Catholic Marxism was deeply involved with the December Group which met annually for some years at Spode House. In most ways the December Group was the institutional form of Catholic Marxism. I was not a founding member of the group—its immediate ancestor was a magazine called Slant run by some young graduates, but I attended regularly for the last ten years of its existence. It was not called after any great event in socialist history but because it was simply convenient to meet in December. As most of its members were academics of one sort or another this is easy to understand. Since I am going to be critical in retrospect it is only fair to point out how good many of the sessions were. There was a memorable paper by Denys Turner (New Blackfriars, 1973), and for those of us who were present, there was the staggering all-day session on the Pinochet coup d’etat with Gonzalez Arroyo—recently evicted from his chair in his Chilean university—and Jacques Chamsun, Allende’s minister of Agriculture. There were some of the best, and best informed, lectures on Ireland, of which Irene Brennan’s contributions were outstanding. But what there was not was any attempt to compare and contrast as Finals papers used to say (and perhaps still do) the substance of Catholicism and the substance of Marxism.

The presiding genius over Catholic Marxism wasn’t Marx, whose name was as infrequently mentioned as that of God. It was the French philosophe, Louis Althusser. He seems to me to have been a fraud from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.

The traditional division of Luke’s Gospel between chapters 15 and 16 conveys a hidden meaning to the reader: a meaning which was not intended by Luke himself who did not make the division. The meaning is roughly: now we have finished with Jesus’s parables on forgiveness; now we are moving on to another topic, the right use of money; here are a couple of parables on that issue.

Luke gives no signal in his text that he sees a change of subject at this precise point. There are signs of a shift at verses 9 and 14 of chapter 16, but this leaves open the possibility that the parable of the wasteful steward might be linked in its meaning to the three parables of chapter 15.

In a sense the parables of the lost coin (Luke 15:8-10) and the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32) are also about money, but everybody agrees that looking after money properly is not the point of these parables. The point of the lost coin story is brought out in verse 10. As regards the prodigal son, the final saying of the father in the story gives the meaning: ‘It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found’ (Luke 15:32). This directly answers the complaint of the Pharisees that Jesus receives sinners and eats with them (Luke 15:2).

The very next verse is: ‘He also said to the disciples...’ Luke 16:1). The natural way to read this is: here is a follow up story on the same theme, but directly aimed at the situation of the disciples rather than the complaint of the Pharisees.

I have long been puzzled by the Gospel prediction that at the resurrection I shall become like an angel in heaven. What does it mean, and did Jesus really say it? What follows is an attempt to settle the matter. I shall be arguing that the passage in its original form envisaged a non-corporeal existence (contrary to the view of some recent writers), but that it does not go back to Jesus.

After routing the Pharisees and Herodians and turning on the scribes, Mark’s Jesus in 12:18-27 slaps down the Sadducees. The Sadducees, who disbelieve in the doctrine of a resurrection, argue that Moses would never have prescribed levirate marriage (Deut 25:5-10) if he had believed in an afterlife, because of the confusion it would cause in extreme cases, such as that of a woman who married seven brothers in succession.1 Jesus defends the doctrine with the hard saying, ‘They are as angels in heaven’ (12:25), and goes on to argue for the doctrine of the resurrection on the strength of what to the present-day reader is very tendentious exegesis of an Old Testament passage: the fact that God calls himself ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’ in Exodus proves that the dead rise.

My prime purpose here is, as I have said, to examine the meaning of the words ‘They are as angels in heaven’ and to see whether it is likely that they go back to Jesus. It will be necessary, however, to look at the passage as a whole. The words attributed to Jesus in Mk 12:24-27 are: