re: #128 goddamnedfrank

This entire part of the story sucks and has zero redeeming value as far as I can tell. Jesus is just being a dick.

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I don’t think it happened. It was inserted into the text by the anonymous writer of Mark (and then ended up in the other gospels) for some reason, and it may have been to promote a kind of supersessionism, in that the Jews were found wanting because there was no fruit on the fig tree. Obviously, I find that interpretation obnoxious. To be blunt, I find the whole story to be obnoxious, because the fig tree did nothing to Jesus.

The thing you have to keep in mind about the New Testament texts is that these guys were fighting their own little wars in what they wrote down. Mark’s Jesus is very much a human being, but John’s Jesus is divine from the beginning of the universe. The writer of Luke/Acts tries to make the founding of the early church as smooth as glass, but Paul’s letter to the Galatians makes it clear that he wasn’t on the same page as some of the other church leaders. The letter of James complains that Paul writes stuff that is hard to understand. And so on and so forth. If you think of these as blog rants, dashed off to correspondents the writers may or may not have met, and not as documents meant for the ages, you’re probably getting a better sense of what the documents were.