conversation

The Societal
Conditions During
Jesus’ Lifetime
A Brief Exploration of the
Economic, Political, and
Religious Conditions

Session 7
Homework
 e Centuries Leading up to Jesus’ Birth

As a result of their unfaithfulness, injustice, exploitation and oppression

God finally let the sin of Israel fall on the nation’s own head. He didn’t
punish them actively; he just withdrew, allowed Assyria and Babylon to
overrun Israel, and no longer intervened to hold off disaster. And so the
northern kingdom (Samaria) was captured in 721 BC by Shalmaneser, the
Assyrian monarch. Shortly thereafter most survivors were deported to
Upper Mesopotamia and, through assimilation, lost forever their identity
as Israelites. e southern kingdom ( Judah) collapsed with the
Babylonian invasion in two successive waves: 598 BC and 586 BC. e
army was slaughtered and many civilians lost their lives in the hopeless
struggle. Jerusalem’s walls were torn down and the temple destroyed; salt
was spread on the site of the temple so nothing would ever grow again.
And then Babylon took the High Priest, religious leaders, the king, the
nobility and their families and the entire economic leadership, clamped
them into chains and marched them 900 miles east to Babylon where they
were settled on the Chebar river, possibly a canal of the Euphrates on the
eastern side of Babylon.1

eir captivity lasted 70 years and only in the year 516 BC was the temple
reconstructed. e years that followed saw brief spiritual and social
awakening through the joint ministries of Nehemiah and Ezra. However,
with the passing of time Jewish religious life increasingly reduced itself to
an extreme form of legalism. Old Testament regulations were greatly
amplified with the drafting of precise rules that could be applied to every
conceivable situation. By thus “fencing the law” – adding other laws to
protect and perfect the Torah – a burdensome legalism developed that
increasingly removed God from the central focus of the religious
consciousness. Although the early rabbis greatly emphasized the doing of
good works: works of love and mercy… “Acts of kindness and charity
weigh more than all the commandments”, insisted an early rabbinic
maxim – this maxim slowly gave way to keeping ritual and cultic purity.
By the time of Jesus’ the later rabbis and Pharisees had atomized God’s
law in 613 rules – 248 commands and 365 prohibitions – and bolstered
these rules with 1,521 amendments. To avoid defiling the Sabbath they
outlawed 39 activities that might be construed as “work”. So during this
period the Mosaic cultic law codes became normative while the prophetic
movement with its interest on current historical events waned, then died
altogether.2

e successive occupation of Judah by the Persians, then the Greeks who

later divided Palestine between the Seleucids and the Ptolemaic
Kingdoms, the brief period of independence under the dynasty of the
Maccabees, and then the beginning of oppressive Roman rule, left the
Jewish people fragmented into a variety of contending schools of thought,

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 following different paths of collaboration or separatism with the
occupying force. Each represented a distinct response to the older
traditions and the newer political and religious realities within their
troubled land:

• e Essences advocated the flight response. Pacifistic, they did not

actively resist the Romans. Instead many of them withdrew into
monkish communities in the caves of a barren desert near the Dead Sea,
Qumran.
• e Zealots represented the revolutionary option or the fight response.
ey hoped to achieve Israel’s political independence through armed
guerilla warfare against Rome and the Jewish aristocracy.3
• e Pharisees operated throughout the countryside actively promoting
their doctrine in local synagogues. According to them, if the entire
nation would live without sin for just for one day, then Messiah would
come and establish God’s rule. Because of the sinners, however, Israel
remained under the heel of the Roman boot!4 e Pharisees, then,
represented the blame response.
• e Sadducees were the most blatant collaborationists. Small but
influential, they combined conservative religious attitudes with power
politics. ey saw Israel’s only hope through playing the political game
with Rome and upholding the status quo which so benefited them.
• e Herodians favored the Herodian dynasty and were typically well-off
land owners. ey and the Sadducees represented the collaborate
response. rough their political affiliation with the Herodian house,
they hoped to keep some autonomy from Rome.

e only uniting factor of these contending parties and schools of thought

was that they believed themselves superior to others, believing that they
were God’s blessed, that they were Jews.

By the time of Jesus’ birth the land suffered under Herodian rule and
stringent taxation, propped up by Roman procurators and the Roman
military presence. e army lived off the occupied country, pilfering its
natural resources, enslaving members of its population, raping women and
generally terrorizing the populace. e gentry of Palestine (mostly
Hellenized upper class Jews) collaborated with the occupying forces and,
in exchange for personal safety and affluence, aided Israel’s oppressors.
is collusion led to class conflict between the rich and the poor, the
faithful and the unfaithful, the rulers and the people.

In summary, the political nation of Israel turned out to be a failure, for it

did not directly culminate in the redemption of the human race. Shalom
was not lived, neither within Israel, nor as a witness to the other nations.
is very failure was a necessary demonstration that nothing of human
achievement could bring about a world of peace and justice. is failure

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 pointed to the need for a solution outside the human realm. And that’s
why people in the centuries before Jesus’ birth began to cry out for a savior
– a messiah that would liberate them. e direct intervention of God was
needed to transform human history and bring about Shalom. Jesus was
God’s way of sending someone to stand in the gap.

And so into this situation of social and political unrest, of economic

exploitation and extreme poverty, of great nationalistic hopes and dreams
which were closely connected to the expectation of a powerful Messiah,
comes Jesus, the son of David, the son of Abraham (Mat. 1:1).

e Kind of Society in which Jesus Grew Up

In order to really understand Jesus and his mission, we need to understand

the society in which he lived and ministered. Without understanding
Jesus’ context we won’t be able to appreciate in full what he set out to do.

How Palestinian Society was Structured During Jesus’ Lifetime

It is appropriate to imagine Palestinian society at that time as a tightly

structured pyramid.

At the top of the pyramid were the far-away Gentile landowners and the
largely urban Jewish elite, which made up about 2-5 percent of the
population.5 ey owned vast estates in the countryside and exploited the
rural poor, in order to maintain a luxurious lifestyle, consistent with their
status in society. rough taxation of Palestine’s peasants, merchants and
artisans, rents on land, trade and merchandizing, agricultural production,
the temple industry, and forced land-appropriations, this local aristocratic
elite, made up of the Herodians, Sadducees, Scribes and the Jerusalem
clerical aristocracy, gained enormous wealth and power.6

A huge gap separated the artisan and merchant class from the elite. ey
cannot be considered a middle class, since it can be safely concluded that
there existed only the extremely rich and the miserably poor in Palestine.7
Nonetheless, this group, which made up about 15-18 percent of the
population and consisted mainly of freedmen and freedwomen (former
slaves), was slightly above the rest of the Palestine’s poor. Most of them
ran small family enterprises (fishing, carpentry, construction), and
employed varying skills to produce goods and services predominantly for
the elite.8 Yet the majority was often still dependent on their
economically powerful patrons and just a paycheck away from poverty. A
few select merchants and skilled artisans, those who were able to gain
enough through commerce or their skills, elevated themselves above most
others and occupied some middle ground.9 Finally, there were those Jews

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 who dropped out of respectable society and became outcasts: the tax
collectors and high-class prostitutes. Even if financially well-off, they were
never counted among the higher classes.

e peasants and rural proletariat of hired shepherds, tanners, and

unskilled laborers were almost at the bottom of this pyramid, engaged in a
daily struggle for survival. ey had no prestigious social connections or
financial means; they didn’t own the lands they worked since these had
been confiscated by the rich through unjust tax schemes. Commonly
known as the “people of the land”, a derogatory connotation, they made up
roughly 70-80 percent of the population. ey were considered careless
and non-chalant in their observance of the laws of Moses.10

e very bottom layers of the pyramid comprised the degraded and

expendables. ese groups consisted of those with no skills but only their
bodies for labor, and those who performed little labor such as criminals,
beggars, lepers, the physically deformed, and the sick. Estimates number
this group between 5 and 10 percent.11

Economics of Exploitation:
Taxation during Jesus’ time was very burdensome. As in other parts of the
Roman Empire, the burden of taxation fell hardest on the lower classes.
Besides collecting money for the Roman Imperialists, the Jewish king
Herod Antipas kept great amounts of money for himself, and was also
infamous for having people killed to obtain their possessions. In his time,
the gap between the rich and the poor grew steadily. So how poor were
the poor?

Worst off were those without land and without skills, the hired laborers
and the beggars. ey were the truly poor. eir hand-to-mouth existence
was considered hardly worth living. Landless peasants (or tenants)
suffered the most from heavy taxation. ey had to give

• 30 to 40 percent of their annual crop production to the landowners –

often the rich urban Hellenized Jewish aristocracy
• 20 to 30 percent to the Roman government and Herod.
• Another 10 to 20 percent went to the religious authorities – the temple
aristocracy – to help the religious apparatus function.

In short landless peasants paid roughly 50 to 80 percent of their income in

taxes and had only about 20 to 30 percent of their annual income to live
on.

e small landholders were not much better off. Taxation was

burdensome and a bad year or two could spell the loss of their land to the
wealthy neighbor who lent them seed after the first crop failure. No

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 wonder, many poor peasants were forced to sell their land due to heavy
taxation and work as day laborers, or they were displaced to the less fertile
hill lands; a reality that we can observe in many of Jesus’ parables. By the
end of it all, virtually no peasant owned their own land as large amounts of
the fertile land in Galilee had become the property of large urban
landholders. e vast disparity between the income of rich and poor in
the first century is quite impressive: a wealthy householder had more than
seven hundred times the income of a peasant, and the extremely wealthy
might have more than fifteen thousand times the income of a peasant.

Politics of Oppression:
Palestine during Jesus’ time was occupied by Rome. e power of Rome
was felt in everyday life, as people suffered from the oppression of the
occupying force. e Roman Empire, however, was not a gigantic police
state, but a constellation of provinces and city states, all pledging their
allegiance to Rome. Political power, then, didn’t lie just in the hands of
Rome. In Palestine, the Romans had given the Sanhedrin, the supreme
Jewish council administrative and judiciary powers to rule the nation.
eir sphere of authority extended over the spiritual, political and legal
affairs of all Jews within Judea.12 While the Sanhedrin could not execute
a capital sentence, the Romans appear to have given the council the
authority to execute perpetrators of blatant sacrilege. e Sanhedrin,
composed of members of the Jewish elite (the 2 to 3 percent of Palestine’s
total population) was made up of four main fractions:

1. e Herodian Nobility: Many of them large land owners with

considerable economic power. e Herodian family and the Herodian
nobility’s political power was easily translated into wealth. It has been
estimated that Herod and later his family and faithful followers may
have owned more than half the land in his dominions.
2. e Sadducees from the Jewish Upper Class: ey were the remnants
of the older Jewish aristocracy and individuals who had become rich
through trade, tax farming, merchandizing or the like. Many of them
would not farm their own land. Instead, they rented it to tenant
farmers and spent much of their time on economic, civic, judiciary and
religious affairs in the city (principally, Jerusalem). is system led to
the abuse of tenants and hired laborers, whose mistreatment was seen
as perfectly legal by the wealthy.
3. e Pharisees and Scribes: While not as powerful as the Sadducees,
they controlled the synagogue system, which gave them considerable
influence over the people. Many scholars assume that most Pharisees
who sat on the Sanhedrin, were city aristocrats, and not from the
merchant class. is explains why they were willing to submit to
Roman rule, rather than express explicit anti-Roman sentiments as
some of their fellow Pharisees from lower echelons of society did.

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 4. e High Priests and the Jerusalem Clerical Aristocracy: Made up by
elders, chief priests and Sadducee city aristocrats, who controlled the
temple and the Sanhedrin. Judah’s rich came primarily from the
wealthy high-priestly clans. e high-priestly clans, profited not only
from the sacrifices offered in the Temple but also controlled the
considerable commerce associated with that sacrifice and other
religious activities.

Apart from Rome, then, these four groups controlled much of the
religious, political and economic systems of Israel during Jesus’ time. All
three groups got money and funding through taxation of Palestine’s
peasants, merchants and artisans. So again, real power not only lay with
the Roman governor or procurator, but also with Israel’s political elite, as
long as they were loyal to Rome and worked with the empire to quench
rebellions and sustain law and order. So while Rome was doubtlessly to
blame for heavy taxation and economic exploitation, it’s equally clear that
the Mosaic stipulation to care for the poor, seek equity, and make sure that
all members of the community had a way to make a decent income, was
blatantly disregarded by the Jewish Establishment. In fact, often they used
their power to oppress the lower classes.

Religion of Control:
Jewish religion during Jesus’ day was a massive and complex social system
infused with do’s, don’ts, pilgrimages and sacrifices. It was a huge network
which encompassed all of life in Palestinian culture from civil law to
national festivals.13 e temple shrine, its services and its priesthood lay at
the heart of this entire religious system and of any identifiable “common”
Jewish vision of Israel’s life rightly ordered before God. Even Jews who
lived at some distance from Jerusalem and its temple would have regarded
the temple as the center of sacred space and of their mental map of the
world.14 Its influence thus not only permeated Palestine’s hinterland but
also many areas of Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and North Africa, as
synagogues in each village throughout the countryside and in many cities
throughout the Roman Empire faced the holy temple. e temple, in
short, was the focal point of Jewish religious life for the 500,000 Jews
living in Palestine and also for the 3 ½ million Jews scattered throughout
the Roman Empire.15

Jews in Jesus’ day envisioned a ladder reaching higher and higher towards
God, a hierarchy expressed in the very architecture of the temple. Gentiles
and ‘half-breeds’ like the Samaritans were permitted only in the outer
Court – the Court of Gentiles, which, in effect, the Jews had transformed
into a barnyard and a place for merchandise. A wall then separated the
court of the Gentiles from the next partition, which admitted Jewish
women. Jewish men could proceed one stage further, but only priests could

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 enter the sacred areas. Finally, only one priest, the high priest, could enter
the Most Holy Place, and that just once a year on the day of Yom Kippur16

e society was, in effect, a religious caste system based on steps towards

holiness. In stark contrast to the early pages of Genesis which envisioned
Abraham’s blessing benefiting all nations, Gentiles were rigorously
excluded from the real worship areas and were forbidden (on pain of
death) from crossing beyond the balustrade that separated the Court of
the Gentiles from the Court of Women. Neither were the blind and the
deaf permitted to enter the temple, for the deaf had not heard the laws of
purity and the blind couldn’t visibly discern impurities and so were
helpless to guard against defilement. Both were judged a hazard to
maintaining the sanctity of the temple and its functions.17 Tax collectors
and ‘sinners’ were de facto excluded from temple worship, since their
impurities would defile the temple.18

e Pharisees’ scrupulosity reinforced the system daily. Many Pharisees

taught around the temple. ey also used the synagogue to add their own
innovations. All their rules on washing hands and avoiding defilement
were an attempt to make themselves acceptable to God. Had not God set
forth lists of desirable (spotless) and undesirable (flawed, unclean) animals
for use in sacrifice? Had not God banned sinners, menstruating women,
the physically deformed, and other “undesirables” from the temple?

e divine intention of the Mosaic Law was to make the Hebrew

community aware of sin, so that the people would see their need for grace
and enter into a renewed relationship with Yahweh. e religious system
was to bring people and nations into a deeper and vibrant relationship
with God, personally and corporately. e Temple was to be “a house of
prayer for ALL nations” (Isa. 56:7; Mark 11:17). Instead, the religious
system under the leadership of Jerusalem’s temple aristocracy and the
Pharisees had gained such control over the people that it took on a life of
its own, enslaving the very people it was intended to liberate: making
people loose sight of God’s grace; disempowering them so they no longer
could fathom God’s mercy and justice; his concern for the poor and
marginalized; hindering foreigners, disabled people and ‘sinners’ from even
entering into a vibrant relationship with Yahweh.19

e people who went to the temple in Jerusalem to offer sacrifices knew

that it was a ‘den of robbers’ (Matt. 21:13). Yet, they came, patronized the
temple and allowed themselves to be exploited by a corrupt
Establishment. Why? Because they believed that they could be saved
only through observance of the law.20 Consequently, many people lost
their freedom and moral agency; they became powerless and subjugate to
the domination of a religious system that no longer served and nurtured
them. e religious system had become a religion of control, where the

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 law was more important than the people. Israel was far from being a
blessing to the nations.

It is against this socio-political, economic and religious backdrop, that

God in the form of a carpenter’s son named Jesus began preaching and
proclaiming the nearness of the Kingdom of God!

reflection questions
Reflect on the following scenario and write your answers to the questions
into your Application Journal. Come prepared to share your answers with
other members of your group in the next class session:

Imagine, just as Jesus is about to deliver his first sermon on a busy street
crowded with people, someone shouts out: “Rabbi, what we really want
is for you to tell us about your plan. What’s your message? What
should we do about the political and social mess we’re in? Which path is
the right path to take?21 How can we bring about Shalom here and
now? Should we agree with the Pharisees, or should we rather adopt the
viewpoint of the Sadducees? Or perhaps the Zealots are right after all?”

What do you think was Jesus’ response? What would you say he
answered? How would he describe his plan of action? What would he
say was his mission on earth? What would his listeners perceive his
‘Good News’ – the gospel – to be all about?

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 application journal

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 endnotes
1 Based on class notes from Bob Linthicum’s course “Building a People of Power”.
2 Arthur F. Glasser, Announcing the Kingdom, 149
3 Arthur F. Glasser, Announcing the Kingdom, 213
4 Brian McLaren, e Secret Message of Jesus, 13
5 Donald Kraybill, e Upside-Down Kingdom, 86

e parables of Jesus also attest to this condition with their numerous references to
absentee landowners who placed a steward in charge of their property to supervise the
work of day laborers. (Ibid, 86).
6 e Roman emperors taxed the wealthy heavily to fund their wars. the rich naturally

sought nonliquid investments to hide their wealth. Land was best, but it was ancestrally
owned and passed down over generations, and no peasant would voluntarily relinquish it.
However, exorbitant interests (25 to 250 percent) could be used to drive landowners ever
deeper into debt. And debt, coupled with high taxation required required by Herod
Antipas to pay Rome tribute, created the economic leverage to pry Galilean peasants
loose from their land. But the time of Jesus we see this process already far advanced: large
estates owned by absentee landlords, managed by stewards, and worked by tenant
farmers, day laborers, and slaves. (Walter Wink, e Powers at Be, 104)
7 Donald Kraybill, e Upside-Down Kingdom, 89
8 Warren Carter, Matthew and Empire, 18
9 Donald Kraybill, e Upside-Down Kingdom, 82
10 Donald Kraybill, e Upside-Down Kingdom, 83
11 Warren Carter, Matthew and Empire, 19

Besides the peasants and common rural proletariat, the Pharisees avoided contact with
them and refused to eat with them. ey were looked down on with contempt, so much
so that according to rabbinical law they could not appear as a witness in court nor be
appointed as the guardian of an orphan. e Pharisees would not marry them and
considered their women as unclean vermin. Such viewpoints communicated the hatred of
the aristocracy toward the common people of Galilee and Judea. e feeling was mutual
for it was also said that the people of the land hated the Jewish scholars more than the
heathen hated Israel. (Donald Kraybill, e Upside-Down Kingdom, 83, 85)
12 e reason why most commentators speak of the religious leaders confronting Jesus –

thus limiting their sphere of action to the religious – is once again the unfortunate result
of the dualistic lenses through which most commentators read their Bibles. e Jewish
leaders would have had difficulties separating the religious from the political and
economic spheres. To them, religion, politics and economics were interrelated and could
not be neatly separated into two parts, as those of us, influenced by Greek dualism, do.
13 Donald Kraybill, e Upside-Down Kingdom, 65
14 Glasser, ?
15 Donald Kraybill, e Upside-Down Kingdom, 66
16 Vishal Mangalwadi, Truth and Social Reform, ?
17 In like manner the disabled were excluded from the religious community of the

Essenes: “No one who is afflicted with any human impurity may come into the assembly
of God… Anyone who is … maimed in hand or foot, lame or blind or deaf or dumb or
with a visible mark in his flesh… these may not enter or take their place in the midst of
the community.” (quoted in Joachim Jeremias, New Testament eology, 175-176)
18 Vishal Mangalwadi, Truth and Social Reform, ?
19 Vishal Mangalwadi, Truth and Social Reform, ?

Instead of calling Israel to Shalom and to be a blessing to the nations, the Pharisees
promoted their viewpoints and own innovations on the law in and around the temple as
well as the synagogues, which functioned as a sort of mirror site of the temple, reflecting
aspects of temple worship and drawing its authority from the temple. All their rules on

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 washing hands and avoiding defilement were an attempt to make themselves acceptable
to God. Had not God set forth lists of desirable (spotless) and undesirable (flawed,
unclean) animals for use in sacrifice? Had not God banned sinners, menstruating women,
the physically deformed, and other “undesirables” from the temple?
20 Vishal Mangalwadi, Truth and Social Reform, 42
21 Brian McLaren, e Secret Message of Jesus, 14

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