There are two schools of thought that I like the most when considering the idea of Jesus preaching a life of poverty.  On the one hand there’s the view that Bart takes which is that the Kingdom of God was a future event for Jesus and as spiker described there would be a reversal of fortune for the poor and downtrodden in the world Jesus lived in and the rich people of that world.  See the Beatitudes in Matthew for what the poor of the world of Jesus would inherit in the Kingdom of God.

The other idea is that Jesus was a Cynic.  For those who take that view Jesus thought he was already living in the Kingdom of God.  Cynics taught that the only way to really see the world and reach a state of purity was to, among other things, live a life of poverty.  There are many parallels between the philosophy of the Cynics and what Jesus taught.  Living a life of poverty is just one of many.

spiker said

Greg Matthews said    The other idea is that Jesus was a Cynic.  For those who take that view Jesus thought he was already living in the Kingdom of God.

I see you finally got your doctorate. Steefan must have put in a good word for you.

Not sure, I follow the logic of the Cynic view, that is, how could one believe they were already living in the Kingdom when Israel was still dominated by Rome, etc. Doesn’t the arrival of the kingdom, mean the overthrow of the evil forces governing the world?

Technically I had it all along.  I think I figured out what the issue was.  At the time I had more posts than you and had reached whatever threshold was the “Doctorate” level.  I think there’s a bug in the module that assigns the badges.  When you reached the threshold you were the second Doctorate and your badge for that was visible.  This idea was proven when I came back from my break and I saw that you no longer have a badge, but now mine is visible again.  You’ve passed me in post count and have crossed the threshold for the next badge.  I think we’ll only know for sure when I pass that threshold which will probably be 450 posts.

As to the Cynics, this is something I’ve become very interested in over the past week or two.  Those who believe that Jesus was a Cynic say that he believed the Kingdom of God was already in the present.  The view is very similar to Bart’s except that he says that since Jesus was an apocalyptic that for him the KoG must be in the future and that it’s arrival was imminent.  For those who think Jesus was a Cynic they propose that Jesus taught that there must be a better way to live together than the way people lived in the “evil”, cold society that the Romans had created.  To bring about a better way to live together then there must be a change in the behavior of people in the world as it existed (not some future world).  The KoG was the manifestation of that change in behavior.  In essence, the teachings of Jesus were an alternative way to live harmoniously together.

To really get a grasp on this you need to understand the collapse of various societies centuries before Jesus when Alexander conquered them, how those societies changed over the centuries to when the Romans arrived on the scene and how the Romans really screwed everything up by trying to scrub away the ethnic, social and religious identities of many of the locales they conquered.  To the pro-Cynic / KoG-in-the-now crowd what Jesus was teaching was a solution to the troubles created centuries before him.

gavriel said

Greg Matthews said
There are two schools of thought that I like the most when considering the idea of Jesus preaching a life of poverty.  On the one hand there’s the view that Bart takes which is that the Kingdom of God was a future event for Jesus and as spiker described there would be a reversal of fortune for the poor and downtrodden in the world Jesus lived in and the rich people of that world.  See the Beatitudes in Matthew for what the poor of the world of Jesus would inherit in the Kingdom of God.

The other idea is that Jesus was a Cynic.  For those who take that view Jesus thought he was already living in the Kingdom of God.  Cynics taught that the only way to really see the world and reach a state of purity was to, among other things, live a life of poverty.  There are many parallels between the philosophy of the Cynics and what Jesus taught.  Living a life of poverty is just one of many.

I think that a cynic teacher of wisdom would not have been executed, or at least much less likely. There must have been some disruptive or offending elements in his teaching, which surfaced at the wrong moment and place. This is the Criterion of Execution, held up by the safest fact of all Jesus-facts.

Care for the suffering is not incompatible with apocalypticism. It would be an independent value, which is abundantly attested in the Gospels and in Paul’s letters. In fact, giving one’s property to the poor fits in with an apocalyptic view because soon  the rich don’t need the money while it helps the suffering.

No doubt.  If nothing else Jesus was thoroughly a Jew and as such he was obviously heavily influenced by Jewish thought.  That said, I think it’s unwise to ignore the fact that the region of Galilee was far from Jerusalem and cut off from the epicenter of Jewish culture by mountains on 3 sides and a huge lake on the other.  Within the region, during the time of Jesus, within 25 miles of Nazareth there were 12 Greek cities and it was the area that later rabbis would call “the region of the Gentiles” (paraphrasing Burton Mack).  Mack also writes that the people in Galilee considered themselves Galileans, not Jews, nor Syrians, nor Samaritans.  It had only been ruled by kings of Jerusalem twice in the preceding thousand years before Jesus.

All that said, I buy into Joel Marcus’ reasoning that Mark wrote his gospel in southern Syria very near to Galilee or in the hills outside of the region.  With this in mind perhaps it is Mark who projects more heavily the Cynic philosophy onto Jesus.  His gospel makes heavy use of the so-called pronouncement stories which are very similar to the way Cynic answer-responses are described by Greek and Roman writers.  There are a few that Mack describes from Mark which are eerily similar to anecdotes told about Cynics as described by writers such as Diogenes Laertius.  Here’s one example:

Diogenes writes of an anecdote about Antisthenes (regarded as the founder of Cynicism) in which the local government censured him for keeping bad company (the implication is prostitutes which Jesus was also accused of hanging out with in later gospels) and his reply was “physicians attend their patients without catching the fever.”

From Mark 2:17 Jesus was asked why he ate with tax collectors and sinners and his answer was “Those who are well have no need for a physician”.

Did Jesus really say this or was Mark simply influenced by Cynicism?  I really like the idea that since Mark is our earliest Gospel that it is perhaps the closest to the ethereal idea of the “historical Jesus” so perhaps he had first hand knowledge of a Cynic influenced Jesus or perhaps it was just Mark’s rhetoric that was influenced.

I don’t completely buy into the Jesus as Cynic theory (yet).  I prefer Bart’s idea that Jesus believed the kingdom of God was yet to come, but I still find the idea that Jesus was at the very least influenced by Cynics to be very interesting.

spiker said

gavriel said 

Care for the suffering is not incompatible with apocalypticism. It would be an independent value…, 

 

Maybe I am missing your point here,  Gav, but aren’t the poor, in apocalyptic terms, the righteous? In a world governed by evil, those who side with it are rewarded with position and power while those who remain righteous are down trodden. In this context giving up one’s wealth is more about renouncing that allegiance, so to speak.  View Mark: 10:25 against that backdrop:  It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Somewhere, Ehrman mentions how apocalypticism is an attempt to understand why the righteous suffer. OT prophets, you suffer because you stopped following God’s way, but why do people who walk with God suffer? This is still an important element of Christianity, that the world is ruled by evil forces, that is why “evil men” prosper while the righteous suffer. 

My point was to the opening post in this thread, ” Seems like it would be better to tell people, especially rich people, to manage their wealth to help the poor over the long term.” In fact, Jesus probably didn’t care for such long-term strategies, since doomsday was believed to be close. In this case it would be more effective to provide your complete assets for the poor immediately.  Later wealthy Christians, at a time when the belief in in the imminency of doomsday had faded, no doubt adopted this attitude, that is, staying wealthy and give a lot.

Greg Matthews said

gavriel said
One of the first lessons one find in most critical Jesus/NT books is that the original context of the pericopes are lost, and later shaped by the needs of the communities in which they were told and re-told. In that oral process, influences from other wisdom traditions may well have sneaked in. Finally the stories have become edited and put into a theological construct made by the gospel writer. I therefore think that the possible parallel to Cynicism has little weight. It could also be considered to be an independent religious idea that may connect to various, otherwise conflicting religious/philosophical worldviews.  Mark 2:17 could even be an invention made by later communities , responding to criticism against stories about Jesus associating, eating and drinking  with “sinners” and outcasts.

What convinces me of the apocalyptic Jesus, is the proposition that Jesus is the middle ground between the attested apocalyptic prophet John, and the well attested apocalyptic view of Paul. It is hard to believe that Jesus had some sort of an initiation/disciple-hood period with John, switched into being a cynicism teacher, and later spawned apocalyptic disciples.

As I said, perhaps it was Mark who was influenced by Cynicism.  In any event, I only listed one pronouncement that has a parallel in Cynic anecdotes.  There are a number of others.  If it was just one, ok, perhaps what Jesus said was just a popular aphorism of the day, but when there are a number of them then I start to wonder….

In fact, there is a large number of inauthentic Jesus-sayings in the gospels, added from contemporary Jewish folkloric wisdom traditions, wishful thinking by poor and down-trodden Jews and gentiles and other inventions.

This poses a methodological problem. Once a possible model of the early Jesus teaching has been established, the student of Jesus starts explaining away all the pericopes and elements that do not fit in with the model. They are considered to be interpolations, or added by posterity, or twisted in the oral traditions, and so on. One can do this exercise with a number of possible different models of Jesus original religious thought universe. That’s why there are so many solutions to the problem.

But any solution must meet the demands of a couple of very hard facts, as suggested. If Jesus had entered the court of the gentiles in a Diogenes barrel, offering cool , hushed pearls of wisdom, he wouldn’t have been executed as a royal pretender.  It is pretty hard to explain away the gist of the passion story.