Yesterday I did an interview with Tripp Fuller of Homebrewed Christianity – the podcast will be up soon. We talked about Marxism and religion, Christian communism and so on. I also referred to Ste. Croix’s excellent Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World concerning the curious challenge to property in the Gospels, which one finds nowhere else in Greek literature (and Ste. Croix has the most thorough references you will find anywhere). But then a listener came in with a question: what about the parable of the talents (in Matthew 25:14-30)? I gave a brief answer, which is a summary of the following.
In the parable of the talents, Jesus talks of a man travelling to a far country, so he gives his slaves 5, 2 and 1 ‘talents’ each. The first went and ‘worked’ (ἠργάσατο – the word used primarily for working one’s hands) the talents and made five more. The second did the same and made two more, but the third slave buried the talent until the master returned. When the master did return he praised to first two and condemned the last. Is this not praise for being an astute manager of money, investing it so that it produces more rather than simply sitting on it and doing nothing?
Not at all. To begin with, a talent was a shitload of money, equivalent to 10000 times the daily wage. Given that most of us don’t even work 10000 days in our lives, one talent is worth more than a life’s income. So the slaves were given what no master would give slaves and then leave – unbelievable fortunes that may have been held only by the very rich. In other words, they have been given the opportunity to be millionaires for a few days.
Further, in an economy where one could not invest money, where the notion of buying shares in the stock market did not exist, for there were no stock markets (let alone banks), where even credit was a very primitive notion, what did one do with any amount of money? As Morris Finley points out, the natural thing to do was bury money until you needed it. This the rich did again and again. So the slave who buried the talent did the right thing according to practices of the rich at the time. But the parable condemns him and not the ones who ‘worked’ the talents out in a desperately poor community.
27 August, 2011 at 10:57 pm
I’m surprised they didn’t go hire an ark-load of bodyguards. I know that’s what I’d do if I won the ‘talent’ lottery.
http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/08/26/164192.html
28 August, 2011 at 12:50 am
When you’re sharing it around, you don’t need any bodyguards, unless you choose to bury it in your back yard.
28 August, 2011 at 2:22 am
Now that is objectively queer!
27 August, 2011 at 11:00 pm
Wow Roland! That’s an interesting perspective on the Parable of the Minas (ugh, the whole Talents as talent thing is so annoying in Amerricuhan churches).
I would have to look further into the practices on the wealthy in the days of Jesus sometime in the future, but yeah, it figures that an evangelical type would bring up the Parable of the Minas to counter questions of economic justice.
28 August, 2011 at 12:51 am
I believe it’s minas in Luke, which changes the meaning a fair bit.
27 August, 2011 at 11:35 pm
[...] See more: Parable of the Talents [...]
28 August, 2011 at 7:01 am
Thanks for posting this. I will link it up to the podcast when it’s live!
Really Enjoyed talking with you.
28 August, 2011 at 8:56 am
I think that there is a huge difference between Matthew and Luke on this parable.
28 August, 2011 at 9:00 am
This is an interesting reading, but I can’t rest with it.
“Further, in an economy where one could not invest money, where the notion of buying shares in the stock market did not exist, for there were no stock markets (let alone banks), where even credit was a very primitive notion, what did one do with any amount of money? As Morris Finley points out, the natural thing to do was bury money until you needed it”
What about putting the money “to the exchangers” so that the master “would receive mine own with usury” like he says in verse 27? This looks like a superior option to “bury it in a hole”, and it does get the money back into the community (albeit with fees). If leaving money with usurers to lend out wasn’t as common a practice as burying it in holes, then where did they get the money to lend out?
I also don’t see what to do with verses 24-26 on your reading; they’re not doing any work if the point of the passage is to criticize the practice of burying money in holes (not that I have a better option — the passage has never been clear to me).
28 August, 2011 at 10:01 am
But how did the first two slaves double the money? Flipping houses? Trading in slaves? Microfinance? Gambling? Counterfeiting?
28 August, 2011 at 12:32 pm
To begin with, the parable has three shocks: the sheer amount of wealth the slaves suddenly have; the criticism of the one who buries it; the harsh master, who engages in all manner of dubious practices.
As far as terminology is concerned, I already pointed out that ergazomai means ‘to work with one’s hands’ (‘trade’ is a late and subsidiary meaning, but that’s the one most translations go with). Verse 27 is more interesting, since here the slavemaster says, ‘at least you could have taken my money to the trapezitais, so on return I would have received mine with tokos’. A trapezitas is a money changer, who would lay the coin out on a table (trapeza) and exchange it with the coin you have. If you have ever encountered a money changer on the street in some country, who offers you a ‘good deal’ and then fleeces you, you’ll get the picture. You have to be extremely sharp and mean not to lose out in such a transaction. Tokos obviously means ‘child’, so metaphorically ‘gain’ or, loosely, ‘interest’. The Greeks and Romans lent out money at interest, but as Finley points out, it was done almost exclusively for non-productive reasons(purchase of land, etc, which was never accounted as appreciating in value) . There is but one instance in all the literature where it may have been for credit for some trading expedition, but that looks like it was done for insurance purposes and not for profit (Ste. Croix points out that there was no sense of balance of trade, of maximising profit: the purpose of trade was to get something you wanted and you got the money for it by whatever means, usually through some silver mine or from your father’s stash).
The upshot: the slavemaster says: instead of burying it in the ground like the rich do, at least you could have been a mean, despicable bastard like me and gone to the money-changers and fleeced them!
So how did the other two double their money? The parable doesn’t say, typically. Obviously not through trade (see above), nor through investment. We can only speculate (!) The parable leaves open the possibility that they were as mean as their master and screwed everyone. However, let me draw on Ste. Croix again. The Gospels have Jesus and the disciples stay in the chora, until at last he goes to Jerusalem, a polis. In other words, the stories have him steering clear of some obvious poleis nearby – close by Nazareth were Sepphoris, which was six kilometres away, and Tiberias, which was on the shore of Lake Galilee at almost the point closest to Nazareth. While the poleis were Hellenistic in culture, language, archictecture and economic structure, the chorae were still part of an older and now very impoverished economic system (what I call the ‘sacred economy’), with different linguistic and social patterns. Their major experience of economics was through the extraction of a very thin surplus to feed the cities and construct its buildings. If the slaves were in the polis, they would have been able to make use of the economic practices there, but if in the chorae, not at all. The response there would have been a communal one in which any wealth was spread out.
29 August, 2011 at 8:30 am
But wasn’t the doubled money (and the buried money) returned to the master? (And isn’t the master always God the father?) So how could that money be worked or spread around if not as capital?
28 August, 2011 at 4:16 pm
I’m unconvinced. I suspect that the two who made money did so by following the same corrupt practices of the master. The one who buried the money is the one who refused to engage in such rapacious economic practices and, in fact, it is this slave whom Jesus says others are to emulate. I believe that this is the reading offered by Ched Myers, Richard Horsley and that crew.
28 August, 2011 at 7:15 pm
I’m aware that’s a consensus reading, but that ignores the standard practice of the rich (and the slaves were stupendously rich for a while), which was to put it in a hole. However, the parable leaves much open. How the other two are understood to have ‘worked’ their money all depends on whether the setting is the chora or the polis.
28 August, 2011 at 5:27 pm
My question is whether this is really about money or economics? Isn’t it about how we user our own God-given talents? Er… I’m only kidding about that. But seriously, aside from that common confusion caused by the English language (talents and talents), I don’t really think the lesson here is about economics and that is probably why details about how the money was increased or might have been increased are absent. I think there is a serious danger of anachronism here. Can Jesus really be teaching, via the implications we insert into the story, something about modern economics? That would be strange. I think he’s talking about what it means to take what God has given to you and use it, make it effective, add to it, and make God look good in the process. Now, granted: that does land us squarely in the question of how to use money, which God has also given us. However, that is one of the many things he has given us AND you will have to get your principles for spending/investment from other passages, bc this one says very little about that and even if it did, that would not be the point (remember the parable of the unjust steward as a reminder that the examples in Jesus’ parables are not necessarily worthy of imitation, even if the principles they teach are). BTW, my thought is that a common way of making money in that context would be to lease land and cultivate it. That would work nicely into the “working with your hands” emphasis. Though with that sort of cash you would have to probably manage other people’s work…
28 August, 2011 at 7:21 pm
Rob, I said nothing about modern economics, which are usually imported into a passage like this – ie. they were simply ‘primitive capitalists’, which is crap. But you are partly right in your last sentence: agricultural production was the way riches were made, either by screwing peasants in the chora, or by buying land and slaves and getting them to run it. That would turn the slaves into masters. I don’t think you can avoid the economic side of the parable, since the slaves were given talents, ie money in coin.
29 August, 2011 at 3:20 am
But surely you are presenting an interpretation oriented to modern economic theory. This is why, according to your intro, you were asked the question in the first place, and your response highlights the compatibility of your modern economic theory and the parable that a Jewish peasant told 2000 years ago. I don’t know, maybe I’m not getting it, but that is what I thought this post was about. But I am not saying the economic side “can be avoided”, only that it needs to be nuanced and that it’s not the main point. I mean, most discipleship principles can be extrapolated to economics, right?
29 August, 2011 at 3:31 pm
Lurking behind your comment is the anachronist argument: applying modern theories to the ancient text doesn’t work, so we need to find methods appropriate to the text. The catch is that such an approach is a fiction, for all methods are anachronistic, especially those ones that claim not to be. Better to be up front about it, for the same applies to notions of ‘discipleship’.
29 August, 2011 at 3:43 pm
I’m out of reply space, but I have add a jibe…. So you now you do admit that you are applying modern economics to an ancient text? :0)
29 August, 2011 at 5:07 pm
Rob, no. I said that all approaches are anachronistic, which is a different thing. If I were applying moden economics, then I would assume that the Hellenistic world was a simpler version of capaitalism, which is most biblical scholars do. Instead, you need an approach that is aware of its anachronism and thereby builds such anachronism into its very structure. A Marxist approach provides such an awareness; hence the stress on the differences of other economic systems, or modes of production. That is to say, the Hellenistic world operates by means of very different modes of production from the ones with we are familiar.
30 August, 2011 at 3:24 am
Rob, you are making it quite obvious that you did not read this post closely, if at all.
30 August, 2011 at 4:25 am
What did I miss Rod?
29 August, 2011 at 5:00 am
[...] Parable of the talents « Stalin's Moustache [...]
29 August, 2011 at 8:17 am
I’m neither a Christian nor a biblical scholar, but isn’t it a parable about conversion/multiplication of people/souls (like so many others), perhaps meant to appeal to people more concerned with or used to dealing in money? (Wasn’t Matthew supposed to be a tax collector?) It reminds me of an old TV commercial about shampoo (I think), in which someone uses the product (recommended by someone else), is converted, and then tells two friends, each of whom tells two friends, and so on, and so on…. So, like a chain letter or pyramid scheme. And don’t converts = money in religion?
29 August, 2011 at 3:32 pm
That would be a spiritualising interpretation so beloved by the church. Some of us are keen to get away from that stuff.
29 August, 2011 at 8:35 am
Or I just had this thought. Wasn’t excess wealth in the ancient world typically stored in temples for safekeeping (so, temples as early banks)? So then, isn’t Jesus recommending that the temple be circumvented?
29 August, 2011 at 3:34 pm
Good point, but only the state would store wealth in the temple, assuming the gods would protect it. It’s a stretch to call it a bank, though, since it was really a glorified hole in the ground. That was the case in earlier Mesopotamia, but by the time of the Romans, the time-honoured was to hang on to your loot (on a more individual basis) was to bury it. As Finley points out, the very limited patterns of exchange simply would not have been to manage the amount of coin available, hence it was buried.
30 August, 2011 at 5:37 am
@Rob Haskell,
“Further, in an economy where one could not invest money, where the notion of buying shares in the stock market did not exist, for there were no stock markets (let alone banks), where even credit was a very primitive notion, what did one do with any amount of money? As Morris Finley points out, the natural thing to do was bury money until you needed it. ”
Note the words—” in an economy where one could not invest money”; in other words, Roland was never saying or ever meant that this story was about proto-capitalism— so you are severely incorrect when you accuse Roland of “applying modern economics to an ancient text.” This was not what he was doing at all.
What Roland is trying to do was say, look, here is what the ancient Greeks/Romans did with their money. Look, here is a story of Jesus, written in the Greek/Roman cultural context. He is comparing ancient practices to determine the meaning of the story, and not any contemporary modern economic system. Therefore, you are wrong, once more, when you ask the question, “Can Jesus really be teaching, via the implications we insert into the story, something about modern economics?” for this was not even Roland’s point in the first place.
Rob,
I also think that you need to keep in mind that economics comes from the greek work, oikeunomia, which just means running a household. In the context of the parable of the talents, the king is leaving his money in the hands of his slaves, who, at least in ancient times, were considered to be part of a household (like the household codes in Paul’s letters–they are about economics too). We aren’t talking about 21st century macroeconomics here, but economics–general ideas for managing households (which includes rates of exchange and value, trading, etc.) in ancient Greek/Roman cultures. You were probably confused when Roland referred to the conversation on the forthcoming podcast, with Roland’s mention of “Marxism and religion, Christian communism and so on,” things having to do with today’s macroeconomics that lead into the rest of his post, which was about ancient Greaco-Roman economic practices.
You’re Welcome,
Rod
30 August, 2011 at 7:20 am
Thanks Rod – I agree that Roland is not making the gross error of reading the Bible without historical/cultural sensitivity. I am not saying that he is finding “communism” or whatever in the text. Still, I do think that there is a hermeneutical issue at work and a that the entire discussion is premised and to a certain extent controlled by contemporary issues which interface only awkwardly with the parable as it would have been understood in the first century. But maybe I still haven’t read Roland’s post deeply enough to be enlightened on this matter!
30 August, 2011 at 7:27 am
“the entire discussion is premised and to a certain extent controlled by contemporary issues which interface only awkwardly with the parable as it would have been understood in the first century.”
You have failed to prove this.
My prior post answers this criticism.
“But maybe I still haven’t read Roland’s post deeply enough to be enlightened on this matter!”
No need to pray to help you understand this post. I’m “just doing a plain reading of the text.”
30 August, 2011 at 10:12 am
Rob, I think you’ve missed the dialectical point of an earlier comment of mine:
“I said that all approaches are anachronistic, which is a different thing. If I were applying moden economics, then I would assume that the Hellenistic world was a simpler version of capitalism, which is most biblical scholars do. Instead, you need an approach that is aware of its anachronism and thereby builds such anachronism into its very structure. A Marxist approach provides such an awareness; hence the stress on the differences of other economic systems, or modes of production. That is to say, the Hellenistic world operates by means of very different modes of production from the ones with we are familiar.”
1 September, 2011 at 8:21 pm
[...] Roland Boer discussed the cultural and economic context of this famous parable. [...]
2 September, 2011 at 1:51 am
I’m writing my dissertation on the Minas. Definitely there’s a difference between Matthew and Luke. I think your heading towards the Lukan interpretation. If your interested in a Marxist reading, check out the peasant interpretation in “The Gospel in Solentiname.” Glad to see this parables getting some of the criticism it needs.