Jesus and the Chaos of History challenges a number of assumptions in contemporary historical Jesus scholarship and proposes to redirect ways in which the quest for the historical Jesus is undertaken. The book challenges the soft superiority of the rhetoric of ‘very Jewish’ Jesuses and the common Orientalist assumptions about Jesus’ ‘background’. This is also a ‘post-criteria’ book in that it looks at how the quest for the historical Jesus might now be understood after the recent criticisms of the ‘criteria of authenticity’. The book looks at ways in which historical Jesus studies can be direct ... More

Jesus and the Chaos of History challenges a number of assumptions in contemporary historical Jesus scholarship and proposes to redirect ways in which the quest for the historical Jesus is undertaken. The book challenges the soft superiority of the rhetoric of ‘very Jewish’ Jesuses and the common Orientalist assumptions about Jesus’ ‘background’. This is also a ‘post-criteria’ book in that it looks at how the quest for the historical Jesus might now be understood after the recent criticisms of the ‘criteria of authenticity’. The book looks at ways in which historical Jesus studies can be directed away from the dominant emphases on Jesus the Great Man and standard narrative presentations, and towards the earliest Palestinian tradition and how it intersected with social upheaval and historical change. The book looks at how accidental, purposeful, discontinuous, contradictory, and implicit meanings in the developments of ideas in the earliest tradition appeared in the movement that followed. A qualified challenge is also made to the idea that the Jesus movement was anti-imperial. Rather than dismiss the anti-imperialism of the earliest Palestinian tradition, this book looks at the ways in which seemingly egalitarian and countercultural ideas coexisted with ideas of dominance and power and how human reactions to socio-economic inequalities can mimic dominant power. The book shows how a Galilean ‘protest’ movement laid the foundations for its own brand of imperial rule. This analysis is carried out in detailed studies on: the kingdom of God and ‘Christology’; ‘sinners’ and purity; and gender and revolution.