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This post ignores the tremendous recent spate of scholarly historical (and even
archaeological) research and writing about the historical Jesus, for which one
should turn to the several books published in the last quarter century by
American scholars and academics Bart Ehrman, John Dominic Crossan, and
especially Richard A. Horsley, a Marxist. They agree that Jesus was no
Christian, nor was he divine either; they see him as a Jewish revolutionary,
but cast in the mould of the Hebrew prophets, attempting to restore the
primitive egalitarianism that can be read into the various covenants
(supposedly between god and his "chosen" people, but probably worked out by the
Hebrews themselves) which established the land of the Jews as a peasant
agricultural state wherein each peasant family was guaranteed a workable plot
of farmland despite, and in the teeth, of moneylenders and the wealthy Jews who
backed the moneylenders in an increasingly unegalitarian Jewish community in
Israel.
Note, for example, that neither Jesus nor his father Joseph is depicted in the
Bible as owning or farming land, nor even as being fishermen like several of
Jesus's comrades, even though, historically speaking, the overwhelming number
of Jewish peasants engaged in farming (and in fishing). Joseph is said to be a
carpenter, which was among the most lowly and looked-down-upon categories of
landless Jews at the time, much lower than farmers, and he probably got work
participating in the construction of new Roman cities such as Tiberias which
went up in Israel during the years of the first two Roman emperors, Augustus
and Tiberias. Like many Jews who toiled away on these showy, expensive,
nonJewish Roman towns near Galilee, they had lost their lands to debt and were
in many senses enslaved and extremely poor; Jesus saw himself as a prophet,
bringing back and enforcing the democratic and redistributive covenants (as
required by the concept of jubilee) and restoring an economic basis for
independence for poor Jewish peasant farmers -- like his own family. Of
course he opposed the wealthy Jews of his time, who were economically allied
with the conquering Romans (and had been allied with the previously conquering
Greeks of Alexander's time). But his goal -- as he repeatedly said -- was to
restore the covenants.
The three historians I have cited use excellent, widely-accepted techniques of
historical criticism, which find much that is in the New Testament to have been
added on later by the True Believers, the followers of Jesus and others who
wanted to claim Jesus as divine, as some part of god (unlike what Jesus
actually said of himself). They find much of the New Testament to be quite
suspicious, and in varying ways they interpret many passages as not reflecting
much of the truth of Jesus's life and prophetic career. They discard these
from the canon, and arrive at a very different image of Jesus than is given in
the post below. They are certainly worth reading, more (in my view) than the
two authors cited in the post below.
Wythe Holt
Philip Ferguson via Marxism wrote:
> POSTING RULES & NOTES
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> At Xmas time, an interesting piece:
> Jesus wasn't a Christian; he was a Jewish revolutionary:
> https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/jesus-wasnt-a-christian-he-was-a-jewish-revolutionary/
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