JESUS STORY CONTINUED: THE MAN JESUS: SEPARATING THE MAN FROM THE MYTH!

 THE MAN JESUS: SEPARATING THE MAN FROM THE MYTH

THE JESUS STORY (CONTINUED)

Search for the Real Parents of My Soul

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 23, 2015

 Religious scholar Reza Aslan maintains in his book “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” (2013) that it is unlikely that Jesus was able to read or write.

NOTE:

This is the last excerpt on the Jesus story.  What follows in the next section of Search for the Real Parents of My Soul is the view of the Jesus story from the perspective of a practicing social psychologist. 

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Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry has published an article by Matt Slick who asserts “Jesus is a Man.”  Other writers, critics and scholars are making similar declarations.  Where Slick departs from the demystification is his assertion that Jesus is both divine and human in nature.  He writes:

It is biblically correct to say that Jesus is a man … But, it would be wrong to say He was only a man.  He is both divine and human in nature at the same time (Col. 2:9); He is both God and man right now.

Furthermore, Jesus' humanity now is important for two reasons.  First, this is what the Bible teaches.  Second, as a man, Jesus is a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.  As a priest He forever intercedes for us.

"Where Jesus has entered as a forerunner for us, having become a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek." (Heb. 6:20).

"Hence, also, He is able to save those who draw near to God through Him, since He  lives to make intercession for them." (Heb. 7:25)

In order to be a priest, Jesus has to be a man.  A spirit cannot be a priest after the order of Melchizedek; if Jesus is not a man now, He could not hold His priesthood, and He could not be interceding for us.  Therefore, to deny Jesus' present humanity is to deny His priesthood and His intercession on our behalf. Without His intercession, we are lost.

Jesus died

There is no dispute that Jesus died on the cross--except for some non-Christian religions and various atheistic groups who deny the biblical record.  Nevertheless, the scriptures teach us that Jesus died.

"For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus." (1 Thess. 4:14).

Jesus rose from the dead physically

The bible teaches us that Jesus rose from the dead.  Unfortunately, some Christians are not aware that Jesus rose from the dead in the same body in which He died though it was a glorified body.  We see that Jesus prophesied the resurrection of His physical body in John 2:19-21 and fulfilled this in other verses:

"Jesus answered and said to them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The Jews therefore said, "It took forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?"  But He was speaking of the temple of His body." (John 2:19-21).

"See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself; touch Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." (Luke 24:39).

"When therefore it was evening, on that day, the first day of the week, and when the doors were shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst, and said to them, "Peace be with you."  And when He had said this, He showed them both His hands and His side.  The disciples therefore rejoiced when they saw the Lord." (John 20:19-20).

"Then He *said to Thomas, "Reach here your finger, and see My hands; and reach here your hand, and put it into My side; and be not unbelieving, but believing." (John 20:27).

"And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain." (1 Cor. 15:14).

Merely asserting that Jesus rose is not enough.  It must be stated that Jesus rose physically lest the very words of Christ be denied.

After Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection

Jesus appeared to various people to demonstrate that He had risen physically.  In these verses we see that Jesus said He would raise the temple of His body.  This He did, and the body He rose in was the same one He died in since it retained the physical wounds of His crucifixion--He still had holes in His hands and side!

If anyone denies the resurrection of Christ, his faith is in vain; and he is not a true Christian.  It is not enough to say that Jesus rose.  You must acknowledge that He rose physically. A "spirit" resurrection is not a resurrection of the body; and without the resurrection of the body of Christ, death has not been conquered, and our faith would be in vain.

Jesus' resurrected body was a glorified body.

Jesus rose from the dead physically in the same body in which He died. But, what kind of a body was this physical body in which He rose?  Was it subject to death again?  Would it grow tired or grow old?  The Bible tells us about the resurrected body of which all Christians will receive in the future.

"But someone will say, How are the dead raised?  And with what kind of body do they come? . . . There are also heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one, and the glory of the earthly is another.  There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.  So also is the resurrection of the dead.

"It is sown a perishable body, it is raised an imperishable body; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.  If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.  So also it is written, The first man, Adam, became a living soul."  

"The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural; then the spiritual.  The first man is from the earth, earthly; the second man is from heaven.  As is the earthly, so also are those who are earthly; and as is the heavenly, so also are those who are heavenly.  And just as we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly." (1 Cor. 15:35, 40-49).

These verses tell us that something happens to the body that is raised from the dead.  Notice that verse 44 says that "it is sown a natural body.  It is raised a spiritual body."  The same body that is sown (dies) is raised.  The natural body is the body with which we are born. The natural body dies and is raised from the dead.  But, when it is raised, it is changed into a spiritual body.

The resurrected body is different from the natural body in its abilities and qualities as Jesus demonstrated; however, and this is vitally important, it is the same body as before--only "improved," "glorified," "spiritualized," etc. 

We see this in the fact that Jesus retained the wounds of His crucifixion as evidenced by the holes in His hands and side (John 20:27), yet He was able to simply appear in a room with the disciples without entering through the door (John 20:19-20).  He was raised in the same body He died in though it had been glorified.

Jesus is a man in a glorified body.

We have already seen that Jesus was raised from the dead in the same body in which He died, but that body is a resurrected body. However, some people believe that at Jesus' ascension, He was somehow changed, and His physical body was no longer needed.  But, this is not what the Bible teaches.  There is no place where it states that Jesus stopped being a man.  If anything, the New Testament says He is still a man.

"For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form," (Col. 2:9).

"For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." (1 Tim. 2:5).

We see here that Jesus is called a man.  Like Col. 2:9 above, this verse uses the present tense ("is").  It clearly states that Jesus is a man.

"And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as a dead man.  And He laid His right hand upon me, saying, “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living One; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades." (Rev. 1:17-18).

Notice that in Col. 2:9 it speaks in the present tense ("dwells").  Colossians was written well after Jesus' ascension into heaven, yet Paul tells us that Jesus is in bodily form.  What body would that be?  Why, it would be the same body in which He was raised.

To clarify that Jesus is a man, read the next verse.  In Rev. 1:17-18, Jesus is in heaven, and John the Apostle falls at Jesus' feet; and Jesus laid His right hand on him.  Clearly, from these verses we can see that Jesus is in bodily form as a man.

Objections Answered

Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.  Some argue that the Bible says that flesh and blood cannot go to heaven as is stated in 1 Cor. 15:50, "Now I say this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable."

The term "flesh and blood" is a phrase used to designate the natural state even the carnal state of man.

"And Jesus answered and said to him, "Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven." (Matt. 16:17).

"To reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood" (Gal. 1:16).

"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Eph. 6:12).

"Since then the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil" (Heb. 2:14).

After the resurrection, Jesus said, "See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself; touch Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have" (Luke 24:39). Jesus specifically stated that He had flesh and bones--not flesh and blood. 

This may seem like a word game, but it is not.  Every word is inspired in the Bible, and Jesus chose His words for a reason.  Remember, Jesus' blood was drained out of His body on the cross.  It is His shed blood that cleanses us of our sins: "but if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin." (1 John 1:7). Jesus was the sacrifice, and His blood cleanses us.  Therefore, flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, but flesh and bones can.

The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.  1 Cor. 15:45 says, "The first man, Adam, became a living soul.  The last Adam became a life-giving spirit."  This verse is not saying that Jesus is without a body, but that He is a life-giving spirit.  That is, as the last Adam, He is the one who gives life to people (John 10:27-28).  Furthermore, it is designating that Jesus' resurrected body is equipped to be in both the physical realm and the spiritual.

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Matt Slick’s summary is more or less consistent with Christian indoctrination into the faith.  In the Jesus story that is this odyssey it is less focused on Jesus’ divinity and more on Jesus the man, a man who walked this earth, a man of flesh and blood, who thought and felt, taught and listened, and left but a mind print in the gospels.  Search for the Real Parents of My Soul is a walk through that mind print to establish some semblance of a connection with spiritual temporal reality.

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Religious scholar Reza Aslan maintains that it is unlikely that Jesus was able to read or write.  Given his obvious deep research into the matter, it is still difficult to fathom much less take seriously this accusation.  

His book “Zealot” (2013) deals with this and other controversial matters regarding Jesus the man and Jesus the Messiah.  In all such references, he is consistently critical.  This excerpt from a candid interview with National Public Radio (NPR) provides a sense of his perspective on Jesus, the Man:

On the Gospels

"What I think is important for Christians to understand is that every Gospel story written about Jesus of Nazareth was written after that event, this apocalyptic event which for Jews signaled the end of the world as they knew it."

On Jesus as a political figure

"[In one story,] Jesus walks into the temple, and he begins to cleanse it. He turns over the tables of the money-changers, who are exchanging the foul foreign currency of the Roman Empire with the Hebrew shekel, which was the only currency that the temple would accept. And then, of course, in a loud, booming voice, he says, 'It is written that my house shall be a house of prayer for all nations, and you have made it a den of thieves.'

"Now, as all historians recognize, this was the action that precipitated his arrest, his torture and his execution by the state. And there's a very simple reason for that: The temple was not just the center of the Jewish cult; it was, in many ways, the representation of the power and the presence of the Roman Empire."

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NPR also interviewed historian Bart D. Erhman who weighs in on this discussion with reference to his book “Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who changed the Bible and Why” (2005):

On using The Bible as a source

"I see the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament very much the same way that I see the scriptures of the Quran or the Gathas or the Vedas or what have you. I think that these scriptures are inspired by individuals who, in a moment of metaphysical contact with the divine spirit, have been able to communicate something about God to us.

"But I also recognize as a historian that this is sacred history. ... They are valuable in the sense that they reveal certain truths to us, but that the facts that they reveal are not as valuable as the truths are."

On his religious affiliation

"I wouldn't call myself a Christian because I do not believe that Jesus is God, nor do I believe that he ever thought that he was God, or that he ever said that he was God. But I am a follower of Jesus, and I think that sometimes, unfortunately — I think even Christians would recognize this and admit it — those two things aren't always the same, being a Christian and being a follower of Jesus."

Erhman offers the ultimate caveat in “Misquoting Jesus” for those who would ponder the Jesus story:

I came to see early on that the full meaning and nuance of the Greek text of the New Testament could be grasped only when it is read and studied in the original language.  The same thing applies to the Old Testament as I later learned when I acquired Hebrew (Erhman 2005). 

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Wondering what manner of man was Jesus

There is little definitive knowledge available other than the gospels, and now, as in the past, many scholars are having issues with these gospels. 

For me, it is not Jesus' teachings that make him so remarkable, so real, although they are inspiring and distinctively informative, but the combination of his teachings with the struggle of the man in that ancient time to fulfill his purpose as it was revealed to him. 

The two cannot be separated as they resonate as one within me.  But if they could be separated, would the man or his message be more prominent, more important to me?

Perhaps the question is moot as Jesus the man made a distinct footprint in the sand and a mind print in my mind, as other men such as Abraham Lincoln and Sir Winston Churchill have.  Their character cannot be easily separated from what they thought, did, and were as mortal men.  With the parables as my guide, the same is true for me with Jesus.

We are mindful of the writings of Lincoln and Churchill, and have access to them through their words.  But we have no such access to Jesus who never wrote but in the dirt, dust and sand of Judea. Alas, our knowledge of him is confined to secondary sources.  

In Jesus’ time few could read or write, and so to suggest that he was so limited in these skills is not beyond the realm of possibility.     

Yet, quite remarkably, we feel (I think that is the operational word) Jesus, and think we know his divine character through the gospels.  

That some scholars define Jesus’ character in psychoanalytical or psychopathological terms man may gain credence today, but imagine how it would play 2,000 years ago.

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Koenraad Elst in Psychology of Prophetism: A Secular Look at the Bible (1993) asks the question: 

Can an intelligent and critically disposed person, who has abandoned childish beliefs and childish prejudice, seriously doubt that Jesus is a case of psychosis? 

For the scholar Elst, psychosis is so clearly discernible in Jesus that he would expect even the layman to make a similar diagnosis, but a layman today or 2,000 years ago?  

Elst writes:

Jesus destiny cannot possibly be understood without the aid of psychopathology.  The dark misgiving which historical theology has had for the past 100 years was on the right track.  Anyone who surveys the extant literature can see it with shocking clarity.  

The notion that Jesus was a mentally ill person cannot be removed anymore from the scientific investigation.  First, science has brought Jesus down from his divine throne and declared him human; now it will also recognize him as a sick man.

A confirmation that the dispassionate study of Jesus as a human person leads irrevocably to a psychopathological diagnosis is given by a Protestant preacher, Hermann Werner.  Objecting to liberal theology with its humanization of the divine person Jesus, he shows what becomes of Jesus when he is measured with human standards:

The image of Jesus … is, no matter how much one would want to ward off this conclusion, mentally … sick.  Although man’s and certainly Jesus’ deepest life is a mystery which we cannot unveil down to its deepest roots, yet certain limits can be agreed upon within which one’s self-consciousness must remain if it is to be sane and human. 

There are, after all, unassailable standards which are valid for all times for the ancient oriental as well as for the modem western.  Except in completely uncivilized times and nations, no one has ever been declared entirely sane and normal who held himself to be a supernatural being, God or a deity, or who made claims to divine qualities and privileges. A later legend may ascribe such things to this or that revered person, but when someone claims it for himself, his audience has always consisted exclusively of inferior minds incapable of proper judgment.

Perhaps Rev. Hermann underestimates the belief of the ancient civilized Pagans in the possibility of divine incarnation, of having a divine person in their midst, in which the meaning of the word “divine” can be stretched a bit; but then he is right in assuming that this divine status is normally only ascribed to the revered person after his death. 

That the modem skepsis towards claims of being a divine person were shared by Jesus’ contemporaries, can be seen from the Gospel itself. The Jews (for whom this skepsis became indignation for reasons of exclusive monotheism) wanted to kill Jesus because he not only broke the Sabbath but also called God his Father, making himself equal with God (John 5:18), and because you, being a man, make yourself God (John 10:33).

Either Jesus was really God’s only-born son (and by accepting that, you become a believing Christian), or his claim to divine status was absurd and abnormal by the standards of both ancients and moderns.  A liberal theology which humanizes Jesus and yet remains Christian, is impossible: it is either the fundamentalist belief in Jesus’ divinity, or no belief in Jesus Christ at all.

Rev. Hermann concludes: Everyone knows that the sources on Jesus life are insufficient for writing his biography.  But they are sufficient to reach the conclusion that he was a pathological personality.  At any rate, these are the conclusions which liberal theology has reached by thinking and taking into account the findings of modern psychiatry.

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Assault on Christian beliefs and believers

Surely, this analysis of Jesus as being essentially mad may rankle orthodox Christian believers, but it needed be so.  Author Elst is wrong, not necessarily in his analysis, but in his conclusions, failing to understand that Christians can accept Jesus as their spiritual leader of mystifying dimensions as a man and not feel the necessity to label mad or otherwise. 

After all, Jesus of humble origins inspired radical change through the gospels with a moral spiritual ethical platform that was revolutionary and has resonated throughout the world for the past 2,000 years.  Jesus was a leader with a mission that has even more validity today than ever before. 

So, if he be mad, we need more not less such madness.  We need to be blessed with the palliative powers of his madness as we are on the brink of Armageddon in this thermonuclear age, an age where madness, real madness, is palpable in every community across the world without exception.   

Psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi writes of “First Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links between Leadership and Mental Illness” (2011), and claims the greatest presidents of the United States were touched with madness, indeed, half of all those who have risen to this office are likely to have suffered mental illness.  He suggest leadership and madness may be twin coordinates.     

Paradoxically, as it happens, Jesus has become more believable as a god-figure as critical scholars have authenticated his character as a man, which obviously is not their intent.  Could religious scholars be conflicting over that possibility? 

As a man, Jesus was a great lover of nature.  His sayings abound with reference to the sun, the clouds, the rain, the birds, the flowers, seed-time and harvest-time, to growth and decay, to the wonder of the sun rising and setting not simply in the heavens but in the moods of man.  

Jesus understood man as he walked among men as a man, as he behaved as a man, but always with a heavenly conscience that reached beyond the temporal transcending comfortably into the timeless.

Christmas and Easter, birth and death are touchstones in Christian history as well as in the history of man, and celebrated with reverence knowing Jesus once walked this earth as man.

With a few pregnant words, Jesus could make the complex simple and comprehensible.  In the technical sense, he was not a philosopher as his wondering was full of knowing and his knowing full of wondering. 

Jesus was earthbound for a brief time, and comfortable in that knowledge, seemingly conscious of everything and everyone while never reverting to abstract terms to discuss good and evil, sovereignty and righteousness.  

What could be clearer then when he was questioned as to his allegiance:

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” 

He would contrast flowers to good and weeds metaphorically to evil and build a story around that distinction.

Jesus liked to be with people, some people like to be with others to suck the veritable oxygen out of them, whereas he would leave his audience heady with his. 

He enjoyed social gatherings and good fellowship and could give as well as he could take in humorous exchange.  But he was also quick to discern the phony from the sincere, the pompous from the humble, the prideful from the contrite.

His sympathies, we learn from the gospels, were as broad as the human race.  Yet, on occasion this did not come through.  Once he put off the plea of a woman of another nation by saying that he was sent only to find “the lost sheep of the House of Israel.”  In another instance, he dispatched his disciples with a rebuke, declaring they were not to minister to non-Jews, whether they be Gentiles or Samaritans.  Yet in the face of this, there is the story of the Good Samaritan and the healing of the Roman servant.

Jesus was in tune with the ancient prophets of Israel and was inclined to interpret his mission in terms of fulfilling these prophecies.  This mission, and his sense of it, was wrest from him and expressed otherwise after his death by St. Paul, and made into what would become Christianity, but that is another story.  

Could Jesus, who was a devout Jew with a reverence for Jewish Law, have been other than the leader of a movement that was but a sect of Judaism?  That, too, is part of St. Paul’s story.

Christian scholars debate such questions with some making a case that Jesus was xenophobic.  Perhaps more revealing is that Christianity as orchestrated by Paul became a proselytizing religion and Judaism is not.  Jesus was not a proselytizer, but Paul was.  

Jesus could become violently angry.  We know he was impatient with Jewish chief priests and the elders in the temple whom he saw as inept and given to unconscionable acts in defiance of Jewish Law.

He also had a keen sense of humor, and used it with skill when his ideas were challenged in contrast to the absence of such humor in the gospels of first century Christian writers.  Imagine if the New Testament had such spirited prose. 

Jesus could wax metaphorically to pluck the spec from a self-righteous person’s eye so that he might see.  We see this same engagement with the solemn and meticulous lawyer who is conscientious to a fault in his profession, but blind to his moral turpitude.  Such blindness, Jesus said, was like the man anxious lest his food and drink be contaminated, straining out the minutest gnat, but then, without forethought swallowing the equivalent of an entire camel, hair, hoofs, humps and offensive breath, and not register surprise. 

He could laugh observing children playing in the marketplace, especially those pouting and refusing to join in the games, even when their friends willingly changed the games to accommodate them. 

He could even scoff at his cousin John the Baptist for his asceticism:

“What went ye out into the wilderness to see, John?  A reed shaken with the wind …. A man clothed in soft raiment?”

Jesus had the soul of a poet for his mind crackled with visual electricity and effusive colors, a fulsome mind like a painter only in a rainbow of words.  For that reason, if for no other, the parables are difficult to forget.

There was also a quickness and directness to Jesus that no reader of the gospel narratives can miss.  He could blaze with anger, take measure of men with a glance often described as looking hard at a person: for example, at the rich young ruler and loving him; at Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane, saying, “Couldn’t you keep watch with me for one hour?” and at Mary, the sister of Lazarus, and weeping with her.

He condemned the aimlessly drifting unthoughtful life of a person; had no use for the indecisive; and declared that the man who put his hand to the plow and looked back was not fit for the Kingdom of Heaven. 

His disciples, who would walk with him, were ordered to renounce all that they had and were.  On the other hand, his draconian flair was tempered with admiration for the deceptive steward, who, when his dishonesty was discovered, adopted a bold strategy to again make himself secure. 

Jesus humanity multidimensional

Another quality, which often has been ignored or misunderstood, was the absence of any sense of personal corruption or sin.  While he taught his disciples to ask forgiveness of their sins, there was no hint of such a need for himself. 

Nor is there any asking of pardon either from those about him or from God.  Missing is the inner conflict reputed to be a necessary precursor to reaching a higher state of being.  Once again, Jesus is confounding, as he frees himself from such needs but sees others controlled by these selfsame needs. 

As the Jesus story is pondered, it is clear that Christianity has not followed the lead of Jesus, but that of the anxious Paul who better reflects the obsessive compulsive psychopathology that writers would attribute to Jesus.

Although there is humanness to Jesus, there is also psychosocial distance of him from his disciples and followers that defies explanation and adds to his baffling intrigue.  We are left to struggle with his humanness and godliness.  

Is he a man or the Messiah?  Can we believe in his mission and miracles, his passion and prophecies, his death and resurrection?  Is he the Redeemer and truly “the Son of God,” or not?  The debate is likely go on as long as man exists.

Incredibly, at this point in this odyssey, what has been described here does not seem apparent in the Christian church that carries his name.  More apparent is that he is “the Son of Man.”

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