The Social World of Jesus

The term has its roots in the sociology of knowledge, which is, broadly, a discipline that looks at the social factors affecting the way members of particular groups experience the world in which they live. It is based on the belief that the ways people experience the world around them (people, things, events) can vary significantly between members of different groups and societies. This is so because every person is born into a particular group and learns not only a particular language or languages but a whole range of signs and symbols that may be encountered in a diversity of ceremonial, ritual, social, and artistic forms, as well as in gesture, artifacts, buildings, and even landscape. Thus, we may speak about a world or universe of signs or symbols every person acquires from the society or societies in which he or she lives. The effect of such "symbolic universes," sociologists of knowledge argue, is to create or "construct" a social world for members of the group to inhabit. [2] Religious symbolic universes create particular kinds of world, sometimes referred to as a "sacred cosmos" (though this may beg some important questions about the place of sacred and profane symbols in religious symbolic worlds). This function of establishing a particular social world may take different forms: It may be world-constructing or world-maintaining. Religious symbols may be powerful ways of preserving the status quo; they may also be used to disturb the established ways of looking at the world. Inherited symbols may be reworked, discarded, and replaced with others to produce another set of concepts and symbols that will serve to construct different kinds of social world.

If this is the case, our principal task is to give some account of the symbolic world Jesus was taught and the social world he in consequence inhabited. But that last phrase "in consequence" raises some thorny questions. Is it to be understood that everyone who acquires a particular set of symbols will therefore see the world around him or her in a given way, that is to say, the acquired symbols will determine with precision and without exception how they see the world? This would be a bold and surprising claim, which has been recently disputed [3] and would make it difficult to see how changes in social worlds could ever occur. [4] People may resist the categories society proposes. The cantankerousness of old people may be a mark of resistance to the way in which their past, that is, their sense of identity, is being eroded, precisely by those who care for them and who, in caring, reinforce old people's fear that what they are in the eyes of society is no more than that: "people who need to be cared for." People, individuals, and sub-groups of people within a particular society may resist the standard readings of the symbols; they may resist the symbols themselves and so, in some cases at least, begin to initiate processes of change and reconstruction. So, in the case of Jesus, we shall need to know what were the dominant symbols and concepts with which he, like other Galilean Jews, was brought up; we shall need to know something about the kinds of social world that such symbols fostered among Jews (different groups) at the time of Jesus. But there will remain a question about the extent to which Jesus himself may have begun to reshape those symbols and to disturb the established social world of his time. In a brief article, we shall be able to do little more than indicate where such reworking of his inherited symbolic world may have occurred.

Jews in the first century (though, of course, not only then) believed that they had been chosen by Cod, that God had made a covenant with them, and that the terms of that covenant were to be found in the law. God, out of his mercy, had chosen the Jews, had promised to "bear [them] up on eagles' wings" (Exod. 19:4) and to give them the land (Deut. 6:1-3); Jews for their part must be faithful to him and obey God's law as revealed to Moses on Sinai and recorded in written form in Torah. God was one and Jews were to have "no other gods but [him]" (Deut. 6:4; 5:7). He was creator and sovereign over the world. [5]

If these were the main Jewish beliefs of the time, it is clear that many other beliefs and practices flowed from them. If God's law is contained in Torah and Torah prescribes circumcision as a mark of the covenant, then it is clear that circumcision is a central obligation for Jews and an affirmation of their election by God. There would also, however, be other beliefs and practices that would not flow directly from these basic beliefs but from a conjunction of them with other beliefs. Thus if one believed that God's law had been revealed not only in written form but also in oral form, then one might also find, for example, the practice of hand-washing before meals a matter of obligation even though it is not contained in the written Torah. Other beliefs might have arisen that challenged more directly the basic or standard beliefs we have outlined. It would seem to be a corollary of God's promises of the land and those to Abraham that he would also be the father of a great nation and that the benefits (rewards?) of the covenant would extend principally (only?) to this life. But what of those who were faithful but did not enjoy the fruits of their labors, who died horrendously up-holding the law in the face of persecution by the Seleucids (1 Macc. 1:60-64)? It is not unreasonable to see the emergence of belief in some future state (Dan. 12:2) or some imminent and dramatic divine intervention to change present trials (Mark 13; Assumption of Moses 10) as a response to such situations. Hence, basic Jewish beliefs were developed, added to, and even modified in the light of experience and history.

Such beliefs are, of course, the bare bones of a religious faith. They need, if they are to move people and to create in them "long-lasting moods and motivations," [6] further expression, for example, in hymns, narratives, rituals, institutions, common practice and observance, and attachment to particular places and sacred sites. Judaism is rich in these and we can here give only an indication of how they looked in Jesus' day. Let me focus on two aspects: belief in Israel's election, and belief in the land and temple.

There were many other ways in which Jews differed from other groups around them that depended not on some physical characteristic but on their patterns of behavior. Foremost among these were the observances of certain days: the Sabbath and the festivals of Passover, Weeks, and Booths (the last two agricultural festivals), and the fast of the Day of Atonement. While the annual festivals and fast were celebrated principally at Jerusalem, Passover was also celebrated elsewhere. Josephus records regulations permitting Jews to sacrifice the Passover in Sardis. [7] Passover recorded God's liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt and therefore particularly brought home to Jews their belonging to a chosen people and their sense of God as one who would liberate them from subservience.

Jews were also well known for their observance of purity laws, notably dietary laws. Such regulations, it is suggested, serve to preserve the external and internal boundaries of the group. [8] To Jews, this appears to have been clearly understood. At least Leviticus 20:22-27 makes it clear that avoidance of unclean foods is undertaken to remind Jews that they have been set apart from gentiles and that they are not to act like them, lest God also spew them out of the land. In practice, such regulations have an inhibiting effect on social mixing and serve easily to mark out those who observe them from those who do not. Such a sense of distinctiveness would also doubtless help to instill in Jews in the diaspora a sense of alienation they were often keen to overcome.

This is in no sense an exhaustive list of the ways in which Jews reminded themselves of their election by God. The stories of the Hebrew scriptures, together with the Psalms, would recall God's past mercies to the nation. The principal daily prayers, the Shema' and Eighteen Benedictions, would remind them of the hope that God would finally reunite all his people in the land he had given them.

In one sense, the existence of the temple in Jerusalem creates a polarity between it and the land. The land is divinely promised and given to Israel and therefore itself set apart for them, but not to be abominated or despoiled, lest God vomit them out of it, as he did the gentiles; at the same time, the temple is the holy place in the holy city, itself divided into spheres of increasing sacredness, from the Court of the Gentiles to the Holy of Holies. This is to say that, within the land, there are degrees of holiness, spreading out like circles in a pool from the sanctuary itself. [10] How was this understood? Was the organization of the temple space seen as a map of sacred space in the land, with spheres of decreasing holiness radiating out from the central sanctuary to the border areas with gentile territory? Or was the temple itself seen as marking the boundary between sacred and profane space, such that the purity laws, for example, which related to the washing of hands before meals, properly applied only within the temple? This is clearly a matter of dispute in the first century, with the Pharisees wanting to argue for the washing of hands throughout the land. [11] By the same token, the Sadducees, who were very much a temple-based group (and who disappeared after the destruction of the temple) rejected the custom, wishing presumably to give clear expression to the belief that the true center of the land was in Jerusalem and that it was here that God's presence was centered.

Descent of the Covenant People
Jews in Galilee would have been as aware as other Jews of their own ethnic identity and of their distinction from gentile neighbors and surrounding territories. Theirs was a territory that had been incorporated into the Jewish state only at the turn of the second century BCE by Alexander Jannaeus. [12] When Pompey carried out his military campaign in the 60s, he "liberated" the coastal cities that, in the main, then remained loyal to Rome. Some have suggested that this led to an exodus of Jews from these cities to the Galilean hills, which would explain the apparent density of population in this area. [13] Moreover, in the disturbances after the death of Herod (4 BCE), Galileans rose up in revolt and were put down by the Syrian legate Varus, who destroyed Sepphoris, sold the inhabitants into slavery, and crucified the combatants. [14] Such actions would doubtless not have disposed the population of the hill country particularly well to their gentile neighbors.

It is, then, not surprising that Jews, faced with such foreign overlordship, should long for a restoration of their sovereignty and freedom from foreign rule. Judas the Galilean, so Josephus tells us, stirred up the Jews in Galilee by urging them to reject Roman claims to sovereignty over them. [15] In this way he invoked powerful theocratic ideas rooted in the Hebrew scriptures. Moreover, he linked the idea of obedience to the sovereign God of Israel with ideas of civil disobedience and armed revolt against foreign rulers. This gave a particular twist to the Jewish sense of identity and distinctiveness. No longer was it purely a matter of remaining faithful to certain customs and laws enforcing a sense of separation from gentiles. It was a matter of working for Jewish freedom from foreign control.

This should not be taken to suggest that Jews therefore had no commerce with gentiles. Josephus makes it clear that Galilee was a thriving center of commerce, exporting agricultural and other products. Recent archaeological analysis of pottery has shown that pottery from Kefar Hanania was distributed across Galilee and into the surrounding areas of the Golan. [16] In lower Galilee, there is a preponderance of Greek inscriptions over Aramaic and Hebrew ones. [17]

Nor should it be taken to indicate that Jews in Galilee were altogether united against the foreign oppressor. S. Freyne and others have suggested that, under Herod Antipas (who had unsuccessfully made his case to Rome to be named king in succession to his father Herod the Great), there was a strong move away from a traditional peasant economy, where all shared in the fruits of the land (which accords broadly with deuteronomic notions), to a market economy that would concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few landlords and rulers. [18] The two cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias, which were, respectively, rebuilt and built under Herod Antipas, were centers of commerce between rural and urban populations and clear evidence, and indeed instruments, of the transference of wealth between peasant and landlord classes. Such developments, which were not restricted to Galilee but also embraced the ruling families in Judea and Jerusalem, go some way toward explaining the popular nature of the Jewish revolt and the deposition of the high priest at its beginning. [19] The fierce character of popular resentment against Sepphoris and Tiberias as centers of such aristocratic exploitation of the Galilean peasants is well documented by Josephus. [20]

Consequently, Jews in Galilee by no means agreed about what it was to be a true Jew. At the time of the Jewish War, many Jews regarded those leaders who sided with Agrippa II and the Romans as "traitors of our freedom.'" [21] Presumably, the same kind of attitudes would have prevailed against those who collected taxes that found their way directly or indirectly to their foreign overlords. But it is by no means clear that those who worked with the Romans or their client rulers would have regarded their cooperation with their overlords as excluding them from membership of the Jewish people. Such people might have had other sticking points as regards what qualified as Jewish and what did not. Josephus, who changed sides in the Jewish War, certainly did not think of himself as having parted company with the Jewish people. But such groups of people viewed the world in very different ways, even while both asserted their Jewishness.

Land and Temple
Again it is interesting to speculate which different conceptions of the land and the temple may have been entertained by different groups of people in Galilee. To what extent did people in the north of the country feel themselves disadvantaged by the centering of the land on Jerusalem and the temple? The implication was that they inhabited a district in some sense distanced from the sacral heart of the country. Certainly the Samaritans, who saw themselves as faithful Jews, disputed the claims of Jerusalem (see the echoes of these disputes in John 4) and established their own temple on Mount Gerizim, which was destroyed by John Hyrcanus (the Jewish Hasmonean king who ruled from 134-104 BCE). At the same time, Galilee, which was yet further removed from the center, appears to have been faithful to Jerusalem. The presence of Galilean pilgrims at the festivals, despite their having to run the gauntlet of the Samaritans on their way, is evidence of strong Galilean attachment. The Gospel of Mark also reflects Galilean peasant amazement or possibly estrangement in face of the imposing Hellenistic architecture of Jerusalem ("Look Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!" [13:1]).

Still, we have evidence, not always easy to evaluate, of practices in Galilee indicating an interest in trying to assert the sanctity of life in Galilean communities, too. Mark 7, written as it was either shortly before or after the destruction of the temple, is strong evidence of Pharisaic attempts in Galilee to introduce the custom of hand-washing before meals during the time of the temple. This was not prescribed in the written law and was a practice originally restricted to the priests in the temple. Behind such controversies lay in all likelihood an attempt to make a statement about the sanctity of the corporate life of the faithful in Galilee. This, in turn, affirms the continuity between life in Jerusalem and Galilee. There is also a growing body of archaeological evidence of immersion pools (mikwaoth) in Galilee. These pools were used for purificatory purposes and would again appear to be a strong expression of a sense of the need to preserve the holiness of Galilean communities. Such evidence, however, is not easy to date and no consensus has yet emerged among archaeologists. [22]

Such concerns about the purity of the community and the land are to be distinguished from the main emphasis of those who, like Judas the Galilean, saw the prime need to be that of reasserting Jewish freedom from foreign rule. It is doubtful whether those who took to the hills to fight would have had time for the finer points of ritual purity. For them, it was necessary to reestablish Jewish independence and to use military means to achieve freedom in order to restore the purity of the temple and the land. For such groups, control over the temple was of central importance, and this indicates that their conception of independence (like that of the Maccabees) was linked to the idea of a renewed temple state in Jewish control. Doubtless there are strong echoes here of Galilee's long history of political separation from Judea.

Nevertheless, Jerusalem and the temple would still have provided a powerful center of national unity, which attracted Jewish pilgrims from all over the Mediterranean. At the same time, precisely its power of attraction for Jews could make it an object of struggle, as is shown by the popular election of a high priest during the Jewish revolt.

It is reasonable to suppose that Jesus, like the rest of his Galilean compatriots, would have been aware of these tensions. It is, as Freyne has suggested, striking that Jesus is nowhere recorded as entering Sepphoris and Tiberias, the two main centers of commercial development in Galilee. His parables make it clear he was aware of the economic hardship and social division caused by changing patterns of land ownership and distribution of goods. [23] His advocacy of the poor and the powerless indicates clearly where his sympathies lay. [24] If Jesus identified with those who found themselves economically divided from the powerful and wealthy in Galilee and avoided centers like Sepphoris, it is less easy to know to what extent he identified with the Jewish population and avoided contact with gentiles. Certainly the Gospels record visits to gentile districts and contact with gentiles. His early association with John the Baptist, who according to Matthew 3:9 attacked Jewish reliance on physical descent from Abraham, could suggest a greater openness to the gentile world. On the other hand, the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman attributes strong ethnic views to Jesus (Mark 7:24-30). The question, which we cannot examine here, is how far Jesus may have attempted to refashion the ways his contemporaries viewed these matters. Certainly his meals with tax-collectors and sinners, those in serious breach of the law, would have raised sharp questions about Jewish particularity.

To what extent did Jesus share contemporary Jewish hopes for the restoration of an independent Jewish temple state? Jesus' use of kingship language suggests strongly he was attuned to some such expectations. At the same time, texts like Matthew 5:38-42, 43-48 make it improbable that he espoused the military solutions of leaders like Judas the Galilean. It is more probable that he looked for a divine intervention that would establish God's rule over the land and bring vindication and fulfillment to those who suffered, without their prior engagement in military action. Precisely what his conception of this fulfillment was is difficult to say. His actions in the temple have suggested to some that he predicted its destruction and restoration, but it is an intriguing possibility that his calling of the Twelve indicates that he looked towards a time after the destruction of the temple state when the twelve tribes would be gathered and ruled over by the Twelve. [25] Does such a vision express something of the peasant longing for the return to a state where all could share in the fruits of the land?

Such millennial dreams (if Jesus actually had them) should not be discarded as being without serious moral or religious content. What they express is belief in a God of justice and equity and mercy, "who causes his rain to fall on the just and the unjust" (Matt. 5:45) and who promises that the poor will experience his rule (Luke 6:20). Such beliefs are given powerful expression in his parables as he encourages his hearers to rethink their standard conceptions of God's rule. [26] In this way Jesus encourages his contemporaries to refashion their social world.

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FOOTNOTES

[26]  See John Riches, "Parables and the Search for a New Community," in The Social World of Formative Christianity and Judaism, ed. Jacob Neusner et al. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988) 235-63.