Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict

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Copious and informed material information by way of well-wrought and well-written biographical narrative.

The movement’s popular appeal was due in part to a desire to represent the values of ordinary rural workers, and its vision meant that the rich would have to give up their wealth, while the poor would be afforded a life of heavenly luxury. Crossley and Myles locate Jesus’s class position as that of a tektōn, an ancient Greek noun meaning craftsman or carpenter. Being born and raised in this artisan rural working stratum, Jesus and his immediate family would have felt the full force of the economic dislocations and displacements caused by the massive Herodian building schemes at Sepphoris and Tiberias. Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict will henceforth provide an easy answer whenever friends and family request a recommendation for an accessible but reliable book about the historical Jesus. The book conveys a sharp sense of the times and places, the issues and discussions, the difficulties and possibilities.For some in Galilee, these grandiose projects, constructed in part to solidify the status of the comprador bourgeoisie of their day, resulted in great wealth and an enhanced social standing. There needs to be more study, not of history as a science, but of the genres of historical writing and their way of asserting the truth, or, rather what truth they mean to assert.

Whether you are an academic of the field, a lay Christian, or clergy, you should be reading this volume and seriously considering it. The movement’s vision meant the rich would have to give up their wealth, but the poor would be afforded a life of heavenly luxury. Fr Henry Wansbrough OSB is a monk of Ampleforth, emeritus Master of St Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and a former member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. Seeing such portraits as romanticized and overly idealized, the interest here is on the social and economic forces that produced the Jesus movement.

Myles have painstakingly examined many of the mainstream interpretations of the life, teachings, and execution of Jesus. The movement’s popular appeal was due in part to a desire to represent the values of ordinary rural workers, and its vision meant that the rich would have to give up their wealth, while the poor would be afforded a life of heavenly luxury. The book is sound in its scholarship, reasonable in its conclusions, yet provocative enough that it will hold an array of readers' interests. That said, the authors do reinforce more traditional interpretations in other regards, including the self-awareness of Jesus that the trajectory of his life would lead to a challenge to the religious and military authorities in Jerusalem. At a time when Marxists and people of faith continue to treat each other’s core texts with contempt or suspicion, Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict is a timely and welcome study.