Preliminary issues

It is true that if we could follow the precepts of the Nazarene this would be a different world to live in. There would then be no murder and no war; no cheating and lying and profit-making. There would be neither slave nor master, and we should all live like brothers, in peace and harmony. There would be neither poor nor rich, neither crime nor prison, but that would not be what the church wants. It would be what the Anarchists want. (Alexander Berkman)^[1]

The claim that Jesus was an anarchist is one that has been made by a variety of individuals and movements since the term “anarchist” itself first began to be commonly used from the 1840s onwards.^[2] Friedrich Nietzsche^[3] is probably amongst the most culturally significant to have given Jesus this label, although other prominent figures have made more or less the same claim, including Nikolai Berdyaev,^[4] Leo Tolstoy,^[5] and Oscar Wilde,^[6] as have a host of lesser-known figures. It has been most common amongst groups and networks that are overt in their espousal of some form of Christian anarchism, such as the Catholic Worker Movement,^[7] the Jesus Radicals,^[8] the Brotherhood Church,^[9] and the Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ,^[10] but could also be said to be implied in movements that have been identified as containing implicit anarchist characteristics, such as those associated with some forms of liberation theology^[11] and related contextual theologies.^[12] The anarchist potentiality of the historical Jesus was even recognised by classical anarchist thinkers, most prominently Proudhon,^[13] but also, to varying degrees, Mikhail Bakunin,^[14] Peter Kropotkin,^[15] and Max Stirner.^[16]

Of course, what exactly is meant when someone calls Jesus an “anarchist” is not self-evident and there is sometimes little, if anything, that such claims have in common. Authors assume a range of different interpretations of the figure of Jesus and also of anarchism itself in making their judgements. This paper is not a criticism of any such estimations of Jesus but rather an attempt to bring a little more clarity to the subject and to see if, historically speaking, there is any analytical value in talking in such a way about Jesus. More specifically, I would like to examine whether the historical Jesus can legitimately be called an anarchist.

By using the expression “the historical Jesus”, I am assuming a distinction, common in biblical scholarship since the nineteenth century,^[17] between the historical figure of Jesus and the Christ of Christian faith, a distinction that assumes that the two are not necessarily the same (a distinction that not all the writers that might be labelled “Christian anarchist” would share). My concern is not whether the Christ of Christian faith, that believers claim is known from the Christian Bible, doctrine, and experience, was, or indeed, for many of them, is an anarchist, but whether the man called Jesus of Nazareth, who lived and died about two thousand years ago, could usefully be called such.

I should also make it clear that I am specifically interested in whether Jesus can be called an “anarchist”. This is not necessarily the same as saying that he simply had anti-authoritarian tendencies nor that he was a violent insurrectionist of some kind — something that received considerable attention some decades ago and which has recently been revived.^[18] Nor is it the same as deciding that he was a “revolutionary” of some other kind, something that has been a particular interest in contemporary scholarship, especially amongst those concerned with trying to demonstrate that the historical Jesus was an “inclusive” figure of some sort.^[19] Ideas about what might constitute “politics” have become increasingly nuanced, under the influence of such things as postcolonial and gender theory,^[20] and the ideological contexts of both the historical Jesus and New Testament scholars themselves have come under extensive scrutiny, making assessments of this kind especially challenging.^[21]

However, before we can attempt to answer the question we have posed, there are a number of preliminary matters that need to be addressed. In asking whether the historical Jesus can be usefully labelled an anarchist I am conscious that many anarchists may be familiar with material, academic and otherwise, which maintains that Jesus of Nazareth never existed,^[22] and they may think that my question is a pointless one to try to answer. Although no questions should be ignored in the critical study of religion, the arguments of those who doubt the existence of the historical Jesus are unpersuasive.^[23] None of the opponents of early Christianity, although they found numerous grounds for criticising the life and teaching of Jesus, doubted his existence,^[24] and, to put the matter concisely, the existence of Jesus of Nazareth is by far the most plausible way of explaining the traditions we have about a first-century, charismatic, Jewish peasant of that name. Traditions that, culturally speaking, cohere with what we know about the religious and cultural environment of Palestine at the time and which combine to form a picture of a specific and distinctive individual within it — not a banal and fanciful composite. Of course, these sources need to be handled with critical caution, as they have been since the Enlightenment, if not before, as most are composed by followers of Jesus.^[25] However, this in itself is not surprising: the poor in the Roman empire — and pictures of Jesus from antiquity are universal in placing him in this category^[26] — like the poor in most of history, had little and left less behind. Very few, mostly through accident rather than design, left anything, so thoroughgoing has been what E. P. Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity”.^[27] Jesus’ significance, to those other than his immediate followers, was only evident in retrospect, and so we should not be surprised that there is little in the way of non-Christian documentary or literary evidence for his life and that our analysis will have to rely on extensive and diverse but largely Christian sources.^[28]

However, having accepted that it is possible to talk about a historical Jesus, how should we go about determining whether it is reasonable to label him an anarchist or not? The current literature that has touched on this is of little assistance. Many of those claiming that Jesus was an anarchist are often doing little more than constructing a mythology to give authority to a movement, as Woodcock has suggested.^[29] Some have arrived at their interpretation of Jesus through more critical, ostensibly historical approach to the sources; Tolstoy’s anti-supernaturalist reading of the gospels, which had no place for the miraculous “rotten apples”^[30] is perhaps the most famous example. However, there has been little systematic or coherent engagement with critical scholarship concerned with the study of the historical Jesus and the problems it has tried to address, and most readings by those who want to label Jesus an anarchist are characterised by rather literalistic and hermeneutically naive approaches to biblical texts,^[31] as the analysis of Alexandre Christoyannopoulos has recently demonstrated.^[32] The teachings of the historical Jesus are, for example, often assumed to be easily accessible. For some, this is just a matter of rescuing Jesus from Paul (and often, by implication, the later church), but however rhetorically appealing it is to many Christian anarchists for whom Paul can be a rather uncomfortable figure,^[33] this is not a defensible approach as Paul is the author of the earliest Christian literature that we possess and provides us with data about the historical Jesus which, limited though it is, actually predates the gospels.^[34] A number solve the conundrum by giving priority to the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5.3–7.27), seeing it as the authoritative epitome of Jesus’ teaching,^[35] but in so doing they ignore its redactional character; it is, to a large extent, the construction of the author of the gospel in which it is found and cannot be said to go back to the historical Jesus.^[36] Even if the sermon is composed of elements that early Christians thought originated with Jesus, many of which are paralleled in the so-called Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6.20–49), and can also be seen in the Epistle of James and the early Christian text, the Didache,^[37] there is much about its structure and content that clearly owes itself to the final author of the Gospel of Matthew and those who brought together and transmitted the sources from which he created his final text. Of course, there have been a handful of scholars who have been practitioners of critical biblical scholarship and who have also shown an interest in Christian anarchism, most notably Leif Vaage^[38] and Ched Myers,^[39] but these are relatively few and, to date, there has been no critical and programmatic attempt to answer the question we have asked. In the light of this it is necessary to sketch, in a little detail, a valid method for scrutinising the sources we have for the historical Jesus that might provide us with some plausible results.

But before I do this, I should add some caveats about my own historical approach here. I am very conscious that in asking questions about the historical Jesus I might well be doing something that strikes some as epistemologically naive — even if a lot of people do it — and I could be accused, along with others who engage one way or another with the “Quest”^[40] for the historical Jesus, of making oddly positivist assumptions about the nature of historical knowledge and how it can be arrived at.^[41] However, my aims are quite modest: I am not claiming to uncover the “real” Jesus,^[42] nor even a useful one, but to make some provisional and, I hope, plausible suggestions about how this figure could be understood if examined in the light of the assumptions, aspirations, and praxis characteristic of anarchism. In asking this question I am not assuming anything about the significance of what follows or its implications: my interest in the historical Jesus is not in uncovering a figure, or an aspect of a figure, that is somehow determinative for Christians or anyone else. The shifting sands of historical reconstruction are not really a very useful foundation for anything much that matters — though many biblical scholars enjoy their time in the sandpit and make quite remarkable claims about the ephemeral edifices that they fashion.^[43]

Before I turn to the question of historical method it is also important to address an initial objection to the question this paper tries to answer, which might, in the eyes of some, like the question of Jesus’ existence, prevent them from proceeding any further: the problem of Jesus’ theism. I am conscious that it might be argued that the theism of the historical Jesus precludes him from being considered an anarchist. Most of the words or actions ascribed to him, in one way or another, either reference or are predicated upon belief in God.^[44] For example, the arrival of God’s rule and its implication for humans seems to have preoccupied him and is at the heart of whatever socio-political vision he may have had, as we shall see.^[45] However, it is not the case that anarchism necessarily implies atheism. It is true that atheism is central to many forms of classical anarchism; one need only think of Bakunin’s famous God and the State, Sébastien Faure’s Les douze preuves de l’inexistence de dieu,^[46] or the infamous anti-clerical massacres carried out by anarchist units in the Spanish Civil War.^[47] Such atheism is often predicated upon the need to reject the tyranny assumed to be inherent in the idea of an omnipotent God (powerfully expressed in Bakunin’s famous remark: “If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him”). ^[48] It is also driven by the desire to oppose the oppression that is thought to result from the social consequences of belief in God, both that oppression caused by religious institutions themselves and the power that they exert, and also the oppression which results from the support such religious institutions, in turn, provide to the state, the prime focus of the anarchist critique of exploitation (Bakunin famously called the state: “the Church’s younger brother”).^[49] Indeed, the apparent demise of religion — even if anarchism has often been rather premature in its claims about this — has been taken by some anarchists as evidence of the likely demise of the state, as can be seen in the words of Nicholas Walters:

The history of religion is a model for the history of government. Once it was thought impossible to have a society without God; now God is dead. It is still thought impossible to have a society without the state; now we must destroy the state.^[50]

The atheism of anarchism can be so intense as to spill over into misotheism, not just a denial of the existence of God but an active hatred of God.^[51] Nonetheless, as the influential chronicler of anarchism, Peter Marshall has noted, “Anarchism is not necessarily atheistic any more than socialism is.”^[52] And it is clear from the existence of religious anarchists of various kinds, some of which we have already mentioned, that this is the case.^[53] However eccentric they might appear, religious anarchists are not normally considered outside the anarchist fold in studies of the field (unlike, for example, anarcho-capitalists^[54] or far-right national anarchists^[55]). It would be, for example, an unusual history of anarchism that did not make at least some mention of Tolstoy or the Catholic Worker Movement.^[56] Therefore, the theism of Jesus should not preclude him from being labelled an anarchist.

These observations aside, let us now turn to the question of historical method.

Constructing the historical Jesus

Until recently there was a general agreement on the historical method used by most of those studying the figure of Jesus.^[57] There was a rough consensus on the range of historical-critical tools that should be employed and the sources that were deemed relevant.^[58] In addition, most scholars also agreed on the need to apply so-called “criteria of authenticity” to the data in order to distinguish between “authentic” and “inauthentic” traditions about Jesus.^[59] Five criteria were given particular weight in reconstructions: embarrassment, dissimilarity, multiple attestation, coherence and crucifiability and these, explicitly or implicitly, have underpinned most of the critical studies of Jesus that have appeared in the last few decades.^[60] However, the field is now experiencing something of a crisis. Consensus on historical method has not produced agreement on the results,^[61] and we have, instead, seen a proliferation of widely divergent reconstructions of the historical Jesus.^[62] There is a growing recognition that, despite attempts to rectify their weaknesses,^[63] some of which have long been noted,^[64] the criteria of authenticity are inadequate for the task, and should be abandoned. The discipline is now (or perhaps, once again) much more alert to the challenges posed by such things as memory^[65] and has a greater awareness of the problems inherent in talking about “authenticity”. A recent essay by Dale Allison, a leading historical-Jesus scholar, in which he chronicled his own growing disillusionment with the way in which the subject has been approached is emblematic of the current state of the field.^[66]

My own position is similar to that at which Allison has recently arrived.^[67] There is much about Jesus that remains impossible to substantiate if we treat the data with the same kind of scepticism that one would use if you were, for example, trying to establish the details of the life of other figures who were significant in antiquity, such as Socrates,^[68] Apollonius of Tyana,^[69] or Rabbi Akiva,^[70] and attempting to determine with any certainty what they may have said or done or what ideas they might have had. Only a limited amount of information can be ascertained about the historical Jesus with anything approaching confidence, and this, for the most part, is of a general rather than specific kind. The significant creativity evident amongst those who first repeated and recorded traditions about Jesus, and the lack of evidence that the early Christians were discerning in their transmission of stories about him,^[71] makes such a position unavoidable. Most of the data we have about Jesus can only provide us with impressions of the man, but these impressions are relatively trustworthy and reflect the enduring effect he had upon his earliest followers. They remain valid irrespective of the historicity of any particular unit of tradition, regardless of the abbreviation, elaboration, conflation, embellishment and fabrication evident within the sources.^[72] So, for example, as I have noted elsewhere, when we look at the relevant texts:

The virtues that Jesus exhibited in the face of death, of both forbearance and submission, and his refusal to return violence with violence, seem to have been recurring motifs in the pictures of Jesus that emerge from these traditions and tell us something about the enduring impression his personality made on his followers.^[73]

And there are, I believe, many larger patterns evident in the sources, patterns that are sufficiently robust so as to still hold true even if the data that they are derived from includes material that was invented. Indeed, as Allison has said, “fiction can bring us facts … some of the traditions about Jesus which are, in the strict sense, not historical, surely give us a faithful impression of the sort of person he was or the sort of thing he typically did.”^[74] The temptation narratives, for example, despite being highly legendary depict Jesus as someone who shows disdain for personal political power, a motif that recurs a number of times in our sources.^[75] And so I would go along with Allison, albeit for slightly different reasons, and say:

So, in the matter of Jesus, we should start not with the parts but with the whole, which means with the general impression that the tradition about him, in toto, tends to convey. The criteria of authenticity are, for this endeavour, simply in the way.^[76]

It is the working assumption of this text that beyond a small cluster of incidents — such as his crucifixion — the details of the life of Jesus are historically elusive although the general picture, and recurrent motifs, are discernible and historically reliable.

It follows, therefore, that I am not going to engage in detailed exegesis of specific texts, even those that look particularly relevant to our theme. For example, the “Render unto Caesar” incident,^[77] something central to most studies of the politics of Jesus,^[78] will not be the focus of detailed scrutiny because the best that can be said about individual traditions of this kind is that they were the sort of thing Jesus’ followers^[79] thought Jesus might have said. Our business is about seeing the patterns and determining what was characteristic of the figure, not to be too concerned with the historicity of the details. Such an approach also has the advantage of resembling the way that ancient biographies — which to a large extent the gospels are^[80] — would have been understood in antiquity.^[81]

The meaning and utility of the term “anarchist”

If we want to determine whether the historical Jesus can be termed an “anarchist” we need to determine not only how we can arrive at knowledge about the figure that might allow us to make such a judgement but also what we mean by the term “anarchist” when we attempt such an evaluation. In addition, we will need to address two potential criticisms of the business of determining whether the term “anarchist” is a fair one to apply to Jesus: that the term “anarchist” is anachronistic and that it is ethnocentric.

Any attempt to define anarchism has to deal with the problem of its popular image. The notion that anarchism is about the absence of order rather than the absence of government, that it is synonymous with chaos and senseless violence, has persisted since the Victorian period,^[82] and was made famous by such works as Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.^[83] Of course, there are some forms of insurrectionary anarchism that appear to fit this stereotype — one needs only think of the recent activities of the Federazione Anarchica Informale^[84] — but counter to the popular image, the use of violence is,^[85] for most anarchists, subject to considerable constraints, and most would eschew anything that could be deemed to be coercive violence against persons, even if outright pacifism is a minority position.^[86] Far from being senseless and destructive, most anarchists would consider themselves engaged in a constructive project consisting of “reconstructive visions, prefigurative politics and self-organisation”.^[87]

But once we move past the problem of the popular image of anarchism, and try to define anarchism more accurately, we still face a number of acute challenges. There are, for example, a range of terms commonly used to qualify the word “anarchist”, such as collectivist, communist, individualist, liberal, lifestyle, mutualist, poststructuralist, primitivist, social, and syndicalist, the diversity of which seems, at first sight, to indicate something that is so pluriform that it resists definition. But whilst such labels, and more, are clearly significant, it is possible to have what has been called “an anarchism without adjectives”,^[88] some kind of anarchism that is roughly representative of what most forms of anarchism have in common and true to its varied but essentially ecumenical character.^[89] Although it is customary to begin such fundamental definitions with an etymological point about the Greek word anarchos, from which the term anarchism is derived,^[90] and to point out that it means “without a ruler”, this does not get us very far, and saying something more is challenging, not least because anarchism is profoundly anti-dogmatic.^[91] Nonetheless, the definition of the anthropologist Brian Morris is one that is helpful for our purposes, encapsulating both its critical and constructive programme:

Anarchists are people who reject all forms of government or coercive authority, all forms of hierarchy and domination […] But anarchists also seek to establish or bring about by varying means, a condition of anarchy, that is, a decentralised society without coercive institutions.^[92]

However, it might also be helpful to keep in mind, in what follows, the suggestion by David Graeber, that any definition of the term anarchist has to encompass a range of interrelated and overlapping meanings. He notes that generally speaking, people, ideas or institutions are labelled anarchist if they endorse an explicit doctrine, display a particular attitude, or engage in specific practices. That is, anarchists include those who are heirs of the intellectual tradition that began in the nineteenth century which is characterised by “a certain vision of human possibilities”;^[93] those that display a particular “attitude” which “reject[s] government and believe[s] that people would be better off in a world without hierarchies”;^[94] and those that engage in practices and forms of social organisation that are broadly egalitarian in ethos^[95] (seen, for example in what E. E. Evans-Pritchard called the “ordered anarchy” of the Nuer).^[96] No definition of “anarchist” will ever be satisfactory, but Graeber’s remarks remind us that whilst we should be careful not to make our understanding of the term so broad as to be meaningless (it will not do, for example, to label anyone who is anti-authoritarian an anarchist) we should be aware that the term is an expansive, dynamic and necessarily malleable one.

However, having briefly explored the question of what an “anarchist” might be usefully said to be, we now need to address whether it is anachronistic or ethnocentric to ask if the historical Jesus can be usefully described in this way.

The charge of anachronism seems, at face value, a damning one. To many anarchism may seem clearly wedded to a specific historical moment, its character determined by its formal origins in the nineteenth century, or the brief periods of prominence it enjoyed with the Makhnovists in Ukraine,^[97] the CNT-FAI in Republican Spain,^[98] the events in France in May 1968,^[99] or its more recent re-emergence within anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation movements, and anarchist volunteers contributing to the defense of the Rojava revolution in north Syria/West Kurdistan.^[100] All these are a long way from first-century Palestine and so it seems legitimate to ask whether it is just downright anachronistic to even pose the question whether the historical Jesus was an anarchist. If it is then we are wasting our time.

However, the problem of using contemporary terminology to describe and elucidate past realities is not a new one and obviously not limited to the study of the historical Jesus (although scholars of the historical Jesus often behave as though they were engaged in a unique endeavour). Given the opprobrium that has faced those who have maintained that the historical Jesus can be usefully described as a Jewish Cynic,^[101] a not unreasonable suggestion given the clear resemblances between Jesus and the philosophical movement of that name active in the early Roman empire, and a suggestion that at least had the virtue of applying to the historical Jesus a term that was current in the first-century world,^[102] to ask whether Jesus could usefully be called an “anarchist” seems unwise. However, it is a term that is, generally speaking, particularly amenable to being used of a figure in the past. As Graeber has noted, the founding ideologues of anarchism, such as Proudhon, “did not think of themselves as having invented anything particularly new. The basic principles of anarchism — self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid — referred to forms of human behaviour they assumed had been around about as long as humanity.”^[103] It is certainly a less problematic term to use than, say, “Marxist”. The latter has always been associated with high theory and the fundamental project of analysis begun with Karl Marx, whilst anarchism is, again in the words of Graeber, “more a moral project”^[104] and the only thing that really changed in the nineteenth century was that it acquired a name.^[105] Such thinking lies behind, for example, Robert Graham’s recent documentary chronicle of anarchism, which begins at 300CE,^[106] or Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible, a substantial and influential history of anarchism that traces the origins of anarchism back to Taoism and the sixth century BCE, and, like Graham, contains extensive discussion of pre-nineteenth-century movements. Indeed, not just historians of anarchism but historians working in other fields have believed that anarchism can have analytic purchase when talking about the past. Patrica Crone, for example, a key figure in the study of Islamic origins, has argued that some Mu’tazilites and members of the Najadāt sub-sect of Khārijites, should be termed anarchists and included in histories of anarchism as they believed that society could, indeed should, function without a government or what we would call a state.^[107] Similarly, Norman Cohn used it to describe various millenarian movements in medieval Europe, most notably the Taborites of Bohemia.^[108] Likewise, the anthropologist James C. Scott has used the term in his history of the peoples of Zomia, a region of upland Southeast Asia which has, until relatively recently, resisted the “internal colonialism” of state-making in the area and whose inhabitants had successfully practised the art of not being governed for centuries.^[109] And similarly, fellow anthropologist Brian Morris has considered it an appropriate designation for Lao Tzu.^[110] Therefore, we should not be reluctant to use the term “anarchist” to describe the figure of Jesus, if he merits such a designation.

Nonetheless, the problem of anachronism is not necessarily dealt with so easily. For much of its history anarchism has been associated with opposition to both capitalism and the state, which are usually seen as inseparable objects that mutually re-enforce one another, are irredeemably coercive,^[111] and neither of which might strike someone as obviously present in the first-century, pre-industrial world, something that might undermine the utility of the concept for our purposes. However, anarchists have not always seen capitalism and the state as the sole causes of inequalities of power and creations of hierarchy,^[112] and critiques of all forms of domination, whatever their source and in whatever domain, are common, something particularly evident in the articulations of anarchism that have come to the fore in recent years. It is also the case that the terms “capitalism” and “state” can have some explanatory power for making sense of antiquity and the world within which the historical Jesus lived. First, it has proven useful for those engaged in the study of antiquity to characterise the economy of the early Roman empire as one of political capitalism,^[113] in the Weberian sense, an economy that consisted of “the exploitation of the opportunities for profit arising from the exercise of political power”;^[114] it may have been a market economy of sorts^[115] but profit-making was in the hands of the political elite within the empire and its retainers. Secondly, whilst there was little analogous to the modern state in antiquity, the Roman government did have ultimate military, fiscal, legislative and judicial power within the regions it ruled (even if also allowed considerable autonomy). Although the Roman empire of the first century CE was relatively light on administrative functionaries^[116] and military personnel,^[117] given the extent of territory controlled,^[118] it certainly meets a minimal definition of a state where a state is understood as a social organisation “capable of exerting a considerable degree of power […] over large numbers of people, and for sustained periods”.^[119] Indeed, the Rome empire fulfilled the classic definition of the state as that which “lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a territory”.^[120]

We also need to address the related problem of ethnocentrism. If we call Jesus an “anarchist” are we employing a term that has no interpretative value outside of the modern European or North American context within which anarchism first emerged as a self-conscious movement, employing a concept that impedes rather than assists our understanding of a figure from a different cultural and historical context?^[121] One that might be said to carry with it the presumption of superiority characteristic of Western modernity (or, indeed, post-modernity) within which anarchism was born and thrives? Not only would such a judgement be wrong because anarchism itself has a long history of formal existence outside of Europe or North America (one thinks, for example, of the history of anarchist movements in Africa,^[122] China,^[123] Korea, Japan^[124] and elsewhere),^[125] but also because, as we have noted, it has been used by those engaged in the description and interpretation of non-European cultures, famously by Evans-Pritchard but also by other anthropologists acutely aware of such criticisms.^[126] Harold Barclay has made perhaps the most thoroughgoing defence of the use of the term cross-culturally. He recognises that the use of the term “anarchy” might be viewed as:

Ethnocentric and confuses ideology with social classification. It is to take a highly emotionally charged word, one with a very clear ideological connotation, identified with Euro-American cultural traditions, and to apply it cross-culturally, when those in other cultures would clearly lack to the ideology and values of the anarchist. Thus, not only is the word distorted but also is the meaning of those cultures.

But quite rightly he notes that:

If this is true of the word “anarchy”, it applies equally to the use of such words as “democratic”, “government”, “law” […] and a host of others employed daily by social scientists, yet derived from ordinary speech. Social sciences is full of terms in common usage which are applied to social contexts in other cultures. There are certainly dangers to such a procedure. It is easy to carry extraneous ideological baggage along with the term. On the other hand, if we cannot at all make such cross-cultural transfers, we are left with a proliferation of neologisms which become pure jargonese, enhancing obfuscation rather than clarification.^[127]

So the question of whether the historical Jesus was an anarchist is one that can be asked and one to which we can expect a meaningful answer of some kind. Let us now sketch a response.

Was the historical Jesus an anarchist?

As we discussed earlier, any attempt to talk about the historical Jesus will need to concern itself with impressions and motifs rather than detailed exegesis of specific traditions. Even within these constraints there is much that could be said but for the purposes of this essay I would like to focus on a prominent motif present within a large quantity of traditions associated with the figure of Jesus: the kingdom of God. A “kingdom”, of whatever kind, does not, of course, sound a very anarchist thing. However, it should be noted, from the outset, that although the Greek term basileia, which is translated into English as “kingdom”, can be understood as having a territorial or geographical meaning, it can also refer to royal power or sovereignty; it can be understood as “reign” or “rule” as well as “realm”. This is also true of the Hebrew and Aramaic word malkūth which probably underlies the use of the Greek term.^[128] So, although we shall use the expression “kingdom of God”, as this phrase remains the best-known rendering into English of the Greek phrase basileia tou theou found in early Christian sources and associated with the figure of Jesus, it can also be thought of as the “reign of God” or “rule of God”.

In our sources, references to the kingdom of God saturate not just Jesus’ teaching but his activity too.^[129] The phrase, or the term “kingdom” by itself, is prominent in the canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke (customarily referred to as the Synoptic Gospels) and the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas,^[130] a text which is considered by most scholars in the field to contain early traditions about Jesus comparable to those of the Synoptics^[131] (the Gospel of John is usually judged to be somewhat later and of little value in the study of the historical Jesus).^[132] The “kingdom” is all pervasive. It appears at the outset of accounts of the life of Jesus, as the subject of his preaching, and remains a preoccupation throughout his ministry. For example, at the beginning of his public activity, according to Mark and Matthew, Jesus proclaims:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news. (Mark 1.15, Matt 4.17)^[133]

And, it remains a preoccupation to the end, a subject of discussion at his final meal^[134] and even his words from the cross.^[135] It was determinative of the content and character of his ethics. For example, renunciation of wealth appears a prerequisite for entrance to the kingdom.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich enter the kingdom of God. (Mark 10.25, Matt 19.24, Luke 18.25)

The kingdom is also directly linked to Jesus’ role as a healer and exorcist, something that is a particularly prominent characteristic of his portrayal in our sources (and although unusual, not exceptional, in the cultural context of the early empire and first-century Judaism).^[136] He is presented, for example, as declaring that his exorcisms are proof of the kingdom’s arrival:

But if it is by the Spirit [finger] of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you. (Matt 12.28, Luke 11.20)

The theme of the kingdom is also present in a range of forms of tradition from which our sources about Jesus are composed, including aphorisms, apocalyptic sayings, pronouncement stories, miracle stories, legends or parables.^[137] Indeed, parables, “the characteristic form of Jesus’ teaching”,^[138] seem particularly associated with this idea. Not only are we told that the interpretation of the parables requires hearers to know “the secret of the kingdom of God”^[139] but a number of parables are introduced with direct reference to the kingdom and most function to explicate some aspect of its character.^[140] The Gospel of Thomas, for example, regularly presents the parables it contains as concerned with the nature of the kingdom. In a tradition that does not have a direct parallel with anything in the Synoptic tradition, the reader is told:

Jesus said: The kingdom of the [Father] is like a woman, carrying a jar full of meal and walking a long way. The handle of the jar broke; the meal poured out behind her on the road. She was unaware, she knew not her loss. When she came into her house, she put down the jar (and) found it empty. (Gos. Thom. 97)

Whilst the introductions to the parables, which tie them so clearly to the theme of the kingdom, might well be redactional and not go back beyond the final composition of the gospels themselves, they are so commonplace that it seems fair to conclude that the parables — or at least most of them — were central to whatever Jesus wished to convey about the kingdom of God.

So we seem on safe grounds in saying that the kingdom or reign of God reflects the main concern of the historical Jesus, as most historical Jesus scholars agree, even if they disagree quite sharply about what exactly this might imply.^[141] As Markus Bockmuehl puts it, “The favourite and important subject of Jesus’ teaching is clearly the Kingdom of God.”^[142]

What exactly the historical Jesus may have had in mind when he spoke of the kingdom is notoriously difficult to determine definitively not just because close antecedents to this idea are not easy to identify, even if it clearly draws upon concepts common in the Hebrew Bible and later Jewish literature,^[143] but also because the form of teaching used by Jesus to talk about the kingdom of God, the parable,^[144] is both terse and figurative — most parables appear to be extended metaphors or similes^[145]— and, as a result their meaning is, to an extent, open and polyvalent (though clearly not arbitrary).^[146] They cannot be crudely reduced to a single referent or point;^[147] the symbol of the kingdom in the parables of Jesus is allusive, tensive and experiential.^[148] But the meaning of the kingdom in the teaching of Jesus has also been hampered by the preoccupations of scholarship. Discussion of the theme of the kingdom in the study of the historical Jesus is often effectively constrained by questions of chronology that are rather narrowly conceived. Did he believe its arrival was imminent?^[149] Or that it was already present?^[150] Or both?^[151] Or are such temporal judgements predicated on culturally inappropriate assumptions about the nature of time and language?^[152] This is not the place to rehearse such debates which have preoccupied scholars of the historical Jesus since the inception of the so-called “Quest”^[153] — although I would say that both tendencies can be found throughout the data, and so it seems unreasonable to deny that one or other did not go back in some form to the figure of Jesus, as has recently been the fashion.^[154] Rather I am here more interested in the question of the character of the reign of God envisioned by Jesus (although I am aware that this is deeply entwined with the question of eschatology).^[155] That is, I would like to make some observations about what the historical Jesus is likely to have understood by the rule of God and the nature of human response to it, and in particular, a number of motifs that may legitimately and usefully be described as anarchist — although what follows is not a comprehensive analysis of the possibilities but an indicative treatment of the subject.

The kingdom of God is characterised by the active identification and critique of coercive relations of power, and the enactment of new, egalitarian modes of social life

This is seen, perhaps most acutely, in the recurrent, general motif of reversal which is typical of traditions associated with Jesus. The theme of reversal is more than a rhetorical characteristic of his teaching. As the leading scholar of New Testament ethics, Richard Hays, has noted:

The theme of reversal seems to have been pervasive in his thought […] This reversal motif is built into the deep structure of Jesus’ message, present in all layers of the tradition […] a foundational element of Jesus’ teaching.^[156]

The socio-political nature of much of this reversal^[157] is obvious to a modern reader without knowledge of the specific political, religious, and cultural context of first-century Palestine, although such knowledge is necessary for a fuller exploration of its implications.^[158] In Jesus’ vision, the kingdom belonged to the poor, not the rich;^[159] to the hungry, not those who were full;^[160] to the tax-collectors and prostitutes, not chief priests and the aristocrats;^[161] to children, not adults;^[162] to sinners, not the righteous.^[163] Its values were exemplified by foreigners,^[164] beggars,^[165] and impoverished widows, not the religiously, politically and economically powerful.^[166] We find this theme in aphorisms,^[167] commandments,^[168] and sayings^[169] ascribed to the historical Jesus, but, perhaps above all, in the parables. For example, in the Parable of the Wedding Feast,^[170] the eventual guests at the banquet are those that one would least expect to be there — “the poor, the crippled, the blind and lame.”^[171] In the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, it is the beggar Lazarus who “longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table”, and who goes to be with Abraham and the angels, whilst the rich man who has “dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day” is in Hades.^[172] In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, the manner in which someone has treated the “least” in society, those who are hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned, sick, or foreign, provides the criterion by which their life is ultimately judged.^[173] In the Parable of the Rich Fool, the selfish accumulation of wealth during his life leaves the rich man impoverished when he dies.^[174] But perhaps the most compelling evidence of socio-political reversal in traditions associated with Jesus is the recurrent portrayal of his own praxis, as someone who lived with the outcasts and the socially marginal,^[175] and in an almost constant state of conflict with those who were not.^[176] The theme of reversal functions not just to expose a number of inequitable relationships, but also to make visible and valorise the powerless within them, and their needs and their desires.

In addition to the theme of reversal, we can see a significant cluster of traditions in which exploitation, whether economic,^[177] legal,^[178] theocratic,^[179] military,^[180] or medical,^[181] is exposed and condemned, and responses advocated or made available that affirm both the agency of the oppressed and their capacity to resist such oppression. An example of this is seen, for example, in the tradition of how one should respond to being pressed into service by the occupying forces in Judea to carry their equipment.^[182] The command that the victim carry it further than was demanded, if acted upon, would have resulted in striking and unexpected behaviour that could function not just to restore the power of agency to the victim but also to non-violently undermine the assumption, on the part of the soldier, that he, and the colonial regime which he represented, had ultimate authority — a response that could be seen to enact the command to love enemies,^[183] an idea particularly associated with Jesus in our sources.^[184] The concern to restore agency to those deprived of it can also be seen, though in a rather different way, in the stories in which individuals gain healing from Jesus by actively demanding it from him or even seizing it for themselves — tactics which he seems not just to have tolerated but to have encouraged.^[185]

New models of social relationships are enacted that present alternative, largely egalitarian ways of living. For example, there are a number of traditions associated with the historical Jesus that contain sharp criticisms of familial relationships and obligations,^[186] and whilst it would be wrong to see these as part of a programmatic attack on patriarchy (significant numbers of women were drawn to the movement, but there is no evidence of a “critical feminist impulse” in traditions about Jesus),^[187] the traditional form of the family is eclipsed and a much more inclusive, fictive family, where membership is not conditional on ties of marriage and blood, but on shared purpose, is advocated and comes into being amongst Jesus’ followers.^[188] Social relations and obligations are no longer structured according to reciprocity, whether symmetrical or asymmetrical, which requires someone to have the means to “repay”^[189] but instead an ethos of generosity is expected, where debts are forgiven and those with resources are told to be free with them and not to keep account.^[190]

Traditions of Jesus’ teaching and praxis also regularly involve a distinctive approach to dining, something that was central to the literal and symbolic maintenance of inequitable relationships of power in antiquity, and also, in the case of first-century Palestine, created significant divisions.^[191] He advocated and demonstrated what John Dominic Crossan calls “open commensality”,^[192] that is “eating together without using table as a miniature map of society’s vertical discriminations and lateral separations.”^[193] This was a significant motif in Jesus’ practice,^[194] so much so that he was mocked as “a glutton and a drunkard”^[195] and someone who ate with “tax collectors and sinners”.^[196] But it is also present in the teaching traditions ascribed to Jesus,^[197] particularly the parable traditions,^[198] as well as miracle traditions,^[199] and is even in his apocalyptic vision of the future kingdom: “I tell you, many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven”.^[200] — a tradition that indicates that the aspirations and concerns of the kingdom envisaged by the historical Jesus were ultimately universal^[201] and could even be said to come close to a form of cosmopolitanism,^[202] a concept central to anarchism.^[203]

The historical Jesus also appears to have modelled a form of social interaction that ignored expectations of deference,^[204] probably rooted in the expectation that the behaviour of those in the kingdom should reflect the character of God, and God was for Jesus, and other Jews of the time, “no respecter of persons”.^[205] This was something both egalitarian in itself but also revealed and challenged the structures and presumptions of power symbolised by such deference; to those who were beneficiaries of stratification and hierarchy, it presented a disruptive rhetoric of impoliteness.^[206]

However, whilst there are sufficient clusters of data to make it plausible to see the historical Jesus as a figure known for confronting coercive and hierarchical relationships, and advocating alternative models of social life, there are aspects of his teaching and actions that do not easily fit with this picture, are equally prominent in our sources, and need to be addressed.

First, it is quite clear that although the figure of Jesus is characteristically associated with the powerless, he enjoyed the support of those who facilitated and benefited from political and economic exploitation, supported by the largess of the rich and socialising with the agents of imperial rule, such as tax-collectors and the military. This is something sufficiently prominent in our sources that it cannot be dismissed as redactional, an invention of Christians who were comfortable within the empire and wished to legitimate their experience.^[207] Such a picture is difficult to reconcile with a figure engaged in a thoroughgoing and confrontational response to non-egalitarian forms of social life. Was he, perhaps, so inclusive that this somehow transcended, or less positively, undermined the political vision we have observed? This seems unlikely. As Bockmuehl quite rightly notes, Jesus was not an inclusive figure: “Jesus of Nazareth includes a remarkably wide diversity of the marginalized, yet he also marginalizes an uncomfortably diverse range of the religiously or socio-economically included.”^[208] It is probably best to explain this apparent tension by reference to the theme of repentance, something regularly associated with the notion of the kingdom of God. Repentance was not concerned with contrition but rather the idea that individuals should return to God^[209] and do what God expects of those who wish to be righteous.^[210] In our sources those responding to the call of Jesus, whoever they are, are expected to imitate Jesus’ praxis, including such things as open commensality, and there is also evidence, from the story of Zaccheus the tax collector, but also in the story of the unnamed rich ruler, that the rich were also expected to make restitution and return what they had extracted by exploitation.^[211]

Second, it should be noted that the historical Jesus does not appear straightforwardly or consistently anti-authoritarian or anti-hierarchical. It would be unfair to ignore the considerable range of data where Jesus is presented as either claiming an authoritative or pivotal role,^[212] or where it is implied,^[213] and this observation stands regardless of other questions about Jesus’ self-estimation and “Christology” which have attracted so much attention because of their obvious theological consequences.^[214] Of course, anarchists have not been averse to leaders, albeit often for tactical reasons, one thinks of the prominence of Nestor Makhno, Errico Malatesta, or Emma Goldman, but this claim appears to be of a rather different kind. The historical Jesus initiated a hierarchical organisation through the appointment of twelve disciples, something which he did not envisage as temporary,^[215] and his own authority was predicated upon coercion through the pronouncement of future judgement upon those who rejected it.^[216] It is usually assumed that where leadership exists within anarchism, it is “a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination”.^[217] Evidently the type of leadership modelled and advocated by the historical Jesus was somewhat different.

In response to this it could be said that the nature of the leadership shown by Jesus and expected of the Twelve was, somewhat paradoxically, an inversion of hierarchical expectations, epitomized in the repeated motif that leaders must be servants, and the deliberate contrast of the model of power within the community with that which was characteristic of the empire, indeed, on which the empire was built and sustained, to the detriment of the latter.^[218] And so, in Mark, we read:

So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognise as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.” (Mark 10.42–44)^[219]

It could also be said — though this is perhaps a little less evident — that in choosing twelve disciples the historical Jesus was using a symbol of a pre-monarchical Israel, when it existed as a confederation of tribes, to represent his vision of the kingdom, something that Ched Myers has said “bears some resemblance to ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ vision in modernity”;^[220] recalling a time before the people of Israel decided to be like other nations and have a king, rejecting God’s direct rule.^[221]

The activities of healing and teaching that are so characteristic of the representation of Jesus in our sources also have little to do with authoritarian forms of kingly, messianic leadership that were dominant at the time.^[222] Indeed, given that the historical Jesus seems to have expected those around him to be empowered to carry out similar actions,^[223] it might not be too fanciful to agree with Gerd Theissen that the historical Jesus may well have envisaged his followers collectively taking on messianic tasks, enacting a kind of group messiahship. If this is the case, it would have meant that the historical Jesus effectively played down his own significance and so could be seen as advocating a kind of distributed, non-authoritarian form of leadership.^[224]

Similarly, the traditions about his death are consistent in presenting a figure who remained consistent in not using or endorsing violence against enemies and for whom physical violence by humans against humans was anathema.^[225] It was not a form of leadership in which authority was equated with a superior sense of personal value. Indeed, it appears to have been the opposite.

The kingdom of God is prefigurative

As we have noted, the kingdom motif is not just associated with judgement but also with new forms of social life, and these are not just advocated but practised. It can therefore be usefully understood as prefigurative and, more specifically, prefigurative in a way that resembles anarchist ethics. In most forms of anarchist ethics, the means are consistent with the desired ends, that is “the outcomes are prefigured by the methods”.^[226] The practice of anarchists is assumed to have immediate consequences and to resemble the outcome that is desired. As James Guillaume, a colleague of Bakunin, said, in his famous critique of statist socialists, “How could one want an egalitarian and free society to issue from authoritarian organisation? It is impossible.”^[227]

The ethics of Jesus could be seen as analogous to this and in many ways this helps makes sense of the notion that the kingdom is already present, and being enacted, even if in an initially insignificant way, in a manner that resembles and is related to its final form. One thinks, for example, of the Parable of the Mustard Seed^[228] or the practice of open commensality we have touched upon.

Indeed, I do not think it is pushing things too far to speak of the prefigurative ethics of the kingdom as necessitating a form of direct action, something characteristic of anarchism and something that involves “acting as if the state’s representatives have no more rights to impose their views of the rights or the wrongs of the situation than anybody else.”^[229] A number of the activities of Jesus seem to have this characteristic, whether it is the tradition of his action in the Temple,^[230] or his response to the question about the payment of taxes to Caesar,^[231] or his behaviour at his trial,^[232] in all of which he appears to show no concern for the consequences of his actions. Indeed, just as direct action is sometimes “playful and carnivalesque”,^[233] so often are the forms of behaviour ascribed to Jesus or advocated by him.^[234] As Peter Marshall rightly observes, Jesus consistently “held political authority up to derision”,^[235] demystifying and mocking the power it claimed.

The vision of the kingdom is not utopian but reflexive, undetermined, and self-creative

It is surprisingly difficult to describe, with any detail, the forms of social life expected within the new reality enacted and proposed by the historical Jesus. Although, as we have noted, it can be characterised by certain practices, such as open commensality, there is much that is not spelt out. There certainly is no obvious utopian blueprint, and despite the arguments of Mary Ann Beavis, it is not useful to characterise the vision of the kingdom held by the historical Jesus as utopian.^[236] As we have noted, the main mode of teaching employed by Jesus, the parable, is figurative and by its nature allusive, resisting simple explanation and allowing a range of indeterminate, experiential responses. Parables do not communicate a specific plan. Indeed, it seems more helpful to think of Jesus as anti-utopian, a quality that resonates with anarchist thinking even if anarchists are popularly assumed to be driven by utopian visions. Although utopias can have their uses — they can inspire, encourage, and provide a pleasurable escape^[237] — they can also be coercive and that is why, on the whole, they have been resisted by anarchists. Utopianism forces others to live in a certain way, and a utopia envisaged as a single, totalising endpoint will necessitate manipulation to fit a predetermined plan. As Marie Louise Berneri demonstrated in her analysis of utopian thought from Plato to Huxley, they are inherently authoritarian.^[238] For anarchists, the details of such social order need to be determined by those that are dominated. Their ethics are:

Reflexive and self-creative, as they do not assess practices against a universally prescribed end-point, as some utopian theorists have done, but through a process of immanent critique.^[239]

Some might feel uneasy about this alleged similarity between the historical Jesus and anarchism because it is often assumed that the historical Jesus had a clear idea of his intentions and understanding of the implications of the kingdom of God from the outset. However, such thinking is an imposition upon the records of subsequent doctrinal assumptions. Our sources indicate a figure open to reflection and revision in the light of events and encounter with others. An example of this is the story of the Syrophoenician woman in which a gentile argues a reluctant Jesus into healing her daughter.^[240] The incidents at Nazareth^[241] and Caesarea Philippi,^[242] likewise seem to be moments that were critical in the formation of his self-understanding.^[243] The possibility that the historical Jesus’ own life was one characterised by reflexivity and a mutable understanding of his mission, should not come as a surprise even if it may be surprising to some. As Henry Cadbury observed many decades ago:

Probably much that is commonly said about the general purpose of Jesus’ life and the specific place in that purpose of detailed incidents is modern superimposition upon a nearly patternless life and upon nearly patternless records of it.^[244]

The pedagogy of the kingdom is prefigurative and non-coercive

There are also significant parallels between the distinctive pedagogy associated with the kingdom and the non-coercive, prefigurative pedagogy of anarchism. Although the latter is, as Judith Suissa has argued, surprisingly under-theorised,^[245] pedagogy has been something of considerable significance in anarchism. This is largely, as Justin Mueller has suggested, because unlike other political philosophies aimed at social transformation, “education has never been simply the means to achieve a new social order”,^[246] but rather part of the prefigurative practice that is central to all forms of anarchism, a prefigurative practice characterised by non-coercion, and the inculcation of solidarity and fellow feeling, rather than competition and domination, the encouragement of active empathy and identification with others.^[247] Some of Jesus’ teaching does seem to have taken the form of commands, such as the command to love enemies^[248] or the prohibition on divorce,^[249] but by far the largest quantity of his teaching comes in the form of parables, which are figurative and affective, a form that does not compel the hearer to arrive at a narrowly predetermined understanding of what is being conveyed. Many parables could also be said to function in some way to directly encourage empathy and identification with others,^[250] and most could be said to contribute to this indirectly by, amongst other things, intensifying the significance placed upon the praxis of the kingdom.

However, before we conclude our discussion it is important to note that some grounds on which Jesus is often considered an anarchist should not be part of any attempt to answer the question, despite their popularity. For example, some might be surprised that there has been no mention of Jesus’ death in the preceding analysis. As Christoyannopoulos has noted:

For most Christian Anarchists, Jesus is the saviour precisely because he accepted the cross — that is the revolution. He is the messiah because he consistently responds to injustice with unwavering love, forgiveness and non-resistance. He does not seek to lead yet another revolutionary government, but instead points to the true kingdom beyond the state. Therefore, the crucifixion is indeed the glorious climax of Jesus’ messianic ministry.^[251]

For many, there is something “inevitable” about this conclusion to the life of Jesus, it is “the concrete consequence” of his teaching and practice.^[252] Christian anarchists and others who believe that Jesus deserves the label of anarchist, are not so unusual in seeing Jesus’ death as a necessary consequence of his teaching. In modern historical-Jesus scholarship, as we have mentioned, one of the criteria used to determine which traditions are likely to go back to the historical Jesus is the criterion of “crucifiability”^[253] — that is, if a tradition can explain Jesus’ execution then it is judged likely to be “authentic”. However, given the ubiquity of crucifixion in the empire, and the casual manner in which it could be imposed on the poor and inconsequential, it is likely that the Roman authorities did not give the killing of Jesus much thought, and he need not have done anything much, in their eyes, for them to put him to death. For example, as A. E. Harvey plausibly suggested:

Jesus could have been one of those innocent victims who are picked up by police action at a time when peace-keeping has become difficult and the forces of law and order are over-stretched, and then arbitrarily put to death.^[254]

The titulus,^[255] placed on the cross by the Romans, which seems to indicate that Jesus was killed because of a kingly claim of some kind, might well be no more than evidence that, from the perspective of the Romans, they were executing a deluded madman who talked of invisible kingdoms — something that would be in keeping of what we know about their treatment of others they believed to fall into this category.^[256]

Conclusion

To return to our question: was the historical Jesus an anarchist? Any answer depends upon the definition of “anarchist” used and how much room such a definition has for anarchism to be judged to exist outside of a formal political movement composed of self-declared anarchists. It would, however, be an inadequate definition that limited itself solely to the likes of Proudhon, and one that would not be true to their own understanding of the perennial nature of the doctrine they espoused. Instead, the suggestion of Graeber, that definitions of anarchism should also be inclusive of those who display anarchist attitudes and practices, as well as those who endorse a specific ideological position, has far more merit.

However, if we decide that Jesus might well meet the rather broader definition of “anarchist” of the kind offered by Graeber, we will need to accept some things that, at least to many contemporary anarchists, appear incompatible with anarchism. For example, as Kathleen Corley has noted, Jesus does not appear to have criticised patriarchy,^[257] and our sources are silent about his thoughts on slavery, something ubiquitous in the empire. Even his proclamation of the kingdom of God could be seen to replicate elements of the imperialism that appears anathema to it.^[258] But such problems should not preclude us from using the label “anarchist” for Jesus. As Barclay has observed in his study of ethnographic accounts of stateless and governmentless societies, we cannot expect contemporary anarchists to necessarily approve of such societies, which though highly decentralised, can, for example, be highly conformist, patriarchal, gerontocracies,^[259] yet the use of the term anarchist is clearly legitimate for them. So, our use of the term “anarchist” outside of the modern context, where individuals and movements may display characteristics that are similarly unappealing to contemporary anarchists, has to be generous.

There is enough in what we can know about the historical Jesus, of the impressions of the man and his vision that have left their mark on our sources, to reveal someone not just intensely anti-authoritarian but also concerned with a prefigurative, non-coercive reality which would both confront existing inequity and be transformative of the lives of those oppressed by it. It may be pushing the evidence too far to say that Jesus of Nazareth was “a major political thinker”,^[260] but it is no surprise, to return to the quote with which we began, that Alexander Berkman believed Jesus to be an anarchist. He was right.^[261]