Clivedurdle

http://www.wolfcountry.net/informati...sandremus.html

Is the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree a direct attack on Rome?

Peter Kirby

Do we have to look this far afield?

Jeremiah 8
4"You shall say to them, Thus says the LORD:
When men fall, do they not rise again?
If one turns away, does he not return?
5Why then has this people turned away
in perpetual backsliding?
They hold fast to deceit;
they refuse to return.
6I have paid attention and listened,
but they have not spoken rightly;
no man relents of his evil,
saying, 'What have I done?'
Everyone turns to his own course,
like a horse plunging headlong into battle.
7Even the stork in the heavens
knows her times,
and the turtledove, swallow, and crane
keep the time of their coming,
but my people know not
the rules of the LORD.
8"How can you say, 'We are wise,
and the law of the LORD is with us'?
But behold, the lying pen of the scribes
has made it into a lie.
9The wise men shall be put to shame;
they shall be dismayed and taken;
behold, they have rejected the word of the LORD,
so what wisdom is in them?
10Therefore I will give their wives to others
and their fields to conquerors,
because from the least to the greatest
everyone is greedy for unjust gain;
from prophet to priest,
everyone deals falsely.
11They have healed the wound of my people lightly,
saying, 'Peace, peace,'
when there is no peace.
12Were they ashamed when they committed abomination?
No, they were not at all ashamed;
they did not know how to blush.
Therefore they shall fall among the fallen;
when I punish them, they shall be overthrown,
says the LORD.
13When I would gather them, declares the LORD,
there are no grapes on the vine,
nor figs on the fig tree;
even the leaves are withered,
and what I gave them has passed away from them."

This (in the Gospel with Jesus) sounds like a story about Israel.

If we wanted to make a connection to Romulus and Remus, would not the she-wolf be the symbol that came to mind? I don't remember the "setting ashore under a fig tree" when I think of Romulus and Remus. I think of the wolf. The "fig tree," to the extent that it is in the R&R story at all, is not an actor.

Clivedurdle

My point is that actually Jeremiah is further afield - we are talking about a key symbol of the foundation of Rome here!

http://www.inmamaskitchen.com/FOOD_I.../fig_walk.html

Peter Kirby

"Ancient pictures of the Roman twins usually follow certain symbolic traditions, depending on the legend they follow: they either show a shepherd, a she-wolf, the twins under a fig tree and one or two birds (Livy, Plutarch); or they depict two shepherds, the she-wolf, the twins in a cave, seldom a fig tree and never any birds (Dionysius of Halicarnassus)." (sigh, Wikipedia, hopefully someone has some better references)

If the reference is to Romulus and Remus, rather than to Jeremiah, where is the wolf, and why does Jesus seem to expect figs on the tree "out of season"?

If the reference is to Jeremiah, the reason is that Israel has not heard the message of Jesus and so are like those addressed by Jeremiah. The Jeremiah hypotext contains the idea of the fig tree not having figs, and of the fig tree withering--a closer contact than the R&R story. Moreover, there is no stretch in supposing that the synoptic authors were writing with reference to Hebrew scripture whatsoever.

If Jeremiah is far afield, how can R&R be closer at hand?

Toto

another possibility

neilgodfrey

It's very plausible that Mark's fig tree was prompted by the sacred fig in the Roman forum if we accept both the 1995 article by T.E. Schmidt on the Jesus "procession" to the cross being modelled on the Roman Triumph (NTS, v.41) and the 1992 article by Paul Duff on Jesus' entry into Jerusalem being similarly modelled in part on Greco-Roman royal ceremonial entries into cities (JBL, v.111/1).

The final "triumphal" procession ended with the King of the Jews on the cross on the Place of the Skull, which I think Schmidt has linked with the Capitol Hill in Rome -- thus uniting in the one image the kingdoms of both the Jews and the Romans. (Is "Existential Jesus" John Carroll's imagination too out of control for seeing an association between the withered fig tree and the cross?)

Back to the fig tree in Mark: Jesus' entry with the crowds, the garments and things, the hymn, is a mix of Zech 14 and royal Greco-Roman triumphal entries. The withered fig tree and temple mount are united in a single image with Jesus pronouncing that both will be tossed into the sea with the prayer of faith.

If so, then we have both triumphal processions arriving at a place where the kingdoms of Jew and gentile meet.

Is not the Kingdom of God in the evangelist's mind destined to replace both the Jewish and Roman kingdoms? He makes a lot of allusions to Daniel to lead one to think so, not least the "son of man" epithet.

But I'm biased a little in this view in that I'm currently playing with the idea that Mark was also intertwining the Jewish and Roman representatives (high priest, governor) as both equally culpable and doomed by the arrival of the new kingdom. The trial depicts the order of the cosmos being overwhelmed by the forces of chaos, and Pilate (Rome) is caught out by the suddenness of the "end" as much as anyone else -- cf his marvelling that Jesus was "already" dead with Jesus' warning that "it" would happen "suddenly". (I don't see any embarrassment in Mark over the role of Pilate. Mark's Pilate yields unseemly quickly for base motives to the crowd. It is the later evangelists who appear to be embarrassed by Mark's Pilate and who begin the PC/anti-semitic rewrite.)

But there is little denying that Mark also used the OT prophetic imagery of the fig tree that there directly applied to Israel. I don't think this precludes the plausiblity that he also had the fig tree in the Roman forum in mind.

And the idea that the fig tree being cursed has a lot of explanatory power if it applies to the doom of the Jewish temple. And that doesn't leave much room for a Roman application. But on the other hand it was not the season for figs, and that would seem (at least with Pauline theology) to apply to the gentiles at that time. But against this Mark's gospel seems to picture lots of gentiles bearing fruit. So I had better quit this before my argument disappears down an endless set of mirror reflections to nowhere, and conclude where I began -- it's at least plausible!

Neil Godfrey

http://vridar.wordpress.com

Clivedurdle

More and more, the Gospel of Mark seems like a very carefully constructed what - political treatise, parody, satire - to announce a new religio-political epoch - a new heaven and earth. I would argue there are deliberate allusions to both Rome and Israel all over the place. And a deliberate parody of Augustus and Roman beliefs.

Should it be read as the equivalent of Payne's Rights of Man?

neilgodfrey

Care to share where you seen the parodies of Augustus and Roman beliefs? Do you see allusions to Rome outside the Jerusalem section and the Legion episode?

Solo

Evidently, the fig tree story was embarrassing enough for Luke to convert it into a Jesus parable which is hard to imagine would have happened if there was an agreed-on theological import in the curse and withering of the tree, relating back to Pauline teachings. I have a strong hunch that none of the OT or other mythical explanations of the fig tree story will account for the "out of season" element which was why the story was told in the first place. The lectio difficilior here is given by the fact that no matter how one wants to explain Jesus' fit, the absence of fruit on the tree is already explained by the course of nature, so no theological justification for the curse technically can work. Matthew senses that Mark's reading of the parallel of Jeremiah 8 (or Hosea 9) into a story he worked with fails on this issue. Therefore he drops it. The Lucan tradition sees the larger cognitive problem of Mark's use of the 'faith can remove a mountain' saying as a punch-line in the context and opts for parable of patience over a Jesus cameo featuring a flagrant abuse of the supernatural.
I think Mark here runs into a similar problem as with the Gerasene demoniac. The residual content of difficult, embarrassing source material shows through clumsy editing and symbolic addenda, messing up Mark's intended moral.

Jiri

neilgodfrey

I don't see Mark being part of "agreed-on theological import" re several major themes found in the later canonical gospels. He has no embarrassment over Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist, Jesus losing his cool, not being able to heal with but a single word at times, his adoptionism, or Pilate wanting to gratify the blood lust of the crowd. All of these were embarrassments for the later canonical gospels.

My "strong hunch" is that the "messing up" of any particular "intended moral" is the consequence of reading what Mark "meant" to say through the theology of the later canonical gospels who went about revising him.

Neil Godfrey

http://vridar.wordpress.com