Sw - Session 7 - Homework

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The Societal Conditions During Jesus’ Lifetime A Brief Exploration of the Economic, Political, and Religious Conditions Session 7 Homework

e Centuries Leading up to Jesus’ Birth As a result of their unfaithfulness, injustice, exploitation and oppression God finally let the sin of Israel fall on the nation’s own head. He didn’t punish them actively; he just withdrew, allowed Assyria and Babylon to overrun Israel, and no longer intervened to hold off disaster. And so the northern kingdom (Samaria) was captured in 721 BC by Shalmaneser, the Assyrian monarch. Shortly thereafter most survivors were deported to Upper Mesopotamia and, through assimilation, lost forever their identity as Israelites. e southern kingdom ( Judah) collapsed with the Babylonian invasion in two successive waves: 598 BC and 586 BC. e army was slaughtered and many civilians lost their lives in the hopeless struggle. Jerusalem’s walls were torn down and the temple destroyed; salt was spread on the site of the temple so nothing would ever grow again. And then Babylon took the High Priest, religious leaders, the king, the nobility and their families and the entire economic leadership, clamped them into chains and marched them 900 miles east to Babylon where they were settled on the Chebar river, possibly a canal of the Euphrates on the eastern side of Babylon.1 eir captivity lasted 70 years and only in the year 516 BC was the temple reconstructed. e years that followed saw brief spiritual and social awakening through the joint ministries of Nehemiah and Ezra. However, with the passing of time Jewish religious life increasingly reduced itself to an extreme form of legalism. Old Testament regulations were greatly amplified with the drafting of precise rules that could be applied to every conceivable situation. By thus “fencing the law” – adding other laws to protect and perfect the Torah – a burdensome legalism developed that increasingly removed God from the central focus of the religious consciousness. Although the early rabbis greatly emphasized the doing of good works: works of love and mercy… “Acts of kindness and charity weigh more than all the commandments”, insisted an early rabbinic maxim – this maxim slowly gave way to keeping ritual and cultic purity. By the time of Jesus’ the later rabbis and Pharisees had atomized God’s law in 613 rules – 248 commands and 365 prohibitions – and bolstered these rules with 1,521 amendments. To avoid defiling the Sabbath they outlawed 39 activities that might be construed as “work”. So during this period the Mosaic cultic law codes became normative while the prophetic movement with its interest on current historical events waned, then died altogether.2 e successive occupation of Judah by the Persians, then the Greeks who later divided Palestine between the Seleucids and the Ptolemaic Kingdoms, the brief period of independence under the dynasty of the Maccabees, and then the beginning of oppressive Roman rule, left the Jewish people fragmented into a variety of contending schools of thought, The Integral Mission of the Church



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following different paths of collaboration or separatism with the occupying force. Each represented a distinct response to the older traditions and the newer political and religious realities within their troubled land: • e Essences advocated the flight response. Pacifistic, they did not actively resist the Romans. Instead many of them withdrew into monkish communities in the caves of a barren desert near the Dead Sea, Qumran. • e Zealots represented the revolutionary option or the fight response. ey hoped to achieve Israel’s political independence through armed guerilla warfare against Rome and the Jewish aristocracy.3 • e Pharisees operated throughout the countryside actively promoting their doctrine in local synagogues. According to them, if the entire nation would live without sin for just for one day, then Messiah would come and establish God’s rule. Because of the sinners, however, Israel remained under the heel of the Roman boot!4 e Pharisees, then, represented the blame response. • e Sadducees were the most blatant collaborationists. Small but influential, they combined conservative religious attitudes with power politics. ey saw Israel’s only hope through playing the political game with Rome and upholding the status quo which so benefited them. • e Herodians favored the Herodian dynasty and were typically well-off land owners. ey and the Sadducees represented the collaborate response. rough their political affiliation with the Herodian house, they hoped to keep some autonomy from Rome. e only uniting factor of these contending parties and schools of thought was that they believed themselves superior to others, believing that they were God’s blessed, that they were Jews. By the time of Jesus’ birth the land suffered under Herodian rule and stringent taxation, propped up by Roman procurators and the Roman military presence. e army lived off the occupied country, pilfering its natural resources, enslaving members of its population, raping women and generally terrorizing the populace. e gentry of Palestine (mostly Hellenized upper class Jews) collaborated with the occupying forces and, in exchange for personal safety and affluence, aided Israel’s oppressors. is collusion led to class conflict between the rich and the poor, the faithful and the unfaithful, the rulers and the people. In summary, the political nation of Israel turned out to be a failure, for it did not directly culminate in the redemption of the human race. Shalom was not lived, neither within Israel, nor as a witness to the other nations. is very failure was a necessary demonstration that nothing of human achievement could bring about a world of peace and justice. is failure

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pointed to the need for a solution outside the human realm. And that’s why people in the centuries before Jesus’ birth began to cry out for a savior – a messiah that would liberate them. e direct intervention of God was needed to transform human history and bring about Shalom. Jesus was God’s way of sending someone to stand in the gap. And so into this situation of social and political unrest, of economic exploitation and extreme poverty, of great nationalistic hopes and dreams which were closely connected to the expectation of a powerful Messiah, comes Jesus, the son of David, the son of Abraham (Mat. 1:1). e Kind of Society in which Jesus Grew Up In order to really understand Jesus and his mission, we need to understand the society in which he lived and ministered. Without understanding Jesus’ context we won’t be able to appreciate in full what he set out to do. How Palestinian Society was Structured During Jesus’ Lifetime It is appropriate to imagine Palestinian society at that time as a tightly structured pyramid. At the top of the pyramid were the far-away Gentile landowners and the largely urban Jewish elite, which made up about 2-5 percent of the population.5 ey owned vast estates in the countryside and exploited the rural poor, in order to maintain a luxurious lifestyle, consistent with their status in society. rough taxation of Palestine’s peasants, merchants and artisans, rents on land, trade and merchandizing, agricultural production, the temple industry, and forced land-appropriations, this local aristocratic elite, made up of the Herodians, Sadducees, Scribes and the Jerusalem clerical aristocracy, gained enormous wealth and power.6 A huge gap separated the artisan and merchant class from the elite. ey cannot be considered a middle class, since it can be safely concluded that there existed only the extremely rich and the miserably poor in Palestine.7 Nonetheless, this group, which made up about 15-18 percent of the population and consisted mainly of freedmen and freedwomen (former slaves), was slightly above the rest of the Palestine’s poor. Most of them ran small family enterprises (fishing, carpentry, construction), and employed varying skills to produce goods and services predominantly for the elite.8 Yet the majority was often still dependent on their economically powerful patrons and just a paycheck away from poverty. A few select merchants and skilled artisans, those who were able to gain enough through commerce or their skills, elevated themselves above most others and occupied some middle ground.9 Finally, there were those Jews

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who dropped out of respectable society and became outcasts: the tax collectors and high-class prostitutes. Even if financially well-off, they were never counted among the higher classes. e peasants and rural proletariat of hired shepherds, tanners, and unskilled laborers were almost at the bottom of this pyramid, engaged in a daily struggle for survival. ey had no prestigious social connections or financial means; they didn’t own the lands they worked since these had been confiscated by the rich through unjust tax schemes. Commonly known as the “people of the land”, a derogatory connotation, they made up roughly 70-80 percent of the population. ey were considered careless and non-chalant in their observance of the laws of Moses.10 e very bottom layers of the pyramid comprised the degraded and expendables. ese groups consisted of those with no skills but only their bodies for labor, and those who performed little labor such as criminals, beggars, lepers, the physically deformed, and the sick. Estimates number this group between 5 and 10 percent.11 Economics of Exploitation: Taxation during Jesus’ time was very burdensome. As in other parts of the Roman Empire, the burden of taxation fell hardest on the lower classes. Besides collecting money for the Roman Imperialists, the Jewish king Herod Antipas kept great amounts of money for himself, and was also infamous for having people killed to obtain their possessions. In his time, the gap between the rich and the poor grew steadily. So how poor were the poor? Worst off were those without land and without skills, the hired laborers and the beggars. ey were the truly poor. eir hand-to-mouth existence was considered hardly worth living. Landless peasants (or tenants) suffered the most from heavy taxation. ey had to give • 30 to 40 percent of their annual crop production to the landowners – often the rich urban Hellenized Jewish aristocracy • 20 to 30 percent to the Roman government and Herod. • Another 10 to 20 percent went to the religious authorities – the temple aristocracy – to help the religious apparatus function. In short landless peasants paid roughly 50 to 80 percent of their income in taxes and had only about 20 to 30 percent of their annual income to live on. e small landholders were not much better off. Taxation was burdensome and a bad year or two could spell the loss of their land to the wealthy neighbor who lent them seed after the first crop failure. No

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wonder, many poor peasants were forced to sell their land due to heavy taxation and work as day laborers, or they were displaced to the less fertile hill lands; a reality that we can observe in many of Jesus’ parables. By the end of it all, virtually no peasant owned their own land as large amounts of the fertile land in Galilee had become the property of large urban landholders. e vast disparity between the income of rich and poor in the first century is quite impressive: a wealthy householder had more than seven hundred times the income of a peasant, and the extremely wealthy might have more than fifteen thousand times the income of a peasant. Politics of Oppression: Palestine during Jesus’ time was occupied by Rome. e power of Rome was felt in everyday life, as people suffered from the oppression of the occupying force. e Roman Empire, however, was not a gigantic police state, but a constellation of provinces and city states, all pledging their allegiance to Rome. Political power, then, didn’t lie just in the hands of Rome. In Palestine, the Romans had given the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish council administrative and judiciary powers to rule the nation. eir sphere of authority extended over the spiritual, political and legal affairs of all Jews within Judea.12 While the Sanhedrin could not execute a capital sentence, the Romans appear to have given the council the authority to execute perpetrators of blatant sacrilege. e Sanhedrin, composed of members of the Jewish elite (the 2 to 3 percent of Palestine’s total population) was made up of four main fractions: 1. e Herodian Nobility: Many of them large land owners with considerable economic power. e Herodian family and the Herodian nobility’s political power was easily translated into wealth. It has been estimated that Herod and later his family and faithful followers may have owned more than half the land in his dominions. 2. e Sadducees from the Jewish Upper Class: ey were the remnants of the older Jewish aristocracy and individuals who had become rich through trade, tax farming, merchandizing or the like. Many of them would not farm their own land. Instead, they rented it to tenant farmers and spent much of their time on economic, civic, judiciary and religious affairs in the city (principally, Jerusalem). is system led to the abuse of tenants and hired laborers, whose mistreatment was seen as perfectly legal by the wealthy. 3. e Pharisees and Scribes: While not as powerful as the Sadducees, they controlled the synagogue system, which gave them considerable influence over the people. Many scholars assume that most Pharisees who sat on the Sanhedrin, were city aristocrats, and not from the merchant class. is explains why they were willing to submit to Roman rule, rather than express explicit anti-Roman sentiments as some of their fellow Pharisees from lower echelons of society did.

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4. e High Priests and the Jerusalem Clerical Aristocracy: Made up by elders, chief priests and Sadducee city aristocrats, who controlled the temple and the Sanhedrin. Judah’s rich came primarily from the wealthy high-priestly clans. e high-priestly clans, profited not only from the sacrifices offered in the Temple but also controlled the considerable commerce associated with that sacrifice and other religious activities. Apart from Rome, then, these four groups controlled much of the religious, political and economic systems of Israel during Jesus’ time. All three groups got money and funding through taxation of Palestine’s peasants, merchants and artisans. So again, real power not only lay with the Roman governor or procurator, but also with Israel’s political elite, as long as they were loyal to Rome and worked with the empire to quench rebellions and sustain law and order. So while Rome was doubtlessly to blame for heavy taxation and economic exploitation, it’s equally clear that the Mosaic stipulation to care for the poor, seek equity, and make sure that all members of the community had a way to make a decent income, was blatantly disregarded by the Jewish Establishment. In fact, often they used their power to oppress the lower classes. Religion of Control: Jewish religion during Jesus’ day was a massive and complex social system infused with do’s, don’ts, pilgrimages and sacrifices. It was a huge network which encompassed all of life in Palestinian culture from civil law to national festivals.13 e temple shrine, its services and its priesthood lay at the heart of this entire religious system and of any identifiable “common” Jewish vision of Israel’s life rightly ordered before God. Even Jews who lived at some distance from Jerusalem and its temple would have regarded the temple as the center of sacred space and of their mental map of the world.14 Its influence thus not only permeated Palestine’s hinterland but also many areas of Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and North Africa, as synagogues in each village throughout the countryside and in many cities throughout the Roman Empire faced the holy temple. e temple, in short, was the focal point of Jewish religious life for the 500,000 Jews living in Palestine and also for the 3 ½ million Jews scattered throughout the Roman Empire.15 Jews in Jesus’ day envisioned a ladder reaching higher and higher towards God, a hierarchy expressed in the very architecture of the temple. Gentiles and ‘half-breeds’ like the Samaritans were permitted only in the outer Court – the Court of Gentiles, which, in effect, the Jews had transformed into a barnyard and a place for merchandise. A wall then separated the court of the Gentiles from the next partition, which admitted Jewish women. Jewish men could proceed one stage further, but only priests could

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enter the sacred areas. Finally, only one priest, the high priest, could enter the Most Holy Place, and that just once a year on the day of Yom Kippur16 e society was, in effect, a religious caste system based on steps towards holiness. In stark contrast to the early pages of Genesis which envisioned Abraham’s blessing benefiting all nations, Gentiles were rigorously excluded from the real worship areas and were forbidden (on pain of death) from crossing beyond the balustrade that separated the Court of the Gentiles from the Court of Women. Neither were the blind and the deaf permitted to enter the temple, for the deaf had not heard the laws of purity and the blind couldn’t visibly discern impurities and so were helpless to guard against defilement. Both were judged a hazard to maintaining the sanctity of the temple and its functions.17 Tax collectors and ‘sinners’ were de facto excluded from temple worship, since their impurities would defile the temple.18 e Pharisees’ scrupulosity reinforced the system daily. Many Pharisees taught around the temple. ey also used the synagogue to add their own innovations. All their rules on washing hands and avoiding defilement were an attempt to make themselves acceptable to God. Had not God set forth lists of desirable (spotless) and undesirable (flawed, unclean) animals for use in sacrifice? Had not God banned sinners, menstruating women, the physically deformed, and other “undesirables” from the temple? e divine intention of the Mosaic Law was to make the Hebrew community aware of sin, so that the people would see their need for grace and enter into a renewed relationship with Yahweh. e religious system was to bring people and nations into a deeper and vibrant relationship with God, personally and corporately. e Temple was to be “a house of prayer for ALL nations” (Isa. 56:7; Mark 11:17). Instead, the religious system under the leadership of Jerusalem’s temple aristocracy and the Pharisees had gained such control over the people that it took on a life of its own, enslaving the very people it was intended to liberate: making people loose sight of God’s grace; disempowering them so they no longer could fathom God’s mercy and justice; his concern for the poor and marginalized; hindering foreigners, disabled people and ‘sinners’ from even entering into a vibrant relationship with Yahweh.19 e people who went to the temple in Jerusalem to offer sacrifices knew that it was a ‘den of robbers’ (Matt. 21:13). Yet, they came, patronized the temple and allowed themselves to be exploited by a corrupt Establishment. Why? Because they believed that they could be saved only through observance of the law.20 Consequently, many people lost their freedom and moral agency; they became powerless and subjugate to the domination of a religious system that no longer served and nurtured them. e religious system had become a religion of control, where the

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law was more important than the people. Israel was far from being a blessing to the nations. It is against this socio-political, economic and religious backdrop, that God in the form of a carpenter’s son named Jesus began preaching and proclaiming the nearness of the Kingdom of God!

reflection questions Reflect on the following scenario and write your answers to the questions into your Application Journal. Come prepared to share your answers with other members of your group in the next class session: Imagine, just as Jesus is about to deliver his first sermon on a busy street crowded with people, someone shouts out: “Rabbi, what we really want is for you to tell us about your plan. What’s your message? What should we do about the political and social mess we’re in? Which path is the right path to take?21 How can we bring about Shalom here and now? Should we agree with the Pharisees, or should we rather adopt the viewpoint of the Sadducees? Or perhaps the Zealots are right after all?” What do you think was Jesus’ response? What would you say he answered? How would he describe his plan of action? What would he say was his mission on earth? What would his listeners perceive his ‘Good News’ – the gospel – to be all about?  

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application journal

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endnotes 1

Based on class notes from Bob Linthicum’s course “Building a People of Power”. Arthur F. Glasser, Announcing the Kingdom, 149 3 Arthur F. Glasser, Announcing the Kingdom, 213 4 Brian McLaren, e Secret Message of Jesus, 13 5 Donald Kraybill, e Upside-Down Kingdom, 86 e parables of Jesus also attest to this condition with their numerous references to absentee landowners who placed a steward in charge of their property to supervise the work of day laborers. (Ibid, 86). 6 e Roman emperors taxed the wealthy heavily to fund their wars. the rich naturally sought nonliquid investments to hide their wealth. Land was best, but it was ancestrally owned and passed down over generations, and no peasant would voluntarily relinquish it. However, exorbitant interests (25 to 250 percent) could be used to drive landowners ever deeper into debt. And debt, coupled with high taxation required required by Herod Antipas to pay Rome tribute, created the economic leverage to pry Galilean peasants loose from their land. But the time of Jesus we see this process already far advanced: large estates owned by absentee landlords, managed by stewards, and worked by tenant farmers, day laborers, and slaves. (Walter Wink, e Powers at Be, 104) 7 Donald Kraybill, e Upside-Down Kingdom, 89 8 Warren Carter, Matthew and Empire, 18 9 Donald Kraybill, e Upside-Down Kingdom, 82 10 Donald Kraybill, e Upside-Down Kingdom, 83 11 Warren Carter, Matthew and Empire, 19 Besides the peasants and common rural proletariat, the Pharisees avoided contact with them and refused to eat with them. ey were looked down on with contempt, so much so that according to rabbinical law they could not appear as a witness in court nor be appointed as the guardian of an orphan. e Pharisees would not marry them and considered their women as unclean vermin. Such viewpoints communicated the hatred of the aristocracy toward the common people of Galilee and Judea. e feeling was mutual for it was also said that the people of the land hated the Jewish scholars more than the heathen hated Israel. (Donald Kraybill, e Upside-Down Kingdom, 83, 85) 12 e reason why most commentators speak of the religious leaders confronting Jesus – thus limiting their sphere of action to the religious – is once again the unfortunate result of the dualistic lenses through which most commentators read their Bibles. e Jewish leaders would have had difficulties separating the religious from the political and economic spheres. To them, religion, politics and economics were interrelated and could not be neatly separated into two parts, as those of us, influenced by Greek dualism, do. 13 Donald Kraybill, e Upside-Down Kingdom, 65 14 Glasser, ? 15 Donald Kraybill, e Upside-Down Kingdom, 66 16 Vishal Mangalwadi, Truth and Social Reform, ? 17 In like manner the disabled were excluded from the religious community of the Essenes: “No one who is afflicted with any human impurity may come into the assembly of God… Anyone who is … maimed in hand or foot, lame or blind or deaf or dumb or with a visible mark in his flesh… these may not enter or take their place in the midst of the community.” (quoted in Joachim Jeremias, New Testament eology, 175-176) 18 Vishal Mangalwadi, Truth and Social Reform, ? 19 Vishal Mangalwadi, Truth and Social Reform, ? Instead of calling Israel to Shalom and to be a blessing to the nations, the Pharisees promoted their viewpoints and own innovations on the law in and around the temple as well as the synagogues, which functioned as a sort of mirror site of the temple, reflecting aspects of temple worship and drawing its authority from the temple. All their rules on 2

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washing hands and avoiding defilement were an attempt to make themselves acceptable to God. Had not God set forth lists of desirable (spotless) and undesirable (flawed, unclean) animals for use in sacrifice? Had not God banned sinners, menstruating women, the physically deformed, and other “undesirables” from the temple? 20 Vishal Mangalwadi, Truth and Social Reform, 42 21 Brian McLaren, e Secret Message of Jesus, 14

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