I never said you said any of these things you say I said you said, and how did we get back to that again? 🙄
Matthew is the oldest surviving source for that story. Is all I meant. We’re not discussing lost sources here. Why did you assume I was saying Matthew was the original source? See? It never ends! And now Bren will pop up and explain why this means Matthew wrote first. Good night. 🙂
There’s no mention of whether the soldiers John talks to are pagans. Yes, Jews were exempt from mandatory military service, but there’s plenty of evidence some did join up voluntarily, and there were instances where the draft exemption was revoked.
So that doesn’t really speak to John’s openness to gentiles. We don’t know they were gentiles (didn’t Herod Antipas have some soldiers of his own?), and it’s a bit of a headscratcher why pagan soldiers would be asking John about their wages. I’m not saying he refused to talk to them. I am saying we have a lot of stories about Jesus actively engaging with gentiles, Samaritans–even women! And if there were such stories about John, I don’t see why Christian writers, looking to attract John’s followers, and knowing Jesus revered John, wouldn’t include more of them.
Robert, very often it seems like you’re never saying anything.
Is this original to Luke, or did he get it from Q? I don’t know what Luke understood that story to mean, but that’s hardly relevant. The point is, the soldiers John spoke to probably were not pagan Roman soldiers. I think his giving them helpful advice would have aroused some controversy among Jews–wouldn’t you?
I read Marcus’ book, btw. I never said John didn’t share a lot of attitudes with Jesus, quite the contrary (so I’m sure you’ll apologize for misunderstanding me).
But Marcus makes it pretty clear John’s approach was pretty different. And we have the simple evidence that Jesus was seen as heretical by many fellow Jews, and John was viewed with some disquiet by the establishment, but still fairly well respected. That’s why Christians were persecuted, and John’s followers were, in the main, ignored, even though there were probably more of them to start with. Jesus encouraged active proselytization–and wasn’t exclusive about who should be approached, even though the main audience were other Jews. He consorted with all kinds of people John mainly wouldn’t have. Including pagans. (And women!)
Reactionay/Conservative/Liberal/Radical–a spectrum. Not absolute positions. I’ve always considered myself a liberal, but to some people I’m quite conservative. To others, I’m a raving commie. (To no one am I a reactionary.) It’s all relative. Relatively speaking, Jesus was further ‘left’ (I can’t imagine a more anachronistic term, but seems we’re stuck with it) than John.
And I’m not sure John viewing rocks on the ground as potential future recruits is terribly helpful. Yes, he was also at war with the Jewish establishment. And yet, his cult went unmolested, far as we know. Because his cult stayed within the rather large boundaries of what was considered acceptably Jewish. And the Jesus cult didn’t. Why? Gentiles.
If we can’t even be sure the passage in Luke is authentic, or refers to pagan soldiers, then why bring it up?
Also, do you mean Mandaeism? I agree that’s not Jewish, but I’m not aware of any scholarly consensus that the Cult of John was not as much a part of Judaism as the Jesus cult, in the years immediately following the crucifixion.
And I don’t take anyone’s word here for what scholarly consensus is. (It’s not like the 538 website keeps track). Back it up.
Found poetry…
I never said you said any of these things you say I said you said…
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These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
Once again, this seems to come from the oldest part of the tradition. It’s very difficult to see what later group of Christians would have made this up. By Matthew’s day gentiles were already an important and growing part of the Church. The general trend is towards inclusiveness (although Matthew’s community still thinks the gentile convert must be Torah observant) and any contrary notion in the tradition would seem to testify to its authenticity. The gospel writers and their audience, mostly gentiles, would have had a vested interest in inclusiveness. Paul, the outrider and innovator, had his own agenda of course.
There is absolutely NO reason to believe there were no gentile converts before Paul. The difference was that before Paul, they had to become Jews in order to be accepted. Because Christianity began as a subset of Judaism, and was dominated by sincere religious Jews, whose only major point of difference with their fellow Jews was that they believed Jesus was Messiah.
Stephen said
Found poetry…I never said you said any of these things you say I said you said…
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These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
Once again, this seems to come from the oldest part of the tradition. It’s very difficult to see what later group of Christians would have made this up. By Matthew’s day gentiles were already an important and growing part of the Church. The general trend is towards inclusiveness (although Matthew’s community still thinks the gentile convert must be Torah observant) and any contrary notion in the tradition would seem to testify to its authenticity. The gospel writers and their audience, mostly gentiles, would have had a vested interest in inclusiveness. Paul, the outrider and innovator, had his own agenda of course.
Glad you liked it. Not much, but better than the poem you posted. 🙂
This quote comes from Matthew, who wanted to emphasize Jesus’ Jewishness. I don’t listen to amateurs on message boards about how old this or that tradition is.
So not really much of an argument.
Interesting question, RE Matthew–I agree with Bart that he probably wasn’t a Jew, at least not in the sense of having been born into a Jewish family. But if he was part of that Pre-Paul generation of pagan converts that had to become Jewish, it would explain a lot about his simultaneous devotion to Judaism, his determination to make Jesus the ideal Judaism was striving towards, and his rage against people born Jewish who fail to see this.
So to me, that quote about not going to the towns of the gentiles is suggestive of a problem–after all, we say the evangelists are overemphasizing Jesus’ attention to non-Jews because pagans were an ever-larger faction within the new church. We don’t 100% trust this emphasis, and rightly so.
But if this is an older tradition–that Matthew is somewhat re-purposing–what’s that there for? What is that overemphasizing, because it was certainly also written down well after Jesus was gone, and also responding to exigencies of the day. Should we trust this 100%?
Why is Jesus bothering to tell his disciples not to go to the towns of the gentiles? Why would they be doing that in the first place? They’re all Jews, and they are preaching a form of Judaism. Mind you, there would be some Jews in gentile-majority towns, just as there would be some gentiles in Jewish-majority towns. And there were plenty of towns where you met basically everyone, trading centers, ports, etc. But Jesus is telling them to avoid towns where Jews are thin on the ground–why would they even be going there, if we’re agreed the focus was on Jews? And the reception would probably not be friendly in heavily pagan towns–it was bad enough sometimes in heavily Jewish towns.
So this smacks of something cooked up to speak to an accusation Jews were making against Jesus, in the early days, after the crucifixion, when the focus was entirely on convincing fellow Jews Jesus was Messiah–that he wasn’t a real Jew, that he talked to all kinds of disreputable people, that he was unorthodox, too free in his associations. That’s too widespread a perception to be cooked up after the fact. Jesus would talk to anyone, and indeed had a special affection for the outsiders–in any society. The Last Shall Be First, The First Shall Be Last. By their fruits shall ye know them. Not what family they were born into, not what synagogue they attend.
And this is deeply original–and almost certainly true of the real Jesus. But again, it doesn’t constitute a ‘mission to the gentiles.’ That came later–after it became obvious that they’d run out of Jews who could be persuaded.
Hngerhman said
My ignorance talking, I’m intrigued by the concept of post-Easter, pre-Paul gentile converts. Not a concept I’ve given much thought to yet. What’s the best set of positive evidence for this?
Not much. That’s the problem. The vital period between the death of Jesus (the thirties) and the period of the authentic Pauline letters (the fifties) is almost completely occluded. The accounts in Acts are thought to be mostly legendary except by fundamentalists.
It’s clear from Paul’s letters that he had competitors. He didn’t found the church in Rome which seems to have been of mixed ethnicity. The presumption is that there must have been non-Pauline gentile converts. But Paul is writing twenty to twenty-five years after Jesus’ death. Who knows how many years must have passed before there was any kind of gentile interest in Jesus? We know there were gentile converts to Judaism but whether this demographic served as audience for the emergent Jesus movement it’s impossible to say.
Why is Jesus bothering to tell his disciples not to go to the towns of the gentiles?
Because he was a Jewish apocalyptic sectarian leading a purity movement preaching to Jews calling for repentance before the imminent judgement and establishment of the kingdom. He was most likely highly suspicious of Hellenized Jews and pagans alike because they were part of a cosmic system of evil that he opposed. The Hellenized Jews would have been considered apostates and the pagans demonically possessed. The truth is that Jesus and his followers had some weird ideas and didn’t think like us at all. Jesus taught love for own community and destruction for everyone else.
That’s a hell of a stretch, Stephen. But then, you’re the one saying that Jesus was arrested at the temple, right after he turned over some tables, and somehow nobody remembered that, even though it wouldn’t have changed the way the story turned out. You believe what suits you, and ignore the rest.
Hellenized Jews? There is zero indication Jesus had any concerns about this. If he was so worried about his followers being polluted, he would have done what John the Baptist did. Never mind what towns you go to–you have to travel for days, weeks, to get to those towns. You will invariably meet all kinds of people on the way. A peripatetic ministry can’t live in a hermetically sealed bubble. If the only people he wants to reach are the ultra-orthodox, how come the ultra-orthodox all hated his guts? It was the ultra-orthodox who got him crucified. His problem isn’t that he’s too pure–even John is concerned that he’s too unconventional, too out there. John is worried about this while he’s in prison, awaiting execution.
The Esssenes tended not to mingle a lot. John took a step away from that, went out to preach, baptize–let people come to him. Jesus took it another step, went wandering from town to town, talking to anyone who’d listen. Primarily to Jews–but invariably others would be curious. And to him, that was fine. Why would they make something like that up, in the early days, when they were trying to convert mainly Jews? That was yet another bug that became a feature, because it gave them another option–gentiles. But they didn’t get this at first. Jesus was telling them not to be so rigid.
There’s so much basis for saying Jesus would talk to anyone interested in what he had to say. But this one quote you helpfully provided really does smack of them trying to play that down, because it was hurting them with Jews who thought Jesus was very very far from being a pure sectarian–quite the contrary. He was the one who wanted to knock barriers down, because what you professed to believe was so much less important than how you practiced that faith. Hellenized Jews? He’d talk to Samaritans. He didn’t care. He was from Galilee. To Jews elsewhere in Palestine, Galileans were the bottom of the barrel. To Jesus, it was the outsiders, the scorned, the poor, the oppressed, who really mattered.
And that is what Bart Ehrman has said. In books. That you read. And sometimes quote. When it suits you. 😉
In your opinion. Yes. But they were almost certainly Jewish soldiers serving under Herod Antipas. As many genuine scholars have pointed out. Look at the analysis further down.
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(I am really surprised you didn’t know this–I mean, I never thought about this quote before, and I just GUESSED. Now you’re going to say “Of course I knew this, why are you assuming I never knew this, it’s so wrong of you to misquote what I’m……).
The Mandaeans are entirely irrelevant to the time period we’re talking about. Might as well bring up the Mormons. 🙂
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