Did Jesus Exist and Does it Matter? (2)
Last
week I spoke about the evidence for the existence of Jesus – evidence from the
New Testament, from the Christian Church, and from non-Christian sources – and
I concluded by saying that this evidence, far from being compelling, and far
from establishing Jesus’ existence unequivocally, was, in fact, rather thin and,
when looked at dispassionately, pointed to Jesus being a fictional, rather than
a historical, character.
Today I’d like to discuss the
implications of this. Does it matter? Is the credibility of Christianity
dependent upon its being inspired by the life, death, and teaching of one
person who can be located in history with a fair degree of precision? For many
people, the question is breathtakingly audacious, even impertinent. For them,
Christianity is Jesus. Many times I’ve heard, and I’m sure you have,
too, that Christianity is not about a body of doctrines, it is about a person.
We have all heard people talk of having a ‘personal relationship with Jesus’,
which implies not only that Jesus lived but that he is still alive and can be
consulted, spoken to, listened to in prayer. (I would have more sympathy with
this point of view if, in the course of such consultations, Jesus gave his devotees
consistent advice, but he seems to say one thing to a Catholic and something
else to a Protestant. This hardly inspires confidence in the supposed
relationship.) For many people – probably the same people – the resurrection of
Jesus from the dead is central to their religion. ‘If Christ be not risen,’
says St. Paul, ‘your faith is in vain’. Without the resurrection there is no
Christianity because, on this understanding, Christianity is about life after
death, avoiding hell and gaining heaven, and the resurrection is a guarantee of
the reality of this. Furthermore, it is a demonstration of the status of Jesus;
because God raised him from the dead, we can be sure that he has God’s
approval, and so we can believe confidently in his message. A historical Jesus
is indeed the cornerstone of such a religious outlook; take him away and the
whole structure would come tumbling down.
But this is not the only way of viewing Christianity,
nor, I venture to suggest is it necessarily the oldest way. If we look at the
Gospel of Thomas, which, in all probability, is as old as the Gospels which
found their way into the New Testament, Jesus appears not so much as a
historical character with a mission to effect vicarious atonement for those who
believe in him, but ‘as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding;
when the disciple attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his
spiritual master; the two have become equal, even identical’ (Elaine
Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels),
To some early Christians, the historical Jesus was of
little consequence; he served as a symbol of what we might call the Christ
principle, the principle of interior illumination, of enlightenment, which all
may access and then embody by embarking on the arduous path of spiritual
transformation. This is a feature of what is called Gnosticism, and it had an
enormous influence in the early Christian centuries; so great an influence, in
fact, that the first defenders of what was to become Christian orthodoxy went
to enormous lengths to combat it. It has customarily been supposed that this
kind of thinking was a wild, heretical shift from a historical understanding of
the Jesus figure, but it is equally plausible that the historical understanding
came later and was constructed by people who wanted to impose structure on a
pretty diverse and almost anarchic set of approaches to God (which Gnosticism
was), and who felt that they could do this best by insisting upon, and
demanding belief in, certain historical elements. Some minds are very uneasy in
the presence of poetry or of disorder.
But this desire to control and bring
order to the loose Gnostic understanding of Jesus has had the opposite effect
to the one desired. Far from establishing a consistent orthodoxy, to which all
may reasonably give assent, it has generated an almost unbelievable array of
possibilities, each one claiming scriptural authority. Nowhere has this been
more apparent than in the area of Christology, that part of theology which
deals with the person and work of Christ. Far from unifying Christians, it has
divided them, to the great puzzlement of other religious systems, like the
Buddhist, the Jewish, and the Hindu, which are less concerned with the nature
and status of the religious messenger, and more concerned with living out the
message.
William Blake, who stands very
firmly in the Gnostic tradition (which has never been eliminated from
Christianity, despite persecution, excommunication, and ridicule), encapsulated
these divisions over Jesus in The
Everlasting Gospel:
The vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision’s greatest enemy:
Thine has a great hook nose like thine
Mine has a snub nose like to mine;
Thine is the friend of all mankind
Mine speaks in parables to the blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
Thy heaven doors are my hell gates.
.....................................................................
Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou readst black where I read white.
None of this would have any importance at all, of
course, if it were simply the preserve and concern of scholarly pedants; it
would be about as relevant to us as the debate between the Big Endians and the
Little Endians in Gulliver’s Travels,
the two groups which interminably and violently argue over whether one should
slice off the top of a boiled egg at the big end or the little end. But the
debate about Jesus (which, of course, is one of the things that Swift is
satirising) has left its bloody mark on human history in a way that few others
have. When it was decided at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. that Jesus was ‘very
God of very God’, intellectual and theological credibility was lent to an
already prevalent anti-Semitism; if Jesus is God, then, so the thinking goes,
the Jews are guilty of the most heinous crime imaginable – deicide, the killing
of God. The consequences of this for the Jewish people, and for the human race,
have been, and still are, unbelievably tragic, and the belated apology that the
pope made recently to the Jews merely serves to highlight the absurd and
inhuman character of this kind of thinking.
And when it became an article of
faith that Jesus walked the earth, then the supposed sites of his earthly
sojourn became ‘holy’ places, giving rise to still more tragedies and follies.
Fighting over places in the name of religion seems to be about as pointless an
act as it is possible to imagine. We may smile today at the antics of the Jews,
Muslims, and Christians squabbling over supposed holy sites in Palestine, many
of which owe more to shrewd marketing than to reality, but the squabbles have
not always been so amusing. The Crusades, whose ostensible purpose was to wrest
control of the so-called Christian holy places from the Muslims, witnessed some
of mankind’s most savage acts. At the siege of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in
1097, between 30,000 and 40,000 Jews and Muslims were killed in two days. A
Christian knight, Count Raymond of Aguilers, wrote:
Wonderful sights were to be seen. Some of our men cut
off the heads of our enemies, others shot them with arrows so that they fell
from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames.
Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city.
What more can I tell? Not one of them was allowed to
live. They did not spare the women and children. The horses waded in blood up
to their knees, nay up to the bridle. It was a just and wonderful judgment of
God. (Ludovic Kennedy, All in the Mind, page 113)
All this and more because the unique God-man, Jesus,
had rendered these places holy by his presence. Now, of course, most orthodox
Christians would deplore such things as much as you or I, but there have been
less overt examples of this insistence on the uniqueness of Jesus which have
caused, and are still causing, conflict among the religions. Those Christians,
and I suppose it would be the majority, who insist that Jesus is the only way
to God – ‘no one comes to the Father except by me’ – automatically and
necessarily hold that every other religious expression is inferior to their
own. This makes conversion of others a duty, and one can readily see the logic
behind the idea that making people Christian by force is actually doing them a
favour. This particular doctrine, which has caused so much misery down the
years, is a great stumbling block to genuine inter-religious dialogue; some
Christians will never rest until the whole world is Christian.
But by far the most important
negative effect of this insistence on Jesus as a unique historical figure has
been its power to distract us from concentrating on the system of spiritual
transformation which bears his name. To our great detriment, we have, as the
Buddhists say, mistaken the finger pointing at the moon, for the moon itself.
We have given our attention to the messenger and neglected the message; we have
constructed a religion about Jesus, sentimentalising him sometimes,
being terrified of him at others, rather than embarking upon the spiritual path
which the Gospels delineate for us; we have developed a non-demanding religion
of cowering obedience to external authorities, rather that one of arduous
interior exploration; and we have failed to see that the Christian system of
spiritual transformation, when shorn of its external trappings, is the same in
essence as that found in other cultures and in other nations, indicating that
these things describe the perennial human search for the divine and are a
source of unity with our fellow human beings and not of isolation from them.
Even liberals like ourselves, with
our own historical hang-ups, have spent our time examining the Gospels to see
which bits are authentic and credible and which are mere mythological
accretions, and this process has reached its natural and crazy conclusion in
the California based Jesus Seminar, which has, using a variety of strange
criteria, reduced what it considers to be material genuinely emanating from
Jesus to about half a dozen incidents or sayings which would hardly cover a
postcard. In short, we have made a mess of things, at times an extremely costly
mess, so much so that I am tempted to suggest that, even if Jesus did exist,
it’s perhaps time that we started acting and thinking as if he didn’t. Then,
maybe, we’ll be able to read the stories about him as they were originally
intended to be read.
My book The Gospel and the Zodiac: The Secret Truth about Jesus is available for a mere £6.89 from
My book The Gospel and the Zodiac: The Secret Truth about Jesus is available for a mere £6.89 from
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