I happen to like mustard as a condiment. Researching it, I see its history as both a condiment and a medicinal herb going back to ancient Rome and Egypt.
Problem with that is that it had always been a rich man’s condiment in ancient days and all the way up until Columbus. Indeed the whole Columbus thing of going out of the superstitious Christian European box was a marketing strategy to obtain greater market share and greater market profits out of the spice trade that had been disrupted by the collapse of the Center of the Christian World in Constantinople in 1453. Center of the European distribution network too regarding the spice trade from the far east.
Greed was the motivating factor in Columbus’ zeal to find a shorter trade route to India.
When I read the parable of the Mustard Seed in the synoptic Gospels I wonder why a simple man of the people, a day laborer, a migrant homeless man in the form of Jesus, why he would preach to the simple masses, mostly farmers and goatherds etc. about the very complex and exotic spice trade item from India such as mustard and or the mustard seed.
I understand the power of metaphor, the power to illustrate a small lurching into the big, to illustrate some other point.
Indeed, I feel certain that the Jesus-y feel of the mustard seed parable has an overlaying stink of an urban scholar that knows all the aspects of primitive botany from books and also commodity profits of an earthy sounding farm product that Jesus must have had knowledge of, but probably did not.
In fact, in one of the synoptic passages, the mustard seed parable is preceded by a parable of weeds among wheat. While an urban dweller who wrote this mustard seed parable might stick his nose up at weeds, many weeds are indeed edible and the poor, the starving unentitled poor, Jesus’ poor, would have gathered up many of those weeds separated eventually from the wheat and ate them. Survival makes more sense than urban vested scholarship in the early church’s reconstruction of a holy man who few if any recorded any details about.
Not only eat the weeds, but dry the ones that were not edible and use them as fuel, not burn them up foolishly like waste in an urban middle class garden.
Mustard, where it can grow, not the Holy Land, is also considered a weed.
A middle class Greco-Roman urban garden view of the natural world?
Confused mixed message from early paid for Jesus scholars? Greco-Roman urban myths? Faulty creationist type middle class science? If it sounds good in an abstract middle class context, it must be true.
Problem with scholars, urban middle class scholars, like the ones involved with the Jesus Seminar, who have signed off on makes sense, sounds like middle class, myths like the Mustard Seed parable, is that they are middle class and see the whole world with their born to, ingrained way of looking at the world.
Problem with scholars, urban middle class scholars, like the ones involved with the Jesus Seminar, who have signed off on makes sense, sounds like middle class, myths like the Mustard Seed parable, is that they are middle class and see the whole world with their born to, ingrained way of looking at the world.
This middle class urban way of looking at Jesus, invention then and still now, is an interesting illustration of the human condition but it is not the true Jesus.
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