Abstract
In dialogue with contemporary issues of movement and social change, this article examines traditions preserved in the New Testament about the commissioning of the first itinerant preachers of the gospel and whether or not apostles voluntarily took on such impoverished travel. The article proposes that an examination of the performative nature of apostolic travel challenges our modern notions of agency and choice, particularly in regard to issues of justice. By focusing on the versions of and allusions to Jesus’s commission preserved in the Synoptic sayings source Q (Luke 10:1–12//Matt 10:5–15) and 1 Cor 9:14, we can retrieve early reflections on how itinerant preaching reframes the individual and society. Subversive demands for justice reveal how individuals are constrained by their contexts and offer a vision of the future in the present.
In 2013, philosophers and activists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri released a pamphlet titled “Declaration” as a response to the year’s spate of popular global demonstrations, including the Arab Spring in the Middle East and Occupy in various American cities (Wall Street, Oakland, etc.).
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Musing on the novelty of these protests, Hardt and Negri contrasted them with the types of direct actions that had occurred over the previous ten years or so: A decade ago the alterglobalization
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movements were nomadic. They migrated from one summit meeting to the next, illuminating the injustices and antidemocratic nature of a series of key institutions of the global power system: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the G8 national leaders, among others. The cycle of struggles that began in 2011, in contrast, is sedentary. Instead of roaming according to the calendar of the summit meetings, these movements stay put, and, in fact, refuse to move. Their immobility is partly due to the fact that they are so deeply rooted in local and national social issues.
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The global emergence of protests that seize public spaces revealed how communities could take control of both space and public discourse in order to raise questions and force a pause in the normal ways in which the world works. For Hardt and Negri, such actions resulted in at least two strange but productive paradoxes: first, a “movement that stayed put,” that “refused to move;” and, second, protests that confronted “global” realities by staging “local” interventions. 4 Protests in Cairo did not primarily target seats of political or economic power but rather encamped in Tahrir (“Freedom”) Square, while Occupy Wall Street took over not the New York Stock Exchange itself but the publically open (though privately owned) space of nearby Zuccotti Park.
Both actions raised awareness and threatened power structures by gathering people in everyday spaces available to anyone while highlighting the constraints materialized in those spaces. The actions showed how, in theory, people everywhere could change their relationship to power simply by gathering in new ways and in strategic locations. Hardt and Negri showed how principles of movement—how to move, when to move, and when to refuse to move—play an organizing role. Protesters not only communicated their dissatisfaction with the present order; they performed it insofar as their actions and use of space challenged normative values and provided an imaginative glimpse of how society could be organized in a different way.
Movement, even when voluntary, is always guided and constrained by physical, political, and cultural boundaries; by buildings and monuments; by roads and conveyances or their lack; by modes of communication; by flows of other people and their goods and resources; by laws and authorities; by incentives and prejudices. And while our movement requires some volition on our part (the choice to move or to stay still), our environment simultaneously hems in our movements. Creating new things always takes the form of transforming what has been given us, of re-forming the world we live in, crossing existing boundaries, using old roads to create new itineraries.
Thus, any decision towards movement also entails the question of how the individual moves through, across, or against the world. And this idea of the decision concerning movement raises the issue of choice. Much discussion about early Christian travel (and the poverty, homelessness, and celibacy that may have gone along with it), for example, has revolved around the question of whether or not such a lifestyle was voluntary. Did preachers choose to be poor and displaced, or did they find themselves in that state and make the best of it? Neither option makes adequate sense of the evidence, I argue, so the problem must be the way we as modern readers think of movement and volition. And the shift we need to make in our understanding of volition, of choice, of intention, helps to determine how we view not just the nature of Christian origins but also how movement and volition work in our own lives. In this essay, I want to read itinerancy in the New Testament in a way that reveals how Christian origins, and human action in general, involves much more than just choice. How we form and are formed by our locations underlies all our endeavors, especially our attempts to re-form our contexts, to create new things. In part drawing upon resources in other fields for addressing agency among oppressed communities, I will briefly propose how two early Christian traditions—preserved in the hypothetical sayings source Q and Paul’s letters—show how issues of place and movement formed early Christian discourse, particularly in regard to transforming the relationship between individual and place as a way of creating a more just world, understood as God’s kingdom.
Traveling freely through bounded spaces—choosing to move or stay put within a certain, demarcated location—serves as an ideal model for thinking through this problem of agency, with regard to both twenty-first-century and first-century social action. For example, Halvor Moxnes examines the earliest evidence for how Jesus and his first followers moved and thought about movement as a way of confronting and reimagining power in first-century Galilee and greater Palestine. Rather than approach this “historical Jesus” question through the traditional mode of reconstructing Jesus’s words and exploring the plausibility of his life events as reported in the Gospels, Moxnes focuses on the space and place of Jesus’s public life.
The itinerant ministry of Jesus and his disciples is depicted by artist Vasilii Alexandrovich Kotarbinsky (1849–1921) in “The Sermon at Capernaum.” Private collection. HIP/Art Resource, NY.
As a part of this contextualization of Jesus and the evidence for his mission, Moxnes observes that the Gospels largely do not portray Jesus as focusing on the centers of Judean power in Judea and Galilee—neither the temple (with the exception of the end of his life), nor any Herodian edifice in the major Galilean cities, Sepphoris and Tiberias. (The cities are unmentioned in the New Testament as locations on the itineraries of Jesus or his followers.) Rather, Jesus and his disciples target the smaller and more mundane locations of power—the village and, especially, the household. 5 One of the best-attested sentiments among Gospel traditions is Jesus’s injunction that followers leave their families to join a new, trans-local family of gospel adherents. Mark tells how Jesus rejects his family when they arrive in Capernaum from Nazareth to bring him back home, claiming that those filling the house to capacity are his true family (Mark 3:31–35). Luke’s Jesus goes so far as to assert that true followers must “hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters” (14:26). As a general mission strategy, Jesus’s call to leave the basic organizing unit of society—the household—attempted to reconstruct society-wide power relations one household at a time. And even if people in a certain place did not leave parents, children, and siblings, their reception of the message (and, at least as importantly, the hospitality they showed its messengers) brought this strange “kingdom” to the heart of village life throughout the region. 6 The Gospels portray Jesus and his followers as occupying household and village, spaces open to everyone, while fundamentally structuring their lives and remaking society. The locales of Jesus’s activity and the mode of life by which Jesus inhabited and moved through those spaces constituted not simply the way his message was delivered but its essential content, its impact on the world.
In a similar vein, Adriana Destro and Mauro Pesce explore the structural impact of Jesus’s itinerancy. Building on the spatial theories of Marc Augé, they posit “Jesus’ refusal of a stable residence can be defined as a continuous calling into question of the relationships and bases of human existence.” 7 Steering clear of any notion of origins in a single, particular village, Jesus always arrived from outside the places where he preached, healed, and exorcised. By continually leaving set village contexts, Jesus’s nullification of the impact of normal structures of life, such as work and family, “allowed him to draw near to individuals in their concrete existence, wherever they were. It allowed him to concentrate on their needs and on their aspirations for justice, where these were not respected.” 8 Itinerancy permitted Jesus and his disciples to address not only the people living in the village but the social forces (some promoting justice, some not) that produced their shared lives. While entering a city claiming to bring God’s kingdom may seem self-valorizing, the itinerant aspect of the earliest gospel message gave at least the appearance of emptying themselves of self-interest. 9
While scholars such as Moxnes, Destro, and Pesce pay productive attention to issues of space, social structure, and individual movement, further exploration of early Christian itinerancy reveals how agency remains a central problem not just in early Christian studies but also in the humanities and social sciences more generally. 10
Early Christian Itinerancy and Poverty: A Voluntary Affair?
Gerd Theissen is one of the pioneers of applying social-scientific observations and approaches to studies of Christian origins. 11 Theissen concludes that the practices of itinerant preachers best explained not just the content of Jesus-sayings but also their dissemination. In the Synoptic Gospels in particular, Jesus calls his disciples to leave family, homes, and possessions to embark on a mission of impoverished preaching and healing, relying on the hospitality of those villagers who received them (Matt 8:18–22, 10:1–42, 19:27–29; Luke 9:1–27, 14:25–33). Theissen reasons that if these preachers are renouncing possessions, they necessarily have possessions to renounce. Thus, we are not dealing with people living below subsistence level—that is, the poor—but, rather, people with some material resources, who nevertheless lived near or among those suffering from poverty and oppression, and who chose voluntary poverty as a way of responding to the situation they saw and, in some ways, vicariously experienced.
It is often only a few groups who are directly affected by crises of this kind; but these exert an influence on the whole of society and essentially color the general climate of feeling. People become inclined to interpret the world around them as shaken by crisis even if they are not (or not yet) personally affected.
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For Theissen, this “general climate of feeling” generated by adverse social changes under the early empire resulted in sympathy and solidarity across different social classes, particularly among the first followers of the gospel message. It is important to notice, I think, how Theissen’s reconstruction uses psychological factors (“general climate of feeling”) to explain a sociological situation. Sympathy felt by those with access to resources becomes the major impetus for the social change and organization that becomes earliest Christianity.
In a situation of political and economic oppression, however, what would voluntary poverty mean—particularly in the ancient world? In the wake of Theissen’s work (and that of other social-historical critics of the same time), some New Testament scholarship began to describe the early Christian movement using the ultimately unhelpful phrase “middle class.” Scholarship on the ancient world, of course, inevitably involves recourse to anachronism. We tend to rely on our own ideas to understand the past. But the term “middle class” distracts modern readers from the true nature of the ancient economy, in which a tiny fraction of the population held most of the wealth, while almost all the population lived at or around subsistence levels.
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Thus, scholars such as Richard Horsley asked Theissen how early Christians could renounce their possessions if they had scarcely anything to renounce. Horsley rightly turns to Q, the hypothetical Synoptic sayings source, as a prime location for this debate: Those who would interpret Q sayings as calling for voluntary poverty and abandonment of home and family must explain the absurdity of addressing such a call primarily to people who were already marginal and under increasing economic pressure—that is, already mired in poverty and struggling to keep their households and village communities from disintegrating any further.
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In such a situation, Horsley and others assert that calls found in the gospels to renounce possessions must either be merely rhetorical—hyperbolic uses of metaphor—or designed to set the activity of Jesus and his followers in the tradition of the biblical prophets. That Elijah’s call of Elisha (1 Kings 19:19–21) lies in the background of the story told in Luke 9:57–62 and Matt 8:18–22 has escaped few scholars. Rather than interpret the Synoptic commissions as reflecting renunciation of property on the part of disciples, claims Horsley, we should see in our evidence already impoverished villagers forging new social bonds in an attempt to restore Israel from the ground up, sharing traditions about Jesus as a way of knitting together their own sense of communal identity.
The debate involves, I would argue, divergent opinions not simply about a particular set of historical evidence, but more fundamentally about how people act within social constraints, especially those of political and economic distress. Since oppression and poverty limit options for life and, thus, limit freedom, resistance to such a situation requires the effort and imagination to work within and against those constraints. And, in their own ways, scholars like Theissen and Horsley are trying to imagine for themselves how the poor and oppressed resist or refigure their plight, despite lack of material and ideological resources, and despite being deprived of sustenance, health, tradition, or hope. Moreover, the struggle of the oppressed to build their communities often also involves arguing for or claiming rights denied them by those better off. Thus, such claims are in part directed at the audience of the wider society. The success of this endeavor may indeed take the form of altering the “general climate of feeling” in a given society, as Theissen puts it.
For Theissen, the lifestyles of itinerant preachers aimed to change society by inhabiting the deprivation they experienced: they inhabited it in new ways that transformed it. “In all these groups,” Theissen asserts, “there was a chance for the deviant, often eccentric forms of living which were practiced in the internal Jewish revival movements, and among which generally widespread deviant forms of behavior—emigration, brigandage, and begging—were taken up and creatively modified.” 15 This notion of “creative modification” of the various ways people dealt with oppression and poverty blurs a simple understanding of “voluntary” action in ways we may not fully appreciate. For while deprivation may be a given constraint, how one acts out that deprivation is a matter of choice or, at least, creativity and imagination. The enacting of poverty and displacement—as through itinerancy—reforms the situation of poverty itself.
Within the humanities more generally (especially within gender studies and postcolonial studies), the last few decades of scholarship have focused on the ways in which individuals considered abject or marginal might live out their abjection in new ways that challenge and transform their place in society. For some, issues of mobility stand as illustrative examples of this dynamic between choice and constraint. And while investigation into what is often called the “subversive performance” of oppression has categorized much work in scholarship and activism over the past few decades, it has done little to impact biblical scholarship, theology, and practical work in the church, though certainly those who have pursued these lines of inquiry have broken much ground. As a way of explaining how social forces constrain and produce our roles in society—indeed, our very selves—performativity can also illuminate how earliest Christians took the marginalized social situation they received and transformed it into a redemptive community.
Performing the Kingdom: Performativity and Politics in Ancient Galilee
The earliest forms of Jesus’ commission to his disciples occur in the Synoptic Gospels. Mark 6 contains one form. Matthew 10 develops a far longer one. And Luke 9 and 10 contain two versions. For most of the past century or so, scholars have posited that the longer Matthean version and the second Lukan version reflect a commission passage in a lost sayings source denoted as Q. 16 A simple reconstruction of this common source version depicts Jesus sending his disciples as if they were laborers working in a harvest, without money, possessions, or their conveyances. They are to offer “peace” to houses in the villages they visit, in exchange for whatever food or drink they offer. And, regardless of how they are received, they are to assert to the inhabitants of villages that “the kingdom (basileia) of God has drawn near” (Luke 10:1–12//Matt 10:5–15).
We could read this passage with Theissen as a command to renounce possessions, or, with Horsley, as a call to hit the road without provisions because there are no provisions to be had. If we are to connect this passage to what we know of the material conditions in Galilee, we do need to take seriously that most villagers—those who first heard the Q sayings—lived in poverty. When Jesus calls his disciples to travel without provisions and depend on hospitality provided by strangers, he is evoking a situation many in Galilee probably experienced at one time or another.
While the social and economic nature of Galilee has long been a subject of debate among historians and archaeologists, recent scholarship has suggested details about poverty in this time and place. Jonathan Reed has argued that Galilean village life entailed a high degree of physical and demographic instability, particularly after the establishment of two Greco-Roman cities (Sepphoris and Tiberias) around Jesus’ lifetime. Since population densities in cities tend to increase the spread of disease, mortality rates in the cities would have been higher than in the villages, but the cities’ population would be replenished regularly by people moving from rural areas to the city for jobs and increased opportunity. 17 If mortality rates and economic realities lead to literal movement and displacement, Q’s command to travel from village to village would have resonated with the experiences of its audience.
It is this notion of “resonance”—akin to Theissen’s talk of a “general climate of feeling”—that needs to be interrogated in more detail. How and to what ends might the general practice and depiction of itinerancy imitate the poverty and instability in Galilee? As a starting point, the fact that Q’s Jesus figuratively describes the disciples as harvest workers, as laborers working a land that is not theirs, reflects the economic and agricultural situation of the time, both literally and figuratively, for the harvest (of people) ultimately belongs to a cosmic landowner, to God.
The metaphor of landless workers has political implications in the way it aims to change the social groups who attempt to live out its meaning. To inhabit the lifestyle of displaced, impoverished farmers harvesting for God instead of an upper-class landowner, the Herodian rulers, or the Roman order, enacts in a different way the unfortunate situation into which villagers found themselves. One way to read this passage, then, is to see people who lived a life they could not escape, but lived it differently, in a way that subverted the status quo from within it.
Subversive Performance
It may be helpful at this point to step back and consider what it means to live one’s life in a different manner. We perform our social roles. Farmers farm, rulers rule, prophets prophesy. Even those aspects of ourselves that seem essential—such as race, ethnicity, gender—are aspects that others encounter through our performance of them. Most people can guess I am male when they meet me, and it is not because they can see my Y-chromosome. Our clothing, mannerisms, and speaking style, which are socially learned behaviors, play an even greater role than physical and biological constructs in creating our identity.
We perform more than our social roles; we perform our very selves. The malleable nature of our identities offers promise. As gender theorists and postcolonial theorists have noted, performed identities have the potential to be performed differently. I can be male, white, and American in different ways, even in ways that challenge what it means to be male, white, or American. While some of my roles seem so essential that I have no choice but to accept them, I can perform them, I can be them, in ways that better fit my understanding of justice. Indeed, since the ways in which we perform our roles usually escape notice, performing them differently can draw attention to them. When we notice these non-conscious aspects in our communities, we also see how such aspects of ourselves exclude other ways of existing in the world. Performing social roles in new ways (“subversive performativity”), even as a way of creating new social roles, is all the more important as a way of making space for individuals who have been excluded from society. As such, it can also help us imagine new ways of being by enacting such roles now. Subversive performativity provides a vision of the future in the present.
When followers of Jesus come to a village as harvesters, but in the service of God and not Herod Antipas or Caesar, they put forth a challenging and subversive image of what society could look like—expressed in the terms given them by imperial society, but radically reframing these terms. The gospel, its preaching, and the lifestyle surrounding it related to Rome in complicated ways. Part of the nature of imperial domination includes how it overpowers not just material realities—through violence or control of resources—but also through the ideas available to people. Imperial ideologies mold the thoughts and assumptions that justify their power. Thus, performative action, even subversive performativity, necessarily is constrained by the ideological resources it attempts to challenge, a constraint that problematizes the notion of agency not just among oppressed peoples but in everyone insofar as they live out the assumptions of their societies. At the same time, performative action reveals these very constraints and contradictions inherent to status-quo power structures, constraints that otherwise go unquestioned. As one influential postcolonial theorist, Homi Bhabha, puts it, in the production of new ways of being, “[w]hat is at issue is the performative nature of differential identities: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, ‘opening out’, remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference—be it class, gender, or race.” 18 For Bhabha, performativity that reframes structures of power works “contingently” in that it inhabits specific locations—the village, the temple, the public square—in order to enact the practices that occur there in new ways that might challenge or change conceptual boundaries. And these reframings of boundaries, according to Bhabha, “find their agency in a form of the ‘future.’” 19
The Q commission passage addressed villagers where they lived, revealing to them a new vision of what labor for God—not Rome—might look like. Indeed, as Giovanni Bazzana has recently argued, the fact that Q is a written text firmly set in village life (where most people would have been illiterate), along with some specific vocabulary used in the commission (specifically the notion of “sending” or “casting out” [ekballō] workers into the harvest), indicates that Q most likely was written and used by people working in a specific governmental role: the “village scribe” (kōmogrammateus in Greek). The village scribe was responsible for keeping local records, inspecting fields, and communicating back and forth between the higher levels of royal administration under the Greek and Roman regimes that dominated during the centuries leading up to and encompassing the roots of ancient Christianity. 20 As part of their duties, such scribes travelled around their designated regions, checking both on agricultural production and on the morale of agricultural workers. In some documents, higher-level officials advise scribes to tell villages that the “kingdom” will take care of whatever grievances they might have. The Roman government relied on village scribes to reach people’s lives right where they lived.
When we hear language of “kingdom” or “empire,” we imagine the terms either geographically (as vast territories) or politically (as powers invested in an individual sovereign). Basileia—“kingdom” as a type of “government”—can also refer to the action of governing. After reading Bazzana, I now remind my students that government touches us in similar ways even today. When the postal worker delivers your tax rebate, the federal government has reached you where you live—literally at your front door—in two very specific ways: postal delivery and taxes. When a village scribe came to a village to check on harvest yields and listen to complaints, the scribe represented the kingdom itself.
A governmental context of the commissioning passage, along with an understanding of performativity, helps explain the effects of claiming that, in the image of the Q proclaimers, the “kingdom of God has drawn near.” New Testament scholarship has long struggled with competing claims that the kingdom is something awaited but also something that already has arrived (imminent versus realized eschatologies, or the “already-not yet” problem). The attempt to reframe power relations by performing them in new ways provides a glimpse, in the present, of a possible future, of a new vision of universal truth and justice. As Judith Butler explains: To claim that the universal has not yet been articulated is to insist that the “not yet” is proper to an understanding of the universal itself: that which remains “unrealized” by the universal constitutes it essentially. The universal begins to become articulated precisely through challenges to its existing formulation, and this challenge emerges from those who are not covered by it, who have no entitlement to occupy the place of the “who,” but who, nevertheless, demand that the universal as such ought to be inclusive of them.
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People who are excluded by current notions of who matters, of who is entitled to rights and justice, reveal a future notion of truth when they claim that they should be included in notions of justice and also act as if they are already included. In Q, we see Galilean villagers of the village-scribe class travel from village to village, not inspecting fields for the Herodian ruling class but rather seeking households receptive to God’s kingdom, promising a restoration of rights and peoplehood crushed by the domination of centuries of empires. Itinerant discipleship connects people to a new kind of kingdom, a new form of government, and promises that its affects will be fully realized in the real future. While moving among the constraints and boundaries of household, village, and imperial power structures, itinerant discipleship creates a new kingdom and a new possibility for agency, as yet incomplete but open to the future.
Paul, the Unwilling Apostle
The apostle Paul seems to refer to part of this commission tradition in 1 Corinthians when he discusses apostolic rights as an example of acting for the benefit of the community and not the individual. As a way of advising some among his Corinthian community to take care in exercising their rights to eat meat (which, in an ancient city, may well have been sacrificed to a statue of a deity), Paul uses his own rights as an example (1 Cor 9). He outlines why he, like other apostles, could expect the community to support him materially. It would make sense culturally, he states, because local villagers supported soldiers (9:7). He also claims, in good Pharisaic form, that the Torah by analogy gives him that right when it provides that a threshing ox be allowed to eat the wheat it labors to harvest (9:9–11) or that priests in the Jerusalem temple might eat the bread offered therein (9:13). Finally, he puts forth Jesus’s (“the Lord’s”) instructions on the matter: “Similarly, the Lord also commanded those who proclaim the gospel to live out of the gospel” (9:14). Most scholars have seen this “command” as mirroring Luke 10:7 (originally stemming from the Q commission passage): “The laborer deserves to be paid.” Paul agrees in principle that common sense, the Torah, and Jesus himself order apostles to be supported by those to whom they preach.
In the wake of all these reasons, his argument why he does not exercise this right—why, in his words, he and Barnabas “have not made use of this right” (9:12; cf. 9:14) by not accepting payment—surprises and confuses the audience. Paul’s refusal to accept payment offers insight into the extent to which apostolic travel and commission should be considered “voluntary.” While I have described this as a modern debate, in this passage we see Paul engage it in the mid-first century: If I proclaim the gospel, this gives me no ground for boasting, for an obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel! For if I do this of my own will (willingly; hekōn), I have a reward; but if not of my own will (‘unwillingly;’ akōn), I am entrusted with a commission. What then is my reward? Just this: that in my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my rights in the gospel. For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them (1 Cor 9:16–19).
For Paul, to do a job (including apostleship) for a “reward” or “wage” is to do it “willingly” or freely, while to abstain from reward is to act “unwillingly,” as an enslaved individual. Paul reinforces the notion of his apostleship as a form of slavery in distinction to the wage-labor conducted by a free person by using the term oikonomia in verse 17. Translated in the NRSV as “commission,” someone with oikonomia (an oikonomos) was likely to be an enslaved individual (or a freed slave) put in a managerial role by the person who owned him. Paul’s understanding of apostleship as enslavement to God (with troubling connotations for modern readers) pervades his letters and evokes the complicated logic of ancient slavery. While relinquishing control over himself, Paul represents fully the will of God, which replaces his. 22 Enslavement to God allows Paul to empty himself of volition while centering himself as purely representative of the universal sovereign.
Within the context of 1 Cor 9, Paul’s emptying of his own apostolic self by refusing a wage for his work enables him to “win” followers no matter their physical, ethnic, or ideological location. Immediately following the passage cited above is the famous section in which Paul professes to be “all things to all people,” whether Jewish or Gentile, under the law or not, weak or strong (9:20–23). 23 For Paul, refusing payment allows his apostleship to focus on those he is trying to win, whoever they are. That Paul attempts to be “all things to all people” bothers some modern readers (as it did some of his contemporaries!). Do we trust a person who is all things to all people—who says whatever might please those to whom that person is speaking? I think what Paul proposes here is even a bit more radical than that. In refusing his rights and freedom as an apostle, Paul’s individuality melts into stewardship from two directions. First, he becomes a container, emptied of his will, to be filled by the will of God. Such a phenomenon parallels quite closely his claim in another letter that “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Second, he dissolves into the contexts into which he travels. He is not “hired” by those who hear him; he “becomes” them. When he travels to a new city and a new people, his apostolic travel targets the local and global structural realities—ethnicity, law, economics—in a way that challenges his individual identity.
It may seem unlikely that Paul would erase himself totally from the work of the gospel. So I am not saying Paul fully accomplishes what he sets forth here. Indeed, we could critique Paul for failing to fully decenter himself throughout his letters and mission. But I think a close reading of 1 Cor 9, in light of the Synoptic commission tradition and other passages in Paul’s letters, shows that Paul sees himself as going beyond the Palestinian tradition of apostolic itinerancy (though I am sure the Palestinian preachers would disagree) in a way that enabled him to target various communities in terms of their particular structural realities. In the same way that social movements in today’s world subversively use mobility to engage new principles of community and justice, Paul performed his impoverished, itinerant apostleship as a way of expressing his devotion to God and the people he engaged in order to re-form their notions of value and justice.
Moving Against Constraints
Today, it is as important as ever to consider the relationship between movement and volition. The term “globalization” encompasses a number of phenomena worth specifying, yet all in one way or another involve travel, borders, ethnicity, gender, family, economics, and justice. Immigration, an obvious and pressing example, generates controversy at any location and at any time the so-called “first” or “Western” world encounters regions torn by war, violence, or poverty. And while most Western politicians advocate unfettered mobility for capital as it unites corporations and states, most simultaneously push for varying degrees of restrictions upon those—almost always poor, and almost always non-European, non-American, or non-white—who attempt to pursue the relative prosperity and safety brought by the movement of capital. Most recently, American news agencies have reported that the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has pondered detaining undocumented migrants, instead of releasing them to await trial. They are even considering separating parents traveling with children. The DHS has made explicit the rationale of such a possible strategy: “With safety in mind, the Department of Homeland Security continually explores options that may discourage those from even beginning the journey.” 24
The proposed DHS plan assumes that migrants choose to travel, when usually they have no other alternative. Increased hardship at the U.S. border will not deter them. Reports and anecdotes have exhaustively outlined the drug cartel violence in many Central and South American countries, or the devastation brought by the Syrian Civil War and the rise of the Islamic State resulting in refugees seeking safety in Europe and the United States. A strategy of harshness at borders as a way of dissuading those considering migration could hardly (one would pray!) escalate to a level matching the pain and suffering that led to their displacement. At the very least, such a strategy radically underestimates or elides the devastation from which migrants flee. But it also misunderstands to what extent choice factors into their movements: they choose the hope of life over imminent death.
In examining the role of volition in contemporary migration and displacement, we need to be careful when we say that refugees have fewer choices, lest we imply that they have lesser ability to choose. The choices they make under constraint are indeed noble and heroic. Yet their situation also should reveal to those of us living well within the borders, economies, and political systems of the “West” just how constrained even our own choices are. Refugees displaced by war or poverty live in the same globalized society and economy as we do, and all too often the suffering they endure results from the very social forces that enable our relative prosperity and security. I, as a white, cisgendered, straight male, American academic, live a privileged life guided, for better or for worse, by the same dynamics governing oppression and deprivation of others in my own city and in other nations. My choices are similarly constrained by these forces; the only difference is that my limited choices are much less likely to lead to suffering and poverty on my part. Disparate lives across the globe are not merely constrained but even linked by the same forces. While this idea does not eradicate our notion of volition, it certainly modifies it, not merely by linking it to the notion of community but by understanding how community blurs the boundaries of volition. As Butler asks: If I am struggling for autonomy, do I not need to be struggling for something else as well, a conception of myself as invariably in community, impressed upon by others, impressing them as well, and in ways that are not clearly delineable, in forms that are not fully predictable?
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This is more than just saying that individuals are connected to other individuals. More specifically: our interconnectedness radically questions the understanding of autonomy we have inherited from the modern, Western, Christian tradition, and often in ways that are invisible to us. By creatively moving among and across the only paths made available by empire, the earliest bearers of the gospel message, as evidenced in Q and Paul’s letters, revealed the possibilities for new communities beyond the choices presented to people filling their constrained, individual roles. And today, the performative actions of those who, despite their own autonomy are being marginalized nearly out of existence, manage to move within those boundaries in new ways that reveal our common constraints, question autonomy as such, even for those of us at the center. Those of us—especially at the center—who take the New Testament seriously as representing first-century voices speaking to the twenty-first-century need to face and incorporate this challenge.
Footnotes
1.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration (Argo Author Services, 2012).
2.
By “alterglobalization,” Hardt and Negri denote efforts to organize “alternatives” to globalization.
3.
Hardt and Negri, Declaration, 4–5.
4.
Ibid.
5.
Halvor Moxnes, Putting Jesus in His Place: A Radical Vision of Household and Kingdom (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 142–57.
6.
Ibid., esp. 22–124.
7.
Adriana Destro and Mauro Pesce, Encounters with Jesus: The Man in his Place and Time (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 25.
8.
Ibid., 34.
9.
This notion of the lack of context for the itinerant activity of Jesus and his followers is more complex than this, however, since the ancient world, and the early Roman Empire specifically, was populated by other wandering preachers of various deities, and early proclaimers of the gospel probably would have been understood among this type. (Destro and Pesce also acknowledge this point: Encounters with Jesus, 30). Such proclaimers, including those who proclaimed Christ, would have relied on other rhetorical and performative means to distinguish themselves.
10.
In general, issues of exile and displacement tend to mark work within these postcolonial studies and gender studies. See also, however, the “manifesto” composed by historian Stephen Greenblatt and colleagues, urging that humanities scholars take mobility seriously, particularly in how they should “account in new ways for the tension between individual agency and structural constraint” (Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 251).
11.
See, among the pieces cited below, Gerd Thiessen, “Itinerant Radicalism: The Tradition of Jesus Sayings from the Perspective of the Sociology of Literature,” RR 2 (1975): 84–93.
12.
Gerd Theissen, “We Have Left Everything . . . (Mark 10:28),” in Social Reality and the Early Christians: Theology, Ethics, and the World of the New Testament, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 92.
13.
For a critique of this tendency to ignore the fact of poverty, see for example Steven J. Friesen, “Poverty in Pauline Studies: Beyond the So-Called New Consensus,” JSNT 26 (2004): 323–61.
14.
Richard Horsley with Jonathan Draper, Whoever Hears You Hears Me: Prophets, Performance, and Tradition in Q (Harrisburg: Trinity, 1999), 60.
15.
Theissen, “We Have Left Everything,” 93.
16.
It must be noted that the Q hypothesis, while still favored by a majority of New Testament scholars, has lost support, while the Farrer Hypothesis, arguing that Luke simply used Mark and Matthew as sources, has gained ground. See a defense of the Farrer Hypothesis in Mark Goodacre, The Case against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem (Harrisburg: Trinity, 2002).
17.
Jonathan L. Reed, “Instability in Jesus’ Galilee: A Demographic Perspective,” JBL 129 (2010): 343–65.
18.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 219, emphasis original.
19.
Ibid.
20.
Giovanni Bazzana, Kingdom of Bureaucracy: The Political Theology of Village Scribes in the Sayings Gospel Q (Leuven: Peeters, 2015). See also William Arnal, “The Trouble with Q,” Foundations and Facets Forum 2 (2013): 55–68.
21.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 191.
22.
For this aspect of Paul’s “slave of God” metaphor, see Dale Martin, Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
23.
On the terms “weak” and “strong” in 1 Corinthians as targeting socio-economic divisions, see Gerd Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth, trans. John H. Schütz (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 121–44.
24.
25.
Butler, Undoing Gender, 21–22.