Speaking of mustard seeds, as a child something troubled my literalist brain. Mark 4.31, “It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth…” According to subsequent translations after the KJV “less than all” reads, “the smallest.” Of course, in Elizabethan English that’s what “less than all” denotes. Since these words came from Jesus, and since the Bible was factually true on every point, I wondered how this error had crept in. The mustard seed, I knew as a child, wasn’t the smallest seed. Not by a long shot. I knew, for example, that poppy seeds were smaller. Why had Jesus said the mustard seed was the smallest when it wasn’t? I was too young for the casuistry called exegesis, so a small crisis of faith emerged.
Pardon the resolution: I don’t have a macro lens any more. Mustard (left) meets chia seed (right).
The mustard seed has other roles in the gospels as well. I still frequently recite “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matthew 17.20). All of this made me curious as to the history of mustard. While in Wisconsin we used to visit the Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb. It’s now the National Mustard Museum and is in Middleton. It seems that mustard, in its familiar paste form, was developed in China centuries before Jesus. And people had been using mustard seeds as a spice long before that. Jesus, like earlier prophets, used nature to make a point. The problem wasn’t Jesus, it was literalism.
Jesus also said “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (KJV) in Matthew 12.40. Modern translations of “sea monster”—for the Hebrew says it was a fish—forced me to dust off my Greek New Testament. So Jesus said “in the belly of Cetus.” Cetus was mythical sea monster, not unlike the mythical Leviathan God describes in Job 40. Good thing I couldn’t read Greek or Hebrew as a kid! Well, it seems we’ve gone from mustard to monsters. If you’re familiar with the history of this blog, that shouldn’t surprise you too much. I wonder what literalists believe about the Loch Ness Monster? But don’t get me started on that or we’ll be here all day.
