The Bible & Class Struggle

The common assumption that Jesus ‘identified with the poor’ suggests that he himself wasn’t poor. I want to follow on from my last post in which I argued that it makes more sense to regard Jesus as expendable–that is, someone who succumbed to downward social mobility due to hostile social and economic forces–than as someone who voluntarily gave up a relatively secure life as a carpenter to go about preaching the Kingdom of God. The same logic applies to the question of whether Jesus identified with the poor or if he himself was poor. Within New Testament scholarship, Jesus’ experience of poverty and homelessness is often presented as a lifestyle choice; i.e. he wasn’t actually poor, but he readily chose to identify with the destitute and downtrodden in his society as part of his God-ordained mission. This is an assumption that easily takes root within the middle-class mindsets of most biblical scholars who themselves are not usually poor, but recognize the importance of helping those less fortunate. The assumption is then read back into the biblical text. Jesus is in some sense regarded as separate from and economically superior to those among him and to whom he ministers.

This can be observed in the work of, for example, at least two mainstream historical Jesus scholars who identify Jesus’ marginality as an important attribute of his identity. From the very first pages of John P. Meier’s first volume of A Marginal Jew, for example, Meier asserts that ‘[t]o a certain degree, Jesus first marginalized himself. At the age of roughly thirty, Jesus was an ordinary carpenter in an ordinary hill town of lower Galilee, enjoying at least the minimum of economic necessities and social respectability required for a decent life. For whatever reason, he abandoned his livelihood and hometown, became “jobless” and itinerant in order to undertake a prophetic ministry, and not surprisingly met with disbelief and rejection when he returned to his hometown to teach in the synagogue’ (p. 8). Moreover, ‘[r]elying basically on the goodwill, support, and economic contributions of his followers, Jesus intentionally became marginal in the eyes of ordinary working Jews in Palestine, while remaining very much a Palestinian Jew himself’ (p. 8). The phrase ‘for whatever reason…’ which begins Meier’s description here implies that the actual reason for Jesus’ abandonment of work and hometown is not as important as the fact that he himself chose to pursue it. The characterization of Jesus’ supposedly intentional actions, however, are both premature and overstated. It reflects a framework of understanding rooted in capitalist (and perhaps theological) assumptions about the individual as an autonomous economic and moral agent and, in fact, as I demonstrate in my forthcoming book on Jesus and homelessness, quite often goes against the grain of what the biblical text itself indicates about Jesus’ descent into the expendable class.

The work of John Dominic Crossan is another interesting example because he actually uses the word ‘beggar’ to characterize Jesus. In this case, the destitution and raw experience of itinerancy is not hidden but exposed for all to see. However, the level of agency ascribed to Jesus is still heavily romanticized; his homelessness and poverty, although undesirable, is once again a thoroughly chosen lifestyle. On the first page of his book The Historical Jesus we find the description that Jesus ‘looks like a beggar, yet his eyes lack the proper cringe, his voice the proper whine, his walk the proper shuffle’ (p. xi). Crossan paraphrases Jesus’ instructions to his disciples: ‘Dress as I do, like a beggar, but do not beg’ (p. xii). So for Crossan, Jesus is like a beggar, but not quite a beggar. While the kingdom Jesus proclaims, according to Crossan, is for the poor and destitute, Jesus only identifies as poor–he is pretending. I would suggest that this is an inauthentic experience of homelessness and poverty. Indeed, according to Crossan, Jesus and his followers fit very well against the background of Greco-Roman Cynics. ‘It involved practice and not just theory, life-style and not just mind-set in opposition to the cultural heart of Mediterranean civilization, a way of looking and dressing, of eating, living, and relating that announced its contempt for honor and shame, for patronage and clientage. They were hippies in a world of Augustan yuppies’ (p. 421). Crossan, quoting Leif Vaage, describes cynicism as a ‘way of life’: their uniform ‘was a cloak, a wallet, a staff. Typically, their life included barefooted itinerancy viz. indigence, sleeping on the ground’ and so on. One of the major issues with with the Cynic hypothesis when applied to the historical Jesus is that the Cynics’ poverty was a chosen lifestyle of the educated elite, and not one they were necessarily born into, as were peasants.

Even though the Cynic hypothesis has been largely debunked, the broader characterization of Jesus’ ministry as itinerant still holds sway. Crossan’s consideration of Jesus’ itinerancy follows after Gerd Theissen’s popular proposal of Jesus and his early movement as made up of itinerant radicals. In summary, Crossan writes that: ‘Itinerant radicalism means that one’s itinerancy or even vagrancy is a programmatic part of one’s radical message’ (p. 346). In spite of the extensive space in The Historical Jesus devoted to examining the political, economic, and social upheaval of first century Palestine, of primary concern to Crossan is the symbolic meaning of Jesus’ itinerancy. Jesus’ homelessness is reduced to a noble choice; a lifestyle, and/or decision to identify with those who have been genuinely displaced and reduced to destitution. But it doesn’t strike him for a moment that Jesus’ homelessness might also be the by-product of wider hostile social and political forces, rather than a deliberate action of solidarity with those ‘others’ who have directly experienced the political turmoil of a peasant existence. Surely, a truly radical Jesus is one whose homelessness has been thrust upon him by external hostile social and economic forces?

The point of all this isn’t to pick on a few scholars in particular, but rather to demonstrate that some of the ideological assumptions that have shaped the interpretation of Jesus’ itinerancy and supposed ‘identification with the poor’ are actually widespread within the discipline of New Testament studies. The question of whether Jesus identified with the poor or was himself forced into a situation of itinerancy and destitution has not, as of yet, been properly addressed. While I make a modest attempt at probing some of these ideological inconsistencies within my own book, I also suggest that further rethinking is required.