"Historical-critical investigations of the Gospels and of the historical Jesus have always assumed the centrality of the Gospels as written texts. Richard A. Horsley overturns that assumption, showing that the Jesus traditions were formed as popular traditions and transmitted through oral performance, not through the textual work of a scribal elite. In order to understand Jesus and the movement around him, then, we must attend to the dynamics of power, social memory, the interaction of "great" and "little traditions," and the moral economy of peasant society in Roman Judea and Galilee. In these groundbreaking chapters, Horsley provides fresh and accessible sketches of a new approach to history "from below," and offers a dramatic new picture of Jesus in context."--BOOK JACKET.