What Kind of Sage?
What Kind of Sage?
Mack portrays a more pervasively Cynic Jesus than Crossan does. He does so by isolating and focusing exclusively on a very slender element of our sources for Jesus, namely, what he considers the earliest part of the source “Q.” This leaves him with only seven pages of wisdom sayings to work with for who Jesus was and what he taught. (“Q” is scholars’ label for a source no longer extant, which Matthew and Luke shared. It is reconstructed on the basis of Matthew and Luke. I will deal with Mack’s perspective on Q in ch. 4, but for now I simply mention that his method of determining the “earliest” part of this hypothetical document is astonishingly subjective.)
The traditions Mack counts earliest (based on his premise that Jesus was only a sage) not surprisingly portray Jesus as a sage. Since Jesus was certainly a sage (whatever else he may have been as well), Mack has no trouble finding genuine “sage” aspects of Jesus. Whereas eschatology tends to be distinctively Jewish,159 highlighting Jesus’ “sage” features can allow for a less ethnic-specific feel to Jesus.
By itself, the observation that Jesus was a sage would not prove particularly profound, controversial or problematic. By definition, everyone recognizes that both Jewish sages and Cynic sages were “sages.” The problem is Mack’s faulty assumption that such sage characteristics must make Jesus like a Cynic, when we know that Jewish sages abounded in Galilee, and we lack evidence for any Cynic ones there!160 As I will show later in this book (in chs. 13-15), Jesus’ teachings show abundant parallels to specifically Jewish teachers.
As Cynic parallels to what he thinks is the earliest layer of Q, Mack adduces Jesus’ “aphoristic style, unconventional behavior,” bold straightforwardness, and so forth.161 But as we have noted, most of these characteristics appear in other wisdom traditions and beyond wisdom traditions, and certainly beyond Cynics.162 The biblical Book of Proverbs, cited regularly among Palestinian Jews, is full of “aphorisms”; aphorisms also characterize Jewish wisdom teaching more generally.163 Many other philosophers besides Cynics were known for their impudent boldness,164 and the same was true for Jewish biblical prophets (e.g., 1 Kgs 21:20-24; 22:28; 2 Kgs 3:13-14). Geza Vermes focuses on similar behavior among Galilean “charismatic sages,” who preserved ancient Jewish prophetic traditions, not new Cynic ones.165 If Vermes’ examples are a bit limited (see our next chapter), they are at least more common in Galilee and much more relevant for a Galilean Jew than Mack’s are.