I enjoyed Schneider’s next chapter, but don’t have a lot to say about it. That is probably because he is interacting with the claim of “radical Christianity” that Jesus completely identified with the poor in His Incarnation, a claim that I tend to take less seriously than Schneider does. To insist that Christ was impoverished throughout the course of His earthly life has the flavor of special pleading and identity politics. Schneider does well in answering these claims, and he does good, sober work in reconstructing what economic strata Jesus was likely to have occupied. He was a tekton, the son of a tekton, which meant that He was a builder of some sort. Most have taken this to mean carpenter, but Schneider suggests the additional possibilities of masonry, or jack of all trades. I have elsewhere seen the suggestion that it may have meant an architect. In any case, it was a respectable trade, and Jesus did not grow up among the street people.
But Schneider made one point in this chapter that was quite striking to me — not only did Jesus attract the down-and-outers of the economic world, he also attracted the down-and-outers of the social world. In other words, Jesus associated with the disreputable, all right, but there are more ways to be disreputable than to have filthy clothing crawling with vermin. The world of Christ’s day (just like ours) contained rich people who were shunned by respectable types — just think of high-priced courtesans of New York governors, to take a recent example. The fact that she might haul in big money at an hourly rate does not make her respectable.
“The woman (no doubt a former prostitute) who poured a whole bottle of nard on Jesus’ hair had money enough” (pp. 136-137).
The Pharisees of Jesus’ day were upset that He would break bread with tax collectors and prostitutes. The sanctimonious of today are upset that He ate with Pharisees. And evangelicals — accustomed as we are to urban missions and soup kitchens — have no problem seeing Jesus laboring in their midst among the poorest of the poor, and they are right to do so. That is just what He would do.
But Schneider makes it plain that Jesus came to seek and save that which was lost, and people get lost in all kinds of places. From all the New Testament data, if these companies were everything a leftist nightmare might conceive them to be, Jesus would most certainly have gone to a banquet attended by bigwigs from Halliburton and Blackwater, even if the event was liberally decorated by platinum call girls for our representatives in Congress. And no, it would not have been to make a contribution to the Republican party.