On the one hand, death by cancer was nothing new. Like so many families with migrant farm labor in their immediate past, varieties of cancers seemed to bloom undetected and unchecked until it was far too late. Some of my fondest memories from childhood are the result of long car rides from our home outside San Antonio, TX to the tiny East Texas town of Rosebud -- population less than 2,000 -- where I played wildly with my siblings and cousins outside as my parents, aunts and uncles mourned distant relatives indoors. Those trips included climbing trees, running from cows, tasting honeysuckle, and steeling myself for the eventual moment when I’d have to kneel and kiss my deceased relative on the forehead. My grandfather’s death, however, was the first time death-by-cancer had touched someone I had known closely, a person I loved and admired deeply.
My maternal grandparents, Eusebio and Cruz Castilleja, immigrated from Monterrey, Mexico in 1954 and settled in San Antonio’s West Side in a small home on Delgado Street. Each summer, they’d pack up their six children, including my mother, for a long drive from San Antonio to family farms outside of Krakow, Wisconsin to work as migrant farm laborers. My father’s family had a similar pattern, although he remembers spending summers picking cotton near Houston, TX. Decades later, during a road trip to Galveston beach, my dad pulled the car over by the side of a cotton field so we could see what it felt like to extract the pillowy fibers from the razor-like leaves. My siblings and I held on to our cotton through the rest of the trip.
The experiences and humiliations of those fields ended up as the seeds of the stories I’d grow up hearing around family dinner tables. Long after my parents, aunts and uncles had moved on to office jobs and various professions, family gatherings included unbearably long story-telling sessions - usually led by an uncle - about what had taken place during those critical years. My family was lucky in that we had been able to leave the fields behind within a generation. And though there were family members who didn’t wish to dwell on that past, the stories would flood out whenever there was a funeral -- and there were many funerals to go to.
On one of the long car trips back from a funeral in Rosebud, I recall my parents talking about why so many people in our family were dying from cancer. They had just overheard other family members -- perhaps distant cousins or an aunt twice removed -- talking about the connection between the cancers and the pesticides they were exposed to in the fields. My father recalled crop dusters dropping pesticides directly on them as they worked below. Like poisonous snow, I remember thinking. Part of why I remember that conversation so distinctly is that it led me to worry, in my own childish way, about whether that poison could be transmitted from skin to skin and from generation to generation. Was the poison eating away at me already?
In 1996 - the same year of my grandfather’s death - a study on the prevalence and cultural attitudes toward cancer among migrant farmworkers affirmed much of what my parents were discussing in that car ride back from Rosebud. After affirming that seasonal and migrant workers are at elevated risk for lymphomas and prostate, brain, leukemia, cervix, and stomach cancers, the study describes the way cancers are understood and described among impacted families: “In regard to cancer, an intense fear of the disease coupled with fatalism regarding its treatment and course were found to be pervasive among the migrant workers who participated in the focus groups. Cancer was nearly synonymous with death - an association that likely reflected the experience that migrant workers have had with cancer.” The economic drivers behind this exposure to pesticides were also examined. When asked why a participant continued to work in the fields when he knew the risks of exposure to pesticides, he responded: "If I refuse to go into the field, there are many others who would be happy to do it so their families could eat."1
Sitting in my grandparents’ home as my grandfather lay dying, different strands that I had intuited about the way the world worked were coming together. His cancer was a striking lesson in the intertwined nature of poverty and vulnerability to disease. Poisonous snow had fallen from the sky onto the skin of my grandfather and closest relatives. Who flew the plane and what were they thinking? Did they know what would eventually happen to the people below? An understanding of the universe as an ultimately cold and cruel place closed in. But then, my depressed daydreaming was interrupted by the sudden presence of a priest.
What I recall is there was a knock, a hubbub among my aunts, and then suddenly there was a Roman Catholic priest in my grandparents’ house, a holy outsider in my family’s deepest moment of mourning. He was quickly escorted from the front door to my grandfather’s bedroom where he performed the Last Rites.
Being something of a veteran of Roman Catholic funerals, I’d certainly seen priests and understood at a basic level why one had just knocked on the door. But at fourteen, I found myself asking a deeper set of questions that I’m still reflecting on today. Why, really, had a priest suddenly shown up? What did my Mexican grandparents’ faith have to say about the full scope of what was happening? And why was it that the church was one of the only institutions that appeared to care about the dignity of my dying grandfather?
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A year or so later, I was riding my bike through the quiet country roads surrounding my family’s home in the Texas Hill Country. As a result of seeing the priest walk through the doorway of my grandparent’s home, I’d begun a slow, careful reading of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, one that involved copying out by hand significant chunks of the Gospels per day to absorb the text more fully. I’d recently come across the Magnificat in the Gospel of Luke and - strange teenager that I was - had decided to commit it to memory. As a result, particular lines kept floating to mind as I rode my bike up and down the gentle slopes that early evening. “My soul magnifies the Lord…” “He has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of humble estate” “He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty...”
These lines were unlike any version of Christianity that I’d experienced up to that point. The small Texas town I grew up in was thoroughly controlled by an aggressively white, Christian fundamentalism that was frequently both ridiculous and terrifying. A politicized version of Christian fundamentalism was growing in strength and force across the country throughout the 1990s, something which I experienced first-hand as I watched friends disappear into homeschooling, or become transformed from decent and funny kids into radical evangelists whose parents sought to ban books from the school library.
By the time I graduated from the local, public high school, Christian students had staged walkouts of Biology II when evolution was taught; an English teacher was fired for teaching the novel Snow Falling on Cedars because it had a scene of interracial sex and discussed Japanese internment camps; our principal led the school in the Lord’s Prayer before football games with impunity; and motivational speakers had been regularly brought in to exhort us to follow Jesus lest we burn in hell.2 Middle school and high school were times of Young Life rallies, and morning gatherings of angry blond teenagers for prayer around the flagpole, and casually dropped comments regarding the immorality of interracial relationships because “God forbids man from laying with animals.”3
What I didn’t realize then but am all too aware of now is that I was witnessing what journalist Katharine Stewart has described as the coalescing of radical Christian nationalism of the late 90s, a highly organized movement based on the myth that the American republic was founded as a Christian nation, that asserts legitimate government rests on adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage, and whose defining fear is that the nation has strayed from the truths that once made it great.4 Stewart intentionally uses the term ‘radical’ because she sees this version of Christian nationalism as pretending to work toward the revival of ‘traditional values’ while contradicting and undermining the long-established principles and norms of our democracy.5
Thankfully, I was excluded from much of this on account of being Latino, nerdy, and very obviously gay. Yet I watched closely as this version of Christianity created holy cover for cruelty toward those on the margins, and it is impossible to briefly describe how much work it has taken to undo the fear, shame, and self-hatred that I internalized from those years. My primary experience of Christianity, therefore, had been this soul-crushing expression of white, fundamentalist conservatism, with cruel so-called Christians serving to mock and self police anyone deviating from this norm.
Because of this, it felt - in fact, it oftentimes still feels - like a betrayal to open the Bible, a text that is so thoroughly owned by those who are committed to terrorizing the lives of LGBTQ+ communities and people of color. And yet my curiosity ultimately got the better of me. What did the text actually say? How did this same text galvanize both the white evangelical movement that I actively feared, as well as lead a Roman Catholic priest to show up to honor the dignity of my grandfather at his deathbed? I was - and remain - fascinated by this dissonance.
What I discovered in my furtive reading of the Gospels was a world of agricultural images and miraculous stories that was a great deal more like the world described around my immigrant grandparents’ kitchen table than the bleached blonde Christianity I was encountering in school.
These were stories about day laborers and outcasts, people who were desperately sick seeking a miraculous cure; there were stories of people who were hungry, had been robbed, or were begging on the side of the road, as well as stories of people who had been humiliated and then lifted up. While it wasn’t clear to me at the time, I now realize that what I was picking up on was one of the peculiarities of the Gospels themselves. In Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, historian Diarmaid McCullough notes, “Biographies were not rare in the ancient world and the Gospels do have many features in common with non-Christian examples. Yet these Christian books are an unusually ‘down-market’ variety of biography, in which ordinary people reflect on their experience of Jesus, where the powerful and the beautiful generally stay on the sidelines of the story, and where it is often the poor, the ill-educated and the disreputable whose encounters with God are most vividly described.”6
Further, in addition to these stories being about “the poor, the ill-educated and the disreputable”, they also gave expression to something I’d not yet had words for: a longing for the world to be turned upside down. In Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, for example, not only does Jesus say that it is the poor, the hungry, those who are weeping, and those who are hated who are blessed in God’s Kingdom. Jesus then proceeds to pronounce woes on the rich, the well-fed, those who are laughing now, and the currently adulated. It is a longing for God’s great reversal.
Reading those words, my teenage soul joined up with generations of people who have found strength and courage in both halves of Luke’s Beatitudes, both the positive affirmations of the poor as blessed as well as the less frequently cited pronouncement of woes on the “powerful and beautiful people” who made the lives of the poor miserable. As I delved more deeply into the Old and New Testament, I discovered that God’s anger frequently flashes like lightning bolts on a hot Texas summer afternoon, and very often this anger is directed at the way the poor are being humiliated and mistreated. “What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the faces of the poor into the dirt?” God asks in the Book of Isaiah.7
What do we mean by this, indeed? It was a life changing revelation to realize that my sorrow and yes, anger, at the way the world was ordered might somehow be connected to God’s desire for justice, and that many of the biblical stories had an undercurrent of desire for a great reversal.
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The stories and images of God’s impending reversal are one of Christianity’s gifts, a balm and source of hope to all those who are living with a boot on their neck. There are two halves to this gift, both an affirmation of the dignity of the poor as well as warnings to the rich, those who are well-fed, those who are laughing now, and the well-praised. Even so, in an effort to be welcoming to all, many Christians will only focus on the positive affirmations found in the Gospels while ignoring Jesus’ harsh warnings toward the wealthy and the powerful. Truthfully, I’ve heard more than a few sermons reduce the Gospels to “follow your joy.” Yet these exclusively positive takes are forever running up against the starker vision of the Gospels, including Jesus’ encounter with the rich young ruler – a version of which appears in Matthew, Mark, and Luke – in which Jesus states that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
In the twenty-four years since I began my furtive reading of the Gospels, I’ve learned a great deal more about the what drove this vision of reversal. What I’ve realized is that pressure speaks to pressure, including across millennia.
In Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich, early church historian Helen Rhee describes the intense socioeconomic pressures of the period just prior to and inclusive of Jesus’ ministry. Called the Second Temple Period in Jewish history, this period is typically bracketed as taking place between 516 BCE and 70 AD during the time when the Second Temple in Jerusalem existed before it was destroyed by the Romans in retaliation for ongoing revolts. Rhee notes that this time in Jewish history was one of intense pressures that were the result of foreign domination from the Persians, Greeks, and Romans, as well as being a time of harsh living conditions for the masses.8
“In first-century Palestine, the social scene betrayed the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small elite group (the landed aristocracy) and the general impoverishment of the majority of the population (the landless peasants). The tension between the wealthy landed minority and the peasant landless majority goes back to the late monarchical period, but throughout the Second Temple period and especially during Herod’s rule, the situation grew increasingly worse through the continuing economic oppression and confiscation of the land by the rich and powerful. Creation of huge estates through the exploitation of the land and through mortgage interest produced a growing number of landless tenants or hired laborers in the very land they had once owned. And the coalition between the great landowners and the mercantile groups over the monopoly of the agricultural goods made the peasant workers’ lot more difficult to endure.”
Rhee goes on to describe this period as having “the firm imprint of feudalism” wherein the pressures on the lives of the poor were immense. In addition, other compounding factors such overpopulation and over-cultivation of the land, natural disasters, as well as increasing tributes and tithes all combined to force “the already poor majority into the arduous struggle for unfortunate survival in a highly stratified society.”9
Just how stratified first century Roman Palestine was has been a source of debate among biblical scholars and early church historians for some time. In Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity, published in 2017, Rhee includes more recent estimates that moderate the stark picture first offered by Bruce Longnecker in his 2010 book Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World. Even these figures, however, are a sharp reminder of the prevalence and severity of poverty and the extent to which this shaped the Gospels.
There Rhee notes that first century Rome was comprised of an imperial & aristocratic elite (1-3%), a middle group with moderate surplus resources (7-15%), and “the poor” who were either stable near subsistence (22-27%), at subsistence (30-40%), or below subsistence and therefore lacking necessary food, shelter, and clothing (25-28%).10 In the agrarian subsistence economy that was the Roman empire, this meant that 75-90% of the Roman world were hovering around subsistence level – alternating between being near, at, or below -- and were seemingly locked in a struggle for survival and sustenance on a daily basis.11 A vast majority of the population was particularly vulnerable to natural disasters, including droughts resulting in periodic food shortages and diseases.
Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome helps to fill in the picture of what these percentages mean. The fact that ancient Rome was an agrarian subsistence economy, for instance, means that 50 million people across the Roman Empire were peasant farmers -- both smallholders and tenants alike -- “struggling to grow enough food to feed themselves in some years, with a small surplus to sell in others.”12 There were periods of extreme hardship such as the late 60s BCE when evidence from Roman coins suggest that peasant farmers experienced “if not starvation then persistent hunger.”13
As early Christianity’s spread was an urban phenomenon, it is especially important to take in her descriptions of the extreme urban poverty that plagued Roman cities. She notes the existence of Roman laws prohibiting people camping in the tombs of the aristocracy, the descriptions of the poor creating lean-tos against walls and how those temporary dwellings were regularly cleared. In describing why so few indications remain that tell us anything about the lives of the poor, Beard writes about how fragile their existence was. “The outskirts of many Roman towns may have not been far different from those of modern ‘Third World’ cities, covered in squatter settlements or shanty towns populated by the nearly starving and those who begged as much as worked for their living.”14 Shanty towns do not leave behind permanent structures to study millennia later, and extreme hunger, she notes, typically resolved itself by the starving dying without leaving a trace behind.
The pressures of poverty on that 75-90% of the population meant that the stage was set for social upheaval and rebellion in Roman Palestine. Jesus' own ministry and the emergence of early Christianity occurs across the same decades as the revolt of Judas the Galilean (6 CE), the Jewish War (66–70 CE), and the Bar Kochba rebellion (132–35 CE). The hopes and fears that come with rebellion and civil unrest are forever flickering in the background of the Gospels.
In addition to setting the stage for social upheaval and rebellion, the pressures of the Second Temple Period also resulted in a particular vision, tone, and framework about what God's justice would look like. The visions of God’s justice in literature from this period – including 1 Enoch and the Psalms of Solomon – echo throughout the New Testament, especially in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Book of Revelation, and the Letter of James. Over and over again, one finds poor people looking toward a final, apocalyptic struggle between the righteous and the wicked, one in which the righteous are the victimized poor and the wicked identified as the powerful rich.
Rhee concludes that “this eschatological conflict between the righteous poor and the wicked rich involved the ‘great reversal’ of their earthly fortunes on the last day,” and that “in this political and socioeconomic climate, the early followers of Jesus believed that, with the coming of Jesus, the eschatological new age had indeed dawned.”
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While these themes of the ‘pious poor and oppressive rich’ and ‘great reversal’ are interwoven throughout all four Gospels, they are especially present within the Gospel of Luke, a gospel that I’ll admit is my favorite for reasons that will become clear shortly.
In addition to the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), Jesus announces his mission as proclaiming good news to the poor (Luke 4:18-19), and tells followers to invite ‘the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind’ to banquets (Luke 14:13, 21). Luke’s version of the beatitudes includes a series of woes to the rich (Luke 6:20-26) and mocks the rich fool who stores up his wealth in barns (Luke 12:16-21). There is also, of course, the story of the rich young ruler, told in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which concludes with Jesus saying that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Indeed, the rich who are to be praised are people like Zaccheus who gives his wealth away (Luke 19:1-10) and the ‘unjust steward’ who halves the debts of his master’s servants, a small sign of God’s Jubilee and, perhaps, the closest thing Luke has in terms of a constructive pathway forward for making friends for one’s self using ‘dishonest wealth’ (Luke 16:9).
In addition to these examples, perhaps the most vivid depiction of God’s reversal in the Gospel of Luke is the one that takes place between Lazarus and the rich man. Theologian Douglas Meeks describes this parable as a vivid illustration of the coming reversal and the need for repentance among the rich and powerful for their treatment of the poor.15
Luke 16:19-31 relates in vivid detail the contrasting lives and fates of the beggar Lazarus and a rich man. Characteristic of the way that the Gospels are view of society from the bottom up, it is the beggar Lazarus who is named while the rich man remains only a generalized figure. Whereas the rich man was “was dressed in purple and fine linen” and “feasted sumptuously every day”, Lazarus lay at the rich man’s gate “covered in sores” hoping to “satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table.” Jesus tells his listeners that even the dogs would come to lick Lazarus’ sores.
Death comes for both Lazarus and the rich man but even here social distinction prevails. Whereas the rich man is properly buried, Lazarus dies at the gates of the rich man. The first hearers of this story would likely have known that beggars like Lazarus ended up being buried in mass graves. It is only in the eternal life that God’s reversal of fortunes finally takes place. M. Douglas Meeks states, “But, though not even decently buried, Lazarus (“God helps”) now sits at the table with Abraham in God’s eschatological household. In contrast, the rich man, properly interred, experiences that hell that the poor Lazarus had known in his lifetime.”16
In a passage that is as frightening to the rich as it would have been soothing to the first listeners of this parable, Jesus continues by telling how the rich man called out to Abraham, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.” But Abraham responds, “Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.” God’s justice has fixed a great chasm between the rich man and Lazarus and everything has been turned upside down.
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At the heart of Christianity there is this deep longing and exploration of God’s reversal of rich and poor. Its depiction of “the righteous poor and oppressive rich”, and God’s preferential option for “the least of these” represented something new, countercultural, and even strange in ancient Rome. The historian – and my former professor – John McGuckin writes that “It was a widespread belief in Hellenistic society that the (often wretched) disparity of lot was simply how things were in the greater cosmic order. Imbalances were not injustices. The attitude (still prevalent today, of course, as an often-unvoiced supposition in many venues) was at the core of pagan Roman ideas on wealth and status.” 17
In contrast, “the gospel’s very different approach to entitlement (based on what was a ridiculous idea to wider Greco-Roman society – that all men and women were equals as the consecrated images of God on earth) was a veritable clash of civilizations.”18
Despite our claims to the contrary, United States culture is not so different from the ancient Roman attitudes toward the poor. Indeed, in our recurring depictions of “the unworthy poor” – think Ronald Reagan’s ‘welfare queen’ of the 1980s - we oftentimes even outdo the ancient Romans our punishing attitudes toward the poor. In Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson argues that Americans need to come to terms with the existence of our own caste system whose hierarchical logic bears cruel fruit at every turn, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. She notes that the high mortality rates of African-Americans and Latino Americans had less to do with preexisting conditions than with the “caste-like occupations at the bottom of the hierarchy – grocery clerks, bus drivers, package deliverers, sanitation workers, low-paying jobs with high levels of public contact – that put them at greater risk of contracting the virus in the first place.” She continues, “These are among the mudsill jobs in a pandemic, the jobs less likely to guarantee health coverage or sick days but that sustain the rest of society, allowing others to shelter in place.”19 Quoting the Guardian, Wilkerson notes, “To a watching world, the absence of a fair, affordable US healthcare system, the cut-throat contest between American states for scarce medical supplies, the disproportionate death toll among ethnic minorities, chaotic social distancing rules, and a lack of centralized coordination are reminiscent of a poor, developing country, not the most powerful, influential nation on earth.”20
In my own work with activists such as the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis of the Poor People’s Campaign and David Giffen of New York’s Coalition for the Homeless, I’m frequently reminded of how countercultural it still is to say that society should have compassion for people struggling on the margins. When meeting with Dr. Theoharis, for instance, I’ve recently noticed that she has a large poster behind her which simply reads, “Fight Poverty. Not the Poor.” And in meeting with David Giffen, he has spoken about the important role faith leaders can play at neighborhood community meetings by simply reminding those gathered that the sixty thousand plus people who live in the NYC shelter system – including twenty-one thousand children – are people too. That they are human, in fact. Both are forever pushing up against a culture, one that was alive and well in ancient Rome and continues today, that justifies inequalities by dehumanizing the poor. What is the point of the Church if we aren’t naming this as evil and pushing against this?
To insist that society should have compassion for the most vulnerable members of our society is still a surprisingly countercultural statement, particularly in a highly stratified caste-system like the United States, and part of my hope here is to encourage Christians to embrace this and not be ashamed of this central message. This “clash of civilizations” will turn up over and over again in the forthcoming snapshots of how Christianity wrestled with issues of poverty and wealth over its first five hundred years. One of the most remarkable features of Christianity was the belief that wealth represented a dangerous form of spiritual temptation and injustice, that the poor are in fact blessed by God, that God comes to us in “the least of these”.
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There is another part of this story regarding the Gospel of Luke and how this impacted my life and outlook in significant ways. Long before my grandfather’s death, long before I began my furtive reading of the Gospels, I’m realizing that I was already being influenced by the Gospel of Luke’s focus on the reversal of the rich and poor, insiders and outsiders, and one in which God shows up in surprising ways. I simply didn’t realize it at the time.
The Christmas traditions many of us are familiar with come from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, but it is Luke especially that plays with power and powerlessness at every turn. It is in Luke, for instance, that we learn of Mary giving birth to Jesus in a manger, wrapping him in bands of cloth, and laying him down “because there was no place for them in the inn.”21
For many, these stories have become so familiar that the shocking nature of this message – that God’s only Son was born into destitution, a member of one of the lowest castes in his society – is lost on many. And yet, even as a child, it wasn’t lost on me. This is not because of any particular insight on my part but because of the shared insights of a family that heard these stories through the experiences of immigration and migrant field labor.
Long before my grandfather’s death, and long before I ever began my furtive reading of the Gospels, Christmas meant celebrating Mexican-American traditions like Las Posadas, a sung tradition that dramatizes Mary and Joseph’s exhausting search for refuge and a place to give birth to Jesus. Led by my grandparents, we would divide our family into two parts: half the family would sing the role of Mary and Joseph and the other half would sing that of the reluctant innkeeper.
At the outset, a weary Joseph says, “In the name of heaven, we ask you for shelter, as my beloved wife can no longer walk.” The innkeeper – who voices society’s response to the least of these at every turn - responds, “There is no room for you here. Keep on going ahead. I will not be opening my doors, for you are likely scoundrels and thieves.” It is only slowly, and very reluctantly, that the innkeeper becomes aware of who Mary and Joseph truly are, a push and pull that finally gives way to the innkeeper opening his heart and home.22
Year after year we sang this. Year after year I absorbed how the words intersected with my family’s search for a place in this country. Since then, I’ve also learned that all of us have the capacity to play both parts: sometimes we are seeking refuge; sometimes we are the stubborn innkeepers with stony hearts. At the end of singing Las Posadas, my family lined up to kiss the foot of the baby Jesus who was nestled amidst straw in a large nativity scene – and I suppose something has remained with me in seeing my venerable grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles bending down to kiss the foot of a child born into utter poverty.
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1 “Peer Discussions of Cancer Among Hispanic Migrant Farm Workers” Paula M. Lantz, Laurence Dupuis, Douglas Reding, Michelle Krauska and Karen Lappe, Public Health Reports (1974-)
Vol. 109, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 1994), pp. 512-520.
2 Associated Press. “'Snow Falling on Cedars' booted from Port Orchard schools” – May 2000. Link: https://lmtribune.com/education/snow-falling-on-cedars-booted-from-port-orchard-schools/article_3686e34a-186c-52f6-b817-3b55f87a4347.html
3 Presumably quoting Leviticus 18: 23
4 Stewart, Katharine. The Power Worshipers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. Page 4
5 Stewart, Katharine. The Power Worshipers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. Page 6
6 MacCullough, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Page 77.
7 Isaiah 3:15
8 Rhee, Helen. Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich . Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Loc 1001
9 Rhee, Helen. Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich . Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Loc 1001
10 Rhee, Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity, Loc 80
11 Rhee, Helen. Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation, pages 5 and 11
12 Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. 442-448
13 Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. 46
14 Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. 443
15 Meeks, Douglas. Economics in Church Scriptures. Oxford. Page 9
16 Meeks, Douglas. Economics in Church Scriptures. Oxford. Page 9
17 McGuckin, John Anthony. The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years. Page 1026
18 McGuckin, John Anthony. The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years. Page 1026
19 Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Page 356
20 Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Page 357
21 Luke 2:7
22 Ironically, the innkeeper in Las Posadas does the opposite of what the Gospel of Luke describes and eventually offers a room at the inn. “Enter now you holy pilgrims, holy pilgrims! Please receive this little place. Although this inn is so poor, I offer it with my heart.” This is a surprising turn as it contradicts the story of the Gospel. It is almost as if Las Posadas cannot bear the harshness of Luke’s description.
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