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ARTICLE
NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 1.5  In this further continuation of part I, Tom Lee's focus shifts to a closer examination of how Jesus fitted with the schema of his time — both in the ways in which he very much 'fitted in'. as well as the places in which, or his followers, contemporary as well as later, offered radically different alternatives. The
Invention of Christianity and the Papacy Babylon… Another important Jewish center was the city of Babylon (south of Baghdad) between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, outside the Roman Empire to the East, in present day Iraq. Hillel was born and raised there, coming to Jerusalem as an adult. Alexandria, which had its own Temple, may have housed Jesus for a time in his formative years, if the story of the flight into Egypt (only in the Gospel attributed to Matthew) is true, but this also is dubious as Herod never carried out a slaughter of innocent babes.
The most famous representative of Alexandrian Jewish philosophy, Philo (c.20 BCE-50 CE) was a near contemporary of Jesus. He set himself the task of reconciling Jewish scriptural theology and Greek philosophy. The greater part of his voluminous writings is in the form of commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures. His most important contribution was his conception of the Logos (Word), carrying further the Book of Wisdom: "God created me when his purpose first unfolded, before the oldest of his works. From everlasting I was firmly set, from the beginning, before the earth came into being." Philo developed the Greek notion of the Logos, conceiving it as a personality whom he calls the second God and also sometimes the Son of God by the virgin Wisdom, who is the instrument of God's creation and revelation, and of his imminent activity in the Universe. The Logos is for Philo definitely inferior to God, and therefore not identical with the Christian dogma of the Logos, the Word made Flesh. Philo's conception never gained credence with his fellow Jews since it seemed to impair the absolute monotheism of their religion. But his works were studied eagerly by the early Church Fathers who found in them much material for that synthesis of Jewish and Greek thought that came to be known as Christian theology. The author of the Gospel attributed to John is Philo's student; his writing not a history but a work of artful theology. Another idea imbibed from Philo was his interpretation of the story of Sodom as a condemnation of homosexuality, a practice neither condemned nor discriminated against among the Greeks and native Egyptians of his hometown. Before Philo's time general rabbinic opinion equated the sin of Sodom with a lack of hospitality to strangers. But Philo's intolerant and scatological opinion was the one adopted by the Church Fathers. In the beautifully written but often-inaccurate King James Bible, the translators introduced the word "sodomites" half a dozen times. It is used to translate the Hebrew word kadesh (plural kedeshim) that means literally "consecrated one" or "holy man." In modern translations they are described as "men who were sacred prostitutes". fathering sons of god with willing women, or channeling lustful men's needs into a preview of ecstatic union with God. They persisted until c.621 BCE in the reign of King Josiah, who "pulled down the house of the sacred male prostitutes which was in the Temple of Yahweh and where the women wove clothes for Asherah," (2 Kings 23:7). The Synagogue — seedbed of Christianity… The seedbed of Christianity was the Synagogue. Of necessity this was so, since the news conveyed by the early followers of Jesus was that in him the promised Messiah (in Greek, the Christos) had appeared. Judaism was a religion of argument, the synagogues being dynamic places where religious devotion was combined with teaching of the Law and debate on the purposes of God. The synagogues bore no resemblance to temples. They had no images of gods, no altars and no priestly rites. The philosophy inculcated separatism, the rejection of all other religious beliefs and fostered its own curious disciplines such as the mutilation of males by circumcision, abstention from various foods and from all work every seventh day as well as special feasts and ablutions. Evidence from Qumram, from Philo, and other sources indicate it was mandatory to pray at definite times of the day and night, rather as good Muslims do today. Some say it was three times, others six. Most of the sectarian Jewish holy men, whether Pharisee, Essene, Nazirite, Rechabite or Zealot, believed they were at the End of Days, when the Messiah would appear. Jesus, we are told, came to believe that he was the embodiment of their hopes. The expected Messiah of the Jews, although ill-defined and variously expected under royal, militaristic, spiritual or suffering guises, was never conceived of as divine in any sense that could constitute a secondary god. There was no one doctrine of the Messiah, but this means only that the various Jewish sects differed as to details. They did believe that the Messiah would establish a New Covenant between man and God. While not superseding the old Law, it would create the circumstances in which the Law would be universally operative. Most sects united too in believing that foreign oppressors would be driven out and God alone would rule a restored and united Israel, with the Messiah as a visible king or judge to guide them. No doubt Pontius Pilate welcomed the removal of John the Baptist by King Herod Antipas, without Roman intervention. But where the Baptist claimed to be preparing the way for the Kingdom of God on earth, Jesus claimed to be inaugurating that Kingdom. It could only be viewed by the Romans as a political challenge to the Empire. It was an in-your-face provocation. Jesus is portrayed as claiming to be able to forgive sins. The Baptist had linked forgiveness to his baptisms, but he did not claim personal power to forgive sins. To justify his power to forgive sins, Jesus bracketed it with his ability to heal the sick. While this may sound strange to us now, in ancient Jewish terminology sickness was attributed to sin. If you relieved people of their guilt you relieved them also of their sickness that had been a symptom of the sin. Unlike the Scribes, Jesus did not wait for the people to come to him in the synagogues but spoke to them in the open air, and during the early part of his mission that probably began in the lunar Sabbatical Year 33-34, when agricultural workers were free from labor, he was followed by excited crowds, eager to hear and believe in the imminent consummation and present dawning of the divine kingdom. The Scribes and Pharisees were accustomed to send out followers who had memorized the instruction of their master and acted as his representatives. A man's accredited envoy was regarded as himself. And that is just what Jesus told his adherents: "Anyone who listens to you listens to me; anyone who rejects you rejects me." The synoptic Gospels, i.e. sharing the same material, Mark, Matthew and Luke, that came to be considered eye-witness accounts, clearly regard the baptism of Jesus as the effective beginning of his ministry, when God acknowledged him as his messianic son and representative. This was the original Jewish-Christian doctrine, later overlaid in Gentile-Christianity by Luke's concept of the Incarnation; asserting in pagan fashion that Jesus had been born Son of God by a spiritual act of fatherhood. Certainly Jesus seems to have believed his baptism to be his messianic anointing. The greatest problem of the Incarnation doctrine — that God-in-Christ lived a human life and died a human death — is to make it intelligible. Muslims and Jews have always regarded the incarnation as a denial of true monotheism. What can it mean to assert that God became man without ceasing to be God? Defenders of the orthodox doctrine too easily waft away the intellectual problem with appeals to "mystery" and "paradox". Fairy-tale is a more apt term. Jesus, as a devout Jew, can never have regarded himself as God. Yet, he seems, in the gospels, near to the Hindu faith's acknowledgement of many incarnations of God. The basis for incarnation in Hinduism is the doctrine of the essential unity of each individual soul with the divine. The Upanishads assert that every human soul is a spark of the divine totality. Salvation involves realizing this. Every God-realized soul is a divine incarnation. It is difficult to disentangle Jesus from myth. There is no direct contemporary evidence of his existence. The Gospels were written decades after Jesus' death, which by the admission of John 20:31 "...are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and through believing you may have life in his name." A capacity for selfless love…
Christianity stresses the radical difference between man and God. God is the creator and man is the creature – that is a metaphysical gap that is never bridged. But though God and man differ in nature, they have a characteristic in common. This is a capacity for selfless love, which in God is complete and in man is potential. Jesus took up John the Baptist's message where he left it. There is no evidence that Jesus attempted to found a new institutional religion. His disciples in Israel were content to remain orthodox Jews, obedient to Mosaic Law. Like many other Jews, they expected the coming of the Messiah who was to deliver their country, and were distinguished from other Jews only by the belief that they knew who the Messiah was. Half-shrewd, half sentimental, Jesus saw the comedy of man's meanness in even the most sacred things, and sublime purpose in the most degrading human affairs. Claimed in Matthew's Gospel as a descendant of King David, through his father Joseph, Jesus was clearly gifted with a very useful and highly equivocal authority, and a not inappropriate name, in Hebrew Y'shua (Joshua), which meant anointed one. Jesus may not have been from the town of Nazareth in southern Galilee to which millions of Christian pilgrims have directed their steps. Many scholars are convinced that the town did not exist in Jesus' lifetime. He and his family were much more likely to have come from Nazara a Jewish town that then existed to the north of Pella in the predominantly Greek-speaking area of Batanea, on the north-eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The initial activities of Jesus were all to the north of the Sea of Galilee and among his first followers were fishermen living at Bethsaida at the northern end of the lake, some with Greek names like Andrew and Philip. Matthew's Gospel affirms that the recognition of Jesus as the Messiah was made in the north at Caesarea-Philippi. Bethlehem in Judea may not have been Jesus' birthplace. In his book Rabbi Jesus, Episcopal priest and religion professor Bruce Chilton questions which Bethlehem. His hypothesis argues the Gospel writers confused that town with another Bethlehem in Galilee, whose existence has been proven by archaeologists. "Because of oral traditions, the Gospel writers knew Jesus' birthplace was Bethlehem, and so they looked in the Old Testament and saw that Micah talks about Bethlehem of Judaea. The inclination was to link those two together. Bethlehem in Galilee was only seven miles northwest of Nazareth, so you don't have difficulty imagining Mary and Joseph making journeys between the two as the Gospels tell us they did. But getting from Nazareth to Bethlehem of Judaea requires a journey by foot of more than a hundred miles." Where Jesus was born is only a secondary issue. Much more important is what Jesus did and said when he grew up, what happened to him when he died and supposedly rose again. It's skewed now in our modern culture in the West. Christmas has become a big festival, and Easter is sort of secondary. But Jesus' birth isn't important to the message of his life and his teachings. The Sea of Galilee (actually a large lake) that figures so prominently in Gospel scenes was a major source of industry; its pickled and salted fish exported all over the Roman empire. To own boats, as some of Jesus' disciples did, one required a standard of living well above subsistence living, the lot of many peasant farmers at the time. Large estates, in the Roman manner, were taking over more and more land in Galilee during this period. Certainly, the disciples were better off than the increasing number of peasants who were losing their claims to the lands they worked to the landholders who held their mortgages. Jesus' ministry seems to have been a powerful, prophetic attempt to revive Israel's sense of peoplehood and to renew its covenant with God. Jesus must have agreed with John the Baptist that the world as they knew it — with its infidelities and oppression — was dying and a new world was about to be born. Jesus' preaching and ministry certainly contain a sense of urgency, an apocalyptic fire drawing force from a vision of a new heaven and earth. Gathering a small community of disciples, Jesus called them symbolically The Twelve, evoking Israel's memory of one people in twelve tribes, long broken and scattered.  ARTICLE
NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 1.5 PHOTO CREDITS:
The image of the Rising Sun used in the headline and footer graphics graphics
was taken by Ines Mad. Linz, Austria and sourced through stock.xchng.
What are your thoughts on this commentary? You can contribute to the discussion in our forum. ©2008 Tom Lee (Star Concepts LLC) 15633 N. 17* Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85023-3409 |
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