this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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Da bibble is full of the truths I need. There's no smaller seed than a mustard seed, and bats are another variety of bird. Is it the truth, or is it what you've been told you must believe lest ye risk ostracizing yourself from your peers?
I feel projection of right wing levels.
There might be more to that one than you think.
Here was the only group in antiquity with a different explanation for the sower parable (that it was about physical creation of the cosmos) talking about the mustard seed:
This group kept describing seeds as being indivisible points that make up all things and were the originating cause of the universe.
Language pretty much straight out of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura where describing the atomism of Epicureanism for a Roman audience couldn't use the Greek atomos ('indivisible') and used the word for 'seed' instead.
In a book widely popular in the Roman empire 50 years before Jesus was born.
In fact, Lucretius's book is not only the only surviving book from antiquity to explicitly describe survival of the fittest being the mechanism by which mutants in nature survived or died off based on adaptation, but specifically used the language of "seed falling by the wayside of a path" to describe failed biological reproduction.
Again, in a book 80 years before a guy allegedly talking about how only what survived of randomly scattered seeds multipled and the seed that fell by the wayside of a path did not. In a public saying that was the only one in the earliest gospel to canonically have a "secret explanation" later on. Why were they so threatened by this saying?
There may have been more to the context around what these sayings about seeds from a guy killed by request of religious orthodoxy leadership were about in a culture where also from the 1st century a Rabbi was recorded as saying "why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean."
Don't just take at face value what cannonical Christianity says with its damage control versions of secret explanations and boring ass nonsense about 'faith growing.'
I don't think the gospels depicted real events I think the whole thing is someone trying to explain a concept or a philosophical or metaphysical idea.
Whether or not the gospels were depicting real events, there are points where they almost certainly are depicting earlier stories of events.
For example, Peter's denying Jesus three times right around the time Jesus is having approximately three different trials to eventually convict him, in one case even going all the way back into the guarded area where the trial was taking place to deny him.
Did this happen exactly this way with the rooster and everything? Almost certainly not.
But it is very unlikely that a group of people following Peter as the person receiving the continuation of the tradition would have invented his denying the founder right when the founder was being tried, and would have made it happen a specific number of times or placed it literally inside privileged areas.
More likely is that there were stories of Peter having been denying Jesus around the time of the trials and having been spotted going back into guarded area where the trial was taking place, and then the gospels in his later tradition were trying to explain these accusations away through narrative.
i.e. Yes, he denied him, but it was only to normal people standing around and it was prophesied so it was ok.
Also, in particular in Mark you can see these splits between earlier stuff which is typically described as in public and the later stuff which is typically described as occurring in private with only a handful of people.
So with a saying like the sower parable, it was likely widely known at the time the gospel of Mark was being written which is why it was characterized as being spoken in public. But the part about him explaining it in private probably isn't even originally part of the first draft of Mark, as they jump from the shore to a private meeting and never jump back, yet are back at the shore before it moves on to the next segment. This makes more sense if a later editor inserted the explanation and the entirety of Mark 4's sayings at the shore were in public.
So did a historical Jesus actually stand at the shore talking about randomly thrown seeds? Who knows?
But regardless of that narrative detail being true, it's likely that there was a saying about thrown seeds attributed to Jesus before Mark was being written, and that either the author or a later editor was adding in a secret explanation well after the parable itself was more widely known and attributed.