A Review of Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict

This review will appear in the Journal of Early Christian History in the near future:

Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict, by James Crossley and Robert J. Myles

Zero Books. 2023. xii +281pp. ISBN 978-1-80341-082-1 (pbk).

Reviewed by Roman A. Montero

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5245-8142

Independent scholar, Hønefoss Norway

James Crossley & Robert J. Myles, Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict. Winchester: Zero Books, 2023. ISBN 978-1-80341-082-1 (pbk.). xii +281pp. £19.99

Endorsement of The Priest and Levite as Temple Representatives by Michale Blythe

Here is a Blurb for the Priest and Levite as Temple Representatives: The Good Samaritan in the context of Luke’s travel narrative:

“The Priest and Levite as Temple Representatives provides an in-depth and thorough exegesis on the parable of the good Samaritan that draws out the often neglected social, economic, political, and cultic factors at play, bringing the parable to life in its first-century Palestinian world as well as within the context of the message of the Gospel of Luke. This book is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand the full ethical impact of the parable.”

—Roman A. Montero, author of All Things in Common and Jesus’s Manifes

Behr’s atemporal Christ, and the temporal Jesus

I recently reread John Behr’s translation of Origen’s On First Principles, and his introduction. There is an interesting concept that Behr brings up, and which he has woven into his larger theology, and which he also argues that Origen had: That Jesus did not pre-exist his incarnation, he rather exists atemporally as the eternal Son of God, and temporally only as the human Jesus. Behr writes:

The crowds

I recently read the collected essays volume Class Struggle in the New Testament edited by Robert J. Myles, and one essay by Neil Elliot stood out quite a bit to me. It didn’t stand out to me because I was convinced of its conclusions, they may be well be correct though; it stood out to me because it is a reconstruction of Jesus’s casting out the money changers in the temple that I have not come across before and that strikes me as very plausible and that deals with the data very well.

Jesus against Hillel on Usury

I would argue that the best summation of Christian ethics is found in the sermon on the plain in Luke 6:20–49. What I love about the sermon on the plain is just how radical it seems on the surface, it seems almost impossible; however, when you think about what it’s saying, and think about it deeply—it makes sense. Probably my favorite example of this is found in Luke 6:34–35 (NRSV):

Jesus and the Abolition of the Courts

Probably the most famous parable by Jesus is the parable of the speck in your brother’s eye as opposed to the beam in your eye. Often this parable is taken to simply be about not being a hypocrite and not being personally judgmental against other individuals. However, this saying was not only used by Jesus and the early Christians, it was also a saying within rabbinic Judaism—seeing how they used it can shed some light on what Jesus meant with it. The saying is recorded the sermon on the plain in Luke 6:41–42:

The Early Christians and the Military

In modern times it may not even seem like an issue if a Christian can or cannot serve in the military, clearly Christians today and for many centuries do, so what would the issue be? On the other hand, anyone who has honestly read the gospels must recognize that the issue of violence is at the very least problematic in Jesus’s teachings. One would simply have to point to the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:38–47) or the Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:27–31), or his teaching on the one taking the sword dying by the sword (Matthew 26:52), to recognize that Jesus tended to reject violence.

Healing

In dealing with theodicy, a scriptural data set that needs to be taken into account is Jesus’s healings. The reason for this is that with these healings, we get Jesus’s own reaction to human suffering. Some accounts portray the motivation as ‘pity’ (e.g. Luke 7:13 with Jesus rising the only son of a woman from the dead,  Matthew 14:14 with the healing of sick people in the crowd, Matthew 20:34 with his healing of the blind man). The word used for being moved pity is σπλαγχνίζομαι bascially means being moved as to one’s inward parts, kind of like how one might say “that hit me in gut”.

So what are we to make of these accounts? I think there are a few things we can say: