After leaving this man to die in complete isolation, how did it come about that his followers not only clung to his message under the impact of his "personality," . . . but immediately made this person himself the essential content of the message?

It is one of the most telling and conclusive deficiencies of the materialist-atheist-scientistic view of reality that it quickly is obvious what it's useful for and what it's not any good for, at all.   

It is good for mentally, at best, destroying anything you want to deny, God, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc.  As the early-modern materialists and scientistic atheists proved, one of the things they most wanted to be rid of were the moral teachings of the monotheistic religions that had come to such enormous influence in the world, probably the foremost of those the requirement of providing for the least among you but also just about anything in that monotheistic tradition that impinged on their own desires and benefits.  That led to the libertines of the late renaissance and baroque periods through the attempts to come up with a rational framework replacing morality with formulations of self-interest and utilitarianism and as the obvious absurdities of those became more apparent and - as atheist-materialists will - into the inversion of morality and even intellectualism under Nietzsche and those like him and following him. 

It is good for denying the validity of anything you don't want to have to consider is possibly true, that, in the late 20th and 21st centuries is all the phenomenon of organized "skepticism" is good for.  In the case of the absurdly successful debunking started by Paul Kurtz,  CSICOP,  the decadence of their ideology became clear in the one and only and totally disastrousscientific investigation it undertook, the sTARBABY scandal (I wrote about it here at length with links and citations, see my archive) in which not only the scientific and mathematical incompetence of even such "skeptics" as taught the relevant topics at world-renowned universities but the main figures,  within CSICOP.   It also revealed the complete acceptance of the exposed incompetence and Nixonian dishonesty of the scientists prominent in the leadership of that major organ of "skeptical" - for which you can with complete safety substitute materialist-atheist-scientism - orthodoxy.  As the soon to be former ex-leader of CSICOP, Dennis Rawlins quickly discovered, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation . . . was primarily a public relations gimmick that had no interest in scientific integrity or investigation, it was an exercise in vulgar debunkery that demonstrated that the scientists and philosophy teachers were ready to abandon science for the most vulgar levels of show-biz as practiced by its most famous member,  James Randi. 

As the atheists' progress continues into the decadence it reaches what is, perhaps, its ultimate decadence in the late 20th century in which the imperatives of intellectual materialist atheism-scientism have led to the denial of the significance and even existence of the consciousness which articulates the logical conclusions of materialism which forces what I have to hold is that ultimate decadence in eliminative materialism as will get you a faculty position at philosophy departments universities as eminent as Tufts, Yale, and the University of California system.  From which you can debunk the significance or even existence of the minds which you are supposed to be improving, filling those loci of insignificance with the fully thought out ideas, the significance of which you hold as an intellectual and logical conclusion you must, of necessity by your own holdings, must hold are totally meaningless.  

And as you are cheered on by your fellow atheist-materialists within the science departments of your and other universities from which they make a good living dispensing science, the significance of which, not to mention a category properly called "truth,"  thing even more remote from the realm of possibility in their ideology, no doubt, protecting and defending all of the privileges, honors and esteem of ones so intellectually accomplished. As is the way with university faculties.  All proving that none of them believes a word of what they hold are truths which are to be insisted on.

Not to mention their demand for the acquiescent belief of those uninitiated into the complexities of their philosophical-scientific tergiversations.  And that is the right word for what they are paid to come up with.  They are oddly insistent on being believed for people who would seem to have no logical claim to want something they had so little regard for as the minds and hearts of anyone. 

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The central role that our conscious experience plays in whatever we can possibly have of what we call truth is remarkably demoted in the modern materialist-scientistic- atheist culture.  Given the central role that experience, observation, plays in modern science, the engine that was linked to materialist-atheism, and the fact that modern physics has directly confronted the vicissitudes, nay, the very centrality that our conscious experience plays in that most reputable of all the sciences, the very thing which all materialists hold that everything is reducible to, the demotion of our experience, individually and collectively as the human species is dispensed with amazing ease as what is allowed to be taken as true.  The psychologists of "skepticism" (conventional materialist-atheism) are specialists in coming up with all kinds of seemingly plausible schemes for pooh-poohing the experiences of people whose experience is not to their liking - many of those schemes totally unevidenced in either individual cases or even as existing as a real thing.  The decadence of psychology and the credulous faith in it which arose in the 20th century has played an outsized role in the decadence that has come with the rise of such pseudo-science.

But this is an Easter post, the first in a series I am hoping to write during Holy Week and maybe beyond, current events, the pandemic, the attempt to save American democracy and, more important than even that, egalitarian democracy and equal justice, will certainty intervene.   

Since he is the theologian I'm reading the most of right now is Hans Kung* and because he seems to have thoroughly thought through just about everything well before I even had a glimmer of it, I will be relying heavily on him.  In speaking about the evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus he deals with the enormous improbability of the Jesus movement surviving and the quick development of Christianity by not only the very first preacher of the risen Jesus - Mary Magdalene but the male followers of Jesus who all fled in terror as the women of the movement stood by him as he was tortured and crucified and buried who very quickly turned and found a courage to not only continue his teachings but who began to make the most incredible claims for him after he died.   Kung begins with a long passage of questions that force you to consider how improbable that was and to provoke you to consider what a profound experience must have led to that.   I, alas, cannot present his full, magnificent and rigorous argument which begins with a description of just how ignominious the crucifixion of Jesus was, indeed the ignominy of it was enough that even his most ardent male followers fled in a clear lapse of belief, in the Gospels, that is most ignominious in the one who put himself in the role of the greatest believer, Peter.  I cannot believe that the account of his denial and abandonment of Jesus would have come down to us except through the confession of Peter, himself.  

Here is the start of Kung's questioning. 

How did a new beginning come about after such a disastrous end?  How did the Jesus movement come into existence after Jesus' death, with such important consequences for the further destiny of the world?  How did a community emerge in the name of a crucified man,  how did that community take shape as a Christian "Church"?

To be more precise:

How did this condemned heretical teacher become Israel's Messiah the Christ?  How did this disowned prophet become "Lord,"  how did the unmasked seducer of the people become "Saviour,"  this rejected blasphemer "God's Son"? 

[Here it's important to note that all of the earliest members of the Jesus movement which incubated Christainity were all Jews, in the case of the most stunningly surprising and effective of them,  Paul, even after his conversion and during his evangilization, he described himself as not only a Jew but a religious fanatic among Jews,  one of the champions of The Law, a Pharisee.  So Kung's characterizations would have been entirely relevant for those earliest followers for whom Jesus, the Crucified, became known as all of those things.]

After leaving this man to die in complete isolation, how did it come about that his followers not only clung to his message under the impact of his "personality," his words and deeds, not only summoned up their courage come time after the catastrophe to continue to proclaim his message of the kingdom and the will of God - for instance, the "Sermon on the Mount" - but immediately made this person himself the essential content of the message? 

How did they come to proclaim, therefore, not only the Gospel of Jesus, but Jesus himself as the Gospel,  unintentionally turning the proclaimer himself into the content of the proclamation, the message of the kingdom of God into the message of Jesus as the Christ of God?

What is the explanation of the fact that this Jesus, the man who was hanged, not despite his death but precisely because of if, become himself the main content of their proclamation?  Was not this whole claim hopelessly compromised by his death?  Did he not want the greatest things and yet hopelessly failed to get what he wanted?  And, in the religio-political situation of the time, could a greater psychological and social impediment to the continuance of his cause have been devised than this disastrous end in public shame and infamy?

Why was it possible then to link any sort of hope with such a hopeless end, to proclaim as God's Messiah the one judged by God, to explain the shameful gallows as a sign of salvation and to turn the obvious bankruptcy of the movement into its phenomenal new emergence?  Had they not given up his cause as lost, since his cause was bound up in his person?  

Where did they get their strength from; these men who came forward as the apostles so soon after such a breakdown, the complete failure of his plans;  who spared no efforts, feared neither adversity nor death, in order to spread this "good" news among men,  even to the outposts of the Empire?

Why did there arise that bond to the Master which is so different from the bonds of other movements to the personalities of their founders, as for instance of Marxists to Marx or enthusiastic Freudians to Freud?   Why is Jesus not merely venerated, studied and followed as the founder and teacher who lived years ago, but- especially in the worshiping congregation - proclaimed as alive and known as the one who is active at the present time?  How did the extraordinary idea arise that he himself leads his followers, his community through his Spirit?  

In a word, then we are faces with the historical enigma of the emergence, the beginning, the origin, of Christianity.  How different this was from the gradual, peaceful propagation of the teachings of the successful sages, Buddha and Confucius;  how different fro the largely violent propagation of the teachings of the victorious Muhammad.  And all this was within the lifetime of the founders.  How different, after a complete failure and shameful death, were the spontaneous emergence and almost explosive propagation of this message and community in the very name of the defeated leader.  After th disastrous outcome of this life, what gave the initial impetus to the unique world-historical development;  a truly world transforming religion emerging from the gallows where a man was hanged in shame?  

I will issue a spoiler and say that one good reason for that is because the earliest followers of Jesus who knew him,  Mary Magdalene, first preacher of his Resurrection, but also those men who had fled in terror as they saw their leader tortured and crucified by the Roman Empire and the puppet king and the religious authorities in Jerusalem in the most ignominious and shameful way, are presented accurately as having seen and experienced Jesus not only as the reanimated corpse imagined by anti-Christian, especially atheist mockery but as far, far more than his body come back to life.  

It is one of the most astounding lapses of Christian teaching that they don't present the Resurrection in the terms the last parts of the Gospels and the letters of Paul present the resurrected Jesus as being.  More than a reanimated corpse, more than a ghost, more than a metaphorical experience, a feeling, as in the most un-Biblical, anti-textual presentation of modern historical-critical New Testament study does.  I doubt anyone would have had the career of James or Peter or the other named followers of Jesus based on a nostalgic feeling for the definitively fallen, crucified Jesus.   I certainly think that that oppressor and would be destroyer of the earliest Jesus movement, the Pharisee, Paul, would have never done what he did unless he really, truly experienced what he claims to have experienced in his encounter with the risen Jesus who he doesn't seem to have claimed to have ever seen before he was crucified.  

Certainly, for us, this isn't' a phenomenon like a mass delusion - the letters of James and Paul certainly aren't the products of people with severe mental illness or who are prone to delusions.  The Letter to the Romans is the product of such a well ordered mind that it even has the respect of some otherwise derisive atheists.  

I'll continue with this tomorrow.  It's already a long post.  But it's a big topic. 

*I think going through Kung's trilogy about the exitence of God,  about Jesus and Christainity and about the continuance of life after death could be an excellent introduction to not only Christianity but modern thought and culture, in general.