Revolutionary or rebellious scriptural texts

So cried the Blessed Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus Christ, according to the text of the Magnificat in the New Testament. During the middle ages, the popular Feast of Fools became a literal, ritualistic acting out of the Magnificat:


http://revchrisroth.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dangerous-and-subversive-song-of.html

https://brotherlapin.wordpress.com/2014/12/28/the-place-of-the-donkey-in-the-feast-of-fools/



I'm talking here about religious texts like that, which seemingly offer support for anti-monarchism, revolutionary upheaval, popular sovereignty and/or a reversal of fortunes in favour of the disadvantaged or disenfranchised members of society.

There is an unfortunate perception bandied about by certain folks (I would say perpetrated first by the likes of Voltaire) to the effect that religious institutions and ideologies buttress the entrenchment of hierarchies and the power of elites.

While this is obviously true in some cases (certainly before the axial age, prior to which religion pretty much was a tool for state control), it's a fact that some of the most influential subversive movements in history have been inspired by religious ideals. One need only think of Mazdak, the 6th century Zoroastrian mobad (priest), reformer and prophet who "instituted communal possessions and social welfare programs", for which reason he remains celebrated in Ferdowsi's Persian epic The Shahnameh. See:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazdak#Mazdakism



Or the role played by radical Anabaptist Christianity in the great German Peasants War (1524 - 1525), the largest popular revolt in Europe before the French Revolution, which was led by clergy like the preacher Thomas Muntzer who declared as follows to the oppressed masses of the Holy Roman Empire:

• Omnia sunt communia, ‘All property should be held in common’ and should be distributed to each according to his needs, as the occasion required. Any prince, count, or lord who does not want to do this, after first being warned about it, should be beheaded or hanged.
  • in Revelation and Revolution: Basic Writings of Thomas Müntzer (1993), p. 200

• The people will be free and God alone will be their Lord.
  • Letter to the Princes as cited in The German Peasants' War and Anabaptist Community of Goods, p. 109

• The stinking puddle from which usury, thievery and robbery arises is our lords and princes. They make all creatures their property—the fish in the water, the bird in the air, the plant in the earth must all be theirs. Then they proclaim God's commandments among the poor and say, "You shall not steal." They oppress everyone, the poor peasant, the craftsman are skinned and scraped.
  • Letter to the Princes, as cited in Transforming Faith Communities: A Comparative Study of Radical Christianity, p. 173

Or the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) in mid-19th century China, which historians claim "marked the end of the Imperial system in China" and was led by a Christian sect:


http://www.chinasage.info/taiping.htm


Time doesn't permit me to mention numerous other worthies: Liberation theology in Catholicism, the Abbasid Revolution in Sunni Islam or the history of Shi'ite resistance theory among many other instances of revolutionary religious ideology.

So, in essence, I'm looking for scriptural references from any holy book that you reckon has 'revolutionary' potential or import.

Vouthon said:

So, in essence, I'm looking for scriptural references from any holy book that you reckon has 'revolutionary' potential or import.

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In my opinion the NT itself was meant to act as an impetus for revolution by the ignorant common folk against the leaders of the Pharisees. You don't really find discussion of the Pharisaic reasoning for any given Law with an accompanying argument against that reasoning. Instead what you commonly find are appeals to emotion, motive, etc. It seems to me that, while this would be an ineffective tool to convince knowledgeable people namely Pharisees, the ignorant masses who only ever see the result of the Pharisaic leaders' reasoning in the form of the Law and not the reasoning itself that lead to it, would be especially susceptible to such argumentation.

Tumah said:

In my opinion the NT itself was meant to act as an impetus for revolution by the ignorant common folk against the leaders of the Pharisees. You don't really find discussion of the Pharisaic reasoning for any given Law with an accompanying argument against that reasoning. Instead what you commonly find are appeals to emotion, motive, etc. It seems to me that, while this would be an ineffective tool to convince knowledgeable people namely Pharisees, the ignorant masses who only ever see the result of the Pharisaic leaders' reasoning in the form of the Law and not the reasoning itself that lead to it, would be especially susceptible to such argumentation.

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I think that's an interesting and certainly plausible way of approaching it, actually. There is a strong strain of Jewish populism running through the Synoptic gospels, not unlike a Second Temple version of Bernie Sanders in today's America - albeit with religious reasoning and justification as opposed to secular arguments.

In terms of theology, Jesus was essentially a very 'liberal' Pharisee. He believed in the essentials of what would became Rabbinic Judaism - such as the resurrection of the dead, the World to Come, an intermediate disembodied state in Hades, wisdom like that in the Pirkei Avot, freedom of the will and even the Mosaic authority of the Pharisees courtesy of their guardianship of the Oral Torah (St. Paul broadened the original vision after Jesus's death to become a superseding of the Mosaic covenant, whereas Jesus had been implementing reforms within it, as part of a Second Temple discourse that is arcane to most Gentile Christians today).

But he seemed to be possessed of the idea that the Pharisees and the priests of the Sadducee faction were placing intolerable burdens upon the common people in their interpretation of the Torah, and likewise exploiting them. He had a strong dislike for the hierarchical structure of the Judean religious establishment (i.e. "Don't let anyone call you 'Rabbi,' for you have only one teacher, and all of you are equal as brothers and sisters" (Matthew 23:8) and "But you shall not be like them. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who leads like the one who serves." (Luke 22:26)).

This partisan agenda on his part, and the bold language he employed to back it up, became rather incendiary at times:

"They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the people's shoulders, but they themselves do not to lift a finger to move them...and they take the place of honor at banquets and the chief seats in the synagogues, and [receive] respectful greetings in the market places, and [are] called Rabbi by men" (Matthew 23:4-7) and yet by their actions, "shut off the kingdom of heaven from the people, devour widows' houses...and travel over land and sea to win a single convert" (Matthew 23:13-15).

He was, in essence, a rebellious son of the Pharisee theology, since, on the other hand he told people:


So he gave the Pharisees that much, whereas he had not one positive word to say about the priests.

Vouthon said:

So, in essence, I'm looking for scriptural references from any holy book that you reckon has 'revolutionary' potential or import.

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It's not a scriptural reference, but a method of establishing correct practice.

In early islamhe Caliph, as God's deputy on Earth, was responsible for defining correct practice. Strange as it may seem, it was not the sunna of the Prophet that defined correct practice, but the sunna of the caliph.

The association of key proto-Sunni sunni figures with mutatawwia movement led to their rise to preeminence and permanently changed Islamic politics and also religion itself (by newly placing hadiths as the key tool for interpreting correct religious practices).

Scholars associated with this movement also compiled most the canonical Hadith collections. Interestingly, they were Persians rather than Arabs, as were most of the key mutatawwia. So Arab Caliphs ended up being weakened via a Persian dominated movement.


Privatized Jihad and Public Order in the Pre-Seljuq Period: The Role of the Mutatawwi'a, Deborah Tor, Iranian Studies, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Dec., 2005), pp. 555-573

The effective halting of the Jihad-and, even worse, the reversal of the offensive into Muslim territory-must have posed an unprecedented crisis for the Faithful. The Jihad, a central tenet of the faith, one which had constituted the main focus of the Caliphate's endeavours from the very beginning of the Islamic polity, had fallen into abeyance. Obviously, the resulting moral and mili-tary vacuum at the frontier could not last-and, indeed, it did not. What has been termed "the Jihad State" may have ended, but the Jihad itself did not; it simply became what we today would call "privatized;" that is, it went from cen-trally directed state campaigns to independent, non-governmentally controlled, smaller scale raids led and manned by mutatawwia, volunteer warriors for the faith. This transferral of religious leadership in the Jihad, from the caliph to the mutatawwia, in turn led to truly fundamental changes in all areas of Islamic civilization.

Religiously, the mutatawwi'a movement brought about a revolution regarding the proper role of the political authorities in the Jihad... There was a deep ideological conflict expressed in these two opposing views: namely, do political leaders have religious control over the Jihad, or is it, rather, a religious obligation in which any believer may engage at any time-as he is entitled to do with, say, the giving of alms-irrespective of the political authority. It was the latter view, the view of the mutatawwi'a, which won (at least in 'Iraq), and was eventually adopted by both the Shafi'ite and Hanbalite schools.

The ramifications of this mutatawwi' victory were immense. Again in the religious sphere, the early mutatawwi'a played a decisive role in the consolidation of Sunnism-and particularly Hanbalism-in the decades around the turn of the third Hijri century. The mutatawwi' emphasis on the individual responsibilities of the believer before God-particularly concerning the Jihad-and on guidance by the Prophetic Sunna weakened the religious role of the Caliph, and marked, if not the beginning, certainly one of the most significant steps in the process Crone and Hinds have described as the transition from Caliphal to Prophetic sunna, and also accords well with the timeline they present.24 Thus, the mutatawwi'a, the militant arm of the proto-Sunni Traditionists, played a significant role in Sunnism's victory through the religious prestige they acquired in their role in leading the Jihad...

The rise of the mutatawwi'a, and the significance of their victory in reshaping the Jihad, was not limited to the religious sphere, though; it was fraught with pol-itical consequences as well. Jihad had traditionally lain at the heart of the Muslim polity from the time of the Prophet; the very first governmental organization, the diwan, had been an outcome of this focus on bringing God's rule to the Dar al-Harb. The fact that the Jihad now passed largely out of governmental hands meant that a major factor in the religious identification of Islam with the government was removed. More importantly, since the nongovernmental mutatawwi view of the Jihad was part of a complete religious outlook regarding the relative worth of the contemporaneous imamate compared to that of the Prophet and the early Muslims as preserved by the Traditionists, the undermining effect that the mutatawwi'i victory in the Jihad had upon the caliph's religious standing and authority was not and could not be limited to that one religious area. Rather, once the question of who would wield religious authority in Islam had been settled in favor of the Traditionists-in no small part, thanks to the prestige of the mutatawwi'a caliphal religious stature and authority crumbled, with political authority and power soon following in their wake.

Augustus said:

It's not a scriptural reference, but a method of establishing correct practice.

In early islamhe Caliph, as God's deputy on Earth, was responsible for defining correct practice. Strange as it may seem, it was not the sunna of the Prophet that defined correct practice, but the sunna of the caliph.

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This was a fascinating read, many thanks Augustus! And that's not a problem at all, the revolutionary mutatawwi'a movement arose from a certain jurisprudential interpretation of religious scripture - namely the Hadith and Sunnah of Muhammad - for which reason it certainly qualifies under my OP.

I myself used the text of the Magnificat (Song of the Virgin Mary) in the New Testament as a basis for a discussion of its subversive influence upon later movements and practices in Christianity, ranging from the medieval Catholic Feast of Fools to the Anabaptist Peasants War of the 16th century and the Taiping Rebellion of the 1800s.

When discussing revolutionary religious movements, one absolutely must bring up the Jewish Maccabees (167 - 160 BCE) who fought for Judean secession from the Seleucid Empire.

Now, they were "bad-***" - to use the modern colloquialism. In many ways, this was the first true war of independence and national self-determination from the despotic rule of a foreign power, as well as being a civil war between Torah-observant Jews and their Hellenizing co-religionists (especially of the appeasing House of Tobiad):


https://www.ancient.eu/article/827/the-maccabean-revolt/



While the victorious rebels proceeded to form first a priestly theocracy and then a new sovereign monarchy, in the First Book of Maccabees (the most reliable ancient historical account of the conflict and regarded as sacred scripture by Catholics and Orthodox Christians), we discover that Judas Maccabeus and his brothers not only secured a treaty alliance with Rome but also admired her republican institutions:

http://www.usccb.org/bible/1maccabees8:1

Vouthon said:

This was a fascinating read, many thanks Augustus! And that's not a problem at all, the revolutionary mutatawwi'a movement arose from a certain jurisprudential interpretation of religious scripture - namely the Hadith and Sunnah of Muhammad - for which reason it certainly qualifies under my OP.

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Also an interesting point that can be inferred, the idea that Sunni and Shiite have been fighting since day 1 after Muhammad is somewhat hard to make when you consider Sunnis weren't the dominant group and, more importantly, didn't even really exist in the current sense until much later.

Sunni Islam did not appear in history fully formed; but that it emerged through a complex historical process, a process which yielded widespread Sunni self-awareness no earlier than the late 9th century.6 As such, the designation proto-Sunni underscores the provisional nature of the many competing versions of Islam in this period, and against that background, the crucial role of those who prepared the way for an eventual Sunni consensus.
The Roots and Achievements of the Early Proto-Sunni Movement: A Profile and Interpretation - Matthew J. Kuiper

Vouthon said:

I myself used the text of the Magnificat (Song of the Virgin Mary) in the New Testament as a basis for a discussion of its subversive influence upon later movements and practices in Christianity, ranging from the medieval Catholic Feast of Fools to the Anabaptist Peasants War of the 16th century and the Taiping Rebellion of the 1800s.

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Have you ever read Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages?

Lot's of interesting examples in that.

Augustus said:

Have you ever read Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages?

Lot's of interesting examples in that.

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I have indeed, a great read. Joachim of Fiore, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Hussites, the Anabaptists, the Diggers and Ranters of the English Civil War...he covers an enormous span of history and Christian revolutionary movements.

Vouthon said:

When discussing revolutionary religious movements, one absolutely must bring up the Jewish Maccabees (167 - 160 BCE) who fought for Judean secession from the Seleucid Empire.

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They might also make an appearance in the Quran. While this is certainly not the orthodox interpretation of the passage, this paper makes quite a good case regarding it.

Maccabees Not Mecca: The Biblical Subtext Of Sūrat Al-Fīl

Sūrat al-Fīl (Q 105) has traditionally been understood by both Islamic exegetes and modern secular scholars as a reference to King Abraha’s “expedition of the elephant,” in which the Christian King of Yemen allegedly attacked pre-Islamic Mecca with an army that prominently featured war elephants – followed by Allah’s miraculous destruction of that army.

This article argues that Q 105 is much better understood as Arabic homiletic on the narratives of 2 and 3 Maccabees, Biblical texts that flourished throughout Eastern Christian traditions (including Syriac Christianity). These two Biblical texts center on narratives of polytheistic royal armies that tried to use war elephants to destroy a community of pious Jewish believers. In both texts, God dramatically rescued his faithful Jews, destroying the polytheistic forces and routing their war elephants. The “companions of the elephant” in Q 105 are thus the Seleucid and Ptolemaic antagonists of 2 and 3 Maccabees. Q 105 does not refer to a legendary expedition by Ethiopian Christians and their elephants against pre-Islamic Meccan polytheists.

Vouthon said:

I think that's an interesting and certainly plausible way of approaching it, actually. There is a strong strain of Jewish populism running through the Synoptic gospels, not unlike a Second Temple version of Bernie Sanders in today's America - albeit with religious reasoning and justification as opposed to secular arguments.

In terms of theology, Jesus was essentially a very 'liberal' Pharisee. He believed in the essentials of what would became Rabbinic Judaism - such as the resurrection of the dead, the World to Come, an intermediate disembodied state in Hades, wisdom like that in the Pirkei Avot, freedom of the will and even the Mosaic authority of the Pharisees courtesy of their guardianship of the Oral Torah (St. Paul broadened the original vision after Jesus's death to become a superseding of the Mosaic covenant, whereas Jesus had been implementing reforms within it, as part of a Second Temple discourse that is arcane to most Gentile Christians today).

But he seemed to be possessed of the idea that the Pharisees and the priests of the Sadducee faction were placing intolerable burdens upon the common people in their interpretation of the Torah, and likewise exploiting them. He had a strong dislike for the hierarchical structure of the Judean religious establishment (i.e. "Don't let anyone call you 'Rabbi,' for you have only one teacher, and all of you are equal as brothers and sisters" (Matthew 23:8) and "But you shall not be like them. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who leads like the one who serves." (Luke 22:26)).

This partisan agenda on his part, and the bold language he employed to back it up, became rather incendiary at times:

"They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the people's shoulders, but they themselves do not to lift a finger to move them...and they take the place of honor at banquets and the chief seats in the synagogues, and [receive] respectful greetings in the market places, and [are] called Rabbi by men" (Matthew 23:4-7) and yet by their actions, "shut off the kingdom of heaven from the people, devour widows' houses...and travel over land and sea to win a single convert" (Matthew 23:13-15).

He was, in essence, a rebellious son of the Pharisee theology, since, on the other hand he told people:

Then Jesus spoke to the crowds and to His disciples: 2“The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’seat. So practice and observe everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach" (Matthew 23:2)

​

So he gave the Pharisees that much, whereas he had not one positive word to say about the priests.

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There are few points that I think bear further discussion not including the question of whether any of your attributed quotations were the views of Jesus or just the authors of the NT:

I don't think we agree on the nature of the society of the time. The Pharisees weren't the leaders of the people. The Pharisees were a denomination. It was made up of leaders or Sages and common folk. It's possible to not be a leader or Sage and still be a Pharisee. The majority of the people, what I call "the ignorant masses", didn't strictly follow the rulings of the Sages of the Pharisees (and we have a lot of ruling instituted to circumvent problems that this caused), but appeared to hold the Sages to varying degrees of regard. So by way of example, we have Rabbi Eliezer ben Horkanos who ran away from his family to go study Torah with the Sages, and reconciles with his father when his father sees that he was actually quite capable in this field. Indicating both him and his father held the Pharisees in higher regard although they were not Sages themselves. On the other hand, Rabbi Eliezer's student Rabbi Akiva is quoted as relating about himself that when he was one of the ignorant masses, he hated the Sages so much that he wished he was a donkey who could bite the Sage and crush his bone in the process.
The Saducees were, I believe (although I'm not 100% sure) exclusively Priests although not all Priests were Saducees and quite a number are counted in the ranks of the Pharisees. They were a competing sect who argued against the validity of the Pharisaic Sages' tradition and only practiced (or attempted to only practice) only what is described in the Written Torah. I do not believe the placed any burden on the people because (1) I don't think they held any power outside the Temple and even there it was limited except maybe what they could pull out of the king and (2) they seem to have followed a doctrine similar to Sola Scriptura, so any blame would be difficult to place at their feet.

The reason why I think this introduction was necessary, is to explain that I don't think "liberal Pharisee" is a correct label at least as far as the NT portrays Jesus. What we may have in this portrayal, is perhaps one of the common-folk Pharisees similar to how I believe Paul describes himself or someone who lived among them and was familiar with the external trappings of Pharisaic practice but lacked understanding of the internal methods that lead to it. Which is why I think we only find rhetoric against Pharisaic practice but never argumentation against the logic the Pharisees employed to derive their practice and never argumentation on the part of Jesus similar to that used by the Sages. The simplest possibility is that he - or at least the NT authors who were writing about him - simply never studied in a Pharisaic study hall to be familiar with it.

That being said, living among Pharisees or being part of a Pharisee family would have definitely given him or the NT authors many theological perspectives simply by way of osmosis. However, I disagree that the actual basis for the NT's argumentation was placing unreasonable burdens on the people. I think the reasoning behind the arguments was whatever could be used to remove the Pharisees from power.

One proof that I have for saying that I don't think it was about unreasonable burdens, is the NT's position on divorce. This position is right out of the house of Shammai's handbook and the house of Shammai is almost always the more stringent position, as they are in this case. If we're talking about placing unreasonable burdens, it seems like if there's a more lenient opinion, we should have found the NT choosing that one. Unless unreasonable burdens are acceptable when the only interpretation which appears valid to you is the more "unreasonable" one which is why the NT has Jesus selecting the more stringent one, in which case the whole argument against the Pharisees falls through.

So instead, I think the driving force is not unreasonable burden, rather unreasonable burden was used as a charge against the Pharisees only for it's ability to evoke sympathy from the masses. Along with that, we have the cry of the anarchist, "everybody is equal! you don't need no stinkin' Rabbi! down with the system!", which is patently ridiculous, because who is more capable of working out what the Law requires than the people who spend their days studying it? Certainly not the layman who still needed his Tanach translated into Aramaic and/or to understand it. But to rouse the ignorant masses? This is the way to start a populist revolt if there is any. And that is the reasoning that lead me to post in this thread.


Although it's not strictly related to the topic, Rabbinic Judaism is just the name of Pharisaic Judaism after the Temple was destroyed. The Pharisaic Rabbis are the Rabbis of our Mishnah on which the Gemara component of the Talmud comments on and elucidates. Jewish Law is a codification of the Laws of the Talmud. So there's not really any difference between the Pharisees of yore and Rabbinic Judaism of today as we follow the same Laws minus the specific Laws that are not presently relevant. This is really just a side note though.

It's literary LSD. OR ESOTERIC.

I think Liber AL Vel Legis, chapter three especially. While it often speaks in symbolism rather than exact literalism, it certainly calls for a spiritual uprising in a sense. It restores man's relationship to God back to Vedic magic and the Upanishadic notions of the relationship between ourselves and God. It's not anti-Christianity or anti-Islam, like the "curses speech" may imply but it is tearing down the walls that separate us from direct connection to God and the universe within older religions. The Will of nature prevails so to speak. The core doctrine "Do What Thou Wilt" (....Shall Be The Whole Of The Law, complimented by Love Is The Law, Love Under Will) happens to polarize many too, meaning that there is a force that is guiding one's purpose in this world - also alluding to the Gnostic notion that there is something mysterious or hidden, in this world that we need to achieve on earth.
To the average reader verses like "Sacrifice cattle, little and big, after a child, but not now" would come off as extremely sinister, but the book in its entirety sees sacrifice as something that has been done away with, something that serves no purpose.
The religion of Thelema is still quite "rebellious" by today's standards, it has a level of depth and relevance that one can't just shrug of, whether one believes the contents to be true. It (Thelema) tends to be thought of by occultists as a magical system but it is clearly much more than that, there is also a strange fascination that psychologists have with it; who tend to consider it only a philosophy - but it is not so.