Christianity
Revising the Jesus of History for the Future of Faith
Abstract
Ideology… is… a way of thinking, speaking, experiencing.Catherine Belsey
It is time to start abandoning, as a basic framework for our understanding of Christianity, the “history” which Christians have used almost from the start—the Old Testament narrative, the Gospel narrative, Acts and the Church History of Eusebius of Caesarea. That is so because it is now possible to see that this is an ideology, party history which does not fall within the canons of what is acceptable history for us.John Bowden
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, September 08, 1999
A Crisis of Faith
Historians have become increasingly important in many fields but notably religion. For Christianity, history is more central than in any religion because Christians claim Jesus of Nazareth appeared on earth as God incarnate, died and was resurrected, and these are indisputable historical facts. Unfortunately, people, some of them Christians, keep disputing these “facts” of history, and as more people note the alternatives, the Christian world experiences a crisis of faith.
It is not new. Reimarus, the German scholar over two hundred years ago first tried to separate the “Jesus of History” (the Jesus revealed by sound historical scholarship) from the “Christ of Faith” (the mythical saviour of Christian belief). Attempts to separate the two were abandoned when Albert Schweitzer declared the effort hopeless, but in the latter half of the twentieth century, biblical scholarship has revived the “quest for the Historical Jesus” in a rebirth of interest in the truth behind the short life that has dominated the ideas of the West in the past two-thousand years.
There are two opposing views. “Historicists”, like the “Jesus Seminar”, seek to to reconstruct the historical Jesus by separating the words and deeds of the Nazarene from myths, legends, and beliefs added subsequently.
Most Christians, however, take the gospel accounts as divinely inspired and therefore true. The idea that these accounts should be scrutinized according to the rules of historical-critical scholarship, like any ancient writings, challenges their faith. Christians are therefore not subject to reason about these things. Ministers and preachers defend their dishonest living while the punters accept any lie they are offered rather than forego the falsehoods they have been taught and accepted for a lifetime and instead recognise Jesus as a historical figure typical of others in his time.
Some Christians like to argue that they are not concerned with an historical Jesus because “Jesus Lives”—he was, after all, resurrected. For them just to consider the historical Jesus is to fail to take faith in the resurrection seriously. More orthodox ones follow Paul and still see the death on the cross and the resurrection as the core of Christian belief, but also like Paul, need no details or proof. William R G Loader says the gospels:
are their own reality and in themselves contain a world where we meet our Jesus.
It is hard to know what clearer confession could be given that professional Christians promote a mental fantasy or figment. As long as punters believe something and think that the professionals have some special power to help them benefit from it, then let the suckers believe anything! What has such a Christian to gain from more detail about Jesus’s life? The answer is only embarassment.
Schweitzer concluded that the one historical fact that was certain about Jesus was that he was an eschatological prophet who saw an imminent end of the world. Since Jesus was manifestly wrong about this, how could he be correct about anything else? The immoveable Christians, as they have done for so many other objections to Christian belief, find excuses. No pair of socks or trousers has ever been as patched as Christianity.
The “Jesus Seminar” says this mistaken apocalypticism was the product not of Jesus but of his followers, a totally absurd idea that can only discredit democracy, if that is how the decision was made. Eschatology is thoroughly mingled with the whole concept of the kingdom of God that every Christian assigns to Jesus as his most important message. And, even if Jesus’s apocalypticism were to be discarded, the problem remains of which parts of Jesus’s gospel messages are historically true.
Stages of Tradition
The Vatican distinguished three stages of tradition in the gospels. The first stage was the recollection of the words and deeds of Jesus. The second stage was the proclamation of the the “kerygma” or original central message that is the essence of Christian belief—primarily the resurrection and its significance. Lastly, the third stage was the elaboration of the kerygma by the different authors and editors.
Is there any criterion by which we might decide to what stage some part of a gospel belongs? If there is none then the same dilemma pertains: what is historically true? Traditionalists and fundamentalists use the unproveable artefact—in short, fiction—of the Holy Spirit, in a circular argument sanctifying all scripture, including those parts that promise the Holy Spirit itself! This Holy Spirit enables any Christian to say anything that comes into their head and maintain it is true because inspired. It is the prime Christian justification for their age old habit of pious lying—and everybody today accepts it without a flinch!
Now it seems strange that a curia of different varieties of professional Christians, like the “Jesus Seminar” should find it so easy to discard most of their historical god as unhistorical. Robert Funk, a leading light of the “Jesus Seminar” readily discards 75 per cent of the words of the gospel Jesus. Rudolph Bultmann, in an earlier time foremost among those who turned aside from the “quest for the historical Jesus” after Schweitzer recommended giving up the task as hopeless, was also trying to “demythologize” the scriptures in favour of a return to faith in Christ.
Faith and Belief
Wilfred C Smith made a distinction between “faith” and “belief”. The first is an unconditional sense of trust in God. The second is an assent to prescribed doctrines or “beliefs”. Note that “faith” is unconditional but “belief” can properly demand confirmation in the form of signs, miracles or persuasion by convincing argument. The two are quite different though confused by most Christians and Christian critics. Faith is entirely personal and needs no mediators in the form of priests or ministers, the quacks who sell “belief” as faith to secure themselves a lifetime of idle sponsorship.
The quacks and mountebanks want to discard the life of Jesus and base Christianity on his faith instead—his unconditional trust or “faith” in God, shown in his certainty of the resurrection of the dead—the basis of the Christian belief that death is not the end. They want to replace Christian faith as a belief in the historical accuracy of the stories relating Christ’s post-resurrection appearances with a faith in God’s promise to Jesus—the promise that Jesus unconditionally accepted.
Christians like these are trying to demolish the historical Jesus and change the foundation of Christianity from its hitherto historical basis to a purely metaphysical one. Separation of Jesus of Nazareth, prince of Israel, from the dying and resurrected saviour god known as Christ would allow believers to indulge purely in a mystery religion with no embarrassing pretensions to historicity. The trouble is that believers always like to think that the object of their adoration has walked among them. By regarding Jesus as “metahistorical” in the sense that Berdayev used, to describe the resurrection, they can have it how they like without any regard to the facts of history.
It boils down to a sort of extrapolation backwards in time. Whatever it was that gave rise to Christianity cannot, if Schweitzer is to be believed, be known, but there is no denying the huge and lasting phenomena it gave rise to. Their argument is that at some point in the past a spring of truth spilled into the world and gave rise to the Christian faith. So it can be believed by committed Christians even if the historical facts of the life of Jesus turn out to be quite different from former conceptions. The spring of “metahistorical” reality is all that faith requires.
If that is the case, is the resurrection of Jesus itself the product of faith? Indeed it is. Men do not rise from death in nature, but if some people have an expectation that resurrection is possible and even probable under some special circumstances, and if they come to believe that the circumstances have been realised, they can easily come to believe that the circumstances have given rise to what is in fact impossible.
If the empty tomb stories are true, and the subsequent behaviour of the disciples is unexplainable except by their belief that a resurrection has occurred, this is still not historical “proof” that it did. It is proof though that the disciples believed it was possible under the circumstances. And Schweitzer was correct in stating that the circumstances were that the world was expected to end and righteous people were to be resurrected into the kingdom of God!
What of the third stage, that of theological expression or beliefs? Were “technical terms” like “Christ” and the “Son of God”, proclamations of the status of a Jesus who is “raised”. Only later did these statements become metaphysical statements about a god who “rises” from the dead by his own divine power. But that is not to say that Jesus did not have these terms applied to him earlier in his lifetime with non-metaphysical meanings.
All of humanity are children of God, so “Son of God” is a banal title at root. Of course, it was an honorific title applied to Jesus because he was a priest and a “prince”, both of which were designated as “Sons of God”. Jesus was also “raised” even before he died and was resurrected, because it is the root meaning of the word “prince” that was used of him (“nasi”, a prince or a leader being “one who is raised up!”). “Christ” is the Greek word used to translate the Jewish word “Messiah” and would have been used of Jesus in his life or immediately on his supposed resurrection.
In its hurry to deify Jesus, Christians dehumanized him from the beginning. Despite the insistence of the early theologians that Jesus possessed a complete human nature, for he had to assume human form to redeem humanity, in the early fifth century, Augustine reprimanded a colleague who suggested Jesus might have been tempted in his faith. Since Jesus was a god, he could not have been tempted, he knew all the answers and he could do anything, whence the miracles. In 451 AD, the Council of Chalcedon defined Jesus as both completely human and fully divine—a fatuous contradiction for how can a fully human entity walk on water? So, Augustine’s divine Christ prevailed. The human Jesus was all but completely swallowed up by the divine Christ. Christianity effectively denied the humanity of Jesus and became “monophysite”—certain he existed as a god.
Christians should Applaud
Christians should be applauding the work of the “Jesus Seminar” and others who are demolishing the historical Jesus and seeking to return to the divine monophysite Christ of Augustine. The closest they want to come to a human Christ is a Jesus whose unconditional faith committed him unreservedly to carrying out God’s will as he understood it, and whose missionary call was that others should follow the path of total trust in God.
They hope what will characterize the follower of Jesus most of all is this trusting faith in God—like that of Jesus himself—not a set of beliefs about who he really was. The “Jesus of History” is he whose life was lived in the loving trust in God throughout doubt and despair. His unconditional faith or trust in God revealed him, to Christians, to be the Son who brings a share in the divine, immortal life, through the power of God’s Spirit.
For those who accept this, it will not matter that the historical Jesus in fact got some things wrong. Nor does it matter that little of his teaching was original. What matters to the believers in the “metahistorical” Christ is his call to universal love and service to God and other human beings confident in the face of suffering, that in God all shall live.
The real conservatives of Christianity can even continue to believe everything they presently believe, happy that the veil of history might be drawn but can reveal nothing to the believer in “metahistory” that could dent their faith. We can never be sure about history but “metahistory” stands before us everywhere in the form of churches, priests, preachers and believers.
The whole plan is a brilliant attempt to discard the aspects of Christianity that are getting more and more embarassing—the very parts that formerly had been the basis of the religion. The trouble for these Christian revisionists is that they have been so successful in the past in getting Christians to believe that black is white and lies are truth that they are finding it no easy task to make their fellow Christians realise that unsafe branches are best pruned.
The race is on between those who would drop the historical Jesus before proof positive is found that he was a bandit or a homosexual, or some other unacceptable reality, and Christianity is thrown into chaos because this Jesus is its core. Far better for these Christians to lop off the limb that is damaged and attacked by termites and dry rot—even if it was previously the main support—and replace it with an unnassailable metahistorical limb that non-Christian insects can gnaw and nibble but never damage.
- Based on an article by R W Kropf in issue #6 of Dialogos: An Interactive Journal of the Sciences, Philosophy, and Theology, June 5, 1997.
