In Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine, Richard A. Horsley offers one of the most comprehensive critical analyses of Jesus of Nazareth's mission and how he became a significant historical figure. Horsley brings a fuller historical knowledge of the context and implications of recent research to bear on the investigation of the historical Jesus. Breaking with the standard focus on isolated individual sayings of Jesus, Horsley argues that the sources for Jesus in historical interaction are the Gospels and the speeches of Jesus that they include, read critically in their historical context. This work challenges the standard assumptions that the historical Jesus has been presented primarily as a sage or apocalyptic visionary. In contrast, based on a critical reconsideration of the Gospels and contemporary sources for Roman imperial rule in Judea and Galilee, Horsley argues that Jesus was fully involved in the conflicted politics of ancient Palestine. Learning from anthropological studies of the more subtle forms of peasant politics, Horsley discerns from these sources how Jesus, as a Moses- and Elijah-like prophet, generated a movement of renewal in Israel that was focused on village communities. This paperback edition is updated with a new preface, bibliography, and indexes.

Hanson and Oakman's award-winning and enormously illuminating volume quickly has become a widely used and cited introduction to the social context of the early Jesus movement. This new printing augments the text with multiple features on an accompanying CD-ROM.

This volume brings together groundbreaking essays that laid the foundations of several of Horsley's later works. The initial aims of these essays were, first, to ferret out evidence from our sources, primarily from the histories of Josephus, evidence for the lives of ordinary people living in Judean and Galilean villages. A second purpose was to explore as precisely as possible the fundamental conflictual division between the Roman, Herodian, and high priestly rulers in Palestine and the Judean and Galilean villagers they ruled. A third purpose was to explore more particularly how the popular and scribal opposition to the rulers was manifested in a remarkable diversity of movements and their leaders. And the fourth purpose, entailed in the first two, was to wriggle out from under some of the controlling constructs of New Testament/biblical studies that had been hiding the considerable complexity of the historical context. This was necessary even to begin to discern more precisely the fundamental political--economic--religious conflict between the rulers and the villagers manifested in a diversity of social movements attested in the sources.

A major advance in Jesus studies and a critique of oppression. Horsley focuses his attention on how Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God relates to Roman and Herodian power politics.

Economic justice is the core of the biblical tradition. In this innovative volume, Horsley takes the reader deep in examining how Jesus’ economic project was shaped in opposition to the Roman imperial order and how Paul’s development of communities around the Mediterranean was part of creating an alternative society among those subject to Rome. This analysis sets in the foreground the fundamental issues of food security, access to resources, and liberation. These movements emerged in opposition to Roman violence, political oppression, and economic extraction. This ultimately leads the author to consider how these issues are more relevant than ever in confronting the most recent form of empire in global capitalism. While we are not living in a Roman imperial world, we must strategize to confront the ways in which the new empire uses violence, oppression, and extraction to the detriment of the vast majority in the world, but especially those who are most vulnerable.

Examines how socioeconomic relations between Judaean elites and non-elites changed as Palestine became part of the Roman Empire.

Amid competing portrayals of the "cynic Jesus," the "peasant Jesus," and the "apocalyptic Jesus," the "political Jesus" remains a marginal figure. Douglas E. Oakman argues that advances in our social-scientific understanding of the political economy of Roman Galilee, as well as advances in the so-called "Third Quest" for the historical Jesus, warrant a revival and a critical revision of H. S. Reimarus's understanding of Jesus as an instigator of revolutionary change.

Uses archaeological and textual evidence to clarify the nature of Galilean discontent and the advent of Jesus' eschatological ministry.

Whether or not Jesus was involved with the Zealot movement of armed resistance to Rome is the provocative question this collection attempts to answer. Twenty-six articles concentrate on four areas: methodology, the historical situation, New Testament exegesis, and the trials of Jesus before the Sanhedrin and Pilate.