Esquire - "What If Jesus Meant All That Stuff?" - Belated Christmas Message...

[TomCADem]

This is a bit late, but here is an alternative view on Christianity that you won't find at your usual mega-church:

http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2009/shane-claiborne-1209

To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.

Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.
* * *
The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.

At one point Gandhi was asked if he was a Christian, and he said, essentially, "I sure love Jesus, but the Christians seem so unlike their Christ." A recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much of that reputation is well deserved. That's the ugly stuff. And that's why I begin by saying that I'm sorry.

* * *

Don't get me wrong, I still believe in the afterlife, but too often all the church has done is promise the world that there is life after death and use it as a ticket to ignore the hells around us. I am convinced that the Christian Gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and that the message of that Gospel is not just about going up when we die but about bringing God's Kingdom down. It was Jesus who taught us to pray that God's will be done "on earth as it is in heaven." On earth.

One of Jesus' most scandalous stories is the story of the Good Samaritan. As sentimental as we may have made it, the original story was about a man who gets beat up and left on the side of the road. A priest passes by. A Levite, the quintessential religious guy, also passes by on the other side (perhaps late for a meeting at church). And then comes the Samaritan... you can almost imagine a snicker in the Jewish crowd. Jews did not talk to Samaritans, or even walk through Samaria. But the Samaritan stops and takes care of the guy in the ditch and is lifted up as the hero of the story. I'm sure some of the listeners were ticked. According to the religious elite, Samaritans did not keep the right rules, and they did not have sound doctrine... but Jesus shows that true faith has to work itself out in a way that is Good News to the most bruised and broken person lying in the ditch.

* * *
In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion — I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend if I thought he was going to hell. I said, "I hope not. It will be hard to enjoy heaven without you." If those of us who believe in God do not believe God's grace is big enough to save the whole world... well, we should at least pray that it is.

[stopbush]

1. Actually, the thing that Christians like this author always fail to realize about

the Good Samaritan is that he wasn't a Christian. Yet, he was the person who had the moral center to do the right thing. For those who aver that our morals come from god or Jesus or religion, the story of the Good Samaritan presents quite a comeuppance. Samaritans were a parallel sect of Jews who believed they were the true religion of the pre-Babylonian-exile Jews.

There's nothing about "true faith" or "Good News" in the story. Those are just code words that Xians use among themselves in their self-congratulatory fashion. The Samaritan neither got his compassion from "true faith" (as Samaritans were in their day considered to lie outside the true faith of the Jews) nor were his actions at all influenced by the "good news" of Jesus' ministry.

The Good Samaritan shows us that our morals and love for our fellow humans comes not from religion, but from our basic, evolved human nature.

[bigmonkey]

3. You could look at Matthew 25 too.

As far as I can tell from reading that famous passage about rewards and punishments, the rewarded did what they did unconsciously, that is, they weren't calculating how they should act, they were just naturally generous, whereas the people who were carefully measuring what they did fall short of the mark. No mention of doctrine at all, in fact an implication that it gets in the way. At least, that's the way I see it.

[roguevalley]

7. one of the problems with the thinking of the priest is the purity issue.

they have such purity-cleanliness restrictions, they could barely touch anything. Knowing the times makes the story more interesting. I love the Samaritan story.

[MilesColtrane]

2. From "Hannah and Her Sisters":

"If Jesus Christ came back today and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up."

[stopbush]

5. Oh, I disagree. Jesus preached a pretty loathsome message:

take no care for the morrow, unless you hate your immediate family you can't love me, eternal servitude in the (hopefully) benign kingdom of heaven (all kingdoms are by definition dictatorships), etc.

No, if Jesus came back today, he'd probably set about fashioning a new whip and attacking the people selling brownies at the church bake sale.

[roguevalley]

8. actually, he wouldn't. You are confounding Jesus who was dead and

gone with his 'creator', Paul. Jesus was part of the messianic movement, something Paul loathed and feuded with, even fighting tooth and nail with Jesus' successor, his brother James the Just, the Righteous One. Jesus wouldn't be happy with things. Not one bit.

[stopbush]

10. But you have it backwards in a sense.

Paul's letters were written before any of the Gospels. Paul didn't believe in a corporeal Jesus. He believed in a Jesus who was seen in visions and who existed in heaven, not on Earth. The Gospels came after Paul's writings and were most likely influenced by them. In effect, the Gospels are a ham-fisted attempt to put historic meat on Paul's Gnostic fiction. The Gospels most likely looked to Paul as a source for information about Jesus, not the other way around.

Jesus never really existed, which is why the Bible makes no sense when one attempts to read it as a historical document. The Gospels do make sense when one reads them as allegorical fictions that are the natural product of Jewish mythology. One need not worry about logical questions like "who was around to hear Jesus' words in Gethsemane and write them down? Were the verses divinely inspired?" when one realizes that the scene in Gethsemane is nothing more than a soliloquy, a literary device employed by authors since time immemorial. It's made up inner dialogue spoken by a fictional character in a mystery play. One need not jump through theistic hoops to reconcile all of the contradictions in the Gospels when one realizes these were made up stories that were written at different times by different sets of authors for different audiences, and that no one sat there and proofed the Gospels against each other for consistency and accuracy. How could they? There were hundreds of Gospels floating around at the time, each one written to influence and instruct different audiences. It's much easier to do that when one is freed from the inconvenient facts of history and is allowed to simply embellish a fiction to make one's point.

As far as James the Just goes, like all NT figures, there aren't any non-Biblical corroborating sources to prove that he even existed, just as there are no sources to prove that Sydney Carton or Rhett Butler were real historical figures. The 2nd century Christian 'historian' Hegesippus and 3rd century theorist Origen between them massaged the whole story of James into a pious nonsense. The title "Righteous One" (Zaddik) was accorded both to claimants of the High Priesthood and to charismatic Jewish holy men. Mistranslated into Greek as "Sadduc" or "Zadok " the term eventually surfaced to give us the anodyne "James the Just."

In other words, the only reason to call James "the Just" is to assign to him the role of a high priest of the early church, which is at best a second-century fiction.

If you're satisfied with error-ridden fictions like the Bible and the invented histories of latter-day Christian apologists as reliable sources on such things, then you're welcome to them. I don't.

[roguevalley]

11. you are wrong about James. He is mentioned extensively in Josephus'

writings as is John the Baptist. The insertion of Jesus into his writings was a thing done years and years later by some monk. James existed. Therefore it is simple to postulate that Jesus existed. Unfortunately, he is buried in the tottering edifice of Paul's bullshit. Of course, some would say Josephus can't be trusted. I think he can with caveats. The Oblias, the Zaddok was James. Eisenmann does extreme justice to the attempt by Paul, "the liar" the Empty Man, to overwrite him to remove his from history. If you take what Paul says and flip it 180 degrees, you get the truth, the Nazirite and Ebionite truth.

[stopbush]

12. Re: Josephus mentioning James.

He is not mentioned "extensively." He is mentioned once, and the James Josephus is talking about is the brother of Jesus bar Damneus.

Here's the passage from Josephus you're referencing:

"... when, therefore, Ananus was of this disposition, he thought he had now a proper opportunity. Festus was dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the Sanhedrin of judges and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned."

Geez. Sounds like Josephus is talking about THE Jesus, ie: the so-called Christ. But wait! If we continue reading, we see the following in the same paragraph!:

"... Albinus complied with what they said, and wrote in anger to Ananus, and threatened that he would bring him to punishment for what he had done; on which king Agrippa took the high priesthood from him, when he had ruled but three months, and made Jesus, the son of Damneus, high priest."

Josephus tells us precisely who James is the brother of – Jesus bar Damneus.

If you drop the spurious clause about being "called the Christ", doubtless inserted by a Christian editor, then this James would have been the brother of the guy who eventually made high priest because of James' execution! Moreover, the reference to "Christ" here relies on the thoroughly discredited "explanation" of the term inserted in the Testimonium Flavianum, which you yourself admit was inserted by some monk at a later date.

It's not Josephus' fault that zealous Christians went about inserting the title "Christ" or "called the Christ" whenever they found the name "Jesus" in Jospehus' works. But just as these scribes didn't think far enough to add the name of Jesus to the Table of Contents of The Antiquities of the Jews (which might have made the forgery in the TF less suspect), the scribe who added the "called the Christ" words in this instance couldn't be bothered to read far enough to realize that the forgery he was attempting would be clearly revealed by the end of the same paragraph.

Stupid is as stupid does.

In Josephus' text, Jesus son of Damneus is the more important of the two, that's why he puts his name first. James may well have led a zealous faction of "law breakers", and he clearly had a brother in high places, but that's about all we learn from Josephus.

Josephus doesn't even mention the death of this James in The Jewish Wars, though he does mention Jesus bar Damneus again in the Antiquities: "And now Jesus, the son of Gamaliel, became the successor of Jesus, the son of Damneus, in the high priesthood, which the king had taken from the other."

That's it. That's the mention of James that you are putting forth as a non-Christian confirmation of the existence of Jesus.

BTW - if you know of other instances where Josephus mentions James the Brother of Jesus the Christ, I'd be interested in learning just how "extensive" those instances are.

As far as Josephus mentioning John the Baptist, that is quite true. But he never mentions John the Baptist in connection with Jesus. It's entirely possible that John the Baptist did exist, but assuming that Josephus confirming John the Baptist's existence verifies the existence of Jesus is akin to asserting that the existence of Robert E Lee verifies the existence of Scarlett O'Hara as both are mentioned in Gone With The Wind.

[Warpy]

4. Mainstream Christians dropped the ball for over a century

and they still haven't condemned Dispensationalism as anti Christian heresy.

Until they drop the false Christian solidarity with those people and see them for what they really are and act accordingly, they'll continue to be painted into the same corner with that same broad brush used by outsiders to condemn the worst of them.

This isn't a threat, it's a statement of fact. The Golden Rule wasn't just pie in the sky, pious nonsense. It's how the world actually works.

[WCGreen]

6. Who knows what to look for when seeking Jesus...

After so many centuries and so much evil and social manipulation justified, for modernity sake, by that meaningless phrase, "what would Jesus do", that seems to captivate American political both left and right, how can anyone claim that they are speaking the truth? Or, for that matter, how can we even believe that Jesus was a new wave prophet, one who intended to break from conservative Jewish ritual and thought?

What if Jesus was really a minor prophet, I guess in those days being a prophet was a fairly common occupation, who was continuing the melding of the ancient traditions of the Jewish faith with those developed during the exile in Babylon?

To me that makes sense. Especially if Jesus was a man who believed that the faith of Judaism resided in the individual and not in a specific place. Which, by the way, is a huge difference between paganism, which is tied to a holy shrine and the big monotheistic religions which are tied to a holy place but can worship just as well anywhere the "book" is available.

To me, and I guess I am as justified in my thinking as say Billy Graham is with his, the whole crux of modern Christianity plays out in the temple scene. This is where Jesus, at least in my interpretation, set down a marker that you can be just a worthy to the lord if you have a lot of money or have none. He is upset that the money changers were profiting from both a favorable artificial exchange rate and also archaic laws that set forth certain rituals that had to be completed in order to be considered in a holy state.

The idea, spelled out but almost always ignored, in the Gospel of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesars is also a clear marker that salvation should never be depended on the State or that the State should never determine who is worthy of salvation. The worst abuse of this is the so-called get rich quick churches sprining up in wealthy suburban areas that claim Jesus wants you to be rich. In fact, one could say it is the whole reason for that church to exist, to give justification of the worship of Mammon.

This leads us to the idea of the communal sacrifice ritual that can be held anywhere there happened to be wine and bread. In other word, Jesus said the holy spirit was in you and that you only had to act in a basically civil way to one another to enjoy the fruits of His blessing. No more Michva's, no more sacrificial lambs and no more money changers at the Temple.

He also gave us a choice. You can believe the old ways but he is showing us a more personal way to be with God.

Now i believe that all the rest that came from the sprouts of Pauline tradition is nothing more that a complete diversion from the so-called Good Word. Throw in that Christianity melded with the state the day Constantine claimed the lord choice him to win his Civil War which, of course. led to the political picking and choosing of which books were to be included in the "official" bible and the persecution of those who refused to let secular power determine how one worships and you have, what I feel, is a complete break from the traditions of Jesus.

Which is why I try to do nothing more than strive to be the best person I can. If god exists, I believe that will be enough.

[roguevalley]

9. nice post. I agree

[stopbush]

13. Good post. Don't know why people would seek Jesus these days,

or any Bronze-aged philosopher, for that matter. We're better people as a species than Jesus was, and we need to move on from his megalomaniacal rantings.

I would take issue with your comments on the scene in the temple. There's nothing to lead us to believe that the moneychangers at the temple were gouging the Jews who came there and were required to change the various currencies they carried into something the Rabbis deemed to be a clean offering. I'm sure the Roman moneychangers would have gouged them even more. The fact that Jewish males were required to pay homage to god through a yearly blood/burnt offering was no more archaic or ritualistic than any religious practice that exists today. Such requirements weren't viewed as heavy obligations but as joyful offerings of thanks and praise.

The fact is that the temple moneychangers were providing a service to the faithful, much the same way a church bookstore today provides a service, or the way the RCC church sets up candles to be lit as long as you put a few coins in the box. Sure, a Jew could bring his own goat with him to Jerusalem for sacrifice, but he risked it being rejected as unclean by the Rabbis. What's so bad about having a few vendors on site to sell pre-approved animals for sacrifice? It sure beats dragging an animal all the way to Jerusalem, only to have it be rejected and having to buy a Temple-approved animal anyway.

No, what I think is overlooked by most in this temple scene is the overt VIOLENCE Jesus visited on people and livestock alike, fashioning a scourge all by his lonesome and beating people and animals with it. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild indeed! The equivalent today would be for Jesus to walk into a Catholic church, start beating people with his scourge and then proceed to turn over the votive candles along the walls.

And what good did Jesus' drive-by shooting do? No doubt, the people visiting the Temple that day had their religious observance destroyed by the madman. I wonder how a Jew making that yearly pilgrimage felt while Jesus was literally busy upsetting the apple cart. By the following day, everything most likely returned to normal.

That's MY take on the temple incident. I have yet to find a person who agrees with me.

[WCGreen]

14. I can see your point...

Especially from a Jewish perspective.

But I think that the reason, if this really happened because the accounts conflict from the earlier Gospels to the later ones, that Jesus upset the whole process was to make a clean break with the old practices. Sure, the idea of Jesus swinging and shouting and reeking havoc doesn't fit well with the whole lamb of god perception, but that is why I feel it was the beginning of a new approach to religion.

As in anything when talking about religion and not historical fact, the interpretation is personal. I think any is valid as long as you can back it up with logic and a good argument...