How Did Jesus and His Disciples Get Enough to Eat?

[00:00:01] How did Jesus and His Disciples get Enough to Eat? By Bart D. Ehrman Read by John Paul Middlesworth how did Jesus and his disciples support themselves? [00:00:12] They left their families, homes and jobs to engage in a life of itinerancy preaching about the coming kingdom. But until it came, how did they survive? Specifically, how did they eat? [00:00:24] I don't recall ever seeing any extended discussion of the question in a scholarly or popular book or article. [00:00:31] If one of you has, let me know. It seems like an obvious question, and I suppose most people think there is an obvious answer. There may be. I can think of three, but it's worth thinking about in greater depth. [00:00:44] One very big problem about understanding the historical Jesus I confront this all the time, is that nearly everyone, including lots of scholars, seems to assume that modern common sense, both in our minds and our actions, would have been common sense in the time and place of Jesus. And so scholars, and most people who read them talk about Jesus being middle class or having a summer home around Bethlehem, or getting a Greek education at the city of Sepphorus, or traveling to India or whatever. [00:01:15] Yeah, no. [00:01:17] We have to understand what it would have been like to be a lower class peasant in a rural part of backwater Galilee before we can even start to talk about Jesus own situation. [00:01:27] I'm not going to get into demographics, poverty, educational levels and opportunities, diet, wealth distribution, etc. Here. That would take a long treatment. [00:01:36] All I'll say is that itinerant preachers who left their homes to wander about teaching and interacting with people did not make any money, so they had to have other resources in order to survive. [00:01:48] The three obvious choices for how Jesus and the 12 found sufficient calories to survive seem to me to be they received financial support from followers who provided them with funds and food. [00:02:00] They begged, they foraged, or some combination of these. [00:02:05] Before considering these in turn in posts to come, we need to think about how long they would have needed to survive without steady employment. [00:02:14] How long did Jesus public ministry last? [00:02:17] It turns out to be a tricky question. [00:02:19] Everyone says it was three years, but where does that number come from? It's a calculation derived only from the Gospel of John, our earliest gospel. Mark appears to assume that Jesus ministry lasted something like six or seven months. [00:02:34] At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus has to explain to other Jewish teachers why it was all right for his disciples to be picking some of the crops from the field to eat even though it was Sabbath. [00:02:45] Mark 2:23 28 I may devote an entire post to the issue, but it appears that if they are eating raw grain it would not be at harvest time. [00:02:55] It's rare that people eat dry wheat off the stock, crunchy and hugely unpleasant and unsatisfying. We're probably thinking late spring or early summer, when the grain was filled out sufficiently, but still green and edible, if still not entirely pleasant. [00:03:12] Say it was sometime in May. [00:03:15] After that, the actions in Mark occur fast and furious One of Mark's favorite words is euthus, Greek for immediately. Mark repeatedly uses it to start episodes. He uses the word over 40 times, way more than the other gospels immediately Jesus did this, that, and the other thing at the end of Jesus ministry in chapter 11, Jesus enters into Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover feast and then has one more week on earth before the crucifixion. [00:03:46] Passover is a spring festival, usually early April, so if Jesus ministry begins in the late spring or early summer and ends at Passover, it's less than a year. [00:03:58] But in John, Jesus attends three separate Passover feasts. That means he must have been going back and forth to Jerusalem. In the synoptics, he only goes once in three separate years at the least. The ministry must then have lasted somewhat over two years, and readers normally simply round it up to three. [00:04:17] How are Jesus and the disciples supporting themselves for all this time? [00:04:21] Even if it's say, seven months, as in Synoptics, it is almost entirely in rural, poor Galilee, even if they were invited over for dinner at wealthy persons houses. But what wealthy persons with large houses say every Sabbath? What about the other meals that day and every other of the six days a week for months? [00:04:42] Or if John is right, for three years? [00:04:45] In either case, they are traveling around from one place to the next without employment and therefore without funds, but are managing to find some way to survive, that is eat how. [00:04:57] That's what I'll be considering in the posts that follow. [00:05:00] As always, I will welcome your comments.