Was the historical Jesus an anarchist?^127as they have been since the Enlightenment, 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 an-
tiquity 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 thor-
oughgoing 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 this 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 his-
torical Jesus, how should we go about determining whether it is
reasonable to label him an anarchist or not? The current litera-
ture 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 interpre-
tation of Jesus through a more critical, ostensibly historical ap-
proach 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 con-
cerned 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 her-
meneutically naive approaches to Biblical texts,^31 as the analysis of
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