Matthew 13:31-Don't know much about biology

Another parable He put forth to them, saying: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field,It is the smallest of all seeds, but it becomes the largest of garden plants and grows into a tree where birds can come and find shelter in its branches." (Also Mark 4:31/Luke 13:19)

Mustard was a weed in the fields of the Levant farmers, and Jesus would have been quite familiar with it. (Evidently, hamburgers and bratwurst had not quite yet achieved popularity in the region, so the condiment wasn't widely used.) Many people now have small mustard seed pendants as reminders that even a mustard seed's worth of faith can move mountains (Matt 17:20/Luke 17:6) and the seeds are not rare as whole spice in American kitchens.

The problem is, the mustard seed isn't the smallest seed in the world. It wasn't necessarily even the smallest seed planted in the area ("Consider the lilies* of the field...")

Some apologists like to assert that Jesus didn't mean that the mustard seed was the smallest seed in the world, and they point to the phrase "which a man took and sowed in his field" as a qualifier that he meant locally. He doesn't really specify that though, and someone making a point to rural dwellers of an agricultural region would want to be a bit more specific to make his point.

Others point to translations that take the greek word mikronos and render it as "least of all seeds" rather than "smallest of all seeds." Thus they say Jesus was making a point about how the mustard seed was unassuming or meek, not about its physical size. However, the parable is about the size of Kingdom Come, not about its ostentation. Further, that usage of mikronos is fairly obscure and doesn't really appear anywhere else in the bible.

Now of course all this is "straining at gnats" in the end. But if someone is the Son of God, the creator of all things, shouldn't he have a little more familiarity with the local fauna? And if the Bible is inerrant, does that mean that the error was one that Jesus the otherwise perfect man made? Most modern believers won't be troubled by this hopefully. It's just fun to kick against the goads of those who insist on absolutism and perfectionism of the book.

*This is used only for dramatic/ironic purposes. Lily seeds actually vary a bit in size by variety but most are not quite as small as an average mustard seed. However, the Lotus flower has seeds so fine that they actually are perceived as a powder in volume. This flower is mentioned in Job twice and was sacred to and part of the creation myth of the ancient Egyptians, their country being one where Jesus is said to have spent some time. For him not to be familiar with the lotus is probably unreasonable, but it is possible he was simply of limited knowledge.

Mark 12:25: You want to know what heaven is like? It's like not-being-married.

For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven.

(Also Matt 22:30 and Luke 20:35)

In context, the Saducees, who are more interested in Temple sacrifice as a means of ensuring well-being in this life than interpreting the law of Moses to make sure you make it in to the next one, are trying to trip Jesus up with a catch-22 in the law. Essentially, the "Law of Moses" says that if a widow is left childless by her husband's death and there is an unmarried brother-in-law available, she and the brother-in-law are to marry. The Saducees concoct a hypothetical situation where there are seven such brothers, and each takes a turn marrying the woman and dying without offspring. The Saducees ask Jesus whose wife she'll be in the afterlife (presumably either the first or the last brother to marry her I guess, but you can see how they thought they had him good.) Jesus first insults them, asking more or less "Don't you know the law and the prophets or the power of God or [and I'm guessing here] are you just stupid?" He then ruins the plans of couples who plan to spend eternity together.

This is probably why the unpleasant "...'til Death do you part" corollary is inserted into the otherwise joyous wedding vows of most christian couples.

Nonetheless, this is more evidence that Jesus wasn't a big proponent of marriage. Neither was Paul in 1 Corrinthians. You don't hear this passage a lot from the American Family Association types, or from anyone whose financial well-being is based on the idea of familial regeneration to populate an organization from century to century. I guess you can't blame them for decontextualizing the Bible so often.

Matt 19:12:If you really want to go to heaven, DON'T get married and cut off your balls

¹⁰His disciples say unto him, If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry.¹¹But he said unto them, All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given.¹²For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.

Any church that wants to last more than one generation is going to have a problem with this line. Indeed, the proto-orthodox church had to brand ascetic sects as heretical in order to continue receiving tithes after the initial converts were made. The greek for the word in question is εὐνοῦχος (eunouchos) and it is rooted in the word for bedroom, which makes sense in that men with large harems would use castrati to guard their women, thinking that the lack of testes would render these guards uninterested in sex with their charges. This evidently was not the case (see Ulpian in the Roman Digest of Law or Hammurabi's Code.) In any case, it's pretty clear that Jesus is talking about someone doing something painful or difficult to himself to make it hard or impossible to procreate. Even clearer is the message that it's better not to get involved with women at all, but it's undeniable here that he teaches that someone who is dedicated to the Kingdom of Heaven will not get married.

Mark 7:27-Greek people are as lowly as Dogs so I won't heal your sick Syrophenician Daughter

²⁵For a certain woman, whose young daughter had an unclean spirit, heard of him, and came and fell at his feet: ²⁶The woman was a Greek, a Syrophenician by nation; and she besought him that he would cast forth the devil out of her daughter. ²⁷But Jesus said unto her, Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it unto the dogs. ²⁸And she answered and said unto him, Yes, Lord: yet the dogs under the table eat of the children's crumbs. ²⁹And he said unto her, For this saying go thy way; the devil is gone out of thy daughter.

It's easy to look past this fact, but the synoptic gospels pretty much make Jesus out as a bigot. Or at least as a nationalist, or a Jewish separatist. Now when you look at it, Jesus doesn't say he won't help the woman, just that she's low on his priority list apparently ("the Children" here are the nation of Israel, meaning both the Judeans in the south and anyone the disciples might find of the "lost tribes" of the North.) It's only when the woman says "You're right, I'm a dog," that Jesus relents and heals the little girl.

In any case, he wasn't a big fan of "greeks." Matt 15:21 says the woman is a Canaanite (which means if you insist on infallible Biblical literalism that this was a separate incident and that Jesus pulled this insult out of his bag of tricks at least twice.) He wasn't big on Samaritans (a group of Jews that broke away from the Jerusalem Temple in a disagreement over where sacrifices were supposed to take place, at least one of whom was decent in a parable of Jesus') or Gentiles either (Matt 10:5):

⁵ These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. ⁶ Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. ⁷

Now in context, let's say you're a Jew of that era. Your people have spent the last 300 years under the thumb of the Greeks (since Alexander's conquest of the world) and now the Romans have pretty much bought out that franchise. In recent memory was the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, who tried to hellenize the Jewish people by outlawing the practice of circumcision. Currently, the Romans keep centurions stationed at the Antonia next to the temple (within mooning distance, anyway, according to Josephus.) Chances are, you aren't going to be too fond of these folks, so maybe we can understand Jesus as a human being here. Still, it's not hard to see why this incident doesn't get a lot of mention in the pulpits on Sunday morning.

Mark 10:28-31:Peter, I'll reward you for leaving your family to fend for themselves!

²⁸ Then Peter spoke up, “We have left everything to follow you!”²⁹ “Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel ³⁰ will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. ³¹ But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”

Ouch. First, you're supposed to leave your wife and family to fend for themselves to follow this guy, and then you're going to "trade up" as it were in kingdom come. Perhaps this is why there is so little shame in having a new "trophy wife" today among so many politicians who confess their allegiance to various charismatic groups.

What's interesting is that just 18 passages before this, Jesus makes the act of leaving your wife out as the one sin that might be seen as unforgivable (Mark 10:6-12. Oddly, this is the passage most often cited as objecting to homosexual activity and same sex marriage-but again, that's for another post at another time.)

This is one of those little gems that is almost word-for-word copied in Luke (18:28) and Matthew (19:27) so scholars tend to give it a lot of weight in terms of likelihood of having been a real exchange. In any case, it appears that to Jesus the sanctity of marriage is violable under some circumstances-namely, that you use following Jesus as an excuse for it. Conceivably, that means it would be perfectly acceptable to join a monastery or become an itinerant preacher if one got tired of providing for one's family.

Matt 10:34-I came to start a battle between the parents and children of a household

"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.³⁵For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.³⁶And a man's foes shall be they of his own household."

This is pretty straightforward "fightin' words." As J.D. Crossan (the charming grey-haired, bespectacled scholar you see in all the documentaries who makes you think "That guy should play the guy who runs the orphanage in every movie ever where the orphans are well treated" when you see him) points out, Jesus has a generational conflict in mind. If you look at who is against who (and take into account the norm that a woman would go live with her husband's family in that culture, thus exposing her explicitly to her mother-in-law) this becomes apparent.

This fits nicely into the apocalyptic context-the Messiah, after all, was supposed to be a great warrior-one who was anointed by God to lead the bitch-slapping the Roman overlords had coming to them (as opposed to the Isaiah 9:5 "Prince of Peace." And it's pretty clear that the "peace" expected in that passage was expected to come from a bloody victory-but that's another post.)

There's no indication that Jesus wants to come off as anything but a bad-ass here. He leads up to it with the language of judgement and follows it with the message to John the Baptizer, so he's pretty clearly in the apocalyptic vein when he says this.

What's probably most interesting is the way in which this appears to clash with the fifth commandment (Ex. 20:12):

“Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you."

I suppose you can be "at variance" with your father and still honor him, but given the ideal that Jesus appeared to preach that one should follow the spirit of the law and not just the word, again it seems that maybe to reconcile these ideas one has to make a few intellectual exceptions.

Luke 14:26-You must hate your family.

"If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple."

This is a good place to start-one of the most troubling lines in the Bible for modern apologists. It appears to fly in the face of the the idea of modern nuclear family values. Of course, the standard explanation is something along the lines of a comparison: "Jesus doesn't mean you really need to hate your family, he just means that next to your love for him, it should seem like you hate everything else." Even agnostic critical scholar Bart Ehrman has made the argument that this is a comparative statement, placing Jesus in the apocalyptic context and making the kingdom of heaven the thing that should receive the higher value.

The problem is, the text doesn't bear this out. There is no comparative term-not in the KJV, the Greek or the Vulgate-to lend support to this idea. The character Jesus in this gospel simply comes out and says to hate all these people you're related to, to bear your own burdens and follow him. It is preceded with the parable of the Bridegroom's banquet for strangers and is followed by the parable of the tower. There is no "next to me" or "compared to your love for me" anywhere, either as an idea or a statement.

In terms of synoptic parallel, this passage is often paired with Matt 10:37:

"Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. "

Fair enough, both end with the idea of taking up the cross. And the softening of the language is well explained by the "de-apocalypticising" of the Jesus movement over time due to the failure of the expectation of the son of man's imminent appearance. However, in Matthew the verse is preceded by an even more troubling line from the "Prince of Peace." (More on that in the next post.) Moreover in Matthew the Bridegroom's feast is found in a completely different place, and Matthew's comparative terms are followed by the report to John the Baptist, so a literalist's plea to Matthew to explain and soften the language are probably a little intellectually disingenuous.

Keep in mind, the purpose of this blog is not to judge what Jesus said, to verify the historical nature of the Bible, to proselytize, to cause doubt or to discover any deeper truth in the Bible. The purpose is to say what is obvious and muse in a (hopefully) amusing manner over that. And poke fun at people with laugh-out-loud-ha-ha-funny-viewpoints on the topic at hand.