WHICH JESUS DO WE HOLD MOST DEAR?

WHICH JESUS DO WE HOLD MOST DEAR?  Dr. Roger Ray

This lecture will be delivered in various locations in England during the first two weeks of May 2018. 

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  Carl Sagan

Who was your favorite James Bond in the 007 series? Who was your favorite Dr. Who? Or your favorite Sherlock Holmes? You have a single character, who first came to life on the pages of a book, a product of an author’s imagination, but in the hands of different actors and directors, we seem to get several different kinds of secret agents, detectives, and whatever Dr. Who is.

You can multiply that diversity by thousands when it comes to talking about Jesus of Nazareth. We have several iterations of Catholic Jesus’, several Orthodox, and Protestants are all over the board. Even when a movie maker has several million dollars and an office building full of writers, when they try to put Jesus on the screen, we hardly recognize them.

The incomprehensibly popular 2004 movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” focused on the suffering of the son of God. It was remarkably violent and in the course of 2 hours he appeared to lose about 18 gallons of blood. The script combined biblical images with obscure Catholic mythology and was brought together by an anti-Semitic fanatic who, for reasons that confuse me, had a big impact on Americans.

In 1988 the very controversial “Last Temptation of Christ,” gave us a much more human and apparenty mentally unstable and rather lusty view of Jesus.

The one that stands out as being more remarkable to me si one you can lay a certain amount of claim to yourselves since Tim Rice attended St Albans school for at least a part of his education. Rice wrote the lyrics to the 1970’s rock opera and I still find it hard to believe that he had not studied any of the historical critical thinking about Jesus that was available at that time because he dis a nearly miraculous job of setting the Jesus story in a almost human context that was so different from the Jesus that I had heard about in my rural Kentucky protestant church that it was like setting my skull on fire.

There is a proverb that says, “Marriage is not a word, it is a sentence.” Similarly, we can say that “Jesus” is not a singular name or a single person, but we have to honsetly acknowledge that there are thousands if not millions of perceptions of Jesus that evolved very quickly from the first century Jewish reformer into the stained glass, son of God, who died to set us free from the bonds of hell and to give us hope of eternity in heaven.

We are no longer dependent upon the creeds and doctrines of the church to tell us what we must believe about Jesus. For two hundred years, a lot of very earnest historians, linguists, theologians, and literary critics have been trying to get at the real Jesus.

When we try to discover the Jesus who actually lived in the first half of the first century in Palestine, we find that there trail has gone pretty cold. There are those who have leveled 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.  Even though 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. But we cannot depend upon Paul to tell us much about that Jesus.

So, when I ask, “Which Jesus do we hold dear?” I am acknowledging that there are several views of Jesus that are of varying degrees of historical credibility.

A few years ago, a forensic anthropologist, working from the skull of a first century Galilean, gave us this image of what the historical Jesus might have looked like… or at least some guy who lived in Jesus’ neighborhood.

I am going to suggest that there are at least four layers of the Jesus tradition that we can rationally talk about that come from the first century following the life of the historical Jesus. The first is a Galilean Hebrew who set out to reform his faith. I hesitate to even call him a Jew because in the early first century, the Jews in Jerusalem called Jews who lived everywhere else, Gentiles. That’s not the way you are used to thinking about it but the Jews in Jerusalem had the temple, they still had animal sacrifice, and they were in charge of the rituals, holidays, temple taxes and they were married to the monarchy or what was left of it under Roman rule.

Away from Jerusalem, the religion of the Hebrews was centered in synagogues that were, in one way or another, in competition with the temple cult. Jesus can from the Galilee, from synagogue country where they did not have priests. They had teachers who were called rabbis. Away from the Temple, these synagogues were much more inclined to reflect regional customs.

For example, in the strict orthodoxy of Judaism in the temple cult, all images of every kind were forbidden. Even Jewish coins had only numbers and letters on them, no images of rulers or historical characters. But we find synagogues of the era out in the Galilee that had elaborate tile Byzantine floors with the images of the Zodiac. That could get a Jew killed in Jerusalem, but in the Galilee, lots of places wrote their own rules.

We have very little to go on about this historical character other than echoes from the gospels. If the travel log of the canonical gospels tell us anything, Jesus didn’t go to Roman towns or many blended towns, but largely kept to his own people. He went to Synagogue and was familiar with the Hebrew scriptures. We do not know if he could read and write.

The Jesus Seminar spent two decades going over the canonical gospels and the Gospel of Thomas, trying to discern what they found there that could be most likely traced to the historical Jesus. They literally voted with colored beads on passages: red beads meant that they thought it was an authentic Jesus saying, pink was for passages that might have a kernel of the historical Jesus present, gray when it was likely not a Jesus saying, and black for sayings that were certainly not a Jesus saying.

I know that church folk will object to this project saying, “They weren’t there,” or “How can they know?” I can tell you that this is serious scholarship and that linguistic and historical criticism, while not an exact science, is not just a guess in the dark. I don’t have time to explain the process, but I am going to share academic conclusions with you today in the hope that you will read more closely. Reading their conclusions published in “The Five Gospels” will be quite illuminating.

This body of scholars did not find many sayings in the gospels that they thought came from the historical Jesus. More than 80% of the sayings ended up in the black category. What did up in red were radical statements of forgiveness and peace, such as “love your enemies,” and “if someone strikes on one cheek, offer them the other cheek.”

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, which can also be said about John the Baptist and several of the Hebrew prophets, especially Isaiah.

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.

We do not think that the historical Jesus thought of himself as a son of God. We do not think that he believed himself to be a sacrifice for the sins of others. He was killed in Jerusalem in the manner of execution used often by Rome. We don’t know exactly why. We do know that Mark wrote his version of the passion narrative very artfully and used a lot of literary elements to weave his story. For example, we do not think that the character of Judas is a historical character. Paul makes no mention Judas and though, in reciting the communion liturgy, he speaks of Jesus having been betrayed, he neither suggests that it was one of the twelve apostles or a member of Jesus’ inner circle. In fact, in 1^st Corinthians, Paul says that Jesus appeared to the “twelve” and in the gospels, Judas is dead before Easter.

Judas exists as a literary creation. The name “Judas” and the name “Jesus” come from the same root and it seems that Mark created Judas to represent the whole of the Jewish people who rejected Jesus. Mark uses this kind of symbolism a lot.

We know from Paul’s writing that several of the personal friends and Apostles of Jesus continued to live in Jerusalem after Jesus had been killed. They stayed there in spite of the fact that they were Galilean Jews who had not been welcomed there and Jesus had been killed there. To my mind, this is the most inexplicable part of the historical Jesus narrative. But we find, in the middle of the first century, a remnant of a church in Jerusalem that Paul went to visit at least once and probably twice.

That remnant probably never saw themselves as being a part of a religion that was separate from Judaism. None of those people wrote any part of the New Testament and people like me are still kinda mad about that. Two generations later the Temple was destroyed and Jerusalem was burned and there is nothing left to aid the historical record of that time and group of people who actually knew Jesus and most of the historical record of Jesus died with them. They repeated and enlarged on the teachings of Jesus and some of that undoubtedly filtered into and were preserved in our gospels but it is covered in layers of editing and tradition.

So, the first Jesus we could focus on was a traveling wisdom teacher who had a very short career and was killed by Roman decree. Though some of his followers reported having visions of him after his death, it is doubtful that they would made any claim of an empty tomb-bodily resurrection. That Jesus was more like Gandhi than like the Jesus of the church’s creeds.

The second wave of the Jesus tradition we can call “Jesus the Christ.” This picture is the oldest known painting of Jesus. It was found in Syria and dates to the early third century. This person, the Christ figure, is an invention of Paul. 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. But Paul wrote first and it is evident that Paul’s thinking influenced the final form of the gospels we have in our New Testament. Paul had no interest in the man, Jesus, and he insisted that he assiduously avoided allowing anyone to tell him anything about the historical Jesus. This passage is a little long but please let me share it with you to let Paul make my point in his own voice:

 

Paul’s image of Jesus as the Christ, as he said himself, has virtually nothing to do with the actual Jesus. From existing early churches, he evidently learned the ritual sentences used in communion celebrations and it seems that he sometimes quotes from early Christian hymns but that is as close as he gets to historical material.

He does not mention Mary, Joseph, or Judas. He does not appear to know about a miraculous virgin birth, nor does he believe in an empty tomb or a physical resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus, for Paul, was a vision. A vision shared with other’s to be sure, but he felt like his vision was just as good as the vision that Peter, James, and John had and that he was just as much of an apostle as they were.

Paul took up a collection among the gentile churches that he brought to the Jerusalem church which could be seen as an acknowledgment of their legitimacy or you could see it as a bribe, begging for their approval.

Paul came from the Pharisaic school of Judaism that had incorporated into Judaism the Greek belief in heaven and hell and in a final judgment. Paul wanted that divine judge to be a Jew and Jesus was the name he chose but he did not embrace the historical Jesus or any of the message of Jesus.

Paul, like many of his contemporaries, believed that the world was coming to an end and he portrayed Jesus as the eschatological agent whose death was bringing about the end of time. He framed that in the language of Jewish sacrifice but the theology was more dependent upon Greek mystery religions.

Paul died shortly before the temple and most of Jerusalem was destroyed. With that event, a form of Judaism died and what was left was the synagogue- based Judaism and Christianity soon began to go its own way. The death of the priestly cult-sacrifice form of Judaism spurred the creation of a more formal approach to the Jesus narrative.

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 though he does have an empty tomb… whether that is to be understood literally or symbolically is unclear. Matthew and Luke, in the forms that we have them were written about twenty years later and they 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.

Many scholars have written about these two images of Jesus. They will call it the movement from the Jesus of history to the Christ of faith. Some try to make this easier for church folk to accept by talking about the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus and that has a certain attraction because, like in the higher Christology of John’s gospel, it is as if we are meeting the risen Christ on page one of the fourth gospel.

Reza Aslan published this very popular book presenting what I would like to call a third image of Jesus: Aslan 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.

I don’t know any college professors who have used Aslan’s book in a college class because it is full of fairly sloppy use of source material and a very inconsistent treatment of biblical literature but there is some good material to find there. I believe that after the first Jesus was lost to history, while Paul was traveling the known world peddling his version of a end-of-time Christ, that there was a third Jesus movement that was decidedly anti-Empire.

In house churches under the bloody oppression of Rome, the Jesus movement because an alternative to the state sponsored emperor worship. It was in these brave little congregations that they began to take the titles ascribed to Caesar and give them to Jesus. Caesar was said to be a son of God, and the state religion said that he was born to a virgin. On the coins of the realm, he was called “savior,” and “lord.” We see reflections of this third Jesus movement in the gospels and we can find evidence of it in the early persecution of the church as an enemy of the Empire.

Caesar became powerful by killing millions of people. Jesus, in these little churches, became powerful by dying. Caesar’s power was the power of an army and the power of Jesus was found in loving, forgiving your enemies, sharing your bread, eschewing wealth, property, and even tribe, to be noble and ethical people.

Aslan presents this Jesus as the historical Jesus and while it is tempting to embrace that view uncritically, it does not stand up to historical criticism. Still, it is an option because, let’s be honest, the Jesus we cherish is the Jesus we choose from among the available options and this one has a lot to recommend it… especially if you are an American… probably if you are British.

The fourth Jesus movement is similar to Paul’s mystery religion but it is the Jesus of the early second century when the Roman empire began to accept Christians as being one of the many religions they tolerated. And we all know how Constantine institutionalized a form of Christianity that was almost entirely focused on the afterlife. This form of religion is what all Empire’s try to use to control the population and to fill the ranks of their armies. In 50 a.d., Jesus was an alternative to the Empire but by 120 or 130, Jesus was virtually an employee of the empire.

Since we know almost nothing about the historical Jesus and we since progressive scholars dismiss notions of 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 21^st 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, a shared common 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.

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 preachers in our day can still say that Jesus is Lord as 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 to the poor and as a bulwark against the abuses of the powerful.