One blogger wanted to find out which words Jesus most used so he ended up using the World English Bible XML and says that it
"contains a \(i.e. "words of Jesus") tag which delimits exactly what I need. So after a bit of processing, and thanks to NLTK, I was able to provide a basic list of Jesus' most common words:
one - 221
father - 211
tell - 210
man - 196
God - 163
things - 163
come - 158
son - 149
go - 123
also - 113
know - 111
may - 111
kingdom - 104
see - 102
lord - 97
said - 96
therefore - 94
give - 93
heaven - 86
Source: http://thelibrarybasement.com/2012/03/18/jesus-vocabulary/ Retreived 1/29/18
What I take from this list is that Jesus most uses the words "God" (God as Abba, the God of the Prodigal Son parable, etc.), "Kingdom" (the ideal society on earth), "give" (probably referring to giving love and showing kindness, etc), and "heaven" (that which represents the Kingdom ideal), and the word "come" as in let God's ideal Kingdom come here and now, grown up like a garden upon the earth (just as it exists in heaven): through transformed humans as seedlings who grow in Christ; and then plant the Kingdom Ideal into the hearts of others until it spreads and takes over the whole world.
What this means to me is that for Jesus the Kingdom was his focus, and the Kingdom model he was enacting represented economic fairness and open commensality. I will address open commensality (open table fellowship) that breaks down class barriers below. First, lets focus on economic fairness.
According to Howard L. Dayton, Jr., Leadership, Vol. 2, no. 2.:
"Jesus talked much about money. Sixteen of the thirty-eight parables were concerned with how to handle money and possessions. In the Gospels, an amazing one out of ten verses (288 in all) deal directly with the subject of money. The Bible offers 500 verses on prayer, less than 500 verses on faith, but more than 2,000 verses on money and possessions."
Source: http://www.preachingtoday.com/illustrations/1996/december/410.html. Retrieved 1/29/18
In his article, Jesus Talked the Most about...Money? (Jul 23, 2011), author Michael Packer writes:
In the New Testament, Jesus offers more wisdom and has more to say about money than any other subject besides the "Kingdom of God." ... Jesus talked more about money than he did Heaven and Hell combined. Eleven of the 39 parables He tells are about finances.
This does not surprise me given that Jesus came from the poor and peasant class and saw some of the super rich Romans exploit and mistreat the poor among those around his village. See the 10 minutes to 17 minutes of the video program, National Geographic: Jesus Revealed (Produced by James Younger); also see the episode as renamed Science of the Bible: Jesus the Man (2005) at 5 minutes to 25 minutes.
Jesus is a peasant growing up and going to Jerusalem and seeing the Temple leaders hoard their wealth and act elitist and uppity. Jesus is accused of hanging out with the lower classes in open table fellowship and is criticized for partying and drinking wine and not following their religious traditions not in the Torah.
Jesus is kind of the blue collar "every man," the "common man," who despises those who hoard their wealth and use their riches to act superior and exploit the less fortunate. In Jesus' Kingdom vision, there is no greed or classism.
In the book,
The Jesus Dynasty by James Tabor, in chapter 17, Tabor argues that Jesus' family
passed on his teachings. He argues that the Q Gospel corresponds with the Epistle
of James. On page 275 he lists the following scriptures side by side that show
similarities between Jesus' teachings and that of James (posted below from his
website). Note the similar teachings on criticism of the greedy rich people:
… when you compare the teachings of Jesus in our earliest
source and the teachings of [the Epistle of] James, the parallels are quite
striking, notice:
Jesus’
Teachings in the Q Source
|
Teachings
of James
|
“Blessed
are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God (Luke 6:20)
|
“Has not
God chosen the poor to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom” (2:5)
|
“Whoever
relaxes one of the least of these commandments . . . shall be [called] least
in the kingdom” (Matthew 5:19)
|
“Whoever
keeps the whole Torah but fails in one point has become guilty of it all”
(2:10)
|
“Not
everyone who says ‘Lord, Lord’ shall enter the kingdom . . . but he who does
the will of my Father” (Matthew 7:21)
|
“Be doers
of the word and not hearers only” (1:22)
|
“How much
more will your Father . . . give good gifts to those who ask him” (Matthew 7:
11)
|
“Every good
gift . . . coming down from the Father” (1:17)
|
“Woe to you
that are rich, for you have received your consolation” (Luke 6:24)
|
“Come now,
you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you” (5:1)
|
“Do not
swear at all, either by heaven for it is the throne of God, or by earth for
it is his footstool . . . let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’” (Matthew
5:34, 37)
|
“Do not
swear, either by heaven or by earth or with any other oath but let your yes
be yes and your no be no” (5:12)
|
Paul’s emphasize on his visionary apparitions or
“appearances” of the heavenly “Christ,” come later by several years. The
Galilean based group of Jesus followers must have found a way to sustain
themselves and express their faith in Jesus as one whom God had exalted to
heaven long before Paul showed up on the scene with his unique claims to be a
“thirteenth” Apostle ….
In his The New Testament: A Translation, author David Bentley Hart writes at Location 307 of the Ebook version (words in double brackets are my own):
... the New Testament, alarmingly enough, condemns [[egocentric hoarding of]] personal wealth not merely as a moral danger, but as an intrinsic evil. Actually, the biblical texts are so unambiguous on this matter that it requires an almost heroic defiance of the obvious to fail to grasp their import. Admittedly, many translations down the centuries have had an emollient effect on a few of the New Testament’s severer pronouncements. But this is an old story. The great theologian Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215 CE) may have been the first—back when the faith had just begun spreading among the more comfortably situated classes in the empire—to apply a reassuring gloss to the raw rhetoric of scripture on wealth and poverty. He drew a distinction between the poverty that matters (humility, renunciation, spiritual purity, generosity) and the poverty that does not (actual material indigence), and assured propertied Christians that, so long as they cultivated the former, they need never submit to the latter. And throughout Christian history, even among the few who bothered to consult scripture on the matter, this has generally been the tacit interpretation of Christ’s (and Paul’s and James’s) condemnations of the wealthy and acquisitive. In the early modern period, moreover, for obvious reasons, forms of Christianity took shape that were especially well suited to the needs of an emerging prosperous middle class, and to the spiritual complacency that a culture of increasing material security dearly required of its religion. For this vision of the gospel, all moral anxiety became a kind of spiritual pathology, the heresy of “works-righteousness,” sheer Pelagianism. Grace had set humanity free not only from works of the Law, but also from the spiritual agony of seeking to become holy by moral deeds. In a sense, the good news announced by scripture was that Christ had come to save humanity from the burden of Christianity. Or so, at any rate, “our” version of Christianity might have seemed in the eyes of the very first Christians. None of which is to deny the cultural genius of, say, early modern Christianity’s sanctification of the ordinary or the countless ways in which it allows for an appreciation of the moral heroism of the everyday. But if, as may be the case, such a vision of Christian life is a genuine unfolding of some logic implicit in the gospel, it was nonetheless a logic largely invisible to those who wrote the Christian scriptures.
[[He further states at Location: 342:]]
... it should probably be translated not as “Who then can be saved?” or “Can anyone be saved?” but rather “Then can any [of them, the rich] be saved?” To which the sobering reply is that it is humanly impossible, but that by divine power even a rich man might be spared. But one can look everywhere in the Gospels for confirmation of the message. Christ clearly means what he says when quoting the prophet: He has been anointed by God’s Spirit to preach good tidings to the poor (Luke 4:18). To the prosperous, the tidings he bears are decidedly grim: “But alas for you who are rich, for you have your comfort. Alas for you who are now replete, for you will be hungry. Alas for those now laughing, for you will mourn and lament” (Luke 6:24–25). As Abraham tells Dives in Hades, “You received your good things during your life . . . and now . . . you are in torment” (Luke 16:25). Again, perhaps many of the practices Christ condemns in the rulers of his time are merely misuses of power and property; but that does not begin to exhaust the rhetorical force of his teachings as a whole. He not only demands that his followers give freely to all who ask from them (Matthew 5:42), and to do so with such prodigality that one hand is ignorant of the other’s largesse (Matthew 6:3); he explicitly forbids storing up earthly wealth—not merely storing it up too obsessively—and allows instead only the hoarding of the treasures of heaven (Matthew 6:19–20). He tells all who would follow him (as he tells the rich young ruler) to sell all their possessions and give the proceeds away as alms, thereby supplying that same heavenly treasury (Luke 12:33), and explicitly states that “no one of you who does not bid farewell to all his own possessions can be my disciple” (Luke 14:33). It is truly amazing how rarely Christians seem to notice that these counsels are stated, quite decidedly, as commands. Certainly the texts are not in any way unclear on the matter. After all, as Mary says, part of the saving promise of the gospel is that the Lord “has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:53). Of the compilation of pericopes, however, there is no end. What is most important to recognize is that all these pronouncements on wealth and poverty belong to a moral sensibility that saturates the pages of the New Testament. It is there, for instance, in the epistles’ condemnations of πλεονέξια (pleonexia) (often translated as “greed” but really meaning all acquisitive desire), and in the Pastoral Epistles’ condemnation of αἰσχροκερδής (aischrokerdēs) (often translated as “greed for base gain” but really referring to the sordidness of seeking financial profit for oneself). James perhaps states the matter most clearly: …
Hart then quotes James 5:1-6 and then discusses how James is not just condemning what we would think of as unfair CEOs; but that seeking riches for luxury itself in general (at the expense of the lower class) is what's condemned. Hart argues this by invoking James 1: 9-11 and 2: 5-7. We already saw above how James's teachings mirror Jesus'.
Adding to Hart's scriptures by Jesus, here is what Meghan Henning writes in her article titled Hell at Bible Odyssey:
In the most detailed picture of eternal punishment in the New Testament (Luke 16:19-31), Hades becomes a way to talk about the importance of caring for those who are poor, wounded, or marginalized. In fact, in the places in the New Testament where Jesus is talking about eternal punishment, words that we would read as “hell” are often used to talk about the serious consequences for not caring for the social outcast or minority (Mark 9:42-48; Matt 5:22-30; Matt 18:8-9; Matt 25:30-46; Luke 16:19-31).
Source: https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/places/main-articles/hell. Retrieved 1/2918
Hart continues to discuss money and wealth in the context of the New Testament era congregations of Jesus-followers: showing how the movement that Jesus started continued on with the same aattitude about money and riches as Jesus. Hart further writes at Location 377:
It is almost as if, seen from the perspective of the Kingdom, all property is theft. Fair or not, the text does not distinguish good wealth from bad—any more than Christ did. This, in all likelihood, explains why the early Christians were (in the strictly technical sense) communists, as the book of Acts quite explicitly states. If these are indeed the Last Days, as James says—if everything is now seen in the light of final judgment—then storing up possessions for ourselves is the height of imprudence. And I imagine this is also why subsequent generations of Christians have not, as a rule, been communists: the Last Days in fact are taking quite some time to elapse, and we have families to raise in the meantime. But at the dawn of the faith little thought was given to providing a decent life in this world for the long term.
Then at Location 386:
To be a follower of “The Way” [[the name of the early Jesus-followers]] was to renounce every claim to private property and to consent to communal ownership of everything (Acts 4:32). Even those verses from 1 Timothy 6 that I mentioned above are not nearly as mild and moderate as they might seem at first glance. Earlier in the chapter, the text reminds Christians that they bring nothing into this world and can take nothing with them when they leave it, and tells them to content themselves simply with having enough food and clothing. It also tells them that all who seek wealth—not simply all who procure it unjustly—have ensnared themselves in desires that will lead to their ruin: “For the love of money is a root of all evils, in reaching out for which some have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves about with many pains” (6:7–10). True, verse 17 merely advises the rich not to be “arrogant” or “in high spirits” (depending on how one interprets it), and not to put their trust in wealth’s “uncertainty” (or, better, in “the hiddenness” of their riches) rather than in the lavishness of God’s providence. But verse 18 goes further and tells them not only to make themselves rich in good works, but also to become—well, here the customary translations are along the lines of “generous” (εὐμεταδότους [evmetadotous]) and “sharing” (κοινωνικούς [koinōnikous]), but the better renderings would be something like “persons readily distributing” their goods, in the former case, and something like “communalists” or “persons having all their possessions in common,” in the latter. (A property that is koinōnikon is something held in common or corporately, and therefore a person who is koinōnikos is certainly not just someone who occasionally makes donations at his own discretion.) Only thus, says verse 19, can the wealthy now “store up” a good foundation for the age that is coming, and reach out to take hold of “the life that is real.” And this would seem to have been the social philosophy of the early church in general.
Then at Location 404:
In the words of that very early manual of Christian life, The Didache, a Christian must never claim that anything is his own property, but must own all things communally with his brethren (4:9–12). In any event, however Christians might be disposed to take such verses today, and regardless of whether they reflect the actual social situation—rather than the professed ideals—of the early church, one cannot begin to understand the earliest Christians or the texts they wrote if one imagines that such language was intended as mere bracing hyperbole. Throughout the history of the church, Christians have keenly desired to believe that the New Testament affirms the kind of people they are, rather than—as is actually the case—the kind of people they are not, and really would not want to be. Again, the first, perhaps most crucial thing to understand about the earliest generations of…
Finally, at Location 420:
To live as the New Testament language really requires, Christians would have to become strangers and sojourners on the earth, to have here no enduring city, to belong to a Kingdom truly not of this world. And we surely cannot do that, can we?
Hart is on to something here. Why is Jesus' main teaching about a communitarian Kingdom on earth, and one of his main condemnations is hoarding money and being selfishly rich? Is it not because Jesus envisioned on earth a society that ran as if it were a heavenly society: without egotism, greed or other forms of self-centeredness? Even if we account for some of Jesus' teachings being directed to only his "Jewish" disciples in the first century and the rich and fake piety of those who ended up dying in 70 AD; there is still a clear attitude by Jesus against hoarding wealth, and living in extreme luxury (off of the backs of others) while others suffer, as being sinful.
Obviously Jesus was preaching to his fellow Jews in the context of the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD when many Jews would be killed. Obviously he was encouraging an itinerant lifestyle for his Jewish disciples in order for them to preach full time and warn their fellow Jews of this coming tragedy (in their generation) in 70 AD. And yes, today we need a certain amount of wealth to take care of our families such as for basic needs and medical care and transportation. But the spirit of the message seems to me to be just as valid today as in Jesus' day: which is basically this, "How can you claim to model and enact the ideal Heavenly Society if you hoard your wealth for excessive personal luxury while others suffer while acting elitist, classist and uppity and looking down on the less fortunate?"
Two good examples of this is the huge Catholic cathedrals and their riches. Or mega church pastors acting like their riches is a sign of God's favor to them.
What usually drives the super rich to hoard their wealth is a form of egotism. Bob Sorge writes:
... there is no teaching of Christ contained in all four Gospels. With one exception. ... Only one verse of teaching is to be found in all four Gospels. When you study the context of these six mentions, you realize they are pointing to four distinct events:
• On His third tour of Galilee (Mat. 10:39)
• After his visit to Caesarea Philippi (Mat. 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24)
• On his final journey to Jerusalem (Luke 17:33)
• During his final week in Jerusalem (John 12:25)
So there are two unique characteristics about the teaching of Jesus to which we are pointing:
1. It is the only teaching of Christ mentioned in all four Gospels.
2. It is the only teaching of Christ that we know He gave on four different occasions.
Want to know what the teaching was?
[Answer:] Find your life, you’ll lose it; lose your life, you’ll find it. John’s wording is slightly different, but it’s the same teaching: Love your life, you’ll lose; hate your life, you’ll keep it. (The references are listed above.)
Source: http://bobsorge.com/2014/11/jesus-most-common-teaching/ Retrieved 1/29/18
The theme of losing one's life and finding it means different things for each gospel, yet the overarching meaning is to lose one's ego and earthly attachments to impermanent possessions and other means of selfish-gain, and to instead seek to embody the Kingdom (being born from above) and being more Other-focused, loving, and egalitarian (following Jesus' Way); while being willing to risk death by opposing The Powers (that oppress the Just Kingdom) that try to keep the Kingdom from growing like a seed into a tree.
When Jesus spoke about hell (Gehenna) he spoke mostly about the greedy elites and those who let their anger control them down the path of vice and destructive decisions which would lead them to being killed and their corpses thrown into Gehenna. The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus is already mentioned above, here are some more passages to ponder:
Matthew 5:21-24 (CEV):
21 You know that our ancestors were told, “Do not murder” and “A murderer must be brought to trial.” 22 But I promise you that if you are angry with someone,[a] you will have to stand trial. If you call someone a fool, you will be taken to court. And if you say that someone is worthless, you will be in danger of the fires of hell.
23 So if you are about to place your gift on the altar and remember that someone is angry with you, 24 leave your gift there in front of the altar. Make peace with that person, then come back and offer your gift to God.
For more information on Jesus and hell (meaning Gehenna), and how he is speaking to some (not all) of his fellow Jewish countryman who let vice take them over, see Steve Cook's archive on hell at blog.stephencook.com.
Jesus also focused a lot on condemning fake piety, religious elitism, pious charlatans, traditional legalism, and acting holier than thou. Here are just a few of Jesus' teachings on such matters:
Matthew 6:1-6 (CEV):
1 When you do good deeds, don’t try to show off. If you do, you won’t get a reward from your Father in heaven.
2 When you give to the poor, don’t blow a loud horn. That’s what show-offs do in the meeting places and on the street corners, because they are always looking for praise. I can assure you that they already have their reward.
3 When you give to the poor, don’t let anyone know about it.[a] 4 Then your gift will be given in secret. Your Father knows what is done in secret, and he will reward you.
...
5 When you pray, don’t be like those show-offs who love to stand up and pray in the meeting places and on the street corners. They do this just to look good. I can assure you that they already have their reward.
6 When you pray, go into a room alone and close the door. Pray to your Father in private. He knows what is done in private, and he will reward you.
Matthew 9: 11-13 (CEV):
11 Some Pharisees asked Jesus' disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and other sinners?”
12 Jesus heard them and answered, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor, but sick people do. 13 Go and learn what the Scriptures mean when they say, ‘Instead of offering sacrifices to me, I want you to be merciful to others.’ I didn’t come to invite good people to be my followers. I came to invite sinners.”
To see how Jesus opposed legalistic traditionalism see An Exposition on the Gospel of Mathew by Dr. Allen Ross, section 22: Jesus And The Traditions Of The Elders (Matthew 15:1-20)
