What can we know about the past?
For decades now, the so-called “historical critical method” has dominated the study of the Bible. In its simplest form, this method asks about the world that the text comes from—what that world was like and what we can know about it—and it asks what the knowledge can tell us about the text itself. This is part of the reason why you’re always hearing scholars and religious leaders talk about what “would have been” the case in the world from which the text arises—what would have been the case about the everyday lives, the experiences, and the conditions of the people who wrote the Bible and the people who inhabit it as characters. If you have a study Bible, chances are good that its introductions and notes are full of historical tidbits—what a shekel is, how food preparation worked, how slavery worked, what the climate was like, when certain festivals happened and why, and a thousand other details meant to transport us to the worlds of knowledge that can help unlock the biblical stories.
But there are (at least) a couple of fallacies that can arise from this focus on history. First, we can become over-confident in our ability to know something about the past, and we can overestimate how accessible the events and ideas of several thousand years ago might be to us. William Faulkner famously said that “the past is not dead; it is not even past.” That’s true in a sense; here we are, reading the things written centuries ago and treating them with care and authority. The biblical past is still very much a part of our present. But another novelist, L.P. Hartley, shared a different view: “The past is another country; they do things differently there.” That’s a key reminder that for all of our attempts to build imaginative time machines that can transport us back to the time of Jesus or David or Mary or someone else from the biblical text, the past is always and forever inaccessible to us, no matter how many notes our study Bibles have. The past is another place, and we cannot go there. The second fallacy is thinking that the way things work in our time must also be the way things worked in the past. We have a tendency to see ideas in the biblical text—marriage, money, households, governments, religion, food, labor, war, music, clothing, death—and assume that those things must have been more or less similar to the things we know in our own time. As an example, I notice this especially in conversations about “biblical marriage,” which usually don’t take seriously either the Bible or the forms of marriage that are found in it. Biblical marriage is a diverse and messy thing, and it has very little to do with marriage in our own time and place (thank God), but that doesn’t stop people from thinking that whatever the Bible says about marriage, it must be a lot like what our marriage is like. The same is true for a thousand other things. We think biblical travel must have been like our travel, we think biblical theology must have been like our theology, we think biblical trials must have been like our trials, and so on. But if the past is another country where they do things differently, then we should take care to keep our hubris in check as we try to understand what the ancient world might have been like.
I was thinking about these twin fallacies (our tendency to be over-confident in how much we can know about the past, and the tendency to project the present back into the past) as I was reading the gospel text for the lectionary for April 21st. This is one of Jesus’ most well-known sayings, part of his discussion of himself and his identity that is found in John. This is the “Good Shepherd” passage, where Jesus is comparing himself to a keeper of sheep. But it’s also part of a larger pattern of texts in the Gospel of John, the so-called “I am” sayings, where Jesus uses a distinctive Greek formula that translates “I am” to introduce aspects of himself: “I am the living water,” “I am the true vine,” “I am the light of the world,” and so on. I think there’s a tendency to read “I am the good shepherd” and assume that we know basically what Jesus means, even though most of us have never herded sheep before, and even the ones of us who do have shepherding experience have never met a first-century sheep. But this passage is full of details that we should take as clues that we don’t know as much as we think we do about the past, and therefore about the claim Jesus is making. A passage like this both calls out for the historical-critical method, and also defies it, showing us the limits of how much we can truly understand the past or inhabit it in any meaningful way.
Take, for example, the claim of verse 12: “The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.” This verse is a description of bad shepherding practice, but it is also a window into the economics of shepherding, something most of us have probably not spent much time considering. The “hired hand” here is a particular Greek word that shows up in this passage and also in Mark 1, where the sons of Zebedee leave their father in the boat with the hired hands to follow Jesus. Another form of the word shows up in Luke 15, the story of the prodigal son, where the son compares himself to his father’s hired hands. In all of these cases, the words are used to describe someone who works for wages, but they also have a secondary meaning—someone whose commitment or bond is inferior. The sons of Zebedee leave their father in the boat with the hired hands, even though sons ought to have been more faithful than paid laborers. The son in Luke compares himself and his poor condition to the conditions of paid laborers, and he concludes that he has taken a wrong turn in his life. And here, in this parable, the hired shepherd bails on his commitments much faster than the ought to have, because he has an inferior attachment to the sheep.
I find this way of talking about paid laborers (the Greek words are misthios in Luke and misthotos in Mark and John) fascinating, because it lays bare a host of assumptions about first-century economics and labor. All three cases, across Mark, Luke, and John, carry built-in assumptions about the inferiority of hired laborers’ commitments and attachments. They all pit the dedication of hired laborers against that of someone with deeper attachments, and they find the hired folks lacking. In Mark and Luke, the comparison is with family—the relationship between fathers and sons, which the text seems to think ought to be sacrosanct. But in John, something else is happening.
The comparison in John 10 is not between hired laborers and sons, but between hired laborers and owners. The difference between the actions of a hired shepherd and a “good shepherd” lies in the fact of ownership; “the hired hand…does not own the sheep,” as verse 12 says, and it goes on to say in verse 13 that “the hired hand runs away because the hired hand does not care for the sheep.” The claim about economics and attachment here is a little bit different from the claims about family ties. The claim seems to be that someone working for wages will never truly be invested in outcomes, but someone working for capital gains will be. To not “own” is to not “care.”
If we commit the fallacy of reading our own world back into the world of the first century, this makes some intuitive sense. I rent my house, rather than own it, so I’m probably less invested in its long-term value than my neighbors who own their homes. (Though, to be fair, the people who own the home where I live do not seem to be invested in its long-term value either). In the past, when I worked for very low pay in menial jobs, I did not necessarily take great pride in my work. (I got a lot of homework done behind the sales desk of the furniture store where I worked in college). We can see in our own time and place how ownership might change things about our level of commitment.
But economics in the present are not the same as economics in the past; they did things differently there. The conditions of “hired hands” in an agrarian pre-industrial setting are not the same as the conditions of wage laborers in our modern capitalist society, and ownership then does not map simply onto ownership today. Perhaps the most significant difference is that in the first century, people could “own” labor. This passage from John 12 talks about owners and hired hands, but a third category shows up in the New Testament far more frequently than either of those: slaves. The New Testament presumes the institution of slavery, because the world it came from took slavery for granted. We, of course, know something about slavery from our own world—the legacies of slavery in the Americas, and the ways the institution of slavery continues to reverberate in our own time. Ancient slavery was similar to modern slavery in some respects and different in others, but it’s worth acknowledging that the world of the New Testament was completely conditioned by it. Jesus, Paul, and others can be found in the New Testament using the language and logic of slavery to make theological points, which does not scandalize us as much as it should. As much as we might wish it were different, the New Testament and the world it came from both accept slavery as a fact of life—as a part of the fabric of society.
Slavery isn’t directly in view in this passage from John, but I think we have to keep slavery in the back of our minds as we read it. The economic reasoning of this passage—that hired hands are not as trustworthy, invested, or committed as people with an ownership stake—comes from a world in which labor conditions were mixed up with ownership not only of things (like sheep), but of people as well. Owning, in the worlds of Jesus and John, could extend from sheep to land to people, and when Jesus describes himself as an owner and not simply a hired hand, he is evoking a form of ownership that comes from our past, that does not quite match the ones we know today. The way Jesus calls into question the motivations and commitments of “hired hands” in this passage is reminiscent of the way many ancient writers remarked on slaves as untrustworthy and self-interested; it reproduces a classist rhetoric of ownership, mastery, and responsibility that can often sneer at the dispossessed—the have-nots—from the perspective of the haves.
What does it mean that Jesus describes himself this way: “I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me”? Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, and we shouldn’t read too much into it. But reading this passage alongside other passages in the New Testament where Jesus describes himself and God as heads-of-households, as faithful owners, and as “lord” (from the same Greek word for the owner of a slave), I’m suspicious of the historical-critical subtext here. If it’s supposed to be a comforting sentiment, I’m suspicious of the kinds of comfort we might derive from it. If Jesus is a “good” shepherd, I’m suspicious of our prejudices against the “bad” ones, and where those prejudices might come from. I’m suspicious of the ways our fallacies about the past might lead us to ignore what’s really at stake in a statement like this, and the ways it might enable us to glide smoothly past something that should really give us pause. After all, most of us have never been shepherds, and most of us know very little about sheep. We come to a story like this one with a lot of assumptions. The danger comes when we assume that our assumptions are the same ones that Jesus might have held, when we assume that his world worked the same way ours does, and when we assume that what was “good” twenty centuries ago might still be “good” today.