NO CHRISTIAN WHO IS sincere in trying to live up to the example of Jesus, as is presented in the most authoritative view of the human life and teachings of Jesus, the writings of the New Testament, has to accept the burden of the history of Christianity as an historical phenomenon whenever that departs from or, especially, is in contradiction to what those writings say about Jesus. I would not include in that any of the various, later, often dubious later gospels promoted by current pop kulcha and would-be scholars on the make these days. I've read a number of those and see no reason to believe they are in any way comparable to the canonical books of the New Testament in either plausibility or quality. That would include the so-called Gospel of Thomas which, far from having a core of great antiquity, seems to me to be an extravagant distortion of passages taken from the synoptic Gospels of the canon. I am ever more deeply skeptical of the products of the historical-critical slicing and dicing of the Scriptures, especially the books of the New Testament which have a far different and far less fraught history of editing and commentary than the books of the First Testament, those have their own history that covers centuries of such practice, whereas the Christian Gospels have a far shorter history before they became Scripture. To treat both bodies of works to the same academic methods is inappropriate on that basis, alone, it would seem to me.
I have become more and more convinced by much of what the inappropriately designated "conservative" Luke Timothy Johnson has to say about that and less and less convinced by the claims of even the superior historical-critical practitioner most influential on me, John Dominic Crossan, in that regard. That's not to say that I agree with Johnson on everything, I find that as I am still convinced by the points and arguments made by various liberation theologians though he is somewhat critical of that in regard to the Scriptural foundations of it. I would guess that in that Johnson, who has pointed out that his fidelity to the New (and, I'd guess, Old) Testaments leads him to may political and social positions that are considered radically "left" might agree with the goals of many of the liberation theologians despite that. Who could read the words of Jesus in the Gospels, the practices of the closest Apostles in Acts, Paul and James and the authors of the other Epistles and not be a radical egalitarian, especially in social and environmental justice? I'd say it is just those kinds of "fruits" that Jesus, himself, said we were to judge those who claimed to be following him by.
You can look at the long history of Christianity, especially in contexts and times when the established churches have had and exercised secular power, and see that most of that history is practiced in opposition to the words of Jesus and the New Testament writers, producing the scandals with which those who hate religion and Christianity have attacked Christianity with. As I get at least once a week here. To claim that the infidelity of church hierarchs, those who are members of clergy or other religious figures, the frequent corruption of them discredits Christianity is false in a way that you can't say about the source of other institutions because of the ultimate authoritativeness of the New Testament. "Democracy" is often far more corrupt than much of religion, the sordid history of the various democracies in the modern period, in that every one of those is a "liberal democracy" instead of an egalitarian democracy, though the alternative to democracy is reliably worse. The many sins of the United States government, the corruption of our politics by racism and greed doesn't mean that we should give up on democracy because we can be certain that the alternative is dependably worse. The evils resulting from the language of the Bill of Rights, the holiest of holies in our frequently putrid civic pseudo-religiosity isn't held to totally discredit the idea of freedom of speech, assembly or religious belief or disbelief. That Madison and the First Congress were witless enough to not distinguish between a genuine right to tell the truth and the dangerously ignored fact that there is no such thing as a right to lie doesn't mean that government censorship of the truth except in rare instances when publishing the truth.
Science, as corrupt an institution these days as any epoch in the history of the Catholic papacy or the shorter one of radio hallelujah peddlers, TV mega-"churches" etc, doesn't negate the validity of honestly done and honest science honestly done and reported. The fact that much of modern day mega-evil was committed with the full and enthusiastic participation of scientists, indeed, often at the instigation of scientists, doesn't negate the validity of scientific method. The greatest defect of science is that, by the agreed to rules, it doesn't have anything like a firm relationship to any morality. Not even the moral positions most important to the reliability of scientific method, that scientists must be honest and tell the truth, must keep their own prejudices and hatreds and greed out of the practice of science. That is responsible for the moral atrocity that much of science produces, much of that relying on the illegitimate repute that anyone holding academic credentials given as "science" is held to have, in much the same way the naive often hold that those with similar religious credentialing used to be given in the West and those held to be in some way religious authorities (often with ties to the local secular powers) are given in other places. Though the diversity of religions show that nothing like the universally monolithic structure of science has ever been universally in place. Making bad science potentially far more dangerous today than any bad religion ever has been. No religious figure ever produced weapons that have the potential of wiping out life on Earth, even the most powerful religion has never done that. I can guarantee you those who planned and carried out the Holocaust believed in science, many if not most of them were hostile to Christianity as it was and is, they certainly rejected the identity of Jesus and his teachings.
Which gets me back to Luke Timothy Johnson. In his excellent book, "Living Jesus," he points this out in regard to the New Testament:
In none of these writings is Jesus' humanity ever subsumed by a process of divinization or forgotten. In all of them, his humanity stands as the measure of Christian life and identity. His words are commandments that the church not only preserves but seeks to obey. His acts anticipate and express the power that the church recognizes as still active in the community of faith. Above all however, it is the character of the human person Jesus that remains normative for believers. It is not the incidentals of his unique historical existence, his Jewishness, maleness, and habits of speech - that are transferable to others, but the pattern of his life, the way in which he disposed of his freedom; this "mind of Christ' is replicable in the freedom of other human beings trough the power of the Holy Spirit.
I will break in here to note that especially on the question of the Jewishness of Jesus (and of Paul and almost certainly of every other writer of the New Testament) any faithful Christianity is incompatible with antisemitism. It isn't only in the very first words said about Jesus in the New Testament that he is specifically noted as being born a Jew, in the first recorded instance of a figure in Christianity to be killed by state authority, Jesus, he was designated by the Romans who crucified him as "The King of the Jews." That was the predicament for the collaborating clergy of, especially, the Lutheran Church in Nazi Germany. There was no honest way to separate Jesus and, in fact, the entire corpus of the ultimate authority for Christianity from their Jewish identity. That was a central aspect of modern antisemitism, especially in Germany. I have documented here that the very inventor of the term "antisemitism" to describe his ideology, Wilhelm Marr, detested Christianity BECAUSE OF ITS JEWISH ORIGIN. That wasn't unique to him but was a central part of Nazism. When collaborationist Lutherans sought to expunge what was explicitly Jewish from the New Testament, they reportedly had to cut sixty percent of it out. If they'd been honest about it, they'd almost certainly have had to cut 100% of it out due to the identity of Jesus, Paul, James, the author of Hebrews, Peter, John, Jude (the author of the Epistle of) and almost certainly John The Divine from it because it is a virtual certainty that the authors of ever one of the books in the Christian Bible were Jews.
It is positively known that if the Nazis had won the war the quick dissolution of the Christian churches was high on their list of things to do, the temporary ruse of "Positive Christianity" as a stop gap to gull the ignorant population of Germany would have replaced the Bible with Mein Kampf and the cross with the swastika.
There was no way to claim that Jesus and the earliest Christians were separable from THEIR Jewishness by virtue of what they did in their lives, especially for Nazis, just as Edith Stein's conversion to Catholicism and becoming a nun and, in fact, a rather significant Catholic theologian didn't change her Jewishness for the biologically minded Nazis. Natural selection and the naive conception of genetics that still held sway in biology well into my lifetime rejects the significance of any choices or actions of human beings. There were many Christians murdered by the Nazis because of their biological identity as Jews just as there were, undoubtedly, many atheists murdered by them for the same reason.
It was a matter of science for the Nazis, as Hitler's #2, Rudolf Hess said in the early 1930s, Nazism was nothing but applied biology." In the then developing neo-Darwinian synthesis of natural selection with the naive view of genetics in the early to late 20th century, it was all a matter of genetics. As I pointed out YET AGAIN in a recent post, that has reemerged, as it always will with Darwinism, in overt science through what Stephen Jay Gould rightly called "ultra-Darwinism," Sociobiology and, especially, "evolutionary psychology" which could include the scientific antisemitism of the man who was David Irving's sole witness in his dishonestly brought libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt, Kevin MacDonald, someone who was credentialed and promoted as a figure of genuine science, a professor of such science at a credentialed university, published in peer reviewed journals, in fact made an editor of such journals within his specialty. Indeed such science is so accepted that one of the biggest names in science, the high priest of ultra-Darwinism, Richard Dawkins, cited some such scientific antisemitism in his attack on religion and, especially Christianity, The God Delusion to little objection from Christianities cultured despisers. He did so to try to negate the virtue of some of Jesus' most admirable sayings of universal love. He had to lie about what Jesus said to make it fit his purpose.*
For current "trad-Catholics" and, I'm sad to say, even the good Pope Francis who they despise, the maleness of Jesus and the named disciples, is dispositive in the matter of maintaining an all-male clergy, despite the distortions and corruptions built into such an institution. But I won't go into that right now.
Johnson said:
Given such a strong sense of Jesus as Lord, the attention paid to Jesus' humanity in the New Testament is the more impressive. We find it not only in the narratives about his past but equally in letters emphasizing his present divine power. In none of these writings is Jesus' humanity either subsumed by the process of divinization or forgotten. In all of them, his humanity stands as the measure of Christian life and identity. . .
He develops what that ultimate modeling FOR Christian life and identity entails.
The diversity of images of Jesus in the New Testament is indeed dazzling. What multiple associations are generated by each of the disparate titles given to Jesus in these writings, teacher, Messiah, king, prophet, priest, Lord, Son of man, Son of God, First-born of the dead, amen, Savior, redeemer, servant, Righteous One, Son of David, Word, overseer, judge, advocate, witness, friend. And how much more complex those associations become when put into a variety of combinations of each composition. There are also the many metaphors and metonymies applied to Jesus - lamb, shepherd, door, vine, light, bread, water, blood, temple, spirit, anchor, stone, builder - which are also combined in intricate ways. It is impossible to select one of these titles or metaphors as more central than the others. They are all put in play by the compositions themselves for our learning of Jesus. None of them captures all of Jesus, none is without some truth concerning Jesus. We are incredibly enriched precisely by their abundance and diversity, and we would be impoverished by the loss of any of them.
We have seen as well that the image of Jesus is affected by the purpose and genre of each composition; in the epistolary literature of the New Testament (including Revelation), it is the living presence of Jesus as Lord that is most explicit, with attention to his human ministry left largely implicit in the Gospels, Jesus' human ministry is obviously the explicit focus, with the prescriptives and concerns of the post-resurrection church largely implicit. Yet each of the Gospel narratives shapes its image differently. Marks emphasis on Jesus as the suffering Son of man is not the same as Matthew's emphasis on Jesus as teacher of the church or Luke's emphasis on Jesus as the prophet like Moses or John's emphasis on Jesus as the revealer of the father.
The diversity of witness and interpretation is real. There truly is a "different" Jesus in each of the New Testament writings. . .
Is it any wonder, then, that those of us coming to our own interpretations of Jesus, out of our own contexts, for what seems the most compelling reasons we experience, come to radically different views of Jesus and how to live in light of the consequences of Jesus. I think that Johnson's own statements about "living Jesus" as well as the "Living Jesus" produces a context wide enough to include the various liberation theologies that have arisen out of different life experiences, lives lived in different contexts and with different exigencies impinging on those images. His controversial embrace of the possible holiness of faithful same-sex unions admittedly comes from having a daughter who is a Lesbian in such a faithful relationship and, as some of his own students started coming out, him knowing them and their lives. So does Ernesto Cardinal's view of Jesus, that of Gustavo Gutierrez, James Cone, Leonardo Boff, Desmond Tutu, and myriads of others come out of their life experience. That is even more obviously true in the case of Womanist and Feminist and Queer theology.
But if that's true, how does Jesus not dissolve into an ever growing and often contradictory number of images and idols to be rejected? How can such a practice avoid the "supply-side, MAGA "Jesus" of Republican-fascism? The macho-Hollywood John Wayne-Clint Eastwood "Jesus" of those who object to the actual, Gospel presented Jesus? The fascist Second-Amendment "Jesus"?
Johnson points out that there is a unity in the diversity of the views of Jesus presented in the books of the New Testament, on which any valid basis for a view of the real, Living Jesus has to rest. And that unified view of the Living Jesus is the most coherent picture of him that we have.
It is on this point, in fact, that we find the most consistent testimony in the writings of the New Testament - namely, that there is a necessary congruence between the character of Jesus' human life and the character of Christian discipleship.
Nowhere in the New Testament is there an image of the human Jesus that is compatible with attitudes of hubris, hedonism, envy, arrogance, acquisitiveness, self-aggrandizement, hostility, or violence. Jesus is everywhere associated with faithful obedience to God and meek, compassionate, self-emptying service toward other people.
Jesus' character reveals him to be someone who hopes in the power of God rather than in human manipulation, who faithfully obeys God rather than is own project, and who loves with a self-giving of time and energy and presence to the needs of others in preference to his own.
That is why the cross of Jesus stands as the central symbol for his entire life, his death was in faithful obedience to God even when he wanted to live, his death was an act of love to overcome alienation between humans; his death was the ultimate expression of hope in a God who can call into being that which does not exist and therefore give life to the dead.
Similarly, we find nowhere in the New Testament an understanding of Christian discipleship compatible with a life devoted to one's own success, pleasure, comfort, freedom from suffering, or power at the expense of others. Everywhere we find the qualities that are found in Jesus advanced as essential to the following of Jesus; the same faith, the same love, the same hope. The basic pattern of faithful obedience to God and loving service to others is the image of Christ that the Spirit replicates in the freedom of those who belong to Christ.
The American old-line, main-line Church Jesus does the modeling backwards, taking an idealized model "Christian" as a middle-class, white, Christian, businessman, who I might stereotype as the Billy Graham kind of Christian and reimagine Jesus as being supportive of that. I take that as a development of such idols as the Jesus of "muscular Christianity" from the 19th century and the genocide-friendly Jesus of Cotton Mather, itself a combination of Jesus with the genocidal Moses of late in Exodus and finding its conclusion in the career of his successor, Joshua. (similar latter-day creations, I suspect). That's what happens when the Jesus of the New Testament collides with one's own success, pleasure, comfort, freedom from suffering and, especially, power at the expense of others, as it has throughout human history. That "Jesus" is more distorted than the worst of science done for personal profit and ideology over honesty and truth and admitting limits because Jesus certainly held that it's a sin to lie and bear false witness, science and, in fact, secularism doesn't hold that as a moral absolute. They have to import the idea of right and wrong from outside because they can't provide it internally.
The real Jesus was disreputable in the extreme, to the established powers and even the aspirations of the modern affluent population in liberal democracies, intact and crumbling. The real Jesus was well described by Terry Eagleton, as given by Walter Brueggeman in one of his lectures on Jeremiah:
It turns out that the life of the Crucified One exhibits the counterpoint to the great seduction of Jerusalem. He is the embodiment of weakness as he stood vulnerable before imperial authority. He is the embodiment of foolishness. Terry Eagleton describes him this way:
"Unlike most responsible American citizens, Jesus appears to do no work, is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, property-less, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful, The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over the top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents. Forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for tomorrow."
So far Eagleton.
He is the embodiment of poverty with nowhere to lay his head or even healthcare. The remembered Jesus sits amid our posturing, it reminds us that the great imperial triad of might, wisdom and wealth never delivers the security or the happiness that it promises.
But I will not linger over that [Christian] counter-triad of weakness, foolishness and poverty that waits silently for us, because that triad is too outrageous and too remote from our business at hand.
I'd add only that it is exactly in the extent to which professed Christians are willing to keep the real Jesus remote from their business at hand that will determine how Christian such a Christian is.
* I can't find my copy of Dawkins but here is how that passage was quoted by Marilynne Robinson in her review of God Delusion:
“I need to call attention to one particularly unpalatable aspect
of its [the Bible’s] ethical teaching. Christians seldom realize that
much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted
by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to apply only
to a narrowly defined in-group. ‘Love thy neighbor’ didn’t mean what we
now think it means. It meant only ‘Love another Jew.” As for the New
Testament interpretation of the text, “Hartung puts it more bluntly than
I dare: ‘Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that
Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.” Pigs being, of course,
gentiles.
Before that she noted:
Dawkins dwells particularly on Christianity, since he is most
familiar with it, and because its influence is and has been very great.
On the one hand, he professes a lingering fondness for the Church of
England and regrets that familiarity with the Bible, a great Literature,
is in decline. On the other hand, he finds the Old Testament barbarous
and abhorrent and the New Testament mawkish and fairly abhorrent as
well. His treatment of these texts depends to a striking degree on a
“remarkable paper” by John Hartung, an associate professor of
anesthesiology and an anthropologist. The paper, titled “Love Thy
Neighbor: The Evolution of In- Group Morality,” originally published in
1995, is available on the Web. Dawkins and his wife are thanked in the
acknowledgments. Curious readers can form their own impression of its
character. A sympathetic review by Hartung of Kevin MacDonald’s A People
That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with
Diaspora Peoples is also of interest. These are murky waters, the kind
toward which Darwinism has often tended to migrate.
Not to mention materialist-atheist-scientism.
