Overview

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.

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9781666722536

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"""Richard Horsley expertly revisits a vast array of first-century sources such as Josephus and offers fascinating, fresh perspectives on the causes and key players in popular movements that shaped the Gospels. Drawing upon his decades of work as an organizer and rights activist, Horsley methodically shifts focus away from the elite in Roman Palestine and foregrounds the agency of ordinary individuals and communities that spearheaded those movements."" --Raj Nadella, associate professor of New Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary ""As a doctoral student in the 1980s, Richard Horsley's work on rethinking understanding about political and religious movements in the Jewish world of Jesus and the movement he spawned was an important part of my training. To have these updated and revised critical essays on social banditry, movement prophets, and zealots collected in this volume will be a major contribution for a new generation of scholars in the fields of New Testament and Jewish history."" --Efrain Agosto, distinguished visiting professor of Latina/o studies, Williams College ""Richard Horsley's early exploratory articles, collected here, read as fresh, new analyses of the social and political movements of the first century. His goal was simple and revolutionary: in order to understand Judaism and the Jesus movement, one had to re-discover the larger politics of the eastern Roman world. These essays still have much to teach us today."" --Lawrence Wills, author of Introduction to the Apocrypha"

Author Information

Richard A. Horsley is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Liberal Arts and the Study of Religion at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His numerous publications include these recent works from Cascade: Empowering the People: Jesus, Healing, and Exorcism (2022), You Shall Not Bow Down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul (2021), Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine, 2nd ed. (2021), Jesus and Magic (2014), and Text and Tradition in Performance and Writing (2013).

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