https://imo.neocities.org/debts
Michael E. Hudson's first book on this topic is posted above - searchable
In the first reported sermon
Jesus delivered upon returning to his native Nazareth (Luke 4:16 ff.),
he unrolled the scroll of Isaiah and announced his mission “to restore
the Year of Our Lord.” Until recently the meaning of this phrase was not
recognized as referring specifically to the Jubilee Year. But
breakthroughs in cuneiform research and a key Qumran scroll provide a
direct link to that tradition. This linkage provides the basis for
understanding how early Christianity emerged in an epoch so impoverished
by debt and the threat of bondage that it was called the End Time.
Jesus
was both more revolutionary and more conservative than was earlier
recognized. He was politically revolutionary in threatening Judaic
creditors, and behind them the Pharisees who had rationalized their
rights against debtors. Luke 16: 13–15 describes them as “loving money”
and “sneering” at Jesus’s message that “You cannot serve both God and
Money/Mammon.”[26]
The leading rabbinical school in an age when creditor power was gaining
dominance throughout the ancient world, the Pharisees followed the
teachings of Hillel. Now credited as a founder of rabbinical Judaism, he
sponsored the prosbul clause in which creditors obliged their clients to waive their rights to have their debts cancelled in the Jubilee Year....
That word is deror,
used in Leviticus to signal a debt cancellation in the Jubilee Year as
described above. Translated on America’s Liberty Bell as “Proclaim
liberty throughout the land,” deror
refers specifically to cancelling debts, freeing bondservants and
returning land to its cultivator-occupants who had lost it through debt
foreclosure or economic duress.
That is
the word’s meaning in Jeremiah’s narrative of King Zedekiah’s promise to
cancel the people’s debts on the eve of war with Babylonia in 588 BC.
Jeremiah, the king’s counselor, interpreted the Babylonian King
Nebuchadnezzar II’s subsequent defeat of Judea as punishment by the Lord
for Zedekiah’s going back on his word and violating sacred law: “You
did not release [your people from their debts], so I will release sword,
pestilence and famine!” (Jeremiah: 17–22). By breaking the Mosaic
covenant with the Lord, Zedekiah’s behavior condemned the land to
destruction at the hands of Babylon. “He did evil in the eye of the
Lord” (2 Kings 224: 19f. and Jeremiah 52: 2 f.)....
Isaiah 61: 1–2 provides the bridge to the New Testament.
Written by the prophet known as Third Isaiah c. 400 BC soon after the
codification of the Priestly Laws of Leviticus in the wake of Nehemiah
and Ezra, this remarkable passage reads:
The spirit
of the Sovereign Lord [Yahweh] is upon me, for the Lord has anointed me
to preach good news [gospel] to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the
broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty (deror) for the captives and
release for the prisoners, to proclaim the Year of the Lord’s favor and
the day of vengeance of our God …
Many
of these phrases have become so familiar that they appear hackneyed
today, but they were quite specific in their original setting. The word
“gospel” means literally “good news.” But apart from Isaiah 61 and its
quotation by Jesus in his inaugural sermon (in Luke 4: 18 f. and Matthew
11: 6 // Luke 7: 23), the full phrase “good news to the poor” appears
nowhere else in the Synoptic gospels. It refers to the deror
tradition, the amnesty freeing citizens from bondage and restoring
their means of self-support on the land in “the Year of the Lord’s
favor,” the Jubilee Year. The Year’s yobel
trumpet is to be blown on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement signaling
the restoration of worldly order, righteousness and equity. The yobel trumpet, a ram’s horn blown on the tenth day of the seventh month, gave its name to the Jubilee.
By
the first century BC the Isaiah 61 passage had come to play a prominent
role in the Qumran archive. A scroll dating from 50 to 25 BC, known as
11QMelchizedek (11Q stands for Qumran cave number 11, where it was
buried during Judea’s war with Rome), weaves together the deror and
related debt cancellation passages from Leviticus, Deuteronomy and
Isaiah, combined with various psalms to elevate the Levitical image of
restoring equity.
Discovered
in 1956, the Qumran scroll highlights Isaiah 61 as the basis for
projecting the idea of release to cover not only debts and loss of
landownership, but all evil in the world – everything that an amnesty
should set straight. The author(s) evidently searched through the Jewish
Bible to find all its references to deror,
and collated them in such a way as to describe the Day of Judgment as a
grand release to end all releases. At the End of Time the Lord will
return to earth to save his followers and smite those who have digressed
from the path of righteousness.
The
scrolls’ authors were long thought to be Essenes, a sect whose members
believed that they were living in the End Time, a cycle-ending Jubilee
year conceived along the lines of renewal called for in the laws of
Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But recently there is some support for the
idea that the Qumram collection was the sacred library of the Jerusalem
temple, stored for safe keeping during the Roman wars.[27]
Whoever drafted these scrolls believed that it would take an
apocalyptic new order, imposed from “above” the world of economic
suffering, to replace wrongdoing and decadence with righteousness.
The
Melchizedek scroll shows the key role played by Jubilee traditions in
shaping Qumran and Christian hopes for how the End Time would be
resolved. Yet even today, half a century since its discovery, this text
still remains more an antiquarian curiosity than an explanatory link to
the Near Eastern tradition and idea of economic righteousness in which
Judaic law was grounded.
Describing Melchizedek as “a
priest on high” (indeed, as founding the Judaic priesthood), Hebrews 7
explains why he is so important: He appeared to Abraham (Genesis 14) and
blessed him after he rescued his nephew, Lot, and his caravan of goods
from the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah.
In today’s interpretation of the Sodom story the narrow
focus on sexual license and other noneconomic behavior misses the
symbolic association of sodomy with the unrighteous behavior of greed.
From Roman Stoic history down through the medieval prosecution of the
Knights Templar it was customary to depict major moneylenders as
sodomists, as the ultimate expression of predatory behavior was usury.
The word seems outdated today, but of all the vices condemned by the
Biblical prophets, it was the sin against which they warned above all.
(See Part IV below.)
Having
rescued Lot, Melchizedek helped bring about the universal release of
captives. His name comprises the Hebrew words for “king” and “justice”
or “righteousness,” alluding to the “king of righteousness.”[28]
That was the same title Mesopotamian rulers used when they proclaimed andurārum. The scroll (lines 2–6) identifies Melchizedek with Zadok the priest under King David.[29]
Deemed to be the prototypical high priest in Psalm 110, he became a
savior figure bringing about the release of the oppressed in the End
Time....
Isaiah, the Qumran sect’s Melchizedek priesthood and Jesus all proclaimed liberty (deror)
for debt bondsmen and other captives of the world. Early Christianity
would extend this idea to signify a release of the poor from suffering
in general, overshadowing the original focus on debt.
It was in the footsteps of Melchizedek that Jesus appears to have walked.[30]
Early Christian iconography depicts Jesus as sitting on the right hand
of God as a priest “after the order of Melchizedek.” The Epistle of the
Hebrews 7 depicts him, like Melchizedek, as being “without father,
without mother, without descent, having neither beginning nor end of
days, nor end of life, but made like unto the Son of God.” The bread and
water that Melchizedek is reported to have given to Abraham was viewed
as a precursor of Christ giving bread and wine for the Eucharist.[31]
Judaic
religion already had taken such proclamations out of the hands of
rulers (with whom they did not have a fortunate experience) and placed
them in the hands of the high priest of Jerusalem. Jesus’s “good news”
sought to take sponsorship of deror out of the hands of the Judaic priesthood that had followed Hillel and the Pharisees in contrast to Mosaic Law.
The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point
by Professor Michael E. Hudson, 2023
I have a book (linked above as pdf on archive dot org) that proves Jesus was talking about financial
debt. It's by Professor Michael E. Hudson - he's an economic professor
who studies ancient economics also.
AD 1st century: Jesus attempts to revive the Mosaic tradition of the Jubilee
Year. He devotes his first sermon (Luke 4) to announcing that he has come
to proclaim a Jubilee Year bringing debt forgiveness and land redistribution
in accordance with Leviticus 25....
Toynbee
draws no parallel between Cleomenes’ debt cancellation and Jesus’s
announcement (Luke 4) that he had come to proclaim the Jubilee Year, nor
between Cleomenes exiling Sparta’s wealthiest oligarchic families and
Jesus throwing the bankers out of the temple....
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....
The Council of Nicaea was convened in 325 under Constantine’s spon-
sorship to help end schisms within the Church. It is best known for oppos-
ing Arian theology with the Nicene Creed asserting that Christ was created
by God out of his own body (“of the substance of the Father”) and thus
was eternal, not coming into existence only at the moment of his birth in
Bethlehem. Defining Christ as always existing, as part of God, removed
Jesus from the worldly Jewish conflicts of his own time. The Council did,
however, maintain the policy of Elvira and Arles forbidding the clergy
to practice usury.....
persecuted as schismatics Jewish Christians, North African
Donatists, Egyptian Nestorians, Northern European followers of Pelagius,
and Arians. The existing status quo of property rights and serfdom was
defended. The economic message of earlier Christians, and Jesus Christ
himself, had become heretical.
By ruling that Jesus always had existed as God, the Nicene Creed down-
played his Jewish context and Jesus’s own hope to revive the Mosaic tra-
dition of the Jubilee Year. There was no awareness of the parallel between
Jesus’s first sermon announcing that he had come to restore the Jubilee Year
and the Lord’s anticipated return restoring equity on earth.35 That Near
Eastern-Jewish background was absent from the Christianity that devel-
oped from Rome to North Africa, Gaul and Western Europe. As the next
chapter will describe, Augustine’s theology changed the meaning of the
Lord’s Prayer to focus on forgiveness of original sin and sexual self-indul-
gence, not on the worldly debt amnesty that Jesus had advocated....
It
was not Christianity that corrupted the Roman Empire; rather, it was
becoming the state religion of the Empire and its landowning elites that
diverted Christianity away from the pro-debtor message of Jesus and his
followers.
A world free of avarice and money-greed would have to await the Lord’s
return to restore a Golden Age at the end of history, as such a world was
unattainable in the face of Roman oppression and indeed in the Empire’s
aftermath in coming centuries....
I describe Jesus’s first sermon and the altered meaning of the Lord’s Prayer and its background in [the book] “… and Forgive Them Their Debts” (2018).
Augustine’s fight against the Donatists reversed Christianity’s role as a
movement protecting the poor against the wealthy. The Church embraced
the status quo, and instead of the debt relief that had been central to Jesus,
it only recommended charitable contributions out of what the aristocracy
extracted from the economy....
They probably did not understand that Jesus’s
first sermon (Luke 4) called for a Jubilee Year bringing debt forgiveness
and land redistribution in accordance with Leviticus 25. Instead, the focus
of Mosaic law on debt relief and land redemption that was at the center of
Jesus’s preaching played no role as the Church reached an accommodation
with the vested interests to receive charity from them, but not challenge
their economic control.
Refraining from criticizing the property rights that shaped the dis-
tribution of landholding and led to clientage and poverty, Catholic
Christianity implicitly backed the power of creditors and landowners over
debtors and tenants. “By saying with Christ, ‘Render to Caesar the things
that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,’” commented Fustel
de Coulanges, Christianity chose not to challenge “the laws of property, nor
the order of succession, nor obligations, nor legal proceedings. It placed
itself … outside all things purely terrestrial,”21 leaving Roman-based law
intact.....
Jesus’s preaching followed this focus on social
injustice and criticized the selfishness of the Judaic wealthy that led to debt
dependency. He devoted his first sermon to announcing that he had come
to proclaim the Jubilee Year. But no members of the Romanized Church
echoed Isaiah 5:12 by denouncing the Empire’s latifundists for “add[ing]
house to house and join[ing] field to field till no space is left and you live
alone in the land.” Augustine instead focused on personal sin, with an id-
iosyncratic focus on sexual indulgence that has remained characteristic of
his church.
In Egypt, largely under Cyril of Alexandria, worship of the virgin Mary
(an element often seen as transposing Egyptian Isis worship) replaced the
classical justice goddess Nemesis punishing hubris (mainly of the rich and
powerful). This Christian Mariolatry, emphasizing the compassionate
Mother
of Jesus/God, helped exclude Jewish Christians as part of Cyril’s
anti-Semitism. It also excluded the idea of a justice goddess protecting
the
weak and poor, a figure going back to Nanshe of Lagash in Bronze Age
Sumer, who was followed by counterpart justice goddesses for thousands
of years down to Greece and Rome. The dimension of social justice as a re-
ligious commandment to protect the poor and their self-support land from
the rich was replaced by Christian compassion taking the form of charity
by the rich—to the Church, at their own personal discretion....
But for Augustine, debita did not mean
monetary debt as it had originally meant. Rather, it referred to the need to
atone for the sin of Adam’s self-indulgence.39 That stripped from the Lord’s
Prayer its call to “forgive them their debts” that reflected Jesus’s focus on the
debt amnesty at the core of the Jubilee Year (Leviticus 25). It was replaced
with the idea of payment to expiate a sin/offense, with the Church receiv-
ing the payment, interjecting itself into the dynamic of personal salvation,
while leaving the world’s monetary debts intact, not subject to forgiveness
either by the Church or by any civic authority. The poor as well as the rich
were deemed sinful, simply for being born....
Romanized Christianity thus made a sharp break from the preachings
of Jesus advocating debt cancellation in the tradition of the Jubilee Year
debt amnesty. Except for Roman tax amnesties, debt forgiveness was no
longer politically feasible in an era when most debts were owed to private
creditors. Despite Christian denunciation of these creditors and usury, per-
sonal debtors were not saved from losing their economic liberty to their
creditors.
Jesus’s worldly fight for debt cancellation also was sidestepped by Cyril,
patriarch of Alexandria (412-444), who led the other schism splitting the
5th-century Church over the threefold nature of Jesus, the Lord and the
Holy Spirit. In the schism, Cyril insisted on Trinitarianism and that the
Nestorians be denounced as heretics. As discussed in Chapter 21, the First
Council of Nicaea in 325 had deemed it a heresy to say that Jesus was be-
gotten at a moment in time and hence did not always exist......
Jesus as eternal God incarnate shifted the focus away from his call for debt
forgiveness, especially his fight against the Pharisees who advocated the
prosbul clause obliging debtors to waive their rights to have their debts for-
given in the Jubilee Year of Leviticus 25. To cap matters, Cyril’s emphasis on
Mariolatry helped exclude Judaism from Christian theology.40...........
Neither Romanized Christianity nor
most subsequent economic reformers went so far as to advocate a general
widespread debt cancellation or land redistribution as earlier antiquity had
hoped for. There is almost no reference to the policy of royal debt amnes-
ties that had kept Near Eastern kingdoms resilient for millennia, nor to
Jesus’s call for a Jubilee Year. There is still a widespread idealism about an
egalitarian Golden Age, but it lacks any recognition of the archaic royal
aim of restoring financial balance by wiping away the accrual of arrears
and other debts.
In the Bronze-Age Near East interest charges were accepted as a normal
phenomenon as long as they remained subject to the safety valve of Clean
Slates alleviating personal and agrarian debts when their buildup threat-
ened to force smallholders into widespread bondage and concentrate land
ownership.54 Interest-bearing debt did not disappear. Debt was allowed to
begin accumulating once again, but the tradition of Clean Slates kept it
from destabilizing archaic economies....
