The sayings of Jesus: Do not worry

I had said at the end of Amy-Jill Levine's newest book that I wanted to take a critical look at several sayings of Jesus from  The Sermon on the Mount, and perhaps elsewhere.

My interest is not textual criticism, nor any version of higher criticism. Rather, it's common-sense secularist skepticism. And with that, let's dive into one of his most famous.

From The Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:25-32, New RSV:

25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life? 28 And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ 32 For it is the gentiles who seek all these things, and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.

OK, several issues. 

The first verses, 25-28, might be filed under "perennial wisdom," per Aldous Huxley, with verse 29 adding a particular referent from Israelite history.

But, precisely because it could be called perennial wisdom means we have nothing unique to Jesus about the insight.

That said, the saying in the second half of verse 28 is problematic. I'm sure nobody in his circle back then, and nobody outside some early Buddhists or early Jains in India, thought a lily had a "soul" or anything close. Birds have brains, and some level of consciousness, and corvids at least have lots of brains. But, analogizing off flowers makes no sense. Beyond that, lilies also have no hands, beaks, claws or anything else with which they COULD work, even if they had a brain, let alone a "soul."

Verse 30 becomes more problematic yet. Wild grasses, wheat straw, or whatever is either being used for a cooking fire or else burned in the field for clearance? Even in my religious days, wild grasses especially would never have been considered "clothed" by me. Why he didn't talk about sheep on the hillsides of Galilee growing wool, then regrowing it after being sheared, I have NO idea.

Then there's that last verse.

Plenty of gentiles, like the aforementioned Buddhists and Jains, or the likes of the Pythagoreans or Cynics closer to Jesus (including the cities of the Decapolis being home to noted Cynic philosophers at this general time) did not "seek all these things." 

Anyway, to go Jesus Seminar (and I am not sure how they rated the Sermon on the Mount in general, or this part) I'm not that sure Yeshua ben Yusuf said this.