November 12, 2020 Jesus

                From the earliest perspectives

Today’s Post 

Last summer we took a first relook at religion from our secular perspective, viewing it as a potential tool for making sense of things and thereby as a resource for managing human evolution.  We followed this with a look how John Haught, employing Teilhard’s hermeneutic, suggested how science and religion could evolve toward a synergism in which the best of both could emerge from conflict to collaboration.

We earlier addressed traditional Western concepts of God, and saw how the concept of a ‘God’ can be reinterpreted by a secular perspective into the recognition of and cooperation with the ‘cosmic spark’ as it can be seen to be active in each particle of the universe, and therefore also in each of us.

Last week, we saw that this reinterpretation does not necessarily contradict the underlying kernels that lie at the basis of traditional Western expressions of belief.  In fact, we saw how such secular reinterpretations can be seen to resolve many of the dualities that are embedded in traditional religious tenets.  In doing so, it also begins to recover those religious insights which are relevant to human life.

This week, we’ll continue to focus our inquiry into the cornerstone tenets of Western theology, moving  beginning with the subject of Jesus, the basis of Christianity.

Christianity’s Dualities

We have addressed many of the manifestations of ‘duality’ that appear in Western theology, as found in Judaism, Christianity and the Greek influences on the continuing evolution of Christianity.  Dualistic concepts such as body/soul, this life/the next, sacred/profane, divine/human, good/evil and many others can be found in much of the evolved theology at the heart of Western religious thinking.

Such instances of duality can also be found in both the scriptural references to Jesus (the ‘new’ testament) and in the theological development which has continued to unfold as Christianity assimilated Greek thought and became established as an agent for stability in the Roman Empire as it expanded into Northward into Europe.

These threads of duality have persisted during the evolution of the West, and can still be found in the appearance and inevitable branching of the new science of psychology.  These traces were highlighted in our history of psychology, which pointed out how Freud’s dystopian theories of ‘the self’ were heavily influenced by the Christian Protestant duality which saw ‘man’ as both the ‘image of God’ and  ‘sinful by nature’.  We also saw how branches of mid-twentieth century psychology leaned towards a more positive basis, in resonance with the more positive of these two Christian perspectives.

These contradictions can still be seen today in the ongoing tension between Protestant fundamentalism and mainstream liturgical expressions of Christianity, as well as the wide divide between the extremes of liberal and conservative politics.

And, as we shall see, another dimension of duality also rose as Christianity began to develop a ‘Christology’, a philosophical approach to understanding Jesus from the universal perspectives of Paul and John, and how this new dimension was to give rise to the idea of a “Trinity”.

What Do We Know Of Jesus and How Do We Know It?

The actual dates of the life of Jesus are not certain, and the first person to write about him seems to be Paul, some years after Jesus’ death.  All the other authors of the ‘New Testament’ seem to have come later, so it seems that no one who wrote of Jesus actually knew him but depended on stories which were prevalent in the many new gatherings which sprung up after his death.  Not much seems known about these different ‘churches’ other than that they represented a very diverse collective memory of Jesus and his teachings.  Much of the diversity found in these churches reflected the dualities already present in the legacy Jewish scripture, (known by Christians as ‘Old Testament’ and by the Jews as ‘The Torah’), but many new dualisms emerged with the new thinking introduced by Christianity.

The ‘stories of Jesus’ that glued these early communities together all reflected the legacy dualisms of their Jewish heritage, such as:

• Was God responsible for evil or was the source of evil elsewhere?
• Was God’s creation ‘good’ or ‘evil’?
• Was God a ‘loving father’ or a ‘vengeful judge’?
• Was The Torah “God’s Word”, and hence to be followed literally, or a collection of human insights to be refined by latter teachers, such as Jesus and Hillel?

The emerging Christian religion introduced new dualisms, such as:

• Was Jesus God? Man?  God and man?
• What, specifically, was his relation to God? Faithful follower?  Offspring?  Co-creator?
• Was he ‘killed by God’ to atone for human sins and thus restore ‘fallen’ man to angry God?
• Is belief in Jesus necessary for salvation?
• Are only Christians saved?
• Will he ‘come again’? How?  When?

The letters of Paul to the early churches clearly show the diversity of belief that had appeared in the few years between Jesus’s death and Paul’s writing.  He consistently critiques beliefs found in the new churches, and his New Testament ‘letters’ contain instructions for ‘correct’ interpretations as well as summaries of Jesus’ teachings.

The First Perspective: The Synoptic Gospels

The first three ‘gospels’, stories of Jesus as formally accepted (‘canonical’) by the Christian church, are known as the synoptic gospels.  Thought to be authored first by Mark, then Matthew and Luke, they seem to have been written some few years after Paul.  They depict Jesus as a Jewish man who was not considered to be more than a man during his lifetime, who offered often unpopular interpretations of the law of Moses (the Torah), ended up on the wrong side of the law, was condemned for political treason against Rome, was tortured and put to death by crucifixion, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.

The synoptic gospels often depict Jesus as a ‘millennialist’, who predicted that God would soon intervene in human history and establish a kingdom on Earth, which would be led by the ‘Son of Man’.

Bart Ehrman, in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, notes that the ‘miraculous’ depictions of the synoptic gospels, such as the virgin birth, healing the sick and resurrection, are not uncommon in the many myths of the ancient world.  They appear in many stories of other ‘God Men’ born to virgins who ascended to heaven.  He notes that such stories would have been familiar to the early Christians.  He goes as far as to suggest that these events in the synoptic gospels were proclaimed by the post-Jesus church to overcome the shame of the nature of Jesus’ execution as a common criminal, and to appeal to those who would have been familiar with these myths.

However, for all the commonality of the Jesus story with other such stories, Ehrman documents how Paul introduced a facet which is entirely new: that of ‘the Christ’.

The Next Post

The writings of Paul and the authors of the synoptic Gospels offer a picture of Jesus which emerged shortly after his death.   However, the writings of Paul introduce a perspective on Jesus that is only vaguely addressed in the synoptic gospels.  Paul’s writings open the door for a perspective of Jesus that will take the new church’s impact on human evolution far past that suggested as a ‘holy man’.

Next week we will address Paul’s new idea, and how his perspective was expanded significantly by the Gospel author, John, and then further evolved as the new church began to develop its ‘Christology’