A Political and Economic Critique of New Testament Scholarship

After nearly two decades of reading New Testament scholarship, I was constantly frustrated by how carelessly even the best of professional scholars were unable to think clearly and consistently about political and economic concepts. Having worked on my degree in biblical studies in the late two-thousands, the heyday of anti-imperial scholarship, I understood that Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God and Paul’s vision of a Spirit-defined, transnational family of believers entailed significant political and economic consequences. Yet I found myself uneasy with the modern consequences Christian scholars derived from their historical research. In nearly every case, the so-called “anti-imperial” scholars ultimately advocated for more money, power, and authority to be granted to contemporary secular governments, a phenomenon which seemed contradictory to their own power-skeptical research. As I continued to develop my thinking, my research ultimately led me to the study of political philosophy and economics, and I quickly realized, coupled with the experience that comes with age, that perhaps the field of New Testament scholarship needed to seriously reconsider its political and economic presuppositions. I waited years, in vain, for a scholar to offer a wholescale critique of what I perceived to be a major intellectual lacuna in the discipline. While scholars would occasionally offer fleeting flashes of concern, the discipline remained mostly shrouded in darkness. Ultimately I grew tired of waiting for someone else to write the book, and decided to do it myself.

Politics, Economics, and New Testament Interpretation, my forthcoming book which will be published by Christians for Liberty Press on Tuesday, September 15, 2026, does just that. I challenge the nearly universal assumption in New Testament scholarship that the Bible legitimizes modern authoritarian socialism. I carefully and clearly define political and economic concepts, discuss the methodologies we employ when interpreting the text, and set the New Testament in its historical context. I then embark on a long journey through the entire New Testament canon, analyzing texts which have political and economic significance and demonstrating time and time again that they do not, in fact, point us in the direction of political or economic authoritarianism. This is a massive, extensively-researched undertaking, but I deliver my readers all the tools they need to combat false prevailing interpretive paradigms. Over the next few weeks I will be releasing small sections of the book, giving you insights into the larger scope of this project and setting the stage for our September 15 release. If you are at all interested in how the New Testament relates to the political and economic structures of our day, this book is for you.

In an effort to package these sections of my book in neat, clean, and brief snippets, I will be removing the footnotes and slightly amending the texts to make them shorter. In the first installment, I lay out both the problems I identify in New Testament scholarship and the goals of my book, including its main thesis: the New Testament is incompatible with modern authoritarian socialism. Enjoy.

The Goals of Politics, Economics, and New Testament Interpretation

I believe that anchoring our modern understanding of politics and economics to consistent, irreducible, and universally applicable categories, exploring the differences (and occasional similarities) between ancient and modern political and economic concepts, and analysing the biblical texts in light this data will inject a level of nuance and refinement into a debate which has far too often been hindered by unclear thinking. My research and reflection on the relationship between modern political and economic thought and biblical interpretation has led me to the conclusion that there might just be a way to clarify the parameters of this discussion after all. The basic premise of this book is as follows: biblical scholarship has generally failed to adequately define political and economic concepts, and this failure has resulted in drawing contemporary conclusions from the biblical texts which are diametrically opposed to the original intention of the biblical authors themselves. In particular, biblical scholarship almost always implicitly or explicitly assumes (and sometimes endorses) the political and economic paradigm of modern authoritarian socialism, even when it contradicts certain conclusions scholars derive from their interpretations. By properly defining and delineating the political and economic categories, New Testament interpretation (and the conclusions which believers in the modern world draw from their interpretation) undermines authoritarian socialism and provides us with a more historically satisfying and accurate reading of New Testament texts. This argument of this book can be reduced to a single thesis statement: the New Testament does not endorse authoritarian socialism.

To this end, there are three goals I hope to accomplish by writing this book:

1. Define modern economic and political concepts and compare them with the ancient world in which the New Testament was written.
2. Demonstrate the complexities of applying biblical texts to modern social and political questions and explore the use of modern social and political categories in biblical interpretation.
3. Analyze several prominent New Testament texts which are often assumed to address ‘political’ and ‘economic’ issues.

A quick word regarding all three.

The first goal is to do what nearly every professional New Testament scholar or theologian who writes about these issues has failed to accomplish: actually define what we mean by ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’. I have spent the last several years studying the Austrian school of economics and it has become increasingly apparent that proponents of the Austrian school have constructed the only categorically consistent and irreducible definition of these terms. Political philosophers who understand the consequences of Austrian economics have provided a more accurate method of understanding modern political dynamics. Instead of the conventional ‘left-right’ spectrum (associated with the terms ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’, respectively) which is constantly shifting and generally interpreted through the subjective preferences of political commentators, Austrian-informed political theorists have correctly relabeled the political spectrum using the categories of ‘libertarian’ and ‘authoritarian’. I will show that this tradition of economic and political thought is intellectually stable, generally applicable, and less susceptible to subjective misappropriation. Related to this, I want to provide a general overview of the ancient political and economic institutions which impacted the early followers of Jesus and contextualized the works that were eventually included in the New Testament. To that end, there will be chapter-length reviews of both the Greco-Roman and Jewish contexts within which the earliest followers of Jesus were located. By understanding this essential background information we will be in a much better position to interpret biblical texts and demonstrate the ways in which our contemporary categories create more hermeneutical dilemmas than they solve.

This leads me to my second point, which is about the difficulty of applying biblical texts to modern economic and political questions and, vice versa, utilizing modern economic and political categories in biblical interpretation. There are, as a matter of pure historical fact, profound differences between the modern and ancient mind. Our categories for interpreting reality are a product of, to put it broadly, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. These long periods of cultural transformation forever altered the Western intellectual landscape and have created such a profound epistemological revolution that we often fail to appreciate just how different the ancient world was from our own. This dynamic stems from the Renaissance itself; the great architect of fourteenth century Italian renaissance thought was Petrarch, who very much understood the times in which he was living as a return to the grandeur of classical Greece and Rome. He is in large part responsible for creating the (mis)perception that the time between Augustine and the rise to prominence of the Italian city-states was a ‘dark age’ characterized by a European rejection of its glorious ancient past, resulting in a popular misconception that the Greek and Romans weren’t really too much different from us after all. Even though the Enlightenment problematized over-simplistic Renaissance readings of history, in popular reception many Western thinkers have internalized Petrarch and assumed we are of one mind with our classical forebears, a myth which has had a profound impact on biblical interpretation.

These differences aren’t just restricted to the world of ideas, however. The social, political, economic, and material fabric of antiquity is entirely different from our own. The urban economies of the Roman cities in which Paul evangelized, as well as the agrarian economies of regions like Galilee, were in many respects entirely dissimilar to modern economic systems. Understanding these differences is essential for contextualizing the ministry of Jesus and the works of other New Testament writers. Similarly, the complexities of Roman imperial rule, which was sometimes administered with a light touch and sometimes enforced through a clenched fist, differs in many important respects from our so-called ‘modern liberal democracies’. Understanding the nature of Roman imperialism and the very real political power held by local rulers will provide precision and nuance to our understanding of biblical works forged in antiquity. We need more research in this area and I hope to contribute another perspective which draws on much of the excellent research already conducted within the field of New Testament scholarship.

My third goal, which will comprise the majority of this book, requires the shortest amount of explanation. Once I have established definitions, methods, and contexts I will examine passages from the New Testament which are often debated in contemporary political and economic discourse. The scope of this work is much wider than many related monographs, however, as I plan on reviewing texts which are often marginalized or overlooked. I will include material from all twenty-seven works in the New Testament, exhaustively demonstrating the utility of employing precise political and economic concepts in biblical interpretation. The scope is massive, to be sure, but I hope my humble exegetical proposals presented in this book will help refine a categorically confused conversation. I strongly believe the prevailing modern political category of authoritarian socialism, which I will define below, is entirely incompatible with the principles embedded in the New Testament. A bold proposition demands substantial evidence, but the scales of probability tip in favor of my thesis.

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