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.  He is out of his mind  : The Greek verb means  to bebeside oneself,  to lose one s mind,  to be possessed.This is one of the most hair-raising verses in the Gos-pels.Hidden inside it is a world of misunderstanding and128 STEPHEN MITCHELLdisappointment.Actually, it is a miracle that the versesurvived at all, to speak to us.It appears only in Mark; bothMatthew and Luke apparently found it so shocking thatthey deleted it from their accounts.(Even in Mark, thetranscribers of two of the best ancient manuscripts were soembarrassed by it that they altered it to read,  And whenthe scribes and the others [italics added] heard about him,they went to seize him, for they said,  He is out of hismind.  )p.40, the strange sounds Jesus had uttered: According to MortonSmith,  Magicians who want to make demons obey oftenscream their spells, gesticulate, and match the mad in fury(Jesus the Magician, p.32).p.50, righteousness: Jesus, like other Jewish prophets, doesn tuse this word in a moralistic sense.By a  righteous manhe means someone whose whole being is illuminated inGod s light and who therefore naturally acts with justice andcompassion.p.54, Our Father in heaven: I have used Matthew s version ofthe Lord s Prayer because it is such a familiar and belovedpart of our Western religious tradition.Luke s version(11:2ff.), which may be more authentic, is as follows:JESUS / WHAT HE REALLY SAID AND DID 129Father,hallowed be your name.May your kingdom come.Give us each day our daily bread,and forgive us our sinsfor we ourselves forgive all those who havewronged us.And do not lead us into temptation.p.57,  Don t judge : This doesn t mean that we shouldn t seepeople clearly or recognize where they and we stand in themoral and spiritual realm.That kind of judgment is as nec-essary to compassionate action as headlights are to night driv-ing.What Jesus means here is that we shouldn t accuse orcondemn, that we should keep our hearts open to everyone.Lao-tzu explains:The Tao doesn t take sides;it gives birth to both good and evil.The Master doesn t take sides;she welcomes both saints and sinners.(Tao Te Ching:A New English Version, chapter 5)The Master imitates the Tao in being available to every-one.Because she can see into the essential nature of every130 STEPHEN MITCHELLbeing, she doesn t get trapped inside her own judgments ordelude herself into thinking that people are good or evil.p.58,  What good is it for someone to say : This is one oftwo passages that I have included in Jesus teachings that aretaken from later church writings.It is from the Epistle ofJames, and is very much in keeping with the spirit of Jesus.What good is it, my dear friends, for someone to say that hehas faith when he doesn t act as if he loves God? Can hisfaith save him? If a fellow human being is naked andhungry, and you say to him,  Keep warm, eat well, anddon t give him what he needs, what good is that? So faith,if it doesn t lead to action, is dead.(James 2:14ff.)p.61,  Miriam s bastard : Literally,  the son of Mary. InEnglish,  the son of Mary gives no idea of the phrase s con-notation in Aramaic or Hebrew.In Semitic usage, a man wasnormally called  [name] son of [father s name] ; if he wascalled  [name] son of [mother s name], it indicated that hisfather was unknown and that he was illegitimate.Accordingto a later Jewish legal principle,  A man is illegitimate whenhe is called by his mother s name, for a bastard has no father. The name Yeshu ben Miriam [Jesus son of Mary] wasthought to be such an unbearable insult by the early churchJESUS / WHAT HE REALLY SAID AND DID 131that only Mark had the courage to retain it.All the otherEvangelists omitted it (Ethelbert Stauffer,  Jeschu benMirjam, in Neotestamentica et Semitica, ed.E.E.Ellis andM.Wilcox [Clark, 1969], pp.119ff.).p.61,  A prophet is not rejected : Mark 6:4.The King JamesVersion softens the Greek by translating it  a prophet is notwithout honor. But the adjective means  dishonored andderives from a verb that means  to dishonor, disgrace, shame,humiliate, treat with contempt.This saying probably circulated independently; its formin another collection of sayings called the OxyrhynchusPapyri is  A prophet is not accepted in his native town, norcan a doctor heal those who know him. This may be a moreprimitive form.On the other hand, it is unlikely that Markadded  and in his own family and in his own house ; thefirst of these phrases was difficult enough that Matthewomitted it.p.61,  Nothing external can disturb us : Epictectus:Encheiridion, V.p.62,  He lets all things come and go : Tao Te Ching: A NewEnglish Version, chapter 55.132 STEPHEN MITCHELLp.68,  For even.the prophets : I have taken the text herefrom the almost entirely lost Gospel of the Nazoreans.p.70, Now a priest: The Torah says that priests and Levitesassistant priests must not touch dead bodies. The injuredman appeared to be dead, and the priest and the Leviteare represented as wishing to avoid contracting corpse im-purity.The priest and the Levite are not accused of lackof piety, or of self-service, but of choosing the wrong piousactivity.The worship of God would go on even though onepriest and one Levite were unable to share in it for a week.Inthis and similar circumstances the right thing to do was tocare for one s brother (E.P.Sanders and Margaret Davies,Studying the Synoptic Gospels, p.182).Samaritan:  The relations between the Jews and the mixedpeoples, which had undergone considerable fluctuations,had become very much worse in the time of Jesus, after theSamaritans, between A.D.6 and 9 at midnight, during aPassover, had defiled the Temple court by strewing deadmen s bones; as a result irreconcilable hostility existed betweenthe two parties (Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus,trans.S.H.Hooke [Charles Scribner s Sons, 1955], p.204).p.70, oil and wine:  The oil would mollify, the wine woulddisinfect (ibid.).JESUS / WHAT HE REALLY SAID AND DID 133p.80,  no one is perfectly good except God alone : Literally,  noone is good except one: God. This verse goes so muchagainst the grain of the evangelists desire to portray Jesus as sinless that it must be authentic.By good Jesus means  absolutely good; perfect. This is atouchingly clear statement of how he thought of himself: asfully human and no more than human, as fully capable ofmaking mistakes.The great English poet and painterWilliam Blake said,  It is not because angels are holier thanmen or devils that makes them angels, but because they donot expect holiness from one another but from God only ( AVision of the Last Judgment ) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]