what would jesus do?
wealth and corruption in nikos kazantzakis' the last temptation of christ (and now)
In my first post, I focused primarily on the companionship between the main characters in Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek (1946) and how that mirrored the philosophical journey undertaken by Kazantzakis himself — and perhaps me as well. This post teases out the political thread from Part I, specifically through the lens of his portrayal of notable leftist activist (!?) Jesus Christ, along with broader critique of money, corruption, and religion in America and the world. Fun stuff! Let me know what you think.
Introduction: The Gospel of Wealth
In the New York Times Magazine on August 30, journalist and musician Elizabeth Nelson opened her review of the HBO show The Righteous Gemstones with a discussion of the state of religion in America, writing that one of the most significant trends of the last 50 years has been the ascendance of the prosperity doctrine, which interprets the “attainment of worldly wealth and privilege as proof of spiritual exceptionalism, the rewards of a life lived righteously.” The show, a dark comedy about a televangelist family whose megachurch descends into “chaos and corruption,” is also naturally a scathing satire of religion and wealth in the United States, as Nelson describes in her review. As conservative Christianity reaches new heights in its penetration of U.S. government institutions, with an increasing number of Americans embracing Christian nationalism and seeking to blur the line between church and state — largely under the aegis of the Republican Party — we must ask ourselves how we got here.1
Nelson’s invocation of prosperity theology is a key part of the story. Televangelism began in earnest in the early 1950s, amid economic optimism in the United States following World War II. As Hanna Rosin described in “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” published in The Atlantic in 2009, one of the initial proponents of prosperity theology who took advantage of TV airwaves was Oral Roberts, who began an evangelistic faith-healing campaign after leaving his Oklahoma pastorate in the late 1940s.2 Roberts and his contemporaries recognized the pecuniary potential of their ministries, soliciting donations with the promise that they would be returned ten times over — many of these preachers donned expensive suits and jewelry, ostentatious displays of wealth that their flocks could aspire to.3
Indeed, one of the most famous graduates of the private evangelical Oral Roberts University, which was founded in the mid-1960s (and is perhaps more generally well-known for upsetting Ohio State in the first round of 2021 March Madness), is Houston-based megachurch preacher Joel Osteen, whose net worth likely hovers around $100M.
Televangelism did not beget the prosperity gospel, however, but merely altered the form in which it was taught and received. According to Kate Bowler, historian at Duke Divinity School and author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, the belief sprung in part from New Thought, a fin-de-siècle spiritual movement focusing on the power of the mind, and in part from the uniquely American emphasis on rugged individualism and upward mobility.4 This time period in American history was the Gilded Age, with all its garish displays of extreme wealth from such household names as John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Carnegie.
The latter wrote the article “Wealth,” commonly referred to as “The Gospel of Wealth,” in 1889. Though not an overwhelmingly religious article, it was a significant boon to those upholding the Protestant work ethic as the model for a virtuous society, proposing the self-made capitalist engaging in philanthropic causes as the ideal reflection of Jesus Christ’s spirit.5 And so the brazen corruption of Gilded Age–era unfettered capitalism was married to the nascent prosperity theology, a religious movement that was bolstered by politicians and businessmen alike in speeches and articles.
Even this brief summary, I hope, is enough to illustrate the path that America took to reach the multimillion-dollar megachurch industry fictionalized in The Righteous Gemstones, the embodiment of Jesus as capitalist. As someone who is not religious, getting in the weeds of interpreting the Bible is unimportant to me, but as someone deeply interested in wealth and corruption in America, this nexus is obviously crucial. Furthermore, books, TV, and other media help us to better understand and dissect the world around us, especially when it is unsettling.6
It was with this mindset that I dove into The Last Temptation of Christ (1955) this summer, armed with the insight into Nikos Kazantzakis’s political philosophy that I had gleaned after rereading Zorba the Greek (see Part I), as well as a bit more familiarity with Jesus than I had with Alexis Zorba. Kazantzakis’s depiction of Jesus as a flawed man, susceptible to temptation and often overburdened by the weight of his mission, was just as intensely resonant to me as his interpretation of Biblical ideals, as communicated through Jesus as the novel progresses, concerning the accumulation of wealth and treatment of the poor.
Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ
In The Last Temptation of Christ, Kazantzakis attempts to reconcile the divinity of Jesus Christ, son of God, with his humanity; in doing so, he creates a passionate, tormented figure who struggles as much with fundamental human temptations as he does with his heavenly-ordained purpose on Earth.
In a brief prologue to the novel unusually addressed to the reader from Kazantzakis himself, he describes this characterization as the “dual substance of Christ,” something that has tormented Kazantzakis amid his own personal battle between “the spirit and the flesh.”7 The prologue offers the rest of the book — Christ’s struggle — as a “supreme model to the man who struggles” with “pain, temptation or death,” struggles that can be conquered and have already been conquered. Kazantzakis writes as a Christian, declaring: “I am certain that every free man who reads this book, so filled as it is with love, will more than ever before, better than ever before, love Christ.”
The reader is introduced to Jesus at the beginning of the novel as a troubled, self-flagellating man who makes crosses on which the Romans would crucify the Zealots, Jews who sought to undermine Roman rule of Judea. The novel’s opening scenes depict Jesus arguing with Judas — portrayed in the novel as an honest and ardent friend instead of a traitor — who calls Jesus a coward; being attacked by villagers for treason against his fellow Jews as he drags the cross up the mountain; receiving a curse from the Zealot’s mother prophesying that he too would be crucified.
But Jesus already knew this. Through the dreams and visions that plague him, whose origin he wants to believe is God but fears is the devil, it is clear from the onset that Jesus knows he has a different role in the world. And yet, because he is but a man, this reality beleaguers him; he is susceptible to the temptations that all men face, and the knowledge that his fate must diverge from that of everyone else is an unbearable weight. He resolves to go to the monastery to find God and confront Him, but he is sidelined when his feet lead him instead to the den of Mary Magdalene, where a different kind of worship takes place.8
Jesus’s reluctance is a dominant force, one that is shocking because it is so human, presenting itself in conversations with his disciples and imagined dialogues with God where Jesus begs Him to shut up already. This depiction of a complex, conflicted individual is a significant reason why The Last Temptation of Christ ruffled some feathers. As translator and biographer P.A. Bien described, the Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church in Athens attempted to ban Kazantzakis’s work in 1955, stating that it contained “evil slanders against the Godlike person of Jesus Christ.”9
As the novel progresses, Jesus’s mission radically shifts. In the desert, Jesus receives the revelation that the day of the Lord is coming, with all the fire and brimstone that this entails, urging him forward.10 And so he sets out, telling his disciples: “I shall baptize with fire… I’m informing you which way we’re headed: toward death —and after we die, immortality.”
Jesus returns to his hometown of Nazareth to address the people there, beseeching his neighbors to prepare for the kingdom of Heaven. He is met with boos and laughter, which makes him furious.11 The poor want miracles and material salvation; the rich want to keep their riches. Jesus regards both groups with love and with pity, even as he declares to his disciples that they are at war. The overwhelming ferocity of the prose and the range of human emotion that Kazantzakis illustrates become difficult to read at times, but to trudge through is to wrestle with the central struggle that Kazantzakis describes in the prologue.
I cannot overstate the centrality of wealth accumulation to Jesus’s tirades, his ire directed at those who forsake the poor. In Nazareth, when a young man asks him what they have to do in order to be saved, Jesus booms: “Open your hearts… open your larders, divide your belongings among the poor!” Later, after Lazarus is resurrected in Bethany, Jesus is confronted with the vastness of his responsibility toward the “oppressed and the ragamuffins” and erupts: “Listen, you who are rich… How long will you recline on beds of ivory and soft mattresses? How long will you eat the flesh of the poor and drink their sweat, blood and tears?”
At this point, Jesus’s antics have attracted the attention of Pontius Pilate, who seeks his head; Jesus quickly realizes his fate, and even as his disciples and followers urge him to avoid Jerusalem, he declares that they will have one last Passover supper in the city.12 Even at the end, when Jesus is dragged to the cross on Mt. Golgotha, the poor and leprous cast stones at him, screeching that their kingdom of Heaven had not come to feed or cure them.
It is here that Jesus faces his last temptation, immediately before he is crucified. In a dreamlike vision, a guardian angel rescues Jesus from the cross, transporting him into the “deceptive vision of a calm and happy life” in which he marries, fathers many children, and follows the “easy road of men” contentedly, without concern for his fellow man. It takes his former disciples, now old men knocking on death’s door, visiting his home and berating him for abandoning God’s mission for Jesus to realize that he had erred so far, that he had almost fully given into the Last Temptation.13 Ultimately, however, he was able to reassume his place on the cross, his last words being “IT IS ACCOMPLISHED!”
The Cleansing of the Temple
All four canonical gospels describe how, when Jesus traveled to Jerusalem for Passover, he was so disgusted by the merchants and money changers conducting business in the Temple of Jerusalem that he forcibly expelled them from the sacred space. In the chronology of Jesus’s life, it is generally agreed that his actions in the temple took place very soon before — and, in fact, likely expedited — his detainment and crucifixion.14 The event itself is also remarkably violent and evocative, the subject of many works of art throughout history.
Sarah Chayes begins her book On Corruption in America by exploring the origins of money, tracing it back to ancient Greece and the minting of coins around the time of King Midas. Chayes draws from the myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Midas chooses to receive the golden touch as a reward from Dionysus but later renounces the gift after realizing its drastic consequences, and combines it with archaeological insights connecting Midas and his kingdom of Phrygia to the first electrum coins dating back to the 7th century BCE. After all, myth and oral history go hand in hand, and the cautionary tale about obsession with gold and wealth wouldn’t have arisen out of nowhere.15 Ovid’s version of the story was published in 8 CE, when Jesus would have been a child, likely drawing upon centuries of oral history, telling and retelling.16
By the time of Jesus’s life, money had been around for centuries. One of its consequences was the standardization of “value” in the form of coin — a sacrificial lamb raised with love, presumably greater in the eyes of God with more care lavished, was now just a lamb like any other lamb, worth a set amount of shekels. People began to buy their lambs instead of expending the energy required to rear them. Under Levitical law, one-tenth of a farmer’s yield was to be shared with the community on Passover at part of the first tithe, but by Jesus’s time, that had become a cash payment, subject to the vicissitudes of crop yields and prices, and the element of community-building and sharing had been expunged.
In her chapter on Jesus, Chayes draws largely from a conversation that she had with several pastors about the passage describing Christ’s cleansing of the temple, from which the above context is derived. This context is important — at this point, the Temple of Jerusalem was home to the money changers, those with the ability to set prices (and scrape off the top).
According to historians, the temple was rife with corruption. Peasants had to go through convoluted steps to exchange their money to pay the tithe (including converting their Roman currency to Tyrian shekels, for example) or purchase an animal sacrifice.17 Of course, more instances of money changing hands means more opportunities for petty corruption by those in the bureaucracy; as Chayes points out, these types of positions are doled out by political elites to friends and family, both in modern kleptocracies and the priestly aristocracy of Jesus’s time.
The temple also served as a bank at this time, keeping the funds of the wealthy while also presiding over the mortgages of farmers’ crops and land when they could not afford to participate in a society that had abandoned its interest in the egalitarian rituals that had bound people together before money began to rule. Therefore, Jesus was not merely going after individual merchants, but rather the entire system. In Matthew, Jesus states that the money changers had made the house of prayer “a den of thieves.” As one of Chayes’ pastors says ruefully, “everyone was robbing God.”
In The Last Temptation of Christ, Kazantzakis describes this episode in accordance with the sequence of events in the Synoptic Gospels, two days before the Last Supper. Upon seeing the merchants and money changers, “Jesus’ bile rose to his eyes; a sacred rage took possession of him.” And he commences the cleansing of the temple, bringing his ox-goad down upon the tradesmen and overturning tables. As chaos begins to reign in the temple, he gives one of his most intense speeches of the book — “I have come to set fire to the world!” — and almost incites a bloody brawl between his supporters and the Levites in the Temple before the Romans break it up.
In conversation with members of one of the pastors’ congregations, Chayes poses the question of who today’s money changers are. Bankers? Big Pharma? One participant takes the question a step further, asking what our temple is. Again, Jesus went after the system — not just the individuals working in the temple, but what the temple had become.
So what are our temples? Schools? While our courts strike down affirmative action, universities have cemented legacy admissions for the children of wealthy donors. Hospitals? We know that our health system is rife with perverse incentives for practitioners, not to mention other actors in the medical/pharmaceutical industry. The obvious answer to this question might be churches, and I would only direct you to the introduction of this essay. Chayes thinks of government, shuddering at the thought of how corroded and corrupted our temples have become, following the money.
If the Bible portrays Jesus’s indignant rage at the transmogrification of the temple into a den of thieves, with Kazantzakis’ interpretation taking every opportunity to voice disdain at the exploitation of the poor by the rich, it must beg the question of how we choose to protect our contemporary temples. Do we take up the ox-goad like Jesus? Do we denounce the money changers that dominate our society, even as the two millennia since the cleansing of the temple undoubtedly saw ever deeper entrenchment of this corruption in and of our institutions? Or do we sit by and allow societal values to be warped to serve the money changers at everyone’s expense?
Conclusion: What Would Jesus Do?
As I mentioned in the introduction, I don’t have a personal stake in the misinterpretation of Jesus’s teachings. Indeed, the version written by Kazantzakis, himself a fervent Christian, is much more compelling to me. He presents a complex, uncertain yet defiant man who relies on his disciples as much as his instincts to do what he believes is right, despite an onslaught of doubts and temptations seeking to sway him from his path. This mission evolves into one that essentially instills class solidarity among the ragamuffins and indicts the wealthy for valuing earthly possessions above that which is truly important.
None of this exists in a vacuum, of course. Even those of us who are not Christians have no choice but to care about how the Bible is interpreted, given the impact of dogma and doctrine, dating back centuries, on our everyday lives. Prosperity theology and the gospel of wealth are not merely abstract concepts to be debated by theologians and clergy, but the underpinnings of a capitalist logic that has found refuge under the aegis of religious values across the world.
At the end of the day, this is indeed a discussion of values, religious or not. These are questions of how we want our society to operate, what behavior is rewarded and what is deemed unacceptable. From the times of Midas and Jesus to the Gilded Age and today, we have always had an understanding of how much money has corrupted our values — and, at the same time, our conception of “value” itself. The Righteous Gemstones is just one of countless contemporary satires hearkening back to Aristophanes, who wrote scathing comedies about the dangers of man’s obsession with money when it had only been invented a few centuries prior.
[Aside: This by no means is a condemnation of those who think about money out of necessity. I currently live in a country where hyperinflation causes people to constantly consider their relationship with the money they possess, whose value changes daily. Although this should be obvious, I want to make abundantly clear that this is not the obsession that I discuss. Indeed, that so many people have such a dependent and vulnerable position with regard to money is symptomatic of the system, the house of worship–become–den of thieves.]
Naturally, the money changers in the Temple of Jerusalem were interested in justifying their practices with religion. So did Oral Roberts, and so does Joel Osteen. So too did Andrew Carnegie, as well as even Donald Trump. It is this grotesque marriage of religion and greed that breeds an all-encompassing value system embracing the accumulation of wealth as an ends rather than a means, and justifies organizing society around that premise. Various trends throughout the 20th century into today, separate but inextricably linked, demonstrate how these ideas have made tremendous purchase in the United States, and how they continue to wreak havoc.
It is unsurprising that the agents of this system seek to ban books, defund the arts, and revise history to stifle creativity and entrench their belief system as much as they can. It has been our myths and stories that have allowed us to consider worlds in which we reject these hyper-individualistic, exploitative premises and imagine a more fair, egalitarian society wherein universal values matter more than how much money is in your bank account (and how much more might in your neighbor’s).
This is where I find hope, even when it seems like an uphill battle. Even as someone who is not a Christian, I can identify with the Jesus who cleansed the Temple in the Bible as much as the Christ of The Last Temptation. I can also see how the evident hypocrisy of the religious right (by a Biblical standard) also reveals their vulnerability. They attempt to censor fiction and overwrite history, from 1955 with Kazantzakis to the present in the United States, because an understanding of history combined with a collective imagination of something better is their worst nightmare.18
Like in Zorba the Greek, Kazantzakis centers The Last Temptation of Christ on a pensive, uncertain narrator who does his best to put his personal philosophy into action while overcoming the temptations of self-doubt, distraction, and the easy way out. This is a struggle that is likely relatable, regardless of what your philosophy is. In Part I, I talked about the pressure to develop a “coherent worldview” that at times feels to me like a looming shadow. This novel is a reminder to keep myself righted on my path, whatever that may be, and to trust myself to keep going even when doubt sets in and the shadow lurks.
At the same time, I was startled by how much of Jesus’s personal philosophy in the book was oriented around the redistribution of wealth, even given Kazantzakis’s flirtations with communism that I discussed in Part I. Then again, given an earnest interpretation of Biblical episodes such as the cleansing of the temple, why wouldn’t it be? Or, on the other hand, are we to believe the adherents of the prosperity doctrine, that it is our Biblical duty to get rich?
I leave to you to decide: What would Jesus do?
A few statistics from within the last few years to support this assertion: 45% of Americans, according to the Pew Research Institute, say that the United States should be a “Christian nation,” with a smaller group (15%) believing that the Supreme Court should draw upon religious beliefs to decide court cases; as more evangelists and Republican partisans embraced the term following the January 6 insurrection, Marjorie Taylor Greene began selling “Proud Christian Nationalist” T-shirts in 2022; according to a February 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, which sorted subsets of the U.S. population into four categories based on their relative adoption of Christian nationalism, over 50% of Republicans were either “adherents” or “supporters” of Christian nationalist ideals. Although these trends have been present in American society throughout history, and especially since the advent of conservative Christianity in the 1970s, according to historians, the mainstreaming of what should be a fringe ideology is cause for concern.
Roberts allegedly developed the concept of “seed faith” after his Bible flipped open one day to the Third Epistle of John, verse 2: “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health. Even as thy soul prospereth.” Rosin writes: “If people would donate money to his ministry, a ‘seed’ offered to God, he’d say, then God would multiply it a hundredfold. Eventually, Roberts retreated into a life that revolved around private jets and country clubs.”
The Word of Faith movement that spawned from the teachings of E.W. Kenyon, one of the earliest proponent of prosperity theology, taught that its believers had a divine right to wealth and well-being. All it takes is looking up “Word of Faith” to find articles and blog posts questioning whether the movement is Biblical or decrying it as a cult.
Bowler herself offers a balanced perspective toward the prosperity gospel and its followers, and is careful to acknowledge its theological roots rather than disparaging it as a bad-faith (pun intended) manifestation of unfettered capitalism. She also tells a compelling story of its liberatory potential, especially in Black churches.
Carnegie’s proposal is not totally objectionable at face value, but another thinkpiece would be required to dissect the overall impact of philanthropic foundations on society (not to mention, of course, the stark inequality that underpins their entire existence). From “Wealth,” to distill his argument and premise, he wrote: “The highest life is probably to be reached, not by such imitation of the life of Christ as Count Tolstoi gives us, but, while animated by Christ's spirit, by recognizing the changed conditions of this age, and adopting modes of expressing this spirit suitable to the changed conditions under which we live; still laboring for the good of our fellows, which was the essence of his life and teaching, but laboring in a different manner. This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of Wealth: First, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community…” [Emphasis added. These “changed conditions” presumably euphemized taking extreme wealth inequality as a given, since, naturally, the “man of Wealth” was the ideal to aspire toward.]
A.O. Scott put this sentiment eloquently in his New York Times Book Review essay a few months ago entitled “The Reading Crisis,” which I recommend — if not for the diagnosis of the eponymous crisis, which I think Scott defends dubiously at best, but his subsequent discussion of the value of reading itself. On the discomfort that makes reading so important, he writes: “Reading liberates and torments us, enlightens and bewilders us, makes and unmakes our social and solitary selves.”
Already one can see how Zorba the Greek, with its overwhelming theme of reconciling the soul and the flesh, was a reflection of Kazantzakis’s philosophical journey. The Last Temptation of Christ, published almost ten years later and only two years before Kazantzakis’s death from cancer, can be read as a continuation of his spiritual journey, on which he directly invites the reader in his prologue.
Mary Magdalene is fictionalized as Jesus’s cousin, the daughter of his uncle Simeon the rabbi. Early in the novel, before the Zealot’s crucifixion, Jesus recalls visiting Cana with a rose in his hand to choose a wife; when he attempts to choose Mary Magdalene, however, a divine force intervenes, causing him to leave Cana empty-handed. When Jesus visits her abode in Magdala, Mary reminisces about a time when the two of them, as young children, shared a tender, intimate moment while naked, pressing their bare feet together. Jesus is anguished. He ends up sleeping over, on a mat on her floor, and leaves at dawn, not before hesitating over Mary’s bed for a moment, and after he closes the door behind him she weeps.
The response to Scorsese’s film adaptation in 1988 was even more dramatic, including a Catholic fundamentalist group setting a theater on fire in Paris, requiring Scorsese to travel with bodyguards for several years.
In the desert, Jesus, confused, asks “Isn’t love enough?” Jesus later recalls the Baptist’s words: “Who knows, perhaps love carries an axe…” This phrase has stuck with me more than any other excerpt from the book. Just before this recollection, he pictures his ideal state: “The high priests and noblemen had opened their larders and coffers, distributed their goods to the poor; and the poor in their turn breathed freely once more and banished hate, jealousy and fear from their hearts.”
This episode in particular interested me because it is directly taken from Luke 4:14-30 rather than being a fictionalization like much of the novel. Jesus begins by reading from Isaiah, which Kazantzakis interprets (accurately) as bringing “good tidings to the poor… freedom to the slaves and light to the blind,” and proclaims that the kingdom of heaven has come. Just as he was rejected by the people of Nazareth, the Jesus of the novel is driven out of town and threatened. Whereas Luke 4:30 states that Jesus calmly walked through the crowd that tried to push him over a cliff, however, the novel confronts the complex reality of such a scene, including Jesus’s shock, fury, and indignation. He insists that those who reject his message in favor of their earthly possessions and concerns will not be allowed to board his ark to the kingdom of Heaven.
Jesus approaches Judas in Jerusalem and entrusts him with the responsibility of betraying his location, following Passover supper in Gethsemane, to the Romans so that they can take him away to be crucified. This interpretation of Judas’s motivation for betrayal, rather than for silver or Satanic possession, as implied in different canonical Gospels (Mark offers no motive), is compelling. I offer that the relationship between Judas and Jesus possesses key elements of the companionship shared between Zorba and the narrator in Zorba the Greek, with Judas being the only disciple to consistently question and challenge Jesus, maintaining a firm allegiance to the Zealots’ cause against the Romans while Jesus preaches loving one’s neighbor, similar to Zorba’s diagnosis of man as a brute vis-à-vis the narrator’s desire to construct an egalitarian brotherhood among his employees.
With regard to Judas, Mary Magdalene, and the other key Biblical figures to whose history Kazantzakis takes a revisionist brush, I’d posit that the plot of The Last Temptation of Christ is not necessarily intended to be a faithful retelling of Jesus’s life story, but to ascribe complex humanness to them all, and especially to Jesus. Perhaps this is why so many fundamentalists were offended by it. As film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his 1988 review of Scorsese’s adaptation: “The film has offended those whose ideas about God and man it does not reflect. But then, so did Jesus.”
Among the disciples, the most influential in persuading Jesus to rediscover his path to save mankind was Judas, who repeatedly shouts at Jesus, calling him a traitor and a coward who broke Judas’s heart, recounting how Jesus begged him to betray him in Jerusalem so that he could be captured and crucified. This emotional outpouring, not to mention the reinvention of Judas as a character in Jesus’s story, is perhaps the most compelling section of the book.
The Gospel of John places the event closer to the beginning of Jesus’s chronology during the first of three Passovers in Jerusalem, rather than closer to the end of his life like the Synoptic Gospels. This may imply that Jesus participated in more than one temple-cleansing event, or may point to a contradiction, depending on who you ask.
As far back as I can remember, my understanding of the Midas legend culminated with him caressing his daughter only to find that the golden touch had turned her into gold as well. What I learned from Chayes’ book is that this version of the legend was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne (coincidentally the namesake of my elementary/middle school) for children. Hawthorne describes how Midas’s daughter Marygold (Zoë, in Greek myth, meaning “life”) cries over the “blighted and spoilt” roses in the garden that Midas had transmuted, and while she eats breakfast, Midas burns his tongue on molten gold: “The poorest labourer, sitting down to his crust of bread and cup of water, was far better off that King Midas, whose delicate food was really worth its weight in gold.”
Later, Marygold attempts to comfort her father by embracing him, and Midas momentarily feels that “his little daughter’s love was worth a thousand times more than he had gained by the Golden Touch,” but he soon realizes that she had become a “victim of his insatiable desire for wealth,” frozen solid. Hawthorne’s story is as explicit and repetitive as it could be about what the moral of the story is, as Midas is told before receiving the cure to the golden touch: “the commonest things, such as lie within everybody’s grasp, are more valuable than the riches which so many mortals sigh and struggle after.”
For example, although the Midas myth is associated with Metamorphoses, Aristotle alluded to the story in Politics four centuries earlier: “It is anomalous that wealth should be of such a kind that a man may be well supplied with it and yet die of hunger, like the famous Midas in the legend.” Chayes dedicates a chapter to Aristotle following Midas and Jesus, describing how he differentiated between “natural” and “unnatural” wealth accumulation, the latter referring of course to how the means of gaining profit in order to procure something useful becomes an end in itself, profit for its own sake, satirized in Aristophanes’ comedies as often as contemporary series and films.
In Mark, Matthew, and John, the verse describing the cleansing of the temple makes reference to “them that sold doves,” which I found oddly specific. I learned that those selling doves were offering animal sacrifices to the poor who could not afford any greater sacrifice, which comes directly from Leviticus. By directing his ire toward those in particular who dealt with the poor, with the implication being that the poor were especially exploited, we can get a sense of Jesus’s priorities.
The books that I wrote about in October by Jenny Odell and Anna Tsing are brilliant examples of how broadening our perspectives and inviting in varied ideas can allow us to dream up more inclusive conceptions of what our shared society can be.