Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict

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We are a conservative evangelical church with a long history of faithful Bible teaching in the coastal town of Whitehaven in beautiful West Cumbria.

Whether you are an academic of the field, a lay Christian, or clergy, you should be reading this volume and seriously considering it. Being born and raised in this artisan rural working stratum, Jesus and his immediate family would have felt the full force of the economic dislocations and displacements caused by the massive Herodian building schemes at Sepphoris and Tiberias. We are part of the pro-democracy media contesting the vast right-wing media propaganda ecosystem brainwashing tens of millions and putting democracy at risk.

Both books start with a review of the classic three quests for the historical Jesus, the first emerging from the European Enlightenment and culminating in Albert Schweitzer (1906); the second (between the two World Wars) pioneered by the studies of Bultmann and Dibelius and characterised by the attempt to establish criteria for the historical Jesus; the third led by Géza Vermes’s insistence on the Jewishness of Jesus and bolstered by new archaeological discoveries, such as that of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. For some in Galilee, these grandiose projects, constructed in part to solidify the status of the comprador bourgeoisie of their day, resulted in great wealth and an enhanced social standing. Most sciences aim to establish general laws, but the science of history accepts that historical events are unique. Bringing a wealth of knowledge on the social, economic, and cultural conflicts of the time, Crossley and Myles uncover the emergence of a fervent and deadly serious religious organizer. Seeing such portraits as romanticized and overly idealized, the interest here is on the social and economic forces that produced the Jesus movement.

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The movement’s popular appeal was due in part to a desire to represent the values of ordinary rural workers, and its vision meant that the rich would have to give up their wealth, while the poor would be afforded a life of heavenly luxury. Nor does the “preferential option for death” accord well with the persistent and emphasised failure of the disciples to accept the message of suffering. An expert panel discusses the introduction of Prayers of Love and Faith and blessings for same-sex couples.

From the outset, this book seeks to place the “Jesus Movement” within its wider economic and social context. Fr Henry Wansbrough OSB is a monk of Ampleforth, emeritus Master of St Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and a former member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.But is Mark’s story his way of showing that Antipas is a foolish victim of a pretty girl’s charm (Esther 5. Some readers may be irritated by the retro-fitting of 19th and 20th century language to a first century setting (the Twelve Disciples are referred to as the Jesus Movement’s “Politburo,” and the desired millenarian outcome as a “Dictatorship of the Peasantry,” for instance). Without such testing, it remains unclear that the Jesus movement was a product of class-conflict and agrarian unrest.