Chapter 11

Teaching Wisdom and Telling Tales

In This Chapter

● Understanding Jesus’s teaching techniques

● Proclaiming the true kingdom of God

● Seeing how Jesus wanted to be remembered

● Discovering what Jesus left out

Among Christians and non-Christians alike, Jesus is widely regarded as one of the great teachers of all time. His simple and challenging sayings, his love for the poor and outcast, and his willingness to die for his beliefs have long caught people’s attention and drawn them to follow him. In fact, teaching is so central to his life that the earliest strand of the gospel tradition, the sayings source Q (see Chapters 3 and 5), likens Jesus to divine Wisdom itself.

In this chapter, you discover Jesus’s teaching techniques, you delve into his central message about the kingdom of God, you find out how he wanted to be remembered, and you read about some hot topics today that Jesus probably never spoke about at all. As for whether the historical Jesus taught about the need for and significance of his own death, you find that in Chapter 14.

Teaching Wisdom with Jewish Techniques

Long before Jesus was born, the Jewish people had created a wisdom tradition that everyone — from educated teachers to poor parents — passed on. Throughout the years they passed on simple proverbs about how to live a happy life (see the book of Proverbs) and sophisticated stories that explored mysteries such as human suffering (see the book of Job). For the Jews, God was the ultimate source of wisdom, so the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament), which they believed God revealed to Moses, was woven into the wisdom tradition as well (Proverbs 8:1-9:18).

In this tradition, Wisdom is personified as that part of God that communicates with people, guiding them on the right paths. Hebrew words can be masculine or feminine, and “wisdom” happens to be a feminine noun (hochma in Hebrew or sophia in Greek), so Wisdom is imagined to be a feminine attribute of God.

In Jesus’s time, the Torah was the preeminent source of wisdom, but children would also learn from their parents at home, students would learn from their teachers, and those who attended the synagogue and Temple would learn there as well (see Luke 2:46, which mentions a youthful Jesus in the Temple with teachers). Given the fact that most people in Palestine around the time of Jesus were subsistence farmers, not many of these folks had time for education outside the home and synagogue. Those who did find the extra time would attach themselves to a particular teacher and form a circle or school.

You can trace the teachings of several different circles in the books that survive from the time of Jesus. Most of the evidence of these teachings comes from elite circles that had scribes, but other more popular movements simply relied on oral teaching, such as the Pharisees (see Chapter 7 for more about them) and Jesus’s group.

Jesus gathered followers and taught them by using techniques typical of the Jewish wisdom teachers in his day, which I discuss in the following sections. There’s no evidence that Jesus or his disciples wrote anything down, although Jesus himself was likely literate enough to read from the Hebrew scriptures (Luke 4:16-22) or at the very least to speak authoritatively about what was in them. All the early written materials that survive “translate” Jesus’s teaching out of his native Aramaic into Greek and were compiled a couple of generations after his death. But even in Greek, it’s clear that Jesus used teaching techniques popular among Jewish teachers.

Posing parables

In Jesus’s time, one of the most common ways to teach wisdom was through parables. A parable is a short story that puts students in a fictional setting so that they can learn a lesson that bears on their lives. The technique was and is still popular for a lot of reasons. Sometimes it’s because the teacher has taken something commonplace and made it a really clever metaphor for something else. Sometimes the student or hearer is sort of tricked into getting a lesson they’re having trouble seeing. And sometimes the parable presents such a riddle that the student doesn’t really know what it’s about, so he or she can’t stop thinking about it and wondering how to apply it to life.

The parable of the Good Samaritan

The parable of the Good Samaritan appears in Luke 10:25-37. In this story, a lawyer asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus asks him what the law says. (In Deuteronomy 6:5, the law says “Love God with your whole heart, soul, and strength,” and in Leviticus 19:18 it says “Love your neighbor as yourself.”) Embarrassed and seeking to save face, the lawyer asks, “And who is my neighbor?” And Jesus responds with a parable about a man, like the lawyer, who’s walking to Jericho. He gets beaten up by robbers and left for dead. Two Jewish leaders pass him by, but a Samaritan stops and lavishly tends to his wounds.

Jesus concludes the lesson with a question for the overconfident lawyer: “Which of these three seems to you to be neighbor to the man who fell among robbers?” The lawyer can’t bear to say “Samaritan” (see Chapter 7 for background on the Samaritans’ bad blood with the Jews). But he has to admit, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus tells him to “Go and do likewise,” to go and act not like a self-righteous, self-proclaimed legal expert but as a merciful man who truly represents the heart of the Jewish law. With parables, there’s always either a sting in the punch line or a riddle that leaves you scratching your head. Here, the lawyer got tricked into learning the lesson about the Torah that he didn’t want to know.

The parable of the prodigal son

The parable of the prodigal son appears in Luke 15:1-2, 11-32. In this parable, the Pharisees and scribes were upset that Jesus was drawing crowds of toll collectors and sinners. Jesus tells them the story of a father who has two sons. The younger one wants to take off and have fun, so he collects his inheritance and belongings, ventures to another country, and blows his money partying. Soon he’s feeding pigs as some guy’s slave, when he realizes that if he were one of his dad’s servants he’d at least get fed. So, he decides to return home and beg forgiveness. But he never gets the chance to deliver his mea culpa. Instead, his father is standing at the road on the lookout for him. Seeing his lost son, the father runs down the road, throws his arms around him and takes him back in as his son, not his slave. He pulls out all the stops and throws a party for him.

You can probably imagine how the older brother felt. He’s ticked and boycotts the party, so his dad tries to coax him in, and the parable ends before you find out what he did. In the same way, the parable is coaxing the Pharisees and scribes to join the party that Jesus is throwing, as he extends God’s prodigal mercy to the lost.

Condensing wisdom into sayings

Another teaching technique that Jesus used was catchy or pithy sayings. These short, memorable sayings were intended to catch a person’s attention and capture the core idea so that it stuck in his or her mind (much like bumper stickers on cars and good sound bytes on the news). Here are a few examples from the gospels:

● “Who are my mother and brothers? . . . Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God, this one is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:33-35).

● “When someone wants to drag you to court to take your shirt, give him your cloak, too” (Matthew 5:40).

● “Do you think that I’ve come to give peace in the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division . . .” (Luke 12:51; Matthew 10:34).

● “And just as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them” (Luke 6:31; Matthew 7:12).

These sayings of Jesus were likely written down soon after his life. After all, as his followers hit the road to spread Jesus’s message, they needed some kind of cheat sheet of his sayings. There’s evidence of such lists in the sayings source Q and the Gospel of Thomas (flip to Chapter 5 for more on Q and Thomas).

Catchy sayings are great, but without a story around them it can be unclear how to read them. For instance, does “give him your cloak, too” mean that you have to cave to every bully’s demands? Because Jesus’s sayings need some context for clarity, they have come down to us embedded in gospels rather than lists. Set in short stories or grouped in longer discourses, the sayings make more sense.

Rhyming to remember

The gospels don’t preserve Jesus’s teachings in his native Aramaic language. But scholars think that, if they did, some of Jesus’s sayings would be in rhythmic or rhyming patterns that would have made these oral traditions easier to remember. Table 11-1 offers an example of what the Lord’s Prayer may have sounded like with these patterns (Luke 11:2-4; Matthew 6:9-13). In addition to the rhymes (which are underlined), there are some rhythmic patterns, like using the same number of syllables in two linked lines (in Aramaic, “hallowed be your name” has five syllables, and the second line “your kingdom come” does too).

Table 11-1 Rhythm and Rhyme in the Lord's Prayer
English	Aramaic
Father	Ahbah
Hallowed be your name/ Your Kingdom come	Yitqahdahsh shemahk/tay-the malkootahk
Our daily bread/ give us today	Lachmahnah dee misteyah hahb/lahnah yomah denah
And forgive us our debts/ as we forgive our debtors	Ooshebooq lahnah chobaynah/kedee shebaqnah lechayahbaynah
And do not lead us to the test	Weh-ahl ta-aylinahnah lenisyon

Using familiar images

Jesus used common images in his teaching: seeds growing, weeds choking the plants off, birds nesting in shrubs, a woman sweeping her house, a servant doing his master’s bidding, a farmer building barns for his grain. These images are usually metaphors for other things, such as the reign of God or human vanity.

These images get their most extended treatment in parables (such as the parable of the sower casting seed that falls on four different types of ground, which is an image of how Jesus’s message of the kingdom is received; Mark 4:1-20). But these metaphors could also occur in the short sayings, such as when Jesus compares the “men of this generation” to children sitting in a marketplace and complaining (Q 7:31-32). Like any good teacher, Jesus invited people to consider deeper truths by using accessible images.

Teaching by example

The most effective way that Jesus taught was by example — he knew the saying that actions speak louder than words. That principle certainly wasn’t unique to the Jewish wisdom tradition, but it’s firmly planted there in the understanding that ethical actions demonstrate the presence of wisdom. Like other teachers, the gospels show him doing to others what he taught others to do.

For example, he preached that God accepted repentant sinners, and he himself met and ate with those who repented (Jesus’s sharing a meal with these folks symbolized their repentance and return to the community of God, much like John’s baptisms). He preached

that people should give up their possessions to follow him, and he, too, left his home and family. He taught his followers to serve each other by first serving them himself.

Making use of different techniques in the gospel of John

The gospel of John does something entirely different with Jesus’s teaching. He still teaches with sayings and by example, but instead of offering parables and short sayings or sayings grouped into discourses, John’s Jesus consistently speaks in lengthy monologues or dialogues that can run as long as a full chapter. A dialogue may start with a traditional saying such as “Unless someone is born from above, he can’t see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). But then John develops a whole dialogue with Nicodemus going back and forth for 18 verses about what that short saying really means.

Historical Jesus scholars consider this kind of lengthening to be evidence of significant post-resurrection interpretation. As a result, they don’t consider John’s portrait of Jesus to be the most reliable historical evidence. They don’t rule out the entire gospel, however, because isolated traditions have a good claim to authenticity.

This judgment that John’s gospel adds later interpretation to the historical Jesus’s sayings is true of other features of John’s gospel as well. For example, John’s gospel says that Jesus knew he was divine, anticipated everything that was coming, and was completely in control of his own trial and crucifixion. Historical Jesus scholars treat these features as post-resurrection insights read back in to Jesus’s life rather than as evidence for the historical Jesus’s self-knowledge and identity.

Jesus’s Central Theme: Introducing the Reign of God

Jesus’s teaching takes many forms, but each shares one consistent theme — that God’s rule is underway. The phrase “reign (or kingdom) of God,” “kingdom of heaven,” or “kingdom of my father,” occurs 13 times in Mark, 13 times in Q, 31 times in Matthew and Luke, and 2 times in John.

The belief that God is in charge had long characterized the Jewish faith, but over the centuries of foreign domination that belief had been tested. Jesus preached that God would soon return in power, and as you see in Chapter 12, Jesus accompanied that message with powerful signs that lent credibility to the message in people’s eyes. In the following sections, I explain how Jesus introduced the reign of God by presenting it as an alternative to the Roman Empire, and I discuss a few details and rules of this divine kingdom.

Proclaiming the kingdom of God as an alternative to Roman rule

Jesus’s assertion that God’s rule or kingdom was at hand was a not-so-veiled challenge to the current rulers (see Chapters 6 and 8 for more about Rome). His assertion implied that their rule was defective and that God’s vision for the world was different.

At times, Jesus’s teachings seemed to parody the propaganda of the Roman Empire. Jesus challenged the Empire by doing the following:

● Calling God abba, which means “father” or “dad” in Aramaic: Referring to God like this was seen as disrespectful to the Roman Emperor because he considered himself the father and king. Emperor Augustus (see Chapter 6 for details about him) had taken the formal title pater patriae (meaning “father of the fatherland”) in 2 BCE. The practice of referring to an emperor as father and king, especially in the Near East, contributed to the religious cult of the emperor, who was likened to the ruler of the gods (Zeus/Jupiter). Jesus, however, prayed to a different father king and God.

● Blessing the poor, the mourners, and the hungry: Augustan buildings, statuary, and coins depicted the imperial family as a source of prosperity and peace, and dedicatory inscriptions to them and their affiliates in the provinces lavished praise on those who bestowed material benefits. Jesus instead taught that the source of prosperity is God, not the emperor or the wealthy. He imagined a kingdom where the oppressed would be blessed (see the next section for more about these oppressed folks).

● Healing and feeding people: A ruler’s chief responsibility was to “save” people by providing conditions for them to thrive. For that reason, the emperors often took the title s_t_r (or “savior”). They justified their absolute power by claiming to have their subjects’ best interests at heart. The fact that there were plenty of people that Jesus needed to heal and feed points to the failure of human rule and to the advent of true salvation.

● Creating a community of the Twelve: Against the expanding Roman Empire, Jesus envisioned a kingdom that harked back to Israel’s earliest constitution of 12 tribes. So, he created a community of 12 disciples (which was called the Twelve) and sent them out to expand God’s “empire” (see Chapter 10 for more about the Twelve).

The previous are just the examples that have a historical basis.

The gospel authors paint God’s reign as an alternative to Rome and its client kingdoms in many other ways as well. For example:

● When they speak of Jesus’s return in glory (with the term “the [second] coming”), they’re using the very word that was coined for the emperor’s visits to the provinces.

● When they refer to Jesus’s message as the “good news” or “gospel,” they’re redefining the very term that the emperor used to announce his own success.

● Even terms such as faith (or loyalty), justice, and peace were prominent in Roman propaganda, and so they carried political freight when used by the gospel authors.

It isn’t clear whether the historical Jesus thought of himself as king of God’s kingdom. For one thing, we don’t really have access to what he thought; we have only the later reflections on his story in the gospels. But one historical fact speaks against it: Had Jesus preached that he was a king or the royal messiah, particularly of the Davidic warrior stripe, the tetrarch Herod Antipas would have hauled him into the slammer while he was still preaching in the Galilee. After all, he beheaded John the Baptist for a lot less! (See Chapter 10 for more on John’s beheading.) In Chapter 14 I take up why Jesus is finally executed as King of the Jews.

Seeing who's invited to the kingdom

Jesus may have been a wisdom teacher, but he sure didn’t attract the most sophisticated students. Rather than wealthy or educated folks, such as lawyers and scholars, his first followers were fishermen, a toll collector (he might have been well-off), a zealot/rebel, and a guy who would betray him in the end. And, of course, he takes a lot of heat for hanging out with thieves and prostitutes (the proverbial “toll collectors and sinners”). It’s no surprise that the citizens of the kingdom that he teaches about look like a pretty ragtag bunch, too.

Blessing the poor, mourners, and hungry through beatitudes

One of the earliest collections of Jesus’s sayings is the beatitudes, or blessings. Some preachers today refer to them as “be-attitudes” — the attitudes you should cultivate if you follow Jesus. But the earliest and most historical of the beatitudes aren’t so much attitudes that you would cultivate; they’re more like states that you would rather not be in, such as poverty, mourning, and hunger.

The beatitudes are preserved in Matthew and Luke. Matthew has nine beatitudes and Luke shares four of those. The shared beatitudes most likely came from the common source Q (see Chapters 3 and 5 for more on Q). Table 11-2 lays out the beatitudes in these sources.

Table 11-2 The Beatitudes in Matthew, Luke, and Q
Matthew	Luke/Q
Blessed are the poor in spirit receive kingdom of heaven (5:3)	Blessed are the poor receive kingdom of God (б:20)
		. . . those who mourn will be comforted (5:4)	. . . those who weep now you shall laugh (6:21)
. . . the meek; will inherit the earth (5:5)
. . . those who hunger/thirst for righteousness; shall be satisfied (5:6)	. . . those who hunger now shall be satisfied (6:21)
		. . . the merciful; will obtain mercy (5:7)
. . . the pure in heart; will see God (5:8)
. . . the peacemakers; will be called sons of God (5:9)
. . . those persecuted for ' righteousness sake theirs is the kingdom of heaven (5:10)
		. . . those reviled, persecuted, slandered reward is great in heaven (5:11-12)	. . . hated, excluded, reviled, cast out reward is great in heaven (6:22-23).

Because the last beatitude in the table is longer than the other three, some people think that it wasn’t part of Jesus’s original preaching even though apparently it was in Q. The oral sayings in Q are usually shorter and pithier, and besides, expanding on the persecutions that followers might endure is just the kind of thing that followers who have already endured those persecutions might amplify. So, if that last beatitude is a late addition or expansion, that leaves the poor, the mourners, and the hungry as God’s special guests in Jesus’s original teaching. The presumption is that the wealthy, laughing, and well-fed won’t be on the guest list. In fact, Luke makes this fact explicit in his subsequent “woes,” when he presents Jesus proclaiming how miserable the rich, the full, the happy, and the well-regarded people will soon be (Luke 6:24-26).

Inviting sinners to share a meal

In addition to the economically disadvantaged, the kingdom that Jesus preached about included any sinner who repented of his or her sinful ways. This practice seems to have been a continuation of John the Baptist’s tradition (see Chapter 10). John preached repentance and symbolized it through a dip in the Jordan River.

However, Jesus’s chief way of symbolizing the repentance of a sinner was to share a meal with him. In the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Jesus does this right away with Levi, the toll collector. Immediately after Jesus calls Levi to follow him, they’re at Jesus’s house for a meal (Mark 2:14-17; Matthew 9:9-13). This meal is held at Levi’s house in Luke’s gospel (Luke 5:29).

This practice of eating with sinners earned Jesus the reputation of a sinner himself — and a glutton and a drunkard to boot (see Chapter 10). But it seems to reflect his vision of God’s mercy. As in the parable of the prodigal son, which I cover earlier in this chapter, God is so overjoyed at the return of sinners that the righteous are practically ignored. You can also compare this situation to the one in the parable of the good shepherd, who leaves the 99 sheep to find the one who’s strayed (Luke 15:1-7).

Rejecting the rich

One of the most awkward of Jesus’s sayings is that the rich will have a rough time getting admitted to God’s reign. This teaching astounded his disciples. After all, they lived in a world with virtually no government handouts, a world where you depended first on your extended family for help and then on the mercy of the wealthy. The wealthy were praised for donations that they would make for the care of the sick, the widows, the orphans, the immigrants, and the burial of the dead. Heck, the wealthy often praised themselves by attaching inscriptions to public buildings, such as hospitals and synagogues, noting their benefactions. However, Jesus came along and said:

How hard it will be for those who have possessions to enter into the reign of God. . . Children, how hard it is to enter the reign of God. It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the reign of God.

—Mark 10:23-25

This motif of favoring the poor over the rich is especially prominent in Luke’s gospel. To stress his point, he adds the following:

Mary’s song praising God for lifting the lowly and the hungry (Luke 1:46-55)

The image of Jesus born in a stable (Luke 2:7)

● John the Baptist’s “economic” advice to the crowds, toll collectors, and soldiers (Luke 3:10-14)

● A warning against greed (Luke 12:13-15)

● The parable of the rich fool who builds bigger barns to store his huge harvest only to die that night (Luke 12:16-21)

● A teaching about humility at banquets and about inviting to your table those who can’t repay you (Luke 14:7-14)

● The parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31)

● The story of the toll collector Zacchaeus who gives half of his possessions to the poor and all of his ill-gotten gains at 400 percent interest (Luke 19:1-10)

Keep in mind the rule for reconstructing history from the sources: A tradition is on firmer historical footing if it’s reported in multiple independent witnesses (see Chapter 3 for more details). When only one gospel stresses a point, and does so over and over again in a unique fashion, it starts to look like the theme is the author’s special interest. That doesn’t mean that Jesus didn’t share the sentiment. It just means that the specific teachings one finds only in Luke more likely trace to the gospel author than to the historical Jesus.

Finding out the kingdom's rules

For the most part, Jesus’s take on the rules of the kingdom of God followed and even strengthened the commands that had been revealed earlier in Jewish history. But he also took certain liberties with them, and offered some new ones too.

Reinforcing the Law of Moses

The Jewish people already had a law to live by, namely the Law of Moses, better known as the Torah. It wasn’t just laws, however; this collection also included the stories from the first five books of the Bible (see Chapter 7 for more on the Torah).

Here are some of the ways that Jesus practiced the Law of Moses:

Jesus wore the kraspedon, a garment with fringes that were designed to remind the practicing Jew of the commandments (Numbers 15:38-39; Mark 6:56).

Jesus kept the Sabbath, which is the day of rest that practicing Jews observed from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday (Mark 1:21-22; Exodus 20:8-11; Deuteronomy 5:12-15).

Like other Jews, it was Jesus’s custom to attend the synagogue on the Sabbath to hear and discuss readings from the Torah

(Mark 1:21; 3:1-6; Luke 4:16). The gospels say that he also healed on the Sabbath and that some people thought this violated the principle of rest. (You can read more on that in Chapter 13.)

● Jesus participated in the pilgrimage festivals and sacrifices at the Jerusalem Temple even though his home was a couple of days’ journey to the north (Mark 14:1-2; Matthew 26:1-5; Luke 22:1; John 2:13; 5:1; 7; 10:22; 11:55-57).

In addition, Jesus summarized the 613 commandments of the Torah in his teaching by quoting 2, Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and Leviticus 19:18, as did other rabbis of the time. When one of the scribes approached him and asked which commandment was first or most important, Jesus replied:

The first is this: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” [Deuteronomy 6:4-5]. The second is this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” [Leviticus 19:18]. There is no other commandment greater than these.

—Mark 12:29-31

The gospels present Jesus’s teaching to be radically faithful to the Law of Moses and the prophets (for more on this dynamic duo, see the nearby sidebar “Jesus’s ‘Bible’”). So, just like the prophets before him, Jesus could be critical of how the Law of Moses was practiced if he thought a deeper principle of the law was at stake.

For example, Jesus praises a scribe who gets the message that love of God and neighbor is more important than Temple rituals, just as the earlier Jewish prophets had said (Mark 12:32-34; see 1 Samuel 15:22; Hosea 6:6; Micah 6:6-8). Laws weren’t actually rejected, but some did take priority. So, Matthew is probably accurate “in spirit” when he reports Jesus’s position:

Don’t think that I’ve come to tear down the law or the prophets; I haven’t come to tear down but to fulfill. Truly I tell you: Until heaven and earth pass away, not one iota or serif will pass away from the law, until all things have occurred.

—Matthew 5:17-18

The gospels probably add quite a bit to the historical record when it comes to Jesus’s attitude toward the Law of Moses. Between the historical Jesus and the gospels’ composition, Jesus’s followers debated the relevance of significant parts of the Jewish law, especially dietary laws (Galatians 2:12) and the obligation for males to be circumcised (Galatians 5:1-12). As more and more non-Jews entered the Christian faith, the issue only became more pointed.

These debates reshaped the memory of the historical Jesus’s views. As a result, the gospel authors overemphasize and escalate the debates between Jesus and the Pharisees and scribes. But if Jesus himself had dismissed all or part of the Jewish law, there would have been no later debate about which parts to keep and which parts to jettison; Jesus’s teaching would’ve settled the matter.

Deepening the law of Moses

Even though Jesus’s teaching was grounded in Jewish law and ethics, he often took the law a little further than Moses originally did. In that respect, Jesus was more like the Pharisees than not; they, too, were trying to extend the written Law of Moses with oral supplements that applied the old law to new situations (see Chapter 7 for details).

In Matthew 5:21-48, the author collects some sayings of Jesus from Q and his own sources that require followers to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). All of these take the Law of Moses and extend it or make it tougher. Table 11-3 lays out Jesus’s sayings against the passages from the Law of Moses so that you can see for yourself how Jesus intensifies the laws.

Table 11-3 The Torah and Jesus's Teaching
Torah	Matthew
You shall not kill (Exodus 20:13).	Don't be angry, insult anyone, or call him a fool (Matthew 5:21-26).
You shall not commit adultery (Exodus 20:14).	Don't look at a woman lustfully (Matthew 5:27-30).
You can divorce (Deuteronomy 24:1-4).	You can't divorce at all (Q: Matthew 5:31-32 || Luke 16:18; Matthew adds an exception in the case of unchastity, but this is probably not original to the historical Jesus; there's no such exception in 1 Corinthians 7:10-16, Luke 16:18 [possibly the original Q form], and Mark 10:11-12).
You cannot swear falsely (Leviticus 19:12).	You cannot swear at all (Matthew 5:33-37).
You can retaliate (eye for eye) (Exodus 21:24).	You can't retaliate (that is, you must turn the other cheek) (Q: Matthew 5:38-42 || Luke 6:29-30).
Love neighbor, hate enemy (first part, Leviticus 19:18).	Love enemy, do good to your persecutors (Q: Matthew 5:43-48 || Luke 6:27-28, 32-36).

Jesus's "Bible"

The Torah wasn't the only source of revealed law around the time of Jesus. The books of the great prophets who served as royal advisers during the Israelite monarchy preserved oracles that challenged the king and the people to live according to God's law. By Jesus's time, "the law and the prophets" was a stock phrase that referred to the scriptures (Matthew 7:12; Luke 16:16; 24:27). Luke adds the psalms to this list as well (Luke 24:44). During this time, people seem to have used this phrase like we might use the term "Bible" today.

Jewish groups, including the Samaritans (see Chapter 7), agreed about the authority of the Torah, although the exact contents of their Torahs differed a bit from each other. However, among those groups that looked to additional books as scripture, there were more significant differences over which books counted as "prophets" and authoritative wisdom books or "writings." Even some of the New Testament authors mention authoritative scriptures that aren't in the Bible today (see Jude 6 and possibly Matthew 2:23).

These “new rules” set the bar pretty high for Jesus’s disciples! No lustful looks and no anger? What fun is that? It’s a pretty impossible standard, but in a way, that’s the point: No one is really righteous; no one is really like God. The first step in following this law is to realize that humans aren’t the authors of it. There’s no room for the self-righteous here. That’s why Matthew follows this up with advice against religious hypocrisy (Matthew 6:1-18) and the accumulation of money (Matthew 6:19-25) — the hypocrites consider themselves the ultimate judges of what God’s law is (Matthew 7:1-5; 12), while the wealthy risk thinking that they’re self-sufficient and don’t need God at all (Matthew 6:25-34; 7:7-11).

Jesus as God's Wisdom

When it comes to the rules of the kingdom of God, Jesus appears to assume the authority of a legal expert. He determines how the Torah should be read, and he feels free to define the principles behind the Jewish law. The gospel authors, especially Matthew, set Jesus up on par with the greatest legal expert in Jewish history: the lawgiver himself, Moses. When Matthew presents Jesus going up a mountain to teach followers about the Jewish law, he’s emphasizing that Jesus is like Moses, who also went up a mountain and proclaimed a law (Matthew 5-7). But when he presents Jesus giving the law rather than receiving it from God (as Moses did), he’s positioning Jesus well above Moses and in league with God.

The earlier sayings source Q doesn’t present Jesus as Moses, but it does tie him to divine revelation. For instance, in Q, Jesus doesn’t only speak God’s wisdom, he actually becomes Wisdom:

The son of man has come eating and drinking, and you say, “See, a glutton and a drunk, a friend of toll collectors and sinners.” But wisdom is justified by all her children.

—Luke 7:35; Matthew 11:19

Figuring out when the kingdom is coming

The historical Jesus seems to have expected that God’s reign and a final judgment were near at hand. He received John’s baptism in anticipation of the day of the Lord. He prepared for that day by gathering 12 disciples. This action was symbolic of the restoration of the scattered 12 tribes of Israel (for the expectation that the scattered people would be gathered back to the land, see Isaiah 27:12-13; 43:1-8; Hosea 11:11; Baruch 4:37; 5:5-6; 2 Maccabees 1:27, 29; 2:18). Like these earlier writers, Jesus envisioned that soon faithful Israel and all the nations would gather together at God’s table (Isaiah 56:1-8). But there is another, darker note sounded as well, that those in Israel who rejected this kingdom would be left in the cold:

I say to you that many from the east and west will come and recline with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of the heavens, while the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.

—Matthew 8:11-12; Luke 13:28-29

Another example showing that Jesus thought the coming of the kingdom was close was when he told the famous parable of the sower who scatters seed. In this parable, after the seeds are scattered, the sun scorches some, birds eat a few, and weeds choke the seedlings, but some of the seeds land in fertile soil and grow into a rich harvest (Mark 4:1-20). The seed is the teaching Jesus “sows” in the ears of his hearers in expectation of an approaching harvest. Like the mustard seed of another parable, the kingdom starts small but grows large (Mark 4:30-32). These agricultural metaphors imply that the “harvest” or end is near.

It seems that Jesus thought some of his disciples would survive to see the son of man return (Matthew 10:23; Mark 9:1; 13:30); Paul thought the same thing (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; 1 Corinthians 7:26, 29-31; 15:51-52; Romans 13:11-14). But Jesus also acknowledged that the precise day or hour was unknown, even to him (Mark 13:32-37; Q 7:26-36; 12:39-46; 19:11-27).

At the same time, Jesus also seems to have acted as if the reign of God had already started. In the gospels, he claims as much on the proof of his power over Satan (Luke 11:20; Mark 3:27). Jesus’s other healings led people to believe that God’s power was breaking into the world in new ways (Matthew 11:2-6; Luke 4:18-19 quoting Isaiah 61:1-2). See Chapter 12 for more on Jesus’s miracles. His practice of eating with sinners rather than fasting also suggests that, for Jesus, the end-time party had already begun (Mark 2:18-20).

Covering all the bases in the Lord’s Prayer

As you might expect, Jesus prayed a lot. So, his disciples asked him to teach them how to pray, too. The core of the prayer that Jesus taught them, which is preserved in Q, covers all the chief themes about the kingdom (Matthew 6:9-13 || Luke 11:2-4):

● “Father”

● “Hallowed be your name — your Kingdom come”

● “Our daily bread give us today”

● “And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”

● “And do not lead us to the test”

The prayer focuses on God’s rule and God’s mercy. Unlike human rulers, this Father was truly holy, fed followers, showed mercy on debts owed him (presumably sins) and expected followers to do likewise with all debts owed them (financial and spiritual), and could protect followers from evil.

Advising Followers How to Remember Him

A couple of practices that Jesus taught, particularly toward the end of his life, had to do with his followers’ remembrance of him.

Establishing a memorial meal

At his final meal with his disciples on the eve of his arrest (see Chapter 14), Jesus broke bread, gave thanks, and shared it with the

Twelve, calling it “my body broken for you.” At that point, he took a cup of wine, gave thanks again, and shared it with them, calling it “the cup of the new covenant in my blood” (1 Corinthians 11:23-26; Mark 14:22-25; Matthew 26:26-29; Luke 22:14-20). He then asked his disciples to remember him whenever they shared this meal.

It seems that the earliest Christians remembered this meal not simply by sharing bread and wine or by recalling Jesus’s words. Instead, because Jesus had made the bread and wine symbols of the gift of his life for them, they understood that the meal was about serving others (John 13:1-17). Remember the part of the Lord’s Prayer that asks God to give people their “daily bread”? According to early traditions, the first Christians made sure that their members got their daily bread by collecting and sharing their surplus (Acts 2:42-47; 4:32-35; 6:1).

Jesus’s final meal looks both to the past and to the future. The meal helped Jesus look backward to his table fellowship with sinners and forward to the messianic party God would throw at the end of time.

Exemplifying service

Jesus shares a final meal with his disciples in John’s gospel, too, only you never hear anything about what they eat! Instead, Jesus stood up from the table, took off his outer garment, and proceeded to wash each disciple’s feet (John 13:1-20).

The image of Jesus washing someone’s feet is a striking one that may be lost on you and me because most people today don’t own slaves. In Jesus’s time they did, however, and foot washing was one of those menial, dirty, smelly jobs you left to your servants. People wore sandals and walked on dirt roads with animal excrement and garbage scattered everywhere. Would you want to wash feet that had tramped through that?

Here’s how John’s Jesus explains why he decided to take up foot washing: If he, as their teacher, takes on the role of his students’ slave, they should do the same for others. It’s an impressive image of humility for the community’s future leaders.

Things Jesus Didn’t Talk About

Given how much attention certain topics get today, you may be surprised to find out that Jesus never even addressed some of them. For example, we have no evidence that the historical Jesus spoke about the following hot topics of today:

● Abortion: The earliest reference to abortion is in the Didache 2.2, or “Teachings of the Twelve,” which is a Christian document that circulated in the late first and early second century CE. In this document, abortion is grouped with a teaching against infanticide, or the killing of newborns, in a short chapter on the love of neighbor.

The Epistle of Barnabas from about the same time makes the same point, grouping the command against abortion with the prohibition of infanticide, love of neighbor, and the encouragement to discipline children (Barnabas 19.5). Even though these texts are early, there’s nothing like them in the gospels at all when Jesus discusses love of neighbor. So, there’s no evidence that Jesus addressed the issue.

● His own divinity: One of the cardinal principles of historical Jesus research is that the belief in Jesus’s divinity is a postresurrection phenomenon. During his life, his acts of power were understood as signs that God (or Satan) was working through him — not that he was God.

The gospel of John presents Jesus teaching that he’s divine, but most scholars treat this as a later interpretation rather than a historical fact because it’s so much more highly developed here than in the earlier gospels and gospel sources (see the section “Making use of different techniques in the gospel of John”).

● Priesthood: Jesus called followers and selected the Twelve to judge Israel, but he never ordained anyone or presented the disciples’ role in terms of the Temple priesthood. There wasn’t any need for all that future planning — because he probably thought that the world would end soon.

● Sex: Jesus offered a brief saying or two about marriage in the context of divorce (Matthew 5:31-32; 19:1-10; Luke 16:18;

Mark 10:11-12), and in one passage in Matthew favored celibacy, although this doesn’t seem to go back to Jesus. Paul says celibacy is his preference, not the Lord’s command (1 Corinthians 7:6, 25). And, despite how much people argue it today, we don’t have any record that Jesus ever mentioned anything about homosexuality.

● Slavery: Jesus doesn’t teach against slavery; in fact, he seems to presume it without criticizing it in his parables (Mark 12:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14).

While the historical Jesus never spoke about these (and many other) issues, most Christian denominations understand their traditions to be based not only on the historical Jesus’s words and deeds, but also on developing traditions about him that are present in the gospels and in ongoing biblical interpretation and church teaching.