Journals

The World Jesus Lived In

The Rev. Brian C. Taylor
Feb. 15-March 4, 2005

Notes from an independent study under the guidance of the following faculty:

Cynthia Kittredge (Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, Austin)

Ray Pickett (Lutheran Seminary Program in the Southwest, Austin)



The World Jesus Lived In

My aim in this study was to gain a clearer understanding of the social, political, economic, and religious world that Jesus lived in. I thought that this would bring more to life the parables, teachings, and texts of the gospels, and perhaps provide new or different insights for the purposes of preaching and teaching.

What follows are brief, informal and unorganized background info and discussion notes. If you are interested in reading more on this subject (including examples of how the themes presented here are visible in the parables).

Sociological background of Israel

(Summarized from Herzog, Parables as Subversive Speech, see bibliography)
Like most agrarian societies, (3000 BCE – 1800 CE), Israel had moved from subsistence-level horticulture and animal husbandry - owned and controlled by the family and village - to farms owned by investors. A huge gulf existed between the few rich and the many poor. As money became increasingly important to the developing economy, peasants were forced into indebtedness through a vast tribute/tax system, eventually lost their traditional family land and became tenant laborers. They supported a system of cash crops controlled by an urban elite owner/patron class. Money flowed in one direction. Things gap between rich and poor widened, and the system became more corrupt and the people’s plight ever more desperate.

The elite owner class comprised about 2% of the population. They were not nice, generous, rich people; they got and stayed where they were through ruthless exploitation and violent enforcement. In ways they were more like the modern Mafia than modern wealthy business people.

Under this top economic level were those who supported and enforced the social system: a standing military, tax collectors, record-keepers, lawyers/scribes, steward/managers, a few wealthy businessmen, teachers for the families of the elite, and a priesthood that reinforced supportive beliefs and behaviors. This “retainer class” comprised approximately 8% of the population, and were literate, which gave them power: they were “white collar professionals,” if you will. A very few members of this class were among Jesus’ followers, and many of them considered him an enemy, as did the elite.

Most of the rest (80%) were very poor farmers, laborers, artisans, fishermen, and traveling merchants who eked out a subsistence living. Their resources went to pay for rent, taxes, tithes and tributes paid to landlords, rulers, and temple, a little food for their family, reserves of seed for barter or for next year’s crop, and dues to the village. They were regularly exploited by the ruling economic/political/religious elite in a variety of creative and cruel ways. They were not comfortable “working class” by today’s standards. This was the group to whom Jesus, his family, and many of his disciples belonged. He was less of a “skilled carpenter” and more of a poor laborer in wood and stone.

Below them were “the unclean, the degraded and the expendables” (diseased, disgraced, homeless: 10%?). They lived by day labor, prostitution, robbery, and begging. They, too, were Jesus’ disciples, and were often those whom he healed and ministered to.

Life in Nazareth and nearby towns

From Excavating Jesus, John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed
Peasant life: Poly-cropping (scattering and diversifying) enabled survival and self-sufficiency, until the family lost their access to lands. Diet consisted primarily of bread, olives, olive oil, and wine, augmented occasionally by beans, stews, nuts, fruits, cheese, salted fish, and for special occasions, meat. Many were malnourished and/or protein-deficient. Life expectancy was in the ‘30’s. Those who lived to 50 or 60 were rare. Upward mobility was unknown (social movement was downward) and peasants lived very close to the edge. Life was local, and travel dangerous.

Nazareth, in Jesus’ lifetime, would have been similar to a small, traditional pueblo in New Mexico. Population was 200-400, consisting of several extended families or clans. There is no evidence of public architecture (no synagogue, fortification, basilica, bathhouse, paved street, etc.). People lived in simple hovels, made of stacked fieldstone, straw and mud insulation, dirt floors, wooden ceiling beams covered in straw and mud. Some had subterranean storage cavities, and most had cisterns for water and storage pots for grain. Two public bath pools have been found, and many typical Jewish graves (body-length shafts cut at right angles into a dirt wall, sealed with a large stone. Built in the sunny hills, the town was well-suited for production of grain, olive, and grapes. Excavations have shown a town of about 2,000 ft. by 650 ft., about ten acres.

Synagogues: Were for the most part the gathering of people, rather than a separate building, which they couldn’t afford to build. There are no ruins of 1st-C synagogue structures in Nazareth. Gatherings of the synagogue took place in a village square or courtyards or rooms of a large private house.

Herod Antipas built vast palaces, theatres, harbors, and cities in an attempt to Romanize his kingdom. These projects included new cities near Nazareth: Caesarea (on the Mediterranean coast), and Sepphoris and Tiberias (in Galilee). These projects were financed for the most part by agricultural taxes (in goods or money). As the building projects multiplied, a higher demand for money led to mono-cropping, less self-sufficiency, eventual loss of ownership, and tenant farming, with all produce being taken off. Goods and money moved from the land to the city. Luxury at one end was built by labor and poverty at the other end. Expensive architecture in the city meant intensive agriculture in the country. Galilee was becoming urbanized, commercialized, the people were being turned into low-wage workers and ancient, traditional ways of life were disappearing.

New architectural styles, wealthy home-owners, public buildings and expensive materials were introduced. The towns differed markedly from surrounding villages. Predominantly Gentile, secular, and wealthy, the inhabitants were of the retainer class (tax-collectors, managers/stewards, military, and others who facilitated money moving from the peasants to the elite. The Jewish-Roman historian Josephus described an assault on Sepphoris and Tiberias by Galileans in the revolt of 67 C.E. In it, he remarks on their “hatred” of the towns, how they “plundered...looted…detested…exterminated” the towns. The populations of Sepphoris and Tiberias were 8-12,000 each, and they were some 100-150 acres in size.

Capernaum was a small town on the shores of the Lake of Galilee where Peter and Andrew, James and John, and other early disciples lived, and a location for Jesus’ ministry. About 1,000 inhabitants lived on 25 acres. It was larger and more prosperous than Nazareth (due to fishing on the lake) but worlds away from Sepphoris, Tiberias, and Caesarea. Like Nazareth, there were no public buildings or paved streets.

Social background and the Jesus movement’s message as a response

From The Message and the Kingdom, Richard A. Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman
The background in which Jesus grew up in Galilee:

• popular uprisings and open rebellion, cruelly and successfully crushed by Rome, including the destruction of nearby Sepphoris

rebuilding project necessitating raising of taxes, resulting in a continuing increase in debt and foreclosures on family property, people becoming tenant or conscripted laborers, homelessness, desperation
development of a more industrialized economy (farming and fishing) and presence of management population

• social control was managed by high taxes and seizure of property, a hierarchical patronage system of privilege/subjugation and debts/favors, and a rigid religious purity system, which demanded tithes, exclusion and privileges, in order to support the social stratification that kept the elite and the poor in their places

Jesus’ message: you don’t have to be victims of all this. Return to the community covenant values of the Torah (a familiar refrain of Israel’s prophets, and an anti-modern traditionalist stance). Leave behind the values of the new economic world order, forgive debts, share, care for the vulnerable among you, ignore rigid interpretations of the purity laws that only serve to separate and exclude, don’t chase materialism, don’t play into contemporary class polarization, share/feast with one another instead of sending all the surplus off to the landlords.

This message was carried by a movement that was centered in villages throughout Galilee. The disciples were not wandering “sages” but village-based teachers who remained as long as they were welcome. They worked to instill Jesus’ message as a program of community renewal that re-affirmed the traditional way of the Torah over the modern, individualistic ways of Rome. This was its controversial nature.

In the rest of the Mediterranean, the same policies (taxes, exploitation, patronage) were creating similar social conditions: loss of land, community, tradition, and dignity. People became tenant farmers or low-wage earners. Many moved to the cities, where they found a modern, rootless and disintegrated cultural vacuum characterized by rampant individualism, exploitation, concerns with power and prestige, poverty, and extreme decadence and immorality among the few elite (is this starting to sound familiar?).
Paul was the apostle to this world, offering a vision of an alternative community, characterized by equality among classes/gender/culture and even slave/free, selfless sharing with those in need, and personal morality.

Parallels with modern life

I am struck by the parallels with modern life and the function of the parish.
The church, in particular the parish “village” community, is a place where we can unlearn the pervasive dominant cultural values, and strengthen alternative kingdom values, by practicing them with ourselves in community. We live in a world still marked by individualism, cultural disintegration, unethical businesses, exploitation of or indifference to the poor, violence, materialism, immorality, prestige, power exercised by the elite, and various forms of divisiveness (racism, class, sexism, etc) . In the parish village, we can learn how to live differently, and hopefully then spread it into the society around us, like the Jesus movement before us:

• the good of the community over individual preference and privilege


• critique of destructive values around us in society


• accountability, forgiveness, reconciliation with one another


• fair pay and benefits for employees and decent treatment of volunteers


• equality of all regardless of age, race, class, gender, economic level or position of influence in society, etc.


• sharing our money, being generous with the most vulnerable in the community and the world around us


• consensus-building instead of power exercised by an elite


• celebrating with beautiful feasts that are open to and created by all, instead of the private privilege of the few

When we live this way as a parish village, we witness to a different way of life, and we learn how to integrate that way into the world in which we live. The church becomes a counter-cultural community, transforming the world from within.

Conversations with Ray Pickett

We spoke about the difficult task of preaching and teaching in a context quite different from that of Jesus’ own. He was from a poor laborer’s background, speaking directly to the economic and other social forces of his day in Galilee. The solution to this difficulty has often been to spiritualize everything to the point of making it all universal, and yet removed from its original meaning. Another equally unattractive alternative is to pretend to be seeing things from Jesus’ perspective, preaching his “radical message” to a privileged modern audience, shaming them for being so, and pointing to the poor of the world as those about whom Jesus really cares.

Ray said that even the gospel writers employed interpretation, so that you can’t get a “pure message” from this Galilean teacher. We all interpret, and our interpretations (or Luke’s or Matthew’s) doesn’t necessarily contradict Jesus’ original contextual meaning. Religion operates on several levels at once. But it is helpful to know what “moves” were made in the editing process. There’s no point in locking horns over the historical debate on a political or ideological basis; instead, just offer a more “robust” view that includes its 1stC setting. Then ask questions, as Jesus did, about our own oppression, our own social assumptions to see how we are impacted by the same kind of issues his people were in very different settings. The texts raise questions about how we are to live.

The economic context in which Jesus spoke was one where land was everything. Ownership and control determined wealth, not money. The poor were subject to a “triple tax,” which consisted of money paid to the Roman Empire, the temple, and the local rulers (i.e. Herod). Rent took the form of produce taken from the land. The rural poor were lucky if they had anything left for themselves.

The poor that Jesus ministered with were oppressed, and much of his teachings were aimed at trying to help his people survive their very hard life, in very practical ways. As an example, the poor didn’t have either the time or the money to keep Jewish law strictly. And so Jesus offered a more “relaxed” approach to religion, making it more do-able and practical for the poor (love neighbor and God; the rest is commentary). Or at times he tightened the Torah when it would make their lives easier (i.e. his teaching on divorce, where he criticized the law that allowed a man to dismiss a woman, calling men to a higher level of commitment).

Hanson and Oakman (Palestine in the time of Jesus) write about three determinative social realities:

1. An honor and shame culture,


2. Patron and client relationships,


3. ownership and control of property.

Ray said that honor and shame could be likened to the Arab world today, or to the old South in the US. Men maintain or compete for position in society by upholding honor and avoiding shame. Women’s actions or presence can be a source of losing honor/being shamed. The “self” is not individual, but refracted through community. Honor leads to and is reflected by patronage. Everyone serves somebody, and every person of means is a patron. Tributes are paid, favors are done, and strings are attached (cf the Mafia). Jesus challenged this system. Patronage was related to who owned or lost their property.

Jesus, like most Jewish peasants (90% of the people) was probably biased against the rich. They were not benevolent rich people, earning their money honestly and fairly, generous to their employees and their community. In this society the only way to become or remain rich was to play the patronage game, exploit the vulnerable, be ruthless, and cheat others out of their money and property. And yet Jesus engaged the rich rather than hating them, inviting them to become part of the solution. They also were drawn to him, in spite of the social gulf between them.

Jesus was part of a wider movement within Jewish life, and essentially Galilean in nature (see current books on Galilean sociology, now a cutting edge in biblical scholarship). Galilee was very Jewish and somewhat conservative (high regard for Torah, temple, and concepts of purity) and yet alienated from the temple system in Jerusalem (where the power/corruption was). It was, as part of the old Northern Kingdom of Israel, more grounded in the local leadership of prophets than in the hierarchy and authority of Jerusalem. It was concerned with covenant renewal (not rejection). Israel had always been challenged by renewing prophets to re-interpret the Torah in light of new and changing circumstances.

Those changes in Galilee in Jesus’ time included an increased gap between rich and poor brought on by centralization of farms and loss of family property, increasing tax burdens on the poor, and in general a desperate economic condition. The gospel of the Jesus movement was born in and was a response to this situation. Jesus saw himself as a prophet who eventually had to go to Jerusalem to challenge the source of the power problem, as prophets before him had done.

Without this newer contextual sociology about Jesus’ setting, much of our reflection on the gospel has been blindly applied to our own setting, as if, for instance, the “rich” are the same today as they were in Jesus’ time, or as if there was a large middle class then (which there wasn’t).

Jesus was like many other teachers and movements of his day. To posit him as a unique wonder who dropped out of the sky, an itinerant enlightened being who was nothing like anything anyone had ever seen is to make him into a modern guru of sorts. Spiritualizing him removes him from his earthly context. We’re all deeply conditioned by this view. It began early, even with the gospel authors (i.e. “blessed are the poor” became “blessed are the poor in spirit”).

But removing Jesus’ teachings from his own social context tends towards anti-Semitism, because it uses as a foil to this “unique” Jesus a Judaism that was supposedly one-dimensional, simplistic, misogynist, legalistic, dry, rigid, and absorbed by mindless purity ritual. This was not 1st C Judaism, and certainly not Galilee. To isolate Jesus from his Jewish and Galilean context is to do violence to the world out of which he emerged.

Conversations with Cynthia Kittredge

Since much of her perspective overlaps with Ray Pickett’s, she suggested I also do some reading on issues related to women in the Jesus movement to augment my focus. And as a movement, she pointed out that Jesus was one of many teachers at the time who were involved in the kind of teaching he was doing. Furthermore, even though the gospels present him as always the center of attention and the main actor, he was, in fact, surrounded by a community of disciples, who experienced these things all together. (Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza critiqued the historical Jesus scholars for “isolating” Jesus from this communal context in Jesus and the Politics of Biblical Interpretation).

Cynthia said that most biblical scholars and preachers misrepresent women in 1stC Galilee by claiming that they were excluded, powerless, and kept from the public, even pointing to Jesus and the early church as a “radical” exception to this reality. This was an exaggeration. Jesus’ relationship to women disciples was not that unusual for other teachers of his day. i.e the Samaritan woman at the well – it wouldn’t have been uncommon for a Jewish teacher (Jesus) to speak with a woman, and the text itself focuses on the uniqueness of a Jew speaking directly to a Samaritan. That was the issue. Also, she was not a “sinner,” according to the text (she doesn’t confess, Jesus doesn’t forgive her). It only says that she has had five husbands already (a widow 5x? something in her cooking?) and isn’t married to the man she lives with. It has been the church’s interpretation over the centuries that has pegged her as a sinner, along with Mary Magdalen being one too (even calling her a “prostitute”—no evidence there either).

In Jesus’ time there were probably no distinctions between “disciples” (which clearly included women) and “apostles” (probably a later construct to highlight the importance of church leaders and their successors), other than those who, for reasons of friendship and intimacy, were closer to Jesus than others. This latter group probably included women (i.e. Mary Magdalene).

In terms of Draper’s thesis (bibliography) on the Jesus movement being part of a larger cultural movement of his day, she said that it was probably characterized by an attempt to revive the “Mosaic” tradition. This was centered around charismatic local teachers (“popular kingship”) rather than the priestly hierarchy of the temple in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, Galilee was culturally very Jewish (vs. Hellenized) and identified strongly with the temple, and would have participated in the pilgrimages there, etc. It’s just that they saw it as sadly deviated from what it should be (loyal opposition).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I read most of the following in the course of my two-week study, and notes on them are found in the fuller text on St. Michael’s website, www.all-angels.com, under “journals.”

Other books will constitute my continuing study in the year ahead.

• Crossan, John Dominic, The Historical Jesus, HarperSanFrancisco, 1992
• Crossan, John Dominic and Reed, Jonathan, Excavating Jesus, HarperCollins 2002
• Draper, Jonathan, “Jesus and the Renewal of Local Community in Galilee,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 87, June 1994
• Freyne, Sean, Jesus, A Jewish Galilean, T&T Clark 2004
• Hanson, K.C., “The Galilean Fishing Economy and the Jesus Tradition,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 27, 1997
• Hanson, K.C. and Oakman, Douglas, Palestine in the Time of Jesus, Fortress, 1998
• Herzog, William R., Parables as Subversive Speech, Westminster/John Knox 1994
• Horsley, Richard and Silberman, Neil, The Message and the Kingdom, Fortress, 1997
• Horsley, Richard, Galilee: History, Politics, People, Trinity, 1995
• Horsley, Richard, Jesus and Empire: the Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder,
• Augsburg Fortress 2003
• Kraemer, Ross Shepherd and D’Angelo, Mary Rose, Women and Christian Origins,
• Oxford, 1999
• Reed, Jonathan, Archeology and the Galilean Jesus, Trinity, 2000
• Schussler Fiorenza, Elizabeth, In Memory of Her, Crossroad 1983/2002
• Scott, Bernard Brandon, Re-Imagine the World, Polebridge, 2001
• Wylen, Stephen, The Jews in the Time of Jesus, Paulist, 1996

A New Testament mega-website: www.ntgateway.com.