Hello everybody and welcome back to RevLeftRadio. 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 thorough going historical materialist analysis of the life and times and material conditions of Jesus.

I am not aware that one exists other than this book which makes this book not only incredible 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.

This book was one I came across that I knew I had to have a bond and this discussion does not disappoint. For the first 30 minutes or so we discuss historical materialism, how they apply it to deep history. This is ancient history. There are not historical sources like there are for World War I and World War II or whatever.

It is much harder to try to extract objective truth from deep history. 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 there are sources of legitimate history or the differences between the gospels, when it comes to historical sort of sourcing etc.

That is the first 30 minutes and then after that we get into the story itself from Jesus as childhood all the way through to his crucifixion and the legacy of the Jesus movement.

We challenge a lot of people's presumptions about who Jesus was, what the Jesus movement was, what it was trying to accomplish.

It is just a fascinating and deeply educational conversation, hopefully, but certainly book. I absolutely loved it, so I'm very, very excited to share this with you today.

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But without further ado, here's my conversation with James and Robert on their newest book, Jesus, a Life in Class Conflict. Enjoy.

I'm James Kressley. I'm a professor of, well, a professor of things to do with religion and history. I've got two parts of what I do. One is I work on English, the English radical tradition from well, from, probably from the 40's.

Probably from the 14th century to the present. For the other half of me is I work on the historical Jesus. I've worked at University of Sheffield, University of St Mary's in London, and I currently work for the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements and for MF in Oslo, Norway.

Hi, I'm Robert Miles. I'm seeing a lecturer in New Testament at Woolestom Theological College, which is a college of the University of Divinity in Australia.

My writing mostly focuses on the historical formation of the early Jesus movement and the socio-economic realities within that context.

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