Scholars Think Jesus Told Chilling Assassin Parable Not Found in Bible

The historical Jesus no doubt told the parables of the good Samaritan, the prodigal son, the lost sheep and the mustard seed, according to a panel of New Testament scholars, but the group also says he may have told a chilling story about an assassin’s preparations.

Of 27 parables found in the Bible, 21 were favored by the majority of scholars voting in a recent session of the Jesus Seminar, an unprecedented project assessing the authenticity of about 500 sayings attributed to Jesus.

The parable of the assassin is not in the Bible; it’s in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas.

But scholars felt by a narrow margin, 16 to 13, that it has the marks of Jesus’ illustrations from ordinary life:

“Jesus said: ‘The Kingdom of the Father is like a certain man who wanted to kill a powerful man. In his own house he drew his sword and stuck it into the wall in order to find out whether his hand could carry through. Then he slew the powerful man.’ ”

Catholic scholar John Dominic Crossan said he believed that most of the panel favored the “assassin” because it is very similar to two well-regarded parables in Luke (14:28-32) about preparations for building a tower and going to war. “If we had no parallels, we might have thought it was too violent an image for Jesus to use,” Crossan said.

Describes Immoral Act

The “assassin” parable does not seem to have any moral, and, if anything, describes an immoral act. But Crossan said the “unjust steward” (Luke 16:1-8a) is another case of immoral behavior, and some parables describe moral or amoral acts. Many parables have moralizing endings but those were added by gospel writers or the early church, mainstream scholars say.

Despite the popular impression that the parables are moral lessons, many scholars say they are succinct stories often illustrating the joy, surprise or shattered expectations that the kingdom, or “reign,” of God would bring. Stevan Davies in “The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom” suggested that the Kingdom parables make sense if the word “wisdom” is substituted for kingdom--a suggestion which some scholars say makes the “assassin” more palatable.

The late Norman Perrin of the University of Chicago wrote of “the extreme unlikelihood of anyone but Jesus” using an assassin as an example, but Perrin was one of the few New Testament scholars in the 1960s and 1970s who supported the authenticity of several “new” parables in the Gospel of Thomas.

The vote taken last weekend at the University of Redlands was indicative of the growth in scholarly esteem for the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. The first complete copy of the Gospel of Thomas was discovered in Egypt in 1945 and it was available in translations by 1960.

Routine Comparisons

Conservative scholars tend to regard the text as tainted by heretical passages and, at any rate, lacking any spiritual authority since it was not included in the New Testament. On the other hand, so-called mainstream scholars, who feel that religious doctrine should not limit research directions or conclusions, now almost routinely compare Thomas versions of Jesus sayings with biblical renditions for historical purposes.

“I think it’s exciting,” said seminar participant Ron Cameron, a Wesleyan University professor currently on a research leave funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities to write a major commentary on the Gospel of Thomas.

“We seemed to have turned a corner--that a gospel text not in the New Testament can be taken as seriously as any of those which are,” said Cameron, who is writing his commentary at Claremont Graduate School.

In fact, of 10 parables that exist in both Thomas and one of the biblical Gospels, the Jesus Seminar deemed the Thomas version closest to the original story in three cases (the “mustard seed,” the “fishnet” and the “feast”) and equal in two (the Gospel of Luke’s “rich farmer” and the “sower” whose seed fell in good soil, in Matthew, Mark and Luke).

On the other hand, two other Thomas parables not found in the New Testament were judged not authentic by most seminar members as were three parables from the “Apocryphon (Secret Book) of James.”

Thomas was said to be one of the 12 disciples, although mainstream scholars do not think Thomas wrote this text any more than they think the disciples Matthew or John wrote the New Testament Gospels attributed to them. The practice of attaching the names of deceased religious authorities to religious writings was common both in Old and New Testament days, scholars say.

Share Works With Public

The Jesus Seminar began the six-to-10 year project last year to spur scholars to share the results of their work with the general public, partly in an effort to counteract the literalistic approaches to the Bible by evangelical and fundamentalist television and publications. One evangelical scholar involved in the controversial project was told to quit the seminar by the president of Point Loma Nazarene College in San Diego last January, but the 15-year faculty member, John Lown, resigned his teaching position rather than quit the seminar.

The skepticism that the Jesus Seminar scholars bring to the texts is often surprising to the religious public. After the Jesus Seminar decided last fall that less than half of the Sermon on the Mount actually goes back to Jesus, a United Methodist weekly newspaper asked why biblical scholars should be trusted any more than television evangelists, and, even if so, whether dissecting the Scriptures amounts to a pointless, possibly harmful debate.

At the University of Redlands, seminar organizer Robert Funk of Bonner, Mont., said that the ordinary believer does not distinguish between the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history.

‘Bewildering Variety’

“While in the popular mind the data about Jesus in the earliest texts constitute an undifferentiated mass, like mashed potatoes or Jello pudding, for us, these data present a bewildering variety that we must sort out,” Funk said. Funk is author of “Parables and Presence” and the two-volume “New Gospel Parallels,” among other books.

Jesus is represented differently in the Gospel of John than he is in the other New Testament Gospels, and still differently in Paul’s letters and as “the bloodthirsty redeemer” in the Book of Revelation, Funk said.

“New Testament scholars have established, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the Jesus of early Christian documents is to some extent a fiction of the Christian imagination,” Funk asserted.

Scholars generally agree that the bulk of Jesus’ parables were not originally told as allegories. When they do appear in that form, mainstream scholars usually suspect the creative hand of a Gospel writer or the early church was responsible. In allegorical parables, characters sometimes represent opponents of the early church or the story betrays theological reflections about Jesus developed after his lifetime, the scholars say.

Thus, at Redlands, seminar members voted against at least three parables in which they saw allegories: “an enemy sowing bad seed among the good seed,” tenant farmers who killed the owner’s “son” and “heir” to the vineyard and another about 10 maidens who await “the bridegroom” (thought to be a later title for Jesus).

Breakfast Favorite

Likewise, the parable of the talents--a story about investing money wisely and a favorite Scripture reading at businessmen’s prayer breakfasts--received an evenly divided vote because some felt it had allegorical elements and was not typical of Jesus’ other parables.

The Pharisee and the tax collector, as well as another story in Luke, the rich man and Lazarus, also had supporters in seminar discussions but the negative votes prevailed.

Many scholars believe that Jesus stories involving the Pharisees are anachronistic--that the Jewish rabbinic movement did not exist under that name prior to Jesus’ crucifixion in the early 30s of the 1st Century.

As for the Lazarus story (not the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John), seminar member Bernard B. Scott of St. Meinrad Catholic Seminary in Indiana said, “The group thought it was written by Luke. It reflected his own theme--the poor.” Funk said the story, about the rich man in hell and poor Lazarus in heaven, also had elements uncharacteristic of Jesus’ parables--the use of specific names and a vindictive flavor.

Membership in the Jesus Seminar has grown from about 70 last fall to more than 100, but Funk and Crossan indicated that the discussion-informed votes by the 30 scholars present at the first two meetings would carry more weight in the project than a scattering of mailed ballots from non-participants.

Half Thought Authentic

Karen King of Occidental College also said that if a two-thirds approval is required to say a Jesus saying has a “consensus”--an early suggestion in the project--then only half of the parables considered last weekend were thought authentic. In later discussion, seminar members seemed to favor later reconsideration of sayings in which votes were close.

Paper ballots were used for most of the voting. But Funk retained the use of colored beads and ballot boxes for selected votes on difficult sayings--red for authentic, pink for probably, gray for probably not and black for inauthentic. The combination of red and pink votes was used to determine a positive vote. The highest number of red votes, 18, went to the succinct story about the woman who put leaven into bread (Matthew 13:33).