Usurer Error

In Ezekiel 18 , he rattles off a list of bad folks, and the last thing on the list is takes advance or accrued interest.

Shall he then live? He shall not. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat that pesky spread of misinformation about the same. And how are things today, Dan?

Good. You just come off the rugby pitch.

I hope you all won.

I, I, I’m a never-lose rugby player. I’ve literally never lost a rugby game in my life.

Nice. There you go.

I’ve never played a rugby game, but yeah, Dan, for those of you listening at home, is referring to the shirt that I’m wearing, which is actually. Do you want to know why I got this? I’ll just briefly. Last year I went to, you’ll recall, I went to Mardi Gras with a bunch of friends, and the whole group of us decided that our theme for that entire week that we were there was Spinal Tap. The movie Spinal Tap.

Yeah. There’s gonna be a new one coming out.

I know. They were literally in New Orleans at the same time that we were there and we didn’t see them, which proves to me that fate isn’t real. But we, but yes, for my character, I was, I played Ian, the band manager, and this, this, this rugby shirt with a leather vest over it. He, he’s inexplicably dressed the entire time.

Anyway. Oh, gosh.

And, and it’s, and it’s the colors for the Washington football team, so all I.

Well, this isn’t a football shirt, so everything’s fine.

All right, well, today we are going to have some fun. We are going to discuss, and we’re going to tread, I think, a little bit back onto Dave Ramsey’s turf because, because we’re getting economic up in here again a little bit. But we’re going to be talking about you. Did you, you actually did a video in your social media recently that, yes. That, that set up a question. And the question is, what is this thing that’s been prohibited so much in the Bible? And we’re gonna, we’re so, I’m not gonna say what it is. We’ll, we’ll get to it very quickly in the first segment. And then in the second segment in our chapter and verse, we’re going to be talking about the, the parable of the talents which I find utterly befuddling and hopefully, hopefully will shed some light on it. Maybe that light will just further befuddle. I don’t know. There might, there might be, might be a mass befuddling.

Yeah, I think we might be able to clear a few things up, but mainly it’s going to be muddying the waters and then running away.

Well, that’s, that’s as we do, that’s what we do. Yeah, it’s kind of our thing. But let’s get on with our first segment. Taking issue. And the first issue we’re going to take, the issue that we are taking is with something that has, that is prohibited far more in the Bible than any any particular kind of sexual act.

Or, or, or, or, or orientation. We’ve talked about how there are no orientations that are prohibited in the Bible. Um, it’s, you know, it’s prohibited in ways that, in, in direct ways that you can’t say transness is prohibited.

Or, or abortion. Like this is hit so many times. What are we talking about?

We’re, we’re talking about usury, which is a word that I really did. I don’t know that I ever heard it before I joined the LDS Church. And, and then on occasion you would hear, you know, the word usury, which is kind of old fashioned. But you know, Latter Day Saints are old fashioned and they still, for, for some reason. And yes, I know the reasons still use the King James Version of the Bible despite my best efforts.

Right.

And, and there were a lot of them.

Keep trying.

But yeah, usury is something I don’t think a lot of people are aware was a huge deal not only in the Bible, but within early Christianity up to like the Reformation and even since. And overwhelmingly it was vehemently condemned by an awful lot of folks. But I want to start way back in the, in the before times in, in the Hebrew Bible where we have a handful of prohibitions. We see this in Exodus, we see it in Leviticus, we see it in Deuteronomy, it is a. And, and usury has come to refer to like the exorbitant charging of interest.

Yeah. We’re talking about lending and then charging interest on a loan.

Right. In the Hebrew Bible it seems to refer to charging any interest at all.

Yeah, yeah. Any interest at all. It wasn’t like, well, once you’re up to eight and a third percent, you’re, you’re okay. But anything above that, you know, we cut your hands off. No, that’s, that, that kind of, that’s a later-developed idea. In the Hebrew Bible, it’s any interest at all. But you have in, in Exodus 22 , this is the Covenant Code. I and, and other scholars think this is probably the earliest legislative layer that we have in the Hebrew Bible. Verse or chapter 22, verse 25. If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, you shall not deal with them as a creditor. You shall not exact interest from them. And, and then we have very similar things going on in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. You shall not.

And that’s very clear. Like, that’s not. You shall not exact a lot of interest.

Yeah, yeah.

That’s just any interest.

Any, any interest at all. And in Leviticus, do not take interest in advance or otherwise make a profit from them, but fear your God, let them live with you. This is talking about the poor. You shall not lend them your money at interest taken in advance or provide them food at a profit. So that’s Leviticus 25 , verses 36 and 37, Deuteronomy 23:19 . You shall not charge interest on loans to another Israelite. Interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on anything that is lent. Now there are, there is an allowance charging interest on loans to non-Israelites. Right?

Yeah, I was gonna, like I was. That’s pretty clear. You pick up on that pretty quickly. Is that like it repeatedly says to our people, to my people, or whatever.

Right. And. And the idea here is, is protecting the well-being and the equity, the social stability of the Israelite people. This is about protecting the Israelite people. And then we have a, we have in Ezekiel 18 , a handful of passages. We have what’s, what’s known as a vice list. This is more popular in like Greco-Roman literature where it’s like everybody sucks who does A, B, C, D, E, F, G all the way to, you know, down. This is what Paul is doing in, or Pseudo-Paul is doing in a lot of places. But in Ezekiel 18 , he rattles off a list of bad folks. And the last thing on the list is, takes advance or accrued interest.

Shall he then live? He shall not.

Oh, wow. Yeah.

Death penalty.

Yeah. According to Ezekiel, he has done all these abominable things. He shall surely be put to death. His blood shall be upon himself. And. Yeah. And then after that it talks about the righteous person, withholds his hand from iniquity, takes no advance or accrued interest, observes my ordinances and follows my statutes. He shall not die for his father’s iniquity. He shall surely live. So, and, and you have in Ezekiel 22 , these are the things that are mentioned, one after the other. Takes bribes to shed blood. You take both advance interest and accrued interest and make gain of your neighbors by extortion. And you have forgotten me, says Adonai God.

So they’re like, they’re pretty emphatic about this.

Yeah, this. That’s. It doesn’t seem like they’re. They’re pussyfooting around this thing.

No, no, they’re not being shy.

They’re coming in strong. They’re coming in hot.

Not bashful. Yeah, guns hot. And then you have a couple places in the Psalms where you have reference to people who are good because they do not lend money at interest, and do not take a bribe against the innocent. Those who do these things shall never be moved. And then one who augments wealth by exorbitant interest gathers it for another who is kind to the poor, which is kind of contrasting the good against the bad.

Right, but.

So Hebrew Bible, firmly against interest. You have 12 occurrences of the word neshek, which is the, the term for interest. Every single one of them condemnatory toward the practice as long as it’s. It’s in-house.

Right.

We don’t do this to our own people because what does it do? It makes the poor poorer, makes the, makes the wealthy wealthier, makes the poor poor. And, and we’re not going to do that to our own people. And this gets picked up in the New Testament. Really only talks about interest a couple of times. Once is in the parable that we’re going to be, we’re going to be talking about right here shortly.

We’ll get to that.

Yes, yeah, we’ll get to that. And then there’s another reference in, I believe it is Luke 6 . Luke 6:34-36 . Um, “Even if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them, expecting nothing in return.” Now, the idea here might be a little, you know, this might be a rhetorical exaggeration. This might be mere hyperbole. Lend money and don’t expect to be repaid. But I think the idea that people, people are lending money and expecting not only to be repaid, but to make a profit off of that, I think those people are, as the great poet once said, right out.

Yeah, I, but I don’t see any reason to assume that it is hyperbole. I, you know, I, it, to me it feels like it comports with a lot of what Jesus had to say about giving to the poor, not being rich. You know what I mean?

Like, yeah, when it comes to the poor, it’s very clearly, “sell all that you have, give it to the poor.”

Right. So it seems like it, that would, it would make sense to me to say get, you know, if you’re going to lend, just don’t expect to get it back. If you get it back, great, but don’t expect anything in return. That seems reasonable to me to hear from Jesus. I, I know that a lot of people would not like that. I know a lot, a lot of people who, who want, you know, who are asked for loans would not like that. But that, that makes sense as a, just as an idea to me.

Yeah. And we live in a world that, where the financial system that holds our world up is built on interest. I think, I think there’s an estimated somewhere around a trillion dollars is made on, on interest. Between 500 billion and a trillion dollars is made on interest in the United States. So that’s just a part of our world these days. Anciently, not so much. There’s an interesting, the Council of Nicaea. We talk about this a lot about how, you know, the main controversy they were talking about was the Arian controversy. There was also this little matter of how we determine the date of Easter so that, you know, people can figure it out for themselves. They can stop hassling us. And then there are a bunch of canon laws which I think some people confuse for talking about the biblical canon. But that has nothing to do with the Council of Nicaea. Dan Brown, nothing to do with the Council of Nicaea. But one of the count, one of the… and we’ve, I think we’ve mentioned the very first one.

I think it’s the very first one at the Council of Nicaea was basically prohibiting anyone who had castrated himself from being part of the clergy. So because that, that was popular back then.

But another one is, is prohibiting the clergy from charging interest on loans. And we have this statement: “Forasmuch as many enrolled among the clergy, following covetousness and lust of gain, have forgotten the divine Scripture which says, ‘He has not given his money upon usury’"—that’s Ezekiel 18 —“and in lending money ask the hundredth of the sum, the Holy and Great Synod thinks it just that if after this decree anyone be found to receive usury, whether he accomplish it by secret transaction or otherwise, as by demanding the whole and a half, or by using any other contrivance whatever for filthy lucre’s sake, he shall be deposed from the clergy and his name stricken from the list.” So basically, and, and you know, they started even one percent. You’re out, you’re gone, defrocked.

And they… now that’s… so that’s… they… they didn’t impose this on Christianity as a whole. This was imposed on… oh, okay. But so that was just about the clergy.

That was just about the clergy. Yeah. But then we get to the Second Lateran Council, which is many centuries later. It’s extended to pretty much everyone. And then the Third Lateran Decree, I think this is from… okay, this is from 1179. “We therefore declare that notorious usurers should not be admitted to communion of the altar or receive Christian burial if they die in this sin. Whoever receives them or gives them Christian burial should be compelled to give back what he has received and let him remain suspended from the performance of his office until he has made satisfaction according to the judgment of his own bishop.” It is.

And then in 1311, the Council of Vienne straight up condemns it as heresy.

Okay, now in this, at this point, are we still talking about lending with any interest, or have we gotten to interest as, as like onerous interest?

Any interest.

And it’s not, it’s, it’s, it’s not until, I think in the 16th century that we get a definition of usury. The Fifth Lateran Council says, for that is the real meaning of usury, when from its use, a thing which produces nothing is applied to the acquiring of gain and profit without any work, any expense or any risk. So any attempt to try to make money without any work, any expense or any risk, in other words, lending money so that you get it back and then some. It defines as usury.

But we get. If indeed someone has fallen into the error of presuming to affirm—and I’ve never seen this word before in my life—pertinaciously, that the practice of usury is not sinful, we decree that he is to be punished as a heretic.

Yeah. And we. And they condemn the secular laws that allow usury.

Now. So, okay, so at this point, we’re getting to the time period in which I first learned about usury, which is because I studied Shakespeare. And. And. And so I had to figure out. I was in a production of Merchant of.

Merchant of Venice. Yeah.

Which. Which centers around a. A Jewish lender who they had to go to, who they despised and they reviled because he was Jewish, but they had to go to him because they.

Only man in town. Yeah.

They needed money. And that’s when I learned about the fact that at that. In that period, Christians were not allowed to lend.

Right.

For. For profit. And so. And. And because it was considered low and because it was. And the. And the fact of the matter is that Jewish people in. In those centuries in Europe had been relegated. They. They weren’t. They weren’t allowed to participate in sort of proper, good, upstanding jobs. So they would. So this was sort of what was left to them.

And they were the only ones who were allowed to do it.

Yeah. And because Christians were unilaterally prohibited from it. But for Jewish folks, the Old Testament only says, you’re not allowed to do it for your fellow Israelites. They’re permitted to loan at interest to non-Israelites. So they become the only game in town for Christians who need to borrow money. And yeah, they. They were relegated to. And you know, this is. Physically, economically, socially, in every way, they were relegated to the dregs. And. And I went. You can go on a tour. If. If you ever have the privilege of. Of having extra time on your hands in Oxford, you can go on a tour of the Jewish quarter of Oxford. Well, they’ll. They’ll take you around and they’ll show you that, you know, Jewish folks live downhill from the tannery and from the. The processing and all that. And so they were basically just. They just had filth running through the ghetto that they were. They were relegated to.

Right.

And the. The. Oh, shoot. I always forget the name of these places where they have lots of plants and flowers and trees. The.

It’s called a garden.

Yeah. But a big one that you can visit that you. Okay, go into. Oh, my gosh.

Botanical garden.

Botanical garden. Good grief. Yeah, I’ve been there multiple times. The botanical garden in. In Oxford. One of the reasons that this part of Oxford is so fertile in terms of growing things is because it is constructed over the ancient. Not ancient, but the medieval Jewish graveyard. Oh, wow. So. And there they have a sign out front that. That explains this. But they are the tax collectors, they are the rent collectors, they are the money lenders. And obviously, since they’re charging interest, the Christians grow to hate them. They put them in that position. And then they said, we hate you for this.

Right. And it does seem to be like that’s the, I mean that is, that never gets expunged. Like to this day, antisemitism largely centers around, you know, the, the money that Jews have and the power that they’re hoarding because of all of the money and blah, blah, blah. And yeah, like they get into Harry

Potter as the, as the, the money-lending

goblins or whatever they are. The goblins or whatever they are. Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s. And I think a lot of the people that are participating in that sort of hatred of these people don’t even realize that the root of all of that goes back to when their own people put them. Put the Jewish people into that position.

Absolutely.

It’s a little yuck.

Yeah. Is, is incredibly yuck. And, and if you want to really just be horrified.

Oh and I do always, always like.

Don’t go look at the interactions between Christians and Jewish communities in the medieval period in like Spain and Portugal and stuff like that. Like, it was awful, awful stuff like. And, and, and that’s kind of the, the seedbed for the development of concepts of racism and race as, as a question of skin color. A lot of it comes down to Jewish and Muslim folks. They have a different skin color from us. We’re good, they’re bad. And, and that’s kind of how the notion that race is something about skin color develops. And. Yeah, but that’s not what this segment is about. We’re, we’re talking about usury, but that’s. We have Christians are, you know, trying to hold themselves up, hold themselves to this standard while having a little relief valve. They have relegated Jewish folks to this relief valve and then they hate them for it. And so these days an awful lot of antisemitism is rooted in these very old stereotypes that were forced upon Jewish communities.

And you know, you have your. All of the blood libel stuff, the. I forget exactly what they call it. The notion that Jewish folks would shave, shave the coins down and collect the, the shavings. And, and all this kind of all, all these are lies that developed so that Christians could vilify and demonize Jewish folks. But, but the Christians would come around centuries later. Wait a minute.

Not come around to being kind to Jewish people? No, they would come around to participating in the, in the interest charging.

Yeah, yeah. Now, you know, it, it first gets a lot more strict. You have St. Anselm of Canterbury, which was, he said that usury was theft. So you know, the taxation is theft, folks. It’s like we’ve heard it before, but it was interest is theft. Right back then. St. Thomas Aquinas condemned it as well. We have Luther and others condemning it. And then. But you, you mentioned the Merchant of Venice. This is the, this is the thing that kind of like begins to turn the tables a little bit. The Renaissance. A lot of that had to do with the fact that there was an awful lot of money and often a lot of trade going through Italy that was facilitating, you know, the translation of a lot of stuff from Arabic back into Latin and Greek. And it was pumping a lot of life into the Italian economy. And so money lending kind of had to be there if they were going to ride that wave all the way.

And so you. There are cracks in the, in the dam of this Christian attempt to, to keep usury at bay. And once you get up into the 18th and the 19th centuries, it is, you know, there’s very little resistance to, as you get, the development of the capitalistic society that we have today. Like, it doesn’t work really, without charging interest. But then you have, I don’t know if you hear the idiotic conspiracy theories that I hear every day about the Rothschilds. Yeah, a lot of that has to do is rooted in loans to the Catholic Church from the Rothschilds.

Oh, interesting. And I didn’t know that that had happened.

Yes. And so, yeah, there was, there was interest that was being charged as well, which was. And then you’ve got. The Medici bank lent money to the Vatican in the 15th century, but they overcharged on a lot of stuff as a kind of a replacement for charging interest. There, there are a lot of ways to get around this.

The Medicis weren’t Jewish, were they?

I don’t think so. But this was another way that the, the Vatican found themselves in, in hot water.

Right.

Because, you know, interest was not supposed to work, but they weren’t supposed to charge it. But there are a lot of ways that you could get around it. You could charge fees, you could overcharge on other stuff. You could say, well, I’m only loaning you this money if you engage in this other exchange with me where you’re going to get raked across the coals. So they had a lot of ways to get around it. And then, yeah, by the 20th century, that dam has burst and disintegrated.

Basically given up on it entirely.

If you tell Dave Ramsey, don’t, you know. Yeah, it’s not okay to charge interest. I, I think he’ll disagree with you.

Yeah. And. And this is a part of the renegotiation of, of the text. Like, you can, you can not like it all you want, but this is very clear in the Bible. And, and early Christians for an awful long time tried to hold fast to this, and then we just decided that we know better and, and we don’t care. And, and we really want this. And, and so it’s gone.

Yeah. What? And, and I saw, you know, as I was sort of researching this and looking into it, I saw some. So many different arguments for why it’s okay now. And they’re all, they all seem pretty disingenuous, but a lot of it was like, you know, the old trope of that’s just in the Old Testament and, and, you know, Jesus fulfilled the, the covenant and now none of the Old Testament rules apply anymore, which has never made any sense to me because they still love the Ten Commandments and whatever. I don’t know. Like, there’s a. It. It’s such a weird case to make, especially considering, like you said, it’s also in the New Testament, like Jesus himself in that, in that Luke 6 passage or.

You know what I mean, basically says, just give your money away, man. Yeah, yeah.

Don’t. Don’t expect anything in return if you’re going. And it’s, and it’s encouraging you to lend just without any expectation of even getting it back. Yeah, I, Yeah, it’s. It’s fascinating to me. Like you say, the entire way our economy is currently built revolves around this, but I think that that’s. I mean, I don’t know. I guess what I was going to say is that we can also look at our world and notice that it is vastly different than the world of, you know, of the Old Testament and New Testament. Like, like, you know, we’re not subsistence farmers the way most of them were. And.

Yeah, and, and this is one of the reasons that I point out, like, negotiating with the text, if you want the text to be authoritative, you have absolutely no choice but to negotiate with it. And that’s not, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Circumstances change. That’s one of the reasons you have to negotiate with it. You know, the, the abolition of slavery to the degree that it was abolished was an awesome thing. And now we have to figure out how to make the Bible work in a world that does not have slavery. But I think just being transparent about the fact that we’re negotiating with it. And so if you, if you want to defend interest like make a secular case for it and say, you know, we don’t really have much of a choice if we want to, we want to survive in the world. But that might have, that might have some bearing on how emphatically you want to defend other increasingly unpopular and harmful ideologies that you insist the Bible demands you, you endorse and you defend. So yeah, just be consistent whatever you’re going to do about it.

But that might be asking a lot of some people.

Yeah. And to this day, and, and Muslims also my understanding, I had a bunch of comments on that video from members of the Islamic communities saying that they’re prohibited from charging interest and there are banks in the, in the Muslim world where you can get interest free loans. And evidently there are groups, I, I don’t know how formally they are organized as banks or if they’re affiliated with banks. There are, are groups that, that will also make loans to members of the Jewish community that are interest free. And I’m sure there are, there are different kinds of standards and requirements and criteria and things like that that must be met. But, but there are a lot of groups that still take this seriously, at least for the in group.

But yeah, I was, I was, I was raised in the wrong group. I, my mortgage is telling me I was, I’m in the wrong group altogether.

Yeah. And one of the interesting things I’ve seen in folks who, who defend the, the validity of interest from a Christian standpoint is saying that it, that it helps mitigate risk. And I’ve, I’ve wondered about that because like if somebody’s not going to pay back the loan, like you’re not getting the interest either for the most part, like we front load a lot of interest but you know, if you don’t even get back the, the loan that, the money that you loaned.

Yeah, well, I, I, I think that is a good place for us to transition into our next segment. Because I feel like the next segment gets into some of these issues and, and, and illustrates them in ways that I do. I. Gosh, I hope I walk away understanding something here. So let’s go into our. Our chapter and verse. And the chapter and verse that we’re talking about is Matthew 25 , and we. We’re deep in Parable Town in Matthew 25 . I, you know, I went and looked. There’s. The first part of 25 is the parable of the 10 bridesmaids, which is interesting. And then it transitions directly into what we are looking at, which is the parable of the talents.

And we should first start by. I looked up what a talent was, and it was a unit of weight originally and then became a unit of heavy money. A heavy unit.

Well, back then, money was basically a weight, right. You had. You had usually silver or something like that, and, and it was that much silver.

And, And a talent is not a small amount.

It is a gigantic amount. Enormous.

So a single talent was. I, I think I. In one thing I saw, it was. It was the equivalent of. Of what was. Was like years of a, Of. Of a standard person’s salary.

I, I think one of them was given like, five talents. Like that would. That would require. I think it was like working for 84 years every single day.

Right.

At a standard day labor wage without spending anything just to get that amount of money. So, yeah, it’s an enormous amount of money. And when we look. And there’s a parallel in, In Luke, but it’s. It’s like the 10 Minas or the 10 pounds, which is another unit of weight.

Right.

And it’s a much smaller one. So when Luke tells the story, it’s kind of like, let’s get real. This is how much. How much he gave him and. Right.

Because it does seem a little weird that. I mean, I mean, it’s a parable. It’s not something we’re not supposed to understand this as actually having happened.

Right.

But. But yeah, it does seem a little weird that, like, the, yeah, the, the master’s like, here, take $2 million and go see what you can do with it.

I’m going out of town. Here’s $5 million. Have a good time.

Yeah, take care of it for me.

And then when he comes back, the sums that are the profits are also astronomical.

Right.

Like, in that time period, you can’t really make that much money even with that much with it, unless you are, like, doing some pretty devious and probably questionable buying and selling of property. And, and things like that. You’re exploiting people to make that much money.

Let’s, let’s quickly just sort of tell the story just so that everybody’s up on it. So we have an. A, A man. And all it says is a man. Right.

Anthropos.

I, I think that the KJV has an interesting thing. It says, for the kingdom of heaven is as a man traveling into a far country, which. One of the things that I read was like, yeah, they just chucked in that kingdom of heaven thing to try and make sense of some. To try and make their own kind of sense of this.

Yeah. But it’s in italics, so it’s not there in the Greek.

Because I, I think that. I think if you read this and you. And it doesn’t say, well, what are we supposed to be comparing? How are we supposed to be understanding this? One might interpret this as a negative thing. And so maybe the King James translators were like, we need to kind of massage them in the direction of understanding this as, as how heaven is supposed to be. All right, let’s add kingdom of Heaven into there.

I’m going to question that because I still interpret this as a negative thing. So we’ll get to that. We’ll get to that. But as we’ve got a man, and he’s very obviously a very wealthy man—we can take that from the context clues later on—he’s going on a journey, and he summons his slaves and entrusts his property to them. To one, he gave five talents, to another, two, to another, one talent. And it says each according to his ability. I don’t know. Does that mean ability to lift it? I don’t know what abilities we’re talking about here.

I think the idea here is that he knows the economic prowess of his—of his enslaved folks. Yeah. He’s got his—his A-team. He’s got his JV squad, and—and he knows what he can give them and expect a return on.

So then he goes away, and the two top guys, the guy who received five and the guy who received two, go off and immediately do whatever they do and make money. They both double their money.

100 percent return. Yeah.

Which is crazy. Yeah. And I kind of want to find out what they did. And then the last guy just goes and buries his talent in the ground and waits for his master to come. Doesn’t want to take a risk, doesn’t want to get in trouble, seemingly. And so he just does that.

And this is—and interestingly enough, we have some rabbinic literature that’s about how the only way for money to be safe is if you bury it. And like, so they even talk about how deep you have to bury it for certain things. Yeah.

Okay. Just make sure you remember where you put it.

Yeah, write it down somewhere. Anyway, so master comes back and it says—

After a long time.

Which suggests we’ve got to give them time to—to make this money. It’s still ridiculous, right? The amount of 100 percent return on five talents is—is—is stupid.

But after—after a long time, meaning 45 years or something.

He comes back, he summons the slaves, he says, what’d you do? Number one guy says, look at this, I doubled. Here’s your 10 talents back, double your pleasure. Number two guy says, here’s your four talents back. I doubled up too. He’s pleased with both of them. Good and trustworthy slave, you’ve been trustworthy in a few, he says, I’m gonna put you in charge of some stuff.

Congratulations on your few things being billions of dollars. Yeah, yeah. An awful lot of money.

You’re—you’re going to be—I think in Luke, don’t—don’t they get to be like in charge of cities?

Yes, yes.

So—so I mean we’re talking about like, yeah, you get to be a big—a big shot now.

And then comes the guy who buried his. And he—he comes in and he says, here you go. Here’s your talent back. But he doesn’t just say that. He says, master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you did not scatter. So I was afraid and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours. And that did not go over well.

Yeah. And this is—like, this is fair though.

Oh yeah.

He’s like, I’m leaving town. I want you guys to make me money while I’m gone.

Right.

And that’s—that’s reaping where you did not sow, gathering where you did not scatter, trying to make money without working for it.

And also clearly this guy knew that if he comes back empty handed, he’s screwed, so he’s not willing to take that risk. He says, I was afraid and I went and hid your talent in the ground. And then the—the man, the master replies, you wicked and lazy slave. You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was mine with interest. So take the talent from him and give it to the one with the 10 talents. For to all those who have more will be given, and they will have an abundance. But from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Now that has always baffled me.

I… because here’s the thing. The explanation that I always got of this parable is that talents, even though, you know, even though it’s a different word, I was always told that talents, what a.

Yeah, yeah. Our spiritual gifts and things, right?

Yeah. So. So you’re. We’re supposed to map that somehow the Master in this story is God or Jesus. And, and he’s given us these. Whatever he’s given us, whatever gifts he’s given us and that we are to magnify them. And, and. And, you know, sort of blah, blah, blah. And so when you read on and you hear about, you know, that all made sense to me until I read the part about, you know, the, the last slave criticizing the master. And the master doesn’t rebuke him and say, I’m not that. He doesn’t say, that’s not true about me. He just says, oh, you knew. You knew that about me, and so you didn’t do anything. Well, you’re out. Which says to me that. That I don’t know how we can interpret that as being God in that case feels very strange. So talk me through it. Help me understand who. What am I missing?

Or. Or. Or are we just gonna live in confusion?

Well, so, so the biggest issue is, is the fact that a parable. And, and this comes from a word that means to. To throw beside or to lay beside. It’s a comparison, right? Is. Is the thinking that there is significance to the. The structure of the parable, like comparing one thing to another. But when we put God in the role of. Of the Master, we’re now thinking, okay, this must be an endorsement, some way of what the Master is doing, because that’s what we’re supposed to be understanding God to do, right?

And, you know, that’s a pretty natural way to approach these things. And it is kind of how traditionally we have approached things. But I’d want to bring up Luke 19 , which says. Which says something peculiar tells a parable. He says, a nobleman went to a distant region to receive royal power for himself and then return.

Right.

And a lot of scholars point out. So, so this is not just somebody’s I got a business trip. This is somebody who is making a special trip to go be endowed with political power. Which is why he can come back and say I give you five cities, I give you two cities. And a lot of people point out that this sounds an awful lot like Herod Archelaus who went off to Rome to be given power to be the, the leader of this tetrarchy after his father Herod the Great died. And Herod Archelaus was a bad dude like he was. He. He ends up being deposed for just rank incompetence in six CE. And it’s after this that we have the need to have a census of the area. This, which is probably what Luke or the, whoever wrote the, the nativity account in the beginning of Luke was, was confusing with, you know, a period during Herod’s life. But so in Luke 19 it seems to be suggesting that God is in the.

Is slotted in for this villain. And so it does, it does raise questions about how we should be understanding what the actual structure of the parable is. Is. Is functioning. Yeah. Should we be taking this as, as an endorsement of usury of the reaction? I think, I think there are problems with that particularly on the other side of abolitionism as well because all of these parables are about enslaved people.

Right? Right. So note how bad it is to enslave anybody.

Right. It’s all about yeah, the slave did this, the slave did that, the master went good slave.

Right.

Like that. If, if you want to understand the structure of the parable to, to have some moral freight that it’s carrying, then, then what do you do about the fact that it’s all about enslaved folks and the fact that the New Testament consistently represents the ideal relationship you have with God as the relationship of slave to master. The. So there, there are a lot of problems with that as well. But additionally it seems like what’s going on in these passages are one, they don’t go back to Jesus. Almost certainly don’t go back to Jesus. These are probably traditions that developed later on and, and perhaps even though they.

Are, they are put in Jesus’s mouth.

In the text, they’re put in Jesus’s mouth. And it’s possible that, that we have some layers that post date the original composition of these gospels as well. Particularly because, you know, like when it says the, the master left and after a long time this could be kind of this delay of the parousia. Why hasn’t Jesus come back yet? Because at the end of Matthew, Jesus tells the people, there are people standing here now who are, well, you know, will see me coming in the clouds of power and great glory the second coming, which didn’t happen.

And so the, the story could be doing that. Now you, you found another reading that.

Yeah, well, it was sent into us by a listener. A listener whose name.

A rather prescient listener.

Yeah. Who. So they sent in a really interesting view of this. It’s sort of a liberation theology view, but it takes the, the idea that it basically makes the third slave the hero of the story. And it, it claims that. That the ancient Israelites would have under. Or the, you know, the, the sort of neo Christians, the early Christians would have understood it in a way that, that what was happening was that the, the, you know, the last slave was the one speaking truth to power and, and that that was the right thing to do and that he was speaking out against the idea of usury and saying you are, you know, you are a usurer and that, that, and somehow that, and that that’s a bad thing and then he gets condemned. Which that’s, that’s, that kind of sucks.

He gets thrown out. But, but one of the interesting things was that this author, and this is, this is from an author named, there’s a name associated with it. Andy Wade, I guess is, is the one who posted this particular thing. Anyway, one of the interesting parts of his theory is that by burying the talent in the ground, there was also this sort of metaphorical idea that money can’t grow in the ground and that’s the subsistence living is the correct way of living. So you know, what you put in the ground is something. And you know, obviously he uses metaphors that are agrarian metaphors. You, you, you know, you reap what you do not sow. You, you, you know, you gather where you do not scatter.

Right.

So it’s. So I think it makes sense to, to look at the fact that he buried his, this money in the ground and nothing grew from it. And the, the idea was that because. But that money itself has no inherent growing value. You have to exploit other people in order for money to grow by itself. And he should have been planting things in the ground that would grow. I don’t know. I just found that really interesting. And, and it made more sense of this, of this parable to me than saying that the master is God. The master then becomes sort of the, the villain of the parable, even though the outcome for this, for the hero, for the, you know, this hero slave is a very bad outcome.

Yeah, yeah. And, and this leads into the parable of the sheep and the goats, where God is, is sifting through and putting the sheep on one side and the goats on the other, and, and sheep go to heaven and goats go to hell, as, as we know from another great poet. But yeah, there are. I, I think that is an interesting reading. I think it certainly helps us to. It’s, it’s a, it’s a great interpretive lens to, to turn on our own selves in our own time and to think about how we engage with the economy around us and, and how so many people treat it as a zero sum game where to get ahead other people have to fall behind. We step on the necks, grind the faces of the poor in order to, to secure the bag. And I think that is a great reading. I don’t know that it has much legitimacy in terms of trying to understand what the authors or the earliest audiences understood about it, but it is a pickle because it does seem to do the kinds of things that other parts of the Gospel of Matthew and here I’m thinking of Jesus’s excoriation of the pursuit of wealth and of the, the Sermon on the Mount.

Those things just don’t jibe with, with what we have here in the parable of the Talents. And I think there’s an interesting, there’s a, the Hermeneia commentary volumes on Matthew. It’s a three volume thing and it’s from about 2005. I think it needs to be updated. But there’s a good, there’s some good final thoughts here because ultimately what this is coming down to is, is it’s trying to tell the story about how the folks who are followers of Jesus need to be productive followers of Jesus and, and increasing value, quote unquote, not monetary value, but they at least need to be doing something in the world in which they’re supposed to be sharing the gospel in order to actually achieve the kingdom of heaven. If they just bury their thing in the ground and, and they don’t go out and engage, then they’re going to be one of the unprofitable servants, which, you know, raises questions about, about faith-alone soteriology in, in the Gospel of Matthew .

But it’s, it’s basically trying to say it’s going to be really good for the people who do the right thing. It’s going to be real bad for the people who do the wrong thing. That’s kind of the main rhetorical point here. And the, the author of the Hermeneia commentary volume here says the parable itself invites misunderstanding. When Jesus, his whole message and his God becomes the parable’s signature and the definition of its contents, such misuse cannot happen. So if, if we just think about, if we set aside the idea of master, slave talents, usury, all that, and we just say, okay, God, Jesus is coming back. We need to be found to have been doing Christian things. Everybody wants to do Christian things till it’s time to do Christian. So if we want to do the Christian things, then, then misuse cannot happen. Where this was not the case, the parable was misused. The parable of the talents is theologically true only when it speaks of the God of Jesus Christ who loves people in such a way that they are indebted to him for everything that they are and that they can achieve.

It is theologically true only when it speaks of his commission of love or to love and of the gifts that are used for that purpose and not for just any human activities. It is theologically true only when it is related to the community of love that Jesus wanted. When it does not speak of these things is merely an empty shell of words with which every human activity can be legitimized, such as exploiting other people in order to, to acquire wealth. And so I think there’s, there are ways that we can acknowledge that this is probably an infelicitous metaphor that is, that is being leveraged here while still trying to, to understand the point the, the author was, was making. Because certainly we can’t expect the author of the Gospel of Matthew to have actually endorsed not only usury and exploiting other people for wealth and investing to, to acquire just obscene amounts of money, right?

But also that it would endorse basically the death sentence on somebody who doesn’t perform well enough or an enslaved person who doesn’t perform well enough. It seems pretty ridiculous to, to think of God being in the role of a master, of a slave who has, you know, control over the life and death of that person. That’s not, not a very Matthean, it’s not a very Christian way to approach these kinds of relationships. So I’m, I’m going to say I, I don’t know exactly what was going on in the, in the mind of whoever put this here, whether it was the, the original author of the Gospel of Matthew , somebody coming afterwards comparing the, the version of the story that’s in the Gospel of Luke even makes it even weirder. Yeah, I don’t know.

Yeah. And the parable in Luke is, it’s clearly the same parable, it’s just, just with modifications and differences. Yeah, but, but it’s absolutely the same. But yeah, I, I’m still, I’m still. Well, as you say, the waters are muddied and, and.

We take our leave.

I guess that’s, that’s when we run away. So thanks for that, I suppose. Listen friends, if you would like to become a part of making this show happen every week and if you would like to, to especially hear more of us get bonus episodes or get early access to an ad free version of every episode, you can go and become a patron over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. You can also write to us at contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and other than that, we’ll just talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

Usurer Error

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology