Servant Leadership

Jesus and Paul

Efrain Agosto

• Éditeur: Chalice Press
• Année: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780827235069
• Sujet: Business
• Sous-sujet: Leadership

Servant Leadership addresses a fundamental concern of the contemporary church by asking pertinent questions of the New Testament: Who became a leader in the Jesus movement and in Pauline Christianity? What was the social status of these leaders in the outside world as compared to the importance of such social status within the faith community? What practices characterized their leadership within the communities they served? The book explores models of leadership in the New Testament's two prime exemplars, Jesus and Paul, and in their respective communities of faith. It studies both Paul's statements and actions with regard to leadership issues with specific church communities, using Thessalonians, the Corinthians, the Galatians, and the Philippians correspondence as case studies in the practice of leadership. It concludes with a discussion of leadership challenges in the modern church and how a Pauline or Deutero-Pauline model can work for us today. The author shows how understanding one's followers, as well as the goals and purposes of the group one leads, is a fundamental function of leadership today, even in the corporate world. Similarly, although we expect Christian leadership to be confrontational and assertive at times, it must also be open to creating opportunities for others to exercise their gifts and, therefore, their leadership. Good leaders move others to respond to their own personal calls and commitments.

1

The World of Jesus and Paul

The first century of the Common Era in Palestine exhibited the rise of many movements, with a variety of movement leaders. The Jesus movement, the first group of believers to organize around the person and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth almost immediately after his death, represents once such movement. A discussion of the extent that it corresponded or deviated from other organized movements of the era will occupy us in this chapter as we try to understand the nature of the social, religious, and political world from which the Jesus movement and its leaders arose.

Questions about the nature of earliest Christianity must come in three forms:

1.What happened to Jesus and his followers during his lifetime?

2.What did his immediate followers do and teach after his death?

3.How and why did the stories about Jesus and those first followers come to be written into that unique form called the “gospel?”¹

For the most part, our sources for all three types of questions have been the New Testament gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—especially the former three, known as the “synoptic gospels” because they share a similar outline and body of material. Although useful for understanding all three stages of earliest Christianity, both historically and especially theologically, these documents represent products of the third phase. The gospels were written by and for the Christian communities as they existed toward the latter third of the first century, with their particular, contextual set of community needs and responses to those needs. Gerd Theissen described this phenomenon well: “We can presuppose that those who handed down [traditions about Jesus] shaped the tradition in accordance with their life.” At the same time, “we should assume a continuity between Jesus and the Jesus movement and in so doing open up the possibility of transferring insights into the Jesus movement to Jesus himself.”²

In our inquiry about aspects of leadership in earlier stages of the Jesus movement, we must inquire about the world during the time of Jesus, including other social, political, and religious movements and their quest for effective leadership. It is also important to look beyond the years of Jesus’ life and ministry to the beginning of this new movement that formed around him and around memories of him. How did this movement form and grow? What leadership was necessary for that to happen? Such will be the focus of this chapter. In the next chapter, I will explore what the gospels say, as far as we can tell, about those earlier stages, but also about their very own stage of the movement in the latter third of the first century. What qualities do the gospel writers promote for leadership in their own faith communities? How do these correspond to what Jesus himself expected?

Finally, in this chapter we must also take stock of the world of the apostle Paul, as he takes the movement beyond the immediate environment of Palestine and Palestinian Judaism into Diaspora Judaism and the Greco-Roman world of the Eastern Mediterranean. I will introduce the topic here, but come back to it when we turn to Paul in chapter 4.

The World of Jesus

The world of first-century C.E. Palestine was one of domination and oppression. Indeed, since the period of exile under the Babylonians and then the Persians, except for a brief period of about one hundred years in the second-century B.C.E., Palestine remained under the autocratic rule of outside forces. The Babylonians and the Persians controlled Palestine from 587 B.C.E. to 333 B.C.E. Then Israel came under the control of Alexander the Great and his successors, the Seleucids and the Ptolemies. Increased pressure to “Hellenize,” i.e., to adopt Greek ways over Jewish ones, precipitated the famous Maccabean revolt of the 160s B.C.E., involving largely northern Judean priests and peasants led by a family of priests, the Maccabees.

This revolt ushered in that one brief period of Jewish independence from 168 to 63 B.C.E. Then the Romans, led by the general Pompey, came at the invitation of a competing faction to the descendants of the Maccabees, the Hasmonean dynasty. With Rome’s invasion, a fair amount of Palestinian autonomy ended, and outside domination and control continued. Resistance to Rome’s presence ultimately brought about the end of a distinctly Jewish state, with the Jewish Wars of 66–70 C.E. and the Fall of Jerusalem in 70. A brief flare-up, known as the Bar Kochba rebellion of 132 C.E., also failed to restore Jewish autonomy in Palestine. Thus the status of the Jews as a diaspora community, which began with the Babylonian exile in 587 B.C.E., became a fait accompli.³

A Peasant Society

Several factors need to be noted about this history at this point. First, we must remember that the world of first-century Palestine was a peasant society. “In any traditional society such as Jewish Palestine in the first century C.E., the peasantry comprise 90 percent or more of the population.”⁴ As in other societies, peasants were at the bottom of the socioeconomic totem pole in Palestine. In addition, continuous occupation by foreign powers took its toll on the economic well being of Israel’s peasantry. Not only did they have to concern themselves with feeding their own families, typically as subsistence farm-workers; but increased taxation from outsiders, especially from Rome with its need to pay, for example, for occupying armies, placed unbearable burdens on the peasantry.⁵

Besides paying outside taxes, the peasant population in Palestine also helped support the religious center of the Jews, the Jerusalem temple. This they had done, gladly, from the beginning of Israel’s history, as many of their neighboring nations did for their gods. Peasants everywhere worked to “produce an abundance of goods to be brought to the temple storehouses, where the priests and ‘great ones’ would then tend to the care and feeding of the gods.”⁶

By the time of the Roman occupation of Palestine, the burden of both foreign taxation and increasing temple costs had become unbearable. Many peasant farmers had to borrow money from their landlords and other Jerusalem elites to pay the political and religious taxes and to feed their own families. In many cases, those few who owned their own plot of land ended up having to sell and enter “indebted slavery.”⁷ Thus a state of “permanent debt” permeated the rural areas of Palestine. The source the peasantry depended on as “highly positive symbols of the unity of the people and their link with God”—the high priesthood and temple elite—offered no relief.⁸ This hoped-for relief in the form of reduced temple taxes did not come, and a climate of peasant revolt was created. Thus the nature of temple leadership must come under some scrutiny in our study, for it represents the leadership that Jesus and his followers, among others, confronted in their day.

The Jewish Aristocracy

As noted above, Israel’s peasantry was loyal to the Jerusalem temple and would withstand almost any hardship to support the ongoing viability of their religious center. However, key to this loyalty was the legitimate status of temple leadership, and when that was not forthcoming at various points throughout the first century C.E. in Palestine, tensions rose. The family of the high priest, in particular, was not only from an illegitimate line of Zadokite priests, but they owed their position of wealth and power, in part, to the Romans. The “compromised position and exploitative behavior of the Jewish ruling class” during the period of Roman domination in Palestine precipitated a series of peasant revolts, culminating in the one that destroyed Jerusalem for many centuries to come in 70 C.E.⁹

In Israel’s history, the establishment of a priestly aristocracy resulted from exile and return. Israel prided itself on its theocratic governance from early in its history. However, that “rule of God” was always mediated by the “rule of the priestly aristocracy.”¹⁰ By the time of Herod the Great—the powerful, but Rome-controlled king of Judea from 37 to 4 B.C.E.—the high priesthood in Jerusalem acquiesced to his rule. Herod consolidated power around himself by appointing only those priests loyal to him. The Pharisees had secured significant power during the Hasmonean period, especially among the peasantry, because they supported the Maccabean revolt and subsequent independence movement. These Pharisees lost influence during Herod’s reign. They “became less a political party and more a loose association of religious brotherhoods.”¹¹ They turned from “politics to piety.”¹²

Thus, the large peasant population in Palestine had little recourse for their social and economic ills. The temple priesthood was beholden both to Herod the Great and to his sons who divided Palestine among themselves after their father’s death with Roman imperial blessings. Thus the priests were also beholden to the Herodian patrons, the Roman imperial court. For the most part, Pharisaic leadership yielded little power as they increasingly paid more attention to legal-religious interpretation of Jewish life and religion rather than the social-economic well being of the Jewish masses.¹³ Roman invasion meant more taxation and “a situation of imperial domination (occupying troops, intercultural misunderstandings, etc.).”¹⁴ Things only got worse when Rome took direct control of Judea, and, therefore, the heart of Jewish life, Jerusalem, by bringing it under control of the provincial governor of Syria and assigning a Roman pro-consul, Pontius Pilate, to oversee Judean affairs directly in 26 C.E. Unlike the gospels’ picture of him as a benign, distant dictator, beholden to the Jewish masses and their leaders, Pilate ruled with a particularly repressive hand.¹⁵

During Pilate’s rule the Jewish aristocracy, which included the high priests, the elders, and the scribes, all protected their own status as elites, centering their power on the Jerusalem temple and its ruling council, the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin consisted of the high priest, elders, and the scribes (cf. Mk. 15: 1). The high priests represented the “aristocracy of worship,” the elders, the “aristocracy of the rich,” and the scribes, “the aristocracy of the educated.”¹⁶ Entry into the first two groups depended on “dynastic or economic privileges”; the third depended on education in the law and religion. Thus a “circulation of elites” predominated the political scene in Judea. Some Pharisees became scribes, but for the most part Pharisees stayed away from the political center of Judaism and concentrated on exercising “spiritual power.”¹⁷ The other groups combined their political power to ensure their survival in the face of the real power—the Roman Empire.

Resistance Movements

The collusion between the Jewish aristocracy and Rome created a vacuum of leadership at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. First under Hellenistic rule and then under Roman, the loss of economic well being and cultural dominance persisted for three hundred years in Palestine and so did a period of peasant revolt (approximately 200 B.C.E. to 132 C.E.). Now economic power ruled in Palestine rather than religious or cultural traditions. By aligning themselves with the building and tax programs of first Alexander’s Hellenists and then the Roman imperialists—including Herod the Great and his sons—the temple elite promoted “a new kind of power based on financial influence” rather than “traditional theocratic authority” (i.e., “the rule of God”). Financial success by certain families secured entrance into Jerusalem’s ruling classes, whereas previously ancestral ties and Torah observance were fundamental for such inclusion. The combination of political-economic alliances with the outsiders and decreased Jewish cultural and religious influences created further gulfs between the Judean peasantry and the temple elite.¹⁸

Resistance and revolt became the answers for many peasants. Popular movements led by grassroots, charismatic leaders persisted throughout the era of Hellenistic and Roman domination. Some experienced great successes like the Maccabean revolt in the 160s B.C.E., but most proved to be terrible failures like the Jewish Wars of the 60s C.E. In between sporadic peasant uprisings dotted the landscape of Jewish-Roman relations in the first century C.E. in response to increasing Roman domination.¹⁹ These popular movements shared several common characteristics.

First, they sought to restore the notion of theocratic rule in Palestine. Such religious movements as the Essenes, especially their extreme manifestations such as the Dead Sea Scrolls community in Qumran who withdrew to the hills from their regular life in Palestine, awaited divine deliverance from their oppressed situation.²⁰ They lamented the shift in Judea from an “ethnos,” a separate people, to a “polis,” a Hellenistic citizen-body, which favored the rich and educated. This shift, in which Greek traditions replaced the Torah, galvanized peasant revolts. Moreover, grassroots leadership emerged in the countryside, r...