In 1976 I received a letter which drew my attention to a possible interpretation of the jubilee message which I had not foreseen. A devoted Christian, writing on behalf of a local body of believers, asked whether, since André Trocmé had cited (p. 61 above), the year A.D. 76 as the scholars' best guess for the date of the beginning ofJesus’ public ministry and therefore for the Nazareth sermon, it would then be in 1976 (after 39 X 50 years) that the jubilee should fall again.
It had not occurred to me that Jesus’ use of jubilee language to describe the imminence of the kingdom could have been construed as continuing or reinstating literally the fifty-year pattern of .the Mosaic legislation, so that his followers should continue the same literal application through the centuries.
The more normal line of interpretation, in response to this sincere question, was so normal that it did not occur‘to Trocmé or to me. t0 say so. It would be that the fundamental notion of periodic leveling would have been lifted, as Jesus appropriated it out of the Hebrew heritage, from the level of some practices implemented every seven years or every forty-nine years. It would have become in Jesus’ teaching a permanently defining trait of the new order. That would have been parallel to what jesus did with other elements of the jewish heritage. It would fit with what actually turned out to be practiced in the community he created.
Further Critical Scholarship
More important is the question whether Trocmé’s hypothesis, which I characterized in 1972 (p. 30 above) as “ingenious,” at a time when professional Bible scholars were ignoring his book, does in fact make sense as contributing to a serious interpretation of the Nazareth sermon. Such further study has since in fact been forthcoming.
In 1977 the Theology Faculty of the University of Basel awarded its doctorate insigne cum laude to Robert B. Sloan, Jr. for his dissertation “The Favorable Year of the Lord": A Study of Jubilary Theology in the Gospel of Lake. Sloan’s primary interest is not in the sermon’s impact on social ethics. His concern is, as his title says, with “theology,” and even more narrowly with Luke’s eschatology. The themes which the Nazareth sermon picks up from the Old Testament are as much prophetic as they are legislative. Luke’s editorial intention is to introduce his Gospel with the proclamation of the beginning of a new age. For Sloan to make that argument, however, presupposes that he must concede some degree of accuracy in Trocmé’s original point, namely that the phrase “the acceptable year of the Lord” (whether or not in the original intent of the Isaiah passage, at least to readers in jesus' age) meant the jubilee in the first place.
Sloan strengthens the case for that meanings being evident by showing the presence of the jubilee concept within the eschatology of the Dead Sea communities. Sloan also shows that the language and the tone of the Nazareth Sermon cast a special light across the rest of the Gospel. Luke’s continuing use of the terms euangelizein (proclaiming good news) and aphesis (release, pardon) in the remaining account projects the jubilee language through the rest of Jesus' teaching.
Sharon Ringe, now teaching at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, was awarded her doctorate in 1981 by Union Theological Seminary for The Jubilee Proclamation in the Ministry and Teaching of Jesus: A Tradition-Critical Study in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts. Ringe’s focus on “tradition criticism” indicates less concern than others might have for what can be known or surmised about Jesus' actual public ministry. Ringe’s interest is in how sets of thoughts and sets of phrases, motifs, and images were correlated with one another as the language of the early Christians was passed on from jesus to the point where our extant Gospel texts were redacted. Like Sloan she is more interested in jubilee proclamation as a component of Jesus’ kingdom language, that is, in knowing how clusters of metaphors work, than for narrative realism about Jesus’ movement.
As Sloan did for Luke, Ringe shows how language derived from the jubilee complex ("good news,” "forgiveness," “return”) is present even in parts of the New Testament where the concrete jubilee meaning (i.e., freeing slaves and reclaiming land) is no longer implied. This would seem to confirm the derivation of these terms from jesus’ own usage, rather than indicating that they were the contributions of later authors. This is also reinforced by the fact that some of the juxtapositions of jubilee-related words make sense only in Aramaic or Hebrew not in Greek. To Sloan’s interest in the Hebrew prophets Ringe adds the awareness that in ancient Israel to proclaim “release” or “amnesty” was a royal prerogative, not the role of a scribe, a priest, or even a prophet.
Donald W Blosser’s dissertation Jesus and the Jubilee: The Year of Jubilee and Its Significance in the Gospel of Luke was accepted by St. Mary’s College of the University of Saint Andrews in 1979. In contrast with the other two dissertations, whose concerns were with specific questions of hermeneutical method, Blosser reviewed in an encyclopedic way the entire scriptural corpus, also reaching beyond the canon to the Mishnah, Qumran, Philo, and Josephus.
Blosser’s historical conclusion is that the entire body of jubilee prescriptions, all the Way to land redistribution, was never regularly practiced, yet nonetheless remained alive in the mind and culture of Jews. As the centuries passed, the accent changed from a command to be obeyed to a dimension of the promise about what God would do in the age to come. Yet the elements of debt release and leaving some land fallow were practiced often enough that they were in people's minds and often enough to make an economic difference (e.g., there are clear records of decreased agricultural productivity every seven years).
Blosser then turns to a very broad survey of all the commentary literature on Luke 4, and a dozen other Lucan texts with analogous themes. I-Ie sees the proclamation of jubilee as central to jesus’ message according to Luke’s thought. Luke probably moved the Nazareth event from a later time, where it was found in his sources, to Where we find it in his chapter 4, because it mattered for him to use this account as a programmatic “platform statement” for the beginning of the public ministry and to make that beginning fall on a jubilee year. Blosser takes seriously the ethical pertinence of jubilee as the background to other teaching (treasures in heaven, the rich ruler, Zacchaeus) and refutes Sloan’s overdone “eschatological” or metaphorical spiritualization.
The Jubilee is not simply a theological concept providing insight into the nature of God; it is a guide for living which is to be observed in normal daily practice among believers .... These jubilee acts are not simply to be expected in the future, they are to be given concrete expression among the people of God in the present . . . what had been expected in the future can now be experienced in the present because we are now living in the new age ,... characterized by jubilee activity among the believers. (p. 297)
Along the way Blosser expertly investigates numerous prickly problems of chronology and of source criticism, and enriches his account with recent practical and pastoral literature.
Other interpreters who affirm the jubilee dimension in Luke are Marshall, Tiede, and Danker.
The simplest strong challenge to Trocmé’s thesis is another dissertation, accepted in 1978 by the Toronto School of Theology. The Beginning of Jesus' Ministry in the Gospel of Luke by Jacob Elias examines in great detail the single Nazareth passage, Luke 4:16-30. Elias uses the tools of redaction criticism, setting aside the matters of context that were given more Weight by Strobel and Trocrné, whom he cites (pp. 147, 198), and Blosser, whose work Elias of course could not cite. Elias looks at one verse, one line at a time, asking first with every phrase the question of Luke’s redactional intent. Elias sees no case for considering “the year of the Lord's favor” in 4:19 (Isa. 61:2) as referring to the jubilee.
One component of the tradition to which the Trocmé text could have given more attention was the way in which jubilee language Was part of prophetic images of the return to the land of Israel after the exile. Distributing land is part of regaining the land:
“In the hour of my favor I answered you, I helped you on the day of deliverance; putting the land to rights, sharing out afresh its desolate fields. I said to the prisoners, ‘go free!" and to those in darkness ‘come out and be seen!’ ” (Isa. 49:8ff NEB)This is one of the “servant songs”; the similarity to the language of chapter 61 is evident.
Pastoral Appropriation
The metaphor of “jubilee” continues to encounter wide resonance in our culture. “jubilee housing" is a ministry of the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C. “Jubilee partners” is a voluntary agency serving captives of the U.S. prison system and of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Popes frequently proclaim “jubilee” as a special time for pilgrims to visit Rome.
