Was Jesus wealthy?

I found this very interesting article about Jesus in CNN.com. Was Jesus really poor or was he really rich? You decide…

Passions over ‘prosperity gospel’: Was Jesus wealthy?

By John Blake, CNN

(CNN) — Each Christmas, Christians tell stories about the poor baby Jesus born in a lowly manger because there was no room in the inn.

But the Rev. C. Thomas Anderson, senior pastor of the Living Word Bible Church in Mesa, Arizona, preaches a version of the Christmas story that says baby Jesus wasn’t so poor after all.

Anderson says Jesus couldn’t have been poor because he received lucrative gifts — gold, frankincense and myrrh — at birth. Jesus had to be wealthy because the Roman soldiers who crucified him gambled for his expensive undergarments. Even Jesus’ parents, Mary and Joseph, lived and traveled in style, he says.

“Mary and Joseph took a Cadillac to get to Bethlehem because the finest transportation of their day was a donkey,” says Anderson. “Poor people ate their donkey. Only the wealthy used it as transportation.”

Many Christians see Jesus as the poor, itinerant preacher who had “no place to lay his head.” But as Christians gather around the globe this year to celebrate the birth of Jesus, another group of Christians are insisting that Jesus’ beginnings weren’t so humble.

They say that Jesus was never poor — and neither should his followers be. Their claim is embedded in the doctrine known as the prosperity gospel, which holds that God rewards the faithful with financial prosperity and spiritual gifts.

A clash of gospels?

The prosperity gospel has attracted plenty of critics. But popular televangelists such as the late Oral Roberts, Kenneth Hagin and, today, Creflo Dollar have built megachurches and a global audience by equating piety with prosperity.

The prosperity gospel, however, clashes with the traditional depictions of Jesus as poor. That’s because the traditional image of Jesus as destitute is wrong, says the Rev. Tom Brown, senior pastor of the Word of Life Church in El Paso, Texas.

The proof, he says, is scattered throughout the New Testament. One example: The 12th chapter of the Gospel of John says that Jesus had a treasurer, or a “keeper of the money bag.”

“The last time I checked, poor people don’t have treasurers to take care their money,” says Brown, author of “Devil, Demons and Spiritual Warfare.”

A debate over the economic status of Jesus may seem nonsensical to some. Does it really matter whether Jesus was rich or poor?

It matters to people like Luke Timothy Johnson, a prominent New Testament scholar and author. He says that a rich Jesus is a distortion of history and a threat to one of Christianity’s core teachings: God’s identification with the poor.

“If Jesus reveals God, there is something powerful about God appearing and working among the poor,” says Johnson, a New Testament professor at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia.

“Jesus’ lifestyle is not of one in a gated community or a corporate office,” says Johnson, a former Benedictine monk. “You don’t have to go through a security gate to get to Jesus. People touch him. He reached out and touched children. His accessibility is one of the most powerful messages of Christianity. In Jesus, God is with us, and the majority of us are poor.”

‘The poor won’t follow the poor’

Some prosperity preachers extract a different message from the same biblical texts. Brown, the El Paso minister, says he doesn’t say that Jesus was rich because he wants to give people an excuse to live self-indulgent lives. He wants people to understand that Jesus used his material and spiritual riches to help people — and so should they.

Brown says Jesus’ own words prove that he wasn’t poor.

“Jesus said you will always have the poor, but you will not always have me,” Brown says. “Jesus did not affirm himself as being part of the poor class…

“I believe he was the richest man on the face of the earth because he had God as his source,” Brown says.

Jesus’ wealth is evident even in the Gospel accounts of his execution, some pastors say.

The New Testament reports that Roman soldiers gambled for Jesus’ clothing while he hung on the cross. They wouldn’t gamble for Jesus’ clothing unless it was expensive, Anderson says.

“I don’t know anybody — even Pamela Anderson — that would have people gambling for his underwear,” Anderson says. “That was some fine stuff he wore.”

Anderson says Jesus never would have had disciples or a large following if he was poor. He would not have been able to command their respect.

“The poor will follow the rich, the rich will follow the rich, but the rich will never follow the poor,” Anderson says.

Twisting scripture for personal gain?

Johnson, the Emory University New Testament professor, calls Anderson’s argument “completely illogical.”

“So Martin Luther King must have been a millionaire,” he says. “Crowds followed Siddhartha Buddha and he was poor. And mobs followed Mahatma Gandhi, and Gandhi wore a diaper, for God’s sake.”

The argument that Jesus was wealthy because the soldiers gambled for his clothes at his crucifixion doesn’t makes historical sense, either, says Johnson, author of “Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity.”

“Crucifixion was the sort of execution carried out for slaves and for rebels,” Johnson says. “It wasn’t an execution for wealthy people.”

A Baylor University religion professor who specializes in the study of the poor in the Greco-Roman world also says there is “no way” that Jesus could be considered wealthy.

Bruce W. Longenecker says life in Jesus’ world was brutal. About 90 percent of people lived in poverty. A famine or a bad crop could ruin a family. There was no middle class.

“In the ancient world, you were relatively poor or filthy rich, there’s very little in-between,” says Longenecker, author of “Engaging Economics: New Testament Scenarios and Early Christian Reception.”

The New Testament is full of parables where Jesus actually condemns the rich and praises the poor, Longenecker says. In the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Luke, Jesus actually curses the rich, he says.

“The only way you can make Jesus into a rich man is by advocating torturous interpretations and by being wholly naive historically,” Longenecker says.

Anderson, the Arizona pastor, doesn’t buy that argument. He says the church has actually been damaged by teaching that Jesus was poor. God wants his followers to be rich, not for selfish gain, but to help others in need and spread the gospel.

When he first preached that Jesus wasn’t poor to his church, Anderson says he “ruffled some feathers.”

Now, he says, his church has 9,000 members and a global ministry.

“That’s so pathetic, to say that Jesus was struggling alone in the dust and dirt,” Anderson says. “That just makes no sense whatsoever. He was constantly in a state of wealth.”

SOURCE: http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/12/25/RichJesus/index.html

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The History of Money

DISCLAIMER: By understanding history we can better prepare for and see a brighter future. If you are not into history, you might want to start reading now. This will determine your financial future.

Just as humans have evolved, money has evolved. “Money” was originally in the form of barter, such as chickens or milk, then shells and beads, then gold, silver, and copper coins. They were physical objects that were deemed to have tangible value, and thus were traded for other items of a similar value. Today, most money is paper money, an IOU (Usually an informal document acknowledging debt. The term is derived from the opening phrase “I owe unto” and/or the pronunciation of “I owe you”) from a government, also known as a fiat currency. Paper money is worthless in and of itself. It is simply a derivative of the value of something else. In the past, the U.S. dollar was a derivative of gold; now it is a derivative of debt, an IOU from taxpayers of a country.

Today, money is no longer a tangible object like chickens, gold or silver. Today, modern money is simply an idea backed by the faith and trust of a government. The more trustworthy the country, the more valuable the money, and vice versa. This evolution of money from a tangible object into an idea is one reason why the subject of money is so confusing. It is difficult to understand something we can no longer see, touch or feel.

A Few Important Dates in the History of Money

1903: Robert Kiyosaki believed the U.S. education system was taken over when the General Education Board, founded by John D. Rockefeller, decided what kids should learn. This put the influence of education in the hands of the ultra-rich, and the subject of money was not taught in school. Today, people go to school to learn to work for money, but they learn nothing about how to have money work for them.

Schools do a good job training people to be E’s (Employee) and S’s (Self-employed), but do almost nothing to train them to be B’s (Big Business Owner) or I’s (Investor). Even MBA students are trained to be highly paid E’s working for the businesses of the rich. Some of the most famous B’s are Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft; Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computers; Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company; and Thomas Edison, founder of General Electric – all of whom never finished school.

1913: The Federal Reserve is formed (It is the central bank of a nation, just like our Banko Sentral ng Pilipinas and Bank of England for United Kingdom). The Federal Reserve is not American, not federal, has no reserves, and is not a bank. It is controlled by some of the richest and politically influential families in the world. It has the power to create money out of thin air.

Institutions like the Federal Reserve have been staunchly opposed by the designers of the US Constitution, and by presidents such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

1929: The Great Depression. Following the crisis of the Great Depression, the U.S. government created many government agencies such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and Social Security; and the government took more control over our financial lives via taxes. This led to an acceptance of increased government intervention via social programs and agencies. Many of these government programs and agencies, such as the FHA, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, are at the eye of today’s subprime crisis. Today, unfunded government liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare are estimated to be $50 to $60trillion time bombs that will eventually blow up and dwarf the current US subprime crisis. In other words, U.S. government efforts to solve the Great Depression will probably cause a bigger depression in the future.

1944: The Bretton Woods Agreement was made. This international currency agreement created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The agreement replicated the Federal Reserve System globally (thus we have Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas) and, in effect, installed the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency of the world. Basically, while the world was involved in a world war, the world’s bankers were hard at work changing the world. This meant that all currencies worldwide were now essentially backed by the U.S. dollar, which was pegged to gold. As long as the U.S. dollar was backed by gold, the world economy would be stable.

1971: President Nixon, without permission from Congress, took the U.S. dollar off the gold standard. When this happened, the U.S. dollar became a derivative of debt- not gold. After 1971, the U.S. economy could only increase by increasing debt, and that’s why the bailouts started. In the 1980s, the bailouts were in the millions; in the 1990s, they were in the billions; and today they are in the trillions and growing. This change in the rules of money, one of the biggest financial events in world history, allowed the United States to print money at will by creating more and more debt, known as U.S. bonds. Never in the history of the world had the entire world’s money been backed by one nation’s debt, an IOU from U.S. taxpayers.

In, 1971, the U.S. dollar stopped being money and became a currency. The word currency comes from the word current, like an electrical current or an ocean current. In other words, a currency must keep moving or it loses value. To retain value, a monetary currency must move from one asset to another. After 1971, people who parked their money in a savings bank or in the stock market lost money because their currency stopped moving. Savers became losers and debtors became winners as the U.S. government printed more and more money, increasing debt and inflation.

After 1971, the U.S. economy expanded by creating more debt. In theory, if everyone paid off his or her debt, modern money would disappear. In 2007, when U.S. subprime borrowers couldn’t pay their mortgages any longer, the expansion of debt stopped and the debt market collapsed, which led to our massive financial crisis today.

The United States has financed its excessive spending by selling its debt to Europe, Japan, and China. If these countries lose confidence in the U.S. government and stop buying U.S. debt, another financial crisis will occur. If U.S. citizens stop buying homes and stop using their credit cards, this crisis will last longer.


Financial Education is important because we need to learn there is good debt and bad debt. Bad debt makes us poorer. Good debt makes us richer. Since modern money is debt, a strong financial education would teach people to use debt to get richer rather than become poorer.

1974: The U.S. Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), which is now known in the United States as 401(k). Prior to 1974, most employees had what is known as a defined benefit (DB) pension plan. A company’s DB pension plan provided employees a paycheck for life. After 1974, employees were moved into defined contribution (DC) pension plans. This meant they had to save money for their retirement. The amount an employee received at retirement depended upon how much was contributed to his or her pension. If the pension ran out of money or was wiped out due to a stock crash, the retiree was out of luck and on his own.

This change from DB to DC pension plans forced millions of workers into the uncertainty of the stock market. The problem is that most employees lacked, and still do lack, the financial education needed to invest their money for retirement wisely.

Today, millions of workers throughout the world are faced with insufficient funds to retire on. Without a financial education, millions go back to the same institutions – the savings banks and stock market, the very institutions that caused much of today’s financial crisis – and attempt to save enough money to enjoy a secure retirement. These people are most affected and worried by our financial crises.

Now that we’ve reviewed a little bit of the history of modern money, you may begin to appreciate why a Financial Education is important. It really pays to know history.

Credits to The Conspiracy of the Rich by Robert Kiyosaki.