The Nomadic Alternative – Page 123

Of the New Testament, the religious movement which became Christian-ity can only have risen from among the outcasts, stripped of all the trappings of advanced culture. And among these pariahs were the hunters, fishermen on the shore, small-time woodworkers and other general scavengers - people who knew their mothers but were often ignorant of their true fathers, loathed by the higher castes, and at the same time feared and grudgingly admired by them.

The time of Christ was a time of excessive authority and demanded an excessive solution. The message of the New Testament scours values more ancient than those of the Neolithic Revolution - therefore of greater universal significance. Those who sought renewal proposed a self-conscious return, not to the 'State of Nature', but to a state where human nature could fulfil its potential. And probably without intention they hearkened back to the archaic world of the hunting and gathering past. Christ rejected Tent or Tabernacle, carried nothing with him, and wandered through the land.