Jesus was not an egalitarian. A critique of an anachronistic and idealist theory

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Summer, 2002 by John H. Elliott

Seymour-Smith notes that if the term is not to become too general,

   we should have to reserve it for those societies in which the expression of
   male dominance is particularly extreme and systematic, such as those in
   which the legal right of women and children are totally subject to the
   atuhority of the male. For many feminist anthropologists, however, the term
   patriarchy is synonymous with male dominance in general, and thus refers
   not to a specific social type but to a general tendency which finds its
   expression in differential form in each social and historical context [218]

Features generally associated with patriarchy include the following: dominance by senior males over all others (women, children, younger males); patrifocality (a form of family or domestic group centered on the father); patrilineality (descent traced through the male line); patrilaterial cross-cousin marriage (as in Israel); patrilocality or virilocality (married couple's establishing residence with or near the husband's family); patronage (diadic ties of patron and client patterned after the dominant position and role of the pater or father in a family); view of the social, physical, intellectual, and moral inferiority of females and superiortiy of males; sexual division of labor and space (males outside and public; females inside and domestic); females as under tutelage of males; respect for and ritual commemoration of ancestors, esp. male ancestors; male as head of household; fictive kin groups modelled on family dominated by male; marriage as male acquiring and owning a female; marriage rules favoring males and restricting to males the right to divorce; association of males with culture and females with nature; sociological paternity (pater and mater as socially recognized parents as opposed to genitor and genetrix as physiological parents--cf. the father adopting of children as his own; primogeniture of males; inheritance limited to or dominated by males; cult dominated by males.

What of reversals of status? Reversals of status clearly are not eliminations of status but rather radical inversions of status, of high and low rankings, of first and last positions. These reversal sayings say nothing explicitly or implicitly of the elimination of status differences altogether. To the contrary, their dramatic punch requires the continuation of the reality of high and low, first and last positions in the social order. Patron-client relations, for example, are not eliminated altogether but rather reversed: conventional patrons are reduced to clients and clients, raised to the status of patrons. Similarly, the reciprocal roles and statuses of children and parents are not not eliminated altogether but rather reversed: children, more than parents, are the object of God's concern; children, more than parents, illustrate the nature of life in the kingdom of heaven.

The syllogism, finally, with which Schussler Fiorenza operates, is flawed because it introduces as a minor premise a notion of which Jesus and his followers never speak; namely, patriarchy and its hierarchical structures, or more accurately, its stratification. Indeed the idea of patriarchy, like that of "homosexuality" or "nation" is a modern etic construct nowhere to be found in the New Testament or the ancient world. Equally flawed then is the conclusion that a critique and rejection of domination is prompted by, or proof of, an egalitarian stance on the part of Jesus and his followers and indicative of a program to eliminate all traces of social and economic inequity. If that were the case, the Jesus movement failed miserably from the outset, since thoughout Jesus' lifetime and thereafter the Jesus movement and its constitutency were marked by clear economic and social inequities. In short, these several passages concerning reversal all speak of status reversal, not elimination of status or the levelling of roles. They constitute no proof of Jesus' egalitarianism, which still remains no more than an unfounded inference.