S14 E6: The One About Decolonising The New Testament Part 1

To continue on our theme of making our schools and curriculum representative and inclusive, I speak to Dr U-wen Low from the University of Birmingham about how to read the stories in the new Testament without a colonial lens. We focus in this episode on Jesus and Phliemonand will do a further episode on the book of revelation.

The episode is going to take a hermeneutical look at specific texts and how they can be interpretted to either be pro or against colonisation and sometimes both.  But don't worry, this isn't heavy and complicated.  U-wen has a brilliant way of making things simple and accessible.

We focus our converstation on Mary's magnificat, the Great Commission, views on the Romans, the story of Zaccheaus and the letter of Philemon (with it's nuanced take on slavery).

It's a brilliant episode that I think will make you look at familiar stories in a new way which is something we love as RE teachers!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

My name is Louisa Jane Smith, and this is the R.E. Podcast. The podcast for those of you who think R.E. is boring, which it is, and I'll prove it to you. My guest today is Ewan Lowe, Assistant Professor of Public Religion at the University of Birmingham, and we're going to be tackling colonization and the New Testament, particularly looking at Jesus and the Book of Revelation. We've previously looked at decolonizing our curriculums, and we've looked at colonization and the church, and we've looked at the prophecies of Revelation on the podcast. But today's episode is really going to take a hermeneutical look at specific texts and how they can be interpreted to either be pro or against colonization, and sometimes both. So welcome to the podcast, Ewan.

SPEAKER_06 0:43

Thank you very much. Lovely to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Can you just start by telling us a little bit about who you are and your role and your sort of specialism?

SPEAKER_06 0:49

Sure. I know my role says that I'm the assistant professor of public religion, but I'm not entirely sure what that means. I um I'm a biblical scholar by training, and I'm a Book of Revelation scholar. And I'm from Melbourne, Australia, I should add. And that informed my context a lot because as I began my studies and I kept going into them and exploring what it meant to do a PhD in Bible and things like that, I gradually became more and more aware of the issues within Australia, particularly to do with how we treat our indigenous or aboriginal folk and sort of the effects that colonization has had on them. And so, as part of my doctoral work, I ended up doing an exploration of the Book of Revelation, but specifically asking questions about its engagement with colonization. I kind of started reading it as an anti-colonial, sort of post-colonial text. My opinion has shifted a little bit and it keeps moving backwards and forwards, basically. But my role at the moment is I work here at the University of Birmingham, I work with our theology and religion students primarily doing all manner of things, mostly teaching, supervision, standard academic work, really. A little bit of publication on the side when I can get time as well.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Yeah. And it's really interesting. You're a very good example of how your kind of personal context influences your academic study. Which I think is really fascinating. There's two terms we're going to use quite a lot throughout the episode. I think it'll be worth just defining what we mean by those. One is colonization and one is hermeneutics. So what do we mean by colonization?

SPEAKER_06 2:21

Yeah, a good question. And I think the thing with colonization and the way we think about it, it's fairly complex, right? Because in perhaps the simplest terms, colonization is just the exertion of power by one group upon another for a variety of different reasons, and often the economic reasons, ultimately at the end of the day, but they play out with different effects. Now, by that logic, we can say that one group of tennis players coming in to push another group of tennis players out of a hole is colonization. Well, I mean, you suppose you could look at it that way. Realistically, what we're looking at is sort of quite large-scale people group upon people group type of idea. I don't want to put too fine a margin on it, because one of the things that comes out of my research and the way I think about these things is that I think a lot of people feel as though they are part of oppressed and minoritized people groups, whether they are or they aren't, right? Which explains quite a lot about the world today and the way that people react and engage with certain things. But yeah, I don't want to put too tight a boundary around colonization. But around the New Testament and its context in particular, I think the safest way to think about it is that you've got a group of Jewish people living in Judea, and you've got the Roman Empire who have come in, sort of been invited in by some, invaded by others. You've got the legacy of Greek empires all the way from Alexander the Great moving down into their present day. And so for them, they're very much a people who live under oppression, who feel like they are being colonized, especially because their cultures and their structures are being slowly but surely altered, both forcefully and through osmosis, basically, with the Romans.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Really fascinating. And then hermeneutics, what do we mean by the word hermeneutics?

SPEAKER_06 4:12

I mean, I favor very simple explanations, and then we can sort of, you know, argue about the fine detail as we go. Hermeneutics to me is just interpretation, right? The way that you bring an interpretation to bear on the text, informed by who you are and where you've come from, but also then ideally that's informed by the text itself and its context and where it comes from. So there's a famous saying, I think it's Thistleton who calls it the two horizons, you know, the horizon of the interpreter and the horizon of the text, which sort of intersect with each other.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

And I think it's something that probably in the Christian church, your everyday Christian isn't necessarily conscious of when they're reading that text, in that actually the people that wrote it had a particular positionality, you as a reader are going to have a certain positionality and that's going to impact how you interpret. It doesn't make it any less true, it's just a factor to take on board. Do you think that then if we're embarking on this conversation about a hermeneutical look within that lens of colonization, that there's anything that is important to consider or understand before we do that?

SPEAKER_06 5:21

I think it's helpful to understand maybe just two things, right? And I've I've sort of already mentioned both of them, funnily enough. The first is that we all interpret from where we have come from and who we are.

SPEAKER_02 5:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 5:32

Which means that we're gonna have our own blind spots, we're gonna have our own ideas. That doesn't make us right or wrong, it just makes us different. And I think that's why it's helpful a lot of the time to hear a range of different interpretations, because that range of diversity alerts us to what we're missing ourselves. Part of the thing that we need to consider as part of that is that when we come and we interpret the text, our interpretations don't come from nothing. If, for example, we have grown up within a particular faith tradition, we have got hundreds, sometimes thousands of years of interpreting the texts in particular ways, sitting behind the way we interpret the text. And that makes it very difficult for us to break away from that. So let's say, talking about Revelation, if you come from a faith tradition which has always understood Revelation to be a literal or literalistic prophecy about the end of the world, then you're almost always gonna start at that point. There's no getting away from that. And that's okay, provided you're able to open your mind and look at other interpretive ideas and perhaps take them into account. I think that's really helpful. The second thing to consider is that the texts themselves are pretty complex things, right? We have them as received, we've got this nice sheet of paper or sets of sheets of paper that have been bound together, printed upon a couple of thousand years later, but when they're first transmitted, they're orally recited, often memorized, very rarely written down. They're these almost fairly nebulous things that kind of float around communities and then eventually coalesce into what we today might even think about as written texts. And they're very much informed by their contexts, and so you've got these ideas, these feelings, these emotions, which are, of course, common to the human experience, but beyond that you've got very specific things. What is it like to suffer from slavery, right? To be brutally subjected to a Roman Empire? What is it like to have your culture slowly eroded by gradual Romanization or Hellenization before that? What is it like to be part of a people group who has been nomadic, for example? All of these experiences and ideas are quite different to what we have today, and we might approximate a lot of that, of course, but that doesn't mean we're ever going to quite get it. So there's always going to be a bit of a gap. And because there's 2,000 years of a gap, there's a lot of knowledge that we don't know as well. There are things that might be taken for granted that the audience knows that we don't actually know. So today, you know, in 2025, I might make a Marvel movie reference, right? And everyone listening might get it. But in 2,000 years' time, who knows if people understand what I'm talking about? If I said something like, oh yes, well, it's like Captain America's shield, it acts in defense of people, you know, in 2,000 years' time, people might say, Wow, you know, there was this mythical creature named Captain America, and who knows if he existed, but you know, we know that he had a shield that could deflect all harms, and maybe they go for an expedition to try and find the lost shield of Captain America. So things that we might take as red and excavate and get very excited about, they might have just thought, oh yeah, well, you know, that's just a pop culture reference, such as it were.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for example, I mean I'm thinking about the eye of the needle, is that actually a literal translation is harder for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven. If you take that literally, that says that rich people is impossible. That's right. Whereas actually, if you know the eye of the needle is a very low entrance into the old city of Jerusalem, you know that actually they just have to stoop. So it's about humility. And so you kind of get that lost in translation. And I'm assuming that that oral tradition that was then written down in a variety of languages, sort of, you know, a bit of Greek and a bit of Aramaic, then translated into Latin, then translated into other, you know, the actually the positionality of the translators of what word they choose to translate to in a sort of their context. But it's so important that we kind of go back quite often to these ancient texts and those ancient cultures to go, what would it have meant to the people that were hearing these words sort of firsthand?

SPEAKER_06 9:50

Absolutely. I'll give you a very quick example, actually, that uh I heard from Professor Will Gaffney, who's uh an American Hebrew Bible professor, and it's so simple, but it really shatters a lot of your kind of preconceived ideas. She says, in I think it's Song of Solomon or one of the poetic texts, historically, it was always translated into English as I am black but beautiful. And she went back and looked at it in Hebrew and went, Well, actually, it says I am black and beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 10:18

And just a very, very small word really can have a profound influence and impact on the way that people view themselves and other people view them. So yeah, positionality is really, really important, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

100%. So let's get into some key texts, and we're gonna start with one, we're not gonna sort of delve into too much, but we're gonna look at Mary's Magnificate. Why is that significant in the context of this conversation?

SPEAKER_06 10:45

I mean, Mary's Magnificate is delightful because it's kind of Jesus' mission statement, but it's not, right? Because he doesn't say it, it's his mother who says it.

SPEAKER_04 10:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 10:52

Luke is a wonderful gospel for that, that it centers the women of the story, it gives them do you a chord, I suppose, and and they have voice. Uh, it passes the Bechtel test. Well, actually, it kind of doesn't, actually, now that I think about it. If we take Jesus to be, you know, this otherworldly ethereal creature, then perhaps it's fine. But for an ancient text to give women this much prominence, it is unusual.

SPEAKER_04 11:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_06 11:17

And she says these things that if you know you were walking the street in 2025 in certain countries and said these things, you might be frowned upon by government agencies and be watched, right? And this mission statement about the way that she understands God coming in human form and being born as her son and all these things, she talks about this idea that he will bring down rulers from their thrones, lift up the humble, depose the rich, basically, and bring about justice on this earth. Now, did Mary actually say that? We're not sure, of course. Like we've said, two thousand years plus oral tradition. But obviously, this idea is important to the church, it's important to the Christian community, so it's in the text. So that gives us a little bit of a hint, this idea that within New Testament Christianity, there's this idea perhaps that maybe God is actually interested in justice, maybe God is interested in pushing back against the excesses of the rich. And we see that right from the beginning of the Lucan Gospel, which suggests to the reader or to the hearer, perhaps more accurately, that this is going to be a gospel about those things, about justice, about enacting, tearing down the rich and the rulers, and to lift up the humble. So, yeah, in that sense it's a really important opening line, almost such as it were, because it takes no prisoners.

SPEAKER_00 12:45

If we're sort of putting this into a colonization context, maybe more for the people at the time, this would have been a sort of anti-colonial, this would have been quite music to their ears if you're in a kind of occupied land.

unknown 12:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

Would it have been read that way?

SPEAKER_06 13:01

Absolutely. Let's say a little bit after the destruction of Jerusalem, so you know, let's say post-70 CE, you're part of a Christian community where Jerusalem's been destroyed, Jewish people have been scattered and dispersed. You're not really sure what's going to happen. You're in this state where the empire has definitively exercised its power and proved that it is indeed the greatest power in the world at the time by murdering lots and lots of people. And then you hear, don't worry, we have hope. God has given us someone to follow, a leader who will show us how to fight these structures of oppression and to challenge evil and all these things. That's pretty great, actually. It gives you hope where you might not have had hope previously. And you can see perhaps of why Christianity was always in the early years so attractive, particularly to marginalized and dispossessed people, to slaves, right? Because it's saying to them, guess what? God's going to make it okay. And if we just hang in there, we believe in this fellow Jesus, God will make things right. So that element of pushing back against the colonization of the empire is really, really powerful and really, really helpful.

SPEAKER_00 14:15

And actually, even in the context of you know the Jewish people waiting for a messiah, this potentially tells you a little bit about what kind of messiah maybe Luke was affiliated with.

SPEAKER_04 14:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

Potentially a bit more of a militant one, maybe, that was there sort of as a political messiah that was going to sort of try and overthrow the oppressors.

SPEAKER_06 14:36

Yeah, and the thing to remember about the biblical texts, people say that the Bible's not political. Well, it's deeply political because you know politics affects the way that people live their lives. And so, yes, there is always a political element to every text that we read, but especially within the Bible, and that's really, really important because if we try and cut that out, we lose a lot of the message.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

Yeah, fascinating. So let's move on to some of the main teachings of Jesus, and we're going to look at three key teachings of Jesus linked to colonization. So, one in relation to what Jesus says about the Romans, one about Jesus' teaching on wealth, and then the Great Commission and the impact of that, you know, the sort of hermeneutical interpretation of that verse. So let's start with Romans. Yes. What was the context in which Jesus was talking?

SPEAKER_06 15:25

So I'll speak specifically to this one text that we have in mind, which is when some of the Pharisees and you know, sort of Jewish folk who are opposed to Jesus come along to try and trap Jesus, as they often do.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 15:39

I should note that when we talk about this, the idea is that this is not specifically an anti-Jewish thing. Jesus is Jewish, right? So this is they're worried about this fella.

SPEAKER_02 15:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 15:51

Called Jesus, because he's going around doing revolutionary talk, basically.

SPEAKER_02 15:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 15:56

Right? Let's take Jesus, you know, let's assume that he is active in the years sort of 20 to 30, however we want to take it. Forty years later is when the Jewish people revolt against Rome and then Jerusalem gets destroyed. We already see at this time lots of discontent and stirrings and little rebellions beginning to rear their heads. And so actually, a lot of the Jewish folk are rightfully very worried about what Jesus is trying to do, because if he starts a new rebellion against the Romans, well, that ends badly for everyone. So a lot of it is not necessarily just them going, Oh, well, you know, we refuse to exercise our belief in him as the Messiah. It's actually them saying, This has got the potential to really ruin everyone's day. So yeah, it's a very nuanced approach, I should say, that we need to bring into the text because it's not as simple as Jewish people bad, Jesus good. It's much more complex than that. So they come along to him and they say, Well, you know, is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not? Should we pay or shouldn't we? Because what do you have to think? Jesus says, Why are you trying to trap me? Bring me a denarius, let me look at it. He brings a coin and he says, Whose image is this, whose inscription? They say, Well, that's Caesar's. And he says, Well, give to Caesar what is Caesar's and give to God what is God's. And this is a text that's often interpreted to talk about the separation of church and state, for example, about taxation, about making sure that your business dealings are separate to your religious life, or however you want to read it, right? And those are all legitimate ways to put it. What's helpful, however, I think, is to consider the undercurrent of what's being said here. If we think about what's been talked about, this idea that you've got this fellow, Jesus, who is a bit of a rabble brouser, you know, has got these revolutionary leanings, shall we say, and everyone's a bit nervous about him. Bring along a denarius. Well, if you have a look at Roman coins from that era, I mean, if you look at coins from our era, we draw a lot from what has come before. And coins haven't changed all that much, actually, interestingly, in the time. But upon the coin always is the head of Caesar on one side, and then on the other side, often some sort of propaganda message, but pushing some sort of imperial agenda. Again, after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, they minted a whole bunch of coins to celebrate the destruction of Jerusalem. So coins are very effective propaganda because everyone has them. It's like banknotes. If you print something on a banknote, you want everyone to see it. So Jesus says, Whose image is this? And the word image itself is really important because if you read the Hebrew Bible, you will know that one of the Ten Commandments is do not create images. And so the fact that these Pharisees, these religious folk, are handling this coin already is a problem. They're already implicated, right, in being able to engage with Roman wealth. And you can imagine, right? I think there's a degree for a bit of creative imagination. You might say, oh, well, you know, they had to go and fetch a coin, which is fine. But imagine if one of them had it on their person, right? Well, Jesus has just trapped them. He's gone, well, you know, you're complicit in this Roman economy, because why have you got a Roman coin? You're carrying around an idol for all effects and purposes, and it, you know, that's a problem. And then he says, Whose inscription? The inscription is also very interesting because it says a number of different things, and it varies from coin to coin, but most of them will say something like Caesar Augustus Patepatrii Divifilius, which is Caesar the magnificent one, father of the fatherland, son of a god. And the moment I say that out loud to people, they go, Oh, I get it.

SPEAKER_05 19:51

And you go, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_06 19:55

And so what people often forget is that the Caesars, the emperors, make a claim to divinity, right? They never come out and say that they're gods themselves, right? Because that's one bridge too far within the Roman world. But they're very happy to say, Oh, yes, I am the son of a god. Well, funnily enough, here's another fellow claiming to be the son of a god. Right? And so when Jesus says, give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's, the Hebrew Bible says, All the earth is the Lord's and everything in it. So if you know your scriptures, which these people would have, Jesus is delivering a verbal akhand, quite a strong one, saying to them, Well, you, by trying to even consider being part of this imperial world, you are now complicit in everything that's happening here. You have lifted up an idol above your worship of God because you're accepting the terms of what Caesar is offering. Now, that's a stronger interpretation. You can pull it back a little bit, and even if we pull it back a bit, Jesus is just saying, hey, the claims that this empire is making are directly opposed to the claims that we believe, so why are we even entertaining this possibility? Why are we talking about this? They have no answer, right? He just says the story goes that he says, give back to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's, and then the story just ends with, in the Market text, they were amazed at him. Because how do you respond to that? There is no response to that. Jesus has shown them up very convincingly, I think.

SPEAKER_00 21:28

And so therefore, just listening to what you're saying, to claim that Jesus is the Son of God would have meant something very different within his context than it maybe does now.

SPEAKER_06 21:39

Oh yeah. It's a political statement as well as a spiritual statement.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

And I don't know which way round it came, whether people just assumed he was the son of God or whether that's what he wanted to portray himself as. So they use this term son of God because that would have been in their vernacular, and that's how they would have understood sort of political rulers.

SPEAKER_06 21:59

It would be like You know, if Jesus was floating around today, I think the question worth asking is what language would he use in regard to rulership that we would understand.

SPEAKER_02 22:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 22:07

So, you know, he might say instead of all of these, he might say first among equals. He th he might use his majesty, right? He might use president. You know, the sort of different languages that we see floating around. Because language shifts over time, right? And this is one of those things we lose if we're not deeply embedded within the Roman world.

SPEAKER_00 22:26

Yeah. So I think today Son of God seems to be a theological statement, whereas actually at the time it was more a political one.

SPEAKER_06 22:33

Both and.

SPEAKER_00 22:33

Both and. In terms of colonization, how do we interpret this message that Jesus is giving? Is it anti-colonial? Is it pro-colonial? How would you interpret that?

SPEAKER_06 22:45

On first glance it is anti-colonial, but it's a bit more complex than that, of course, right? Because what Jesus is pushing back against is the claim to divinity of Caesar and reminding the Jewish people that he's speaking to at the time that they should not be engaging with this claim of divinity in any way. Now, that's great. That's a clear anti-oppressor or anti-invader message. And that remains true today. If we consider many of the historical instances of invasion, occupation, genocide, a lot of them come with deep religious undertones, i.e., the divine right to dispossess, right? The divine right to enact certain things. So we can read it as Jesus pushing back against those things quite easily, I think. The coin is another example of that because to establish a new form of currency, or in this instance, to either force or over time infiltrate a new form of currency is also its own form of colonization, right? Because, well, you're losing what you had in the first instance. And like I said, the coins bear propaganda. So if we look at it from that perspective, it's pretty clear, like Jesus is pushing back against, you might say, capitalist systems, you might say invasive systems, you might say oppressive systems, all kinds of things. What's also helpful to think about though is what's the alternative, right, that Jesus is suggesting here? And the implication in the Gospels is, well, Jesus is the Son of God. And so what a lot of kind of post-and decolonial scholars who engage with the biblical text say is, well, the problem is there is no alternative being presented. Arguably, what you have is kind of a theocracy. It's not a theocracy because there's very clearly an emperor in the Roman world, but then all that happens is that in the other texts, there's just a flip, right? You get rid of the emperor, here's our new emperor, it's Jesus, hooray. Well, two wrongs don't make a right. That doesn't solve anything. And that's, I think, the question that a lot of us who work in decolonial thinking have to grapple with, which is in this world, the world of the New Testament, is there really an alternative? Can the biblical writers of the time conceive of an alternative way of living to something that looks and smells a little bit like empire? I mean, even today, right? Can we realistically come up with something that doesn't look like this big capitalist world that we live in? It's pretty difficult, actually. And so, yeah, you fall into the trap then of just reversing stuff, which means that, you know, if Jesus just says, Well, actually, I'm the Son of God, worship me instead, well, we kind of still have a lot of problems because sure Jesus is a good person and he acts rightly and justly, but what happens when Jesus leaves and the next ruler takes over? And the argument is that that's exactly what we see play out in Christian history. Because there are so few alternatives actually offered, we just keep what we had and change the window dressing a little bit, basically.

SPEAKER_02 25:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 25:50

And the fact is that Jesus challenges the systems, yes, absolutely he does, but then he gets hoovered up into heaven.

unknown 25:59

Right.

SPEAKER_06 25:59

He doesn't stick around and bring about this new in the early church in apps, we begin to see glimmers of what this new society might look like, but that also doesn't really last for very long.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

Yeah. And also it does feel like they're trying to figure it out. It's not like Jesus left and they all went, Right, everyone know what they're doing, brilliant, you do that. They were like, What where is he? When is he coming back? We're terrified, we're gonna hide in a room. And so they didn't have this fully formed sort of system of running society or developing Christianity. They sort of had to kind of work it out as they're going along and make a few mistakes, and Paul has to come along and sort of kind of tell everyone what to do, and you know, and then throughout church history, you've just had loads and loads of councils where they've all tried to work out what we meant to believe. What does everyone else believe? What did Jesus say? And so we've had this kind of evolution of Christianity rather than it's sort of established fact at one in one moment in time. You mentioned there obviously this whole story centres around a coin. And so actually, one thing that Jesus does speak quite a lot about is kind of wealth and money. So what was Jesus' economic critique, and how is that relevant to this conversation?

SPEAKER_06 27:14

So there's a bunch of stories that are strung together that I usually use to talk about in terms of an economic critique comes in Luke. So we're hopping around from gospel to gospel, which you also shouldn't do with that some warnings. But we're back to Luke where the Magnificat was earlier. Luke 19, famous story of Zacchaeus, right? And actually, there's a sequence of stories about Jesus and economic critique there, and I'll see if I can power through some of them quite quickly. So Luke 19, most people know this story, right? Where Jesus enters Jericho, there's a guy called Zacchaeus, he's a tax collector. If you've been around church circles for almost any amount of time, you know the story that tax collectors are hated, and you know, they're people who are despised because they sell out their countrymen, inflict economic disaster upon them, basically. So he climbs the fig tree because he's short, Jesus looks at him and goes, Ah, Zacchaeus, I'm coming to your house today. So Jesus picks a wealthy guy and goes, you know, hey mate, I'm coming to your house for dinner. Gets probably quite a good feed. Then everyone's a bit annoyed about this. Zacchaeus stands up and he says, Here and now, I'm reading it off Luke 19, I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I've cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount. So Zacchaeus here, after an encounter with Jesus, is not just saying, I will restore what I have cheated. He is going above and beyond, right? He is abundantly giving away. If we add this idea of him cheating and giving back four times the amount plus half his possessions to the poor, he's probably not got much left. So he's really divesting himself of wealth in order to restore justice, shall we say. And then Jesus says, Today salvation has come to this house, because this man too is a son of Abraham, for the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost. Only after Zacchaeus makes this declaration does Jesus make a his declaration of salvation. So there's the encounter with Jesus, yes, but that's not enough, right? Because Jesus can turn up to this guy's house, have dinner, say, Right, salvation's come, see you later. But he waits. He waits for Zacchaeus to respond to the allegations being made. He waits for Zacchaeus to declare that he is changed by this encounter, perhaps, uh, and willing to financially wreck himself in order to restore the wrongs that he has done. And then Jesus says, Right, now you're good. So that's a clear statement. Then he goes on, immediately it says, to tell this story about the ten Minas. Now we have to be careful with this one, because there's two versions of this story. There's a Methian version and a Lucan version, and they are different. In the Lucan story, it says, a man of noble birth went to a distant country to become king and then to return. He called his servants, gave them ten minas, said, put this money to work, and then there's this weird little line that says his subjects hated him and sent a delegation after him to say, We don't want this man to be our king. Really strange. Come back to that. The man comes back and after becoming king, he calls his servants. The first one comes back and says, You gave me one, I have earned ten more. He says, You have been trustworthy in a small matter, take charge of ten cities. The second one comes back and says, You have earned five more, take charge of five cities. Another one came back and said, I put it away in a piece of cloth, I am afraid of you, because you take out what you did not put in and reap what you did not sow. The master doesn't deny this allegation. He says, You knew, did you, that I am a hard man taking out what I did not put in and reaping what I did not sow. Why didn't you put my money on deposit so that when I came back I could have collected it with interest? And then he said, Take his minna away and give it to the one who has ten. They said, Oh, he already has ten. He said, I tell you to everyone who has more will be given, and as for the one who has nothing, even that will be taken away. Take my enemies in and kill them in front of me. Right? Now, again, this is different to the Methean parable. In the Lucan story, there's this weird little thing of a guy going to claim kingship and come back, and his enemies hated him and sent a delegation after him. Historically, most of the time we've interpreted this as being Jesus, right? Jesus is left heaven to come to earth, or dies on earth to go to heaven to become king and come back, and his enemies hate him, and so it's it's a parable in theory about doing the best you can with what God has given you, and then God will richly bless you in return. Okay, well that doesn't really tally with the way that Jesus talks about things and does things, particularly in Luke. Now, one of the Herodians, I can't remember which one exactly, I think it was the one after Herod the Great, went to Rome to ask Caesar to make him king over against his brothers when his father died. So the moment I say that, you go, Oh, actually, hold on. It's Jesus referring to a historical thing that happened here. Then let's unpack that a little bit more. Okay. So if this parable is about this Herodian king, what then do we need to change? Well, let's reread that, right? He gave these guys money and said, Go and invest it. The first one comes and says, I had one, but I have earned ten. You now take charge of ten cities. Well, that makes a lot more sense, all of a sudden, because if we are talking about Herodian King, this is to do with his generals, shall we say. How do you earn ten out of one? Right? That is an enormous return on investment. Well, if we think about the ways of earning money and the ways of getting that type of return, most people would say to you there is no way to do so in a fair and legal way.

SPEAKER_01 33:02

Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 33:04

So the implication here is that some dodgy dealing has happened. Right? That this person has done whatever it is and gotten this enormous return on investment. So the master is really happy about that because, ah, you know how to get money out of people, whatever it is, right? And often in that time, we consider all these schemes that have existed for a long time, Ponzi schemes, ways of extracting money from people, economic oppression, all of that. Fine. Same with your second person, a bit less, but still 500% return on investment. Crazy. That's not fair, right? Then the third sermon who's mentioned says, I was afraid of you. You take out what you did not put in and reap what you did not sow. Okay, well, if that's not about Jesus and that's about Herod, oh, okay. That's a critique, right? That the Herodian kings who were client kings subject to Rome, that's a clear critique, right? By Jesus, an economic critique. You have not invested in your citizens, and you are reaping what you have not sown. Especially when we think about the fact that we Jesus is in the house of a tax collector still. Right? He's talking about the way of the economic systems within the Roman Empire being out to work in this part of the world. And then the master says, Well, just put the money on deposit and collect an interest. Well, within Jewish law, you can't collect interest on each other. So that's also dodgy. And then the master's final words are, those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king, bring them here and kill them in front of me. Those who have more will be given to them. Those who have nothing, even that will be taken away. Now, if we read that, that's a very capitalist statement, actually.

SPEAKER_01 34:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right?

SPEAKER_06 34:45

It's it's going, oh, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, basically.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 34:49

And all of a sudden we go, whoa, hold on a second. This parable is about money. It's not this weird spirit, well, it can be this weird spiritual allegory about you know Jesus' kingship as well, if you want it to be, and about stewardship, but it's literally just about money.

SPEAKER_01 35:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 35:07

It's about the way that we use our money for righteousness or for evil. And this is a critique of the way that money has been used for evil, and it's framed by a tax collector going, what I did was evil, I'm paying it all back.

SPEAKER_02 35:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 35:22

And then it's even more telling that immediately after this story, Jesus wanders over to Jerusalem and kicks out all of the people who are selling in the temple. So this whole chapter, chapter 19, is actually an extended critique of economic systems within Unjust Empire.

SPEAKER_02 35:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 35:41

But it takes a lot of nuance and care to get there. It's not something you can preach.

SPEAKER_00 35:45

But actually, it's much more consistent with, you know, when Jesus turns over the tables in the temple, that that was about injustice, inequality, and people profiting off cheating and lying and stealing. If we think about the camel and the eye of the needle, that it's much more consistent with Jesus' other teachings, that this would be a warning about an oppressive economic system where some people get unfairly richer and other people get unfairly poorer. So this is more just a story about what can happen rather than it meant to be some idealistic thing about a sort of perfect society.

SPEAKER_06 36:24

Yeah, Jesus is making a critique based on things that are familiar to his audience because they're happening around them.

SPEAKER_00 36:29

Yeah. But it's interesting that 2,000 years later they're still equally as valid that capitalism does create inequality. It's designed to do that. That's really, really fascinating. So, in terms of empire and colonization, that is an unjust system that lies, cheats, steals, oppresses in order to create winners that are victors that are financially profiting from that oppression.

SPEAKER_06 36:59

Right. And it's tied in with this idea of within the Hebrew scriptures, there's these ideas about, as we mentioned, you know, don't take interest on loans. Yeah. Every seven years, you know, you give back a certain amount to the community, you bring your first fruits to the temple. There's an almost inbuilt system within that of some level of social care.

SPEAKER_00 37:21

Yes.

SPEAKER_06 37:22

Right? Whereas when the Romans come in with their, I guess you might call it a pre- or early kind of capital type system, it's not quite capitalism, but it's close.

SPEAKER_02 37:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 37:32

It kind of destroys all of that.

SPEAKER_02 37:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 37:34

Because the idea is just to gain and to accumulate wealth as much as possible. And if we get time, we'll get to revelation, and there's a critique of that in Revelation as well. So there is this idea that this new system that's being brought in is warping and changing our society for the worse. And Jesus is very happy to push back against that.

SPEAKER_00 37:53

Yeah. I mean it's really fascinating. So the last thing that Jesus is recorded to have said is now known as the Great Commission. So I'm going to read it, and then we can explore how this is being interpreted in relation to colonization. So then Jesus came to them and said, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you, and surely I am with you always to the very end of the age. Wow, okay. It's a very complex, I think, rich piece of text with so many interesting words in, but just unpack this for us.

SPEAKER_06 38:41

I mean, if you grew up a Christian, if you grew up within those faith traditions, this is a very encouraging text, right? Because it's very motivating, it gives you that impetus to go and do things, there's that assurance at the very end that I am with you always to the end of the age. Very exciting stuff. If you are on the receiving end of this text, it's perhaps less exciting. Yeah. Because often what what's what's drawn out of the text, shall we say, and this is seen in the way that empire works itself out, and not just ancient empire, but more recent empires, right? Spanish, English, all kinds. Well, we've got the authority. Jesus has delegated his authority to us. We'll often alloy in things like subdue the earth, multiply, fill it, and subdue it. Go and make disciples of all nations. Well, great, we can do that. Doesn't say that we have to do that in a nice way.

SPEAKER_02 39:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 39:39

And baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. If taken to extremes, and the problem is that humans do take things to extremes, this can just mean obliterate other people's cultures and other people's faith traditions in the interest of achieving this goal.

SPEAKER_02 39:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 39:58

Right? And it's interesting that it's a complex thing for Jesus to say. We have to try and remember that when Jesus says this stuff, there's no guarantee that Christianity is going to survive beyond his death and resurrection and the early church, because there is not many of them. They're a small sect or small cult who are floating around this one part of the world at the time. All of a sudden, a few hundred years later, when Christianity becomes the dominant religion of the empire and has the machinery, the war machinery of empire backing it, well, this takes on a much more sinister meaning. And so it's a really good lesson, I think, in this decolonial idea that even things that are intended well can unfortunately be flipped around and used for evil. And when we have colonizing type language or impulses like this, they can really end poorly, basically. And so, in some perspectives, these are the verses that launch a thousand ships. They just happen to be ships of war, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_02 41:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 41:06

So all it takes sometimes is just to flip your perspective and go, what happens if I'm on the other end of this? Yeah, it's not great, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_00 41:13

So do you think this is almost then justified colonization? So, under the guise of bringing the good news of Jesus Christ to other countries, we've actually used that as a justification for colonization. And so actually, what we haven't done is been sensitive to the culture and provided a Christianity that is sensitive to context. We've enforced our cultural version of Christianity on others. But it's that language of authority, isn't it? That we have been given this authority as Christians.

SPEAKER_03 41:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:46

You know, this is my personal take. I think Jesus is fantastic and I think his teachings inspire me. This for me is hugely problematic. And I don't know what Jesus meant by it, but I know how it has been interpreted and used to colonize, oppress, and sometimes massacre people who do not follow the authority. Do you think there's a difference then between what Jesus meant and how it's been interpreted historically through the church?

SPEAKER_06 42:14

I'd say so. I mean, to me, the simplest way of thinking about it is to look at how Jesus makes disciples, right? And his idea of making disciples is not forcibly making people do certain things. He comes along and he goes, Oi, come follow me. And then while they're following him, he goes, Oh, by the way, this is really difficult. Are you sure you want to do this? Right? Your mother and brother and everyone will hate you, just making sure you're gonna deny me. Jesus puts in all of his caveats along the way in his journey with his disciples, and he makes it very clear to them that this is something very difficult for them to do. And so I think that's where we can kind of split the difference a little bit. That I think Jesus' idea of discipleship is very different to the church's idea of discipleship. Where I would almost say that maybe a more helpful way of thinking of it is Jesus' word instead of disciple might be apprentice. Right? This idea of someone who comes alongside and learns and slowly gets inducted because that's what it was for the early Christians. Unfortunately, when if we want to do it quickly and outwork it, that we have colonization, right? And to be fair, Christianity isn't the only thing that's complicit. Often it is a convenient excuse, right? That people go, oh well, you know, we've got this mandate, that's yeah, it's divinely granted. You can't separate that from other urges and impulses, like the urges of empires to expand, or, oh, we've just discovered sugar cane over there, or there's a an enormous amount of land over there, or hey, here's a population that we can make into slaves, right? The justifications often come later, and by that point we've had enough time to make them fairly airtight. But certainly what happens, as as you mentioned, is that the culture and the religion get alloyed together such that they're inseparable.

SPEAKER_02 44:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 44:09

Right? And so for many nations still today, right, Christian equals Western.

SPEAKER_02 44:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_06 44:16

And and usually in negative ways. Not always, but often. I remember being told stories from people I did my theological studies with who grew up in the Pacific Islands, where, despite it being the Pacific Islands and enormously warmer a lot of the time, all the time they wear sort of normal clothing or traditional clothing. When they go to church, they put on a full three-piece suit, and you know, you must come to church in a suit because that's what the English did. And that's what they forced us to do, because that's how they wanted to be presented before God, because they brought civilization along with God. So it becomes this complex mess, it's all blended together, unfortunately. And it's quite difficult for people to work out how to separate those things.

SPEAKER_00 44:58

Yeah. Yeah. And also it almost feels it's disrespectful for God to do something different. But actually, if you really were bringing New Testament Christianity to society, in the context of what we've just said about Jesus' economic kind of appraisal, he wouldn't be bringing capitalism, you'd be bringing more socialist ideas. And I think capitalism has also got caught up with Christianity and sort of seen as that's part of the kind of Western version of Christianity, is that capitalism is the right thing.

SPEAKER_06 45:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:34

So that's really interesting. Now, there's a small letter in the New Testament called Philemon, which I think often goes unnoticed. I would say I don't even know if I've ever read it. But actually, there's some really interesting verses in there that are relevant to this topic. So let's talk about the context of this letter and then the different interpretations of some of the verses it contains.

SPEAKER_06 45:55

Yep. So Philemon is wonderfully contested, or can be wonderfully contested, because at various points in history it's been interpreted as either being pro-slavery or anti-slavery. And you go, hmm, okay. And then when you read it, the story, well, it's not a story, it's a letter. It's a letter written by Paul, and I think from memory it's one of the ones that it's not disputed. So people are fairly sure it is written by Paul, or certainly narrated by Paul, written to Philemon, who was a member of one of the churches that Paul was part of, or had established. And basically Paul is saying to Philemon, hey mate, there's this guy Onesimus, who was one of your slaves, he's run away and come to me. I want you to take him back. That's all the letter is. And on the surface of that, you go, Well, that's bad. Paul says, take your slave back, right?

SPEAKER_02 46:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 46:48

That's really problematic, actually. Because not only is it justifying slavery, it's returning abusee to abuser. Right? Everything about it is wrong. And this is where I think we run into issues when we just read words on page. If you read it like that, yeah, of course that's what it is. If you add in nuance and inject some emotion into it, this letter is deeply sarcastic, deeply ironic. It's pulling all sorts of emotional and social levers in order to push Philemon, the recipient of the letter, to actually releasing Onestimus. The problem is Paul never says that. Paul never says, release him from his slavery.

SPEAKER_02 47:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 47:30

Because he can't. Right? That's just not socially acceptable for Paul to say it. He can hint it very strongly.

SPEAKER_01 47:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 47:37

Right? And he does that through the words that he says. The problem is we don't see that. So I'll read a little bit to you. I'll read it twice. I'll try and do that very quickly. So Paul says from verse ten, I appeal to you for my son Onesimus, who became my son while I was in chains. Formerly he was useless to you, but now he has become useful both to you and to me. I am sending him, who is my very heart back to you. I would have liked to keep him with me so that he could take your place in helping me while I'm in chains for the gospel, but I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that any favour you do would not seem forced but would be voluntary. Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a while was that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave, but better than a slave as a dear brother. He is very dear to me, but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and brother in the Lord. Okay, so if we read it like that, whatever.

SPEAKER_01 48:31

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 48:32

Now, let's inject a bit of emotion, a bit of pathos into it. I appeal to you for my son Onesimus, who became my son while I was in chains. Formerly he was useless to you. But now he has become useful both to you and to me. I'm sending him who is my own very heart back to you. I would have liked to keep him with me so that he could take your place in helping me while I am in chains for the gospel, did not want to do anything without your consent, so that any favor you do would not seem forced, but would be voluntary. Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever. No longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me, but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord. So if you read it that way, Paul's really piling on sort of emotional and all kinds of different rhetorical techniques. You know, it's almost a little bit like a mafia boss kind of going, You gotta do me a favor. It's not really you're you're not really doing a favor, this is a command couched in favorable language. And the problem is when we read it flat, we don't see it that way, when we inject all of this, wow, actually, yeah. And if you've grown up in highly context specific cultures who are not direct in the way they communicate, you'll miss that, right? So I grew up sort of in Southeast Asia, and a lot of Southeast Asian cultures are less direct. And so when I read this, I immediately get it. I'm like, oh yeah, okay, yeah, this is a command. This is a command to Philemon to take him as a brother and release him and make him a fellow man, not a slave. But if you aren't from that type of reading background, you might be like, oh no, this is very clearly about, oh, this is bad because he wants him to take him back as a slave. It's not that simple. Yeah. Right? But it again, it requires layers of nuance, it requires reading it out loud, I suggest, to really understand it. And people don't take the time to do that in the same way as as perhaps we might have.

SPEAKER_00 51:10

But I think a lot of us that are listening are teachers, and we'll totally understand that when you're dealing with an a child who's been misbehaving, you don't shout at them, you don't tell them how awful they are, though you don't tell them to stop. You go, it's so lovely that we get this chance to talk. I know that you are this amazing person, and I know that you've just made a mistake, and actually you're gonna be much better in the future. We use that language to influence their behavior in a positive way. You wouldn't take that literally. You know that they're a terrible kid, they've done really awful things, they're really naughty. You just don't say it like that because that's not convincing. That's just going to antagonize somebody and they're not gonna do what you say. And so there is a bit of manipulation you use as a teaching tool when you've got a bit of a naughty kid. And actually, though, I think we could probably understand that way of organizing things. It's really fascinating.

SPEAKER_06 52:01

Let me eject one more quick thing, which is that the the beginning of the letter, Paul lists all the people that this is written to, and at the end, he says two things. He he says, All these people heard me write this letter, and also I'm coming to visit. Yeah. Right. So Paul adds this social pressure of going, this is a letter to be read out loud to the entire church, not to just this one guy. And then at the end he goes, Oh, a bunch of people heard about this, and also I'm coming to check up on you. Right.

SPEAKER_00 52:28

How does he do it? I thought he was in prison.

SPEAKER_06 52:30

Yeah, I mean he you know.

SPEAKER_00 52:31

He's gonna say, I will be let out at some point, and when I'm let out, I'm gonna come and just check that you've done what I've asked you to do, kind of thing.

SPEAKER_06 52:37

Yeah, Paul's Roman citizenship goes a long way towards mitigating his circumstances.

SPEAKER_00 52:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So, you know, what we're gonna do is we're gonna stop it there. We're gonna do a part two where we talk about revelation and we unpack some of that because that's quite a rich, deep text, and I think it's gonna take its own. So thank you so much for this. It's been so fascinating, so interesting, and really reminds us of the importance of looking hermeneutically at text and looking at context and positionality and the bias that that can create. Thank you for your insight and thank you for your wisdom.

SPEAKER_06 53:13

Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 53:14

My name is Louisa Jane Smith, and this has been the R.E. Podcast. The podcast for those of you who think R E is boring, but it is not. It is rich, it is interesting, it is complex, and it uses our brain power in a way that many things don't. But thank you so much for letting us bore the life out of you.