狄瀚晨

The first Christians were revolutionaries. The first sermon of Jesus Christ (PBUH) announced the restoration of the Jubilee year, which was an annual tradition in Judea that canceled all debt - forgotten after centuries of Greek and Roman occupation. The followers of Jesus rebelled against the elite Roman creditor landowning class, and when the message of Christ was universalized, it came to represent all the oppressed debtors of the Roman Empire seeking relief. This is why it was persecuted by Roman authorities with such extreme violence and brutality. The first Christians established Communist societies. This is clearly written in Acts 4:32: "All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had." Acts 2:44-45: "Now all who believed were together, and had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods, and divided them among all, as anyone had need." It was only later that the economic and overtly Communist goals of the Christians were erased from the religion, replacing them with the "purely spiritual." But this notion of the "purely spiritual" divorced from actual reality was drawn from the Stoics and other Greco-Roman forms of philosophical Paganism. Read the passages of the Bible which denounce excessive fixation on the worldly, and you will find are actually references to selfish individual gain and greed. The other-worldly can be easily interpreted, in contrast to the Stoic and pagan view, as in reference to the higher, more intangible and lofty realities of collective existence. Mathew 6:33: "But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." The kingdom of God is none other than Communist society, where devotion to the higher realities of obligation to one's neighbors and ones community is what produces wealth, rather than individual envy or greed. Or do the modern Pharisees mean to imply that God promises the satisfaction of necessity will fall out of the sky? The meaning clearly implies a co-operative existence based on belief and mutual obligation. How do we know this? Because the same chapter opens with the command to the faithful to help the needy selflessly and without expectation of reward, and to forgive others trespasses in order that they may be forgiven for oneself. And modern scholarship has found clear evidence trespass refers to DEBT. This is what establishes the context of verses 25-33, which make clear that one should not be anxious about 'worldly' necessity: Because so long as believers take care of each other selflessly, there is no need to worry about anything. What it means for God to take care of your problems is not that he will magically do so from thin air: He will do so through the actions of a COMMUNITY OF BELIEVERS. The Bible tells us that God is present wherever there is constituted a community of the faithful. Jesus (PBUH) was not talking about the aethereal realm of the Greco-Roman tradition: But a concrete and materially real community! Let us further devote our attention to the famous passage - from Mathew 22 - where Jesus commands the faithful to "render unto Caesar." Many forget that the context was an attempt to trap Jesus (PBUH) into saying something that would get him killed by the Roman authorities. It talks about Jesus rebuking the hypocrisy of the Pharisees who asked him about paying tribute to Caesar - what was this hypocrisy? That they were using the very coins minted by the Roman state in the first place! The message can easily be interpreted as far more radical than refusal of tribute: As one of re-acquiring sovereignty. It is known that one of the fundamental features of the ancient (and modern) state is monopoly on coinage - a monopoly which Judea had already given up. How has the message of Jesus (PBUH) become so distorted to serve the opposite purpose as it's original meaning?