Here was the only group in antiquity with a different explanation for the sower parable (that it was about physical creation of the cosmos) talking about the mustard seed:
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
Pseudo-Hippolytus Refutations 5.4
This group kept describing seeds as being indivisible points that make up all things and were the originating cause of the universe.
Language pretty much straight out of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura where describing the atomism of Epicureanism for a Roman audience couldn’t use the Greek atomos (‘indivisible’) and used the word for ‘seed’ instead.
In a book widely popular in the Roman empire 50 years before Jesus was born.
In fact, Lucretius’s book is not only the only surviving book from antiquity to explicitly describe survival of the fittest being the mechanism by which mutants in nature survived or died off based on adaptation, but specifically used the language of “seed falling by the wayside of a path” to describe failed biological reproduction.
Again, in a book 80 years before a guy allegedly talking about how only what survived of randomly scattered seeds multipled and the seed that fell by the wayside of a path did not. In a public saying that was the only one in the earliest gospel to canonically have a “secret explanation” later on. Why were they so threatened by this saying?
There may have been more to the context around what these sayings about seeds from a guy killed by request of religious orthodoxy leadership were about in a culture where also from the 1st century a Rabbi was recorded as saying “why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean.”
Don’t just take at face value what cannonical Christianity says with its damage control versions of secret explanations and boring ass nonsense about ‘faith growing.’
There might be more to that one than you think.
Here was the only group in antiquity with a different explanation for the sower parable (that it was about physical creation of the cosmos) talking about the mustard seed:
This group kept describing seeds as being indivisible points that make up all things and were the originating cause of the universe.
Language pretty much straight out of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura where describing the atomism of Epicureanism for a Roman audience couldn’t use the Greek atomos (‘indivisible’) and used the word for ‘seed’ instead.
In a book widely popular in the Roman empire 50 years before Jesus was born.
In fact, Lucretius’s book is not only the only surviving book from antiquity to explicitly describe survival of the fittest being the mechanism by which mutants in nature survived or died off based on adaptation, but specifically used the language of “seed falling by the wayside of a path” to describe failed biological reproduction.
Again, in a book 80 years before a guy allegedly talking about how only what survived of randomly scattered seeds multipled and the seed that fell by the wayside of a path did not. In a public saying that was the only one in the earliest gospel to canonically have a “secret explanation” later on. Why were they so threatened by this saying?
There may have been more to the context around what these sayings about seeds from a guy killed by request of religious orthodoxy leadership were about in a culture where also from the 1st century a Rabbi was recorded as saying “why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean.”
Don’t just take at face value what cannonical Christianity says with its damage control versions of secret explanations and boring ass nonsense about ‘faith growing.’