JAMES CROSSLEY’S MAIN PROBLEM with traditional historical Jesus research is its tendency to regard its subject as a “heroic genius.” All too often, he observes, the past is seen as little more than a succession of Great Men, and historical change is simply the degree to which these men (and they nearly always are men) have shaped and influenced lesser mortals around them. But this way of thinking is flawed. Rather than focus on the lives of Great Men, we should explain historical change by looking at contemporary socioeconomic factors, asking what part these played in changing opinion, forging alliances, and creating fresh opportunities for change and development. New movements are always a complex mixture of both individual influence and social context. Thus, in Crossley’s view, any attempt to understand the emergence of Christianity needs to redirect its focus away from too myopic a gaze upon Jesus alone and onto a wider set of social, economic and historical factors.

The present short study gives a sense of the possibilities inherent in Crossley’s approach rather than an exhaustive treatment. The first two chapters prepare the ground for his discussion, mapping out the first-century context (chapter 1) and highlighting the limitations of the so-called “criteria of authenticity” (chapter 2). He makes it clear that the available evidence will not allow us to reconstruct the words and deeds of the historical Jesus with any confidence, but we are on firmer ground when we talk about the “earliest Palestinian tradition.” The three subsequent chapters each take a major theme within Jesus scholarship (Kingdom/Christology, purity/sinners, gender), demonstrating what a less Jesus-centred approach might look like. For example, chapter 5 offers a fascinating discussion of crucifixion as a “feminized” death, representing Jesus’ emasculation by Rome. Crossley argues (rightly, in my view) that Jesus and his followers would have tried to make sense of this shameful death as soon as they saw it as a distinct possibility, and that the evangelists continued the trend towards viewing it as a more manly, noble death several decades later. Social upheavals in Galilee, however, generated their own set of localized questions about gender, and the existence of both patriarchal elements (such as several assumptions found in the story of the death of John the Baptist, Mark 6:17–29) along with more egalitarian strands (such as the memory of female patrons), suggest that there existed a range of possible attitudes towards gender within the earliest Palestinian traditions. Some repressed gender roles, others reinscribed them, but all were as much an adaptation to the shifting social structures of a turbulent society as they were memories of the views of Jesus.

This is a challenging, provocative, and often mischievous book. It is full of historical examples and analogies, often drawn from a much wider horizon than the typical canon of biblical scholarship. Crossley is as happy discussing rabbinic literature as he is evaluating the English civil wars, historical theory, or contemporary UK politics. It has to be said, of course, that a critique of the “Great Men” view of history is nothing new, and it has been challenged in other disciplines. Crossley is right, however, to highlight its survival, even vitality, within contemporary Jesus scholarship. Although he doesn’t speculate much on why this might be, two reasons spring immediately to mind. The first is that most historical Jesus critics are not really “historians”; an analysis of the figure of Jesus is often a thinly veiled way to comment on theology, contemporary politics, or both. Second, although Jesus critics nowadays claim to treat Jesus in exactly the same way as figures such as Alexander the Great or Socrates, this is rarely the case. Jesus might have been an “ordinary” first-century Jew, but for many critics he wasn’t that ordinary (to adapt a favourite Crossley formulation). Holding on to a rather outdated way of doing history (whether consciously or not) is a useful sleight of hand for a critic who wants to claim rather more for Jesus and his legacy than strict evidence allows.

A third reason is rather less obvious, but concerns the nature of the gospels themselves. Scholars are generally agreed that the gospels are bioi, or ancient biographies, though the full implications of this are not always appreciated. As soon as Mark decided to cast his traditions in the form of a biography, he ensured that the life and character of Jesus himself would take centre stage. It is in the nature of bioi that everything else (characters, plot, even decisions over what is included) are subordinated to the central person. If all we had from the ancient church were letters (Pauline and otherwise), and perhaps the Acts of the Apostles, we would have to tell the story of Christian origins very differently. The existence of four biographies, however, ensures that the life of Jesus—just as much as his death and resurrection—is at the heart of Christian proclamation. And this biographical way of conceptualising Jesus has dominated scholarly enquiry from the first century all the way to the twenty-first. It is no accident that biographies of “Jesus the Great Man” began to appear in the late Victorian age: not only was the Gospel of Mark rehabilitated as the earliest (and, it was therefore assumed, most historically reliable) account of the life of Jesus, but it was a time when prevailing biographical conventions were relatively similar to those of the ancient world. Victorians, like the ancients, expected the lives of the great and the good to be improving examples, to say little of their private lives, and (pre-Freud) to have little sense of psychological development. Any attempt to shake off the “Great Men of history” paradigm might want to be rather more critical of the gospels themselves than Crossley appears to be. I would want to take his analysis of gospel texts further, not to stop at the level of individual pericopae (as Crossley tends to do) but to extend it to the level of the DNA of the gospels themselves.

Articulating the problem, however, is one thing; finding a solution is something else entirely. In broad terms, Crossley is entirely right that historical development is commonly the result of random, chaotic processes which only with hindsight begin to form a coherent pattern. He is also right to stress the importance of the socioeconomic context for any understanding of earliest Christianity. But this means that we have to know a great deal about that first-century context. Crossley does provide a sketch of what he regards as the chaotic and strife-ridden world of the first followers of Jesus, of the devastating effects of urbanization in Galilee and temple expansion in Judaea. He urges us to take seriously the fact that the country revolted against Rome only a few decades later. Yet given the importance of this particular set of socioeconomic conditions, which for Crossley are basically the early stages of the nation’s descent into catastrophic insurrection, readers may be surprised that conditions are treated so briefly (21–27). The “oppressed nation on the brink of disaster” is of course a familiar portrait of Galilee in the 30s, but it is also a view that has been challenged in much recent literature. How you describe Jesus’ socioeconomic context depends to a great extent on which sources you use. Those who draw on certain passages from Josephus, supplementing his work with sociological models drawn from the social sciences, tend to offer a rather bleak picture (as we see in Crossley’s work). Others, however, particularly archaeologists, commonly portray a relatively tranquil setting, with little evidence for any widespread social upheaval.

Recently, Morten Jensen’s highly detailed book on Antipas (Herod Antipas in Galilee) characterises the tetrarch as a minor ruler with a moderate impact, with no evidence of social crisis, serious unrest or widespread public dissatisfaction throughout his long reign. While noting Jensen’s book, Crossley simply suggests that “perception” might have been worse than reality, without telling us what would lead to such perceptions. Nor does appeal to a revolt which occurred thirty years later really help matters. Recent events in the Middle East have demonstrated that even apparently stable countries can become volatile in a very short amount of time; there is no need to appeal to a gradual disintegration of society (and hindsight here is a dangerous thing). In this analysis, Crossley is too guided by Josephus, who wanted to give his Roman readers the impression that war was inevitable, and that, although everyone other than the Jewish people as a whole were to blame, the writing was on the wall from early on. Yet we need to be more critical of Josephus (despite the fact that he is our only source for most of this period) and at least reckon with the possibility that the Jewish homeland was very different after Agrippa I’s brief reign (41–44 CE) than in the 30s. My point is not to argue that all was rosy in the Galilee of Jesus’ day – on the contrary, localised unrest and resentment must have been common—but simply to challenge the picture of extreme social unrest (even “chaos” and “upheaval”) in which Crossley locates the earliest Palestinian tradition. By the 70s, of course, the nation was in chaos, but by then the message had already spread well beyond the confines of its Palestinian origins. As with so much in historical Jesus studies, we need to recognise what we don’t know. Ironically, it may be that we know more about the figure of Jesus of Nazareth than we know about the Galilean context in which he grew up.

Some readers will complain that Jesus has retreated too much from Crossley’s book, such that it is hardly a “historical Jesus” book at all. This is perhaps inevitable. If the book encourages scholars of the first century to redirect their attentions to understanding the minutiae of life in Antipas’ Galilee, or Judaea under Roman rule, that will be no bad thing. And if Crossley’s work makes scholars reflect more deeply on the many differing contexts within which Jesus traditions were transmitted, shaped and even created, that too will only enhance our appreciation of the complexities of Christian origins.

IN JESUS AND THE Chaos of History (hereafter JCH) James Crossley wishes to “redirect” the focus of historical Jesus research by exploring how the earliest traditions about Jesus can be “a means of understanding historical change and the ways in which power functions in human society.” Directing this concern for redirection are Crossley’s own interests in Marxist materialism, which frame the book (see chapter 1 and the conclusion) and inform his understanding of historical change. I found the Marxist-materialist framework refreshing vis-a-vis conventional approaches to the historical Jesus, although, as I explain below, I think it also proved limiting in certain areas.

Crossley begins by positing the exploitive urbanization and commercialization of first-century Palestine (namely the massive building projects in Tiberias, Sepphoris, and Jerusalem) as the most appropriate backdrop for assessing the “earliest Palestinian traditions” about Jesus (chapter 1). According to Crossley, these changes created chaotic social upheaval which in turn led to the kind of peasant unrest that fueled millenarian and utopian groups such as the Jesus movement. After critiquing the conventional criteria of authenticity and challenging Richard Bauckham’s arguments for the historicity of the Fourth Gospel (chapter 2), Crossley isolates three major areas of investigation: the nature of “kingdom” expectations (chapter 3), the pattern of repentance and forgiveness in relation to ritual purity (chapter 4), and construals of gender (chapter 5).

While each chapter of JCH yields numerous insights and will, inevitably, spur various kinds of scholarly debate, I have chosen to focus most of my attention on chapter 3, provocatively titled “The Dictatorship of God.” Crossley summarizes the chapter as follows:

The Gospel kingdom tradition has all the key elements: challenging the dominant world power from below while implicitly or explicitly putting in place a system that likewise uses imperial language in its replacement of kingdom with kingdom, or empire with empire. After all, the kingdom of God would, in the long run, become the empire of Rome and, of course, it helped to have imperial teaching which was ultimately compatible with Roman power. The cliché that Constantine was a betrayer of Jesus’ teaching may be true to some extent but it is not the full story. The earliest teaching in Jesus’ name does seem to have envisaged him as having a prime position in the impending kingdom of God, as did the developing Christology in his name.

In fleshing out this argument, Crossly follows the “apocalyptic prophet” school of historical Jesus research whereby Jesus “predicted that something dramatic would happen, and that this should be taken somewhat literally.” This “something” was God’s kingdom. Crossly acknowledges references to a present kingdom in the earliest Palestinian traditions, since the “simultaneous transmission of chaotic or incompatible ideas cannot be ruled out.” Like many, however, he is convinced that there was a gradual movement from imminent expectation (reflected in the Gospels and Paul) to the realization of delay (adjustments for which may be seen in 2 Pet 3:3–10).

When it comes to the anti-imperialist aspects of the earliest Palestinian traditions, Crossley focuses on passages dealing with wealth, especially Mark 10:17–22 and Luke 16:19–31. He contends that the concern for rich and poor was “inherited by the Gospel writers” and was “most likely to have been generated by the perceptions of what was happening as a result of the social upheavals in Galilee.” There was, in other words, “a more ‘revolutionary’ and ‘subversive’ attitude toward empire, wealth, and inequality” that became “integral” to the earliest Palestinian traditions. In terms of Jewish background, Crossly maintains that Daniel’s vision of the smashed statue (Dan 2) was particularly influential in shaping expectations of God’s overthrow of hostile empires.

Having acknowledged the revolutionary aspects of the earliest Palestinian traditions, Crossley dedicates the lion’s share of chapter 3 to explaining how those same traditions promote a “theocratic imperialism” that has been “hidden in [the] plain sight” of Jesus historians. He appeals to passages from Jewish literature to show that expectations of God’s coming kingdom “frequently had imperialist implications.” Reading the Gospel evidence through the lens of these pre-Christian expectations, Crossley finds examples of theocratic imperialism in the following places:

• The promise that the twelve will sit on thrones of judgment (Matt 19:28 / Luke 22:29–30)
• The Davidic accolades to which Jesus enters Jerusalem (Mark 11:10)
• The depiction of Jesus’ exorcisms as demonstrations of royal power (Matt 12:28 / Luke 11:20; Mark 3:22–27)
• The promise of eschatological role reversal (e.g., Luke 16:19–31; Mark 10:23–31)
• The bestowal of special authority to Peter (Matt 16:19)
• Parabolic promises of kingdom’s appearance and/or rise to power (Mark 4:26–32; Luke 13:20–21 / Matt 13:33; Matt 13:44; Luke 17:21; Thom. 113; also citing Mark 10:14–15; 12:34)

From this evidence Crossley concludes that “domination, subjugation, imperialism, and theocracy are part of both the Synoptic tradition and the relevant contextualizing sources, and are perhaps the only way people could realistically conceive an alternative to the present world powers.”

In explaining the development of early Christology, Crossley circles back to the political chaos of first-century Galilee. The exalted status of Jesus in the earliest Palestinian traditions (Messiah, king, judge) reflects the historical reality that “movements and leaders in times of social upheaval can . . . have agendas of power.” Without identifying Jesus as an outright revolutionary bandit, Crossley notes that the earliest memories of Jesus are not unlike the earliest memories of bandits: “As bandits could be remembered as a product of social upheaval . . . attacking power, wealth, and Rome . . . and mimicking the world of kings and kingship . . . so can Jesus in the earliest Palestinian tradition, where he seems to have a prime role in the kingdom—might we even say, perhaps, leading the vanguard of the dictatorship of God?” This is not to deny other contributing factors in the generation of early Christological speculation, such as the visions that Jesus’ followers had of him shortly after his death. Prior to these experiences, however, the earliest sources were already generating a high Christological trajectory—which seems for Crossley tantamount to imperialist ideology. For Crossley the orthodox deification of Jesus continues this trajectory, but not without centuries of debate reflective of the tensions and contradictions contained in the New Testament writings.

I found the governing argument of this chapter, at least in its basic outline, compelling. Our earliest Jesus traditions both challenge empire and—at least potentially—reinscribe imperial values. I admit that my openness to this argument is largely due to the fact that postcolonial interpreters have been identifying and critiquing the imperialist dimensions of the Bible, including the Gospels, for a while now (as Crossley acknowledges). Still, when it comes to bona fide historical Jesus research, the reconstructions often do not reflect the ideological paradox that Crossley attributes to the earliest Palestinian traditions. It is in pointing to this discrepancy that he makes his real contribution to the conversation.

To place my appreciation in context: I teach in a mainstream Protestant seminary in the United States. Like other seminary professors (I assume all others), I am responsible for correcting the presuppositions and oversimplifications of first-year students. Relatively few of them matriculate already having begun to think through the ramifications of the ancient imperialization of Christianity. Even fewer have begun to consider how the potential for Christianity’s imperialization might be embedded in its own scriptures, even in teachings attributed to Jesus himself. Of course the challenge of compressing numerous learning objectives into a relatively short period of time means that I occasionally oversimplify issues; and while I consistently point to tensions and even contradictions within the New Testament, I admit to having done little justice to the kinds of tensions described in the third chapter of JCH. So, as a teacher, I am thankful to Dr. Crossley for raising these issues for me. Also, as a researcher with interests in how historical Jesus research might intersect with Christian theology, I appreciate the discrepancy he highlights between mainstream portraits of the first-century figure and the more paradoxical nature of the earliest Palestinian traditions as he describes them.

But why the discrepancy? Crossley surmises that “scholars have implicitly bought into the rhetoric of Jesus too much and have not been suspicious enough of the violence involved in such theocratic thinking.” This results in a sugarcoated Jesus. For example, at one point Crossley briefly singles out John Dominic Crossan, whose Jesus espoused a “brokerless,” anti-imperial kingdom devoid of hierarchy. The contrast to Crossley’s depiction of the earliest Palestinian traditions is enlightening. However, Crossan would no doubt reply that he has employed a rigorous methodology that pushes us beyond the “earliest Palestinian traditions” to the actual message of the historical Jesus. And, to be sure, Crossan grounds his arguments (or attempts to do so, depending on one’s view) in a rigorous methodology. So, whatever one makes of Crossan’s historical conclusions, we are really looking at two different questions, with Crossley assessing the ideologies of the earliest Palestinian traditions and Crossan reconstructing the mission and teachings of the historical Jesus. In order for the discrepancy between their conclusions to resonate as a real critique of Crossan, Crossley would need to engage Crossan more directly and extensively, demonstrating deficiencies in Crossan’s methodology (beyond the brief discussion of criteria in chapter 2) and/or Crossan’s arguments for the authenticity and inauthenticity of particular traditions. Otherwise we are comparing apples to oranges. As JCH contains a number of similarly fleeting critiques of Jesus historians (e.g., Borg, Wright, Sanders), I would argue that this applies to most of those instances as well.

It also seems that JCH overstates the extent to which the Synoptic sources present an imperialist ideology. For instance, while he is aware of the argument that Jesus (and/or the earliest Christians) co-opted imperialist language—that is, misread it—for anti-imperialist purposes, in practice Crossley disallows this possibility in the analysis of particular passages, leaving readers with one-sided arguments. Take, for example, Jesus’ promise in Matthew 19:28: “You who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” Taken on its own, this statement does not spell out the nature of the authority to be exercised by the twelve apostles. If our only possible frame of reference consists of the most militaristic kingdom passages from the Jewish literature, then Matthew 19:28 will appear to condone a kind of imperialistic subjugation. But what if our frame of reference consisted of Jesus’ other instructions to the disciples? For instance, just a few verses earlier he tells them that the kingdom of God belongs to children (Matt 19:14); and in the previous chapter he tells Peter that he is responsible for forgiving repentant sinners without limit (Matt 18:22). Going back even further, those instructions to Peter are introduced by yet another analogy to children: “Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 18:4). My point is that if the exercising of apostolic authority looks like the actual teachings of the Matthean Jesus, then Matthew 19:28 does not reflect imperialist ideology but is actually culturally subversive. This is not to insist on a narrative-critical methodology for answering historical-critical questions. Rather I want to raise the question: How do we decide upon our interpretive frames of reference?

Related to the above critique, in reading this chapter I found myself asking: By what criteria do we define “empire” or “potentially imperial”? For instance, in JCH there is repeated reference to “hierarchy” as something that lends itself to imperialism, subjugation, and violence. I admit to scholarly deficiencies in the philosophy or sociology of hierarchy (assuming such disciplines exist), but it seems to me that “hierarchy” per se is an ideologically neutral term, at least when it comes to adjudicating whether a particular social structure is imperialist or anti-imperialist. I am also inclined to say that some degree of hierarchy is an inevitable sociological phenomenon no matter how anti-hierarchical a particular community’s rhetoric might be. If that is the case, the question is not “hierarchy or not?” but rather “hierarchy to what end?” The same goes for manifestations of “power,” as in the case of Jesus’ mighty exorcisms. Crossley discusses exorcisms briefly in terms of the reinscribing of imperialistic values, moving directly into the analogy of bandits carrying “agendas of power,” with no consideration of how exorcisms function for the healing of the sick and marginalized. Perhaps it is to be assumed that they function this way, in which case Crossley simply wants to emphasize the potentially imperialist connotation. Again, he repeatedly acknowledges, in general terms, that the imperialistic adoption of these traditions betrayed the intentions of Jesus (and Paul). Yet he seems unwilling to concede that this betrayal came by way of the actual misreading of particular verses and passages. That is what confuses me.

Furthermore, just as JCH overstates the extent to which the Synoptic sources present an imperialist ideology, it also understates the extent to which it forwards anti-imperialist themes. This is one area where I think the Marxist-materialist framework, for all its real benefits, may have proven problematically limiting. In particular, I do not think passages dealing with wealth and poverty exhaust the culturally revolutionary perspective of much of the Synoptic tradition. What about the host of teachings on compassion, forgiveness, and service? What about the host of recorded deeds—e.g., healings and debates about the interpretation of Torah—by which Jesus is said to embody those teachings? And is it a coincidence that the depiction of Jesus giving himself up to death—even given the complexity of socio-political factors contributing to that death—is remarkably consistent with those teachings and deeds? To be clear, I am not precluding the presence of genuinely imperialistic themes in the Synoptic sources [see below]. Nor am I suggesting that Jesus and/or earliest Christianity held a monopoly on compassion, forgiveness, and service. My point is simply that, when all the evidence is taken into consideration, I am not convinced that the earliest Palestinian traditions are defined by the ideological paradox that Crossley describes. Instead, what I see is a dominant pattern of peace (or, better, shalom) predicated on compassion, forgiveness, and service rather than violence and subjugation. There are good reasons, in other words, why scholarly reconstructions of the historical Jesus typically do not resemble Crossley’s description of the earliest Palestinian traditions. I realize that these arguments require monograph-length substantiation, so I forward them here as conversation starters.

When it comes to the more imperialistic tendencies in the Synoptic tradition, I think the best arguments are to be made in the areas of eschatology and gender. Crossley points to promises of eschatological role reversal such as Luke 16:19–31 and Mark 10:23–31, in which the rich receive eternal punishment or exclusion. Yet we can move beyond this materialist scope to find numerous other promises of the same basic kind, several of which fall under the category of the allegedly early Q. These passages may not reflect imperialist values in socioeconomic terms, but, like Rome, they depict violence and revenge as the chief instruments of peace. As a Christian, I admit to finding these passages theologically problematic. When interpreted literally, I cannot reconcile them with the dominant pattern of compassion, forgiveness, and service. The eschatological punishment or exclusion of God’s enemies does not fit with the command to “love your enemies” (Matt 5:44). Furthermore, I found Crossley’s arguments in chapter 5 about the “stabilizing of gender” in the early Palestinian traditions more convincing than the arguments in chapter 3 about the reinscribing of imperialist ideology in explicitly “kingdom” traditions. Alongside traditions that “shake up traditional gender roles” there exist traditions “reinscribing assumptions of gender and controlling gender through promoting stereotypical gender roles.” This, I think, is a genuine ideological paradox embedded in the Synoptic sources. Moreover, this paradox is hardly unrelated to how we assess the Synoptic presentation of the kingdom. Here too, as a Christian, I am challenged by the social and theological implications. I would prefer utterly subversive Jesus traditions entirely removed from the patriarchal matrix of human history.

To summarize, I think that JCH overstates the tension between revolution and empire as it relates to the Synoptic presentation of the kingdom of God. Thus I take exception to Crossley’s concluding observation that “imperialism, theocracy, and empire were as integral to the earliest tradition as were promises to the poor and overthrowing the rich and Rome.” To be sure, there are passages easily appropriated into an imperialist agenda, even passages that openly describe the kingdom’s consummation by means of violence. The reinforcing of gender stereotypes problematizes things further. These tensions and contradictions are of considerable political and theological consequence, and I do not want to ignore them, either for my own convenience or for that of my students. Still, I do not think a fair assessment of the entire body of Synoptic evidence points to anything like a sustained paradox of competing ideologies on relatively even footing, and that is why scholarly reconstructions of the historical Jesus typically do not resemble Crossley’s description of the earliest Palestinian traditions. However, due to Crossley’s thought-provoking work, Jesus historians will need to be more attentive to the imperialist dimensions of the sources they investigate, both for the sake of academic transparency and as a way to avoid the continued absorption of imperialist values. Of course, why one would even want to avoid that absorption—helping the poor instead of subjugating them, loving enemies instead of conquering them—is a question that, in my view, requires a kind of philosophical and even theological nuance that a purely materialist framework, by definition, cannot provide. That might be an interesting conversation as well.

FOR TEN YEARS JAMES Crossley has been engaged in historical study of Jesus and earliest Christianity.1 He has also drawn attention to the contemporary social, ideological, and political contexts of Jesus scholarship.2 In both areas, Crossley aims to locate significant individuals (whether Jesus, on one hand, or historians of Jesus, on the other) within broader historical trends, with special emphasis on material causes. Jesus and the Chaos of History critiques historical Jesus studies as “biographies of a Great Man,”3 shrines to “the cult of the individual” that highlight Jesus in stunning contrast to his dimmer, inferior cultural background. Crossley resists merely describing the historical Jesus and sets out, instead, to incorporate “the earliest Palestinian tradition” into a broader portrayal of social and economic trends in first-century Galilee and Judea. In other words, Crossley wants to emphasize “materialistic questions relating to why the Jesus movement emerged when and where it did and why it led to a new movement.”4 The bottom line: Crossley refuses both to elevate the historical Jesus as the explanatory cause of the rise of the Jesus movement, on one hand, as well as to dismiss him as irrelevant for the actual causes of the birth of Christianity on the other. Instead, he probes the historical Jesus’ connections with or disjunctions from the Jesus tradition and earliest Christianity in search for “the socio-economic upheaval, structures, trends, and long-term developments which fed into the rise of Christianity.”5

Crossley cautiously participates in two recent and related trends in historical Jesus scholarship: the turn to memory studies and the sharpened skepticism toward traditional criteria of authenticity. Both trends work well within Crossley’s programmatic concern to broaden the discussion from Jesus-as-individual to the “early Palestinian tradition” more generally. The precision and objectivity the criteria were supposed to offer historical Jesus research become unnecessary for Crossley because, whether a passage (e.g., Mark 2:23–28, the dispute about plucking grain on the Sabbath)6 yields “useful information about the earliest Palestinian tradition or Jesus,” that passage sheds light at least on larger issues of social conflict and material concerns of Jesus and/or his most immediate followers. Similarly, recent turns to memory work well with Crossley’s argument that “we should be content with generalizations about the early tradition”7 and the possibility, therefore, that we might “build up a general picture of Jesus according to the earliest tradition.” He objects, however, to a third trend: the use of the Fourth Gospel for historical Jesus research: “The traditional position viewing John’s Gospel as of minimal use in reconstructing the life of Jesus must remain in place.”8 The Gospel of John is “far more reflective of later Christian theology” and, significantly for Crossley, “lack[s] useful connections in earliest tradition.”9 Jesus in John’s Gospel reveals much more about the later “Christianized” contexts of the late first century ce than about either Jesus or the earliest Palestinian (Jewish) tradition. With this general framework in place, Crossley offers three chapters discussing the kingdom of God, “sinners” and purity, and gender.10

Blurring Jesus in His Time

Crossley’s emphasis on the “early Palestinian tradition” blurs the historical Jesus into the tumultuous upheaval of first-century Galilee and Judea. As I read Jesus and the Chaos of History, I was never sure if I was looking at the one Galilean, Jesus, engaging the kinds of debates Jews engaged in the early years of the Roman era, or if I was seeing mid-first-century Jews engaging those debates in Jesus’ name. Presumably, for Crossley, the difference doesn’t much matter. Both negotiated similar unknowns (imperial and counterimperial claims, purity, issues of gender and family structures) in something like the same socio-cultural and political environment. Not until “Christianity” spread out into the diaspora, began incorporating increasing numbers of gentiles, and had to address new concerns raised by the “mission to the gentiles” did the tradition begin to morph into something that would have been less recognizable to the Jesus of history (and so something that makes the Jesus of history less recognizable).

But if Crossley blurs the historical Jesus, making it harder to see him in distinction from those around him, he simultaneously helps us see more clearly what James Dunn calls Jesus’ “impact” on his followers.11 “One of the advantages of working with the general ‘earliest Palestinian tradition,’ rather than trying more precisely to reconstruct the historical Jesus, is that it potentially allows for more evidence to assess the ways in which people were part of the complexities and chaos of historical change.”12 Though Crossley doesn’t acknowledge the point explicitly, his book implicitly foregrounds the fact that Jesus’ followers, even in those places where we may see their creativity and innovation most clearly, expressed their creative and innovative impulses with reference to the Jesus of history.13 To take one recurrent example, Crossley takes as axiomatic that Jesus, unlike his later followers, did not engage with or call for outreach to gentiles.14 If we grant Crossley’s assumption—I do not, but we can for the sake of the present discussion—the Jesus tradition nevertheless consistently demonstrates that his followers felt compelled, when faced with the question whether to extend the preaching of the gospel not only among but also to the gentiles, to attribute this innovation to Jesus. In other words, even if Jesus never laid upon the disciples the obligation to preach the gospel to all the nations (see Mark 13:10), Jesus’ followers nevertheless came to feel the weight of that obligation pressed upon them, and they thought (or at least claimed to think) that Jesus was its source.

Crossley might say this only tells us about Jesus’ followers. Perhaps. But those followers, apparently, identified themselves with and defined themselves with reference to Jesus. Something about the Jesus of history led, even if only indirectly, to the outreach to gentiles.15 Jesus and the Chaos of History begins to describe that “something” in terms of Jesus’ call for “sinners” to return to Torah-observance, which led (perhaps directly) to the inclusion of gentiles, since sinners could refer to—and even likened—unobservant Jews and gentiles. Crossley opens possibilities for us to explore Jesus’ broader influence upon processes of historical change without becoming mired in ultimately unanswerable questions of authenticity.

As far as Crossley has gone, however, we can go further. Daniel Boyarin has argued, in an essay with close affinities to Crossley’s book, that “Christ existed before Jesus. . . . Jesus, in the Gospel of Mark, is the precise fulfillment, I suggest, of well known and ancient pre-Jesus ideas about the Messiah as a divine human (which is not to deny a Markan contribution to the development of such ideas).”16 In other words—and here Boyarin parts company with Crossley—the superlative adjective in “earliest Palestinian tradition” makes the same mistake Crossley critiques in rejecting histories of Jesus as biographies of a Great Man: it assumes Jesus is the beginning-point against which the tradition can be marked early, earlier, earliest. By following Boyarin, we can begin to recognize not just how Jesus was taken up by his followers as a resource for navigating the uncertainties of first-century Galilean social and political vicissitudes, but also how Jesus himself took up (and was taken up by) broader social, cultural, and political ideas and patterns of behavior. Jesus was not just a producer of social or historical change but also a product of it.17

Bringing Jesus into Our Time

But Crossley does more than blur the historical Jesus and shed light upon the earliest Palestinian tradition. Jesus and the Chaos of History explicitly advocates for an approach to historical Jesus scholarship that is aware of and takes seriously its “interconnect[ions] with major geopolitical trends” and that bears some “significant oppositional political impact” in the present.18 In this vein we might take note of the first chapter’s title, “Does Jesus Plus Paul Equal Marx Plus Lenin? Redirecting the Historical Jesus,” a tip of the hat to the influence of continental philosophers Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, with whom Crossley opens the book.19 He exploits the “tension between revolution and authoritarianism” common to the universalizing tendencies of both the earliest Palestinian tradition and Marxism in order to open up a space for the historical analysis of Jesus and earliest Christianity to critique and transform contemporary discursive and power structures, especially the commodification of education.20

I want to shift our focus to a more mundane question, one that more directly addresses the kinds of concerns my students would bring to a book like this if I used in it class. What use, theologically speaking, is the earliest Palestinian tradition to readers who, unlike Crossley, turn to the Gospels seeking an encounter with Jesus, the Great Man par excellence? The historic Christian faith has affirmed precisely the thing Crossley wants to deny: that Jesus was the “prime historical mover,” “the original figure” who heralded the kingdom of God and inaugurated the church.21 For the reader willing to look past the surface, however, Jesus and the Chaos of History opens up at least two avenues of potential for theological advance. Because of space limitations, we can only briefly sketch these avenues, which hopefully can be explored more fully in other arenas.

Re-forming Christian Theology for New Crises

The Reformed theological tradition (of which I am not a part; my apologies if my comments are imprecise or misleading) offers the motto, Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda est: “the Church reformed is always reforming.” Set against the backdrop of the various European Reformations of the Renaissance, this motto provokes the image of the need for Martin Luthers in every generation to identify and challenge those places where the church increasingly diverges from its scriptural charter. Another sense of semper reformanda, however, arises from my reading of this book. Crossley invites us to embrace the call for semper reformanda not in terms of the church’s deviation from but of its response to. The church-as-institution is not called merely to remain faithful to the conditions of its founding; it is also thrust into the world’s challenges and needs as these change through time and circumstance. Crossley recognizes the danger that historical Jesus scholarship might focus on crises of the past and, having spent its energies in the first century, become complicit in the exercise of power in the twenty-first century.22 The church’s semper reformanda, however, continually reevaluates the world and responds to the crises of each new generation. The reformation of the church, in this sense, refers not to restoration of the past but to reconfiguration to address the challenges of the ever-shifting present.

Jesus and the Chaos of History focuses this latter sense of semper reformanda through material lenses, especially “how people in and around the Jesus movement interacted with the social upheavals of Galilee and Judea, as well as the Roman empire more broadly.”23 Here Crossley arrives at some standard conclusions (“The earliest Palestinian tradition pitted the kingdom of God against Rome, attacked wealth and privilege, supported the poorest members of society . . .”). Unlike some recent historians of Jesus, however, Crossley resists romanticizing Jesus as an egalitarian who abolishes hierarchical power structures. Instead, he rightly recognizes that the earliest tradition “simultaneously mimicked power and imperialism.” Crossley’s conclusions about gender and the earliest Palestinian tradition are similar: Jesus and his followers highlighted “problems for some traditional conceptions of masculinity”; however, he also finds “more ‘reactionary’ models of gender already being utilized” in the same tradition.24 This tension between conservative and countercultural tendencies lies at the heart of Crossley’s analysis. “In many ways,” he says, “the in-breaking of a more ‘revolutionary’ moment as seen in the earliest Palestinian tradition was always constrained by broader imperial and phallocentric structures.”25 This, I think, offers a more responsible approach to the historical Jesus than those “neoliberal Jesuses” who stand over their social, cultural, and political contemporaries as the Great Man embodying twenty-first-century values of liberty and equality.

Modeling the Church’s Reformanda

Crossley, however, does not accept the inevitability that this tension must reinscribe hierarchical structures; he holds out the possibility that, in our own time, we might resist “complying with, and imposing a narrative of, domination and power.”26 Here I think Crossley’s political reading becomes naïve; whereas he rightly recognizes the problematic inscription and exercise of power in Communist states (he explicitly mentions the Soviet Union, but the Communist regimes of southeast Asia and Latin America would come in for similar critiques), he nevertheless endorses a Chomskian approach to “challeg[ing] authority and authoritarianism and thinking about how to build a fairer society.”27 I do not see that such an approach has actually resulted in broader or longer lasting diffusions of authority and power than have classical expressions of liberal democratic impulses (for all their many problems). The church’s semper reformanda, I think, will and can only mirror the early Palestinian tradition: challenging the oppressive expression of power, proposing new power structures to enfranchise the marginal, and challenging these new power structures when they, too, marginalize and oppress. Thus, semper reformanda.

For those of us who, like Jesus’ earliest followers, turn to traditions of Jesus’ life and teaching to orient our lives, the Gospels provide more than the ethical what that Christians should observe, they illustrate also the how by which we may address new challenges. Again, Jesus’ embrace of “sinners” provides an instructive example. As Crossley reconstructs the earliest Palestinian tradition, Jesus himself encountered Jews who “were perceived to be acting as if they were outside the covenant and were thus seen as law-breakers.”28 His “ministry” (if we may use that very Christian term) consisted of calling these unobservant Jews back into Torah’s moral, ethical, and ritual systems. Jesus’ followers inherited this tradition of calling “sinners” to repentance, which tradition located them within the social world of first-century Galilee while simultaneously demarcating them from other Jews in that same social world. If Jesus’ earliest followers had interpreted Jesus’ teaching strictly literally, Christianity as we know it would never have resulted. However, they applied the structure of Jesus’ teaching rather than its superficial form to new challenges. When they encountered the gentile problem, they turned to Jesus’ attitude toward unobservant Jews (“sinners”) to provide orientation for their attitude to gentiles (“sinners”). The contemporary church, likewise, sees in the earliest Palestinian tradition not just what to think and do but also how to think and do.

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Describing this how remains the perennial theological challenge. Historians and theologians have failed at describing the structure of Jesus’ teaching apart from its form, its particular embodiment in concrete times and places. This structure—akin to “religion,” which does not exist separate from other ideological and material discursive networks29—is visible in and never apart from concrete negotiations of power. If Jesus’ and his followers’ responses to the chaos of history are to have any significant theological utility, they will have to be brought to bear, mutatis mutandis, upon the chaos of the present.