This chapter was an occasion for me to reflect on Chartism and unjust death. Crossley notes for the Chartist interpretation of Jesus:

Jesus’s death was regularly understood as an example of the unjust end that always awaits the benevolent reformer, though this Jesus did not always passively accept his fate.

From our point of view, Jesus didn’t deserve to die, like Socrates didn’t either. We live in a more enlightened age. But that enlightenment was built on the corpses of those martyrs that opened our eyes to the corruptions of the system.

And so, we didn’t see the unjust nature of the traditional definition of marriage until we saw it do violence to LGBTQ+ rights. And for Socrates, this was the important point. Socrates’ last words to Crito was to make a sacrifice to Asclepius to give thanks for the poison for the curative salve it would be opening people’s eyes to the unjust nature of their society. And it worked. The injustice of Socrates’ death opened our eyes to what was wrong with that society, and we don’t execute people for being a gadfly/nuisance anymore. Plato thus paints the just martyr (his impaled just man in the Republic) as the philosophical ethical ideal.

It is the opening of eyes that is key in the bible tradition. Adam and Eve had their eyes opened to their nakedness, just as Paul later had his eyes opened. Perhaps the climax of the gospels is not the crucifixion/resurrection, but the Roman soldier’s eyes being opened (truly this was God’s son / an innocent man).

We come to see revolutionary individuals, not as they were seen at the time as evil, but from the distance that allows to appear the greatness they really were – seeing the forest despite the trees. Crossley comments:

Paine and Evans, with their ideas about religion and the Bible, were two of the more influential figures on lower order and working-class radicalism of the nineteenth century. And, of course, the politically radical Jesuses did not end there or with their ongoing receptions, and examples from many more interpreters could be given. But to get a general sense of the wider diffusion, influence, and popularity of politically radical and potentially violent “human” Jesus tropes influenced by Paine, Evans, and others, we can turn to another figure of the Chartist past whose exemplary life was merged with Jesus’s: the priest of the 1381 English uprising, John Ball. The uprising had at this point been largely vilified for four hundred years, but by the end of the eighteenth century it was starting to be sympathetically understood not just as an expression of justified concerns but as an English expression of revolution and social change along the lines of Jacobin idealism and radicalism in 1790s London… [W]e can still see a coherent outline of a popular English historical Jesus emerging in the first half of the nineteenth century. For all the idiosyncrasies of given writers, we see repeated traits associated with the historical Jesus: a virtuous, egalitarian, anticlerical, revolutionary, Jewish, antislavery, class warrior and martyr with an ambiguous attitude toward violence and who was unjustly killed because of competing class interests.

Bibliography

Crossley, James. Chartism and the Forgotten Quests in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (p. 314-344). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition (2024).