Easter Day Message: De-Bunking Weak Socialist Exegesis

I’m not going to do any work today, for obvious reasons probably minutely detailed in Canon Law somewhere. Instead, I thought I would offer, as briefly as possible, some exegetical clarifications that Christian Conservatives can make when markets and finance are attacked as immoral and enforced redistribution of wealth is advocated as a genuine response to Christ’s exhortation to charity.
What I’m going to do is to take the two most oft-referenced passages used by agoraphobes (in the etymological sense) to try and claim that Jesus opposed markets. Then I will endeavour to point out a few of the complexities of these passages, or otherwise how an anti-market understanding of them simply ignores the historical or literary context. I apologize in advance for not being able to cite the commentaries that taught me these details when I did my exegesis paper last year. Well, here goes.

1) The famous ‘render’ passage (Luke 20:21-28):
(in which Jesus is asked by Pharisees whether or not Jews ought to pay taxes to Caesar, and replies that one must ‘render unto Caesar what is his, and unto God what is His’)

This is doubly important as it is also used to attack an Augustinian opposition to big government: statists claim that obedience to the laws, whatever they are, is simply ‘rendering unto Caesar’ and so the only proper way to oppose unjust laws is to go through the rigmarole of parliamentary democracy to change laws (that is, impose Christian morality on society using government). Usually, however, it is used to argue that Christ has basically given taxation (the violent collection of money from people living within a certain territory) a Divine Command carte blanche. Its repercussions in terms of doctrine and simply theological attitudes towards government stretch and multiply throughout Thomist theory and beyond.

First, we need to ask ourselves why Jews would object paying taxes to Caesar at all. The uninformed answer is that Jews simply resented being subjected to Roman rule and may have felt that, since Caesar had simply invaded Israel, he had no claim to their loyalty or a portion of the profits of their labour. But there’s more to it than that. Crucially, the wording on a Roman denarius, the coin with Caesar’s profile on it which Jesus holds as he gives the ‘render’ statement, calls Caesar a god. It refers explicitly to the imperial cult, in which Caesar is both ‘lord’ and ‘saviour’, among other divine titles – titles that Jews used for God. For Jews in the first centuries, to use Roman money was to traffic in idolatry and by implication ought to be avoided (more on this later) yet at the same time its use was practically demanded of them under Roman rule.

So the Pharisees’ question isn’t a tricky one because it seeks to expose Jesus as being either a rebel against Roman rule or a collaborator. It is difficult to answer because it represents one outward expression of a major moral dilemma for Jews then: how to refrain from idolatry to the extent that the Law demands, while living under the rule of an empire which relies on idolatry (the imperial cult) as its cohesive force. It is true to say that Jews were exempt from the usual requirements to sacrifice to Caesar: yet Roman understanding of the Law was not so adequate that they were allowed, for example, to pay taxes in their own currency, or keep the imperial cult out of their lives in the many minor ways in which it daily infiltrated the lives of subjects of the empire. It was not the paying of taxes to an external ruler per se that Jews objected to (although they surely objected to paying too much), as can be seen by the same dilemma not arising under the other imperial powers, without imperial cults, that dominated them in the Old Testament. It was the idolatrous violations, if minor, of the rule incurred everyday by living under Roman rule. So when Jesus tells Christians to ‘render unto Caesar what is his’, how should they understand that? If Caesar is an idol then nothing can belong to him.

There is a second problem with the statist interpretation of the ‘render’ passage. The formula of ‘give to X what he/it deserves, and to God what He deserves’ is not unique here: Jesus borrows it from the Old Testament, where the meaning is occasionally explicitly ironic or hostile. In 1 Maccabees, for example, the dying Matathias, at the end of a battle, tells his brother to “pay back the Gentiles in full, and obey the commands of the Law”. So perhaps if what is Caesar’s is his use of violence and striving for temporal power, then the ‘render’ passage is really directly rebellious.
This argument, however, is not majority opinion.

Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees cannot be shown to be an injunction to pay taxes as a service to Caesar equivalent to following the Law as a service to God: Caesar’s role as idol rules out such an understanding. What Jesus’ answer did was allow him to express his dissatisfaction with Roman rule without saying something that could get him mistaken for a political rabble-rouser; and he could make the ambiguity of his answer more acceptable to those worried about the idolatrous implications of following Roman laws and customs by including a reminder that, whatever you did with your denarii, Gods Law was notwithstanding.

The radicalism of Jesus’ social message, and His admonition to turn from worldly concerns, however, extend to political life and what role we accord government. Civitas Dei would be the obvious recommended reading on that whole theme.

None of the details I draw out in this article are intended to show that the converse of the statist interpretations is true (e.g. that tax is bad or shouldn’t be paid) but rather that these interpretations don’t stand up to serious scrutiny. The ‘render’ command can’t be used to show that we are divinely enjoined to pay taxes and obey the law. Attempts to do so may entirely miss the point of the passage.

2) The expulsion of the moneychangers from the Temple (I don’t cite the passage because here the redaction between gospels is relevant)

This is not often used as a proper argument that Jesus was antipathetic towards markets: it wouldn’t hold up if used that way because the Temple-context is obviously central to the passage. Instead, it is appealed to as evidence of a general sentiment – shops make Jesus angry – which is easier to support with a string of irrelevant quotes from the sermon on the mount and so on. There’s anecdotal evidence below of the earnest, if not necessarily effective, way in which this passage is appealed to as evidence of Jesus’ broad dislike of people buying and selling things.

Among the G20 protesters there was a chap dressed up as Jesus bearing a placard with ‘throw the moneylenders out’. Firstly, he had misquoted the gospels. Secondly, I don’t understand how he thought the economy was going to recover without them. Money-lenders serve a necessary purpose in our financial system (as in pretty much any – there’s evidence that Thales bought olive fortunes).

Likewise, the money-changers in the Temple of Israel had a very important function in the Jewish sacrificial cult: Jews could offer money to the temple coffers as a sacrifice, and needed to pay for the animals they intended to sacrifice (hence the livestock salesmen: also a necessary service), but they could not do so using pagan money, stamped as it was with images of idols and bearing profane creeds. So money-changers were needed to trade foreign coinage for the domestic currency. This service became particularly important in the early first century as Jews were returning from a plethora of different nations, bearing different currencies, to sacrifice. Technically, then, there was a market-place in the Temple: but it was there because it was needed for the Temple to work in the way it always had done.

The past tense there is the key. Jesus was going to change the way that God’s people sacrificed to Him: rather than animals in one physical building in the world, the people of Israel, after the Crucifixion, were going to re-present Christ’s sacrifice in their own churches, anywhere, and it would be a complete rather than petitionary sacrifice. John’s gospel makes it explicit that Jesus’ expulsion of the money-changers and livestock salesmen from the temple was a symbol of the impending total renewal of the cultic practices of God’s people (John 2:18-21).

To understand the passage as Jesus accusing necessary cultic service-providers of being “robbers”, implying that money-changing and livestock selling did not belong at the edge of a holy place, carried to its logical conclusions, suggest that not the nature of the Temple cult but rather the extent of the providers’ profit-margins was the issue at stake. Nevertheless, the “den of robbers” accusation that finishes this pericope in Mark (11:17), Luke (19:43) and Matthew (21:13) seems pretty strong and needs consideration.

Mark 11:17: “and he was teaching, saying to them, ‘Hath it not been written — My house a house of prayer shall be called for all the nations, and ye did make it a den of robbers?’” (my italics). Note that ‘the nations’ is the equivalent term for gentiles. The prophetic-symbological interpretation, then, can be maintained here: Jesus is making the distinction between the universality of the future temple cult of the Church and the specificity of the Temple in Jerusalem which has led to its misuse (not necessarily at that very moment) in the history of Israel. So an anti-market interpretation in the Marcan pericope is not necessarily appropriate. Matthew copies Mark’s account almost word-for-word.

Luke 19:43: “saying to them, ‘It hath been written, My house is a house of prayer — but ye made it a den of robbers.’” is much less clearly symbological, although it contains compressed references to the Marcan juxtaposition of universal spiritual future and flawed contingent past. It could be argued that Luke’s redaction of Mark here tones down the prophetic content, perhaps in order to bring out Jesus’ vehemence towards markets. This contention becomes rather strained since Luke places that very redaction immediately after a parable in which a servant gains his master’s praise by successfully investing the master’s money, gaining profit.

The above analysis is, of course, somewhat speculative and quite close to the text: I am an amateur and my conclusions worth little. The attempt to use this passage to paint Jesus as an habitual opponent of trading and capital, however, requires two things: it not only requires (a) that Jesus is specifically throwing traders out of the Temple specifically because they are trading there, but also that (b) he does so vehemently enough that we can infer a negative attitude towards trading per se and not just in the Temple – otherwise the most that the G20 placard-bearer could have been complaining about is, perhaps, that he had to pay for his Catechesis in the church book-shop. If (a) is ambiguous – if not a misunderstanding – then we cannot move to (b).

I’m sorry that took so long. Thank God you don’t have to do it for weekly supervisions! Basically, try to paraphrase the arguments in your head so that the next time a statist tries to claim Jesus would have raised capital gains taxes, you have something to say back besides attacking their party’s anti-clericalism (which never goes down well, and often results in one accidentally defending clause 28 or something equally tasteless). Have a good year!
p.s. last time I tried arguments like this on an evangelical I know in the CSLD he claimed I was ‘intellectualizing’ the gospel. There’s a very easy way to undercut such an approach: ask so-called ‘literalists’ to explain how the words of the Bible teaches the existence of the Holy Trinity. Then watch them squirm.