Jesus and Prostitutes

[The Grand Nudger]

We're all aware that Jesus hung out with prostitutes. At least, this is the story told in the Gospels. Also found in the Gospels is this: "The prostitutes and tax collectors will be the first to enter the Kingdom of Heaven"... "the last shall be first and the first shall be last."

Theologians have produced a crystalized interpretation of these verses over the centuries, but others (like Leo Tolstoy) have their own interpretation of Jesus' amiability toward sex workers. To Tolstoy, Jesus compassion springs from empathy... that they are downtrodden and hated among members of society. As traditional theologians tell it-- they see it through a Pauline lens-- Jesus is rescuing prostitutes from sin. ie. even though they are so wretched, and their sin is so great, Jesus nonetheless rescues them.

I'd like to hear everyone's input on this, especially the Christians on the forum. How do you interpret the Gospels' statements about prostitutes being the first to enter the Kingdom? Why did Jesus particularly aid and befriend prostitutes? Was it their downtrodden-ness, their "sinful nature" or something else?

The poor and downtrodden were the target market of the early romanizers.  

There's nothing in the character of christ that remains of any human prototype.  In a collection of sayings attributed to a holy person that are (at least conceptually) a mix of authentic and inauthentic utterances, there are two basic reasons that anything out of the full body of literature remains in the sanctioned version...neither of which has anything to do with what or why some jesus, if there was a jesus, said anything.

It was popular with the target market, and useful to the disseminator. The jewish jesus, the alleged historical jesus, was supposed to be an apocalypticist crowing about the immanent fulfillment of davidic prophecy. The meek inheriting the earth, the last being first...negatron, none of that shit. As to some historically plausible explanation for there being so much outsider weirdness in the stories about a christ.....about a savior....... That's the authors of the narratives coming through. The lens they saw the world with, what made their narratives (as opposed to those others deemed heretical) so useful, what made them speak to the disenfranchised of rome. I always suggest to people who want to know why the character in magic book says this or that, to read up on early christan rebuttals to julian apostate. It's rare to find such a credible back and forth in the historic record in which both parties admit to their underlying aims as well as their failures while laying out their goals and accomplishments so frankly. Their world was full of the sick, starving, maimed, and impoverished. Two appeals competed for space in the minds of those afflicted. One, the now failing organization of the imperial cult, and two, a nascent catholic church providing those services the hallowed out civil administration had bungled. The emperors religion and the bishops religion are both political vehicles which serve the purpose of contextualizing their beliefs about the proper civil order. Walls of separation between religions and states are artificial, poorly constructed, and ineffectual today...and were non existent then.

It's an unsatisfying answer for the superstitious - as it's a literary and sociological explanation for a literary and social phenomena. I think that's a shame, as an understanding of why this sort of thing was crammed into the mouth of a god is the heart of a religion, a real religion that a society can organize itself around and absolutely none of it hinges on whether or not a real boy said a thing to have personal intentions about. We start off wrong footed in asking the question about an individual of whom we have no trace, by reference to a book about a movement of which we have a great deal of information, a book and a movement which has no meaningful relationship to any jesus-the-man, whoever he was, if he was.