Jack Elliott thinks not. The concept of social equality did not exist in ancient Judea.
by James A. Bacon
Jack Elliott takes pride in his career of liberal activism. In the 1960s, he protested against the Vietnam War and marched in Selma, Alabama. In the 1970s, he employed Christian theology to advance the quest for social justice. Since then, he has dedicated his career to making the Lutheran Church more inclusive. A self-avowed feminist, he has advocated the equal treatment of women within the church. But as a scholar of the New Testament era, there’s one place he draws the line: He won’t change the past. No one advances the cause of justice, Elliott says, by rewriting history and pretending that Jesus and his followers were social reformers with 21st-century sensibilities.
In Elliott’s reading of history, Jesus was indeed a reformer. He preached “radical inclusiveness,” bringing into his circle the outcasts and the dispossessed of Galilean society. In place of a hierarchical and exploitive system, with temple priests and Herodian princes at the top and peasants at the bottom, Jesus preached a new family of God with a just and benevolent deity at the apex of the social order. But the notion that Jesus advocated an egalitarian society — a view promulgated by a growing number of biblical scholars and theologians over the past decade — is just wishful thinking.
Elliott advanced this interpretation March 16 at the annual meeting of the Context Group at the University of Notre Dame. His thesis — “The Jesus Movement was not ‘Egalitarian’ but Family-Oriented: A Critique of an Anachronistic and Idealist Fallacy” — was one of nine working papers presented at the conference, which is devoted to exploring social-scientific perspectives on the biblical era. The purpose of the Context Group is to test ideas before an audience of friendly, like-minded colleagues before subjecting it to rigorous, and often critical, scrutiny in a formal setting like a Society of Biblical Literature conference. Accordingly, all views expressed are tentative and subject to revision.
In the 1990s a number of prominent New Testament scholars and theologians — including such luminaries as John Dominic Crossan, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and Gerd Theissen — put forth the idea that Jesus launched an “egalitarian” reform movement. He respects all three authors, says Elliott in explaining his interest in the topic: “They do good stuff. But I found it odd that they thought they could find evidence of egalitarianism in the 1st century.” He found it downright disconcerting when other scholars began repeating the error. He expected that someone would correct them sooner or later, but no one did. So, he took the job upon himself.
A composite view of the Egalitarian Thesis would go something like this: Jesus rejected the stratified and exploitative socio-economic system in the Judean homeland. In preaching the Kingdom of God, he described a demolition of the social hierarchy — “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last”[1] — and its replacement with a discipleship of equals. Jesus wasn’t in a position to overthrow the Romans and their Judean collaborators, but he did initiate a social revolution. He urged followers to abandon their homes, possessions and families, as he himself had done. His jarring words regarding the family, in particular — “if any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children · he cannot be my disciple”[2] — suggest that he repudiated the patriarchal, male-dominated family structure. He also forbade divorce, an institution that favored the rights of men over those of women. And he practiced “open commensality,” the sharing of meals with sinners and outcasts. The community of equals survived Jesus’ death in the form of homeless, itinerant preachers and the households that sheltered them, but the church reverted to traditional patriarchal and hierarchical structures within a few decades.
Elliott contends that such views impute 21st-century concepts and values to inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean world. The Judeans of the 1st century lived in a society organized around politics and kinship. By monopolizing the instruments of coercion, the Romans and the local Judean aristocracy extracted wealth from the population through taxes, rents and temple tithes. Wealth trickled back down as powerful patrons acted as benefactors, bestowing wealth and favors to their clients in exchange for acclaim and support. Language reflected the social structures of the time. The ancients had words for “justice” and “fairness” and “equity,” reflecting the ideals of people receiving treatment in accordance with their circumstances and social rank, but they never articulated an ideal of social equality. People enjoyed only those privileges ordained by custom or granted as benefactions by rulers.
“There was nothing in the Greco-Roman world that would have served as an analogy or impetus for eliminating prevailing patriarchal structures and social inequity,” Elliott says. The concepts of inalienable rights, equality before the law and social-economic equality originated with the 18th-century Enlightenment and were first put into practice — imperfectly, at that — only with the American and French revolutions.
Rather than creating a community of equals, Elliott suggests, Jesus organized a movement with an alternative hierarchy in which he stood at the top and others defined their status in relationship to him. He appointed “the Twelve,” including an inner core of those first called to his mission: Peter, John and James. Of those, Peter held the highest status, although John and James also jockeyed for precedence. Even women such as Mary Magdalene who had close personal contact with Jesus enjoyed higher status than others, men or women, who did not. Among his followers, only those who traveled with him embraced a life of poverty. Others, the publicans and the Galilean women who financially supported Jesus, evidently remained wealthier than the rest.
Jesus used the metaphor of family — the traditional patriarchal family — to organize his movement. He urged behavior consistent with patriarchal family values, which, according to Elliott, included submission to the father’s will, family solidarity, mutual support and protection, forgiveness of offenses and debts, protection of the vulnerable and the integrity of marriage. Jesus’ innovation was to integrate God into a redefined family structure, Elliott says. “The new family of God was one in which all humans trusted in and relied upon God as their Father and benefactor. It was a family constituted not by ties of blood or marriage but by obedience to the heavenly father’s will. It was a family in which all who trusted in God, as did Jesus, were established and united as brothers and sisters who maintained familial solidarity.”[3]
The Jesus movement also was distinctive, Elliott notes, in its radical inclusiveness. All Judeans were eligible to receive God’s forgiveness for their sins, and all levels of society were invited into his movement. Jesus took in the poor and dispossessed. He embraced publicans, sinners and other outcasts. Indeed, in the Kingdom of God, the poor would be preeminent: The last would be first. Although Jesus anticipated a cosmic role reversal — an inversion of status — he never hinted at an abolition of hierarchy. God would simply reshuffle the individuals within the hierarchy according to the criteria that Jesus enunciated. Furthermore, Jesus never advocated an earthly program, such as redistribution of land and property for society at large, that would address inequities on a systemic basis. As Elliott observes, “Suffering and want caused by inequity were to be alleviated by generosity, almsgiving, and compassion towards one’s fellow human beings, but Jesus engaged in no campaign to eradicate altogether the causes of such disparities.”
Egalitarian theorists have succumbed to the “idealist fallacy,” Elliott concludes. They improperly infer affirmations of social and economic equality from Jesus’ statements, and then treat those inferences as evidence of actual social and economic relations. “By all means let us reform the ills of society and church,” he writes. “But let us do so with historical honesty, respecting the past as the past and not trying to rewrite it with new ideological pens.”
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John H. Elliott graduated from Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Mo., the largest Lutheran seminary in the world, and then pursued graduate studies in Germany. Returning to Missouri in 1963, he was teaching New Testament studies when the civil rights movement erupted across the American South. He belonged to a group, the Council for Religion and Race, which was in contact with Martin Luther King. One night, King called the seminary, rounding up supporters for his march in Selma, Ala. Elliott skipped classes the next morning to attend the rally. “That was my baptism of fire,” he recalls. The problem wasn’t police dogs and fire hoses — it was the reaction when he came home. A lot of people didn’t believe in mixing politics and religion.
Leaving the seminary in 1967, Elliott took a job at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution located in the cockpit of the 1960s youth rebellion. “All hell was breaking loose in San Francisco,” he recalls: “flower power, free speech, the Vietnam War. I could hear Jefferson Airplane playing free concerts in the park out my [office] window.” Joining the antiwar movement, Elliott participated in demonstrations that resulted in the arrest of some of his compatriots. He remembers celebrating Eucharist outside prison, expressing solidarity with a friend inside.
Finding that he shared intellectual interests with a number of his fellow protestors — many of them from Berkeley — Elliott met with them off the streets to explore the intersection of politics and theology. They called themselves the Bay Area Seminar for Theology and Related Disciplines — BASTARDs. “I was deeply committed to liberation movements,” he says.
n his view, there were no good guys or bad guys in the Vietnam War. Theology didn’t help him make much sense of what he saw. Searching for new perspectives, he began reading widely in sociology, anthropology and political science. He asked many of the same questions as the liberation theologians active at the time, but he found they weren’t rigorous enough in their analysis. “You can’t talk about liberation in a vacuum,” Elliott says. “You’ve got to ask, what are the causes of oppression? Who benefits? Who’s being oppressed? How are they being manipulated?”
As Elliott developed a framework for answering such questions, he began applying it to the Bible. He had written his dissertation about 1 Peter, arguably the most neglected letter of the New Testament. The few scholars who had studied the document had interpreted its message along spiritual lines: Grit your teeth, hang in there, and God will take you to heaven. Viewed afresh through the lens of social analysis, 1 Peter took on a new meaning. The letter wasn’t dispensing spiritual pabulum, Elliott says, it was addressing concrete concerns of real people. The author probably was writing from Rome around 70 C.E. to 90 C.E. to a mixed Judean-gentile community in Asia Minor. Many of the church members were recent migrants to the city, resident aliens, who were looked down upon by the native inhabitants. 1 Peter’s author gave a positive interpretation to their condition, says Elliott: “I know you’re suffering a lot, but this situation can be turned to good; you are resident aliens, but you have a home with us in God.” He published his work under the title, “Home for the Homeless: A Social-Scientific Criticism of 1 Peter, Its Situation and Strategy.”
After a stint at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, where as a Lutheran he found himself in the remarkable position of teaching theology to Jesuits, Elliott returned to the U.S. In 1979 he experienced a major turning point in his career: While giving an address on Home for the Homeless, he met Bruce J. Malina. Like Elliott, Malina had been exploring the social sciences for new perspectives on biblical studies. The two immediately hit it off, sparking a life-long friendship and forming the nucleus of like-minded scholars to pursue the application of social sciences in the New Testament. After a brief incarnation as the Social Facets group in affiliation with the Jesus Seminar, Elliott, Malina and their colleagues assembled annually under the banner of the Context Group. (For more about the Context Group, see the May 2001 article in the Jesus Archive.)
One of the contributions of the Context Group to the study of the historical Jesus has been to expose the anachronistic fallacies embedded in much New Testament exegesis. When reading scripture, most scholars unconsciously apply their 21st frame of reference to 1st century people and institutions. These subtle biases apply to almost every sphere of life: from politics to economics, from religion to family. Historians readily perceive the differences in outward forms: that the political structures of 1st-century Judea were undemocratic, that the Romans and the Judean aristocrats monopolized political power, and that the ruling class exercised its power to extract wealth from the weak. But few scholars appreciate the dynamics of such a society. A tendency exists to interpret the social conflicts of the era in terms with which we are familiar, such as class struggles or anti-colonial liberation movements. But the Mediterranean world operated according to the principles of a “patron-client” system in which powerful patrons developed networks of face-to-face relations with clients, exchanging gifts and protection for political support and acclaim. Individuals perceived themselves as participating in one of many pyramids of political power, not as belonging to social classes such as “the aristocracy” or “the peasantry.”
The mental frameworks that contemporary Westerners use to interpret society simply did not exist anywhere in the world before the 18th- century Enlightenment. Only when overseas exploration exposed Europeans to the incredible diversity of human cultures and civilizations did anyone begin to appreciate that different forms of social organization were possible. Only then did philosophers theorize that human behavior was shaped by social structures, that the cause of human suffering resulted from inequities in those structures, and that society could be organized so that all men could be treated equally. The ancients had no such perspective. They attributed misery and misfortune either to the folly and wickedness of men, or to the design of gods, spirits or demons acting out of very human motives. Those who thought about such matters, such as Aristotle and Plato, suggested that social differences were determined by nature, thus permanent and unalterable.
That’s why Elliott thought it strange that respected scholars began writing of Jesus as the leader of an egalitarian movement. The egalitarian theme can be discerned in earlier works, but it gained momentum in the early 1990s with the publication in 1991 of Dominic Crossan’s “Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography” and in 1993 with Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s “Discipleship of Equals: A Critical Feminist Ekklesia-logy of Liberation.” On the basis of their prestige, other scholars began replicating the fallacy, says Elliott. “I thought it important to nip this in the bud. I waited and waited for someone else to do it, but no one did.”
Three years ago, he decided to undertake the effort himself. His essay, “The Jesus Movement Was Not Egalitarian but Family-Oriented” is the result.
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Egalitarian theorists cite numerous passages in the New Testament scriptures as evidence of egalitarian impulses in the Jesus movement. In each case, Elliott argues, they misinterpret the significance of the material.
Abandonment of family, renunciation of possessions. A prevalent theme of the Gospels is Jesus’ call for disciples to abandon their family ties and obligations, give away their property, drop their occupations and trust to God for their material security. The egalitarian theorists regard these proclamations as a critique of prevailing social institutions, the family in particular. But they misconstrue what Jesus is saying, Elliott argues. Jesus wasn’t passing judgment on family structures or social institutions but enjoining his disciples to re-order their priorities in anticipation of God’s imminent reign. Jesus made these demands not of the Judean population at large but of the disciples who personally accompanied him. The success of his movement required sympathizers who maintained the means to house and feed him. Jesus’ call for his closest followers to adopt his way of life implied no desire to transform the social structure. Indeed, no society could have long remained viable for long if all its members had ceased productive activity such as farming, fishing and herding.
Homelessness of the Son of Man. Jesus’ voluntary homelessness, suggests Crossan, “symbolized the egalitarian message of the Kingdom where all are equal, and no place is dominant — and neither is any person, family or village.” This is pure inference, responds Elliott. “Crossan’s conclusion involves an unacceptable leap from having no geographical place to call home to an inferred equality of persons, families or villages.”
Jesus and Divorce. Crossan finds that Jesus’ saying on divorce implied that women should have the same rights as men in marriage. But Jesus was not expanding women’s rights, Elliott notes: He was prohibiting a practice — divorce and remarriage — that had disruptive social effects. Divorce didn’t make reconciliation impossible, but remarriage did. Unlike in contemporary Western societies in which marriage is a legal union of two individuals, marriage in Judean society represented an alliance between two families. Complicating matters upon a break-up, marriage typically involved the transfer of property through a bride’s dowry. As a consequence, divorce could lead to bitter acrimony, even feuds.
Reversal of status. According to Schussler Fiorenza, Jesus radically rejected all relationships of domination and subordination — within the patriarchal family and the hierarchical society at large. She cites the array of passages suggesting a reversal of status: “Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” But Schussler Fiorenza and others mistake the reversal of status with the elimination of status. Far from preaching the obliteration of hierarchical structures, Elliott contends, Jesus’ vision required hierarchy. In God’s Kingdom, Jesus, his disciples and those who accepted his message would be elevated in stature. They would rule and pass judgment on those who had formerly persecuted them.
The New Family of God. Egalitarian theorists point to Jesus’ embrace of God’s family in place of his biological family as another rejection of prevailing social structures: “Whoseover shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.” Noting the omission of “father” from those whom Jesus accepts as his kin, Schussler Fiorenza speaks of a new “kinship of equal discipleship” and of a new family where fathers are excluded: “Insofar as this new ‘family’ has no room for ‘fathers,’ it implicitly rejected their patriarchal power and status, and thereby claims that in its midst all patriarchal structures of domination and subordination are abolished.” Far from critiquing the family structure, however, Elliott says the passage shows Jesus’ conception of the family as an institution appropriate for defining life under the reign of God. “What the saying expressly affirms,” writes Elliott, “is a redefinition of the identity of the family of Jesus and the basis for membership — not blood or marriage but obedience to the will of God.”
Open meals. According to Crossan, one of the ways in which Jesus put his egalitarian ideas into practice was through “open commensality,” expanding the circle of those with whom he ate. Says Crossan: “Open commensality is the symbol and embodiment of radical egalitarianism.” Elliott takes this practice as a sign of Jesus’ inclusiveness, but finds no evidence that Jesus accorded all participants the same status at the banquet table. The Gospels never hint at an abolition of servants/slaves serving the meals or a reordering of seating arrangements that gave places of honor to those of greatest status.
Many of Jesus’ teachings presume economic and social disparity. Among the examples that Elliott cites:
- Male household owners having authority over their servants. (Mark 13:34: “For the Son of man is as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch.”
- Children honoring their parents. (Mark 7:10: For Moses said, honour thy father and thy mother.”
- Older sons superior in social rank to younger sons. (Implied in Luke 15:11-32: parable of the prodigal son.)
- Differentiated places of honor and status. (Luke 14:8-9: “When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, set not down in the highest room; lest a more honorable man than thou be bidden of him; And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room.”
To Jesus, disparities in wealth and status were the natural order of things. As he said in Mark 14:7: “Ye have the poor with ye always.”
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Preaching equality is one thing, achieving it is quite another. Even if the egalitarian theorists could make a case that Jesus articulated a vision of equality, Elliott argues, they offer very little evidence — outside the dubious example of open meals — that Jesus and his followers actually put such ideals into practice. Demolishing traditional social structures would have required far more than a one-time redistribution of property to transform social relations. It would have meant changing practices and institutions that created the inequalities to begin with. Some of these include:
- The patron-client system in which patrons possessing power acquired wealth then redistributed it to clients in exchange for support and honor.
- The system of patrilineal descent, in which families derived honor from their descent through the male’s lineage.
- The patrilocal rule of residence, in which the wife moved into the husband’s family’s household in a subordinate position.
- The prerogative of male heads of households to arranged marriage, subordinating the personal desires of the bride to the interests of the family.
- Primogeniture, or the favoring of the eldest son in inheritance.
- The distinction between male-gendered space (public) and female-gendered space (domestic).
Had Jesus launched a social movement that changed the way people interacted with one another, there should be evidence that he altered real-world practices. But what signs are there, Elliott asks, that the Jesus movement accorded its members equal access to power, wealth and honor? “Our egalitarian theorists have provided no such evidence because it does not exist and because such fundamental changes would have been impossible to effect.”
Rather than reinventing social institutions, Jesus adapted an existing institution — the patriarchal family — as a model for his movement. “In this family of faith,” Elliott contends, “social and economic disparities remained but were relativized by an insistence on mutual humility, mutual forgiveness, mutual aid and mutual respect.” After Jesus’ death, his followers assembled in households, even as they moved beyond the homeland of the Jews. They saw themselves as constituting a new surrogate “family of God” and defined their social relationships in family terms. These fictive family ties facilitated mutual support but also perpetuated differentiated roles and statuses.
As evidence of an egalitarian impulse in the early church, Shussler Fiorenza has pointed to Paul’s famous passage in Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one.” From this passage she infers an obliteration of ethnic differences, an abolition of slavery, and a demolition of the patriarchal family. “Insofar as this egalitarian Christian self-understanding did away with all male privileges of religion, class and caste,” she wrote, “it allowed not only gentiles and slaves but also women to exercise leadership functions within the missionary movement.”
Schussler Fiorenza confuses equality with unity, Elliott retorts. The statement, “You are all one in Christ,” affirms the inclusivity of the Jesus movement. Greeks were no longer excluded from the family of God. Women and slaves were regarded as capable of making their own moral choices. But Paul did not say “You are all equal in Christ.” No one freed his slaves. Males still ruled their households. The wealthy refused to associate with the poor. Economic inequity and partiality plagued the believers addressed not only by Paul but James and 1 Peter. Even the egalitarian theorists concede that the Christian communities eventually reverted to hierarchical patterns.
Which scenario is more likely? That Jesus created social arrangements with no known precedent, that the experiment survived his death but perished without a trace within a generation, and that these wrenching social transformations left only the faintest spoor in the historical record? Or that Jesus patterned his movement upon an alternate — but existing — institution, that of the family? For Elliott, the answer is clear.
Many scholars claim the moral authority of Jesus to support their own view of the way things should be. But Elliott does not succumb to that temptation.
“I myself have been arguing for greater equality in the Church my entire professional career,” he says. But “a respect for history and the actual social reality of the early Jesus movement requires that we not confuse current ideals with past realities. It requires that we acknowledge that all societies of all times work with differing cultural constructs of reality that shaped their visions, attitudes, values and actions. As biblical interpreters, our responsibility is to read and interpret the biblical writings within their own historical, economic, social, political and cultural contexts. An erroneous and anachronistic imputation of modern notions to the biblical authors should be challenged and resisted in the name of historical honesty.”