James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Originally published © May 27, 2016/©August 15, 2021
IMPROBABLE CHRISTIANITY
"The Jesus Story"
FROM A MODEST JEWISH SECT, OF MAINLY ILLITERATE SOULS
LED BY A MAN WHO MAY NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO EITHER READ OR WRITE, BECAME THE
CHRISTIAN RELIGION OF MORE THAN A BILLION SOULS.
It is very often said that the soul
cannot be pure unless she is reduced to her original simplicity, the state God
created her in; just as from copper-gold cannot be made by two or three
roastings, it must be reduced to its elemental nature. Things that melt on heating and solidify on
cooling are pure of a watery nature.
They must therefore be turned back again to water and get quite rid of
their present nature. Thus heaven and
science conspire to transmute it into gold.
We can counterfeit silver with iron and with copper-gold; the more like
the more false, without riddance. It is
the same with the soul. Virtues are easy
to talk of, easy to feign but to have them is extremely rare.
Meister Eckhart (1260-1328), German theologian
WHEN MYTHS ASSUME THE CHARACTER OF REALITY
REFLECTIONS
Like many others, I have pondered my birth faith, which is Irish Roman
Catholicism. Again, like many readers,
I’ve turned to scholars who continue to ponder the fragments discovered of the
ancient writings of the early Christian Church in the original Greek and
Aramaic as translated into English.
These scholars make what they know comprehensible to a lay
reader, such as me, and what they believe to be its significance in a
historical context. This is not
easy. There is a serious gulf between
what is known about the historic Jesus, and what has been mythologized about
him, first in the hundred years after his death mainly by Peter and Paul, and
the writers of the Four Gospels of the New Testament, and then by all the
Doctors of the Roman Catholic Church once the Roman Emperor Constantine ceased
to persecute Christians in 305 C.E. (Common Era), then to have Christianity
declared the state religion of the Roman Empire in 380 C.E.
Of the early writers,
only Peter knew Jesus in life, but he was not a writer or chronicler of his
relationship with Jesus. Moreover, it is
not certain he could either read or write.
The same is likely to have been the case of James, the brother of Jesus,
known as “James the Just” for his righteousness in defense of the poor. He, not Peter, headed the Jerusalem Church
after Jesus’ death, and like Jesus, he was a consummate Jew, loyal to the Law
(of Moses) and Jewish tradition and ritual.
There is no evidence that Jesus intended the Christian Church
to be a mainly Gentile religion, as Paul saw that it became, but a reformed
Jewish faith.
Scholars of the Jesus Seminar have argued that much of what
is written in the New Testament cannot be trusted as factually true as there is
no reliable foundation for the Nativity, the Resurrection, the Sermon on the
Mount, the encounter of Jesus with Pontius Pilate, and many other instances,
including the role of Judas in the Betrayal of Jesus.
Add to this the fact that there are very few Jews in the
Roman Catholic Church of more than a billion souls that have survived. Roman Catholicism is largely the invention of
the Doctors of the Church over the centuries with such giants as Augustine of
Hippo and Thomas Aquinas among many others.
Christianity is essentially the church of Jesus in name only.
Scholars have determined from studying fragments of documents
that gospel writers of the early Christian Church didn’t write their books
until at least forty to one hundred years after the death of Jesus. None of these writers ever met Jesus or
talked to anyone that had known Jesus.
Their works relied on the oral history and stories of Jesus that
survived along with their embellishments.
It has been a daunting task of these scholars to make sense of
the Four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as they are loaded with
contradictions, exaggerations, and novelized attempts to create a sense of
Jesus’ ministry and him as the messiah, or the Christ. In addition, there are the Gospels of Thomas,
Judas, Peter, and the mystifying “Q” documents, none of which was likely
written by any of the named gospel writers.
Complicating this matter further, reading these scholars, the
reader encounters inconsistencies in their assessments of the same events, as
well as a level of contradiction in their analyses. Yet, when you step back, these discrepancies
seem healthy if not heroic given these fragments with which they have to
work. Many authors are quite candid
about their biases alerting the reader.
For example, Professor Bart D. Ehrman admits to being an agnostic.
Many of my friends, colleagues, and even my children
and grandchildren have come to reject religion entirely if not the idea of God,
as they live in the world of agnosticism, atheism, and the physical sciences,
and are suspicious of anything that has the hint of religion. This leaves little room for the Virgin Birth
of a Savior, the Miracles, or the Death and Resurrection of Jesus as the Christ
into Heaven.
As a child, indoctrinated into Roman Catholic dogma, rituals,
rites of passage, and the Community of Saints, I assumed that these tenets of
the faith emanated from Jesus, the Christ, who in his short ministry of three
years before his death on the Cross had established my “Roman Catholicism.” Naïve, to be sure, yet quite compelling when
you are a child with an open mind with no filters.
It wasn’t until I was a young executive working in South
Africa for an American company facilitating the formation of a new chemical
company that I encountered a world outside the parameters of that comfort zone
of my American youth. My university
college education failed to penetrate this façade as I practiced my Roman
Catholicism without distrust: “The Roman Catholic Church is the only true
church established by Jesus Christ . . .”
Indeed, I ignored the duplicity encountered between my
Catholic faith and the real world until I experienced the discomfiture of
apartheid in South Africa. It was
1968. It angered me to find my
Catholicism existed placidly in a country where the majority Bantu (black)
population was ruled with draconian efficiency by the South African Afrikaner
minority. Where was the Jesus of the
Gospels? He was not here!
Over the next several decades I would read scholars of early
Christianity “In Search for the Real Parents of My Soul.” The search continues but is invariably
frustrated by the fact that the historic Jesus seems buried in the imagination
of Christianity if not history.
Contrast this with the profound impact the iconic Jesus has
had on the world with more than two billion practicing Christians with over a
billion Roman Catholics. His ministry
and his teachings did not emerge in a vacuum no matter how much they may have
been doctored and romanticized over the centuries.
What scholars tell us is that the teachings of Jesus, as well
as his ministry, were in the tradition and culture of ancient Judaism. Jesus was once and always a Jew, and his
vision and promise were in that setting.
Jesus and Judaism are inextricably linked to the same theology. He cannot be understood other than from that
perspective as he was of his time preaching the Word.
WHAT SCHOLARS BELIEVE TO BE TRUE
ABOUT JESUS
Most scholars believe that Jesus did
exist, that he was born in a small backward peasant village called Nazareth,
not Bethlehem, as many Christians today prefer to believe.
Nazareth was a
fishing village with farmers and other unskilled and poorly educated citizens
of only a few hundred souls. There is
evidence that Jesus could neither read nor write, and that many of the
quotations attributed to him as well as the events that are celebrated in his
life did not take place, or were not nearly as glamorous as portrayed.
There is also
evidence that he was attractive of medium height with a gentle manner and
commanding voice and presence that contributed to his charismatic messianic
appeal. He spoke in Aramaic, which was
the tongue of the peasant class, and not the Hebrew of the Elders and High
Priests.
[As is common when people speak, we can tell what region of the country,
the level of education, and their relative sophistication after exchanging a
few words with them. This was also true
in the time of Jesus with Hellenistic Jews from the diaspora, such as Paul, who
flaunted their Hellenistic superiority to Aramaic Jews.]
Chances are Jesus was married,
although there is no such record, as nearly all men of the age were
married. He had brothers and sisters
with his brother James important in preserving his form of Christianity, which
was essentially a Jewish sect.
His brother, known as “James the
Just,” chose to live in Jerusalem after the death of his brother, Jesus. James was recognized for his consummate piety
and tireless defense of the poor. He
owned nothing, drank no wine, and ate no meat while religiously keeping the
Jewish diet and the tenets of the Laws of
Moses. For the followers of Jesus,
he was the “just one,” while to Jewish authorities he was praised for his
rectitude and unshakable commitment to the Law.
James would come to have trouble,
however, with Paul-the-convert, who was of a different persuasion and at
variance with him on what constituted the mission of Jesus. James had little to no interest in Gentiles,
which was the thrust of Paul’s ministry.
James could tolerate Gentiles, but only if they subscribed to the tenets
of Jewish law and were circumcised. Like Jesus, there is little evidence that
James could either read or write, while Paul was educated in Greek, the
language of Mediterranean culture, and was a skillful writer. Jesus, like James, was deeply committed to
the tenets of Judaism and the Old
Testament, the faith of his birth.
This found him giving scrupulous attention to the prophecies of the
Jewish prophets.
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.
Jesus was a reformer and in that
sense political, and therefore a threat to the power and privilege enjoyed by
the High Priests and Elders who were in collusion with their Roman
occupiers. This would lead to his death on the Cross.
While scholars tend to agree that
Jesus did die on the Cross, “The Story of
Jesus” reflected in the Four Gospels
of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are considered suspect and full of
speculation, interpretation, projection, and spin, as well as laden with
inconsistencies, contradictions, and novelistic invention.
It is likely
that Jesus was born in around 2 C.E. (Common Era) and died about 35 C.E. Brother James took control of the Christian
sector of the Jerusalem Movement
after his death. He was a zealot keeping
the group consistently centered on Jewish tradition.
The Christianity that followed the
conversion of Saul of Tarsus (born in Tarsus, Cilicia, which is Turkey today)
to Paul of Christianity would not follow this script. The fateful conversion happened on the way to
Damascus around 36 C.E., or shortly after the death of Jesus.
Paul, as a Greek educated diaspora Jew was considered by James and the Jerusalem Group as an outsider. Compounding this, he had been employed by the Romans to persecute Christians. His personality and sense of the Christian mission clashed with the Jerusalem Christians from the beginning.
As mystifying
as Jesus is to scholars, Paul seems to be equally so. He wrote well and often, but in Greek, not
Hebrew or Aramaic, chronicling his exploits, many of which were incorporated
into the New Testament. He may also have been a Roman citizen,
yet he was beheaded by Rome for his beliefs.
Despite the many books on him, his biography remains tantalizingly
sketchy.
While Paul and
James were invariably in conflict, Peter, who is recognized in Christianity as
the “chosen” leader, was not gifted with either leadership or unifying skills
and appears quite remarkably peripheral to events. His tentative nature was apparent when James
assumed the leadership of the Jerusalem
Movement without his opposition.
Stephan, the first Christian martyr
(died c 34 - 36 C.E.), was stoned to death shortly after the death of
Jesus. He is described as a young
Hellenistic Jew and deacon in the early Christian Church assigned to distribute
food and welfare to the Greek-speaking Hellenistic Jews in Jerusalem. He appears in Luke’s “Acts of the Apostles.”
Stephan believed Jesus was not only
the “Son of Man” (Daniel 7:1-14) but God made flesh, and openly proclaimed
that belief in synagogues.
This assertion, considered blasphemy
by the High Priests, led to his stoning.
Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee, was witness to this, but not a
participant. Yet, watching the young man
defiantly embrace his death for his faith moved him deeply. Two years later, Saul, on his way to Damascus
experienced his life-changing conversion.
He was struck blind by a light in the
sky, fell off his horse to the ground, and heard a voice say, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
“Who are you, Lord?” he asked.
“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” the voice replied, “Now get up and go into the city, and you
will be told what you must do.”
Saul got up
from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could not see. So, his companions led him by the hand into
the city of Damascus, where he was blind for three days.
Next to the dramatic appeal of the
life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth stands the conversion to
Christianity of Saul of Tarsus.
If Saul had remained a Jewish rabbi,
we would not have thirteen of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, and Christianity’s early
expansion into the Gentile world would unlikely have taken place.
The Jerusalem Movement, headed by “James the
Just,” would have remained essentially a Jewish sect. Many historians, but certainly not all, speak
of Paul’s conversion as being essential to Christianity becoming the faith that
it was destined to become. Arguably,
the religion that Christianity was to become carries more the imprimatur of
Paul than Jesus.
Paul was known to be epileptic, and
the validation of his conversion is only a matter of his account of that
experience and that of his disciple, Ananias, who was with him at the
time.
With that
conversion, Jesus was detached from his Jewish mission of liberation to an
otherworldly figure centered around the Gentiles, and away from the politics
and suffering of Israeli Jews under the Romans.
This is due in no small measure to the fact that Paul, as a Jew of the
diaspora lived and thought in the context of a world apart from the Jerusalem
Church headed by James the Just.
To state it another way, Paul from the first was not interested in the
historical Jesus but only in his messianic mission to fulfill the prophecies of
the Old Testament. Only the spiritual Jesus mattered, a man who
as God left his earthly body behind and spiritually ascended into heaven. Without the legitimacy of the Resurrection, Paul’s Christianity has no
validity. In his transformation of Jesus
from an earthly figure in history to a transcendent being beyond history, he in
effect made the Jews and not the Romans responsible for his crucifixion and
death.
Lost in this was the fact that Jesus was concerned less with his Father’s Kingdom, as traditionally understood, and more with dealing with the pathology and earthly corruption that pervaded the authorities of the Temple. He could see what the High Priests and Elders extorted from the poor, the destitute, the oppressed and subjugated in complicity with the Roman occupiers who seized property and subjected ordinary citizens to usury practices without recourse.
Jesus was never interested in power,
but in righting wrongs by reforming his beloved Judaism, which would also be
the mission of his brother, James, after his death. Paul, the outsider, could never appreciate
their pain or have this perspective as he was not privy to what they had
endured.
The Christianity
that followed the conversion of Saul of Tarsus to Paul of Christianity on his way to Damascus could not be more
different.
Paul and James disagreed
fundamentally on what Jesus meant. This
put Paul in conflict with Peter as well.
Although Peter was the putative leader of the new church, he was less
prominent than James in the early days after Jesus’ death, falling in line with
James and his ministry of Christianity as a Jewish sect.
Incidentally, James had no active
role in the ministry of Jesus in his brother’s earthly lifetime. After the Resurrection
of Jesus, which he believed emphatically, he took control of the Jerusalem Movement. Like Stephan, more than a quarter-century before,
he was stoned to death on the authority of the High Priest Hanan ben Hanan in
62 C.E. for “breaking the law” with his apostasy. Four years later, as Jerusalem erupted into
revolt against the Romans, 66 C.E., the Roman Emperor Nero, reacting to the sudden
surge of Christian persecutions in Rome, seized Peter and Paul, and had them
executed for espousing what he assumed was the same faith. Paul was beheaded near Rome with a sword,
while Peter was crucified on a cross, choosing to be nailed upside down in
deference to how Jesus had been crucified.
Emperor Nero thought they were
followers of the same Christian religion.
He was wrong. Peter was closer to
the Jewish Christianity of James, while Paul was an advocate of a more Gentile
Christianity.
[It has always felt strange to me when I visit Rome to see that
magnificent Cathedral of St. Peter’s in the heart of the City of the Seven
Hills, carrying the name of that saint, whose work was, at best, peripheral to
the establishment of a dominant Gentile religion, while St. Paul’s Cathedral is
“Outside the Wall” of that great city, yet there is little evidence that there
would be a St. Peter’s Cathedral much less a Roman Catholic Church were it not
for the writings, energetic mission, and creative theology of St. Paul’s.]
Many martyrs were to follow these
great leaders of the early Christian movement.
Paradoxically, martyrdom, far from diminishing a cause, energizes it to
spread its message. This would prove to
be the case with Christianity.
*
* *
Everything changed for
Christianity after 70 C.E. when the Romans at the command of Emperor Nero took
siege of Jerusalem, decimated the famous Second Temple of Judaism leaving the
Holy City in ruin.
The Roman Army, led by the future
Emperor Titus with Tiberius Julius Alexander as his second-in-command, retook the city of Jerusalem that had
been lost to Rome by the Jewish Uprising in 66 C.E.
While this temporarily crushed
Judaism, it gave momentum to Paul’s Christianity as a Gentile faith spreading
it across the Mediterranean from its tenuous Jewish roots. On the other hand, James having been martyred
nearly a decade earlier, The Roman Siege essentially
ended the Jerusalem Church as its devotees took flight from Jerusalem to avoid
the Romans never recovering their mission.
Quite surprisingly, on the other
hand, the siege had the opposite effect on Judaism. The Temple essentially shredded its political
and corrupt baggage of the Jewish hierarchy that had hampered the Jewish faith
for decades, providing a colossal resurgence and renewal that would auger well
for Judaism to the present day.
Meanwhile,
Christians who followed the writings of Paul latched on to the idea that Jesus
died for the Sins of Adam and Eve,
and that he rose again from the dead to prove he was God immortal, and that his
life was meant to prepare Christians for life after death in heaven.
Paul had turned the authenticity of “The Jesus Story” from an earthly to a
spiritual paradise beyond evaluation.
Martyred only four years before the Roman
Siege of Jerusalem, his legacy was firmly intact to dictate the surge to a
new Christianity.
As difficult
as it is to discern the authenticity, the teachings of Jesus did not emerge out
of a vacuum. Jesus and Judaism are two
subjects so inextricably linked that we cannot separate one from the other if
the interest is in understanding Jesus and his time. Given this limitation, the Jesus of Nazareth
and the Christ of the Christian Church that evolved appear to have a fragile
connection.
WHY “NOWHERE
MAN” IN “NOWHERE LAND” IS
RELEVANT
Religion is very much in our cultural
DNA as a utopian phenomenon. This has
been so since man first became aware of his consciousness. Once aware, he found himself in a hostile
environment in which he did not have the physical attributes to deal directly
and effectively with the wild beast of the planet. His survival depended on using his wits
against this monstrous disadvantage, which he did.
Survival has
always been critical and the principal motivation of man on earth. In time, he recognized that his conscious
mind was something the animal kingdom did not possess. Man came to recognize that wildlife operated
within a nature that was predictable, which was something he could use to his
advantage.
But alas, with
consciousness also came fear: fear of being unable to deal successfully with
these creatures; fear that man could not find adequate food, clothing, and
shelter to preserve his life; fear of clashing lightning and thunder in the
sky; fear of wild forest fires ignited by bolts of fire from the sky; fear of
torrential rains that engulfed the earth; fear of snowstorms that did the same;
fear of shivering cold and blistering heat; fear of the earth opening up with
earthquakes; fear of mudslides cascading down the mountains to bury him; fear
of the hot lava of volcanoe eruptions doing the same; fear of tsunamis and hurricanes;
fear of all-natural phenomenon that was beyond his control or
understanding. It was as if these forces
of nature were telling him: you don’t
belong here!
Terrified
beyond comprehension, he looked for something or someone to calm his haunted
spirit. Enter the shaman priest, a
person experiencing the same phenomenon, but who chose to embrace his fears and
spin them to his advantage. He explained his fears away, and in so doing, realized his power.
Thus religion was born. All
religions emanate from that simple premise of fear many eons ago.
Religion is
and has always been a coping mechanism and God is a part of that device, and
essential to conscious man. There must
be a force, a Divine Nature beyond
pulling the strings. Man needs to
believe this to give him a sense that he is not alone; that there is some connection with the divine to give meaning
to life. Man is a conscious animal with
the power to conquer and manipulate nature to his purposes in a godlike
fashion. If he can do this, there must be
a Universal Consciousness beyond that
is the Master of the Universe. He chooses this to be his God.
No one has
ever seen God, but many have claimed to have heard his voice, and strangely,
God always speaks in the language of the listener and therefore is
comprehensible. Note that God addresses
listeners in the same dialect and garbled syntax of the grammatical language of
the listener. Of course, he can because
he is God, and knows precisely in what language to converse with the listener
of the more than 100,000 languages available.
People hold to this connection, dubbed insane at one level
(schizophrenia), and sane and sanguine at another (prayer).
When you think
of the prophets of the Old Testament,
against the long journey of man on earth, you realize that organized
consciousness in terms of religion is a recent development. Am I implying that I am an atheist? Or an agnostic? No, I believe in God as God and the Roman
Catholic Church has given me succor since my birth. I am no longer a practicing Catholic, but it
is in my cultural DNA and displays itself every day of my life in the
discipline with which I am inclined to conduct myself.
God and
Catholicism has been fundamental to how I view life, and how life views
me. I pray. I even pray to my favorite saints. So, you ask:
How can I be so philosophical about God in one sense,
seemingly rejecting him as a supreme entity in another, and to be so in tune with him as
an unknowable force in yet another?
The reason is quite simple. Were it not for that foundation, that belief
system of trust, I would be a very different person and personality.
The divinity
of Jesus and his relationship to the Godhead has often been questioned, indeed,
from the very beginning of Christianity.
Sadly, there has not always been a tolerance for such questioning or
speculation.
Arius (250 – 336 CE), a
Christian priest in Alexandria (Egypt), went against the prevailing norm of his
time regarding the divinity of Jesus. He
got into trouble over such questioning.
This led to the First Council of
Nicaea, which was convened at the request of the Roman Emperor Constantine
in 325 C.E. The council declared the
divinity of Jesus Christ equal to the Father and the Holy Ghost, postulating
the concept of Trinitarianism, or
three equal persons in a single Godhead.
It became known as The Blessed
Trinity.
The trinity had its roots
in the Old Testament, but the Council of Nicaea defined it in
Christological terms. Those familiar with the “Apostle Creed” (“I believe
in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, and Jesus Christ His
only Son Our Lord . . .”) know that
it lays out the total belief system of Roman Catholicism. The Council
of Nicaea created the Nicene Creed to
combat the apostasy of Arianism, disseminating the creed throughout
Christendom. It proved effective in
neutralizing the spread of Arianism.
Religion and even the phenomenon of
belief in one God or monotheism have had many authors, but the one most
familiar in ancient history is Akhenaton, also known as Amenhotep IV. He abandoned Egyptian polytheism for
monotheism, ruling for 17 years and dying in 1336 B.C.E. (Before the Common
Era).
Even though Christianity, Judaism,
and Islamism seem constantly in conflict in this postmodern age of the 21st
century, they worship the same monotheistic God. It is as if God’s children fight to claim
his favor, seeing their way as the right and only way with every other way the
way of the infidel.
We seemingly need some force or
reference point outside ourselves, some being or entity with which we can
identify, a being far greater than anything conceivable but yet integral to how we
see ourselves. We are incapable of
imagining this force or being without making it into our image and likeness.
How else would we claim that man is
made in the image and likeness of God?
Although God is the same God to all, he differs from one religion to
another to be an angry God, a savage God, a jealous God, a vengeful God, or a
righteous God.
God is never seen as a complacent forgiving God or a tolerant God. On the contrary, he is perceived much like
Freud’s “Morality Principle” or the
self-righteous parent. He is a force to
be reckoned with or pay the consequences.
Not surprisingly, those in power positions whatever the institution,
demonstrate the propensity to act as a parent. Religious authorities assume the role of the father figure, academics the mantle of knowers, while corporate CEOs
pontificate, “We are family.”
What is the story of the Garden of Eden
and Adam and Eve’s fall from grace, but a demonstration of parental disgust
with delinquent children?
Men kill or die in defense of God’s Sacred Word, whatever the religion when they feel That Word is sullied, failing to get
inside The Word to embrace the rebuke to
understand the nature of the conflict, anger, hate, jealousy, frustration, and envy.
We make God very human and then treat
him as less than human, failing to understand that people behave as they do
towards God as they behave towards each other.
God comes in for rebuke because we have self-contempt for
ourselves. The greater the pleasure of
our self-indulgence the more we become out-of-control malcontents looking for a
cause greater than ourselves to rise out of the muck, only to find ourselves
sinking deeper into the muck as we no longer have room for God.
Throughout time, man has had to accept the idea of his fall
from grace to save him from damnation for he is, alas, prisoner to the Word of God when that Word was written by a man.
Stories have always provided man with
solace as a means by which to cope with the unknown and the unknowable, and man
is clever in writing such stories for that purpose. But when he treats these stories, and these
words as divine is when he gets into trouble.
Brilliant men for centuries have
pondered these stories for hidden meanings, treating them as sacred and
sacrosanct, which has eased the plight of man as he depends on the veracity of
these stories to explain his nature to himself as well as to console him. This quiets his anxious spirit in the midst
of the unknowable.
If you peruse these stories taken
from the Good Books of any religion,
you often find an angry or disappointed God, a God who can only be consoled
through contrition and sacrifice. Then there
are the gods of Buddha. They understand
that despite man’s persistence he cannot
push the water. They feel there is
no other recourse than for a man to have a sense of humor about his
debilitating angst and fears by exhorting him to joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world.
Religion through these books has been
the psychologist through the centuries but not always wisely for to take refuge
in these works exclusively can blunt the reality of daily encounters. As the Buddha says, “We are all Buddhist.” Were that to be true, the fact remains that
for the past quarter millennium the West has led and now the East is following
in imitation of Western enterprises, for better or worse.
The “Jesus Story”
happened only a short 2,000 years ago in the Cradle of Western Civilization,
which is also the birthplace of Judaism and Islamism.
The Four Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John have been proven by scholars over
the past one hundred years to contain many myths. They cannot be trusted as authentic when it
comes to the historic Jesus, who was born in the backward hamlet of Nazareth
around 2 C.E.
As much as “The Jesus Story” is romanticized, given where Jesus was born, the
inhabitants of his community, the nature of the work available, the level of
poverty incidental to that community, the absence of schooling, chances are
most Nazarenes could neither read nor write, and Jesus rose out of these
circumstances.
He was a deeply religious Jew and was
well versed in the oral history of Judaism, the Laws of Moses, the Torah, and
the customs and traditions of Judaism that he upheld to the fullest. He wasn’t interested in Gentiles, or the
world beyond Judea. He was however a
reformer and saw massive corruption in the Temple and the Jewish hierarchy of
High Priests and Elders.
In his time, High Priests and Elders
were more political than religious, actively engaged in courting favor with the
Roman occupiers at the expense of lower rabbis and the Jewish people. This rankled Jesus, who did not see himself
as political, but who became political as he opposed religious duplicity and
doctrinal negligence.
Since the earliest Gospels were
written forty to one hundred years after Jesus’ death, they reflect the spirit
and temper of the times including the chaos and simmering conflict within
Judaism and between it and the Romans.
With oral histories of any culture, stories evolve and are embellished to put the best face on events. Scholars tell us this is the case with the stories of Jesus. Inevitably, there are contradictions and false inferences in the Four Gospels. So, it should come as no surprise that scholars of Christology can differ as well. I have tried to glean some sense of their agreement.
This does not detract from the fact
that Jesus did live, did have a mission that lasted about three years, did
attempt to establish some integrity in the Jewish Temple, did come to cross
purposes with the Jewish hierarchy, did die on the Cross and was taken down
from the Cross, and buried in a rich man’s sepulcher. From that point on, Paul’s religiosity takes
over with his Gentile brand of Christianity promoting the Resurrection of the Risen Jesus, which is critical to the theology
of Christianity beyond Judaism.
Many claimed to have seen the risen
Jesus and held to that belief as they attempted to carry out his message, not
to the Gentiles, but to the Jewish people. The
principal among those disciples was his brother, James, who led the Jerusalem Group. James assumed this role with unfathomable
energy. Like Jesus, he was thoroughly
Jewish and would find it incomprehensible to evangelize the Jesus Mission other than to the Jewish
people.
In his single-minded passion, James
had no intentions of being political. But in preaching the Jesus message, he
ran into discord with the High Priests of Jewish authority who were deeply
political. For his attempt to Reform Judaism, he was tried and stoned
to death in 62 C.E. He did not live to
see the disastrous Jewish rebellion against Rome in 66 C.E.
The Jewish Great Revolt against Rome in 66 C.E. led to the greatest catastrophe in
Jewish life and many scholars believe it was a terrible mistake. Rome had occupied Israel for more than one
hundred years (63 B.C.E. to 66 B.C.) with the rule of Rome becoming
increasingly onerous. Roman procurators
continued to appoint High Priests who imposed unjust usury taxation on the poor
that ultimately led to the fatal rebellion.
In 70 C.E., Rome brought a massive
army to Israel and decimated Jerusalem, and destroyed the Second Temple, the
most sacred place of the Jewish faith.
The Christian Church of Jesus had survived his death but was already
eroding once James had been martyred in 62 C.E.
Now members of the Jerusalem Group
were flying to the hills to avoid the advancing Romans. The Jewish Sect of Jesus was essentially
history.
CHRISTIANITY AS A GENTILE FAITH
About the same time as of the Jewish Revolt, Paul and Peter were being
put to death in Rome in 66 C.E.
Peter, always ambivalent about
Christianity as a Jewish sect of Judaism or an extended Jewish faith to
Gentiles, was neither as persuasive as Paul nor as energetically
resilient. Both men, however, were put
to death by Emperor Nero. Christian
scholar Reza Aslan writes:
“Luke ends his account of Paul’s life (Acts of the Apostles)
with his arrival in Rome and he does not mention that Peter was in the city,
too. Stranger still, Luke does not
bother to record the most significant aspect of the two men’s years together in
the Imperial City. For in the year 66
C.E., the same year that Jerusalem erupted in revolt, the emperor Nero,
reacting to a sudden surge in Christian persecution in Rome, seized Peter and
Paul and executed them both for espousing what he assumed was the same faith. He was wrong.”
The Roman Catholic Church has the
indelible mark of Paul in its works as it does the Four Gospels, but nowhere can be found the historic Jesus, the
Jewish Jesus, the Jesus of James in Judea, only Peter as hypothesized in
the Four Gospels.
That said everything changed with the
“Siege of Jerusalem” by the Romans,
sacking the city, destroying the Second
Temple, and decimating both Judaism as it was known, and vanquishing the Jerusalem Group of Christians. A new Judaism would emerge and Christianity
would become a Gentile religion. Jesus
was in a new religion only in name.
Over the next more than 200 years,
the early Christian Church would suffer constant persecution throughout the
Mediterranean world. This tyrannical
discrimination would only make the Christian cause stronger and Christians more
passionate to prevail.
FORTUITOUS SERENDIPITY
The decision of the Roman Emperor Constantine's
(306 –337 C.E.) to quit the persecution of Christians was formalized
in 313 C.E. with the Edict of Milan. The decriminalizing of Christian worship was
a boom to the Church with emperors who followed Constantine mainly maintaining this
same practice.
Then, in 380 C.E., the “Edict of Thessalonica” ordered all subjects of the Roman Empire to profess
the faith of the Bishop of Rome and the Bishop of Alexandria, making Nicene Christianity the state religion
of the Roman Empire.
By making Christianity the state
religion of the empire, or the universal or catholic religion of the Western
World, this came to be known as The Roman Catholic Church.
This nascent Christianity had the
enduring imprint of Paul and the Four
Gospels. Yet, Christianity would be
changed decisively over time by Doctors
of the Church such as Augustine and Aquinas.
Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430 C.E.),
also known as St. Augustine, was a Christian theologian and philosopher whose
writings influenced the development of Western Christianity and Western
philosophy. Prolific author Garry Wills
is a diligent student of St. Augustine and interpreter of his works such as “The City of God” (412 – 427 C.E.) and “Confessions” (397 – 401 C.E.).
When the Western Roman Empire began
to disintegrate, Augustine was at the ready to establish his muscular Christianity with his Christian philosophy and theology of the tenets of Roman Catholicism. These would become central to the Christian
faith, especially the “Doctrine of
Original Sin,” and The Blessed Trinity, or three in one God. This theme is central to Augustine’s “City of God,” a spiritual rather than an
earthly city, and in that sense, parallels his thinking with that of Paul’s.
Then in the early middle ages, the
Italian Dominican friar and Roman Catholic priest, Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274
C.E.), emerged as a formidable Doctor of
the Church as a philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of
scholasticism, which was then dominant.
Unlike many currents in the Church at the time, he embraced several
ideas of Aristotle, indeed, he attempted to synthesize Aristotelian philosophy
into Christian principles. He argued:
“Philosophy examines the supernatural order in the light of
reason, and theology examines it in the light of revelations. Although reason is used in theology,
revelations does not fall into the providence of philosophy. And philosophy cannot contradict theology
because truth cannot contradict truth.”
For Aquinas, faith and
knowledge were not mutually exclusive.
He claimed that belief took over where knowledge ended, summing up his
theory, “To believe is to think with
ascent.”
This transformation from “The Jesus Story” to what subsequently
became Roman Catholicism, then Protestantism and other forms of Christianity
can be found in many sources. Time
permitting, it will be addressed in a future segment.
A VIGNETTE OF CATHOLICISM’S TROUBLED HISTORY
The Roman Catholic Church has had a
rocky history, and none more debilitating than the Spanish Inquisition, which was established in 1480 C.E. by the
Catholic monarchs of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile.
The Spanish Inquisition was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy and
to replace the Medieval Inquisition of the Church under Papal control. Spain, at the time, was fearful of Jewish and
Moslem influence and felt obliged to install a draconian system to deal with
the problem. Jews and Moslems were being
forced to convert to Catholicism or be deported. Worse yet, if they insisted on practicing
their religion, they could be imprisoned, tortured, and even killed for
resisting the crown.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov” (1880) captures
a sense of Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land in the time of the Spanish Inquisition. This Russian author saw Jesus as “the Special One,” and was incensed at
the brutality of this chapter in his Christian faith.
Dostoyevsky's story of “The Grand Inquisitor” is told by Ivan, who questions his brother,
Alyosha, a novice monk, on the possibility of there being a personal and
benevolent God. The tale centers on the
ideas of human nature, freedom, and the fundamental ambiguities to life with
which religion seems to be so inexorably entangled, and paradoxically, the more
the church attempts to improve the situation the deeper the muddle, so Ivan
asks, “Why the church? Why
religion?”
In the tale, Christ comes back to Earth in Seville (Spain) at the time of
the Inquisition. He performs many miracles echoing the words
in the Gospels, and people come to recognize and adore him. But for this attention, he is arrested by Inquisition leaders and sentenced to be
burnt to death at the stake the next day.
The “Grand Inquisitor” visits
Jesus in his cell to tell him that the Church no longer needs him, that he is
an impediment to its geopolitical status and ambitions which are political and
not moral, worldly, and not spiritual.
The text of the story is devoted to the Inquisitor explaining to Jesus why his return would interfere with the mission of the Church, which has nothing in common with his Jewish origins and reform ideas. Besides, his presence would disrupt the Church’s hold on power “in these critical times.” Jesus should forget that he is “the Special One,” of being God and man, and return to anonymity where he belongs.
Anyone who has ever
struggled with his faith, whatever that faith might be, has paused at some time
to question the relevance of his faith to his life experience, as Dostoyevsky
did, in writing this novel. This episode,
alone, is one of the great moments in Western literature.
THE PAPAL BASILICA OF ST. PETER’S
When you
study the footprints of Jesus in the early first century, you get the sense of
a man confident in his mission, sure of its relevance, with a vision of a more
unified Israelite Kingdom, or earth, not in heaven.
He was not
for pomp and circumstance, not for uniforms of splendor that set him apart from
other men. Neither did he reflect wealth and power, nor a force
with which to reckon. He was a humble
man with a message, and that message was consistent with the Laws of Moses and the words of the
prophets in the Old Testament.
What would he think of the magnificent cathedrals such as St. Peter’s Basilica? There has been a church on this site since the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great. The construction of this impressive church replaced the Old St. Peter’s Basilica of the 4th century, C.E., taking from April 1506 to November 1626 to complete or 120 years.
Incidentally,
Martin Luther (1483 – 1546) visited Rome for the first time in 1511, while it
was still in construction, with several other Augustinian monks on business for
the order. It was then that Luther
witnessed the cavalier selling of Catholic indulgences on the streets of Rome,
and the flagrant greed of the church operating as an outlet mall or discount
store of rosaries, crucifixes, scapular medals, prayer books, and medallions –
all supposedly “blessed” by the pope – provoking him to return to Germany and
write his 95 theses and post them on the door of the Wittenberg Chapel. The
Protestant Reformation would follow.
St. Peter’s
is regarded as one of the holiest Catholic shrines, holding a unique position
in the Catholic world, and perhaps the greatest of all the churches in
Christendom. But the question still begs
to be answered: what would Jesus think?
I sense
that if the Jerusalem Group of James
had survived after the death of Jesus, it might have had a significant
influence on the Jewish religion. There
were between 600,000 and 1 million Jews in Jesus’ time with a world population
of 300 million, but only about 100,000 Jews in Judea.
The works
of Paul and less of Peter tapped into that world population with Christianity
as a Gentile faith. Today, with a world
population of 7.2 billion, there are 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, with 40
percent of them in South America. The
Jewish population is about 6 million Jews in America and 8 million Jews in
Israel with the world population of Judaism less than 20 million.
COMING FULL CIRCLE –
WHEN A POPE ACTS LIKE JESUS
Pope
Francis I, the current pope, was chosen on March 13, 2013, after Pope Benedict
XVI resigned. He is the first Jesuit priest to
become pope and the first pope chosen from the Americas. In every respect, his papacy presents a long
bridge back to Jesus as he walks and talks and ministers as did Jesus. This is the most encouraging sign of a church
that has become increasingly political and contentious, and far more involved
in world affairs than in the people’s spiritual mission. In not too subtle a
way, given his encyclicals and remonstrations of common self-aggrandizing
practices of those in positions of authority, Pope Francis has indicated
somewhat Christ-like his suspicions about the value of:
• The Roman Curia
• The College of
Cardinals
• The Archbishops
• The Bishops
• The Monsignors
• The Priests
• The Lay Teachers
He sees an
absence of accountability. For him, the
church has become too stodgy, too complacent, too hierarchical, failing to deal
effectively with the demands of a shrinking world. He doesn’t stop there.
Pope
Francis advocates a daringly relaxed policy on gay couples and divorcees who have
remarried who want to rejoin the church.
Indeed, he talks of allowing those who divorce and remarry to receive the
Sacraments and welcomes gays to attend services. He even shows encouragement towards the
liberalization of the role of women in the church. His critics don’t know whether he is a
reformer or a traditionalist or both, but it is clear that they are not
happy.
He questions the behavior of Cardinals who have never been questioned before by a pope. When Cardinal Pell, the Vatican’s finance czar, spent over $4,500 for a designer kitchen unit, the pope asked, “What? Is it made of gold?”
Although Pope Francis was elected two years ago with a mandate to overhaul the Roman Curia, the Vatican bureaucracy looks much the same as when he arrived (except for Cardinal Pell’s new Secretariat for the Economy). Still, the threat of imminent redundancies has kept the Pope’s opponents on their back foot, but unfortunately, this has led only to lower morale among loyal and diligent officials.
Corporate psychology operates the same in the religious as the wider world: the people least guilty suffer the burn. When Pope Francis addressed the Roman Curia, the governing body of the church, in December 2015, no one expected him to bounce out like the former Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer, shouting, “I love this company!” But many were taken aback when he accused these Vatican workers of being gripped by sicknesses of the soul, including “spiritual Alzheimer’s” and the “vainglory.”
One can imagine Jesus echoing the same complaint were he to have encountered power-hungry hypocrites. Vatican politics are quite mundane when it comes to corpocracy, as the behavior of the corporate body behaves much the same whatever the institution when it comes to the sharing of power.
What is new in the church, which is common to the executive ranks in corporate society, is that the exorbitant entitlements enjoyed by these pampered clerics may disappear. Worst case scenario, they might be sent out to pasture to some parish, be made redundant, or sacked. This keeps the pope’s opponents on a back foot as he has the power of the church.
Chances are the agenda of Pope Francis during his reign as Supreme Pontiff will be difficult to implement. That is because belief systems are powerful and behavior is difficult to change.
As a boy, I can remember believing in
everything Catholic, having been born during the papacy of Pope Pius XI. As a young man during the reign of Pope Pius
XII, I carried no doubt as to the legitimacy of my faith. It was my pleasure when in the U.S. Navy to
have been part of a US military audience with Pope Pius XII in 1957. I was a hospital corpsman on the heavy
cruiser, USS Salem (CA-139), the Flag Ship of the US. Sixth Fleet, operating in
the Mediterranean. Seeing the pope up
close was a moving experience. But life
and time would put this experience in perspective relative to my feelings about
the church, the papacy, and Roman Catholicism in general.
ONE’S RELIGION EVOLVES LIKE
EVERYTHING ELSE
Although
already a college graduate when serving on the Salem as a “white hat,” I
believed Jesus was, in fact, the center of Christianity, and that the dogmas
and beliefs of Roman Catholicism were a natural progression of Jesus’s message
formed in the early Christian church. It
wasn’t until much later after being bruised by life and working around the
globe that I started to read Christian scholars, learning that Jesus had little
or nothing to do with:
•
The
Seven Deadly Sins
•
The
Seven Sacred Sacraments
•
The
Holy Days of Obligation
•
The
Christmas Tradition, the Shepherds, or the Wise Men
•
The
forty days of Lent and Easter
•
The
Sacraments of Penance, Confession, Communion, Confirmation, and Extreme
Unction
•
The
Apostles Creed
Catholic ritual and rites
of passage were inventions over time that had little or nothing to do with
Jesus, the Jew, or his ministry in Jerusalem, but much to do with Paul and the Four Gospels and the
subsequent role of the various Doctors of
the Church, and the Popes throughout time.
This does not make
Christianity or Roman Catholicism wrong but it does show that the ministry of
Jesus, from a historic perspective, was different than presented. Alas, with so little known of the man and the
time, the invention of his essence was bound to fill the vacuum.
When we move from the
simple and the direct to the invented significance of events, we move perilously close to the utopian, to the unreal, not to the world we have
inherited, but the world that Pope Francis is confronting, the world that Jesus
dealt with, which was the same world, only now a magnitude of pathology beyond
man’s capacity to comprehend much less deal with other than as a conundrum. Religion attempts to fill this vacuum.
It is the world of NOWHERE MAN in NOWHERE LAND, gaudy with a natural affinity for the spectacular but
often at the expense of the real and therefore invariably empty of meaning or
relevance. It is as if we cannot help
ourselves from moving away from ourselves while choosing to think we are
otherwise engaged because we are religious.
Myth is the connective tissue of that mindset. And so, it has been since the beginning of
time. Alas, we have never escaped the
shadow of the shaman.
NEXT: NOWHERE MAN IN
NOWHERE LAND – TWELVE – A SENSE OF
MANDATE
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