Christmas: An Institutional Story

As the semester has come to a close, I've been thinking about the Christmas holidays a bit. Looking forward to being with family and old friends for a little while, and also have been thinking about the Christmas story writ large.

The Christmas story, it seems to me, has rather a lot to do with the things we study in Political Science. I don't know a lot about biblical scholarship, so my interpretation of the story could be all wrong. However, here are my thoughts:

For one thing, the story of Christmas, and the story of Christ, is the story of a political entrepreneur. That is, Christ was, if we are to believe the story the way it has traditionally been told, a person who wanted to change many rules in society. In particular, he took issue with many of the rules (we would call them institutions) that held Jewish society together at about the year 0, apparently hoping to build a more egalitarian order.

Of course, Jewish elites were (unsurprisingly) vested rather strongly in the existing order. They were, in a sense, caught between pressures from below--pressures from masses for an independent Jewish state--and pressures from above--pressures from the Roman empire and its client kings, who above all hoped to maintain the region as a piece of the empire. These elites had carved out a place for themselves in between radical masses and conservative Roman rulers, and they knew that they (and the whole Jewish population in the Middle East) faced powerful threats to their survival that they were unlikely to overcome if they challenged the Roman order too strongly. To hold their own place in society, and to hold their own society back from demanding freedoms too strongly, they relied on a fairly rigid system of religious rules that allowed them to keep the local population under control from within.

Understandably, perhaps, they felt that killing Jesus (and many like him) was the only way to keep themselves from being annihilated.

The success of the existing social order also helps to explain why Christian rhetoric was less successful with other Jews than it was with non-Jewish peoples, and with the outcasts of Jewish society (tax collectors, prostitutes, etc.)

There you have it: Jesus, the institutional entrepreneur.