And on the morrow, when they were come from Bethany, he was hungry: and seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever. And his disciples heard it. (Mark 11:12-14; cf. Matt 21:18-19a; Luke 13:6-9)
This incident, recorded in all three Synoptic Gospels, is often used by some Muslim apologists as “proof” that the New Testament depicts Jesus as rather clueless, not knowing the very basics of the horticulture of the time, showing that the New Testament Gospels are unreliable and internally inconsistent with respect to their “high” Christology (esp. in comparison to the low Christology of the Qur’an and Islamic theology) and/or that the historical Jesus was not a divine preexistent being, but at best, a prophet as he is in the Islamic tradition (his being “Messiah” in their view only extends to the people of Israel, not a global scale; also, no one doubts Jesus was a prophet, just not a prophet merely).
Notwithstanding, this is eisegesis of the passage. F.F. Bruce, a leading New Testament scholar, offered the following brief commentary on this incident in the life of Jesus:
This incident is related by Mark and, in a more compressed form, by Matthew. According to Mark, Jesus and his disciples spent the night following his entry into Jerusalem in Bethany. Next morning they returned to Jerusalem. On the way he felt hungry, ‘and seeing in the distance a fig tree in lea, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing, but leaves, for it was not the season for figs.’ Then come the words quoted above [“May no one ever eat fruit from you again” Mark 11:14]. They continued on their way into Jerusalem, where that day he cleansed the temple; in the evening they returned to Bethany. Next morning, as they passed the same place, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. And Peter remembered and said to him, ‘Rabbi, look! The fig tree which you cursed has withered’ (Mark 11:20-21).
Was it not unreasonable to curse the tree for being fruitless when, as Mark expressly says, ‘it was not the season for figs’? The problem is most satisfactorily cleared up in a discussion of ‘The Barren Fig Tree’ published many years ago by W. M. Christie, a Church of Scotland minister in Palestine under the British mandatory regime. He pointed out first the time of year at which the incident is said to have occurred (if, as is probable, Jesus was crucified on April 6th, A.D. 30, the incident occurred during the first days of April). ‘Now,’ wrote Dr. Christie, ‘the facts connected with the fig tree are these. Towards the end of March the leaves begin to appear, and in about a week foliage coating is complete. Coincident with [this], and sometimes even before, there appears quite a crop of small knobs, not the real figs, but a kind of early forerunner. They grow to the size of green almonds, in which condition they are eaten by peasants and others when hungry. When they come to their own indefinite maturity they drop off” (W.M. Christie, Palestine Calling [London, 1939], pp.118-120). These precursors of the true fig are called taqsh in Palestinian Arabic. Their appearance is a harbinger of the fully formed appearance of the true fig some six weeks later. So, as Mark says, the time for figs had not yet come. But if the leaves appear without any taqsh, that is a sign that there will be no figs. Since Jesus found ‘nothing but leaves’—leaves without any taqsh—he knew that ‘it was an absolutely hopeless, fruitless fig tree’, and said as much.
But if that is the true explanation of his words, why should anyone trouble to record the incident as though it had some special significance? Because it did have some special significance. As recorded by Mark, it is an acted parable with the same lesson as the spoken parable of the fruitless fig tree in Luke 13:6-9. In that spoken parable a landowner came three years in succession expecting fruit from a fig tree on his property, and when year by year it proved to be fruitless, he told the man in charge of his vineyard to cut it down because it was using up the ground to no good purpose. In both the acted parable and the spoken parable it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the fig tree represents the city of Jerusalem, unresponsive to Jesus as he came to it with the message of God, and thereby incurring destruction. Elsewhere Luke records how Jesus swept over the city’s blindness to its true well-being and foretold its ruin ‘because you did not know the time of your visitation’ (Luke 19:41-44). It is because the incident of the cursing of the fig tree was seen to convey the same lesson that Mark, followed by Matthew, recorded it. (F.F. Bruce, The Hard Sayings of Jesus [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983], 208-9. Comment in square bracket added for clarification)
