Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§13.4 For Whom Did Jesus Intend His Message?
to which the psalmist and his community identify themselves as the poor and
needy. 143 Nearer the time of Jesus, this self-designation is echoed in the Psalms
of Solomon and the Dead Sea Scrolls. 144
The traditional Jewish understanding of poverty, therefore, was neither
simplified nor idealized. 145 Starting from the harsh, often brutal reality of poverty,
it recognized different dimensions of poverty — material, social, and spiritual.
It was a concern which spread across all parts of the Jewish Scriptures —
from Torah legislation for the caring society, through prophetic denunciation of
the ruthlessness and heartlessness of the rich, to the psalmist's confidence in God
as preeminently the God of the poor.
b. Jesus and the Poor
At various points in §9.9 we reflected on how social and political circumstances
must have influenced or affected Jesus in his youth and young manhood in Galilee.
As a member of the family of a tekton, brought up in a small and not very
well-to-do village, he would not have experienced destitution but would certainly
have been familiar with poverty, as were also his immediate circle of disciples. 146
He would almost certainly have been aware of the tax burden which his fellow
villagers bore, how many were caught in a tightening cycle of debt, and that
some had been forced to sell off their generations-old patrimony to become tenant
farmers or day-labourers. 147 His parables reflect awareness of tensions which
probably existed in villages within the sphere of influence of Sepphoris and
143. 'I am poor and needy' (Pss. 40.17; 70.5; 86.1; 109.22); see also Pss. 18.27; 37.14;
68.10; 69.32; 72.2, 4; 74.19, 21; 140.12; Isa. 54.11. See further Gerstenberger, TDOT 11.246-
47, 250.
144. Pss. Sol. 5.2, 11; 10.6; 15.1; 18.2; lQpHab 12.3, 6, 10; 1QM 11.9, 13; 13.13-14;
CD 19.9; 4QpPs 37(4Q171) 2.9-10; 1QH 10[= 2].32, 34; 13[= 5].13-18, 21; 23[= 18].14. See
further Bammel, TDNT 6.896-99; L. E. Keck, "The Poor among the Saints" in Jewish Christianity
and Qumran', ZNW 57 (1966) 54-78 (here 66-77); Gerstenberger, TDOT 11.236.
145. Crossan generalizes too quickly from Lenski's model that not just poverty but destitution
is in view: 'the unclean, degraded and expendable classes', 'the destitute, the beggars,
and the vagrants' (Historical Jesus 273, 275). Similarly Birth 320-21, 344, but he includes
within 'the destitute' (= 'the landless peasant') 'tenant farmers, sharecroppers, day-laborers,
and beggars' (321).
146. E. W. Stegemann and W. Stegemann, The Jesus Movement: A Social History of Its
First Century (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), locate them in the 'lower rural stratum'; during
'their nomadic existence' at least they would belong to the ptöchoi (203).
147. See above, §9.6b. Crossan argues that 'Jesus' primary focus was on peasants dispossessed
by Roman commercialization and Herodian urbanization in the late 20s in Lower
Galilee' (Birth 325).
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