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, Jesus repeatedly made a point of affiliating with whose whom Jewish custom and practice also socially marginalized. Why that happened can be interpreted in fairly simple terms. In Luke, for example, when Jesus has just come from the experience overcome being "tempted of the devil" (4:2), he attempts to instruct the ministers and people at the synagogue in Nazareth. What might have been charming at age twelve (Luke 2:47) was plainly not so at age 30: The Nazaren...