{"id":637,"date":"2004-04-11T11:59:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-11T11:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2004\/04\/11\/637\/"},"modified":"2013-08-24T12:41:35","modified_gmt":"2013-08-24T17:41:35","slug":"637","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=637","title":{"rendered":"Jesus, Unplugged?"},"content":{"rendered":"

EASTER EDITION: I was browsing the magazine rack at a bookstore yesterday and glanced at the TIME Magazine cover story<\/a>: Why Did Jesus Have To Die? From my thirty second scan of it, the article appeared to focus on alternate theological and historical interpretations of the Jesus story, ranging from the various Christian mythological interpretations (Jesus as Son of God) to modern “histo-critical” views (Jesus as a human being living in ancient Judea).<\/p>\n

I guess you could say that I sympathize more these days with the scientific view of Jesus rather than the religious view (or at least the standard religious views). My first answer to the Time Magazine question would be: Jesus died because he was human, and all humans die. (If you are a really heavy-duty Christian, you might say that Jesus DIDN’T die; he rose again on the third day, body and all, and was swept up into heaven about fifty days later). My second answer would be: that’s just what the Romans did back then. As a dilettante student of the Roman Empire, I know that the Romans held on to their distant colonies through brute force. They responded to the tinyest little signs of rebellion with torture, humiliation and painful death. It was their way of keeping their subjects in line and thus maintaining their Empire.<\/p>\n

Do I have a third answer? Well, when you zoom in on the Jesus Passover Incident of approx. 30 CE, the answers start turning into questions, sort of like ice melting into pools of water. Jesus seems to have been a pretty savvy dude. He must have known that he was playing with fire by messing around with the Temple. You can’t say that he didn’t ask for it.<\/p>\n

So then, why did he intentionally risk crucifixion? Why did he feel that it was time to bring his ministry to a close? Weren’t there other towns and peoples and places that could have benefited from his preaching? Did he really think that Peter and the gang were ready for prime time, ready to keep his cause going? And just what was that cause?<\/p>\n

From my own histo-critical viewpoint, Jesus’ cause was the renewal of the Jewish people in the face of Roman imperial dominance. I’m still plodding my way through Richard Horsley’s book “Jesus and Empire<\/a>“, and I don’t agree with all of his conclusions and analogies between the Middle Eastern situation in Jesus’ time and current American involvements in the Middle East. But Horsley makes a very good case that the writers of earliest Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) were strongly focused upon the crisis of Roman dominance of the Jews back in Jesus’ time, reflecting Jesus’ own focus on the Romans. Horsley is ultimately convincing when he peels away the familiar Christian interpretations of the parables and the miracles stories, and shows how they address the social and economic crisis that the Romans and their lackeys (Herod and the Temple priests) caused for the average Jewish peasant, especially those in Galilee, back in the early First Century.<\/p>\n

So, would I completely unplug Jesus from the world of religion and spirituality? I would surely put a firewall between Jesus and Paul. Paul led the Jesus movement off into an entirely new direction, a direction that had little to do with the sufferings of Galileans under Herod and the Romans. But as to unplugging Jesus from the force that seemed to power him and his ministry, i.e. his strong Jewish relationship with his God … no, that I cannot do.<\/p>\n

As I said above, even when you approach Jesus from a non-religious academic viewpoint, the answers to the questions (like the question on the cover of TIME) quickly melt like snow in the light of the sun. As you watch the outward facts about Jesus melt away into their underlying intentions, you start to feel something like the sun’s warmth on the back of your neck. Yes, for me, this is the “coming back” toward that force which inspired Jesus to avoid preaching a violent response to the Romans (as with the Zealots and Sicarri<\/a>) and next face a gruesome Roman death. I’m glad that the churches and temples and their elaborate rituals still help people to feel some of that light and warmth in their own lives. For other people, like myself, that sort of thing doesn’t work anymore. Luckily, though, there are other roads that lead to “the light”. For me, that road is through study and thinking and analysis, through intellectual contemplation. I’m sure that other people have other roads, however twisted and circuitous (not that my own road is exactly an 8-lane, 65 MPH Interstate).<\/p>\n

I just wish that the priests and rabbis and ministers and other holymen (and women) of established religion could give us heretical wanders a bit more hospitality. There are plenty of “alternate shamans” out there, but they usually turn out to be money-hungry charlatans (or money hungry Episcopalians!). Hey, I’m probably never again going to be a devout Methodist or Jew or Moslem or Orthodox Christian or Catholic or Hindu or Buddhist or whatever. But some open discussion and interaction between the wanderers and the leaders of the “religious establishment” might be good for both sides. Hey, whenever you bishops or imams or swamis want to talk about Jesus or the Buddha or Mohammed or whatever, I’m here!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EASTER EDITION: I was browsing the magazine rack at a bookstore yesterday and glanced at the TIME Magazine cover story: Why Did Jesus Have To Die? From my thirty second scan of it, the article appeared to focus on alternate theological and historical interpretations of the Jesus story, ranging from the various Christian mythological interpretations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637"}],"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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=637"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3657,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions\/3657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}