I’ve been thinking that I must be more careful when I head into a rant (or even when I’m just sitting quietly thinking) to acknowledge that I am not a learned Biblical scholar and to make clear that I am simply reacting to disturbing doctrines and practices common to Christian churches and other organizations that insist they are “Christian.”  I must remind myself that although I am not a Biblical scholar it seems reasonable to acknowledge that the word Christian suggests something about the Jewish peasant Jesus of Nazareth who lived two-thousand years ago that is dramatically inconsistent with most of his day-to-day life and teachings as they are described in Christian Scriptures. Christ from the Greek Χριστός, meaning the anointed one, a messianic prince, was folded into the accounts of his life a couple of generations after the man Jesus died.  Jesus Christ became the expected name of the historical Jesus of Nazareth in biographies written by authors of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). Bible scholars generally agree the Gospel of John is significantly different from the other three Gospels, and while many theologians and historians today believe he was the only writer of one of the four gospels who might have actually witnessed events he described, most modern scholars believe the apostle John was not the author of any of the books of the New Testament referred to as “Johannine” literature. Mark and Luke almost certainly did not witness any of the events of Jesus’ life, and there are compelling reasons to believe that the Gospel of Matthew wasn’t written by the apostle Matthew. For one thing, it was common practice for biographers of the period to attach the name of some well-known person as author of a work they hoped would be taken seriously.

If we set aside the mythic stories like those about virgin birth with angels in attendance, a voice booming from heaven at his baptism, transfiguration, resurrection from the dead and ascension into heaven, almost everything else in his life story suggests he was distinctly not royal.  He spent his short life going around among poor, oppressed people doing whatever he could to help them. He was clearly a situationist. He always did what the situation required… not because of law but out of love and compassion for the people encountered.  He was more like a servant to people than a kingly overlord.  We must consider the possibility that after his horrible death, some of the men (notably no women) who wrote about his life stuck into their narratives little magical stories that somehow don’t fit with the things he said were important. It’s difficult to imagine the historical man Jesus relating comfortably to the images of him as a light skinned, fair haired European nobleman with royal crown pictured in Renaissance paintings and sculpture… or to him seated in a heavenly throne room at the right hand of God through all of eternity the way he is presented in stained glass windows, laudatory sermons and songs, and Sunday school pamphlets distributed all over the world. 

Why am I thinking heretical thoughts about what two thousand years of Christian tradition established as Holy Writ, Sacred Scripture, the Word of God?  It’s my reaction to the very real danger of jihad in any culture when religious zealots and radical politicians justify their madness by claiming allegiance to religion based on some historical person as ISIS is doing now, as the Salem with witch trials demonstrated in the late 1600s in Protestant Colonial Massachusetts, and as the Crusades, the military campaigns sanctioned by the Latin Roman Catholic Church did during the High Middle Ages and the Late Middle Ages.