WILLIAM HARWOOD
When Herod the Great died, a Judean delegation traveled to Rome to try to dissuade Augustus Caesar from appointing Herod’s son Archelaus king of Judea. When Augustus rejected the petition and gave the Jewish kingdom to Archelaus, it is a matter of record (¹) that Archelaus promptly executed 3,000 adherents of the faction that opposed him.
The anonymous author of the gospel called Luke utilized that incident in a parable that he put into the mouth of Jesus. He showed Jesus quoting Archelaus as saying, (19:27), “As for those enemies of mine who didn’t want me to be king over them, fetch them here and kill them in my presence.” Even though Luke detested Archelaus and used those words to portray him as a monster, some commentators—but no prominent biblical scholars—have cited, “Kill them in my presence,” as depicting Jesus’ personal philosophy. Apart from the fact that the incident is fiction and has no resemblance to anything the Jesus of history actually preached, such an interpretation is incompatible with the reality that Luke saw Jesus as his ultimate hero and would not have portrayed him as an admirer of mass murder.
There is, however, a parable elsewhere in Luke that indeed depicts Jesus unflatteringly, portraying him as a prototype Machiavelli. Luke showed Jesus preaching (16:1), “There was a human, a capitalist, who had a steward, and he received complaints about him, that he was wasting his property.” (²) Luke then described how the steward, knowing that he was about to be fired, summoned his employer’s debtors and unilaterally reduced their debts in the hope that one of them would be sufficiently grateful to hire him when his current employment was terminated (16:2-8). He showed Jesus praising the steward’s actions and telling his followers (16:9), “So I’m telling you: Use swindled money to buy yourselves companions, so that when it runs out they’ll accept you into their permanent residences.” Or to paraphrase the verse, “Rob those who can no longer be of use to use, and use the stolen money to bribe those who are in a position to reward you for your deceit.”
It is not known where Luke derived such a fable, since it did not come from a source also utilized by Mark or Matthew. But Luke must at some level have recognized the fable’s negative implications, since he tried to soften it by adding his own interpretation (16:10-11), “Whoever is unfaithful in the little will also be unfaithful in the large, and whoever cheats for a little will cheat for a lot. So if you’ve been faithful with swindled money, who’s going to trust you with anything real?” The incompatibility of those two verses with the rest of the fable is the proof that the whole thing was not Luke’s invention. He repeated a story from an unknown source, and added his own highly dubious interpretation to make the fable conform to his conviction that Jesus’ endorsement of swindling must have had a more moral purpose.