QUOTE : While that term “middle classes” may be inaccurate for first-century realities, the distinction between “declined” or “born” into poverty is crucial for understanding Jesus and his first companions. I accept, therefore, Theissen’s proposal and Stegemann’s emphasis that the kingdom-of-God movement began by making “an ethical virtue out of social necessity”—that is, by refusing to accept the injustice they were experiencing as normal and acceptable to God. Those first itinerants were, like Jesus himself, primarily dispossessed peasant freeholders, tenants, or sharecroppers. They were not invited to give up everything but to accept their loss of everything as judging not them but the system that had done it to them. It was ethical to accept the abandonment of such a system and no longer to participate in its exploitative normalcy.