The Meaning of Forgiveness
Debt Forgiveness in the New Testament
This part of the System Failure constellation of ideas explores how the Fall of Rome shaped Christianity. Death and rebirth are central to that religion, both in its mythology—the story of Jesus is about coming back from the dead—and in its history. Christianity resurrected much older Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions, dusted them off, and transported them forward into the Middle Ages and beyond. Three major examples—all readily allegorized by death and rebirth—are debt forgiveness, astronomical cycles, and ego death.
Christianity originated within the Roman Empire, which eventually collapsed because of debt. The Romans were pioneers in forgoing the stability of systematic debt forgiveness. By contrast, much older Fertile Crescent societies held a long tradition of it to stave off collapses exactly like the one that befell Rome. This Mesopotamian tradition arrived in the Roman Empire through Jewish scripture. That’s the story of Jesus. However, Rome's fate was sealed when the financial forgiveness he preached was changed into forgiveness for bad behavior instead. That’s how the Christianity we recognize today was shaped by the Fall of Rome.
Last week’s essay focused on debt forgiveness in the Old Testament. Today’s essay will examine how that tradition made its way into the New Testament…
Greek Debt Forgiveness
After the Babylonian Captivity of 586 BC, Jews released from bondage in Mesopotamia carried the knowledge of an ancient debt-forgiveness tradition back to their homeland in Judea, where they codified it into Jewish scripture.
Around the same time, debt forgiveness also arrived on the Greek peninsula.
In 594 BC, Athens was mired in an existential debt crisis. Too many of its small farmers had fallen into debt slavery, and mass civil unrest racked the city. To address the crisis, Athenians elected a poet named Solon to office and granted him broad emergency powers.
With a piece of legislation known as the Seisachtheia (or “shaking-off of burdens”), Solon used these emergency powers to cancel the debts of small Athenian farmers across the board. He also outlawed debt slavery so that people could no longer be pledged as loan collateral. Then, he abruptly retired from public life and left Greece.
Roman Debt Forgiveness
Solon saved Athens from economic and social collapse. Because European societies lacked the tradition of debt forgiveness that stabilized Mesopotamian civilization for thousands of years, Greek city-states were chronically roiled by similar crises. And the situation was no different across the Ionian Sea on the Italian Peninsula.
85 years after Solon’s Seisachtheia, in 509 BC, Rome experienced one of these inevitable debt crises. Rome was still a monarchy, and her king attempted to deal with the crisis by mimicking Solon’s strategy. But this time, those to whom the debts were owed struck first…
The wealthy aristocratic families of Rome banished their king and created the Senate to rule in his stead. Though they were a tiny minority, these families strictly controlled the Senate and, by extension, the political agenda.
Secessio plebis
Mesopotamian kings were forced to periodically reset their economic scoreboards because people could leave those societies. Anyone who fell hopelessly into debt could simply relocate to a neighboring city-state and start fresh. Those kings understood they wouldn’t be kings for long if they permitted too much wealth inequality.
However, the Romans were innovators in controlling vast geographical areas with soldiers, roads, and aqueducts. Their society was too large to escape. When the Senate blocked redresses of economic grievances, Roman workers decamped to a hill outside the city and refused to work. This general strike, and others like it, were known as Secessio plebis, or “Secession of the Plebs.”
The aristocracy appeased the mob by creating political offices for them. However, they also preserved the status quo by depriving these offices of any real power to alter economic outcomes. Though the sheer size of the Roman Republic delayed the coming of the Mesopotamian kings’ worst nightmares, the endless class strife finally ignited a cataclysmic civil war during the last century BC.
The Emperors
In his Parallel Lives, the Roman historian Plutarch wrote, "the disparity between rich and poor reached such a high point, and the city was in an altogether perilous condition, that it seemed as if the only way to restore order and stop the turmoil was to establish a tyranny."
Plutarch was writing about Solon of Athens. But he could just as easily have been describing the career of Julius Caesar or the coronation of his nephew, Augustus, as the first emperor of Rome. These men rose to supreme power because only someone with supreme power could stop the fighting.
A civil war brought the Emperors to power, and that power allowed them to end the civil war. But the root of the problem facing Rome was debt. Only regular debt forgiveness could prevent the systematic consolidation of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. The Emperors could prevent the pot of Roman society from boiling over by forcing a lid onto it. But they had no ability to turn down the heat.
Christianity
When the Caesars assumed power in the first century AD, Judea had already been conquered by Rome and converted into an imperial province on the outer rim of the Empire. There, one man understood the political and economic significance of debt forgiveness and decided to act on it. His decision made him even more recognizable to history than Julius Caesar.
Jeshua ben Joseph, whose Greek name is Jesus Christ, began his career of preaching forgiveness in his hometown of Nazareth. Being Jewish, he was very familiar with the debt forgiveness that his ancestors had learned about in Babylon and baked into Hebrew scripture. From among those writings, he selected the scroll of Isaiah for his debut sermon.
In the New Testament, the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 4, tells the story:
16 And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read.
17 And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written,
18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,
19 To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.
20 And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him.
21 And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.
Jesus’ reference is to Isaiah, Chapter 61:
1The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;
2 To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn;
Any doubts that the ministry of Jesus was about debt forgiveness are put to rest in the Sermon on the Mount. That sermon, which includes the Lord's Prayer, is one of the most essential teachings of Jesus Christ. In the King James version of Matthew, Chapter 6, the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer are given as:
9 After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
The Crucifixion
Everyone knows the finale of Jesus’ story. His message so challenged the powerful that they executed him in a gruesome public spectacle. In all four gospels, the Romans who crucified Jesus affixed a sign to his cross that read Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum. That’s Latin for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”
In virtually all forms of Christianity today, the iconography of the cross is still accompanied by the four letters “INRI” to implicate Jesus in the worst crime the Roman mind could imagine: claiming to be king. The Roman taboo against declaring oneself king was established after the ouster of the last king of Rome, who was banished for trying to implement debt forgiveness.
In next week’s essay, we’ll learn about the economic situation in Rome and how debt forgiveness could have saved the Roman economy from collapse.
Further Materials
The “tyranny” of Peisistratus was part of a general movement in the commercially active cities of sixth-century Greece, to replace the feudal rule of a landowning aristocracy with the political dominance of the middle class in temporary alliance with the poor.* Such dictatorships were brought on by the pathological concentration of wealth, and the inability of the wealthy to agree on a compromise. Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes. Hence the road to power in Greek commercial cities was simple: to attack the aristocracy, defend the poor, and come to an understanding with the middle classes.89 Arrived at power, the dictator abolished debts, or confiscated large estates, taxed the rich to finance public works, or otherwise redistributed the overconcentrated wealth; and while attaching the masses to himself through such measures, he secured the support of the business community by promoting trade with state coinage and commercial treaties, and by raising the social prestige of the bourgeoisie. Forced to depend upon popularity instead of hereditary power, the dictatorships for the most part kept out of war, supported religion, maintained order, promoted morality, favored the higher status of women, encouraged the arts, and lavished revenues upon the beautification of their cities. And they did all these things, in many cases, while preserving the forms and procedures of popular government, so that even under despotism the people learned the ways of liberty. When the dictatorship had served to destroy the aristocracy the people destroyed the dictatorship; and only a few changes were needed to make the democracy of freemen a reality as well as a form.
*The word tyrant had come from Lydia, perhaps from the town of Tyrrha, meaning a fortress; probably it is a distant cousin to our word tower (Gk. tyrris). Apparently it was applied first to Gyges, the Lydian king.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Life of Greece, 1939, page 122
The early 7th-century Archilochus used the word turannis in a poem about Gyges of Lydia in Asia Minor, a bodyguard for its king, whom he killed to gain the throne. The word was soon applied to outsiders who replaced entrenched dynasties. The term is best translated as “demogogy”, which retains the populist demos root. But history is written by the victors—the landed oligarchies in Greece and Rome, which felt threatened by revolts led by lawgivers or reformers. They gave the word “tyrant” a negative connotation and writers unsympathetic to democracy gave an autocratic meaning to the word.
What subsequent oligarchies found so “tyrannical” was the assertion of public power restraining the privileges of the wealthy by driving the dominant families into exile and much, as Near Eastern rulers had done, redistributing their land and canceling the debts that had deprived many clients of their liberty. That led oligarchies to denounce reformers who advocated canceling debts and limited the land grabbing of creditor elites as being “immoderate” and power hungry as if they rather than the creditor elites were hubristic.
Michael Hudson, The Collapse of Antiquity, 2023, page 51
Reacting against public spending by the kings, Rome's oligarchy embraced an anti-government ideology as passionately as do today's anti-socialists. Much like the Greek oligarchs who accused reformers seeking popular support by cancelling debts and redistributing land of being "tyrants," Roman patricians accused reformers of "seeking kingship" by proposing debt reform and assignment of public land to settle the poor instead of letting patricians grab it for themselves. Such advocacy led to the most progressive reformers from the leading families being assassinated in political killings over the ensuing five centuries.
In the republican period the very idea of a king was viewed with an almost pathological dislike. ... The tradition is very likely correct when it says that the first acts of the founders of the Republic were to make the people swear never to allow any man to be king in Rome and to legislate against anyone aspiring to monarchy in the future. What was truly repugnant to the nobles was the thought of one of their number elevating himself above his peers by attending to the needs of the lower classes and winning their political support.
This explains why all the serious charges of monarchism (regnum) in the Republic were leveled against mavericks from the ruling elite whose only offence, it seems, was to direct their personal efforts and resources to the relief of the poor.
This Roman fear of kingship is what Judea's upper class played upon when they sought to have Jesus condemned after he incited the hatred of the Pharisees and the creditor class with his first sermon (Luke 4), when he unrolled the scroll of Isaiah and announced that he had come to proclaim the Jubilee Year of the Lord, cancelling debts as called for under Mosaic Law. They accused him of aspiring to be "king of the Jews," that is, "seeking kingship," the familiar epithet the Romans applied to leaders whom they feared might cancel debts, including Catiline and Caesar around Jesus's time.
Michael Hudson, The Collapse of Antiquity, 2023, page 187
This was excellent!!!