Also there’s always this tone Christians take about this shit like Jews saw tax collectors as some sort of unclean aliens living among them and xenophobocally despised them when actually they were angry with them the same way you’d be if a family member started extorting you.
https://twitter.com/bpadge/status/1491147421992505345
Like Christians REALLY want to associate tax collectors with lepers, as if Jews of the time were less capable than we are of understanding a distinction between quarantining people they believed to have a communicable disease and shunning wealthy, abusive grifters.
Or they want to associate tax collectors with marginalized people today, as if they were equivalent to disabled people or queer people being failed by society, instead of rich people exploiting their own people on behalf of an occupying power.
And that’s gross for two reasons.
1) it reverses the power dynamics between tax collectors and Pharisees (most of whom weren’t wealthy, and whose only power was popular support)
2) it treats marginalized people in our own society as if their marginalization was their own “sin”
1) it reverses the power dynamics between tax collectors and Pharisees (most of whom weren’t wealthy, and whose only power was popular support)
2) it treats marginalized people in our own society as if their marginalization was their own “sin”
First-century Jewish contempt for tax collectors wasn’t about rigid adherence to arbitrary religious law.
It was “that fucker came to take most of my harvest to give to the occupiers and broke my knee when I wouldn’t hand it over.”
It was “that fucker came to take most of my harvest to give to the occupiers and broke my knee when I wouldn’t hand it over.”
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