[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”0800638476″ locale=”us” height=”160″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51LvbQFTHVL._SL160_.jpg” width=”107″]Page 2: Douglas Oakman – The Political Aims of Jesus
Thus, in Oakman’s attempt to recover ‘the real Jesus,’ he treats our Gospel sources as an archaeological tell which, after enough digging downward through the earliest sources, will yield the true, pre-Christian Jesus and his politically-subversive aims. Oakman appeals to our earliest tradition of Jesus, the hypothetical source “Q” (short for the German Quelle, or “source”). Q, which is the putative shared source of Matthew and Luke, contains some of the most politically-subversive sayings of Jesus and predates the canonical Gospels by a few decades. Oakman argues that, as the earliest tradition of Jesus, Q is the best source for accessing the Jesus of history who stands somewhere behind the ancient texts (19). Yet Oakman goes further, for it is not just Q which brings us closer to Jesus, but an even earlier (and thus doubly hypothetical) version of it. Oakman takes it as a matter of fact that Q, itself a hypothetical document, “passed through at least two recensions: wisdom Q (or Q1) and deuteronomic Q (or Q2)” (71). It is on the political sayings of Jesus in a reconstructed Q1 that Oakman bases his argument.
Unfortunately, this reviewer is not as confident that Q can be parsed out in this way. Even if Q can be subdivided into an earlier and later version, it still does not get us back to the original Jesus and his aims. Even the earliest version of Q—arguably composed shortly after the death of Jesus in the 30’s CE—would have reflected the agendas of the early Christian communities who circulated it. In other words, Q does not just reveal Jesus; it reveals some of the earliest Christian memories and interpretations of Jesus. As far as our sources are concerned, they are post-Easter all the way down. That any political aims of Jesus can be discerned in the post-Easter traditions suggests that the Christians who circulated them did not break from the politics of Jesus: they valued and shared them. The fact that Q was widely circulated after the death of Jesus and later integrated into Matthew and Luke suggests quite strongly that the earliest post-Easter followers of Jesus did not depoliticize the message (so Reimarus and Oakman) but rather recontextualized the political tradition of Jesus and his subversive praxis.
Questions of sources and methodology aside, Oakman is successful in reclaiming a subversive politics for Jesus in his first century imperial context. Readers will greatly benefit from Oakman’s illustrations of everyday agrarian life in imperial Judea (26-43) and will be challenged to rethink long-familiar teachings of Jesus in light of them. A highlight of The Political Aims of Jesus is found in the concluding ‘postscientific postscript’ in which Oakman offers a few thoughts on what it might mean to pursue the politics of Jesus today. He writes
In truth, Jesus’ political aims remain to be contemplated and taken seriously. They are not confined to first-century Galilee, nor need they be relegated to some dustbin of history. They were a response to the Power [or ‘Kingdom of God’], and the same Power still stands behind and energizes all things. Jesus’ total identification with the Power led to his absorption into it as God’s only begotten. In the Christian tradition and church, the Power is seen as through a glass darkly. It is there, present, where the Gospel is preached and the sacraments are administered. […] It challenges to the core, however, the plutocrats of a new age of Mammon, whose politics and commerce will be far more destructive and disastrous for global affairs than the Roman Peace. The truth still stands, as it did for Jesus by the lakeside, that you cannot serve God and Mammon (138).
Thus Oakman ends his exploration of the politics of Jesus with a challenge to all who would ‘keep faith’ with the crucified messiah. For Douglas Oakman (and this reviewer), the political aims of Jesus were—and are—subversive and restorative, radical and healing for a world enslaved and abused by empire and Mammon.
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Daniel M. Yencich is a student in the Joint Doctoral Program at The University of Denver and Iliff School of Theology, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Religious Studies and New Testament.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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