In my previous post I raised the question of how Jesus and his disciples supported themselves for a year or three (depending on which Gospel you read) when they were unemployed itinerates?  One of the options (I’ll get to two others in the posts that follow, so stay tuned) would be that they had wealthy donors, as explicitly indicated in one passage of the Gospels (that I’ll discuss below), and intimated in other ways.  But is it likely?

To begin with, Jesus does seem to get invited to a lot of homes for dinner in the Gospels.  It is difficult to know if the Gospel writers are simply telling good stories – for example, setting up a plausible situation for Jesus to have a discussion or controversy with other Jewish teachers — or if it actually happened regularly.  If it did – how often?

From a social and historical perspective, it’s a little bit difficult to think that sort of thing was happening a lot during Jesus’ ministry.  Wealth – and therefore wealthy people with homes to entertain groups and resources to feed them – was almost entirely restricted to major cities (not rural places).  And there only two of these in all of Galilee at the time of Jesus: Sepphoris and Tiberius.

What is striking is that Jesus is never said to go to either one in any of the Gospels.  He was in the countryside and in hamlets, villages, and small towns – where houses were small and dinner parties unusual.  Archaeologists have dug up Nazareth itself.  It didn’t have houses with dining rooms that could accommodate dinner parties, except for maybe a few people (not thirteen, let alone thirty).  It’s possible that the events happened outdoors, picnic style.  But it would have been expensive to host many to dinner if you’re living hand to mouth normally.  Were they potlucks?  Possibly.  Or possibly these stories are just made up to provide Jesus with a place to meet people when he wasn’t preaching in the open air.

Jesus does of course go to the other large city of Israel at the time, Jerusalem down in Judea, but that is only at the very end of his life – the last week.  It’s very hard to imagine that Jesus knew anyone in Jerusalem who would host a dinner part to invite him to, but in any event, he stays outside of the city with friends in Bethel, at least according to the Gospels.  And that, of course, is only for a week or so.

If Jesus and his disciples did get dinner invitations on occasion, that could not possibly have been sufficient for their needs.  Suppose it happened once a week (I can’t imagine that’s possible).  It would have been nice to have sufficient food for that meal, but what about the other meals that week (or those two weeks, or that month)?

It seems pretty clear they must have had other access to resources.  Is it possible that they received not only dinner invitations but also direct funding from wealthy patrons?

There is one (but only one) passage in the Gospels that says so.  In Luke 8:1-3 we are told that three wealthy women – Joanna, married to the steward of King Herod (!), Susanna, and Mary Magdalene – along with “many other” (women) supported the apostolic band from their own resources.

As a side note: this is the ONLY passage in the entire New Testament that mentions Mary Magdalene in connection with Jesus during his public ministry, and it is in company with Joanna and Susanna and a group of other women.  And the only way the passage identifies Mary is by indicating she had seven demons cast out of her.  By Jesus? We’re not told.

There is nothing in this passage that suggests Mary M. was particularly close with Jesus or special to him (as opposed, say, to Joanna and Susanna), let alone that she was one of his inner circle or his favorite/most beloved disciple.  Let alone that they were an “item” (or, as some would have it, his wife and mother of his children!).

Mary Magdalene became important in the Christian tradition not because of her close relationship to Jesus during his life, but because of what happened at his death.  In the Gospels she and the other women go with Jesus to Jerusalem, and they (unlike the men disciples) see him crucified, and they (or just Mary in John’s account) find the empty tomb.

But to go further to claim that she was hugely important personally to Jesus during his life before that fateful trip is, well, rather difficult to sustain if we prefer historical evidence to scintillating fiction.

In any event,  back to the possibility that these women provided Jesus and his disciples with the funds they needed:  is Luke 8:1-3, the one passage that mentions it, right?  Did Jesus and his followers get financial aid from wealthy women (or, for that matter, anyone else).  Again, it is possible.  But there are a few caveats:

• One might expect to find some reference to it in some other source if it was a known reality.
• One of the leading themes of Luke’s Gospel (where this is found) – more than the other Gospels — is that Jesus spent time with and ministered to women in public. This is part of Luke’s social agenda generally.  More than our other accounts, here Jesus is particularly connected with the poor, the outcast, and the marginalized.  In other words, this passage, found only in Luke, supports Luke’s agenda for portraying Jesus as closely connected with those outside the realms of power.  That too should make us further question if it’s historical.
• Another doubt-raising feature is the identification of Joanna. She is married to one of the leading figures in the court of King Herod, one of his most central and trusted administrators?  That certainly raises her status a huge number of notches, and by association, the high connections of Jesus.  But is it likely?  I very much doubt it, especially since none of the other Gospels says anything about it.

At the end of the day, I have trouble believing that Jesus, historically, was supported in his ministry by rich folk.  For people living in our world, it might just seem common sense that “of course” that’s how he managed to engage in his world-transforming ministry.  It happens all the time, here and now, with preachers raking in fortunes from their donors, and even middlin’ ministers often having wealthy supporters.  But did a lower-class peasant preaching in the backwaters of rural Galilee?

The Gospels certainly want us to think he had those kinds of connections.   But it seems unlikely to me.

[Postscript: some readers may be thinking that in antiquity there broadly WERE “patron-client” relationships where a poorer person received material support from a rich and important one in exchange for favors.  That was indeed ubiquitous in elite urban settings.  But nothing about that profile fits Jesus.  He wasn’t in a city, he wasn’t anyone’s patron, and he certainly wasn’t doing his superior’s bidding, waiting on him every morning, doing him favors in exchange for gifts….]