When I decided to look into the teachings of Jesus for myself, I realized with shock that his first, foundational teaching was a call for the destruction of human family as a system of meaning.

I looked at words I must have seen before.

Yet another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say goodbye to my family.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:61–62)

Don’t even say goodbye.

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26)

This was a radical teaching against biological family, clan and community, as “traditionally” understood. This was something new.

“Following Jesus means, first, leaving home,” as the Bible scholar Leif E. Vaage observes. The disciples are to leave families. No looking back. Come now.

Jesus gives them new names, ripping them out of family lineages, shredding genealogies. No longer is the child an extension of the parents. The child is a new being, independent and self-defining.

Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon the son of John. You shall be called Cephas” (which means Peter). (John 1:42)

Peter goes back to being ‘Simon’ whenever he has slipped back into old thinking, as in Luke 22:31. He is again ‘Simon, son of John’ when his love for Jesus is in doubt, in John 21:15.

It’s like Peter kept going back to the “son of John”—kept losing track of “Peter.” His new, higher self flickers in and out of existence. After awhile, in the narrative of Acts, it flickers out.

Dale B. Martin notes: “Jesus refused to identify with his traditional family and instead substituted for it the eschatological community that shared his vision of a new, divinely constituted family.” This is the key to Jesus’ teachings: a new family replaces the old family.

The old family fought back.

When his family heard this they went out to restrain him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.” (Mark 3:21)

As Richard Bauckham says, they “misunderstand his mission, seek to curtail it, and are in effect disowned by him (Mark 3:21–35).”

Jesus disowns his family. He rejects the family as a mode of control and silencing, with their accusations of mental and spiritual problems when you don’t agree with them. He has a new family now, as in Matthew 12:47–50: