152 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
we will need to accept some things that, at least to many con-
temporary anarchists, appear incompatible with anarchism. For
example, as Kathleen Corley has noted, Jesus does not appear to
have criticised patriarchy,^259 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 el-
ements of the imperialism that appears anathema to it.^260 But such
problems should not preclude us using the label “anarchist” for
Jesus. As Harold Barclay has observed in his study of ethnograph-
ic 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,^261 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 individu-
als 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-au-
thoritarian but also concerned with a prefigurative, non-coercive
reality which would both confront existing inequity and be trans-
formative 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”,^262 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.^263
Notes
- Alexander Berkman, Now and After: The ABC of Communist
Anarchism (New York: Vanguard Press, 1929), p. 61. - The term “anarchist” had been used before this date but was em-
ployed solely to refer to someone who sought to create disorder
rather than an advocate of a political ideology. It acquired the addi-
tional meaning following the publication of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
Qu’est-ce que la propriété? Ou recherches sur le principe du droit et
du gouvernment (Paris: Librairie de Prévot, 1840).