Either Sage or?
Either Sage or?
To argue against Jesus being an eschatological prophet, Mack forces an illogical choice: if Jesus was a sage, Mack contends, then he was not an eschatological prophet.166 Because Mack accepts only the “wisdom” “layer” of Q as early, he argues that its image represents the real Jesus, suppressed by a church antagonistic to this image of Jesus. (As noted above, I shall deal later with the subjective way that he defines which part of “Q” is early, but a central factor seems to be that whatever fits his thesis about the authentic Jesus is early.)
Mack contends that the later canon purposely excluded “Q” to destroy evidence of the earliest Christian genre of instruction.167 In reality, we lack any evidence that “Q” even remained extant in the second century. (Christians probably simply did not feel a need to keep using “Q” independently because they found most of it incorporated in more complete Gospels.) By contending that the church did away with the instruction genre, Mack must ignore the inconvenient fact that the church actually continued to use this genre, even more frequently than it appears in the New Testament. (Compare the “Two Ways” instruction format in Barnabas and the Didache.) Contrary to Mack’s conspiratorial thesis, the catechetical model probably increased rather than declined in subsequent centuries.
Mack suggests that for the “first followers of Jesus . . . What mattered most was the body of instructions that circulated in his name”; only later, he contends, did “groups in different locations” produce varied mythologies of his life somehow harmonized with his teachings in the later gospels.168 After Mack has eliminated the context of Jesus’ prophetic life (contrast our ch. 17), it is much easier to reinterpret his sayings that remain.
Simply comparing other ancient sources would ruin Mack’s thesis, however: his forced-choice logic cannot work in any document where it may be tested objectively. His assumption that the roles of wisdom teacher and eschatological prophet are incompatible169 does not fit all ancient Jewish teachers. That a figure expecting the imminent end of the age might also provide rules for a community expected to survive that final holocaust or endure for some time is evident in the conjunction of both modes of thought in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are pre-Christian.170
The Dead Sea Scrolls moreover include wisdom texts as well as eschatology, showing that the same people could accept both approaches.171 Some also contend that even the eschatological Similitudes of Enoch (no later than the first century) blend “wisdom and apocalyptic or eschatological sayings.”172 Similarly, that Rabbi Akiba (early second-century) was purportedly a mystic and also among the most vocal supporters of Bar Kochba suggests that even the early rabbinic trajectory did not absolutely separate revelatory, rabbinic, and revolutionary streams of thought.
First-century Judaism does not allow us to simply force a choice among options such as teachers, prophets, healers, and messiahs, as if such categories were logically incompatible. While these categories did not always overlap, they sometimes did so.173 Recognizing (rightly) that Jesus was a sage thus affords us no license to automatically infer that he was not also a prophet (or whatever other category we might conceive for him). We must grapple fairly with all potential roles for Jesus claimed by the texts without assuming that demonstrating one refutes another, except in cases of true contradiction (e.g., a pacifist versus an armed revolutionary).
Cynic parallels for the study of Jesus prove useful only when placed in a larger context of ancient sages, especially the closer and more abundant Jewish cultural parallels. Likewise, Jewish wisdom parallels should be pursued heavily but not to the exclusion of Jewish apocalyptic, legal and “charismatic” parallels. Early traditions about Jesus also attribute these roles to him (see chs. 13, 17-18), and our sources indicate that these categories were no less a part of Judaism nor incompatible with the wisdom tradition.