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| October, by James Tissot (1877) Tissot is the artist whose sower painting is featured on the cover of my forthcoming book I took this photo in early August at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts |
The vast majority of people in the first century were at the
mercy of power-holders outside their social realm. Their sense of powerlessness
was often reinforced by the climate and lack of natural resources in many areas
of the Mediterranean world. Such persons had little or no control over the
conditions that governed their lives. This more-or-less determined existence
was verified by experience and led to the cognitive orientation that all
desired goods—social (e.g., honor), economic (e.g., land), and natural (e.g.,
health)—existed in a finite quantity and were always in short supply (e.g., George
Foster’s "Peasant Society and the
Image of Limited Good" in American Anthropologist).
One of the strategies in these "limited good"
societies is the formation of horizontal and vertical alliances. See S. N. Eisenstadt and L. Roniger, Patrons,
Clients, and Friends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). For an
excellent list of the characteristics of such alliances, see K. C. Hanson and
Douglas E. Oakman, Palestine in the Time of Jesus. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 72. Peter Garnsey and
Richard Sailer give an overview of social relations (e.g., patrons, clients,
and friends) in The Roman Empire: Economy, Society, and Culture (London:
Duckworth, 1987), 148-59. An important study of patronage and Luke-Acts may be
found in Halvor Moxnes, "Patron-Client Relations and the New Community in
Luke-Acts," in The Social World of Luke-Acts (ed. Jerome H. Neyrey;
Peabody: Hendrickson, 1991), 241-68.
In brief, relationships among those of equal rank are based
on an informal principle of reciprocity, an implicit obligation that is
enforced by the honor and shame system. This implicit contract is an informal
binding of pairs in an ongoing series of acts of mutual support. Asymmetrical contracts can also be established between
people on differing social levels. Persons on a higher social level can serve
as patrons for their clients on a lower social level, but the goods or services
in this reciprocal relationship are not similar. Patronage thus occurs whenever
someone adopts a posture of deference to another deemed more powerful and
therefore gains access to resources as a result. See John Davis, The People
of the Mediterranean (p. 132).
James C. Scott describes how this patronage works in
the "moral economy of the peasant.” See James C. Scott, The Moral
Economy of the Peasant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). As a side
note, although the social location of the implied author of Luke is above that
of a peasant, the "voices" of the peasants (e.g., the peasant artisan
Jesus) can still be heard. As Mikhail Bakhtin argues, speakers do not use
pristine words—"untainted" straight out of a dictionary—but rather
these words have already existed in the mouths of others and thus already
partially belong to others. Each word "tastes" therefore of the
contexts in which it has lived its socially-charged life in previous speakers'
personal, cultural, social, and ideological contexts. See Bakhtin, Dialogic
Imagination, 293-5.
Back to Scott’s arguments: Peasants are like people
who are standing permanently up to their chins in water, so that even a ripple
is sufficient to drown them. Such peasants are not radically egalitarian but
instead—living in a limited good society—believe that all persons are entitled
to a living out of the resources of the village (Scott, Moral Economy, 1,
5).
The peasants' "subsistence ethic"
involves both a norm of reciprocity and an ethical belief in a right of
subsistence. Patron-broker-client ties, then, are a ubiquitous form of
"social insurance." Although the peasants' bargaining power is
minimal, patronage includes a moral obligation; people who have resources are expected
to help in difficult circumstances (Scott, Moral Economy, 11, 27, 51).
In a similar way, I would argue, the narrator of
Luke uses characters like the Roman centurion in 7:1-10 as a moral example to
emulate. In contrast, characters such as the rich man in 16:19-31 serve as
warnings to persuade readers that they should—if they have the economic
means—behave in a fashion similar to the centurion, not the rich man. Thus the
centurion is one of many models in Luke-Acts of the proper attitude and behavior
that socially advantaged patrons should have—both to Jesus and to members of
their local community. The rich man, in contrast, is an example of what will
happen if they do not follow this exhortation.
In the next post, I will comment on how the
narrative of Luke expects such elite to live.
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