Christmas as development

Another (possibly) interesting way of looking at the Christmas story is through the lens of economic development. Christmas may be viewed as the story of some very poor people who managed to live through very challenging times, surviving a number of threats to their lives created by the underdeveloped conditions in which they lived.

It is difficult to imagine that life expectancy, infant mortality, or education levels were much better (and were probably much worse) than they are today in much of the developing world. Most children did not live to adulthood, and it is remarkable that a child born under the presumably unsanitary conditions that reigned in the barn of the local inn (itself probably just someone's home, with some rooms rented out to earn some income) after a long pre-natal journey by mule-back would survive.

Perhaps Jesus' birth was miraculous in a more conventional sense.

Indeed, it is unsurprising that so much of the new testament is devoted to accounts of the miraculous healings that Jesus performed--presumably because illness, under extremely unsanitary conditions and with poor medical treatment--would be rife.

Under conditions like this, and where the state was relatively weak and there was no social safety net provided by government, informal social institutions within communities and ethnic groups would take on great importance as the only places to turn when people encountered misfortune and needed a hand. Religious orders, community and family groups, and local power-brokers would be the only places people could turn for help if they were sick or needed money. Small wonder that Jesus' attempts to craft a new social order were frightening to local elites!

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.