Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE MISSION OF JESUS
§14.3
ate group of disciples with a view to their assisting or sharing in his own mission.
We have already noted that the Q tradition recalls Jesus sending out his disciples
to proclaim the very same message that characterized Jesus' own preaching: 'The
kingdom of God has drawn near' (Matt. 10.7/Luke 10.9). 68 Most striking is the
saying preserved in Matt. 10.40/Luke 10.16 in teaching attached to the mission
commission:
Matt. 10.40
He who receives you receives me,
and he who receives me receives him
who sent me.
Luke 10.16
He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects
you rejects me; but he who rejects me rejects him
who sent me.
The saying is usually taken to reflect the concerns of the subsequent communities
in regard to their own authorisation, 69 and no doubt it does so. But the idea of
Jesus' disciples as representing their master is recalled at various points in the
ongoing tradition. 70 And the saliah principle (saliah = 'sent man'), that the one
who is sent is as the one who sends (m. Ber. 5.5), is generally reckoned to be at
the root of the concept of apostleship. 71 So the principle may be assumed to have
been already familiar at the time of Jesus. In other words, here too the saying, in
its different versions, simply makes explicit what was anyway implicit: that Jesus
sent out his disciples to carry forward the mission to which he evidently believed
himself to have been called.
To be a disciple, then, was to take part in Jesus' mission. Does this give sufficient
ground for Theissen's description of Jesus' following as 'a movement of
wandering charismatics'? 72 Not really. For all Theissen's concern to root his
68. It is doubtful whether the second commissioning of seventy(-two) in Luke 10.1-12
provides sufficient evidence of a second sending out by Jesus; it is more likely that Luke himself
has compiled two commissionings from the differing Mark and Q traditions (e.g.,
Fitzmyer, Luke 842-43), possibly to foreshadow the double mission of earliest Christianity (to
Jews and Gentiles), as in 14.21-23.
69. Funk, Five Gospels 175-76; Lüdemann, Jesus 329.
70. Mark 9.37 pars.; John 13.20; Did 11.4; Ignatius, Eph. 6.1 (latter texts in Aland, Synopsis
149; see also Crossan, Fragments 104-19). The idea of acting 'in the name of Jesus, that
is, with his authority or authorisation, also carries the same overtones (Mark 9.37 pars.; 13.6
pars.; Mark 9.38-39/Luke 9.49; Matt. 7.22; 18.20; Luke 10.17).
71. See, e.g., Davies and Allison, Matthew 2.153-54 (bibliography in nn. 34-35), but see
also chapter 15 n. 226 below.
72. Cited above, §4.6; for its influence see chapter 7 n. 96. Crossan regards this complex
of sayings (Mission and Message — centring on GTh 14; Mark 6.7-13 pars.; Q 10.4-11) as 'the
most important unit for understanding the historical Jesus . . .'. The itinerants in view are 'dispossessed
and now landless laborers, close to but not yet beggars'. He envisages not a single
sending, but 'a permanent process, with Jesus as the moving center of a changing group' and
cites Patterson's argument (Thomas and Jesus 132) that 'originally the ideal of radical
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