Melbourne Unitarian Peace Memorial Church

Val Noone, Unitarian Church, East Melbourne, Sunday 22 June 2008

Over the past thirty or so years, there has been upsurge in knowledge about the social conditions of Galilee, the northern part of Palestine, in the time of Jesus, some two thousand years ago. This has two main sources. Firstly, the excavations at the Roman towns of Sepphoris and Tiberias, which, for those who have eyes to see, throw into relief issues of land and labour, the role of opulent elites, cultural conflicts and accompanying movements of resistance. From what I can gather, Sepphoris has been the key dig, more excavation has been done there than at Tiberias, by both Israelis and North Americans. Second, there has been a lot of interesting analysis of the gospels, the Qumran scrolls and other early texts, which have become known as the new quest for the historical Jesus and which draw on and fit in with the archaeological work.

A long time ago, I was trained in biblical studies and not in archaeology. Today I want to talk about what I have gained from sampling some of the new literature. I will draw especially on the studies of Galilee by the Irish scholar Sean Freyne, especially his latest book, Jesus, a Jewish Galilean, and the study by the American scholar Ched Meyers, entitled Binding the Strong Man: a political reading of Mark’s story of Jesus, both of whom have spent a lifetime in study of these matters. Myers is indeed coming to Melbourne in a couple of weeks to give lectures at Trinity College.
I want to suggest that, in this context, Jesus’ teachings and lifestyle were, as radicals over the centuries have argued, acts of defiance of both the Roman rulers and the Jewish priestly classes. However, there are some new angles coming to light as well.

Social situation in Galilee

Jesus was known as one who came from Nazareth in Galilee, and he built up a following in Galilee. Scholars argue about what exact social status the family of a carpenter had in Galilee but it is clear that they were workers not bosses. Here then is a rough summary of some aspects of the social situation in Galilee in Jesus’ time and shortly after.

Galilee, the most naturally fertile agricultural region of Palestine, with perhaps 750,000 people at the time, was different from the southern part of Palestine. Among other things there seems to have been more Greek and Roman influence there in education, commerce and technical skills. But archaeology has also found plenty of evidence of continuing Jewish cultural and religious practices.

Jesus came into public life at the time of Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great. In Jesus’ lifetime Galilee was changing. Freyne remarks, “As a young adult, Jesus would have seen Sepphoris, just 4 km from his native Nazareth, being rebuilt and renamed in order to honour the Roman emperor as sole ruler, by the Herod Antipas.

“Less than 30 km away on the lake front, a new city, Tiberias, was also founded for the purpose in 19 CE. Antipas’ father, Herod the Great, had begun the policy of honouring his Roman patrons but most of his monumental buildings were in the south.

“Now, however, Antipas, who aspired to succeed his father as king, was anxious to win favour by following the same policy in his building projects in Galilee, albeit on a more modest scale. … The establishment of a city in the immediate neighbourhood of his own village must have involved a serious disruption to all aspects of life in the region as a whole.”

These new towns of Sepphoris and Tiberias destroyed the patterns of the lives of the farmers and workers in the area. Freyne argues that the immediate catalyst for Jesus’ public teachings was the worsening social and economic situation in Galilee when he returned there after John’s arrest and subsequent murder. There were, of course, other factors such as the foreign occupation.

The new cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias meant confiscation of the land of the native population. Newcomers such as scribes, tax collectors, soldiers and demobbed soldiers, all supporters of the Herodian regime, gained privileges in return for various favours. Their job was to extract enough annual revenue from the peasants to ensure the opulent lifestyle of the elites, local, provincial and imperial, that made up the pyramid of power in Roman Galilee.

The issue of land, then as now, was a central one. The Roman-Herodian regime involved large estates, some in the hands of non-Jews, some in the hands of Jews. There were many small landholders and many landless labourers. A Galilean peasant farmer could have up to half his harvest extracted as rent and land taxes to the Herodian kings and to the Romans. Then there were the tithes to the Jewish authorities.

It is significant that Jesus is never said to have visited Sepphoris nor Tiberias, Freyne points out. He visited other surrounding town and territories. This must be understood as defiance, a throwing down of the gauntlet to the Roman ruling elite and the Jewish priestly classes. References in the gospels to “royal palaces” and “fine garments” were to such people as the elite of Sepphoris and Tiberias.

Jesus’ alternative vision was called the kingdom of God, of a world were each contributed according to their ability and received according to their need. Blessed are the poor is thus not a pious sentiment of resignation but a protest and a statement of support for those on the outer.

The texts we have show that Jesus, like John the Baptist, criticised the luxurious lifestyle of the Herodians and their style of rule. Jesus enters public life as a follower of John the Baptist. In contrast to John, Jesus seems to have devoted more time and effort to healing and in taking his case to Jerusalem.

Not only did he heal sick people but he also preached love, justice and equality. His Sermon on the Mount was a declaration of alternative values to those of the ruling class, or sympathy with the poor, the landless and the exploited. He drew a following which Freyne and others call the Jesus movement, and which soon spread throughout the Roman empire. What happened a couple of hundred years later under Constantine is a story for another day, but you know the gist of it.

As we know, lifestyle matters. The parables of Jesus reflect “the daily realities of disease, poverty, and disenfranchisement that characterized the social existence of first-century Palestine’s other 95 per cent”, says Ched Meyers. The kingdom of God was not an idea but a way of life.

That Jesus was crucified by Pilate and the priestly classes - for which there is evidence in the four gospels and also Josephus - is a sure sign that he was a threat to the social order.

Jesus’ response to social issues

Where did Jesus’ ideas come from? The records do not tell us exactly. Dominic Crossan suggests that Jesus took his critique of the society of the day from the Cynic philosophers of Greece. In particular, he suggests that the instruction to his followers to travel with one cloak and one pair of sandals is parallel to well known Cynic moral teaching. While Greek influence can be found on this point, as it can be found in other aspects of Galilean life at the time, analysis of Jesus’ teachings shows that on major points he was drawing on the radical stream, what is known as the prophetic stream, of Jewish tradition.

Like the group at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls come from, Jesus had a detailed knowledge of the Hebrew bible. Like them and others, he and his group seem to have described the social upheavals of their day in apocalyptic terms, that is, that the kingdom of God was at hand, right now. However, Jesus’ teachings about concern for the orphan and the widow can be traced in a direct line to Jewish poets and prophets such as Isaiah, Amos and Osee.

On the issue of Jesus’ relationship to the Zealots, a violent revolutionary group, it is worth noting that they do not seem to have been a big factor in Jesus’ day but were by the time Mark’s gospel was being written. While Jesus was more like Mahatma Gandhi than Vladimir Lenin, there are good grounds for saying that his teaching and lifestyle were revolutionary in the social and political conditions of the time, and Myers argues that Jesus and his contemporaries did not always draw a strict line between violent and non-violent.

By the way, Freyne makes a good case for saying that Jesus, like the Galileans with whom he mixed, had an ecological awareness. Claims that Christian beliefs fuelled the degradation of our environment, made by Lynn White and others, are false. Peasants in Galilee had a love of the land and felt an obligation to care for the land.

A key story in regard to Jesus’ approach to the social conditions of his day is that of the cleansing of the money changers from the temple. This is action against the Jewish elite and their relationship to the Herodian social order. Meyers again, “Jesus’ story is always more radical when understood first in its own socio-historical terms”.

What this means today

What does this mean today? Allowing for the complexities of the details, it is possible to say that modern scholarship confirms the views of a long list in history of people who have taken Jesus’ teachings as a basis for working to alleviate suffering and oppression. There have been, and will be, as many approaches as there are people and situations. However, we can recognise a river of tradition that flows from Jesus, in differing ways, through Francis of Assisi, Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, Thomas Müntzer and the peasants’ revolt, James Connolly, Mahatma Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero and the liberation theology of the Philippines and Latin America; and perhaps Victor James, Joyce Clayton, Catherine Spence and Bernard O’Dowd.

Thus, many Christians I know do not recognise themselves in the pictures of believers presented by Richard Dawkins, Anthony Grayling et al. The new atheists seem to have some taboos not only on words like capitalism and imperialism but also on the teachings of Jesus.

On Monday last I was one of an overflow crowd at St Ignatius’ church in Richmond for the funeral of Andrew Dent, 53, head of the emergency department of St Vincent’s Hospital. Half a dozen speakers recalled how Andrew gave his life to alleviating suffering and reversing injustices, working for those who are poor and marginalised in our society and also in Papua New Guinea. Friends and family read passages from Jesus’ sermon on the mount, the parable of the good Samaritan and the judgement story about “whatever you do to one of these, the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me”. Andrew Dent, Methodist educated and later a Catholic, read the gospels in a radical way. Millions of others around the world also do that.
The martyred Salvadoran liberation theologian Ignacio Ellacuría said that God is to be found in joining in the struggles of the poor for justice. The Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, put that another way: they said, “an injury to one is an injury to all”. An Irish proverb says that we all live in the shadow of one another, Ar scath le chéile a mhaireann na daoine.

My critical reading of some of the latest scholarship on first-century Galilee by Seán Freyne, Ched Meyers and others, suggests that that was the view of Jesus and the early Christians. The gospel stories of Jesus do not give us a critique of today’s social issues, nor a plan of action, but they do give us a possible framework for critiquing the issues and taking action. I look forward to discussing this further with you.