Partner article to my honest analysis and appraisal of atheism.
Did you know I earned a degree from a seminary? Yes, really. My first master’s degree was from an odd little UCC seminary that was looking for non-Christians to help establish a religious studies program.
I’ve never been a Christian, but I respect religions, and I’m fascinated by religious history and the many varieties and expressions of Christianity. At that odd little seminary, my MA thesis was on the first-century heretic, Marcion. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Incredibly important guy for Christian history, his existence and influence deliberately buried, but that story’s for another time.
Which Jesus?
Christianity has never been a unitary entity, despite so many people wanting it to be. Christianity, like all human cultural expressions, has always been subject to interpretation. Differences in interpretation of who Jesus was and what his existence means began almost immediately. The first testament to this is in the Christian Scriptures, which relate the dispute between Paul and James as to the relation between Jesus and the Jewish Law.
Jesus was a Jew and was respectful of his heritage and the traditions of his society. Nevertheless, he taught a reformed version of that tradition that, among other things, recognized God as the God of all of humanity, not of only the Jewish people. Early Christianity tried to synthesize Jewish traditions with the new universalism of Jesus’s teaching, and much of the differences among Christian communities were different interpretations of the relationship between the “old covenant” of Moses and the “new covenant” of Jesus.
Then came the Christological controversies of many debates over Jesus’s nature and relation to God. Long and complex attempts to rationally understand Jesus and God but, more importantly, to understand ourselves and our relations to Being, truth, and meaning. The Christological controversies are too long to get into, but here is a decent introduction.
Jesus has always been a mystery. Everything ever said about Jesus has in part been a reflection on the speaker or writer. Not a projection, as Ludwig Feuerbach speculated (a dismissal that said more about him than anything), but a product of a person’s orientation toward the world. Like almost every other person, idea, event, or object, Jesus has been molded and twisted to be or represent what suits their orientation and purposes.
Jesus really existed — of that we can be certain. He was a real person. The problem is that Jesus never wrote anything, so we have nothing of his own voice. This is the case for most everyone who lived in ancient times, a time when very few people were literate.
Who Jesus was and what he actually did or said is difficult to pin down. We have only the testimony of witnesses who give us a mixture of similar and disparate accounts of Jesus (and far more than four accounts, thank you very much). Similarly, Socrates never wrote anything, and we must try to piece together a picture of who he was and what he said and did from the testimony of witnesses Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, and Antisthenes. No one doubts that Socrates existed, and no one has good reason to doubt that Jesus existed. Everything beyond that is a matter of intelligent guesswork.
We know that Jesus was a teacher, an unofficial rabbi who delivered a deeply radical message of dissent against the Jewish authorities of his time and criticized their doctrines and practices.
Jesus was a real Jew who really railed against political corruption. He spoke against the political and economic domination of the many by the few. He condemned a class system that benefited a few elites at the expense of everyone else that created inequalities of income and justice.
Oh, yeah, and he said we should be nice to each other.
Damn socialist.
Whether Jesus is God is a whole other question, and one can legitimately posit that Jesus never claimed to be God. Even the most fervent supporters among his early witnesses don’t mention such claims. We know that from the very earliest days, the interpretations and reinterpretations of who Jesus was and what his teachings meant were debated and evolved. I mentioned Marcion, who is significant because less than 70 years after the Roman Empire executed Jesus, Marcion claimed the apostolic church had distorted Jesus’s teaching and founded a Christian community that in some regions of the Empire had more adherents than the apostolic church. You never learned about that? Typical of how uncomfortable truths of history can be silenced.
The witnesses didn’t relate a physical description of Jesus, allowing leeway for the human tendency to interpret things to one’s personal preferences. This allowed for wildly different imaginings of what Jesus looked like, remarkably similar to how the artist looks.
Jesus wasn’t a European and he wasn’t a sub-Saharan African. He was a Middle Eastern Jew. We don’t know what he looked like, even if we take the Shroud of Turin as evidence (though most portrayals for over 1,600 years closely align with the image on the Shroud; do with that what you will). But we can rule out most if not all portrayals of Jesus.
I like Jesus. The real Jesus, not the fake ones. Not the white guy holding a lamb or the white guy condemning others to damnation or the other white guy heading an autocracy. No, the real Jesus — the Palestinian Jew who spoke out against political corruption and demanded justice for the people.
About Right-Wing Jesus
Believing that Jesus was white is bad enough. Believing Jesus is right wing is beyond the pale. We may lack some details about Jesus’s positions on some issues, but we can be certain that he wasn’t a capitalist, libertarian, crypto-fascist, anarchist, white supremacist, male supremacist, reactionary, or any other variety of right-winger.
We can argue over details, as the gospel writers did, but any honest study of the accounts left by witnesses that Jesus was executed by the political authorities because he taught and practiced anti-authoritarian views such as that people don’t need the priesthood to relate to God. He also practiced radical inclusion such as taking on as a disciple a collaborator with the Roman occupiers, and treating women with at least the same (if not more) respect as he treated men.
Jesus was a revolutionary, a leftist advocate for the poor who dared to declare that God was for them, not just for the powerful. As John Dominic Crossan puts it, Jesus was “a savvy and courageous Jewish Mediterranean peasant, a radical social revolutionary, with a rhapsodic vision of economic, political, and religious egalitarianism and a social program for creating it.” The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. I also recommend Crossan’s Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography.
The right-wingers of Jesus’s day had him killed — a fate dealt out to so many people over the centuries who challenged authority on behalf of the cause of justice for the oppressed. It is ironic, but emblematic of humanity, that over those same centuries right-wing rulers took over the concept of Jesus and reinterpreted him to support their hierarchical power structures. The image of Jesus shifted from his reality as a revolutionary Mediterranean peasant to a fantasy of a warrior Lord who sanctioned authoritarian rulers. How that transformation occurred is a long, complicated story, but there are well-researched theories about it, including by Bart D. Ehrman.
This bastardized right-wing Jesus has been with us since Ancient Rome. People in power used the fantasy of Lord Jesus to justify their power and excesses, which is how the powerful use everything. The fantasy about Jesus manifests today as the “religious right,” particularly in the United States where a nationalist adaptation of Calvinism emerged as fundamentalism and the evangelical movement. These are the “god, guns, and country” right-wingers.
They are not Christian. Those people are American nationalists, as I wrote about in this article.
It’s just plain bizarre that people with a gun fetish believe God and Jesus are gun wavers. And yet, they do believe in a bastardized Jesus who despises the poor, women, and nonwhites and would take up arms against non-Americans and those US citizens deemed not conforming to American zombie nationalism.
The fundamentalists and evangelicals parade around their idol of the right-wing Jesus. They use their fantasy of Jesus to justify their selfishness, bigotries, and fragility. They say Jesus is their Lord and Savior but ignore the reality of who Jesus was and what he taught. Jesus loved everyone. Fundamentalists do not, and their attempts to use Jesus as an excuse to condemn their fellow human beings is reprehensible. It’s also very not Christian.
The Error of Biblical Inerrancy
The fundamentalist evangelical movement will talk about God, call Jesus “Lord,” claim they are the arbiters of who is Christian, and most of all wave their Bibles. Those Bibles are their gods. It’s idolatry. It’s business.
A fundamentalist is someone who thumps his Bible rather than reads it. They claim this gaggle of documents from multiple anonymous and pseudonymous writers is the inerrant Word of God. To begin with, none of the documents in the Bible claim that any of it is the Word of God. As for its alleged inerrancy, the mental gymnastics people require to maintain that fantasy is painful to watch.
What makes the Bible an incredible collection of documents is the things it shows about humanity — different people from different times and cultures trying to understand themselves, their history, and the meaning of life. And yes, some of those people who wrote some of those documents that ended up in the Bible were nasty people who spewed their bigotries and nastiness. That shows us a side of humanity we need to understand.
The fundamentalists and evangelicals who idolize the right-wing Jesus use the nastier parts of the Bible as a weaponized book of quotations. They cherry-pick a small number of favorite nasty verses and load them in the magazine of their rhetorical automatic weapon to fire at adversaries. It must be why the fundamentalists like to link the ideas of God and guns — they have weaponized everything.
Then there’s the quandary of why those who claim the Bible is the inerrant Word of God ignore the vast majority of it. I’d like to see a statistical study of the literature produced by fundamentalist evangelicals as to the number of Biblical versus they quote compared to the number of versus on the Bible. I think we are talking single digit percentages.
A well-known hypocrisy of fundamentalist cherry-picking is their use of Torah verses to condemn homosexuality while ignoring the verses surrounding it that command restrictions on diet and dress. I say “Torah” because what Christians call the “Old Testament” are the Jewish Scriptures.
When fundamentalists aren’t expropriating Jewish teachings heavily cherry-picked, they are giving the so-called New Testament the same selective treatment. For example, this command from Jesus that almost every Christian ignores.
The rest of Jesus’s teaching in that verse is to pray to God in private and in secret. A key pillar of Jesus’s teaching was that each individual should cultivate a personal relationship with God, unmediated by priests or rituals. It’s as if fundamentalism ignores the very core of Jesus’s mission.
Heretics?
Let’s talk heresy for a moment. I’m sure this article will cause fundamentalists and evangelicals to brand me a heretic. Of course, the right-wingers of Jesus’s time condemned Jesus as a heretic.
The word “heretic” has become synonymous with unorthodox with an insinuation of cult-like behavior. But look at the etymology of the word.
HERESY — In ancient Greek, the verb ‘hairein,’ meaning ‘to take,’ gave rise to the adjective ‘hairetos’ ‘able to choose’ and the noun ‘hairesis’ ‘the act of choosing.’ In time the noun developed the extended senses of ‘a choice,’ ‘a course of action,’ ‘a school of thought,’ and ‘a philosophical or religious sect.’ Stoicism, for example, was a ‘hairesis.’
A heretic is someone who makes a choice, and heresy is a belief or action that is chosen. Originally the term was not pejorative, though it did become that when wielded by a Greek speaking group that called themselves the Apostolic Church.
Beginning around the start of the second century CE, the group, claiming to know the pure teaching of the twelve apostles of Jesus, began to use hairesis for other beliefs about Jesus, most notably, Marcion’s community. The word ‘hairesis’ was appropriate because the Apostolic position was that their doctrines were the original Christian teachings and all who disagreed had chosen a contrary (and thus erroneous) doctrine. Since history is written by the winners, the Marcionites were declared “heretics” and condemned as not merely people who chose a different school of thought but people who choose an evil path.
The Apostolic Church was the forerunner of the Catholic Church, which claimed to have inherited the Apostolic doctrinal authority. The latter inherited the habit of declaring doctrinal opponents “heretics.” As the centuries passed, the methods of dealing with heretics evolved leading to official intolerance, excommunication, and the Inquisition.
Christianity has never been a unitary entity. There have always been divergent opinions and practices and communities who consider themselves Christians. It is important to realize that heresy begins with a choice — a choice to think for one’s self. Individuals’ intellectual freedom is not often accepted by the powers that be — then and now.
Hell?
Jesus said surprisingly little about hell, though right-wing Christians seem to talk about hell an awful lot. Jean-Paul Sartre said that hell is other people. I say hell is reserved for people who would condemn others there. That’s if there is such a thing as hell aside from the ones we create on Earth.
The concept of hell exists in one form or another in many religions and cosmological legends. It is a place for those condemned, and so many people in so many times and places love the feeling of condemning others. Such feelings have nothing to do with religion (atheists also loving to condemn others), but religion being a cultural expression, human desires are added to it.
Within Christianity, the human desire for others to be condemned collides with Jesus’s teaching of a loving God. Importantly, Jesus didn’t teach about a tribal warlord deity who protected a tribe by smiting their enemies. Jesus taught about a God reaching out to everyone. As the apostle Paul said, there is neither Jew nor Greek in Jesus — the community is universal, and everyone is welcome.
When the right-wingers of Jesus’s time demanded that he condemn people, Jesus famously said instead to the sinner, “you are forgiven, go and sin no more.” It’s one of those Bible verses today’s right-wing fundamentalists conveniently forget. They’d rather practice vindictiveness than follow Jesus’s example.
The concept of hell as a place of eternal punishment appeals to some people. The concept serves no purpose other than to give nasty people a vicarious thrill. The problem is deeper than the Sunday school question of why a loving God would condemn people to hell. Eternal punishment would serve no purpose for a supreme deity. It wouldn’t make God feel better, unless God is as petty as the lowest human. It wouldn’t protect the innocent from evildoers. It wouldn’t offer offenders a path toward rehabilitation.
The fundamentalists argue that God must condemn people to hell because God is so holy and good that God can’t abide the presence of people who sin. This idea not only calls into question God’s omnipotence, it calls into question the whole project of God’s creation. The concept of hell is a theological morass that has theists trapped in eternal mental gymnastics to justify it, and it provides easy ammunition for the anti-Christian bigots. It’s a childish pissing match.
One can be sympathetic to the feeling that mass murderers and child rapists deserve hell. It’s another thing that some people would condemn others to hell over differing views on doctrine. How agreeing with monophysitism causes one to deserve eternal punishment is beyond all reason.
A Barbaric God?
Someone once told me that Christian theologian Hans Küng claimed that the idea that God sacrificed Jesus for the sins of the world was a horribly barbaric notion. I’ve never found such a quote attributed to Küng, but it is a provocative idea.
To paraphrase hundreds of apologetics on the issue, the idea is that Jesus, the Son of God, became human and was the sacrificial blood substitute for sinful humanity who deserve God’s curse against that sin. The idea comes from the Jewish religion, which practiced blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of the community. Jesus attempted a reform of Jewish religion and society, and early Christianity tried to synthesize Jewish traditions with the new universalism of Jesus’s teaching. It was understandable, then, for the early Christians to interpret, with scriptural support, the execution of Jesus as the substitutionary death for the sins of the world. Codified by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the idea that Jesus suffered and died for your sins is a staple in church doctrine.
To demand atonement for sin makes sense. We expect someone who does wrong to make amends and reform their behavior. That’s what Jesus practiced — that and forgiveness. Somehow, we are expected to believe that God demands not atonement but retribution. God demands a blood sacrifice. Fundamentalism reduces Christianity to the story that God created a flawed world that is now so full of sin that it can only be redeemed by God manifesting on Earth to suffer and die to cleanse the world of sin, but that monumental sacrifice doesn’t remove sin from the world, and the wrathful God must still condemn many, if not most, people to eternal damnation. It does seem rather barbaric, and it cheapens Jesus’s suffering and sacrifice.
Apocalypse, but Not as You Imagined
It gets worse. Because not only is there the idea that God demands that Jesus be killed, and that many people be condemned to hell, the whole world must be destroyed. This story is an outgrowth of the belief in hell and the desire to condemn other people to it.
Stories about apocalypses and vengeful deities were common in ancient societies. The Jewish people also had such stories, and many of the sayings of the Jewish prophets were predictions of God’s revenge against foreigners who tormented Israel. “We’ll be saved, and our enemies will be destroyed.” It’s a very human emotion.
Jesus’s attempts at social reforms took place within a fraught time for Judea. The land was effectively occupied by the Roman Empire, which erected a puppet government to maintain order. As is to be expected, the Jewish people wanted to be free from Roman occupation and domination. For a history of this time, see Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.
Having a long tradition of apocalyptic literature, some people in occupied Judea wrote their own predictions of God’s revenge against foreigners who tormented Israel. Some of those predictions were surely lost to time, though some survived in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts. One such prediction survived as the Book of Revelations.
Revelations is a favorite of many fundamentalists and evangelicals. God pours out wrath on the world, after allowing evil forces to enslave the world and attack Israel. A small number of people are saved — one verse suggests 144,000 people—and everyone else is tortured and destroyed. But, hey, Israel is saved, and the small number of people get to live in the New Jerusalem.
The writer(s) of Revelations and the people of that time believed the prediction would come true in their lifetimes. God will liberate God’s people from Roman occupation and Israel would be restored. Such feelings were solidly within the Jewish tradition, a tradition not as much interested in condemning others to hell as it was interested in Earthly freedom for the Jewish people.
The many predictions of the apocalyptic rescue of Israel inspired multiple major revolts between 66 and 135 CE against Roman domination. The Romans won each time, finally, according to the Roman historian, Cassius Dio, the Romans razed nearly one thousand Jewish settlements and killed over a half million people, leaving Judea severely depopulated. It was an apocalypse, but the opposite of what Revelations predicted.
The failed prediction of Revelations has not stopped people from reinterpreting it as a prophesy yet to be fulfilled. There is a vibrant industry of end-times prophesy, in which self-proclaimed experts cherry-pick Bible verses to spin lurid tales of apocalypse right around the corner. Repent, the end is near. It’s a big money maker for some, but many people sincerely believe the stories. It must fulfill that human desire to condemn others. What kind of person would feel gleeful at the idea of the impending destruction of the vast majority of humanity?
Today, the primary reason that fundamentalist Christians in the US support Israel is because they believe the stories that an infidel war on Israel will usher in the apocalypse. God will save the fundamentalists and kill everyone else, in particular, those who fail to support Israel.
The end-times prophesy industry reduces the entirety of Jesus’s words and actions to the service of a cosmic retribution against enemies. That is truly barbaric.
The God of Jesus?
There is no solid consensus on what Jesus taught or believed about God, as demonstrated by the many hundreds of books written offering disparate opinions on the question. Did Jesus preach a God of love or a God of rage? Or, as the fundamentalists teach today, was Jesus’s God a God who loves them and rages against everyone else?
Marcion claimed that the God of Jesus was not the God of the Jews. The earlier God was a vengeful tribal war deity, Marcion claimed, and Jesus revealed a new God, a God of forgiveness and love. The Apostolic Church, who believed that Jesus’s teaching was a continuation of Jewish tradition, proclaimed Marcion a heretic. It was all a matter of interpretation, and we can’t be sure who was correct.
The Still, Small Voice of People Reaching to God
I have long been struck by that verse of Matthew 6:5. The teaching that one should commune with God in private rather than make big public shows of piety is consistent with the fragmentary view we have of the revolutionary Mediterranean peasant. The Sabbath is made for people, not people made for the Sabbath. God is for the people; people are not the slaves of God. You don’t need the priests and the sacrifices to be justified with God. You need to go to God.
There is religion and there is spirituality. They are not necessarily the same. I’ve been fortunate to attend religious services of multiple religions and multiple sects with religions. I’m allergic to mandated ritual, but I enjoy observing the sincere devotion of people at religious gatherings, and I deeply respect them. There is great beauty in the simple, earnest energy of people reaching beyond themselves toward the sspiritual. God does not exist in the icons or the books or the objects — God exists in the hearts and minds of the people who pray, meditate, and listen. These still, small voices are beautiful realities.
Jesus lived. He was a Jew who wanted to build a better world. Love your neighbor as yourself, he said. That is a beautiful truth.