CHAPTER 2 - Jesus the Cynic Sage?
CHAPTER 2
Jesus the Cynic Sage?
“The historical Jesus was, then, a peasant Jewish Cynic. His peasant village was close enough to a Greco-Roman city like Sepphoris that sight and knowledge of Cynicism are neither inexplicable nor unlikely.”
JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN1
“Jesus’ use of parables, aphorisms, and clever rejoinders is very similar to the Cynics’ way with words. Many of his themes are familiar Cynic themes.”
BURTON MACK2
“. . . especially among certain authors now or formerly connected with the Jesus
Seminar, emphasis on the Jewishness of Jesus is hardly a central concern.
Whether one looks at the more serious works of writers like John Dominic
Crossan and Burton L. Mack or the sensationalist popular works of authors
like Robert W. Funk, one finds Jesus the Cynic philosopher or Jesus the generic
Mediterranean peasant . . . largely overshadowing the specific 1st-
century Palestinian Jew named Jesus.”
JOHN P. MEIER3
Most of the approaches sampled in this chapter will be echoed later in this book less often than those treated in the following chapter. The authors surveyed here portray a Jesus who does not fit a first-century Jewish context nearly as convincingly as views to which we will turn in ch. 3. Not all of the sample views surveyed here are equally widely held among scholars, but they do illustrate the wide range of proposals that scholars have offered in recent decades.
Although the “Jesus Seminar” is somewhat of an amorphous group, it has popularized the idea of Jesus as a noneschatological sage, an image that can appeal to much of our modern culture without much translation. I use the Jesus Seminar to introduce my discussion of the Cynic Jesus of Crossan and especially that of Burton Mack.