Movement,Performance,and Choice in Earliest Christianity

Early Christian Itinerancy and Poverty: A Voluntary Affair?

Gerd Theissen is one of the pioneers of applying social-scientific observations and approaches to studies of Christian origins. ¹¹ Theissen concludes that the practices of itinerant preachers best explained not just the content of Jesus-sayings but also their dissemination. In the Synoptic Gospels in particular, Jesus calls his disciples to leave family, homes, and possessions to embark on a mission of impoverished preaching and healing, relying on the hospitality of those villagers who received them (Matt 8:18–22, 10:1–42, 19:27–29; Luke 9:1–27, 14:25–33). Theissen reasons that if these preachers are renouncing possessions, they necessarily have possessions to renounce. Thus, we are not dealing with people living below subsistence level—that is, the poor—but, rather, people with some material resources, who nevertheless lived near or among those suffering from poverty and oppression, and who chose voluntary poverty as a way of responding to the situation they saw and, in some ways, vicariously experienced.

It is often only a few groups who are directly affected by crises of this kind; but these exert an influence on the whole of society and essentially color the general climate of feeling. People become inclined to interpret the world around them as shaken by crisis even if they are not (or not yet) personally affected. ¹²

For Theissen, this “general climate of feeling” generated by adverse social changes under the early empire resulted in sympathy and solidarity across different social classes, particularly among the first followers of the gospel message. It is important to notice, I think, how Theissen’s reconstruction uses psychological factors (“general climate of feeling”) to explain a sociological situation. Sympathy felt by those with access to resources becomes the major impetus for the social change and organization that becomes earliest Christianity.

In a situation of political and economic oppression, however, what would voluntary poverty mean—particularly in the ancient world? In the wake of Theissen’s work (and that of other social-historical critics of the same time), some New Testament scholarship began to describe the early Christian movement using the ultimately unhelpful phrase “middle class.” Scholarship on the ancient world, of course, inevitably involves recourse to anachronism. We tend to rely on our own ideas to understand the past. But the term “middle class” distracts modern readers from the true nature of the ancient economy, in which a tiny fraction of the population held most of the wealth, while almost all the population lived at or around subsistence levels. ¹³ Thus, scholars such as Richard Horsley asked Theissen how early Christians could renounce their possessions if they had scarcely anything to renounce. Horsley rightly turns to Q, the hypothetical Synoptic sayings source, as a prime location for this debate:

Those who would interpret Q sayings as calling for voluntary poverty and abandonment of home and family must explain the absurdity of addressing such a call primarily to people who were already marginal and under increasing economic pressure—that is, already mired in poverty and struggling to keep their households and village communities from disintegrating any further. ¹⁴

In such a situation, Horsley and others assert that calls found in the gospels to renounce possessions must either be merely rhetorical—hyperbolic uses of metaphor—or designed to set the activity of Jesus and his followers in the tradition of the biblical prophets. That Elijah’s call of Elisha (1 Kings 19:19–21) lies in the background of the story told in Luke 9:57–62 and Matt 8:18–22 has escaped few scholars. Rather than interpret the Synoptic commissions as reflecting renunciation of property on the part of disciples, claims Horsley, we should see in our evidence already impoverished villagers forging new social bonds in an attempt to restore Israel from the ground up, sharing traditions about Jesus as a way of knitting together their own sense of communal identity.

The debate involves, I would argue, divergent opinions not simply about a particular set of historical evidence, but more fundamentally about how people act within social constraints, especially those of political and economic distress. Since oppression and poverty limit options for life and, thus, limit freedom, resistance to such a situation requires the effort and imagination to work within and against those constraints. And, in their own ways, scholars like Theissen and Horsley are trying to imagine for themselves how the poor and oppressed resist or refigure their plight, despite lack of material and ideological resources, and despite being deprived of sustenance, health, tradition, or hope. Moreover, the struggle of the oppressed to build their communities often also involves arguing for or claiming rights denied them by those better off. Thus, such claims are in part directed at the audience of the wider society. The success of this endeavor may indeed take the form of altering the “general climate of feeling” in a given society, as Theissen puts it.

For Theissen, the lifestyles of itinerant preachers aimed to change society by inhabiting the deprivation they experienced: they inhabited it in new ways that transformed it. “In all these groups,” Theissen asserts, “there was a chance for the deviant, often eccentric forms of living which were practiced in the internal Jewish revival movements, and among which generally widespread deviant forms of behavior—emigration, brigandage, and begging—were taken up and creatively modified.” ¹⁵ This notion of “creative modification” of the various ways people dealt with oppression and poverty blurs a simple understanding of “voluntary” action in ways we may not fully appreciate. For while deprivation may be a given constraint, how one acts out that deprivation is a matter of choice or, at least, creativity and imagination. The enacting of poverty and displacement—as through itinerancy—reforms the situation of poverty itself.

Within the humanities more generally (especially within gender studies and postcolonial studies), the last few decades of scholarship have focused on the ways in which individuals considered abject or marginal might live out their abjection in new ways that challenge and transform their place in society. For some, issues of mobility stand as illustrative examples of this dynamic between choice and constraint. And while investigation into what is often called the “subversive performance” of oppression has categorized much work in scholarship and activism over the past few decades, it has done little to impact biblical scholarship, theology, and practical work in the church, though certainly those who have pursued these lines of inquiry have broken much ground. As a way of explaining how social forces constrain and produce our roles in society—indeed, our very selves—performativity can also illuminate how earliest Christians took the marginalized social situation they received and transformed it into a redemptive community.

Performing the Kingdom: Performativity and Politics in Ancient Galilee

The earliest forms of Jesus’ commission to his disciples occur in the Synoptic Gospels. Mark 6 contains one form. Matthew 10 develops a far longer one. And Luke 9 and 10 contain two versions. For most of the past century or so, scholars have posited that the longer Matthean version and the second Lukan version reflect a commission passage in a lost sayings source denoted as Q. ¹⁶ A simple reconstruction of this common source version depicts Jesus sending his disciples as if they were laborers working in a harvest, without money, possessions, or their conveyances. They are to offer “peace” to houses in the villages they visit, in exchange for whatever food or drink they offer. And, regardless of how they are received, they are to assert to the inhabitants of villages that “the kingdom (basileia) of God has drawn near” (Luke 10:1–12//Matt 10:5–15).

We could read this passage with Theissen as a command to renounce possessions, or, with Horsley, as a call to hit the road without provisions because there are no provisions to be had. If we are to connect this passage to what we know of the material conditions in Galilee, we do need to take seriously that most villagers—those who first heard the Q sayings—lived in poverty. When Jesus calls his disciples to travel without provisions and depend on hospitality provided by strangers, he is evoking a situation many in Galilee probably experienced at one time or another.

While the social and economic nature of Galilee has long been a subject of debate among historians and archaeologists, recent scholarship has suggested details about poverty in this time and place. Jonathan Reed has argued that Galilean village life entailed a high degree of physical and demographic instability, particularly after the establishment of two Greco-Roman cities (Sepphoris and Tiberias) around Jesus’ lifetime. Since population densities in cities tend to increase the spread of disease, mortality rates in the cities would have been higher than in the villages, but the cities’ population would be replenished regularly by people moving from rural areas to the city for jobs and increased opportunity. ¹⁷ If mortality rates and economic realities lead to literal movement and displacement, Q’s command to travel from village to village would have resonated with the experiences of its audience.

It is this notion of “resonance”—akin to Theissen’s talk of a “general climate of feeling”—that needs to be interrogated in more detail. How and to what ends might the general practice and depiction of itinerancy imitate the poverty and instability in Galilee? As a starting point, the fact that Q’s Jesus figuratively describes the disciples as harvest workers, as laborers working a land that is not theirs, reflects the economic and agricultural situation of the time, both literally and figuratively, for the harvest (of people) ultimately belongs to a cosmic landowner, to God.

The metaphor of landless workers has political implications in the way it aims to change the social groups who attempt to live out its meaning. To inhabit the lifestyle of displaced, impoverished farmers harvesting for God instead of an upper-class landowner, the Herodian rulers, or the Roman order, enacts in a different way the unfortunate situation into which villagers found themselves. One way to read this passage, then, is to see people who lived a life they could not escape, but lived it differently, in a way that subverted the status quo from within it.

Paul, the Unwilling Apostle

The apostle Paul seems to refer to part of this commission tradition in 1 Corinthians when he discusses apostolic rights as an example of acting for the benefit of the community and not the individual. As a way of advising some among his Corinthian community to take care in exercising their rights to eat meat (which, in an ancient city, may well have been sacrificed to a statue of a deity), Paul uses his own rights as an example (1 Cor 9). He outlines why he, like other apostles, could expect the community to support him materially. It would make sense culturally, he states, because local villagers supported soldiers (9:7). He also claims, in good Pharisaic form, that the Torah by analogy gives him that right when it provides that a threshing ox be allowed to eat the wheat it labors to harvest (9:9–11) or that priests in the Jerusalem temple might eat the bread offered therein (9:13). Finally, he puts forth Jesus’s (“the Lord’s”) instructions on the matter: “Similarly, the Lord also commanded those who proclaim the gospel to live out of the gospel” (9:14). Most scholars have seen this “command” as mirroring Luke 10:7 (originally stemming from the Q commission passage): “The laborer deserves to be paid.” Paul agrees in principle that common sense, the Torah, and Jesus himself order apostles to be supported by those to whom they preach.

In the wake of all these reasons, his argument why he does not exercise this right—why, in his words, he and Barnabas “have not made use of this right” (9:12; cf. 9:14) by not accepting payment—surprises and confuses the audience. Paul’s refusal to accept payment offers insight into the extent to which apostolic travel and commission should be considered “voluntary.” While I have described this as a modern debate, in this passage we see Paul engage it in the mid-first century:

If I proclaim the gospel, this gives me no ground for boasting, for an obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel! For if I do this of my own will (willingly; hekōn), I have a reward; but if not of my own will (‘unwillingly;’ akōn), I am entrusted with a commission. What then is my reward? Just this: that in my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my rights in the gospel. For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them (1 Cor 9:16–19).

For Paul, to do a job (including apostleship) for a “reward” or “wage” is to do it “willingly” or freely, while to abstain from reward is to act “unwillingly,” as an enslaved individual. Paul reinforces the notion of his apostleship as a form of slavery in distinction to the wage-labor conducted by a free person by using the term oikonomia in verse 17. Translated in the NRSV as “commission,” someone with oikonomia (an oikonomos) was likely to be an enslaved individual (or a freed slave) put in a managerial role by the person who owned him. Paul’s understanding of apostleship as enslavement to God (with troubling connotations for modern readers) pervades his letters and evokes the complicated logic of ancient slavery. While relinquishing control over himself, Paul represents fully the will of God, which replaces his. ²² Enslavement to God allows Paul to empty himself of volition while centering himself as purely representative of the universal sovereign.

Within the context of 1 Cor 9, Paul’s emptying of his own apostolic self by refusing a wage for his work enables him to “win” followers no matter their physical, ethnic, or ideological location. Immediately following the passage cited above is the famous section in which Paul professes to be “all things to all people,” whether Jewish or Gentile, under the law or not, weak or strong (9:20–23). ²³ For Paul, refusing payment allows his apostleship to focus on those he is trying to win, whoever they are. That Paul attempts to be “all things to all people” bothers some modern readers (as it did some of his contemporaries!). Do we trust a person who is all things to all people—who says whatever might please those to whom that person is speaking? I think what Paul proposes here is even a bit more radical than that. In refusing his rights and freedom as an apostle, Paul’s individuality melts into stewardship from two directions. First, he becomes a container, emptied of his will, to be filled by the will of God. Such a phenomenon parallels quite closely his claim in another letter that “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Second, he dissolves into the contexts into which he travels. He is not “hired” by those who hear him; he “becomes” them. When he travels to a new city and a new people, his apostolic travel targets the local and global structural realities—ethnicity, law, economics—in a way that challenges his individual identity.

It may seem unlikely that Paul would erase himself totally from the work of the gospel. So I am not saying Paul fully accomplishes what he sets forth here. Indeed, we could critique Paul for failing to fully decenter himself throughout his letters and mission. But I think a close reading of 1 Cor 9, in light of the Synoptic commission tradition and other passages in Paul’s letters, shows that Paul sees himself as going beyond the Palestinian tradition of apostolic itinerancy (though I am sure the Palestinian preachers would disagree) in a way that enabled him to target various communities in terms of their particular structural realities. In the same way that social movements in today’s world subversively use mobility to engage new principles of community and justice, Paul performed his impoverished, itinerant apostleship as a way of expressing his devotion to God and the people he engaged in order to re-form their notions of value and justice.

Moving Against Constraints

Today, it is as important as ever to consider the relationship between movement and volition. The term “globalization” encompasses a number of phenomena worth specifying, yet all in one way or another involve travel, borders, ethnicity, gender, family, economics, and justice. Immigration, an obvious and pressing example, generates controversy at any location and at any time the so-called “first” or “Western” world encounters regions torn by war, violence, or poverty. And while most Western politicians advocate unfettered mobility for capital as it unites corporations and states, most simultaneously push for varying degrees of restrictions upon those—almost always poor, and almost always non-European, non-American, or non-white—who attempt to pursue the relative prosperity and safety brought by the movement of capital. Most recently, American news agencies have reported that the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has pondered detaining undocumented migrants, instead of releasing them to await trial. They are even considering separating parents traveling with children. The DHS has made explicit the rationale of such a possible strategy: “With safety in mind, the Department of Homeland Security continually explores options that may discourage those from even beginning the journey.” ²⁴

The proposed DHS plan assumes that migrants choose to travel, when usually they have no other alternative. Increased hardship at the U.S. border will not deter them. Reports and anecdotes have exhaustively outlined the drug cartel violence in many Central and South American countries, or the devastation brought by the Syrian Civil War and the rise of the Islamic State resulting in refugees seeking safety in Europe and the United States. A strategy of harshness at borders as a way of dissuading those considering migration could hardly (one would pray!) escalate to a level matching the pain and suffering that led to their displacement. At the very least, such a strategy radically underestimates or elides the devastation from which migrants flee. But it also misunderstands to what extent choice factors into their movements: they choose the hope of life over imminent death.

In examining the role of volition in contemporary migration and displacement, we need to be careful when we say that refugees have fewer choices, lest we imply that they have lesser ability to choose. The choices they make under constraint are indeed noble and heroic. Yet their situation also should reveal to those of us living well within the borders, economies, and political systems of the “West” just how constrained even our own choices are. Refugees displaced by war or poverty live in the same globalized society and economy as we do, and all too often the suffering they endure results from the very social forces that enable our relative prosperity and security. I, as a white, cisgendered, straight male, American academic, live a privileged life guided, for better or for worse, by the same dynamics governing oppression and deprivation of others in my own city and in other nations. My choices are similarly constrained by these forces; the only difference is that my limited choices are much less likely to lead to suffering and poverty on my part. Disparate lives across the globe are not merely constrained but even linked by the same forces. While this idea does not eradicate our notion of volition, it certainly modifies it, not merely by linking it to the notion of community but by understanding how community blurs the boundaries of volition. As Butler asks:

If I am struggling for autonomy, do I not need to be struggling for something else as well, a conception of myself as invariably in community, impressed upon by others, impressing them as well, and in ways that are not clearly delineable, in forms that are not fully predictable? ²⁵

This is more than just saying that individuals are connected to other individuals. More specifically: our interconnectedness radically questions the understanding of autonomy we have inherited from the modern, Western, Christian tradition, and often in ways that are invisible to us. By creatively moving among and across the only paths made available by empire, the earliest bearers of the gospel message, as evidenced in Q and Paul’s letters, revealed the possibilities for new communities beyond the choices presented to people filling their constrained, individual roles. And today, the performative actions of those who, despite their own autonomy are being marginalized nearly out of existence, manage to move within those boundaries in new ways that reveal our common constraints, question autonomy as such, even for those of us at the center. Those of us—especially at the center—who take the New Testament seriously as representing first-century voices speaking to the twenty-first-century need to face and incorporate this challenge.