Halvor Moxnes, familiar to students of the New Testament from his social-scientific engagements with early Christian texts and history, has now provided a distinctive and provocative offering to historical Jesus research. In Putting Jesus in His Place, Moxnes makes a case for place as essential to questions of identity and meaning in general and with respect to Jesus in particular. He wishes to supplement, if not supplant, eschatology as the central interest of historical Jesus research by instead offering ‘place’, broadly conceived, as a fruitful and corrective alternative. In doing so, Moxnes situates his work in continuity with the Third Quest's interest in Galilee as the context of Jesus's activities, but it is clear that historic Galilee itself does not exhaust his interest in place but is rather the broader context for several more particular concerns. No doubt, the most distinctive aspect of the present study will be Moxnes's appeal to ‘queer theory’ as a critical and heuristic resource for understanding the manner in which Jesus destabilised contemporary norms. While the author is clear that his appeal to queer theory is not a claim regarding the sexual orientation of Jesus or his followers, this aspect of his study is sure to attract interest.

Moxnes begins with a three-chapter argument (chapters 2-4) regarding the relationship of Jesus to household as the most central institution of ancient Galilee. First, he offers a familiar account of the basic contours of household and family life in first-century Palestine, especially by drawing evident contrasts with the nuclear family of modern Western societies. This account then provides the background for an analysis of the traditions (chapter 3) in which disciples are summoned to leave place and follow Jesus, especially as those traditions are found in Q and Thomas (e.g. Q 9:57–8 par. Gos. Thom. 86; 9:59–60; 12:51–3 par. Gos. Thom. 16; 14:26–7; 17:33) and Mark (e.g. 1:16–20; 3:31–5; 10:26–31), though ‘before they were reinterpreted within Mark's narrative structure’ (p. 70). It is argued that these traditions reflect a dislocation of followers from the secure context of the household into a liminal identity, a call to follow, but to an unknown or undefined place. Moxnes maintains that this amounts to a leaving of ‘male space’, a subverting of masculine identity by means of dislocation from the function of paterfamilias.

Moxnes then proceeds to substantiate this claim by an appeal to the eunuch tradition of Matt 19:12 (chapter 4). Casting doubt on the standard interpretation in which ‘some have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’ is a figure for elective celibacy, he argues instead that Jesus may well have intended the saying quite literally. Moxnes suggests that, given the gender ambiguity of eunuchs in the ancient world, the eunuch tradition represents a ‘queering’ of Jesus's male followers into ‘a liminal position where there was no possibility of integration into the order of masculinity’ (p. 89).

In his fifth chapter, ‘Entering Queer Space’, Moxnes sketches the broader symbolic world of the Jesus movement. He finds continuity between the eunuch tradition and the traditions in which children (Matt 19:14 par. Gos. Thom. 22), barren women (Luke 23:29 par. Gos. Thom. 79) and angels (Mark 12:25 par.) are paradigmatic of kingdom membership. In various ways these images represent a ‘queer space’ in which the presexual (children), the asexual (angels) and the non-ideal (barren women) join the ‘eunuch’ in the symbolic world of the kingdom. Although Moxnes does not claim that this symbolic world was mirrored specifically in the social realities of the Jesus movement, the movement was a kind of ‘no-man's land’ in that it was not dominated by a patriarchal masculinity. ‘As ideology, a kingdom of eunuchs, barren women, and children clearly presents a queer image, a break with the social model of the ideal household’ (pp. 106–7).

In chapters 6–8 the author turns his attention more specifically to Jesus's use of kingdom language to create an ‘imagined space’ in which the kingdom is described especially in terms of household, not as a separate place per se but as a transformation of mundane space. Here again Moxnes finds a subversion of patriarchy as ‘Jesus portrays fathers and householders who do not conform to socially honored masculine roles’ (p. 123). Nevertheless, the kingdom of which Jesus speaks is also in conflict with the external world, particularly with respect to the demonic as a manifestation of the conflict between Jesus and the Galilean political structures (chapter 7). The book concludes with a synthetic chapter in which the kingdom of God is shown in fact to be the ‘household of God’ as an alternative to the regnant social and political structures.

There are many interesting moments in this book. Moxnes's choice of ‘place’ over ‘time’ is itself a promising development. Likewise, Moxnes's construal of Jesus's kingdom language as creating an ‘imagined space’ is genuinely helpful (cf. N. Perrin's ‘tensive symbol’?). Above all, this study challenges the reader to consider just how radical Jesus's social vision may have been. Nevertheless, I have several misgivings with the primary argument and will here mention briefly a few of the more significant.

It is hard to avoid the impression that by discounting the eschatological altogether, the author has made a decision which both effectively sifts the relevant Jesus traditions and then circumscribes how the remainder might be understood. The complaint here is not that Moxnes appeals to evidence selectively – a matter of practical necessity; rather it is that so little acknowledgement is given to evidence that is potentially disconfirming of the primary contour of his arguments. Similarly, it is surprising that Moxnes does not explore analogous movements in which ‘discipleship’ or fictive kinship or itinerancy were characteristic. It would seem that certain of the author's claims could be tested by comparing the rhetoric and practices of the Jesus movement to broadly analogous movements. Furthermore, there is no concerted attempt to see if the author's construal of the Jesus movement itself is actually borne out in any of the available evidence.

In the end, it is probable, if regrettable, that responses to this book will have less to do with the author's argument than with readers' fundamental sympathy or antipathy towards a project that invokes ‘queer theory’ to understand the historical Jesus. That being said, it is not clear to this reader that the author's appeal to ‘queer theory’ is altogether central to the argument, that, in fact, it is not rather more rhetorical than heuristic.