Not Peace but a Sword: The Case Against Early Christian Pacifism

It has become a near-universal assumption that Jesus was a courageous champion of Pacifism and non-violent resistance. But for many years, a few maverick scholars have made the case for Jesus having been an armed insurrectionist. This version of Jesus is the "black sheep" of gospel studies, unthinkable equally to conservative and liberal Christian scholars, who want the historical Jesus to have been a peace-loving precursor to Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A radical, even violent, Jesus is not the "personal savior" they feel comfortable following! But certain stubborn bits of evidence in the gospels continue to haunt them. Dare we set aside our sentimental views of Jesus to consider the alternative? In Not Peace but a Sword, New Testament scholar Robert M. Price carries this "Jesus the Zealot" hypothesis significantly further and asks the intellectually honest reader to take a fresh and fearless look at the surprising case for a militant Jesus.