this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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I'm confused, are you disagreeing with me? I said the same thing. Jesus was in favour of many of the things we now associate with socialism. They just didn't call it that at the time.
Not sure what you mean by this. Jesus was a pacifist. He literally just played along while the ruling classes murdered him. He wasn't about to start a violent revolution.
Jesus whipped people who were making money off the temple, so he certainly wasn't a pacifist. This may have happened twice.
He may have known enough not to pick a fight that would be lost, anyway.
Bart Ehrman argues that Jesus' actual goal was to lead a rebellion that would kick the Romans out of Judea and set himself up as king. That wouldn't have been too unusual for the apocalyptic preachers of the time.
Taking the wealthy is not socialism, it is at best, a very mild form of social democracy. The ballance of power is not changed the owning class still has all the power as they still own the means of production.
I understand Jeasus was a passifist, and he would not have lead a violent revolution, but he would have advocated the workers runing the show, not just "taxing the rich"
Keep in mind this was 2000 years ago. Modern notions of a "working class" didn't exist. The Roman Empire had completely different and far more primitive economic structures compared to what we have now. There was no concept of corporations, industry, labour, or capital. These were primarily agrarian people who worked the land and paid taxes to the imperial administration. Production of finished goods was limited to small local guilds and artisans. And since Jesus was born and raised as a carpenter, he was part of that artisan class. The closest thing they had to a bourgeoise was landowners and religious oligarchy, and those were exactly the people Jesus spoke against.
That's a pretty dumb take considering we're talking about a society which was not democratic. "Social democracy" doesn't mean "diet socialism", it's a specific form of government which would have been completely meaningless to the people of Jesus' time.
Suffice to say, Jesus was in favour of redistributing wealth. Modern concepts of the "means of production" would have made little sense to him. He'd have been like "yeah, no shit the worker owns the means of production. I'm a carpenter and I own my own hammer and blade". We can speculate that if he were brought forward in time to after the industrial revolution, he would have probably associated himself with the labour movement, but there's no way to say for sure.
Remember to put things in the appropriate historical context. You can't look at 1st century Palestine using the same eyes you use to look at the modern world. It was fundamentally a different kind of world.
Tell me more about democracy in 1st century Middle East.