Christology for the New Millennium

Christology for the New Millennium

Curtis J. Scott

For decades serious scholarship and the pick and hammer of biblical archaeology have chipped away at many core Christian beliefs - from virgin birth to the nature of Jesus - and soon may induce profound changes to Christianity.  Sooner, if those holding on tight to traditional beliefs were either aware of such findings, or receptive to the light good, and often devout scholarship has shed on events of the first-century.  Sometimes revelations come from getting a hold of earlier version of sacred texts and simply having a better grasp of Greek and Aramaic than our Medieval and Renaissance predecessors.  Sometimes new texts are found, analyzed by scholars then unveiled to the world, as was the case recently for the Gnostic Gospel of Judas.  Such texts can be quite thought provoking.  The Gnostic Gospel of Philip, for instance describes the frustration of the male disciples of Jesus with their master's public displays of affection toward Mary Magdalene.  Christians have long assumed that Jesus had no such relationship, but that assumption was based on traditional belief, apocryphal stories made up centuries after Jesus' death, not anything in the Bible; and perhaps solidified by Pope Gregory VII when, in the eighth century he, through some misogynistic bent, turned Jesus' beloved disciple into the whore upon whom a village of hypocrites wished to cast stones.  So it can't have been his girlfriend, right?  There are other revelations that cause consternation. For example, from a strictly historical perspective, it appears Jesus was not from Nazareth, but a Nazaraean - a member of an ultra-orthodox sect of Judaism that emphasized the healing of the sick.  As a student of ancient Greek myself, I assume this was a mild error in syntax.  Still, once a thing is repeated for, say, a thousand years it becomes "fact."  What is coming into light in the twenty-first century is why, when, where and how we came to believe what we believed.  Through scholarship we now have available a view of Jesus in his element and the first centuries of context within which the Bible, the Church and ultimately Christian beliefs formed.  A pertinent question would be one like this.  If we were to figure out, for instance, that the churches founded by St. Paul had little in common with the teachings of Jesus, and actually censored teachings they disagreed with, whose side should we take as authoritative, Jesus, or Paul?  For two thousand years the answer has been "The Church's."

Faithful though I am, the more I come to understand the middle of the first-century through the fourth, the more I have to ask myself, "Faithful to what?"  I've come to believe that so many discoveries of in some cases blatant misunderstandings should call into question how it is we've come to believe what we believe.  Though the song says, "Because the Bible told me so," it is far more likely that one's Christian beliefs stem from what one's mothers taught, or some other member of our family, priest, or pastor.  No matter what religion one is, in practice, it is a religion of tradition.  Meaning one does what one does and believes what one believes because that's the way they've always done it - even when "always" points directly to a moment of revelation or change in personal philosophy that occurred in the last 150 years.  As the recent rise of evangelical churches shows, it really only takes a generation for people to declare themselves the self-anointed keepers of Truth.  Until 1963 the Catholic Church, of which I am a member, used only 7% of the Old Testament and 17% of the New Testament in the transmission of its Christology.  The rest came from nearly two thousand years of tradition.  After roughly one thousand five hundred years of that tradition Martin Luther, a priest of the tradition, began his own tradition, as did John Calvin and so on.  Both men based their Christology on the old tradition while rightly rejecting many Catholic methods of implementation, some of them downright vulgar, many of them outright cruel.  Few assumptions about the first centuries were changed though.  The distillation of Jesus as both God and a conduit to God by way of salvation remained.  Extra biblical traditions also remained.  For example, John Calvin was a great believer in the interceding characteristics of saints - a tradition already more than fifteen hundred years old, but by no means Biblical - though the Protestant religions that descended from Calvin quickly adopted a tradition of rejecting that tradition - the decision of men.  The point is, for all we say about what we believe the Bible to be and to say about Jesus, as humans we lean toward putting it into our own words, which stem from our personalities, which are formed by those who love us effectively or poorly.  The versions of Christianity we've inherited, at their root, show our propensity to make up stories and traditions, and pick and choose those sacred texts that agree with us, rather than the other way around, then call it all "Truth." What we disagree with we have a range of names for.  I have met precious few people who take an objective look at the text itself.

The New Testament itself is a perfect example of this.  In my conversations over the years with members of the Christian flock of many stripes, I have found that few have an understanding of its origin beyond, "It's the stuff God wanted in there."  A more accurate answer is that it's the stuff Athenasius, Bishop of Alexandria wanted in there.  It's when one gets to the question, "Who was Athenasius?" that doubt begins to plague the mind; as he is also prominent in pushing, to the point of murderous riots, the idea of Jesus being God as most of Christianity understands it, in the middle of the fourth-century.  In other words, Jesus didn't become God in the way a contemporary Christian would perceive it until three hundred years after his death.  At that point in Christian history also came the picking and choosing among sacred texts those that agreed with the beliefs of men with political power, including the Emperor of Rome.  That's why the Gospels of Judas, and Mary Magdalene and Philip and Thomas aren't in it.  Not until this very moment has a Christian had access to the cornucopia of sacred materials and ideas of two thousand years of faith.  Also, only now can one get an honest view of life in the Roman Empire, a view that looks upon them as ruthless, murderous occupiers sucking the life and wealth out of the ancient Third World, and not as the heroes of later empires doing much the same ugliness, including our own.  Not since Origen of Alexandria in the 200s have we even sought a picture of the real and historical Jesus, his time, or the world that must have influenced Paul's decisions and actions.  Only in the last hundred years have scholars obsessed over context; but most importantly, only recently has the grip of politically powerful churches lessened such that a picture of the first centuries of Christianity can come to light.

So what does all this mean?  For one thing we are starting to get an image how Jesus spent his days.  One would be forgiven for assuming we already had that, but the simple truth is we didn't, for several reasons.  So, who was he?  Jesus and his ilk were among several sects of Pharisees, meaning they were educated men, the intelligentsia of their day who, by job description, taught the tenants of their faith and settled disputes - legal and religious - similar to the Irish Brehan.  To be a Nazaraean was to be among an ultra-orthodox, ascetic, pharisaic Jewish group specializing in what amounted to a combination of faith healing and medicine man.  He lived his daily life under Roman occupation that, though the technology was different, the factors on the ground were much the same as American occupation of Iraq.

These are things we Christians could have known five hundred years before the first wave of murderous Crusades, but weren't interested, precisely because it brought into focus how devoutly Jewish our Savior was.  Some two billion people, I would bet, are still uncomfortable with Yeshua the Orthodox Jewish Pharisee, and would rather stick with the Jesus of Nazareth of the Christmas pageant.  In other words, they have a vested interested in traditional "Truth" over historical fact.  Until the Holocaust, for perhaps 800 years, Catholics of greater Germanium and Poland had an Easter tradition of leaving church after the Stations of the Cross Passion, picking up torches then marching to the shtetl or ghetto to kill Jews.  While burning their houses and farms they'd scream, "Christ-killers" with a thirst for blood.  Krystalnacht wasn't a Nazi invention.  It was part of a Christian tradition of anti-Semitism that started early in the Church, despite everything Jesus actually said about the acceptance of anyone who carried the first century label of "other."  Love your enemy was the directive.  Kill your enemy became the tradition.

On the surface such revelations about Jesus' life as an ascetic Pharisee seem harmless, and they should be.  Still, violence is rarely far behind any challenge to one's beliefs.  (Whatever we in the West call what is happening in Iraq - terrorism, insurgency, chaos, etc - it is most definitively the beginning of the Islam's Reformation.)  Thanks to fiction writer Dan Brown, and movies like Stigmata, other "facts" about the historical Jesus and the early Church have come to light recently that should cause both literalist Pentecostals and traditionalist Catholics alike to squirm a little in their seats.  Both ends of the Christian spectrum emphasize that Mr. Brown is a writer of fiction.  Indeed, much of what he writes about the Church is the product of imagination alone.  Opus Dei does not hire hit-man priests to kill those who would unleash biblical history upon the masses, for instance.  I hope not anyway.  On the other hand, historically speaking it is quite clear that infamous St. Athenasius, fourth-century Bishop of Alexandria - the man most responsible for the Creed that came out of the Council of Nicaea and the final verdict on what would be contained in the New Testament cannon - had no problem whatsoever hiring hit-men priests to do away with other priests, monks mostly, who disagreed with his imaginative understanding of the nature of Jesus.  And while we're on the topic of the Council of Nicaea, I cannot imagine any historical truth about Jesus more shocking to the modern Christian than the idea that Jesus was not assumed to be God incarnate until that meeting in 325 A.D., presided over by none other than Emperor Constantine.  Some historians, myself included, see so much irony in those meetings that we want to either laugh or cry, depending on our desire to believe despite what we know.  I can and have often argued that that moment in history was the precise moment in which Jesus, and everything he believed, lived and died for was rendered unto Caesar, so that Bishop Athenasius could be called St. Athenasius.  Power and politics have had more to do with what we believe than anything Jesus ever said.  Nothing speaks more loudly to that than the relative absence of his words in our traditions.  Take away the Lord's Prayer and what do we have?

That meeting was pivotal to say the least.  To make a very long story short, Constantine, recently impressed by the God of the Christians took one look at their organizational structure - bishops in big towns, different scriptures scattered all over the place, with the North Africans believing one thing, the Syrians another, the Celts up in Gaul, literally off in left field starting their own set of traditions, already Mary-centered, Athenasius burning his rivals alive and starting riots, (remember, the Romans hate uprisings) - and said "This in no way to run an empire!" He called the wisest and most powerful bishops of the Roman Empire to the table and said, "Make it uniform!" Uniform is what we got.  The real Jesus, Yeshua, is what we lost. Gnostic Gospels and letters that painted a different picture of Christ from the one Athenasius and his gang of priest thugs wanted were tossed out.  Check that.  They were burned if at all possible, but this was not the first time the depiction of an alternative Christ was under fire. 

We now have a fairly clear picture of the Church in the first-century that shows two distinct camps alluded to in Acts.  One is the Jerusalem Church left in the hands of James, the brother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Peter, with the rest of the disciples, like John, Thomas and Timothy going off and setting up holy lives that included preaching, teaching, healing and comforting pilgrims who sought them out as followers of Jesus.  Though Athenasius would have put a hit out on me for saying so, others and I have come to believe that Hebrews in the New Testament was possibly the work of Mary Magdalene.  I imagine Hebrews as the keynote speaker's message to a gathering of priests and disciples of the early Jerusalem Church; a message from one who knew Jesus personally, knew his thoughts and beliefs intimately from so many years in his company; who is reminding these Jesus-centered Jews of their awesome tasks and responsibilities.  She is literally keeping them on task against the reality that they are part of a fledgling sect, a cult of neo-orthodox Jews spreading the Good News about a dead rebel who spoke for God, as if God were inside him, and could have been king were it not for the bloody Romans.  To stray from the path Jesus trod, when they had heard the Wisdom of God was to imperil one's soul.  Add Hebrews to James and Peter, along with the Gospel of Mark - also known as John Mark, the young man Peter sent to see what Paul was going around telling people - and you have the Jerusalem Church, the church Jesus left behind, so to speak.

In opposition to Jesus' best friend, girlfriend and brother were the Paulines, the followers of Paul.  To get a sense of the depth of that opposition it has been surmised by some in the biblical archaeology field, based on documents sent to Africa for safe keeping, that the account of Stephen's martyrdom in Acts in not entirely the way it went down.  What really happened is that Paul, who believed he had a more recent revelation from Jesus and therefore was the authority on all Christian matters decided to revert to his previous occupation as hit man for the Sadducees, the holy puppets of Rome in Jerusalem, and kill James, the head of the Jerusalem Church outright.  Stephen was James.  That hit-man theme keeps coming up, doesn't it?  This makes Kazantzakas' view of Paul in The Last Temptation of Christ pretty much dead on, so to speak.  It also makes sense that Peter would send Mark to look into the actions of Paul.

So where does that leave us?  Peter and the Apostles wanted to carry on as Jesus, the Christ, talk about love, giving and sharing the nature of their souls and God's love.  Enough of endless rules, buildings made of stone, and fancy titles for men who love power, they said.  God is inside us, and all around us!  They liked to gather at the water's edge and share a meal.  Paul wanted to start churches and create a hierarchy of power within the Roman Empire, based on some things Jesus said.  Paul was a can-do kind of guy.  He left backwater Tarsus to seek fame and fortune in the big city, took a great paying job harassing and killing Christians who were embarrassing the rich guys in charge then went on to do whatever it took to create the only other authority structure within the Roman Empire.  He wanted buildings and power even though Jesus was rather specific about not finding God "in buildings made of stone." 

The rest of the New Testament is Pauline.  The Gospel According to John is a beautiful depiction of the distilled image of Christ from the perspective of the winning side.  Paul won.  James was murdered, Peter crucified upside down, Mary Magdalene run out of town despite Philip, Apostle of Jesus, making it abundantly clear that Jesus loved her more than the rest.  By the middle of the second-century Christianity was Pauline in all the big towns: the result of Paul's plan and his efforts.  In the countryside the outcast followers of the true Apostles wrote Gospels and letters, roamed the deserts, started monasteries.  The Desert Fathers, St. Anthony et al blossomed.  Most preached about a transcendental Jesus within us and all things, an ascetic Jesus, a Jesus who despised Empire.  Some were literally hunted down by a Church that was gradually becoming an empire within the Roman Empire.  Thus the need for Nicaea by 325 A.D. to decide who and what was this man Jesus, and who would control the message once and for all.

Men in charge, that's the rub.  The Greek Paulines didn't like that Yeshua sounded so Jewish so they changed his name to Jesus.  The misogynist Church Fathers didn't like women in positions of authority so they threw out the priestesses, though they had no problem taking money from women; in fact wealthy women were a great source of income in the early Church.  One can be forgiven for imagining what Jesus would say about such money.  In the Roman Empire, if Caesar said to the Governor of Cyrenia, "For the audacity of wearing a purple scarf, you will run around naked until we cut off your genitals and nail you to a wall," it was done.  In the Roman Empire, no one had authority except Caesar.  Slaves were naked, period, unless their bodies were so old and wrinkled that they were no longer fun to look at.  And everyone was a potential slave.  Paul offered that a man who was a slave could, through his church, be part of another secret authority structure.  In the church, a slave could be a ward, a deacon, a priest or even a bishop, not just fully clothed, but royally clothed.  I can look around Wal-Mart and see how tempting that argument still is; but missing was Jesus' preaching that such things carry negative weight in the eyes of God.  They are vanity.  They are pride.  They are of the earth, as dust.  They are sin.  What about camels and needles?  Nothing matters except how we treat one another, the widows and the orphans.  Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.  Give everything away and God will take care of you like the birds in the air.

I am a Catholic because I believe in its definition as both original and universal.  That doesn't mean that I don't see one thousand, nine hundred and fifty seven years of tradition based on much original falsehood.  Or is it?  Is it based on traditional worship of Jesus, or the idea that Jesus was the Son of God?  Is it as the Council of Nicaea declared in 325A.D. Jesus is God, "God from God, light from light, true God from true God; begotten, not made; one in being with the Father?"

As I see it, and I was raised Presbyterian, all Protestant faiths have their origins in disputes over details, emphasis, nuance and the authority of documents that were themselves tampered with by earlier righteous, self-righteous and sometimes angry men.  As I said in the beginning, between the Protestants and the Catholics there are two-billion people with a vested interest in tradition, many of whom have their eyes squeezed tight and their hands cupped over their ears, saying "na na na na na" as loudly as they can so that the real Yeshua, that Orthodox Jew who lived and talked and died for them, doesn't screw with their image of Jesus of Nazareth, that Danish-looking guy on their dining room wall.

From a sociological standpoint we are generally the religion of our grandfathers.  As long as the old man is alive, it's really hard to tell him you're having an original thought about Jesus, or Moses, or Mohammed.  Still, I cannot bring myself to point to the walls of my Cathedral and tell my son, "This is what Jesus had in mind."  Harder still the mega churches and their narcissistic televangelist hacks in $3000 suits selling the apocalypse for $24 a book.  I say we blow it all up then call in the Archeologists, historians, philosophers and educated priests of all persuasions.  Let's insist they leave their agendas and vested mythologies in the sacristy then maybe, just maybe we can build it again with honesty instead of self-interest, compassion instead of delusion; and this time without the gold, and the marble, and the hypnotic big-screen TV.  What would Jesus do?  I think he would point to the guy with the nice fire pit and ripe apples and say, "We'll meet at your house.  I'll bring the wine."

            "What will we eat, Lord?"

            "Don't worry about it."

            "Who's in charge?"

            "No one!  That's the beauty of it.  We will all speak freely from our hearts without fear of excommunication or dead relatives, without fear of being turned into naked slaves, or burned at the stake, or made to feel low in any way.  Not that there's anything wrong with being naked.  It should feel good the wear the skin God gave you.  Just don't forget the sunscreen, `cause we've messed with the sky and made it dangerous.  Make sure someone picks up Hazel.  She's not getting around so well these days.  And remember, love God will all your heart and love one another too.  Nothing else matters as much as you think it does."