Abstract
Full disclosure: I have followed Douglas Oakman's work for many years and have consistently found it helpful in my own work on the Jesus movement in ancient Palestine. For those familiar with his body of work, this new collection of essays is “classic Oakman,” complete with social-scientific models and diagrams illustrating the analyses. The unifying theme is also familiar: the prominence of debt in Jesus' teachings and its social consequences for his fellow peasant villagers. All but one of the essays have appeared elsewhere, many in the author's 2008 book Jesus and the Peasants, which is also highly recommended. This smaller volume focuses closely on the theme of indebtedness, no doubt a timely project in the eyes of many modern audiences.
Chapter One, the introduction, is newly written for this collection. It explores a three-stage development of the Christian idea of God's kingdom. The earliest expression of this is the political kingdom that Jesus himself preached in his life, which centered on fulfilling the basic necessities of the most vulnerable people in the peasant villages that Jesus frequented. Yet that notion of the kingdom was transformed by his later followers, who shifted the focus from Jesus' social practices to person of Jesus himself. The final incarnation of this concept concerns Jesus' “enduring table and political vision” (1), which continues for Christians today and embodies his ideologies “about redistribution, not property; about reciprocal sharing, not Mammon, and finally about the fullness of life here and now” (16).
Chapter Two examines the problem of agrarian debt in Jesus' historical context. Instead of viewing language of indebtedness in the Gospels as theological metaphors, Oakman outlines the specific socio-economic circumstances that must be kept in mind when imagining Jesus' early teachings. This chapter brings together a variety of ancient evidence, from Josephus to rabbinic writings, Greco-Roman inscriptions to Galilean archaeology, and situates it all within socio-scientific models of the structural mechanisms of agrarian societies. Thus, one can easily see how the sometimes off-hand, but surprisingly frequent, references to indebtedness in the Jesus traditions are part of a larger socioeconomic system that is well-documented by sociologists and social historians. In Oakman's view, Jesus emerges in antiquity as one especially concerned with the exploited peasants who suffered under a “crushing load of indebtedness” (18).
Chapter Three aims, first, to place the Lord's Prayer in its original socio-economic setting, and second, to chart the way its meaning was made more abstract by later scribal custodians who penned the Q source. Initially, the Lord's Prayer spoke to concrete subsistence concerns of the peasant villagers who would have constituted Jesus' main audience. It was literally a petition to God for essential foodstuffs and release from debts. By the time the prayer became modified for Q, and subsequently for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the subsistence requests were projected forward into an eschatological timeframe and made to reflect more abstract theology. This shift corresponds to the transition of the Jesus movement from rural villages to scribal circles in more urban locales.
Chapter Four explores Jesus as a “Tax Resister.” This has long been one of this reviewer's favorite essays by Oakman, because it represents a badly needed sociological imagination when studying the ancient world. Many of the sayings attributed to Jesus deal with honest economic dealings and strategies for resisting economic exploitation, which would have been subversive ways to deal with the rife structural inequality in ancient Palestine. In addition, Oakman also inquires about how tax collectors would have heard many of Jesus' teachings about money and debt.
Chapter Five offers a very brief conclusion, reiterating the author's overarching concern for the theme of economic justice in biblical texts, which for many might provide some guidance for acting in the contemporary world.
Although this volume appears to be aimed at a popular audience that shares the author's theological and ethical concerns, many of the essays also engage in close analyses that rely on the original source languages and so are more suited for specialists. However, the amateur can wade through well enough and will appreciate the historical and sociological data that Oakman integrates in each essay to make sense of the ancient texts.
The concern for social justice is characteristically prominent: Oakman wants to prompt thought about “the consequences of a world in debt, and of the many as a consequence in a world of hurt” (xv). Moreover, his interest is not in the abstract world of ideas, but rather, in the tangible praxis by which Jesus implemented his social vision in the past and what that might mean now. Though socio-historically focused, this is thus also an ethical project for the author: Jesus' core message about debt, obfuscated by later traditions, can be revived and made relevant for today.