JESUS STORY CONTINUES!

 JESUS, CHILD OF DESTINY?

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

© March 15, 2015

From English scholar M. R. James’ (1862-1936) The Apocryphal New Testament (1924), we are told that Jesus claimed his godhead in the cradle.  Several such works after Mark’s gospel made such claims.  In any case, the story of Jesus invades history, but this does not mean it is historical. 

Much as we cannot lay bare the Four Gospels by modern historical techniques, we can analyze to the point of obsession the fragments of first century writers that sporadically become available to us through new discoveries.  Much as these fragments are valued they invariably fail to restore a true sense of the time much less the story of Jesus.  In many cases, they seem as wistful in their impact as they seem promising in their revelations.

Luke places the birth of Jesus in a particular year in the reign of Herod and at the time of the universal census commanded by Emperor Caesar Augustus.  None of this is verifiable.  In fact, it may not even be true.  Christians believe it to be so as a matter of faith and choose as well to see it as a matter of historical fact. 

Gospel of St. Lukce

Moreover, the Incarnation in traditional Christianity is the belief that the second person of the Blessed Trinity, also known as God the Son or the Logos (Word) "became flesh" by being conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Jesus Christ, fully God and fully human.  Christians would say that this was something that happened in history just as Pearl Harbor and the Second World War were events that happened in history.

The Jesus Story bears a remarkable resemblance to Greek mythology.  For example, the legendary story of Semele, who was human, but also the mother of the god Dionysus. 

According to Greek legend, Semele was one of the many love interests of Zeus, who engaged in a love affair with this lovely mortal.  His wife Hera, angry with Zeus’s infidelity, decided to get her revenge, targeting the unfortunate Semele.

Hera, the Queen of the Olympian gods disguised herself and appeared to Semele one day to make Semele doubt her lover’s claims to immortality, convincing the poor mortal woman to demand proof of his divinity. Unfortunately, Semele accepted this advice.

The next time she was with Zeus, she requested that she be granted whatever she asked of him. Zeus reluctantly agreed. And so Semele ordered Zeus to reveal himself in all of his divine glory. As much as Zeus wanted to resist, he could not, and when the god showed himself to the woman, she was incinerated by the heat of his thunderbolts.

Semele, who was pregnant at the time, died immediately. But Zeus rescued the unborn child and placed him in his thigh. When the child was ready to be born, the immortal Dionysus emerged. 

To debate the historical probability that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and of the line of David is as impossible to verify as his having been divine.  The Fourth Gospel very specifically states that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem, and that he was not born of the King David line.  Yet the Fourth Gospel is no more historical than Luke.  Furthermore, it was Emperor Augustus Josephus who mentions a census in 6 C.E. before the imposition of a poll tax.  King Herod died in 4 C.E.  So, Jesus had to be born before that census.  Even so, Luke’s gospel, for many scholars, has the “look of history.” 

In the four gospels, Jesus is a very special person chosen by God, sent forth by God, and raised up by God, but never quite God Himself.  He is however invested with quasi-divine powers.  But in non-canonical or Apocryphal Gospels (James, Thomas, Peter, etc.), he is God. 

The word "Apocrypha" means "things put away" or "things hidden."  It comes from the Greek through the Latin.

The general term is applied to the books that were considered by the church as useful, but not divinely inspired. As such, to refer to Gnostic writings as "apocryphal" is misleading since they would not be classified in the same category by orthodox believers.

The term as used by scholars is "falsely inscribed" or "falsely attributed" in the sense that the writings were written by anonymous authors who affixed the name of an apostle to the  work, such as the “Gospel of Peter,” yet there is no evidence that Apostle Peter ever wrote, but clear evidence that Apostle Paul did.

Almost all the books written in both the Old and New Testaments called "Apocrypha" in the Protestant tradition are “falsely attributed.”  Likewise, “Apocrypha” is synonymous in the Catholic and Orthodox tradition as in the Protestant tradition (see Wikipedia, “New Testament Apocryphal”).

Unfortunately, within the limits of history and historical methodology, the existence of Jesus cannot be definitively proven; nor his place of birth, where it happened, when it happened, who his parents were, and how his mother became pregnant. 

The Virginal Conception of Mary, mother of Jesus, was unknown to the early Christian community.  As with many other dogmas that became instituted within Roman Catholicism over the centuries, this is but one.   No mention of this is in the Gospel of Mark or in the Epistles of Paul. 

All New Testament Gospels mention that Jesus was brought up in Nazareth in the reign of King Herod.  That would suggest that he was born before 4 C.E., which was the year Herod died.

The Gospel of Matthew tells of Herod’s jealous rage when he heard that a rival king had been born, commanding that all children under two be slain.  Josephus tells us Herod was cruel, corroborating this by telling us how Herod had forty-five prominent Jews killed for resisting his occupation of Jerusalem.  These Jewish leaders resented his subservience to the Romans and claimed he was not a good Jew, but was, indeed, a Roman sympathizing polytheist (Antiquities, XIV, 11-16). 

Matthew has Jesus, Mary and Joseph during the “Massacre of the Innocence” fleeing to Egypt to avoid the slaughter thus fulfilling the prophecy of Scripture, “Out of Egypt did I call my son” (Hosea 11:1).  There is no evidence that Jesus ever went to Egypt.  But the canonical gospels as well as the Gospel of St. Thomas has an angel informed Mary and Joseph of the death of Herod and that it was safe to return to Judea.  The Gospel of St. Thomas also has Jesus and family fleeing to Egypt (M. R. James, pp. 14-16, and 49-70).

When grown up, Jesus started preaching at the synagogue in Nazareth, where we are told he joined his father, Joseph, in the carpenter trade (Matthew 13:55).  But was he or his father actually carpenters?  A. N. Wilson writes:

In the old Jewish writings, the word “craftsman” or carpenter had a metaphorical meaning, in the language that Joseph and Jesus would have spoken.  Aramaic, the word is “nagger” and it would either mean a craftsman or a scholar, a learned man (Wilson, op. cit., p. 83).

Yet, the Gospel of Thomas makes it clear that Jesus was in fact a carpenter’s apprentice and was able to lengthen pieces of wood rather than make them shorter (James, op. cit., p. 63)

Wilson continues:

The Catholic Church, partly in order to steal a march on the Communist Party, and partly to express its keenly held belief in the sanctity of work, has instituted the feast of St. Joseph the Worker on May Day (Wilson, op. cit., p. 83).

Of Jesus’s childhood the canonical Gospels tell us nothing, but the Apocryphal Gospels fill in this disappointing gap with stimulating wonder.  For example, when Jesus was five-years-old, he made some clay sparrows on the Sabbath Day, spread out his hands, saying, “Go forth into the height and fly; ye shall not meet death at any man’s hands.”  The clay birds flew away (James, op. cit., p. 55).

The Gospel of Thomas not only displays the power of Jesus, but reveals his spite as well.  Thomas shows the young Jesus sending people away mad, deaf or blind, then later                   making them again better when they return.  Jesus even strikes people dead, solely for his amusement, then brings them back to life again (James, op. cit., p. 62).

One of Jesus’s most remarkable tricks is recorded in the Arabic Gospel and Syriac History, but not in any Greek or Latin text. 

Jesus is shown attempting to join the play other children in their game, but the children terrified run away and hide in a cellar nearby.  When Jesus asked the woman of the house if she has seen the children, she answered “No.” 

Jesus hears commotion in the cellar, and asked, “What is that noise?”  The woman says it is her goats.  Jesus answers, “Let the goats come out.”  When the cellar door is opened to the woman’s horror, all the children have been turned into goats. 

Bust of Jewish historian, Josephus 

The woman goes to Mary and Joseph and implores them to use their influence with Jesus to turn the goats back into children.  Jesus complies.  “Come my playfellows,” he calls out, “let us play together.” 

When the goats are fully human again, their mother tells the children, “See that you do everything that Jesus the Son of Mary commandeth you to do” (James, Ibid, pp. 62, 68).

We don’t see Jesus cruelty in the Four Gospels, but we can imagine here in the 21st century a child with such powers behaving precisely as Jesus is said to have behaved.  We know children can be spiteful, even cruel, some of us have only to look back to our own childhood to find such evidence.

In these four gospels, which give little insight into his childhood, we are led to assume he behaved in a human sense very well.  We do find him when he is twelve-years-old sitting in the Temple with teachers and rabbis asking them learned questions.

When Mary discovers where Jesus has been, she complains, “My child, why have you done this to us?”  Jesus answers, “Why are you looking for me?  Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:48, 49, Jerusalem Bible).

Interestingly enough, certainly most readers who have had children can relate to this, nearly all of the references to Jesus in family are ones of conflict, in which the child Jesus demonstrates quite early that he has his own mind.  Mary, the mother of Jesus is very understanding and patient with this Jesus in the bible, while Jesus is nearly always rude towards her. 

The Synoptic Gospels even suggest that Jesus is mad.  We know from Mark’s gospel that Jesus came from a large family with four brothers, James, Joset, Simon and Jude as well as sisters ((Mark 6:3). 

Evidence of Jesus existence outside the annals of Christianity are rare but significant.  Tacitus in his Annals tells of a Christian ringleader who was condemned to death during the reign of Tiberius by the prosecutor Pontius Pilate (Tacitus: Annals XV: 44). 

Pliny the Younger wrote to the Emperor Trajan saying the Christians sang hymns to Christ as to a god (Pliny: Letters X: 96-97). 

Flavius Josephus (c37-100 C.E.) refers to James the brother of Jesus, head of the Jerusalem Christian Church, calling his brother, Jesus, “the Messiah.” (Josephus XVIII). 

Josephus speaks of Jesus as a wise man, a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men who receives the truth with pleasure, and the race of Christians so named after him, are not extinct even now (Josephus, op. cit., XVIII).   

It is interesting to note that as the Apocryphal Gospels are discovered they invariably emphasize Jesus’s exceptionality and even his strangeness.  The 20^th century Christian preferred an idealized Jesus with a divine nature.  A century of technological explosion has changed the calculus of life and living, and was bound to change the sense of people with and about themselves and this small planet.

In Jewish historian Josephus, a man who once lived and wrote about what he observed, we have an authentic almost contemporary voice that confirms there was a Jesus, and in the time Josephus observed him, he was not thought of as God, nor as a heretic, but as a wise man and a doer who did wonderful deeds (Josephus, Ibid, XVIII.III-3).  In contrast, none of the gospel writers of the New Testament ever refer to Jesus as a “wise man” (Geza Vermes, “Josephus Portrait of Jesus Reconsidered” in Occident and Orient: A Tribute to the Memory of A. Scheiber, 1988, 373ff).

Now in the 21^st century, the climate in which Christians find themselves is that their religion is on trial,  rightly or wrongly, Christianity (and other religions as well) has been accused of being the problem rather than the answer.  As this explorer has found, there is more information available than ever before on Christianity.  Paradoxically, it widens rather than reduces the reader’s apprehension.  It simply doesn’t hold together, for reason.  

Mythmakers from the conception of Christianity have been busy formulating appealing themes, creating stories and presenting acts beyond human comprehension as probable if at all possible. 

Once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the early fourth century, evidence that conflicted with the Orthodox view of Jesus was destroyed or buried.  The irony is that here early in the 21^st century belief in something larger than ourselves, or what we can touch, feel, see, experience and understand has never been more important, because we find the mind is never enough.

A proportion of the Jesus stories described here may seem fanciful, but they have survived!  Granted, turning children into goats, killing and bringing people back to life, changing water into wine, walking on water, or turning clay sparrows into flying birds has little chance to seem credible.  Then you come to a story that has the pulse of the real where a woman of the street drops behind the feet of Jesus, weeping, wetting his feet with her tears, then wiping them with the locks of her flowing hair, kissing his feet and anointing them with perfume (Luke 7:37-44).  Jesus is rebuked by his host for allowing such a sinner to be in his presence much less conducting herself in this style.  The action of Jesus demonstrated his humanity and accessibility, and like the Publican and the Pharisee, that humility and confession prove a healthier soul.

Given Christianity would become a Gentile faith, another story seems beyond invention.  It is the story of the Canaanite woman demanding Jesus heal her daughter.  His reply was that it wouldn’t be worth the scraps from the Jewish table to its dogs to do so, that is, to Gentiles.

New discoveries of the Jesus Story such as Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt of a cache of Gnostic writings in 1945, the Dead Sea Scrolls near Qumran in 1947, and other discoveries show Jesus was a morally serious man, that he may not have said precisely what the gospels and apocryphal gospels say, but it is clear he had a theology from the beginning, and no discovery has diminished that fact. 

The aim is still to one day reveal the historical Jesus, which means getting beyond what we already know, or is recorded in the referenced sources here, as well as getting beyond the Roman Catholic Church’s very specific view of what is conceived as the Catholic faith. 

Catholicism has survived and triumphed, and Protestantism has not shown much more interest in the Semitic origins of Jesus.  As the impact of traditional Christianity continues to dwindle, perhaps the Qumran Scrolls, and other writings, which in all probability were written during the lifetime of Jesus will be able to depart from myth to embrace some sense of history.  One thing is certain.  The Jesus Story shall survive.