Yagan the Outlaw

Social banditry in early colonial Australia and in the time of Jesus

The early Jewish historian Josephus (c. 37-100 CE) provides countless stories of bandits responding to the social and material upheavals in Palestine during the first century CE. In our forthcoming book Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict (2023), James Crossley and I suggest that for a non-elite Jew like Jesus, banditry was one obvious option for expressing…