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BOOK REVIEWS ٠ 161 text takes profoundly negative approaches to the economic institutions of Rome, and that John envisions a renewed, domestic economy to take its place—a vision Oakman argues was difficult to accept in a post-Constantinian Christianity during the canonization process. The parable of the mustard seed is the subject of chapter nine. Here Oakman argues that Jesus primarily identifies himself with the agrarian society and its concerns, not the urban context with its very different concerns. He suggests that the point of the parable is not about the growth of something great but rather the destructive power that small seed can have. The small seed of God’s kingdom has a destructive, uprooting effect on the political, economic, and social institutions of Jesus’ day—an effect lost in urban and theological readings. In chapter 10, Oakman makes a similar case for the Beelzebub pericope (Luke 11:14-26). He contends that the text is really about political exorcism and the usurpation of the Herodian dynasty and its replacement with the kingdom of God. In chapter 11, Oakman employs a conflict approach to assessing the political situtation of those living in the countryside in Luke-Acts. He makes a contrast between the competing interests of the elite in the city aiming to expand land holdings, gain political security, and ultimately control with the interests of peasantry aiming to achieve political independence through debt forgiveness and redistribution of the land. Oakman argues in chapter 12 that Jesus was peasant with peasant values but nonetheless was hopeful that the Kingdom of God would bring transformation even to the often vilified government. He repeats here what he perceives as the hermeneutical uncertainty of reading parables in order to gain such data (180). Oakman turns to the Jesus’ cursing fig trees narrative in chapter 13, and he suggests that these texts demand closer analysis in social-systemic approaches. The curses, he argues, apply primarily to the Palestinian social situation under Herod, and they indicate Jesus’ critique of these structures. Again here Jesus offers the kingdom of God as an alternative to these institutions. The Lord’s Prayer, according to Oakman’s discussion in chapter 14, also has a primarily immediate concern—but not completely unrelated to eschatological hope—addressing very real and immediate social concerns for peasants and agrarians in his context. Dividing the passage in two tables, Oakman suggests that the first table reflects more basic theological beliefs about God’s concern for the welfare of people, whereas the second table deals more specifically with the values and concerns of the Galilean Jesus movement. The author outlines an integration of model of social interpretation to the social world of Jesus in chapter 15. He aims to implement abductive procedures with both theoretical models of social consciousness and historical data, because he believes that a “more sophisticated sociological imagination thus can inform social inquiry centered on the historical Jesus or Roman Galilee” (246). The model Oakman proposes combines macrocultural, macrosociological, and social-systems approaches in order to produce “an augmented understanding of politics as a key institutional and cultural variable and of struggles in the environment of Jesus” (253). The interdisciplinary engagement from this model and archeology results in understanding the Judean quality of Jesus’ Galilean context. The Jesus seen at the end of this enterprise is not the philosopher or cynic decontextualized by Crossan and Mack but rather a Jewish Jesus in line with the tradition of Israel and who proclaimed a non-elitist message against the political institutions of his setting that would cost him his life.
162 ٠ JBTM Vol. 6 No. 2 the Proclamation of the Gospel Oakman paints the historical Jesus found in earlier Jesus traditions as symbol of tax subversion in the name of God’s kingdom in chapter 16. In the final chapter, “Jesus, Q, and Ancient Literacy in Social Perspective,” Oakman aims to distinguish between the Jesus of a predominantly oral culture (buried in the Q tradition) and the Jesus recorded in scribal traditions with respect to Jesus’ own social and political interests. Contingent upon an understanding of a largely illiterate culture in Herodian Galilee, Oakman contends that passages demonstrating literary competency reflect scribal addendum, not the native Aramaic oral traditions. He concludes that Jesus attracted negative attention from the powerful and wealthy in his subversive messages about politics and economy with his idea that God’s kingdom came with “tax shelters” of sorts—and it was this political-economic message that cost Jesus his life and perhaps even was the reason for the first scribes writing Jesus’ sayings down. Oakman suggests that the message preserved in the Gospels more or less reflects the political and religious ideals of rabbinic Judaism and the Jesus movement, not those of the illiterate, Galilean peasant (308). Oakman provides exemplar work in the application of social matrices to the biblical text in social-scientific exegesis, but evangelicals will often have serious disagreement with his conclusions. He argues that Jesus was conservative with regard to the tradition of Israel but revolutionary in regard to political and economic structures. Oakman concludes that “Jesus’ historical activity was essentially about politics, and the restructuring of society, and not about religion or theology” (296). In his hermeneutic, Oakman rejects what he perceives as traditional “Jesus-idolatries” and “biblical tyranny” (6) as well as the purely reductionistic approaches to religion by the social sciences—but he can’t find the happy medium he’s looking for here. Rhyne Putman New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary
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JBTM VOL. 6, NO. 2 THE PROCLAMATION
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T Editorial Introduction: the Procl
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Section 1 The Character of Preachin
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Expository Preaching & the Mission
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Preaching The Forest And The Trees:
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Preaching the Forest and the Trees
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The Holy Spirit in Preaching Jake R
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Apologizing To Postmoderns: Develop
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Humor In Preaching ٠ 73 the sermon
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Rethinking The Value Of Metaphors I
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The Resurrection 1 Corinthians 15:1
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The Resurrection ٠ 103 By the way,
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