A Cynic Kingdom?
A Cynic Kingdom?
Mack’s assumption that noting Jesus’ role as a teacher makes him like a Cynic sage (incompatible with an end-time prophet) is astonishing enough. Yet still more astonishing is Mack’s comparison of Jesus’ clearly authentic “kingdom” teaching to Cynic teaching about rulership.174 When Mack tries to defend this quite distant comparison by denying that the “kingdom of God” is a pre-Christian Jewish conception,175 he ignores several important points.
First, he ignores with but brief argument the consensus of most Jewish and New Testament scholarship on the question. A consensus can be and sometimes is mistaken, but that claim should be argued rather than assumed.176 Second, Mack ignores the precise parallels in wording between the opening lines of the “Lord’s Prayer”177 (“Hallowed be your name; your kingdom come . . .”) and the regularly uttered Jewish prayer known as the Kaddish. Most commentators familiar with Judaism recognize this prayer as the background of, or at least derived from the same milieu as, the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer.178 In its earliest form, the Kaddish runs something like, “. . . hallowed be his great name . . . may his kingdom reign . . .”179 The parallel between the Kaddish and the first stanza of Jesus’ model prayer was so obvious in a Jewish setting that an eighth-century translation of the Lord’s Prayer from Latin into Hebrew borrows some of its wording directly from the Kaddish.180 Third and most significantly, as we note below, Mack ignores the Bible known and regularly quoted by Jesus and his Jewish hearers.
Because the kingdom is the most pervasive element in Jesus’ teaching, Mack must make it a Greek idea to maintain his thesis. But consider the evidence. Which is closer to Jesus’ teaching about God’s kingdom: the ideal of wise philosophers’ right to rule,181 to which Mack appeals, or the common Jewish expression “kingdom of God”? Let us for the sake of argument exclude from consideration our earliest rabbinic sources that employ the expression and all other Jewish sources (including pre-Christian Qumran scrolls)182 from the first centuries of this era. When Mack excludes from consideration all Jewish evidence as too late, did he think to first check the Jewish Scriptures, used widely by Jewish people?
Jewish people regularly employed the psalms in worship, and the psalms praise the reign (“kingdom”) of God (Ps 22:28; 145:11-13; cf. Ps 47:8; 93:1; 96:10; 97:1). The expected Davidic king would rule over David’s kingdom (Is 9:7). Daniel 2:44, 47, even implies the “mystery” of God’s future “kingdom,” just as in Mk 4:11. Is not the Jewish conception of the one, Jewish God’s kingdom closer to Jesus’ message about God’s kingdom than a Cynic sage claiming that sages have the right to rule? Why would a scholar bend over backwards to avoid that conclusion?