Like so many great religious and philosophical figures in antiquity who are known to us not by what they wrote and who have no corroborating evidence of their existence other than that of their disciples and followers, Jesus as a person is difficult to know. As I have mentioned in previous posts, the Synoptic Gospels offer us the only picture of what Jesus was like as a person. Unfortunately, they have been written and edited to reflect an understanding of who Jesus is after the fact of his time on earth. It is difficult to get a sense of what it was like to be around Jesus on a daily basis during his brief ministry.
If Jesus is a person just like the rest of us, we can assume some things because our collective history as a species hasn't changed in the more than two thousand years since Jesus walked on earth. Behaviorally, we humans continue to do the same things over and over again since the beginning of recorded history. We can assume, broadly speaking, that Jesus acted and reacted pretty much the same way people today act and react to things and events in our lives. The basic human responses of happiness, sadness, and anger and what makes us happy, sad, and angry haven't changed because behaviorally and emotionally we haven't changed.
What has changed, however, is our understanding of the world and universe we live in. We live in an age of discovery about ourselves and the universe we find ourselves in. We have discovered more about ourselves, the planet will live on, and more about the universe we float around in within the last one hundred years than at any other time in our history. We know more of the past than at any time in our past. We know more about the present in real time than we have at any other time. We know how fragile life on this planet truly is and that much of the fragility is due to us. What we have discovered in the past one hundred and fifty years has changed how we understand ourselves and our finite place in a vast and expanding universe.
We also know more about the time and place where Jesus lived and worked than what people understood a thousand years ago because so much of history lied buried in the earth or was kept hidden away. In short, we are experiencing a sense of unvarnished discovery about us.
Histories can be buried or hidden away for centuries but at some point they emerge and are revealed. When it comes to Jesus and Christianity, the Dead Sea scrolls and the discovery at Nag Hammadi come to mind. Even the New Testament scriptures and the credal history of the Church point out that after Jesus death and reported resurrection, Jesus' question within the Synoptic Gospels, "Who am I" became "Who is Jesus" and more to the point, "What is he?"
Who and what is Jesus is once again emerging as the question of our time, a question that has never really disappeared despite all the theological and doctrinal attempts to put a lid on it and to bury it in creeds formulated to stop the questioning. That lid has been cracked open by what we know today and it is time to re-examine and ask, "Who is Jesus?" It is no wonder that some religious leaders are joining some of their secular and political counterparts in trying to put a lid on history and the questions such historical revelations are prodding us to ask.
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Whatever else we may believe about Jesus, there is one simple fact that we cannot dismiss. Jesus was a human being who lived in Galilee during the early part of the first century of the Common Era. To the local residents of his hometown of Nazareth he was simply known as the carpenter's son. To others he was considered a healer, a rabbi, a prophet, and the longed for Messiah.
From the Synoptic Gospels we can deduce that he was intelligent and likely educated by rabbincal scholars. He is depicted reading Hebrew as all of his teachings were grounded in the scriptures of Judaism that he studied and knew.
What was provocative was the context in which he presented his teachings on the Torah and the prophets. He preached about them in the context of the Kingdom of God and its imminence and presence in the here and now. We know he was perceived as a threat to religious authorities and ultimately to the Roman authorities, which led to his being crucified as a rebel.
After his death, stories about Jesus emerged. Reports of his resurrection quickly spread and a community of Jewish followers of Jesus was established in Jerusalem which sent out apostles (missionaries) to spread the word of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection to Jewish communities throughout the known world. The result of their efforts led to the eventual establishment of a new religion, Christianity.
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Twenty-one centuries later, Christianity remains enthralled by the stories about Jesus; in particular, his birth stories, his death stories, and his resurrection stories. Within less than a century after his death and reported resurrection, Jesus had been made a god, but not just any old god, but GOD, being assigned the second person slot in a trinity of a three-person God. With that said, Jesus became understood as the only human manifestation of God in the flesh who, for the period of a human life time, lived among us and whose purpose in doing so was to sacrifice himself to pay the price of our collective sins so that those who "believe" in him will be saved and have eternal life. After his death, Jesus was raised from the dead by God who was manifested in the human form of Jesus. Shortly, thereafter, Jesus returned to his heavenly throne to await the end of earth's allotted time when it is believed he will to return to earth and judge those still living and and those who have died since the beginning of time.
For one thousand, six hundred, and forty years, the Nicene Creed which provided an outlined summation of this premise in 325 CE has become the standard expression of "right belief" about who and what Jesus is. That creed was brutally enforced as such by the Roman Emperor Theodosius in the year 381 CE when Christianity was established as the only religion of the Roman Empire. Expressing belief in it premises as the true expression of who God and Jesus remains the doctrinal standard by which a Christians is recognized as a true follower of Jesus. As a result, Jesus is hardly recognizable as a human being just like us, even though the Nicene Creed gives a nod to Jesus being human by virtue of being born into our world through the Virgin Mary.
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As I have mentioned in other posts, the idea of Jesus somehow being the only-begotten Son of God and being both purely human and purely divine makes Jesus unrecognizable as one of us, no matter how one formulates the equation. Even in the twenty-first century that understanding holds true, but the question I am putting on the table is whether that understanding of who and what Jesus is remains valid, and if so, in what context does it make sense?
I see a need for Christianity to take a huge step back from the Nicene and other creeds that have been used to chain the minds of those who love God and are followers of Jesus from freely loving God and knowing Jesus as a brother who is truly one of us. To do so requires that one unwinds these doctrinal and historical understandings of who Jesus is and go back to the Synoptic Gospels and take a deeper look at them. What I have come to conclude from them is this: "What is true about Jesus is true about us, and what is true about us is true about Jesus, a deduction from what Jesus in these Gospels taught.
Let me be clear. In stepping back, way back, from the creeds that defined me as a Christian at my baptism and which I have repeated for most of life in countless worship services, I have come to understand Jesus much differently. First and foremost while I believe Jesus forgave us our sins, I don't believe Jesus was sent to earth to die for them. I only have the Gospel of Luke to base that belief on; a Gospel that readily employs a mythic imagination to express it. It is only in Luke we hear Jesus forgiving those who crucified him. By extension Christians have largely concluded that the rest of us are also forgiven for not knowing what we are doing. I don't know if Jesus actually said those words on the cross as he was dying but they captured my imagination and if we are to believe our sins are forgiven by God because of Jesus's asking God that we be forgiven then Luke's mythic Gospel is the one that champions that understanding.
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Being a human means that we are limited by our five senses and a three-dimensional perspective by which to understand the world we live in. Beyond those limitations, however, most of us possess the ability to imagine. I consider imagination to be on par with our physical senses.
We can create. Creativity is linked to our ability to imagine. The human imagination has led to discoveries beyond what our five senses and three-dimensional perspective can perceive. It has led to discoveries that effect our lives everyday. It was Einstein who said that imagination is more important than knowledge because it is through our imaginations that our intuitions are awakened and from which knowledge is formulated and acquired.
Unfortunately, Christianity has a long history of manipulating and suppressing the imaginative if and when it leads one to wander beyond the parameters set by the creeds and ecclesial authority. Ecclesial authority has also attempted to concretize the imaginative myths surrounding Jesus' birth and resurrection as historical facts. Let me be clear, the story of Jesus birth by a virginal Mary who never had sexual encounter with Jospeh before Jesus' birth is a myth as are the stories of Jesus' resurrection. The person of Jesus is enshrouded by these myths that are treated as factual events.
After twenty-one centuries, there is no other way to understand them other than as myths because they are not facts as we understand fact today; which is to say, something that is corroborated by other sources and can be forensically or scientifically repeated. There is no historical proof of these events ever having occurred other than the existence of their stories which were written between forty and seventy years later after Jesus' death by those who had (at best) second hand information passed to them. There are no verifiable events of that kind that are known beyond those expressed in what Christians consider the myths of other religions.
Myth is a dirty four-letter word to most Christians, thanks to First Timothy. This is unfortunate because as I have said in other posts myths are the oven-mitts of truths too hot to be handle. It is through the mythic that the imagination is engaged, allowing one to probe the meanings of our being that lie below or beyond the mundane surface reality of the world we have made for ourselves. These myths are important portals to examine truth but they should not be treated as facts. They lead to deeper understandings that awaken within us another sense of perception, intuition.
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I will explore the mythic side of Christianity in subsequent posts, but for now I want to return to Jesus, the human who possessed the same five physical senses, three-dimensional perspective, and the same imaginative and intuitive abilities we possess. We see these abilities at work in his parables, his metaphorical and mythic tales that offer us insights into his teachings about the Kingdom of God. Intuitive people are imaginative people, they are visionary and are likely to experience visions. I would suspect that most of us have had experiences with intuition, imagination, and perhaps have experienced a vision or two in our lifetimes that have made us question the concreteness of accepted reality.
Jesus was such a person. He was a product of the times and place in which he lived, but he also questioned and took issue with a concrete world-view regarding what constituted power and authority. He was a gentle but passionate soul whose vision of his relationship with God extended to all he encountered. If Jesus came to save us, it was not by dying but rather by his having lived a life shaped by a love that would not let him go, a love that could not die with the death of his body. Jesus teachings help us understand that we are like him in every way, children of God, born of God's love. Like Jesus we are the incarnate manifestations of that love. Jesus offers us no proof of that other than his own visionary perspective of who he and we are as found in his teachings.
The teachings of Jesus are vital to understanding how to live into becoming the children God that we are. It is not so much that Jesus saved us from our sins, but rather that he has redeemed (reclaimed) for us the vision and knowledge of who we truly are. It is clear throughout scriptures of the Holy Bible, that God's will cannot be averted by any human action or failure; that the pronouncement of God as recorded in Genesis; that creation is inherently good remains how God has always and always will see it, including us. The biblical story is above all else the stormy story of our collective (past, present and future) relationship with God told through allegory, legend, and myth and through the mediums of poetry, prose, parable, prophecy, and proverb.
To study and understand scripture is to understand the literature one is reading; to be able to identify the type of literature one is reading and its purpose in being written in the format it was written in. Beyond that, especially for the New Testament reader, it is vital to be able to identify editorial comments when one encounters them; comments that can be deceptive and misleading as to their intent and meaning.
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All of biblical scripture has been subjected to editorialization. Some by the original authors of these scriptures and some by later editors. In the New Testament, editorials were added to deny the mythic elements of the original story. I will offer just a few examples with regard to the Synoptic Gospel accounts of Jesus life. Most of these revolve around Jesus' birth and lineage.
Matthew 1 begins with "This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham." Then in verses 24 and 24 of Matthew 1 we read: "When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus. In Luke 3 we encounter another genealogy of Jesus that extends all the way back to the first "son of God," Adam (see verse 34). This genealogy begins in verse 23 by saying, "...he (Jesus) was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph..." These underlined comments are editorial in nature. The problem with both of these accounts is that whereas Jesus was considered a son of Abraham; in particular, a Jew by having a Jewish mother, Mary, Jesus being the Son of David was passed through Joseph's bloodline. If Jesus was not the biological son of Joseph, Jesus wasn't the Son of David. Oops!
Such comments also appear in the story of Jesus' resurrection, apparently to demonstrate Jesus physically appearing after his death, as proof of his being resurrected. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus appears to his disciples behind locked doors and to dispel any thought that Jesus was a ghost or a figment of their imagination, Luke adds the following, "(Jesus) showed them his hands and feet. And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them, 'Do you have anything here to eat?' They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence."
In the Gospel of Matthew, the women who encounter the resurrected Jesus, "clasp" his feet. In Mark's Gospel, beyond the women who went to Jesus tomb and found it empty and were told to go and tell Jesus' disciple that he is risen. That is where the earliest manuscript of this Gospel ended. Someone added more information that was consistent with Matthew's account, apart from that there is no editorial comment offered attempting to explain a physical resurrection. In fact, the additional ending admits that there were those among his disciples who doubted his resurrection and who Jesus rebuked. The Gospel of John is entirely a theological work that casts the story of Jesus parabolically ending with an editorial addition depicting that Jesus (who couldn't be touched by Mary Magdalen) cooking fish for his disciples.
Such efforts to cast Jesus' resurrection as a physical occurrence were employed to underscore the truth of its meaning for us but ventured into overkill in doing so. Unfortunately, these Gospel writers seem to have had no knowledge of or ignored the fact that Paul describes Jesus' resurrection in his letters as a purely spiritual event. "Jesus died a physical body and was raised a spiritual body." - 1 Cor. 15:44 . The epistles of Paul are the earliest known Christian writing that predate the Gospels by at least 20 years.
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There are two sides to Jesus' story, the story told through Jesus' teachings and the stories told about Jesus. It is important to know both and to know the difference, but it is vitally important to know and embrace Jesus as one of us in order to understand who we are. If we lose that understanding and put Jesus on a pedestal above and beyond our reach, we lose the good news of our own goodness, the goodness Jesus was trying to get us to embrace and manifest in our lives.
Until next time, stay faithful.
Norm
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