Only the poor will be saved : a theology for the artisans of Elizabethan England

Abstract

Popular Christianity has always been influenced, above all, by the life of Jesus, as celebrated in popular festivals like Christmas and Easter.1 In its simplest sense, ‘Christianity’ is embodied in Jesus: the baby born in a stable; the simple carpenter; the uncompromising miracle worker who sprang from and spent his life among the labouring poor, insisted that his followers give away all they had, and who was crucified by the bishops and archbishops of Judaism with the permission of a vacillating imperial state official. Jesus, of course, comes in many forms in the Christian sources—from the illiterate peasant-artisan envisaged by a series of recent scholars of the historical Jesus, to the king of kings favoured by Constantine and succeeding religious establishments. But it has always been the life of Jesus, not the theology of Paul or the fine disputes of all the doctrinal acrobats who followed him, that captured the imagination of the millions of people Bob Scribner called ‘the simple folk’.2 Let me be clear that my concern here is not with what, in the light of Scripture and/or tradition or any combination of the two, can in fact be shown to be or to have been the case. My interest is in what the author of the text I am to discuss, Philip Jones, said and wrote was the case, whom he said it to, and in what historical context