Judas had the bag: How poor were Jesus and the Twelve?

 

 

 The Fourth Gospel is the only evidence we have that Jesus and the Twelve had a common kitty.

This "bag" was presumably the equivalent of the small box such as might store and protect the reeds/mouthpieces used by musicians in their wind instruments.

This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein.

 

-- John 12:6

For some of them thought, because Judas had the bag, that Jesus had said unto him, Buy those things that we have need of against the feast; or, that he should give something to the poor.

 

-- John 13:29

Otherwise in the Synoptics we have references to the personal belt, which was hollow and could store money (Mt. 10:9, Mk. 6:8), personal money bags for coins (Lk. 10:4, 12:33ff.) and provision sacks in which to carry a variety of travel supplies, generally understood, analogous to backpacks or saddlebags (Mt. 10:10, Mk. 6:8, Lk. 9:3, 10:4, 22:35f.). All these feature in Jesus' missionary instructions to his disciples where we learn that they are to carry no money and no supplies whatsoever. This is in keeping generally with the call to discipleship in the first place, to say goodbye to one's possessions (Luke 14:33) and follow Jesus.

Presumably, however, Jesus and the Twelve, being thus poor and preaching poverty, were recipients of charity, and it had to be someone's job to thus be the banker. But such money as there was can't have gone very far and did not amount to very much.

The story of the miraculous feeding of the 5,000 provides a ceiling limit for what Jesus and the Twelve might have imagined to be a lot of money. In it the disciples express incredulity at Jesus' expectation that they come up with the cash to feed so many, knowing as he must have that coming up with such a sum was pure fantasy.

He answered and said unto them, Give ye them to eat. And they say unto him, Shall we go and buy two hundred pennyworth of bread, and give them to eat?

 

-- Mark 6:37

The penny here is the denarius, in Matthew 20 famously considered fair pay for a full day's labor or for even much less than a day's labor, which seems rather over generous (see below).

The parallel in John 6:7 indicates that 200 denarii would allow 5,000 to eat only a little and not be satisfied:

Philip answered him, Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one of them may take a little.

It should be stated that not even a Roman soldier would have this kind of walking around money.

At the time of Jesus, a Roman legionary received base pay of about 0.6 denarius per day (10 asses), from which the soldier had to provide for his own arms and food. That's 224 denarii per year, from the time of Julius Caesar. So try to imagine that sum in the bag Judas had, and it is not at all credible.

A soldier received other intermittent pay, boosting the base pay on average to as much as 1 denarius a day, and of course out on the perimeters of the Empire he had a reputation for intimidating the locals for additional gain, which would make sense in Palestine given the poor agricultural conditions which drove up the price of daily bread.

And the soldiers likewise demanded of him [John the Baptist], saying, And what shall we do? And he said unto them, Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages.

 

-- Luke 3:14

Content with your wages.

 

Theoretically, the cost of a one pound to one and half pound loaf of bread at this time could be as high as 2 asses or as little as 1, but double this on the poor soil of Palestine. So 200 denarii would feed at the outside 1,600, or as few as 800, with say 1,400 calories each. The conundrum with even 200 denarii means the 5,000 would have to get by on 224 to 448 calories each. While the problem in the story sounds about correctly imagined, the prospect of the availability for purchase of such a great quantity of bread as well as of solving the logistical and distributional problems implied seems as utterly fanciful as the notion that they might have had the means to purchase so much bread in the first place.     

On the other end of the scale it makes sense that the bag which Judas had could often be quite empty, necessitating scrounging operations on the part of Jesus and the Twelve themselves just to survive.

At that time Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn; and his disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat.

 

-- Matthew 12:1

And it came to pass, that he went through the corn fields on the sabbath day; and his disciples began, as they went, to pluck the ears of corn.

 

-- Mark 2:23

And it came to pass on the second sabbath after the first, that he went through the corn fields; and his disciples plucked the ears of corn, and did eat, rubbing them in their hands.

 

-- Luke 6:1

The needs of Jesus and the Twelve at a minimum subsistence level of 1,400 calories daily would mean in the hardest of times requiring as much as 3.25 denarii a day (4 asses for one loaf of bread X 13 = 52 / 16). Charity must have played an outsized role in the ministry of Jesus and his disciples.

Hence the centrality of daily bread to the Lord's Prayer, and the fame and survival of the bread sayings generally throughout the Gospels.

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

 

-- Matthew 6:25

Greek Men Conjugate in Their Sleep

When I was growing up, my mother kept telling me that smart boys pretty much had three options professionally. You either studied to become a doctor, a lawyer, or a preacher. She was trying to get me ready for the future, since by the time I was a freshman in high school, I was more interested in making explosives in chemistry class and in playing football than in anything else. (If you weren't obsessed with football in Wisconsin in the 60's there must have been something wrong with you.) So when a victory over a track and field injury through surgery meant that I could continue to compete in football, it seemed like divine intervention to me and the die was cast. A preacher I would be.

In college in those days the place where all preacher wannabes met their Waterloo was in Greek grammar and syntax class, at the beginning of the sophomore year. If you didn't pass the verb exam with 90 percent accuracy, you didn't go on. You'd be steered at that point to a degree in "education," and become a certified teacher in the church, but not a preacher. We were, of course, terrified of this possibility, not because the outcome was so bad, but because it meant that we didn't have "the right stuff."

It was a good system, and weeded out the intellectually less gifted pretty quickly. By the second quarter of Greek you could already tell who was going to make it and who was not, and those over whom a question mark hovered tread their way precariously. Greek is a very difficult language in many respects, not in the least because of the precision of expression it affords through a multiplicity of inflections, both for the noun and the verb. And if you came to it without having learned Latin or French or German in the grades, you were at a distinct disadvantage, especially at the relatively late stage of college when beer and girls represented a far more appealing past time than drilling with flash cards two hours every evening. It's much better to get language under your belt before you get there so that you can actually spend your time reading the ancients in the original languages with smart guys who've spent their whole lives doing the same.

It's true that since this high water mark in the 70's there has been a precipitous decline in standards and expectations in America, but from the perspective of the history of education over the last hundred years, the story is really much much worse. For many years I mistook the high point in my own experience for the veritable Olympian heights, only to realize much later that it was merely a stop at the lowest of the base camps situated far below the summit. Today by comparison most divinity students aren't even mucking about in the grassy foothills far below . . . for them the mountain is not even in sight.

To appreciate my point fully consider some of the books used by a ministerial student during the years 1880-1884, which I acquired a hundred years after the fact through a friend. They are inscribed by one B. Henry Succop, who studied at what is now Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, a scion of a storied and prolific clan of Lutherans of the day. The young Henry was wont to mark his progress in the margins of his books, recording the day, the month, and the year at each point along the way, employing perfect penmanship I might add. His youth is in evidence because just like any school boy he doodles, delightfully, on the pages as he daydreams. There are even some fine figures he created, colored, and cut out for imaginative moments upon his desk, tucked between the pages. This means that Henry was younger than the typical divinity student of today, who matriculates at a seminary only after completing an undergraduate degree somewhere first.

The only volume in evidence for 1880 shows Henry reading Julius Caesar's commentaries on the Roman civil war, in Latin, using a Weidmann edition published just two years prior. In 1881-82, he moves on to Cicero and Livy in Latin, and Plutarch's lives of Themistocles and Pericles in Greek, employing late Teubner editions dating from 1872 to 1877. In 1882 he is also reading Virgil's Aeneid, again in Latin, not in translation. Come 1883 Henry is quite busy, reading Cicero's Against Catiline and the Odes of Horace in Latin, as well as the Ajax of Sophocles and the Philippics of Demosthenes in Greek, again employing the latest Teubner and Weidmann editions as available. Rounding out the list for that year is Justin Martyr's Apologies, in Greek. For the final year, 1884, there is evidence for only one subject, St. John Chrysostom, in Greek. Quite the plate full apart from the rest of the curriculum, about which there are no clues. And, oh yeah, the trots between the pages, they're in German, his native language.

B. Henry Succop came to Concordia prepared to read the ancients in Latin and Greek, and not just the New Testament or the fathers, but the best authors the pagan past had to offer. This means he had learned his Latin and his Greek in the grades. It also means those so-called backward, conservative, fundamentalist Lutherans thought it important for their future leaders like Henry to spend time studying the cultural opposition. In consequence, Henry's library more closely resembles that of a classicist. Poke around in the library of a contemporary preacher if he'll let you. You'll find far lighter reading in it, I assure you.

If it be objected that Henry's experience was peculiar and parochial, it must be remembered that public school students of the day themselves were reading difficult Latin authors such as the historian Tacitus by the time they were in high school. This was the case because most colleges had a foreign language requirement of three semesters of Latin, and high schools were expected to send them students who could complete them successfully. Today, by contrast, the country is crawling with degree mills without such requirements. Majors in classical antiquity themselves often have to wait until the senior year for a seminar in Tacitus. So-called doctorates in less demanding fields stalk the land who have never once studied a foreign language for a week, and masters of divinity litter the landscape who have passed Greek with a rudimentary summer course and presume to rule on matters of eternal significance but can't pronounce the letters of the Greek alphabet arranged carefully to embody those ideas. "If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!"

No wonder the thoughtful man in the pew is sad. He is alone.