Seeking the Imperishable Treasure

Wealth, Wisdom, and a Jesus Saying

Steven R. Johnson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9781556352447
  9781498210713
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498273848
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

In Seeking the Imperishable Treasure, Johnson tracks the use of a single saying of Jesus over time and among theologically divergent authors and communities. He identifies six different versions of the saying in the canonical gospels and epistles (Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, James, and Colossians), as well as the Gospel of Thomas and Q. After tracing the tradition and redaction history of this wisdom admonition, he observes at least two distinctly different wisdom themes that are applied to the saying: the proper disposition of wealth and the search for knowledge, wisdom, or God. What he discovers is a saying of Jesus--with roots in Jewish wisdom and pietistic traditions, as well as popular Greek philosophy--that proved amazingly adaptable in its application to differing social and rhetorical contexts of the first century.

chapter 1 Introduction

Why This Book?

One of the more significant lessons we have learned from biblical scholarship is that traditions about Jesus were not passed down in any kind of linear or uniform fashion. We know with certainty that the teachings of Jesus were transmitted through a variety of media including, but not exclusive to, sayings collections, rules for church order, instructional and hortatory letters, liturgies, and apostolic word-of-mouth. We know that individual writings of the New Testament and other early Jesus movement literature usually reflect not singular, but multiple sources.

The most obvious example of this latter reality comes from gospel studies. Regardless of one’s theory of the source relationships between canonical gospels, it is clear that a variety of sources are involved. Even if one begins with the most fundamental and widely-held hypothesis—the two-source hypothesis (Matthew and Luke used Mark and another source, “Q”)—one is still faced with the likelihood of additional “M” and “L” sources used by Matthew and Luke respectively, as well as sources used in the composition of Mark and Q themselves.

Part and parcel of the problem of identifying sources and the forms they took is discerning in what ways and to what purposes oral tradents, collectors of traditions, and gospel writers modified their sources in order to address new and different social contexts. Simply put, sayings of Jesus found in more than one gospel are rarely identical. And while some differences can be readily identified as changes befitting the individual gospel writers’ stylistic or grammatical preferences, other differences reflect their theological or cultural viewpoints—perspectives that become apparent through a close reading of the entire respective work and by comparison with other gospels.

Still other differences can be attributed to various pre-gospel stages of transmission. Form critics, beginning with Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Dibelius, have demonstrated the tendency of nascent Jesus movements to shape the sayings traditions according to their particular needs.1 More recently, John Dominic Crossan showed how regularly the gospel writers shaped the core of aphoristic sayings by various means, such as contraction, expansion, substitution, transposition, and conversion, and then further shaped the interpretation of those sayings by combining or clustering them and then embedding them in larger speech units and narratives.2 And so, with even the subtlest of modifications, an aphoristic saying can take different forms, such as maxim, rhetorical question, admonition, or prohibition and take on different meanings in different hermeneutical contexts.

With occasional exceptions (e.g., The Lord’s Prayer, Against Divorce), Crossan deals only with gospel material. However, his arguments are appropriate to a wider range of material. Compare the following:

“Are grapes gathered from thorn-bushes, or figs from thistles?” (Matt 7:16b)

“Figs are not gathered from thorns-bushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush.” (Luke 6:44b)

“Can a fig tree . . . yield olives, or a grapevine figs?” (Ja 3:12a)

With regard to form, Matthew and James have rhetorical questions; Luke states a gnomic truth. With regard to content: Luke and James begin with figs, Matthew with grapes. Matthew and Luke contrast fruits with prickly plants that do not bear edible fruit; James contrasts fruits with plants bearing different edible fruit.

Advances in rhetorical criticism have since confirmed many of Crossan’s observations, but gone beyond them as well. By focusing on the way ancient rhetoricians worked with the chreia, rhetorical critics have demonstrated how sayings of Jesus could be and were transformed for rhetorical effect (at any stage of transmission) according to the methods of chreia elaboration as outlined in the ancient progymnasmata (exercises preliminary to training in rhetoric).3

The relevant point for this study is that individual sayings of Jesus underwent significant transformations in form and meaning depending on how they were used—in much the same way ten Christian preachers can apply the same given lectionary passage, on the same Sunday, in ten different ways, depending upon their particular congregations’ social and historical contexts and perceived needs. Compare again the previous New Testament examples, but with a little context added:

“You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorn-bushes . . . ?”

“For each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thorn-bushes . . .”

“Can a fig tree, my brothers, yield olives . . . ? Neither can salt water yield fresh.”

The broader Matthean context has Jesus warning the crowd to beware of false prophets, who are to be identified in the metaphor as “thorn-bushes” and “thistles” that do not bear (good) fruit. Luke’s context has Jesus admonishing listeners in the crowd to examine the “fruits” of their own lives and thereby consider their quality of character. The implied readers of James, who are viewed as religious family members, are exhorted to watch their tongues, because good and evil should not proceed from the same source. The contrast of the metaphor is less sharp here and more an issue of like producing like fruit. In each of the examples, however, what is essentially the same saying of Jesus—in this case an aphoristic teaching that applies a specific metaphor to express the necessary congruence between moral nature and resulting activity—is used in a different literary context, exists in a different form, and consequently has a different hermeneutic.

In subsequent chapters, I will track the development of the Treasure in Heaven saying of Jesus, a saying that is remarkable for its utility and breadth of interpretive applications in New Testament and other early Jesus movement writings. Elements of the Treasure in Heaven saying are found not only in the canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but also in extra-canonical Q and the Gospel of Thomas. It was used in the Pauline epistolary tradition (Colossians) as well as in the Letter of James. Not only are no two of these eight versions of the saying exactly alike, but the saying is broadly applied under two vastly different topoi, or motifs, of the Jewish Wisdom tradition: the proper disposition of wealth and the search for divine wisdom or knowledge. These different topoi are not particular either to gospels or to epistles; each topos is found in both genres. The saying functions as exhortation or prohibition—sometimes both—as a rationale for moral behavior, and as a prophetic warning against unethical behavior. In short, it is one of the most widely used and broadly interpreted sayings of Jesus and is therefore a prime candidate for studying the development of sayings traditions in the first century of the common or Christian era.

Thesis and Approach

My primary thesis in this study is that the Q and Thomas versions of the Treasure in Heaven saying (Q 12:33; GTh 76:3) are particularly relevant to discussion concerning the development of sayings traditions. It is my contention that, on the one hand, the Thomasine Treasure in Heaven saying was well known in the first century and played a pivotal role in the early transmission of the saying, influencing or being modified in three canonical versions (Luke 12:33; John 6:27; Col 3:1–2). And on the other hand, the use of the saying in James (5:2-3) reflects knowledge of Q, which was also an early and foundational version of the saying for the gospel tradition (cf. Matt 6:19; Luke 12:33). Ironically, both extra-canonical gospel versions of the Treasure saying may have found their earliest canonical expressions in the epistles.

One ramification of this thesis, if it holds up under close scrutiny, is important for our reconstruction of the development of early Christian texts and communities because there is the implication that some sayings traditions (as represented in the Gospel of Thomas, for example), eventually excluded for their perceived heretical theology or for their use by groups excluded from the mainstream, were recognized as authoritative in the first century. However, the point should not be overstated. This study focuses on one saying of Jesus, not an entire collection, such as we find in the Sayings Gospel Q, the Gospel of Thomas, or in the many non-Q collections of parables and aphoristic sayings found in, for example, Matthew 13, Mark 4, and Luke. I stress this caveat later in the chapter by comparing pairs of studies by James M. Robinson and Risto Uro that lead to apparently contradictory results—...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Synoptics and Q
• Chapter 3: John, Thomas, and Luke
• Chapter 4: James and Colossians
• Chapter 5: Inferences and Reconstruction of an Archetype
• Chapter 6: Conclusion
• Appendix: Reconstructed Text of Q 12:33
• Works Cited