As I said in my previous posting, I have great enthusiasm for the insights and example of Jesus of Nazareth. I believe that this man really lived, and really said many of the things attributed to him. I realize this cannot be proved by historical evidence independent of the Bible (yes, like some of you I have read Bart Ehrman and Israel Finkelstein’s books) but here is my reason for believing.
Many of the things that Jesus said and did are in direct contradiction to what many self-identified Christians today believe. They are not things that a group of people could use as a way of controlling or oppressing others. “Consider the lilies of the field, which bloom today but tomorrow dry up in the heat. Yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” This contradicts many fundamentalist sermons, which say, in effect, Do not bother to look at the lilies of the field, since God wants us to pave them over, and since he is going to burn the world up in a few years anyway. And no one on the Christian Right would tolerate a religious leader who overturned the tables of the moneychangers who made a big profit off of religion, who called religious leaders “whitewashed sepulchres,” who told his disciple Peter to put his sword away, “For those who live by the sword will die by the sword.”
The sayings attributed to Jesus are incredible. How could anyone have just thought them up? Even two thousand years later, we are amazed at them. Certainly the warriors of the Christian Right would never have come up with them. How could a handful of uneducated fishermen have invented them? I am not saying they came into Jesus’ brain out of heaven. But clearly there was a genius named Jesus who actually said these things or something similar to them.
But since Jesus said these things, his followers figured that this was not enough with which to start a church. They were not contented with having people do as Jesus did, just go off in the hills to look at wildflowers and meditate. So they had to create a doctrinal framework in which to place him. All of Christian theology is based on twisted interpretations of the recorded words of Jesus, some of which were invented by his followers.
But even when we consider the words most likely to have been Jesus’ original sayings, we find that he was wrong. He said God would take care of us. The end of the quotation above, about the lilies of the field, is “If God so clothes the grass of the field, will he not take care of you?” His most famous statement is, “Ask and it shall be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.” Perhaps all of you have had experiences that show this is not true. As I will explain in a later post, God does not answer prayers. Jesus was wrong about this. Beautifully wrong, wrong with a supreme goodness of mind, but wrong. He wanted so strongly to believe that God had to be better than he was. But it was not true.
When I read the words of Jesus, fully aware of the priestly accretions that have been added to them, I believe them not as literal truth but as an insight into the transcendent goodness of love and beauty of the natural world.
No comments:
Post a Comment