A Political Jesus?
Traditionally it has not been supposed that Jesus had anything quite like what we would call political opinions or beliefs. Orthodox Christians in fact did not picture Jesus as having any opinions on anything at all. You know the slogan: “The gospel is good news, not good views.” Even so, as the earthly avatar of Jehovah, Jesus did not need “opinions,” which are, by definition, less than certain, more tentative, like theories which compete with rival theories. What need had he for such gropings? After all, he did not see in a glass darkly but already face to face. And this contrast hints at a serious inconsistency underlying the whole endeavor to reconstruct “the politics of Jesus.” On the one hand, we ask what this man’s political opinions might be, as if we were asking after those of Ashley Judd or Sean Penn. On the other, we ask this because we imagine that, whatever views we may decide Jesus held, they will be normative for us, implying we consider them no mere opinions from which we may learn, but rather divine dictates which we may demand that others must join us in following. It is a case of theo-political bait-and-switch and, finally, of cynical manipulation.
Apolitical Apocalypse
Some modern-era scholars have seen nothing political in Jesus as recorded in the gospels. This might be a good or a bad thing depending on how one looked at it. Rabbi Joseph Klausner,[1] generally an admirer of Jesus, regarded it as a regrettable blind spot that Jesus had nothing to say about political things, as he thus created a vacuum for the Christian Church which, having no guidance from him, defaulted into worldly politics, for instance, Caesaro-papist authoritarianism. Jesus could have prevented such abuses had he only done what Moses and Samuel and Chairman Mao did. But instead, he shrugged off any such duties: “O man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter over you?” (Luke 12:13-14).
Liberal Protestant theologian Adolf Harnack[2] took a different view of the matter. Yes, Jesus had nothing to say on governance and policy, but that is good. Had he worked out some political theory or platform, it must soon become obsolete and incompatible as times and conditions changed. So he left that task to future generations, like the king who departed for a journey, entrusting money to his servants to see what they would do with it in his absence. (Compare Matthew 25:14-30 with 1 Corinthians 3:10-15.) It might be thought that Harnack forgot what he had said when he began to advocate the Social Gospel of humanitarian service in the name of Jesus, but I think it was rather that he took on that responsibility that Jesus had bequeathed to future generations of disciples, and he considered the Social Gospel to be the appropriate Christian response to the conditions of his age.
Albert Schweitzer[3] saw Jesus as providing no political guidance, but for almost the opposite reason that Harnack had suggested. Jesus did not trust Christians to deal in their best Christian way with the circumstances of their future because he believed there would be no future. The world as we know it would soon come crashing down at the blast of the Last Trumpet and the shout of the Archangel. Politics? Why bother rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? Any ethic must, given these constraints, be an interim ethic: emergency measures on the eve of the End. Extra righteousness, like turning the other cheek, or giving away your money to do the only thing left to be done with it: feeding those in imminent danger of starvation. On the one hand, you can afford to do it because there is no future to prudently provide for. On the other, you had best beef up your resume of good works because God will be checking it very soon. He’s going to find out who’s been naughty or nice!
Son of Man with a Plan
There are, however, plenty of scholars who are confident Jesus was a political figure—and that they have his political leanings pretty well pegged. I will summarize what I would consider the main positions, evaluating them as I go.
Was Jesus a violent revolutionist? I believe the first to propose this was the eighteenth-century Deist Hermann Samuel Reimarus.[4] He noted that the gospels clearly depict Jesus’ disciples expecting an earthly regime to be headed by their Master. They jockeyed for positions of honor and power alongside him. They expected the liberation of Israel from Roman rule (Luke 24:21; Acts 1:6). We also read that Jesus sent out his disciples, already in the days of his public ministry (Mark 6:7-13), to preach the coming of the kingdom of God, and we cannot imagine he would not have drilled them on what they were to preach, to make sure they were correctly representing him (cf. 1 John 2:19). If subsequent to this we see the disciples continuing in their belief in a this-worldly regime for Jesus and themselves as his cronies, we have no right to believe Jesus taught anything different, i.e., some more “spiritual” version of the coming kingdom (contra John 18:36). But Jesus’ planned revolution failed, and the disciples regrouped, transforming Christianity from a political movement to an otherworldly salvation cult.
Decades later, Robert Eisler[5] renewed this theory, appealing to the then-recently discovered Slavonic version of Josephus’ Jewish War, which contains a longer version of the notorious Testimonium Flavianum which occurs instead in Josephus’ other major Greek language book, Jewish Antiquities, in shorter compass. (This would be just one of many parallel passages shared by both the Antiquities and the Jewish War.) In it, as Eisler translated the Slavonic text, Jesus is depicted as a revolutionary leader who justified Pilate’s placard inscription, “Jesus of Nazareth, the man who would be king.”
An even stronger version of this “Zealot hypothesis” was set forth by S.G.F. Brandon in a pair of books, The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church (1951)[6] and Jesus and the Zealots (1967).[7] Zeroing in on a number of puzzling features of the gospel texts, Brandon said they make the most natural sense as loose ends that escaped the attention of the gospel writers as they sought to rewrite the history of Jesus. Let’s take a brief look at some of the main ones.
The names and epithets of some of the disciples must give us pause. There is, of course, Simon Zelotes, i.e., Simon the Zealot, as modern translators render it. Granted, “the Zealot” might denote simply extraordinary piety, great religious zeal. But what might mark him out as exceptionally religious (i.e., fanatical) among a group of men who had abandoned home and family to follow a traveling guru, learning the arts of soapbox preaching and casting out demons? Wouldn’t you say all these fellows qualified as “zealots”?
So what else might “the Zealot” have meant? During the Roman siege of Jerusalem a group of revolutionist lestai (“bandits”) played a major role. While the group’s name was a recent coinage, it represented the proud legacy of Judas the Galilean who had fomented the tax revolt against Rome in 6 C.E. They were in effect a new Hasmonean dynasty of freedom fighters. And, who knows? Perhaps the Zealot tag went back some years earlier. Or maybe tradition merely tagged Simon retrospectively with the slightly later term for revolutionaries. The punch line: one of Jesus’ inner circle may have been a freedom-fighter.
Maybe not just one! Judas is dubbed “Iscariot.” What does that mean? There are a hand full of possibilities, but probably the most popular among scholars is that “Iscariot” represents another revolutionist label, the Sicarii, or “dagger men,” assassins who would slither through the crowds surrounding Roman officials and wealthy Jewish collaborators, short-swords up their sleeves, stab the victim, then join in the shouting while they slipped away undiscovered. Judas, then, may well be portrayed as another Zealot, “Judas the Sicarius.”
Simon Peter is at one point (Matt. 16:17) called “Simon Bar-Jona,” but this was not a typical Jewish patronymic (an epithet identifying you as So-and-so’s son). Perhaps it originally denoted something else. There was another militant sect in New Testament times called the Barjonim, which means “the Terrorists.” Was Peter a member?
If three of the twelve look like Zealots, it would hardly be a surprise if the rest were, too. And what does that imply about Jesus? You know, don’t you?
Brandon did not mean that the evangelist Mark wanted readers to understand the names this way, only that he (or a predecessor) had suppressed the original meanings as part of a larger program of trying to shed and conceal the revolutionary origins of their religion. Another device for the same purpose was to shift the blame for Jesus’ death from the Romans onto the Jews. Romans crucified seditionists; Jews (if they obtained Roman permission) stoned blasphemers. The role of the Jewish authorities in engineering Jesus’ death has been enlarged: why? Because, Brandon suggests, Christians wanted to avert Roman suspicion from themselves by scape-goating the Jews, an easy target since Roman anti-Semitism increased every time there was a Jewish revolt.
As for the incompletely erased remnants of the original, revolutionary Christianity, they are both minor and major. Have you ever wondered what Jesus intended by saying, “The kingdom of God advances by violence, and violent men seize it by force” (Matt. 11:12; Luke 16:16)? I think Brandon is correct: the only likely sense to be made of it is as a reference to the insurrectionist violence of the Zealots. And it doesn’t sound like any sort of a criticism.
And what did Jesus mean in Luke 22:36-37? “Let him who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one”? I’m guessing that the evangelist means to portray Jesus as setting the stage for the upcoming scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, where the disciples are to mount a token resistance to his arrest just so Isaiah 53:12 can be checked off the prophetic “To Do” list. Such a contrivance is fiction, not history. It is like Jim Phelps setting up some scam on Mission Impossible. Why cook up such nonsense? To substitute for an original account in which Jesus told them to arm themselves in order to fend off an anticipated ambush, which is of course exactly what happens in the Gethsemane scene. Only originally they weren’t just kidding around.
But the most striking piece of evidence for a now-hidden militant Jesus must be the so-called Cleansing of the Temple. Mark seems to want to depict the event as if Jesus had merely burst into a church basement rummage sale, upsetting some card tables piled with old Readers Digest books. Did he know (or did he want his readers to know) that the Court of the Gentiles, containing the livestock stalls and coin exchange tables, was actually ten acres in size? And Jesus is said to have seized control of the whole space, since he was able to prevent anyone carrying sacrificial vessels through the area (Mark 11:16). And how could he have done that unless he had brought a large contingent of armed men with him? Now the whole thing might be pure fiction; that’s entirely possible. But if there was any factual basis to it, Mark has suppressed the scale and the stakes of the scene. Remember how Mark notes in passing that Barabbas was to be executed for his role in “the insurrection”? What insurrection? Why, the one Jesus had provoked in the Temple only brief hours before.
I’ll tell you the truth: if there was a historical Jesus at all, this one’s got my vote. But it remains altogether speculative, as all these theories must be. Let’s try to keep that in mind as we proceed.
Prince of Peace
To go to the opposite extreme, might Jesus have been a pacifist, as Mennonites and Quakers think? This estimate of Jesus seems to be based upon a couple of gospel passages. The first is the famous command to turn the other cheek to get slapped after having the first one smacked (Matt. 5:39). The second is like unto it: Matthew 26:52, “All who take up the sword shall perish by the sword.” Remarkably slim pickin’s, no? The first passage concerns non-retaliation in interpersonal relations. Nothing at all is said of warfare. To count it as a proof text for pacifism is a pretty risky inference. If I were faced with the choice of meekly yielding to some terrorist versus defending myself with counter-violence, I think the mere possibility that Jesus meant to forbid self-defense would not be enough to tip the balance. I’d like better exegetical odds. How about you?
What Jesus says to Peter about the inevitable violent death of the violent man does not entirely fit the context. It is not exactly a command to renounce violence but more like a fatalistic observation like these. “The poor you have with you always” (Mark 14:7). “To him who has more, more will be given; from him who has nothing, what pittance he has will be taken away” (Matt. 25:29; Luke 19:26). “Take no thought for the morrow; today’s troubles are enough for today” (Matt. 6:34). Or think of what Jesus says about divorce: it is always a declension from God’s best plan, but Jesus says not a thing about henceforth prohibiting divorce, only that even God must reckon with the stubbornness of the human heart (Mark 10:5; cf., Gen. 8:21).
I watch The Rifleman pretty much every day. A recurring theme is that if a man acquires a reputation as a fast gun, he will forever be plagued by challengers hoping to outdraw him and to enhance their own reputations. The only way to escape this fate is to be outgunned—killed. “Those who live by the sword will sooner or later die the same way.”
It is conceivable that Jesus shared the provisional quietism of the Dead Sea Scrolls sect. They would not indulge in violence against the enemies of the Jews. “Vengeance is mine! I will repay” (Rom. 12:19). They waited with growing impatience for God to open the skies and dispatch an army of angels to deal with the pagans. But when that day arrived, the sectarians would plunge right in with sword and shield. They even had battle plans drawn up! You can read them in the War Scroll (“The War of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness”). Is this really pacifism?
A variation of the pacifist Jesus understands him as something of an accommodationist. That was the position of most Pharisees and of the Sadducees. They figured it would be suicide to take up arms in a war they could not win, so they swallowed hard and cooperated as best they could with Rome. This is the issue when Jesus’ critics think to trap him with a question about Roman taxes. If Jews cough up the tax (and they’ll be in big trouble if they don’t), are they flouting the Torah? Uh, how would they be doing that?
Hadn’t Jews long been paying taxes to foreign overlords like the Persians, Ptolemies, and Seleucids? Things changed with the death of Herod the Great, who was nominally a sovereign ruler even though he reported to Rome. His son Archelaus had the same arrangement but he displeased Rome, so henceforth Judea became officially a Roman province (or part of one, namely Syria). Jewish radicals led by Judas the Galilean rebelled: “Read my lips: no Roman taxes!” They believed paying Roman taxes amounted to, at best, collaboration with the enemy and, at worst, idolatry.
Jesus’ critics are asking if Jesus agrees with the radicals. If he does, someone will surely rat him out! His response? “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s” (Mark 12:17). This saying is popularly taken to endorse something like modern church-state separation or, worse yet, the sealing off of religion from mundane concerns, a perfect recipe for quarantining one’s faith from one’s everyday behavior.
But this interpretation is certainly mistaken. It overlooks the matter of the coin. Remember how Jesus asks for a volunteer from the audience to loan him a denarius, the Roman coin used to pay the tax. It is stamped with the profile of the emperor who reigned when the coin was minted. Roman coins could not be used to buy sacrificial animals in the Temple because of the scriptural prohibition of images. That’s why there were money-changing tables in the Temple: if the only cash you had on you was Roman coins, which were fine for everyday commerce, you had to exchange them at the going rate. To buy your sacrificial animal, you needed Jewish or Phoenician coins which were not stamped with images. Problem averted!
So what’s Jesus’ point? There is no compromise in rendering (i.e., paying) Roman coins to Caesar since they belong to him in the first place and, in the second, you can’t render them unto God in the Temple because he turns up his omnipotent nose at them and their idolatrous images. So there’s no conflict, right? Indeed there is not. Does this place Jesus on the side of the Pharisees or anybody else? He is not talking about abstractions but about a specific case.
Finally, good luck with another saying, “Do not think I have come to bring peace. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword!” (Matt. 10:34).
On This Rock I Will Organize my Community
Was Jesus a community organizer? Some have thought so. John Howard Yoder, skirt-chasing Mennonite New Testament scholar,[8] floated an early version of this theory in his 1972 book The Politics of Jesus.[9] An Evangelical Christian, Yoder viewed Jesus in traditional theological terms plus the Anabaptist specialty of Jesus the pacifist. Yoder disliked the critical tendency to deny certain sayings to the historical Jesus on the grounds that, as a proclaimer of the imminent Judgment Day, he could hardly have founded a church, an institution with rules of conduct and behavior such as we read in, say, the Sermon on the Mount and in Matthew chapters 18-19. Why bother, since there will soon be no ongoing world in which to govern one’s mutual behavior? The problem is exactly like its Old Testament counterpart, the various Torah codes ascribed to Moses in the wilderness. They are anachronistic, predicated on Israelites already living a settled agricultural existence in Canaan. Clearly, these laws were formulated in Canaan/Israel, by Jews who lived there, to govern life and commerce there. Moses’ name was borrowed to lend them clout. Ditto for the “church rules”[10] attributed to Jesus in the gospels.
Yoder, when not busy sexually harassing women at Goshen Biblical Seminary, came up with a way of circumventing the difficulty. He wanted Jesus to have said all those things, not some nameless Christian prophets or legislators. So here it is: what if Jesus viewed things as Gandhi would two thousand years later: “Be the change you want to see”? Suppose he taught a kind of “realized eschatology,” creating a proto-church already in this fallen, pre-messianic age? It would be a beach head of the soon-coming kingdom of God, initiating the sort of sanctified, harmonious lifestyle that would be universal in the coming kingdom, though swimming against the current until then. You know, the cost of discipleship[11] and all that.
Yoder was not really describing what Schweitzer had called an “interim ethic,” because Schweitzer figured Jesus envisioned no social dimension. Rather, repentance was a matter of “every man for himself.” (Remember the deck chairs on the Titanic?) Schweitzer had factored in what Yoder didn’t, namely the utter discontinuity between This Age and the Age to Come. Who needs to be warned not to lust after his neighbor’s wife (Matt 5:28) if the sons of the resurrection are like angels who neither marry nor are given in marriage (Luke 20:34-36)? Do you really need to be told not to hate or kill your neighbor (Matt. 5:21-22) when the redeemed will be one big happy family in the Millennium? Jewish Kabbalists[12] understood the point: the Torah could not survive into the kingdom of God without drastic transformation; otherwise, it must become a cobwebbed museum relic. Of all this Yoder seemed oblivious.
A newer version of “Jesus the community organizer” was popularized (at least within the scholarly fish tank) by Richard A. Horsley,[13] who just happened to be a community organizer himself. Coincidence? I don’t have enough faith to believe that. John Dominic Crossan[14] has made this Jesus model central to his (grossly anachronistic) reconstruction of the historical Jesus and Christian origins. We find it also in Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s[15] discussion of Jesus’ “discipleship of equals.” Though these scholars are on the opposite end of the theological spectrum from Yoder, they share his interest in vindicating various dubious gospel sayings as actually the words of Jesus. “There’s something about that name!” Namely its propaganda value.
Horsley, Crossan, and the rest picture Jesus as going village to village, organizing what Latin American Liberation theologians call “base communities,”[16] something like today’s “sanctuary cities,” a network of effectively autonomous shadow governments in which debt amnesty would be declared, patriarchal families and hierarchical authority would be dissolved, and Roman courts would be boycotted. One thinks inevitably of the People’s Front of Judea in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.[17] It is all a lattice of transparently spurious Jesus quotes that Bultmann wouldn’t have touched with a ten foot pole, which are then reinterpreted according to a modern Leftist agenda. Somebody apparently never read Henry J. Cadbury’s classic book The Peril of Modernizing Jesus.[18]
Crossan envisions Jesus getting his sympathizers to give their money to a common fund, as in the early chapters of the Book of Acts, and imperiously declaring the Levitical laws segregating lepers null and void, inviting them, stinking mummy bandages and all, to share the supposedly joyous table fellowship of “commensality.” He and Horsley sound like they are describing the behaviors of a Melanesian Cargo Cult,[19] except that those modern apocalyptic social movements did all these things in order to trash the mores of this age, which is passing away (1 Cor. 7:29-31), and to exhaust their worldly resources, burning all bridges to the passing order. Those without the faith to do this must be shut out of salvation. In other words, they were by no means trying to set the ground rules for a new ongoing society to replace the old one. It was, again, an interim ethic.
But Albert Schweitzer was right on something else, too. In The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Schweitzer exposed the many previous historical Jesus reconstructions as mirror images of their authors’ theological and social views. Jesus as a ventriloquist dummy. And Jesus the community organizer is the new Charlie McCarthy.
Jesus in a Pink Pussy Hat
Was Jesus a feminist? Some are pretty sure he was. Why? Some contend that Jesus is shown “breaking boundaries” that traditionally separated men and women in contemporary Jewish society. For instance, we are told that the story of the woman with the issue of blood shows Jesus tossing aside Levitical purity laws. Daring! Heroic! Feminist! Hold on there; read the story again. For one thing, Mark underlines the fact that Jesus did not initiate the contact; the woman did. For another, the feminist reading misunderstands the purity laws. The Torah by no means forbade a man to touch a woman while she was menstruating. It just stipulated that doing so would require a minor ritual purification. Ditto when it comes to touching someone with open wounds, or touching corpses. So did the Torah outlaw doctors or morticians? Absurd. Besides all this, do you really want to accept as data for the opinions of the historical Jesus a healing story reminiscent of the extravagant testimonials at the Asclepius shrines? If we do, the whole endeavor is a charade—as I suspect it is.
In Luke 10:38-42 we see Jesus discoursing in a private home with friends. His hosts are women. One is busy with meal preparation, while the other sits at Jesus’ feet, listening to the blessed words of the Savior. Aha! Rabbinical pupils sat in a circle at the teacher’s feet! Does that mean that everyone who sits at another’s feet listening to him is a rabbi in training? Close enough for feminist interpreters, apparently. But the mere idea of Jesus teaching a woman! That’s pretty radical, right? At this point, advocates for a feminist Jesus love to produce a quote from Rabbi Eleazer (second century C.E.): “If any man gives his daughter a knowledge of the Torah, it is as though he taught her lechery.” So once again, that radical rascal Jesus defies chauvinistic convention by teaching a woman! Or does he? Were religious Jews so misogynistic? Maybe not. If you look at the context, things look quite different.
Ben Azzai says, “A man ought to give his daughter a knowledge of the Torah so that if she must drink [the bitter water, a test of chastity], she may know that the merit [that she acquired by Torah study] may hold her punishment in suspense.” Rabbi Eliezer says: “If any man gives his daughter a knowledge of the Torah, it is as though he taught her lechery.”
Now we see that Rabbi Eliezer’s statement is to be understood as a rejoinder, rejecting the implicit use of Torah study as an indulgence enabling a well-educated adulteress to escape her due punishment. It is not fair to use this text, or half of it, to characterize ancient Judaism, making it look bad so Jesus will look good by contrast.
Was Jesus outraging decorum by daring to converse with the Samaritan woman (John 4:4-9, 27 ff.)? As Kathleen E. Corley[20] asks in a similar case, was Samaria like Wahabi-controlled Saudi Arabia? Were the codes that strict? The woman is indeed surprised that Jesus addresses her, but the issue is explicitly that of a Jew asking to drink water from a Samaritan’s bucket.
The Achilles Heel of the feminist Jesus model is the utter lack of female names on the lists of the twelve. That is just deadly. Apologists for “biblical feminism” reply that for Jesus to have included, say, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Salome, Susanna, and Mary and Martha of Bethany alongside Peter, Andrew, James, John, Matthew, and Judas, would have been just too controversial! Jesus had to accommodate his plans to the hardness of his contemporaries’ hearts. This rationalization gives with one hand what it takes away with the other. The whole Jesus-feminist argument is that Jesus courageously broke with the all-pervasive male chauvinism of the ancient world. Yay Jesus! But suddenly we hear that, of course, he dared not ruffle feathers at this particular point! Which way is it? Obviously, this is just butt-covering exegesis.
All right then: forget the matter of “the twelve.” Jesus did have female disciples, didn’t he? I just listed six of them! But let’s not read too much into that. The sketchy picture the gospels give us of these groupies following the itinerant guru and paying his bills (Luke 8:1-3) out of gratitude for his healing, teaching, and exorcizing them, recalls a pattern well known in the Hellenistic world—and long afterward. Nothing suggests Jesus’ female devotees had any authority or positions of responsibility. A fan is one thing, a deputy quite another.[21]
If the Bugle Makes an Uncertain Sound, Who Will Prepare for Battle?
So what? Since we cannot be certain of what political stance Jesus may have held, it must be sheer manipulation to choose one model and use it to command allegiance to the particular politics that one prefers. The only saying of Jesus I consider relevant to our topic is this one: “Why do you not decide for yourselves what is right?” (Luke 12:57). Don’t take lazy short cuts. Consider the issues and to what extent your principles can be applied without adjustment to actual conditions. Where will you strike the balance between idealism and realism?[22] It takes work.
What’s the alternative? If your approach is simply to obey Jesus in the gospels as if you were reading Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, you are begging the question of what he actually did teach. You will be making a false idol of whatever scholar who is using “Jesus” as a mouthpiece. You are allowing yourself to be manipulated. It’s easier that way, after all.
But it is worse than that. Suppose you could be sure of Jesus’ political views? And suppose you felt obligated to parrot them and obey them, come hell or high water? How would it not be theocratic fanaticism like that of radical Islam? They take Muhammad’s word as law just as stubbornly as you take that of Jesus.
[1] Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching (New York: Macmillan, 1925).
[2] Adolf Harnack, What Is Christianity? Trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), p. 119; Harnack, “The Evangelical Social Mission in Light of the History of the Church,” Chapter I., “General Attitude of the Gospel towards Social Arrangements,” in Adolf Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann, Essays on the Social Gospel. Trans. G.M. Craik. Crown Theological Library Vol. XVIII (London: Williams & Norgate, 1907), pp. 13-14.
[3] Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede. Trans. W. Montgomery (New York: Macmillan, 1961). Otherwise, Schweitzer shared a good bit of agreement with Harnack: he approved the general, liberal ethical stance Harnack derived from Jesus as a model for us, but he thought Harnack mistaken in ascribing it directly to Jesus. Schweitzer saw Jesus’ own ethics, the “interim ethic,” as more radical in both motive and application. He also agreed with Harnack that Jesus gave no thought to social reform, caring only for individual piety.
[4] Charles H. Talbert, ed., Reimarus: Fragments. Trans. Ralph S. Fraser. Lives of Jesus Series (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970).
[5] Robert Eisler, The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist. Trans. Alexander Haggerty Krappe (New York: Dial Press, 1931).
[6] S.G.F. Brandon, The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church (London: SPCK, 1951).
[7] S.G.F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity (New York: Scribners, 1967). I am leaving out of consideration here Reza Aslan’s sorry book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Random House, 2013), as it is completely derivative of Brandon but gives him virtually no acknowledgement.
[8] https://peacetheology.net/john-h-yoder/john-howard-yoder%e2%80%99s-sexual-misconduct%e2%80%94part-one/
[9] John H. Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972).
[10] Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition. Trans. John Marsh (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), “Legal Sayings and Church Rules,” pp. 130-150.
[11] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship. Trans. Irmgard Booth (New York: Macmillan, 1963).
[12] Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. Trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), Chapter 2, “The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” pp. 32-86.
[13] Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), Chapter 8, “The Renewal of Local Community, I: Egalitarian Social Relations,” pp. 209-245; Chapter 9, “The Renewal of Local Community, II: Social-Economic Cooperation and Authority,” pp. 246-284.
[14] John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), Chapter 13, “Magic and Meal,” pp. 303-353.
[15] Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1984), Chapter 4, “The Jesus Movement as Renewal Movement Within Judaism,” section 5, “Liberation from Patriarchal Structures and the Discipleship of Equals,” pp. 140-154.
[16] Ernesto Cardinal, The Gospel in Solentename (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1978).
[17] Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (of Nazareth) (New York: Ace Books, 1979).
[18] Henry J. Cadbury, The Peril of Modernizing Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1937).
[19] Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia (New York: Schocken Books, 1968).
[20] Kathleen E. Corley, Women & the Historical Jesus: Feminist Myths of Christian Origins (Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 2002), is a devastating refutation of the feminist Jesus-ventriloquism I am rejecting here. Corley herself is a feminist, but she disdains any ideological hijacking of the text. (Her remark to which I refer comes from personal conversation.)
[21] Please bear in mind that I am not criticizing what I consider propagandistic versions of a political Jesus in order to default to one that I personally prefer. My own political opinions have nothing to do with Jesus, which is lucky for me, since I am afraid we must remain agnostic on the very existence of Jesus, much less what he may have thought about politics or anything else. But even if we were sure Jesus existed and that he taught either feminism or chauvinism, capitalism (as Bruce Barton, in The Man Nobody Knows, 1925, thought) or anarcho-syndicalism, pacifism or revolutionary violence, it would make no more difference to me than if we knew his favorite flavor of ice cream. (My friend Joseph Christopher remarked, concerning the topic of this paper, “I’m very interested in knowing what Achilles thought about nuclear proliferation.” Bingo.)
[22] Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Living Age Books/Meridian Books, 1956), Chapter 4., “The Relevance of an Impossible Ethical Ideal,” pp. 97-123.
Bob Price is a board member of Republican Atheists. He is a Freethinker, Author, Debater, Editor, Anthologist, Columnist, Podcaster and Heretic. You can visit his podcast The Bible Geek here. Contact Bob.
