Christianity
Christ as Social Bandit, Freedom Fighter, and Revolutionary
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 6 November 2009
Christ a Bandit?
Whatever the Christian today takes from the stories of Christ in the gospels, the Romans at the time thought Jesus was a bandit. The translation used in the gospels is “robber”, but bandit or rebel is a more accurate translation of the Greek. Of course, the gospels try to distinguish Christ from the revolution that is going on at the time, notably by distinguishing him from the robber, Barabbas, but as we have argued elsewhere in these pages, the trick is too transparent to work unless you are already convinced of Christ’s divinity.
At any rate, the Romans hanged Christ whatever happened to Barabbas, so they thought Christ was the bandit. Pilate asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?”, and Jesus either did not answer or answered evasively. Pilate is depicted as not being convinced he was claiming to be a king, but hanged him anyway, and had written on the cross that he was the king of the Jews, rather spoiling the story of the handwashing. Roman administraters were not idiots, and the only natural conclusion from the evidence is that Jesus called the Christ was actually a Jewish bandit protesting against Roman rule and the collaboration of the “publicans”.
In fact the gospel story of Christ can be read as the story of a rather typical social bandit, operating clandestinely from the base of a secret society, the Essenes, against the rule of the Romans that most Jews considered to be a violation of their own constitution, which promised them that no less than God ruled them. A godless people like the Romans therefore could not be allowed to rule the Jews, and Jesus was not the only egregious bandit of the time in Judaea. Here the characteristics of the social bandit are reviewed from historian, Eric Hobsbawm’s book, Bandits.
The review is instructive, not only in illuminating the life of Christ, but also the many modern bandit groups, especially in the Middle East, objecting to US colonialization and exploitation of their land. Osama bin Laden and Jesus Christ begin to look quite similar. The reader can make their own comparisons.
Social Bandits
Social bandits are peasants who have stepped outside the law and so are criminals so far as authority—the king or the lord—is concerned, but remain within their own society as heroes, champions, avengers, freedom fighters, and fighters for justice. They are therefore helped and abetted by their own class. It is how the Mafia, originally Sicilian bandits protesting the misrule of the Neapolitans, started.
Sometimes they become revolutionaries. Such bandits do not rob their own class, at least in their own territory or country, but rob their oppressors, the rich and their servants. Sometimes bandits become criminals—like the Mafia. Robbing a fellow peasant makes the bandit into a criminal to his own class too.
Social banditry is common to history in countries all over the world, and its characteristics are much the same everywhere. The reason is that peasants are uniformly exploited over the whole world, or sooner or later become oppressed by bad rulers or the greedy rich. Endemic banditry becomes an epidemic when times are hard, the economy of a region is collapsing, and peasants, already poor are being driven into destitution.
The main characteristic of the bandit is that he is a peasant who refuses to stand by when their friends and relatives starve or suffer unbearable oppression. In eighteenth century Spain, for example, Catalonian peasants strove against the oppression of feudal landlords.
Bandits or brigands do not set out to transform society as revolutionary guerrillas but simply to correct an injustice. Often they turn to banditry because they cannot pursue the life that they expected and wanted, a life in which they were poor but honest, and accepted a degree of oppression as normal so long as it was bearable. Peasants are not radical, they are conservative, and so bandits do not typically have grand ideas of changing the ways of society, which they often consider as permanent as the seasons. They are not ideologues but just responding to some circumstance that has hit their own class hard—famine, drought, pestilence, and often warfare, as well as a marked ratcheting up of exploitation by the rulers, especially when they are foreign conquerors.
Generally, they want the restoration of an old order, an earlier time when things were just, when peasants were poor but were happy with their lot because it was bearable. They accept there are rich and poor, strong and weak in society—the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate—but those permanent relations are meant to be tempered with justice. People, even peasants, are not to be arbitrarily wronged, and any wrongs are to be corrected. When they are not, some peasants seek to correct them unilaterally, or will seek to avenge them. They are therefore, at best, intent on reform not overthrow of the social order. They can, however, become revolutionary, or support a separate revolutionary movement when some force is trying to disrupt and destroy society—foreign invaders perhaps, or a new and more oppressive regime.
Even then, the bandit thinks in terms of restoration rather than revolution. They oppose the new rule because they prefer the old one, not some idealized one, though on occasions even peasants who normally accept a degree of exploitation and subjection, do dream of equality, brotherhood and freedom, an apocalyptic renewal or reversal—the messiah will come, king Arthur will return, or Barbarossa, or Charlemagne, or the Queen of the South, or Zoroaster, or Christ—the sign being the collapse of social order making the apocalypse seem imminent. The fraternity and personal honour or chivalry local to many outlawed bands seems to forerun the prophesied fairness of the post apocalyptic order. Millenarianism is therefore often accompanied by the appearance of prominent social bandits, the primitive forms of revolution and reformism respectively.
The Circumstances of Banditry
Bandits are endemic mainly in regions which have low labour demands for much of the year, or are too poor to employ all the young men—pastoral economies, mountainous regions, and arid or infertile areas are typical. Bandits also thrive in frontier regions and near state boundaries, allowing them to escape from one dominion to another. Unemployed young men turn to raiding or banditry for occupation and income. Places where smallholdings are too small to support a family necessitate that some young men leave. Some become bandits. So too when lords and landowners turn peasants off their land, they force some at least into banditry, and create vast reservoirs of resentment.
All bandits are propertyless and they are unemployed. What they may possess is personal and came only with the success of their reckless adventure.J Usang Ly, Bandits in China, 1917
In nineteenth century Italy, 201 of 328 brigands being tried in Calabria were described as farm hands or day labourers. Such men are unemployed for much of the agricultural year from the sowing of the crop to its harvest, and then back to the next sowing. Of the other 127, 51 were peasants and 24 were artisans. So there are always a proportion of the able bodied men who need an alternative source of income for much of the year.
In particular, young men between childhood and marriage have little social responsibility and supply most of the bandits. If they live long enough in their career as a brigand to consider marriage, they have to retire from brigandage to settle down, and rarely is it possible. To settle, is to surrender for the bandit. The feckless youth of our society, in peasant society, is the source of youthful bandits. Out of childhood but in adolescence, youth are rebellious and ready to become independent of their family. They sometimes form gangs in our society, and in peasant society, they sometimes become bandits.
So, the typical bandit is a young man between about 17 and 30. Many are dead by their mid 20s. Thus Joaquin Murrieta—a Californian Mexican, who from 1850 to 1853 objecting to the unfair laws of the American “Gringos” now ruling California, and robbed and murdered them in protest—was beheaded aged 23. He remains a legendary Robin Hood figure to some Latin Americans.
Even young men with no initial ambition to be bandits may end up as bandits. They aim for some other employment, as a herdsman or drover, a priest, a soldier, a merchant, and so on, but do not make it, or do but become dissatisfied or disillusioned, and join the brigands. Others join because they were serfs, or virtual slaves, to some landowner and escaped, or some were already free men who had gone bankrupt, or never had the means to live independently, and some were escaped criminals. Ex soldiers and ex mariners were often significant in bandit groups, often men trained for guerrilla warfare as irregulars like many of the bandits of the US after the civil war—William C Quantrill, the James brothers and Cole Younger. The medieval eschorcheurs (skinners) were discharged soldiers in the Hundred Years’ war who roamed France, terrorizing and robbing.
The Robber Band
So, a robber band will typically be made up of laborers, landsmen, and former soldiers, with no married men, and skilled artisans rare. Women are unusual in a band but not unknown, usually present as lovers but very rarely active. Some will be peasants who might have lived peacefully but who were outraged and alienated by injustice, refusing to stand by passively allowing it to happen. Bandits are pretty exclusively men who make themselves respected by deciding to resist.
But peasants are not trained to fight. Society has special classes of men it trains as fighters, knights, archers, footmen, considered a class or more above the peasants, the lowest class in society. The rebellious peasant was like the uppity slave of the slave owning American republics. Like slaves, the peasant was utterly subject to their “betters”, and the uppity one just proves the rule. Bandits share the values of the ordinary peasant. They are generally pious, religion being the solace of the downtrodden, as well as one of the jackboots that treads them down.
Soldiers and deserters were common among bandits in periods during or soon after wars. Besides these, there is also the phenomenon of the secret societies which arose in response to repression and persecution. They secretly tried to circumvent the normal channels of power, either in opposition to it, or to bypass it because official access to it was restricted to a particular class or classes. Sometimes these societies were at the interface of banditry and political subversion. The Essenes in Palestine at the time of Christ were among these, and Christ was one of them. Hobsbawn reports that Diego Corrientes of Andalucia (1757-1781), a noble robber, was regarded as being like Christ. He was betrayed, delivered to Sevilla on a Sunday and tried on a Friday in March, though he had killed no one:
He robbed the rich, helped the poor, and killed no one.
But bandits are also avengers meant to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies, the enemies of the people, their exploiters. Thus they are violent to their oppressors while having the reputation of being kind to the oppressed:
Brigands live by love and fear. When the inspire only love, it is a weakness. When they inspire only fear, they are hated and have no supporters.Yashar Kemal, Turkish Writer
The Characteristics of the Noble Bandit
Most of the criminal bandits were not noble, but the noble robber is defined by his sympathetic relationship with the poor, usually the peasant farmers. The bandit career can be summarized thus:
- Most often, he begins his career as an outlaw as the victim of an injustice, perhaps by being victimized by the authorities, but not for anything the peasants think is criminal.
- He rights the wrongs against them, defends honor, brings justice or vengeance for them—he is their champion.
- He takes from the rich and gives to the poor.
- He is admired and helped by the poor.
- He never kills anyone gratuitously, but only in self defence or in revenge for some injustice.
- Throughout his career, he seems to be invincible, and seems invisible when he needs to escape or hide.
- He is not the enemy of the highest authority, but of those local or foreign oppressors who act according to their own law of greed or malice.
- He remains a member of his own community in that they will always receive him and protect him, and, if he is able to retire from banditry, perhaps with a restoration, or some change of regime, he returns to his people as an honoured member.
- More commonly, he is killed, but only by being betrayed, for no one decent would want him harmed, though, if a large reward has also been advertised, the stage is set for betrayal—some peasant at breaking point will yield to the temptation.
Actual bandits often match these points or most of them. Especially, the injustice done to them matches that done to the generality. If he were a real criminal, robbing indiscriminately, he could be respected by no one. Noble bandits make a point of redistributing their loot, or part of it, and often they live personally frugal lives.
It is doubtful, though, that like the legendary Diego Corrientes, a bandit could avoid killing at all. The point is that whoever is killed deserves it, just like the modern American hero who kills prolifically and apparently willy nilly, but all of his victims are, of course, bad guys! It is why enemies are depicted in propaganda as less than human, and are given disparaging names like Chinks, Goons, Gooks, Commies, Ragheads—we must despise and hate them in case we need to kill them in battle. Rambo kills anything that moves, but anything that moves is subhuman and evil, so deserves to die. The audience know it, because they’ve followed the plot of the film, but in real life no one is in that position, and guilt has to be established by due process. Killing by the hero is assumed to be just, but practically, what punishment can be just when there is no justice? Without a proper system of justice, vengeance or honor killings simply become vendettas with people killed tit for tat on both sides.
So, the bandit is a peasant torn from or forced from the land. Bandits are young men, scarcely men, without practical hope, who replace the uncertainty of their lives with an uncertainty of life, seeking fulfilment in adventure, in risky enterprises, in seeking justice or vengeance, and briefly the admiration of their own class. The loss of their smallholding or their previous life as a farm laborer leaves them with no secure anchor, without permanence or security, without tranquillity, and without a home and love. They are outcast, itinerant and outlawed, and they know, for them, there is effectively no way back. To try to settle is to surrender, to expose themselves in all vulnerability to the authorities who will murder them for their own revenge and satisfaction. All that remains is to fight to the death.
The Mythical Invulnerability of Bandits
The community from which they emerge support them when necessary, but the support is not pure hero worship. The peasant attitude is “better to feed them that they do not steal”. They realize it is in their own interest that the social bandit does not become a common criminal, when they would become victims of the bandit as well as the authorities.
In the most remote areas, the bandits even remain in their home villages unless a warning arrives from an outlier that police or soldiers are on their way. If the bandit had a good reputation and was not to rob widows, the poor and holy men, then he could depend on everyone’s protection, and thus became invisible to plods and swaddies. As he always operated on familiar territory too, whereas his pursuers were often on unfamiliar territory, he had the advantage of local knowledge. Only treachery could lead to his capture.
Often the police do not have a good likeness of the brigand, who can therefore assume a simple disguise, perhaps just the dress of a peasant, to be overlooked. It meant he was as good as invisible. The myth of invulnerability probably reflects the same circumstances. Their allies among the common people look after them, and having planned their raids with local knowledge, they have a scope and advantage that guards and police, able only to react, lack.
Lastly, the social bandit is often thought to be protected by magic, whether some arcane secret or the blessing of a local god or holy man. In Catholic countries and times, the brigand would be protected by the Pope, or the Virgin, or a saint, or the rightful king whose land has been occupied by foreigners. The shadowy king Arthur of British history seems to have been a Romano British bandit fighting Saxon invaders. They rode into battle in the myth with a banner of the Virgin Mary. Arthur does not really die. He remains the future king.
Psychology adds to it. The belief in magical protection or the protection of a god is a psychological buttress for those who will be putting themselves into hard situations with death quite possible. There is also a magic attached to brotherhood, like that of the Round Table, the magic really being the force of personal conviction, the rightness of the cause—its spirituality! The people hope their champion will not be defeated, for his defeat is their own defeat, at least for a time.
But magic helps too when something goes wrong. Then the runes, the omens, the auspices, signs or prophecies, have been misinterpreted. The magical conditions or the will of God have not been fulfilled. The magic, and God can never fail, so it is the bandit leader who has made the error, whether in reading the signs or in following them. Perhaps he has lost the magic charm, or lost the faith God had in him, like Saul, but the ideal remains untarnished.
The Essenes thought just like this, and so too did Jesus Christ and his followers the Christians. Even now, point out the corruption of leading lay Christians, ministers and the clergy, and the faithful follower will turn the criticism aside because of their belief that Christianity is unaffected by whatever its practitioners do. They are never real Christians, even though they were treated with reverence until their corruption was exposed! Christianity is perfect by definition.
In the myths of banditry, the bandit leader is also never evil, though he might be flawed. Essentially he is noble, so is always aligned with whatever the local fount of goodness is, wise magician, king, Pope or God. Any failing is a sad misjudgement on his part or that of his lieutenants. His principles are faultless.
Relations with Authority
I much prefer dealing with bandits than the police. The police are a bunch of dog killers who come from the capital with the idea that all the backwoodsmen protect bandits. They think we know all their escape routes. So their chief objective is to get confessions, at all costs.… If we say we don’t know, they beat us. If we tell them, they still beat us, because that proves we have been tied up with the bandits… The backwoodman cannot win… And the bandits? The bandits behave like bandits. You have to know how to handle them so they don’t cause trouble. Still, leaving aside a few of the lads who really are cruel, they cause no harm except when the police are on their tails.Brazilian landowner about 1930, cited by Hobsbawm from Leonardo Mota
When the central power is weak, its local agents often have to come to some amicable compromise with the bandits, and lawman and outlaw seem to be coöperating, especially as bribery of either party by the other is common. This sort of compromise, though, is always less likely when the bandit is really acting as the people’s champion, and does indeed have principles of serving the poor.
Such social bandits have short careers, often only a few years. Less principled ones, ready to compromise with the authorities last longer, and even eventually might be employed by the central authorities in some capacity allowing them to preserve a racket while performing some sort of policeman service for the king, usually against more revolutionary groups. Such men, of course, do not become heroes.
If the central authority recruits a strong enough force to enter bandit country seeking a confrontation, it is the peasants who suffer the callousness, hatred and brutality of the invading soldiers, their raping and pillaging. At the least, soldiers have to be fed, and will take the food if it is not offered, so the peasant will go hungry.
A fact which present day political leaders cannot grasp in respect of their overseas adventures is that when public order breaks down and no effective machinery can reëstablish it, no one can appeal to local authorities for protection and justice. Simply to make such an appeal might invite the central authorities, such as they are, to send in a regiment of soldiers who would make all the common people miserable. In such conditions, the local people put their trust in the band of robbers, the brigands who nowadays become the liberation guerrilla army.
From Bandit to Revolutionary and Guerrilla
The bandit’s social position is ambiguous. He is a poor man who will not accept oppression even if ready to accept poverty, an outsider but loved by his own people, a rebel but only against cruel authority, not against authority per se, fair authority. He uses all he has in his struggle, personal strength, cunning, determination and bravery. He is for the poor and against the unjust exercise of power by the rich, but only rarely will he return to the land, and can never aspire to be a gentleman:
Banditry is the most primitive form of social protest, the single peasant who will not put up with any more exploitation, and joins with a few more of like mind. They have no notion of overthrowing or at this stage of even reforming the hierarchy of society, but simply to show that justice is necessary even for the poor—that people will be content to be poor but not to be abject. Without justice, even S Augustine, saw that kingdoms are nothing but great robbery. So, while oppression remains intolerable, the peasantry continuously conceive their Robin Hoods, and the myth is the model for each new generation of them.
The Robin Hood type of bandit, as we have seen, is rarely a revolutionary, being generally a reformer. Their idea is one of fair dealing rather than a change in the nature of society, something of which they have no practical concept, only romantic utopian ones if any. Peasants will accept their lot, but want no unfair demands made upon them by their “betters”, and justice in disputes when they arise. If the local lord will not supply these requirements peasants expect that the local bandit will.
The basic fact of banditry is that he forms a nucleus of armed strength, and therefore a political force.E J Hobsbawm, Bandits
Banditry is a social protest and, in times of upheaval, can become a source of revolution. In such times, people are displaced, perhaps after a war or famine, and are angry and frustrated by the neglect of their rulers. Only a united people can support a revolutionary guerrilla war and tolerate the terrible suffering necessary, with success never guaranteed. A good example is the Brigands’ War of 1795 to 1803 in the Caribbean, a revolutionary rising of the slaves of the French West Indies to get the freedom promised by the “Fraternity, Liberty and Equality” of the French revolution.
Neither the British, who also were involved, nor Napoleon regarded the revolutionary slaves as anything other than bandits, leaving them free to murder the rebels willy nilly because they did not have the legal protection as bandits they were entitled to as civilian insurgents. The US today make a similar distinction over suspected terrorists, leaving them free, US administrators argue, to torture them, free of any international legal disapproval. The last thousand men of the revolutionary black army of General Louis Delgres retreated to Guadeloupe where they set fire to the arsenal and blew themselves up, committing mass suicide. The Jewish defenders of Masaba in the Jewish War against the Romans also committed mass suicide almost two millennia earlier. Masada is still remembered today, but few know of the similar despairing self sacrifice of the West Indian black slaves.
The American nation was founded in a revolution against British colonial rule under the Hanoverian Georges. Nearly all Americans claim to be followers of Christ, a man who was judicially killed for objecting to Roman colonial rule, a fact that is plain to anyone reading the gospels except those who have been indoctrinated with the fatuous Christian interpretation of an incarnate God who loved oppressed and oppressors alike.
Despite revolution being prominent in the basics of US history and culture, American citizens apparently do not have the intelligence or the imagination to sympathise with oppressed people fighting against the colonial rule of their own ruling class of financial militarists. If they have, then they are simply hypocrites. So Americans are hypocrites or dunces. Another possibility is that they have been so thoroughly gulled by the propaganda they are fed, that they are quite incapable of making a properly informed decision. If that is the case, the whole of their much vaunted democracy is a sham. The US elector is ballot fodder. Maybe a lot of people in the US realise it and set themselves up as bandits. They are characterized as isolated madmen, but maybe they are not mad-insane, but mad-angry.
Protest against injustice is not a crime, it is noble. Bandits mostly are protesting, and can become simple criminals or can lead a revolution. Of course, all bandits are not noble. Besides disaffected common people, bandits attract ex soldiers, deserters and men trying to avoid being pressed into military service, people being persecuted for their political views or acts of social protest, escaped prisoners and many seeking freedom from oppression or vengeance for wrongdoing. Though they start as bandits, they can become guerrilla bands, particularly in opposition to foreign occupation or colonization. Western colonial powers, especially today the USA, have never grasped these ancient facts, and by refusing to learn from history have to keep repeating it.
Americans are the Romans of today. Who then is Christ?
Further Reading
- More on Jesus as a Galilean, a member of the bandits founded by Judas of Galilee
- More on the meaning of Nazarene
- More on Jesus crucified
- More on the Star prophecy
- More on the Jewish idea of resurrection, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, or spiritual or bodily resurrection, and some more, and more on Jesus is Risen, and belief in the resurrection.
