Was the historical Jesus talking about evolution? (You might be surprised)

post by kromem · 2025-04-01T10:32:56.162Z · LW · GW · 4 comments

Contents

  Myth 1: Evolution wasn't an idea in Jesus's time
  Myth 2: Epicurean ideas wouldn't have been generally discussed in 1st century Judea
  Myth 3: Jesus was only alleged to be talking about religious stuff, not philosophical ideas
  Myth 4: The Gospel of Thomas is Gnostic
  The Marvel of Marvels
  A close look at Thomas sayings 7-9
    The lion still will become human
    Selecting the large fish
    What survives to reproduce multiplies
    Interpreting the sayings together
  "I said nothing in secret"
  Conclusion
None
4 comments

Out of all the research rabbit holes I've ever gone down, this one is by far my favorite, as to most people at first glance it's so unthinkable an idea.

Years ago, I would have been right there with you in disbelief, but the reasons why turned out to be a kind of perfect combination of counterfactuals that come together in a very unexpected juxtaposition between what we come to the subject thinking we know and what we can actually know.

It's also the perfect marriage of a topic where billions of people would turn a blind eye because it contradicts a picture of a figure they are committed to seeing a certain way, and everyone else is so exhausted by those people talking about that figure they immediately ignore anything related to them.

Now clearly - anything relating to a historical figure two millennia ago with limited primary source documentation and massive survivorship and anchoring biases is going to be murky, so the goal here isn't definitive proof, but I hope you'll agree that even a plausible case for the subject above is going to end up a wildly unexpected result.

So if you enjoy counterfactual discoveries and a long read, let's dive in for a wild ride!

Myth 1: Evolution wasn't an idea in Jesus's time

While this expands on my top comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] so far on LessWrong, evolution was very much an idea in the first century CE.

It's not clear how far back it went, but much as we may credit Democritus for the idea of atoms while the Greeks themselves credited an even earlier but archeologically unattested Phoenician "from around the time of the Trojan War," Mochus of Sidon, the earliest extant Western conceptions of evolutionary naturalism may be from Sanchuniathon's alleged secret Phonecian creation mythos:

This was the beginning of the creation of all things: but the wind itself had no knowledge of its own creation. From its connexion Mot was produced, which some say is mud, and others a putrescence of watery compound; and out of this came every germ of creation, and the generation of the universe. So there were certain animals which had no sensation, and out of them grew intelligent animals, and were called "Zophasemin," that is "observers of heaven" [...] Such was their cosmogony, introducing downright atheism.^[1]

The broader context here was the claim that the true Phoenician mysteries related to the idea that naturalist origins led to humans deifying their rulers & inventors and then mysticism arose secondarily and caught on, spread by priests. While we don't have Sanchuniathon's text in full, this account from "around the time of the Trojan War" was initially dismissed in modernity until the Ugarit excavation matched a lot of the proposed pantheon. As well, there is a generally overlooked Egyptian reference from around that time that has a similar euhemeristic character^[2].

Unfortunately, much like the atomism of Mochus, we can't really get a good picture of texts that have been lost.

What we do know is that around the 4th to 3rd century BCE the Greek philosopher Epicurus put forward a naturalist philosophy.  And while many of his texts are also lost, thanks to the efforts of a secretary of the Pope shortly before the Renaissance, a surviving copy of a later Epicurean author details evolutionary thinking from antiquity in remarkable detail.

Namely, the work of the Roman author Lucretius in 50 BCE, converting the Greek ideas of Epicureanism for a Latin audience in his poem De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of Things").

For evolutionary theory broadly comparable to how we think of it today, we need two key components. One, that traits are passed on from parents to children:

Sometimes children take after their grandparents instead, Or great-grandparents, bringing back the features of the dead. This is since parents carry elemental seeds inside – Many and various, mingled many ways – their bodies hide Seeds that are handed, parent to child, all down the family tree. Venus draws features from these out of her shifting lottery – Bringing back an ancestor’s look or voice or hair. Indeed These characteristics are just as much the result of certain seed As are our faces, limbs and bodies. Females can arise From the paternal seed, just as the male offspring, likewise, Can be created from the mother’s flesh. For to comprise A child requires a doubled seed – from father and from mother. And if the child resembles one more closely than the other, That parent gave the greater share – which you can plainly see Whichever gender – male or female – that the child may be.^[3]

And two, that the success or failure of emergent traits depends on selection effects for their reproduction:

In the beginning, there were many freaks. Earth undertook Experiments - bizarrely put together, weird of look Hermaphrodites, partaking of both sexes, but neither; some Bereft of feet, or orphaned of their hands, and others dumb, Being devoid of mouth; and others yet, with no eyes, blind. Some had their limbs stuck to the body, tightly in a bind, And couldn't do anything, or move, and so could not evade Harm, or forage for bare necessities. And the Earth made Other kinds of monsters too, but in vain, since with each, Nature frowned upon their growth; they were not able to reach The flowering of adulthood, nor find food on which to feed, Nor be joined in the act of Venus. 

For all creatures need Many different things, we realize, to multiply And to forge out the links of generations: a supply Of food, first, and a means for the engendering seed to flow Throughout the body and out of the lax limbs; and also so The female and the male can mate, a means they can employ In order to impart and to receive their mutual joy.

Then, many kinds of creatures must have vanished with no trace Because they could not reproduce or hammer out their race. For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air, Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare, Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now.^[4]

I've seen some modern critics claim that Lucretius was in error because of the "In the beginning..." here, suggesting he imagined fully formed mutants at the dawn of life, though even a casual read of the rest of the work makes it clear that Lucretius was indeed envisioning selection process from primordial atomist building blocks:

For obviously the primary particles did not scheme to fit Themselves each in their proper order by their cunning wit. Nor did they strike a deal amongst themselves exactly how Each should move. Rather, for time infinite up to now Myriad primary particles moving in many directions, whether Driven by blows, or their own weight, were wont to come together Every which way and experiment with every permutation And everything that they could fashion by their combination, And as a result, the particles, spread out over a vast Span of time, by trying each movement and combination, at last Suddenly hit upon the combinations that can be The building blocks of greater things, the earth, the sky, the sea, And all the generations of living beings.^[5]

The one component of modern evolutionary theory that is arguably most absent in Lucretius is the notion of common descent. While it is true that Lucretius proposed the possibility of parallel emergence of different species, to a degree this objection feels a bit like both an argument from silence and a matter of scope.

When we think of Darwin's theories, we are thinking within a biological frame of mind. For Lucretius, there is a common ancestor, which are the elementary particles as described above. As well, it was quite common that the Epicureans would propose multiple possible solutions for a problem when they weren't sure which the answer was, so the existence of a parallel emergence ancestor solution would not imply that there weren't other solutions considered (they took this so seriously they even suggested not discarding other solutions when we did know the answer, as a problem with one solution in this universe might have a different solution in a different universe).

We should also consider that some of these topics had a certain danger to them in antiquity (as they have for most of human history) - Socrates was executed for the crime of impiety after all. So it's hard to argue that an absence of explicit mention necessarily implies an absence of consideration. And Lucretius did push the envelope quite a lot even when it came to human genesis:

A mistake I strongly urge you to avoid for all you’re worth, An error in this matter you should give the widest berth: Namely, don’t imagine that the bright lights of our eyes Were purpose-made so we could look ahead, or that our thighs And calves were hinged together at the joints and set on feet So we could walk with lengthy stride, or that forearms fit neat To brawny upper arms, and are equipped on right and left With helping hands, solely that we be dexterous and deft At undertaking all the things we need to do to live. This rationale, and all the others like it people give, Jumbles effect and cause, and puts the cart before the horse – For nothing is born just so that we can use it – in due course, That which is born creates its own use. Before the light Of eyes arose, there was no such thing as a sense of sight. Before the tongue was fashioned, there were no words to recite. But rather, the genesis of the tongue by far pre-dates the word, And ears came into being long before a noise was heard. In short, the organs and the limbs existed, I surmise, Before there was any use for them.^[6]

All this said, hopefully the above presents a compelling case that the fundamentals of evolutionary theory specifically around natural selection and a rejection of intelligent design were present in a widely published and discussed work roughly 80 years before Jesus was allegedly going around telling parables.

Oh, and an interesting thing to note - Lucretius was writing about Greek philosophy in Latin. As such, he couldn't rely on Greek technical terms like atomos ('indivisible') to describe these fundamental smallest parts of matter, so he opted to use the term 'seed' instead, which is why his atomism is often referred to as "the seeds of things."

We'll come back to this point later (foreshadowing), but first, we have another counterfactual to dismiss.

Myth 2: Epicurean ideas wouldn't have been generally discussed in 1st century Judea

Ok, so even if ideas like natural selection, trait inheritance, and randomly composed primordial building blocks were being discussed in Greece and Rome in the 1st century, is it plausible that they'd be discussed as far as Judea?

While a clear picture on the scope of discussions in 1st century Judea is difficult given the rather sparse information compared to Greece or Rome, we do have a rough picture encapsulating the Epicurean presence and related ideas in the region.

In the 2nd century BCE, the Epicurean Philonides of Laodicea joins the court of Antiochus IV Epiphanes trying to convert him and tutors his nephew Demetrius I Soter. These were the rulers of the Seleucid empire that held Judea around the events of the Maccabean revolt.

Also in the 2nd century BCE, one of the three main philosophical sects of Judaism, the Sadducees, became quite prominent, and in both Josephus and the Talmud they are credited with a disbelief in the afterlife - a belief shared with the Epicureans. In fact, Josephus described them as:

But the doctrine of the Sadducees is this: That souls die with the bodies; nor do they regard the observation of any thing besides what the law enjoins them; for they think it an instance of virtue to dispute with those teachers of philosophy whom they frequent;^[7]

So after the time the political rule over Judea was held by a court with a valued Epicurean tutor a sect in Judea subsequently rose to prominence that shared the Epicurean belief the soul dies with the body, and that it is virtuous to attend and debate with "teachers of philosophy."

In terms of the region, the Greek areas nearby were producing Epicurean scholars during this period. In fact, the most extant Epicurean author, Philodemus of Gadara from the 1st century BCE, was born in a town closer to Nazareth in Galilee than Jerusalem was.

Bookending all of this was a comment recorded by Rabbi Elazar at the end of the 1st century CE:

Be diligent in the study of the Torah; And know how to answer an epicuros^[8]

So the Epicureans were enough of a discussion point at this time that a rabbi was citing winning an argument with them as a key focus for studying the Torah. Later on, the name of the sect would become synonymous with 'atheist' in the language.^[9]

We have one of the three major Jewish philosophical schools sharing beliefs with the Epicureans and debating with unknown philosophers, rabbis saying to know how to answer Epicureans, and major Epicurean scholars coming from neighboring towns.

But are there any links between the traditions of Jesus and Epicureanism?

Myth 3: Jesus was only alleged to be talking about religious stuff, not philosophical ideas

There's a joke among biblical scholars that if you walk into a room with a hundred of them, you'll hear about a hundred different guys named Jesus.

And even in antiquity, there were a lot of different versions. In fact, one of the earliest primary source Christian documents is Paul complaining about how a community had accepted a different version of Jesus from his version.^[10]

The one we're going to take a much closer look at were the interpretations of Jesus's ideas as recorded by a heresiologist in the 3rd century CE documenting the 'heretical' ideas of a sect called the Naassenes. Who had very curious language for how they discussed 'seeds.'

And so it is that these (heretics), placing the originative nature of the universe in causative seed [...]

They affirm, then, concerning the substance of the seed which is a cause of all existent things, that it is none of these, but that it produces and forms all things that are made [...]^[11]

[...] the seeds scattered from the unportrayable one upon the world, through which the whole cosmical system is completed; for through these also it began to exist. And this, he says, is what has been declared: "The sower went forth to sow. And some fell by the wayside [...]^[12]

That which is, he says, nothing, and which consists of nothing, inasmuch as it is indivisible — (I mean) a point — will become through its own reflective power a certain incomprehensible magnitude. This, he says, is the kingdom of heaven, the grain of mustard seed, the point which is indivisible in the body;^[13]

Wait a second - seeds that were the cause of the cosmos, that make up everything, that are like the smallest indivisible point - this seems really familiar.

(Also a quick note: in modernity we jumped the gun naming 'atoms,' which are divisible, after the Greek term for 'indivisible'; philosophically what we now call 'quanta' are closer to what was being theorized back then.)

As we discussed earlier, Lucretius when he was writing about Greek concepts of atomos ('indivisible') in Latin ended up describing them as 'seeds' instead. Now here are a sect claiming that Jesus's sower parable was about the scattering of these indivisible seeds that compose all things or that his smallest mustard seed is best understood as an indivisible point.

And as best I can tell, the similarities here have completely gone unnoticed over the years. At the time, this heresiologist was even documenting the beliefs of the Epicureans, but was clearly doing so in Greek:

Epicurus, however, advanced an opinion almost contrary to all. He supposed, as originating principles of all things, atoms and vacuity. He considered vacuity as the place that would contain the things that will exist, and atoms the matter out of which all things could be formed; and that from the concourse of atoms both the Deity derived existence, and all the elements, and all things inherent in them, as well as animals and other (creatures); so that nothing was generated or existed, unless it be from atoms. And he affirmed that these atoms were composed of extremely small particles, in which there could not exist either a point or a sign, or any division; wherefore also he called them atoms.^[14]

The same foundational ideas, but just different enough wording it slipped under the radar for centuries.

We even see this phenomenon occur with an earlier 2nd century CE heresiologist, Irenaeus, who in covering the Valentinian Gnostics credited the discussion of seeds falling down from the heavens to create animals to a Greek philosopher, completely overlooking Lucretius's language as a possible parallel, though he goes on to immediately cite that sect's other inspirations from the Epicureans:

Again, adopting the [ideas of] shade and vacuity from Democritus and Epicurus, they have fitted these to their own views, following upon those [teachers] who had already talked a great deal about a vacuum and atoms, the one of which they called that which is, and the other that which is not.^[15]

Indeed, it may be that atomism was present at the very beginning of Christian 'heresy.' While the work no longer survives, the Great Announcement of Simon Magus, the alleged first heretic contemporary to Peter, was said to have been covering the very topic:

If one, however, be made into the figure of (the Spirit), and be generated from an indivisible point, as it has been written in the Announcement^[16]

Amidst a massive survivorship bias - we literally only have small references by texts specifically attacking and discrediting the very ideas we are trying to assess, and many of the texts themselves we do not have because possessing them or believing in them became a death sentence - we have a clear pattern of discussion of indivisible points and a particular sect with extremely specific language around such indivisibility paralleling Lucretius's phrasing.

Again, compare what the Naassenes were saying above to Lucretius:

And yet True reason and the Nature of Things say otherwise. Lend an ear For just a few more verses until I can make it clear That there are things made up of solid stuff that lasts forever, Which I teach are the seeds of things that make the sum, The basic elements the universe is fashioned from.^[17] [...]

Then furthermore, since when we peer at objects, there must be An ultimate, smallest point which is the smallest we can see, So also in things, there is a smallest point beneath our sight, And this contains no parts, being of a stuff so slight, It is the smallest stuff of all. And it can never start To exist as something separate, because it's always part Of something else, primal and indivisible.^[18]

Given this rather specific level of overlap, let's take a closer look at what else was unique about the Naassenes. Namely, they are the only sect that was explicitly recorded following a text called The Gospel of Thomas, such that the surviving record of their beliefs was directly quoting from it.

Which brings us to our last myth to get out of the way.

Myth 4: The Gospel of Thomas is Gnostic

The only full copy of the Gospel of Thomas was found in 1945, but it had been known about for much longer before that through references by those writing about heresy over the centuries. As a result, there was a rather massive academic mishap in how the text and surrounding traditions were being analyzed that lasted for around half a century after its discovery.

I'll let Princeton's Elaine Pagels explain (from an email debate):

The earliest editors of "Gnostic" texts thought that they were dualistic, escapist, nihilistic, involving "esoteric ideas about aeons and demiurges," as you yourself write. As my former teacher at Harvard, Krister Stendhal, said to me recently about these texts, "we just thought these were weird." But can you point to any evidence of such "esoteric ideas" in Thomas? Anything about "aeons and demiurges"? Those first editors, not finding such evidence, assumed that this just goes to show how sneaky heretics are-they do not say what they mean. So when they found no evidence for such nihilism or dualism-on the contrary, the Gospel of Thomas speaks continually of God as the One good "Father of all"-they just read these into the text. Some scholars, usually those not very familiar with these sources, still do.

So first let's talk about "Gnosticism"-and what I used to (but no longer) call "Gnostic Gospels." I have to take responsibility for part of the misunderstanding. Having been taught that these texts were "Gnostic," I just accepted it, and even coined the term "Gnostic gospels," which became the title of my book. I agree with you that we have no evidence for what we call "Gnosticism" from the first century, and have learned from our colleagues that what we thought about "Gnosticism" has virtually nothing to do with a text like the Gospel of Thomas-or, for that matter, with the New Testament Gospel of John which our teachers said also showed "Gnostic influences." ^[19]

Basically at the very end of the 20th century, the work of scholars Michael Allen Williams and Karen King completely upended how academia was thinking about the notion that there was a coherent umbrella category of ideas called 'Gnosticism' and found that instead what had been grouped there each had rather distinct and different nuances.

Currently, the Gospel of Thomas is commonly referred to in scholarship as 'proto-gnostic', which though better as a term, in that it is not misleading, doesn't quite tell us very much at all. Where were these ideas coming from? What were the associated contemporary ideas? The name simply tells us they came before later ideas which were commonly called 'Gnostic.'

If you love counterfactuals as I do, this leaves ripe picking grounds. As not only do we have a massive survivorship bias (literally the only full surviving copy of the text was found buried in a jar around the time the text was outlawed), but there's now also a half century anchoring bias around dismissing the 'weird' ideas as indecipherably grouped with weird stuff about Archons and demiurges. Even in the present day, respectable scholars broadly look down on even bothering to look closer at the text, such as biblical scholar Larry Hurtado writing to colleague April DeConick (who focuses on the texts in that aforementioned jar):

Why are you wasting your time on them?  When I read the Nag Hammadi texts it was clear to me that it is all craziness.  Nonsense.  Go back to the New Testament where it matters.^[20]

The important thing to take away here is that currently, no one really knows where the ideas in this text are actually coming from, and the field is still trying to correct course from the mistakes that led them to erroneously think they knew what the ideas were about and where they were coming from.

These myths out of the way, let's take a closer look at the Gospel of Thomas through the lens of a Epicurean ideas, specifically as found in Lucretius.

The Marvel of Marvels

While we're going to take a much closer look at a grouping of three sayings in a moment, I want to really sell just how mired in the above topics this text seems to be. So let's take a quick look at certain sayings.

To start, consider saying 29:

If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.

Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty. 

While most of the analyses I've read on this saying focuses on the last line (and often applies later ascetic perspectives in that analysis), pretty much all overlook the part that is most surprising to my eye.

In discussing the chicken and egg ontological problem between the relationship of body to spirit^[21], this saying is suggesting that the spirit arising secondarily from the body having existed first is the greater wonder over spirit creating the body. Naturalism as the more impressive feat over intelligent design wasn't something I'd ever have imagined attributed to Jesus.

Two similar sayings that often confounds analysis are 56 and 80:

56. "Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, of that person the world is not worthy."

80. "Whoever has come to know the world has discovered the body, and whoever has discovered the body, of that one the world is not worthy."^[22]

A lot of the discussion of these talk about them in a metaphorical sense or tie in anti-materialist later 'Gnostic' thinking.^[23] More promising, a recent text^[24] looking at this text through the lens of Platonism dedicated two chapters to arguing these sayings were related to Plato's living world concept. But that text also summarized all of the other research that has looked at the Gospel of Thomas through various philosophical lenses, and notably absent was any analysis through the lens of Epicureanism^[25]. Could this context decipher these strange sayings with more grace than Gnostic or Platonist references?

Let's return our gaze to Lucretius:

To resume: I’ve reached the juncture of my argument where I Must demonstrate the world too has a ‘body’, and must die, Even as it had a birth.^[26]

So we have this Roman author saying "bad news, have a seat - the cosmos is also a body that will one day die" ~80 years before the Thomasine Jesus is allegedly saying "the cosmos is like a (dead) body." Given the sayings elsewhere in Thomas that exhibit a nonlinear perspective of events and an over-realized eschatology^[27] the cosmos being described as actually being a dead body in 56 lines up pretty cleanly with Lucretius's claim that the cosmos is a body that will one day die. This gets connected to another Epicurean idea in saying 87:

How miserable is the body that depends on a body, and how miserable is the soul that depends on these two.

Here, a point that often confounds^[28] analysis is the "body that depends on a body." But if the cosmos is a body, and our bodies depend on that body, then this is a lot less confusing. And helping this interpretation along is that the very notion of a soul depending on a body^[29] is extremely Epicurean - arguably it is the very foundational premise of their entire school of philosophy.

I could go on about other places where this lens is useful, such as looking at Lucretius argue in book 3 "But it's clear A spirit can't possess an eye or hand or nose or ear Or tongue without a body" relative to Thomas's saying 22 talking about eyes in place of an eye and hand in place of a hand before finishing with discussing these as an eikon in place of an eikon using Greek loanwords in the Coptic that tie in with those terms from a Platonist cosmology in very surprising ways.

But... you probably already get the point - Epicureanism and specifically Lucretius may be an overlooked context that offers notable benefit for the analysis of things in Thomas which were otherwise just labeled 'weird' while stuck in a creationist and mystical interpretative framework.

With this in mind, let's dive deep into three adjacent sayings.

A close look at Thomas sayings 7-9

Something useful to remember in working with the Gospel of Thomas is that the numbering of the sayings was done by scholars who were analyzing the text under a now rejected framework. And these sayings were not originally separately numbered - in fact, originally there wasn't even punctuation. And yet often the separation of the arbitrary numbers leads to separation in how sayings are evaluated.

Here, we're going to look at the sayings all together, and then dive in to each for a closer look before summarizing our findings all together again:

7. Jesus said, "Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human."

8. And he said, "The human^[30] is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of little fish. Among them the wise fisherman discovered a fine large fish. He threw all the little fish back into the sea, and easily chose the large fish. Anyone here with two good ears had better listen!"

9. Jesus said, "Look, the sower went out, took a handful (of seeds), and scattered (them). Some fell on the road, and the birds came and gathered them. Others fell on rock, and they didn't take root in the soil and didn't produce heads of grain. Others fell on thorns, and they choked the seeds and worms ate them. And others fell on good soil, and it produced a good crop: it yielded sixty per measure and one hundred twenty per measure." 

The lion still will become human

Saying 7 gives a lot of people trouble and leads to wild explanations. Before we dive into it, let's look quickly at Lucretius:

They take us by the hand and show that animals arise From things with no sensation at all. For instance, take the birth Of living worms from filthy dung piles when the sodden earth Festers with unseasonable rains. All things, moreover, Transform themselves in the same way. And so rivers of water, Leaves and fertile pastureland turn into herds of beasts, And beasts become our flesh, our flesh in turn becomes the feasts That strengthen savage brutes and raptors mighty-on-the-wing. So Nature makes all nourishment into some living thing, And fashions all the feelings of a creature from this food,^[31]

Can we really rely on this as an interpretive lens for the cryptic saying 7? Well luckily for us we also have Thomas saying 11 with the phrase "During the days when you ate what is dead, you made it come alive." So the idea that the flesh of dead things being eaten by living things was perceived as transformative nourishment like was found in Lucretius does seem to be shared in Thomas. But how does this relate to saying 7?

There's two very relevant points to navigate here: (1) No matter who eats whom, the end result is the lion becoming human. (2) The saying following this one is the only one in the entire work connected to the previous saying with a conjunction. So let's just keep in mind that the human is the inevitable result here while we look to saying 8 for further insight when interpreted as combined sayings.

Selecting the large fish

In saying 8, a common mistake in interpretation is to think "the human is like" refers to the fisherman.

The parable is one of Thomas's clearer Semitisms, expanding a metaphor found in one of the books of minor prophets:

You have made people like the fish of the sea,
   like crawling things that have no ruler.

He brings all of them up with a hook;
   he drags them out with his net;^[32]

Here, the context and wording is clearly referring to God selecting which humans live and which die, where later it references emptying the net as "destroying nations without mercy."

This perspective of the 'human' as referring to the fish is also reflected in the secret explanation (we'll discuss this more shortly) in Matthew 13:

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.^[33]

But here a difference from Matthew is that we're not describing the 'kingdom' as like this fishing process, but the 'human' as like it. And unlike in Habakkuk, it's not similar fish or multiple fish being selected from the net, but a single fish notably larger than all the others.

Again, we should keep in mind this is the only saying that is separately numbered from the previous while starting with a conjunction. So perhaps the question of what is meant by a parable likening the human to a large fish selected from many smaller fish is better understood in conjunction with the previous saying about how no matter if the human ate the lion or vice versa, the 'human' was the inevitable result. Let's consider the following saying for further context.

What survives to reproduce multiplies

Before we look more closely at the sower parable, let's refresh ourselves with how Lucretius saw the ontological process for the world:

it is most unlikely that this world, This sky and rondure of the earth, was made the only one, And all those atoms outside of our world get nothing done; Especially since this world is the product of Nature, the happenstance Of the seeds of things colliding into each other by pure chance In every possible way, no aim in view, at random, blind, Till sooner or later certain atoms suddenly combined So that they lay the warp to weave the cloth of mighty things: Of earth, of sea, of sky, of all the species of living beings.^[34]

Is this related to what the sower parable is actually about? Well, there's only two extant explanations for the parable. One is an explanation canonically offered in secret after this saying was told publicly to gathered masses. That explanation is that this is about proselytizing. The only other surviving explanation from the first few centuries is the one found among the Naassenes, which begins with the aforementioned curious word choices:

For "the ends," he says, are the seeds scattered from the unportrayable one upon the world, through which the whole cosmical system is completed; for through these also it began to exist. And this, he says, is what has been declared: "The sower went forth to sow. And some fell by the wayside, and was trodden down; and some on the rocky places, and sprang up," he says, "and on account of its having no depth (of soil), it withered and died; and some," he says, "fell on fair and good ground, and brought forth fruit, some a hundred, some sixty, and some thirty fold. Who has ears," he says, "to hear, let him hear." 

Notably, the form of the parable here - where the seeds are understood in the same context Lucretius seems to be suggesting as scattered parts which make up and complete the cosmos - does not mention any animals, as all the other versions of the parable do. Unfortunately, if this existed as retold here in some other form or text, it's been lost to the ages.

But something in both the above version and the canonical versions of this parable catches my eye. See, multiple scholars over the years analyzing the parable have come to the conclusion that the canonical versions have a mistranslation due to ambiguity of Aramaic prepositions, suggesting that the Coptic Thomas has the correct "on the path" whereas Mark, Luke, Matthew and apparently the Naassenes above incorrectly use "beside the path" or "by the wayside of the path."^[35][36]

For a long time I was persuaded by this argument, until I noticed a passage in Lucretius:

For a woman prevents pregnancy this way, resisting it, When she grinds her buttocks against the man’s member as it thrusts, Gyrating, her whole body turned to jelly with her lust. By doing this, she turns the furrow away from the straight and true Path of the ploughshare, and the seed falls by the wayside too.^[37]

So not only is the only extant non-canonical version of the parable using the language of Lucretius's seeds making up all things and being an originating cause of things, but the canonical versions of the parable as well as the Naassene version are all describing failed reproduction of seeds as falling "by the wayside" of the path while Lucretius's work, predating the earliest alleged use of this parable by ~80 years, was referring to failed biological reproduction as like seed falling to the wayside of a straight path.

Interpreting the sayings together

So to recap, we first have a saying about how no matter if lion eats human or vice versa, the lion becoming human is inevitable. Why?

Well then we have "and then he said" right after this describing how the 'human' is like a large fish selected from many fish in the sea because of how much bigger it is than all the others.

And finally we have a saying about how with randomly scattered seeds only what survives to reproduce ends up multiplying.

Should we apply the lens of Lucretius? It does overlap across all three sayings around discussion of eaten flesh nourishing the living, selection of fitness for trait survival, randomly scattered seeds creating everything including living creatures, and failed reproduction as like seed falling by the wayside of a path.

If we do, then the three sayings together seem to be suggesting that humanity was an inevitable result of creation, not necessarily because of design, but because we were especially fit to reproduce and multiply compared to everything else.

We have one final piece of the puzzle to consider.

"I said nothing in secret"

When we look at the early Christian traditions, as mentioned earlier, there's plenty of disagreement about different versions of Jesus and different beliefs. Not only do we have Paul's complaining about Corinth believing some other version or gospel from unnamed "super-apostles," but then we have Clement of Alexandria complaining just a few decades later of Corinth deposing their presbyters, a few decades later Ignatius of Antioch complaining about a different Eucharist tradition and schisms, etc.

Much of what we just discussed only survived because of the dedication to cataloguing 'heretical' beliefs to denounce them. So with every action is a reaction, and as such one of the more interesting ways to analyze and correct for survivorshp bias is to look for unusual reactions absent an apparent action.

There's even clear contradictions in canon, and between canon and early church history. Take for example John 18:20, where in defense at his trial Jesus claims (much like Socrates in The Apology) that he said nothing in secret.

Or consider Papias of Hierapolis writing about a supposed Gospel of Matthew that bears little resemblance to canonical Matthew, describing it as a collection of sayings without explanations such that each person interpreted as best they could.^[38] This almost seems more like Thomas as a collection of sayings without explanations than the canonical Synoptic gospel.

See, the Synoptic gospels, starting with Mark have an unusual pattern to them. Jesus will say something out in public, and then elsewhere in private explain what he was saying publicly. Sometimes the jump between these two is so abrupt it isn't even clear where one scene ends or begins. For example, after giving the parable of the sower in Mark 4, it jumps to a private setting where he explains why he's explaining the parable in secret and offering up an explanation. And then it never quite returns to the public shore. He keeps giving sayings, but are these in secret or in public? Particularly confusing is that in Mark 4:35-36 they then decide to leave the shore and it mentions they leave the crowd behind. Except didn't we just leave the crowd in 4:10? It almost seems like the secret part was poorly interpolated later on^[39] into a sequence of public sayings.

This is the only parable in Mark and Luke that has an explicitly secret explanation.

A parable about seeds? What was so dangerous about people at the time "interpreting it as best they could" as Papias described?

In Matthew there's two additional parables that have explicitly secret explanations. One is the parable of the net we just described above.

The other is an explanation for a parable about how when it isn't clear if a seed is wheat or weed, it's best to leave it alone as at some point in the future it might become clear which is which. A sentiment quite similar to Lucreitus's approach to knowledge:

...if you cannot understand, It’s better to offer erroneous explanations than let slip Any aspect of the graspable out of your grip...^[40]

But which of these is the true cause, it’s hard to ascertain. Rather, it is the possibilities that I explain – What things can and do come about in all the universe In the many worlds created different ways. I give divers Rationales which can explain the motion of the stars In all the worlds – and one of these has to hold true for ours, Empowering stars with motion. Which is right? We cannot say, When we are only blindly, step by step, feeling our way.^[41]

So out of the three sayings we examined closely, the two that appear in the canonical gospels are also two of the only three secret explanations for parables in said canonical gospels, with the third being about not prematurely digging up which seed is worth harvesting before you're certain which is correct.

Seems like that would have been good advice for the church to consider in deciding whether to ban interpretations of 'seeds' as indivisible points making up all things, but hindsight is 20/20.

Conclusion

• We discussed how survival of the fittest and trait inheritance were ideas that pre-existed Jesus.
• We covered how these ideas would have been present in first century Judea and the group advocating them overlapped one of the three schools of Jewish thought.
• We saw that a sect was interpreting Jesus's sayings about seeds using language extremely similar to the extant popular Roman text that covered these beliefs less than a century before Jesus was allegedly saying them.
• We talked about how the text this group was following has a history of misinterpretation in scholarship that has led to a degree of anchored paradigm blindness, and broadly has notable overlaps with ideas adjacent to survival of the fittest in the Roman work.
• We looked closely at three sayings which overlap those concepts about survival of the fittest, even with remarkably similar language and metaphors to the Roman poem.
• And we covered how the early church happened to claim that there were secret explanations for these very same sayings, contrary to reports elsewhere that nothing had been said in secret or that the parables didn't have any explanations that came with them.

For me, while the question of if the historical Jesus was talking about evolution may not be able to be proven beyond any reasonable doubt given the difficulty in proving anything about a historical Jesus, I do think that given all of what I've outlined above that it does seem quite plausible that a historical Jesus was discussing evolution.

And that is pretty darn strange a thing to find myself saying, yet here we are.

One parting thought that I reflect on often - the story of Jesus's persecution by the theological leadership and the reluctance of Rome in execution is one of the stranger parts of the official story. In Josephus, there's a number of messianic claimants who are immediately killed by Rome, often with their followers too.

Would talking about humans arising from evolutionary processes have been dangerous in 1st century Judea? Would leadership in a theocracy take issue with a citizen publicly claiming their creation story wasn't correct? Would a Roman prelate struggle to strike the right balance around a request to carry out a lawful execution under local theocratic laws for discussing ideas that were quite popular in Roman academia? Would damage control have involved sending someone like Paul to persecute followers where he had the authority and to suggest replacing/denouncing versions of Jesus or different gospels in areas where he didn't have that authority?

These are some of the lingering questions I still think about as I consider the possibility that all the smoke we laid out above originated with a probable fire.

I hope if you managed to make it this far that - as promised - it proved interesting and worth the read.

1. ^{^}

   Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio Evangelica, book 1

2. ^{^}

   In the Papyrus Harris, Ramses III discussed how at the end of the 19th dynasty foreigners connected to Syria took over Egypt and changed the governance to rule by city governors (similar to the Phoneican style of government) and got rid of all religious worship, explicitly saying they "made the gods like men"

3. ^{^}

   Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, book 4 lines 1217-1232

4. ^{^}

   Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, book 5 lines 837-859

5. ^{^}

   Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, book 5 lines 419-431

6. ^{^}

   Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, book 4 lines 823-841

7. ^{^}

   Josephus, Antiquities, 18.1.4

8. ^{^}

   Pirkei Avot 2.14

9. ^{^}

   Jenny R. Labendz, "Know What to Answer the Epicurean": A Diachronic Study of the ʾApiqoros in Rabbinic Literature (2003)

10. ^{^}

    2 Corinthians 11:4-5

11. ^{^}

    Pseudo-Hippolytus, Refutations of All Heresies, 5.2

12. ^{^}

    Pseudo-Hippolytus, Refutations of All Heresies, 5.3

13. ^{^}

    Pseudo-Hippolytus, Refutations of All Heresies, 5.4

14. ^{^}

    Pseudo-Hippolytus, Refutations of All Heresies, 1.19

15. ^{^}

    Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 2.14

16. ^{^}

    Pseudo-Hippolytus, Refutations of All Heresies, 6.9

17. ^{^}

    Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, book 1 lines 497-502

18. ^{^}

    Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, book 1 lines 599-606

19. ^{^}

    From "Scholarly Smackdown: Did Paul Distort Christianity?" (2004) [Web Archive Link]

20. ^{^}

    From "The Gnostics Were Intellectuals", (2014) [Archive Link]

21. ^{^}

    For both words, the Coptic text uses Greek loanwords, which I've found often correlates with philosophical overlaps

22. ^{^}

    The Coptic text here uses a Greek loanword for 'world' which is kosmos

23. ^{^}

    See Funk, The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (1996) p 505 or Grant, The Secret Sayings of Jesus: A Modern Translation of the Gospel of Thomas with Commentary (1993) p. 164

24. ^{^}

    Miroshnikov, The Gospel of Thomas and Plato: A Study of the Impact of Platonism on the “Fifth Gospel” (2018)

25. ^{^}

    Technically there was a book written on similarities between Thomas and Epicureanism: Hannah, You will not taste death: Jesus and Epicureanism (1997) but Jack Hannah was not a professional scholar, the book is plagued with extreme speculation around links between Thomas and Mark, and Hannah didn't even seem familiar with the Naassenes who provide some of the stronger links for an argument of Epicurean influence in Thomas - so it's understandable this earlier effort was overlooked and dismissed

26. ^{^}

    Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, book 5 lines 64-67

27. ^{^}

    See Thomas sayings 18-19a, 51, 113

28. ^{^}

    For example, Doresse writes "...'the body which depends on a body' is a living person who, through care for earthly obligations, wishes to bury his dead person. 'The soul which depends on these two' is the soul of such a person, a living body depending on a dead body." in Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics: An Introduction to the Gnostic Coptic Manuscripts Discovered at Chenoboskion (1997)

29. ^{^}

    A sentiment also found in Thomas saying 112

30. ^{^}

    I'm changing the word here from Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer's translation as 'person' to be consistent with how they translated 'ⲣⲱⲙⲉ' in saying 7 as 'human' given in the Coptic the words are the same. This is also the translation used in Linssen, Complete Thomas Commentary, Part I & II (logion 0-55) (2022) which is a great resource on the Coptic nuances present in Thomas.

31. ^{^}

    Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, book 2 lines 870-880

32. ^{^}

    Habakkuk 1:14-15

33. ^{^}

    Matthew 13:47-50

34. ^{^}

    Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, book 2 lines 1056-1061

35. ^{^}

    Wilson, Studies in the Gospel of Thomas (1960) p. 98-99

36. ^{^}

    Bruce, Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament (1974) p. 116

37. ^{^}

    Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, book 4 lines 1269-1273

38. ^{^}

    Eusebius, History of the Church 3.39.16

39. ^{^}

    I really like the idea of redactional layers in thinking through the Synoptic problem, and if this is of interest recommend Burkett, The Case for Proto-Mark (2018)

40. ^{^}

    Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, book 4 lines 502-504

41. ^{^}

    Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, book 5 lines 526-533

4 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.