I'm particularly concerned that in France the III Republic imported some Kantian ethics from Prussia (which had just defeated France) and that this kind of economic snobbery is resurfacing when a Baron in France called Jesus a Cult Leader. The Protestant sensibility about "Cults" isn't exactly the same thing as the Catholic sensibility about "Heresies" ... obviously Catholics should simply be telling the Baron to stop being a MIVILUDES jerk! If you have a problem with Jesus couchsurfing, your ethics are wrong, it's not a question of trying to disprove it.
How Did Jesus and Disciples Afford Stuff?
Bart D. Ehrman | 2 June 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpLtwEEIQlM
4:40 I would simply suggest that the economy back then for a carpenter or fisherman is different from what you expect.
12 People can't possibly eat 153 fish in a day. After the breakfast when Jesus proves He isn't a ghost from Sheol by actually eating, most of that would have been sold. The boats and nets would not have been bought on credit, they had no mortgage to pay on the bank loan, they were also not engaged in getting ripped off by big fishing industries who underprice what they pay the fishermen so they can sell the fish conserves reasonably affordable while still making a huge profit.
Fishermen would not have been living on subsistence level.
And a tekton was more qualified than a shepherd, perhaps even than a farmer, so, would also have been making good money. Joseph could afford a donkey, and accomodation in Bethlehem, the problem wasn't affording, it was opportunity. On certain evenings, the price for a parking loot may be peanuts to you, but the parking place is already full, and you can't park your car until you get a bit out of town. The Holy Family couldn't park their donkey other than in the stable next to (as per legend) an ox and (Biblically) manger. Which place was also where they were accomodated themselves.
Either a fisherman or a tekton would have been better off than a factory worker in early Manchester or Chicago factories. MUCH better.
5:13 I subscribe to the idea of rich benefactors, and take exception only to the expression "patrons" ...
These people wouldn't have been giving orders to someone they thought of as speaking to God, they couldn't have taken the attitude of Maecenas who was certainly in a position to assign tasks to people like Virgil and Horace. The idea of "patron" on the internet clearly suggests the latter relation, coming directly from Latin patronus. Virgil and Horace were certainly a very privileged type of clientes, but each had the position of a cliens.
And there were there many women afar off, who had followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering unto him:
[Matthew 27:55]
Who also when he was in Galilee followed him, and ministered to him, and many other women that came up with him to Jerusalem.
[Mark 15:41]
And all his acquaintance, and the women that had followed him from Galilee, stood afar off, beholding these things.
[Luke 23:49]
Add to this, according to the thesis of Father Jean Colson, John the Beloved was actually not the fisherman son of Zebedee, not one of the twelve, but a Cohen. Also in position to be a benefactor and the actual host of Last Supper and of Pentecost morning, before they went out to preach, and obviously, the adoptive of Mary was able that day to host his adoptive mother.
6:55 I'd obviously differ from "try to reconstruct", "slippage", "borrowed from St. Paul" ...
- Dialogue:
- James Dewane
- @jamesdewane1642
- James Dewane
- Zebedee, father of James and John, had hired men, so not destitute.
In fact, in chapter one to me it looks like Peter's mother in law gets her fever because it's very upsetting that she's gonna lose the two wage-earners in the household. And it seems like she gets better when Jesus explains that she can call on Zebedee any time. Obvious, right?
- Old Possum
- @oldpossum57
- My grandfather was born into a fishing outport in Newfoundland. Actual cash money was something there was very little of. The merchant’s clerk at the general store gave families credit against the season’s catch. They tallied the number of quintals of salt fish on sticks: many were illiterate and innumerate. “Hired” meant “sharers”, a tenth part, a twelfth part. Just like the whalers on the Pequod.
If you think a late 19th century Newfoundland outport was short of hard currency, imagine rural Roman Palestine in the first century CE.
Btw, the Bible is a story book Don’t ask it questions it wasn’t designed to answer. All you need to know is that a Nimbus 2001 is a fast but nimble broom. You don’t have to know how it flies. Rowling doesn’t know either.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @hglundahl
- @oldpossum57 "If you think a late 19th century Newfoundland outport was short of hard currency, imagine rural Roman Palestine in the first century CE."
I'm sorry, but you miss one very important thing.
That fishing port in Newfoundland had a very capitalistic trait. Fishermen had a kind of contract with "the merchant’s clerk at the general store"
Like in Marseille or Dragør to this day, fishermen [in 1st C Capharnaum] themselves sell the catch to the public.
It seems Newfoundland fishers were so impoverished by the general store that 1st C. fishermen in Palestine would have pitied them (and Sts Peter, Andrew, James and John arguably did so, from Heaven).
"the Bible is a story book Don’t ask it questions it wasn’t designed to answer."
If you want to test the Bible as a history book (in many places, like not exactly in Wisdom or Syrach, but the places you think of), how about asking questions that a story book wasn't designed to answer?
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @jamesdewane1642 "Zebedee, father of James and John, had hired men"
Says where?
"the two wage-earners in the household."
I don't think anyone was a wage-earner ... that was a class below that of the Apostles. In Matthew 20, a parable gives a description of their situation, they are called "labourers" ... unlike fishermen and carpenters, they didn't own their tools or workplace.
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