When I was 15 years old, I worried a lot about what Jesus said in the Gospels. Yea, I was a bit different from most guys my age, who mostly worried about playing sports, getting hold of contraband (cigarettes, liquor, marijuana), and getting girls to notice them and perhaps allow them into the garden of sensual delights. For a host of reasons that would require a small book to explain and a panel of shrinks to interpret, I became more and more religious just as most kids lost interest in churchgoing. I was taking the Gospels seriously, looking to them as the rulebook by which I was to live my life. <\/p>\n
The problem with that is that Jesus set really high standards. I became increasingly worried about my ability to live up to his standards; like hey, even thinking about sex was just as much a sin as doing it! So I started going to confession a lot (that wonderful Roman Catholic ritual of having a priest listen to your sins and give you pardon, on the condition that you perform some penance \u2013 usually saying a bunch of prayers), because I was afraid of the danger of going to hell for not fulfilling the strict standards that Jesus set. <\/p>\n
A few years later, when facing the possibility of being drafted into military combat service in Vietnam, I decided to file for conscientious objector status so that I would not violate Jesus’ blanket prohibition on taking another human life. (Luckily for me, the draft soon ended). I also shied away from any romantic involvements with the opposite sex, as to avoid the temptations of the flesh. I didn’t care that no one else seemed worried about the lapse between the way that most people acted and what Jesus said was acceptable; not even the priests in my church seemed overly upset about that, despite occasional grumbling on their part during their sermons. But I didn’t care, I was going by the book.<\/p>\n
And now it seems that I didn’t have to. I just finished reading \u201cJesus of Nazareth\u201d<\/a> by Prof. Paula Fredriksen, a prominent scholar who focuses on the \u201cJesus of history\u201d. On page 110 of her book, Prof . Fredriksen explains that Jesus only got away with setting such strict standards because he lived under a \u201cforeshortened time frame of vivid apocalyptic expectation\u201d. It wasn’t explained to us in \u201cChristian Doctrine\u201d class (good old \u201cCCD\u201d) that Jesus expected God’s kingdom to arrive on earth within a year or two at most, and that people needed to be on their best behavior in preparation for it. In Jesus’ mind, there weren’t going to be too many tomorrows in the imperfect world that we know. <\/p>\n Prof. Fredriksen explains that \u201cno normal society could long live according to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount\u201d. To live by stringent moral codes similar to what Jesus prescribed, the ancient Essenes needed to form their own separate society; Christians interested in doing the same later formed walled-off communities, i.e. monasteries. As the Professor explains: \u201cthe earliest followers of Jesus did not retreat into separate communities . . . Why not? Because these early Christians, and Jesus before them, did not expect a long run. The Kingdom was at hand . . .\u201d<\/p>\n Hmmm, I did not know all of that back in my high school days. My attempt to live a \u201cJesus life\u201d in the suburbs obviously failed. It turned out to be folly, a naive exercise in idealism and anxiety. I could have saved all the energy that it took to go off on my own and be different from the rest, and used it for something more tangible. Right?<\/p>\n But then again . . . . even though folly is failure and stupidity, sometimes there’s still something about it that makes you glad it all happened; perhaps this kind of folly wasn’t so \u201cfolly-esque\u201d after all. I believe that the Renaissance writer Erasmus was trying to make a similar point in his \u201cPraise of Folly\u201d<\/a> (but I’m not 100% sure, given how complicated PofF<\/em> is). Perhaps we need more folly like that in our world after all, Prof. Fredriksen and my former parish priests notwithstanding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was 15 years old, I worried a lot about what Jesus said in the Gospels. Yea, I was a bit different from most guys my age, who mostly worried about playing sports, getting hold of contraband (cigarettes, liquor, marijuana), and getting girls to notice them and perhaps allow them into the garden of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1975"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1975"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1977,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1975\/revisions\/1977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}