MOST PEOPLE DON’T REALIZE JUST HOW RADICAL JESUS REALLY WAS. Even most committed Christians seem to overlook this truth about Jesus. Perhaps they miss it because their churches focus on the teachings of Paul more than the teachings of Jesus. It is easier to believe in Christ, to feel justified by faith alone, than it is to trust God and practice the utopian way of life Jesus taught. Besides, the foundational teachings of Jesus can be a little hard to find in the gospels.
Each of the four canonical gospels is a rich literary structure that integrates different types of material into a relatively unified composition. Sayings and parables and dialogues and stories blend together in each to create a biographical narrative. Mark, Matthew and Luke follow essentially the same plot — a ministry in Galilee culminates in a journey to Jerusalem and leads to the crucifixion, all in the span of one year. John’s plot is more complex, and it unfolds over three years instead of one, but it still begins in Galilee and leads to crucifixion in Jerusalem.
Foundational teachings about a way of life are not at all the focus in John, however. Unlike the other three gospels, John presents the words of Jesus as elaborate discourses, in which Jesus mostly seems to be talking about his own divine identity.
If we want to learn what Jesus taught, we have to read the so-called synoptic gospels, the three gospels that seem to see things the same way — Mark, Matthew and Luke. And, if we especially want to find out what Jesus himself probably taught, we have to dig even deeper.
Roughly two hundred years ago, New Testament scholars made two monumental discoveries. They noticed, first, that much of the text of Mark appeared, more or less verbatim, in both Matthew and Luke. Then they realized that much of the text in Matthew and Luke that isn’t also in Mark is essentially the same, again more or less verbatim, in each gospel. The most likely explanation for these literary similarities is that Matthew and Luke, as they wrote their gospels, each independently borrowed from two written texts: the Gospel of Mark and a second text that Mark did not have.
The second source text used, which was lost in antiquity but can be reconstructed at least partially from the existing gospels of Matthew and Luke, is now known as the Book of Q (from the German Quelle, “source”). It’s a “sayings gospel,” a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus. When a manuscript of the Gospel of Thomas was unearthed in 1945, scholars finally knew that there had been such a thing as a “sayings gospel” in circulation during the early years of Christianity. So, starting in the 1970s, the hypothetical Book of Q became the focus of serious study for New Testament scholars.
By the 1990s, studies of Q had identified three thematic layers in the sayings (Q1, Q2, Q3; see Burton Mack, The Lost Gospel). The sayings in one thematic layer present Jesus teaching about the way of life he referred to metaphorically as the “realm of God.” The second layer introduces the prophetic theme of an imminent day of judgment; and in the third, Jesus reproaches those who failed to listen and learn his lessons. Because Q material appears in both Matthew and Luke, the collection had to be available before those gospels were written in the 80s and 90s of the first century CE. Some scholars argue the composition of Q1, the first layer of Q, should be dated to the 50s. If true, that means Q1 would have been contemporaneous with the surviving seven authentic letters Paul.
Now that we know where to find the foundational teachings of Jesus, let’s take a look at a few of them to see just how radical they were — and still are. (In what follows, I’m adapting Mack’s translations of Q/Luke.)
Consider these Q1 aphorisms, which are attributed to Jesus:
Give to anyone who asks. (QS 9, Lk 6:30)
This human being has nowhere to lay his head. (QS 19, Lk 9:58)
Do not carry money, or a bag, or sandals, or a staff. (QS 20, Lk 10:4)
Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or wear. (QS 39, Lk 12:22)
What does a life lived according to these instructions look like? Giving to anyone who asks requires you to give up all your attachments to personal property. Having nowhere to lay your head means you are homeless. When you travel without money, bag, sandals, and staff, you put yourself entirely at the mercy of others. If you could stop worrying about your life, your food and your clothes, you would move into an entirely new and unconventional way of living. In each of the scenarios suggested by these aphorisms, the implied lesson Jesus offers is that his followers must actually and wholeheartedly trust God to provide what they need. Jesus, in fact, says as much: “Your father knows you need these things” (QS 39, Lk 12:30).
If that way of life isn’t radical enough for you, consider what Jesus says about the family (QS 52, Lk 14:26):
Whoever does not hate their father and mother cannot learn from me.
Whoever does not hate their son and daughter can’t belong to my school.
In other words, Jesus says his followers, his disciples, must cut off their ties to their families. Children must cut themselves off from their parents, parents from their children (and siblings from siblings, too). Could it be that Jesus is calling his followers to adopt a new family in which God is the only parent, caring not only for themselves, but also for their own children?
Who can live in such radical detachment from our ordinary world, from possessions, from the shelter of a home, from basic needs for food and clothing, from the security of family ties? The spiritual path laid out in the aphorisms of Jesus collected in Q1 is so radical and difficult, no wonder the church tends to prefer Paul’s offer of salvation through faith alone.
Still, it’s a spirituality Sakyamuni, and Zhuangzi would recognize and immediately understand: “let go and let God.”
Thank you for reading my blog. If you enjoyed this post or found it insightful, please share it with your friends. And feel free to invite them to follow the blog, too. Oh, and while you’re at it, why not check out my book, Moonlight Shines in the Darkness, a Jungian study of Jesus and the feminine in the Gospel of John.
Today’s featured image is a painting by Kristen Muench, “Walking Down the Road Together” (#6 in her Emmaus series), which I used in a video for my song “Emmaus.“
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