So here I present an idea about Christ’s injunction to the rich young man that I read in a book I really like. We all know the story and know it’s often used to as bludgeon to declare that Christians are coming up short of their charitable obligations.
In Morton Smith’s Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (1973), Smith does a close examination of Mark 10 because of his claim that “secret Mark,” or a longer passage that was sacred because it referred to a secret ritual, fit into Mark 10. Secret Mark has long been debated, and, yes, these claims sound pretty Mormon.
Smith argues that the requirements that Jesus gives the rich man in verses 17-22 fit the early Christian requirements for baptism, including “renunciation of property” (170). Smith explains, “Whoever joins the group enjoys its common property and is a member of its common family…. So the ancient Church understood the passage (Cramer; Theophylact) and so, generally do modern commentators (cited by Lagrange, ad loc.)” (172).
In other words, Smith argues that the requirement to “sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor,” was a baptismal requirement to give all to Christ and his followers, what Smith calls “primitive communism” (172). In fact, “the poor” was a name for early Christians: the Ebionites’ name derives from the Hebrew Ebyonim, “meaning the poor.”
Acts 2:44-45 and 4:32-37 is similar in that giving all to the church is a requirement. Ananias and Sapphira “kept back part of the price” and were smitten” (5:1-5).
To me, requiring the rich man to give all to the community makes more sense than what Smith calls “indiscriminating charity” (173) that is often assumed. First, because it’s really hard to get by on nothing. My understanding is that some eastern monks attempt this but aren’t able to do much. It seems much more functional to “enjoy … common property” as “a member of [a] common family.”
In Mark 10:28, Peter states “we have left all, and have followed thee,” but the apostles seem to either have a boat or frequent fare for a boat: Mark 4:1, 36–41, Mark 6:32, 45-54, Matthew 8:23–27, Matthew 14:22-33, Luke 8:22–25, John 6:16–21. This would make sense if the boat or the fare were “common property” held by the “common family.”
So for me, I really think that Morton Smith’s claim fits the evidence. The rich young man was asked to fulfill the requirement of giving all to the community, but turned away because he had many possessions. “How hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God!” (24). Smith defines the kingdom of heaven as Christ and his followers, not necessarily the afterlife (Smith, 169). The rich young man refused the requirement to join Christ and his followers.
Communal living is quite difficult to maintain; I’ve heard that 90 percent of communes don’t make it past 18 months. Our church’s attempt in Missouri fit that category. So early Christians attempts probably didn’t last long but were nonetheless was part of the memory of Jesus’s teachings (Smith, 172).
Therefore, it appears to me that this “Christian” requirement of the rich young man was also a communal one: a requirement and characteristic of the kingdom of God that’s quite difficult to achieve. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (10:25). Christ’s followers were “the poor” because very few of the rich joined.
Comments
18 responses to “Christ and Community, 3: “Sell Whatever Thou Hast””
This reading makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t eliminate all the ethical obligations arising from Mark 10, but it provides another way to think about them.
Agreed. This is an illuminating perspective.
More generally, just on their face, some of Jesus’s teachings famously look to be so demanding that it seems almost impossible to live by them in our actual world. If you always turned the other cheek, gave your coat to anyone who asked you, forgave relentlessly and unconditionally, never resisted unjust treatment, etc., could you realistically raise a family, perform your civic duties, and so forth? So I think Christians have always struggled to know what to do with these teachings.
Maybe these teachings serve to show us how far short we inevitably fall from living truly godly lives, and thus how much we are in need of grace. But it’s also possible that we sometimes misconstrue them by reading them out of context. (Although even in context Jesus’s disciples constantly seem to have misunderstood him.) And there is a risk that by making such teachings too idealistic and unlivable, we actually weaken their force and render them practically irrelevant; it’s easy to think, “Well, that may be okay for Mother Theresa, but for me and my spouse and five kids . . . .” So I think there is value in interpretations that seem to make sense and to make such teachings more realistically livable. The interpretation offered in this post seems to fit into that category. (Actually, it’s still more demanding than ours or virtually any other Christian community has found to be viable over a sustained period.)
Since some of my ancestors were part of the Missouri LDS settlements, and others lived in Orderville when it was living the United Order, I’ve given some thought to communal property ownership and how it might work today. Some of my thoughts, noting that I’m talking about voluntary communities and not about government-enforced property sharing:
* It seems to work best with small communities, where there is a reasonable expectation that everyone knows everyone else. Something like Dunbar’s number seems to apply here. I’ll note that the church seems to try to keep ward sizes not too far over this number, so if we ever try something like the United Order again it should probably be at the ward level. Which would, of course, complicate ward splits and reorganizations, which would still need to happen.
* Socializing children to accept communal ownership can be difficult. There’s a story that in Orderville when a new style of pants became popular the young men would sneak out at night and run them against a grindstone so they’d need new, more fashionable pants sooner. You might need to do something like the Amish and have a period in young adulthood where they can go off on their own and experience the outside world.
* An April 15 special: figuring out the community’s income taxes would be fraught. (My great-great grandfather’s biography attributes the breakup of the United Order in Orderville to the Edmunds-Tucker act’s provisions for confiscating church property.)
Indeed, it would seem to change the command from extraordinarily difficult that’s pretty much never followed, to something also really hard, but has been attempted and sometimes successfully. Indeed, my understanding is the the Hutterites have been living in Bruderhofs (their communes) for nearly 500 years. I believe that makes the Hutterites the most successful communitarian group in history. I also understand that they’ve influenced many others.
So it IS possible even if 90 percent of communes don’t make it past 18 months.
Those are good points to consider, Curtis. Historically, communes have been little agrarian villages (Bruderhofs are usually that way) so trying to implement something like that in our pretty big church and modern economy just wouldn’t work.
Also, I think it’s becoming more and more of a challenge to make money at agriculture (a lot of the Hutterites have shifted to manufacturing, which is also a challenge). We just have a very different economy now.
It reminds me of a comment from a guest of Ezra Klein’s discussing this topic. Around the 25 min 30 sec mark, she said something like, “intentional community [the generic name for attempting such things] may be more doable if the community isn’t also trying to create an economy.” In other words, is there a way to live in something like an intentional community where people keep their regular jobs, but figure out someway of having some kind of shared community?
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0TyYzJXmnNUf4UVxAoAaxZ?si=i37DXuAJSnixVpL5rA-VuA
Shared goods under those circumstances would be hard, but Plato said that if you can’t pull off fully shared goods, it’s okay to try what he called “the second best city” or still attempting a form of communalism without fully shared property. Plato talks about that in his LAWS where people have shared meals and are assigned to be stewards of property that belongs to the city. (Yes, Mormon stewardship sounds like this).
Mormon wards do have a communal aspect which is important. Could individuals attempt something a bit more communal and see how it goes?
That’s a cool interpretation–and one that should resonate well with latter-day saints. That said, I think the key to keeping the community going is found in how and where the covenant of consecration is positioned in the church today. To my mind it suggests that we must be–or at least striving to be–perfect in Christ for such a system to continue.
Not to be flippant, but I wonder if asking members to clean the meetinghouse is a gauge of how willing we are to approach any sort of communalism. Or maybe it’s a token of the practice, accepted in lieu of signing over one’s property.
Interesting. This interpretation of the phrase “the poor” would also make Judas’ objection over the spikenard, and the subsequent explanation regarding it, (John 12:5-6) make a bit more sense.
Do we even still aspire to someday living in communal enclaves? It’s very hard to enforce the necessary rules of such an arrangement without becoming an oppressive cult. It only worked as long as it did in places like Orderville because of the isolated location in the frontier West.
Jack, yes our temple covenant is interesting in that we DON’T live communally. It still seems to be the ideal and as PNW notes, we still make attempts at smaller forms. As I’ve noted in these posts, I do think the smaller forms are important.
Dr., that is interesting, but I’m not sure how to interpret Jesus’s response in verse 8 about the poor always being “with you” in this context. Scholars argue for John coming later and shifting a lot of themes around.
Travis, I’m not sure who you mean my “we,” but just type in “intentional community” into Google, and you’ll see that the idea is as popular as ever. As I note in my comment above, Plato made allowances for other form of community short of all things in common (yes, I argue JS taking Plato’s injunctions seriously). Orderville isn’t the only form.
Interesting reading. I think I’m skeptical that “the poor” meant a specific group (particularly because I’m not a fan of the idea of secret meanings), but I appreciate your bringing it up!
I just had to jump in on Curtis’s third point (because tax! and also, it’s something I’ve written about!). In the early 20th century, Congress actually enacted a provision in the federal income tax to deal with communitarian religious organizations (called “religious or apostolic organizations”). (Quick plug: I mention them in both of my books and also have an article, “Taxing Utopia,” about it.)
There’s only a paragraph of legislative history discussing the provision (now in section 501(d) of the Code), but it seems to have been passed with the Shakers and the Israelite House of David in mind. (As an aside, the Israelite House of David is a really interesting communitarian religious group, which operated an amusement park, jazz and concert bands, baseball teams, etc.) Basically, it says that members of these communitarian religious groups pay taxes on their pro rata share of the group’s income (but the overarching organization doesn’t owe taxes).
Great post; I’m here for all content related to building the economy of Zion. I think technology will play a major role in increasing the trust and verification among people who seek to build it anew. These tools will reveal information that will turn to knowledge and wisdom faster than earlier attempts were able to utilize. It will still require willing hearts and minds, but bad apples will be detected sooner and needs/wants will be tracked and optimized for orders of magnitude more efficiently.
In the decentralization of the internet is the nugget of Zion. I wrote about that here: https://notonlyluck.com/2021/04/12/the-compelling-vision-of-internet-decentralization/
My great-grandparents belonged to the Kingston United Order while it lasted and my g-grandfather was sufficiently committed to the cause that my g-grandmother took to hiding food in the house so he wouldn’t give it away. He later became chairman of the Socialist Party in Piute County.
If I ever start my own commune, I’m going to name it S-Corpville (at least Sam will get it).
Thanks so much for your expertise, Sam.
That’s a very interesting take on all this, John. We certainly are in a different world than nineteenth century utopianism.
That’s a great family connection, LL. And, yes, I don’t get the joke.
(The joke is, fwiw, legitimately funny!)
I think the emphasis of these scriptures should be helping the poor, not communal living. The rich man should give all he has to the poor. In the contemporary world, maybe that means that for those of us who are rich (or relatively rich compared to the rest of the world) need to commit to sharing the wealth.
To what extent to we need our luxury goods? Most of us suffer from afluenza. Maybe we need to think of assisting the poor in lieu of buying that expensive new toy. We can help the poor best earning well, and contributing a larger percentage of our earning to humanitarian causes. We can help a larger percentage of the poor that way, rather than through communal living.
The current Church tithing system is regressive. It hurts the poor much worse than the rich. It needs to be revised so the rich pay a higher percentage. And that money needs to be used for humanitarian causes and not hoarded in a “rainy day fund.”
The great contemporary Mormon thinker Hugh Nibley understood and believed this, perhaps to the extreme. He begrudged the current obsession with buying unneeded things.
You’re mixing up all kinds of language, Roger. “The rich man should give all he has to the poor.” I think it’s morally problematic for people to make demands on others that they do not follow. I’m unaware of ANYONE who’s sold EVERYTHING they have and given it all away.
“In our modern world …” why do the rules change?
My understanding is that Nibley sought the Mormon ideal of Zion, which is sharing within a covenant community. The city of Enoch was a covenant community.
I think Morton Smith’s explanation makes the most sense.
In the modern world the spirit of the law doesn’t change, the opportunities have expanded. In Christ time, opportunities were by necessity more local. But today, opportunities are endless given modern communications, computers, transportation, financial sophistication, etc. You can assist the poor anywhere. There are better ways to assist the poor than selling all you have.
The Church is now global. Over 50 percent of the members live in developing countries. The Church is experiencing most of its growth in Africa. There are enormous opportunities to make the world a better place.
I’m just saying there are additional ways to make the world a better place And that selling all you have may not be the best option.
I’m pretty sure “selling all you have” and giving it all away wasn’t any more effective in Christ’s day than it is now. That’s why I think the theory I present here makes a lot more sense.