It should be dead easy to realize that guidelines for how to live and behave from one time and place may have almost no relevance to those living at other times elsewhere.  For ancient sailors it may have made perfect sense that “Thou shalt not sail after dark” – when there were no such things as, say, navigation lights and radar.  But to enforce it as a rule today?

Or take actual legislation, such as requiring execution for witches or for disobedient children in the Hebrew Bible.  Or think of standard mores, such as how partners are to engage with each other in a pederastic relationship, as in ancient Athens.

But for some reason, whereas virtually everyone agrees there are problems in these kinds of cases, many don’t see there can be equivalent problems when it comes to following the teachings of Jesus.  Hey, he’s always relevant, right?

He certainly can be relevant today for people who want to follow him.  But even they would be well-served to consider the radical differences between his “then and there” and ours.  In my previous post I pointed out that his teachings on money and wealth were driven by a set of apocalyptic perspectives that few people today share.  (While most of those who do share them ironically choose not to follow what he says about them!).  His religious context was very different from ours.

So too was his economic context.  Radically different.  A different universe.

Since “hunter-gatherer” cultures shifted to village cultures, raising crops and rearing livestock, “economic exchange,” such as it was, was absolutely tied to the land.  That was thousands of years before Jesus, but land-based economics was THE system virtually everywhere in the world up to, more or less, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism.

Jesus himself lived in an agrarian economy.  So did everyone in the Roman world.  It was the only world they knew.  It would be virtually only the world there was until the 19^th century.  (Even merchandise capitalism focused on crops and precious metals – which came out of the ground).  His teachings on wealth assumed that system.

A necessary feature of agrarian economies is that since land is necessarily finite, so too are the resources it can yield.  As a result, wealth is rarely “created” – it’s just there and there is a finite amount of it available.  Most of this wealth came from crops – with all the vicissitudes connected with growing, harvesting, and distributing them.  (Some of the wealth came from forestry and precious metals, but they too are part of the land and therefore limited, especially in the eras before serious methods of extraction.)

In agrarian economies, those who owned the land could reap the wealth of what was grown there, even if they themselves did not work the land.  And since the wealth was necessarily finite, agrarian cultures were “zero-sum.”  That is, the only way for one person to have more than average wealth was to have more of the land (or to figure out how to farm it better, but that was difficult prior to modern technology).  And to acquire more land required taking it from others, either through agreement or force.

80-90% of the population in the Roman empire was rural.  Virtually everyone in rural areas (the vast majority) worked the land to feed themselves and their families.  If there was surplus, they could exchange for other things they might need or want.  If there was no surplus, they ate what they could and hoped for better results next year.  If the results were worse, they may well just starve.

Those who purchased or otherwise acquired larger tracts of land did better.  The ultra-wealthy – the ancient equivalents of our 1% — acquired large tracks of land that, in most cases, had been worked by local subsistence farmers for generations; the farmers then became “employees” for the owners, who who would allot some to the workers (hopefully enough to feed their families) and took the larger share of crops and turned them into cash.

In that world “trade” and “business” were occasional options for urban dwellers without land-holdings, though – oddly in our thinking – merchants, traders, and business people were looked down upon by the elite as gaining wealth by dubious means beneath the dignity of significant members of society.  Instead, large estates and their produce were the “respectable” resources of income and excess.  Rarely was it a moral issue that this involved making money off the backs and sweat of the brows of others or that it meant appropriating resources produced by others rather than doing the work themselves.

And so, in the zero-sum economy of Jesus’ world, just about the only way to be rich was to do so at the expense of another.  “Affluence” (literally an “overflow”) for one required deficit for another.

In that kind of system, how could one concerned about the poor and hungry provide for their needs?  There was really only one way.  Redistribution of wealth.  Those with excess needed to give (some of) what they had to those who had not.  Hence the teachings of Jesus.  The rich should give to the poor.

And there were huge numbers of “the poor.”  It is very difficult for modern historians, sociologists, and economists to determine the demographics of wealth and poverty in antiquity, especially in rural areas from which we get very little information (since scarcely anyone could write and so we have few traces) — except from the wealthy (who were educated) who lived in the cities but had rural estates.  It’s also hard determine the demographics in most cities (given the nature of our sources), except for large and well-documented ones such as ancient Athens and Rome.

But we do know that living in a major city was not necessarily a guarantee of wealth.  On the contrary, the discrepancies of wealth even there were stark.  The best analyses have concluded that only about 2 to 3 percent of the major urban population in the empire enjoyed abundant wealth, while another 5 to 8 percent had more than they needed to survive; these would mainly have been merchants, traders, and artisans. Probably about 10 to 20 percent were not in danger of immediate want. But some 55 to 60 percent of the urban population lived very much on the edge, just at or below subsistence level, and 10 to 20 percent significantly below it. That is to say, 65 to 80 percent of urban dwellers were dangerously poor or completely destitute.

It would have been worse in the rural areas where the vast majority of the population dwelt; there would have been no significant wealth (the land owners lived in the cities) and an even larger part of the population would have lived at a subsistence level or (well) below.

We live in a different kind of economy now.  With the fall of the Soviet Union and other major developments, capitalism is the name of the game all over the world.  I will be the last person (well, one of millions of last persons) to say that capitalism is inherently “good.”  It clearly is not.  From a historical perspective one needs only look at the horrors it created (and still creates) under colonial regimes of the west.  (There were colonial horrors before capitalism, of course, but the passion for resources in capitalist economies that, as a result of the same industrial revolution that brought massive gains in agricultural production and alternative forms of economic growth, also introduced modern weaponry into existence, provided even more horrific possibilities).

From the modern perspective of, say, this week, one need only look at the incredible wealth gaps not just from the upper crust to the lowest but even between the solid middle classes and the utter destitute, in a world where, for no reason other than lack of political and popular will, there are still something like fifteen people who starve to death every day. Or in a country – the richest country in the world, where some 20,000 people die of malnutrition every year.  There’s clearly something wrong here.

But it’s probably not “capitalism” per se.  Poverty itself is not caused by capitalism.  It was around and was far, far more severe before the rise of capitalism.  As economic historians have repeatedly shown, poverty rates worldwide have dropped drastically since the introduction of capitalist economies and the developments of technology they presuppose and the globalization they entail.  Look at the numbers and graph the percentages of the destitute from 1800, say, to 2026, and you’ll find an impressive array of data.  Other massive problems have emerged as a result (mind-blowing inequality gaps, carbon emissions, etc.): but if you’re concerned about poverty, things are massively better than they ever have been in the history of the human race (for one accessible discussion by a leading expert, see Thomas Piketty: A Brief History of Equality).

And why is that?  It’s because capitalist economies, unlike agrarian, are not zero-sum.  Capitalism actually creates the wealth that it distributes (even if unfairly).  That is, with a capitalist economy, a person who acquires wealth is not necessarily taking it from someone else.  The wealth itself can be generated.  If I invent a widget, and someone buys it, I might decide to make some more, and then I decide to start manufacturing them . I build a facility to do it (those who build it make money off my decision); I hire workers and administrators and salespeople and I expand and … and and and.  I’m getting wealthy – but not by stealing someone else’s land and forcing them to grow crops for me and requiring them to live on what little is left to them.

Jesus lived in a zero-sum economy.  It was the only one he knew.  He had no concept of the economic system that began to occur to thinkers such as Adam Smith and others like him the late 18^th century.

Jesus’ economic advice – sell it all and give to the  poor – was rooted in the economic world he lived in where wealth came from taking it from others and the only way to deal with poverty was for the wealthy to give it back.  We don’t live in that world any more.  And so Jesus’ teachings have to be reinterpreted in the modern (capitalist) context to make any sense at all.

There are ways of doing that, for those who are interested.  Even for those who are not, the issues themselves are interesting.  How could teachings from virtually different universe of thought, assumptions, perspectives, religious understandings, economic systems, and ethical practices relate to our Brave Relatively-New World, if literally following them is not an option?