Here is the summary:
In Jesus and the Chaos of History, James Crossley looks at the way the earliest traditions about Jesus interacted with a context of social upheaval and the ways in which this historical chaos of the early first century led to a range of ideas which were taken up, modified, ignored, and reinterpreted in the movement that followed. Crossley examines how the earliest Palestinian tradition intersected with social upheaval and historical change and how accidental, purposeful, discontinuous, contradictory, and implicit meanings in the developments of ideas appeared in the movement that followed. He considers the ways seemingly egalitarian and countercultural ideas co-exist with ideas of dominance and power and how human reactions to socio-economic inequalities can end up mimicking dominant power. In this case, the book analyzes how a Galilean "protest" movement laid the foundations for its own brand of imperial rule. This evaluation is carried out in detailed studies on the kingdom of God and "Christology," "sinners" and purity, and gender and revolution.
Here is the (actual) Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. Does Jesus Plus Paul Equal Marx Plus Lenin? Re-directing the Historical Jesus
2. Criteria, Historicity, and the Earliest Palestinian Tradition
3. The Dictatorship of God? Kingdom and Christology
4. 'Sinners', Law, and Purity
5. Camping with Jesus? Gender, Revolution, and Early Palestinian Tradition An Irrelevant Conclusion
TO some extent, we might see the Jewish/Palestinian desire for a "kingdom" to be one and the same wish motivating other empires. Even Galilean rebel movements may well have had the aim of finally joining and augmenting Jerusalem and that possible future Jewish kingdom.
ReplyDeleteThis capitulation to imperialism we see in another way in say, the attempts by Josephus to break away from the Roman empire ... followed by Josephus becoming Rome's local governor in Galilee.
Do you mention Josephus?