Liberal Phil Jenkins reviews Tom Holland's DOMINION in Christianity Today, spending zero time on its central thesis about the poor, talking instead about what he wants to talk about, which is classic Phil Jenkins

Oh look! A deer!

Tom Holland's DOMINION: HOW THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION REMADE THE WORLD is reviewed here by Phil Jenkins:

In Holland’s view, the teachings of Jesus constituted an ethical revolution that would gradually transform human consciousness, to the extent that we today find it hard to imagine credible alternative systems. ... Christianity mattered because it taught respect (or even veneration) for the poor and the oppressed. That implied the historically unprecedented exaltation of humility, forgiveness, and love.

A proper examination of the thesis would discuss the extent to which the antecedents of Jesus' teaching in Judaism as well as Jesus' personal historical circumstances do or do not explain it, but you won't get that from Phil Jenkins.

The ethical revolution of the good news preached to the poor (Matthew 11:5, Luke 4:18, Luke 7:22) is itself part of a long backstory which gradually transformed Judaism as its society degenerated and came to manipulate and oppress its own people. The rise of the prophets as social critics cannot be understood apart from Israel's mistreatment of the poor. Jesus comes on the scene as a prophet himself at the end of this long period of cultural degeneration, the poor bastard child of parents who could not afford the required lamb offering for him (Leviticus 12:1ff.).

[T]hey brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord; (As it is written in the law of the Lord, Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord;) And to offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.

-- Luke 2:22ff.

The cleansing of the Temple's "thieves" (Matthew 21, Mark 11, Luke 19), the warnings against wealth (Matthew 19, Mark 10, Luke 18), the favoritism for the have-nots (Matthew 5, Luke 6, Luke 14, Luke 16), the transvaluation of poverty as a good in the call to discipleship (Luke 14:33), and the woes pronounced against the haves (Luke 1, Luke 6, Luke 12, Matthew 23) cannot be understood apart from his personal experience, let alone from the cultural history.

The basis of culture is in the cult, and Jesus attacked it. Jesus is a revolutionary in that he found in the Temple cult the central means by which the poor were oppressed, but he was a religious, not a political, revolutionary, and specifically an eschatological revolutionary. That he expected apocalyptic judgment on this system by the Son of Man and his armies and its replacement with a heavenly Temple, a Jerusalem descending from above, shows this.

It is also what repulses interpreters, who would rather talk about, and make it about, anything else.   

Tom Holland, author of DOMINION, observes that Christianity is the grandmother of Bolshevism, just as Oswald Spengler had maintained

Inescapable Influence, ‘How the Christian Revolution Remade the World’:

“That’s fine,” I seem to hear a skeptical reader saying. “This may work in the case of the Enlightenment, but you are not going to say that Marxism or Communism, for example, also had Christian roots, are you?” That’s precisely one of the subtler points Holland is making in Dominion. In the foundational texts of Christianity there are places where a fundamental solidarity with the poor and the hungry, the powerless and downtrodden, is formulated.  Jesus himself called these people “brothers,” and identified with them unreservedly (“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me”), whereas for those at the other end of the power spectrum, he had a different message (“Woe to you who are rich!”). And the first generations of Christians understood quite well what Christ had meant: “We have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world,” writes Paul (1 Corinthians 4:13). Importantly, such a social vision is not just a peripheral feature of Christianity, or something added later by charitable souls, but stems from the central doctrine of Christianity: the Incarnation. As Holland puts it, “by making himself nothing, by taking on the very nature of a slave,” Christ had “plumbed the depths to which only the lowest, the poorest, the most persecuted and abused of mortals were confined.” In early Christian communities, all were “brothers” and “sisters,” everything was held in common, and power was deliberately shunned—a radical response to the radicalism of Christ’s own message. Various forms of what would later be called “socialism” or “communism,” recurrent throughout Christian history (from the Taborites to the Münster Anabaptists to countless other fringe groups) took those early communities as a good model to follow.

By the time Karl Marx entered the scene, then, Christianity already had a long and colorful history of toying with the communist idea. Coming from a solid rabbinical environment as he did, Marx didn’t fail to recognize a great Jewish teacher when he saw one, even when that teacher had ended up inspiring another religion altogether. Even the terminology used by Marx “to construct his model of class struggle—‘exploitation,’ ‘enslavement,’ ‘avarice’—owed less to the chill formulations of economists than to something far older: the claims to divine inspiration of the biblical prophets.” Marx’s famous formulation “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” looks to Holland like a cheeky act of plagiarism from the Acts of the Apostles: “Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to everyone as he had needed.” 

Muhammad the plagiarist: Age of Koran manuscript pre-dates his career by as many as forty-two years

The story is here (subscription required). The UK Daily Mail here had the money quotes:

Historian Tom Holland, told the Times: 'It destabilises, to put it mildly, the idea that we can know anything with certainty about how the Koran emerged - and that in turn has implications for the history of Muhammad and the Companions.'

Keith Small, from the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library, added: 'This gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Koran's genesis, like that Muhammad and his early followers used a text that was already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda, rather than Muhammad receiving a revelation from heaven.'

Students of the Koran in the West have long doubted the story of the miraculous origin of the words of the Koran given to the illiterate prophet, based in part on Muhammad's version of Christianity in it, which is derivative of heretical Nestorianism, not revelation. Muhammad had contact with Nestorians according to various accounts, but it is thought that it was primarily through the family of his wife Khadija, from whom he must have learned much of what he knew about Christianity and Judaism. An anonymous philologist (who fears for his life) has even proposed that much of the Koran was originally a Christian Arabic lectionary translated from Syriac sources, which makes even more sense now that a manuscript of the Koran appears to be dated precisely to the period when the words were supposedly circulating only as oral tradition, as recitation.

It would seem that Muhammad and his companions raided more than caravans.