Tag: Christian

How Empire Eliminated the Historical Jesus for Good

(This is the twelfth in a series of “mini-classes” on the historical Jesus. Together the pieces are intended to assist those who wish to “dig deeper” into the scholarly foundations of postmodern faith and to understand the methodology behind the postings on the blog site.)

According to the biblical scholarship we’ve been reviewing over the last dozen weeks or so, Jesus of Nazareth stood with the poor, and announced a future of justice for them. Jesus also resisted the empire which, as we’ll see presently, eventually dramatically diminished the importance of the Jesus of history. Examination of Jesus’ resistance to empire and empire’s co-opting of the Nazarene’s life and words is the point of this posting on the historical Jesus.

That Jesus stood with the poor and favored them is obvious. He was a simple worker, the son of an unwed teenage mother, and theologized as an immigrant in Egypt. He healed sick people, fed the hungry, and cast out evil spirits. He announced and embodied a new reality for the poor. In the “reign of God” justice would replace exploitation; the positions of rich and poor would be reversed, and a sharing ethic would take the place of competition and oppression. To put it in terms of faith: a poor person was the site God chose to reveal God’s Self to the rest of us. That in itself constitutes a stupendous revelation.

Being a poor person in Palestine, and especially coming from the revolutionary Galilee district, Jesus himself was understandably anti-empire. The best illustration of Jesus’ resistance is in the famous story of his temptations in the desert. We all know the story with its rich blend of historical fact, symbolism, and explicit and implied scriptural references. Jesus has just been baptized by John. A voice has told him that he is somehow the “Son of God.” He goes out to the desert to discover what that might mean. On this vision quest, he prays and fasts for 40 days. The visions come. He is tempted by Satan. In Matthew’s account, the culminating vision is imperial (4:8-9). Satan takes Jesus to a high mountain. He shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth – an empire much vaster than Rome’s. Satan says, “All of this can be yours, if only you bow down and worship me. Jesus, of course, refuses. He says, “Be gone, Satan! It is written, the Lord God only shall you adore; him only shall you serve.” In other words, Jesus rejected empire in no uncertain terms.

Jesus’ opposition to empire is extremely important to understanding how Christianity lost contact with the historical Jesus over 1500 years ago, when it became pro-rich and pro-empire. That’s what happened to the faith of Jesus under Constantine when Christian “orthodoxy” emerged. Christianity lost its soul. Or to put it more starkly: it actually began worshipping Satan at that point.

Here’s what I mean. Jesus rejected the temptation to empire as we’ve just seen. But in the 4th century, circumstances made it necessary for the emperor Constantine and his successors to repeat unwittingly Satan’s temptation – this time to the leadership of the Christian church. They could allow Christianity to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. All they had to do was to accept empire, give it religious legitimacy – become the state religion. Jesus had said “No!” to a similar temptation back there in the desert. Fourth century church leadership said “Yes!” and in doing so, in effect said “yes” to Satan worship – the necessary precondition of accepting empire. They also abandoned the Jesus of history and his this-worldly message. In the process, they reduced Jesus to a mythological figure and Christianity to a Roman mystery cult. Let me explain.

Think about the historical circumstances that led Constantine to be concerned with Christianity at all. Like all oppressors, he realized that religion represented an incomparable tool for controlling people. If an emperor can convince people that in obeying him they are obeying God, the emperor has won the day. In fact it is the job of any state religion to make people believe that God’s interests and the state’s interests are the same.

What Constantine saw in the 4th century was that as Rome expanded and incorporated more and more Peoples with their own religions, Rome’s own state religion was losing power. At the same time, Christianity was spreading like wildfire. And it was politically dangerous.  The message of Jesus was particularly attractive to the lower classes. It affirmed their dignity in the clearest of terms. Often the message incited slaves and others to rebel rather than obey. Rome’s knee-jerk response was repression and persecution. But by Constantine’s day, Rome’s repression had proved ineffective. Despite Rome’s throwing Christians to the lions for decade after decade, the faith of Jesus was more popular than ever.

Constantine decided that if he couldn’t beat the Christians, he had to join them. And he evidently determined to do so by robbing Christianity of its revolutionary potential. That meant converting the faith of Jesus into a typical Roman “mystery cult.”

Now mystery cults had been extremely popular in Rome. They were “salvation religions” that worshipped gods with names like Isis, Osiris, and Mithra. Mithra was particularly popular. He was the Sun God, whose feast day and birth was celebrated on December 25th.  Typically the “story” celebrated in mystery cults was of a god who descended from heaven, lived on earth for a while, died, rose from the dead, ascended back to heaven, and from there offered worshippers “eternal life,” if they joined in the cults where the god’s body was eaten under the form of bread, and the god’s blood was drunk under the form of wine.

To convert Christianity into a mystery cult, Constantine (who wasn’t even a Christian at the time) convoked a church council – the Council of Nicaea in 325. There the question of the day became who was Jesus of Nazareth. Was he just a human being? Was he a God and not human at all? Was he some combination of God and man? Did he have to eat? Did he have to defecate or urinate? Actually those were the questions. For Constantine’s purposes, the more divine and otherworldly Jesus was the better. That would make him less a threat to the emperor’s very this-worldly dominion.

The result of all the deliberations was codified in what became known as the Nicene Creed. Maybe you know it by heart. It runs like this:

We believe in one God,

the Father, the Almighty

maker of heaven and earth,

of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,

the only Son of God,

eternally begotten of the Father,

God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made,

of one Being with the Father.

Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation

he came down from heaven:

by the power of the Holy Spirit

he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;

he suffered death and was buried.

On the third day he rose again

in accordance with the Scriptures;

he ascended into heaven

and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,

and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life,

who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified.

He has spoken through the Prophets.

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

We look for the resurrection of the dead,

and the life of the world to come. Amen.[

The Nicene Creed can be so familiar to us that we don’t notice what it does. In the part italicized above, it jumps from the conception and birth of Jesus to his death and resurrection. It leaves out entirely any reference to what Jesus said and did. For all practical purposes it ignores the historical Jesus and pays attention only to a God who comes down from heaven, dies, rises, ascends back to heaven and offers eternal life to those who believe. It’s a nearly perfect reflection of “mystery cult” belief. In effect Jesus becomes a harmless Mithra. The revolutionary potential of Jesus’ words and actions relative to justice, wealth and poverty are lost. Not only that, but subsequent to Nicaea, anyone connecting Jesus to a struggle for justice, sharing and communal life is classified as heretical. That is, mystery cult becomes “orthodoxy.” Eventually, the example and teaching of Jesus becomes heresy – especially later on when “communism” becomes a threat to Rome’s modern imperial successors.

Please think about that.

Next week: Series Conclusion

A Long Oral Tradition: Step four in the development of early Christian faith

(This is the tenth in a series of “mini-classes” on the historical Jesus. Together the pieces are intended to assist those who wish to “dig deeper” into the scholarly foundations of postmodern faith and to understand the methodology behind the postings on the blog site.)

The first three stages in the early development of the Christian tradition – Jesus’ life, the primitive Christian community’s resurrection experience, and the initial proclamation (kerygma) – were followed by a period of about 40 years of oral tradition. During that time, stories about what Jesus said and did were spoken and not written down. This nearly half-century of oral tradition represents the fourth of the five stages in the development of early Christian faith that this series of weekly “mini-classes” is attempting to address. (Find the previous nine postings under the “Historical Jesus” category below the masthead of my blog.)

It is inevitable, of course, that oral tradition varies considerably. Even a group of ten or so people consecutively whispering a single message to their neighbors, can end up changing that message beyond recognition by the time it reaches the last message-recipient. Despite the fact that surviving eyewitnesses surely provided a degree of reality-check, imagine what happened to Jesus’ words and deeds over a half-century as his Aramaic words were translated into Greek, Latin and other languages by people working purely by memory. Imagine what happened to memories of his deeds when they were narrated outside of Palestine by storytellers who were not eyewitnesses, had no knowledge of Jesus’ language, and who possessed little acquaintance with Palestinian geography, Jewish customs, or of Hebrew Scriptures. Imagine what happened to Jesus’ message as Christian storytellers tried to make it relevant to “pagans” who had no knowledge of Judaism. The storytellers would have exploited perceived similarities between Jesus preaching and what the storytellers’ audiences already believed in their own religious traditions. [The Acts of the Apostles provides an example of Paul attempting such cross-cultural explanation (17: 16-34).] Soon Jesus would be explained to Romans in terms of their “mystery cults” with their “dying and rising gods.” As a result, Jesus would be perceived like the sun god, Mithra, whose birthday was December 25th. All such dynamics would have (and did) introduce variations from what the historical Jesus actually said and did.

In the case of Christianity, the obvious confusions of oral tradition were further complicated by the “resurrection factor.” By this I mean that Christians’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection and in the living presence of his Spirit was powerful enough to convince them that the risen Lord continued speaking through community members endowed with the gift of “prophecy.”  They thought that Jesus was still addressing their problems even years after his death. Problems in question had to do with worship, community leadership, resolution of disputes, and everyday matters such as paying taxes, marriage and divorce. So the words of Jesus dealing with such issues and spoken through prophets found their way into the oral tradition about Jesus’ words. Understandably, it soon became impossible to remember which were the words of the historical Jesus and which the words of the risen Christ. Evidently, that distinction wasn’t of much importance to the early Christians. They placed both types of utterance in the same category. All of that further complicates the work of those trying to discern the actual words and deeds of the historical Jesus.

Next week: Step Five: writing down the tradition

Jesus Was a Radical Feminist: 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sunday’s Readings: Wisdom 1:13-16, 2:23-24; Ps. 30:2, 4-6, 11-13; 2Cor. 8:7, 9, 13=16; Mk. 5:21=43

All of us, I know, have been following with great interest the Vatican’s confrontation with U.S. nuns. Officials in Rome are disturbed because the sisters have adopted what the patriarchy considers a “radical feminist agenda.” That agenda includes advocating a priesthood open to women.  It also places service of the poor ahead of issues dear to our male church leadership such as contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage.

Towards resolving the crisis, the Vatican has insisted on placing a major national organization of sisters under the authority of a Rome-appointed bishop. The idea is that this man would determine what is best for the women religious.

Not surprisingly, the nuns find the Vatican’s action unacceptably patriarchal, patronizing and insulting. They also insist that the issues Rome finds objectionable are more in accord with the actual teaching and example of Jesus than the focus the hierarchy prefers. After all, the nuns say, Jesus said a great deal about the poor, but nothing at all about contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage, or women priests.

Jesus himself might also be considered a radical feminist, some sisters hold.  They point out that in addressing specifically female issues, he favored women who spoke for themselves and courageously exercised their own initiative. Jesus even praised women who disobeyed laws aimed against them precisely as women. He ended up preferring them to females who were passive captives of the religious patriarchy. We find an example of such radical feminism on the part of Jesus in today’s reading from the Mark’s gospel.

First of all consider Mark’s literary strategy. In today’s reading he creates a “literary sandwich” – a “story within a story.” The device focuses on two kinds of females within the Jewish faith of Jesus’ day. In fact, Mark’s gospel is liberally sprinkled with doublets like the one just described. When they appear, both stories are meant to play off one another and illuminate each other.

In today’s doublet, we find two women. One is just entering puberty at the age of 12; the other has had a menstrual problem for the entire life span of the adolescent girl. (Today we’d call her condition a kind of menorrhagia.) So to begin with the number 12 is centralized. It’s a literary “marker” suggesting that the narrative has something to do with the twelve tribes of Israel – and in the early church, with the apostolic leadership of “the twelve.” The connection with Israel is confirmed by the fact that the 12 year old in the story is the daughter of a synagogue official. As a man in a patriarchal culture, he can approach Jesus directly and speak for his daughter.

The other woman in the doublet has no man to speak for her; she has to approach Jesus covertly and on her own. She comes from the opposite end of the socio-economic spectrum from the 12 year old daughter of the synagogue leader. The older woman is without honor. She is poor and penniless. Her menstrual problem has rendered her sterile, and so she’s considered technically dead by her faith community. Her condition has also excluded her from the synagogue. In the eyes of community leaders like Jairus, the petitioning father in the story, she is “unclean.” (Remember that according to Jewish law, all women were considered unclean during their monthly period. So the woman in today’s drama is exceedingly unclean. She and all menstruating women were not to be touched.)  

All of that means that Jairus as a synagogue leader is in effect the oppressor of the second woman. On top of that the older woman in the story has been humiliated and exploited by the male medical profession which has been ineffective in addressing her condition. In other words, the second woman is the victim of a misogynist religious system which, by the way, saw the blood of animals as valuable and pleasing in God’s eyes, but the blood of women as repulsively unclean.

Nonetheless, it is the bleeding woman who turns out to be the hero of the story. Her faith is so strong that she believes a mere touch of Jesus’ garment will suffice to restore her to life, and that her action won’t even be noticed. So she reaches out and touches the Master. Doing so was extremely bold and highly disobedient to Jewish law, since her touch would have rendered Jesus himself unclean. She refuses to believe that.

So instead of being made unclean by the woman’s touch, Jesus’ being responds by exuding healing power, apparently without his even being aware. The woman is cured. Jesus asks “Who touched me?” The disciples object, “What do you mean? Everybody’s touching you,” they say.

Finally, the unclean woman is identified. Jesus praises her faith and (significantly!) calls her “daughter.” So what we end up finding in this literary doublet are two Jewish “daughters” – yet another point of comparison.

While Jesus is attending to the bleeding woman, the first daughter in the story apparently dies. Jesus insists on seeing her anyhow. When he observes that she is merely asleep, the bystanders laugh him to scorn. But Jesus is right. When he speaks to her in Aramaic, the girl awakens and is hungry. Everyone is astonished, and Jesus has to remind them to feed her.

What does all the comparison mean? The doublet represented in today’s Gospel addresses issues that couldn’t be more female – more feminist. The message here is that bold and active women unafraid of disobeying the religious patriarchy will save the faith community from death. “Believe and act like the bleeding woman” is the message of today’s Gospel. “Otherwise the community of faith will be for all practical purposes dead.”   

Could this possibly mean that we should imitate the women religious who evidently represent such a threat to the Vatican today? Could today’s gospel be telling us that their bold specifically feminist faith that sides with the poor and oppressed (like the hero of today’s Gospel) will be the salvation of the church which is otherwise moribund? Are they today’s real faith leaders, rather than the elderly, white, out-of-touch men who overwhelmingly claim to lead the church?

Consider some patriarchal history related to today’s Gospel reading. Does it suggest déjà vu?

As late as the 13th century Christian theologians were warning people that it was a mortal sin to have relations with a menstruating woman because sickly or possessed children would result from them. A hotly debated theological theme during the middle ages was whether a woman during menstruation (also called her “periodic pollution” or her “monthly venting”) could receive communion during mass or not. Even worse, the blood of a woman giving birth was considered to be more noxious that the menstrual blood. The Synod of Treves in the year 1227 established that after childbirth women needed to be “reconciled” with the Church – a disposition which combined the Jewish laws of ritual purification with Christian theologians’ rejection of the pleasure that is implicit in every sexual relation. In many cases of that epoch the religious hierarchy determined that women who died in childbirth could not be buried in Christian cemeteries because they had not been “reconciled.”

Such recollections do not inspire confidence in patriarchs making pronouncements on women’s issues. I mention them here only because they show those male “leaders” pontificating quite confidently about women’s biological processes, about the effect of sexual intercourse on fetuses, about God’s attitude towards women during menstruation, and about women’s “pollution” following sexual intercourse and childbirth. And in hindsight all of it turns out to be pure nonsense!  In summary, it reveals that male church leaders never have really understood female sexuality – or sex for that matter. Obviously, pronouncements like those just mentioned (however confident and supported by scripture) have nothing to do with “revelation.” Is it any different – can it be any different – in our own era? 

Today’s Gospel then suggests that it’s time for men to stop telling women how to be women – to stop pronouncing on issues of female sexuality whether it be menstruation, abortion, contraception, same-sex attractions, or whether women are called by God to the priesthood . Correspondingly, it’s time for women to disobey such male pronouncements, and to exercise leadership in accord with their common sense – in accord with women’s ways of knowing. Only that will save our religious community which is currently sick unto death.

All of us can imagine how such suggestions apply to the controversy between the Vatican and U.S. nuns. Let’s discuss that now. (Discussion follows).