I will admit to being inordinately skeptical, so there are of course lots of points where I simply don't think much (read 99%) of the Gospels are historical (sorry, not even John the Baptist's baptism of Jesus). I also don't think Q existed or similar. So, of course, Crossley and Myles come to rather radically different conclusions than I would, but that is irrelevant to the quality of the volume ultimately. Even where I firmly disagree with them, their cases are still well argued and entirely plausible. I have always been partial to historical materialist understandings of Jesus, and this one as a millenarian prophet, and a failed revolution (which did not bring about the theocratic dictatorship of God, or the systemic economic changes it wished) is, I will say, the most convincing I have read. 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.

This combination produced a millenarianism that was both ideologically focused on right behaviours, and adroitly pragmatic enough to embark on a sustained “mission to the rich” to swell its numbers and financing. Crossley and Myles have recaptured the mind-blowing excitement generated by the original quest to distinguish the Jesus of history behind the myth. Although Jesus scholarship has struggled to let go of the fantasy of a man who dropped from the sky, this book places Jesus firmly on his feet, a product of his agrarian class and imperial repression. Crossley and Myles have found Jesus: in the Galilean dirt under his fingernails.From the outset, this book seeks to place the “Jesus Movement” within its wider economic and social context. In so doing, the authors speedily debunk the “Great Man” myth and demonstrate the large number of similar grouplets in a Palestine that was being convulsed by serious dislocations. James Crossley (MF Norwegian School of Theology and Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements) will present his new book co-authored with Robert J. Myles (Wollaston Theological College, Perth, Australia)

His research and teaching interests can be put into two broad categories: historical Jesus, Christian origins and Judaism in the first century; politics, religion, and reception history. He has supervised and welcomes PhD students in both areas.They have found most to be wanting, if not serious distortions predicated upon the writers’ own contemporary class interests, including revered Biblical scholars such as EP Sanders. 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.

Sometimes, Crossley and Myles try too hard in their debunking mission. The claims of hyper or “servant” masculinity and the downgrading of the Movement’s radical inclusion of women needs far more substance to stand up than they provide here. Neil Elliott , author of Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle and The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict provides an important refocusing and reprioritizing of earlier Scriptural studies as seen through the lens of historical materialist analysis. Precise, clear, accessible, and important. I can think of no better introduction to the historical Jesus for the general reader, no clearer statement on the legacy of the Jesus movement in the sweep of subsequent history, or a more worthy challenge to contemporary scholarship on Jesus and the rise of Christianity.” – Neil Elliott, author of Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle

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Although containing little original research, authors James Crossley and Robert J Myles have painstakingly examined many of the mainstream interpretations of the life, teachings and execution of Jesus. JESUS: A Life in Class Conflict provides an important refocusing and reprioritising of earlier Scriptural studies as seen through the lens of historical materialist analysis.

Crossley, J. (2022). John Ball and the 1381 English Uprising: From Rebellion to Revolutions, Religion in Rebellions, Revolutions, and Social Movements,, s. 71 - 88. Routledge, ISBN: 9781003177821 With Crossley and Myles, the difficulty is that too often supposition turns into certainty. There is too much of “it is not out of the question to suppose . . .”. To mention just two detailed points: the presentation of the movement as “tough, muscular, hard, and manly” hardly fits Peter’s reaction to Caiaphas’s servant-girl. Nor does the “preferential option for death” accord well with the persistent and emphasised failure of the disciples to accept the message of suffering.This book moves on from the Third Quest for the historical Jesus, so focused on seeing Jesus as a great innovator within a particular cultural, religious and societal context. Seeing such portraits as romanticized and overly idealized, the interest here is on the social and economic forces that produced the Jesus movement, so that Jesus and his associates are seen as responding to the material upheavals of the time. For many young men of the time, there were only two realistic responses: banditry or hitching themselves to a prophetic itinerant movement. Crossley and Myles locate Jesus’s class position as that of a tekton. 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.