JESUS, PAUL AND FREUD

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

© March 5, 2015

JESUS

Jesus or Joshua, if you prefer, means “savior.”  The Western World divides history into before and after Jesus.  Jesus taught the human race how to live.  Would the Christian faith collapse if historians and theologians could prove that Jesus never lived, or that he didn’t rise from the dead?

None of the Gospels states that Jesus was born in a stable.  It is also extremely unlikely that he was born in Bethlehem.  Even the census taking for tax purposes that has Mary (with child) and Joseph on the road to their ancestral home may be spurious as well, an invention of the four authors of the Gospels. 

Apostle Paul’s “Letters” have a distinct set of beliefs for Jesus as Paul was writing for Gentiles, not for Jews.  One of the beliefs of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, called the “Synoptic Gospels” because they use similar source material and replicate each other, has Jesus dying on the Cross before the Passover, which is clearly in dispute in the Fourth Gospel according to John.

The Gospels are intent on blaming the death of Jesus on the Jews, which had the effect of Christianity starting out as a Jewish heresy.  Religious persecution of dissident groups within Jewry is unknown in Jewish history with absolutely no evidence of crucifixions, which were common practice of the Roman Empire, occupiers of Palestine in the first century.

Christianity invented the idea of the embryonic church being persecuted by the Jews with the central focus on the Crucifixion while there is no evidence in the first century writings of Josephus to suggest such a Jewish practice.  Crucifixion was a common practice of the Roman Empire in dealing with criminals, crucifying tens of thousands in this manner.

Jesus as the mythological Christ was born in a stable, instituted the Christian Eucharist, was crucified on the Cross, rose from the dead, and founded the Christian Church.  There is no way to verify any of this other than the putative Four Gospels in the New Testament.  Scholars from nearly every perspective have come to view these documents as being mainly mythologies.

Christians today are sustained by the body and blood of Christ in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.  The Fourth Gospel makes no mention of the Eucharist or the transubstantiation of the bread and wine of the Catholic Mass into the body and blood of Christ.

Jesus comes alive as a recognizable Jew in the first century of the Common Era (C.E.), and only as a Jew.  For in none of the gospels does he utter a word or demonstrate a behavior to suggest that he was other than a teacher and holy man among his Jewish people.

Jesus was a Galilean Hasid or holy man.  He wrote no books.  He has been found more real to me in Searching for the Real Parents of My Soul than that provided by my Christian training or through the eyes of my Christian belief system.  The gospel writers, like all good writers, say more with what is left out or left to the imagination.  There the words can be made flesh and dwelt amongst one; there the mystical Jesus can become real in one’s consciousness.

PAUL

Paul wrote about Jesus during the winter of 50 – 51 C.E., approximately twenty years after his death, personifying Jesus as an extension of his own manic, compulsive, twisted self, urging those who would listen to abstain from sexual immorality and all forms of pleasure in the name of Jesus, who was the Messiah.

Yet, Jesus was comfortable around the dregs of society.  This included prostitutes, deviants and sinners of every description.  He also enjoyed the pleasure of food and drink and showed none of the ascetic inclinations legendary for his cousin, John the Baptist.  Paul was a crankier side of Jesus.

The majority of Paul’s hearers would be Gentile Greeks, who had very different ideas about God and gods than that of Jews.  Therefore, Gentiles would have had no trouble turning Jesus into God.  Indeed, these Hellenistic Gentiles took Paul, and his acolyte, Barnabas, to be divine beings, Barnabas to be Zeus and Paul, as he messenger, to be Hermes.

Paul’s message was ingenious: Jesus had risen from the dead, and to those who believed, they would one day meet him in Paradise in everlasting life.  That took the pressure off the poor, the disadvantaged, and the exploited to challenge the rich and powerful for suffering in this life meant for eternal bliss forever in the next life – for the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

There is little to no evidence that Jesus instituted the Eucharist.  This is Paul’s invention.  Paul is not interested in the historical Jesus.  Nor is he self-conscious for his proselytizing zeal to convert all to Christianity even though mythology shadows his Jesus.  On the contrary, he enhances his message because it cannot be challenged.  It is the death of Jesus that matters.  The risen Jesus means everything to Paul as it indicates death has been defeated.

Jesus as described in the Gospels, and Jesus as interpreted by Paul are often worlds apart, especially in the Fourth Gospel.

Paul has an agenda that he makes up as he goes along adjusting to challenges and circumstances, failures and setbacks, but always with a visceral vision of establishing a universal Church.  This makes Paul the inventor and founder of Christianity, not Peter.

Yet the gospels have Jesus declaring, “Peter you are my rock and upon this rock I build my church.”

St. Peters Basilica today is a monument to those words in the center of Rome in all its majestic splendor, which belies this fact, as Paul’s Cathedral Outside the Wall is beyond the Seven Hills of Rome, and is modest by comparison.   

Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us all that we can hope to ever know about the man Jesus.    The Fourth Gospel of John makes no attempt to replicate their claims, but instead chooses to tell his story of Jesus in metaphor, in rich glosses, subtle interpretations with embellishments and in an unabashed entertaining impressionistic style.

Paul writes much about himself and is the only gospel writer autobiographer for he is incapable of anonymity.  His personality breathes through his every word, which is ecstatic, quarrelsome, changeable, contradictory and conciliatory.  He can be feisty and engaging, intimidating and humble, all in a single letter to the Gentiles.  He is always playing to make the convert, to make the sale.  The moral, religious, ethical and psychological contradictions within these writings become the grand strategy that mirrors the principles of human nature and God-like requirements as he see them.

Each generation reading Paul has felt the power of his writing, individually, which has made it unsettling and therefore changeable in the minds of readers as a group as the world in which they are engaged is changing.  In this current era of evolutionary biology with human behavior being reduced to post-Darwinian mathematical algorithms, and religion seen totally false in every literal sense, Paul had the wisdom of spreading his Christianity at the individual level that then metastasized to the cultural or group evolutionary level to claim more than a billion souls 2,000 years later.  

Paul's genius is like a surfer riding the waves of his time that become today the same waves that they were 2,000 years ago, if we believe in thermodynamics.  It was Paul, after all, who singularly wrestled Jesus from the Jews and its Laws, diet, circumcision, its provincialism, and xenophobia, and then from the Jerusalem Christians.

Paul was a native of Tarsus in Cilicia, Asia Minor, a city in modern Turkey today.  He was also a citizen of the Roman Empire.  Tarsus was a sophisticated cosmopolitan city and Jews of that city were Hellenistic.  It was a melting spot of the Jewish idea of God and the Greek idea of good.  Paul lived and worked in the Gentile world, whereas Jesus lived his entire life in the Jewish world.

Paul like Freud was a far more gifted writer and poet than he was a thinker or a philosopher.   Again, like Freud and other great writers, he was able to project the conflicts in his own mind unto others in the wider cosmos.

It was quite a challenge for a Jew born in the Diaspora to get the attention of the polytheistic Gentiles to know and aspire to become part of a monotheistic faith called Christianity. Paul’s confidence came from knowing that in his Hellenistic world there was an inbuilt thirst of the human race for God, the same thirst and compulsion that expressed his own will and motivation.

At some point in his young life, Paul rejected his Hellenism, and became a Pharisee, stating, “I was born of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrew parents.  In the matter of the Law, I was a Pharisee.” (Philippians 3:5 -6)

From the beginning, Paul was in conflict with James the brother of Jesus, and Jerusalem Christians who saw Christianity as the New Israel, and therefore a Jewish religion.

Jews outside the pages of the New Testament have no history of religious persecution, no inquisition, no Mount Calvary.  In contrast to the Jerusalem Christians, Paul came to view Christianity’s only possibility for survival as a new religion for Gentiles.

James didn’t see it that way; nor did Peter.  Tension between Peter and Paul was inevitable as their temperaments and personalities were bound to clash.  Paul was combative, impatient, a man of action.  Peter was conciliatory, indecisive and patient placing his confidence not in ideas or action, but in the Torah and the Jewish tradition.  Like James, he saw the new religion as the New Israel, believing it would all work out in the end.

Author A. N. Wilson in “Jesus, A Life” (1992) believes Paul may have come face to face with Jesus, perhaps in the Garden of Gethsemane as one of the arresting Pretorian guards.  Wilson imagines that that confrontation came to haunt Saul (not yet Paul) afterwards until his conversion on the road to Damascus. 

Jesus, although he had his clashes with Pharisees, seems to have had much in common with them in terms of his views on Judaism.  Moreover, Pharisees were some of the most virtuous men who had ever lived.  They believed God smiled on virtue and frowned on vice.  Paul thought otherwise.

This was made famous by Paul as he clearly took the side of the sinning Publican over the virtuous Pharisee in that defining epistle.

Whereas the Pharisee believed virtue was its own reward, and he was a virtuous man, the Publican admitted that he lacked virtue and was a sinful man, and asked God to be merciful to him a sinner (Luke 18:9 Jerusalem Bible).

This story resonates to this day as a morally anarchic story. The Pharisee and the Publican is not a moral fable against self-righteousness.  It is a nihilistic charter from the Gospel of St. Luke.

The Pharisee believed an exemplary moral life would lead to future blessedness.  Not true according to this story.  It denies the commonsense love of virtue absolutely.  It denies its roots and branches.  What matters in the story is God’s capacity to forgive.  Sin, not virtue, is the focus of this story.

Since the Pharisee has no sin, he cannot get into touch with God.  It is the Publican, the contrite sinner, who is welcomed into God’s house.

The test of a good life, this story is saying, is not virtue, but a childlike dependence on the mercy of God.  Paul took this idea to the bank with Christianity his vault.  Roman Catholicism, which became universal Christianity, has exploited this dependence throughout its social, theological and political history, and into the 21st century.

The Gospels which are written from a Gentile perspective see the Pharisees as petty and conservative when actually Pharisees were quite radical. 

Whereas the Sadducees were content with the Torah as a fixed and finished guide laid down in the Scriptures, the Pharisees applied it as a living document to deal with ever changing contemporary life.  They believed the will of God could be discerned in everyday life, not through religious dogma or ritualistic observation, but in an honest assessment of what is and is not right, what is good and what is not, what is ethical and what is dishonest.

From everything we know of Paul from his epistles and letters, this strand in the teachings of Jesus as shown in the Four Gospels, which are close to that of the Pharisee’s virtue, would be nearly maddening to Paul.   His Galatian Letter to the Romans makes this clear:

God’s forgiveness is not dependent upon human virtue at all, but rather on a free outpouring of divine love for God and the human race in all its frailty.

Paul doesn’t see man as strong, but weak, as dependent, not independent, as wanton and depraved, as collectively needing a guidance system, not capable as an individual to make prudent choices in terms of love and will.

Paul as a Pharisee was scandalized by Jesus’s laxity in his view of the Law (Torah) and in his indifference to ritualistic observations.  Mark has Jesus saying, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).  For Paul the Torah was equivalent to Kant’s categorical imperative (see “Grounds for Metaphysics of Morals,” Chap. 2, Part 1).

Actually, it was probably propitious that Paul was not like a tree, rooted, stable and firmly in place, but more like a river ever in motion yielding to and circumventing obstacles of uncertainty to oblige the forces of nature.  Were he to have been as rooted as James and the Jerusalem Christians chances are the Christianity we know would have been assimilated into Orthodox Judaism and lost forever.

Paul decided to focus on the Gentiles, which meant altering the implicit sense of Jesus in the four gospels as necessary to successfully engage the non-Jewish world to his purposes (see A. N. Wilson’s “The Mind of the Apostle,” 1997, pp. 229-239).

Why he did this rather than proclaim his own vision is reminiscent of people in general, and individuals in particular who can take someone else’s creation and work it to their advantage but are otherwise stymied when faced with a carte blanche situation.  The Epistle to the Romans is a case in point.

This book by Apostle Paul is one of the most influential books ever written, giving a picture of man’s relationship with God which is compatible with Jesus sayings in the Gospels.  It had great impact on Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther and John Calvin.  It provided clues as to how the intellectual and social world of the West would develop against such concepts as original sin and man being saved only through faith, alone.  The power of the epistle has God cancelling out sin through love.

That said the faith of Paul is not the faith of the Galileans or Jerusalem Christians, who had been Jesus’s closest personal friends.  Wilson writes:

(Paul’s faith) grew out of a hatred, a fascination, in the end a possessive love for one strand in Jesus’s teaching which they (the other apostles) seem to have missed: that is the strand contained in the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee.

Peter saw James and the other Galileans envisioning Jesus as the last great Jewish prophet speaking quite literally within the main body of Judaism, not outside the Torah and Jewish tradition.  It was from confrontation with this body of Jerusalem Christians that Paul decided that Judaism had to be overturned.

His personality is central to this advocacy, as he was a man tormented with conflict, in constant war with his colleagues as adversaries; his mind at odds with the Law and grace, God’s righteousness and man’s fallen nature, and at loggerheads between interpreters of Mt. Sinai and Golgotha.

The Cross of Jesus became Paul’s cross, and then that of Christianity.  He had been a bitter persecutor of Christians, which led to intolerable guilt, ultimately to be expiated in a miraculous conversion, followed by internalizing Jesus altogether as his personal savior.

That enlightening experience was then projected on to the human race, which he saw as neither righteous nor just, but lost and sinful requiring saving.

PAUL AND FREUD

Centuries later, Sigmund Freud's mission was not the hereafter but the existential now.  Even so, he showed much in common with Paul.  Modernity was consumed with the crippling effects of guilt and repressed anxiety on human consciousness as Western society was experiencing the Industrial Revolution.  People were making material progress but fixated with debilitating depression and stultifying disquiet. 

Freud, the Jewish psychiatrist, formulated relief through a talking cure rather than a ritual of prayer and good works.  For Paul it was salvation through Christ and the forgiveness of sins.  For Freud it was sanity and the ability to get out of bed in the morning and have some kind of life.

Paul and Freud were moralists of a difference.  With the liberation of repressed demons that Freud insisted all possess, coping mechanisms could be proposed to lead to self-awareness and the triumph Eros or the life instinct over Thanatos or the death instinct, to neutralize man’s capacity for being his own worst enemy to being his own best friend, or a move from self-destruction to self-realization.

Whereas 2,000 years ago, man was obsessed with the idea of God, a century ago man declared the death of God and became obsessed with his ego, self-indulgence and psychosexual satisfaction.

Western society, especially the United States, embraced Freudianism as the palliative they were looking for, to change without changing at all, the medication to quell their pesky free floating anxiety with a balm of free floating expression.  Few realized they were embracing a new religion of sand castles in the air.  Not too strangely, the answers to man’s dilemma were wrapped Apostle Paul’s and Psychiatrist Freud’s own troubled psyches.

By a curious juxtapose of ideas, one about Jesus and his message, the other about the libido and its taunting demands, one steeped in theology and the other in psychology, one monotheistic, the other agnostic or atheistic, but the message of both ringing clearly false today.

Paul is saying man is not capable of morality; Freud is saying man is helplessly consumed with lust and equally incapable of morality.  Paul is saying Jesus as God is the answer; Freud is saying a healthy ego and his Reality Principle is. 

They are saying righteousness is not enough; that man can abstain from murder but carries within himself the forces of destruction.  The Law of Moses can tell us to be chaste in a negative sense, but it cannot banish the demons from our souls.  Freud unwittingly has introduced us to our demons and now we are obsessed with them.  Paul locked Jesus out of Christianity and now it is what this faith needs but is impossible to acquire.  It bears repeating: Paul and Freud took on the world to reflect their own personal torments and made them ours.

Jesus in the Gospels teaches us that morality and virtue are not enough.  And even though Jesus didn't find these values that important, his message made it clear that the yawning gulf between the perfection of God and the imperfection of man could never be bridged by a mere set of religious observations or rules.  There was no pomp and circumstance to his ministry, no baroque rites and rituals, no cathedrals or castles in the air, no priests draped in majestic gowns or power hierarchies, nothing like this charismatic teacher named Jesus writing with a stick in the sand. 

Paul and Freud, on the other hand, interpreted their message in terms of observations and rules.  Paul is saying:

The mere existence of the moral imperative cannot save us because we are all exiled from our true homeland with God.  Jesus did not offer a way to be morally better but to be Sons of God.

He wasn’t concerned about a proven historical Jesus became Jesus was internalized as his redeemer.  In Romans (8:12; 8:21, 22; 8:39), Paul expresses his discovery of Jesus outside the realm of history into the “unsearchable riches of Christ.” 

That was once true of many who called themselves Christian.  As Christianity has come to lose its simplicity, it has come to lose something greater, its validity and relevance.  It started with Paul and his interpretation of the gospels.

For Paul, the Synoptic Gospels, the first three gospels of Jesus as Christ, is not a religion, but religion itself in its deepest and most significance.  The three gospels of the New Testament were written by Matthew, Mark and Luke, men who had learned to look at things in Paul’s way.

That was not true of the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John.  The Synoptic Gospels make no claim to history; the Fourth Gospel implies that sense.

The Synoptic Gospels are lenses focused on the person of Jesus through the eyes of Paul of Tarsus.  Paul focused on Jesus and saw him as a man in whom God Himself was at work.  John in the Fourth Gospel saw Jesus as totally a Jew governed by the Law of Moses with a Jewish orientation and perspective.  His Jesus had no interest in going beyond the borders of Judaism to embrace Gentile pagans. 

In the belief system of Paul, which became the belief system of Christianity, the Synoptic Gospels exemplified Jesus as God-like love in his own person.  This was in defiance of the cruelty of men and in the indifference of nature.  For Paul, the principle of life itself was love.  To live without “agape,” without unconditional love, he saw morality itself as a sham.  Religious observance in Paul's lexicon was synonymous with the word, love.

For the modern reader, looking 2,000 years back, the perception of love as perceived by Paul would be close to incomprehensible.  Likewise, his hymn to love wrapped in the mystical Jesus was that of a visionary governed by the quality of his imagination.  We are not an imagining people.

The events of Jesus’s life take shape after they pass through Paul’s eyes of faith.  Since he is the architect of Christianity, the same is likely to be true of those who call themselves Christians today. 

Likewise, much as the world might deny it, there is little that shapes the sensual materialistic mind of the times that hasn’t passed through Freud's prism of consciousness.  He is presented here as foil to our own misgivings looking through a mirror darkly.

Most readers are not likely to be that familiar with the “Freud, the Father of Psychoanalysis,” although his roots go back less than one hundred years. 

For my generation, we looked into the mirror and saw not a face but a retinue of maladies that blocked our consciousness as our eyes were blurred with the idea of neuroses and psychoses that men of Freud’s school bombarded our psyches.  Freud explained our deepest terrors to us in his explanatory models, which gave us little relief but gave us a better sense of him.  By the same token, the Synoptic Gospels explained Jesus to us that was Paul’s sense of the man.  As we shall see, it was not John’s in the Fourth Gospel.

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