Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 87 (June 1994) 29-42
Jesus and the Renewal of Local Community in Galilee
Challenge to a Communitarian Christology
Introduction
In his devastating critique of the first quest for the historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer warns of the inherent danger of the influence of theology on New Testament study:
Each successive epoch of theology found its own thoughts in Jesus; that was, indeed, the only way it could make Him live. But it was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each individual created Him in accordance with his own character. There is no historical task which so reveals a man's true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus.[1]
So it is with trepidation that I venture a paper on the Jesus of history. I am only too well aware that the face that I find staring up at me from the bottom of the well may be my own.
Nevertheless, I believe that we dare not ignore the question of Jesus' identity from either direction, from the New Testament or from Systematic Theology. There is a dialectical relationship between our Christology and our praxis. I was first alerted to the way in which Christology is a reflection of socio-economic context in a paper given by historian Philippe Denis on his book on representations of Christ in the sixteenth century.[2] But it is also true that our ideological perspective on who Jesus was and what he did will influence both our own course of action and the kind of society we strive to build as Christians.[3] I do not really want to get into a debate about the relation of base to superstructure at this point, and simply point out the dialectical nature of the relationship.
If I may begin by laying my cards on the table. I was deeply struck some years ago by reading the book by Luise Schottroff and Wolfgang Stegemann, Jesus and the Hope of the Poor.[4] Their thesis seemed to me to make sense of the Jesus tradition after the intense experience of form and redaction criticism:
On the one hand, then, it is hardly possible to ascertain any historically sure details regarding Jesus. On the other hand, it is possible to say a good deal that is historically reliable about Jesus provided we no longer isolate him from the individuals who first thought of themselves as his followers, that is, from his disciples both in his lifetime and in the period immediately following his death. If we attempt to understand him in the context of the earliest Jesus movement, we can draw a good many historically valid conclusions regarding him. The historian, then, cannot isolate Jesus from his disciples. But then neither can the theologian afford to do so.[5]
This matched a growing conviction arising from my pastoral experience[6] and my exegesis[7] that western individualism was distorting our perspective and served the interests of the status quo. I became increasingly impatient with the implicit self-centredness of Bultmann's existentialism, which stressed individual decision and ruled the historical Jesus out of account. Here I would concur with E. Schillebeeckx:
Much as I may appreciate the significance, the unique importance, of existential experience and religious enthusiasm, I am none the less certain that a God who is encountered simply as "my God" and is avowed as such is in my view a non-god, unless it can be reasonably - which is not at all to say mathematically or in a rationally conclusive way - shown that in this person, Jesus of Nazareth, we actually have to do with the One who liberates and yet at the same time - however incomprehensibly - is the final arbiter of meaning, the "Creator of heaven and earth." Here if anywhere, in the sphere of religion, pious self-deception is a very real possibility. So religious faith in Jesus of Nazareth, a person appearing within our human history, is problematical for me if the personal relation of this historically localizable individual with the "Creator of heaven and earth," the universal factor cementing all that lives and moves, - the living God - is not clear to us.[8]
So it has been with relief that I have learned that other New Testament scholars are coming to recognize the centrality of community even at the very outset of the Christian faith. I might, of course, have found the same theme in John Gager's fine work of a few years earlier, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity.[9] Gager begins citing Peter Berger to the effect that human worlds are social constructions and that without the processes of "world-creation" and "worldmaintenance" "there can be no social existence whatsoever ... the social world in which we live determines our experience of what is real."[10] Incarnation is inconceivable in the abstract: it can only be incarnation into membership of a specific and particular community and world view, into a network of human and material relations. Bultmann's pupil, Käsemann, already recognized that the concept of a human essence which is the same in all times and places is untenable.[11] Human being is socially and historically determined, just as it is inescapably corporeal. This, as Schillebeeckx: argues,[12] must be the starting point for any modern reconstruction of Christology.
In the meantime, a so-called third quest for the historical Jesus has burst on the scene with its plethora of books. This has brought in its wake what Stephen Barton describes as "an explosion of interest in the communal dimension of earliest Christianity."[13]
Previous "Quests" for the Jesus of History
The first search for the Jesus of history arose out of the Enlightenment attempt to set reason up against tradition, and the Reformation attempt to set up the Bible against the Church.[14] The Bible was subjected to historical investigation in the same way as any other historical text, and viewed in the light of the history of religions generally. The reductionism of this approach was to some extent offset by the influence of Romanticism as mediated through Schleiermacher's affirmation of religious experience. Christianity was defined in terms of evolutionary ethics, and Jesus the teacher of primal religious experience and ethics. This psychologizing production of lives of Jesus in the so-called "First Quest" was brought to an end in part by the work of Johannes Weiss and then Albert Schweitzer, who argued that apocalyptic expectation lay at the heart of Jesus' proclamation and not ethics at all.[15] Jesus deliberately provoked his own death and expected God to intervene on his behalf to bring in the end of the world. He was wrong and died in that awareness of his desertion by God. This is what lies behind Bultmann's unwillingness to allow the validity of the quest for the Jesus of history and of his attempt to demythologize and strip off the layer of apocalyptic to arrive at a timeless and eternal existential truth. This truth is the kerygma, the proclamation of the Church, in which the grace of God confronts the human-being with a krisis, a call to unconditional decision for authentic being, open to God and to the future.
Although Form Criticism evolved out of the attempt to isolate the genuine sayings and doings of the historical Jesus, in the end it proved the exact opposite. It demonstrated that we receive the Jesus tradition from the hands of a believing, worshipping community little interested in history. Redaction Criticism demonstrated that even the earliest and probably oral layer of the tradition, the so-called Q material, has theological tendencies and interests. Bultmann argues that little can be known of Jesus, other than that he lived and that he preached the coming of the Kingdom of God as a call to radical decision. He sees a radical disjunction between the historical Jesus and the post-Easter Christ of the kerygma. In any case, he argues that we should not even want to know about the pre-Easter Jesus, since this would then be works and not faith. Since Jesus preached an eschatological gospel and this is historically contingent, it would in any case have to be stripped off in order to reach the timeless and the universal. Only so can the decision of faith be a simple response to the grace of God:
His form-critical research tended to confirm the view that such a quest is impossible, and his existential theology carried through the thesis that such a quest is illegitimate.[16]
In this perspective, Bultmann shows himself to be both the heir of liberal theology and of Albert Schweitzer.
Bultmann was challenged on this hypothesis of radical discontinuity by his own students, who inaugurated a "New Quest" for the historical Jesus. Ernst Käsemann writes:
I completely fail to understand how it is possible, within the field of the historical, to maintain the existence of material continuity without immediately thinking at the same time of historical continuity.[17]
Historical processes require a tension between continuity and discontinuity, so that Easter is both bridge and watershed between Jesus and the kerygma.[18] Bultmann's pupils still seek to find the continuity in the kerygma of Jesus and that of the early church:
Our task, then, is to seek the history in the Kerygma of the Gospels, and in this history to seek the Kerygma.[19]
Joachim Jeremias[20] attempts to use the same tools of historical criticism to redeem the possibility of recovering the ipsissima verba of the historical Jesus. Jeremias succeeded in forcing a re-assessment of the reliability of the Jesus tradition, but only in reaching the earliest Palestinian layer of the Jesus tradition. The attempt to reach the historical Jesus through his sayings and parables has proved problematic, since there has been no agreement over precisely which sayings can be considered authentic. Moreover, the post-Bultmannian search for the historical Jesus also seems flawed from the start by a bias towards the history of ideas. It neglected the analysis of material factors. It is here that the more recent flowering of research into the historical Jesus has made a radically new departure. The acute comment of Schillebeeckx, may again serve as an epitaph for this second or "New Quest":
What the historical Jesus has left us is not in the first instance a kind of résumé or bits and pieces of preaching about God's approaching dominion, nor a kerygma or string of verba et facta ipsissima, that is, a pure record of precisely what he did as a historical individual or a number of directives and wise sayings that can fairly certainly be picked out from the gospels. What he did leave - only through what he was, did and had said, simply through his activities as this particular human being - was a movement …[21]
Ideas are contingent and culture bound, so that what is needed is sociological enquiry into their base.
Dimensions of the "Third Quest"
The Use of the Human Sciences and Socio-Economic Analysis
There is a sense in which the so-called "New Quest" inaugurated by James Robinson and Ernst Käsemann overlaps with the "Third Quest."[22] Along with the attempt of Bultmann's pupils to re-examine more carefully the sayings of Jesus, came a renewed interest and understanding of the Jewish background in the first century, brought on by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi texts and others. Jewish scholars began to discover that Jesus was recognizably Jewish, could be reclaimed as a part of their own heritage, and entered the fray.[23] In some respects, Sanders' volume Jesus and Judaism[24] summarizes the possibilities of the "New Quest" and also its limitations. Its horizons are still those of the history of religions and the history of ideas. Pharisees, for instance, are still seen as a kind of first century religious pastor group, whose church was the synagogue. It is still Jesus' "teaching" which forms the focus of interest and how it differed from the "teaching" of these religious officials. Nevertheless, Sanders recognizes the primacy of action in interpreting Jesus, since he makes the action in the Temple the hermeneutical key. He also recognizes that Jesus cannot be described as unique, except inasmuch as he produced a movement which endured and shaped modern society. The quest for the unique, heroic, individual Jesus who opposed a primal experience of religion to the dry legalism of the Pharisees has gone.
The logic of Sanders' position would be to begin to focus the historical research on the processes of group formation, on social analysis of the economic and sociological base of the actors in the drama which produced the movement. This is a move Sanders and others of the older school did not and (in the case of Sanders) still will not make (as his SBL Paper in San Francisco, 1992, shows).[25] For instance, Sanders admires the Pharisees as religious leaders. He fails to see that they are in fact retainers of the system and that their concern with tithes and purity regulations are a direct consequence of their dependence on the revenue generated by the temple system which they administer. When the War of 68-70 AD destroyed the priestly ruling class, the Romans were able swiftly and easily to transfer clients status power to this group of retainers who had always been beneficiaries of the system.
The growing conviction that the first Christian community or movement held the key to an understanding of Jesus,[26] however, developed in two related directions. In the first place it led to careful social description, a return to sources for first century Palestine and the wider Mediterranean world to examine the material base of ancient society. In classics this approach was already well under way with Rostovsteff,[27] Heichelheim,[28] Jones,[29] Macmullen,[30] Ste. Croix[31] and others. In the field of the New Testament the pioneer work was done by J. Jeremias,[32] F. C. Grant,[33] and later Hock,[34] Elliott,[35] Meeks,[36] and others. Finally, David E. Oakman[37] raises the whole question of the economic context of Jesus again with a careful analysis of economic factors and their interaction with Jesus' ministry. Oakman, however, despite his commitment to an economic analysis, begins with the teaching of Jesus:
Every modern interpretation of Jesus must begin with the most original and unique aspects of the Jesus tradition.[38]
He is at this point heir to the idealist tradition. Why, after all, must one begin with what is "original and unique" (something it is very difficult, if it is possible at all, to demonstrate). This starting point significantly skews his study.
Above all, it has been Richard Horsley's careful re-examination of Josephus and the various movements of protest in Roman Palestine which has influenced the direction of further study.[39] Horsley challenged the existence of a prolonged and organized "Zealot" movement and shows that it did not exist before the War of 68-70 AD. Rather there were diverse protest and resistance movements with very different social bases throughout the whole period. Jesus could no longer be ideologically set in opposition as the "peace party" over against the Zealots and a "war party."
In the second place, the new emphasis on the Jesus movement led to the use of theories and models from the social sciences, above all sociology and anthropology. The economic models of Kautsky,[40] Gerhard Lenski,[41] or Alföldy,[42] with their theories of the social stratification of advanced agrarian societies have led to more accurate delineation of Palestinian society.[43] Class analysis has noted the radical separation of the ruling class from the rest; the separation of the urban and retainer population from the rural peasantry; an examination of the means of production and distribution.[44] The sociological theories of Weber's charisma,[45] models of millenarian movements drawn from Worsley[46] and Burridge[47] of sects,[48] of conflict[49] and the models of cross-cultural anthropology, e.g. Mary Douglas on group boundaries and symbols,[50] Victor Turner on ritual,[51] Peristiany on honour and shame[52] have been taken up.[53] The theories of Berger and Luckmann[54] have been explored to show the way in which the Jesus movement was constructing a symbolic universe. We will examine this further in what follows.
For our purposes here, it is important to note the subtle change in research into the historical Jesus which the use of the social science makes. These disciplines assume that a movement arises out of concrete social circumstances and not as a result of unique individual religious genius. In fact the word "unique" would have no place in such studies with their assumption that everything is socially conditioned. They depart from an examination of norms and averages and common patterns, of a certain unity in human experience. As Peter Worsley restates Weber's famous theory of charisma in his analysis of millenarian cargo cults, charisma is not a factor of a unique individual but of the community which accepts the charismatic leader, it is a "function of recognition"[55]. Thus a founder of a religious movement is not conceivable without the concrete community who accept her/his claims.
In Christological terms, we should already ask at this point whether there can be any longer a valid enterprise in defining the person and works of Jesus without including the concept of community. We should also question a Christology which claims to work "from below," as Pannenberg does, while at the same time insisting that:
its first question has to be that about his unity with God. Every statement about Jesus taken independently from his relationship to God could result only in a crass distortion of his historical reality.[56]
We should more appropriately insist that any serious incarnational Christology should begin with Jesus' location in a concrete network of human relationships and that any mission here would be a historical distortion.[57]
Galilee
A second point of broad agreement in the most recent research into the historical Jesus, lies in the recognition of the special position and history of Galilee. The Jesus movement is a Galilean movement. Further it is a movement of Galilean peasant society. Again the work of social description has been decisive here, and especially the work of Sean Freyne[58] on Galilee and its history. The dynamics of Jewish society in Galilee and Judaea were quite different, according to their very different histories, and their different relationship with Jerusalem.
Galilee was heir in some form to the traditions of the Northern Kingdom. Especially the figures of Elijah/Elisha and Moses seem to have played a key role in popular consciousness, keeping alive prophetic liberatory memories. Torah was important, as was circumcision in Galilean society, but not the written and oral Torah as interpreted by the Judaean and Jerusalem retainer class and enforced where they could by the Temple aristocracy. Rather Galilee was home to popular legal and wisdom traditions. The kind of position here is illustrated by the way Jesus answers the retainer class on the issue of divorce. Certainly Moses allowed divorce, but only because of human hard-headedness. In the beginning God separated them out of one flesh in order that they might join again to form one flesh in marriage. So any subsequent separation divided what God had joined.
Galilee was also ambivalent about Jerusalem, the Temple, the priestly aristocracy, temple dues and tithes. For most of the period after the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom, Galilee had been under a separate administration from Judaea. While it was reconquered by the Hasmoneans, it was again divided in administration under the Herodians and Romans. Under the rule of Herod, Galilee was expected not only to pay the Temple tithes and taxes, the Roman taxes, but also to support a Herodian aristocratic administration. This meant that economic pressure on the peasantry was almost unsupportable: a triple tax system on the land. There were large royal estates owned by absentee Herodian nobility, many of whom would be living in Jerusalem. The economic pressure on the peasantry placed by the aristocracy was in turn exploited by the aristocracy, who loaned out money to desperate peasants and eventually obtained their land and their persons in debt-slavery. Land deprivation and debt meant desperation for peasants.
This meant that demands by far away Jerusalem priestly aristocracy for further moneys and control were often resisted. On the one hand it was recognized as the centre of Jewish identity and the holy city. On the other, it was perceived to be the very embodiment of the exploitative system which was destroying peasant society.
A further point about Galilee is that it was under pressure from expanding Hellenistic cities in the south. Sepphoris was a large and important Hellenistic city located on the main trade routes, very close to Nazareth, Jesus' home town. Tiberias was founded on the shore of the Sea of Galilee by Herod as a Hellenistic city. These cities depended on a control of the countryside and peasants surrounding them for their financial support. Thus they provided another source of economic exploitation and debt. It was in these cities that the local aristocracy lived and utilized the peasant surplus. During the War of 68-70 AD, the Galilean peasants did not want to fight the Romans, but did want to burn down these local Hellenistic cities. They were only dissuaded by the cunning of Josephus. There is no evidence that Jesus had extensive contact with these cities, despite the attempts of Oakman[59] and Crossan[60] to bring them strongly into play. They depend on arguments from silence.
The distance from Jerusalem, on the other hand, gave the Jewish peasantry space for a certain independence. Horsley has pointed out that administration in such outlying areas as Galilee was largely a matter of enforcing the collection of taxes. Actual government was still carried out in the traditional way by village and town elders and heads of families. This meant that local initiative was possible in a way it may not have been in Jerusalem and Judaea.[61]
Peasant Society and Peasant Movements
A further point of agreement in the Third Quest, is that an understanding of the Jesus movement requires an understanding of the dynamics of peasant society in advanced agrarian society. In particular the work of Eric Wolf,[62] Gideon Sjoberg,[63] and Eric Hobsbawm[64] has been influential. These anthropological studies have shown that peasant societies are forced by the ruling class to produce a surplus, which supports the ruling class and its retainers and soldiers in the cities. Usually peasants are quiescent and reluctant to take action, adopting tactics of silent resistance and non-cooperation. It is only in extreme necessity and the threat of landlessness and social disintegration that the peasants' resistance becomes overt.
One of the first marks of distress in peasant society is the emergence of social banditry. Bandits emerge from the ranks of the peasants as a result of some local injustice or problem, and live outside the law largely by plundering the aristocracy. The peasants largely support them and hide them from the authorities, who regard bandits as a very serious challenge. Invariably the bandit is betrayed in the end and so the challenge is usually short-lived and only becomes a serious threat to the ruling class if it co-incides with a general rising of peasantry for which bandits may provide the leadership.
Popular prophets also emerge as a sign of peasant distress, especially in Galilee with its strong prophetic tradition. Characteristically such prophets lead a group of peasants in a symbolic re-enactment of the Exodus and Conquest traditions, out into the wilderness, across the Jordan and on to the Mount of Olives. There is no record of any such movement attempting an armed insurrection but they were usually ruthlessly suppressed by the ruling aristocracy by force of arms. Such movements are close in many respects to millenarian movements elsewhere.
Finally, Horsley demonstrates that there was a strong surviving tradition of popularly elected kingship among the Jewish peasantry. Peasant resistance movements often took the form of a declaration that the leader of the movement was king, and the beginning of a social revolution to restore traditional Jewish structures. It could also take the form of the election of a Zadokite high priest, in opposition to the non-Zadokite ruling families in Jerusalem, who had been brought from Egypt and Babylon and were considered illegitimate by many. Here again, however, there is a key difference between Judaea and Galilee. If Horsley is right, then the Zealot movement originated among Judaean peasantry fleeing the advancing Roman army in 68 AD. They set about installing a renewed Zadokite hierocracy and executing the current ruling class. There is, on the other hand, no evidence for an interest in hierocracy among Galilean movements at all, only a hostility towards the exactions of the temple system.
The specific Galilean and peasant location of the Jesus movement clearly affects its profile and its aims. It is also the pre-supposition of Jesus' parables, relating to peasant means and relations of production.[65] To this extent, it poses a challenge to Christology to recognize the incarnational specificness of Jesus. We can no longer talk about Jesus' Jewishness, as if that could suffice. We need to understand his incarnation and socialization in a particular historical, socio-economic environment. The Jesus movement has no abstract, universal significance, but a historically and socially rooted one; just so Jesus as the Christ has no abstract universal credal significance separate from his location in a specific community and specific programmes of renewal in local communities.[66]
Taking this seriously would require a different model of how we should do our theology. It should begin with the reflections of local communities on their experience and praxis as a starting point for critical reflection on our Christian traditions concerning Christology. This challenge is expressed by James Cochrane in his forthcoming paper, "Faith in Doubt: Tradition, Criticism and Popular Religion"[67] as a call to a Gestalt of Theological Construction, based on the 'incipient theologies' of local base ecclesial communities.
Apocalyptic and Eschatology
The "Third Quest" has also achieved a measure of agreement on apocalyptic, but also some sharp disagreement. Firstly, it is agreed by most that the old idea of a consistent and coherent Jewish expectation can no longer be maintained:
The particular eschatology which Schweitzer posited did not, we now know, exist as a set system, and perhaps not at all.[68]
There were a variety of ideas and movements. Yet it is clear that the Jesus movement was a movement of renewal or restoration aimed at all Israel. Sanders' excellent work here has not been superceeded.[69] The Jesus movement was not, to this extent, as Gager has assumed. It may have ended up that way, but its initial impulse was directed outward to all Israel and not inward to a small elect group. The choice of the twelve apostles and their allocation of twelve seats establishing justice for Israel is decisive here. So too is Jesus' close and undisputed link with the movement of John the Baptist. The climactic act of the demonstration in the Temple can also best be understood in this way.
Another important new development in research into the historical Jesus, stimulated by cross-cultural anthropology, but also by re-examination of the texts, concerns apocalyptic. Schweitzer and Bultmann thought that Jesus was an apocalyptic figure, who expected a future divine inter-inauguration of transformed social relations in Israel. As Borg puts it, Jesus, like the OT prophets was "concerned with the immediate present of their people and of the immediate future that flowed out of that present".[70] Apocalyptic expectation relates to a concrete programme of action in the present. The "Now and Not Yet" of the German New Testament scholars has no basis in Jesus movement. So the work of the second person of the Trinity is inseparably tied to a concrete programme of action for social transformation.
Jesus and the Renewal of Local Community
Precisely what in historical terms that programme of action entailed is the basis of a real division among current researchers. One party links Jesus with the itinerant Cynic beggars of the Hellenistic cities. Leif Vaage[71] and Dominic Crossan[72] are representative of this group of scholars, and draw on the theory of Gerd Theissen[73] and the descriptive work of F. Gerald Downing[74] and Abraham Malherbe.[75] Crossan argues that Jesus began an itinerant movement of vagabond beggars, who healed and exorcised and demanded open table as the price of their labours. Jesus deliberately attacked the honour/shame culture of the ancient Mediterranean and the patronage system. He was a teacher of popular peasant wisdom.
It seems to me that this picture at the end of the day cannot stand the test of exegesis. There are very few texts indicating itinerancy, apart from the sending of the twelve/seventy, which was a specific embassy and not necessarily a general one. There is no indication that travelling was a permanent condition (after all they come back!). The text of the mission discourse seems to reject key Cynic symbols like staff and wallet for begging. Instead the apostles are to stay in one place and eat what is provided in that house. They only move on if the place will not listen to them.
Furthermore, as Horsley points out, all the other sources in the Jesus tradition presuppose the existence and support of settled local communities. The instructions relate to settled community life, marriage, children etc. By the time we can see the Jesus movement in concrete form, it consists of settled communities with a strong sense of community. The historical development of Christianity is inconceivable on the Theissen/Crossan model. Moreover, the Cynics were an urban Graeco-Roman phenomenon which flaunted an individual moral perfection. It was easily absorbed into the status quo and many aristocrats held to a modified Cynic position. It had many of the dimensions of the longing of a recently urbanized people for a romanticized and remote rural past. Crossan's argument depends on an entirely fictitious "unity of the Mediterranean" popular from Malina:
It seems, then, that we are dealing with a valid unity-in-diversity called Mediterranean society. But it is built up in interactive layers from geography and ecology, through technology and economics, and on to culture and Politics.[76]
This assertion deriving from Peristiany has been strongly challenged by more recent anthropological research.[77] There is no evidence for the existence or viability of a Cynic movement in rural society. They are parasitic on urban society and begging there. All the evidence of the Jesus tradition indicates that it was centred in the rural towns and villages. There is no mention at all of Sepphoris and Tiberias. To argue that because Jesus was born in Nazareth that he must have been familiar with Greek Cynics is an argument from silence with little value. The silence is more readily explained by a profound antipathy of Galilean peasants towards the encroaching Hellenistic cities which threatened and exploited them. It is also hard to see in what way the ruling classes would have seen such Jewish wandering Cynics as a real threat to their survival, enough of a threat to crucify their leader. An organized Cynic movement with a programme of action and a community and a deliberate entry into Jerusalem and demonstration in the temple would be a contradiction in terms. In fact it would make the movement already something other than Cynic.
A final factor for me in rejecting Crossan's theory is that it makes very arbitrary and selective use of texts, despite his attempt to stratify, codify and evaluate the texts systematically. At the end of the day, his interpretation turns on privileging the Gospel of Thomas, the papyrus fragment called the Secret Gospel of Mark, the papyrus fragment of the Gospel of Peter, the eucharistic prayers of the Didache contentiously interpreted. While I am in agreement with removing the artificial barrier on the canon in historical study, I believe that each text must be as critically and carefully dated, evaluated and assessed as has been done with the canonical material. Furthermore, Crossan's opening analysis of the Jesus movement against the background of Galilean peasant society is invalidated by his use of texts against the background of Graeco-Roman urban society.
The analysis of Horsley (and Borg, though he modifies and "spiritualizes" it) seems to me far more likely, far more in agreement with the Jesus tradition which has come down to us both inside and outside the canon. The Jesus movement originated as a renewal movement among the Galilean peasantry in response to economic and social disintegration and threatened landlessness. It was an attempt to use the space created by the partial power vacuum in outlying Galilee to renew local community in villages and towns, to strengthen and renew family and community relations and reverse the downward spiral of violence. Inevitably, since towns and villages and their peasant folk had links also with cities, it resulted in communities of adherents in the cities also. Such a programme could only be extended to the whole of Israel by confronting the temple-state and its aristocracy and retainers in Jerusalem. A serious confrontation of this kind, as evidenced by the entry into the city on a donkey, if it happened, and the demonstration in the Temple, which everyone agrees did happen, could only result in a conspiracy by the ruling classes and their Roman overloads to stop the movement by removing its leader. But clearly the movement was too strong and the impact of the personality and teaching of Jesus were too enduring for his death to be the end of it all. The movement continued to experience his presence in their midst, believed that he had died a martyr's death which God had vindicated and continued to live a strong renewed community lifestyle. The communities in the cities made a strong impact on some Gentiles who desired to join them and were admitted under various conditions, which formed the basis of extensive disputes about the nature and future of the movement as it grew.
The key aspects of the community were an attempt at concrete alleviation of the debt burden and dire poverty by an ethic of reciprocity, by which people were encouraged to give when they had a surplus to those more desperate, to cancel debts where possible "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors."[78] Jesus absolved people from the obligation of paying Temple tax "the children are free" and attacked the exploitation exercised by the ruling class and their retainers. Oakman argues, plausibly, that Jesus advocated the practice of "general reciprocity" in the face of indebtedness, as a "way back toward human solidarity in an age of insensitive egoism and brutality."[79] This was to be built on a renewal of kinship ties on a broader basis.
Related to indebtedness for the peasant producer was the problem of purity, since maintenance and restoration of purity was a financial burden, channelling scarce resources into the coffers of the temple system. The tithing and purity laws emphasized by the retainer class were keystones for maintaining exclusiveness, wealth and /pp. 40-41/ privilege for the overlords in the system, and that is why the Pharisees upheld them. Jesus absolved people from the obligation of maintaining ritual purity in its rigid form, especially as taught in the oral tradition of the retainer class, which Borg describes as the "politics of holiness."[80]
The purity system regarded sickness and misfortune as punishments for sin. It laid the burden of guilt on the victims of society, while absolving the beneficiaries of exploitation. Forgiveness of sins was controlled to the economic advantage of the ruling class by their monopoly of the temple. Jesus undercut this by declaring sins directly forgiven and demonstrating this by his healing miracles. This restored the dignity and self-worth of the oppressed and enabled them to take part in the reconstruction of their towns, villages and homes.[81] Demon possession is a phenomenon of colonized indigenous populations in an empire, as Fanon[82] and Hollenbach[83] have shown. It is a way of protecting the distressed colonized people's sense of dignity and protest when a direct protest would be physically impossible. Guilt lies not with the individual but with demonic forces battling against God and his people. So exorcism sets people free from the cycle of helplessness, symbolizing that the power of the oppressor has been overthrown by God and will shortly be realized concretely.
The family structure, traditionally patriarchal and authoritarian, now in danger of disintegration, is affirmed, but in a new egalitarian way. The role and rights of women are protected by rejecting the divorce law. The dignity and importance of children is affirmed. But no one is to rely on the title "father" for status and importance. Kinship ties are no longer exclusive and competitive, for in the Jesus movement, whoever belongs to Jesus is his mother, brother, sister. The promise of the renewal movement is houses, land and family now, not in some future eschatological age.[84]
The removal of sin, guilt and oppression by demonic forces was a release of hope and creative energy, as can be shown to be common in millenarian movements seeking a reconstruction of their social universe in the face of social disintegration. This is expressed in feelings of joy and celebration symbolized by the sharing of common fellowship meals. After Jesus' crucifixion by the ruling class, these meals may well have formed the focus of a feeling of his continuing presence with the people in his movement.
Conclusion
In terms of our focus on the Christological significance of this kind of picture of the first Jesus movement, we would have to take up again the central significance of community in the person and work of Jesus. But it is community of a particular kind, namely affirming, liberative and developmental community. It does not consist primarily of coming together for a meal and worship, although clearly that is part of it. Rather, itconsists of a community focused on renewal and empowerment, of caring for the victims of the ruling system whatever it is, of strengthening mutuality and /pp. 41-42/ relatedness. Meal and worship are the expression of the joy consequent on seeing the beginning of the rule of God in the community.
However, the actual concrete expression of this liberative community would depend on the nature of the society in which it is located. There is no universal community or universal liberation. To this extent, the content of the nature and work of Christ would vary, to plagiarize Albert Nolan, but the shape of it would remain the same. We will need to work out the content of the person and work of Christ for ourselves in South Africa. Perhaps this might relate to the call of some black theologian for a critical theological reflection on the function of ubuntu in black communities, to develop what Bonganjalo Goba calls a "black Christian communal"[85] praxis. The African practice of affective community, of fundamental humanity, seems to me to relate closely to what emerges from a sociological/anthropological analysis of the Jesus movement. We are human only in society; we attain full humanity only through a liberative, empowering relationship with other human beings in community. However, if ubuntu is to become a Christological category for us, it should be approached via the practice of actual Christian base communities, rather than as an abstract concept.
Further, we are accustomed to begin our Christologies with the person of Christ and then move on to a consideration of his work. This overlooks the subtle way in which our understanding of his work is already determined by a priori theological decisions concerning his person, often defined in alien Graeco-Roman categories. What is clearfrom the findings of the "Third Quest," is that we can only begin to define the person of Christ in terms of Jesus as a product and also as a shaper of community. There is priority of praxis over theory here which should be explored theologically.
Notes
[1] A. Schweitzer, Quest of the historical Jesus (New York, 1959).
[2] P. Denis, Le Christ-etendard, L'homme-Dieu au temps des reformes (1500-1565) (Paris, 1987).
[3] J. Pelican, Jesus through the centuries (New Haven, 1985); R. Nicholson, A Black future? Jesus and salvation in South Africa (London, 1990).
[4] L. Schottroff & W. Stegemann, Jesus and the hope of the poor (Maryknoll, 1986).
[5] Schottroff & Stegemann, Jesus and the hope of the poor, 2.
[6] J. A. Draper & E. Ruddock, "Ministerial formation of self-supporting ministries in a rural environment", Ministerial Formation 40 (1987) 4-11.
[7] J. A. Draper, "The tip of the iceberg: the temple of the Holy Spirit", JTSA 59 (1987) 57-65; "For the kingdom is inside of you and it is outside of you", Text & interpretation: new approaches in the criticism of the New Testament, eds. P. J. Hartin & J. H. Petzer (Leiden, 1991) 235-257.
[8] E. Schillebeeckx, Jesus: an experiment in christology (New York, 1981).
[9] J. Gager, Kingdom and community: the social world of Early Christianity (Eagle Cliffs, 1975).
[10] Gager, Kingdom and community, 9; cf. D. B. Batstone, "The communal dimension of Earliest Christianity", JTS n.s. 43:2 (1992) 395-397.
[11] E. Käsemann, "On Paul's anthropology", Perspectives on Paul (London, 1971) 1-31.
[12] Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 44-45.
[13] S. C. Barton, "The communal dimension of Earliest Christianity", JTS n.s. 43/2 (1992) 399-427.
[14] S. Neill, The interpretation of the New Testament 1861-1961, (London, 1966) 104-190.
[15] Neill, The interpretation of the New Testament, 191-200.
[16] J. M. Robinson, A new quest of the historical Jesus and other essays (Philadelphia, 1983) 12.
[17] E. Käsemann, "Blind alleys in the 'Jesus of history' controversy", New Testament questions of today (London, 1969) 36.
[18] Käsemann, "Blind alleys", 40.
[19] G. Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth (New York, 1960) 21; cf Käsemann, "Blind alleys", 47-48.
[20] J. Jeremias, The parables of Jesus (London, 1954); The eucharistic words of Jesus (London, 1966); Jerusalem in the time of Jesus (London, 1969); New Testament theology (London, 1971).
[21] Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 47-48.
[22] E. Käsemann, "The problem of the historical Jesus", Essays on New Testament themes (London, 1964) 15-47; "Blind alleys".
[23] E.g. G. Vermes, Jesus the Jew: a historian's reading of the Gospels (London, 1973); I. M. Zeitlin, Jesus and the Judaism of his time (Cambridge, 1988).
[24] E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (London, 1985).
[25] E. P. Sanders, Government, taxes, and synagogues in First Century Galilee and Judea: similarities and differences (San Francisco, 1992).
[26] Barton, "The communal dimension", 399-427.
[27] M. Rostovtzeff, The social and economic history of the Roman empire (London, 1957).
[28] F. M. Helchelheim, "Roman Syria", An economic survey of Ancient Rome IV, ed. T. Frank (Baltimore, 1980) 121-257.
[29] A. H. M. Jones, The Greek city (Oxford, 1940); The cities of the eastern Roman empire (Oxford, 1971); The Roman economy: studies in Ancient economic and administrative history (Oxford, 1974).
[30] R. MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman order (Cambridge, 1966); Roman social relations (New Haven, 1974); Paganism in the Roman empire (New Haven, 1981); Christianizing the Roman empire (A.D. 100-400) (New Haven, 1984)
[31] G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The class struggle in the Ancient Greek world (London, 1981).
[32] Ste. Croix, The class struggle in the Ancient Greek world.
[33] F. C. Grant, The economic background of the Gospels (Oxford, 1926).
[34] R. F. Hock, The social context of Paul's ministry: tentmaking and apostleship (Philadelphia, 1980).
[35] J. H. Elliott, A home for the homeless: a sociological exegesis of 1 Peter (Philadelphia, 1981); "Social scientific criticism of the New Testament: more on methods and models", Semeia 35 (1986) 1-33.
[36] W. Meeks, The first urban Christians: the social world of the Apostle Paul (New Haven, 1983).
[37] D. E. Oakman, Jesus and the economic questions of his day (Lewiston, 1986).
[38] Oakman, Jesus and the economic questions of his day, 8.
[39] R. A. Horsley & J. S. Hanson, Bandits, prophets, and messiahs: popular movements in the time of Jesus (San Francisco, 1985); R. A. Horsley, Jesus and the spiral of violence: popular Jewish resistance in Roman Palestine (San Francisco, 1987); Sociology and the Jesus movement (New York, 1989).
[40] K. Kautsky, Foundations of Christianity (New York, 1953).
[41] G. E. Lenski, Power and privilege: a theory of social stratification (New York, 1966); J. Lenski & G. E. Lenski Human societies: an introduction to macrosociology (New York, 1978).
[42] G Alföldy, The social history of Rome (London, 1985).
[43] E.g. H. Waetjen, A reordering of power: a socio-political reading of Mark's gospel (Minneapolis, 1989) 1-26.
[44] Note here that the use of concepts like "middle class" have been shown to be inappropriate in advanced agrarian societies like that of the ancient Mediterranean world. Consequently, the attempt of Oakman to re-introduce such a concept "by the back door", with his use of terminology like "middle" people (Oakman, Jesus and the economic questions of his day, 213-214), is inappropriate.
[45] G. Theissen, Sociology of early Palestinian Christianity (Philadelphia, 1978).
[46] P. Worsley, The trumpet shall sound: a study of "cargo cults" in Melanesia (New York, 1968).
[47] K. Burridge, New heaven, new earth: a study of millenarian activities (New York, 1969). Scholars utilizing this method include J. G. Gager, Kingdom and community, and H. Waetjen, The origin and destiny of humanness (San Rafael, 1976); Reordering of power.
[48] J. D. Crossan, The historical Jesus: the life of a Mediterranean Jewish peasant (San Francisco, 1991).
[49] M. Borg, Jesus a new vision: spirit, culture and the life of discipleship (San Francisco, 1987); Horsley, Spiral of violence.
[50] M. Douglas, Purity and danger: an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo (London, 1966); Natural symbols: explorations in cosmology (New York, 1982).
[51] V. Turner, The forest of symbols: aspects of Ndembu ritual (lthaca, 1967); The drums of affliction: a study of religious processes among the Ndembu of Zambia (lthaca, 1968); The ritual process: structure and anti-structure (Ithaca, 1969); Dramas, fields, and metaphors: symbolic action in human society (Ithaca, 1974).
[52] J. G. Peristiany (ed.), Honour and shame: the values and Mediterranean society (Chicago, 1965).
[53] E.g. B. J. Malina, The New Testament world: insights from cultural anthropology (Louisville, 1981); B. J. Malina and J. H. Neyrey, "Honour and shame in Luke-Acts: pivotal values of the Mediterranean world", The social world of Luke-Acts: models for interpretation, ed. J. H. Neyrey (Peabody, 1991); J. H. Neyrey, Paul, in other words: a cultural reading of his letters (Luoisville, 1990).
[54] P. L. Berger and T. Luckmann, The social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge (New York, 1967).
[55] Worsley, The trumpet shall sound.
[56] W. Pannenberg, Jesus: God and man (London, 1968) 36.
[57] Cf. J. L. Segundo, The historical Jesus of the Synoptics (Maryknoll, 1985) 28-32.
[58] S. Freyne, Galilee from Alexander the Great to Hadrian, 323 B.C.E. to 135 C.E.: a study of second temple Judaism (Wilmington, 1980).
[59] Oakman, Jesus and the economic questions of his day, 175-198.
[60] Crossan, The historical Jesus, 15-19.
[61] Horsley, Spiral of violence, 209-284; on "decentralization" see Oakman, Jesus and the economic questions of his day, 213.
[62] E. R. Wolf, Peasants (Eaglewood Cliffs, 1966).
[63] G. Sjoberg, The preindustrial city (New York, 1960).
[64] E. Hobsbawm, Bandits (New York, 1981).
[65] Oakman, Jesus and the economic questions of his day, 95-131.
[66] Cf. Segundo, The historical Jesus of the Synoptics, 38-39.
[67] published as "Theology and faith: tradition, criticism and popular religion", Doing theology in context: South African perspectives, ed. J. de Gruchy and C. Villa-Vicencio, Theology and Praxis 1 (Maryknoll; Cape Town and Johannesburg, 1994) 26-39.
[68] Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 328.
[69] Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 61-119; cf. Borg, Jesus a new vision, 120-140.
[70] Borg, Jesus a new vision, 151
[71] L. Vaage, "Q: the ethos and ethics of an itinerant intelligence" (PhD Thesis, Claremont Graduate School, 1987).
[72] Crossan, The historical Jesus.
[73] Theissen, Sociology of early Palestinian Christianity.
[74] F. G. Downing, Christ and the Cynics (Sheffield, 1988).
[75] A. Malherbe, Paul and the popular philosophers (Minneapolis, 1989).
[76] Crossan, The historical Jesus, 6
[77] E.g. M. Herzfeld, "Honour and shame: problems in the comparative analysis of moral systems", Man 15 (1980) 339-351; various essays in Honour and shame and the unity of the Mediterranean, ed. D. D. Gilmore (Washington, 1987).
[78] Oakman, Jesus and the economic questions of his day, 141-169, 215-216; Horsley, Spiral of violence, 253-254; Sociology and the Jesus movement, 124-128.
[79] Oakman, Jesus and the economic questions of his day, 215-216.
[80] M. J. Borg, Conflict, holiness and politics in the teaching of Jesus (New York, 1984); Borg, Jesus a new vision, 86-93; 131-133; 157-163.
[81] Horsley, Spiral of violence, 181-184; Sociology and the Jesus movement, 125-127; Crossan, The historical Jesus, 315-352.
[82] F. Fanon, The wretched of the earth (New York, 1963).
[83] P. Hollenbach, "Jesus, demoniacs, and public authorities: a socio-historical study", Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49 (???) 567-588.
[84] Horsley, Spiral of violence, 231-240.
[85] B. Goba, "Corporate personality in Israel and Africa", Essays on Black theology, ed. M. Motthabi (Johannesburg, 1972) 44-52; An agenda for Black theology: hermeneutics for social change (Johannesburg, 1988); G. Setiloane, African theology: an introduction, (Johannesburg, 1986) 9-16; cf. J. A. Draper, "The tip of the iceberg".
Jonathan A. Draper (draper@theology.unp.ac.za) is Professor of New Testament Studies at the School of Theology, University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg (South Africa). This paper was given at the Congress of the Theological Society of Southern Africa held at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town (South Africa), 18-20 August 1993.