Christians often think of Christianity as “following Jesus.” If this is so, then we need to know what Jesus really said and did. Unfortunately, we don’t, as anyone familiar with post-medieval biblical scholarship knows. The Bible just isn’t a reliable guide to the historical Jesus.
The irony is that people who seek after the historical Jesus — those who try and determine what Jesus really said and did — might end up being the real Christians. They are at least closer to knowing who Jesus was compared to evangelicals. And it’s all about “knowing Jesus,” right?
Evangelical Christians are following a puppet of oral history and scribal stories. They are not following Jesus. And if what they say is true — that God will be angry and send us to hell if we don’t believe what Jesus taught and know Jesus, ahem, intimately — then virtually all Christians will be sent to hell, because they don’t know who Jesus really was or what he did. Instead of just a great rabbi, they believe he is a mythic god-man who is born of a virgin, does amazing miracles, and then rises from the grave.
The only problem is, there isn’t any evidence at all for those myths.
Following Jesus means finding out what Jesus really taught, evaluating his teachings to see if they are true, then deciding to follow him. It’s not accepting what some ignorant yelling pastor says while he hits his bible and spits on the front row. It’s having a critical mind and a firm grasp on biblical and ancient scholarship. Otherwise, the Jesus that will be followed will be a straw man, built up from the foundations of error and legend.
It will be, in other words, evangelical Christianity.
I understand what you are saying. However, I must humbly disagree. I understand your desire to find the “real” Jesus. Scholarship has it’s place. I think that the problem with much of what the American church pitches is fairly spurious due, mainly, to a lack of adequate scholarship. And yes, any serious person will have to evaluate the teachings of Jesus and choose for themselves. But you also cannot discount faith. Faith asks you to believe something, something that you can’t boil down and weigh or measure. Do your research and ask your questions but remember that not everything can be solved through the scientific method. Sometimes, you just gotta have faith.
Peace
Ubahleeob,
My friend, you have drunk deeply from the well of the postmodern.
While absolute historical truth may be a pipe dream, it is not simply a matter of looking at the evidence (or lack thereof) and then “choosing for yourself.” Reality is not the dairy isle, where you can choose willy nilly what it will be. You have to weigh the evidence, and in the case of Christ, the evidence is sorely lacking. An honest person could only admit that there may have been a very smart, very socially aware rabbi in ancient Israel, but anything more is just what you purport – faith.
There are eight definitions of faith; only two of which apply in this discussion. They are:
1. confidence or trust in a person or thing.
2. belief that is not based on proof.
So, with regard to Jesus as some kind of god-man, I must either believe it without a shred of proof, or simply have “confidence.” For me and many others, confidence is provided by proof, and there is no proof of his deity.
That leaves us with belief without proof. And since I insist on living in reality, I deny the divinity of Jesus.
Edman –
I understand your need for proof. While I may have “drunk deep from the well of postmodernism”, I would think that you have dined at the Cafe of the Scientific Method. (Ok enough food and drink metaphors). I understand your feeling that no proof results in a verdict of “not God”, I really do. It is quite something to be asked to believe that this guy that lived 2000 years ago was both God and Man, without any definitive proof. I get it.
Again, I think you are attempting to disprove something that is, due to the nature of the argument, not able to be proven or disproven using the scientific method. By it’s nature ‘proof” is subject to interpretation. It is subject to some amount of faith, if nothing other than how much do you trust your own ability to reason.
If you will indulge me, help me understand who/what you believe to be the “historical Jesus”. No cons or sham arguments on my part, I am really interested.
Peace
Ubahleeob,
I am happy to dine at the Cafe of the Scientific Method, because that is how we learn more about reality. And it sounds delicious. (I really am too hungry right now.)
Fortunately though, my lack of faith did not arise from the use of the Scientific Method. I actually walked away from 15 years of Christian faith as a result of years of debating and “working out” some of the issues I had with it.
A couple examples:
Why is it that YHWH required a blood sacrifice to atone for sins? How did this make him any different than the other gods of the area?
How can YHWH endorse the genocide of the Amalekites, Gibeonites, the people of Makkedah and Lachish, the Eglonites, Hebronites, Debirites, Canaanites, and everybody else living in the land now known as Israel, and still be considered a loving and compassionate god?
After seriously dealing with these and many other considerations, I concluded that god, were he real, was not only no different than the multitude of other gods demanding worship, but that he was akin to a mischievous child playing with a loaded gun. That child needs to be dragged by the ear to the woodshed and spanked. Hard.
But I digress.
In regards to Jesus, I conclude that the stories attributed to him are really not much different than the stories attributed to other exceptional rabbis, such as the Baal Shem Tov. However, there are 2000 years of separation, and with that amount of time comes distortions, exaggerations, errors, misapprehensions, and flat-out lies.
I think the most reasonable thing to think about Jesus is that he was a very socially aware rabbi who strove to raise the bar of morality for those following him. Interestingly enough, I wonder if Jesus was even a rabbi, simply because I imagine there was a rigorous training program already in place for the other rabbis, such as the Pharisees and Sadducees, and Jesus was a carpenter. So, like John the Baptist, he was a new kid on the block with no formal training, and telling everybody in the “establishment” how things should be. In many eyes, a cult leader.
Understandably, the Jewish authorities wanted him out of the picture, but they may have settled for simply discrediting him or silencing him. However, when Jesus began speaking about “higher authority” and “kingdom of heaven,” no doubt that turned Roman heads toward Jerusalem. After all, Caesar was a like a god, and none on earth had greater authority. It was only too convenient that both the Jewish and Roman authorities wanted the same goals: to quell this possible uprising against both the established religion of the area, and the established government.
After Jesus’ death, his followers went underground to escape Roman (and possibly Jewish) persecution. There, they continued to tell and retell the stories about Jesus: a little exaggeration here, some embellishment there, a little bad memory, some after-the-fact rationalizations thrown in, a healthy amount of time, some charismatic followers, and voila! Gospel.
Then, as they say, it’s all history from there.
Well, that’s more likely than all the Gospel mumbo-jumbo.