You have permission to do nothing!

The psychology of lockdown: you have permission to read, relax, exercise and not worry about accomplishing anything.

Curious.

Amazon link (the cover is the Conversion on the Way to Damascus by Caravaggio)

I have just finished reading this astonishingly violent, immersive, visceral, sexual and situated account of Paul and the formation of the early Church. It wears its vast learning and research lightly. It's altogether brilliant. I was intrigued: wanted to discover more about the drivers and trajectory of the early church. Who better to consult than Michael White?

Amazon link

My briefest possible summary of his masterly summation/evaluation of the scholarship. Judea and Galilee were part of the territory administered by Herod the Great as a client-king under the Romans. According to Wikipedia: "Upon Herod's death, (4 BCE), the Romans divided his kingdom among three of his sons and his sister—Archelaus became ethnarch of Judea, Samaria, and Idumea, Herod Antipas became tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea, Philip became tetrarch of territories north and east of the Jordan...".

Archelaus proved incompetent and his provinces came under brutal and insensitive direct Roman rule. The result was a flourishing of Jewish messianic and apocalyptic movements. The Jesus movement was one such, rather apolitical and eschewing political violence, focused more on communal solidarity and egalitarianism as a precursor to the generally-held expectation of the imminent arrival of 'The Kingdom' and the overthrow of the Roman oppressors.

The Jesus movement added the belief that - following Jesus' crucifixion c. 30-33 CE - Jesus himself would lead the process in the Second Coming. The Resurrection (a concept already present in Jewish scripture and Graeco-Roman culture and myth) provided a guarantee, a kind of preview, of a generalised resurrection of the bodies of the faithful. Certainly without the inspirational 'visions' of the (bodily) resurrected Christ, the Jesus movement would simply have become one more failed Jewish cult.

Things did not end well, however, for Jewish apocalyptic expectations of imminent victory. The Jewish revolt of 66-73 CE was crushed by Vespasian and his son Titus. The defeat demolished ideological certainties. The Jesus movement outside of Judea (cf. Mark's Gospel) reframed the events as a delay, a clearing of the way prefiguring Jesus's forthcoming arrival; meanwhile the mainstream Jewish community reforming in Galilee initiated the Pharisee-driven rabbinical movement, laying the foundations for later Judaism.

The lines were soon drawn and the Jesus movement anathematised. Matthew's Gospel is a Jewish-Christian counter-polemic, a response to these intense pressures, written within the Jesus movement in Galilee at the time.

The Jesus movement persisted as a low-level Jewish sect but its message proved far more popular amongst gentile sympathisers. It had an appeal particularly to slaves, women and the lower orders - the first shall be last etc. As the social weight of the Jesus movement moved into the Gentile communities in Asia Minor, around the Adriatic and in Rome itself (Paul, Luke) the ideology of the Jesus movement decoupled from its previous deep Jewish, Old Testament roots becoming more abstract, more symbolic, more spiritual (John's Gospel). The community began to bureaucratise with rules for liturgy, leadership structure and an approved canon of sacralised texts.

The Jesus movement appropriated more of its surrounding Graeco-Roman culture, (esp. the Stoics) becoming pre-adapted to its subsequent role as social glue for the later Empire (out of scope for White's book).

Michael White presents an appealingly materialist understanding of the way ever-changing social conditions and pressures drive ideological creativity and innovation ... and then ruthlessly select for those which give meaning to the social tasks facing the sect's adherents.

It is a truth which should be universally acknowledged, especially today ...