/ 4 April 2007

Was Jesus the first socialist?

Was Jesus ‘the greatest socialist in history”, as Venezuelan President Hugo Chàvez recently claimed?

That depends on what one means by ‘socialism”. And there are huge difficulties in trying to force the 1st-century Jew, Yeshua ha Nosri, into a 21st-century political mould. Universal suffrage and human rights were undreamt-of in his age; even Greek demokratia was city-based and excluded slaves and women.

But by focusing on the Gospel narrative, stripped of its theological accretions, one can get a sense of where Jesus might stand on today’s political spectrum.

For all their inconsistencies, interpolations and reliance on hearsay, the Gospels paint a compelling picture of the man and his conception of how people should treat each other.

He would definitely be on the left, but equally definitely, would not be a socialist of the revolutionary or even activist type. He saw no role for the secular state in redistributing wealth and power — the heart of the socialist platform. He could perhaps be described as a utopian liberal.

Traditionally, Jesus is betrayed by the Zealot Judas because he refuses to lead a struggle against the Roman occupiers — and his foxy rejoinder on the payment of Roman taxes, ‘Render unto Caesar — ” tends to support this.

‘The first shall be last … ”, ‘the meek shall inherit … ”, Lazarus and the rich man and many other Gospel passages do seem to suggest imminent revolutionary upheaval.

But Jesus is clearly not predicting the reversal of power hierarchies in this world, nor urging the poor and downtrodden to overturn them. Instead, they are told to love their enemies and offer the other cheek — the watchword is patient submission, not revolt.

It is in the impending Kingdom of Heaven that the poor will have their reward. Jesus was convinced that he was ushering the ‘great and terrible day of the Lord” prophesied in Judaic scriptures, which would turn the world upside down.

Indeed, his confident prediction that his disciples would see the coming of the Kingdom in their own lifetimes rather puts paid to the doctrine of his ‘divine nature” (which he never claimed). The end did not come then and has not come since, despite the incessant forecasts and timetable revisions of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Wrote theologian JC Duncan in 1870: ‘Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud; or he himself was deluded; or he was divine. There is no getting out of this trilemma.”

The deferment of social justice to the Kingdom prompted Marx’s ‘opium of the masses” jibe. It also underpins Nietzsche’s idea of Christianity as a ‘slave ethic”, which, by sanctifying their status and promising other-worldly redress, took the underclasses of the Roman empire by storm.

Yet, at the same time, Christ’s basic ethical perspective — his sense of who will enter the Kingdom — has been a taproot of modern, mass-based democracy and the democratic left-wing perspective.

The latter implies a belief in the unity of the human species and in people as fundamentally good, redeemable and cooperative by nature. Among the corollaries are sympathy for the underdog, hostility to insolent power and wealth, and anti-militarism.

All are central motifs of Christ’s message, which appears as the last gasp of the Judaic prophetic tradition (‘You levy taxes on the poor [and] persecute the guiltless,” thunders Amos). In Luke, he sets the tone in his first public utterance: good news for the poor, the release of prisoners, freeing ‘the broken victims”. Peacemaking, justice and mercy are extolled. Repeatedly, ‘his heart goes out” to the hungry crowds; he protects an adulteress from stoning; he asks a Samaritan ‘untouchable” for a drink.

Jesus was decidedly not the milksop of Victorian sentimentalists — the Gospels are studded with his virulent attacks on bigwigs and fat cats (‘You cannot serve God and money”), respectable hypocrites, self-righteous moral censors (‘Judge not …) and those who pride themselves on being ‘saved” (‘I thank thee, O God, that I am not like the rest of men … ”). Shocking the right-minded by mixing with prostitutes and other dregs of Palestinian society, he castigates the religious establishment, personified by the spiritual leaders of Judaism, the Pharisees.

Indeed, it is through Christ’s humanity that many modern Christians, repelled by the traditional theology, understand the crucifixion. Instead of a primitive blood sacrifice organised by a wrathful God to appease himself, it becomes an archetypal tragedy of persecuted innocence.

Right-wingers start from the opposite assumption: of humankind’s structural inequality and incorrigibly fallen state. Hence their tendency to bully-worship: authoritarian hierarchies are enthusiastically embraced both as an expression of the natural order and to hold base humanity in check.

In the service of this worldview, the Christ of the Gospels, and his god, are twisted out of recognisable shape. For American-style fundamentalists, God is the foul-tempered, jealous and vindictive super-patriarch of Mosaic law — William Blake’s ‘Nobodaddy aloft [who] farted and belched and coughed” — and Jesus his Grand Inquisitor, sent to scourge sinners and terrorise them with spoekstories of hellfire.

The right-wing ideologue of the New Testament is not Jesus but St Paul, a martinet haunted by human sinfulness to the point of pathology.

In his letter to the Romans, the word ‘sin” or its equivalent appears more than 60 times. Human desires are ‘vile”; human bodies ‘degraded” and bodily pursuits ‘base”; all are ‘slaves to sin” redeemable only through God’s arbitrary grace.

Diehards, life-deniers and moral tyrants down the ages have drawn rich sustenance from Paul, who tells us that slaves should obey their masters ‘with fear and trembling”, that women ‘reflect the glory” of their male overlords, and that all must submit to the civil powers, ordained by God to punish crime.

One scours the Gospels in vain for the doctrine of original sin, inflicted by Adam on all future generations — it is a Pauline concoction.

And it is Paul’s abhorrence of sex, sensual pleasure and the human body — he repeatedly recommends sexual abstinence — which underpins the religious right’s obsession with sin as sexuality, rather than as cruelty, greed and injustice. Paul’s disciple St Augustine believed original sin is transmitted through the sex act, like a virus.

The gospel tale of the woman caught in adultery highlights Jesus’s central concerns: not the woman’s transgression, but the lynch mob’s hypocrisy and rigid adherence to cruel religious law. And, as he nowhere refers to homosexuality in the Gospels, it can hardly be considered high on his agenda. It is on Paul’s ranting about ‘shameful” homosexual passions, and the law of Moses, that the right mainly relies.

Chavez exaggerates by recruiting Jesus to the socialist cause. But, through lower-class religious movements and radical clerics in many countries, including South Africa, Christ’s affirmation of the worth of ordinary people, and the importance of their suffering, has undoubtedly fuelled democratic change.

More than this, his teachings — in contrast with the psychoneurotic and ideological distortions of St Paul and the Christian right — are broadly life-affirming. Their unmistakable thrust is to call believers to the service of human dignity and happiness.