 Just to kind of give you a bit of Contextualization on the genesis of this paper. I've kind of been thinking about some of these issues for a while now and and sort of working on them in different ways, but About this time last year I was reading What was it started with reading Bart Ehrman's book on memory because you know groundbreaking book on memory and He kind of had this aside where he talks about the spread of The gospel in earliest Christianity through kind of our spread of our tradition, but he has this sort of a side where he gives this hypothetical scenario of a Christian or a convert who Then suddenly goes on a business trip and and Converses with business associates who then also convert to Christianity and I just thought okay This is a really interesting and weird way of framing the development of Christian origins About the same time at my previous institution University of Auckland this Email from a pie came out suggesting that we all apply for this money on research into entrepreneurialism and Unfortunately, I'm not there anymore So I couldn't I couldn't follow through with actually applying for this But I was thinking okay. Yeah, this is this is great because I can apply for this money on research into entrepreneurialism Look at it in the Bible and then kind of tear it apart So that was my goal but it's been a kind of slow process of getting to this point and I Think this paper as well is sort of a bridge between what I'm currently working on and what I want to work on next so the language of entrepreneurialism is rife today through more or less all genres of discourse Popular political or academic and one way the ideology of neoliberalism That is the normative rationality of contemporary global capitalism that Orders people to live by the generalized principle of competition and basically all areas of social life One of the ways this has become entrenched is what David Harvey calls a hegemonic mode of discourse Or what my personal current my current favorite view of Philip Morovsky? describes as a set of epistemic commitments over the past 40 years or so as through a constant practice of dehistoricizing universalizing and Internalizing some of its key ideas and one of the the key ideas or assumptions is that The world consists largely of individual entrepreneurial agents Seeking to maximize their own human capital So in this paper, I'm going to demonstrate how New Testament scholarship itself can be complicit in this process of dehistoricizing and universalizing some of the kind of key assumptions or core assumptions of neoliberal ideology or perhaps epistemology specifically by fishing for entrepreneurs in the ancient economy Now on the surface level, I guess this means that scholars are perhaps guilty of anachronism But I think on a much deeper level it reveals a process this process through which neoliberalism is becoming Has become basically a totalizing ideological Framework or perhaps a hermeneutical frame. We can't not but avoid Seeing the world even when we're reading ancient texts and trying to be careful about contextualizing them in the ancient world Read through this frame because we don't even know that we're doing it the positive role first described to the entrepreneur Emerges explicitly in 20th century political economic thought Joseph Schumpeter Who writing in the 1930s pinpointed the entrepreneur as a source of surplus value and this becomes a way of Explaining spontaneous and discontinuous changes in the economy without having to refer to extra economic Factors like wars religion or politics Prior to the 20th century the entrepreneur when he appears in economic theory at all Is largely indistinguishable from the capitalist at the center of classical economics or the petty capitalist trailer within mercantilist theory Within the neoliberal era of capitalism the entrepreneur remains an enigmatic and contentious figure Campbell Jones and Andre Spicer for instance contend that discourse about entrepreneurship is often ambiguous Revolves around the gap or lack of repeated failure for every success. There are of course 99 Failures right which itself does not make notions of entrepreneurship less appealing But actually more attractive and engaging to us and it's so for this reason that they argue that the entrepreneur should be Conceived of as a sublime object that is a figure of discourse which is attractive, but ultimately empty Now of course prior to the emergence of capitalism and especially within an agrarian economy like that of 1st century Palestine Value created through entrepreneurial profit was probably not a significant factor Effort is to be considered a factor at all Rather economic value was found primarily in the factors of land represented by the landowner and Labor represented by the peasantry and slaves two of these actors put forward value claims The landowner collecting rent and the peasant claiming what we might now call a wage It was not until the late 18th century that a third actor puts forward a Further claim namely the capitalist whose claim rested on the production of value through venturing capital Given this the minority of the workforce Which does not directly work the land has often caused confusion for New Testament scholars Do fishermen and artisans for instance constitute some kind of middle class Were they as John Meyer and others put it put it relatively prosperous and this of course Raises the question will relative to what to slaves or you know that tends to not get defined This is a common assertion to be found in biblical commentaries But the I mean the Marxist classicist G M this to cry however would say emphatically no the small independent producer Was still subject to indirect and collective forms of exploitation Primarily through payments and services not rendered from individual to individual But rather extracted by the authority of the occupying regime So first just to set the scene a bit I want to give to what I think quite revealing examples of entrepreneurial language nested in the work the writing of leading New Testament scholars and my first Example is found in a recent article by Burton Mac who invites us to re-imagine the pioneers of Christian thought as Intellectual entrepreneurs He writes there was no Christian Bible for the first three centuries Only myth makers such as Paul, Mark, Thomas, John all intellectual entrepreneurs Working in discourse networks that were carving out a social rationale For a new network of Jesus School associations max Fascinating description of the development of early Christian myth-making Intriguingly bears some resemblance to an academics mandate in the neoliberal University. Does it not? The early Christian myth-makers are remodeled as a constituent part of the knowledge economy Engaging in knowledge production demonstrating entrepreneurial conduct through participation in research networks, perhaps via information exchange and so on a Bit like this conference or why we're at this conference perhaps very enterprising of us. I Guess the question for me is in what sense is our ideological context? that of the modern university and The way that the modern university has been reconstituted shaping our own interpretation of the data That we're reading and interpreting my second example to return to But Erman is found in his introductory textbook to the New Testament About the spread of early Christianity and Paul's role in this and so in this textbook Erman describes how Paul probably won over converts in the new cities He's he visited by suggesting that Paul preached while on the job Using his place of business as a point of contact with people to proclaim the gospel and this all seems mildly reasonable I mean Erman isn't obviously the only one who makes this point However, what raises eyebrows is a few pages later when Erman puts forward without evidence a rather intriguing proposition Did Paul and his companions set up a small business a kind of Christian leather goods shop in the cities he He visit they visited and then having posed this as a question in the subsequent chapters Erman proceeds with it as you know a hypothesis that turns into a fact interestingly so Paul's multinational Christian leather goods corporation becomes the infrastructure for spreading the gospel to the ends of the earth in each city That Paul writes a letter to he's already or the ones that he established the church He did so on the basis of starting this small business now I Begin with these two broader examples to demonstrate just how embedded I think some of these Assumptions are within the discourse of the discipline even if we marginally Disagree or largely disagree with Mac or Erman on other aspects We might read over this and not even kind of question it Yet we should I think be quite suspicious of this sort of language It at least raises some of these questions that I that I'm wanting to raise so As you can probably guess by the title of my paper. I'm now going to talk about the Fisherman in the Sea of Gaddley And how this might apply to them So I mentioned before that it's not uncommon to hear the fisherman described as coming from a relatively privileged background Day wellison and W.D. Davies. Oh, by the way. Yeah, meanwhile in the Sea of Gaddley Describe Them as coming from the lower lower and brackets middle class Morena Hooker suggests That the reference to hired men Indicates that the brothers were by no means poor men as fishermen. They would have all been reasonably prosperous John Meyer similarly notes that Mark's mention of hired workers gives the impression of a relatively prosperous fishing business on the Sea of Gaddley Luke instead presents James and John not as workers for their father But rather as quote business partners with Simon Peter Furthermore, he notes Quote it is well to remember that the fishing business on the Sea of Gaddley was a lively and prosperous one at least for those who owned or oversaw the operations a pivotal argument Sorry article Published by Casey Hansen 20 years ago in the biblical theological bulletin should have put I think a lot of this to rest Applying social scientific criticism Hansen forcefully argued that the fishers could hardly have been classed as entrepreneurs in Such a highly regulated text in hierarchical political economy and he Has this diagram is from the article where he kind of shows the complexity of the relationships within which these fishermen were embedded so there's a whole kind of sorry if you can't see it there's a whole kind of Down And there's all this other stuff going on in terms of cycles of of where the money that they might be coming in and going out and all This kind of stuff. It's complex So while the boat owners Or fishermen may or may not have been involved in fish processing This would not have necessarily made them wealthy and certainly not middle class as some authors have contended Since the whole conceptualization of a middle class is anachronistic relative to Roman Palestine The surplus went to as Hansen puts it the brokers and the ruling elite Now a very recent article from this year in fact And this is what sparked me to write on this particular topic because there's been two articles that have come out this year in New Testament journals on fishing And one of them was by Rhymer Hikola in November testament him Asks us to re-examine the portrait of the Galilean fishing economy in light of fresh Archaeological findings in Magdala along with recent classical scholarship on ancient fishing technologies and fish production In opposition to Hansen so he does engage with Hansen Hikola contends the expansion of Galilean fish production and trade Gave an economic boost to the local economy and that local Collectors of fishermen were able to benefit from this development. So basically we have a kind of trickle down explanation to the for their so-called relative prosperity and Hikola puts forward a number of pieces of evidence to support this claim first excavations in Magdala reveal an urban character and Harbour dating to the first century BCE which suggests large industrial scale Fishing and trade in the region structures such as storage facilities and port structures the evidence quoting Hikola For the stick for the scale of investments that were put into the development of the infrastructures that facilitated the Galilean fishing economy So he doesn't actually met so he's talking about investment and so on. He doesn't actually talk about who invested in these and my guess is that it wasn't venturing capitalists But probably at that time the Hasmonean authorities Second Hikola suggests a high level of prosperity in the region Evidence in part by the high number of coins found of minimal value indicating that intense Monetary economic activity and frequent change trade exchanges took place in Magdala Third Hikola goes on to mention the findings in Magdala should be placed in a larger comparative context That supports the conclusion that these structures are associated with small Scale urban fish production Which often included rooms for salting and processing fish moreover quote It is most probable that urban fish salteries were examples of small privately owned industries Working independently of the state and in competition with one another So hallelujah, we have the free market, right? The free market becomes a kind of natural state of all societies, not just the modern capitalist one fourth the documentary evidence indicating tight State control of fisheries in the ancient economy i.e. that the king or holder of the estate Made a large amount of profit whereas fishermen made very little and that fishing rights were farmed out at a very high rate of Taxation and so on and this is a central claim obviously for Hanson and others The evidence for that comes from Egypt comes from documents in Egypt and there is no actual evidence in Palestine and I think what's interesting about this claim and it may have some Validity is that Hikola himself is suggesting that we take the findings from the industrious urban Magdala and apply them To everywhere around the Sea of Galilee So he he's okay to do that, but he's not okay to take Kind of information about regulatory control from another context and apply it So that's perhaps an oversight there So I hope it goes without saying that material remains from antiquity do not provide us with direct unmediated Facts and archaeological discoveries as with written texts require careful interpretation Irrespective of whether his assessment of some of this evidence is correct. It's not difficult to see I think how Entrepreneurial language or assumptions are shaping some of the interpretive decisions In fact Hikola arguably sounds almost like the finance minister for the Herodian elite When he suggests that the expansion of the new fishing markets and Flourishing local economy at Magdala quote very likely opened up new possibilities of at least a reasonable livelihood for ordinary fishermen Working on the lake as well. He continues It is likely that some rural fishermen families Who had organized the practice of the trade collectively were able to benefit from the development of the Galilee and fishing economy and get a moderate livelihood for their profession Now I would suggest that we need to view the fishing trade within Magdala, Capernaum or wherever Within the broader cycles of production and consumption within an ancient agrarian economy. This is So this becomes inevitably a question of who has control of the means of production Fancy Marxist speak for the instruments both the instruments of labor like tools and infrastructure and the subjects of labor like the raw materials and natural resources The holders of fishing rights or contracts in a sense here then are akin to Landlords or wealthy estate holders So for all practical purposes can be identified along with the same basic class group. So irrespective of whether the fishing trade was prominent or even relatively Relatively prosperous enterprise. It does not follow that the fishermen themselves even boat owning servant hiring fishermen were primary or even secondary benefactors This speaks past their subordinate relationship to the means of production and While in some cases fishermen owned fishing boats and nets the lake itself as with all natural resources was ultimately under the jurisdiction of Rome Now Hikola Contests this point by suggesting that the concept of That fish like hunted birds or wild animals was regarded as the property of no one an ancient Greek philosophical thought So he's citing examples from kind of six years prior that You know, who knows if that's actually relevant to the first century So he suggests goes on to shit. There's actually no evidence of officials policing seawaters in an attempt to regulate marine fisheries However, I wonder if the evidence that Hikola suggests is absent is actually to be found in the synoptic tradition itself the call of Levi From a tax revenue office on the shores of Galilee Right mirrors the call of fishermen in the synoptic sources and while interpreters have tended to explain this unity in terms of their Prototypical function i.e. it's they're both kind of people sacrificing their ordinary lives or whatever to follow Jesus as a sort of model for Christian discipleship We can look at it in another way the parallel setting of the lakes foreshore indicates That there is some kind of connection between the fishing trade in the collection of tax Which I regard as an obvious kind of example of soft compulsion Why else is there a tax booth on the foreshore? Well Levi is also part of the Jewish subject population and not a Roman official And this is why I said soft compulsion Tax collectors and counten in the synoptics were not the holders of tax farming contracts themselves But underlings hired by them So we don't necessarily expect to see evidence or anything of Roman soldiers or officials patrolling the seashore for it to be under the authority of Rome The individuals were generally taken from the native population But the higher officials were usually foreigners absentee fishing contract holders So it's important to note that irrespective of official decrees decades if not centuries of social upheaval And sometimes brutal repression would have imprinted on the native population who was really in charge of this natural resource When the Roman warlord Cassius wanted to reassert Roman power in Palestine after an insurgency by one of the Hasmoneans He enslaved thousands of people around the area of Magdala In fifty fifty three to fifty two BCE and Josephus probably exaggerates But he says that it was as many as thirty thousand the memory this memory of kind of mass enslavement Would hardly have faded by the time of Mary of Magdala for example or other people in villages along the shore less so-called prosperous regions By the time of the first century Yeah, the expansion of fishing markets very likely opened new possibilities and so on so if we take the Call narratives and the synoptic tradition themselves perhaps as evidence of peasant social unrest in first-century Galilee Then things were not so rosy for the entrepreneurial fishermen and their families Indeed peasants do not generally take such drastic actions like abandoning their livelihoods unless conditions Have already become such that they can no longer Pursue traditional patterns of life. I mean why does it matter what their class position was well? I contend that their economic status has some bearing on The interpretation of these call to discipleship narratives Interpreters who emphasize that the fishermen were relatively prosperous tend to read the call narratives as this kind of proto prototype for the cost associated with Christian discipleship and of course This is often spiritualized so even though they're imagined to be middle-class like us and maybe So we can identify with them. It might be spiritualized. So it's a cost of you know some aspect of your life is lost but At the end of the day For this to stick it requires relatable middle-class individuals making middle-class sacrifices for the work of the kingdom Ancient writers a number of ancient writers and others describe the fish's life as impoverished and miserable In some cases men who fished were characterized as unmasculine as their trade meant they Earned their keep by serving the indulgent pleasures pleasures of others particularly rich fish eaters So the economic life of fishermen as with all peasants in the first century was probably one of subsistence In which any surplus produced would filter to the retainers and the ruling elite There's some to conclude There's something There's oftentimes I think little awareness of this appreciation for just how radically different an Ancient agrarian economy is from a modern capitalist one and I think just to echo Some of what Christina was talking about yesterday in terms of translation and to follow up with Steve's question that you put well Sure, we know that translation isn't perfect, but isn't this the work for biblical commentaries Well, I think I'm showing that even in biblical commentaries these Our modern worldview if we put it like that is just always kind of shaping our interpretation of the data and But what we see here is more than just an Anachronism or an ability to appreciate these differences the retrogection of entrepreneurialism onto the ancient world demonstrates just how totalizing neoliberal capitalism has become as this implicit hermeneutical frame a way of seeing and structuring the entire world in every field of human knowledge and I think Moroski is correct when he suggests that these shifts are being implemented on at the epistemological level and we can think about how We academics ourselves are subjected to kind of this whole neoliberal processing the process of Auditing surveillance of our work and so on that and we don't even kind of realize that then that is going to shape Perhaps at some level how we view this ancient material and the rest of the world So this then has Significant consequences for the interpretation of texts and I think any texts not just the Bible, but I think with the Bible in particular Given its kind of valorization of scripture if you can if you kind of naturalize or dehistoricize Neoliberalism within the Bible then it's going to have an even more kind of significant impact on We're going to make it even more difficult to resist neoliberalism and undermine it. Thanks