_____________________________________
The Homeless Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew - Robert Myles
First of all I want to thank Chris and Anthony for inviting me to write
this guest post on the topic of my new book on Jesus and homelessness. The Homeless Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew (2014), published by Sheffield Phoenix Press, is an exercise in
the burgeoning field of Marxist exegesis of the New Testament. For readers
unfamiliar with Marxist approaches to biblical criticism, 'Marxist exegesis'
focuses on the critique of ideology in biblical interpretation and also how
issues like class conflict are essential to explaining cultural and historical
change.
My book examines the juncture between Jesus and homelessness by emphasizing
how Jesus' experience of homelessness fits into his wider social, political,
and economic context of the first century. The gap it identifies is basically
that Jesus' homelessness or itinerancy has never been adequately
integrated into its wider social, political, and economic context, despite this
being a major area of concern for New Testament scholars. Jesus'
homelessness is rather presented as an arbitrary choice, or consequence of his
God-ordained mission, which Jesus seems able to freely enact at will. The book
re-reads a number of pivotal texts from the Gospel of Matthew to expose how
Jesus' homelessness is more likely produced as a consequence of these
wider hostile forces.
Given that the book is also a work of ideological critique, my other
overarching concern is the contemporary context of neoliberal capitalism and
how this context has shaped scholar's presuppositions over the past forty or so
years. James Crossley has recently drawn attention to some of these issues in
his book Jesus
in an Age of Neoliberalism (2012). Neoliberalism is typically associated
with the policies of the Reagan and Thatcher governments, particularly their
ideas about personal responsibility, undermining of social welfare,
deregulation of markets, and so on. It now blindly operates as a kind of
hegemonic mode of discourse or theory of everything, and is tacitly accepted as
a default ideology by most people in contemporary Western societies, including mainstream
biblical scholars.
In my book I demonstrate how neoliberalism has operated at the level of the ideological unconscious to heighten Jesus' agency, individualism, and ability to 'choose' homelessness, while simultaneously downplaying some quite obvious connections between Jesus and his economic context. This means that Jesus' experience of homelessness often gets 'romanticized' in contemporary interpretations, even when this seems to go against the grain of the text. A good example of this is the Flight to Egypt in Matt. 2.13-23. Recent scholarly attention has focused almost exclusively on how this story reconfigures texts from the Hebrew Bible, for instance, by echoing the figure of Moses. While these aspects are certainly interesting, the lack of attention to how this text functions as a narrative of forced displacement is a curious oversight. Right from his infancy Jesus is depicted not only as the Jewish Messiah, but also as a marginal, persecuted, and displaced refugee.
In my book I demonstrate how neoliberalism has operated at the level of the ideological unconscious to heighten Jesus' agency, individualism, and ability to 'choose' homelessness, while simultaneously downplaying some quite obvious connections between Jesus and his economic context. This means that Jesus' experience of homelessness often gets 'romanticized' in contemporary interpretations, even when this seems to go against the grain of the text. A good example of this is the Flight to Egypt in Matt. 2.13-23. Recent scholarly attention has focused almost exclusively on how this story reconfigures texts from the Hebrew Bible, for instance, by echoing the figure of Moses. While these aspects are certainly interesting, the lack of attention to how this text functions as a narrative of forced displacement is a curious oversight. Right from his infancy Jesus is depicted not only as the Jewish Messiah, but also as a marginal, persecuted, and displaced refugee.
Towards the end of the book I put forward the case that Jesus' homelessness
is, in part, a reason for his eventual execution by the ruling elite. This is
because what emerges through the gospel is Jesus the expendable, the refuse of
first-century Palestinian society. As a deviant outsider and perceived criminal
threat, he is targeted for extermination. To envisage Jesus as an excess to
dominant arrangements of power works to both undermine and challenge some of
the more idealized readings of Jesus and his homelessness that have materialized
in the past few decades.
If you’d
like to read more about the kind of things I argue in the book, you can check
out a couple of posts on my blog about Jesus and work and Jesus and class.
1) Forced displacement would be one consideration; 2) living as a seeker or hermit in the wilderness would be another. More interesting to me though: the perhaps 3) widespread practice of living as a religious mendicant or beggar, would be another.
ReplyDeleteOr even more interesting to me: 4) the destruction of the Jewish theocratic state c. 64 BC, dramatized by the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, meant the separation of Jewish religion, from the practical useful services of the central theocratic state. The loss of civil government function, meant consequent loss of institutional/material base and support.
A state has many material functions: proving an army, granaries, medical care, schools. But when religion was no longer part of an actual material state, religion became homeless, and "spiritual." It also lost realistic ties to the material function of the kingdom, the theocratic state however.