Jesus had, if we follow accepted chronology, about three years in which to preach and/or perform anti-Roman warfare. But as far as we can glean from the New Testament, he did no such thing.
On the contrary, Jesus’ teaching was overwhelmingly pacifistic. In most situations of foreign occupation, there is at least one “peace party” which, while opposed to the collaborators at the top of the system, nevertheless argues for non-violent solutions. Jesus seems to have been affliliated with such views. We know that some of the most stringent anti-Roman, anti-collaborationist people were also non-violent, namely the Dead Sea Scroll, or Qumran, community. They held that while they would be ultimately be called to an apocalyptic battle with God and the angels on their side, their role in history was to eschew what they saw as the corrupt Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, and wait for God to decide the time of the final battle. So they retired to the shores of the Dead Sea to farm, pray, and await the End which would come in God’s good time..
Jesus himself believed in God’s apocalyptic transformation of the current age, but he went beyond Qumran’s idea of an apocalyptic battle. Instead, Jesus seemed to think that a mysterious agent of God – the Son of Man – would appear at the end of the age, to perform God’s “cleanup” of the world. Some scholars believe that the Son of Man is Jesus’ oblique reference to himself, or to some other Yahwistic agent whose secrets were somehow acquired by, and known to, Jesus. In any case, the judging Son of Man is to separate the sheep from the goats not in terms of Jewish nationalism, but rather in terms of the Jewish Torah. Living out the Torah’s social mandates of care for the imprisoned, poor, widowed, orphaned, sick and rejected will be the moral measure by which the sheep are divided from the goats.
Not only did Jesus value simple charity as the saving point in the apocalyptic judgment. He further explicated the details of the Torah’s social mandate, and his explication is pacifistic. Not only to murder is wrong; but the simple wish to murder is equally wrong, with the same kind of inner application holding for a number of sins and human failings, with mercy topping the list as the highest virtue. This is demonstrated in Jesus’ mercy toward the woman caught “in the very act” of adultery, in his parable of the Good Samaritan, in his advice to aid even the fearsome Roman soldier in carrying his pack “the extra mile”.
Moreover, Christians acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah, the rightful King of Israel. Some scholars think that Jesus may have thought of himself as a king in the sense of being the unique agent of the Kingdom of God, and therefore its earthly “king”. If this is true, then clearly Jesus’ messianic response – his kingly response – to Roman occupation and priestly collaboration was pacifistic. He never encouraged his disciples to revolt. He never refused them the freedom to pay the Temple tax in good conscience. As far as we know, Jesus’ sole rebellious act was his demonstration in the Temple – the so-called “Purification of the Temple” – which was his lived-out criticism to the collaborationist priesthood. It was also an act of animal liberation, since Jesus’ prime motive was not the money changers, but the selling of animals for sacrifice. It is highly probable that Jesus was opposed to animal sacrifice, which is an ancient tradition within Judaism, although this is not a familiar idea to many. In any case, Jesus’ prophetic act in the Temple was a case of non-violent resistance.
In view of all this, it is baffling to see so many American Christians defending the US’s recent military interventions in the Near East. “Whatsoever you do to the least of these,” Jesus said, “you do to me.” From attacks with weapons associated with depleted uranium, to deadly drone attacks, to the highly questionable assassination of Osama bin Laden, to contemplation of war with Iran, it is clear that US foreign policy is far from Christian, if by “Christian” one means the pacifistic ethic of Jesus himself. How sad that the Prince of Peace has been assimilated by Christian hawks; stolen, disfigured, and re-created along militarist lines into a Lord of War.
Christianity’s major theological flaw is its doctrine of the Holy Trinity. This dogma has split the Church through the centuries, and has even been responsible for deaths of sincere Christians such as Miguel Servetus, the biblical unitarian who was executed in Geneva at the orders of the Trinitarian, John Calvin.
The doctrine grew out of a Hellenistic misunderstanding of the Hebrew/Jewish title for Jesus, “Son of God”. Trinitarianism has inverted the term to mean “God the Son”. Unfortunately, this idea is as unbiblical and unhistorical as the term itself.
In context, no New Testament text thinks of Jesus as God. There are one or two texts in which the title, “God”, has been applied to Jesus, but these are highly questionable translations; moreover, they contradict the rest of the NT’s non-Trinitarian christology.
“Son of God” in its original Jewish application to Jesus meant several things, all Jewish, all monotheistic, and all non-Trinitarian:
1. Jesus was “made” Son of God by God when God raised Jesus up in “the Resurrection”.
2. Jesus was “adopted” Son of God when God down his Spirit on Jesus during Jesus’ baptism by John the Immerser in the Jordan River.
3. Jesus was “begotten” Son of God when God created Jesus’ conception through the “overshadowing” of God’s Spirit.
None of these ideas about divine sonship think of Jesus as God. On the contrary, God remains Creator and chief agent in the world and in the life and ministry of Jesus.
In the Gospels Jesus claims certain divine powers and rights. However, these are derivative: God has granted them to Jesus as God’s Messianic agent (shaliah), and they are not native to Jesus himself. God has ordained and deputized Jesus with certain divine prerogatives, but God has not done the impossible, and granted Jesus Godhood.
Jesus never claims deity in the Gospels, not even in the most “divinizing” of all Gospels, the Gospel of John. John’s Jesus speaks as a “man” who has “heard” and “obeys” God’s will and God’s commands. A person who does these things is not God; on the contrary, such a person is the agent, servant, and vessel of God, and/or God’s Spirit. Jesus’ claims of power and authority are thus rejections of deity, just as much as they are proclamations of subordination and loving service.
Traditionally John’s Gospel has been mined for christological nuggets, because John presents Jesus’ unity with God so intensely. But, unlike mainstream Christian doctrine, John never ventures into (from unitarian, monotheistic perspective) Trinitarian idolatry and blasphemy. The idolatry lies in turning human prophet/mystic Jesus into a second divine “Person” within a Trinity, an appropriate object of worship due only to the one God. The blasphemy lies in turning the human Jesus into God, thereby creating a new God besides Yahweh, and shattering the Hebrew echad, or “the One”-ness of Yahweh’s nature.
But a quick survey of Johannine material shows that John’s Jesus is still a Jewish Jesus, at least in christological terms. In John 17:3, Jesus praises God as “the only true” God, leaving Jesus himself completely out of the statement. Later, in John’s resurrection narrative, Jesus assures Mary of Magdala that he will be ascending to “your Father and my Father; to your God and my God” (John 20:17b). Simply and obviously put: if Jesus himself has a God, Jesus cannot be God.
But, the Trinitarian will protest, what of John 1:1; 1:14:
In the beginning was the Word …
And the Word was made flesh and dwelled among us…” ?
First, John is talking about the Word, not about Jesus or Christ. It was not Jesus who was in the beginning with God, but rather the Word. Jesus himself only comes into the scene as one in whom the Word is incarnated. Jesus embodies the Word, carries the Word; but the Word, not Jesus, is the factor that is eternal with God.
Second, in John Jesus never refers to himself as the Word. The Johannine Jesus calls himself many things – Good Shepherd, Bread of Life, Son of Man, Son of God – but never “the Word”. The Word in John exists only in his Prologue (John 1:1 – 18), and nowhere else in his Gospel. (Note that the Prologue itself is probably a pre-Johannine “Hymn to the Word” which the author of John included in his first chapter in order to identify Jesus’ importance and to establish Jesus’ ministry beginning in John the Immerser’s work. In fact, John disrupts the hymn in verses 1:6-9 in order to insert brief Immerser material, and then takes up the hymn again at 1:10-18.)
But surely Trinitarians will again object, what about John 17:5:
“And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.”
True, this is a bit of a tougher nut to crack speaking from a biblically unitarian perspective, but it is hardly insurmountable.
First, this may not be a claim of pre-existence at all.
Second, even it it is a claim of pre-existence, it still is not necessarily a claim to divinity. After all, Judaism held that there were many kinds of spiritual entities that pre-existed humankind and the world (the angelic court or court of the gods in heaven comes to mind, as does the radiant “Standing One” by God’s throne as mentioned in Ezekiel and Daniel). Pre-existence is simply pre-existence. Without supporting evidence, a claim of pre-existence does not automatically imply a claim to eternal divinity.
Later posts will explore these final two issues. As for now, it’s sufficient to note that the Gospels simply do not support Trinitarianism. The Gospels are, in this case, strikingly and surprisingly “Jewish”, in that they preserve the monotheism of Jesus and his earliest Jewish disciples.
Considering arguments that Jesus’ resurrection was a physical event in space-time, in human history, by definition involving a resuscitated corpse (imbued with supernatural abilities) and a vacated tomb, we can only ponder with some puzzlement the Gospel narratives of the “rolling away” of the tomb’s “great stone”.
Even if we consider that Jesus’ resurrection was not purely spiritual, mystical, and visionary – that is, even if we consider that it very much involved his resuscitated corpse, a corpse that could be seen, felt, that could prepare meals and eat – still, the empty tomb and the rolled-away stone loom as highly problematic elements in the resurrection narratives.
The reason for this is that even the “physical resurrection” stories incorporate distinctly non-physical, and even supernatural details. For example, although the risen, bodily Jesus can offer his crucifixion wounds to be probed, still he appears out of nowhere, in the midst of locked rooms; although he can prepare a breakfast of grilled fish, he can bilocate between Jerusalem and Galilee, again appearing out of nowhere; although he can walk with two disciples and break their bread in Emmaus, he can just as easily “vanish from their sight”.
The problem emerges. If Jesus’ post-resurrection physicality presents no difficulty for him in appearing/disappearing at will, no difficulty for him to simply ignore solid walls and locked doors, then what in the world is the rolled-away stone doing at Jesus’ tomb – and more importantly, what is it doing in the Gospel narratives at all?
After all, if the risen Jesus can disregard matter, how is it that the great stone has suddenly – among all manner of other physical barriers – become the one insurmountable barrier? If Jesus can pass through walls, why can’t he pass through the tomb’s walls without needing to remove the stone? If Jesus can simply will himself to locate/travel from one point to another, then how is it that he can’t simply will himself from the tomb’s enclosed depths to its external entrance, bathed now in the light of the world’s first Easter Morn?
The stone has become a stumbling-block. It contradicts the other reports that insist that matter presents no barrier to the risen Christ. It collapses the “spiritual body” of the risen Christ back into a mere resuscitated corpse – like Lazarus – still constrained by the limitations of normal biology and space-time functioning. It suggests that the risen Jesus – far from being an exalted, glorified being possessing an unprecedented, new kind of “spiritual physicality” – either has to muscle his way out of the tomb, or requires help – human, angelic, or divine – to free himself. Such a vision of the Victorious Christ vitiates the rest of the Gospel resurrection accounts. Additionally, it is a horrific artistic and dramatic faux pas. It simply does not fit the image and concept that the Gospel writers convey in every other resurrection scenario.
Ironically, the rolled-away stone has become the Gospel’s single strongest argument against Jesus’ resurrection. Ideally, the tomb ought to have been discovered as-was on the evening of Jesus’ crucifixion: a sepulchre tightly sealed by a large stone. With as much help the task required, the tomb-visitors would roll away the stone … and then discover that Jesus’ body is missing. This scenario would preserve the Easter affirmation that Jesus’ “spiritual, resurrection body” could pass unhindered through physical barriers.
As it is, however, that darned stone most unattractively lies as a fly in the very center of the resurrection ointment
In New Testament/biblical studies, the “Mythicist” school claims either that Jesus did not exist, or (more moderately) that there is no sound evidence to support his existence. But on serious investigation and reflection, it is possible to make the counter-claim that there is nothing intrinsically fictive about the main outlines of Jesus’ ministry as recorded in the Gospels.
Mainstream scholarship recognizes what are called “the seven authentic letters of Paul”.
In those letters, Paul mentions his personal knowledge of Jesus’ closest disciples, the “Jerusalem Pillars”, including Peter, John, and Jesus’ own brother James. If these letters are authentic, then clearly Paul virtually establishes Jesus’ existence via his acquaintance with Jesus’ own family members and closest disciples. One sound reason for viewing Paul’s references to Jesus’ disciples is the fact that most of Paul’s references are extremely critical of the Jerusalem disciples. If Paul’s letters were a secondary creation of an ideology-driven proto-Catholic church, then it would be very doubtful that Paul’s enmity with those who knew and traveled with the historical Jesus would be preserved – as it apparently is - in all its vitriol. On the contrary, the expectation would be that the church would smooth over, or even delete, these Pauline critiques, in order to present a false, manufactured picture of a nascent church as “one happy family”. But since the letters do present the conflict and the vitriol, consensus scholarship finds their historicity plausible and probable.
Even if it should turn out that these Pauline letters are, after all, invalid, we still have the very historical plausibility of James, Jesus’ brother, and his long influence in Jerusalem and the early Jerusalem Jesus movement; and we still have records of the direct descendents and relatives of Jesus leading the Judean church for a hundred years after Jesus’ execution. These people and institutions point back to the strong likelihood that a real, Jewish, historical figure was their causitive agent.
Another item related to Jesus’ personal historicity is the Gospel record of his miracles and his theological claims. As it turns out, these issues are not as problematic as some would have it.
Most of Jesus’ miracles (cures, exorcisms) do not require a supernatural cause (obviously miracles like walking on water, storm-stilling, turning water into wine are exceptions to this rule, and are not under consideration here).
In fact, Jesus fits very well into religious-social categories that have been well-documented cross-culturally, globally, throughout time, including the modern era. The issue is not whether miraclesand/or theological claims are supernatural. The issue is whether they happen via the actions and teachings of a healer/mystic. The answer is: of course they do. They happen all the time, especially in “third world” cultures not too dissimilar from Jesus’ own culture.
There follows a short list showing how Jesus fulfills well-known, documented religious-social functions that include both the miraculous and religious claims.
renewal movement founder
charismatic mediator
wisdom teacher
parable teacher
social prophet / religious rebel
mystic
healer/exorcist
messianic figure
spirit person/holy person/shaman
martyr
We can see that there is no pressing reason to leap to supernatural categories for the main outlines of Jesus’ ministry, nor is there any good cause to deny their reality, since from the evidence of cross-cultural studies and anthropology, we know they exist in all cultures. There is nothing outlandish or preposterous about Jesus’ religious-social functions and roles; in short, nothing that supports the Mythicist “improbability-to-Jesus’ non-existence” trajectory.
The issue, of course, is about plausibility, not certainty. Certainty relative to Jesus’ historicity cannot be achieved without access to time travel technology. But since we must rely on plausibility, all the indications support the notion that Jesus was a divine union mystic, an exorcist/healer, social prophet, and religious reformer. All of these attributes could be “Gospel fictions”. But if they are, support for their fictitiousness must be garnered from sources other than the extremely plausible Gospel accounts. That is, if the Gospel authors were spinning Jesus’ story out of thin air, they happened to find a narrative mode that conforms perfectly to the findings of modern scientific/anthropological research, with its substantiation of authenticity concerning religious figures, their healings, exorcisms, teachings, and claims.
Mythicists are free to make a “leap of faith” to an unhistorical, wholly mythological Jesus, but the New Testament documents themselves encourage a much more pragmatic, close-to-home, and research-supported view.
Filed under: Christianity
Bernard Brandon Scott has written a fascinating book on Jesus’ resurrection:
The Trouble with Resurrection (Polebridge Press, Salem OR: 2010)
Its main premise suggests a lesson from the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. Scott asks what we would draw or how we would describe the figure of Humpty Dumpty. The univeral answer, of course, is “an egg”.
But, as Scott proves in this clever book: there is no egg. He reveals the simple fact that originally, there were no particular associations with, or depictions of, Humpty Dumpty. The egg idea only evolved over time, with the development of an easily-pictured example of a figure whom “all the King’s horses and all the Kings’ men” could not put together again. In a world of fragile and delicate – easily broken, difficult to repair – items, the egg eventually won out as Humpty’s chief descriptor. So the popular, set image of Humpty as egg is a mere convention, not original to the real scenario. Scott argues that a similar situation pertains to the most common notion and image of Jesus’ resurrection when conceived as a radiant, resuscitated Jesus stepping out of tomb whose stone has been rolled away,, and who then appears to disciples in various guises and under varying conditions. Scott argues that this idea and this image are the “egg” in the Christian resurrection narrative: that is, the real story is utterly absent of the standard resurrection imagery.
By a careful sifting through the New Testament resurrection data, in chronological order, Scott works from the earliest Jewish notions of resurrection, through the original Jewish-Christian ideas about the resurrection, to late New Testament depictions and concepts about Jesus’ final victory over death. In this process, Scott separates the actual story from its final expression as “egg”.
Scott cogently establishes that the earliest resurrection affirmations were “anything-but” the Easter morning scenarios of the later Gospels (and of most of our modern depictions). As it turns out, as with Humpty Dumpty’s story, with Jesus’ resurrection equally: there is no egg, because there never was an egg to begin with. There was no physically restored Jesus exiting a tomb, appearing to disciples on the road, breaking bread with them, inviting them to probe his crucifixion wounds. Rather, there was a hope and a subsequent experience that conformed to the hope.
In the Second Temple period, Judaism had incorporated afterlife beliefs. These were chiefly driven by the fate of the Maccabean martyrs. The idea was that, in a period where righteous Jews were being slain by Hellenistic interlopers, God would not stand by and let the situation go without redress. The theological solution was to have God honor the righteous dead in an afterlife. Some were even visible to the eye as stars, which were thought of as angelic beings in the heavens. Thus we have the first stage of resurrection: it is applied to righteous Jews who died for their God and nation.
The second stage was Jesus’ own martyrdom. Since heavenly exaltation and glorification for murdered righteous ones was an idea already “in the air” at the time, it was only natural that Jesus would now be thought of as having been posthumously transformed into a heavenly, angelic being after his martyr’s death. Here we have the second stage of resurrection: the martyr’s heavenly exaltation now specifically applied to Jesus. These two stages represent the hope element in the formation of belief in Jesus’ resurrection.
But it is very clear that Jesus, in his followers’ estimation, was much more than just one more posthumously-vindicated Jewish martyr. He was also “seated at the right hand” of God; he would return as Messiah; he would judge the nations with God’s own judgment; he could even be addressed in the Maranatha prayer: “Come, Lord Jesus”. Certainly Jesus was a vindicated martyr … and yet much more. At this point the third stage enters: the stage of subsequent experience congruent with the first two “hope” stages.
Scott refers us to the earliest extant resurrection data, that of Paul the Apostle. As opposed to any other descriptions or imagery (even that of the Acts of the Apostles), Paul’s own testimony about his experience of the risen Christ is quite spare. It does not depend upon, or even refer to, an empty tomb or to a miraculously resuscitated body imbued with preternatural powers. On the contrary, Paul describes his experience of the vindicated Jesus by use of the term, ophthe. The word’s main connotation is “having been seen for”, and it suggests insight rather than physical seeing. Paul describes it as God “revealing his Son in me“.
“Having been seen for” strikes us as unusual syntax. But it is constantly found in biblical descriptions of otherwordly perceptions. It means that a divine reality has been grasped as insight, that a revelation has been granted “for” the recipient’s sake, in an internal, subjective manner. Scott shows that this is the earliest connotation of resurrection available to us, namely, Paul’s insight that Jesus is a living Lord, an insight not granted by human agency, but by divine will. In this way, Paul was assured that Jesus is far more than a recently-executed martyr. Yet Paul was not alone in experiencing this type of insight; moreover, there was a distinct cultural wave that Scott brings forth, namely, the continued experience, after his death, of Jesus’ “spirit”; the continuation of the Kingdom of Heaven that was central to his message.
Scott shows that Jesus’ death at Roman hands had not succeeded in eradicating the Kingdom that Jesus had taught and embodied. A “holy spirit” continued to be highly active in the early Christian communities, with seemingly ever-increasing effects; the cures and exorcisms performed by Jesus continued on in his disciples’ lives; his teaching, in their preaching.
Scott argues that it did not take long for these inheritors of Jesus’ life and message to realize something profound, something which reinforced their hope and their subsequent experience. This great something was the understanding that Rome and its collaborators among the Jewish elite, in killing Jesus, had lost. Scott marks the simple social fact that the early Christians discovered that the Kingdom that Jesus preached was greater even than Jesus, its agent and representative. The Holy Spirit lived and moved among a movement which – to judge by the fates of most similar movements – should have quickkly disbanded and vanished after the death of its charismatic leader.
Scott maintains that it was from this seemingly miraculous continuation of Jesus’ message – despite his sudden, ignominious execution – through the survival and flourishing of the Kingdom he had embodied, that multiple instantiations of the Pauline ophthe rolled like a wave through the early communities. They took the survival of Jesus’ message, its victory over Roman-Sanhedrine opposition – as God’s vindication of Jesus. Jesus had taught God’s Kingdom. Yet after Jesus’ death the Kingdom was still there, and even more significant, it was burgeoning. Thus they claimed that, because of God’s vindication, Jesus had been ophthe (seen by insight); had been raised up; had been exalted to heaven. In this, Scott is in close agreement with other writers, such as Thomas Sheehan in The First Coming (Random House, NY: 1986).
It was only much later that, probably in order to combat the idea that Jesus had never “come in the flesh”, that Matthew, Luke, and John in their resurrection accounts, felt obliged to literalize ophthe, and physicalise the risen Christ into the bodily form with which we are so familiar. This literalization of the subjective ophthe and the social claim of Jesus’ vindication created the fateful Easter “egg”: the assignment and reification of “Jesus/Humpty” into a definitive, but fictitious, image and identity.
Filed under: Christianity
Anti-semitism is always raising its ugly head in modern society, all too often in the form of the tired old lie, “the Jews killed Christ”.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. “The Jews” during Jesus’ lifetime probably heard very little of this itenerant preacher from Galilee. Those who did probably reserved “in their hearts” the points they thought worth pondering, and made a prudent judgment about his character and claims at some unknown later period. And much later, when some of Jesus’ disciples began to claim that their master had ascended to heaven and was sitting in God’s Judgment Seat, Jews living in Judea at that time would have had some startling new ideas about Jesus to consider and react to.
In any case,The Gospels are clear that “the Jews” collectively are not to blame for Jesus’ execution. In fact, the Gospels explicitly name Jesus’ executioners mostly as influential members of the priesthood and certain scribes… and of course the Romans. Thus both “ethnicities” – Jewish and Gentile – had a hand in Jesus’ death. Which is simply to say, theologically, that “we all killed Christ by our wickedness”. But the Gospels do not blame ethnicity for Jesus’ death: they blame human evil and sinfulness, presenting the interpretation that Jesus’ death was an atonement for ALL human sin, regardless of ethnicity and religion.
Anti-semites are fond of citing Matthew 27:25, “Then all the people answered, saying, ‘Let his blood be upon us, and upon our children’ “, mistakenly taking this to mean that “ALL” the Jewish people uttered this sentiment.
This is glaringly wrong, since Matthew’s “people”, “crowd”, and “multitude” do not – cannot – refer to the entire Jewish people – for the simple reason that this text refers only to the small fragment of people who had crowded into Pilate’s courtyard. Even at that, these were not necessarily the anti-semites’ much-vaunted “Jews against Jesus” … because as Matthew 27:20 says, it was “the chief priests and elders” who “persuaded” this small gathering to choose Barabbas over Jesus. The entire scene was, according to Matthew, a put-up job by the priests, not an action undertaken by “the Jewish people”.
Moreover, Matthew 26:3-5 states that Jesus was so popular with his own (of course, Jewish) people that the “priests, scribes and elders” were afraid to arrest Jesus for fear of creating “an uproar among the people”. What people? The Jewish people of Jerusalem and the Jewish people of Galilee who had come south to celebrate the Passover. Nowhere does Matthew suggest that “the Jews” were collectively responsible for Jesus’ execution.
Mark 14:55-59 shows that at Jesus’ trial, some “false witnesses” were brought in to condemn Jesus, but their testimony conflicted and was worthless. Moreover, Mark explicitly states that “the chief priests and all the council sought for witnesses against Jesus to put him to death; but found none“. That is, no valid Jewish witnesses recommended Jesus for execution. Again, “Jewishness” and “the Jewish people” or “the Jews” did not condemn Jesus, but only certain politically-motivated collaborationist priests who were inseparably entwined with Roman rule.
Luke 23:27 claims that many Jews took pity on Jesus and openly supported him on the way to Golgotha:
“And there followed him a great company of people – and of women, who also mourned and lamented him.”
What “great company”? What “people”? What “women”?
Answer: all were Jewish people. Enough said.
Those who insist that “the Jews” crucified Jesus, are obviously scripturally and historically ignorant, as well as being consorts of the hate-mongers. Knowing full well that only a tiny fraction of an elite Jewish aristocracy – a collaborationist group of Rome-supporters – were agents of Jesus’ execution, these ferocious anti-semites continue to broadcast their old lie that “the Jews killed Christ”. One can only stand aghast at the abysmal hatred and willful ignorance of such intellectual and moral cowards, and work toward quashing the lie every time it is disseminated.
I have become weary and sickened by the increasingly strident Christian-bashing that has become prevalent in modern society.
It is as if secularists and other non-Christians wish, consciously or unconsciously, to create “the new Jew”, a pilloried social leper upon whom it is considered healthy, wholesome, and even dutiful to heap scorn and ostracism. My sense of respect diminishes when people whom I might otherwise admire – and those whom I grudgingly respect even while wildly diverging from their thinking – when they play the “evil Christians” card. It is really so beneath them, but paradoxically, for these mostly bright folks, their prejudices seem to be reflexive and mostly unconscious. Seems that it’s time for some reflection and consciousness-raising.
Most of us have this tendency to revile “an Other”, in the process elevating ourselves, but danger flags should start flying when the media and other expectedly responsible, rational sources typically and as a matter of course begin a program of social bashing . A fishy stench is very much in the air when this kind of thing occurs, and sensitive, conscientious noses will scent it out.
So these are my feelings:
I was raised by Christians, fed, sheltered, educated and loved by Christians. – a huge number of us can say this, so it is the height of arrogance and selective amnesia to behave as if Christians are some foreign, exotic – and evil – species whom our daughters must never marry. I myself was a Christian for some 28 years. I therefore feel that this new wave of “anti-Christianism” is as mean and nasty as it it unjustified and disturbing.
A truism must be invoked here: Christians are people. As with most other people, they live in society with more or less success, with more or less helpfulness. They are people. They ought not to be vilified or ostracised – except for anti-social behavior that would result in anyone else being marginalized. Discernment in this area is crucial, as is recognizing the huge spectrum of belief in Christianity, for example, the unbridgeable gap that exists between emergent Christianity, liturgical Christianity, “biblical”/evangelical Christianity on the one hand, and fundamentalist Christianity on the other. Only when these inter-religious differences are known and recognized can an observer make any claim to fairness and objectivity. It takes a little homework. But so does any worthwhile effort to keep a society aligned with justice.
The following is a link to an article – a Buddhist appraisal of some local Christians, written by an ordained priest of the Jodo Shinshu (“Shin”) sect:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/01/14/the-christians-i-know/
It makes beneficial reading for those who wish to be socially apt, realistic, and compassionate – that is, for those whose conscience rebels at participating in the creation of any “new Jews”, be they Christian or otherwise.
Filed under: Christianity
Just a few more words to convey Marcus Borg’s and John Crossan’s work on the death of Jesus, for this Lenten season. Already mentioned was their conclusion that Jesus’ sacrifice was not one of atonement or substitution. Rather, it was seen as a “ransom”. In the language of the times, to “ransom” meant to liberate someone from debt, or to pay for a slave’s release from servitude. And this meaning, say Crossan and Borg, is the earliest, truest connotation of Jesus’ “sacrificial death” in the New Testament. It means liberation from bondage.
Beginning with the Last Supper, the authors explain Jesus’ own view of his impending death:
“… when a person dies violently we speak of a separation of body and blood. That is the first and basic point of Jesus’s separated bread/body and wine/blood words… a correlation becomes possible between Jesus as the new paschal lamb and this final meal as a New Passover… The point is neither suffering nor substitution, but participation with God through gift or meal… it was by participation with Jesus and, even more, in Jesus that his followers were to pass through death to resurrection… It is… a final attempt to bring all of them with him through execution to resurrection, through death to new life. It is…about participation in Christ and not substitution by Christ.”
Moving on to Jesus’s death itself:
“… this [substitutionary atonement] is not the only Christian understanding of Jesus’s death. Indeed, it took more than a thousand years for it to become dominant… [it] first appeared in fully developed form in a book written in 1097 by St. Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury… [According to Anselm's view,] God must require a punishment, the payment of a price, before God can forgive our sins or crimes. Jesus is the price… [However] the substitutionary sacrificial understanding of Jesus’ death is not there at all in Mark… According to Mark, Jesus did not die for the sins of the world. The language of substitutionary sacrifice for sin is absent from his story. But in an important sense, he was killed because of the sin of the world. It was the injustice of domination systems that killed him, injustice so routine that it is part of the normalcy of civilization.”
Marcus J. Borg & John D. Crossan, The Last Week, Harper Collins, San Francisco: 2006, pp. 118-119 and pp. 138-139.
Filed under: Christianity
New Testament scholars Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan discuss the meaning of sacrifice in relation to Jesus death. They use the example of a (female) firefighter who rushes into a burning building, finds a child, and drops the child safely into the net. Then the roof caves in, killing the firefighter. The next day the local paper has headlines about the firefighter’s life-sacrifice. Borg and Crossan accept the modern meaning of sacrifice and self-sacrifice, and emphasize that the firefighter has made “her own death peculiarly, especially, emphatically sacred by …[saving] the life of another”. The authors continue:
So far, so good. Now imagine if somebody confused sacrifice with suffering and denied it was a sacrifice because the firefighter died instantly and without intolerable suffering. Or imagine if somebody confused sacrifice with substitution, saying that God wanted somebody dead that day and accepted the firefighter in lieu of the child. And worst of all, imagine that somebody brought together sacrifice, suffering, and substiution by claiming that the firefighter had to die in agony as atonement for the sins of the child’s parents. That theology would be a crime against divinity.
The astute reader can see where these considerations lead – to the complete inversion of fundamentalist soteriology, to the utter refutation of what has been termed “Crossianity”.
Later on during Lent, this blog plans to present just what Borg and Crossan think that a non-sacrificial, non-substitutionary yet “salvific” death means in the context of Jesus’ execution.
Marcus J. Borg & John D. Crossan, The Last Week, Harper Collins, San Francisco: 2006, p. 38.
Filed under: Christianity
The season of Lent has arrived. The Christian world turns its thoughts toward the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, while the Jewish world anticipates the arrival of its Paschal season. These joyous-sorrowful feasts attend the Spring of the new year, and the mystery of God’s interaction with humankind.
While by no means meaning to be the skunk at this truly beautiful religious garden party, I wish to express a somewhat minority view, namely, that Jesus’ sacrifice was not one of atonement for sin. Rather, it was the inevitable outcome of his work and teaching, following an understandable line of cause and effect. I will grant – without ascribing paranormal future-predicting talents to Jesus – that he probably intuited that what turned out to be his final visit to Jerusalem would be lethal. In this, he is among other Jewish prophets and religio-social critics who met unpleasant fates at the hands of the powers that be (or were).
That Jesus “had a problem” with the current Temple and its priestly management makes historical sense if we take his message at face value. This is reiterated by the subsequent history of the Jesus movement in Palestine-Judea. Some of Jesus’ Jewish followers were persecuted and killed in their own homeland by their own Jewish peers. However, this was not yet a case of Jews against Christians. Rather, it was a case of some Jews against other Jews who belonged to the “Jesist” sect. And the persecution consistently issued from the priesthood and its minions.
Jesus’ message has many facets, but the pertinent one for this discussion is his opposition to the current running of the Temple and its animal sacrifice system. Note that Jesus’ “cleansing of the Temple” was not primary launched against the money changers – who, after all, had the legitimate function of seeing that the correct coinage was donated to the Temple. Rather, it was launched against the animal sacrifice system, which for reasons too complex to treat here, Jesus abhorred. The main result of Jesus’ actions in the Temple was to disrupt the flow of sacrificial animals into the sanctuary. He not only disrupted this meat parade, he set animals free and scattered them. Shortly thereafter, at “the last supper”, Jesus made clear his intentions, namely, that his renewed Covenant would be sealed with an unbloody sacrifice of plant offerings (wheat/bread and grapes/wine). These would constitute his new, reformed offering in place of animal flesh and blood. In none of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ final meal is any mention made of the Paschal lamb, the idea presumably being that bread and wine would now be sufficient offerings for the reformed Temple in the inauguration of the Kingdom of God on earth.
No one in his/her right mind could possibly expect to call the Temple unholy, and to further desecrate its sacred commerce, and at the same time not expect some kind of retribution to follow. Those familiar with Christianity know that retribution did follow, with Jesus appended to a Roman cross. The Gospels are not specific in connecting legal charges against Jesus with his Temple demonstration, but they do mention the charge that Jesus was “leading the people astray”. Jesus’ Temple rebellion would surely have infuriated the priestly elite and worried the Roman authorities who counted on taxation received from the Temple, and surely would have constituted a major motivation for both parties to remove him from the scene.
Hence, Jesus sacrificed himself for his own unique prophetic message of a renewed Covenant minus animal sacrifice, for his proclamation of a definitive in-breaking of God’s Kingdom (itself enough to alienate the priesthood and Caesar’s agents)… and of course for Israel, for whose “lost sheep” alone Jesus said he was laboring. Here we have a martyr’s death, but not a sin-atonement.
Moreover, it is a pertinent fact that Jewish scripture and tradition holds that Yahweh, the tribal deity of Jesus and his Jewish confreres, had instituted myriad means of forgiveness and atonement for his “Chosen”. Of course, some of these were bound up with the Temple which Jesus so sorely wished to reform. But the bulk of them were simple acts that any Jew could perform, unconnected with priesthood and Temple. They included prayer. repentance, loving kindness, repudiation of idolatry, offerings of flour, money and jewelry, incense, and other means. Moreover, the Torah and Prophets, as Jesus received these texts, already contained strong currents of anti-animal sacrifice argumentation. At several points, Yahweh himself was presented as repudiating the sacrifical system, and – a thousand years before Pauline “Judaism by faith” and “internal circumcision” – was said to be pleased by “circumcised hearts” rather than animal sacrifice.
It is abundantly clear, then, that Judaism saw itself well-provided for in the areas of sacrifice, forgiveness and atonement. Nothing more was necessary than the rubrics laid down by Yahweh himself. Nothing was lacking in the atonement system, for the simple reason that Yahewh himself had provided it. The notion that a human being – a perfect, sinless, half-divine human being, no less – would in the future be necessary to provide some kind of ultimate, flawless sin-atonement is completely un-Jewish, and foreign to the Jewish scriptures and Prophets. For the Jews, their God-given atonement system was God-given, and to last forever. Nothing else was needed or desired. The Christian notion of Jesus as atoning sacrifice is a betrayal of Judaism and the Jewish Jesus. This is borne out even by the New Testament.
The New Testament describes Jesus’ Jewish disciples as operating from Jerusalem as their new headquarters. They remain Jews and practice Jewish rituals, including praying in the Temple. They continue to observe the Law and circumcision. They are sporadically persecuted not by “the Jews” but by the same priestly elite that Jesus before them had opposed. When they hear that Paul has been telling his Diaspora communities that Torah – precisely because of Jesus’ supposedly atoning sacrifice – is invalidated, even for Jews, they insist that Paul undergo the Nazirite vow in the Temple. For them, although the priesthood is corrupt and the animal sacrifice system needs reform, still the fact that they regard some of the Temple’s rubric as valid shows that they did not think that Jesus’ death replaced the Temple. They knew what was at stake when they pulled Paul’s feet to the fire and coerced him to take a traditional Jewish vow, namely, that Temple and Torah are still operative and authentic, regardless of Jesus’ martyric sacrifice.
Jesus’ death was that of martyr, prophet, and Kingdom-agent, not the atoning sacrifice of a World-Savior.
