Jesus: from preacher to God
December 15, 2024 Dr. Roger Ray
At the age of 41, I was newly divorced and, it so happened, I had finally, over a period of nearly 20 years, accumulated enough points to claim a free ticket to Europe. On the advice of several friends, I made my first European trip as a tourist to see Paris.
I was working my way through all of the Michelin Tour Book recommended things that a tourist really must see, and that is a long list in Paris. I got through all of the 4 star sites and worked my way down into the 2 and 3 star sites, one of which, was the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte.
I had been surprised at several points in my tour of Paris, by how much oblation was shown to the memory of a man who had not been portrayed in a very favorable light in my public school education but that only means that my public school was not in France. The sarcophagus sits enthroned beneath a dome that is more than 100 yards high, and the tomb itself is so massive that it could have held the remains of two dozen men of Napoleon’s stature.
Hitler attempted to militarily conquer the world but Hitler is not well remembered in most of Germany but Napolean, who had similar designs on world domination, has grown larger in the memory of the French than he ever was in real life. Everything about him, his apartments, his furniture, his personal effects, are treated with greater reverence than a beloved saint. I made a remark in my own diary of my trip to Paris that, were the French given a choice between having Jesus return or Napolean, that they would choose Napolean without hesitation.
Without debating the good or the ill aspects of Napolean’s character, he is revered by the French because of what he represents, not really for who he was. He represented a time when France strove to be the world’s super power. And, a couple of hundred years later, you wouldn’t have to scrape the surface of the collective French ego to find a still surviving belief that France really ought to rule the world.
People tend to expand the memory of their heroes over time. People in our time comment on the obvious phallic nature of the Washington monument, erected in honor of America’s first president, standing 555 feet tall, which, consciously or unconsciously, says something about the remembered stature of President and Revolutionary War general, George Washington. And, not to be outdone, even after losing the Civil War, survivors saw to the construction of a memorial to the first president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, near his birthplace in western Kentucky. It goes without saying that the monument to Davis, when completed, was dedicated by the Klu Klux Klan who burned a cross at the top of it.
In the ancient world, there was a predictable evolution of historical heroes being enhanced by the generations that followed, for their own benefit, until a late king, like Gigamesh of Sumer, goes from being a popular king, to be a person of super human strength, to finally being portrayed as a god.
While most Buddhists would insist that the Buddha was not a god, one need only spend a little time in Thailand to discover that, in spite of the protests, the treatment of the Buddha is a classic example of deification. But, I have also known some Trappist monks whose “veneration” of the Virgin Mary went far beyond fond thoughts about a human woman. Some even call Mary the “co-redemptress” with Christ. It just doesn’t really sound like monotheism, does it?
Deification almost always wipes out the intended message of any religion. To the extent that we can take historical narratives about the Buddha seriously, he was born a prince in India and set aside power, position, and wealth to be an ascetic monk. But over the centuries, Buddha stops being such an ascetic figure and is, more or less, brought back into the palace.
The most holy Buddhist temple in Thailand is where this, the Emerald Buddha, is kept. You have to take off your shoes to enter the temple and attention must be given to how you sit on the floor in front of the statue so that the soles of your feet are not exposed to the face of the Buddha. You can’t take pictures or videos and you are expected to be quiet and respectful. The temple is next to the king’s grand palace, so the monk has been brought into the palace of the king, surrounded by ornate decoration and, if the point were not clear enough already, this statue, which is made of Jade, also wears clothing and the clothing is changed every six months by the King, himself, because only the King is allowed to touch this most revered image of the Buddha.
It may seem like a humbling task for a King, but, come on, no one can touch the statue but the King which doesn’t exactly make the King divine, but he is certainly divine adjacent, right?
No matter what you may say about the Buddha’s message regarding compassion, rejection of material wealth, power, status, none of that means much in a context in which the Buddha’s image is presented in opulence, power, and ultimate status. Deification is how we silence a religious message and turn it over to the government or organized religion where it becomes a guardian of the status quo.
Which, it should be obvious by now, is what happened to the historical Jesus. Because trying to describe the historical Jesus is a matter of academic conjecture, it is impossible to come up with an entirely agreed upon description but, using the broadest possible terms, Jesus was a Jewish reformer during the time of the Roman occupation of Palestine. He was killed by Rome because he challenged the authority of Rome and a couple of generations later, Rome tried to wipe out the Jewish population entirely. They destroyed the Jerusalem Temple and the remnants of Judaism, including its branches like the Christians and the disciples of John the Baptist, were pushed into hiding from which they continued to be rather subversive, anti-empire forces.
We are now in the thick of the Christmas season and there are a lot of wonderful things to be said about Christmas as a cultural event; especially for the more healthy families for whom holiday gatherings are happy times with feasts and presents and parties and it is a huge boost to the retail economy and it usually even gives Wall Street markets an end of the year shot in the arm.
Forgive me if I can’t be quite to ebullient about the biblical role of the Christmas narrative. I was just 19 years old and actively involved in a college campus ministry that actually encouraged daily Bible reading, something that I was eager to do anyway. But even as a kid who was much more inclined to be defensive of all things Christian and not at all a critic of the Bible, at that time, even I couldn’t help noticing that the two birth narratives in the New Testament, the one in Matthew with the star, wise men, and dreams, and the one in Luke, with the shepherds, angels, and a stable did not read like they were actually a part of the gospels where they are found. The language, vocabulary, and mythic nature of the birth narratives made me ask our professor if they were late additions to the gospels, and I wondered if they were not more imagination than reliable accounts.
The students around me were shocked and offended by the question but they were even more shocked and offended by the professor’s response, because even 50 years ago in a conservative Christian college, the professor sighed and acknowledged that the birth narratives were late additions to the gospels and they they should be read as apologetic sermons, not actual accounts of events. The professor ran some professional risk by being so honest but, thankfully, he was one of the good ones who believed that telling students the truth was ultimately easier than keeping up the scam.
You see, the thing is, trying to make a mythic account a literal historical account, robs it of the theological point of the narrative. If you try to take movies like Star Wars or the Matrix as being documentaries, and, it is not impossible that the History Channel might run them as documentaries given how they play equally fictional pieces about Egyptian history as documentaries, but sane people know the difference. The enthusiastic Christians who wrote the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke were, on the face of it, ascribing to Jesus the kinds of things said in their culture about other important figures . . . . philosophers and royalty were often said to have divine parentage, such that they were born to virgin mothers, and sometimes astral signs accompanied the birth of a king, or angels would make announcements.
The writers of the Christmas story were, you could say, padding Jesus’ resume but it wasn’t just that; they were also writing a sermon. Luke gives special place to women in his narrative. He has the Christ child born into humble circumstances and the announcement of his birth was made to the lowest and most poor members of society. Matthew stretches Jewish exclusivist prejudices and has the birth of Jesus announced to foreign astrologers, pagans, rather than to the temple priesthood or to the Jewish king.
There are good messages to draw out of the New Testament’s birth narratives, just not any history. And, in my younger years when I had to try to find ways to bring modern meaning to ancient myths, I tried. I really tried. I had the midnight lessons and carols services on Christmas Eve, with candles and communion. I kept trying to preach demythologizing sermons while still giving some lip service to tradition.
I even tried to change the tradition. A couple of times we did full on theatrical productions of Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol,” which really is a Christmas sermon about conversion and compassion. Finally, we just replaced it with musical presentations of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” which was fun and it still taught a moral lesson without being as heavy handed as the Christmas Carol or as overtly religious as lessons and carols.
Picking hymns for the Advent and Christmas season got to be harder and harder. Once you demythologize the whole incarnational view of Christmas . . . well, my music director sat in my office one day with tears in his eyes saying, I just can’t sing this Christmas crap anymore. We turned to Christmas albums by Sting and Bruce Cockburn to find more acceptable holiday fare that could be sung with full throated enthusiasm without all of the Little Town of Bethlehem or Hark the Herald Angels singing.
I’ve tried to go to traditional Christmas Eve services a few times, to hear a friend’s kids singing in a choir, or to placate someone’s desire for me to accompany them, but, at least for me, there is no putting that genie back in the bottle. The virgin birth, incarnational tales of the first century lost their power in the age of reason and I don’t think you should feel guilty about not participating in it anymore.
Enjoy the family gatherings. Indulge yourself in traditional holiday dishes. Be generous in gift giving, especially to children and to the poor. And there really is some good holiday music out there that you can enjoy, even though you may have to look for it.
I will leave you with the apologetic that Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, offered to him in the Christmas Carol when Scrooge said that Christmas was just “humbug” that never put a scrap of gold in your pocket. Fred said:
“‘There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,’ returned the nephew. ‘Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round——as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!‘”
So, please, have yourselves a merry, albeit rather secular, Christmas!
