138 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
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 the ideology and values of the anar-
chist. 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 or-
dinary 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 extrane-
ous 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.^127So the question of whether the historical Jesus was an anarchist is
one that can be asked and one to which we can expect a meaning-
ful answer of some kind. Let us now sketch a response.
4. 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 rath-
er than detailed exegesis of specific traditions. Even within these
constraints there is much that could be said but for the purpos-
es of this essay I would like to focus 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 but it should be noted,
from the outset, that the Greek term basileia, which is translated
into English as “kingdom”, can be understood as having a territo-
rial or geographical meaning but 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