Hello and welcome to Farm Blog , and today I'm talking to Dr Robert J Miles and we are keeping the J in there because it's easier finds working to do that . We are talking about his edited volume a class struggle in the New Testament from Fortress academic Lexington books 2019 , and his co-authored work with James Crossley from zero books , jesus alive in class conflict and the context around that . One of the things I guess people probably ask you the most is why is there a Marxist side of the vanity school ?
Speaker 2Why not ? It's my question that's fair .
Speaker 2I Mean I'm sure , yeah , I mean I'm sure plenty of people ask that including within the divinity school itself . But you know , I mean I was interested in in this kind of area , the , the relationship between Marxism and Christianity , and particularly my own field of New Testament studies . I've been interested in both fields . For as long as I've been interested in both fields , I developed the centrists at around the same time and , yeah , it's a . It's a weird story . I don't know how I ended up in a divinity school . I started out at a , at a secular public university , both in terms of my study . All my study was done there and my first few teaching jobs were at public universities . Where I'm from , in Australia , in New Zealand , religious studies and theology 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 .
Speaker 1We have a pretty robust private sector here in the states that is nominally religiously affiliated , including most of the IVs . So 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 .
Speaker 1But my interest in religious studies actually predates 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 your collective volume and your co-authored work is that you do contextualize this historical Jesus phenomenon and you even puritize that . You talk about the first quest , the second quest , the third quest , and now we're kind of beyond that . There's also and I'm gonna bring this up there's a trend , not so much in academia but in like para-academic Circles in the last decade and a half that was picked up by some leftist to be Christ mythicists , and so we can talk about that too . But how , how do we contextualize Historical Jesus studies and point out that it actually does have a Relationship to Marxism , going all the way back to the young gale ?
Speaker 2Mm-hmm , yeah , I mean historical Jesus research , kind of like Marxism , is a both products the Enlightenment , the European Enlightenment .
Speaker 2And when , when historical Jesus studies started , you know when it got going , it was very much Kind of a cipher for political discussions .
Speaker 2So , given the , particularly in Germany , given the relationship between the church and state In the attempt to create a kind of a human Jesus who stood apart from the , the , the Church's 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 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 crossovers there .
Speaker 2Equally so , it was driven very much by the interest in in biography , and again , this was something that Various Enlightenment intellectual figures were quite interested in about , kind of biography and Historical biography , because it was part of this broader intellectual process of creating individuals , individual persons who Could themselves , you know , fundamentally own property , have rights and so on and so forth . So you know , they go to the most important historical figure that they know and attempt to reconstruct him as this individual person who you know is , I think , wrapped up in all of those various threads .
Speaker 1One of the things about your book and you're in James book . I should not cut him out of the equation is ? It does some 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 , and people who focused in on the nature and politicization of the apocalyptic movement and In Judaism art we shouldn't say apocalyptic movement , we should say apocalyptic movements plural . What prior historical Jesus scholars did you find most enlightening for your own work ?
Speaker 2It's a good question . I mean , this is a huge sub-discipline with , you know , possibly hundreds of people having having written important works on it and 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 have come up particularly over the last several decades , like EP Sanders , as you mentioned , including a 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 EP Sanders or John Dominic Cross and even Nt right and some of these other major figures from a kind of a generation ago . So I'm thinking of Helvin .
Speaker 2Moxness wrote a really interesting book . He's written a couple of books on the historical Jesus . 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 gender . Is is influential in our book 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 and the rise of nationalism , and it was here that he was one of the pioneers of contextualizing historical Jesus research as not only this product of the Enlightenment but part of the , the , the nation building and kind of bourgeois elite , cultural , cultural production of Particularly Germany at the time that this whole project started started to get going . So that's a really fascinating book . It it puts , 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 .
Speaker 2I've known James crossley for about 15 years almost 15 years now and one of the things that got me interested in in Meeting him to begin with was some of his earlier work as well . So he's been writing on historical Jesus for a lot longer than I have and he's got a couple of books where he contextualizes historical Jesus research in a and this is the more contemporary stuff , so the stuff of the , the late 20th century , early 20th century , contextualizing this work in terms of its ideological context . So he's got two books that do this Jesus in an Age of Terror and Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism and very much showing how historical Jesus research , which is a very popular book , so , particularly in the contemporary era , it has both an academic audience but also very much a popular audience . 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 . So in writing our book , we were both aware of that and trying to avoid it . So we haven't actually .
Speaker 2I mean , although we are very open about coming from , you know , a leftist perspective and using the tools of the book , and we're not going to be using the tools of the book . We're not going to be using the tools of the book , so we're not going to be using the tools of the book . We're not going to be using the tools of the book . So I mean , although we are very open about coming from a leftist perspective and using the tools of historical materialism to write this book , doing that for us doesn't mean that we're just projecting this romantic kind of first century Shag of Ira Jesus or something like that .
Who is ? Because that seems to be the tendency within historical Jesus research , that , whatever the predilections of the of the author , they kind of reconstruct this Jesus in their own sort of image . And this has been actually a long trope of historical Jesus research , going back right back to the stuff that was going on in the 18th and 19th centuries as well .
Speaker 1Yeah , I was actually thinking that . I was thinking about like the radical school that comes out of explicitly comes out of young Victor games after Farah Bach into the power brothers etc . And that's a crypto kind of left liberals , almost anachronistic , but it's kind of what it is debate around all sorts of things and development of the Prussian state , like it's the crypto debate , right , I mean and just 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 .
Speaker 2That I think did exactly that . I think often 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 connected to this much broader intellectual current , liberal intellectual current of the Enlightenment , rather than a kind of , you know , like the liberal Jesus or the conservative Jesus or that kind of thing . I think it's a much bigger idea , connected to kind of liberal philosophy and classical liberalism of the human person , and also you know how that intersects economically as well with liberalism being a kind , you know , an ideological part of the ideological fabric of capitalism , and so on .
Speaker 1It's interesting . This is another thing that you've kind of reminded me of , but I find it a lot more substantive than I knew . You're probably familiar with someone like Robert Price who politically is a reactionary , but what's very good . I'm 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 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 about 20 years ago now does seem still pretty sound .
Speaker 2I mean it's not . I mean that idea the first part of what you just said is not particularly unique to him and I think of I mean there's another really interesting book from around the same time actually , what's it called the Symbolic Jesus , by William Arnell and I think basically makes that same point in a really interesting way that that kind of discourses of the historical Jesus and 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 this unconscious or not conscious level , or maybe sometimes it is happening at the conscious level . You know , that's sort of irrespective of the point . So , yeah , I don't see how that necessarily you would go from that . You know you'd leap from that to a kind of Christ mythicism .
Speaker 2In terms of our book , I think we kind of bypass this whole issue because we're not kind of hard empiricists in the sense that we think that we've got . It sort of comes down to the nature of dealing with the ancient world and the scarcity of information we actually have about anybody with the exception of the elite . So for most people in human history we don't have the abundance of resource , you know , of information , to kind of prove their existence or disprove their existence , and most of the writings that we have about the ancient world , and it is focused on the lives of the elite . Equally , the archaeological record tends to preserve what's durable rather than what's makeshift , you know , preserve what's monumental and so on . And so this means that the lives of the non-elate through history they don't leave a massive imprint . So for the kind of for the historical materialist or the Marxist historian , it raises some massive methodological questions about , well , what do we do about this ? To say that someone didn't exist because we don't have this abundance of evidence , I think is to kind of jump the gun and it also risks erasing the poor and the non-elate from history altogether . 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 .
Speaker 2Part of the problem is that the sources are all particularly biased , because , like any source actually , 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 accounts as such . Rather they are proclamations , proclamations of faith based on telling people about the life of this person , jesus , 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 issue is to say that we're looking for the earliest traditions , so the earliest traditions , themes , ideas about the historical Jesus and also the broader historical Jesus movement that he was a part of and I'll come back to talk about that in a second and so this takes 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 .
Speaker 2And sometimes other sources go back earlier , closer to the time of the early Jesus movement . Most of the Gospels were written from probably around 70-ish to the late 1st , early 2nd century . So if the Jesus movement was active around the late 20s , early 30s , you've got a few decades of development , embellishment , where this movement has already begun to transform and develop certain ideas . And so by the time of the writing of the Gospels at least , there's a mixture of both what we might consider historical material and material going back much earlier , as well as material that has developed in the interim period .
Speaker 1So one thing I actually know a bit about , that I always have taken as a problematizer for the early Jesus movement , is how late it takes the also forming at the same time rabbinic movement to fully see the Jesus movement as separate from itself . In the earliest rabbinic writings we have around Christians they're not called anything other than basically we're Jews in Hebrew , until probably about 100 years , like 100-120 years after what we consider would have probably been the active moment of Jesus movement . And all this is post destruction of the temple effectively . So it is to me that makes some claims kind of interesting , because the Jewish and Talmudic writings about Jesus , which are much later , I think people will try to use them as authoritative sources . I'm like , well , the Talmud's from like yeah , someone's like between 600 and 1000 , depending on what volumes you're dealing with and its compilation etc .
Speaker 2I mean , even if you're dealing just with the , I mean similarly , though , you've got material , and you've got a combination of earlier material that's been passed down as well as later material . So I think that some rabbinic sources are useful in terms of our project , but for the most part it's not . They're too late , they're too influenced by later developments , including that the later kind of what's maybe wrongly called the parting of the ways or whatever , where Judaism and Christianity become distinct , separate religions . Yeah , no , you're absolutely right .
Speaker 2In terms of the early Jesus movement is a Jewish movement thoroughly within Judaism . Jesus and others , paul , did not see themselves as beginning a new religion or anything like that . 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 . So , but I think 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 , I suppose , the Jesus movement by that stage coming into conflict with other Jewish groups in a way that lays the foundation for that later parting .
Speaker 1So one thing I want to ask of you , because this is actually important to you and James's book , 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 .
Speaker 2I mean there's only a few , there's only a handful of Aramaic phrases , but yeah , the point taken yeah .
Speaker 1I mean , there are arguments that I don't buy by some some , by some Aramaic scholars , who claim that it seems like their phraseology is particularly a Matthew . It's in like the bar of Aramaic , but it's a stretch . One of the things I was going to ask you , though , while this is a thoroughly Jewish movement , is it of any import to the context and to 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 , it's speaking the dominant language of trade , and I asked that because it's actually also relevant to who you think the mission was to .
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean , that's a really good question
. So we would say that the earliest Jesus movement was an intra Jewish movement , in the sense that its mission was entirely to initially to other Jews within Palestine . It used the language of the Jewish tradition and concepts from the Jewish tradition to formulate its own ideas . Again , I can go into a bit more detail later on about this . And it's only later , after Jesus is death and as the movement begins to spread , and in fact spread rapidly around the wider Roman Empire and to various urban environments far outside of Palestine , that it begins to bring on board Gentiles and non-Jews . And this changes 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 Palestine and envisage that the movement is only for practicing Jews , we think that that's a good sign that these traditions come from an earlier time in the movement , whereas ideas that appear to be much more sort of maybe universal or inclusive of non-Jews come from this later point in the development of the movement , and that shift happened really quickly .
Speaker 2So the letters of Paul , st Paul the Apostle . He wrote that I think there's 13 letters in the New Testament which were attributed to this figure and many of them most of them are addressed to Christ assemblies in major Roman cities including Rome , corinth and so on , and it seems that the 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 it's already sort of 20 years after , but still they're early and by that so anything that suggests a kind of solely Jewish movement focused purely on kind of the what's going to happen in Palestine and so on , must be from well before then . So this is one of the reasons why we think that's good evidence for that material being earlier , potentially going back to the early Jesus movement or the time of the early Jesus movement .
Speaker 1So one thing I think we have to do when we talk about , like the class analysis of Galilee at the time is it's actually , I mean , it's simple in that most people are peasants , at subsistence or even lower levels , but it's complicated in that you have competing levels of elites both within the Jewish society and outside of it , and I think your book actually does kind of deal with some of this complication and the language of empire being adopted seemingly kind of has a double movement , one against , you know , to invert the Roman hierarchy and the Roman elites which they're dealing with , but also in a way , to not give credence , to say something we might see in and said you see , in Judaism or something like that , which is the kind of prior priestly and monarchical , is both correct , but also it brings up medieval connotations , but still monarchical context is not pulling back to that exactly either . And your argument about Basilia and the kingdom of God being specifically which you really should translate it as the empire of God , right , like that's , it's the same word .
Speaker 2Some scholars have . Yeah , I mean it's the same word that would have been used to refer to Rome's empire . It's a different . Yeah , I mean the idea of translating that to kingdom of God comes from the first English translations in medieval Europe , right , or medieval England . So that's where that language has kind of come about and it stayed , and that translation hasn't really been updated . Some scholars have argued that it should be translated as empire of God .
Speaker 2We suggest another translation could be dictatorship of God or dictatorship of the peasantry , in the sense of the fact that this is not just a religious idea but also a political one . And in the ancient world , well , I mean , the distinction that's often upheld between religion and politics is itself this modern construction , 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 New Testament studies as well . It'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 and it's not involved with politics or it kind of . You know , these are categories that we are imposing on these texts , that the texts themselves do not assume , and yeah , the same context as religion Sorry , the root word that we use to make the word religion .
Speaker 1Religion does not have the same . No , no , no , absolutely not .
Speaker 2And also religion has now become something that's very like , it's become privatized right , and so again we can think about that , and scholars have written about this in terms of of how this has happened .
Speaker 2Through the period of capitalism you have this uptick in kind of individual expressions of religion as being something not public but private , or best done in private .
Speaker 2It's about inward personal spirituality and so on .
Speaker 2And 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 side .
Speaker 2It's not 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 what the concepts of salvation would mean for Jews in the first century , who are themselves under occupation , who are directly or indirectly by the Roman Empire , who historically have read stories , heard stories about the Passover , the God who liberated their ancestors from Egypt , the God who returned their people from exile and Babylon , and all this kind of stuff .
Speaker 2These are stories of political liberation that are understood religiously , and equally major political figures were also religious figures and again , this is a very well established point within scholarship , that Caesar Augustus himself you go and you read some of the ancient biographies of Herm and they're talking about Herm as the Pontifix the Maximus , the equivalent of the High Priest of Roman religion , is also the Son of God and becomes divinized himself , so bringer of peace . All this kind of stuff , so all this language 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 early Jesus movement understood their world in this way , so they were thoroughly immersed in this religious world and idea that they understood also politically , and they understood their political world and their economic world through this lens of their Jewish heritage and culture .
Speaker 1Yeah , for me . I come from a Jewish background . I actually come from a mixed Jewish Catholic background , so the idea that salvation is not particularly individual , that's clear in Jewish scripture . The Mashiach is clearly a political category , which is why most Jews no longer really care about it , except for some very specific types of pro-produced Jews , etc . I mean , we talk about this as part of the modern world and I think in this sense it's both true , and 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 . To me , those are like basic religious anthropologies , basic religious points , right .
Speaker 2It's surprising because but I feel like it's really important to lay that out there because a lot of people who are not particularly familiar with the field , 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 everything else or other aspects of culture . I think that , particularly when it comes to studying ancient religions , what we call ancient religions , you know , this is really problematic because it stops us from seeing some of these connections .
Speaker 1One of the most interesting parts of the beginning of Yaron James' book . I really like the focus on what is actually indicated by tales that we get about Jesus , about where in the Class formation he was , what kind of relationship he had to literacy etc . And I'm going 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 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 , from these hints about the nature of the very beginning of the Jesus movement . What class was it really coming ?
Speaker 2out of . I think . Before getting there , I do want to make one more comment , because I think it nicely segues between what we've talked about before 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 , where most historical Jesus studies talk about Jesus adopting this familiar great man view of history , where kind of history happens because of innovative , singular , great individuals and their genius or whatever it is , their ideas , actions and so on , whereas , you know , the critique of this is to flip it on its head and to say , well , great men are about the products of the social conditions of their time and place . And so this is really our starting point and I think , linked 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 and which formed him as a significant figure within , you know , later on to become a significant figure within this movement . 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 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 , and this is one of the ways in which I think we can kind of bypass the , the , the mythicist arguments as well that also are focused on on the importance of you know , proving or disproving , in this case a great man of history .
So with that caveat , I can then talk about Jesus the individual 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 a very small village focused on agricultural production , and the Gospels themselves identify Jesus as a tecton , which the tradition is translated as carpenter but , as you point out , has a much broader meaning . I mean could mean that he works with works with various materials , stone or wood , as a builder or you know , or doing kind of carpentry work , but maybe construction worker or something like that would be a more interesting translation . I think , given where he's from and the kind of trade that he's involved in and some of the the earliest people that he associates with , fishermen and so on , we can see him as aligned with the broader peasant classes , most of whom were were engaged with the , the agricultural production of the land or , in the case of fishing , of the water .
Speaker 2And , importantly , this needs to be connected to some of the broader economic dynamics of Galilee , at the time where there were a couple of major urbanization projects that were going on as Jesus was growing up and slightly more of the early Jesus movement began to kind of organize its , its initial response . So this , this was the construction of Sephirus which , about six kilometers from Nazareth , and then in about 19 CE , herod Antipas found the city of Tiberius , named in honor of the Roman Empire Emperor at the time who you know , kind of pointing to the real backing of this whole political dynamic there . And the Tiberius was built on the Sea of Galilee and enabled so the construction of both these cities , importantly put massive pressure on the surrounding environments to produce more to in order to sustain them . So farmers , agriculturalists , would have to produce more than simply enough to eke out their own subsistence living but to support the influx of people within , to say , sephirus and Tiberius . And then Tiberius , given a strategic location on the Sea of Galilee , enabled better connected elites to really dominate the fishing economy .
Speaker 2So I think it's really important that we see that the first people that the Gospels associate with this early Jesus movement as being prominent members of this early Jesus movement are four fishermen who are located as based in the small fishing fishing village , capernaum .
Speaker 2And you know , there's interesting stories within the New Testament about well , interestingly often they're associated with the miraculous whenever kind of fish or fishing is noticed . So I've mentioned so , including one miracle story where the disciples have been out fishing all night and then they've caught nothing . You know , and to me this , you know this is a very speculative argument , but it speaks to a situation where the there's an imbalance within the lake in terms of fishing productivity and so on , and it means , you know , it's suddenly become hard work and that 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 and to me that's just really interesting . It points to and again I'm not talking about the kind of the literal historicity of these events , but rather the kinds of ideas that were generated by this underlying changing historical material situation .
Speaker 1Yeah , I think 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 and upper middle class . These are approximate words , they're anachronistic . But elite , women , soldiers , the kinds of people who are could be marginalized in Roman society but were not really part of , like , say , the Galilee and peasantry , but that's a later development . It just that's the people we have evidence for .
Speaker 2Absolutely . I mean , we can see some . We can see where some of the stuff begins in terms of the early Jesus movement and I'll talk about this in a second we think that although it was a movement of and for the peasantry , they also had a mission to the rich , and I'll come back to that in a sec . But yeah , I mean by later , in the first century , the movement has really , as it's expanded , has drawn in people from a number of different class positions and backgrounds . And I mean , you know , in many ways we've got to explain how this movement that starts off as this kind of ragtag bunch of mostly peasants within Galilee ends up several centuries later becoming the religion of the Roman emperor and ultimately the religion of empire itself . So some of these trajectories are there from the beginning , but certainly the more as time went on , it would have had more and more well connected elites , especially outside of Palestine when the movement was in Palestine . So I'll talk about the mission to the rich now we make an argument within the book that the mission 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 or even survive . And there are . I mean you mentioned before the elite woman being attracted to this movement and in fact there is evidence within the Gospels of some of Jesus's earliest followers being elite women who actually provide for some of the men . When I say elite women I mean maybe relatively elite , so maybe slightly better off than the male fishermen , disciples and so on . At least they would have had enough resources to support some of the movement abandoning work for whatever reason and traveling around the countryside .
Speaker 2But we also look at the translation of this word sinners . And the Gospel state unambiguously that Jesus came not to call the righteousness but sinners to repentance . And the kind of the conventional understanding or misunderstanding of this term sinners is that it refers to kind of downtrodden society , outcasts . But actually this translation or mistranslation is actually wrong . Within ancient Judaism , sinners refers to lawbreakers , those who have not upheld the commandments , those who have strayed from the Mosaic law I mean also 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 Gentile nations could sometimes be described as nations of sinners and so on . And interestingly , in work that James had done earlier in a previous book , where he painstakingly looked through almost a thousand years of ancient Jewish texts , he found that whenever there is a consistent meaning in this term 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 is in line with the Mosaic law , understanding of justice and so on .
Speaker 2And so the Gospels talk about Jesus associating with both tax collectors and sinners . Famously , he sits down to dine with tax collectors and sinners and this is seen as scandalous . And the reason it's seen as scandalous is precisely because he was sitting down to dine with wealthy , corrupt individuals seen as lawbreakers 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 inner circle of the 12 , who gets named Levi or Matthew the tax collector these people would have had some of these connections to wealthier individuals within Galilee , those responsible for and benefiting from these urbanization projects as well . So 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 , that 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 the coming day of judgment .
Speaker 1Your book actually clarified something to me when I , when I hit that that I'd never had gotten before . I , like I've mentioned , I can read Hebrew , and kata means to fail . You almost never , you're right , you almost never hear it referred to just general , like you know , the poor , the cursed , etc . There are words for that in Hebrew , particularly the totally outcast , like the masamore , etc . And in Greek the word is haimartia , which is the same word as tragic flaw , right , like literally the same word . If you're reading Aristotle and I was like how in the hell did 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 what your book pointed out is my inclinations . They're actually correct 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 inflation , not not an ancient one .
Speaker 2I mean part of the process of this , this change of the meaning of the term happens because , because of this transition of the movement to a movement inclusive of non Jews , so , as the move and we go , we go into this a little bit in the final chapter of the book , where we kind of indicate that suddenly , you know , when we're talking about sinners we can't necessarily be talking about . Well , if non Jews are now part of the movement , right , like , this whole question of who is a sinner , I think , becomes a bit more more prescient perhaps . And then you know , as someone said to me once when I was explaining this , they're like oh , but Robert , we're all sinners , you know , and it's like well , yeah , that that meaning comes from the idea of the movement spreading beyond just Jews , so that if Gentiles , who are of course sinners within that ancient Jewish idea or worldview , then yeah , I suppose in one sense we kind of we all are sinners in need of redemption and so on . You know , so it universalizes the message to a greater extent .
Speaker 1You 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 Basil . Lea , I think you say Basil Lea is not used in John .
Speaker 2It does appear . But there's the famous phrase my kingdom is not of this world . So where is the first three Gospels , matthew , mark and Luke , which we refer to as the synoptic Gospels , because they're very similar in many ways and Mark of those three was probably the earliest , and these three Gospels talk about the kingdom as a kingdom for this world , I think in a very tangible sense , whereas as the tradition develops , and particularly in John's Gospel , what kind of matters is actually a spiritual enlightenment or salvation in the here and now ? And the kingdom is described interestingly , as is said , kind of not of this world . And again , this is a really interesting development that happens through through the first century , in particular towards the end of the first century , is we say that the Jesus movement or the earliest traditions of the Jesus movement were millenarian . The early Jesus movement was this very immersed in this kind of end times ideas , within the which they had drawn from their own kind of cultural Jewish traditions . But within this understanding , millenarianism would refer to the sort of expectation of destruction , radical transformation of the current world order into an age to come , and so this specifically meant the kind of the handing over of the , the political institutions of this world of the Roman Empire and so on , over to the Jesus movement . This would be the kingdom of God or the empire of God , or the dictatorship of God led by or on behalf of the God of Israel and the co-regent , jesus , and so
on .
Speaker 2And so many of the New Testament texts , including some of the Gospels , and the Book of Revelation is big on this actually as well . Imagine this , this handing over from one age to the next in 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 well , when is this going to happen ? How come it hasn't happened yet ? You know there's a lot of anxieties about it .
Speaker 2Paul still remains this ardent apocalypticist . The end times are at hand . We are living in the time right before the final end , the day of judgment , and so on . The Mark's Gospel , matthew's Gospel , absolutely massively see things in this way . But then some of the later New Testament texts and I think John is a great example of this change , this idea from a dualism between this age and the age to come . For John it's about accessing the divine within this age , in the here and now . And some of the other later texts , I think as well , do have different ways of negotiating this failed apocalyptic moment . That never quite came . And of course , by the time this movement becomes a religion and then a world religion and then we've had almost 2,000 years of this Christianity there's been reinterpretations of what some of the end times and apocalyptic ideas could mean , or what they do mean , and alongside that we've also seen occasional kind of millenarian and apocalyptic movements which draw inspiration from some of those early ideas which are still contained within some documents of the New Testament .
Speaker 1One of the things that I found interesting about your book as well you and James book make sure I always mention second one is that you go into this to gender and there's been a lot of use particularly of like second and third century fragments we have about women , our Gnostic texts from the third and fourth century , which try to read a kind of proto-feminism into the early Jesus movement . I think even in the case of Gnostic texts that's kind of it's a stretch .
Speaker 2I mean , I think one thing I'll point out just there . I don't think you're wrong , but I would nuance it a little bit and I would say that earliest , what we call earliest Christianity , was incredibly diverse . There wasn't this kind of some scholars refer to like a proto-orthodoxy , which is what would later become the to define orthodox not Eastern orthodox , but orthodox Christianity and , like the fourth and fifth century , like imperial Christianity . By the time Christianity becomes very much aligned with empire and it's and it stamps out some of these other so-called Gnostic movements and various divergent forms Christianity . But 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 , especially after the initial organizing of the early Jesus movement , which was very much focused on the imminent end times and responding to the social material upheavals in Galilee and Judea . By the time the movement spreads beyond that and it's got a different kind of message . There's various power groups and factions trying to figure out what to do now , what it actually means to say follow Jesus , within these different environments . I think Paul is already doing this and reveals this diversity because he's oftentimes responding to the influence of other Christian missionaries who have come in and are teaching a different gospel .
Speaker 2So the proto-orthodox movement was one that was particularly patriarchal . 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 1st , 2nd , timothy and Titus they're probably 2nd 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 is becoming a movement based on certain creeds and doctrines so you'll know if people are on site or not because they'll subscribe to this kind of box of belief . They're very interested in structure and the offices of various leaders within the church , so they define the roles 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 .
Speaker 2So the early Jesus movement was not at the time of Jesus . 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 intents and purposes , much like any other kind of peasant of his time , in the sense that life was very village focused , it was based around the patriarchal household . This was the central kind of microcosm 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 so on .
Speaker 2And times of social crisis , and particularly within social movements that are responding to various upheavals , we often see , and even in we provide a couple of other examples from around the first century within the Jewish world at the time of the Jewish war , where ideas of gender could get mixed up , so you might have women fighting alongside men , for example , or women could be put in places of authority and so on . And it seems that in the early Jesus movement they absolutely were and there were numerous women in who were particularly influential in positions of authority . Again , paul's letters give some examples and say Romans 16 , he names a woman apostle and a woman deacon . So yeah , I mean this stuff was , I think , part of the broader ideas that the early Jesus movement were playing with and were working with in terms of understanding their own ideas about millenarianism and how this world was being transformed from one age to the next .
Speaker 1So I don't disagree with that I'm thinking about when we talk about the use of Gnostic stuff for trying to engage the early Jesus movement attitude toward gender .
Speaker 2what most of the Sorry . That's where that began and then I just went on a big rant , but yeah .
Speaker 1No , I'm with you Because I also think you said on another show no , we can't call Jesus a socialist , but we also can't call him not one . I similarly think we can't call the Jesus movement feminist , but it wasn't particularly anti-woman either right ?
Speaker 2No , exactly . And again , I think this goes back to something we were saying earlier in the show about being careful , about not wanting to romanticize Jesus . So Jesus is this cultural figure 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 trying to claim him for their side . But , yeah , to talk about Jesus as a socialist or to talk about Jesus as a feminist , I think it raises a whole lot of issues . 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 sober critical academics , about how we talk about these things and to try and not , I suppose , conflate our two worlds , because the world of first century Galilee was incredibly different from our own in terms of how class was structured , in terms of how gender was understood .
Speaker 2And I think the historical Jesus that we construct is very much a contradictory figure , 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 social context that he was a part of .
Speaker 2He came from a very small village , agrarian society where , and so his thinking and his ideas would have been conditioned by all of those broader societal structures . The idea that Jesus was this and this taps into the great man view of history as well , because the idea that Jesus was different from or ahead of his time or different from everyone else and so on , of his time it's not a credible picture Historically . If we're doing critical historical work on this , jesus needs to make sense within his own historical , social , political context , which means that he was working with concepts that were available to him in his day and time . And we can , I think , contextualize those by comparing the early Jesus movement to other social and religious movements from the time , contextualize the gospels within other Jewish and perhaps even Greco-Roman texts from the time , and so on and so forth .
Speaker 1One of the things that your book talks about a lot , and before I go into why specifically , thank you using Gnostic stuff , it doesn't make sense , actually , I'll just say that before I go into it . I think if you look at quote Gnostic texts , not all of them , but most of them show the influence of fairly advanced neo-Blatonism , which means that they are heavily Gentile oriented and also highly educated in their authorship . It's weird , as they can sometimes be . I don't think that's true of all the Gnostic texts , and I say Gnostic texts mostly what we have from the patristics fighting them and what we have from the Nagamani texts , but it's pretty clear then . That's a late development .
Speaker 2Absolutely so . These texts , 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 , so they have historical value in that sense , but they have very little , if any , historical value about the historical Jesus because they're not reflecting early traditions . Often they're dependent upon the canonical gospels of what would become the canonical gospels Matthew , mark , luke and John that we and particularly Matthew , mark and Luke that we use for our historical reconstruction . So yeah , that's absolutely right .
Speaker 1So one of the things that you bring up that now I'm going to get to that point is that there is a kind of breaking of the Oeikos or the household . I guess is the closest thing we can translate to in English . In the Jesus movement there's also a focus on fatherly , as opposed to say maybe soldierly , masculinity , although there are , there are martial metaphors , all throughout the gospel .
Speaker 1But you make a big deal out of this and that does kind of I think we talk about that contradictory now . I think that's even contradictory in the time . What do you think about the class arrangement is being reflected in that kind of contradictory pool of a very , you know , 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 the early times .
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean , this is always a really interesting point talking about the kind of anti household texts or the breaking from household that we see within the gospel texts , particularly in terms of contemporary , some contemporary understandings of Christianity , as 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 . I've come to bring a sword to set father against son and so on and so forth .
We think that you know there are a number of reasons why this kind of stuff would have been going on , why they would have developed this idea of being estranged from household in some sense . I think most pertinently to draw back to some of the material conditions , was that the building of Cephorus and Tiberius , the rebuilding of Cephorus and the building of Tiberius , would have displaced a lot of people , if nothing less it disrupted traditional life patterns , made would have made life a lot difficult 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 , including the ancient Jewish historian , josephus , actually in the building of Tiberius , talks about literal upheavals of you know , land being cleared to make way for these , for the building of Tiberius , and kind of moving people around to make this happen . So we know that these sorts of displacements and so on could happen .
Speaker 2And , given the importance of the household , not only within early Judaism but within the broader Greco-Roman world I mean the entire Roman Empire was actually imagined as a big household of Rome , with the Roman Emperor as 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 Rome . So on a smaller scale , the role of the household was incredibly important . Masculinity was a very kind of pivotal value related to ideas of honor and shame within wider Greco-Roman society , and so if you became divorced from household or if you weren't kind of meeting your familial obligations as the head of a household through providing economically for your household and so on and so forth , this was very shameful . This was seen as shameful and it seems that this became a site of conflict within the early Jesus movement . Perhaps within it was a way in which elites and others within Palestine could ridicule the early Jesus movement , referring to them as kind of effeminate or in particular , the male members as effeminate , as not living up to their household obligations .
Speaker 2There's one phrase it's hard to know whether this goes back to the early Jesus movement or not , but it is preserved in the Gospel of Matthew that talks about the coming eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven , and eunuchs would have been understood as interestingly . I mean , it's such a great term to use but eunuchs were understood ambiguously within the ancient world in terms of gender . They both kind of would have prominent places , say in a royal court , but equally , you know , they couldn't procreate and they were outside of the households and so on . So they could be ridiculed accordingly .
Speaker 2And it seems that that saying , in particular by Jesus , suggests that 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 , I suppose , the greatest patriarchal figure they knew , the Father God , right , so they may be a movement without Father's I mean , the Greek word for Father is Patrice , right , and this is where we get patriarchy comes from . That's the rule of the Father , like it's all kind of tied into this idea and so , and as you say , yeah , this is where we see a real contradiction coming through , because on the one hand , they're kind of championing , I suppose , a kind of emasculated understanding of gender , but equally , at the same time , they reinvest in patriarchal ideas such as a father figure in heaven with power and might , bringing in this new age , caring for them in the present , and so on , and they could draw on various Jewish traditions to establish this idea .
Speaker 1Yeah , this leads to two sections of your book that I've also found You're in James's book that I also found fascinating . One is a section on Butch Millenarianism , which is one of the subtitles in your James's book . That legitimately made me laugh , but I think there's a lot in that . And then the other is there's this focus and redefinition of purity and family law . That makes a lot of sense . And I think it makes more sense if you're assuming you're going to be in an apocalyptic conflict and reestablishing a kingdom when you rule , and possibly eternal rules very soon . But you mentioned early on , it's pretty clear that in at least the first in the synoptic Gospels the apocalypse is immediate . Like by the time you're getting to the Gospel of John and Revelations it's already kind of too late . So what do we make of this butch millenarianism ? And then , how does this relate to the redefinition of purity inside or outside and the kind of insistence actually on fairly strict marital laws for people who also discourage family ?
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean , I think 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 and the reactionary . Because although the early Jesus movement is imagining a better world and a new world , the transformation of society into this ideal kingdom or empire of God it's it bases its understanding of what this would look like on a traditional peasant society in which households , peasant hierarchies and social structures will still be present . You've simply got kind of a new ruler in charge and what have you . And as a Jewish movement , it's , at least initially . And again , this is one of those longer term developments from the early Jesus movement to Christianity where , with the influx of Gentiles and this is something Paul's concerned about in conflict with others about do non Jews have to become Jews first , do they need to follow the laws of Moses , and so on . Well , for the early Jesus movement , at the time of Jesus , all indications are yes , anybody who's involved in this movement is going to be following the Jewish law as the early Jesus movement understands it .
Speaker 2Now , that's the key point , because whenever we see debates over law or , in particular , purity law within the Gospels , so when Jesus has a conflict with , say , the Pharisees or some other Jewish groups . It's not because , as is sometimes understood or misunderstood , 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 help it make sense within your particular social context . The early Jesus movement's understanding of the law was very much focused on , I think , what we would call the kind of social justice aspects where the poor and the , I suppose , taken care of that , the , but you know , it's kind of not in the secular sense , but precisely because it's seen as fulfilling the commandments to do so . Does that answer your question ?
Speaker 1Yeah , to some degree . I mean , like you would . I think we could definitely link the early Jesus movements ties into like what we would consider like prophetic Judaism , which is very concerned with a lot of the similar things , as opposed to like the Torah , which is kind of concerned with some of those things .
Speaker 1But not generally , 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 . But another thing 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 in first-century Palestine , both in Galilee and in Judea , because you have one . I mean , who the Pharisees are is not entirely clear , but you have multiple origins of the rabbinic movement . You have the Sadduceean movement , you have all these other apocalyptic zealot movements that , and in Jewish tradition they kind of get represented in the rabbinic movement by like by like rabbi figures .
Speaker 2But again , it's , and it's really , I mean , I find one of the fascinating things . But one of the very difficult things about reconstructing this period of history is that , again , you know , our sources tend to preserve the views of . You know , we're produced by basically one class of people literate , scribes , who were elite or semi-elite , and so there's so many views within and particularly popular , some of the more popular views that are not so readily preserved or they're preserved through the filter of something else . So Josephus , who I mentioned before , he talks about and you know he's this aristocratic Jewish figure from the first century and he talks about other millenarian movements within the early first century , but often in like the most scathing , dismissive terms . But you know , again , historically that's useful for us . We will kind of say , okay , well , we don't agree with Josephus' perspective of just dismissing these people , but it shows that they were there , that they held particular views , 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 , and they would be framing it in terms of using symbols and traditions from Judaism , such as , you know , symbolically crossing through the river Jordan to evoke the parting of the Red Sea or various . You know , you see , you find all these kind of figures propping up and doing similar things like that In terms of just getting back to like the difficulty of reconstructing these groups .
Speaker 2The Gospels themselves are written relatively late , you know , if we're looking at the second half of the first century and particularly I mean 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 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 scribal elite who are all vying to define the tradition , the authority . You know , the define the authoritative tradition when the central , centralized power structure is gone . So for the author of the Gospel of Matthew , the answer is Jesus . Jesus is the Jewish Messiah who was promised to fulfill , who came not to abolish the law but to fulfill the law and the prophets . He's remodeled on the Jewish tradition in many respects . He has his own kind of exodus from Egypt . He gives the law and the Sermon on the Mount and this is Matthew's answer too and struggle with some of these competing Jewish groups .
Speaker 2But this is a struggle that was not going on , at least not in any way recognizable , in the time of the early Jesus movement . So there would have been absolutely struggles between different factions , political factions and various schools of thought and so on . But and again , just like I said , we talk about earliest Christianity as a kind of Christianities , it was a diverse realm and I think , similarly within early Judaism or Second Temple Judaism , this is a very diverse society and it's not unexpected that you would have competing claims to the tradition or the kind of the cultural symbols of that tradition . Who owns what ? In the same way that we see it today , who owns Jesus ? To hark back to what I was saying before , that you point to authoritative ideas , traditions and you try and claim it for your side .
Speaker 1Yeah , 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 post-destruction of the temple , which also means post-Sajusic dominance of the religion .
Speaker 2Right , so the Sadducees get wiped out , yeah .
Speaker 1And so , like one of the reasons why it's such hotly contested with the Pharisees is like that's another sect that you can contest that has a rival claim , kind of equal to yours , to the post-legitimacy of a post-Sajusic , post-temple Judaism . Right , but we're not even totally sure that the I mean there's a tradition that links them , but we're not 100% sure if you read the work of Jacob Newsner , that like the rabbinic Judaism as we understand it , post-demissiona and the Pharisees are actually a continuous line and like we don't know . And I find that interesting Also when you start adding , like the you know Josephus mentioned in the Leesons what we know about how many weird millenian Christian sects that we find evidence for in Krumron . I mean that Christian Jewish sect , jewish yeah .
Speaker 1It's interesting that I slipped up and called them Christian , because they actually do indicate that some ideas that are floating around in Christianity are not unique .
Speaker 1That that's really , really interesting .
Speaker 1And another thing that you catch on to and you talk about in the Puritan and impure section , you focus on the Samaritans , because I'd always been like , why did the Samaritans get I mean for Jews too , but for Christians , like the kind of why are they used as like the prototypical Gentile ? Because if you actually know anything about the Samaritans , they're a group that has a slight variant of Hebrew , still currently exist and has a different holy mountain , but , other than that , is very similar to , you know , second Temple Judaism , and you actually point this out . That that's like part of why this is specifically what is referenced in kind of this liminal case of purity and impurity is being invoked deliberately in that context . Are you in terms of pointing out and that's important ? And then you also point out the kind of Jesus movements , general redefinition of purity laws and purity contamination , which which , when you know , and in Greek tends to be talked about in terms of sin , but actually in Hebrew has a different word . So what do you and James think is really going on there .
Speaker 2I mean and again , let's put this in class terms- I'm not going to be able to get as technical as James might be on this thing . He's I mean , james is really the strength in this , in this area he has . He did his PhD in his first book was looking at Jewish , jewish law as its , and purity laws as they're talked about in the Gospel of Mark . So , with that said , I'm going to talk in a more general sense and , I think , harking back to something I think I already mentioned is that they're you know , yeah , these are introduced debates where they're , they're developing particular purity ideas . Just trying to think where to start .
Speaker 2I mean , yeah , I think you're absolutely right in the sense that this isn't necessarily to do with sinfulness or anything like that , and and that's certainly important in terms of the caricature that sometimes comes up in Christian circles of Jews as kind of being slaves to the law or something like that . So , just with that out of the way , gosh , where am I going to go with this ? I'm trying to think of some of the examples we give . I mean , we get in the book we give . Well , the stuff that I think they're saying about divorce is an interesting one , right ?
Speaker 1Right yeah .
Speaker 2So that might be a good way into this . So the interestingly , the early Jesus movement has a really harsh what we would consider harsh teaching about divorce or prohibition against divorce , and we think that this is you know , it's quite an early tradition because it comes up in not only the Gospel of Mark but also in Paul's letters seems to refer to this at some point . And equally , when , when Matthew includes the same story , he he gives an out , he gives an exception . So he says that in cases of porno , sexual morality or what have you , divorce is okay , but other than that , don't get divorced , right ? Mark's Gospel preserves probably an early version of it , which is that kind of in all circumstances don't get divorced .
Speaker 2But the whole reason for the conflict and this debate being put within there and told within there is that another Jewish group I think it's the Pharisees are named within within the Gospels try to trick Jesus by by kind of asking for his opinion on well , who will they be married to ? And the da , da , da , da , da , da . And gosh , how am I going to answer your question ? Can you ? Can you talk a bit more about your question than I'll try to answer it specifically ?
Speaker 2I realize I'm rambling a bit yeah .
Speaker 1Yeah , sorry , I didn't mean to trip you up with knowledge of .
Speaker 2Jewish stuff . I know . I know James would be able to shoot his way through this a lot better than I took .
Speaker 1This is a problem with a co-written book . Is that maybe some type of accidently hit on the stuff that's actually specialty of your co-op but , no , your stuff about ? Because that's in the same chapter about fornication and and that exception and Matthew , but if you go back a markets not there . One of the things I think is interesting about that is that you point out that in traditional Jewish law , as understood by rabbinic and probably Pharisee it can probably sad to see Judaism you can divorce for a man , can divorce a woman for almost anything . In fact , if anything , the Talmud put some limits on it and I think people don't entirely know what that means in a modern context is because we see it divorces liberating . But that , and in Jewish law that If she does not get immediately remarried you are , your options for survival are Right yeah , I mean basically you would you .
Speaker 2this is why how you might end up Working as a prostitute or or , or something else .
Speaker 1Yeah , yeah , yeah , prostitute are . You might get it's easier , yeah , so .
Speaker 2No , that's right . So I think that the , the prohibition against divorce , very much as a yes , it's an , it's an interpretation of of the mosaic law that is strict , but strict for reasons of of , I suppose , social care and and seeing the that , 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 traditional Village life and so on . So Imagining the , the structure of , or the , so that's , such a structure is being , you know , of fundamental importance to the , the care of people within society . Divorce , within that context , you , from the early Jesus movement's perspective , could be seen as this yeah , really elite practice , or self-serving elitist practice .
Speaker 2Yeah , and I think the so yeah , sorry and okay , so now , thank you 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 class interests and possibly is an expression of of Underlying class antagonisms and so on Mechanisms and saw yeah , and what ?
Speaker 1and to help you out about this marriage
. So you know , samaritans are closed out of , like , the Jewish power league not so much the Roman but the Jewish right early and they are seen as unclean because they're Gentiles by technicality , right . But you know part of what they're pointing out . If you think about , like , why it's a Samaritan and not just any random Gentile , it's that the Samaritans actually are Pinnacle far as they follow them is they follow a slightly different version of Mosaic law and yeah , I mean like very slightly different you have a totally like .
Speaker 2You know so . So quite and quite literally , the the neighbor . So that question 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 Traditional Ideas within Judaism , but that seemingly , yeah , very much would go against the some of the power brokers of that society .
Speaker 1Yeah , and in the book it states you to state that the , the Samaritans are also parallel negatively , and a lot of other Jewish religious or Sadducees who are the dominant Jewish in the second to period . So I think that's , there's a Lot there , and I found that really interesting and trying to understand , you know , and maybe it's even important for the day , like the intersection of class and ethnic conflict and and the way that is understood in a pre capitalist , pre modern society .
Speaker 2That's right . I mean this is , this is how they built their , their 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 that that proved popular right , that had credibility and so could draw people from that , that brought a world of Galilean and Judea into the movement , particularly those who shared its , its class interests and you know , and we think of this as a political moment you talk about .
Speaker 1You know , one of the best ways to see this is to understand what's going on in the Judas tale , where you know , um , judas is not just a theological defector , he's also a Political defector .
Speaker 2You basically turning you know , he's turning them a class tracer , I think yeah .
Speaker 1Yeah he's class traitor .
Speaker 2In fact , no , what , yeah , what do we ? I ? Defection of a comrade , or something .
Speaker 1Yeah , I think was no , um , yeah , and and and . That happening in the context of Passover is particularly symbolic because what Passover is about is a liberation of the Jewish people from slavery , so when they're , all you know , equal in servitude . And that's also a chapter where you talk about the symbol , the possible symbolism behind Son of man . 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 and that you know , and they had , you know , there's a hand all the way back in that inversion of Basilia . Well , all you have to do is re-invert it , right , like it's like .
Speaker 2You've already used the language , the language of Empire and hierarchy was all was there from the beginning . And 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 , so , in many ways this , this lays that that foundation for a Christian Empire . You've got the , you've got all the language you need to be able to establish that . But equally , you know that again , this is One of the contradictory aspects of Christianity that goes right through the tradition Is that Christianity is both a revolutionary and a reactionary Religion , or it has both ideas simultaneously .
Speaker 2So people can . People can justify empires and various Imperialistic ideas and movements and so on and powers on the basis of the Christian scriptures . But equally , these , the , the , the scriptures , that these texts have been foundational to a number of Liberative political movements through history Right up until the present day . What one of the , I suppose , misnomer is again in this concern historical Jesus , research and study of early Christianity . And and Again it points that kind of romanticization of the past where , where texts like the New Testament or the Bible as foundational documents , there's this tendency to try and Say like , look for a purity of origins , right Like that .
Speaker 2Christianity at its beginning was actually revolutionary and then and then certain figures betrayed the , the movement and it became impaired , 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 simultaneous Revolutionary and reactionary . It had both currents within it . From the beginning . It didn't abandon this idea of Empire or hierarchy , it simply remodeled this coming kingdom that it envisaged on preexisting hierarchical ideas and constructs . And then the Taking off my religious scholar hat , putting on my Marxist hat and my Marxist hat says , like duh , that has to be the case because Right , develop the proletariat are the bust you could do would be to .
Speaker 1Invert ownership or maybe make it relatively more meritocratic or fair , but that's about right , that's the best way to do it . I mean , I mean one of the one of the , I think , common criticisms that's made of Of Marxist readings of .
Speaker 2Jesus and the early Jesus movement which I don't think can be labeled against owls Is is precisely this kind of the kind of the kind of Romanticization of the past where basically the peasants become the proletariat and and so they , they . So you've suddenly got like Peasants , imagining a , a world , or , or working towards a world that has no class and and , and , and . I think that that isn't anachronism , 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 . Yeah , I think that's crucial .
Speaker 1I mean , yeah , why I might look at the work of , say , like Richard Seaford about like the changes and say Indian and Greek context , when you start introducing something like property , the way that views soul and stuff like that . One thing I will say is is , basically , it takes capitalism or Hunter gatherer , immediate return societies to imagine class of society like right , what are those other ? You're the beginning or you're here like and we see , and , as I say we do , we do see hints of this , like within the book of Acts .
Speaker 2Early on in the book of Acts , you know , the early Christian community is suddenly like sharing property . We have what's been called Christian Communism , this early Christian communism of , of . They sell all their , their , their property , and Share it all that they help . So I think , what's the phrase ? They hold all things in common and and , but , and . Then , interestingly , you know that text , although that selection of texts have proved enormously influential within later Christian influenced Socialist groups and so on . But it's not . It's not quite the same thing . It's not quite the same thing because there is still a hierarchy that is modeled on agrarian ideas of , of , of power and authority . Yeah Right , I mean , it is not a hierarchically less .
Speaker 1Class of society .
Speaker 2It is just a proper less society and and while well , I mean also , I mean we I didn't really touch on this , but but but part of the early Jesus movements , I suppose manifesto was that the the Was was was a reversal , was a reversal of the fortunes of the rich and poor . So it wasn't necessarily a classless society . It was that those currently suffering under the changing socioeconomic conditions as a consequence of these building projects and so on , they would inherit wealth , property , riches in the age to come . And the wealthy and those who didn't surrender their wealth and repent , turn from their oppressive ways , they would be cast out . They would not inherit this kingdom . So to me that doesn't really speak to a classless society so much as an inversion of material fortunes .
Speaker 1Absolutely .
Speaker 2But it's not as if those ideas couldn't sit alongside ideas about sharing , classless society and so on at the same time . But again , I don't think it's pure . I don't think we have this kind of pure idea of a classless society .
Speaker 1No , I mean it's at least domestically , not pretty clearly . I mean , there's also hints and you talk about this in the kind of gender emergence 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 de-emphasizes secondary sex characteristics and stuff like that , and that's not even unique to Christianity , like that in Buddhism too , and that is about like a way out of household relations which cannot be imagined to be any other way than gender . Right , like there's no , there's no way for that not to be gendered . So the only way out of , say , the gender roles is out of it entirely , which also means you're opting out of most society .
Speaker 1And but even there I mean like how directly that's related to the early Jesus movement a little bit iffy , like you know , paul's language about that is highly interpretable , particularly once you pull out all the likely pseudo-Pauline material . So yeah , I think that's a fair point and I also think it's important to point out the way relative equality or propertylessness or whatever might not be classlessness , the way we think about there , might still be , not just like relative roles but like inherited ones and stuff like this too , but now you're doing property , 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 .
Speaker 2Even egalitarian , maybe overstepping it Right .
Speaker 1I mean , when I think of , even in the case of like , we get into deep anthropology and 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 classless society , what you even in those , some of them have more hierarchies than others .
Speaker 1So , whether or not there's gender hierarchies like that's not consistent from hunter-gatherer example . Hunter-gatherer example , either of which we have aramans of are currently existing ones . And I just I really do like to point that out because I do think we can understand people . The past I don't think it's like these completely , you know , humanically sealed , like epistemes or whatever , but I do think it's often wrong to assume they could have possibly thought about this in the same way we did , because there's just not like , if I'm in them 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 .
Speaker 2I think the closest you sort of get is the ideas about treating slaves well , rather than abolishing the institution entirely , given how dependent the Roman economy was on slave labor to function .
Speaker 1Yeah , and another thing that we might talk about that you mentioned acts , but I'm like by acts we already have some gentilization of massacres and so like you have epicureans and stoics who talk about this , and particularly epicureans who do live in gardens and share things with them , like 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 , yeah , although interestingly , epicurean and Greek is also the word for atheists , it's kind of fun but not Greek Hebrew , it's a translation of the Greek into Hebrew is the word the rabbi , jews for atheists .
Speaker 2Right , okay , I didn't know that Interesting .
Speaker 1If you call someone an Epicurean and Talmudic literature , you're saying they're an atheist Right .
Speaker 2Anyway . I mean , you know like the early Christians were seen as atheists ? Oh yeah , Because they denied every other God's existence . Right , so right that that word itself doesn't .
Speaker 1It doesn't mean what we mean yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah . Oh yeah .
Speaker 2Christians are the best atheists , right , right .
Speaker 1And you know we can go back to Platonist and piety , because it's not like Plato was an atheist in any meaningful sense of the word . So anyway , thank you so much for your time . I know we got into the weeds a little bit in this one , but I really , I really enjoyed this book . It was one of the few books like these are two different obsessions I have , and very rarely other than coming together Right .
Speaker 1Other than we mentioned the scholar Roland Bohr , who is the only other person to know who really ties them together . But even I don't think Roland writes that much on the historical Jesus . We can see a lot of early Marxist scholarship . On another podcast you mentioned Ingels and his writings about this . Kalski did a whole book . That is
good . As much as I love , it is guilty of everything you're saying is like pretending that it's a proletarians and like that's the thing I mean .
Speaker 2This is the selling point for our book really is that it's the first historical materialist approach to Jesus done 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 the examples of Kalski and Ingels and stuff you know like there would be considered really out of date now Because they're just not up to play with this , with the scholarship . And a lot's happened since then in terms of discussions of early Christian literature , early Judaism , roman history , all that kind of stuff . So we bring these worlds together , I think , in a way that hasn't hasn't actually been done quite like this .
Speaker 1I mean , yeah , I mean it's easy to forgive Ingels for it because the fields actually what we think of as New Testament historical studies actually concurrent to him in his early development Right Exactly , and Kalski can be forgiven . Kalski can be forgiven because , well , you can't know everything .
Speaker 2But also you know , like that , his books what 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 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 , but the general , the general overview is one that strongly influences us , which is that , you know , religion is seen as a an expression of , or a kind of cultural expression of underlying social and economic antagonisms . Right , and 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 .
Speaker 1No , I mean the field is overwhelmingly liberal , and both the popular and in the strict sense of that term .
Speaker 2Absolutely .
Speaker 1Absolutely . Yeah , I was thinking about when this reading this book compared to like one of the other left readings of Jesus and you mentioned him earlier , John Dominic Crossen and I'm like that is really reading liberal values into like the first three and I don't think that's , you know , I think that's a pretty big misstep .
Speaker 2Because , interestingly , he , you know , and Crossen Crossen's work , you know , is amazing in a way . It's really detailed and interesting scholarship but and he talks about a lot of the social context that we talk about as well but in a way that my criticism is 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 it's , it's , it's still very much in the guise of Jesus , the individual genius who , or innovator , who , who was part of the social context but actually had other other ideas and , you know , and presented a different version , or something like that .
Speaker 1Yeah , it was not an emergent negation so much as like no , no , a kind of force here to something like proto liberal values . And I also , I like , I like Crossen's work but his ideological gloss on Jesus likewise role and I mean he's got that huge .
Speaker 2Not his short popular book , that big one is really one , yeah , oh yeah , yeah , absolutely , um , if , if , if , if , if any of your listeners , or if you want to check out my own , 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 .
Speaker 2It's called the fetish for a subversive Jesus and you found that yeah , I look at I look at both Crossen's and another scholar called anti right , at both their work and the way in which they do exactly this . They do this kind of postmodern liberal thing , but they're actually writing to very different audiences and anti right is very popular among certain types of conservative 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 .
Speaker 2And , and he needs to compete with Catholic right intellectuals usually yeah , and then cross and as they taken up by , 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 it's fascinating , you know , and I think that that was some of the pre work that that I had done , and James has written similar stuff on another topic , sue , with historical Jesus . This was part of the pre work that we did . That really , when it came to writing our own life of Jesus , you know , we're like we 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 and surely will 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 modern leftists or anything like that , because I think that the Jesus that we present is both useful and not useful .
Speaker 1Well , it's part of my . You know , one of my big pushes is like , if you want to understand , you know a marks ish . I'm going to use that broadly . I'm not even going to say strictly Marxist , but historical , materialist approach to 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 re contextualize it as close to we can to the kinds of social tensions and conflicts and class conflicts that are existing at the time .
Speaker 2It's just part of that broader project of seeing the , of seeing all history is the history of class conflict , right , 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 going to 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 .
Speaker 1And I think about this time period in particular . We have basically Roman imperial data and religious data . That's what we got , like Josephus and Philo and a few other people and , and I guess , some philosophers but I actually found most of philosophers under religious data , right , right , 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 like they have theologies , dude . Well , hey , yeah .
Speaker 2Absolutely .
Speaker 1Yeah , but anyway , thank you so much for your time . People should check out your work . I got 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 expose anything about that . I don't think I did , because I think if I would have remembered this book more so , but quite I was . I'm going to put this nicely I like zero books a lot , but I don't normally expect us to publish like fairly rigorous , like . Are there any of its offices ? So I tell people to check this out . I'd also say , if they , if people can get it , maybe get it from your library is a little bit harder and a little bit more expensive . Class struggle in the new testments pretty great . Got a lot of different essays and a lot of different perspectives and that was edited by you . So people should check that out . Anything else you want to plug at ?
Speaker 2one of the weirdest things about socialist podcasting is plugging at the end , but yeah , no , just follow me on Twitter at Robert J Miles R O B E R T J M Y L ES . All right , that's it . And yeah , get the book , get Jesus . A life and class conflict .
Speaker 1It's not expensive . You can go ahead and give out with no reason , all right .
Speaker 2All right , thank you .
Speaker 1Thank you .