Tax collectors

*From Kenneth E. Bailey's The Cross & the Prodigal

During the time of Jesus, tax collectors were naturally seen as “sinners.”
When any ethnic community is forcibly incorporated into someone else’s
empire, tax correctors are inevitable despised intensely. But the Roman Empire
presented a special problem. It collected taxes through “tax farmers.”
An individual would buy from the rulers the right to collect taxes in a certain
area. That person was then able for the most part to set his own rates and
exact whatever he could. He was bound by contract to deliver a certain sum
to the authorities. The rest was his. These “tax farmers” were often Gentiles.
In Palestine local people were then hired to do the actual collecting of the
money.3 Obviously, with unscrupulous men involved, there was a great deal
of graft.

The practice still persists at one point in modern Egyptian village life
where a local citizen contracts from the government the right to tax the use
of the village riverbank crossing on the Nile. He then hires men to collect a
premium from every person who crosses the river. The going rate is whatever
the traffic will bear. Graft and favoritism become the rule when
unscrupulous men seize control of the village crossing point. The last years
of the Turkish Empire saw the same ancient system at work, and once again
widespread abuse was common.

Furthermore, Palestine in the first century was occupied by imperialists.
It is difficult for anyone who has never lived in an occupied country to fully
appreciate the hatred generated toward the “collaborator.” (Modern African
and Asian nationalisms give us many parallels.) In modern Arab politics the
bitterest of all insults is “agent of the imperialists.”

When a colony approaches the ignition point of revolt, it hates any “collaborator”
with ferocious intensely. Suddenly the collaborators’ compromises
with national honor become unendurable. In Jesus’ day nationalistic
forces in Judea and Galilee were gathering strength. The smoldering of revolt
would burst into flame within a few years. Any cooperation with Rome
and its tax collectors was surely looked on as a betrayal of race and religion.
In the Gospels the title of tax collector is usually linked with sinners or with
adulterers and quite naturally with Gentiles.4 The most common identification
is with sinners. In the mouth of a Pharisee sinners meant the “unclean,” the
“breakers of the Law” and those of low moral character generally. In short,
anyone they condemned. Luke uses sinner thirteen times and generally
means by it people of low moral character. Here he is quoting the Pharisees,
and thus the added flavor of “traitor” and “unclean” are probably intended.

3John R. Donahue, “Tax Collector,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New
York: Doubleday, 1992), 6:337-38.