Pearls before Swine

The purpose of this post is not to discuss the divinity of Jesus, his teaching, his miracles, or his crucifixion and resurrection. Countless books have been written on these subjects, and they are not yet exhausted. Rather, the modest intention here is to mention one aspect of Jesus’s activities to which not enough attention has been paid. I refer to the fact that Jesus was a literary genius. How can this be, you say? We know that Jesus didn’t write anything (except for the time when he wrote something in the sand with his finger).

Though Jesus don’t write anything, his disciples took down what he said and included it in the gospels. Epictetus didn’t write anything, either, but Arrian, one of his pupils, wrote down his teacher’s lectures The result is the Enchiridion (Handbook) and Discourses. Those books are well worth studying.

As far as Socrates is concerned, his words were uttered in the form of dialogues, making it hard to separate Socrates’ words from his interlocutor’s in the form of a treatise or essay. George Bernard Shaw argued that Socrates was an invention of Plato.

There is little doubt that Jesus is the author of the parables because in their style and profundity they exceed what the apostles (simple fishermen) were capable of.

With Thomas Gray (Elegy in a Country Churchyard), we can wonder how much wisdom has been lost because no one took it down

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,

The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

As a side note, the emperor Justinian set humanity back one thousand years when in an act of misguided zeal he burnt down the library of Akexandria. The Spanish priests and conquistadors similarly destroyed the temples and codicils of the Aztecs. Did the 700-plus works of the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus (none of which have survived) meet the same fate?

It is not surprising that Jesus and other teachers did not write anything. More than any other literature, philosophical works were related to oral transmission because ancient philosophy was above all oral in nature. The ancients believed in the power of the spoken word over the written word, especially when so many people were illiterate.

Jesus “wrote” 46 parables and uttered metaphors and phrases that are astonishing and still fresh after two thousand years. He recited these remarkable works ex tempore (without notes).

When you read Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, God and the Son debate like Scholastics (according to Alexander Pope).

You can’t say that of Jesus’s style, which is unique.

For centuries writers have been searching for striking metaphors to embellish their works, but no one has invented such graphic and novel ones as Jesus.

For example from the Sermon on the Mount (which is a compilation),

Matthew 7: 6

Do not give what is holy to the dogs or cast pearls before swine

The metaphor has entered popular culture through an American rock group with that name and appeared in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice.

How did Jesus invent that metaphor? It is so extraordinary that it astounds us even after two thousand years.

Then there is his remark on funeral rites:

Luke 9: 60

Let the dead bury their own dead

That admonition is not popular with the funeral industry.

What Jesus says is that we should not let other duties come between us and our spiritual calling, though I doubt if he meant that we should not attend the funeral of a relative

Matthew 5: 3.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

That remark from Sermon on the Mount seems contradictory. Yet, if we change poor to humble, the meaning becomes clear.

Jesus in his ethical teaching emphasized good behavior as the way to go to heaven.

The mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1757), in contrast, stressed intelligence. He told the story of a man who became a hermit, abstained from sensual, intellectual, and aesthetic pleasures. When he died, there were no grounds to deny him entry into heaven. But when he got there, he discovered that the angels were engaging in all sorts of sophisticated discussions that he couldn’t understand. He was very unhappy in heaven.

Another mystic, William Blake (1757-1827) in his book Marriage of Heaven and Hell stressed aesthetics, the finest example of which he found in Jesus’s literary work.

In Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, God and the Son debate like Scholastics (Alexander Pope’s opinion), but Jesus’s style is exceptional.

Blake was of the opinion that Milton belonged to “Satan’s party” (on account of the striking portrayal of Satan).

The four synoptic gospels of the Bible are unsurpassed.

We are still waiting for some ambitious genius to write a fifth gospel, with great metaphors and a new look at the ethics of Jesus.

Nietzsche attempted something similar in Thus Spake Zarathustra, but his work does not come up to the synoptic gospels.

The deaths of Socrates and Christ have often been compared. Their ethics are also similar, though one is secular, the other religious.

For both Socrates and Jesus, the ideal is the just man.

They both seem to have courted their deaths, but Socrates did not say that he was dying to save humanity.

A good place to begin your exploration of the parables of Jesus is the following book (there are countless others):

William Barclay, The Parables of Jesus.Westminster,JohnKnox Press, 1999.