Someone, I forget who, suggested I read a book about Jesus by an American man of colour  – Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman, 1949.  I have done so and I at least feel better informed,

To those who need profound succour and strength to enable them to live in the present with dignity and creativity, Christianity often has been sterile and of little avail…. The conventional Christian world is muffled, confused, and vague.  Too often the price exacted by society for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in its formal expression must be on the side of the strong against the week….a religion that was born of a people acquainted with persecution and suffering has become the cornerstone of a civilisation and of nations whose very position in modern life has too often been secured by a ruthless use of power applied to weak and defenceless peoples.

Precisely.  The people acquainted with persecution and suffering were the Jews.  Their overlords were the Romans. 

Who is doing what to whom in Palestine today?  Are people there persecuted and, if so, who are the overlords?

Jesus was a Jew.  He saw his people ‘smarting under the loss of status, freedom and autonomy…The House of Israel was haunted by the dream of the restoration of a lost glory and a former greatness.  His message focussed on the urgency of a radical change in the inner attitude of the people.  To revile because one has been reviled – this is the real evil because it is the evil of the soul itself.’

The Sadducees ‘loved Israel, but they seem to have loved security more…the lines were held by those whose hold on security is sure only as long as the status quo remains intact.’  The Pharisees had ‘no active resistance against Rome – only a terrible contempt’  The Zealots said ‘out of the depths of their hearts there swells a great and awful assurance that because the cause is just, it cannot fail.  Any failure is regarded as temporary and, to the devoted, as a testing of character.’

Unlike Jesus, Paul, the letter writer, was a free Jew – a citizen of Rome.

Unless one actually lives day by day without a sense of security, he cannot understand what worlds separated Jesus from Paul at this point.  The striking similarity between the social position of Jesus in Palestine and that of the vast majority of American negroes is obvious to anyone who tarries long over the facts….For the most part, Negroes assume that there are no basic citizenship rights, no fundamental protection, guaranteed to them by the state, because their status as citizens has never been clearly defined.

Israel has statehood.  Palestine does not.

The lives of the disinherited are ruled by fear ‘that arises out of the sense of isolation and helplessness in the face of the varied dimensions of violence to which the underprivileged are exposed….In physical violence, the contemptuous disregard is the fact that it is degrading….The underprivileged in any society are the victims of a perpetual war of nerves.’

Above all else, the disinherited must not have any stake in the social order; they must be made to feel that they are alien, that it is a great boon to be allowed to remain alive, not be exterminated.  This was the psychology of the Nazis; it grew out of their theory of the state and the place given the Hebrew people in their ideology.  Such also is the attitude of the Ku Klux Klan toward negroes…the fact that the lives of the disinherited are lightly held by the dominant group tends to create the same attitude among them toward each other.

The upshot, the Reverend says, is fear, deception and hate.

Hating is something of which to be ashamed unless it provides for us a form of validation and prestige….Because they are despised, they despise themselves.  If they reject the judgment, hatred may serve as a device for rebuilding, step by step, the foundation for individual significance….

Here is the gist of the first chapter and the book as a whole.

The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed.  That it became, through intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus.

It’s as if I have been waiting for half my life for someone to say all that.  A tearaway, radical young Jewish hasid was executed on trumped up charges by the Roman overlords after he got up the noses of the local clergy (whom Rome regarded with loathing and suspicion) and he had taken the lash to the money market.  How on earth – or elsewhere – do you build a genuine establishment on the life and teaching of the greatest assailant of the Establishment that the world has seen?

I commend a book that contains truths that have been too long ignored or denied.