Politics, Conflict, and Movements in First-Century Palestine ed. by Richard A. Horsley and K. C. Hanson (review)

Reviewed by: Politics, Conflict, and Movements in First-Century Palestine ed. by Richard A. Horsley and K. C. Hanson Steve Mason Politics, Conflict, and Movements in First-Century Palestine. Edited by Richard A. Horsley and K. C. Hanson. (Eugene: Cascade Books. 2023. Pp. 304. 35. ISBN 978-1-666-73070-8. ) We are all indebted to Wipf and Stock, which hosts the Cascade imprint, for affordable reprints of classic studies. The present volume is an example. It comprises nine articles by the eminent New Testament scholar Richard Horsley. Appearing from 1979 to 1986, these laid the groundwork for a dozen influential books. Readers familiar with the books' themes—the common folk of Judea and Galilee pitted against Roman power and its local enablers, seeking resources for resistance in the "little tradition" of Israelite prophets and popular kings, which yielded first-century "bandits, " messiahs, prophets, and revolutionaries—will find much preparatory work here. The first chapter, "High Priests and the Politics of Roman Palestine" (1–29), seeks to confirm who the local villains were. Rejecting claims that Herodian royals and hereditary priests had complicated roles as intermediaries between people and ruling power, Horsley views them as an elite bloc that maintained "a consistently cooperative relationship with the Roman government" (8). Preoccupied with protecting wealth and power (6), they were insensitive to—and even exacerbated—the people's suffering. Against this backdrop, the remaining chapters take up what Horsley sees as peasant- and scribe-based resistance movements, opposing the establishment: social "bandits" (31–81), popular king-messiahs (83–109), prophets (111–63), and hands-on revolutionaries and assassins (165–234). Indices to ancient texts and modern authors add to the value of the collection. Because all nine essays remain available via their journals, and their contents are too diverse to engage here, I devote the rest of this review to what is new here: the 29-page introduction (ix–xxxvii). It elucidates what the essays have in common, justifies their reprinting as a group, and situates them amidst the scholarship of ca. 1980. This last aspect alone is worth the price of the book, since the fields have changed so much. Many readers will also enjoy the autobiographical peak behind the curtain, which throws light on the motivations of this influential scholar. Horsley describes New Testament studies in a way that those of us who were then beginning graduate studies will recognize. Although fancy literary and social-scientific methods were making inroads, its interests remained overwhelmingly theological and exegetical, grounded in word studies and emphasizing the Greek background of the texts. Biblical and Jewish backgrounds were invoked, too, though the former mainly for word-and-concept studies via the LXX; the latter limited to dodgy ideological constructs: apocalypticism, pan-messianism, and an abstract "religion of Judaism" anchored in Torah study. Horsley describes his gradual departure from these prevailing currents as he became committed to a "history from below. " His early involvement in civil rights actions and historical and social-scientific study outside New Testament courses were among the stimuli. He found Eric Hobsbawm's research on social banditry and rebellion "particularly suggestive End Page 403 for Josephus' many accounts of brigands" (xvii). Finally, Horsley's time in Tübingen afforded an opportunity to travel in Europe and experience village culture, which gave him a clearer sense of the real-life struggles ignored by elites—and the perennial conflict between rulers and ruled. So deeply was Horsley convinced of this "fundamental conflictual division" (ix) that, when he now reflects on his four motives in writing these articles, he makes this a presupposition. He sought, namely: to "ferret out evidence" of this basic conflict, especially of "collective actions of resistance and revolt by ordinary people against their Roman and Jerusalem rulers"; to explore the nature of the division between rulers and villagers; to distinguish the diverse forms of popular and scribal opposition; and to see how this might help scholars "wiggle out from" the prevailing structures of New Testament studies (ix–x). It would be easy, but otiose, to run through the developments in research since the 1980s—on Roman governance, ancient banditry, Judea among the provinces, interpreting Josephus, archaeological and numismatic evidence—that. . .