156 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
of the New Testament in Greco-Roman Paganism (Peabody:
Hendrickson Publishers, 2002).
- For a useful survey of non-canonical sources of various kinds see
James H. Charlesworth and Craig A Evans, ‘Jesus in the Agrapha and
Apocryphal Gospels’, in Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations
of the State of Current Research, ed. by Bruce Chilton and Craig A.
Evans (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 479–534. - See, for example, the pagan critic Celsus in Origen, Contra
Celsum 1.28. - E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
(London: Victor Gallancz, 1963), p. 12. - For the inconsequential nature of Jesus’ life from the perspective
of the Romans see Justin J. Meggitt, ‘The Madness of King Jesus’,
Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 29 (2007), 379–413. - George Woodcock, Anarchism, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1986), p. 36. - Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Christian Anarchism: A
Political Commentary on the Gospel (Exeter: Imprint Academic,
2010), p. 19. - Few, if any, have paid attention to non-canonical sources despite
their significance in contemporary scholarship concerned with the
figure of the historical Jesus. For example, as Patterson rightly notes,
“anyone who writes today on the historical question of what Jesus
said or did must deal with the issue of the Gospel of Thomas” (Stephen
J. Patterson, ‘The Gospel of Thomas and Historical Jesus Research’,
in Coptica – Gnostica – Manichaica, ed. by Louis Painchaud and
Paul-Hubert Poirier [Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval,
2006], p. 663). - Christoyannopoulos, Christian Anarchism, pp. 15, 295.
- Tolstoy, for example, called him “the lover of authoritarian teach-
ing” and held him chiefly responsible for Christianity’s departure from
Jesus’ vision. See Leo Tolstoy, Church and State and Other Essays:
Including Money; Man and Woman: Their Respective Functions; The
Mother; A Second Supplement to the Kreutzer Sonata (Boston: B. R.
Tucker, 1891), p. 17.