8/9/13I gave up the dry martini for the sake of a clearer head. I think I may now have to give up reading the op-ed page of the New York Times for the sake of keeping my blood pressure at the happy level of 130/68.
My frustration with the page may have hit a new high this past Sunday when, side by side, appeared columns by T.M. Luhrmann, the Times' newest darling -- a Stanford anthropologist who studies goofball religions -- and the perennially dyspeptic Catholic Ross Douthat. Luhrmann rhapsodized about prayer as if it were not a form of para-psychotic behavior. As for Douhat, he decided to get some skin in the new game forming around the Muslim writer with the same last name C.S. Lewis gave to his fictional lion.
Can you not feel the earthquake gathering momentum in Lewis' grave? Here we have a Muslim writing a book about "Jesus" and pronouncing him a revolutionary zealot whose laser-beam focus was beating Rome at its own game. Had that been the case, the myth of Sisyphus and his rock would have been trumped by the myth of Jesus the revolutionary, who could not keep Rome from falling down on him no matter how hard he may have pushed against its massive force.
If the Iranian author's name were Joe Smith -- and if he were not Iranian -- no one would care about his evanescent sparkler of a book in a world of scholarly fireworks. Douhat fastened on the idea that Reza Aslan's Jesus and his church "upended the ancient world's violent, patriarchal, hierarchical norms."
Really? As to the upended "violent" norms, forget neither the brutal Crusades nor the more recent epidemic of child abuse among Christian clergy. As to "patriarchal" norms being done away with, check out the all-male priesthood that persists in the Roman Catholic Church with no sign that it will be altered any time soon. As to "hierarchical" norms, they're still in place and ever more strenuously enforced. Lord Acton was spot-on about the corrupting nature of power.
Had Douhat proposed a thesis on those terms to the faculty of the graduate school in which I began my scholarly journey, he would have been laughed off campus. And what is Douhat's time bracket for "early Christian zeal"? By the time Constantine the Great had made the most expeditious conversion ever to Christianity, the church Douhat thinks his Jesus founded had fallen into bed with empire and has never left it. Well, OK, there was Luther, but the Protestant movement quickly cobbled together its own banana republics of ecclesiastical power.
So much for Douhat's uncertain grasp of ecclesiastical history. Meanwhile, I have been engaged with the rigors of New Testament scholarship -- including early Christian history -- for half a century. I have kept up my own research in the area and have read mountains of other scholars' work for all of which forests of trees were mown down.
The principal hypothesis of my research over the past 15 years is that the Jesus of the early Christian (or Jesus Judaism) documents may be a composite character composed of a number of types, one of which J. Dominic Crossan denominated "itinerant sages."
How I arrived at that hypothesis is how one is supposed to arrive at one -- almost by accident. After living with the texts of the 20-some documents known as "gospels" for most of 50 years, I began to see not one but many Jesuses variously depicted in them -- sometimes variously in the same gospel.
For the first several years on that track, I was trying to disprove the hypothesis (which is what one who aspires to scholarship ought to do). I failed in that effort for some time. Then against my will, my upbringing and my own self-interest, I began to take the hypothesis seriously.
What I had -- and anyone seriously working on the "Jesus question" has -- are the canonical texts of the New Testament and the non-canonical texts of the gnostic gospels and related material -- external authentication of an historical Jesus being slim to none. Work with those biblical texts over the long term -- having put aside your Sunday school, catechism and seminary education as best you can -- and you cannot honestly say that, for instance, the Jesus person to whom the Gospel of Thomas attributed 114 sayings is the same Jesus person depicted in the Gospel of John.
As Elaine Pagels points out, the church chose John's Jesus.*
The grief I have taken in merely putting out what remains an hypothesis with no claim made for its eternal and undivided truth has been nothing short of hysterical. My �ber-liberal friends and colleagues insist that Jesus was something like Aslan's fiery zealot. My more evangelical friends -- if friends they are -- insist that he was the witting martyr who, by his cross and resurrection, saved us from our sins and paved our way to life everlasting. Others want to see him as a humble first century rabbi. And it goes on and on.
One thing is true: the English "Jesus" has been tortured out of the Aramaic Yeshua after being sliced and diced into the Greek Ιησους, then into the Latin Iesus. Yeshua is, for all intents and purposes, "Joshua," meaning "one who saves." One of the contributors to the Gospel According to Matthew has Yahweh tell Joseph in a dream to name his illegitimate son "Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins."
Yeshua was a popular name for male children in the Palestinian world of antiquity. Flavius Josephus mentions the following: Jesus son of Phabet, Jesus son of Ananus, Jesus son of Sapphias, Jesus brother of Onias, Jesus son of Gamaliel, Jesus son of Damneus, Jesus son of Gamala, Jesus son of Nun, Jesus son of Saphat, Jesus son of Thebuthus and Jesus son of Josedek.
Withal, Aslan may be right about a Jesus having been a zealous revolutionary. Crossan is almost surely right about a Jesus being, as he put it, a "Mediterranean Jewish peasant" who may have been at the same time an "itinerant sage." The liberation theology people may be right in saying that a Jesus was a socialist at heart. And I may be right in saying that the Jesus may be a composite of all of them.
It is not a popular hypothesis. I was once told that if I kept on with it, I might not go to heaven when I die. I'll take that chance.
*Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. New York, NY. Random House, 2003. pp. 30-73, 114-142
