An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 199: Jesus demands obedience, flubs his own parables and doesn’t care if the housework doesn’t get done (Luke 6-10)

Luke 6-10
Jesus demands obedience, flubs his own parables and doesn’t care if the housework doesn’t get done.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT

For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Luke 6

“Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven”

Most important in this chapter is that it gives Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount. Before that, there are some entanglements between Jesus and the Pharisees about what can and can’t be done on the Sabbath (which we have seen before), but the meat to me is the reported speech from Jesus.

This ties back to a question I posed earlier, which is how authentic are the words that the gospel writers put into the mouth of Jesus? Was there someone taking short-hand notes all the time? Are the words memorable due to some divine power within them? Is Jesus’ rhetoric such that He is able to produce turns of phrase that are pithy and memorable? Or are these added or “amended” by later writers? Possibly all of these (obviously I tend away from the divine power option, but believers may feel otherwise).

Comparing Matthew and Luke’s versions of the sermon is telling – Luke’s is a lot more truncated (at least so far – it may well spill into the next chapter and beyond), omitting much of the interpretation of the commandments that is found in Matthew in this section. It focusses more on the concepts of loving the enemy, and forgiveness, than did Matthew’s version. Matthew also includes more types of people amongst the “blessed” that opens the sermon, including the peacemakers and the meek; Luke does not include these, and also there is a small but important difference right at the starts. Matthew mentions the “poor in spirit” whereas for Luke it is merely the poor; the two are surely very different things, one much more material.

Luke pretty much states at the start of his book that this is a setting down and organising of existing material, so to what can we attribute the differences? Is Matthew a later version than Luke, expanded to include more details such as the Lord’s Prayer and the aforementioned discussion of the commandments? Surely Luke wouldn’t have edited the words of Jesus down if he’d access to Matthew’s gospel. And if there truly was some kind of divine power in the words, why would the two men end up with different versions? In that case, it ought to be the same. The other explanation is that Matthew and Luke both drew from an earlier, shared, source (probably Mark); perhaps Matthew had more sources for other details, perhaps not. Certainly the version in Luke is a more concise speech with a fairly easily discernible point, whereas in Matthew it leaps from topic to topic; this suggests to me that Matthew has combined several different sermons into one.

Luke 7

“And, behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment”

I guess that answers my query last time – no, the Sermon on the Mount, in Luke, only lasts part of one chapter, so it is considerably truncated compared to Matthew.

What we get in this chapter is a return to vignettes in the life of Jesus. First the centurion comes asking for his servant to be healed. I’ve got a feeling, without going back to check, that this is a Roman administrator, not a soldier, in the other two gospels. However, here, a certain parallel is drawn between the centurion having the power to order men around, and Jesus having the power to heal a man with a word. Jesus then raises a dead man, the only son of a widow, and people begin to pronounce Him a great prophet.

There’s also a bit of a mutual admiration between John the Baptist and Jesus. Followers of John seek out Jesus to find out if He is the Messiah or not (or, more specifically, “Art thou he that should come?”), and Jesus basically tells them to decide for themselves based on what He’s done, and also proclaims John as the herald of the Messiah (and thus in the process legitimises Himself). Jesus draws a neat irony between the Pharisees calling John the Baptist possessed of a “devil” because he neither eats nor drinks (except locusts and wild honey, of course), whilst Jesus gets condemned for eating on a Sabbath and drinking wine with publicans. Which is a good point – which do you want, Pharisees?

The chapter closes with a scene where Jesus goes to dinner with one of these Pharisees (a less hostile one, I assume), and a woman “who was a sinner” anoints Jesus’ feet and dries them with her hair. This event is enfolded in the myth of Mary Magdalene, although the name is never given here. I presume that by “a sinner” this has been taken to mean “prostitute”, although the Bible hasn’t been coy up to this point to call a whore a whore. According to later Christian scripture, everyone’s a sinner, so that really doesn’t give her a special attribute. Anyway, Jesus uses the incident to show how it is a better thing to forgive people that have a lot to forgive than to forgive people who have done very little wrong.

Luke 8

“And certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils”

Ah well, I can see why the woman from the last chapter has come to be seen as Mary Magdalene, since here she is mentioned in verse 2 of the very next chapter. Two other women are named as well – Joanna, wife of Chuza, a steward of Herod, and Susanna, as well as others. Fleetingly mentioned, but I think that it’s significant that Jesus’ message attracts women, who must surely be amongst the otherwise downtrodden and voiceless members of society (even wives of privilege like a king’s steward).

There are more scenes from the life of Jesus, each of which we’ve already seen in either Matthew or Mark (or both) – the casting out of the devils of Legion into a herd of swine, the parable of the sower, Jesus calming the storm at sea, Jesus bringing the daughter of Jairus, master of a synagogue, back to life, and the woman with the “issue of blood” being healed by touching His robe. There’s not a lot more detail here than we’ve already had – I note again that the Gadarenes become frightened at Jesus’ exorcism of Legion and tell Him to leave their country; also seemingly new in Luke is that Jesus can tell that “that virtue is gone out of me” when the woman touches His robes. A little odd, perhaps, as it suggests that His divine power to heal has a set of daily charges – you’d think that the power of God, even expressed through a man, would be limitless. Hey ho.

Luke 9

“And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.”

As with much of Luke, there are a lot of incidents crammed into this chapter, but the overall theme is of the revealing of the divinity of Jesus, and His role as the Christ. After imparting powers to the disciples to heal and cast out devils (which they later fail at doing, to His annoyance – “And I besought thy disciples to cast him out; and they could not. And Jesus answering said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you, and suffer you? Bring thy son hither.”)

Then there is a jump to Herod wondering who Jesus is, and hearing rumours that He is John the Baptist reborn (John has, by now, been beheaded by Herod). After an interlude with loaves and fish, Jesus asks His disciples who people think He is, and as well as Elias (Elijah) and John returned, Peter mentions that people believe Him to be the Christ, i.e. Messiah, to which Jesus swears them to silence on the matter.

After this, Peter, John and James get the vision on the mountain of Moses and Elijah standing beside Jesus, and a voice from the heavens proclaiming Jesus as its son; not long later Jesus announces that his destiny is to rejected and slain, but rise on the third day, and preparations begin to head to Jerusalem. There are a few interludes en route where Jesus can’t find anywhere to stay, and James suggests a bit of heavenly smiting, which Jesus rejects, “For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them”.

There are sprinklings of Jesus’ philosophy throughout this chapter, and as before, Luke explains them in a clearer fashion compared to Matthew. There is a growing sense of cultishness and single-mindedness to Jesus’ thinking that seems to grow along with the certainty that He is the Messiah. At the end of the chapter He tells people that any delay in following Him is wrong – “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God”. There is no time to say goodbye to loved ones, no time to bury the dead. Is Jesus seeing the arrival of the Kingdom of God to coincide with His death and resurrection, perhaps?

And what, exactly, does Jesus mean by the “Kingdom of God”? He gives a lot of information about who can and cannot enter it, but are we to understand a supernatural entity? There are, after all, some hints that the term refers to a higher state after death, with a closeness to God where marriages are irrelevant. A more material kingdom? Which is certainly what the older prophets seem to be referring to, a rebirth of the old kingdom of David from the returning Exiles. Jesus seems a bit more abstract from that. I quite like the interpretation that it turns out to be something that Jesus doesn’t expect, perhaps the formation of a world-wide religion that follows His teachings, which probably plays to my own personal preference for prophecies always turning out different to expected.

Luke 10

“After these things the Lord appointed other seventy also, and sent them two and two before his face into every city and place, whither he himself would come.”

Jesus appoint another seventy (!) missionaries to spread His word, telling them to take no money or shoes, but to take charity from houses that will let them in, and spurn places that do not. These seventy have the power to cast out devils and tread on scorpions, although Jesus warns them not to get too cocky about this – “Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven”.

This chapter has the tale of the Good Samaritan, which I don’t recall featuring in Matthew or Mark. It is used to illustrate a question from a lawyer about who “thy neighbour” is that it is told in scripture to “love…as thyself”. In Jesus’ parable, the Samaritan who stops to help the mugging victim is the neighbour. Two things here – one is that it’s my understanding that as Samaria is considered an enemy kingdom to Israel, it’s not just that he stops and helps that makes the Samaritan a better man than the priest and the Levite who don’t, but that he stops to help an enemy Jew, whilst the priest and the Levite (who, arguably, it’s their job to help) fail to do so. So there’s that, but also this seems to run counter to some other elements of Jesus’ teachings about turning the other cheek, and ministering to the sinners over the righteous – the mugging victim should surely forgive the priest and the Levite despite their obnoxious attitude to him, and even work harder to help them become better people. This is, though, partly because I think Jesus wrongly attributes the Samaritan as “the neighbour”, whereas to truly illustrate the point, it’s the Samaritan who is the only one who sees the mugging victim as “the neighbour” and helps him.

Anyway, the chapter ends in the house of Martha, who complains to Jesus that her sister Mary has become one of His followers and no longer helps around the house. Jesus basically shrugs it off!