I was raised thinking Jesus was completely relevant for  our own current affairs, that his teachings were directly relevant for governmental policies and social agendas, that he had preferred methods of political rules, definite ideas about competing economic systems, and strong opinions about governmental priorities.  To no great surprise, growing up in Kansas in the 1960s and early 1970s, I simply assumed his teachings provided divine support for Capitalist Democracy.

I don’t think so any longer.  It’s not that I think he preferred Marxist Socialism, as has been sometimes argued by academics and their eager followers, or … well, any other modern political-economic system.  My view is somewhat (though in a different way) more radical.  I don’t think he cared.

It will take a while to explain this.  But I want to argue, as intimated in my previous post on Jesus’ “Indifference” that Jesus’s concerns were not strictly speaking political (in the ways we think of politics) or economic.  His priorities lay elsewhere.

This will take several posts.  To begin with, I need to start by showing that, contrary to one widely-held view – rekindled on occasion by popular books on Jesus such as Reza Aslan’s New York Times best-seller Zealot —  that Jesus was decidedly not a Jewish insurrectionist interested in raising an army and overthrowing the Roman government.  That was quite contrary to his message and mission.  He was a passivist who believed God himself would destroy the Romans – along with the Jewish leaders and everyone else who was not living in the ways he (God) wanted.  He (God) didn’t need any human assistance for this.  He would be taking care of it himself.

And that overarching view, based on Jesus’ apocalyptic message of the coming intervention of God on the day of judgment when he wiped out his enemies (both superhuman and human) and established a new rule over the earth, the Kingdom of God, meant that Jesus had no interest in overthrowing or even reforming the government.  Jesus was a passivist.

Since there are other writers who think differently, I need to explain why I think they are wrong.  I’ll do so by focusing on the strongest piece of evidence that Jesus wanted to start an insurrection, the story of his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane.

I dealt with the issue and that particular episode in my book Jesus Before the Gospels, and don’t think I’m able to say it any better by putting it in other words.  So here is what I said there:

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In all four Gospels, at least one of Jesus’ followers is armed when he is arrested.   In the Synoptics, this unnamed follower draws his sword and strikes the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear (see Mark 14:47).  In John’s Gospel we learn that the sword-bearing disciple was Peter (John 18: 10).  Jesus puts a halt to his follower’s violent inclination, however, and humbly submits to his arrest.  In Luke’s version he does so only after healing the ear (Luke 22:51).

From the eighteenth century until the present day (starting with Hermann Samuel Reimarus, the first scholar to write a critical study of the historical Jesus in the modern period), there have been scholars, and non-scholars, who have thought that this incident in the garden is both altogether plausible and indicative of the character of Jesus’ message and mission.  In this opinion, the incident must be historical for a rather simple reason.  What later Christian would make up such a story?   When Christians were telling and retelling their accounts of Jesus’ life in the years after his death, of course they would want him to appear entirely palatable to their audiences.  Nothing would make Jesus more palatable in Roman eyes than the view that he was a peace-loving promoter of non-violence, not a violent insurrectionist against Rome.

If Jesus allowed his followers to be armed, however, that would suggest he was in favor of them carrying out acts of violence.   If later Christians would not make up the idea that Jesus’ promoted violence, then no one could make up the idea that his followers were armed.  Following this logic, the story of the sword in the garden is not an invented tradition but a historical fact.  Jesus’ followers, therefore, were armed.  Moreover, if they were armed, so this reasoning goes, then Jesus must have anticipated and even promoted an armed rebellion.

There’s a good deal of sense to this view and it is easy to see why it is attractive.  Still, at the end of the day I don’t find it convincing.  This is for two reasons, one that is obvious but ultimately unpersuasive, and the other that is less obvious but absolutely (to my mind) compelling.  The obvious objection is that throughout all of our traditions, Jesus is regularly and consistently portrayed as a teacher of non-violence.  “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  “Love your enemies.”  “Love those who persecute you.”  “Blessed are the peacemakers.”   “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars.”  “The one who lives by the sword will die by the sword.”   Throughout independent accounts of Jesus’ life he is shown to promote loving and submissive non-violence.  Doesn’t that squelch the possibility that Jesus favored armed rebellion and that his followers were armed?

The reason that argument is not totally persuasive is that Christians may have wanted to portray Jesus as non-violent, and remembered him as non-violent, for reasons of their own.  Christians themselves were often opposed by the authorities and would have wanted to stress that they were no threat and no danger.  In their own defense they argued that they were peace-loving people.  But how could they really be peace-loving if they worshiped and strove to emulate a person crucified for insurrection against the state?  The Christian response could have been to emphasize that Jesus’ execution was a complete miscarriage of justice.  In this view he was a peace-loving rabbi who urged a pacifist message of non-violence.  In theory the Christians could have put this message – extensively – on his lips.

Still, the abundant number of such pacifist statements on the lips of Jesus should give us pause and make us suspect they might well represent accurate memories of his teachings, especially in light of the second reason for thinking that Jesus’ followers did not put up an armed defense of him when the crowd came to arrest him.  I think this reason is absolutely compelling.  If Jesus’ followers tried to defend him with a sword, or more than one sword, why weren’t they arrested as well?   If the problem with Jesus is that he was about to lead an armed rebellion, then surely his followers would have been as much of a threat as he, especially if they start whacking away at people’s ears with their swords.

I don’t think Jesus’ followers were armed in the garden when Jesus was arrested.  Why then do we have discussions of the followers’ swords in the various Gospel accounts?   My sense is that the sword attack is a story that was invented by an early Christian (either consciously created or simply generated as someone happened to tell the story and unconsciously elaborated it) who was trying to illustrate Jesus’ teaching, that anyone who “lives by the sword dies by the sword.”

This view will require a short explanation.  Many of Jesus’ best sayings in the Gospels may indeed go back to him:  “Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath”; “Those who are well have no need of a physician but only those who are sick”; “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country.”  A large number of these great one-liners are delivered at the end of stories for which the sayings are particularly apt.  It has long been recognized that, as happens even in modern contexts, sometimes a story will be told in order to set the stage for the delivery of a great, climactic statement.

I think that may have happened in the case of the story of the sword in the garden.  Originally there was a saying, possibly something Jesus actually said, about swords and not wielding them:  “the one who lives by the sword dies by the sword.”  As that saying was rehearsed over the years, there emerged a story that illustrated the point that Jesus’ followers should not arm themselves with swords.  This story was retold until it became the Gospel account that someone wrongly used the sword to attack Jesus’ enemies.  By way of contrast, Jesus himself passively submitted to being arrested.  If I’m right, then the sword fight in the garden is a distorted memory.  If it were an accurate memory it is very hard to see why the disciples were not arrested.

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Even though Jesus did not urge an insurrection against Roman rule, or governmental restructuring or reform, or any kind of political solution at all to the current crisis, he was not favorably disposed toward the Romans either.  God would be destroying them soon.  In the meantime, they were simply irrelevant for what really mattered.  I’ll try to explain that in the next couple of posts, before showing that Jesus had a similar view of the leaders of the Jews as well.