What has been passing for Christianity during these nineteen centuries is merely a beginning, full of weaknesses and mistakes, not a full-grown Christianity springing from the spirit of Jesus.
—Albert Schweitzer
First, I owe a word of explanation to readers. This book is not about one more attempt to prove why it is wrong to be a fundamentalist. Nor is it a book meant to prove that Jesus is not divine—at least in a metaphysical sense—and never walked on water or raised anyone from the dead. Indeed, I could not prove such a thing to anyone who wasn’t already inclined to believe it. Instead, it is a book written by a pastor, an invitation that comes bearing the postmark of the church and addressed to those who already accept the Bible as inspired, but not infallible. It is not offered as a scholarly argument against literalism or literalists, nor is it intended to be one more tirade against any form of ignorance or arrogance. Those in glass houses should not throw stones.
Rather, it is a word on behalf of those who have walked away from the church because they recognize intellectual dishonesty as the original sin of orthodoxy. It is a sermon addressed to nonbelievers as well as to those who grew up in the church. It is meant to provide a second opinion for all those who know what they are supposed to believe but refuse to equate miracles with magic or liturgy with history—and yet still fall silent when someone reads the Beatitudes or get goosebumps listening to the parable of the prodigal son. It is not an apologetic but a call to reconsider what it means to follow Jesus, instead of arguing over things that the church has insisted we must all believe about Christ. Doctrines divide by nature. Discipleship brings us together.
Instead of digging deeper trenches, we need to declare a cease-fire and agree to meet around the kitchen table, where people actually live, to discuss exactly what we are fighting about and what on earth it has to do with Jesus. There are countless pilgrims out there who remain fascinated and humbled by his wisdom and by the movement that his life and death unleashed, but who know too much now about the formation of church doctrine, the evolution and redaction of scripture, and the incredible but intransigent cosmology of the church to place much trust in the institution. There is a deep hunger for wisdom in our time, but the church offers up little more than sugary nostalgia with a dash of fear. There is a yearning for redemption, healing, and wholeness that is palpable, a shift in human consciousness that is widely recognized—except, it seems, in most churches.
Strangely, we have come to a moment in human history when the message of the Sermon on the Mount could indeed save us, but it can no longer be heard above the din of dueling doctrines. Consider this: there is not a single word in that sermon about what to believe, only words about what to do. It is a behavioral manifesto, not a propositional one. Yet three centuries later, when the Nicene Creed became the official oath of Christendom, there was not a single word in it about what to do, only words about what to believe!
Thus the most important question we can ask in the church today concerns the object of faith itself. The earliest metaphors of the gospel speak of discipleship as transformation through an alternative community and the reversal of conventional wisdom. In much of the church today, our metaphors speak of individual salvation and the specific promises that accompany it. The first followers of Jesus trusted him enough to become instruments of radical change. Today, worshipers of Christ agree to believe things about him in order to receive benefits promised by the institution, not by Jesus.
This difference, between following and worshiping, is not insignificant. Worshiping is an inherently passive activity, since it involves the adoration of that to which the worshiper cannot aspire. It takes the form of praise, which can be both sentimental and self-satisfying, without any call to changed behavior or self-sacrifice. In fact, Christianity as a belief system requires nothing but acquiescence. Christianity as a way of life, as a path to follow, requires a second birth, the conquest of ego, and new eyes with which to see the world. It is no wonder that we have preferred to be saved.
FROM YESHUA TO JEHOVAH
To understand how a first-century Mediterranean Jewish peasant named Yeshua went from being what historical Jesus scholar Marcus Borg calls a spirit person, a teacher of wisdom, a social prophet, and a movement founder to the Only Begotten Son of God requires a clear and courageous approach to the study of the New Testament. To use Professor Borg’s immensely helpful dichotomy, the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) provide us not historical accounts but “sketches” by the early Christian community of both a pre-Easter man and an emerging post-Easter deity.1
Jesus is the pre-Easter man, or what biblical scholars have long searched to uncover: the “historical Jesus.” Christ is the post-Easter deity that had fully arrived by the time John’s gospel was written, even though his evolution from Jewish mystic to supernatural Savior was already emerging in the synoptic gospels. For the remainder of the book, however, I will speak of “Jesus” when referring to the Jewish peasant from Galilee—from his birth through the writing of the synoptic gospels. I will use the exalted title “Christ” to refer to the preexistent divine Savior from John’s gospel forward to the writing of the creeds.
This separation cannot be made easily, of course, but the search to distinguish between the two is hardly new. For over two hundred years, biblical scholars have labored to glimpse the Jewish man behind the Christian myths, and Albert Schweitzer made it clear that such a search is ultimately in vain. In his epic work The Quest of the Historical Jesus, he solidifies the notion of a “thoroughgoing eschatology” in which Jesus preached an “interim ethic” in what he tragically believed were the last days. Recently scholarship, however, has made this image of Jesus as eschatological prophet a minority opinion.
Even so, it is Schweitzer’s closing words that are most remembered—leaving open the possibility that it is only through discipleship that we bridge the gap between Galilean sage and long-awaited messiah:
He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the task which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.2
If this is true, then Schweitzer has both confirmed his belief that the historical Jesus cannot be “found” and confessed that the voice of the Nazarene still beckons. He says, moreover, that it is not in believing, but in following, that his identity is revealed. It is ironic that none of those who took issue with Schweitzer’s theology and cursed his writings gave up fame and fortune or membership in the highest stratum of German society to live among the poorest of the poor. They prepared their critiques in the comfort of the pastor’s study or the university library, while Schweitzer nailed patches of tin on the roof of his free medical clinic at Lambarene by the banks of the Ogoove River. Theologians who sat in endowed chairs took his Christology to task, while he scraped infectious lesions off blue-black natives in the steaming misery of equatorial Africa.
Albert Schweitzer deserves to be remembered as the greatest Christian of the twentieth century, yet he did not believe in literal miracles—the blood atonement, the bodily resurrection, or the second coming, just to name a few. All he did was walk away from everything the world calls good to follow Jesus. And in all honesty, his conclusion that the historical Jesus cannot be found is correct—at least not according to the standards of the Western rational tradition. But his work did not close the book on such research, as many thought it would.
There has been a “third quest” for the historical Jesus under way since the 1980s, and, although misunderstood and much maligned, the work of the Jesus Seminar has yielded insights of great value to the church. Moving beyond the work of German scholarship, which sought to extract abiding existential truths from mythological wrappings, the latest generation of historical Jesus scholars has used the tools of higher criticism to isolate two layers, or “voices,” in the gospels—a pre-Easter voice that more likely belongs to Jesus and a post-Easter voice that more likely belongs to the Christ of the early church.
One method for doing this, widely reported in the press and mocked as blasphemy by some, was the vote that the members of the Jesus Seminar took on the historical accuracy of the sayings attributed to Jesus. The scholars dropped colored beads—red, pink, gray, and black—in a ballot box to measure the degree of consensus about whether a particular passage is Jesus speaking or the voice of the early church. “A red vote means, ‘I’m pretty sure Jesus said that’; pink, somewhere between ‘probably’ and ‘more likely yes than no’; gray, somewhere between ‘more likely no than yes’ and ‘probably not’; and black, ‘I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t say that.’”3
The idea was not to reduce biblical authority to scholarly hunches, prove that the Bible is “wrong,” or suggest that the sayings of Jesus are “fictitious.” It was a serious and scholarly attempt to distinguish between the more authentic sayings of Jesus and those created by a witnessing community that had crowned him messiah. The scholarly work of the Jesus Seminar is not done for the benefit of the church, but the church can certainly benefit. We have come to a moment in the life of the church when only the most candid and intellectually honest assessment of the life and message of Jesus can prevent the continued implosion of the church. We should study the Bible with all the tools of higher criticism not to prove that some are “right” and some are “wrong” but to uncover a more authentic reading of the life and ministry of Jesus. Otherwise, the church will quite literally lose its voice. Biblical illiteracy is contributing to theological laryngitis.
The reason that such biblical scholarship is vital has nothing to do with elitism or the intellectual arrogance of separating the blind goats from the enlightened sheep. The quest for the historical Jesus is not ultimately destructive but constructive. Biblical scholars are not myth busters; they work to uncover the truth, whether on behalf of those who still call themselves Christians or those who have given up on organized religion. They have no agenda other than to recover the most accurate and authentic meaning from the text by studying it as literature. They do not presume that facts are the same thing as faith, but they certainly think that faith built on demonstrable fictions advances neither faith nor intellectual honesty.
Anti-intellectualism remains strongly entrenched in many parts of the church, but it is grounded in fear, not in faith. Instead of seeing the benefits of a vital conversation between the academy and the average person in the pew about how a third-millennium man or woman might still follow a first-century Jewish sage, many Christians view scholarship as a threat to church doctrine. They believe that professors who make clever arguments against the virgin birth, for example, are careless vandals poking holes in the dike of faith. To shore up that dike, they believe they need to show “true faith” by accepting uncritically the tenets of their particular tradition without question. Such defiance is captured in a popular bumper sticker: “THE BIBLE SAYS IT, GOD WROTE IT, AND THAT SETTLES IT!”
Ironically, biblical scholars are actually interested in the same “trinity” of ideas, but they put question marks where others put exclamation points. What does the Bible really say? What does it mean to say it is inspired by God? And why do we believe that God’s voice is exclusively in the past tense? Perhaps, as my denomination is fond of saying, God is still speaking.
Adoration of the post-Easter Christ so dominates the language and liturgy of the church that the wisdom of pre-Easter Jesus is all but lost. The divine Savior image is now so exclusively the message of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity that the Sermon on the Mount seems almost superfluous. Sunday school classes have given up the study of the parables, even though the parable was the principal teaching device of Jesus. They are not wrestling with the hard sayings of the Jewish prophets who preceded Jesus. Indeed, instead of being disoriented by divine wisdom, they are “decoding” the salvation “contract” that is presumed to be hidden in scripture, so that true believers can cash in their winning ticket and collect their eternal inheritance. Being a disciple today often means little more than believing stuff in order to get stuff.
Christian education today is often more about spiritual empowerment than about enlightenment. In addition to Christian aerobics and end-times investing, “Bible study” is offered as a series of self-improvement seminars sanctified by John 3:16. Christianity has become primarily a strategy for “victory,” but it is an individual victory over debt, obesity, or low self-esteem, not a collective victory over injustice, poverty, war, or environmental degradation. Faith has become essentially an individual transaction, and the image of God is that of a personal trainer. Much preaching today is framed as an invitation to God to come into our story, but the biblical invitation is radically different. We are being invited into God’s story.
How can we decide whether to accept that invitation or be prepared for its consequences, however, if we do not understand our own story? Recent studies show that only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments and only half can cite any of the four authors of the gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. Three-quarters of Americans believe that the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves,” when in fact Ben Franklin said this. To understand how dangerous this is, just imagine, one scholar wrote, “if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.”4
The value of serious Bible study is not to deconstruct the authority of the Bible, one myth at a time, but to use the mind as well as the heart and soul to recover the most accurate possible portrait of what the Bible actually says, not what we assume that it says. If we are going to go to this party, we need to know how to dress, what gift to bring, and whether we will recognize anyone when we get there. A party with strangers is one of life’s most awkward situations.
HONESTY AND FAITH
One thing every pastor knows is that knowledge is not redemptive. Indeed, sometimes we can know the truth, and it will not set us free. Ask a smoker, for example, if he knows that tobacco is addictive and death-dealing, and he will say yes. Ask a cheating spouse if he or she knows what the affair could cost, and the answer is always yes. Ask a teenager if she knows what drugs and alcohol can do to destroy her future, and she will almost always say, “Yes, I know.” Obviously “knowing” is not enough, and one of the great divides in the church could be overcome if we got one thing straight: the truth of which Jesus speaks is wisdom incarnate, not intellectual assent to cogent arguments made on behalf of God. Indeed, a quick glance around this broken world makes it painfully obvious that we don’t need more arguments on behalf of God; we need more people who live as if they are in covenant with Unconditional Love, which is our best definition of God.
Having said this, it is not the case that faith is more pure when it is uninformed or when it turns away from critical thinking and sound reasoning as threats to the life of the spirit. Science is not the enemy of faith, but rather its handmaiden. More threatening to the future of faith is the fear of what can be known as well as the search to know more. In fact, the ongoing suspicion that scientific discoveries or rigorous biblical scholarship will undermine faith is a tacit admission that faith is threatened by knowledge, because it is ultimately constructed on weak or faulty assumptions and, like the proverbial house of cards, needs to be “protected” from collapsing. The horizon, as one preacher put it, is not all there is; it’s just the limit of our sight. Faith’s impulse is not to provide a substitute for anything less than can be known. Rather, faith wants to trust in more than can be known. Robert Funk, the founder of the Jesus Seminar, puts it this way:
To be sure, I am not of the opinion that facts of themselves will provide us with the ultimate truth about Jesus, about ourselves, and about our world. But whatever we come to believe about those ultimate issues should be informed by the facts, insofar as we can discover them. I am not an empiricist, much less a positivist, contrary to some of my critics. But the pressure to discover all we can know about our own past, about the history of Jesus, and about the physical universe has a cathartic way of disciplining our imaginations.5
Once again, religion at its best should be biblically responsible, intellectually honest, emotionally satisfying, and socially significant. The first half of this formula requires that we fearlessly admit to what higher criticism of the Bible has shown us, recalling that the greatest commandment is to love God “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind … [and] your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:37, emphasis added). After two centuries of intense and devoted biblical scholarship, we can and we should confess to what we now know—and do so fearlessly.
We know that the gospels were written in the last third of the first century, and that they are not historical accounts but testimonies of faith, written to persuade a mostly Jewish audience that Jesus was indeed the long-awaited messiah. Of central importance is the fact that during the forty to seventy years that elapsed between the ministry of Jesus and the written records we call the gospels, his early followers adapted to new circumstances as they blended memories of his teaching with their continuing experience of him as the risen Lord.
We know that Saul of Tarsus, who never met Jesus, became the apostle Paul through a completely mystical experience and seemed to care nothing for the earthly teachings of Jesus, only his “adoption” as the Son of God through the resurrection. Not only did he alter the nature of the gospel from a story to an argument, but his letters and those written by others in his name are the earliest Christian documents we have, written long before the gospels. Almost all scholars believe that Mark was the earliest of the synoptic gospels (or “see together” gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, so called because they share similar material) and that Matthew and Luke drew common material from both Mark and a hypothetical gospel known as Q (from the German Quelle, meaning “source”).
The Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings of Jesus discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, is thought to be completely independent of the canonical gospels. It may be similar to the Q gospel, and although it identifies itself as a gospel at the end, it has no overall narrative or biographical framework. There are no descriptions of deeds or miracles and no crucifixion or resurrection stories.6
What’s more, many other gospels have been discovered that did not make it into the Bible. When historical Jesus researchers sought to chronicle all twenty of the known gospels from the early Christian era, the list looks strange indeed to those who know only the gospels they learned about in Sunday school. In addition to the narrative gospels, the so-called holy four, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, there is believed to have been a signs gospel, now lost, which is almost entirely a catalog of Jesus’ miracles, intended to prove that he was the messiah.
Scholars group the remaining gospels by categories. Under “sayings gospels” are the aforementioned Gospel of Q and the Gospel of Thomas, the Greek Fragments of Thomas, the Secret Book of James, the Dialogue of the Savior, and the Gospel of Mary. Under “infancy gospels” are the Gospel of Peter, the Secret Gospel of Mark, the Egerton Gospel, and the gospels Oxyrhunchus 840 and 1224. Under “Jewish Christian gospels” are the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Ebionites, and the Gospel of the Nazoreans.7
What does this mean? At the very least it means that what we ended up with was a very short, “approved” list of gospels chosen from a large and diverse collection of existing material, and then this “foursome” became a “spectrum of approved interpretation forming a strong central vision that was later able to render apocryphal, hidden, or censored any other gospels too far off its right or left wing.”8 The revelations that come from reading early Christian writings beyond the pages of the Bible provide tantalizing evidence that women held prominent roles in the early church (Gospel of Mary), that Jesus imparted a private revelation to James and Peter prior to his ascension (Secret Book of James), and that the Gospel of Peter may have given us the original passion narrative later adapted in the synoptic gospels.
This simple fact, that the Bible came to us through a process of review and selection by human beings who condensed an enormous amount of material down to four gospels, a pseudo-history we call the Acts of the Apostles, and the letters that complete the New Testament, is remarkably unknown to most Christians. Indeed, part of the controversy over The Da Vinci Code came not just as a result of the question of its plausibility, but as a result of the shock that seems to accompany the realization that other gospels even exist outside the Bible—especially when one of them, the Gospel of Philip, contains a reference to Jesus’ companion (also translated “consort”) Mary Magdala. It says that he “loved Mary more than the rest of us because he used to kiss her on the ____ [hole in the text].” Perhaps never has a papyrus-eating worm destroyed the final word of a more intriguing sentence!
Regardless of whether this was the holy kiss or something more, we know that Jesus was Jewish and spoke as a Jewish man to Jewish followers. We have no evidence that he thought of himself as the founder of a new religion, and the dark legacy of anti-Semitism is ironically the result of the myth that Jesus was a Christian rejected by “the Jews.” In order to put down a growing rebellion that Jesus was inspiring, Rome executed him with the help of Jewish proxies who did not represent the Jews but carried out the orders of the empire. What became the Christian church was originally formed as a movement within the life of the synagogue, where it existed for fifty to sixty years before its divorce from Judaism in the late eighth or early ninth decade CE.
This means that Mark and Matthew were written before the divorce and Luke perhaps during the final days. Only John is clearly written after the divorce, and some of its references reveal the bitterness of separation. In Mark, the earliest gospel, Jesus begins his ministry in the river Jordan as a disciple of John the Baptist; in Matthew and Luke he begins life as a divinely conceived infant. But in John, Jesus is preexistent with God and descends into human history from above as the exclusive way to salvation. He supersedes both John the Baptist and Moses and occupies a separate realm in a gospel full of the rhetoric of antitheses: light and darkness, spirit and flesh, knowledge and ignorance, sight and blindness.
In John, Jesus was the Christ before he was born, and those who reject him are children of the devil (8:44). His opponents are called the Ioudaioi, which originally meant “Judeans” but, by the time the gospels were assembled as a collection, came to mean “the Jews” and thus the opponents of Jesus who cry out, “Crucify him!” Only in John’s gospel does Jesus appear to disciples who had locked the doors “for fear of the Jews” (20:19). In the progression from the earliest gospel, which records Jesus as saying, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18), to John, whose preexistent Christ visits the earth but lives in a kind of parallel universe as a Gnostic contrarian, we see the evolution of Christianity itself—from Yeshua to Jehovah, from Jesus to the Christ.
After Constantine engineered the merger of Christ worshipers with sun worshipers in the fourth century, the creeds solidified and finalized the view of faith we hold today. Not only was this politically expedient, but it gave the church many elements of Mithraism that survive to this day. Christ is depicted in early paintings as the Sun (with rays bursting from his head), Sun-Day is the day of rest, and Christmas was moved from January 6 (still the date for Eastern Orthodox churches) to December 25, the birthday of Mithra. The ornaments of Christian orthodoxy today are nearly identical to those of the Mithraic version: miters, wafers, water baptism, altar, and doxology. Mithra was a traveling teacher with twelve companions who was called the “good shepherd,” “the way, the truth, and the life,” and “redeemer,” “savior,” and “messiah.” He was buried in a tomb, and after three days he rose again. His resurrection was celebrated every year.
We know that the manner in which Jesus came into the world is of no concern to Paul or to Mark but becomes increasingly important and supernatural in Matthew, Luke, and John. The conflicts between Matthew’s account and Luke’s account are irreconcilable from a historical perspective, even as they reveal what each author was trying to accomplish for his audience. Matthew’s genealogy is distinctly Jewish, going back to Abraham and tracing the line from David forward through the kings of Israel, while Luke goes back to Adam, father of both Jews and Gentiles, and traces the line from David forward through the prophets of Israel.
Matthew’s Jesus comes out of Bethlehem, where he is born at home, and then moves to Nazareth after returning from the flight into Egypt. In Luke, Jesus’ family comes from Nazareth but travels to Bethlehem because of the census; Jesus is born on the road, as a refugee, and finally returns to Nazareth. Matthew’s Jesus is attended by wise men who follow a star; in Luke there is neither star nor wise men, but there are shepherds. Matthew tells us that King Herod ordered the slaughter of male infants in Bethlehem, which causes the family of Jesus to flee to Egypt; in Luke there is no slaughter and no flight to Egypt.
We know that the infancy narratives cannot be history any more than the four accounts of the resurrection, all contradictory, can be considered historical. What we really have in the New Testament is a stylized witness, a confessing liturgy of believers. It was the Torah of the early church, written finally in the face of an interminable delay in the second coming. To make their case, the early Christian witnesses simply adapted the great themes of Judaism to convert nonbelievers using their own religious experiences and expectations. As the eminent historical Jesus researcher John Dominic Crossan reminds us, just as those in the Homeric tradition would use the Iliad and the Odyssey to exalt Italy over Greece, so the early Christians used the Law and the Prophets to exalt Christianity over Judaism.
In biblical studies, this is called typology, and it opens the meaning of scripture in ways that are both helpful and hopeful. In short, Jesus the Galilean sage becomes Christ the Anointed One through the creative reinterpretation of early Christian believers who went back to read the Hebrew scriptures as divine foreshadowing—no matter how labored and sometimes contorted the process.
Christ is the new Adam, whose sacrifice frees us from the sin of the first Adam; he is the Lamb of God, whose offering in place of a sinful humanity not only mirrors the ram provided in place of Isaac but renders all further sacrifices unnecessary. Isaac, the son of Israel, walked three days to a place where he was to be sacrificed by his own father, Abraham—the same amount of time spent by Christ in the tomb. He also carried his own wood, just as Christ was said to carry his own cross.
Christ becomes the church’s Moses figure, leading his people out of bondage and escaping a massacre of the innocents. Both are connected to Egypt, and both are providers of a new law. On the mount of transfiguration, both Moses and Isaiah appear in a dream to hand over the messianic mantle: lawgiver to greater Lawgiver, and prophet to greater Prophet.
Noah saves animals from a physical flood, but Christ saves people from spiritual destruction, and both use the symbolism of water as either life-threatening or, through baptism, lifesaving. The obscure figure of Melchizedek, who appears briefly in Genesis 14 and is mentioned in one psalm (Ps. 110), is said to have brought bread and wine with him when he blessed Abram, creating an echo of the Eucharist in the minds of early Christian readers according to the letter to the Hebrews.
In the final round of the plagues in Egypt before the Exodus, the paschal lamb’s blood on the doorpost of Jewish homes marked those households to be “passed over” by the angel of death. This experience of the magical saving power of blood would become a template metaphor for the blood shed by the Paschal Lamb of God on the cross, like a doorpost between heaven and earth, to forgive all sins, save all people, and banish death itself.
Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale before he is “delivered” by God to do his redemptive work among the Arabs, enemies of the Jewish people. The confusion of tongues at Babel is reversed by the translinguistic miracle of Pentecost. Moses is tested in the wilderness; the new Moses likewise. He is said to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2 and to place him in the same city as the great King David. The baby Jesus is said to have been visited by magi in order to fulfill a prediction in Isaiah 60 that kings will come to “the brightness of [God’s] rising” (v. 3, NASB) on camels, from Sheba, bearing gold and frankincense. What about the myrrh? It may have appeared later, to connect the story of another royal visitor, the queen of Sheba, who came bearing truckloads of spices to pay homage to another king of the Jews, King Solomon (1 Kings 10:10). As for a star pointing the way, this was hardly unique. It is part of the “interpretive tradition of the rabbis that a star was said to have announced the birth of Abraham, the father of the nation; another announced the birth of Isaac, the child of promise; and still another, the birth of Moses, the one who most dramatically shaped Jewish consciousness.”9
BEYOND THE PAPER POPE
The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at work in a human being. For our part, however, the evolution from symbol to idol is inevitable. We are always tempted to make golden calves out of the instruments of revelation, and the result is more than just the sin of idolatry. Jesus becomes the Christ, and then Jesus is lost. We stare across the abyss of adoration at a deity we can worship, but not emulate. Claims of biblical infallibility are identical to claims of the metaphysical divinity of Jesus. Both make idols of the temporal, and idolatry is the mother and father of all sins.
What we learn if we study the Bible carefully is that this library of books, this far-flung and diverse collection of literature, is neither infallible nor inerrant. It is entirely a human product, though one may choose to believe that it is a human response to God or inspired by God. What it preserves is not a formula sufficient for salvation but the repository of wisdom from a particular people living in a particular time and place, elevated through a human process to the status of sacred scripture. As scripture, the Bible is therefore “authoritative” for the community that regards it as scripture, and then that community is shaped by those divine encounters, which continue to spark new encounters with the divine. To use Professor Borg’s phrase, the Bible is a “sacrament of the Sacred.”10
What we are left to decide is whether we will approach the life of faith as a means to an end or as an end in itself. Will we allow the idolatry of any particular religious tradition, book, or doctrine to replace the unifying message at the heart of the universal religious impulse? Will we surrender the shared concept of enlightenment, which is present in the teaching of all great religious traditions, to any “closed” system of creeds and doctrines that uses faith in God to divide and conquer?
If it could be proved that there was no star hanging over Bethlehem, where Jesus wasn’t really born (or we admitted that what a star is “over” depends entirely on one’s point of view), and almost nothing of historical certainty can be known about Jesus of Nazareth, then what should compel any of us to seek out his message or try to emulate his life? If the old image of Jesus as Savior sent on a rescue mission to die for our sins and appease an angry God attracts mostly militant believers rather than honest seekers, then what is left to recommend Jesus to the rest of us? If the scriptures do not contain historical truth, then what sort of “truth” do they contain?
The answer is a very different sort of truth than we expect, arrived at by a process very different from the rational reductionism we have been taught. Readers of the Bible who take poetry less seriously than prose are at a disadvantage when reading Mary’s Magnificat, for example, because the deeper the truth, the more uneven the margins. It is, quite unavoidably, a different part of the brain that leads one to “think of Jesus as a poet rather than as the second person of the Trinity.”11
Even so, the fear remains that the net effect of all higher criticism is a deconstruction. Don’t we have less to believe after we have finished identifying what is unbelievable? At one level, the answer is yes, but what is exciting about honest biblical scholarship is that, for some, it represents a reconstruction. Once we understand the evolution of Jesus the teacher to Christ the Savior, we can reverse it and discover the pre-Christian wisdom of the Galilean sage. Our list of things to believe about Jesus becomes something closer to a vision of what the world might look like if God sat on the throne instead of Caesar. Our clues will come not from holding the text under the magnifying glass of modernity, where veracity equals truth and mythology equals falsehood, but rather from what philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “second naiveté”12—the posture of hearing truth in stories that are not and never were intended to be taken literally.
Just imagine listening to Robert Frost read his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then grilling him on the “truthfulness” of the poem. Exactly who owned those particular woods? What breed of horse was it exactly that “gives his harness bell a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”? And while we’re at, Mr. Frost, you don’t mean to imply that a horse can actually signal a rhetorical question, do you? Can you verify that it did indeed snow on the night in question? And how will you answer the owner of the property “lovely, dark, and deep,” who has filed a complaint for trespassing?
Novelist Saul Bellow said that “science has made a housecleaning of beliefs,” but only if believing means clinging stubbornly to what can be disproved. Better for the future of the human race—and organized religion—is the posture of the Native American storyteller who always began his recitation of tribal creation myths by saying, “Now, I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.”
It should be humbling for Christians to remember that great figures were always being called sons of god when alive, and more simply gods when dead. Gaius Octavius, who became Augustus Caesar, was pronounced a divi filius, a “son of the divine one,” and virgin births were a dime a dozen—at least among the upper classes. What is utterly remarkable is that a member of the peasant class, Jesus, should merit such mythologizing. It was not the claim that was absurd, but the object of that claim.
As Christians were being persecuted in the late second century, the pagan philosopher Celsus wrote an intellectual attack on this new religion entitled True Doctrine. It in, he hardly sneezes at the idea of a virgin birth—how unoriginal! As John Dominic Crossan puts it:
It is not absurd, in Celsus’s mind, to claim that Jesus was divine, but it is absurd to claim that Jesus was divine. Who is he or what has he done to deserve such a birth? Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s objection to Christianity:
First, however I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show, deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar; nay, one can even say it spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate, reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its purer form among the ignorant.
It is not enough, therefore, to keep saying that Jesus was not born of a virgin, not born of David’s lineage, not born in Bethlehem, that there was no stable, no shepherds, no star, no Magi, no massacre of the infants, and no flight into Egypt. All of that is quite true, but it still begs the question of who he was and what he did that caused his followers to make such claims. That is a historical question, and it cannot be dismissed with Celsus’s sneer.13
Perhaps the church itself cannot be dismissed with the scholar’s sneer, but not because everyone in it is vulgar and illiterate. The most interesting question that can be asked in the church today is this: What shall we offer to those who are not believers and yet wish to be followers? Just imagine that we could take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement, the bodily resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the morning. Now what?
By evening, a crowd will have gathered. People are glad to see that the garbage is gone, of course, but for some reason they do not leave. They linger. They ask about supper. Some want to stay over and have breakfast together. What are they looking for? Don’t they realize that when the creeds are gone, Jesus has left the building? Don’t they understand that once the stained-glass window of the Savior is shattered, there is nothing left to do but sweep up the shards, build a museum, and give tours?
Before you know it, someone pulls out a pocket version of the Sermon on the Mount and starts reading it aloud. The listeners include a widow, an orphan, a divorcée, a soldier without legs, a high-school football coach, and a gay man who is still in the closet. Standing in the back is a respected local businessman who stopped by on his way home from the motel; when he touches his face, he can still smell the adultery on his hands. There is a drunk, a confused teenager in dark clothing, and a university professor who was just denied tenure. Not a single one of them is into angels or demons or worries about being “left behind.” They just can’t believe their ears.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after more than food? Blessed are those who are not popular because they do the right thing? Let’s hear it for salt and light, and for those who are reconciled to one another before they go to church? You can commit adultery in your mind? Divorce is actually condemned? Turn the other cheek? Pray for your enemy, but don’t do it where people can hear you and compliment you on what a fine prayer it was? Fast in secret? Don’t store up treasures on earth? Don’t serve two masters? Don’t worry? Don’t judge? Ask, search, and knock before you give up? Not everyone who talks about Jesus a lot will enter the kingdom?
They all sit down to eat a simple meal, and around the table there is no discussion whatsoever about what anyone “believes.” A motion is made and seconded to meet again and take turns reading, listening, and discussing this utterly fantastic document. The group agrees that such meetings are both important and dangerous, and it would be wise to move them around to a different location each time. Those who are more affluent are instructed to share out of their abundance, giving to anyone in need. It is assumed by everyone, without a word spoken, that what Jesus taught cannot be separated from how Jesus lived—or how we ought to live. The questions are all ethical. None are theological. How can we do the will of God?
No one thinks to write a creed.