Abstract
Forty years ago, Bruce Malina led the way in applying social-scientific models and concepts to the study of the New Testament. He especially argued that respectful reading scenarios could be drawn from the cultural anthropology of the Mediterranean world, which offered the nearest contemporary analogy to biblical societies. His early work on limited good beliefs in biblical cultures is here extended to investigate links between cultural beliefs and conditions of agrarian economic production and to test several corollaries in the cases of the Jesus group in Palestine and Christ-followers in the Roman cities. It is argued that limited good beliefs in the New Testament are related to the actual conditions of the low-productive societies and social-stratification realities in which the Bible was inscribed.
Several salient factors played a role in Malina's oeuvre. First he was of Polish descent, but through his doctoral education in Italy and Spain (in Mediterranean cultural settings) and through experiences working in the Philippines as a Franciscan, he grew to appreciate deeply the problems of cross-cultural understanding. Malina's publications already in the 1970s show his advancing work on the cross-cultural study of the Bible. His 1981 classic The New Testament World (second ed. 1993; third ed. 2001; for a complete bibliographic listing of Malina publications up until 1999, see Pilch: 381–97) brought sharply into focus the ways in which Euro-American biblical scholars missed important differences in the biblical cultures. Importantly, false analogies can be redressed by cross-cultural models helping to overcome cultural ethnocentrism. For instance, honor and shame in collectivist or extended family contexts are core biblical values in contrast to individualist guilt or self-made persons; any claim to individual honor and worth has to be acknowledged by the larger group; dyadism means that group concerns and consciousness take precedence over individual choice and opinion; personalistic patronal relations govern both domestic and political societies in contrast to impersonal political offices; religion is not “free standing” in churches or “separated by walls” from domestic or political settings; and economic production is largely agrarian and conducted within domestic units rather than impersonal factories. These contrasts could be multiplied many times, and have been in numerous books by members of The Context Group including Malina and other scholars around the world. Malina proposed a method of using cross-cultural models and scenarios to navigate more effectively the cultural divide between modern reader and ancient biblical texts. This method is brilliantly demonstrated in The New Testament World (1981), Christian Origins and Cultural Anthropology (1986), and in the work jointly authored with Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (1992). In short, it is difficult to read any biblical scholarship today without seeing the need to reckon with these issues and perspectives. Malina played a catalytic role in the emergence and development of the social-scientific approach, and he deserves to be remembered as a seminal scholar in the history of biblical scholarship.
Already in 1978 Malina had written about “limited good attitudes and beliefs.” The notion of limited good continues to provide an important and accurate heuristic for the biblical world, and for reasons that amplify the original model of George Foster. In fact, limited-good perspectives are rooted in specific circumstances that regularly yield actual limited goods for most people, and such circumstances recurrently conditioned the cultural and social attitudes and values of the Bible. Moreover, biblical attitudes and values must continue to be appraised in relation to the economic/ecologic realities of the ancient circum-Mediterranean. Ancient social attitudes and cultural values of limited good were rooted in persistent social structures reinforced by ecological/environmental constraints (Gregg: 50, 92; Schneider). This is why these attitudes and values recur over many centuries, in the writings of ancient moralists as well as biblical material.
I invoke as something of a point of contrast and departure one of Ronald Reagan's famous statements about pies (from 1984):
Our opponents … view our country not as people of varied backgrounds who share common values and aspirations; instead, they see us as warring factions and interest groups. They try to divide us, using envy, and playing people off against each other by telling us we're competing for a piece of a pie that is ever getting smaller. Well, that's not our way.
… And about that pie — we also believe that we should work together to make a bigger pie, so everyone can have a bigger slice.
Ronald Reagan obviously did not believe in limited good, nor did he apparently understand that a sharply stratified society of haves and have-nots would hardly allow all to benefit equally from greater productivity. But he did express a conservative commonplace of the post-industrial era: The economy must always grow. And this idea is rooted in technologically-grounded beliefs that nature's limits have been permanently overcome in the industrial age, such that production can ever be increased.
Not only did most ancients not see ever-increasing pies, but they realistically understood that under the precarious conditions of agrarian production, increase of the essential goods of life was not to be had. Besides stringent natural limits, there were also social limits. The ancient world of the Bible was hardly industrialized, and in addition that world lacked key social values and arrangements that would encourage industrial organization on a wide scale or the productive attitudes that first gave rise to the notion of “economic growth.” This anti-industrial sentiment is illustrated in a nutshell by the following anecdote from Suetonius (Vespasian 18):
To a mechanical engineer, who promised to transport some heavy columns to the Capitol at small expense, [Vespasian] gave no mean reward for his invention, but refused to make use of it, saying that he should not be forced to take from the poor commons the work that fed them.
This story points up what will be an important theme of this article. Ancient economies were built largely by human and animal labor, with limited inputs from mechanical or “labor-saving” technologies. Elites depended upon various means for controlling and organizing labor to their own advantage. Moreover, ancient societies offered a variant of Lenski's advanced agrarian societal type; that is, they were largely occupied with agrarian food-provision based upon iron plows drawn by oxen (Lenski: 189–210). The productive capacity of agrarian societies limits the available surpluses for non-food-producing classes. Ancient technology and concomitant social organization must be an important aspect of ancient limited-good attitudes (Finley; Humphreys; Scott 1976).
Given the limited agrarian surpluses of Roman antiquity, social stratification and the urban locus of elites faced economic/ecologic constraints. Neither cities nor the numbers of elites whose life was characterized by agrarian leisure could increase indefinitely. Indeed, the prosopography of elites in Roman antiquity is seen to have been quite limited: Although absolute quantification will always be uncertain, the Prosopographia Imperii Romani (1933–2015) lists 17,229 total entries for the 253-year period 31 BCE to 284 CE. For comparison in later Roman antiquity, Jones, Martindale, & Morris contains 3,740 pages with on average eight entries; this amounts to about 30,000 elite names over 381 years. Consider also, the names listed for Josephus's entire Antiquities in the LCL edition number well under 10,000. Life expectancy itself was a limited good, as “[l]ife expectancy at birth among the elite was of the order of twenty to thirty years” (Scheidel 1999: 280). Following Tim Parkin on average nuclear family size (family of five; Parkin: 5, 112), the imperial elites up until the third century amounted to no more than 150,000. All this would suggest that the first-century “most rich and famous” in any one generation amounted to only several thousands out of approximately 50 million (Scheidel 2007: 48). Lenski sees the entire agrarian governing class on average as about 1%, which would be around 500,000 for the first-century Roman Empire (Lenski: 245).
Theoretical Resources
George Foster first formulated the model of limited good in 1965. He proposed in a response to critics that “the cognitive orientation of Limited Good goes farther than any other model yet advanced to explain peasant behavior” (1972: 62). He also referred to such social settings as “deprivation societies,” where most are living under conditions of limited good, but gross inequalities between elite and non-elite are also broadly recognized.
While Foster receives primary credit for formulating the model, work of other students of classic peasant societies and comparative macrosociology provide support and perspective. I will draw here particularly upon Karl Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism. Wittfogel considered that whatever insights his seminal work had achieved were particularly dependent upon, “the use of big structured concepts for the purpose of identifying big patterns of societal structure and change” (1957: iii).
Such large-scale approaches have fallen into disfavor in some scholarly sectors today, for various ideological reasons, but without such perspectives the forest is missed for the trees or the exceptions are thought to be the rule. Explicit integration of large-scale social-scientific conceptions leads to useful generalizations, which raise counter-intuitive questions and lend insights into regularities or even specific facts that would not otherwise be apparent to the inductive historian. Or as Foster stated it for the middle range:
A good model is heuristic and explanatory, not descriptive, and it has predictive value. It encourages an analyst to search for behavior patterns, and relationships between patterns, which … may not yet have [been] recognized …” [Foster 1967: 301].
Biblical Cultural and Social Values, and Limited Good
Most of the discussions of limited good by biblical scholars have attended to the cultural and social perceptions involved in the term. As mentioned previously, Bruce Malina was the first biblical scholar to highlight limited-good perspectives for the New Testament. His seminal treatments “Limited Good and the Social World of Early Christianity” (1978) and The New Testament World (1981: 75–76)—followed by John Elliott's 1988 Forum article “Fear of the Leer” and 1991 review of evil-eye material related to the Hebrew Bible, or Jerome Neyrey's “Bewitched in Galatia” (1988), Richard Rohrbaugh's “A Peasant Reading of the Parable of the Talents/Pounds: A Text of Terror” (1993), and Neyrey & Rohrbaugh's “‘He must increase, I must decrease’” (2001)—largely adhere to Malina's Interpretive/Verstehen approach in relation to the Mediterranean cultural system. Although some aspects of biblical limited good can be studied relative to accumulation of honor or wealth, much else is hidden under various linguistic markers such as the “evil eye” (Neyrey 1988: 72–75; Elliott 2016; Malina & Seeman). The evil eye becomes an important index of limited-good beliefs. As these scholars point out, “limited good” implies a zero-sum view of natural and social goods. Increase somewhere must imply decrease somewhere else. Hardly a Reaganesque view of life!
Rightly queried, the emic material of the Bible yields a variety of limited-good material. For instance, Psalm 62:10 [MT 62:11], through parallelismus membrorum, equates the increase of riches with extortion and robbery. Psalm 73:12 suggests that only the wicked increase in wealth. The well-known biblical passage in John 3:30 expresses the zero-sum attitude. The idioms of Matthew 20:15 and Galatians 3:1 attest wide-spread evil-eye beliefs. Alicia Batten perceptively discusses James's views of poverty and wealth against the horizon of a limited-good economy (65–77). Malina & Seeman (53) and Elliott (2016) identify many more places in the Bible where limited good or the evil eye is mentioned.
Ancient limited-good attitudes are not restricted to the Bible. There is for instance this anecdote in Augustine's City of God (4.4; originally from Cicero):
Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “Exactly what you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who do it with a great fleet are styled emperor.”
Neyrey & Rohrbaugh and Batten document these attitudes widely among the Greco-Roman moralists and other writers. Rivka Ulmer (1994) has examined the Ayin Ha-Ra in rabbinic literature. And we have recently received the fullest book-length treatment of the evil eye in world culture (including the biblical cultures) from John Elliott (2015–2017).
Besides the exegetical documentation of limited-good instances in the Bible, scholarship has explored the cultural mores determined by such attitudes and values. Malina, for instance, discusses the strategies of the ideal or wealthy man for preserving and protecting honor in a limited-good world (1981: 76–79; 1987). It is important in this cultural scheme that everything be seen as “given.” This conviction probably recurs within intransigent peasant thinking—whether of commoner or elite—which is fixated within a magical world. Max Weber stressed that peasant religion is bound up with magical thinking to influence nature; also, Heinz Werner showed that magical thinking deals in all-or-nothing propositions and one part of the whole cannot be disturbed without disturbing everything (Weber: 470, 482–83; Werner: 344; see Horsley's critique). But since the elites value leisure, others must understandably work to provide “what has been given.” Conversely, since increases in power or wealth achieved by less-honored families are always “new,” these are generally difficult to rationalize within a limited-good world (consider aristocratic attitudes toward the nouveaux riches).
Technological and Environmental Perspectives, and Limited Good
The importance of limited-good attitudes and values in the Bible seems adequately established by the scholarship of the last thirty years. Less attended to, however, and less successfully clarified have been the links between culture and the natural and social-structural bases of such attitudes.
Elliott provides some pointers in this direction when he refers to the “fragile and unpredictable ecological environment” that gives rise to evil-eye and limited-good beliefs. He documents exegetically that the evil eye in the Bible is often associated with the sharing of food, acquisition of wealth, or distribution of alms. Moreover, Deuteronomy 28:53–57 depicts “the most extreme illustration of Evil Eye behavior in all of scripture,” based presumably upon the severe deprivations of the neo-Babylonian siege. Elliott concludes that the evil eye “constituted a symbolical rendition of the ecological, economic, and social conditions in which the ancients felt themselves exposed and vulnerable,” dependent upon a “precarious natural environment” where economic survival was uncertain and made more insecure by constant competition for resources (Elliott 1991: 153, 159; 2015: 54–58).
Yet even more needs to be done to explain the social recurrence of such perspectives over centuries. In order to accomplish this task, specific attention needs to be devoted to the actual working circumstances of our biblical writers, and macrosociological frameworks must effectively be brought to bear on the matter. The remainder of this article will offer a sketch as to what is meant by this (limited to the New Testament period and Greco-Roman world).
Applied to agrarian antiquity, limited-good attitudes and values expressed both acquiescence to extreme inequalities and a living protest against the exploitative conditions under which most lived. There was no source of unlimited goods in antiquity—at least for the vast majority. Wind, wheel, and lever technologies had limited application, and served the few; most useful work whether in agriculture or building was still the outcome of organized labor or animal power; elite taxation posed disincentives for increasing agricultural production. While Rostovtzeff toyed with the idea of a “commercial Mediterranean” as a significant economic engine, imperial Mediterranean commerce really in the final analysis served only the Roman elites and their political agents (as sharply depicted by Revelation 18 or The Gospel of Thomas 64; Rostovtzeff: 3, 95, 772; Banaji; Brown: 14). The agrarian masses toiled for limited goods under the Italian boot. The preindustrial techno-environmental conditions and the organization of labor within an agrarian society must be the final court of appeal in the explanation of limited-good attitudes and values.
Important for understanding the recurrence of limited-good notions is incorporation of social structural considerations and macrosociological theory. Wittfogel provides a suggestive starting point. While his 1957 book has been too simplistically characterized (or even dismissed) as a deterministic study of irrigation societies, and its alleged defects noted by many reviewers (Said: 89–107; Toynbee: 196; Turner 1979; 2000: 1–31; Venturi; Wittfogel 1969), it has also been very positively evaluated. George Murdock wrote, “This is a truly great book, one of the major contributions to the science of man in our time. Its importance to anthropology in the area of comparative political institutions parallels that of Tylor's Primitive Culture in the field of comparative religion, and may conceivably even outrank that of the entire corpus of theoretical literature in political science” (545; see also Eisenstadt's judicious review). Wittfogel's work has broad application in understanding the social realities of absolutist power, weak property, and coerced labor under low-productivity conditions. It is an excellent comparative study of channeled power, not just channeled water.
“Hydraulic society,” as Wittfogel defines it, depends upon organization of labor, intensive cultivation, and large-scale cooperation. He includes imperial Rome in the discussion as a loose and complex hydraulic society, because the absolutist politics of Augustus drew upon examples of the “Hellenistic Orient,” and “By laying the foundations for a salaried officialdom, he initiated a bureaucratic development that rapidly gained momentum in the 1st century a.d.” (Wittfogel 1957: 210). Wittfogel also calls this pattern “agromanagerial despotism.”
Ecological determinism oversimplifies the relation between the natural environment and man's technical and economic activities by claiming that this relation is one-sided (with man passively responding to the natural setting) and necessary. In fact, it involves a two-way process; and the ecological setting more often provides the possibility or probability, rather than the necessity for certain types of action.
But these differentiations do not eliminate the role of the natural factor. They only limit it. And the ecological approach remains central for the understanding of the ‘Orient’ in which only agro-managerial and state-directed action can solve the problems posed by the natural environment [Wittfogel 1957: 361].
As he makes clear, only absolute despotisms could compel the labor force necessary to feed numerous cities, erect monumental buildings or fortifications, or maintain extensive waterworks like aqueducts, baths, canals, or harbors. He also points to the weakness of property within agromanagerial empires (e.g., as revealed in partible inheritance arrangements or land grants by autocrats to their clients; Wittfogel 1957: 78–86), as well as the introvert nature of architecture (one thinks of the windowless mansions at Pompeii).
All of these features were characteristic of imperial Roman society, and the social contexts attendant to the writing of the New Testament literature. The Romans, like the Hellenistic rulers before them, promoted urban intensification in the East and intensification of agrarian production to supply those cities. Eastern cities as sites of delegated honor required adornments, and the archaeological record attests them aplenty! For instance, cities required secure water supplies, beautiful buildings, good roads, monumental tombs, and the like. Much of this was done in dressed stone, and required enormous investments of labor under preindustrial conditions. Cities required taxation and supply; so commercial development and agricultural intensification followed logically. Speaking directly about the agrarian situation, agricultural intensification required debt, alienation of traditional village lands, and growth of large estates controlled by the cities. As Foster, and Marx and Sorokin before him, have pointed out, peasant villagers are always provincial, difficult to coordinate, and must be compelled into larger social endeavor. Debt and taxes, coupled with the threat of violent reprisals, are perhaps the best social leverage for labor and the surplus that villagers would otherwise devote to themselves and store up for the winter. Moreover, village labor needs to be harnessed directly for the benefit of the city-dweller. This is perhaps the most interesting aspect requiring further study. The city necessitated that village and craft labor be more intensively exploited. Interestingly, the Jesus and the Christ-follower movements, bridging this social divide, addressed and incorporated people deeply affected by imperial labor exploitation.
Perhaps the matter can best be summarized under two aspects: (1) First-century Mediterranean social structures depended upon labor and agricultural surplus. These social entailments implied intensified agricultural production, and the organizational requirements to ensure surplus, as well as labor extraction. But under conditions of productivity within firm environmental limits, “surplus” would mean decrease of village edibles and “labor exploitation” marginal returns on agrarian production. (2) Ancient Mediterranean values centered upon honor. The city as the site of ascribed or achieved honor had political entailments. These entailments required increased monumental building to display that honor. We look at each of these selectively vis-à-vis the Jesus group and Christ-follower movement before concluding.
The attitude of the Jesus group in Roman Palestine
The parable of Matthew 20:1–16 often appears in Exhibit A for limited-good perspectives and surely expresses attitudes of Jesus and his associates. Conventional commentaries (like Jeremias's) stress the graciousness of the estate owner, “the good employer” (136). Brandon Scott considers that the “lack in the parable of any absolute standard of justice undermines any human standard for the kingdom” (1989: 297). The synoptic commentary of Malina & Rohrbaugh handles the parable's meaning as a matter of a generous patron (100). Of the existing treatments of which I am aware, only that of William Herzog comes close to the visceral Jesuanic situation: The “owner” arrogates to himself the prerogatives of God in his “ownership,” and the true interests of the workers are confounded by the “divide and conquer” strategy in the payoff (93–94).
In light of structural macrosociology, in other words, there appears a largely ignored dimension in this parable. First, village labor is vulnerable and readily available for the purposes of the elites on large estates. Second, the pay issue underscores that conventional village morals are irrelevant. The capriciousness of the pay underscores the vulnerability and exploitation of a coerced labor force. The picture brings into focus something like the degraded wage-labor conditions in the American South during the era of slavery. Third, the pay is in silver coin that will simply return to the tax collector in tribute. And fourth, the envy of the workers has less to do with the pay than with the distortion of village justice under conditions of coerced labor organization. This story encapsulates a statement about conscript labor, not the landlord's generosity. The evil eye has to do with the landlord's evil in destroying the integrity of the traditional village, as well as the entire situation of imperial exploitation.
In similar fashion, Rohrbaugh shows convincingly that the Parable of the Talents/Pounds depends for its central evaluation on an appreciation of limited-good beliefs among Jesus' first-century Galilean audience, and a concomitant critique of money as associated with evil powers (1993: 33–34).
The Jesus group conversely centered in a sense of Passover freedom and covenant justice, of familial sharing, and a table free from invidiousness. After all, Jesus assuredly said “You cannot be a slave to God and Mammon” (Luke 16:13) and probably said something like “It is more honorable to give rather than to receive” (Acts 20:35). Because these values challenged the Roman patronal order and allegiance to Rome, Jesus met the rebel's fate of Roman crucifixion (Oakman 2012: 94–111). Within a few decades, Simon bar Giora led an important segment in the rebellion against Rome's coercion and immediately declared freedom for slaves (Josephus War 4.508). The Flavians made a special point of leading him in public triumph to his execution in Rome.
Roman honor, the Jesus group, and the Christ-follower movement
Roman honor had a significant impact on the Jesus group and Christ-follower movement through its building and labor impacts. The Herods were continuous builders. Herod the Great rebuilt the Jerusalem temple and Caesarea Maritima; Herod Antipas founded Tiberias. When the Jerusalem temple was completed, Agrippa II was forced to establish a paving program to keep the labor occupied (Josephus Antiquities 20.222). Jesus of Nazareth's participation within this building system, and his historical activity, needs much further appraisal along these lines. Both his critique of Mammon and his advocacy of an ethic of sharing express contrasting limited-good perspectives (Oakman 2004; 2012: 91). Since the royal power of God held eminent domain over all property, Jesus in effect subverted permanent inequality and the weak-property ideology supporting the ruling elites. This would explain why he showed no interest in land-redistribution schemes (Luke 12:14; whether Matthew 5:5b and Mark 10:30 go back to Jesus is questionable).
Turning to the Christ-followers in cities, much more should be done to investigate the circumstances of their networks within the labor and urban structures of the East. Taking the case of Corinth, for instance, Rome's reshaping of the city embodied its claim to honor. That reshaping included significant temple-building and waterworks. Moreover, Rome attempted building a canal to facilitate transhipment across the Isthmus of Corinth (Suetonius Nero 19; on the ancient “railway” for hauling ships across called the diolkos, see Fraser: 134; Hornblower & Spawforth: 475). This kind of project had enormous labor ramifications, and Paul's group drew upon those involved in the labor-system. Paul mentions Erastus the city treasurer in Romans 16:23; a Latin inscription, discovered in 1929, identified a city-aedile as Erastus, perhaps the same person (Cadbury: 42–58). If Corinthian baptismal practices had elements of “ritual inversion,” as DeMaris suggests (32, 49), namely, by subverting Rome's honor claims and replacing them with Christ's claims as the source of all good, then limited-good perspectives are clearly involved in shaping the social attitudes and values of these followers.
The same kinds of study should be carried through for the movement in other cities, such as Syrian Antioch or Asian Ephesus where urban building and agrarian restructuring were equally significant. Moreover, attention needs to be given to Julio-Claudian and Flavian social policies that would affect the labor circumstances of the Jesus group and Christ-followers. At the time that Paul was dealing with the Corinthian problems, Claudius (in order to solve the problem of Rome's grain supply) refashioned the harbor at Ostia. Consonant with general Julio-Claudian policies, such a project implies greater centralization of the Roman administration and more rigorous taxation to maintain the annona (Rome's citizen-grain supply) and enlarged bureaucracy.
The New Testament writers largely worked during the Flavian period. Much might yet be brought into focus about how Flavian policies regarding city and country affected the attitudes and values of the second-generation Christ movement through its writings. Vespasian has already been mentioned. Though there was a revisioning in the New Testament of the social dynamics of the Jesus group (largely in the service of historical amnesia—since Jesus became honorable and increasingly clothed in the garb of developing christology), the texts still embody the everyday contexts and circumstances under Flavian labor coercion.
Conclusion
In sum, this limited review of limited-good attitudes and values in the Bible stresses past achievements, after the pioneering work of Bruce Malina and others, and the need for further inquiries into the ecological, natural, and macrosociological bases of such attitudes and values. Not only is such study needed for understanding the Bible, and its formulating social movements, but also for appraising the on-going significance of the Bible. For while Reaganesque beliefs about unlimited goods and unlimited good continue to infect contemporary thinking, global warming and other environmental strictures impose increasingly formidable “externalities” on formal economistic theories hitherto untroubled by a naturally limited world. Regardless of the babble of political ideologues, the bubble of the myth of endless economic growth seems about to burst. Perhaps the clarity about social relations, ethical imperatives, and ultimate environmental conditions first formulated within ancient texts like the Bible become not less relevant, but even more relevant to our times when it comes to discernment of humane values. Indeed, it may be that biblical scholarship can play a genuinely significant cultural and social role in helping the twenty-first century to realize its constructive human potential within a world of real limits.