Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§12.6 The Kingdom of God
(not just peasant Judaism, but peasant society as such), Crossan stretches some
of the particularities of Galilean archaeology 407 and finds confirmation of escalating
peasant protest and turmoil at the time of Jesus in Horsley's thesis to that
effect. 408 Together with his literary analysis by chronological stratification, 409
the result is one of the most impressive methodological tours-de-force since
Strauss a century and a half earlier. When Jesus' kingdom preaching is located
within this framework, Crossan argues that, while the kingdom could have been
understood in apocalyptic terms at the time of Jesus, it was the sapiential kingdom
which provides the best fit: 'The sapiential Kingdom looks to the present
rather than the future. . . . One enters that Kingdom by wisdom or goodness, by
virtue, justice, or freedom. It is a style of life for now rather than a hope of life for
the future'. 410
There are several problems with this grand narrative. For one thing, although
Crossan protests that he does not wish simply to extrapolate from the
Mediterranean world as though it was a single cultural unit, or to generalise too
straightforwardly from the universals of peasant society, his treatment of Judaism
is very limited and his analysis of the conditions in lower Galilee very restricted.
But we really do need to have a clearer idea of what Judaism meant at
the time of Jesus, of its distinctives, and how it shaped Jewish identity, in Galilee
as well. There were national and religious factors operative in Jewish society and
not simply social and economic factors, and arguably the former provided the
dominant narrative by which even Jewish peasants made sense of their lives. 411
That narrative cannot simply be fitted into a larger economic narrative, ä la
Marx; the distinctives of Jewish tradition and identity actually form a counternarrative,
which for Jesus at least seems to have been determinative, and for his
message of the kingdom not least.
For another, the half-dozen episodes of protest narrated by Josephus for the
407. Birth ch. 13.
408. Birth 148, 210, referring to R. A. Horsley and J. S. Hanson, Bandits, Prophets, and
Messiahs: Popular Movements in the Time of Jesus (Minneapolis: Seabury, 1985); see also
Crossan, Historical Jesus chs. 7, 9 (particularly 184-85), and 10 (particularly 218-19).
409. See above, chapter 4 n. 163.
410. Historical Jesus 284-92 (here 292); also Jesus 55-58.
411. See particularly the critique by S. Freyne, 'Galilean Questions to Crossan's Mediterranean
Jesus', in Arnal and Desjardins, eds., Whose Historical Jesus? 63-91 ('If one were to
follow Crossan's methodology to its logical conclusion ... it would be difficult to locate Jesus
anywhere, certainly not in Galilee', 64), and the warnings on this point by M. Sawacki, Crossing
Galilee: Architectures of Contact in the Occupied Land of Jesus (Harrisburg: Trinity, 2000)
73-80; cf. J. A. Overman, 'Jesus of Galilee and the Historical Peasant', in Edwards and
McCollough, eds., Archaeology and the Galilee 67-73 (here 69-72). M. Cserhati, Methods and
Models in the Third Quest of the Historical Jesus (Durham PhD, 2000), also warns against the
ideal construct of an egalitarian peasant society (as in Crossan, Historical Jesus 263).
471