The ideal of this teaching is of an ascetic absolute abandonment of all the concerns of normal secular life, family ties, community, and all, leaving “the dead” — i.e., those that we call the living—“to bury their dead”; and in this the earliest Christian teaching is seen to have been of the order of the early Buddhist and of the Jain. It is a “forest teaching.” And what it does to the general apocalyptic theme is to transform its reference radically from a historical future to a psychological present: the end of the world and coming of the Day of God, that is to say, are not to be awaited in
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