Politics, Conflict, and Movements in First-Century Palestine

by Richard A. Horsley

This volume brings together groundbreaking essays that laid the foundations of several of Horsley's later works. The initial aims of these essays were, first, to ferret out evidence from our sources, primarily from the histories of Josephus, evidence for the lives of ordinary people living in Judean and Galilean villages. A second purpose was to explore as precisely as possible the fundamental conflictual division between the Roman, Herodian, and high priestly rulers in Palestine and the Judean and Galilean villagers they ruled. A third purpose was to explore more particularly how the popular and scribal opposition to the rulers was manifested in a remarkable diversity of movements and their leaders. And the fourth purpose, entailed in the first two, was to wriggle out from under some of the controlling constructs of New Testament/biblical studies that had been hiding the considerable complexity of the historical context. This was necessary even to begin to discern more precisely the fundamental political--economic--religious conflict between the rulers and the villagers manifested in a diversity of social movements attested in the sources.

306 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 3, 2023

Reviews

[Jordan Everett]

Good research, and the author works hard to treat Josephus objectively and fairly. Particularly strong breakdowns of the priestly class and and the disparate groups that have been collectively designated as the Zealots. Would have liked to see more analysis of the scribes/Pharisees and the Sadduccees, along with how these different group dynamics worked specifically at the time of Christ (the crux of the book's focus was on the 60s70s).