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It was in 2007 when Ratzinger published his book on the historical Jesus, a not insignificant date. While there were those who criticized the book for its poor quality, this is only part of the story. In addition to a curious embrace by American evangelical scholars (see below), Ratzinger's book was enthusiastically received among a group of people close to John Milbank, the beating heart of the much-hyped world of Radical Orthodoxy now effectively centred at the University of Nottingham. This resulted in a 2008 conference and a 2010 publication, both of which lavished high praise on Ratzinger and his book.

It is important, of course, not to de-emphasize the roles of personal politics and scholarly rhetoric completely. For instance, it is no surprise that certain historical Jesus scholars are pro-Israeli in the sense that they will tow dominant media and party-political lines on issues relating to the state of Israel and the Palestinians, and perhaps unsurprisingly reflect such concerns and narratives in their work on the historical Jesus. But what I want to do here is look at the less predictable examples and how the seemingly contradictory figures end up buying into, or helping explain, dominant political discourses once their work enters the scholarly arena, with ultimate reference to the social world constructed around Jesus. One feature of Herman and Chomsky's approach to propaganda I want to develop here is the role of the individual as discussed briefly in the Introduction. Herman and Chomsky are both clear that individuals may hold different views from the dominant ideological positions but ultimately they will, intentionally or otherwise, buy into such trends. I want to push this tension to its extreme in this chapter by looking at the influential work of Bruce Malina and his personal politics, and how they work out (or not) in relation to Jesus and ‘the Land’ and how his scholarly output buys into dominant American media and party-political views on the Middle East, all of which run clean contrary to his political intentions.

Before the turn of the millennium, critical historical Jesus scholarship was certainly a chaotic world. There were liberal and conservative disagreements over whether Jesus was something like a Cynic philosopher, an eschatological prophet, a teacher of wisdom, a ‘liberal’ rabbi and so on. There were also accompanying disputes over sources: can we use something called ‘Q’? Can we even define ‘Q’? Should we use the Gospel of Thomas and certain other non-canonical Gospels? But in the midst of the chaos one thing seemed certain: John's Gospel was not to be used as a source for reconstructing the life and teaching of Jesus and it certainly was not the earliest Gospel. There were differing dissenting voices, such as J. A. T. Robinson and D. A. Carson, but these could be dismissed (rightly or wrongly) as being either too maverick or too evangelical for mainstream tastes. John, with its high Christology, lengthy discourses and disputes with the generalized ‘the Jews’, was deemed too different from the Synoptic tradition and anachronistic in ways that the Synoptic tradition was not.

Two 1996 publications illustrate this well. Maurice Casey's book, Is John's Gospel True?, may have provoked some hostility through its polemical tone but part of its design was simply to make clear what Johannine scholarship had long assumed, namely, that John's Gospel was of little use for reconstructing the life and teaching of Jesus.

Introduction: Redrawing the Battle-lines

More than any other group of scholars, the Jesus Seminar courted historical Jesus controversy in both academic and popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s. Liberal, sage-like and shocking to certain wings of Christianity this Jesus may have been, the Jesus Seminar still had Jesus at, and perhaps in, its heart and it was essentially a Christian project. While Jesus may have been deemed a ‘secular sage’, and while some critics may have seen this Jesus as a product of secularization, it remained tied in with Christianity. John Dominic Crossan, like other major fellows such as Marcus Borg, is a well-known Christian of a liberal stripe. Crossan openly sees his historical Jesus work as a critique of the present, even to the extent of performing ‘open-heart surgery on Christianity itself’. Robert Funk's rhetoric remained religious and Protestant of a very liberal variety, a Christianity shorn of its dogma and miraculous stories. He may have come to challenge the worlds of traditional Christianity and right-wing Christianity, but he would do so by bringing a new Reformation and a new gospel, not least by posting ‘Twenty-one Theses’ on his website, a very modern spin on Luther's famous ‘95 Theses’ on the door of the Wittenberg church.

For those who may still be in the dark, ‘biblioblogging’ is a popular phenomenon in the world of biblical scholarship. The term simply refers to the activities biblical scholars, ranging from interested amateurs through to famous professors, blogging on the Bible (known collectively as ‘bibliobloggers’) which took off in the previous decade. Biblioblogs now number, remarkably, in the hundreds. They also seem to be popular among biblical scholars, and not simply because people regularly encounter biblical scholars who read blogs. By August 26, 2008, Mark Goodacre's NT Blog received four million visits since 2 September, 2003. Biblioblogging is one of the most helpful ways of showing the connections between scholarship and contemporary cultural trends partly for the reason of a tendency towards explicitness on a range of topics. Through biblioblogging, the conventional constraints of academic publishing are considerably looser and it means bloggers can be overtly political and engage with a whole range of cultural and current events. Furthermore, it is intimately tied in with the tendencies of the mainstream media and it regularly mimics and replicates the very style of (for instance) newspapers, the online versions of which also typically have a number of blogs. At the same time, blogging is still part of the public persona of the scholar (and here I would contrast it with personal politics) and so it becomes an ideal collection of material for testing the role of ideology and cultural trends in contemporary scholarship.

One purpose of a book like this is to provide a context for future specific case studies on an aspect of Jesus and New Testament scholarship relating to neoliberalism and its cultural wings. We have certainly seen how issues surrounding neoliberalism have had a profound impact on historical Jesus studies over the past forty years. The whole industry has been swept along, like so much in contemporary culture, by neoliberal trends, from the intensification of marketing different Jesuses and Jesus the Great Man to a historical Jesus (or a historical Jesus who did not exist) being fought over in the so-called ‘culture wars’. All too often these Jesuses buy into dominant neoliberal trends and contribute to the masking of social realities. Even when some of the scholarship and thinking on Jesus and the Gospels thinks it is opposing dominant political and cultural trends, it can still manage to produce a context utterly complementary to the politics the scholar personally utterly opposes (see chapter 4). By way of analogy with the influence of dominant political trends on previous eras of New Testament studies, none of this ought to be a surprise, but as there remains a relative ignorance in mainstream historical Jesus studies of such historical analysis of its own intellectual history, then this point cannot be made too strongly.

Introduction

As we have just seen, one dangerous idea in historical Jesus studies is Jesus the Jew, or, rather, the ‘problem’ of Jesus being as Jewish as the Judaism constructed by scholarship, and how this is compensated in scholarship by what I would call a ‘Jewish…but not that Jewish’ Jesus. Many historical Jesus scholars will now emphasize how Jewish their Jesus is, tell us what constituted Jewish identity in the first century, before having their Jesus transcend this Jewish identity, or at least do something new and unparalleled either generally or on some specific (and often crucial) issue, typically involving the Torah and/or Temple.

This book is effectively a non-comprehensive cultural history of contemporary scholarship mostly relating in some way to the historical Jesus. In a previous book, Jesus in an Age of Terror (Equinox, 2008), which this present book complements, I argued for the importance of contemporary Anglo-American foreign policies and geopolitics concerning the Middle East to be seen as a significant driving force behind major cultural trends and the ways in which academic ideas have been framed, not least those which involve historical research into the Middle East in some form, such as New Testament and Christian origins scholarship. In this present book, I want to look at the related economic and cultural trends in which such geopolitics are embedded and which in some way influence almost everything we do, whether in academic roles or outside work in leisure time or, indeed, whatever and wherever.

Put simply, a major aim of this book is to show how some presentations of the historical Jesus, from learned academics to amateur bloggers, have been, over the past forty years, embedded in the context of neoliberalism. This inevitably means a dominant focus on North American-led scholarship because, as might be expected and as we will see throughout this book, this is where the power currently lies in scholarship and the past forty years has marked the shift away from the dominance of German scholarship.