Jesus, the Tortoise and the Hare

Comparing the Lives of Jesus and Aesop

Today, Aesop is best known as the genius behind the popular children’s fable, The Tortoise and the Hare. ‘Slow and steady will win the race.’

In the classical world, however, Aesop was a huge deal in his own right. Often cast alongside the ‘seven sages,’ the prolific early Greek thinkers, Aesop was looked to as a great teacher of antiquity; a divine repository of wit and wisdom.¹

In the last three decades, many Gospels scholars have started to spot similarities between the lives of Jesus and Aesop. While many of these parallels are not necessarily ‘genetic’ - with the Gospels borrowing from Aesopic traditions - ancient readers familiar with Aesop’s life may have noticed certain affinities.

Since Aesop is one of the oldest Greek figures to bear significant comparisons to Jesus, he is the perfect figure to begin a series on ‘Jesus-like’ figures in antiquity.

Let us take a look at some of the similarities.

1. Both figures are the subjects of biographies

For a student of the Gospels, the most striking thing about Aesop is that he was the subject of an ancient biography, written around the time of the Gospels.

The Vita Aesopi (‘Life of Aesop’), composed sometime between the 1st century BCE and the 2nd century AD, is a popular biography, which tells the life of the sage.² Some Gospels scholars ignore the Vita as a genuine ‘life’, since it is written in a popular style, closer to an ancient romantic novel than a historical biography.³ The humour is scatological, the dialogue novelistic, and the sources obscure.

I think it is a mistake, however, to discount the Vita as a biography. Classicists routinely acknowledge that biography was a diverse genre, which ranged from the highly fictional to the more historical biographies of Plutarch and Suetonius. The tradition named it a ‘life,’ and most modern scholars concur.⁴

Moreover, when we set the Vita alongside the Gospels, particularly Mark, we find some striking similarities in their style. Both lives begin in media res (in the course of the narrative); have an anonymous narrator (less common in ‘historical’ biographies); and are are substantially episodic.⁵ They even share literary techniques, such as sandwiching, where the placement of one narrative inside two others give it meaning.⁶

2. Both biographies share a similar ‘plot’

In addition to their similar style, Mark and the Aesopia share a similar plot.

Both biographies begin in the course of the narrative with a figure on the periphery of society: Jesus in Galilee, Aesop in Phyrgia. Quickly, the figure encounters a ‘priest’ of sorts (John the Baptist/a Priestess), who imbues him with special powers. For Jesus, this is the Spirit’s power to perform miracles; for the mute Aesop, to speak.

Following this, both Jesus and Aesop attract large followings, tell fables, and challenge advocates of the status quo. For Jesus, these are the Pharisees and (eventually) the Jerusalem authorities; for Aesop, the educated philosophers.

Yet things turn south – quite literally – when both figures move from the periphery to the centre; Jerusalem and Delphi, the ‘Greek’ Jerusalem. Here both characters are embroiled in a conflict surrounding a Temple and are put to death for blasphemy. Both figures conform to the scapegoat archetype and their vindication is foretold.

There is, then, a very similar ‘movement’ to these plots. And that movement embodies a similar value structure: a figure on the margins of society criticises its institutions and is put to death as a result. There is, then, a topsy-turvy element to each of these stories; they both present a challenge to the existing conditions of society.⁷

3. Both are ‘thrown of a cliff’ for blasphemy

We have seen that, in the broadest brushstrokes, the lives of Aesop and Jesus follow a similar movement. But there are details in their lives which also dovetail.

Take a scene, unique to Luke’s Gospel, in which the people of Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown, attempt to thrown him off a cliff for blasphemy. Commentators have scratched their heads at why exactly cliff-throwing is the response to Jesus’ words.

Yet for those who familiar with Aesop’s life, this cliff-throwing incident is thrown into clear relief. For Aesop is faced with a similar descent. When he is in Delphi, the people initially receive Aesop’s words well, just like those in Nazareth (124; 4.22). Yet when he challenges the Delphians, Aesop meets his fate at the bottom of a cliff.

The fact that both figures are thrown from a cliff may not seem peculiar but not particularly surprising. But they are thrown off the cliff for the same reason: blasphemy. It would be difficult, then, for those who knew Aesop’s tradition not to be reminded of it in this incident; not to think that Jesus is being cast as an ‘Aesopic’ figure.⁸

4. Both are popular tellers of fables

The most thorough-going similarity between Jesus and Aesop is the fact that are both weavers of fables. For a long time, scholars have not known how to place Jesus’ parables. Their self-referential character and consistency have been seen by historians as virtually unique in the Jewish world - a mark of Jesus’ distinctive genius.

Yet they have not always looked for parallels in the right places. As a recent award-winning study by Justin David Strong demonstrates, the Jewish parables of Jesus and other rabbis can be situated within the wider Greek phenomenon of the fable.⁹ To understand the fables of Jesus, we can look to Aesop’s long-neglected tales.

This is not to say that the subject matter is entirely the same; Aesop prefers animals to Jesus’ social scenes. Yet their fables embody the same narrative process. Both fabulists draws upon quotidian to explain something abstract, leading the audience to think analogically, understanding the theme through their everyday experience.

In one occasion, the words of Aesop are even found on Jesus’ lips. After the resurrection of Jesus in Luke, he appears to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, chiding them with the words: ‘O foolish ones, and slow in heart [ὦ ἀνόητοι καὶ βραδεῖς τῇ καρδίᾳ]’ (Lk 24.25). These are the same words found near-verbatim in Aesop’s fables, The Fox and the Goat in the Well and The Frogs at the Wedding of the Sun.

Upon first hearing this, we might suspect the Christianisation of the Aesopic manuscripts. After all, the corpus does show minor signs of Christianisation. Yet this is unlikely, for where Christian influence occurs it is typically marginal. As Steve Reece notes, “[that]] a verbatim interpolation of a New Testament passage would have occurred twice, independently, in two different Aesopic tales is hardly imaginable.”¹⁰

5. Both figures were remembered as ‘ugly and short’

A further similarity between Jesus and Aesop is their physical appearance - or at least, the later depiction of it. For both Aesop were remembered as ugly and short.

In the beginning of Aesop’s life, we find the following pile of adjectives:

The fabulist Aesop, the great benefactor of mankind, was by chance a slave but by origin a Phrygian of Phrygia, of loathsome aspect, worthless as a servant, pot- bellied, misshapen of head, snub-nosed, swarthy, dwarfish, bandy-legged, short- armed, squint-eyed, liver-lipped–a portentous monstrosity.” (Vit. Aes. 1.1)

Recently, Isaac Soon has argued that Luke presents Jesus as ‘short,’ in keeping with a wider interest in presenting Jesus as Aesop-like (recall the cliff-throwing incident, and Jesus’ Aesopic-rebuke.) Soon finds evidence for Jesus’ short height in the story of Zacchaeus climbing the Sycamore tree. While the traditional reading is that Zacchaeus is short, the Greek leaves open the possibility that it is Jesus who is small.

I have argued elsewhere that Soon’s reading is unconvincing. Yet the idea of a ‘small’ Jesus is attractive, for it captures an ancient idea – aptly expressed by Aesop himself – that “little fellows who are short on looks are long on brains (ταῦτα τὰ ἀνθρωπάρια τὰ λειπόμενα τῇ μορφῇ φρένας ἔχει)” (18). To be short, like Aesop or Socrates, was a hallmark of a philosopher; it was to excel in mind, rather than body.

Interestingly, some Christian writers do later imagine Jesus as short and ugly. Yet this appears to be on the typology of the Greek text of Isaiah’s ‘suffering servant’ (52:13-53:14). It does not tap directly into the idea that Jesus as an Aesop-like figure.

6. Both figures are scapegoated

Towards the end of their lives, Jesus and Aesop are portrayed using the myth of the scapegoat or pharmakos.¹¹ This is where one (highly valuable) person is offered as a sacrifice for many. One early example is the story of Codrus, King of Athens, who sacrifices himself in the guise of a beggar to assuage an enemy invasion.

In the passion narratives, Jesus is presented as a pharmakos. Upon his arrival to Jerusalem, he is not welcomed by the city as Messiah; in turn, he enacts the Temple’s destruction, telling parables and oracles which prophesy the city’s destruction.

Holding up a “moral mirror” to the religious leaders of Jerusalem , they make a plot to put him to death, accusing him of blasphemy. Yet unwittingly, Jesus’ death provides an atoning sacrifice for sin. As the high priest puts it, in classic Johannine irony: ‘the Romans will come and remove our temple and our people… is better that one man should die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed’ (11:48-50).

Aesop’s end also contains elements of the pharmakos myth. While he is initially accepted by the people of Delphi – the Greek ‘Jerusalem’ – attitudes turn foul when he begins to criticise the Delphian people and leadership, accusing them of greed and corruption. In a plot to do away with him, the Delphian leaders hide a chalice in his bag and accuse him of Temple robbery: like Jesus’ charge, a form of blasphemy.

In turn, Aesop tells parables which condemn the corrupt priestly institution. In one of his fables, he prophesies its destruction: “the mouse got his revenge on the frog. In the same way, men of Delphi, though I die, I shall be your doom. For indeed, Lydians, Babylonians, and practically all of Greece will reap the fruits of my death” (142).

Just as Jerusalem is ransacked forty years after the death of Jesus – an event which allows Jesus to atone for sin, so Aesop’s death leads to the destruction of Delphi by surrounding armies. In neither case is there a direct historical link, but in both stories the myth of the pharmakos allows a narrative connection to be forged.

7. Both figures are vindicated as divine

Finally, the death of the scapegoat is not the end of their lives. In the pharmakos myth, there is sometimes a prophecy that the victim is deified, and must now be worshipped.

In the case of Mark, we are told that Jesus has arisen and ‘gone ahead to Galilee’, his empty tomb signifying his deification. And in the later Gospels (Matthew, Luke and John) Jesus receives the worship of his community. The disciples fall before him in Matthew and Luke, and Thomas calls Jesus his ‘Lord and God’ (Jn. 20:28).

Aesop is also vindicated. At the instruction of an oracle, an altar is set up up at Delphi, with sacrifices indicating his divine status. In some traditions, Aesop is even ‘resurrected’. In a conversation in Plato (the comic poet, not the philosopher), one man states, ‘Swear also that the soul returns to the body.’ His interlocutor replies: ‘Just as the soul of Aesop once returned to his body.’ Apparently, Aesop was reanimated.

The tradition of a resurrected Aesop re-emerges in the early second century CE. The historian Ptolemy Chennus reports that Aesop came back to life and fought alongside the Greeks at Thermopylae (480 BCE).¹² Meanwhile, Zenobius the rhetorician asserts that ‘Aesop was so dear to the gods that the story is told of him that he was resurrected like Tyndareus, Heracles, and Glaucas.’¹³

As David Litwa points out, it is unlikely that these traditions have been influenced by Christianity. These authors are likely too early to be thinking of Christianity. In any case, the figures Zenobius compares Aesop are all Greek.

The Lives of Jesus through Aesop

The lives of Aesop and Jesus display an impressive level of similarity. Dare I say, the Vitae Aesopia may be one of the most significant and overlooked comparanda in Gospels scholarship. But how does this text help us to understand the Gospels?

In my view, the Vita Aesopia help us to situate the Gospels as ancient lives. If one compares the Gospels to the lives of Suetonius or Plutarch, it is easy to find sharp disparities in their authorial voice and literary style. Comparing the Gospels to the Vita Aesopia, however, helps us to unlock more popular elements of the Gospels; style, such as its sandwiching, repetition or the presence of mythical elements.¹⁴

Texts like the Aesopia may also help us understand why we have four Gospels, rather than one. Since it survives in more than one major recension, the Aesopia is often described as an ‘open’ text; an anonymous work which others felt to work and re-work. The Gospels, as originally anonymous works, betray a similar process.

Yet most importantly, the Vita Aesopia helps us to understand the Gospels’ characterisation of Jesus. What happens when we read the Markan Jesus through the lens of Aesop? We see a figure who is not formally educated (see here) but who exposes those who are. We see a divine charismatic, a weaver of fables, and a vindicated scapegoat. Reading Jesus through Aesop, these elements – more familiar to ancient audiences than to our own – would come to the fore.

For some readers, this may be their first introduction the fabulist. Yet if Aesop still seems a strange character upon which to draw for light on Jesus, we may do well to recall: he was drawn upon by one of Mark’s earliest readers, the third evangelist. As we have seen, Luke explicitly employs Aesopic traditions in his portrayal of Jesus.

If that is not an incentive to pick up a copy of the Vita Aesopia, I don’t know is.

1. On Aesop as distinct from yet related to the Seven Sages, see Leslie Kurke, Aesopic Conversations : Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

2. The life survives in two major recensions; the more complete ‘Q’ (Perry, 1929)and its abbreviated form ‘W’ (Westermann, 1845), which has some of its own unique material. Although G is mutilated in some places, it is generally considered the better text since it is more organised and complete.

3. For example, Craig Keener excludes the Vita Aesopia from his list of lives. This seems driven by an apologetic intent to maintain that biographies were historical. See Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels (Chicago, MI: Eerdmans, 2019).

4. See, for example, Tomas Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 101-117.

5. See Whitney Shiner, “Creating Plot in Episodic Narratives: The Life of Aesop and the Gospel of mark” in Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative. eds. Ronald F. Hock, J. Bradley Chance, Judith Perkins. Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series Number 6. (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1998), 155-176; Mario Andreassi, “The Life of Aesop and the Gospels: Literary motifs and narrative mechanisms” in Holy Men and Charlatans in the Ancient Novel, ed. Stelios Panayotakis et.al. (Groningen: Eelde, 2015), 151-166.

6. Lawrence M. Wills, The Quest for The Quest of the Historical Gospel: Mark, John and the Origins of the Gospel Genre (London: Routledge, 1997), 31, 129-130.

7. For a comparison of the value structure of both texts, see David F. Watson, “The Life of Aesop and the Gospel of Mark: Two Ancient Approaches to Elite Values,” JBL 129 n.4 (2010): 699-716.

8. For a comparison of these two scenes, see Margaret Froelich and Thomas E. Philipps, “Throw the Blasphemer off a Cliff: Luke 4.16-30 in Light of the Life of Aesop” NTS 65 (2019): 21-32.

9. Justin David Strong, The Fables of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke: A New Foundation for the Study of Parables (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

10. Steve Reece, “‘Aesop’, ‘Q’, and ‘Luke’” NTS (2016): 355-377 (365).

See Vita Aesopia, 18 . The Greek text is Iōannēs-Theophanēs A. Papadēmētriou, Aesop as an Archetypal Hero (Athens: Hellenic Society for Humanistic Studies, 1997), 24.

11. See “The Pharmakos” in David M. Litwa, How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 156-168.

12. See Ben Edwin Perry, Aesopica: A Series of Texts Relating to Aesop or Ascribed to Him or Closely Connected with the Literary Tradition That Bears His Name (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1952), 226 (testimony 47) cited in Litwa, 165.

13. See Perry, Aesopica, 222 (testimony 27) cited in Litwa, 165.

14. For Litwa, the Vita Aesopia is evidence of mythography: the narration of mythical tropes as history. While scholars today may doubt whether Aesop ever lived, there is no doubt that ancient people thought he did. The fact that this ‘life’ contains mythical motifs is thus evidence that the bounds between history and myth were more porous in antiquity than they are today. For Litwa, the Gospels are a similar mythography. See Litwa, History.