In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 Standard and Poor The Economic Index of the Parables Amy-Jill Levine, Myrick C. Shinall Jr. Biblical scholarship, like the Bible itself, does not exist apart from its historical context, and the context of twenty-first-century United States of America provides biblical scholars new lenses through which to interpret the ancient narratives. For example, during the second Bush administration, as the number of biblical scholars dissatisfied with American policies increased, so did the bibliography that saw in the first century’s Pax Romana disturbing connections to the twenty-first century’s Pax Americana. In this construction, with its intertwined agenda of colonialism, militarism, jingoism/ethnocentrism, and patriarchalism, Jesus and Paul—and the (usually liberal) Christian today—appear as standing against the “empire.”1 Given current fiscal concerns, exegetical attention is tilting from empire to economics, with Jesus and Paul helping their followers to negotiate questions of unemployment, low wages, employer-employee relations, taxes, and especially government support to the poor.2 Granted, neither Paul nor Jesus escaped the economic contexts of their time: they are men of the first century, a time of advanced agrarian systems functioning under a militarily enforced state, and not 1. For a helpful summary, see John Dart, “Jesus and Paul versus the Empire,” Christian Century (Feb. 8, 2005): 20–24. John Dominic Crossan comments in the prologue to his God and Empire: Jesus against Rome, Then and Now (New York: HarperCollins, 2007): “I have been hearing recently two rather insistent claims from across the spectrum of our religio-political life. The first one claims that America is now—and may always have been—an empire. . . . The second and subsidiary claim is that America is Nova Roma, the New Roman Empire, Rome on the Potomac” (2). See also Richard Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). 2. See, e.g., Ben Witherington III, Jesus and Money: A Guide for Times of Financial Crisis (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010). 95 of the democratic systems of modern (if not “late”) global capitalism. However, their followers, especially those who foreground questions of society rather than soteriology, nevertheless typically understand them to represent the values of the left wing of the American political system. This paper looks to the parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16)—which could be called the parable of the Conscientious Householder (titles do make a difference)—to examine how a text of the first century might instruct readers two millennia later. It does so with explicit awareness that contemporary concerns affect the exegetical enterprise; it also takes seriously the ways the Bible has been used to justify inequity as well as to promote reform. The concerns are not simply hypothetical or merely academic; how one understands the Bible does have political and economic implications for present practice. If Christianity is reduced to confession, and if the confession does not cash out (after all, “faith without works is dead”), then we find its claims to be no more meaningful than the belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If those who function as clergy read only what already supports their presuppositions, then they are betraying their congregations and, by extension, their tradition. Theology vs. History The conventional view, which crosses the liberal Christian academic spectrum, claims that Jesus promoted a “religious and economic egalitarianism that negated alike and at once the hierarchical and patronal normalcies of Jewish religion and Roman power.”3 Otherwise put, he promoted “a radical reordering of all relationships into a greater egalitarianism under the one Householder, God (see 20.1, 11).”4 Thus, Jesus is an economic visionary, the first “egalitarian” (quite a miracle, given that the idea of egalitarianism is primarily understood to be a product of the Enlightenment), unique in his social context. The devil is, of course, in the details, and the details do not point to an egalitarian system. Politically, the movement is not egalitarian: Jesus is not taking votes about whether to go to Galilee or speak against the temple. Jesus is not the first among equals. Religiously, he does not appear to be egalitarian either: he speaks on his own authority, he is not interested in consensus, and his followers view him as their master (hence titles such as κύριος and ἐπιστάτα). 3. John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 421–22. 4. Michael H. Crosby, House of Disciples: Church, Economics, and...

Share