The Tri-part Jesus
He did not claim to be God; that would have blasphemed against everything in the spiritual environment in which he lived and taught. He called himself the Son of Man.
—Janet and Stewart Farrar 22
Don’t be shocked. We need to begin our journey with a naked Jesus, a Jesus stripped of his Christian clothing! He demands it, and when we’ve done so we must resist the temptation of re-clothing him with a “DaVinci Code” imagination. He requires brute honesty at this stage, not fantasy. There will be plenty of time for mythology later. All those wonderful legends about Jesus travelling to India, Egypt, or Britain are beautiful tales which can impart the deepest truths, but they are not provable history, so we must put them to one side for now.
This book must begin with facts, and as we will soon see, there are not many of which we can be certain regarding Jesus of Nazareth. However, once we have uncovered what we can and disentangled the historical man from the many layers of theological interpretation, we can then begin to do two things:
1. Get to know the man—the real person who challenged the political and religious world around him; a man who lived two thousand years ago in a Jewish backwater of the RomanEmpire, and
2. Remove the negative layers of literalised mythology which have quenched the spirit of the man himself and, rather, turned him into something he never was. Then we might be better able to create a useful mythology that actually uplifts and inspires rather than burdens and cripples with guilt.
I started this project as a personal quest, an opportunity to try to understand Jesus in the light of my Pagan encounters. I wanted to push back the boundaries and ask myself, honestly, who I thought he was. But something strange has happened during the intense research. I have met not one but three different figures of Jesus. It’s not that I’d never come across them before but that they were always a part of the one central personality know as Jesus Christ. I’m not referring to what Christians call the Holy Trinity; I’m referring to three separate religio-spiritual personalities:
1. The human Jesus of Nazareth
2. The divinised Jesus Christ of the Church (whom the scholars often refer to as the Christ of Faith)
3. The universal Mythic or Cosmic Christ
It was back in the days of pre-theological training that I first awoke to the shell-shocking realisation that the biblical portrait of Jesus is not historically accurate. My current research has led me even further down this path, and now I’m not only certain that parts of the New Testament are historically inaccurate but that the original Jesus and the Christ of the early Church are entirely different personas. Indeed they are different categories of person. One of them is a historical human being, and the other is an interpreted mythos. The Jesus of history may well be the historical figure behind the Christ of the Church, but the latter is a theologically constructed personality who began his life sometime between the middle and end of the first century ce, when Christian evangelists wrote stories and letters as a means of proclamation and teaching. The personality of this Christ of the Church then expanded and adapted over the decades until it was formally fixed in the fourth century during the period of the great ecclesiastical councils, when creeds were hammered out to combat heresy. This is who we might refer to as the Orthodox Christ.
On top of these two personas—the Jesus of history and the Christ of the Church—is the Cosmic Christ, or what I call the Mythic Christ. The term refers to the universal spark of deity manifested within all people and all things. This Cosmic Christ is not the possession of the Church. World-renowned Wiccan teachers Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone, who also speak of Three Christs, refer to the third one as the Astral Christ.
The more I discover, the more I become aware that the problem—the real stumbling block for Pagans—is not the human Jesus nor is it the Cosmic/Mythic Christ, but the Orthodox creedal Christ of the Church. And it would not have become such a problem were it not for one thing—it became a myth literalised. In other words, what was only ever intended to be symbolic was eventually regarded as factual.
In the early days of my priestly vocation I always pushed the boundaries, and often ended up in the ecclesiastical “dog house.” I remember one particular clergy breakfast where I, the rookie, suggested that Jesus and Christ were two different aspects of the one we call God Incarnate and that they might be better understood separately. Suddenly one of the clergy shot out of his chair shouting, “Heretic! Do you think you know better than the earliest Catholic councils? Are you going to try to undo their work?” Well, heretic or not, and over a decade late, I now have the arrogance to answer that man, “Yes. I’m going to do precisely that. I’m going to split the one we know as Jesus Christ into two. For once we’ve temporarily separated this god-man, it will be easier to recognise what each part stands for.”
I hasten to add that not all Christians see this as heretical. Indeed, some see it is a necessity. In a beautiful book called Saving Jesus from the Church, progressive Christian minister Robin R. Meyers suggests that the only way we can recover anything positive about Jesus is to go back to the point in history where (he believes) the Church took a wrong turn and created the Orthodox Christ. With uncompromising passion he says, “We have a sacred story that has been stolen from us, and in our time the thief is what passes for orthodoxy itself … ”23 The rest of the book re-presents the historical Jesus, stripped of his later Church-tailored garments, not as a savior to be believed in but a teacher to be learned from.
Jesus the man needs to be reclaimed, and the scholarship of the modern Jesus quest can help us do so. But Jesus the Christ also needs reclaiming as a universal mythos—something far beyond Christianity alone—something that points us to what is outside of everything and yet also strangely inside everything. This is a Pagan concept, and what really excites me is that we reach this “Pagan Christ” when the second and third personas of my “tri-part Jesus” have been merged.