Roger Ray, D.Min.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." -Carl SaganNot very many years go by without a new popular book about Jesus dominating the market. Some are better than others and though each would seem to have some redeeming qualities, none are, it is fair to say, either perfect nor will they prove to be "the last word" on the topic. Reza Aslan has received a lot of media attention in the spring and summer of 2013 following the release of his book, Zealot. Though Aslan now self identifies as a Muslim and he has certainly gained a lot of notoriety for his publication of the history of Islam in No God but God, he presents a fairly devotional though non-divine view of the historical Jesus. In some ways, progressive Christians will find a natural ally in Muslim thinkers who affirmed over a millennia ago that Jesus was a prophet but insisted that it was blasphemous to call him God. We will not find many practicing Muslims who do not try to work Jesus into being a prophet of a supernatural theistic God but there should still be some good common ground for conversation between progressive Christians and Muslim scholars in the rejection of incarnational theology.
At present, while Zealot is giving Aslan a forum to quote New Testament gospel passages as if they were reliable reports of what Jesus actually said, there is an even more radical group attempting to support the charge that Jesus never existed. They say that there wasn't even a village of Nazareth in first century Palestine and that the entire Jesus narrative was made up by second century Roman aristocrats to create a religion that would calm down the peasants.
We cannot realistically just brush the skeptics aside. There is not much in the written historical record about Jesus and there is no physical evidence at all. Travelers to modern day Jericho may be shown a Sycamore tree that tour guides will tell them is the actual tree that Zacchaeus climbed up into in the gospel account of the encounter between Zacchaeus and Jesus (Luke 19). Etchings in the pavement in Jerusalem or even an old building dubbed the "upper room" are used to thrill tourists with the prospect of walking where Jesus walked or drawing near to historical evidence of gospel accounts. For more on this I can only refer you to proverb mistakenly attributed to P. T. Barnum: There is a sucker born every minute. But most of us have, at one time or another, fallen prey to being suckers for a good Jesus story because we so wanted to believe that what our pastors, priests, Sunday School teachers, parents and peers had told us was true.
Though I suspect that there was a village known as Nazareth that was a poor Jewish suburb of Sephoris, a much larger city of blended Greek and Palestinian people, it is impossible to prove from currently extant written records or archaeologically certain finds. I am disinclined to jump off the cliff with the skeptics and say that Jesus is a literary creation but honesty compels us to acknowledge that most of the Jesus tradition is a matter of conjecture, tradition and false attribution.
More than a century of sincere and scholarly research into the historical Jesus has resulted in several quite plausible images of this Palestinian religious figure and some scholars would even object to the idea that he was religious. Most of what we know about Jesus we know from the four gospels in the New Testament, all of which were written to accomplish a theological goal and none of which give us eye-witness or contemporary reports.
Possibly our best support for the claim that Jesus even existed comes from the hand of the self-appointed apostle, Paul. Paul never met Jesus and did not seem to have much interest in the actual history of Jesus, the person. However, Paul does report having gone to Jerusalem and met with the family and close friends of Jesus with whom Paul was, essentially, a competitor. By his own reporting, his relationship with them was more than a little strained and he was at considerable pains to make it clear that he didn't learn anything from them and was not indebted to those who actually knew the Jesus traditions first-hand for anything that Paul preached. We could wish that he was a lot more curious and a lot less arrogant but we have to depend on the Paul we have and not the Paul we might wish for. Almost by accident, Paul gives us enough evidence to assume that Jesus, a Palestinian Jew, lived, taught and made a life long impression on some followers.
It is not a stretch to say that were it not for Paul most of us would never have heard of Jesus. The Jesus tradition may have been just a brief blip on the radar of history had Paul not taken his name and sketchy historical background to use as the language set for the mystery religion Paul taught that is a synthesis of Jewish thought with Greek salvation and mystery religions. What we can say with confidence is that the message that was central to Paul and the message that was central to Jesus have little or nothing to do with one another.
It is evident that Jesus had a following that included even at least one of his brothers and all of us who have brothers can testify to the fact that this was no small feat. What Jesus said and did was sufficiently profound and meaningful to cause a following to remain intact after he was dead. So there were those who repeated what he said, told stories about what he did but those traditions come down to us only through obscure non-canonical sources such as the fragmentary sayings source, The Gospel of Thomas and a few other pieces of gnostic writings and the four gospels of the New Testament.
Paul, as the first and most popular writer in the Christian tradition, undoubtedly influenced how all four canonical gospels were written. Mark is the oldest of the four gospels and each of the others were largely dependent on Mark's story line.
Twenty years after the facts, Mark tells a martyr's tale beautifully, memorably and persuasively. Mark's narrative contains no virgin birth and no resurrection appearances. Matthew and Luke, written about twenty years later add contradictory virgin birth narratives and totally different resurrection appearances to the theological evolution of the Jesus tradition. When another generation has passed, the gospel attributed to John takes the final step in the evolution of Jesus into being, literally, the eternally existent God.
Paul, the first known author to write about the resurrection of Jesus, describes the event in 1 Corinthians 15 as a visionary event in which his own encounter with the resurrected Jesus was just like the experiences of Peter, James, John and the other Jerusalem witnesses. Paul never mentions an empty tomb and would not have believed that the body of Jesus of Nazareth had been transformed into the spiritual Christ of Paul's theology. Mark's gospel gives us an empty tomb narrative but not a resurrection appearance. Matthew and Luke add resurrection appearances that are highly symbolic and that do not agree with one another. John adds to the resurrection appearance traditions in even higher Christological terms, which makes John the favorite of those who want a very divine Jesus. Traditional Christianity has tended to view all of the gospels through the lens of our least credible ancient witness, John.
Since we know almost nothing about the historical Jesus and we since we acknowledge that there is no incarnation, substitutionary death or creedal path into a glorious afterlife, why is Jesus still important to us? The unsettling but honest answer is that Jesus is only important to us if we choose to gift him with importance. There is no supernatural theistic deity demanding a blood sacrifice to save us from eternal damnation. Progressives then see Jesus as being one of the many historical characters around whose name a body of spiritual teachings has been collected. We know the names of many others and there are thousands more who have contributed to human spiritual evolution whose names we do not know. The religion that claims the Jesus tradition has been numerically successful for political and sociological reasons as much as for the actual content of the teachings.
Liberated from a controlling ecclesiological authority or the darkness of pre-modern superstitions, we recognize that what draws us to a spiritual life is a desire for truth, meaning and insight. Now the guiding issue is: does the Jesus tradition have something to offer to the 21st century and if it does, just what is it?
Of the major academic trends in historical Jesus studies, several paths do not lead us to a Jesus that offers much to us. If Jesus was only a reformer of first century Judaism then while he may have some historical interest to us, we would never be inclined to quote him as a moral authority in our lives. Even those who try to temper theological excesses with more realistic historical boundaries often end up trying to preserve a certain fealty to the institutional church's need for a supernatural theistic god who intervenes in human history. I appreciate the helpful steps offered to the evolution of progressive faith by those authors who helped to build a bridge from traditional Christianity to a more progressive faith but I cannot convince myself that there is a future for Christianity that asks post modern thinkers to accept the unverifiable truth claims of traditional orthodoxy.
Extraordinary claims, as Carl Sagan has said, demand extraordinary evidence and there is no credible evidence for heaven, hell, a Trinity, souls, angels, demons or a personal God who is out there somewhere. The claim that the sacrifice of Jesus is the necessary and only way to a right relationship with God is the most extraordinary of claims and there is no evidence that such an absurd assertion has the slightest veracity.
While gospels written long after Jesus death by people who had never met him record accounts of miraculous events all of the way from changing water into wine to restoring life to the dead, we have no reason to take any of these accounts to be factual. We can, however, find a great deal of moral insight and even personal inspiration when we read them for what they are, messages of spiritual instruction.
There are good reasons to conclude that the Jesus of history was interested in speaking only to his own Galilean Jewish constituents. We, however, are only interested in how the Jesus tradition applies to every nation and race of modern society. A credible case can be made that the Jesus of history may have even been something of a racist but the Jesus tradition we choose to extoll teaches universal harmony.
The historical Jesus may or may not have believed in an immanent apocalyptic end of history. If he did, he was wrong. Either way, we don't believe in an apocalypse of divine creation but we are faced with potential forms of apocalypse from warfare, disease, pollution or economic collapse and so any spiritual insight we can gain to help us avoid the real potential of apocalypse rather than the imaginary apocalypse of religious superstition is going to be of tremendous value to us.
The Jesus of the later church, once thoroughly turned into the spiritual Christ of salvation from hell myths, has been useful to both institutional religion and to empire building governments but, for progressives, we can safely say that is the mental and emotional prison from which we have declared ourselves to now be liberated.
There are three things that I propose keep us tethered to Jesus. In order of ascending importance I suggest that we continue to talk about Jesus because the Christian traditions help us to understand ourselves through rituals around birth, coming of age, marriage, illness and death and in the processes of living within families and societies. Secondly, as I will discuss further in a later chapter, a religion gives us a language set of stories and ideas that allow us to communicate with one another about meaningful living. For many of us, the Christian scriptures and traditions form an irreplaceable base of mutual understanding.
Finally, and most importantly, between the stripped down view of the historical Jesus and the exalted presentation of the magical Christ, there is a Jesus who stands up in history as a loving advocate of the poor, sick and vulnerable who challenges the power and abuse of the rich and of the/any empire.
The canonical gospels are written when the Roman Empire has won its battle for dominance of the Jews and, so far as they were concerned, the known universe. Still, we find in subtle ways, a distinct anti-empire thread in how they tell the story.
The exaggerated titles heaped up on Jesus in the evolving christologies of Mark to Matthew and Luke and finally John, can be seen as a distinct alternative to the empire and their enforced emperor worship. The titles of "savior," "son of god," and "lord," were all given to the Roman Caesar. Even the tradition of virgin birth was given not only to powerful emperors but also to influential philosophers.
There is a distinct and undeniable way in which the Jesus tradition is offered as an alternative to cowering before wealth and power. There was a point at which saying that Jesus is Lord was a way of saying that the Caesar is not lord.
In our day, the coercion, deception, manipulation and abuse of governments and corporations demands an alternative. A renewed devotion to the truth is the best antidote to the misdirection of corporate media. A spiritual sense of connection to the poor, to war refugees, the uninsured, the uneducated and the hopeless is the best response we can give to an economic system that continues to transfer the resources that should be fairly spread among the people of the world into the hands of a smaller and smaller super elite.
Jesus, as a teacher of radical compassion and self sacrificing devotion to the truth continues to be symbol of the kind of spiritual depth we must claim as our own in order to transform the world in ways that brings good news the poor and as a bulwark against the abuses of the powerful.
