Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio.

I have a wonderful episode for you today based on a wonderful and fascinating book that I came across, put out by zero books.

It is called Jesus A Life in Class Conflict, and it is written by James Crossley, based out of the

UK, and Robert Miles, based out of Australia. I have them both on to discuss this wonderful

work. In the first 30 minutes or so, we discuss historical materialism, the methodology

of historical materialism as applied to the life of Jesus Christ. The fact that

such an analysis has really never been done while there have been Marxist attempts to sort of cover

the topic of Jesus or engage with it, an actual thoroughgoing historical materialist analysis

of the life and times and material conditions

of Jesus. I'm not aware that one exists other than this book, which makes this book not only

incredibly unique, but I think incredibly important. And I would love to see more sort of historical

materialist analysis of major religious figures from different traditions as well. But this one was

when I came across it, I knew I had to have them on and this discussion does not disappoint. So for the

first 30 minutes or so, we discuss historical materialism, how they apply it to deep history. This is

ancient history. There's not historical sources like

there are for World War I and World War II or whatever. It's much harder to try to, you know,

to try to extract objective truth from, you know, deep, deep history. So we talk about the difficulties

in that, the way that they approach those difficulties

and try to solve them.

We talk about the Gospels and whether or not they're sources of legitimate history

or the differences between the Gospels when it comes to historical sort of sourcing, etc.

So that's the first 30 minutes.

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