Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§4.6 The Flight from Dogma
debts') and willingly helped one another, even the local adversary ('love your enemies'),
communities which worked out conflicts without resort to the courts
(Matt. 18.15-22) and regarded themselves as independent from the Temple and
the attendant political-economic-religious establishment (Matt. 17.24-27) and
without obligation to pay Roman tribute (Mark 12.17). 148 'The kingdom of God
apparently had no need of either a mediating hierocracy or a temple system'. 149
Horsley has restated and buttressed his arguments in a sequence of further
studies, 150 but the main thesis and its principal components were already clear in
the initial statement. Its egalitarian utopianism is certainly attractive for anyone
dismayed by the longevity and persistence of traditionally oppressive hierarchies,
and the thesis is more soundly based than Theissen's portrayal of Jesus' first followers
as itinerant charismatics. But its very attractiveness inevitably raises the
question whether Horsley has been able to avoid the mistake of those old Liberals
who projected on Jesus their own priorities in portraying him as a social reformer.
151 Some of the same problems arise. Like the Liberals he remains ambivalent
about the references in the Jesus tradition to a future coming of God/the Son
of man in judgment and full realization of the kingdom. 152 And as with the Liberals,
the transition to the expanding mission of Paul remains problematic to envisage,
since the Jesus tradition takes us only to continuing Galilean village communities.
153 Moreover, it is difficult to avoid the impression of special pleading at
some key points: particularly in the suggestion that Jesus' exorcisms implied that
'the days of Roman domination were numbered', and in the surprising tour de
force against the consensus view that Jesus associated or ate with tax-collectors
and sinners. 154 Nevertheless, Horsley's warning not to abstract Jesus' teaching
from the religious-social-political context of his time must be heeded, and Horsley
will inevitably be an important dialogue partner in the following pages. 155
148. Horsley, Jesus chs. 8-10.
149. Horsley, Jesus 325.
150. Particularly Sociology; also Archaeology, History and Society in Galilee: The Social
Context of Jesus and the Rabbis (Valley Forge: Trinity, 1996); R. A. Horsley and J. A.
Draper, Whoever Hears You Hears Me: Prophets, Performance, and Tradition in Q (Harrisburg:
Trinity, 1999).
151. See above, n. 107.
152. Horsley. Jesus 175-77, 320.
153. The problem becomes clearer in the two later volumes (n. 150 above).
154. Horsley, Jesus 181-90 (here 190), 212-23. See also below §13.5 and n. 216, chapter
15, n. 279.
155. Pertinent, however, is the observation ot'L. E. Keck, Who Is Jesus? History in Perfect
Tense (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2000), that 'today's sense of the task is no
longer that of locating second-temple-era materials that illumine aspects of Jesus but rather that
of first reconstructing as fully as possible the Galilee that he knew and then detecting where Jesus
should be placed in it so that he becomes an integral part of it' (36).
57