SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
Artisan rural working-class Messiah
PAUL SIMON applauds a daring, if sketchy, work that bridges the divide between Marxists and people of faith
CLASS CONFLICT: Herodian massive building schemes at Sepphoris, above, and Tiberias caused widespread economic dislocations and displacements (ethnic cleansing?). Jesus, described as tekton/builder - not a carpenter - might have worked at Sepphoris which was only five kilometers from Nazareth
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
RON JACOBS welcomes the translation into English of an angry cry from the place they call the periphery
GUILLERMO THOMAS recommends a useful book aimed at informing activists with local examples of solidarity in action around the world
HENRY BELL is provoked by a book that looks toward, but does not fully explore the question of who gets to imagine the shapes of cities to come
Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict,
by James Crossley and Robert J Myles, Zer0 Books, £19.99
JESUS: A Life in Class Conflict provides an important refocusing and reprioritising of earlier Scriptural studies as seen through the lens of historical materialist analysis.
Although containing little original research, authors James Crossley and Robert J Myles have painstakingly examined many of the mainstream interpretations of the life, teachings and execution of Jesus.
They have found most to be wanting, if not serious distortions predicated upon the writers’ own contemporary class interests, including revered Biblical scholars such as EP Sanders.
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PHIL KATZ applauds the biography of a man of principle that is a vibrant excavation of the radical tradition itself
JAMES CROSSLEY charts how anti Jewish sentiment developed from ancient days and the dawn of Christianity to the Middle Ages, the birth of Protestantism and the sinister era of of the Nazis
RUTH AYLETT assesses the poetic impact of setting the story of the miners’ strike to the Stations of the Cross