jack

Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. ... Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—some thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times what was sown.”

Narrative device

This is another parable from the J K Rowling school of "try to persuade the listener it's obvious by acting all surprised that they don't know it".

Step one. Everyone agrees Jesus told a parable about a farmer sowing seed, and most of it didn't grow, but the ones that germinated paid for the rest.

Step two. For some reason, Jesus takes the disciples aside later and says "Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable?"

Then he explains what it means. Is this so he could talk openly without being arrested? Is it because the "meaning" of the parable was intended to be passed only orally, so the teacher can check the student's understanding or leave it open to multiple interpretations? Or the "official" meaning was only added to the story later?

The puns

After a lot of planting corn, Jesus says “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.” That would be a great pun, but presumably "ear" and "ear" are different words in greek? :)

Theology

The theology is actually strange to read about having grown up in a broadly fluffy-christian culture. People who are have a vaguely Christian background but not super-observant often have the impression that "it will all turn out ok". Which I mostly like. And people definitely play up the idea that however much it might be difficult to get saved, God will do Her/His best to make it happen somehow.

But this is one of the passages strongly suggesting most people won't be saved, because of their own choices or bad luck. That you have to try as hard as you can just to have a good chance of being saved, and don't have any leeway to take chances with "maybe I can do this and get away with it".

Which in many ways is a much more powerful message, especially for the leader of a new sect struggling to grow rapidly in the face of persecution from the orthodox majority. "Don't quibble, come follow me now." Even if it's a potentially strange creed for a dominant religion.

I do like that flavour -- try as hard as you can is a compelling message. But even if I like the message for me, I don't like the suggestion that of most people, most will fail, I prefer a more optimistic one.

Summary

Jesus says his true mothers and brothers are his fellow disciples.

Family ties

The idea that we can be a family with God is a nice piece of Christianity, especially if your existing family is not worthy of the name.

But it's also true that large scale popular movements (good or bad) are much more likely to succeed if they include the idea that other people in the movement are more important than your existing emotional ties.

Someone thought this sounded like "Jesus has run off from his family to sleep in the open and lead a parade of unemployed hippies around the countryside preaching anarchy, and are understandably worried about him". Of course, that's inconsistent with the idea that Mary was told by God that she was going to bear the son of God.

On the other hand, there's a touching story in there, if Mary hoped Jesus is who he said he is, but can't bring herself to believe it, and feels like she should protect him from herself, but then, after he dies, is finally convinced that he really is what she always hoped. Of course, that's not quite what the bible says, but it makes a good story.

Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven all their sins and every slander they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.

Ooh, controversial.

It's understandable that Jesus is angry here. The teachers of the law are supposed to be a moral and theological authority, and having just seen the holy spirit heal someone, are accusing it of being a demon. If Jesus is right, it's clear why that's some nasty blasphemy.

On the one hand, I think it's understandable if Jesus spoke with vehemence over precision here (and in other places). Words are always imperfect: being imprecise (especially as a moral authority) is bad, but it's not always the MOST bad thing. For the usual analogy consider a parent and a child. If the child tried to have the parent cast out for being a demon, I think it would be entirely reasonable for the parent to say that was unforgivable, even if it was still possible, though unlikely, to reconcile later.

On the other hand, even if we take a fluffy Jesus-was-a-nice-guy-even-if-he-wasn't-God viewpoint, it's easy to get sucked into contorted explanations of why he was ALWAYS right, and gloss over things he said that might be bad as a moral example nowadays (whether or not there was a good reason for saying them).

From a theological standpoint, if you take forgiveness-by-God literally, is there a standard interpretation of this passage?

If you take Jesus-died-for-our-sins literally, does that only apply to people who died after Jesus? Were there things which were previously unforgivable sins which became forgiveable with Jesus' sacrifice -- either specific really bad ones like blaspheming against the holy spirit, or as some people would say, ALL sins? Or was forgiveness via God's grace available before Jesus' death, just very rare?

Jesus went up on a mountainside and called to him those he wanted, and they came to him. He appointed twelve that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach and to have authority to drive out demons. These are the twelve he appointed:

Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter)
James son of Zebedee
and his brother John (to them he gave the name Boanerges, which means “sons of thunder”)
Andrew
Philip
Bartholomew
Matthew
Thomas
James son of Alphaeus
Thaddaeus
Simon the Zealot
Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

Here we have a list of apostles.

Specificity

The sheer specificity makes me think the author saw this as a factual account, in that they thought the list of people sufficiently accurate to preserve, and knew them or knew of them. If the life of Jesus was a complete legend, there doesn't seem to be any particular reason to invent such a specific list. (Over 100s of years, yes -- look at the names of hierarchies of angels "deduced" from first principles. But probably not over 20-100 years.)

Judas

The gospel is structured as a record of historical writings: you get the feeling reading this, that the reader is expected to already know the story of Judas. If it were a novel it would be foreshadowing, but I don't think it is, it's just a pile of details all assembled into the most relevant/coherent order the author thought they could manage.

Peter, you are the rock

Here we have the bit where Simon aka St Peter is called "Peter". After a bit of googling, it looks like:

* Jesus and Peter probably talked in Aramaic
* Jesus dubbed Peter with a nickname meaning "Rock" in Aramaic, which was translated into "rock" in greek
* The greek used for "rock" sounded like "Peter", which was the presumed origin of the name Peter
* AFAIK neither the aramaic or the greek being a previous name (although I don't know if that's certain)
* Later on Jesus talks about "Peter, you are the rock on which I build my church"
* Which is sort of a pun, but not, because it seems "Peter" was a nickname anyway

So what actually happened? Was Peter nicknamed "Peter" for some unknown reason (eg. it was an affectionate nickname, it was a reference to rock for some other reason, etc)? Or did Jesus just say "you are the rock on which I build my church" and then everyone started calling him Peter? Or something else?

Aside

The details of Peter being the rock on which Jesus builds his church are disputed depending on which Christian tradition you follow, what exactly Jesus means by this analogy if he even said it, and it wasn't Peter putting words in Jesus' mouth. But I don't really follow the differences.

My gospel readthrough is falling very behind. I skipped the end of chapter 2, which I didn't have anything to say about, and here's the beginning of chapter 3. Not all of this is in Mark, I'm taking some of it from the description of the same incident in Matthew.

This is related to the "picking grain on the sabbath" thing. Jesus goes to a synagogue where some proto-Rabbis who disagree with him hang out. It's not clear if this is coincidence, or he's deliberately letting them have a swing at him in order to win the argument.

There's a man with a shrivelled hand. Reading between the lines, it seems the proto-Rabbis, as told by one of Jesus' disciples in a story designed to make Jesus look good, deliberately draw this to Jesus' attention. Presumably it destroys Jesus' mystique if he refuses to heal someone who needs it, but if they can trap him into breaking the sabbath laws they can denounce or possibly arrest him.

It must be really frustrating it some chav[1] turns up in the cathedral and disrupts all the services and tells you you're doing it all wrong. Even if he's right, it's unsurprising people didn't like it.

Unsurprisingly, Jesus heals him anyway, and gives a short homily of halacha-fu which convinces the crowd Jesus is (a) channelling miracles (b) devout law-follower and (c) quick-thinking and turns them to his side, continuing the popular insurrection. The pharisees go off to plot Jesus' downfall (presumably this was written by someone who knew the crucifixion story[2]).

Analysis

So what do we know?

Implicitly, healing (or related things) were forbidden on the sabbath. Anyway with a greater talmudic knowledge want to comment?

In Matthew, Jesus draws a parallel with pulling a sheep out when it's stuck in a ditch. So implicitly, humanitarian acts of that sort were accepted at the time. But this changed?

If I recall correctly, in modern Judaism, anything life-saving is almost always allowed, and people who keep Sabbath laws generally interpret the exceptions fairly broadly to include any urgent medical activity. Anyone want to expand on that? Do most people apply it to sheep?

Footnotes

[1] I debated saying "yokel", but I feel class prejudice is more alive against "chav" than "yokel" these days, and I want to put the disagreeable view the people in charge might have had about Jesus in terms modern people would have a visceral reaction to.

[2] Freudian slip of the week: "crucifiction".

Note: The last couple of entries failed to crosspost from DW to LJ. You can see them at jack.dreamwidth.org if you want.

One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?”

Is this traditionally a sabbath rule? I know work is forbidden, but does it count if you pick something and eat it then? Eating blackberries feels more like play than fun to me.

I've no idea if this passage is put in to defend the sorts of things Jesus did, or to push the point that Jesus could do that sort of thing.

Or maybe it's another case of "the rules Jesus grew up with weren't picky about the same things"?

The same story appears almost identically in Matthew and Luke, but they don't add much to it.

“Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

17 On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

This is another of the famous quotes, and one I quite like.

It's another that would probably be more readily understandable if "sinners and tax collectors" were translated into something more familiar to a modern reader. Perhaps "people who've been to jail a couple of times" fit the same "ostracised, sinning, but fairly normal for their culture" role?

Although it's probably instructive to imagine the same passage with a variety of different sinners. People probably imagine Jesus meeting people doing something technically illegal and socially ostracised, like people who've done prostitution.

How do you feel if Jesus were eating with someone in the middle of a killing spree?

What about running a corrupt hedge fund?

What about world leaders who committed their country to expensive and pointless wars with lots of people dead?

To me, each one produces a different sort of "He can't eat with them! No, wait..."

But on the other hand, most people read this passage already know that Jesus always turns out to have known best. If you knew a long-haired hippie cult leader, but DIDN'T think they were the son of God, wandering round the country collecting bands of desperate people and leading them away from their homes telling them "it doesn't matter if you have a home or a job, as long as you're with me everything will be ok", you would probably have lots of worries about how it might go wrong, but some of the worries might actually be RIGHT.

"Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them"

Once again, a single verse that could contain a whole story. If you're skimming, it's just "Jesus preached". But if you were making a film, you can imagine a whole scene here.

Maybe someone happened along, and spoke to Jesus, and Jesus replied, and someone else overhead, and said that was interesting, and they began to debate. And then a couple of other people saw something going on, and one of them came over, and the other ran back to get a friend, and ran into a bunch of other people, and told them that preacher they'd heard about was just getting into an argument about theology, and they rushed over. And Jesus is just looking around for something to stand on, when you get a montage sequence of people leaping up, kicking over chairs, scuffing stones with sandles, rushing along the beach... A crowd has gathered, Jesus straining to retain some sanity in the discussion...

Wow, now I want to make a humorous but pro-Jesus film of the gospels. Wow, that would be controvertial :)

Mark 1:35-45

Jesus spreads his teachings to other towns. Jesus heals a lepper and some other people. He says to keep it quiet (why? just so he's not snowed in with petitioners?). He tells him to make the appropriate sacrifices in thanks. But word gets out, and now Jesus is mobbed wherever he goes, and has to stop before entering the towns, but still preaches and people still come.

This all sounds quite plausible; the same basic thing has happened to lots of people since. It could have been made up to make some specific message about the beginning of Jesus' ministry, but it could well be exactly what happened.

End of chapter 1. This is going to take a while :)

¹⁰ Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. ¹¹ And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.

OK, we make really, really sure the reader gets the point here. I suspect this "heaven being torn open" may have been more obvious in retrospect than it was at the time.

¹² At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, ¹³and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.

Hm. I think the wilderness thing is in more detail in some of the other gospels? Here's it's just one line. It looks like Mark knew a longer story about it, but just put in the bare bones for whatever reason (IIRC a lot of the Mishnah in the Talmud is like that, it's not expected to be read by someone COMPLETELY unfamiliar with it, but to provide an outline). There obviously was a really important story about it, or Mark wouldn't have mentioned it, but it's not really clear what happened or why it's important yet.

( Read more... )