The Poor Men, Jesus and Christianity 2
Christians cannot escape from the fact that, in Jesus’s parable of Dives and Lazarus, we are the rich man, clothed and fed in comfort, and also guilty of appalling negligence concerning the starving and sick man at our gate… We have ignored the insistent theme throughout the scriptures—that God has always been on the side of the poor.Rev David C K Watson
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Wednesday, 06 October 2004
Abstract
The Poor Christ
S Paul says of Christ:
Though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor.2 Cor 8:9
In the biblical account, Christ’s parents were too poor to bring to the temple a lamb, the normal offering for purification, bringing instead two pigeons. They were depicted as refugees seeking asylum first in Egypt from a cruel king (Mt 2:13-15), then in Galilee (Mt 2:19:23) from Herod’s son. Jesus had no home of his own, warning an eager recruit:
Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.Mt 8:20
John the Baptist sent messengers to ask Jesus if he was the messiah, Jesus answered by pointing out his good works—healing the sick and preaching to the poor (Mt 11:2-6). Jesus preached to all Jews, but preaching to the poor seemed to show he was the messiah. He goes on to tell his audiences that they can only be saved if they are kind to the poor. Speaking of the chosen ones at the Judgement day, he said:
Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me… Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.Mt 25:34-36;40
The so-called Brother of the Lord, James, who led the first church in Jerusalem after the crucifixion, wrote emphasising the proper attitude of Christians to poor and rich, in his neglected epistle:
If there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment, and ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place, and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool, Are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges? … Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him? But ye have despised the poor. Do not rich men oppress you, and draw you before the judgment seats?James 2:2-6
The “poor of this world, rich in faith” were the Ebionites, there being no reason to think that the poor in general were rich in faith. Ebionies were voluntarily poor! They chose to be poor because poverty was a sacred virtue. The poor were blessed, meaning they would enter God’s kingdom—they would be saved! Luke gives the same beatitude as Matthew but phrases it differently:
Blessed be ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.Luke 6:20
Not the rich, who had already had their consolation (Lk 6:24), and were not to receive any other! The poor scabby man, Lazarus (“Saved by God”), begging at the door of Dives, the rich man, gets his reward, but the rich man ignores his plight and has to look on him in heaven from the fires of hell. These are written as direct quotations of the words of the incarnated son of God—God Himself, Christians say they believe, yet they will ignore them in favour of various formulae given by such as Paul, a mere mortal man. Jesus said unequivocally:
When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen, nor thy rich neighbours, lest they also bid thee again, and a recompence be made thee. But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and thou shalt be blessed, for they cannot recompense thee. For thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.Luke 14:12
Even the young and innocent Mary, according to Luke, knows that the rich could not be saved, when she recites her Magnificat:
He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.Luke 1:52
The fact that Luke has put these words from an Essenic liturgy into the mouth of Mary ought to emphasise their significance for a Christian.
In an address to a group of Christian ministers, Upton Sinclair, the revolutionary US author, read a contemporary speech by Emma Goldman, the anarchist militant activist:
You rich men, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is corroded, and the rust of them shall be a testimony against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. You have heaped treasure together for the last days. Look, the wages of the labourers who reaped your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have entered the ears of the Lord of Hosts. You have lived in pleasure on the earth, and in luxury. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter.
The ministers were outraged, calling out, “This woman should be deported at once”.
In fact, it is from the New Testament (James 5:1-5). Ronald J Sider (Rich Christian in an Age of Hunger, 1977) explains that this story, exemplifying Christian hypocrisy, was actually preached by Dr Paul E Toms, President of the National Association of Evangelicals, in an unpublished sermon.
A Rich Young Man
The incident of the rich young man in Mark 10:17-25, though quite explicit, has been traditionally totally ignored by the clergy. Jesus has no doubt that wealth corrupts—his view being that of a “Poor One” but quite different from mainstream Jews who took wealth to be a blessing of God.
A man wants to know how to inherit eternal life. He wants to be sure of entering the coming kingdom. Jesus tells him that those who have followed God’s commandments—the law of Moses—will be saved. The man says he has followed them since his youth—if we are to believe Luke 18:18 who calls him a certain ruler, he is a Sadducee—and appears thoroughly complacent. Jesus is about to burst this particular bubble. To become a Nazarene he must give all he had to “the poor” (“The Poor”, the Ebionites, the Essenes) then he would gain treasure in heaven. The man cannot do it—he is rich—proving that he did not believe in the imminence of God’s kingdom as Jesus and the Nazarenes did. For the sake of the story the other requirements which Jesus would have stated, repentance and baptism, are omitted by Mark as irrelevant since the man would not give up his wealth. Mark is also constantly at pains to edit out references to baptism which would make Jesus sound like John the Baptist.
This little nugget shows that the Nazarenes, even when Jesus was alive, had the same requirement of foregoing material possessions as the Essenes. In Acts of the Apostles this rule is explicitly stated. As if to emphasize it—and, since Mark reports this emphasis, it was obviously still held by the early church—Jesus says (in some manuscripts twice):
How hardly shall they that have riches enter the kingdom of God,
adding:
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.Mk 10:25
Christian churches are amongst the wealthiest institutions on earth but still gladly accept the mites of widows. Their defence of wealth is that it does not matter as long as you trust in God rather than trust in riches. Well, they should read the story again! Jesus’s parable is unmistakably clear, and he says it is “impossible” for the rich to enter the kingdom of God. Who are the hypocrites now? The only reason Jesus does not say it is easier for a rich man to fly or walk on water is that there is a tiny hole in a needle which offers for the rich sinner the chance of God’s forgiveness once he has given away his wealth, repented sincerely and accepted baptism. The young man’s reaction shows how difficult it is.
Without any evidence at all from early manuscripts, some Christian apologists have argued that “for a rich” in Mark 10:25 is an interpolation. Perhaps that suits them because it then reads that it is impossible for any man to enter the kingdom! Other attempts to discredit the passage persist but there is absolutely no scholarly basis for the eye of a needle being a narrow gate in Jerusalem. Arguably the meaning could be a cable, that is to say a thick rope, the contrast being with the thin strand of cotton that would normally thread a needle.
The word in the Greek New Testament, “kamelos” (Latin, camelus), is undoubtedly a camel, but sometimes kamelos is spelt or misspelt as “kamilos”, which means a rope in Greek, and so the Christians decided that a rope was meant, thus giving the rich man hope, if a big enough needle could be found for the rope. Undoubtedly the story was meant to leave hope for the rich because the needle has a hole through which the camel or rope could notionally pass if it were large enough, but was in practice saying it was impossible.
The alternative to camel seems to have been justified by G M Lamsa, who wrote a version of the New Testament based on a Syriac text near the outbreak of the last world war. Lamsa was an Assyrian who thought the Hebrew scriptures originated with Ezra (who supposedly re-wrote it from memory after it was burned by the Babylonians) but the Israelites captured earlier by the Assyrians had, in the myth, taken their original scriptures to Assyria where they were preserved in the Peshitta. Thus he give priority of the Peshitta over the Masoretic text, taking the Aramaic as superior to the Hebrew.
He also believed the Syrians had preserved the Aramaic text of the New Testament in the Peshitta. He had the novel view that the Aramaic Peshitta was from the original Aramaic of the New Testament and not a translation from Greek. He thought the entire New Testament had been written in Aramaic and not in Greek. The evidence probably is that the Peshitta has a later revision of the Old Syriac New Testament, not the original Aramaic version as Lamsa thought.
From his eastern text, Lamsa reads the Aramaic word, “gamla”, where the Greek has “kamelos”. The equivalent Hebrew word is “gamal”, which means a beast of burden in general. The Arabic, “jamel”, means to carry a burden, and all come from a Semitic root “GML” that means to settle upon or place upon. Lamsa says “kamelos” is a word adopted into Greek from Aramaic, an attempt at expressing “gamla” into Greek.
”Gamla” has several meanings, besides camel, related to the idea of bearing a burden, one of which is a rope and another is a plank, “glmh” being modern Hebrew for a plank, the modern word having been derived from the old Aramaic word, which therefore must also have meant a plank, among other things. The meaning plank was not, it seems adopted into the Greek otherwise we might have had Jesus urging us to take the camel from our own eye before we tried to get the mote from our brother’s (Mt 7:3-5). Or we might have been straining out our gnats and swallowing ropes or planks instead of camels (Mt 23:24).
Doubtless it is possible that Greek, having purloined a word from Aramaic found more than one of its meanings useful but, though rope is far from impossible in the context, it seems more likely that a camel was meant in the original. The rabbis use the same absurd imagery and impossibilities to bring out points. Nor does it really matter which meaning was intended because the point is not altered despite the hypocrisy of rich Christians.
The Western Text manuscripts place Mark 10:24, with “trust in riches” removed, after Mark 10:25 removing the curious repetition and adding to the sense of the passage. The disciples in Mark 10:26 are then responding to Jesus in Mark 10:24 saying, “It’s hard to enter the kingdom of God!”
Jesus’s attitude is not surprising. For Essenes wealth was one of the three snares of Belial—the three major sins. The corresponding passage in Matthew makes the Essene connexion more explicit still. He writes (Mt 18:21):
If thou wouldst be perfect, go, sell that thou hast.
Essenes called themselves “the perfect” so Matthew is precisely saying, “To be an Essene you must sell…” etc.
Abandoning personsl wealth was a requirement rapidly abandoned by all Christians except certain monks and ascetics. Nowadays, if you are wealthy, you are courted by Christian churches or even found your own with an associated TV station! Even in Mark’s time it was being watered for the sake of wealthy Romans. Mark puts “they that trust in riches”, when Luke 18:24 puts the more obvious and certainly original, for it matches Mark 10:23, “they that have riches”. In Luke’s day for some the Essene poverty principle still held as an ideal and, as if to show there is no mistake Luke 16:19-31 gives together the parable of the rich young man and then that of Lazarus the beggar, in which Lazarus goes to heaven and the rich man to hell. Curiously the parable concludes by refuting the basis of Christianity, saying that a man who will not obey the law will not repent even if “one rise from the dead!”
Christians, in particular, might also note that, in Mark 10.18 and in Luke 18:19 but not in Matthew, Jesus denies that he is God, for only God is good—Jesus does not claim to be. Neither Essenes nor Pharisees would have made a claim to perfection, especially Essenes whose goal it was! For an Essene to claim perfection would be so lacking in humility that he would be dropped right to the back of the queue for the kingdom.
The list of commandments (Mk 10:19) must have not been needed by any but the most uncouth Jew. Mark wants to avoid saying the law of Moses and yet provide a basic moral code for Christian converts. Books of the scriptures in Greek would have been rare among gentiles in the earliest days of the gentile church so the list fills a gap.
The expression “treasure in heaven” occurs in the Psalms of Solomon 9:9 which is decidedly Essenic in tone. We observed in a previous passage that to take up the cross looks all the world like a Christian interpolation but could be genuine Essene tradition for, following the example of the first visitation, they were certainly marked with an invisible cross at baptism, just as Christians still are. Thus the reference is really to baptism and not to crucifixion. Matthew and Luke seem to realize that before the crucifixion the reference looks oddly anachronistic and omit it.
Observe Jesus’s mode of address to his adult audience—children!
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Moses and Exodus
