Jesus and the Disinherited

Like the book’s other four chapters, “Jesus—An Interpretation” begins with the rhetorical argument that Thurman will eventually argue against or attempt to provide a solution for. Thus, he lays out a series of problems he sees within the history of Christianity and the contemporary Christian church. To those who are impoverished and struggling, Christianity has often been “sterile and of little avail” (11). While originally started by a persecuted people, throughout the ages, Christianity has often been the religion of the persecutors. Furthermore, it is used specifically as a tool of persecution, through what Thurman believes to be a perversion of the missionary objective. Missionaries hope to share the truth they have found, but Thurman points out the dangerous “sin of pride and arrogance” that often accompanies such hope and leads to attitudes of “self righteousness […] and racial superiority” (13). Thurman restates his question from the preface: “The masses of men live with their backs constantly against the wall. They are the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed. What does our religion say to them?” (13). For Thurman, this is modern Christianity’s most important question.

Thurman relates the story of his visit to Ceylon as part of a delegation on a “pilgrimage of friendship” in 1935 (13). The principal of the University of Colombo invites Thurman to have coffee and asks him, “What are you doing over here?” (14). The Sri Lankan principal cites the heinous acts of violence committed by white Christians against Black people throughout history and notes that one British slave ship was named “Jesus.” He challenges Thurman, asking him to defend himself and his Christianity against the allegation that he is “a traitor to all the darker peoples of the earth” (15). Thurman uses this question to transition to the essay’s interpretation of Jesus as a model and representative for the disinherited.

First, Jesus was Jewish and deeply connected to Israel, a fact which Thurman believes the Christian church tends to gloss over. Second, he was poor. Thurman offers evidence from Luke, in accordance with rules from Leviticus, to argue that Jesus came from a family who could not afford the standard wealthy family’s sacrificial offering. As a Jewish person in Roman-occupied territory, Jesus was “a member of a minority group in the midst of a larger dominant and controlling group” (18). Under Herod, taxes increased, and the masses were poor. Thurman thus contends that growing up, Jesus must have been acutely aware of the political and economic climate, and he supports his claim by including text from Vladimir Simkhovitch’s Toward the Understanding of Jesus. Christianity begins under oppressive Roman rule.

Thurman describes his experience listening to a speech by a young Korean girl at a convention of the Student Volunteer Movement. The girl makes a plea for Korean freedom from Japan, and Thurman compares the girl’s sense of urgency with Jesus’s political and spiritual weight. He compares Jesus’s political situation to the situation of Black Americans living in a world circumscribed by the dominant culture and state, “the controllers of political, social, and economic life” (23).

Thurman presents a typography of options for the disinherited in society. First, there is nonresistance, which is then divided between imitation and reduced contact. For Thurman, King Herod and the Sadducees are biblical examples of imitators, Jews who assimilated into Roman culture. Thurman presents a scene from Ben Hur, wherein a Jewish man spits on the ground behind a Roman legionnaire only after the legionnaire has passed as an example of the second type of nonresistance, reduced contact. Finally, there is armed resistance, which Thurman associates with Israeli Zealots of Jesus’s time, wherein “men measure their own significance […] in the amount of power and energy other men must use in order to crush them or hold them back” (27).

Jesus presents an alternative to these forms of nonresistance with a doctrine of love and salvation. His peers often resent him and see his philosophy as “a complete betrayal to the enemy” (28). Thurman continues to explore this argument, giving credence to the idea that Christianity as it is commonly taught seems to be a “betrayal of the Negro into the hands of his enemies by focusing his attention upon heaven, forgiveness, love, and the like” (29). Thurman, however, contends that Jesus’s context gives his message “strength and vitality rather than […] weakness and failure” (30).

Thurman pivots to his childhood, describing his grandmother, who was born into slavery. Thurman’s grandmother had him read the Bible aloud to her but asked him to never read Paul. This was because, in her younger days, a white minister who held services for slaves would often read from Paul, frequently returning to the passage “slaves, be obedient to them that are your masters […].” (31). Thurman reflects that “too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong and the powerful and against the weak and oppressed […] despite the gospel,” and despite Thurman’s interpretation of Paul, which “certainly included all men, bond and free” (31). Thurman continues to examine the life and political context of Paul, a free, privileged Jew in Rome. Paul has a more sympathetic view of the state than Jesus, who was not a Roman citizen. Jesus was a second-class citizen in a community that had to look out for itself, and Thurman emphasizes the social similarities between the conditions of Jesus and those of Black Americans.