Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism: Quests, Scholarship and Ideology

265 Pages·2012·1.371 MB·English

by  James G. Crossley

Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism
BibleWorld
Series Editors: Philip R. Davies and James G. Crossley, University of Sheffield
BibleWorld shares the fruits of modern (and postmodern) biblical scholarship not only
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biblical scholarship.
Jesus in an Age of
Neoliberalism
Quests, Scholarship and Ideology
James G. Crossley
First published 2012 by Equinox, an imprint of Acumen
Published 2014 by Routledge
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© James G. Crossley 2012
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ISBN 978-1-908049-70-4 (hardback)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crossley, James G.
Jesus in an age of neoliberalism: quests, scholarship, and ideology / James G. Crossley.
p. cm.—(BibleWorld)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-908049-70-4 (hb)
1. Jesus Christ—Biography—History and criticism. 2. Neoliberalism—
Religious aspects—Christianity—History. 3. Jesus Christ—Historicity. I. Title.
BT301.9.C76 2012
232.9’08—dc23
2011026250
Typeset by S.J.I. Services, New Delhi
For Serena and Dominique
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgements and Pre(r)amble xiii
1. Introduction: Jesus Quests and Contexts 1
Part I: From Mont Pelerin to Eternity?
Contextualizing an Age of Neoliberalism
2. Neoliberalism and Postmodernity 21
3. Biblioblogging: Connected Scholarship 38
4. ‘Not Made by Great Men’? The Quest for the
Individual Christ 68
5. ‘Never Trust a Hippy’: Finding a Liberal Jesus
Where You Might Not Think 85
Part II: Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism
6. A ‘Fundamentally Unreliable Adoration’:
‘Jewishness’ and the Multicultural Jesus 105
7. The Jesus Who Wasn’t There? Conservative
Christianity, Atheism and Other Religious Influences 133
Part III: Contradictions
8. ‘Forgive Them; for They Do Not Know What They Are
Doing!’ Other Problems, Extremes and the Social World of
Jesus 169
viii Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism
9. Red Tory Christ 189
10. Conclusion: They Know It and They Don’t 211
Bibliography 219
Index of Ancient Sources 237
Index of Authors 239
Index of Subjects 245
Preface
This book is effectively a non-comprehensive cultural history of contem-
porary scholarship mostly relating in some way to the historical Jesus.
In a previous book, Jesus in an Age of Terror (Equinox, 2008), which
this present book complements, I argued for the importance of contem-
porary Anglo-American foreign policies and geopolitics concerning
the Middle East to be seen as a significant driving force behind major
cultural trends and the ways in which academic ideas have been framed,
not least those which involve historical research into the Middle East in
some form, such as New Testament and Christian origins scholarship.
In this present book, I want to look at the related economic and cultural
trends in which such geopolitics are embedded and which in some way
influence almost everything we do, whether in academic roles or outside
work in leisure time or, indeed, whatever and wherever.
Put simply, a major aim of this book is to show how some presenta-
tions of the historical Jesus, from learned academics to amateur bloggers,
have been, over the past forty years, embedded in the context of neolib-
eralism. This inevitably means a dominant focus on North American-led
scholarship because, as might be expected and as we will see throughout
this book, this is where the power currently lies in scholarship and
the past forty years has marked the shift away from the dominance of
German scholarship. Hence, German scholarship, so influential up to
the mid-twentieth century, will have to be put largely to one side as it
would have to be properly analysed in light of its own historical and
cultural peculiarities, much admired though it still is in some parts of
the English-speaking scholarly world.
While this book remains a history of contemporary scholarship, it is
emphatically not comprehensive. Instead, it is hoped that the book will
establish the general case for the importance of the context of neolib-
eralism for understanding contemporary scholarship and for others to
provide new case studies. This book is merely about certain examples of