Jesus From Cradle to Grave
Recently I attended a seminar presented by the Westar Institute: “Jesus From Cradle to Grave.” Over the course of two days, participants examined what the phrase “Son of God” meant to Jesus and his contemporaries; the virgin birth; and the Resurrection.
Son of God
The firsst session discussed the question “When did Jesus become divine?” — that is, the Son of God. Was it upon his baptism, as the gospel according to tells us? Was it upon his resurrection, as says, quoting an ancient creed? Was it at his conception, as the infancy narratives in the gospels of have it? Or was it before the creation of the Universe, as sings?
And what exactly are we to understand from the phrase “Son of God”? In the Hebrew Scriptures, a son or daughter of God can be ; ; ; or even .
It is clear from the gospels that Jesus thought he was a son of God. It is also clear that Jesus did not consider himself unique or deserving of privilege. He taught his followers to pray to “OUR Father,” called believers “” and “,” and , “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”
To the first-century Jewish mind, to call a man the son of God made him neither unique nor divine. To the gentile mind, however, sons of gods were usually divine (sons of goddesses were not) but hardly unique — Zeus was positively rabbit-like in his enthusiasm for procreation. And there is considerable evidence in the Christian Testament to suggest that many rituals we now consider uniquely Christian, such as the Eucharist, were actually “taken over” from worship.
“Born of a Virgin”
The stories about Jesus's virgin birth have inspired Christians for almost two thousand years, but they are not essential to the Christian message. After all, as a session leader pointed out, Paul spent in Jerusalem talking to Peter, Jesus's best male friend, and to James, Jesus's brother; and yet Paul says only that Jesus was “.” One would think that if the virgin birth were essential to the Christian message, or if believing in the virgin birth were essential to being a Christian, Paul would have mentioned it at some point.
The second session of the seminar explored the conflicting stories of the virgin birth in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and set them into the larger context of the ancient writings about the miraculous births of such historical figures as (son of the god Zeus-Ammon), (son of the god ), and and (both sons of the god Apollo). It is very clear by a study of world literature that in Jesus's time, as for centuries before, extraordinary men could not possibly have sprung from ordinary parents. As the Greek author , “It seems to me that a man who is different from all other human beings could not have come into being apart from divinity.” (So that explains the Elephant Man!)
Moreover, none of the words used in the original text requires Mary to have been a virgin. The Hebrew words almah and betulah meant merely “maiden, young woman,” as did the Greek word parthenos and the Latin word virgo. Only a term equivalent to the Latin virgo intacta meant that the hymen of the maiden in question was still (you guessed it) intact; no such term is used of Mary of Nazareth.
From the absence of any interest in Jesus's birth in Mark, Paul, Q, and Thomas, it seems clear that the earliest members of the Jesus Movement did not believe in Jesus because they believed in the virgin birth; rather, they believed in the virgin birth because they already believed in Jesus.
Resurrected by God
Finally, seminar participants discussed the Resurrection. Although all four canonical gospels and are , they are in rough agreement as to the public events of the Crucifixion: Jesus went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, as all pious men were expected to do; he did one thing too many to annoy the local ecclesial power structure; said power structure informed Pontius Pilate that Jesus was a seditionist, out to overthrow the Roman Empire; Pilate had Jesus summarily crucified, the death reserved exclusively for slaves, the lowest classes, and the worst criminals, especially revolutionaries.
Once we get to Easter morning, however, the canonical gospels' agreement breaks down. For example:
- According to Matthew (27:51-53), at the moment of Jesus's death there was an earthquake, and “many” people were resurrected. However, all these zombies stayed quietly in their tombs for three days, after which they came out of their tombs and appeared to many. This must have been EXTREMELY dramatic. Why don't the other canonical gospels mention it? Why doesn't Josephus, Tacitus, or any other historian mention it? (Doesn't this story sound as if it was made up by the Weekly World News?)
- Who found the open tomb? Was it:
- Mary the Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome (Mark 16:1)?
- Mary the Magdalene and “the other Mary” (Matthew 28:1)?
- “The women who had come with him out of Galilee,” including Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of Yakobos, and at least two other women (Luke 23:55, 24:1 and 24:10)?
- Or was Mary the Magdalene all by her lonesome (John 20:1-4)?
- Whom did Mary, and possibly other female disciples, find at the tomb? Was it:
- a young man in a white “linen” (Mark 16:5)?
- an angel (Matthew 28:2-4)?
- two men in dazzling apparel (Luke 24:4)?
- Jesus himself (John 20:4-14)?
- Whom did Mary and possibly four to ten other female disciples tell about the
empty tomb?
- No one (Mark 16:8)?
- Did they run and tell the male disciples (Matthew 28:8)?
- Did they tell “the eleven [male disciples] and all the rest” (Luke 24:9)?
- Or did Mary simply announce, “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:18)?
- Did Jesus ascend to heaven from Bethany on the day he was resurrected (Luke 24:51) or forty days later from Mt. Olivet (Acts 1:3)? Or did he imitate a yo-yo?
The earliest known writings about Jesus — the sayings gospel Thomas, written around 45 CE, and the source gospel known as Q — are silent on all matters relating to Jesus's divinity. For them, the circumstances surrounding Jesus's life and ministry are irrelevant. They are interested only in the Good News.
The Good News
Which brings us to what for me was the whole point of the seminar. Given that to the first-century Jewish mind a son of God was no one special; given that the authors of the Christian Testament cannot agree on the major details of Jesus's birth, life, or death; given that the earliest writings about Jesus found all these things irrelevant — how are we best to tweak out the meaning of Christianity for 21st-century minds? Must we really compel ourselves to believe that theological writings inscribed onto papyrus almost two thousand years ago, during the Iron Age, are just as valid historically as your driving record, as fundamentalists insist?
Or put it another way: Suppose that Paul, the author of the Fourth Gospel, and the panderers to the Roman Emperor Constantine were wrong, and Jesus was not “God in a man-suit.” Suppose none of the beautiful myths about Jesus's birth and resurrection are anything but myths. Does that render Jesus's teachings null and void? Which is more important: To believe in the teachings of Paul of Tarsus, who never met the historical Jesus — or to believe the teachings of Jesus himself?
Buddhism teaches that if we can learn to detach ourselves from worldly passions and desires, we can rise above the sufferings of life and eventually achieve nirvana. Yeshua bar Maryam — the historical figure known to the Roman Empire as Jesus, son of Mary — teaches us to envision a perfect world, a world in which every human alive loves God with all our hearts and souls and mind and strength, and loves the rest of God's creation as much as we love God. We are to work to make God's Perfect World a present reality, rather than a beautiful dream; we are to live as if we were already citizens of God's Perfect World. We are to live as if the world were already what it should be, so that the world itself can see what it could be.
This was the Good News preached by Yeshua bar Maryam, who would have been horrified at the notion of people worshiping anyone other than God (especially himself). If the historical Yeshua turns out not to have been Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior, who died for our sins and was resurrected on the third day — so what? So you'll now feel free to rape, rob, and murder? You'll completely ignore Yeshua's teachings about compassion, justice, generosity, and God's Perfect World?
Buddhism teaches us, “Get over it.” Christianity teaches us, “Fix it.” In today's superheated, super-partisan, super-bigoted world, we hear a lot of self-described “Christian” squabbles about when the Second Coming will happen in relation to the Rapture, or how many billions of people the Prince of Peace will slay by the sword, in honor of the God who is Love.
“Fixing it” is what Christians of the 21st century ought to focus upon:
- Loving our enemies, not recommending their assassination or informing them, after they have rejected inserting religious dogma into science classrooms, that by doing so they have rejected God.
- Praying for our enemies (Matt. 5:44) each Sunday during worship services, not praying exclusively for our side.
- Actively working to eliminate poverty, marginalization, and oppression, not working to transfer wealth and power into the hands of Halliburton, Bechtel, Kellogg Brown & Root, and others in the elite favored by the kleptocrats who have seized power.
- Giving money to those who need it, not to those who are already wealthy or who want to build “bridges to nowhere” in yet another Congressional porkfest.
- Focusing on fighting injustice today, not promising people who are outside your little in-group injustice when they die.
- Living in compassion, generosity, peace, and justice — not informing other Christians that they're going to Hell because they don't agree with your church's dogma.
Yeshua taught us that the only religious laws that matter are to love God back, and to love God's creation as much as we love ourselves. If you obsess about Heaven and Hell, the Rapture, the Second Coming, and so on, you are not living in love; you are living in self-interest — your ambitions for your future destination.
And if you consider anything whatsoever more important than loving God and loving God's creation — even accepting Jesus as Lord and encouraging others to do the same — you are not a Christian.
