Who was Jesus?May 11 2007
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I have not been a church goer for many decades but I have to concede that Christianity and The Bible have played an enormous role in the creation of the society and the culture in which I live.
For that reason I decided that it was foolish to avoid studying the Bible simply because I did not necesarilly agree with the people who claimed that I should be following its teaching.
About a year ago I decided to read the New Testament and to decide for myself what it said to me. Here is what I found.
My Summary of the New Testament's Table of Contents
The New Testiment is comprised of: - The Gospels, four books each a recounting the story of Christ by a different individual;
- The Epistles are twenty-one books or letters, written from church leaders to churches in various parts of the world. Fourteen of these were written by Paul.
- The Book of Revelation, describes a vision by a leader of a church community in Asia Minor living under the persecution of the Roman Empire.
Having surveyed the Epistles and the Book of Revelations I decided that they expressed more about the opinions of their authors on various topics than on the reality of who Jesus was. As such I decided to focus my attention on the four Gospels.
Of these I found the three Gospels of Mark, Mathew and John told a consistent and believable story about Jesus that must have been based either on a single reality or were the synopsis of a single larger work of fiction. Practicality leads me to believe that the Christ did exist and that these three Gospels do represent the retelling of the story of Jesus' active years. The Gospel according to Luke seems to me, to be less real and more of an embellishment of the truth, adding certain myths around the story of Christ in an effort to make him appear more "God-Like" to the general public.
That left me to study the three Gospels of Mark, Mathew and John to search for my own evidence of just "Who was Jesus?" To do this I read and reread the King James translation of these documents and then asked my self. "What would I make of these stories if they had not already been interpreted to me by the practicioners of the official Christian Religions?"
Here is the story that I would have told having been asked to interpret the meaning of the events described within these books.
My Interpretation of the Gospels of Mark, Mathew and John
In the these sets of stories it tells us that Mary the mother of Jesus was a cousin to Elisabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. So we know that there was a relationship between John and Jesus prior to John identiifying Jesus as "The Mesia." Knowing this, and knowing as well that this region was occupied by the Roman Empire and governed by Jewish Pharasees who had clearly made a deal with the devil. There was as well historically documented frustration among the people that they had no leader who would stand up for them against the Roman occupation.
This combination of circumstance created an opportunity for many fast talkers like John the Baptist to play on this frustration in order to gather crowds of the discontent and without much doubt to raise money by passing the hat at such gatherings.
Now Rabble Rousing like television show production requires that you constantly raise the level of excitement and expectations around your message or you are sure to become yesterday's talk show host. For John this would mean that once he convinced people that he was the precursor to a coming Mesiah he would eventually need to come up with that Mesiah or the people would lose interest and his cash flow would similarly dry up ... So who better to call on for help than his cousin Jesus who worked as a carpenter and who probably would like to make a little extra income on the side in addition to what he making as a carpenter.
The fact that John and Jesus had a prior relationship guarantees for me, that the identification to the crowd of Jesus as the Mesiah by John, was staged prior to the event. This could not have been the revelation that it as made out to appear but rather a conspiracy between John and Jesus to announce Jesus as John's newest partner in crowd raising.
Clearly Jesus was more talented than his mentor John, because he succeeded in gathering crowds which were much larger than John's. He was so successful that he began gathering around him a group of helpers, the Apostles, who helped him organize and manage the crowds. Noteably he would also need to share some part of the income generated form these events with his assistants.
Now before you accuse me of claiming that Jesus was some common carnie huckster I will tell you that faith can have strange effects. In many cases a placebo pill will have up to a 50% success rate in controlling symptoms of a disease. Faith healers today who make no claim to be God are said to have cured paralysis and blindness. If faith healing can occur today with people who claim no immortal connections, then it is very easy for me to believe that Jesus was an actual faith healer in the way that the Gospels claim.
The Gospels's are very clear that first and foremost Jesus was a faith healer. People came to him in droves not seeking knowledge of God and the future of their eternal souls, but seeking relief from their diseases and injuries. With no hospitals there were very few other paces you could go for help with your ailments.
What Jesus did not say in these Gospels was that he was the personification of God on Earth. At most he made occassional references to God as "my father" while at other times expresses distress at his lack of assurance in his connection with God ... on the cross he says "Father why have thee foresaken me?"
After reading the Gospels there was one message left ringing in my ears and that was that faith could move mountains and that to be healed we must first believe. On consideration there was one important prophecy, and that was that the Kingdom of God would be established on earth in our time. The time of the people who could hear Jesus' actual spoken worlds.
Taking the prophesy first; the meaning I took from this statement and the context in which it was made was that the audience should expect that God would come to earth and displace the government of Rome during the life time of the people who were alive and listening. This prophecy, his primary prophecy, was a failure, a fact that two thousand years of Christianity seems to have deliberately overlooked. To me this is like trying to hide an Elephant in the kitchen. Given the many things attributed to Christ that he did not seem to say and certainly did not emphasize, the one thing that he clearly did claim would happen ... didn't happen!
So if Jesus made no clear claim to be the personification of God on earth and his one major prediction failed to come about, what was it about his message that was so powerful that it caused his followers to organize a formal a religion in his name?
Clearly Jesus and the New Testament are primarily concerned with dicussing the power of faith. That was Jesus's message: You can be healed, you can be saved, if you believe. Faith makes everything possible.
Getting back to the story of Jesus I would say that Jesus was as suprised as anyone at the power that was unleashed once he was able to make people believe. Involved in a project that was originaly designed to raise a little money to supplement his income as a carpenter, he found himself caught up in his own myth and beginning to believe what other people are saying about him.
But who could blame him for believing in himself. After all miracles happened everywhere he went ... well almost everywhere ... On one occassion after establishing his mass of followers he revisited his home town where mysteriously his power to heal vanished.
On the otherhand with 12000 believers around him his power extended to being able to create food enough to feed an army from only a few loaves and fishes.
What was the difference?
Obviously the difference was in his ability to create belief in the people around him. In his home town he was carpenter who in 30 years had performed no miracles and people had no reason to believe that he wasn't the same Jesus he was a year earlier. Howver elsewhere he was known as "The Mesiah."
Jesus's various reported miracles have varying feelings of truthfulness. The lowering of a man on a cot through the roof for Jesus to heal sounds like it might have been staged for the effect; as does the resurrection of Lazurus. Lazarus was Mary Magdeline's brother he was certainly connected closely enough to inner circle to have benefited for assisting in the promotion of belief in the power of Jesus. On the otherhand whether these miracles were real or staged has no real impact on Jesus' message or on my interpetation of the meaning of his story.
Finally we approach to the fateful conclusion of his story, where excitement over Jesus has peaked and is beginning to wain. By this time Jesus would have been a believer in his own myth and would have felt compelled to push his power and his popularity to ever higher levels. However he soon realizes that there is nothing left to do but to go back to carpentry unless he can find a way to raise the bar of the excitement yet another notch.
To do this he decided to march on Jeruselem and to confront the Pharasees on their own territory and in doing so embarass them with their own hypocracy. This undertaking succeeds in drawing an enormous crowd and when he challenges the merchants in the temple he makes his presence impossible to ignore. He has not only marched an army of anti-authoritarian followers into the capital city but he has physically interfered with the business of the city while publically naming its leaders as hypocrits.
The fact that this bold confrontation of authority would lead to his own death could not of have been a suprise to Jesus. It had to be his plan. He was negotiating a trade .. the exchange of his mortal life for the immortality of his story and his movement.
In my view the execution of Jesus was not murder, but was clearly a suicide by Jesus undertaken by confronting the authority of the state in a public way. He had the deliberate intention of achieving martyrdom. Pilate would have preferred to have Jesus repent and then have the whole thing blow over, but even facing execution Jesus was resolved to follow his plan through to the end and during his trial he left Pilate no option but to have him executed.
In summary I see the story of Jesus as the story of a gifted man who found himself placed in front of a wave of human energy which he molded into a coherent belief in his own power to heal, and to produce miracles. As dumb founded as everyone else about the source of this power, he synthesized a few weak explanations but never missed a chance to channel his followers into the path of belief because he did understand that human belief was at core of his power.
Once Jesus was gone it was left to his followers and their successors to craft the explanation of what all of this meant. They have created a number of organized religions around this story which serve the purposes of both the organizers and the followers.
However we have come to a new juncture of history with knowledge far beyond the knowlege of the people who originally interpreted this story for us.
What I Think It All Means
With a clear mind I see these stories as describing a demonstration of the power of the human mind to alter our physical reality. Such stories are not unique to Jesus, nor to Christianity. Faith healers exist today. In 1993 4000 people congrgated in Washington DC and demonstrated that mass medatation could reduce the city's crime rate by 25%.
Jesus's real message was that "faith can move mountains." It is this message that we need to know, and to believe today, if we are to have any hope of saving ourselves and our planet from destructive forces which for the monent seem far beyond our control.
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