The religion of Jesus vs. the religion about Jesus

[His Divine Shadow]

This is something I found in D&D forums on SA, I think it's worth a repost here, it's quite an interesting read.

You probably aren’t aware of what a significant day this is. For today, October 23, 2005, is the 6009th birthday of the universe! Yes, according to Archbishop Ussher’s seventeenth-century calculation, made by adding up all the days he found in the Bible, he concluded that the world was created on October 23, 4004 B.C. Pretty exciting. Also pretty absurd.

Yet that absurdity is part of one of the main styles of religion that exist within Christianity, so it’s worth understanding those styles, and the implications of that absurdity.

Within the tradition of Christianity, there are two distinct and diametrically opposed religions. They have almost nothing to do with each other, and both began in the first century, about thirty to forty years apart.

The first is the religion of Jesus, which can be found in his most profound teachings. The second is the religion about Jesus, which is called Christianity. The differences between them are sometimes almost total, and they had two very different origins. So I want to talk about these two religions this morning, because those two styles of religion - the liberal and the literal, the religions of trust and of fear, of love and of hate, seem to be eternal parts of the human imagination, wearing the costumes of the culture and era in which they appear in each of their new forms.

Let’s start with the religion of Jesus. We know almost nothing about the man. We think he was born around 6 or 7 BC, but we don’t know. The tradition says his father was a carpenter, and that he may have been one too. We don’t know. He seems to have been born and raised in Galilee, a country north of Israel, in very complex and contentious times.

There was no unifying identity in Galilee, and many little religious and ethnic groups lived together without sharing a lot of values or traditions. The conquests of Alexander the Great’s Greek army and then the Roman army had destroyed all the temples that had served as the unifying centers of the several different religious and ethnic groups in the area. The different religious and ethnic groups living together didn’t share enough social or ritual identity to provide a cultural center. Jews wouldn’t eat pork or shellfish. Greeks, who were often their neighbors, loved both.

It was a time of great religious experimentation. Religious entrepreneurs abounded. A dozen religions and mystery cults flourished. The cult of Isis and Osirus was popular, as were Dionysian festivals and meetings of the new religion of Mithraism, from which Christianity took much of its structure.

And there were great animosities between some groups in particular. The Samaritans hated the Jews and the Jews hated the Samaritans. Each considered the others to be half-breeds. And Greeks, Jews, Samaritans and others were all under the rule of the Roman Empire, whose gods were more like social binding agents than the markers of deep personal beliefs.

Each little group had its own stories, and each of their stories tended to make them the center of the universe. As small stories always do, they were too small to include or care for those not in their club. In this respect, their world was a lot like our own.

Jesus had been a disciple of John the Baptist, a very charismatic teacher who said the world was ending and the kingdom of God would be coming with judgment and wrath. After John’s murder, Jesus emerged as a new charismatic leader, and many of John’s followers began following him.

But Jesus’ message was radically different. His was not a supernatural message. He didn’t think the kingdom of God was coming at all. He thought it was, at least potentially, already here. That phrase “the kingdom of God” was a popular phrase in the first century, and a lot of groups used it. It meant the best kind of world, the world where compassion and justice ruled rather than the values that almost always rule us.

John the Baptist’s supernatural religion had said there was nothing we could do, that it was all in God’s hands. We had to wait for God to act. Jesus reversed it. He said only we could bring about the kingdom of God, and that it would be here when we treated one another like brothers, sisters and children of God. No short-cuts and no magic: God was waiting for us to act.

He attacked the Jewish identity that exalted Jews over Samaritans and others. But if he had been a Samaritan, he would have attacked their small, exclusive and judgmental rules. What was distinctive about Jesus was that he had that kind of grand vision that we associate with history’s greatest sages and prophets. He thought he saw how to make the world whole, and he put the ball squarely in our court.

He had no creeds, nothing people were required to believe. He didn’t seem to care what they believed. He never spoke of heaven or hell, though those who wrote the gospels a half century after he died put words about heaven in the mouth of their Jesus. But Jesus wasn’t concerned with rewards, punishments, or an afterlife. He was concerned with how people treated one another. He said they shouldn’t judge others, and that the quality of their faith was determined by how they treated “the least among them,” the poorest and most vulnerable people. This group “the least among you” is a moveable group, different for each of us, and sometimes changing several times a week or day. It is whatever person or group of people we are currently treating as things, as means to our ends, as less precious than we are. For some today, it’s gays or lesbians. For others, it’s independent women, or the poor, or liberals, or atheists, or fundamentalists.

Jesus didn’t think rich people could get to heaven, didn’t trust or respect the priests, and wasn’t interested in quoting the Bible as an authority. This was not a man you’d want at a polite cocktail party or a political gathering.

He spoke, they said, under his own authority. And this always irritates priests, who have decided they speak for God, since God couldn’t possibly believe any differently than they do. The teachings of the priests were seldom about behavior. Just do the rituals, recite the prescribed beliefs, love who they love and hate who they hate, and you’re saved - at least in the imaginations of the priests and the others in your particular club.

More accurately, Jesus spoke from within a vision of life that was so big it transcended the beliefs of any religion and the teachings, creeds and absurdities of the priests. He would have been bored or angry if someone tried to tell him on what day the universe was created. He didn’t care. He cared about how we were to treat one another while we are here, and those are much harder teachings because there is no place to hide from them, no simple creed to recite and shut off your responsibility toward others.

Few people seemed to understand Jesus, including his own followers. This isn’t covered over in the New Testament. It’s right out in the open. At one point, the author of the gospel of Mark has Jesus saying to his disciples, “You still aren’t using your heads, are you? You still haven’t got the point, have you? Are you just dense? Though you have eyes, you still don’t see, and though you have ears, you still don’t hear!” (Mark 8:17-18, Scholars’ translation from The Five Gospels, by the Jesus Seminar)

At one point, he even called his disciple Peter Satan, in the famous line “Get thee behind me, Satan!” He said this because Peter didn’t understand him or his mission. Peter kept wanting to exalt him as a superhero, and Jesus kept saying not to call anyone good but God.

The spirit of the religion of Jesus was profoundly liberal. He excluded no one, even made a Samaritan the hero of one of his most famous parables. It’s hard for us to imagine how disgusting it would have been for his fellow Jews to hear a story about the Good Samaritan. In the year 6, Samaritans had thrown human remains over the wall into the courtyard of the huge temple in Jerusalem. They did this to define the space, but also to make a particularly vulgar insult. The Jews hated them. Nobody could imagine linking the idea of a Samaritan with the idea of a good person - and Jesus made the Samaritan a better model than the priest and the Levite. Today, to get such an effect, you might have to tell the story of “The Good Terrorist.”

He saw God as a God of love, not judgment or exclusion, and told people not to judge, not to puff themselves up, not to wave their good deeds about for others to see, because it was phony, and you can’t do honest religion with that kind of phoniness.

The truth is, that while the religion of Jesus was profound and timeless, it would never be very popular, either then or now. It’s too hard.

After he died, maybe in the year 30, maybe a little later, there were groups of people who collected his sayings, and wrote some others in his style, to augment them. They saw his sayings as offering wisdom for living wisely and well here and now, and they passed them around, talked about them, and saved them.

But there is something remarkable about this group of people, who you could call Jesus People, but not Christians, for they had never heard of Christ. They didn’t consider him a savior, a son of God, or a miracle-worker. They didn’t even tell a story about his arrest, trial or crucifixion. In fact, they seem never even to have heard of these stories. They just knew and loved his teachings, as some of them could remember hearing them from Jesus. (This fascinating story can be read in the now-classic book by New Testament scholar Burton Mack called The Missing Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins.)

What this means is that the biography of Jesus had not been written yet. He had died, but nobody had invented his life yet. He was just a teacher who even the gospels described as a glutton and a drunkard, who hung around with the outcasts and prostitutes, and taught really disturbing things. But for many groups of people in the 30s, 40, 50s and 60s, Jesus wasn’t any kind of a savior, miracle worker or son of God. This is remarkable. Because - think about this with me - if they had believed this man was born of a virgin, or a son of God, or a miracle-worker or a savior, or rose from the dead or walked on water, they could not have left that out! Can you imagine people saying “Well, this guy was a son of God and all that stuff, but forget it. We just want to talk about his teachings.” It’s not possible! If the story had existed, if they had ever heard it, that supernatural story would have trumped a mere collection of teachings. But the religion of Jesus didn’t have a Christ, just a Jesus. In the 30s, Christ had not yet been invented.

The religion about Jesus seems to have originated with Peter, the one Jesus called Satan because he couldn’t understand either Jesus’ teachings or his sense of mission. Peter was also the one who denied Jesus three times when he was arrested, claiming he never knew the man.

And in a favorite line of mine, Roman Catholic scholar Thomas Sheehan has written “And Peter continued his denial of Jesus by inventing Christianity.” Roman Catholicism considers Peter to be the first Pope.

The Christ myth was constructed two or three decades after Jesus died. And to turn him into a savior and a god-man, the early Christians patterned him after most of the other god-men and saviors well known in the culture at the time.

So like many Greek and Roman gods, he was born of God and a young woman. He was given a virgin birth, but virgin births were a dime a dozen in the first century. Even Caesar Augustus, who had died in August of the year 14, was awarded a virgin birth by the Roman Senate a month later.

The category of savior figures was a genre in the first century. There were things that would-be saviors needed to be able to do. So the life of Jesus as the Christ was patterned after the well-known savior figures already known to most people of the time. Like the Greek Aesculapius, Jesus raised men from the dead and gave sight to the blind; like Attis and Adonis, Jesus is mourned and rejoiced over by women. His resurrection took place, like that of Mithra, from a rock tomb. And like Dionysus, Jesus turned water into wine, and his body and blood were symbolically eaten by worshipers.

In Christianity, everything Jesus cared for has been thrown aside. Now Jesus has been turned into a god-man and a supernatural savior. And once again, there isn’t much we need to do except believe the stories being taught by the new priests. Once again, there is our in-group, and everyone else is the out-group, a fit target for scorn or hatred. This was the situation Jesus spent his whole life fighting against! All religious wars have been designed to kill or eliminate those who wouldn’t get in line behind the story of the priests of the day. Jumping ahead more than a thousand years, remember that the Crusades were undertaken to kill all the Muslims. And the Christian soldiers were promised a trip to heaven if they died in this holy war, just as the Islamic Jihadists are promised by Muslim fundamentalists today.

In a sentence, Christianity - the religion about Jesus - has been the mortal enemy of the religion of Jesus, ever since Jesus called Peter Satan.

It was those who followed the story put together by Peter and Paul who put together the gospels, forty to eighty years after the man Jesus had died. And the victors write the history, as well as the gospels. No, the gospels were not written by disciples or by eye-witnesses. Mark and Matthew were given their names in the second century by a Catholic bishop named Papias, who thought it would sound better if the gospels were written by disciples.

But the difference between the two religions is fundamental, profound, and often deadly. Jesus hit people between the eyes with his demand that they treat all humans as equally children of God. The religion about Jesus demanded obedience to their teachings, not his, and to their ever-changing and usually strange creeds. Catholics teach that there is no salvation outside of the church. Jesus never talked about salvation at all. Baptists say Presbyterians, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists and just about everyone else is going to hell. Jesus never talked about heaven or hell at all - though the community that wrote the Gospel of John put words in his mouth sixty years after he died, that made it seem otherwise.

If you look back through the history of Christianity for its absurdities, as many like to do, you will find virtually all of the absurdities in the religion about Jesus, but almost never in the religion of Jesus. Like people saying Jesus was both God and man, when there has never been a theologian who could make coherent sense of such an absurd statement except as poetry. Churches exhorting believers to go into holy wars and kill other people, as they are now exhorting American Christian Soldiers to kill people in Iraq who look a whole lot more like Jesus than they look like most of us. It’s absurd. They’re also saying the universe is just 6,000 years old, and may well agree with the 17th century Archbishop Ussher that today is the universe’s birthday. It’s a dangerous kind of absurdity.

Voltaire once said that those with the power to make you believe absurdities have the power to make you commit atrocities. That’s why absurdities like thinking this is the universe’s 6009th birthday are potentially so dangerous. Because those conditioned to believe that are also conditioned to believe that teaching about “Intelligent Design” is intelligent, or that God hates homosexuals, or wants America to rule the world, or invade Iraq, take its money and oil, and kill anyone who gets in the way.

I know many people who call themselves Christians who reject this kind of Christianity. What they are saying is that they prefer the religion of Jesus, the teachings of a holy spirit rather than a bigoted and deadly spirit.

When you compare the teachings of Jesus with the religion about him created by far lesser people, it is easy for Christians and non-Christians alike to hate the religion that has so often served as the enemy of the teachings of Jesus, the enemy of love, the enemy of the kingdom of God. But of all the people who might hate Christianity, none would hate it more than Jesus.

And Voltaire’s saying keeps haunting us, that notion that those with the power to make you believe absurdities have the power to make you commit atrocities.

Today, we hear the Christian Coalition, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and a host of other morally and theologically reprehensible preachers say that Christianity demands that the rich not be taxed, that uppity women and all gays and lesbians be excluded and suppressed, and that you don’t have to act as Jesus wanted, you only have to do as today’s priests and politicians say. It’s hard to imagine a teaching designed as more of an insult to the man Jesus. It is the new crucifixion of Jesus. And today, Jesus is being crucified by Christians.

And when you think of the times that Christianity has been combined with state power, as is happening now in our country, it is always the religion of the priests, the religion about Jesus, but almost never the religion of Jesus.

Proposition Two is coming up for passage on November 8th, to add an amendment to the Texas constitution forbidding any area of Texas to give gay couples status or rights similar to marriage. This is an excellent example of this religion Jesus would have hated. I suspect it will pass by an embarrassing margin, and the Christian churches will be able to take major credit for passing it. That’s what I mean by saying the religion about Jesus is, as it has often been, the mortal enemy of the religion of Jesus.

Now what does any of this have to do with you?

For one thing, since we are hearing a low form of Christianity being increasingly mixed in with our government and our war, it is important to be able to point out that this is a religion, filled with bigotries and hatreds, that is a complete betrayal of the teachings of Jesus. We don’t have to be against religion to be against the religious right; we only have to be against dishonest and ungodly religion. We can attack the religion about Jesus in the name of the religion of Jesus - which is what Jesus would have done.

For another, it’s important for us to understand that virtually all liberal Christians in the country would agree with us in this. I have now set up the Round Robin series of guest preachers for January, when we’ll have a Muslim preacher and three Christian preachers. All three of those Christian ministers are trying to stand up for the religion of Jesus against their churches who have nearly beat it to death with the religion about him. We’re all on the same side, and it will strengthen us all to know that.

But there is another reason, and ironically it is profoundly Christian, from some of the best thought in that religion about Jesus. When you study the philosophy of religion, you learn that, theologically, what the invention of the Christ figure represents is the realization that the only God we’re likely to find, now or ever, is the one that has taken human form and acted in loving and godly ways right here on earth. It seems that’s what Jesus taught in the Gospel of Thomas, too. That’s where he said that those who understood him became him: that we are all potentially incarnations of the divine. That’s really why Jesus is so beloved by so many Christians and non-Christians alike: because he was the embodiment of love for the least among us, the kind of love we have always thought of as God’s main job on earth.

That notion that we can become incarnations, embodiments, of a spirit of compassion and love that might rightly be called holy - that is a sacred notion, and a profound one.

Maybe, if Voltaire is right that those with the power to make you believe absurdities have the power to make you commit atrocities, then maybe it’s also true that when we are led to profundities, we may also be led toward acts of compassion and courage, with the power to reconstitute, to save, both ourselves and our world.

We can only hope - but not only only hope.

[Spoonist]

Nice piece.
I really like this

This was not a man you’d want at a polite cocktail party or a political gathering.

[His Divine Shadow]

I liked this part:

Today, we hear the Christian Coalition, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and a host of other morally and theologically reprehensible preachers say that Christianity demands that the rich not be taxed, that uppity women and all gays and lesbians be excluded and suppressed, and that you don’t have to act as Jesus wanted, you only have to do as today’s priests and politicians say. It’s hard to imagine a teaching designed as more of an insult to the man Jesus.

[wautd]

Loved it.

I wonder what the reactions would be if someone posted it on a fundie forum

[Molyneux]

The question is, how *accurate* is that article?

[brianeyci]

The question is, how *accurate* is that article?

I think it all comes down to this.

The category of savior figures was a genre in the first century. There were things that would-be saviors needed to be able to do. So the life of Jesus as the Christ was patterned after the well-known savior figures already known to most people of the time. Like the Greek Aesculapius, Jesus raised men from the dead and gave sight to the blind; like Attis and Adonis, Jesus is mourned and rejoiced over by women. His resurrection took place, like that of Mithra, from a rock tomb. And like Dionysus, Jesus turned water into wine, and his body and blood were symbolically eaten by worshipers.

If a theologian or a religious scholar can find accurate links like this, then his story fans out. And of course, we all know of people who follow "Christinanity" but have never read the bible in their life. These would be the "of Jesus" people, people who don't take the bible literally. If there aren't any hardcore links, then I'm inclined to say it's bullshit.

Brian

[Morilore]

What I'm wondering is where he's getting his description of Jesus's "real" life, since he says the Gospels were written by liars.

[Braedley]

I must say I liked it. It gives me hope that at least some of the religious nut jobs on this continent may be implored to change their ways.

On second thought, maybe not, but I can still dream, can't I?

[Surlethe]

He's right about how the teachings of Jesus would never have survived if it hadn't been for the religion of Christianity. Without an aggressive conversion agenda, the teachings of Jesus would never have gained the widespread audience they have now; on the flip side, however, that aggressive agenda has ensured Christianity continues to obscure the teachings of Jesus which reside at its core -- or, what used to be its core.

[EmperorSolo51]

What I'm wondering is where he's getting his description of Jesus's "real" life, since he says the Gospels were written by liars.

There is one paragraph were he states that that the early Christians didn't think of Jesus a Divine Person. This is just a Rahash of Elaine Pagels' and Dan Brown's Theories that We Christians sometime around the Council of Nicea turned Christ into God. People like them tend to bring out the Gnostic Gospels as some sort of proof or other even though they contradict the writings of the Early Church fathers, esp Clement of Alexandria who wrote his attack against gnosticism and the other Heresies creeping up during this time in 80 AD, about 50 years after the death of Christ.

[Ender]

What I'm wondering is where he's getting his description of Jesus's "real" life, since he says the Gospels were written by liars.

the appocrypal gospels.

[Spice Runner]

John the Baptist’s supernatural religion had said there was nothing we could do, that it was all in God’s hands. We had to wait for God to act. Jesus reversed it. He said only we could bring about the kingdom of God, and that it would be here when we treated one another like brothers, sisters and children of God. No short-cuts and no magic: God was waiting for us to act.

This part really strikes me. It's sad how Christianity has twisted this whole idea around. The original idea that it is all in our hands to improve our world and make it great. None of this woo woo you're not a believer crap that is so prevalent in the world today.

[Morilore]

Okay, I like where this guy is going as far as bashing fundie assholes goes, but I'm wary of (actually, I have absolutely no reason to believe) his assertion that the "true" Jesus was all nice and humanist and not-at-all-bringing-any-kind-of-sword.

the appocrypal gospels.

After a few minutes at Wikipedia (I know, I know) it appears to me that most of the so-called "apocryphal" gospels are believed to have been written in the mid-to-late 2nd century, whereas the "canon" gospels are mostly attributed to the latter half of the 1st century. Since there is a strong insinuation in this work that humanist-Jesusianity came first, he's either wrong or not using them.

There is one paragraph were he states that that the early Christians didn't think of Jesus a Divine Person. This is just a Rahash of Elaine Pagels' and Dan Brown's Theories that We Christians sometime around the Council of Nicea turned Christ into God. People like them tend to bring out the Gnostic Gospels as some sort of proof or other even though they contradict the writings of the Early Church fathers, esp Clement of Alexandria who wrote his attack against gnosticism and the other Heresies creeping up during this time in 80 AD, about 50 years after the death of Christ.

Actually, he very clearly didn't blame Nicea, which occured in the 4th century:

The Christ myth was constructed two or three decades after Jesus died.

He talks about the Q Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas. I found an online translation of the Thomas Gospel after about 5 seconds of Google. Mostly one long (like most of the Bible, I imagine, for those not raised on it). It did contain these "jems:"

16 Jesus said, "Perhaps people think that I have come to casy peace upon the world. They do not know that I have come to cast conflicts upon the earth: fire, sword, war.

55 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."

The "cross" above hits warning bells in my mind, since

They didn’t even tell a story about his arrest, trial or crucifixion. In fact, they seem never even to have heard of these stories. They just knew and loved his teachings, as some of them could remember hearing them from Jesus. (This fascinating story can be read in the now-classic book by New Testament scholar Burton Mack called The Missing Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins.)

Unless "cross" was a popular term for suffering before Christianity made it chic, there's something here that this guy either isn't telling us, doesn't know, or is lying about.

[EmperorSolo51]

Actually, he very clearly didn't blame Nicea, which occured in the 4th century:

I know that. However I was making a general statement about those who talk about Christ's supposed "non-divinity" usually bring up both the Gnostic Gospels and how Constatine imposed Christ's worship as God at Nicea to thwart Aerius and his ilk. Which is funny since Constantine was an Arianist for much of his life.

[Rye]

This seems to have several problems from a preliminary reading, even for me, and I'm not like a biblical scholar or anything.

Within the tradition of Christianity, there are two distinct and diametrically opposed religions. They have almost nothing to do with each other, and both began in the first century, about thirty to forty years apart.

<- This seems to be well out of whack, in addition to the two sides the author presents, he seems to have glossed over the gnostics that were around since pre paul's writings.

But Jesus’ message was radically different. His was not a supernatural message. He didn’t think the kingdom of God was coming at all.

I don't see how this is a rational conclusion given that in the gospels, we have a doomy "we're all going to die, unbelievers destroyed, kingdom of heaven, etc" Jesus represented repeatedly. Since the Q document was, like integral to the gospels, I don't really see why they would invent common themes anathema to Jesus' actual teachings.

Check out these bits from Q: Watchfulness and Faithfulness Matthew 24:42-51, Luke 12:35-48... if you think that doesn't talk about the coming apocalypse...what are you, stupid?

Jesus didn’t think rich people could get to heaven, didn’t trust or respect the priests, and wasn’t interested in quoting the Bible as an authority. This was not a man you’d want at a polite cocktail party or a political gathering.

Misrepresentation of Jesus here, wasn't one of his disciples or one of the other main characters rich, and Jesus never dissed him, since he was faithful.

It gets dull, doesn't seem to use a whole lot of evidence or scholarly precedent to prove any points, at BEST it appears to be cherry picking Jesus quotes that support it and ignoring ones it doesn't like. The idea Jesus was a hippie humanist communist is a modern fabrication.

As for Jesus hating gays having less rights? What does he base that on? What jewish sect in galilee thought such things were okay?

Wishful thinking, cherry picking and undoubtedly double standards abound in that text, not convincing at all.

[wolveraptor]

How does he know this stuff without be Jesus himself? Jesus was some carpenter; the guy says it himself. So there's no way anyone could know what he really believed or thought.

[Anguirus]

While I agree with the article's spirited attack on fundamentalism, it's very shaky logic. It seems to say that any information about Jesus that he doesn't agree with is fabricated by the Gospels, and any stuff he likes that was recorded by the Gospels is reliable information.