Except in this parable, the king expects results, not just trying or even breaking even.
So, IMO this is either a crappy parable or your screwed.
That interpretation is anachronistic if it’s original to Jesus, because the whole interpretation of Jesus as God (or even as the Messiah) wasn’t developed until after his death. Jesus never thought he was God.
Who did he think he was?
The issue may be straight obedience - they were told to put the money to work, and were rewarded to the degree they were effective at obeying that task. Presumably this would apply to other orders as well - and there’s no shortage of those given in the bible.
The parable doesn’t say he was God. It’s about a king. And I think there’s some mild evidence that in his time he was known by some as “king of the jews”.
A prophet, probably. It’s unlikely he thought he was the Messiah. He certainly never thought he was God.
Begbert, there is no evidence that Jesus was called the “King of Jews” (i.e. the Messiah) in his own time.
So basically, if I get a bull horn, stand on street corner telling folks to repent or burn in hell, and I drive more folks away than I convert than I am screwed eternally ?
What do you believe his Apostles though he was?
What about Paul?
Honestly, I don’t know. It’s a difficult question to answer since they left no writings of their own, and the exact beliefs of the original Jerusalem sect have been lost. I think it’s possible that they came to believe he was the Messiah after his death, and that some kind of of visonary experiennces convinced that that he would return.
They might not have, though. The earliest layers of Christian literature (outside of Paul) only characterize him as a teacher.
Paul thought he was God, and may have been the first to think so. He claims to have gotten all his information from personal revelation, and “not from any man.”
INRI?
The first claim that Jesus had “King of the Jews” written on his cross was made 40 years after the crucifixion.
As opposed to the rest of the gospels which were composed on the spot?
And anyway, a rather significant detail like that (a highly controversial placard at the center of a dispute between the Roman occupiers and the top priesthood, displayed publicly at the execution ground) and well within living memory: people at the time would surely call shenanigans if it was just made up, wouldn’t they?
Really, Dio, you’re kind of grasping at straws here.
God has many servants, not all of them human. There is nothing to say that the particular servants who were given minas were the same ones that are later ordered to kill people. This parable is not an order for Christians to kill people who don’t follow God’s word.
Also: the INRI sign was hardly putting Jesus’ claims (whatever they were) in a good light, as far as I can tell. If you want to make up stuff to lie to people and convince them that Jesus was called the King of the Jews when in fact he wasn’t, you’d probably wouldn’t be highlighting the fact that the Romans were making jokes about it.
Very little in the Gospel narratives have any historical reliability. They were written 40-70 years after the crucifixion by non-witnesses for non-witnesses.
It’s a very common apologist canard to try to claim that Asia Minor and Syria in the late 1st century were just crawling with Jewish-Roman War survivors who had clear memories of the excution of a trouble-making nobody a half-century before, and would have just been waiting to jump on any historical inaccuracies. It just isn’t so.
Jerusalem was destroed in 70 CE. The first Gospel, Mark, was written around that same time. It was written outside Palestine, by a non-witness, to a Greek (mostly gentile) audience. These books were not mass-published. There wasn’t any internet, or Barnes and Nobles. People didn’t own individual copies (and most of them couldn’t read anyway). They were owned by individual congregations, who made their own copies and distributed to other congregations. When they were read, they were read aloud to these (small) congregations of gentiles living in the Greek cities of the Roman empire. It took roughly ten years for a Gospel to achieve any kind of significant circulation, so we’re up to about 50 years after the crucifixion before even the first Gospel is being read with any kind of regularity.
Now what are the odds that some creaky old survivor of the Jewish-Roman War was going to wander into one of these obscure little cult meetings of a dozen or two dozen people, hear a reading from Mark, and remember that one obscure nobody out of thousands crucified by the Romans didn’t have a particular placard on his cross? Even if he does remember it, and objects, so what? Who’s going to listen to him or care? Who’s going to write down that somebody objected?
I honestly don’t know why anyone tries this argument. It’s so patently lame if you give it even a moment’s examination.
The authors of the Gospels didn’t think they were making things up or “lying.” They thought they were able to infer things about Jesus from the Hebrew Bible, personal inspiration, etc.
Pilate putting that placard on Jesus would not have been seen as embarrassing to Jesus, just what the Romans would have been expected to do .
You make a fairly solid attempt at identifying an example of what’s called the “criterion of embarrassment,” though (Gospel claims that are embarrassing to Jesus are more likely to be authentic). It’s a better argument than all those imaginary witnesses listening to Mark, anyway.
So nothing in the Gospels is reliable, including the parable in question. Fine, if you want to go that way. (Though it’s interesting that you say you know with such certainty what Jesus did and didn’t claim. Feeling divinely inspired today?) But in that case, isn’t this whole discussion moot from beginning to end?
That’s not what I meant. Nothing in the narratives is reliable, but a lot of the sayings tradition comes from an earlier source called Q. Practically none of the claims about what Jesus did have any historical reliability, but at least some of the sayings and parables have a reasonable shot at having really been said by Jesus. The Parable of the Talents/Minas is independently attested in Q and Thomas, so there’s a decent chance he really said it. Matthew and Luke supplied their own context and interpretation, though.
The problem with Q is that we don’t know for sure what’s in it. We can just infer its contents from the commonalities among Matthew and Luke that are absent in Mark. We don’t even know for sure that Q exists. There’s always the Ferrer hypothesis that one of Luke’s sources was Matthew.
We also don’t know for sure that Thomas is an early work. Thomas could have been derived from Luke. You could even combine the two theories like Perrin tries to do, and have the chain go Mark ->Matt.->Luke->Thomas (with John, of course, all on its lonesome).
Wading where angels fear to tread… (OK, I’m waiting for a compilation to finish.)
Dislaimer - lifelong atheist here. But I enjoy looking at religions, and the manner in which the beliefs come about. With a long heritage of Christianity around me it is hard to ignore.
So, my take is to look at the parable as this:
It is likey that it isn’t all that badly mangled from the origional. But it is almost certainly somewhat mangled. We can assume there is but one parable, as we see different versions. The difference between the versions should provide some rough estimate of the damage to the original version. One should probably assume that they all differ from the original by about as much as they differ from one another.
The parable will have been told and massaged with a reasonably sensible set of aims. If it makes less sense now, it isn’t going to because the early versions were just pain strange, but because there has been some degradation.
There is absolutely no point trying to be theological about it. Theology of almost any nature is a post hoc attempt to create a consistent view of something that probably never was consistent. The theology of Christianity didn’t exist when this parable was told.
The parable will have been massaged into a form that followers felt provided a story that worked as a basis for their continued beliefs. This is the bit I find fascinating. A simple obvious parable that has almost no room for interpretation has nowhere near the value as one where the listener needs to fit their lives and values into its structure. People like to join the dots themselves. A bit of mysticism, a requirment of effort on the believer’s part, these make for a much more compelling parable.
Such much for that.
My take is something I remember from my youth, and I’m not sure I didn’t learn it as part of this parable. It is this: (Using Diogense’s translation - since that is most likely to be the least damaged) He said [then] to him, "from the mouth of yours [“from your own mouth”], I judge you, "
Which is simply God/Jesus/King saying - if you consider me to be harsh, then harsh I will be. The parable does not seem to condem the King as intrinsically harsh, but rather leaves it to the third slave to have this point of view. (Those that didn’t want the King don’t seem to actually believe he is bad, just that they didn’t want him.)
So we have the proper parable style additional layer of depth. A listener hears the mystical idea that God/Jesus will judge him according to how he regards God/Jesus. This is gold in any religion. It also fits well into context. With a transition from the OT to NT style of God. You get to choose the God you would prefer, and God will oblige by changing to fit. Jews of the time would probably find such an idea quite appealing. I like the recursive logic, something I have observed is always a winner in any mystical dogma. People love to mull over those. Also, when people get their head around such recursive thoughts, they often find some semi-religious epiphany as part of the process. Also pure gold.
Just to follow up. This was the king I mentioned in an ealier post:
Again, whoever wrote the parable was using Archelaus’s reign to hammer home a lesson.
If you do X (follow the Word of God), you will get Y (rewarded).
If you don’t do X (follow the Word of God, you won’t get Y (reward).
And since you seem to feel it makes a some sort of point (what exactly, I’m not sure): Don’t believe in X (Word of God) you die.
The audience for which the parable was written lived a tenuous existence. Teachings like these offered security and simplicity and hope. Can you not see the attraction?
You can can carry on all you want about Jesus Christ getting his smote on but you’re not seeing the forest through the trees.