Who should be called father? Paul of Tarsus between the Jesus tradition and patria potestas

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Winter, 2003 by S. Scott Bartchy

The Greatest Offense to Filial Piety?

Perhaps the most misinterpreted sentence on Jesus' lips in this connection is his response to one of his would-be followers, who had answered Jesus' challenge to join Jesus' group with the plea that he first be permitted to go home and bury his father. According to both Matthew (8:22) and Luke (9:60), Jesus replied with one of the most breath-taking rejections of traditional family values coming to us from antiquity: "Let the dead bury their own dead"! In Martin Hengel's judgment "there is hardly one logion of Jesus which more sharply runs counter to law, piety, and custom" (14).

When I first heard this passage discussed as a teenager, I was told that the urgency of Jesus' call to discipleship was so great, that potential followers could not even take off a few hours to attend their own father's funeral. Many interpreters continue to understand the passage in this way, and some of them are encouraged in their view by Jesus' reply, according to Luke, to the next "wanna be" who stated: "I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home" (9:61 NRSV). In Luke, Jesus shot back: "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the rule of God" (9:62 NRSV). I suggest to you that while Luke does link these two scenes, they are not redundant. Rather, Jesus' replies assume two distinct scenarios: the first implies the postponement of following Jesus until conventional filial obligations were met; the second seems similar to the kind of leave-taking the prophet Elijah granted his follower-to-be Elisha (1 Kgs 19:19-21). Moreover, the "plow" saying is more difficult to trace back to the historical Jesus than is the "bury their own dead" statement, which easily satisfies the major criteria for such historical tracing.

In any case, in the first scene the point, as I see it, is not that the potential follower's father has just died and that Jesus is so strict that he forbids his leaving for the weekend to attend to burial matters. Neither am I persuaded by Byron McCane's argument (31-43) that this saying refers not to the initial burial but rather to the re-burial of the person's bones in an ossuary, a scenario embraced and elaborated upon by Kathleen Corley (73-75). No, in view of the solemn obligation in filial piety for the son to be sure that his father receive a dignified burial, it is much more likely that this would-be disciple of Jesus was saying: "I need to go home and serve and support my father until he dies, and I have buried him. Then I'll return to follow you." Only years after reaching this conclusion did I discover that Kenneth Bailey, one of the first scholars to stress the importance of Mediterranean cultural values for understanding the Gospels, also had observed (26-27) that the potential disciple's request to bury his father expressed the son's duty to obey his father until his father's death and fitting interment.

The young man had probably been taught that the Fifth Commandment--"honor your father and mother"--obligated him at the minimum to support his father materially in his old age and to give him an honorable burial. Thus Torah-piety as well as filial piety would have been at stake here. In any case, according to both Luke and Matthew--in material they have in common from the "Q" sayings source--Jesus seemed to be aware that this young man would never be able to escape the family obligations that would be heaped upon him if he returned to his father's house. His father was a patriarch; the young man had been socialized to become a patriarch himself. And after his father's death and proper burial, all those around the young man would expect him to act like a patriarch--or risk being dishonored and bringing shame upon his family. As noted above, Sirach teaches: "When the father dies he will not seem to be dead, for he has left behind him one like himself," his obedient son.