136 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
back to Taoism and the sixth century BCE, and, like Graham, con-
tains 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 pur-
chase when talking about the past. Patricia 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 medi-
eval Europe, most notably 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
practiced the art of not being governed for centuries.^109 And simi-
larly, fellow anthropologist Brian Morris has considered it an ap-
propriate designation for Lao Tzu.^110 We should not, therefore, 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 its utility
for our purposes. However, anarchists have not always seen capi-
talism and the state as the sole causes of inequalities of power and
creations of hierarchy,^112 and critiques of all forms of domina-
tion, 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 en-
gaged in the study of antiquity to characterise the economy of