The Serpent's Wisdom

For a couple of weeks now, i've been thinking about the Parable of the Vineyard Workers. This is one of the more bizarre parables, and that's saying quite a lot as many of them are quite odd.

( the parable )

Those who say the primary or sole focus of Jesus' message was "saving souls" say this teaches us about getting into heaven. If you are born again while young and do good your whole life, you'll get the same reward as someone who converts on their deathbed after a life of wickedness and iniquity. This is because God is "merciful." Don't forget that the twisted assumption behind this is that God doesn't care about how good we might or might not be, just whether or not we have "accepted Jesus" (whatever that actually means).

Let us say that the above interpretation is correct. Even if so, this parable is hardly a ringing endorsement of the doctrine, because in that case at least a third of the parable is given to considering that maybe it's not fair for someone to "toil" all their lives (as if living an ethical life is necessarily drudgery) and get the same heavenly reward as someone who comes along at the last minute and converts right before they die.

Essentially, we are supposed to accept that god tells do-gooders, "Suckers! Gotcha!"

But all of this strikes me as an excuse to overlook the parable for what it is on its face: an examination of the way wage labor works. What we see here is that the person who pays the wage has the opportunity to set the terms, to give favor or not as they see fit; and that those who are forced to work for wages have very little input into the way they are paid -- creating opportunities for exploitation. The landowner is hiding behind "the tyranny of the contract" to exploit the day laborers who worked for him all day, under the guise of generosity towards the later laborers.

Labor for wage is a good thing to question, because in an empire, jobs which relate directly to the business of empire tend to earn the highest wages. Look at our present-day American empire and see how many positions of prestige and wealth are ethically bankrupt and involve directly increasing American power or profiting from disparity with developing nations. Note, too, that many of the most important jobs in human society -- bearing and caring for children, teaching, maintaining house, day-to-day caretaking of sick relatives -- pay almost no wages at all. Wage labor is a system designed to push people into working for the perpetuation of empire.

If the hypothesis i've offered in the past is correct, and Jesus wanted his followers to turn on, tune in, and drop out of the monstrous imperial machine, then the second view of the parable makes a lot of sense. Jesus would have wanted his followers to examine the true nature of wage labor.

John Dominic Crossan demonstrated in his complex anthropological investigation of Galilee at the time of Jesus (detailed in The Birth of Christianity) that a considerable upheaval was going on in which many peasants were driven from their land so that rich Roman developers could build large villas and other pet projects. Displaced peasants have a much lowered standard of living and are forced to take up crafting or day labor -- which Crossan pointed out added a dimension of significance to the fact of Jesus' career as a carpenter: he was a displaced peasant.

Property ownership is the key to power in a human society. Any class of unpropertied renters are kept in a state of perpetual debt to them. This is particularly hard to swallow when many of the unpropertied renters once owned their own land.

This is why throughout human history, mass displacement of peasants -- usually from families which had owned their land for generations -- is one of the primary causes of armed rebellion.

Christianity, which may have had its roots as a pacifist and egalitarian response to lower-class unrest, was over the generations misappropriated by the Roman upper-class and became a primarily "spiritual" movement, with all vestiges of its former radicalism painted over and spliced out. It became dominated by the heirarchical edifice of the church and became eventually a gear in the imperial machine. The "spiritual" interpretation of this parable, as an instruction on god's endorsement of the moral unfairness of deathbed conversions leading to eternal reward in heaven, is revealed as not simply being nonsense, but a deliberate burial of radicalism beneath a memetic morass.

from John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, pp.293-298: (italics in original)

"A key axiom in medical anthropology is the dichotomy between two aspects of sickness: disease and illness. Disease refers to a malfunctioning of biological and/or psychological processes, while the term illness refers to the psychological experience and meaning of perceived disease." -- Arthur Kleinman, Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture, p. 72

Scholars working in medical anthropology, comparative ethnomedicine, and the cross-cultural study of "indigenous" healing have proposed a distinction between curing disease and healing illness. ... To further distinguish the two components, we could say that the surgeon is better at curing disease while the shaman is better at healing illness. And that might be all right, of course, if those two processes were always totally separate.

In explaining that distinction to undergraduate students at DePaul University as a background for discussion of Jesus as an indigenous healer, I was usually met with obedient disbelief... until the movie Philadelphia came along.... The protagonist, played by Tom Hanks, had AIDS, a disease caused by a virus that attacks the immune system. This disease may someday be curable.... But the movie was not about the disease, which for Hanks could not be cured, but about the illness, for which healing was possible. The illness involved the man's own reaction to his disease, as well as the reactions of his lover, his family, his employer, his lawyer, and of society at large through the justice system. He was fired by his employer not just because he had AIDS but because he had become infected as a homosexual, and he successfully sued his firm for that discrimination in court. In Philadelphia the distinction between curing disease and healing illness was devastatingly obvious. But so also was the interactive loop between the twin processes of disease and illness. ... That story... showed how one could have successful healing where no successful curing was possible. It also showed how, in other places and times, where curing was not generally possible, healing might still be very important.

... [W]ith some forms of chronic or long-term pain -- especially psychosomatic ailments, where stress or oppression, strain, or exploitation have resulted in somatization or embodiment of the general distress as a specifically localized problem -- supportive companionship can slowly but surely eliminate the disease itself. Rodney Stark, speaking of ancient epidemics, gave the following statistic: "Modern medical experts believe that conscientious nursing without any medications could cut the mortality rate by two-thirds or even more" (89).

... In 1960 I visited the Roman Catholic healing shrines of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in France and at Fatima in Portugal. In 1965 I visited the pagan healing shrines of the god Asklepios at Epidaurus in Greece and at Pergamum in Turkey. I remember being struck by the general similarity between the ailments involved in stories of healing at all those shrines (as well as by ailments whose reminders could be seen: there were many crutches at the back of the grotto at Lourdes, for example, but no prosthetic limbs or empty coffins).

... I have three conclusions so far. First, society and individual, disease and illness, healing and curing always intertwine together, be it delicately or brutally. Second, supportive companionship and/or religious faith can heal illness and, by so doing, even cure disease, but only in certain cases. ... Third, healing stories tend to increase and become more extraordinary rather than decrease and become more banal.

Edit: in retrospect I have decided to crosspost this entry.
crossposted in my journal and crossposted in jesusliberation

I'm only 80 pages into it, but already I'm considering John Dominic Crossan's The Birth of Christianity to be one of the most important books I've read in a long time.

Crossan starts by delineating two major strands in Western philosophical thought which he has labeled "sarcophilic" (lit. "flesh-loving") and "sarcophobic (lit. "flesh-fearing"). He makes it clear that he favors sarcophilic tradition and considers sarcophobic tradition, whether moderate or extreme, to be inherently dehumanizing.

His argument is that distinctions between "catholic" and "Gnostic" Christianity (which are inaccurate anyway), and between "dualism" and "monism," have become so caught up in polemic and apologetics that they are best discarded at this point. I agree. I also agree with him that sarcophobic thought is inherently dehumanizing and have sought to distance myself and some of the early strands of Gnosticism from dualistic tendencies. (As I mentioned to digbydolben yesterday my efforts in this regard look like this and this.)

His assertion is that sarcophobic thought was not an inherent element of Christian thought until it was injected by Paul (who was a "moderate" sarcophobic) and later by extreme sarcophobics like the Docetae. The history of Christianity, he then says, is the slow victory of sarcophobia over sarcophilia -- which would account for the dehumanizing results that I have catalogued at length in challenging_god. (See for example this entry, this entry, and this entry by yahvah.)

There are points of disagreement already. For example, Crossan calls sarcophobia "Hellenistic" but conveniently overlooks distinctly Jewish forms of sarcophobia such as the teachings of the Qumran Essenes, who were radically flesh-denying and who sought to infuse Judaism with the Zoroastrian "war between light and darkness" -- and succeeded in infusing such thought into Christianity. (Matthew 24 would have been right at home with the Dead Sea Scrolls.)

However I'm finding Crossan's work invaluable to my own approach. His chapters on psychological researches into memory are unsettling (for example, the correlation between certainty and accuracy in memory is only 0.4 -- that is, being certain you are remembering something correctly gives you a 4 in 10 chance of being correct) and his overview of the way oral tradition differs in its conception from literate tradition of "word-for-word transmission" of a teaching is eye-opening.

Edit. Another plus is that the text is very readable. Crossan is a scrappy arguer, and relentless enough that I sure wouldn't want to come up against him. There is also a strong sense that he is a man of high academic integrity. For example, he considers it an ethical issue that scholars should not dismiss out of hand the Roman view of Emperor as divine incarnation while accepting without question the Christian view of Jesus as divine incarnation.