and and so on and times of social crisis and and um and particularly within social movements that are responding to various upheavals you know we often see and even in we provide a couple of other examples from around the first century within the and particularly within the Jewish World at the time of the Jewish War where um ideas of gender could could get mixed up so you might have woman fighting alongside men for example or um or women could be put in in places of of um Authority and so on and it seems that in the in the early Jesus movement um uh they absolutely were and there were numerous women in who were particularly influential in positions of of authority um again Paul's letters um give some examples and say Romans 16 there's uh he names a a woman um Apostle and a woman Deacon right so um yeah I mean the stuff was was I think part of the the broader um the broader idea is that that the early Jesus movement were were playing with and we're working with in terms of understanding their own um this this their own uh uh ideas about millenarianism and how this world was being transformed from from one age to the next so the I I don't disagree with that I would I'm thinking about when we talk about the use of uh Gnostic stuff for trying to gauge the early Jesus movement attitudes or gender what most of them sorry I that's where that that's where that began and then I just went on a big rant but yeah yeah no I'm with you because I also I think you said on another show no we can't call Jesus a socialist but we also can't call him not one um I similarly think we can't call the Jesus movement feminist but it wasn't particularly anti-woman either right no no exactly exactly and and again I think this goes back to something we were saying earlier in the show about um being careful about not wanting to to romanticize Jesus so Jesus is this cultural figure um within our own Society whether you're kind of Christian or not it's besides the point Jesus is this authority figure and so you're constantly finding people from whatever political persuasion um uh trying to claim him for their side and um but yeah to talk about Jesus as a socialist or to talk about Jesus as a feminist um I think is it raises a whole lot of issues um but equally yeah it's not to say that you might not see things that look to be very socialist or look to be very feminist but we just have to be very careful kind of as you know sober critical academics about how we talk about these things um and to try and not um I suppose conflate Our Two Worlds because the the world of uh uh first century Galilee was incredibly different from alone in terms of how class was structured in terms of how gender was understood and um I think the the Jesus the historical Jesus that we construct is very much a a contradictory figure um in the sense that he combines both elements that we would understand as Progressive with elements that we would understand as reactionary or conservative and this simply has to do with the the social context that he was a part of um you know he came from a a very uh a small village agrarian society where um uh and so you know his thinking and his ideas would have been conditioned by all of those uh broader societal structures right the idea that Jesus was this and this it Taps into the great man view of history as well because the idea that Jesus was different from or you know like ahead of his time or different from everyone else and so on of his time it's not a credible picture um historically we if we're doing you know critical historical work on this Jesus needs to make sense within his own historical social political context um which means that he was working with Concepts that were available to him um in his day and time and we can we can uh I think contextualize those by comparing the early Jesus movement to other social and religious movements from the time um contextualize the gospels within other uh Jewish and perhaps even Greco-Roman taxes from the time and so on and so forth it talks about a lot um and before I talk you know go into why I specifically think using classic stuff it doesn't make sense actually I'll just say that before I go into it I I think if you look at quote Gnostic text not all of them but most of them show the influence of Fairly Advanced neoplatanism which uh which means that they are heavily Gentile oriented um and also highly educated in their authorship as weird as they can sometimes be I don't think that's true of all the Gnostic texts and I say Gnostic that's mostly what we have from uh the patristics fighting them and what we have from the nagamati text but but it's pretty clear then that's a late development absolutely so these these texts are I think and I love these texts like I love reading them I love teaching about them but they tell us very little about the historical Jesus what they tell us about is what Christianity looked like in the late second third fourth centuries right um so they have historical value in that sense but they they have very little if any historical value about the historical Jesus because they are not reflecting uh early Traditions often they're dependent upon the canonical gospels of what would become the canonical gospels Matthew Mark Luke and John that that we uh and particularly Matthew Mark and Luke that we use um for our uh historical reconstruction so yeah that's absolutely right so one of the things that you you bring up did not only get to that point um is that there is a kind of breaking of the Oikos or the household I guess is the closest thing we can translate it to in English um in the Jesus movement but there's also a focus on like fatherly as opposed to say maybe soldierly masculinity although you know there are there are martial metaphors all throughout but but you make a big deal out of this and and that does kind of that I think you know we talk about that contradictory now I think that's even contradictory in the time like that that what do you think about the class Arrangement is being reflected in that kind of contradictory pool of a very uh you know um there's both a kind of meta respect for the idea of the household and the whole father-son metaphors all throughout but also there's a fundamental breaking of it in these early particularly in there um yeah I mean this is always a really interesting point um talking about the the the the kind of anti-household texts or the the breaking from household that we see within the gospel text particularly in terms of contemporary some contemporary understandings of Christianity as um you know like promoting familial values or something like that right like it seems that some a lot of the earliest material that we have in the gospels is very anti-family um uh I've come to bring a sword to set father against son and so on and so forth um we think that you know there are a number of reasons why uh this kind of stuff would have been going on why they would have developed this idea of of being estranged from household in some sense um I think most pertinently to to draw back to some of the the material conditions was that the building of uh sephorus and and Tiberius the rebuilding of sephorus in the building of Tiberius um uh would have displaced a lot of people it if nothing less disrupted traditional life patterns um made would have made life a lot difficult for for some people some people would have probably benefited materially from the situation in any case you know it shook things up to a certain extent um uh including um the ancient Jewish historian Josephus actually in the building of Tiberius talks about um uh literal upheavals of of you know land being cleared to make way for um these for the building of tiberias for and and kind of moving people around to to make this happen so we know that this these sorts of displacements and so on could happen and um given the importance of the uh the the households not only within early Judaism but within the the broader Greco-Roman World um I mean the entire Roman Empire was actually imagined as um a big household of Rome with with um with the Roman Emperor as the the say Augustus as the father of the Fatherland that was one of the titles that he took on the head of the household of the household of Rome so on a smaller scale the role of the householder was incredibly important masculinity was a very uh a kind of pivotal value um related to ideas of of honor and shame within wider Greco-Roman society and so if you became um divorced from household or if you weren't kind of meeting your your familial obligations as um as the the head of a household through providing economically for your your your household and so on and so forth um this was very shameful this was seen as shameful and it seems that um this became a site of conflict within um the early within the early Jesus movement perhaps within it was a way in which um Elites and and others within uh Palestine could ridicule the early Jesus movement um referring to them as kind of uh effeminate or um and particularly the male members as a feminate is not living up to their household obligations um there's one phrase It's hard to know whether this goes back to the the early Jesus movement or not but it is preserved in the gospel of Matthew that talks about uh eunuchs for the the coming eunuchs for the for the Kingdom of Heaven um and uh eunuchs would have been understood you know um as um interestingly I mean it's it's it's it's such a great um uh term to use but Unix understood Ambiguously within the ancient world um in terms of gender they they both kind of would have um prominent places say in a Royal Court um but equally you know they they couldn't procreate and they were outside of the household and so on so um uh they could be ridiculed accordingly um and it seems that that saying in particular by by Jesus um suggests that the the early Jesus movement were embracing being called eunuchs right they were embracing some of this idea of being a kind of socially castrated movement but they were doing this at the same time as investing in um I suppose the the greatest patriarchal figure they knew um the father God right so uh um they may be a movement um without father's um I mean the Greek word for father is Patrice right and this is where we get patriarchy comes from us the rule of the father like it's all kind of tied into this idea and um so and as you say yeah this is where we see a real contradiction coming through because on the one hand they're they're they're uh yeah kind of um championing uh I suppose a kind of emasculated understanding of gender but equally at the same time they reinvest in um patriarchal ideas such as as a father figure in heaven um with power and might bringing in this new age um caring for them in the present and so on and they could draw on various Jewish Traditions to establish this this idea um yeah this leads to to two sections of your book that I've also found for a year and James's book that I also found fascinating um one is a section on Butch millenarianism which is a which is one of the subtitles in in your in you're in James's book that legitimately made me laugh um but uh but I think there's a lot in that and then the other uh is there's this focus in redefinition of Purity and family law uh that makes a lot of sense and it makes I think it makes more sense if you're assuming you know you're going to be an apocalyptic uh conflict and re-establishing a kingdom with new rules uh and possibly Eternal rules um very soon but um you you mentioned early on it's pretty clear that that in at least the first in the synoptic gospels the apocalypse is immediate like by the time we get into the Gospel of John and Revelations it's already kind of too late um uh so what do we make at this uh this Butch millenarianism and then how does this relate to uh the redefinition of Purity Insider Outsider and the kind of insistence actually I'm fairly strict marital laws for people who also discourage family um yeah I mean I think um the again this is this is really harking at that kind of contradiction between the Revolutionary and the reactionary or what we would see as the Revolutionary in the reactionary because although the early Jesus movement is imagining a better world and a new world the transformation of of society into this ideal Kingdom or Empire of God it's um it it bases its understanding of what this would look like on a traditional peasant Society um in which households peasant hierarchies and and social structures will still be present you've simply got kind of a new ruler in charge and what have you um and uh as a Jewish movement it's at least initially and again this is one of those longer term uh developments um from the early Jesus movement to Christianity where with the influx of Gentiles um and this is something Paul's concerned about and in conflict with others about do do non-jews have to become Jews first do they need to follow the the laws of Moses and so on well um for the the early Jesus movement at the time of Jesus uh all indications are yes anybody who's involved in this movement is going to be following the Jewish law as as the early Jesus movement understands it now that's the that's the key point because whenever we see debates over law or and particularly Purity law within the gospels so when Jesus has a conflict with say the Pharisees or some other Jewish groups it's not because um as is sometimes understood or misunderstood uh Jesus was doing away with the law or saying that the law wasn't important rather this is a kind of intra-jewish conflict around the law and I mean this was something that would go on all the time among various teachers of the law you would come up with a particular authoritative understanding of or interpretation of the law to to help it make sense within your particular social context the early Jesus movement's understanding of the law was very much focused on um I think the uh what we would call the kind of social justice aspects where um the the the poor and and um the uh um I suppose taken care of uh that the the the um uh but you know it's but kind of not in the secular sense but precisely because it's it's seen as fulfilling the Commandments to do so um does that does that answer your question yeah to some degree I mean like the the you would I think we could definitely link the early Jesus movements uh ties into like uh what we would consider like prophetic Judaism which is which is very concerned with a lot of the similar things as opposed to like uh that the the Torah which is kind of concerned with some of those things but not generally um uh and you know I have my own like Jewish readings of class conflict in the construction of the Tanakh and in the construction of the talmud and all that uh but another thing that that we have to remember is like and your book does remind us of this we tend to view this as Pharisees versus proto-christians or Christians and that's a really limited milieu of what's happening and and first century Palestine both in Galilean and Judea because you have one I mean who the Pharisees are is not entirely clear but you have multiple origins of the Forbidden movement you have the sagician movement you have all these uh other apocalyptic Zealot movements that and in Jewish tradition they kind of get represented uh and they're better Movement by like by like Rabbi figures but um again it's it's and it's it's really um it's it's I mean I I find one of the fascinating things but one of the very difficult things about reconstructing this this period of history is that again you know our sources tend to preserve the views of what you know we're produced by basically one class of of people uh literate scribes um uh who uh were Elite or semi-elite and so there's so many views within and particularly popular some of the more popular views that um are not so readily preserved or they're preserved through the the the filter of of something else so Josephus who I mentioned before he talks about um um and you you know he's this aristocratic uh Jewish figure um from the first century and he talks about other millenarian movements um within the early first century but often in like the most scathing dismissive terms um but you know again historically that's useful for us we will kind of say okay well we don't agree with josephus's perspective of just dismissing these people but it shows that they were there that they held particular views um that they managed to gather Mass followings because they had cultural credibility because they would understand their social critiques in terms of what they were doing in they would be framing it in terms of um uh using symbols and traditions from Judaism um such as you know symbolically Crossing through the River Jordan to evoke The Parting of the Red Sea or various you know you so you find all these kind of figures propping up and and doing similar things like that um in terms of uh uh just getting back to like the difficulty of reconstructing these groups the gospels themselves are written relatively late if you know if we're looking at the second half of the first century and particularly I mean I I I think this is the gospel of Matthew especially written at a time post the destruction of the Jewish temple so the central Authority Institution for the Jewish world is kind of gone and the god the author of The Gospel of Matthew is some kind of scribal figure devout Jewish scribal figure who's in Conflict himself with other Jews other Pharisees and scriber Elite who are all vying to define the tradition The Authority the you know the Define the authoritative tradition when the central centralized power structure is gone um so for the the author of The Gospel of Matthew the answer is Jesus Jesus is the Jewish Messiah who was promised to fulfill who who came not to abolish the law but to fulfill the law and the prophets um uh he's remodeled on the Jewish tradition in many respects he has his own kind of Exodus from Egypt he uh he gives the law and the Sermon on the Mount you know he's he um and this is Matthew's answer too and struggle with some of these competing Jewish groups but this is a struggle that was not going on at least not in any way recognizable in in the time of the early Jesus movement so there would have been absolutely um uh struggles between different factions political factions um uh and and various schools of thought and so on but um and again just like I said um uh we talk about um earliest Christianity as a kind of Christianity as it was a diverse realm and I think similarly Within early Judaism or second temple Judaism this is a very diverse Society um and it's not unexpected that you would have uh you you would have competing claims to um uh the tradition or the the kind of the cultural symbols of that tradition who owns what in the same way that we see it today you know who owns Jesus to hop back to what I was saying before that you you point to authoritative ideas traditions and you try and claim it for your side yeah that's that's crucial and I think it's also crucial that you point out that particularly in the gospel of Matthew it's clearly also to me clearly posts destruction of the temple which also means post-saduce dominance of right so the sentences get wiped out yep yep um and so like one of the reasons was such hotly contested with with the Pharisees is like that's another sect that you can contest that has a rival claim kind of equal to yours uh to the post legitimacy of a post-sadgetic post-temple Judaism right like um but yeah yeah we're not even totally sure that the I mean there's a tradition that links them but we're not 100 sure if like you read the work of Jacob newsner that like the rabbinic Judaism as we understand it post the mishnah and the Pharisees are actually a continuous line like we don't know um and I find that interesting I also when you start adding like the the you know Josephus is mentioned in the the scenes what we know about how many weird millionaire and Christian sex that we find evidence for him qumran um I mean not Christian uh Jewish Jewish yeah yeah uh at it it's interesting that I slipped up and called them Christian because they they actually do indicate that some ideas that are floating around in Christianity are not unique um uh that that that's really really interesting and another thing that you catch on to and you talk about in the Purity and impure section you focus on the Samaritans because I'd always been like why did the Samaritans get for but I mean for Jews too but uh but uh um but for Christians like the kind of why are they uses like the prototypical Gentile because if you actually know anything about the Samaritans they're they're uh they're a group um that that has a slight variant of Hebrew still currently exists and um has a different Holy Mountain but other than that it's very similar to to uh you know um you know second second temple Judaism and and you you actually point this out that that's like part of why this is specifically what is referenced and kind of this liminal case of Purity and impurities being invoked deliberately uh in that context uh are you and James pointed out and um that's that's uh that's important and then you also pointing out the the kind of Jesus movements um re general redefinition of uh Purity laws um and uh Purity contamination which which when you know in in Greek tends to be talked about it in terms of sin but actually in Hebrew has a different word um so uh what do you and James think is really going on there I mean again let's let's put this in class terms you know um I'm not going to be able to get as technical as James might be on this thing he's I mean um James is really the strength in this in this area he his um he did his PhD in his first book was was looking at uh um Jewish Jewish law as its um and Purity laws as as they're uh talked about in the gospel of Mark um so with that said I'm going to talk in a more General sense um and uh I I think harking back to to something I think I already mentioned is that the the you know yeah these are intra-jewish debates where they're they're developing particular purity ideas just trying to think where to start I mean yeah I think you're absolutely right in the sense that um uh this isn't necessarily to do with sinfulness or anything like that um and and that's certainly important in terms of the caricature that sometimes comes up in Christian circles of of uh Jews as as kind of being slaves to the law or something like that um uh so just with that out of the way um gosh where am I going to go with us I'm trying to think of some of the examples we give I mean we get in the book we give um well the stuff that I think they're saying about divorce is an interesting one right right yeah yeah so so that might be a good way into this so um the the it interestingly the uh the early Jesus movement has a really um harsh what we would consider harsh uh teaching about divorce um or prohibition against divorce um and uh we think that this is you know it's quite an early tradition because it comes up in um uh not only the gospel of Mark but uh also in Paul's letters seems to refer to this at some point and um equally when when Matthew includes the same story um he uh he um gives an out he gives an exception so he says that in cases of porneo sexual morality or what have you um divorce is okay but other than that don't get divorced right Mark's gospel preserves probably um a an early version of it which is that uh kind of in all circumstances don't get divorced but the whole reason for the conflict and the this um debate being put within there and told within there is that um another Jewish group I think it's the Pharisees that are named within within um the gospels uh try to trick Jesus by by kind of asking for his opinion on well who will they be married to and [Music] um uh gosh how am I going to answer your question can you can you talk a bit more about your question and then I'll try to answer it specifically I realize that I'm rambling a bit yeah yeah sorry I didn't mean to trip you up with uh like knowledge of uh it's all right I know I know James would be able to shoot his way through this a lot better yeah this is a problem with a co-written book is that maybe sometimes I accidentally hit on the stuff that's actually the specialty of your Co-op um because that's in the same chapter about fornication and and that exception in Matthew but if you go back to Market's not there one of the things I think is interesting about that is that you pointed out that in in uh traditional Jewish law as understood by rabbinic and probably pharisaic and probably sad to see if Judaism uh you can divorce for a man can divorce a woman for almost anything in fact if anything the talmud puts some limits on it um right uh but and I think people don't entirely know what that means uh in a modern context is it because we see his divorce is liberating but that in in Jewish law that if she does not get immediately remarried uh you are your options for survival are right kind of bad like yeah I mean basically you would you this is what uh how you might end up uh working as a prostitute or or um or something else yeah yeah yeah yeah prosecutor you might get it's easier yeah so so no that's right so I think that the the prohibition against divorce um very much is a yeah so it's an it's an interpretation of of the um Mosaic law that is strict but strict for reasons of uh of I suppose social care um and and seeing the that uh so harking back to some of the stuff I was saying earlier about the early Jesus movement being very fixated on the the preservation of uh traditional Village Life and so on so Imagining the the structure of or the so that social structure is being you know of fundamental importance to um the the care of of people within Society um uh divorce within that context uh from the early Jesus movement's perspective could be seen as this um uh yeah really Elite practice or self-serving elitist practice yeah and I think um the so so yeah sorry and and okay so now thank you for for getting that out of me so yeah so now we can tie that back into the class conflict aspect right right that that this is not simply a kind of moral prescription it's one that actually is related to um class interests and possibly as a is an expression of of uh underlying class antagonisms and so on yeah and to help you out about the Samaritan so you know Samaritans are closed out of of like um the Jewish power like not so much the Roman but the Jewish um and they are seen as unclean because they're Gentiles by technicality right but you know part of what they're pointing out if if you think about like why it's a Samaritan and not just any random Gentile um it's the the Samaritans actually are then it took fires they follow them and say they follow a slightly different version of Mosaic law and and so it's like yeah I mean like very slightly different you have a different Holy Mountain like so so and quite literally the the uh the neighbor so that whole question of of of of who is my neighbor love my neighbor and so on so so again there's a there's an interpretation of that's based on uh uh traditional um ideas within Judaism but that seemingly yeah very much would go against the some of the power Brokers of that Society um yeah and uh in the book it states you you two state that the the Samaritans are also a parallel negatively and a lot of other Jewish leadership with the Sadducees who are the dominant Jewish groups in the second period um so I think that's there there's uh a lot there and I found that really interesting in trying to understand you know and maybe it's even important for the day like the intersection of class and ethnic conflict um and and the way that is understood in a pre-capitalist pre-modern society that's right I mean this is this is how they built the the cultural credibility as a popular movement within Judaism was that you have to still work within I mean it was there was never a question of kind of abandoning the law or anything like that or abandoning their tradition it was to work within the tradition in a way that um that uh that proved popular right that had credibility um and so uh could draw people from that that broader world of of Galilean and and Judea into the movement particularly those who shared its its class interests and you know when we think of this as a political movement you talk about you know one of the best ways to see this is to understand what's going on uh in um the Judas tale where you know um Judas is not just a theological Defector he's also a political Defector he's basically turning you know he's turning them across Tracer yeah yeah he's a class trailer in fact no what yeah what do we I a defection of a comrade or something I think it was no um yeah and and that happening in the context of passover's particularly symbolic because what Passover is about is a little break of the Jewish people from slavery so when they're all you know equal in servitude um and that's also a chapter where you talk about the symbi the the possible symbolism behind son of man um the last part of the book I also find fascinating because it's kind of where you you start talking about how this could have been turned into an imperial cult um and that you know uh and the hint you know there's a hint all the way back in that inversion of basalea well all you have to do is reinvert it right like it's like you've already used it right like the language the language of Empire and hierarchy was all was there from the beginning um and um even when you talk about you know the the last will become first and the first will become last there's still a hierarchy there it just gets flipped on its head so um so in in many ways this this lays that that foundation for um a Christian Empire you've got the you've got all the language you need to be able to establish that um but equally you know that again this is a one of the the contradictory aspects of Christianity that goes right through the tradition um um is that Christianity is is both a revolutionary and a reactionary religion or it has both ideas simultaneously so people can um justify Empires and uh various uh imperialistic ideas and movements and so on and powers on the basis of the Christian scriptures but equally um these the the the the the scriptures the these texts have um been foundational to a number of uh liberative political movements through history um right up until the the present day um one of the I suppose misnomers again and this comes through in historical Jesus research and study of early Christianity and and um again it points that kind of romanticization of the past where um uh where texts like the New Testament or the Bible um as foundational documents there's this tendency to try and um say like look for a purity of Origins right like that Christianity at its beginning was actually revolutionary and then and then certain figures betrayed the the movement and it became Imperial you know became allied with Empire or something like that and we don't hold to that view at all we think that from the very beginning it was simultaneously um uh revolutionary and reactionary it had both currents within it from the beginning it didn't abandon this idea of Empire or hierarchy it's simply remodeled uh this coming Kingdom that had envisaged on pre-existing hierarchical ideas and constructs and taking off my religious scholar hat putting on my Marx attack and my mark for that so it's like duh that has to be the case because right it developed a proletariat are the best you could do would be to invert ownership or maybe make it relatively more meritocratic or fair but that's about right that's the best you're going to be I mean I mean one of the one of the I think common criticisms that's made of um of marxist readings of of Jesus in the early Jesus movement um which I don't think can be labeled against owls um it is is precisely this kind of uh romanticization of the past where basically the peasants become the proletariat and and so they they so you you've suddenly got like um peasants imagining uh a a world or or working towards a world that has no class and um and and I think that that is an anachronism um uh it's not as if you can't see it's not as if you can't see some of the precursors to later ideas that develop within socialism and Marxist thought and so on but the the idea of a kind of communist Utopia is the outcome of the kingdom of God doesn't really make sense in terms of the the concepts and the ideas that were available to them at the time oh yeah I think that's crucial I mean um you know why I might look at the work of say like Richard Z Ford about like the changes in say uh Indian and Greek context when you start introducing something like property um with that view so uh and stuff like that one thing I will say is is uh basically it takes capitalism or hunter-gatherer immediate return societies to a magic class of society like right what are those other you either at the beginning or you're here like um and we see and as I say we do we do see hints of this like within uh the book of Acts early on in the book of Acts you know the early Christian Community are suddenly like sharing property we have what's been called Christian communism this early Christian communism of of um they sell all their their property and um uh share it all they help so I think What's the phrase they hold all things in common and um and but and then interestingly you know that text although that selection of texts have proved enormously influential within later uh Christian influenced uh socialist groups and so on um but it's not it's not quite the same thing it's not quite the same thing because there is still a hierarchy um uh that is modeled on um agrarian ideas of of of power and authority yeah right I mean it is not a hierarchically less uh class of society it is just a properly list Society um and and while well I mean also I mean I didn't really touch on this but but but part of the the early Jesus movements um I suppose Manifesto was that the the um uh was was was a reversal of the fortunes of the rich and poor so it wasn't necessarily a classless society it was that the the those currently suffering under the the um the the changing socio-economic conditions as a consequence of these building projects and so on um they would inherit wealth property riches in the age to come and um uh and the wealthy and those who who didn't surrender their wealth and repent um turn from their oppressive ways uh they would be cast out they would not inherit this Kingdom so um that's to me that doesn't really speak to a classless society so much as an inversion of material fortunes absolutely um but but you know it's not as if that those ideas couldn't sit alongside ideas about sharing classless society and so on at the same time but I don't again I don't think it's pure um I don't think we have this kind of pure idea of a of a classless society no I mean it's it's it's at least domestically not um pretty clearly um I mean there's also hints and and but you know you talk about this in the kind of gender versions that we see in the language of the gospels but there's also like by the time you get to the monastic movement it is pretty clear that part of the monastic movement uh de-emphasizes secondary sex characteristics and stuff like that and that's not even unique to Christianity like that and uh Buddhism and two um and that's you know that is about like a way out of household relations which are which Cannot Be Imagined to be any other way than gender right like there's there there is no you know there's no way for that not to be gendered so the only way out of say these gender roles is out of it entirely which also means you're opting out of most Society um and but even there I mean like how how directly that's related to the early Jesus movement a little bit iffy like um you know Paul's language about that is highly interpretable particularly Once you pull out all the uh likely pseudopoline material um so yeah I think that's that's a that's a that's a fair point and and I also think it's important to point out that like relative equality or propertylessness or whatever might not be classlessness the way we think about there might you know um there might still be not just like relative roles but like inherited ones and stuff like this too but you know property um right in which case this is like a far more egalitarian-ish form of relations but it's not what we tend to mean by classless and like I said no I don't know even even egalitarian maybe yeah right I mean when I think of uh even in the case of like we get into deep anthropology we talk about like hunter-gatherers and if you want to really be specific immediate return hunter-gatherers are the only ones where you see something like a a class of society um what you even in those some of them have more hierarchies than others so yeah yeah whether or not there's gender hierarchies like that's not consistent from Hunter from hunter-gatherer example 100 gather example either of which we have airmens of are are currently existing ones and I just I really do like to point that out because I I do think we can understand people in the past I don't think it's like these completely you know himatically sealed like epistems or whatever but I I do think it's often wrong to assume they could have possibly thought about this in the same way we did um uh because there's just not like if I'm in the this is actually a point with slavery if I'm in the first century trying to imagine a world without slaves where work still gets done and there's still enough Surplus is really hard to do it's not that no one had any inclination of it we know like there were like radical epicureans and radical stoics and stuff I think the closest you sort of get is is the is ideas about you know treating slaves well rather than abolishing the the institution entirely given how dependent the the Roman economy was on slave labor to function um yeah and another thing that we might talk about that you mentioned acts but I'm like by acts we already have some gentilization of uh and so like you like you have epicureans and stoics who talk about this and particularly epicureans who do live-in Gardens and share things in common like um they did not see themselves as a classless society because they didn't think that was totally possible they saw themselves as opting out altogether so right yeah um um although interestingly Epicurean and Greek is also the word for atheists it's kind of fun um uh Hebrew uh it's a the transliteration of the Greek into Hebrew is the word the rabbi Jews for atheists all right okay I didn't know that yeah interesting yeah if you call someone an Epicurean and and talmudic literature you're saying they're nakedness right um anyway uh I mean you know the like the early Christians we've seen as atheists oh yeah um because they denied every other God's existence right so right um that that word itself doesn't it doesn't mean yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um oh yeah Christians are the best atheists right so right um and uh yeah um we can go back to platonist and piety because it's not like Plato was a atheist in any meaningful sense of the word so um anyway um thank you so much for your time and then we got into the weeds a little bit in this one but I I really I really enjoyed this book um it's it was one of the few books of like these are two different obsessions I have and very rarely uh other than coming together yeah right uh other that we mentioned um uh The Scholar Roland Moore um who is the only other person I know who really ties them together in a uh but even I don't think Rowan writes that much on the historical Jesus I mean we can see a lot of early Marxist scholarship on another podcast you mentioned Ingles in his uh writings about this kalski did a whole book that is get as much as I I I I I love it uh is guilty of everything you're saying it's like pretending he has that to proletarians and like uh that's the thing I mean this is the the the selling point for for our book really is that it's the first it's the first historical materialist approach to Jesus done by by experts in the field so James and I are both you know credentialed professional New Testament Scholars so this is our bread and butter and we're also marxists so we bring those two worlds together when this kind of thing has been done before and and the examples of kowsky and Ingles and stuff you know like the the there that would be considered really out of date now um because they're just not up to play with this with the scholarship um and A lot's happened since then in terms of discussions of of early Christian literature early Judaism um Roman history all that kind of stuff so we so we bring these worlds together I think in a way that hasn't hasn't actually been done uh quite like this I mean yeah I mean it's easy to forgive English for it because the field actually what we think of as New Testament historical state is actually concurrent to him in its early development right exactly and uh Kowski can be forget kotsuki can be forgiven because well you can't know everything but um and that but also you know like that his book's 100 years old or over 100 years old as well so it's you know you think about it in terms of any field of of study it's not to dismiss their works I think that they're really valuable in reading but you're not going to get like a Cutting Edge view based on the latest scholarship on on this particular topic yeah um but the general the general overview is is one that strongly influences us which is that you know religion is seen as uh a an expression of or a kind of cultural expression of underlying social and economic antagonisms right um that's the that's the kind of basic orientation that we have which unfortunately is is not an orientation that's shared by by pretty much any other historical Jesus scholar no I mean the field is overwhelmingly liberal and in both the popular and in the strict sense of that term absolutely absolutely yeah um I I was thinking about winning this reading this book compared to like one of the other left readings of Jesus uh and you mentioned him earlier John Dominic Crossing and I'm like that is really reading liberal values into like like and yeah uh I don't think that's you know I I think that's a pretty big mess up um see because interestingly um he you know and Crossing Crossings work you know is amazing in a way um it's really detailed and and interesting scholarship um but and he talks about a lot of the the the the social context that we talk about as well but in a way that my criticism as work would be that in a way that Jesus becomes kind of elevated above that context or stands outside of it in some interesting way um uh it's it's it's still very much in the guise of of Jesus the the individual genius who or innovator who um who was part of the social context but actually had other other ideas right and what you know and presented a different version or something like that yeah it was not an emergent negation so much as like uh no no um uh a kind of force year to something like proto-liberal values and and that I also I like I like cross's work but his ideological gloss on Jesus I always wrote Miser um and uh I mean he's got that huge not his short popular book that big one is really big ones yeah oh yeah yeah absolutely um if um if if if any of your listeners or if you want to um check out my own uh some of my own critique of his work and this is kind of like a metacritical critique so I published an article I think it's 2016. it's called The Fetish for a subverse of Jesus and you found that yeah I look at both Crossings and um another scholar called NT Wright both their work and the way in which they they do exactly this they they do this kind of post-modern liberal thing but they're actually writing to very different audiences and anti-wright is very popular among certain types of conservative uh Evangelical Christians I think like I say certain types because not your anti-intellectual types they tend to be your more kind of intellectually engaged yet still conservative Evangelical Christians and um who need to compete with Catholic uh right intellectuals usually yeah and then Crossing is like taken up by um by liberals who kind of their whole and particularly liberal or Progressive Christians who Define their and it's all tied up into like American culture War stuff and um it's fascinating you know and and I think that that was some of the pre-work that that I had done and James has written similar stuff on on other topics with historical Jesus um this was part of the pre-work that we did that really when it came to writing our own life of Jesus um you know we're like we've got to make sure that we're not just doing what we've criticized everyone else of doing right and and I think I think what we've done I mean surely we'll be critiqued on many things but hopefully one of the things that it will be very difficult to critique us on is that we are simply just playing up to um uh modern leftists or anything like that because I think that the Jesus that we present is both useful and not useful um right uh yeah well it's part of my you know one of my big uh pushes is like if you want to understand you know a Marx ish I'm gonna use that broadly I'm not even going to say it strictly Marxist but a historical materialist approach to uh the past which will help which will help us understand I hope the current but it is to like not try to read the current into the past unilaterally but to try to recontextualize it as close to we can to the kinds of social tensions and conflicts and Clash conflicts that were existing at the time it's just part of that broader project of seeing the of saying old history as a history of class conflict right um but that now that doesn't mean that there's always been a proletariat through all of history or what have you right like it's gonna work out in very different ways and look very strange in some cases across different modes of production different times and places different cultural and social contexts yeah and and uh I think about this time period in particular We have basically Roman Imperial data and religious data that's what we got like in Josephus and Philo and a few other people and and I guess some philosophers but I I actually follow most of philosophers under religious data to be quite frankly um I think that's also weird post Enlightenment cleaning up of the past where we're like well that's religion but like the epicureans and the stoics and the and the cynics that's not I'm like they had theology dude absolutely um yeah but anyway thank you so much for your time people should check out your work um I I gotten a lot from this book which I cannot remember if I voted on when I worked for zero so I don't know if I have to disclose anything about that I don't think I did because I think if I would have remembered this book more um so uh but uh quite I I was um I'm gonna put this nicely I like zero books a lot but I don't normally expect us to publish like fairly rigorous uh his like um so uh uh you know are there any of its auspices so I would tell people to check this out I'd also say if they if people can get it maybe get it from your library it's a little bit harder and a little bit more expensive um class struggle in the new testament's pretty great and got a lot of different essays and a lot of different perspectives and that was edited by you um so people should check that out anything else you want to plug I one of the weirdest things about socialist podcasting is plugging at the end but yeah yeah uh no just follow me on Twitter at uh at Robert J miles I wrote the r t j m y l e s all right um that's it and yeah get the book get Jesus a life in class conflict it's not expensive you can go ahead and get that one no reason not all right all right thank you guys thank you [Music] [Music]

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Published: Thu Jul 20 2023