Jesus and Social and Cultural Outcasts

The purpose of this research is to examine the biblical theme that associates Jesus with specific social and cultural outcasts, and how this shaped Christian moral and philosophical content.

The central importance of the Redemption to the spiritual content of Christianity is difficult to overestimate. But the implications of the Redemption for Christians can be more fully appreciated to the extent they are captured by a more complete understanding of the social and political background of the gospels. For the Redemption cannot be considered in isolation; that is, it has to be understood as the culmination of the life and career of Jesus, which is full of evidence that the reason that Jesus was condemned to death in the first place had to do with the content of his teachings and the content of his behavior. One important feature of such content is his deliberate association with outcasts, specifically, those persons who were deliberately marginalized by the mainstream of first-century Jewish society and culture.

The Jews themselves were already socially marginalized during this period, to be sure. The Roman historian Suetonius explains that Tiberius Caesar--during whose reign John the Baptist and Jesus went about Judea preaching repentance (Luke 3:3)--banished from Rome foreign cults, "particularly the Jewish and Egyptian," and transferred Jews "of military age . . . to unhealthy regions, on the pretext of drafting them into the army" (132). But within the Jewish community,

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trying to shore up their own cultural position. He notes that when they wanted to prove the godlessness of John the Baptist they said that he "came neither eating bread nor drinking wine" (Luke 8:33). But now when they want to prove the godlessness of the "Son of Man" they complain he is "a gluttonous man, and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!" (Luke 8:34). In other words, their real agenda is to stress the outcast status of anybody who functions outside their authority. But they use contradictory logic to do so--which proves that their real logic has nothing to do with God, only with their own prestige. Thus, when Jesus criticizes Simon for despising the prostitute, he is showing the superiority of inclusion to exclusion as a moral principle. Much the same point is made at John 8:7, when the Pharisees and scribes are on the point of stoning woman for adultery. Leave aside for the moment that adultery perforce involves both male and female participants but that it was only the woman "taken in adultery, in the very act" (John 4:4). In other words, only the woman is to be cast out. Jesus' sensible answer is to invite the Pharisees and scribes who are without sin to cast the first stone (4:7) and to suggest to the wo

Category: Philosophy - J