Fascinating post! About Jesus, for evidence that he's primarily about debt forgiveness, one of just two pieces of evidence you cite is Luke and Isaiah, and the closest they get to mentioning debt forgiveness is "opening of the prison to them that are bound", and even that is just one item in a longer list of what Jesus is advocating for. So it's not convincing ,although somewhat supportive that it's in the Lord's Prayer.
Hi Alex, thanks for reading! Isaiah isn't the best Old Testament example of the debt jubilee commandments. Leviticus 25:10 (the same text engraved on the Liberty Bell) might be a better example. But the scroll of Isaiah is the passage chosen by Jesus, according to the gospel of Luke.
During the Bronze Age, people often pledged themselves as loan collateral. That meant that debtors who couldn't make their loan payments ended up enslaved to their creditors to work off their debt. That's why, in these old documents, notions of liberty and freedom are bound up with debt forgiveness.
Another piece of fascinating evidence is the fact that "sin" and "debt" are the same word in many Indo-European languages. If you bump into somebody in Germany, for example, you might say "entschuldigung" instead "excuse me". It literally means something like "faultness". In German, the word for debt is "schuld". It just goes to show how our modern understanding of forgiving sins is just one tick away from the old idea of forgiving debts.
Michael Hudson points out that "forgiving sin" was not only a great moneymaker for the Church, but a means of total control, as 'sin' was mostly made about sex. Since sex is part of the human condition, every adult sins.
There's a charming, though unverified, story about the propaganda used to quell the uprisings. According to this tale, Menenius Agrippa used the fable of the supposedly rotten stomach as an argument to bolster the ruling class's position. However, he conveniently omitted—regardless of any mutual dependence—that the stomach, too, would be doomed to decay if the ruling class didn't cooperate. He also neglected the possibility that the limbs could exist even without the stomach.
The real solution, however, was achieved with the promise of creating tribunes of the plebs who could veto the Senate's decisions.
That's an interesting story I'd not heard before. Thanks for sharing it, Renée!
The Roman Senate allowed the appointment of a Tribune of the Plebs as a concession to striking workers. But of course, when the tribunes tried to use their position to actually help the working class, the Senate pulled the rug out from under them. In the famous cases of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, they were straight up murdered.
The assassinations of the Gracchi brothers was a major escalation in the civil war that eventually saw Julius Caesar cross the Rubicon.
Well written. I saw that the movie 'The Man Who Would Be King' is available on Netflix. I saw it long ago, but barely remember it, and I wonder if it is a fantasy of land redistribution and cancellation of popular debts.
I hadn't heard of this movie, Tedder, but I looked it up. The plot description appears to confirm the worst Roman fears about people who seek kingship haha. All-star cast, though, with Sean Connery and Michael Caine
Fascinating post! About Jesus, for evidence that he's primarily about debt forgiveness, one of just two pieces of evidence you cite is Luke and Isaiah, and the closest they get to mentioning debt forgiveness is "opening of the prison to them that are bound", and even that is just one item in a longer list of what Jesus is advocating for. So it's not convincing ,although somewhat supportive that it's in the Lord's Prayer.
Hi Alex, thanks for reading! Isaiah isn't the best Old Testament example of the debt jubilee commandments. Leviticus 25:10 (the same text engraved on the Liberty Bell) might be a better example. But the scroll of Isaiah is the passage chosen by Jesus, according to the gospel of Luke.
During the Bronze Age, people often pledged themselves as loan collateral. That meant that debtors who couldn't make their loan payments ended up enslaved to their creditors to work off their debt. That's why, in these old documents, notions of liberty and freedom are bound up with debt forgiveness.
Another piece of fascinating evidence is the fact that "sin" and "debt" are the same word in many Indo-European languages. If you bump into somebody in Germany, for example, you might say "entschuldigung" instead "excuse me". It literally means something like "faultness". In German, the word for debt is "schuld". It just goes to show how our modern understanding of forgiving sins is just one tick away from the old idea of forgiving debts.
Michael Hudson points out that "forgiving sin" was not only a great moneymaker for the Church, but a means of total control, as 'sin' was mostly made about sex. Since sex is part of the human condition, every adult sins.
There's a charming, though unverified, story about the propaganda used to quell the uprisings. According to this tale, Menenius Agrippa used the fable of the supposedly rotten stomach as an argument to bolster the ruling class's position. However, he conveniently omitted—regardless of any mutual dependence—that the stomach, too, would be doomed to decay if the ruling class didn't cooperate. He also neglected the possibility that the limbs could exist even without the stomach.
The real solution, however, was achieved with the promise of creating tribunes of the plebs who could veto the Senate's decisions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_Menenius_Lanatus_(consul_503_BC)
That's an interesting story I'd not heard before. Thanks for sharing it, Renée!
The Roman Senate allowed the appointment of a Tribune of the Plebs as a concession to striking workers. But of course, when the tribunes tried to use their position to actually help the working class, the Senate pulled the rug out from under them. In the famous cases of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, they were straight up murdered.
The assassinations of the Gracchi brothers was a major escalation in the civil war that eventually saw Julius Caesar cross the Rubicon.
Hadn't known that about "tyrant" ! Wow
I'm very happy that you got something out of this week's essay, Leon!
Well written. I saw that the movie 'The Man Who Would Be King' is available on Netflix. I saw it long ago, but barely remember it, and I wonder if it is a fantasy of land redistribution and cancellation of popular debts.
I hadn't heard of this movie, Tedder, but I looked it up. The plot description appears to confirm the worst Roman fears about people who seek kingship haha. All-star cast, though, with Sean Connery and Michael Caine