Abeer Khshiboon. Political Theology. Volume 25, Issue 7, 2024.
Introduction
Palestine, as experienced by those identifying as Palestinians, is a twofold cause: Both the ongoing Nakba since 1948 and the Western denial of the Nakba as a multifaceted loss and an intergenerational trauma. This denial can be observed in varied forms and circles. First, Maha Nassar speaks of “Nakba Denialism,” referring to the broad systematic erasure of the recent Palestinian narrative, where the Zionist project is not only absolved of settler colonialism, but also praised for supposedly being a civilizing force for Palestine. Second, Rosemary Sayigh points up the Nakba’s striking omission from trauma studies. Third, in the domain of theology and religious studies, of which this study is part, Palestine is first and foremost the Holy Land, a biblical venue; it is abstracted, essentialized, and romanticized insofar as it is hardly ever thought of, deliberated on, or portrayed as being the tangible and lived home of a living and dynamic people. The prevalent dismissal, in theological discourse, of Palestine as the colonized and fragmented homeland of the Palestinians underscores an implicit acceptance or endorsement of a regulated denial of the Nakba as history and as trauma. This paper offers a historicization of the Jesus event as a chapter in the history and memory of Jesus’s homeland. I draw parallels with first-century Palestine, and in doing so strive to go beyond a recognition of the Nakba as such in order to probe the historical reasons for its initial denial, and thus to grasp the deeper explanations for these multi-layered disenfranchisements.
The Jesus event is one of the most celebrated stories in the Christian West, and has been globalized from Eurocentric and colonial-imperial standpoints. By deifying this story, Europe has effectively detached Jesus and historic Palestine from worldly injustices, rebellions, destructions, and losses. The indisputable terror of crucifixion notwithstanding, the theological-institutional interpretation of the Jesus event—the kerygma—prevails over the event itself. Ahn Byung-Mu (1922-1996), a Protestant Korean theologian and a pivotal figure in Minjung Theology, articulates the marginalization of history by the kerygma:
In the kerygma, historical realities such as inspiration and frustration, delight and rage, hopelessness and triumph, and the thoroughgoing failures are covered up, especially since the kerygma does not reflect the misery of the crucifixion of Jesus, the wretchedness of the event, and the questions of whom and why are obscured. Compared with the kerygma, the tradition of the Jesus Event in the Gospels discloses those facts covered up by the church leadership.
Ahn accuses the first-century local Jerusalemite kerygma—not the fourth-century imperial Roman dogma—of de-historicizing the Jesus event. That is, the event had been “robbed of its historical dimension” even by the first church in history, that is, the church of the disciples, whereupon the narrative of its eyewitnesses was silenced. For Ahn, “there was no kerygma in the beginning, only the Jesus Event.” As a liberation theologian, Ahn urges a shift in focus from the kerygma to the trauma, from the ecclesiastical to the communal, and advocates for a reinterpretation of the biblical text as if we, the interpreters, were an integral part of it. I see Ahn’s approach as an opportunity to revisit the biblical past as history, and further to reintroduce and rework the Palestinian Nakba in the present. While Palestinian Liberation Theology (PLT) is particularly tailored to contextualize Christianity within the Palestinian struggle, Ahn’s liberation theology, as I read it, has more of a potential to re-indigenize the Jesus event, thus enabling the reclamation of this Palestinian event as cultural memory. According to Jan Assmann, “cultural memory” is a form of memory that extends only as far back as the past can be reclaimed and embraced as “theirs” by those who share it, and that, in turn, shapes a long-term collective consciousness and cultural identity that is rooted deeply in how the past is remembered rather than in plain factual knowledge.
In the introduction, I provide the relevant background to the historical Jesus of this reading, then to the oneness of the land, people, memory, and trauma. The article then goes on to discuss the people, a central issue of which concerns their passage between belonging and exile, as we see elaborated in Ahn’s theology. The essay concludes with an examination of remembrance as a form of resistance against erasures of history and memory.
Jesus as methodology
In contributing to an indigenous reading of the Jesus event, the historical Jesus will be used to mark out milestones. While the historical character of Jesus has been the focus of a major stream of research since the late-eighteenth century and the subject of a wide-ranging literature, this study positions him as a methodological conduit in order to shine a light on those he interacted with. Here, I do not refer to the documented disciples, but rather to the unnamed multitudes, the sheep without a shepherd, continually mentioned in the synoptic Gospels and personified in Mark as the ochlos. Following two centuries of historical Jesus research that rehumanizes, re-Judaizes, and re-Palestinizes Jesus, I argue that a shift towards a people-oriented inquiry is overdue. The masses who sought Jesus in remote corners of Galilee remain largely ignored. This quest is key to Ahn’s interpretation. His pioneering theology perceives the Markan text beyond the Gospel as a collection of narratives embraced by a Jesus who “did not utter monologue, but talked with the ochlos.” This study aims to deepen our comprehension of Jesus’s people, leveraging potentially fruitful works selected from the immense archive of scholarship on the historical Jesus.
Pursuing a Jesus who is in any way historical is no ordinary task. Historicizing Jesus is neither solely about history nor theology in the pure sense; rather, it is customarily about altering the power dynamics between the Empire and its Others. It is a reclaiming of more than a mere Jesus. One example is Abraham Geiger (1810-1874), who declared that Jesus is a Jew in Wissenschaft des Judentums. While his rabbinic-based contributions were innovative in demonstrating Jesus’s faith, Halakhah, and Pharisaism; they did not, in the nineteenth century, elicit either intellectual curiosity or exchange, but provoked only “hostility,” rooted in racialization, coloniality, and Orientalism, as Susannah Heschel has shown in Revolt of the Colonized. What suppressed Geiger’s voice is comparable with postwar Western narratives that Nassar identifies as strategically constructed to racialize and overpower Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. This similarity is somewhat unsurprising. Historically, “Orientalism is antisemitism,” as Gil Anidjar remarks:
there is no document of one that is not at the same time a document of the other. And just as an antisemitic document is never free of Islamophobia, so Islamophobia always taints the manner in which antisemitism is transmitted from one owner to another, from one war to another.
Heschel, Nassar, and Anidjar together can be used to create an analytical framework to examine how Western-Christian centrism might operate in theological encounters between the Global South and North, in the post-Shoah, post-Nakba era.
A parallel example to Geiger’s re-Judaization of Jesus is Mitri Raheb’s liberation theology. Raheb, the Lutheran Palestinian theologian, reclaims Jesus as a Palestinian Jew, highlighting what could be recognized as Jesus’s “ethnorace;” a potential for a local political identity, involvement, or insurgency against the oppressive Roman rule. Raheb’s re-Palestinization of Jesus is often labelled as antisemitic in the field. This indictment has, regrettably, circulated to the point that it has come to headline entire essays, such as The Return of Religious Antisemitism?—this latter text being one in which the scope of the indictment extends beyond the work of an individual scholar to encompass the movement of PLT, the broader spectrum of Christian activism in the Middle East, and all of Arab and Islamic studies. Alas, critiquing Global Southern theologies primarily through the accusation of antisemitism—a European hate movement cultivated and institutionalized for centuries in “Western Christendom,” as thoroughly traced by Anidjar—potentially reinforces the Empire against its Others. Otherwise put, it inadvertently perpetuates a form of epistemic violence, belittles the grievances of colonized collectives, curtails their entitlement to opposition, and cements their status as “subaltern voices” and “racialized others.” This climate discloses abiding inequalities, still entrenched in academia through notions of superiority and exoticism. Evidently, combating antisemitism with unilateral Western-centric criteria has proven not only inadequate but also counterproductive, to the point that it has seemingly replicated colonial-imperial, orientalist structures that are historically antisemitic. If antisemitism is a problem of “the Semites” and “the colonized,” as Anidjar and Heschel argue, it is inherently a Southern issue and should be addressed and fought as such—a point warranting further research.
Geiger and Raheb’s studies on Jesus are invaluable as both scholarly and decolonial endeavors. However, they do not encapsulate the entirety of the historical Jesus. Geiger’s Jesus is a rabbi immersed in Pharisaic Halakhah, as though the Jewish Law stands apart from political justice. Conversely, Raheb’s Jesus is a patriotic messiah, yet one ostensibly detached from Israelite traditions. Ahn reconstructs a more integrated historical narrative of Jesus, melding Jewish-Galilean indigeneity with revolutionary zeal. Revitalizing not just Jesus’s persona but also his engagement with the ochlos, Ahn reclaims Jesus as a messiah of the ochlos, as an insurgent shepherd of the sinners. Ahn’s Jesus is the cornerstone of this reading.
One land, one people
Decolonial quests in Palestine and the rest of the Global South exceed the dynamics of geopolitical struggles. Intimately tied to these pursuits of liberation is the task of breaking free from hegemonic anti-indigenous epistemes and epistemologies. In his Faith in the Face of Empire, Raheb redefines Ām HaĀretz (Hebrew for People of the Land) as follows:
The majority of the native people of the land seldom left. […] They remained the Am Haaretz, the native ‘People of the Land,’ in spite of the diverse empires controlling the land. […] Their identity, however, was forced to change and develop according to the new realities and empires in which they found themselves. They changed their language from Aramaic to Greek to Arabic […]. The name of the country also changed from Canaan to Philistia, to Israel, to Samaria and Judea, to Palestine. The people changed religion too. […] And yet they stayed, throughout the centuries, and remained the people of the land with a dynamic identity. In this sense Palestinians today stand in historic continuity with biblical Israel.
Raheb disputes mainstream interpretations of the Bible, asserting the unbroken presence and evolving identity of Palestinians, despite foreign dominations. His examination serves as an implicit critique of the erasure and oversimplification of indigenous histories and identities by colonial narratives. Concerning Zionism in particular, Raheb redresses the Bible and its epistemes, insofar as they are continually used to disenfranchise Palestinians from their land. He recasts biblical heritage as an affirmation of the people’s innate bond to the land. This recontextualization reveals that the State of Israel represents not a modern version of the Israelites’ homeland, but rather one of empires under which Israelites and their descendants were subjugated and tyrannized. According to Henry Laurens, since its very beginning, the Zionist Project has approached Ottoman Palestine with an orientalist and colonialist agenda. Early Jewish European immigrants showed interest in the land alone, while systematically isolating themselves from its natives, whom they perceived as barbaric and inferior. In conclusion, the State of Israel appears to proceed from the colonial-imperial legacy of the Christian West.
In the passage from biblical Israel to Zionist Israel, a significant cultural memory was obscured. The historical indigeneity of the Palestinian people, which Raheb reclaims, allows an exploration of the biblical memory of Palestine and its obscurity. Historic Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Israelites, has been essentialized by Christendom as the Holy Land, and after Nazism, as the postwar salvation nation-state for Jews. It could be argued that the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948 marked the transformation of Palestine’s ancient name into a divine justification for settler colonialism, potentially severing Palestinians from their Israelite heritage. Apparently, what has persisted for them is their recent past, as remembered and transmitted among the post-Nakba generations. It is what Assmann terms “communicative memory”—a form of living, embodied, autobiographical memory, characterized by the informal transmission of history through everyday communication and traditions. It spans a fluid time structure of eighty to one hundred years, or three to four interacting generations. Raheb describes the discontinuity between the Palestinians’ communicative-modern and cultural-biblical memories as “political amnesia.” Yet, it is noteworthy that scholars like Hans-Georg Gadamer and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi posit that complete amnesia is improbable owing to the enduring presence of the past in our living consciousness.
A decolonial critique is imperative. The historical suffering of the Jewish people links the Jewish diaspora, initiated after the destruction of Jerusalem (66-70 CE) and the crushing of the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-135 CE), to the Shoah. Nonetheless, the strategic use of biblical and indigenous narratives, from Rome to Zionism, has institutionalized the marginalization of Palestinians as Ām HaĀretz and of Palestine as biblical Israel. In order to challenge anti-indigenous epistemologies and historiographical practices, the inclusion of Palestinian history and memory is key.
One memory, one trauma
Jewish identities and cultures are diverse, yet a common origin to them is found within Deuteronomy. From a memory studies perspective, Assmann recognizes the exodus from Egypt and the revelation in the Sinai—regardless of the historical factuality of these occurrences—as major events that converted the Hebrews from a collective of slavery survivors lost in the desert into a people chosen by a sole god. Encapsulating exile, diaspora, and oppression as elements of trauma, together with adaptability, resistance, and liberation as elements of resilience, the “Exodus Tradition” has anchored the cultural memory of the twelve tribes that were later to become Ām HaĀretz. Essentially, one could argue that the Mosaic Covenant was a novel culture and lifestyle for those who came at long last to be liberated. Put differently, had it not been for the flight from injustice and inequality, “the new faith of Yahweh,” which transcended Pharaoh and Empire, would probably not have been revealed in the Sinai or anywhere else.
The tribal alliance maintained the Exodus Tradition for nearly two centuries. Later, it underwent a shift during the Davidic-Solomonic period (1250-1000 BCE), which, it might be said, affected the core cultural memory of Ām HaĀretz. A transmutation began towards embracing royal and imperial Near Eastern traditions at odds with “mono-Yahwism.” As Walter Brueggemann has suggested, a “Royal Trajectory” thus emerged, sidelining the focus on liberation, covenant fidelity, justice, social revolution, and the righteousness of God’s will in favor of an ideology that prioritized social stability, monarchic continuity, and the celebration of God’s glory and holiness. Brueggemann’s analysis offers a picture of what may be called two generations of one cultural memory: a Liberation stem; and a Royal branch. According to Ahn, despite the dominance of the royal over the pre-royal in historical and biblical records, mono-Yahwism continued to live within prophecies that arose and continued to evoke the Exodus Tradition from the time the First Temple was built until the Second Temple was destroyed. As Ahn puts it, “the tradition of the prophets who preserved mono-Yahwism ran through the genealogy of Hasidim, the Essenes, and John the Baptist to reach Jesus.”
The destruction of the Second Temple, referred to as Khurbān HaBāyit (Hebrew for home destruction) appears to have heavily influenced Ām HaĀretz. This event, along with the Bar Kokhba Revolt, coincide with Rome’s renaming of the land as Palestina, thus replacing the Hebrew names (Israel and Judea) with the name of the Israelites’ biblical “enemy.” Khurbān HaBāyit is mainly acknowledged as the beginning of the longest Jewish diaspora, and it has reshaped the traditions and identities of Ām HaĀretz in exile, affecting contemporary Jewishness to this very day. As regards Ām HaĀretz, this paper asks about those who remained: How might we explore the ways that Khurbān HaBāyit affected their traditions and identities? Jeffrey C. Alexander’s concept of “cultural trauma” is critical here. When a “collectivity” endures a catastrophic event that leaves an indelible impact on its memory, this imprints on its members shared consciousness, irreversibly transforming their identity, and fundamentally altering how they perceive their past and future. Therefore, I am led to suppose that if the imperial violence exerted by Rome against the inhabitants of first and second-century Palestine constitutes a cultural trauma, it is one for all Ām HaĀretz, those exiled and those remaining. This hypothesis challenges the dominant narrative that frames Palestinian identity as a nascent, uprooted Arab-national identity spanning two hundred years. Instead, it proposes that Palestinianness, akin to Jewishness as described by Yerushalmi, should be understood as “inseparable from its evolution through time, from its concrete manifestations at any point in history.” Postcolonial projects, wherein history calls for the re-inclusion of marginalized voices, can benefit from a Eurocentrically unbiased reading of Khurbān HaBāyit as a cultural trauma; a reading that re-includes the Israelites’ traditions, cultures, identities, memories, and traumas as ancestral roots of what could be termed contemporary Palestinianness.
Alongside the trauma experienced by Ām HaĀretz lies their notable resilience. Reengaging with the Bible and with biblical memory as essential components of Palestinian indigeneity can enable us to enrich resilient and resistive narratives pertaining to the historical trauma. This reengagement can shed new light on revolts and insurgencies against the Roman Empire, the British Mandate, and the Zionist Settler Colony. Furthermore, it enables refreshing understandings of the concepts of sumūd and intifāda, concepts that symbolize Palestinian resilience and resistance against Zionism. Through a Deuteronomic lens, both sumūd as “resilient resistance,” and intifāda as a grassroots uprising, can be explored as continuations of the Mosaic inheritance. They are closely intertwined with a persistent hope for liberation beyond the present exile.
The people
This section focuses on the ochlos, the sheep without a shepherd, the forgotten players in the Jesus event. Their story unfolds progressively. Beginning with Raheb’s geopolitical theology, it proceeds via Ahn’s sociopolitical minjung theology, and culminates in a portrayal of the third Jesus.
The meek
Raheb, sharing his homeland with Jesus, grounds his theology in the geographical and historical context of Palestine. He states that, “One cannot understand the Gospels if they are disconnected from their original context, which is Palestine.” Employing the broad sweep of a longue durée approach, Raheb suggests that Jesus viewed the land’s history as a series of recurring patterns. Over approximately three thousand years, Palestine appears as a “buffer zone,” consistently occupied and utilized by regional empires to secure their dominance. According to Raheb, Palestine’s geopolitical significance has been its capacity to endure, through either miraculous resilience or sheer persistence, across eras of relentless subjugation.
The culmination of Raheb’s theological analysis is notably found in his reinterpretation of a verse concerning the meek. In Matthew 5:5, amid the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus proclaims: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Raheb is drawn to this passage, and dedicates considerable effort to exploring its deeper meaning.
Expanding on the word meek, we can note that meekness is a trait that melds flexibility with strength, fostering an ability to endure adversities over prolonged periods. This flexibility of meekness may initially suggest weakness or a lack of resistance. However, it ultimately prevents the individual from succumbing to destruction, unveiling a profound underlying strength. In the Bible, meekness is typically attributed to those who withstand oppression and ridicule with patience, and are eventually rewarded for it. A notable example is Moses, who is described in Numbers 12:3 as the meekest man on earth.
According to Raheb, the verse on the meek was mistranslated by the church fathers in Rome. He claims that Jesus was making reference to Psalm 37 (9-11), which centers not on “the Earth,” as in the Greek text of Matthew, but on “the land.” In both Hebrew and Aramaic (the languages Jesus likely spoke), the word for “land” (mentioned six times in Psalm 37) encompasses both global and local connotations (ārets in Hebrew and ara’a in Aramaic). Thus, Jesus’s prophecy can be seen as forecasting the fall of the empire, which was a prerequisite for reclaiming the land.
Building upon the work of Naim Ateek, Raheb’s liberation theology forges a path towards an indigenizing of the Bible. Nevertheless, his argumentation against the church of the empire seems to fall short of drawing its full consequences. By attributing the Roman “mistake” to geopolitical ignorance and a struggle to “spiritualize” material rewards, Raheb either duplicates Western theological epistemologies, underplays local-imperial dynamics in Palestine (thereby giving insufficient attention to the political relations between Jerusalem and Rome), or both. This is not unusual, as liberation projects often inadvertently replicate patterns of coloniality, PLT being no exception. John Munayer and Samuel Munayer note this tendency within PLT, as led by Ateek and Raheb, emphasizing that, due to its elitism, it even remains beyond the Palestinians’ reach. As they put it: “The dependence on white-Western-male sources and methodologies in PLT largely perpetuates the hegemonic knowledge production of the West, or at least does not challenge it.”
Moreover, Raheb’s adherence to the Christ of Faith may also limit the scope of his indigenizing work. Munayer and Munayer, as proponents of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, do not problematize this dogma-dependency. Indeed, Palestinian theologians such as Raheb, Ateek, J. Munayer, and S. Munayer, suggest liberation projects that fail to confront the kerygma or dogma, rendering their efforts at liberation impracticable. After all, this version of Christ’s love, propagated by the Church and the Empire, has not liberated the meek or halted the Nakba yet. As Ghassan Kanafani had it, “love alone cannot, no matter how hot, bake a loaf of bread.” In the following sections, I will show how Ahn Byung-Mu’s minjung theology offers a promising avenue for advancing the liberation project.
The Minjung
Minjung is a Korean term made up of two words: min (people) and jung (mass, crowd, or the common). It is one of those peculiar terms that cannot be understood apart from its historical evolution. As Mitzi J. Smith explains, “Minjung signifies the Korean people’s history of oppression, colonization, and alienation.” HUR Soo notes that, in the 1920s—nearly a decade after falling under Japan’s colonial rule—the term minjung was used to address the nation’s majority, its underclass as well as agricultural and industrial workers, who were characterized in terms of their economic and educational deprivation. Throughout the 1930s, minjung gained a stronger class-conscious orientation thanks to the rise of socialism. Later, it came to encompass other phases of the Korean trauma that were aggravated after the allied forces ended Japanese colonization in the Second World War, only to embroil the peninsula in their strategies and contests. Yet, the minjung catalyst did not occur until 1970 in the south of a divided Korea, when activist laborer Jeon Tae-il set fire to himself and ran around in the streets of Seoul, shouting in protest against the state of working conditions. This self-immolation appears to have materialized the transformation of minjung from a mere concept into the seed of a grassroots movement.
Investigating the context of the Minjung Movement and its theological branch, Volker Küster highlights the importance of reading the history of the Cold War era from a local, and tragically hot, Asian, Korean, and particularly minjung perspective. Concerning Minjung Theology in particular, a radical shift within Korean Protestant thought became noticeable in the 1970s and later consolidated in the 1980s, one that dispensed with Western doctrinal interpretations and suggested a more lived and contextually rooted understanding of faith. Minjung theologians sought to focus on the struggles of the alienated and dehumanized, whom they cast as the central actors in both Korean history and the redemptive narrative of Christianity. Like other Korean theologians of his age, Ahn embarked on his journey to search for Jesus in Western Christendom—an endeavor that proved fruitless. As Küster puts it, “Ahn was shocked when he had to discover in Germany that Bultmann’s attitude towards the question of the historical Jesus leads into a dead-end street.” For Ahn, Jeon’s self-sacrifice was a turning point; he proceeded to read the biblical text through the experience of the presently oppressed, connecting the Jesus event with the suffering of the minjung. In the same era, the rest of the Global South had witnessed the emergence of other “contextual,” “liberation theologies.” Positioning Ahn within that wider spectrum, Rasiah S. Sugirtharajah writes:
These resistance theologies questioned the hegemonic and universalistic tendencies of Western discourse and power politics of the time. Some of them were thinly disguised Marxist influenced discourses. […] But minjung theology was different in that it was not only political but also an intensely cultural discourse. Minjung are not the proletariat in the Marxian sense but much more than this socioeconomic description allows. They are cultural bearers. Korean minjung theologians, especially Ahn, who were consistently adamant in refusing to define who the minjung were, have come up with hazy descriptions, such as minjung as ‘politically oppressed,’ ‘economically exploited,’ ‘socially alienated,’ ‘culturally and intellectually uneducated,’ but crucially as agents who change society and history. They are, essentially, subjects of history—a phrase that minjung theology made famous. (emphasis mine.)
Motivated by his sociopolitical perspective, Ahn finds himself drawn toward the Markan text. Mark initially uses ambiguous words to describe the audience of Jesus, and soon after introduces the term “ochlos”—translatable as hamon (many people), crowd, or minjung. Ahn notes not only the frequency of the use of the word ochlos in Mark, but also the fact that another term—laos, which traditionally refers to the Israelites—was undoubtedly more prevalent at that time. This linguistic distinction in Mark is remarkable among the New Testament writers, according to Ahn, who goes on to say: “The Gospel of Mark was written either when the Jewish War had already begun or when Jerusalem had already fallen in 70 CE (I believe the latter).” This timeline is an indication of why Mark’s theology may diverge from earlier textual interpretations of the Jesus event, given its portrayal of Jesus in closer connection to the people who lived through the immediate aftermath of Khurbān HaBāyit.
The ochlos, whom Jesus described as “sheep without a shepherd” (6:34), are said by Mark to be a crowd of sinners, tax collectors, the sick, prostitutes, the possessed, and others. Geiger recognizes that they “stood very low in society, and were pretty much despised by the best portion of the population.” Raheb considers them as an “inclusive community based on social justice.” In his Jesus and Minjung in the Gospel of Mark, Ahn emphasizes how alienated this crowd was: “In 8.2, we see that they followed Jesus without eating for three days. This fact demonstrates that they did not have recognized social positions nor were they economically established.” Who are the ochlos, then? And who is their Jesus?
From the synoptic Gospels we know that Jesus sought a renewal of Israel under the rule of God. What was Jesus’s societal, economic, cultural or political standing within Ām HaĀretz in first-century Palestine? How should his polemical dispute with the Pharisees be understood? Are the answers to these questions related to the reason he was subjected to such an “utterly dehumanizing form of execution?”
I present two methods to broach the ecclesiastical interpretations that inquire into the question of who is the Jewish-Palestinian Jesus? The first method is Halakhah-oriented and concentrates on Pharisaism and oral/written law; and the second is ochlos-oriented, and is concerned with the Judean system of sin and belongingness. Since the positioning of Jesus amidst the Pharisaic and Sadducee Halakhah has been thoroughly examined by biblical scholars, I reference it here only briefly, yet augment it with some points from Richard A. Horsley’s critique. Then, with the third Jesus, Ahn’s messiah of the ochlos, we see a Jesus that shines light on those sheep that are without a shepherd, their “sins,” and, above all, their disenfranchisements.
The third Jesus: a shepherd for sinners
The historical Jesus is Jewish Jesus. Hence, the Halakhah is a major source of reliable readings. Scholarly contributions that revive the Jewishness of Jesus manage to re-Judaize him, mostly owing to doctrinal autonomy. An influential example involves the Pharisees and scribes that condemn Jesus’s disciples for eating with unwashed hands. Jesus responds by saying, “What makes a person unclean is not what goes into his mouth; rather, what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean!” (Matthew 15:11, CJB). Ecclesiastically, this story has been declared a momentous one; Jesus’s announcement that all foods are henceforth clean, namely kosher, invalidates the entire Halakhah system. In rectifying interpretations, as analyzed by Daniel Boyarin in Mark 7 and Holger Zellentin in Matthew 15, Jesus’s intervention is deemed to be about the issue of purity/impurity (Tumā’h/Taharāh), which includes regulations on maintaining purity, such as avoiding contact with certain animals (Leviticus, 11:26-28). Jewish Law, indeed, incorporates two separated systems: purity and kosher (Kashrut). Clarifying the difference between them, Zellentin demonstrates that “only kosher food can be defiled; non-kosher food by its very nature cannot. There is no such thing as defiled pork.” That is, what has been taken to mean the end of one testament with God and the beginning of another is an inter-sectarian discussion on purity, irrelevant to kosher. Boyarin attributes the amalgamation of “pure/impure” with “permitted/forbidden” foods to an outsider’s ignorance of Judaism. Whether this misapprehension stems from an epistemological blindness to native customs, an imperial tendency to undervalue traditions of indigenous peoples whom Rome subdued, or both, remains a highly relevant question, but is for another study on the historical Jesus.
In the aforementioned reading, Jesus is re-Judaized as leaning more towards originalism than traditionalism, as prioritizing the written word over oral laws. Since the practice of Netilāt Yadāyim (ritual hand washing) is an innovation of the elders, and not a tradition mandated by scriptural law, he deprioritizes it. Boyarin and Zellentin’s examination is ostensibly accurate, if evaluated on the legislative dimension alone (purity, kosher and scriptural, innovative laws). However, the preoccupation with confronting the Roman dogma could limit the contextualization of Halakhah to its own Jewish terms. Otherwise put, even while critiqued, Christianity appears to maintain its hegemony, and to retain Judaism as its opposite, thus undermining its capacity or availability to probe itself as independent and self-sufficient, rather than merely as a counterpoint. In summary, by portraying Jesus essentially as an intellectual, this Halakhah-oriented reading obscures the value of rediscovering first-century Palestinian Jewishness as a standalone heritage that is inherently embedded in peoplehood. This Halakhah-oriented portrayal confines the Jewish-Palestinian Jesus in what could be viewed as an ahistorical individuality.
Advocating for a more “relational approach,” Horsley emphasizes that Jesus’s criticism of these Pharisees and scribes reflects an interplay of several inseparable aspects of first-century Palestinian life. An alternative reading of the (Markan) story of purity recognizes its starting point, which Horsley describes as a “set-up” by some Pharisees and scribes “who c[a]me from Jerusalem” to Galilee (7:1), according to Horsely’s rigorous analysis, as representatives of the temple-state. Thus, Jesus’s responses to these intrusive outsiders are unlikely to represent an internal religious debate among equals, but rather a political protest against the economic repercussions of religious legalizations that were imposed by the Judea-based ruling class on impoverished Galilean villagers. As part of his all-encompassing interpretation, Horsley explains that by invoking the commandment “honor your father and mother” (Exodus 20:12), Jesus “shifts the focus to the conflict between people’s hunger and the sacrality of the Temple,” thereby rebuking the onerous secondary duty of temple sacrifice. Historically, this duty and others, imposed by the Priests of the Temple, had overburdened the peasantry to the point that, according to Mark’s Jesus, they can no longer fulfill one of the foremost Mosaic religious-social commitments: to care for their elderly parents (Mark 7: 11-13, CJB).
The value of Horsley’s analysis is threefold. Firstly, it reminds us that the Pharisees (who were popular for their custodianship of local traditions over centuries) were not a monolithic group, but diverse in their practices, ideologies, and political engagements. It is essential to destigmatize the Pharisaic figure as it has been entrenched in Western Christianity, namely as one who is exclusively, systemically, and excessively concerned with legislations. James D. G. Dunn provides us with a highly detailed historical picture through which he clarifies that, in the Late Second Temple Period, some Pharisees had “influence in the highest Jewish councils,” and “served as emissaries from Jerusalem.” Dunn’s insights support Ahn and Horsley’s arguments that the Pharisees and scribes who encountered Jesus in the texts belonged to such groups, groups that had seemingly reframed their epistemic authority to serve in the temple-state’s politics.
Secondly, Horsley’s reading gives classism the recognition it deserves in historical Jesus scholarship. Norman K. Gottwald’s investigation in Social Class as an Analytic and Hermeneutical Category in Biblical Studies emphasizes the criticality of social class in biblical manuscripts from David to Jesus, demonstrating how these texts mirror and critique the socio-economic-political structures of their times. Concerning the crowd of Jesus in particular, Gottwald underscores that “they carried the burden of multilayered surplus extraction through tribute to Rome, taxes to Herodian client rulers, tithes and offerings to the Temple, rent payments to landlords, and debt payments to creditors.” Third, in his analysis, Horsley acknowledges the inseparability of this socio-economic-political structure from the regional dynamics between Judea and Galilee. Alas, the reality of regionalism and classism is predominantly underrepresented or misrepresented in biblical and historical sources, presumably due to a “Jerusalem-centrism” and the common overlap between literacy and elitism. This embeddedness of regionalism and classism echoes Brueggemann’s aforementioned view of the Royal and Liberation Trajectories, and is crucial for grasping Ahn’s theology and understanding of Jesus.
In his minjung theology, Ahn contemplates the deep fissure between the regions on the cultural, religious, social, economic, and political levels. Following Gottwald and Brueggemann’s works on classes and trajectories, respectively, he considers the unification of all Israelites under King David (2 Sam 2:4) not to be a harmonious consolidation of the twelve tribes but a biblical misrepresentation of a tyrant’s assault, after which “Yahweh came under royal authority.” David’s successor, Solomon, built a temple that, according to Ahn, “centralized Jerusalem as the holy city and established the ideology of the Davidic monarchy.” Gottwald shows that it was Solomon’s policies of forced labor for the temple construction that split the tribal alliance; the ten northern Israelite tribes formed their own kingdom based on Mosaic faith and lived “completely severed from the priesthood and festival schedule at Jerusalem.” The establishment of the royal dynasty was, as Brueggemann argues, “an imitation of urban imperial consciousness of Israel’s more impressive neighbors and a radical rejection of the liberation consciousness of the Mosaic tradition.”
The year 733 BCE marks the conquest of Galilee by the Assyrian Empire. Thereafter, Galilee was ruled, apart from Judea, by other foreign empires (Babylonian, Persian, Ptolemaic, Seleucid). Over many later centuries, the two regions of Galilee and Judea continued to diverge in all aspects of life. Judea underwent well-documented, intense upheavals, and became a temple-state with officialized laws, while Galilee remained relatively underrepresented in historical records and an administratively separate entity. Hence, it could be argued that Galilee preserved its faith relatively “uncontaminated.” Indigenous Galileans were notably neither subjected to exile like the native elites of Jerusalem nor bound by the Judean laws of the temple-state. One may infer that these northern communities were upholding ancestral Sinaitic tradition, the liberatory and therapeutic dimensions of which had made them a collectivity of equals. Ahn, Horsley, Gottwald, and Brueggemann all speculate that, though not directly documented, this sort of cultural framework appears to have been the principal catalyst of the resistive, apocalyptic literature and prophecies that continued to evolve, notably in Galilee, for many centuries after the Israelites’ division, and that enabled the envisioning of a messiah who would justly reunify the kingdom of God of all the Israelites on the remnants of David’s Jerusalem-centered kingdom.
Key here is that the Galilee-Jerusalem polarity goes beyond geography. For Ahn, Galilee was “where the minjung lived.” In other words, he says: “Galilee was the symbol of the oppressed, alienated, and exploited.” Along its evolution, Galilee came to symbolize “village communities,” the underclass of Ām HaĀretz, which is to say, the majority of Jewish Palestine.
Only in 104 BCE, when the Hasmoneans took over, did Galilee come under the rule of Jerusalem once more. Finally subordinate to Jerusalem, the Galileans were disparaged as not being Judean enough, which is to say, not Jewish enough, and were therefore seen as warranting Judaization, or civilization. Nonetheless, Hasmonean rule was probably too short-lived to be able to invest in Judaizing Galilee. Instead, Jerusalem had to readjust to life under the new foreign occupier, the Roman empire.
Under Rome, taxation measures reached draconian levels for the Herodian rulers and the native elites alike. The rulers, a priestly aristocracy, were an elite cohort that the empire co-opted; they closely collaborated with the empire’s officials and were alienated from the people they exploited and overtaxed. As relations were riven between the temple elite and the rest of the populace, and the middle classes were non-existent, the Pharisees and scribes seemingly went in to act as intermediaries. The villagers, especially the Galileans, who farmed lands they did not own, had livelihoods that amounted to little more than basic survival, many of them faced insurmountable bankruptcy and even starvation. Driven by insurgency-oriented traditions and common-born prophets like Elijah and Elisha, the Galileans corralled resentment and orchestrated grassroots protests against both the temple-state and Herodian governance. Revolution filled the air of Galilee. It was in this Jewish-Palestinian world that Ahn’s Jesus met the ochlos.
Ahn politicizes Jesus’s Halakhah by portraying his Galilean Jewishness as an effective insurgency against what he terms “the Jerusalem faction.” He positions Jesus in “the anti-Jerusalem faction,” which is associated with the revolutionary and “ochlos-like” Galilee, i.e., the Liberation Trajectory. This faction, a somewhat authentic agglomeration of “popular movements of villagers,” as Horsley defines it, voiced its antipolitics either in a scholarly and ideological form like the Essenes or in desperate uprisings of guerrilla warfare. These movements stood in opposition to the Royal Trajectory incarnated in the Jerusalem faction—the native Judean elites, resented by the people as much as the Romans themselves, for their tendency to quash change that was sought or spurred by the masses.
Ahn reads the Jesus movement as an opposition to the Jerusalem faction’s “system of sin.” He explains that the temple-state deemed people sinners not for moral or criminal offenses, but for failing to meet the Judean standards of kosher and purity, often due to circumstances beyond their control. More particularly, Ahn elucidates that this system showed no leniency towards physical or mental illnesses, nor towards occupations that entailed regular impurity (like tanning) or Sabbath work (like tax collecting). Essentially, Jerusalem enforced what appears to be a merciless system under the pretense of indigenous tradition, justifying the dehumanization and abandonment of many who were inevitably victimized, that is, who became sheep without a shepherd.
Based on this reading, the crowd of sinners was turned into a collective enemy for being neither pure nor kosher. By legislating their exclusion from Ām HaĀretz, the system of sin presumably forced a mode of no continuum between the redeemable-laos and irredeemable-ochlos, alienating and dehumanizing the latter within their own land and people. Seen through a Mosaic lens, the Judean system of sin appears to have instrumentalized the tradition, sowing seeds of discord within Ām HaĀretz and assuring that the ochlos remain despised, lost, and internally exiled by law, by the supposedly local law. Ahn’s theology reveals that the withoutness of the sheep without a shepherd does not signify a paucity in shepherds and shepherding, nor an absence thereof, but rather a total rightlessness in its regard. The ochlos were, I argue, sheep who were denied shepherdhood; they were those already declared to be without a right to redemption. Hence, initiating a movement to shepherd and thus absolve the ochlos would have required extraordinary courage and wisdom. This surfaces as the core of the Markan Jesus’s grassroots movement, as interpreted by Ahn. In a summary of Ahn’s theology, the Jesus movement redefines sin and restores the kinship of Ām HaĀretz, thereby undermining the Jerusalem faction and reintegrating the internally exiled into “the post-Jerusalem” kingdom of God. This movement, which could also be called Jesus’s intifāda, was deemed an egregious sin and worthy of condemnation to crucifixion.
Erasure
Judging from narratives of contemporary Jewish, Palestinian, and Global Southern memory and trauma, Jesus’s martyrdom falls into the domain of that which is imaginable. Whereas most Western trauma frameworks continue to be bound to individualistic, ahistorical, abstract, and text-based epistemologies, in the Global South—where traumas suffered at the hands of colonial violence, slavery, and systemic injustices are transmitted across generations—it is possible to find other, largely underexplored ways of learning and understanding. In his Epistemologies of Trauma, Tyler M. Tully presents an overview of these alternative forms of knowing, recognizable among traumatized peoples, such as experience-based epistemologies and ancestral-communal wisdoms. I submit that such “embodied knowledge” is more likely to enable one to go beyond the ahistorical kerygma and to perceive the Jesus event as a collective trauma of the powerless. Furthermore, Jesus’s execution could be understood as a predictable, common outcome of insurgencies, revolts, uprisings, and intifādas against oppressive systems.
Yet, the Jesus event retains something baffling about it. Its centrality for Christendom, from the fourth century CE on, goes against its omission from the historical records of its time. In this regard, Ahn writes: “The Jesus Event was ignored or distorted. It is inexplicable that there is no record of the Jesus Event in the Jewish or Roman corpus.” Indeed, there is a notable historiographical gap from the Jesus movement (late 20s to early 30s CE) to when the synoptic Gospels were fully composed (75-100 CE), a detail often treated by scholars as a historical anomaly. Ahn examines and attempts to clarify this vacuum. He discerns two key transmitters of the Jesus event: The ochlos, who conveyed the historical Jesus event; and the nascent church of the apostles, which chronicled the Christ kerygma.
The ochlos, it might be presumed, preserved the Jesus event as an oral tradition, transmitting it in the form of a rumor. Ahn highlights that rumor is a potent method for disseminating sensitive stories while circumventing any attributions of direct responsibility for spreading these stories so as to evade persecution. This strategy would reflect, on the one hand, the resilience and adaptability of the meek, and, on the other, the political culture of Galilee.
Conversely, the apostles, who established their church in Jerusalem and not in Galilee, would have had to adapt to the troubled city that executed their mobilizer during Passover—the holiday of liberation. In seeking institutional survival within the prevailing power structure, they were likely compelled to forge diplomatic ties with both the imperial and the local authorities. This survival strategy resulted in their transmitting the Christ kerygma, a narrative that is less reflective of the Galilean nature of the Jesus movement and more aligned with Judean culture and the interests of the ruling class. Provocatively put, the disciples, who were Jesus’s closest friends and who retreated during his trial and crucifixion, recorded his memory through what emerges as another retreat: a denial of his antipolitics, of his Galileanness. While the Markan text introduces Jesus as a humble carpenter from Galilee, disregarding his lineage and focusing on his devotion to the ochlos, the synoptic Gospels, which were written later, inconsistently trace Jesus’s ancestry to King David. In Luke (3:23-38) and Matthew (1:1-17), two different, inconsistent genealogies are constructed, the first through Joseph and the second through Mary, creating contested links to the royal dynasty. By altering the portrayal of Jesus in their texts, the apostles may have immortalized a legacy that resonates with imperial-Judean politics.
In light of the historical trajectories (Liberation and Royal), regionalism (Galilee-Jerusalem), and classism (masses-elites), I conclude that the Davidic Gospels are fundamentally anti-Jesus. This apostolic twist, as emphasized by Ahn, led to an erasure both of the ochlos as internally exiled and of Jesus himself as ochlos, on the cross, “hopeless and abandoned even by God.” To recapitulate, the kerygma, as Ahn states early in this essay, not only obscures the wretchedness of the Jesus event; it also depoliticizes the Jesus movement, the ochlos narrative, as well as Galilean Israelite traditions and intifādas at large.
The fourth century marked an indelible moment in human history when the Roman Empire was “Christianized.” Based on this paper’s reading, it may be more accurate to rewrite this chapter of history and claim that it was Jesus who was “Romanized.” Considering the idiosyncratic role of Western Christianity in human history, further research is required to investigate subsequent chapters of the Romanized Jesus; that is, how he was institutionalized and Europeanized, from Catholicism to Lutheranism, into secularism and beyond; and how the Love of Christ was universalized, utilized, and perhaps also weaponized against other peoples of other Jesuses, against the ochloses of the Global South. At this stage, the concept of Romanization may serve as an example of the weaponization of indigenous epistemes against indigeneity, a phenomenon discernible throughout the colonial-imperial history of Western Christendom, and contemporarily in Palestine under Zionism.
Remembrance
The narrative of the Jesus event, which has been overshadowed by Jerusalem-centrism and later by Eurocentrism, challenges us to reconsider notions of martyrdom and resistance. On my view, Ahn’s theology invites a reflective pause; it envisions the return of Jesus, shepherd of the sinners, to our era. Were the Galilean Jesus to visit a church of today, whether in Jerusalem or Rome, one might ponder whether he would, once again, overturn furniture, decorations, and even his own ornate cross, this time in protest against his own disfigurement.
Despite the unbridgeable gap between Ahn’s Jesus and his ahistorical figure, we might learn from his movement how indestructible empires can seem, when the oppressed do not confront their political amnesias and fail to remember. Can the ochlos be remembered after their millennia-long suppression? By integrating memory and trauma studies with historiography—or its absence—a pathway towards uncovering aspects of this distant past may become possible.
The ochlos between redemption and exile
Given that the historical vacuum following the Jesus event spans approximately the lifetime of a communicative memory, and considering that the four Gospels are the earliest primary texts in the canon that record the Jesus movement, this documentary work appears to have been completed around the time when the grandchildren of those who had witnessed the Jesus event had passed away. I thus conjecture that the Jerusalem-centric kerygma did not receive its full chronicling so long as communicative memory remained. This timing could thus have been used to prevent the ochlos’s word of mouth from evolving into any form of lasting cultural memory. Regarding the preservation and erasure of traditions and histories, further research can be developed by drawing upon Aleida Assmann’s essay “Canon and Archive,” or with reference to James C. Scott’s terms “Great Tradition” versus “Little or Popular Tradition.”
The ochlos, denied the possibility of remembering their own history, are described by Jin-ho Kim as “deprived belongingness.” Belonging and memory are interdependent; their relationship, according to Assmann, is “a matter of political foundation or fabrication. Both remembering and belonging have normative aspects. If you want to belong, you must remember.” This idea nicely encapsulates the Jesus movement, its Galileanness, and Galilee as a symbol of the ochlos: A messiah remembers, loudly and defiantly, in the face of empire, and the exiled return.
Alas, most readings of the story of Jesus, whether kerygmatic-dogmatic or historical-scholarly, remain incapable of grasping the trauma of the ochlos. This incapacity is expressed in mainstream, individualistic interpretations of Jesus’s interventions with the sick, possessed, cursed, or dead. Inspired by Ahn’s theology, I propose that while Jesus emerges as a miraculous healer, his most remarkable act of healing transcends all individual cures and revivals, culminating in the collective redemption of the ochlos. It was by embracing as children of God those deemed irredeemable sinners, by considering them just as worthy of love and grace as the laos, that Jesus performed his greatest miracle. Moreover, in light of Ahn’s nuanced reading and other critical sources, there is cause to revisit Jesus’s march to Jerusalem, to reconsider it as a sacrificial act that put his life at risk, an act that ought to be remembered as a protest for the ochlos’s right to re-belong to Ām HaĀretz.
To recapitulate, the Galileanness of Jesus, inspirational on many levels, helps us to reconstruct the notion of belonging in the context of Palestine today. Just as Galileans were rendered enemies under the temple-state of Jerusalem, so too are today’s Palestinians cast as such under Zionism, where they are denied the right to belong to their biblical memory, history, culture, and homeland and denied recognition as Ām HaĀretz. More liberatory and decolonial theologies enable us to better think through and thus to reclaim the oneness of history and memory, of the Jesus event and the Nakba. Whether it is in stories of Galilee’s struggle against Jerusalem, Jesus’s against David, Biblical Israel’s against Roman Palestina, the crowd of sinners’ against the laos, or Filastin’s against the Zionist regime, each time we find the ochlos anew, exiled from human rights, and persistently yearning for a single sense of home. On second thought, every empire is, at some point, powerless in the face of the ochlos, who will find ever new ways to break with forgetfulness, to remember, and to return. As Gadamer had it, “[i]n fact, history does not belong to us; we belong to it.” Here and now, it is indispensable to reread Palestine’s disenfranchised stories from Solomon’s Temple to Khurbān HaBāyit all the way to the Nakba; they seem to carry exiles that are yet to be remembered as one.