1. “Do not be anxious about life, what you shall eat, nor about the body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?”
2. “Damn the Pharisees! They are like a dog sleeping in the cattle manger: the dog neither eats nor lets the cattle eat.”
3. “Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”
4. “If anyone does not hate his father and mother he cannot be my disciple; and if any one does not hate son and daughter he cannot be my disciple.”
5. “Foxes have their dens and birds have their nests, but human beings have no place to lie down and rest.”
6. “If you have money, don’t lend it at interest. Rather, give it to someone from whom you won’t get it back.”
7. “The first will be last and the last will be first.”
8. “Be passersby.”
9. “Blessed is the person who has suffered. He has found life.”
10. “Give to Caesar what is Caesar's. Give to God what is God's.”
Jesus of Nazareth will be known to most readers as the personage at the centre of what is now known as Christianity. Preeminently, we read about him in the pages of the Christian New Testament. But it is not that Jesus that I want to speak about in this chapter - which is to say that I want to talk about the same historical figure but I do not want to present him as these Christian others have presented him and as their descendants still wish to present him today. In my own researches into the historical figure of Jesus - which are extensive and, beginning as an undergraduate in a department of biblical studies, now extend to over 20 years of work and 6 books of my own - a different figure has emerged, a Cynic Jew whom I have, half jokingly and half seriously, described as Elijah the prophet of Jewish history crossed with Diogenes of Sinope of Greek fame.
To this figure are ascribed, to be sure amongst many others, the ten sayings quoted above. They are all, so I am going to argue, things of Cynic cast and so they are all matters in which, in some sense, we are encouraged to let go of civilised thinking and civilisation itself by Jesus of Nazareth. This, I want to say, was his own “nothing to stick to” where this is at least a letting go and a giving up of things thought regular and normal by those so civilised but not thought healthy or virtuous by Jesus himself. Putting these ten thoughts together we will get something of an image of the mentality of Jesus which you may wish to find suggestive of the historical character of the man but here I do not intend to write at length about that as I have in other places. Instead, I want to focus on the meaning of these sayings and what they have to say about nothing to stick to and every step being on the path.
The first of the ten sayings I have chosen could easily have been said by a secular Cynic for it is standard Cynic wisdom. Cynics in general were known for being very lightly attired, a simple cloak being their noteworthy item of attire, and for eating whatever was at hand, often simply from what grew openly in the fields. They were not those who valued wardrobes of fine clothes or lavish meals, both of which would have cost money - about which more very soon. In both cases, in fact, we can argue that Cynics [and now apparently Jesus] were wary of such things and the decadence involved in them. In the context of virtue, the art of living well as a human being, one has to ask after the consequences of coming to value fine clothes and exquisite banquets. Might they not seem to be diverting one away from simpler and more natural truths? Cynics valued simple lives exactly because they thought simplicity taught virtue. In that context, lack of simplicity, increasing complication, can only lead to lack of it. So here Jesus with his “Don’t worry about food and clothing” saying. He is teaching a simple and virtuous life in doing so.
The Pharisees were historically a school of Judaism during the Second Temple period of Judaism which ended with the destruction of Jerusalem [and so its temple] by the Romans in 70CE. Thereafter, Pharisaical beliefs would form the basis of what went on to become Rabbinic Judaism. They stood opposed to other forms of Judaism at that time such as the more elitist and priestly Sadducees or the more hermetic Essenes or the more confrontational Zealots. So it is a point in the historical favour of the texts that make mention of them in relation to Jesus that they are there. Pharisees were known for believing in an oral as well as the written law [which basically means interpretations and applications of what was written down in the Jewish law, the books of Moses], for believing in resurrection, and for favouring the second and third collections of books, the prophets and the writings, that would go on to make up the Jewish holy book, the Tanakh. They were a grouping, as we sometimes see in the gospels of the New Testament, which were concerned with a practical living of daily life in tune with the law of Moses and had developed complex rules and rituals for its strict obedience. As forerunners of what would became the major form of Judaism after 70CE they are an important grouping in the story of its history.
Not that any of this seems to have found favour with Jesus, however. The gospels report several incidents in which Jesus interacts with them which, even if fictional, speak to the relevance and importance of both him and them in the need for the text to address them. In chapter 2 of Mark’s gospel, for example, we see related a collection of encounters between Pharisees [or their ‘scribes’] and Jesus in which Jesus’ activities clash with their established practices. Mark 7:1-23 is a further example in which Pharisaical rules for ritual washing are ignored by Jesus who teaches, instead, that “what comes from inside” is what defiles rather than dirt you may not have washed off, much less the lack of a mere performance of a ritual washing. But in the saying I have quoted above what we get is a condemning of the Pharisees whole and entire for their practice which Jesus sees as a blocking of the road ahead. There he accuses of them of blocking the road for all concerned by their procedures and so he essentially condemns those who will go on to be the religious authorities of the faith in their “civilisation” of Jewish religious beliefs. Jesus, instead, rails against the notion that correct living can be codified in the performance of rituals and speaks to a much more authentic expression of duty in a self-discipline which concentrates on intention and motivation. In Mark 7 Jesus can even accuse the Pharisees of, essentially, overcomplicating the matter of duty to God by making their codes and rituals the only allowable means to that duty’s fulfillment. In so doing, he argues that, in fact, such understandings are nothing to stick to. All one has to do is to have regard to oneself and one’s virtue as what comes “from the heart”.
My third saying is another that is classically Cynic in its eulogising of poverty. Here Jesus pronounces the poor - AND ONLY THE POOR - blessed. In doing so we must also read this as the lack of blessedness for the wealthy and, indeed, a eulogising of poverty over wealth which, we may observe, is a complete reversal of civilised values. Here Jesus does not say, in one of the verities of our own times, that “God helps those who help themselves” neither does he mention anything about work or earning money. He simply says that the highest riches he can think of - the kingdom of God - are the reward of the poor which, as historical Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan points out, actually means the “destitute”, those who have nothing. Here Jesus seems to pronounce this blessing simply because they are poor. It is their state of poverty which earns the blessing, suggesting, at the very least, that poverty is a blessed state to be in and we may note that this is not a thought of most conventional civilisations. We may then further compare this idea favourably with the reported lifestyle of Diogenes who lived by begging or from nature whilst skulking around the buildings of Athens or Corinth, perhaps sometimes making a discarded barrel or tub his home and having only a cloak for clothing. He, too, preached a simplicity of poverty as an aid to virtue and blessedness and he, too, saw wealth as an undesirable state which led one away from the reward of virtue. We may, then, see in this saying some of Jesus’ own beliefs as expressed in his own, different context in that “the kingdom of God”, which was what Jews generally longed to see, was a matter of poverty and being poor in earthly terms, a matter of a different set of values. Here wealth is nothing to worry about and nothing to stick to even as, in my first saying, food and clothing weren’t either.
In the ancient world the primary economic unit was the family. In this context my fourth saying seems to charge a coach and horses right through such an idea when Jesus says that there are things more important than this. Family, in fact, is clearly nothing to stick to for Jesus who, elsewhere, was reported to have left his own family, which many conjecture may have been without a father figure since Joseph is nowhere mentioned in Jesus’ adult life. His mother and siblings, then, may well have been relying on the eldest son for their survival as part of the family unit but he seems to have had better things to do, one of which was telling parents to hate their children and children to hate their parents. Elsewhere, there is a story about Jesus in which his genetic family members come to collect him but he refers to those who share an understanding with him in familial terms instead, this, in turn, suggesting that Jesus sees nothing to stick to in genetic kinships as the saying I quote here also likewise suggests. Of course, the context of this saying here is also one of being his disciple which means nothing other than following him, metaphorically or literally speaking. This is, then, a saying about the kind of virtue Jesus offers and what its demands may involve. Genetic family, and civilised understandings about its importance, are nothing to stick to and what Jesus offers instead is seen by him as the more necessary duty, a duty to virtue and authenticity.
The fifth saying plays on the concept of rest but also assumes an itinerant scenario. Animals quite naturally build homes for themselves from what is to hand from a few twigs for birds to a hole in the ground for a fox. But what about human beings? Jesus says they have nowhere to rest. But what human beings have nowhere to rest? Only those who have no home because they are wandering itinerants. This can be viewed here in a double sense as, on the one hand, a reflection on this state of itinerance but, on the other hand, as a recommendation for we have only just read a saying in which Jesus tore the traditional family unit apart. If you have now become estranged from your family then it is quite likely you may have nowhere to live as a result. But given that Jesus counts the destitute as “blessed” we should not see having “nowhere” to lay your head as a bad thing. On the contrary, with the picture that is being built up we may see it as necessary for virtue or a future state of blessedness.
With the sixth saying above we see the theme of poverty as one that is deliberately articulated and required for, should one do as this saying says, there can only be one result: your own destitution. Here Jesus not only tells people to ignore the prevailing civilised economic practice - lending at interest - but he tells such people to purposefully give it to someone who not only will not give them the interest back but they won’t give them the initial money back either! This saying, then, displays a complete contempt, both for notions of fair exchange and for market economics. Jesus encourages people to gift their money, if they have any, to people who won’t pay it back which will inevitably result in their own poverty. We may consider, then, that Jesus sees little use for money except giving it away in a way that completely devalues it much as Diogenes himself was known as a defacer and devaluer of the currency of his homeland and, thereafter, of civilisation generally. There is absolutely no thought here for what can be done with money and its value as currency is completely disregarded. The thought is that if someone can be helped by the money then they should be and without the thoughts implanted by notions of finance or economics which may require getting something back for your trouble or “fair exchange” or other such ideas. Jesus, however, finds these notions nothing to stick to and implicitly judges and disregards them with this saying. If people need something and you have it, just give it to them.
The seventh saying makes sense of earlier sayings I have already remarked upon. It is simple, to the point, and a judgment and valuation of the worth of people in civilised society generally: “the first shall be last and the last shall be first.” This is a saying that, very simply, disarms the social climbing and strata of social society and all that goes into such things, not the least of which is the wealth and possessions those thought by civilisation to be ‘first’ will have and those thought ‘last’ won’t have. The saying intersects very nicely with the “blessedness” of “the poor” or with those who have left family and have no home. The saying pronounces these people the real “first”, regardless of appearances in the eyes of civilised society, and those who such civilisation lauds and honours as last. It is, then, an expression of a completely different system of valuation to that which civilisation uses and sets Jesus at odds with civilisation itself as it is presented to him in his time and place.
So, having got this far, we should not be surprised to find the simple saying, “Be passersby” as our eighth saying here, a saying which, quite simply, recommends itinerancy and encourages people to such a lifestyle. This lifestyle, as we have already seen, is one of poverty, lack of home and family and one without money. Such a lifestyle, we may rightly infer, does not involve living with the value system of society and civilisation as these sayings of Jesus are generally and consistently implying. Instead, it is about a different set of values and different ways to virtue. This, it seems to me, at least implies that the mode of living is implicated in the fruits, virtuous or otherwise, it produces. Can one imagine that Jesus would have recommended itinerancy where that itself was not implicated in producing the outcomes he wanted to see? Jesus, we may then argue, was about producing new forms of humanity and community much as other Cynics, by their habitual performance, were too. As such, being a “passerby” wasn’t coincidental to this: it was what it was all about and was an active means to “decivilisation”.
The archetypal figures for Greek Cynics were said to be Heracles, he of the twelve labours, amongst other things, and Odysseus, he of the ten year journey home from Troy after the Trojan War. Both of these figures, figures about whom great stories were told, suffered, laboured or toiled and these things are eulogised later in Greek culture as essential to how we evaluate their characters. They are, in fact, why Cynics took them as their examples. This is highly relevant to our ninth saying here which waxes lyrical on exactly such a theme. Here “suffering” [although ‘labour’ or ‘toil’ do just as well as translations] is regarded as pertinent to reward which, in this case, is called “life”. Life itself, whether here literal or, more likely, metaphorical, is something that all people want so it is relevant that Jesus finds such a difficult but necessary road to it. We may have read the previous eight sayings with some disbelief as Jesus dismantled the evaluations of civilised society but one thing not there envisaged was that doing so would be easy or a walk in the park. Here Jesus explicitly acknowledges the burden of it but that doesn’t make it any less necessary. Perhaps somewhat like Nietzsche, in this Jesus thinks suffering beneficial. Like poverty before it, suffering is a further path to blessing and what is necessary should not be put off by its difficulty. As in Heracles and Odysseus, such labours end up being matters of credit and good character.
The tenth and final saying here concerns civil authority generally. Jesus, in his saying about giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s and giving to God what is God’s, relativizes the former by reference to the latter. For Jesus, God is the perfect example of virtue, although there is a lot more to it than this which we cannot go into here. In my context here, however, the important point is that civil authority, and in his time and place there could be no greater such thing than that exemplified by Rome, did not have any call upon him except that which was its business and with which it was concerned. So here Jesus does not promote resistance to the state [he was being asked about paying taxes] but he does suggest that the duty to God [and so to virtue] is greater which might mean ignoring civil authority at some imagined future point. Indeed, I recommend a somewhat metaphorical reading here with “Caesar” doing service as civilisation and “God” doing service as the requirement to be virtuous which, in the context of religious myth, is thought pleasing to him. The latter should then clearly be regarded as the more important duty and the lesser only a relative one should you happen to be tangled up within it. If we imagine other, more civilisation-friendly things Jesus could have said in this context we will perhaps get a better handle on the cleverness of this saying, something which does not seek to overtly makes an enemy of civilisation but which puts it in its place. It, too, is nothing to stick to.
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