Why did Jesus consort with tax collectors? To broker relief for Galilee’s peasants, says Doug Oakman.
by James A. Bacon
“And after these things he went forth, and saw a publican, named Levi, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he said unto him, Follow me. And he left all, rose up, and followed him. And Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a great company of publicans and of others that sat down with them. But the scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples, saying, Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners?” (Luke 5:27-30).
Jesus’ proclivity for feasting with tax collectors presents a challenge to New Testament scholars. As agents of imperial Rome and its client kingdom in Galilee, publicans squeezed the poor mercilessly. Jesus sided with the dispossessed and downtrodden of Galilean society — why would he associate with the publicans who persecuted them? Who were the sinners referred to in the Gospels — prostitutes, thugs, henchmen of the publicans, perhaps? And what was going on at these feasts — was there more than the evangelist reveals?
Jesus’ association with tax collectors is firmly rooted in history, notes Douglas E. Oakman, chairman of the Religion Department at Pacific Lutheran College. References to tax collectors appear in the Gospel of Mark, in the “Q” sayings employed by Matthew and Luke, and even in the special sources unique to each Gospel writer. The Jesus movement had no reason to fabricate stories and sayings linking Jesus to a despised element of Galilean society. These passages cry out for explanation, he says.
Building on his research into the economy of the 1st century Palestine, Oakman suggests that Jesus acted as a “broker,” or mediator, between tax collectors and debt-ridden peasants. Jesus gathered the tax collectors and the peasants, whom the translators of the Gospels described to as “sinners,” around the banquet table and tried to work things out. Says Oakman: “He’s trying to get tax relief for the person in debt. Jesus’ argument to the tax collector is, ‘Show some mercy. In the name of the higher power, why don’t you help this person out?’”
As benign as such activity might seem, the authorities regarded it as seditious. In all likelihood, Oakman contends, Jesus also advocated resisting taxes through dissimulation and the manipulation of tax records. He made tax resistance and relief of debts the cornerstone of his teaching. And this teaching probably led directly to his arrest and crucifixion.
Oakman is still following this line of inquiry. His work is not yet complete, and some portions of his argument are better documented than others. But he tested this argument in March when presenting a paper to The Context Group, a loose association of scholars that apply social-scientific methods to the study of the New Testament world. In the paper, “Jesus the Tax Resister: The Meaning of Resistance and the Resistivity of Meaning in the Early Jesus Traditions,” he applied two new perspectives to the Jesus-and-the-publicans question. In one, he interpreted Jesus in the context of the prevailing patron-client economic system of 1st-century Galilee. In the other, he looked for evidence in the earliest literary stratum of Gospel material, the Jesus sayings known in New Testament studies as Q1.
The parsing of the so-called “Q” sayings shared by Matthew and Luke has emerged as one of the more fertile fields of New Testament inquiry in recent years. Scholars have long hypothesized that the sayings common to both Gospels come from the same source (in German, quelle, or q). But in the past decade, Canadian scholar John Kloppenborg has theorized that the Q sayings can be divided into three clusters, Q1, Q2 and Q3, written at different stages in the development of the early Jesus movement. The Q1 sayings were the earliest, he argues.
The authors of Q1 are unknown. Jesus’ followers were probably illiterate, so they did not compile the sayings. Kloppenborg suggests that the people most likely to have put Jesus’ words in writing would have been village notaries and scribes. Oakman starts with this hypothesis then probes deeper. Functioning as local representatives of the Herodian administration — recording loans, contracts, debt receipts, tax receipts, and other legal documents — the scribes would have paid especially keen attention to Jesus’ teachings on matters related to debt and taxes, he contends. Indeed, he suspects that the earliest Q sayings could have been recorded during Jesus’ lifetime.
Another breakthrough in Biblical studies has been the recognition that patron-client relationships, not free markets, defined the Mediterranean economy of the 1st century C.E. Rulers extracted the agricultural surplus by force — tribute, taxes, tolls, levies — then redistributed the wealth to their servants and retainers in exchange for support, favors and honor. In this system driven by personal relationships, there was a recognized role for the “broker” who mediated between patrons and the powerless. It is precisely such a role, Oakman suggests, that Jesus filled.
When Jesus preached the “kingdom of God,” Oakman says, he wasn’t spinning some pie-in-the-sky fantasy. His version of the kingdom, or basiliea, was one in which God extended his principles of justice and equity to the affairs of men — here and now, not after some divinely powered apocalypse. “Apocalyptic Judaism was an elite game, the province of scribes who could read and write about the traditions of Israel,” he says. By contrast, Jesus sought direct, concrete remedies for the woes of the poor. “He was an acute social observer and he was seeking immediate relief.”
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When interpreting the lives of Jesus and his Galilean followers, Oakman finds it helpful to think like a peasant. Taking the peasant’s perspective can totally change the meaning of a text such as the Lord’s Prayer, he says. The Gospels present two variants of the prayer, one in Luke and one in Matthew. The discrepancies between the two can be explained by the different theological concerns that the evangelists brought to their writing. Did these preoccupations go back to Jesus? “I doubt it,” says Oakman. As a peasant addressing other peasants, Jesus was addressing very practical issues: “Give us this day our daily bread, release us from our debts, and don’t bring us into trial or the court, where the odds are stacked against us.”
Adopting a peasant mindset comes easily to Oakman. Raised in Iowa, he spent memorable time in the company of his maternal grandparents, Serbian peasants who had come to the United States before World War II. They remained people of the soil, surrounding their country house with orchards, a vineyard, stands of corn and a vegetable garden. His grandmother spoke only broken English, and his grandfather sang Serbo-Croatian songs that young Doug could not understand. But as he listened to stories of how his grandfather had spent time in jail for bootlegging long before, and how a great uncle had killed a man in a fight in Kansas City, he soaked up his grandparents’ way of looking at the world. “I directly experienced the honor-shame, strong-group, limited-good world of the Mediterranean peasantry,” he says. And thinking back upon how his grandfather spoke of God as a presence in their lives — “I’m going to tell you what God wants,” he’d say — he realized, “That’s the God of a peasant.”
To Oakman, it is axiomatic that Jesus was a peasant. He was born in a village in Galilee, probably Nazareth. Joseph, the patriarch of the household, was a tekton, a carpenter who probably worked for hire. Christian tradition suggests that Jesus had numerous brothers and sisters. Custom dictated the giving of dowries to the daughters and the division of the inheritance between the sons, with larger shares going to the eldest son. Even if Joseph had managed to accumulate any possessions, Jesus would have received little of his estate — indeed, nothing at all if he were illegitimate, as Oakman thinks he was. Having no property to speak of, Jesus would have departed to seek his fortune. Says Oakman: “I see him leaving the village as a surplus, peasant child.”
Jesus probably moved around Galilee, looking for employment. “I argue that he was transient for economic reasons,” Oakman says. “He had to go where the work was.” In all probability, Jesus labored on large estates like those that figure in his parables. He might have worked in Sepphoris, the capital city of Galilee only a few miles from Nazareth, which underwent a building boom in the early 1st century, and he might have labored on the Temple in Jerusalem, which employed thousands of workers during its construction. Ultimately, he ended up in the villages along the Sea of Galilee, living among the fishermen and farmers there.
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There were few checks and balances to the levy of taxes system in Jesus’ Galilee. In Oakman’s analysis, systemic pressures worked to ratchet the level of taxation and other forms of expropriation — tolls, rents on land, interest, tithes to the Temple — ever higher. In 6 C.E., the Romans incorporated Judea into the province of Syria, and instituted a census to measure the population and gauge an appropriate level of taxation. Proclaiming that the Jews had no Lord but God, a certain Judas of Gamala and Saddok, a Pharisee, advocated armed resistance. The taxation, they argued, “was no better than an introduction to slavery.”
It’s not clear that anyone actually heeded Judas and Saddok at the time, though the Judean chronicler Flavius Josephus blames later insurrections on their philosophy of resistance. But their creed does highlight an important aspect of taxation in the 1st century. The notion that taxation was “an introduction to slavery” was no mere rhetorical flourish. People who fell in arrears on their taxes, whether due to crop failure or personal circumstances, often borrowed money to pay the tax collector. Failure to repay the moneylender could result in forfeiture of property if the borrower had property, or forfeiture of one’s liberty if he did not. Debtors could be literally sold into debt bondage, a form of slavery. Indebtedness was a widespread phenomenon in Galilee, Oakman argues, and relief of debts appears as a recurring theme throughout Jesus’ teachings.
The peasants of Galilee had a variety of options to protect themselves from the depredations of their rulers. Rarely did they rise in revolt. Ill armed, poorly organized and unskilled in the arts of war, they had no chance of winning a military confrontation. Sometimes they fled to the hills, living in caves as bandits and preying upon the estates of the wealthy. The phenomenon of “social banditry,” endemic throughout the ancient Mediterranean, is well documented in Galilee and Judea.
Drawing from anthropological studies, Oakman suspects that Galilean peasants also devoted considerable effort to tax avoidance. Unlike modern Americans, Galilean peasants had no social compact with their rulers: They received nothing in return for their taxes — no public works, no services, no pensions. With no stake in the system, they didn’t hesitate to lie and deceive when dealing with the tax collectors. Around the world, peasants have employed a variety of strategies, such as failing to declare land under cultivation, hiding produce, delivering grain contaminated by rocks and mud to increase its weight.[1] There is no reason to think that Galilean peasants were any different, Oakman says.
In his paper, “Jesus the Tax Resister,” Oakman reinterprets Jesus’ Q sayings as reflecting an acute sensitivity toward taxes, debts and tax/debt collection. His spin on Q is highly unorthodox, even jarring, and if viewed in isolation from the rest of his argument, would strike many readers as thoroughly implausible. However, examined through his lens of Jesus as leader of an anti-tax movement addressing the scribes who transcribed Jesus’ remarks — not necessarily to the population at large — the sayings take on a whole new meaning. For example, in Matthew 5:39-40, part of the so-called Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Traditional commentary pictures publicans or soldiers harrying peasants with physical blows. In Oakman’s interpretation, Jesus was telling the publicans to “turn the other cheek” when the peasants, in their outrage, escalate their resistance from prevarication to physical resistance.
Oakman concedes that his interpretation poses difficulties, and he’s still trying to sort out a context for the Q sayings that would make sense. He suspects that the setting may have been meals where both publicans and peasants were present. “That’s as far as I’ve gotten.”
Crucial to Oakman’s reinterpretation of the Q sayings is his idea of Jesus as a broker. Where John the Baptist had exhorted publicans to “exact no more than that which is appointed to you,”[2] Jesus went a step farther: He became actively engaged in seeking restitution. Although the story of Zacchaeus falls outside the scope of his focus on Q1, Oakman says, it is illustrative of what Jesus was trying to accomplish. Zacchaeus, chief of the publicans in Jericho, invited Jesus to a banquet. There, according to the Gospel of Luke, he stood up and announced, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.”[3]
From the Gospels, it appears that Jesus and his disciples banqueted also with the publicans of Galilee. The narratives frequently allude to “sinners” as parties to these events, pairing them with the toll collectors, as in “publicans and sinners.” Traditional biblical exegesis has interpreted the sinners, or havvayim, as referring to members of disreputable occupations, particularly prostitutes, who were cultically impure or morally unclean. Modern readers might imagine publicans participating in an underworld populated by such sinful and ostracized occupations as tax collectors, moneylenders (of the loan sharking variety), prostitutes, pimps and the thugs who enforced the tax and loan collections. But Oakman suspects that modern categories of thought confuse the original meaning. He believes the word havvayim carried implications of indebtedness. Publicans took on debt when they acquired tax collection rights. Prostitutes may have been indebted to their pimps. Oakman does not exclude the possibility that disreputable elements joined Jesus and the publicans, but he thinks the word as employed by the Gospels referred to a broader category of debtor that included distressed peasants.[4]
To make sense of the meetings involving Jesus, tax collectors and indebted peasants, Oakman views Jesus in the context of patron-client relations. Patrons were powerful figures who bestowed their wealth and influence in return for gifts, favors and acclaim from their clients. Relationships were characterized by reciprocity: the mutual exchange of wealth, political influence, support and honor. Networks of patron-client obligations defined the distribution of wealth, political power and status throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Within this system, there was a recognized role for the “broker” — an intermediary who introduced the powerless to powerful individuals they otherwise could not gain access to.
As a broker, Oakman suggests, Jesus set up meetings between tax collectors and peasants. It’s obvious enough what the peasants were looking for: relief from taxes and debt. But what did the publicans receive in exchange? Oakman is still thinking this through, but he believes they sought acceptance and a different kind of human relations. Tax collectors were despised not only by the peasants they tormented but by respectable elements such as the Pharisees. As social outcasts they enjoyed no honor, one of the core values of the ancient Mediterranean world. But Jesus accepted them into his community. They gained friends in the villages,[5] won acclaim for their generosity and had the satisfaction of knowing they were conducting their lives closer to the purpose of God.
Ironically, publicans often were debtors themselves. Says Oakman: “That’s how the elites got people to do the dirty work.” Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee, franchised tax-collection rights to chief publicans, who in turn sub-contracted the work to lesser tax and toll collectors. Publicans advanced the tax payments up front, often borrowing the money they needed to win the contract. It was up to the tax collectors to recoup their investments and make enough to live on. If they failed to collect sufficient taxes, they couldn’t repay their loans and they could end up in bondage themselves. Given the pressure on the publicans to collect revenue, were the inducements that Oakman’s Jesus offered — acclaim, spiritual satisfaction, acceptance by lower-ranking members of society — sufficient to win clemency for taxes owed?
Perhaps Jesus played a more active role in brokering relief than even Oakman imagines. In his article “Miracles, in Other Words: Social Science Perspectives on Healings,” Jerome H. Neyrey, a Context Group colleague, asks how exorcists and healers such as Jesus might have functioned in a patron-client economy. “Perhaps money is not exchanged between the healer and the healed, but some sort of exchange or reciprocity is expected and regularly occurs. What is it?”[6] The Gospel accounts make it clear that Jesus had no interest in accumulating personal wealth. On the other hand, notes Neyrey, he did receive honor and acclaim. “Most, but not all, healings end with some sort of acknowledgement of Jesus’ honor claims or some public confirmation of his role and status.”
Carrying this logic another step, one must consider the possibility that Jesus also bartered access and influence. His followers included wealthy Galilean women such as Mary Magdalene, Susanna and Joanna, whom he had healed of “evil spirits and infirmities.”[7] Joanna was married to Chuza, the steward of Herod’s estates, which means she probably was a member of Herod’s court. She may even have had access to Herod himself. If Luke can be believed, Herod had heard much about Jesus — not all of it bad.[8]
Not only did these wealthy women “minister unto” Jesus “of their substance” — supporting him financially — they might have utilized their influence, on Jesus’ behalf, to do favors for the tax collectors. Is not possible that Jesus parlayed his ability to exorcise demons from wealthy Galilean women into influence in Herod’s court? Is it too far fetched to think that he then reciprocated favors with tax collectors on behalf of Galilee’s powerless peasants?
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At the Context Group conference, the job of critiquing Oakman’s paper fell initially to William R. Herzog, professor of New Testament Interpretation with the Colgate Rochester Divinity School. “The recontextualization is really startling,” said Herzog. Oakman’s portrayal of Jesus as a broker between peasants and publicans challenges some deeply rooted interpretations.
While Oakman’s main thesis was attractive, Herzog said, he wondered if was it necessary to tie it to a radical re-reading of Jesus’ Q sayings. Anthropologists distinguish between the “public transcript” of the ruling elites, whose scribes left written records of their ideologies, and the “hidden transcript” of the powerless, who had every motive to conceal their rebellious thoughts, Herzog said. “Peasants do not advertise their resistance. It is to the advantage of peasants to let elites think what they want. They offer false assurance that nothing subversive is going on off-stage.” The problem with interpreting Q as Oakman does is that the peasants suddenly take their message on-stage. How plausible is it to think that Jesus would have abandoned the traditional strategy of the downtrodden and proclaimed a seditious philosophy so openly to village scribes and agents of Herod’s regime?[9]
Other scholars at the conference suggested refinements to “Jesus the Tax Resister.” Like Herzog, some questioned the way Oakman employed the Q material; others would have liked Oakman to provide more context, such as additional background about the history of tax resistance during the Herodian era. But most seemed to accept the core thesis that Jesus acted as a broker between peasants and publicans. Admittedly, this was a friendly crowd: Most of the scholars present were accustomed to refracting their analysis through the prism of patron-client relations. Oakman might receive a chillier reception among exegetes unschooled in cross-cultural anthropology.
Reflecting upon the paper a couple of weeks after the conference, Oakman said he expects to refine it this summer in anticipation of facing more hard-nosed critics at the Society of Biblical Literature. He will address the issues that Bill Herzog raises, give a fuller account of the tax regime of Roman Galilee and pay serious attention to the issues surrounding the use of Q stratigraphy.
When first hearing the paper’s title, “Jesus the Tax Resister,” Oakman recalls, his friend Jerry Neyrey kidded him: “So, Jesus was a Republican!”
“The context makes all the difference,” he responded. But if there are any big Republican donors out there who might be willing to subsidize his work this summer, please get in touch!
James A. Bacon
April 18, 2001
[1] According to James C. Scott’s study of Malay rice farmers, cited in Oakman’s paper, such measures could be highly effective: “Quietly and massively, the Malay peasantry has managed to nearly dismantle the tithe system so that only 15 percent of what is formally due is actually paid.” Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance; Yale University Press; 1985.
[2] Luke 3:13
[3] Luke 19:8
[4] It may be possible to equate “sinners” with Oakman’s indebted peasants in quite a different way. The Judeans of Jesus’ era used the concept of sin to explain misfortune. God punished transgressions against the law by afflicting the sinner with a wide array of evils: illness, accidents, drought, poor harvests, economic setbacks. If a peasant had fallen into calamity ö owing taxes, borrowing money, living under the threat of losing his land and/or freedom ö it was a reasonable presumption that God was chastising him for some previous sin. Almost by definition, those who suffered misfortune were sinners.
[5] Jerome H. Neyrey, one of Oakman’s fellow Context Group members, cites the parable of the wasteful steward in Luke 16:1-9 in support of this idea. Fearing the loss of his job, the steward reduces the obligations of his master’s debtors so that “when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses.” Says Neyrey: “No doubt there is some sense that if they are dismissed for failing to collect taxes, surely they would find aid with the non-taxed peasants.”
[6] Neyrey, Jerome H.; “Miracles, in Other Words: Social Scientific Perspective on Healings”; in Cavadini, John C., ed., Miracles in Jewish and Christian Antiquity; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press; 1999.
[7] Luke 8:2-3. “And certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, And Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance.”
[8] Luke 23:8. “When Herod saw Jesus [during his trial] he was exceeding glad: for he was desirous to see him of a long season, because he had heard many things of him; and he hoped to have seen some miracle done by him.”
[9] Although Matthew and Luke depict Jesus as proclaiming many of the Q sayings publicly in the so-called Sermon on the Mount and Sermon on the Plain, the historian cannot assume that these literary settings reflect the actual historic settings in which the words were uttered. Oakman is not convinced at all that the Q sayings were part of the “public discourse.” There is insufficient evidence to tell, he says.