Things Jesus may have said

Or perhaps he didn’t say it after all. In Luke 14:1–6 there is a certain disagreement in the manuscript tradition between manuscripts. The question is what is the earliest recoverable reading for Luke 14:5?

And he said to them, “Which of you shall have…or an ox fall into a well, will not immediately draw him/it out on the Sabbath Day?”

Here is the problem: The oldest reading for the missing word in the passage above is uios (son). It pairs up with ox (bous) to make a rather incongruous pair: if your son or your ox falls into a well will you not immediately draw him out? Of course, you would; you would break sabbath laws and rescue your son! Children are a heritage from God, the psalmist believed (Ps 127:3). You have absolutely no choice assuming you are humane, religiously inclined, and concerned about pleasing God. And the saying seems to assume that to be the case on the part of those hearing the saying.

            Later copyists, however, in some manuscripts changed son (uios) to ass (onos) as making a better pairing (compare Luke 13:15) with ox (bous), or changed the word son to sheep (probaton). A few manuscripts even use all three words: son, donkey, sheep.* Since one of the canons of textual criticism is “the more difficult reading is to be preferred,” the preferred reading, text critics aver, appears to be son.**

The similar saying in Luke 13:15 reads:

You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the manager, and lead it away to water it?

There is a third saying appearing in Matt 12:11, which reads:

What man of you, if he has one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out?

None of these three sayings, as related as they are in concept and style, have parallels in the other two synoptics.

The Jesus Seminar in its deliberations did not regard Luke 13:15 as originating with Jesus. On the other hand, Luke 14:5 and Matthew 12:11 were given gray ratings.***

The rationale of the Fellows of the Seminar with regard to Luke 14:5 was that the historical Jesus did not debate the finer point of Torah nor did he debate about sabbath observance (like the rabbis). “The Fellows of the Seminar strongly agreed that Jesus did engage in activities that suggested that he had little concern for sabbath observance.”**** His actions, however, could have provoked those who did care about sabbath observance, which could have led to arguments about proper sabbath observance.

            The two earliest texts (P⁴⁵ P⁷⁵) that read “son” are from the third century. This time frame allows for over 100 years from original composition of Luke to the copyists in the third century, during which time texts were copied and altered. In other words, earliest recoverable forms are not the original and are still suspect.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

*Metzger, Textual Commentary, 138–39.

**The King James Version, however, reads ass/donkey, as does the New King James Version.

***See Funk, et al., The Five Gospels, 36. A gray rating indicates: “Jesus did not say this, but the ideas contained in it are close to his own.”

****Funk, et al., Five Gospels, 350.

When did Jesus stop talking?

It sounds like a trick question, right? Nevertheless, I will attempt to show you that it is quite serious. When Jesus died by crucifixion at the hands of the Romans somewhere around 30,¹ his early followers believed that God restored him to life and the three authors (whoever they may have been) of the canonical gospels (which Christians today affirm as God’s Word) conclude their gospels with resurrection narratives.² All but Mark end their gospels with a series of post-crucifixion appearances of Jesus in which Jesus (back to the land of the living) speaks. None of the sayings of Jesus in these appearance stories, however, are regarded by historians as sayings of the historical man, Jesus.³

            Later followers of Jesus (30-70), before the canonical gospels began to be written, apparently believed that resurrection appearances of Jesus confirmed that Jesus had, in fact, been raised from the dead. See Paul’s statement (1 Cor 15:3-8) that after the crucifixion Jesus had appeared to Cephas (Peter), to the twelve (disciples), more than 500 people on one occasion, James, all the apostles, and even to Paul himself. And the voice of the living Jesus continued to be heard through the mouths of prophets whom, as it was believed, God had appointed to speak in the name of the Lord in the gatherings of Jesus followers (1 Cor 12:10, 28).⁴

The early Christian prophet was an immediately-inspired spokesperson for God, the risen Jesus, or the spirit who received intelligible oracles that he or she felt impelled to deliver to the Christian community or, representing the community, to the general public.⁵

The most intense period of early Christian prophecy was roughly 30-70 before sayings of Jesus were incorporated into gospels.⁶ During this period prophets circulated among gatherings of Jesus followers and, when prompted, spoke the Word of the Lord to their contemporaries (Didache 11:3-13:7). Hence, the oral tradition about Jesus’ sayings and doings contained both sayings of the (dirty-footed) historical man and sayings of the (spiritually?) resurrected Lord. Such sayings entered the stream of Christian oral tradition, which was the resource used, in part,⁷ by the authors of the canonical gospels in narrating the teaching and deeds of Jesus reported in their gospels.⁸

            A case on point is a saying of the resurrected Lord spoken by the early Christian prophet, John the revelator:

Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. (Rev 3:20 RSV)

Should this saying be regarded as spoken by Jesus? John regards it as part of the revelation of Jesus Christ (Rev 1:1), which came to him through the Lord’s angel (Rev 1:2) while he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day (Rev 1:11) as a part of a “letter” to the Jesus gathering in Laodicea (Rev 3:14). If you regard it as a saying of Jesus, should it be accorded equal weight with sayings that came out of Jesus’s own mouth? The big question, however, is how does one sort out sayings in the gospels that probably came from the Lord’s own mouth from sayings that may have come from an early Christian prophet or the creative imagination of the evangelists?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Jesus was crucified at some point within the Prefecture of Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea, 26-36: Tessa Rajak, “Pontius Pilatus,” Oxford Classical Dictionary (3^rd ed., 1999), 1220.

²Mark 16:1-8; Matt 28:1-8; Luke 24:1-12; John 20:1-10.

³The empty tomb stories, resurrection appearances, and ascension of Jesus are not printed at their narrated place in each of the gospels but handled in a separate section in the back of R. W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus (HarperCollins, 1998), 449-95.

⁴http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=early+Christian+prophets

⁵M. E. Boring, “Prophecy (Early Christian),” Anchor Bible Dictionary (1992). 5:495-502.

⁶Although the oral tradition was still influential into the second century.

⁷Matthew, Luke, and John also drew from other written texts, and their own creative imaginations. None of them were eyewitnesses to what they reported.

⁸Hedrick, When History and Faith Collide, 127.

Jesus on the Management of Slaves

Traditionally, scholars of the parabolic language attributed to Jesus will distinguish between types of parabolic sayings: simile (a saying that uses “like” or “as” for a comparison, Matt 13:33), similitude (an analogy, similar to a simile, but elaborated with more detail, Matt 13:31). A parable, on the other hand, is a fully formed narrative, a story with beginning, middle, and end (Matt 13:3b-8). There are relatively few similes in the gospels, and many think of similitudes as narrative parables with less detail.¹ A case on point is Luke 17:7-9, a story with less detail.

Who among you having a slave ploughing or tending sheep, when he comes in from the field will say to him: “Come here at once and take your place at the table?” On the contrary, will he not rather say to him: “Prepare my meal, and after girding yourself, serve me while I eat and drink, and after these things, you can eat and drink?” He would not thank the slave because he did what was ordered, would he?²

The saying reflects the schema of a story: the beginning of the story: a man’s slave was working in the field. The middle of the story: the slave comes in from the field. The end of the story: his work day is not yet done. It is as much a story as is the “parable of the leaven,” Matt 13:33b.

Luke 17:7-9 is cast in the form of a conundrum, a series of three questions about how to treat slaves, and appeals to common social practice for the definitive answer: “Who among you having a slave…will say…?/On the contrary, will he not say…?/Does he thank the slave…?” (Luke 17:7, 8, 9). The conundrum provides one example of the treatment of slaves and allows it to stand for the customary practice as a whole: slaves do not eat before their owners; slaves exist only to make the owner’s life more comfortable.

The evangelist strains to find an appropriate religious moral for the story (Luke 17:10). Comparing disciples to the slave in the story (“So also you...”), the evangelist tells the disciples to admit that they are worthless slaves because they only did what was commanded (by God)—that is, they should have done more. Luke 17:10 is not part of the story; it is the evangelist’s interpretation of the story.³

The complication, which is left unresolved in the story, is: how should owners treat their slaves? The story leaves that question unresolved. It only describes what people usually do. Hence some readers are left pondering if there might be a better way of treating slaves, and that eventually raises the issue of the institution of human slavery itself for a thoughtful reader.

Slavery was ubiquitous in both ancient Greece and the Roman Republic and Empire. The general view of slaves is that they were chattel (a self-moving item of personal property). Aristotle argued that slaves should be thought of as a “live tool”; that is, as a living item of property (Pol. 1.2.3-6). Slaves had no legal rights and the slave owner had the power of life or death over them. The institution of slavery was based on violence, and the slave’s life was harsh. Hence, the best admonition for slaves was “Slaves obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling with single-hearted devotion” (Eph 6:5; Did. 4:11). The slave in the story of Jesus was a farm slave, where life was even more difficult than the lives of town slaves.⁴

We may be surprised that Jesus does not outright condemn such an inhumane social institution, but his stories are not frontal assaults on human degeneracy. His stories realistically mirror situations designed to provoke auditors into pondering their own situations in life through the story. Here is Adolf Jϋlicher’s description of the situation in Luke 17:7-9:

The Jesus who speaks in 17:7-9 is not the ethicist but the knower of men, who describes things, as they were at the time, without sentimentality also without exaggeration of the wretched conditions of slaves.⁵

His invention of a heartless slave owner and his treatment of a (single?) slave as characters for this story may be taken as a subtle criticism because it raises the question: might there be a better way of treating this particular slave? Paul, likewise, offered a subtle criticism of slavery, when he violates his own directive of “remain as you are” in view of the imminent end of the world (1 Cor 7:17-20). As I read the text, Paul allows an exception for slaves. If they can gain their freedom, they should do so (1 Cor 7:21).⁶ The short letter to Philemon (particularly verses 10-17) also support the idea that freedom is better than servitude, even though Paul does not specifically ask Philemon to free Onesimus.

The story in Luke 17:7-9 constitutes a subtle criticism of slavery. A better example, however, is the behavior of the appreciative slave owner in Luke 12:35-39. The slave owner dons an apron and serves his slaves a meal (Luke 12:37). There are other sayings attributed to Jesus that also suggest better ways in human relationships in general (for example, Matt 5:6; Luke 6:29a; Luke 6:32), and, hence, they obliquely apply to the treatment of slaves. A similar subtle criticism of slavery is reflected by Paul in his suggestion of a “better way” for the Jesus gathering at Corinth (1 Cor 12:31b-14:1a). The later writings of the New Testament, however, seem oblivious to the evils of slavery. Their authors advise slaves to obey their masters (even the hard or merciless ones) so as to reflect well on their religious faith (Eph 6:3; Col 3:22-23; 1 Tim 6:1; Tit 2:9-10; 1 Pet 2:18). On the whole, the Bible’s record on the institution of slavery is rather poor.

The Jesus Seminar voted that Luke 17:7-9 was not a genuine saying of Jesus.⁷ As I look today at the rationale for that decision, the reasons do not seem cogent. Our rationale at that time was that Luke invented the saying out of Israelite wisdom and Greco-Roman symposium traditions, but the meal in the story is not a symposium and no parallels are offered from Israelite wisdom traditions in support of the Seminar’s rationale. On the positive side, Luke 17:7-9 has the same oblique quality as Mark 12:17b (“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”), which was voted Red (assuredly genuine)⁸ at the University of Redlands in 1986. Luke 17:7-9 is, therefore, also likely a genuine saying of Jesus, the historical man.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Charles W. Hedrick, Many Things in Parables. Jesus and his Modern Critics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 6-7.

²My translation.

³Hedrick, Many Things in Parables, xvi, 12-14.

⁴On slavery, see K. R. Bradley, “Slavery,” 1415-17 in The Oxford Classical Dictionary (eds. S. Hornblower and Antony Spawforth; 3^rd ed.; Oxford, 1999); H. W. Johnston, The Private Life of the Romans (New York: Scott, Foresman,1903), 87-111.

⁵Die Gleichnisreden Jesu (2^nd ed.; 2 vols.; Freiburg: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1899), 1.16. My translation.

⁶How the translation of 1 Cor 7:21 (μαλλον χρησαι) should be rendered in translation is disputed. For example, E. J. Goodspeed: “If you were a slave when you were called, never mind. Even if you can gain your freedom, make the most of your present condition instead.” RSV: “Were you a slave when called? Never mind. But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity.” Goodspeed’s translation slights the adversative (αλλα) that suggests a strong contrast between the two states of servitude and the slave’s opportunity to gain freedom.

⁷R. W. Funk and R. W. Hoover, The Five Gospels and the Jesus Seminar (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 363. The Jesus Seminar, “Voting Records,” Forum 6.3-4, 265. At Cincinnati in 1990, the vote on Luke 17:7-10 was Red=0, Pink=13, Grey=30, Black=57. Hence, the saying was considered nongenuine.

⁸Jesus Seminar, “Voting Records,” Forum, 6.3-4, 302.

Is "Love Your Neighbor as Yourself" Something Jesus taught?

It seems likely to me that Jesus knew the Scripture “love your neighbor as yourself.” It was part of the legal code of ancient Israelite religion (Lev 19:18), and other Judeans familiar with the Scriptures surely would have known it. In ancient Israel, however, the neighbor was a fellow-Israelite (Deut 15:1-3; Lev 19:17-18). This definition of neighbor was expanded in Leviticus to include foreigners who came to dwell with the Israelites (Lev 19:33-34). It seems likely that Jesus was aware that the obligation of “loving the neighbor” also included foreigners in their midst. The issue, however, should not be decided on whether he knew the Scripture, but on how well it fitted his ideas and attitudes. Is it something he might have taught?

The Jesus Seminar voted several times on the saying and gave it a weighted average of gray,¹ which meant “Jesus did not say this, but the ideas contained in it are close to his own.”² Unfortunately the Seminar did not vote on the saying Lev 19:18 by itself, but rather they considered it as a package with Deut 6:4-5: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut 6:5) as one of the two chief commandments of the law. There was a mail-in vote in 1989 on two of the three occurrences of the “chief commandments” appearing in the gospels: for Matt 22:37-40 and Luke 10:27 (Red, 0; Pink, 33; Gray, 60; Black, 7). At the University of Redlands in 1986 there was a vote on Mark 12:28-34 (Red, 11; Pink, 28; Gray, 22; Black, 39). At the University of Notre Dame also in 1986 there was again a vote on Mark 12:28-34 (Red, 4; Pink, 32; Gray, 28; Black, 36).

Paul (Gal 5:14; Rom 13:9, 10) and James (2:8) knew the saying, “love your neighbor as yourself,” but they do not cite Jesus as their source. It seems more likely that they were familiar with the saying through the Israelite Scriptures. Luke, however, seems to think that the saying fitted the attitudes of Jesus by associating it (Luke 10:25-29, 36-37) with the story Jesus told about a robbery and assault on the Jericho road (Luke 10:30-35). From my perspective Luke’s reading of the story is simply misguided. The story is an exaggeration of what it meant to be a righteous man in late Judaism: “a righteous man risks his life and living for the nobodies of the world.”³ The story has little to do with loving neighbors. But from Luke’s perspective the story reflected an attitude toward others similar with that found in the saying about loving the neighbor.

Surely it is not a wrong thing to love one’s neighbor, even defined as one’s “own people.” Paul even thought that loving the neighbor fulfilled the whole law (Rom 13:8-10)! But loving the neighbor, however defined, does not go far enough. Thus Paul (Rom 13:8a: “owe no one anything except to love one another”) and James (Jas 2:1-9: “show no partiality”) expanded the horizon of the saying “love one’s neighbor” to include one’s fellow human being (an attitude also shared by Jesus in Luke 6:32, which implies that love must be extended beyond one’s own kind); and Jesus expanded the horizon of the saying even further to include love for enemies (Luke 6:27b and Matt 5:43-44).⁴ Thus, these three ideas, loving one’s neighbor (narrowly defined), loving one’s fellow human being (broadly defined), and loving one’s enemy come together under the obligation to love others. It seems inevitable that Jesus would have taught all three concepts.

While the saying “love your neighbor as yourself” fails to meet the criteria of dissimilarity and multiple attestation, it may be considered a saying of Jesus under the criterion of coherence.⁵ “Love your neighbor as yourself” is an idea that is consistent with Jesus’ attitudes on love of others, and as such deserves a pink rating; that is to say: “Jesus probably taught something like this.”

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹The weighted averages ranged from a high of 0.42 to a low of 0.35: The Jesus Seminar, “Voting Records. Sorted by Group Parallels by Weighted Averages,” Forum 6.3-4 (September/December,1990), 299-352 (319).

²Robert Funk, Roy Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 36; Jesus Seminar, “Voting Records. Sorted by Gospels, by Weighted Averages,” Forum 6.3-4, 319.

³Hedrick, Parables as Poetic Fictions. The Creative Voice of Jesus (Peabody. MA: Hendrickson, 1994; reprint, Wipf and Stock, 2005), 116 (93-116).

⁴Hedrick, The Wisdom of Jesus. Between the Sages of Israel and the Apostles of the Church (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), 87-88.

⁵The Criterion of Coherence states: “material from the earliest stratum of the Jesus tradition may be original, provided it coheres with material established as original by means of the criterion of dissimilarity.” For a short discussion of the criteria for determining authenticity see Hedrick, When History and Faith Collide. Studying Jesus (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999; reprint, Wipf and Stock, 2013), 135-52 (143-44).

Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31)

There is only one version of this parable: it comes from Luke's special parables tradition. Joachim Jeremias, the distinguished German New Testament scholar, pointed out that of the ninety examples of the Greek historic present¹ appearing in Mark's gospel, Luke has only used one from their shared material (Luke 8:49).² In Luke's special parables tradition, however, he has used the historic present five times in narrating parables (13:8; 16:7; 19:22), two of which appear in Rich Man and Lazarus (16:23, 29). Jeremias argued from these observations that the contrast in the use of the historic present between Luke's broader gospel narrative and his parables constitutes "clear evidence of an underlying pre-Lucan tradition."

 

            He further pointed out that the first part of this parable (Luke 16:19-26) reflects well-known folk material deriving from Egyptian traditions (The Journey of Si-Osiris to the Underworld), which was transported to Palestine as the story of the poor scholar and rich Publican, Bar Ma'jan.³ His view is that Jesus made use of the underlying folk narratives to compose his own story. The second part of the parable (Luke 16:27-31) is a new epilogue that Jesus added to the traditional folk material in the first part; hence the emphasis of Jesus' parable lies in the second part. Further, the parable's title should be the "Parable of the Six Brothers."

 

            The result of the discussions of this parable by members of the Jesus Seminar concluded that this parable did not originate with Jesus for several reasons: because folk tales about a rich man and a poor man whose fates were reversed in the next world were well known in the ancient Near East; in no other genuine parable of Jesus were characters given names; and that an interest in the plight of the poor is a special interest of the author Luke. The result of the combined vote of the Fellows was that the first part of the parable is questionable as a parable originating with Jesus. The second part, which described the six brothers, concerns the characteristic early Christian theme of the Judean lack of belief in the resurrection. For these reasons ninety percent of the fellows voted against the parable as originating with Jesus.⁴

 

            Hence, on balance, there are enough questions about the pedigree of this parable to seriously question it as a parable composed by Jesus of Nazareth. Not all agree, however. For example, one critically trained scholar is aware of most of these challenges to the parable as a composition by Jesus, but nevertheless argues the following: "Although the parable in its present wording has clearly been transformed by Christian allegorization, it would seem that a nucleus of the parable can be attributed to Jesus."⁵ And he even uses a 12th century painting of Lazarus at the rich man's gate on the dust jacket of his hard-back book, in a sense symbolizing all the parables.

 

            Perhaps it is time that critical scholars formulated a history of religions rule for evaluating parables that states: "The more certain it is that a parable reflects themes, plots, values, and traditional religious views of antiquity, the less certain it is that the parable originated with Jesus of Nazareth." The rationale for the rule is the following: because the parable makes extensive use of well-known traditional material it is far less certain that it might have originated with Jesus. The problem is not that one has thereby disproven its origin in the mind of Jesus, but that one cannot disprove that it originated with the gospel writer or elsewhere in antiquity. In attributing the parable to Jesus one runs the risk of attributing ideas to Jesus that were not his own. And for those reasons it should not be included in a database for determining the characteristic ideas of Jesus.

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

¹ The Greek "historic present" is the use of a present tense where one would have expected a past tense. For example, in telling a story a narrator says: "and he says…" instead of the expected "and he said…" The historic present is a characteristic literary feature of Mark's gospel, but not of the other two.

² Jeremias, Parables of Jesus (6th edition), 182-86. See Hawkins, Horae Synopticae,149.

³ Jeremias, Parables, 183, 178-189.

⁴ Funk and Hoover, Five Gospels, 360-62.

⁵ Hultgren, Parables of Jesus (Eerdmans, 2000), 115.

Why did Jesus tell Parables?

Well actually he told stories, or if I must use the technical literary term for stories, his characteristic way of speaking was in narrative. Narratives (stories) have as a minimum a beginning, middle, and end, and consist of a series of related events that develop and continue through the narrative to the end. In other words it is a story, and not just a statement. Calling a story a "parable" is a reading strategy describing how one intends to read the story. In other words a parable is not a distinct literary form; it is simply a brief narrative read in a particular way.

 

            In the early Christian gospels parables are generally viewed as brief stories intended to make a comparison, draw an analogy, or illustrate a moral or religious principle. Some of the parables are regarded as example stories that provide an example of proper human conduct. Some scholars theorize that parables are stories making a single comparison between an unstated reality and the situation in the story. The single point where the unstated reality and the situation in the story come together is best rendered as a broad single moral point. The stories of Jesus have also been described as metaphors: a narrative description of one thing under the guise of another unlike thing. On this reading strategy parables are described as stories intended to bring the kingdom of God into expression in vivid memorable language—all the above theories take their place among other reading strategies for the parables of the early Christian gospels.

 

            Basic to all these strategies, however, is the story, i.e., the narrative. In my view the stories Jesus told are freely invented secular fictions, which are subjected to various reading strategies by the writers of the gospels and subsequently by modern critics. A parable works when readers put themselves into the story and identify with one of the characters; they are then positioned to make discoveries about themselves.

 

            Why would Jesus tell what are principally secular stories that have been so confusing to understand? The earliest recorded answer to that question is found in the Gospel of Mark around 70 CE—we have no idea what Jesus thought of his stories; all we have to go on are the stories themselves to investigate the earliest period of Christian origins. Some forty to fifty years after the death of Jesus Mark thought the stories were allegories, which is another reading strategy for the stories. A narrative read as an allegory assumes that it is comprised of a series of figures, or metaphors: See Mark 4:3-8, a story about farming in the first century and Mark's reading of it (Mark 4:14-20) as a series of individual figures, which understands it as an allegory about the results of early Christian preaching.*

 

            Why did Mark think Jesus told figurative stories? Mark said that parables are for those outside the circle of the inner group of associates of Jesus. Parables were designed to keep "those outside" in the dark so that they would not learn the "secret" of the kingdom of God and turn and be forgiven (Mark 4:11-12). Matthew, on the other hand, blames the crowds to whom Jesus addressed his parables for deliberately hardening their hearts (Matt 13:10-15)—but omits Mark's strange phrase "lest they turn again and be forgiven" (Mark 4:12). Luke says that the parables concealed the secrets of the kingdom, which were only meant for disciples. Luke left it open that the crowds might still understand other things Jesus spoke about in parables (Luke 8:9-10), and like Matthew he also omits Mark's offensive phrase "lest they (the crowds) turn again and be forgiven" (Mark 4:12).

 

            When I was teaching classes in the parables of Jesus at Missouri State, students delighted in telling me that Jesus used parables because it was a good teaching technique, and made things clearer to the audience—like good examples do. The difficulty is that not even the evangelists agree among themselves on what a parable is and what it was about.  For example, Matthew and Luke come to opposite interpretations of the Parable of the Lost Sheep, and even disagree on what the parable says (Matt 18:10-14/Luke 15:3-7).

 

            I have never found anyone to agree with Mark that Jesus used parables in order to keep people from understanding "lest they turn again and be forgiven."

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

*See the discussion of Mark's theory of parables in Hedrick, Many Things in Parables. Jesus and his Modern Critics (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2004), 27-35.

Religious Titles for Jesus

Two titles conferred on Jesus by his early followers are so well known many think of them as part of his personal name: i.e., "Lord Jesus Christ."  Jesus, however, is the personal name that his mother gave him. "Christ" (χριστός, Christos) is a title coming out of the Israelite tradition meaning "anointed." Another title, "Lord" (κύριος, kurios), is a term of respect addressed to a person who commands respect or exercises authority; it is used in Hebrew Bible/Septuagint of Yahweh, God of Israel, where he was referred to as "the Lord God" and/or the "Lord." The title carries the idea of high authority.  Hence Jesus' two best known titles are "The Lord" and "the Anointed."

 

            An odd, little-known, title barely surviving in the New Testament is αρχήγος (archēgos), but how should it be translated?  In the Greek tradition it is used to refer to the founder of a city, among other things.  In the Septuagint it refers to political and military leaders of various sorts, both tribal and national.  In English translations it has appeared variously as beginner, leader, instigator, author, captain, chief, prince, etc.

 

            There are only four instances of its use in the New Testament, and all appear in confessional statements:

 

Acts 3:15 refers to Christ as "the Author (archēgos) of life."

 

Acts 5:31 refers to Jesus as "Leader (archēgos) and Savior."

 

Heb 2:10 refers to Jesus as "the pioneer (archēgos) of salvation."

 

Heb 12:2 refers to Jesus as "the pioneer (archēgos) and perfecter of our faith."

 

            The word also appears in 2 Clement 20:5, where it refers to Jesus as "the Saviour and prince (archēgos) of immortality."  In the Nag Hammadi writing (Letter of Peter to Philip 139:27 and 140:4) it refers to Jesus as "the author (archēgos) of our life."  In the German translation of Peter to Philip archēgos is translated as Urheber, which carries the dictionary meanings of author, creator, founder, or originator.

 

            George Johnston argued in 1981 that the term should be translated "Prince," and explained as a Christology viewing Jesus as "the fulfillment of the Davidic hope" (Ezekiel 34:24, 37:25; p. 384).

 

            From my perspective archēgos, as used in the New Testament, is a clearly secular word, which only takes on secondarily a religious sense by the word with which it is paired and the confessional context in which it appears.  A place in Hebrew Bible where an early follower of Jesus might have encountered it, while looking for messianic "prophecies," is Numbers 24:17: "A star shall rise out of Jacob, a man shall spring out of Israel, and shall crush the princes (archēgos) of Moab and shall spoil all the sons of Seth."  In the early 2nd century Irenaeus (Against Heresies 9.2) and Justin (Dialogue with Trypho, 106) cited this verse as a messianic prophecy, which Jesus fulfilled, but with no explanation as to how it applied.

 

            Simon bar Kosiba, the Judean rebel leader of the second Jewish revolt (early 2nd century) appealed to Numbers 24:17 to support his messianic claims.  His supporters and followers called him Bar Kohkba, "son of a star."  During his occupation of Jerusalem Simon even minted coins featuring a star.  Eusebius (4th century) said of him:

 

The Jews were at that time led by a certain Bar Kokhba, which means star, a man who was murderous and a bandit, but relied on his name, as if dealing with slaves, and claimed to be a luminary who had come down to them from heaven, and was magically enlightening those who were in misery. (Ecclesiastical History, 4.6.1-3)

 

Although Bar Kokhba may have presented himself as a messianic figure, he is clearly a military/political leader and war chieftain.  Those who view God as working in the world in a spiritual way, like Irenaeus and Justin, however, would see archēgos in a religiously spiritual sense.  Hence Jesus is the "leader" who, as precursor, first led the way in faith. He was archēgos in the sense that his faith (that is, Jesus' own confidence in God, Galatians 2:16) first established the spiritual path.  He was the pioneer, trailblazer, or archēgos of that Way of faith (Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22). For a more complete development of this idea see the last four paragraphs of http://blog.charleshedrick.com/2015/11/is-holy-spirit-part-of-trinity.html.  Such a secular title had little chance of succeeding, however, against early orthodoxy's idea of a crucified and resurrected Savior, and its use simply died out as too bland or clearly inappropriate for a dying and rising Savior, who was far more than simply a "leader" or "beginner" of a path of faith.

 

            Titles given to Jesus tell us nothing substantive about the man, however; they only tell us what early Christians thought about him.

 

How does it seem to you?

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

George Johnston, "Christ as Archegos," New Testament Studies 27.3 (1981), 381-85.

The Wisdom of Jesus. Between the Sages of Israel and the Apostles of the Church

My new book (The Wisdom of Jesus) has just been published by Wipf and Stock in their selective imprint Cascade Books.  Basically my study of Jesus addresses two questions: (1) how would the image of Jesus appear if it were based only on the limited number of sayings that scholars generally agreed originated with Jesus?  And (2) how would the wisdom of Jesus reflected in those few sayings compare to the wisdom of the sages (a sage: someone distinguished for their wisdom) of ancient Israel and the apostles of the early Christian church?

            To answer such questions historians face serious difficulties.  Everything we know about Jesus comes from what later writers thought about him; none of the statements they attributed to him come directly from him.  Everything in the early Christian gospels is either derived from historical memory, or is borrowed, or invented.  In short, everything about Jesus in the gospels is at best hearsay.  Even those very few sayings receiving near-universal agreement from historians as sayings of Jesus can only be affirmed as historically probable rather than historically certain.  In describing the sayings and doings of Jesus the later gospels, written a generation or more after the time of Jesus, are seriously flawed as history, meaning that the evangelists are not reporting the traditions about Jesus in an unbiased way.

            The aim of the book is to allow Jesus to speak directly to modern readers in his own voice, as nearly as possible in his own words, without the theological explanations of the gospel writers, or the interpretations of modern scholars and theologians.  The resulting image of Jesus that emerges from the study of his sayings is a complex picture of a first-century lower-class man who was not religious in a traditional sense.  For example, Jesus says very little about God.  His discourse was the language of the secular world and addressed issues of common life in an oblique way.  That is to say, his actual words deal more with lower class village life, and offer sweeping unrealistic challenges to the complexities of daily living.  He did not leave behind a code of conduct to be followed, and also simply omitted any practical guidance as to how his challenging ideas should be incorporated into daily life.  For example, one of the probable statements of Jesus is this rather contradictory directive: Be sly like snakes and simple like pigeons (Matthew 10:16).  The statement prompts the question: how is it possible to be both at once?  And on another occasion he said: when someone snatches your outer garment, don't prevent them from taking your undergarment as well (Luke 6:29b)—obeying this instruction in a literal fashion would leave one virtually nude—not very practical advice for living in a dangerous world.

            The sages of ancient Israel, on the other hand, offer a range of advice about how to get along in the world.  Some texts offer religious instruction, which is identified as divine wisdom, and devalue human insight and experience.  Job's book is a courageous human challenge to the supposedly perfect divine wisdom, while Ecclesiastes finds both divine wisdom, and human insight and experience bankrupt as resources for getting on in the world.  The apostles of the church locate wisdom in the world as a divine initiative and disparage human wisdom.    The ideas of Jesus, however, conflict with the religious and secular wisdom of his day—even putting him at odds with human self-interest.

            The chapter titles are:

            The Problem of the Historical Study of Jesus

            Jesus and the Language of the Gospel

            Early Christian Wisdom

            Surveying the Sages of Ancient Israel

            The Sayings of Jesus: A Preface

            Vestiges of a Discourse

            Parables: Fictional Narratives about the Ordinary

            A Case Study of a Parable: The Fired Manager

            Jesus between the Wisdom Canons of Israel and the Church

The Epilogue is entitled: Pondering the Unreliability of the Gospels

 

The publisher's website describing the book is: http://wipfandstock.com/the-wisdom-of-jesus.html.

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

Reading Jesus’ Mind

Today's average Christian if asked whether Jesus thought of himself as the Son of God and the messiah, would likely answer in the affirmative.  Critical scholars in general would likely avoid the question, however, for obvious reasons—who can possibly know anyone's thoughts?  Confessional scholars would likely side with the average Christian.  Nevertheless, some critical scholars are not at all uncomfortable talking about what was going on in Jesus' mind.  Marcus Borg, for example, affirms some things that "Jesus was aware of": "The power or authority which others sensed in him"; "the power of the Spirit flowing through him"; "his teaching also shows an awareness of a numinous authority not derived from tradition."  And if you allow Borg to define carefully the terms he uses, he is willing to affirm: "in this Jewish sense, Jesus may have thought of himself as 'son of God.'" (Borg, Jesus A New Vision, 47-49).

               At the turn of the previous century Albert Schweitzer (holding three doctorates: Music, Theology, Medicine) wrote a short work entitled The Psychiatric Study of Jesus. Exposition and Criticism (1913).  The book was his medical dissertation.  In it he countered the views of those in the medical profession who at that time were arguing that Jesus, "who considered himself the 'Son of Man' and the 'Messiah,' is to be adjudged in some fashion as psychopathic" (p. 27).  And Schweitzer himself felt comfortable telling the reader what Jesus thought: Jesus "did not permit the conviction that he was destined to be the coming Messiah to play a part in his message" (p 51).  And again: "That Jesus of Nazareth knew himself to be the Son of Man who was to be revealed is for us the great fact of His self-consciousness" (Quest of the Historical Jesus, 367).

               Even the gospel writers knew what went on in the mind of Jesus—or claimed they did.  Here are a few of their comments: "Jesus knowing their thoughts said..." (Matt: 9:4); "knowing their thoughts, he said..." (Matt 12:25); "he knew their thoughts and said..." (Luke 6:8); "But when Jesus perceived the thought of their hearts, he took..." (Luke 9:47).

               Providing the reader with interior views of characters in a narrative is a function of the narrator (i.e., the voice telling the story).  Such a narrative technique is a standard feature of narrative fiction and qualifies the narrator as omniscient, i.e., a narrator who knows everything (see Arp and Johnson, Perrine's Literature, 238-45).  Matthew and Luke also engage in reading Jesus' mind; hence they are omniscient narrators, because they know everything—even what goes on in the minds of their characters.  John, on the other hand, features an unreliable narrator, for the principle narrator's story is frequently corrected by a second more knowledgeable narrative voice at points in the narrative (see, Hedrick, "Unreliable Narration: John on the Story of Jesus and the Chronicler on the History of Israel," Perspectives on John [Edwin Mellen, 1993], 121-43).

               An author's use of the literary technique of reading minds calls into question the realism of the narrative.  The use of such a technique results in a less realistic narrative because it provides the reader with something s/he could not possibly know in real life. Hence the early Christian gospels are more akin to fiction than history.  For historians to use this technique in historical narrative is irresponsible, because it misleads the reader in that historians present as a datum of history something that is obviously a fantasy of fiction.

               The truth is that we never know what people are thinking even when they tell us what they claim to be thinking.

What are your thoughts?

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University