Truth
Jesus in Fairyland
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, November 03, 1999
Popularity
In the sixties John Lennon had a hard time from US Christians when he said that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. It was a simple statement of fact. Though at least a billion people are nominally Christians, many do not practise their religion in anything but a cursory way. The US religious right were indignant because they seemed to think Lennon said something like: “the Beatles are better than Jesus”. The furore shows how illiberal fanatical Christians are. They are no better than any other religious fanatics, Muslim, Hindu or Jewish.
Christians say that Jesus was a unique figure in history because he is the only recorded instance of God manifesting himself on earth. There have been many myths about gods coming to earth but Christians claim only the appearance of Christ is well founded in history. Yet the only evidence we have is that recorded in the New Testament, a set of books compiled by the church, years after the events they relate, to persuade people to convert!
Many non-Christians will therefore reject the claim that Jesus was a divine being, but despite their scepticism about Christian claims, they put Jesus among the great teachers of the world, alongside Plato, Buddha, Confucius and Mohamed. In this too they might be wrong. There is little in the New Testament to support it and the New Testament is no more to be relied upon in this than in its claims of divinity.
Besides its weak foundations, the Christian churches have a history of their own which is far from a proud one. Injustice, hypocrisy, intimidation, torture, oppression and indifference have too often characterized the institutions and personalities of Christianity. The church preserves the names of saints to counter the historical truth but usually they are worthy eccentrics or people of only local importance while uncanonized popes, cardinals and bishops had power and riches aplenty.
Wars, Jew-hatred, and acceptance and justification of the exploitation of the poor have been more important to the church than holiness. The main Christian church, the church of Rome, has a spectacular history of corruption and crime. The reformed churches have often been little better and latter-day fundamentalist evangelists have been exposed as total crooks, yet they or their successors still attract the gullible.
A Role Model?
Modern Christians, unable to deny all this, tell us it is caused by the foibles of men and have nothing to do with the founder of the religion, who was a perfectly holy person. Jesus was God incarnate and wanted his followers only to be humble, to love everyone, to be tolerant of and merciful towards others. But is it true in the sense that Christians think it is? Even if this was a model for Jesus, Christians from the earliest days did not feel it was a model to be followed themselves. Why? Did they have grounds to know it was not?
It is a curious fact that Jesus seemed to surround himself by sinners, thus leaving himself open to the criticisms of the Pharisees, his enemies, because they were overly pious do-gooders. Some seem to take it virtually as a condoning of sin, and indeed the gospels themselves give that impression.
In Luke, the tax collector, Zacchaeus, merely had to return half of his crooked gains to be accepted by Christ! Well, the gospel does add that if he had cheated anyone, he would return it fourfold. But he was a publican. He had cheated everyone. That is how he had got rich in the first place! The gospels make it clear that the Christian had to give everything he had to the poor, Jesus says so and the disciples adopt this after their leader’s death. The story of Zacchaeus must have been corrupted but it has been a fine excuse for exploitation ever since.
Clergymen are apt to argue that the sins of Jesus’s companions were meant to show that the church had to work in a sinful world with imperfect and selfish men as its material. Thus abberations in the fabric of the church are to be expected. Men are sinners and that includes churchmen, though they have the advantage of realizing it. Jesus demonstrated that something could be done with this imperfect material and the object of the church is to do the same.
Regrettably, the truth about Jesus shows that this is baloney. Jesus expected his converts to aim to be perfect. Baptism was symbolic of their purification from sin. Having accepted baptism they were not free to revert to being sinners as the church has been ready to condone, with only the occasional confession to rectify matters.
The Church’s Record
The church has even made virtues out of its own sorry track record. It claims that one of its benefits to humanity was that, through the schools it founded and its monasteries, it preserved learning and culture through the dark ages. Admirable, except that the dark ages were caused by the deliberate and wanton destruction of Pagan knowledge by the church itself in the fifth and sixth centuries.
It claims that it helped to raise women from chattels to people but the church’s teaching on the inferior status of women had put them there anyway. Under the neo-republican emperors women were gaining a lot of emancipation in the second century, but the church stopped all that nonsense.
The church claims that through its building of wonderful cathedrals and commisioning of works of art for alter-pieces or decorative friezes, it stimulated creativity. It did but any religion would have done the same whether it was Mithraism which commisioned pictures of Mithras killing the bull or the death of Attis. Equally, traditional arts and crafts considered Pagan were stamped out.
The church tells us that Christians tempered the stringencies of the industrial revolution through the abolition of slavery and the introduction of the Factories Acts. But these very measures had been opposed by Christians for years before they were eventually introduced through popular outrage. The Christian bishops in the British House of Lords were notorious for opposing any progressive legislation.
The church likes to claim the credit for compassionate legislation whether directly or indirectly. If the legislation was not introduced by a Christian—at a time when it was almost unthinkable to be anything else—it was introduced because of the growth of Christian values in society. But Christians have no exclusive title to caring and compassionate values.
Indeed, it is more likely that the emergence of these inherent values, in human beings faced with the spectacle of human degradation, forced the church to adopt them in reality rather than as a pretence. Christianity was the only religious system available to people but they rejected the corruption of the established churches and turned to the nonconformist churches to express their concerns. Methodists took a leading role in the campaigns for greater social justice in the United Kingdom.
Missionaries
The church is fond of citing the work of Christian missionaries to the colonies as examples of the truly good nature of Christianity. Plainly the missionaries came from a culture with a superior knowledge of medicine and food values and were able to save lives with this knowledge. But they also destroyed native cultures which were perfectly valid in their own right and had they been approached with true compassion would have given far better results than forcing Christianity and its Western mores on to natives.
The missionaries manifestly took the role of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, giving to simple people the knowledge of their own nakedness as a sin. And the hypocrisy of it all is best left to AJ Cronin to relate in his great novel, The Keys of the Kingdom, where the dedicated missionary, who struggles against all adversity to apply Christian values as he saw them, is patronized as a poor thing by the noble bishop with whom he had gone through the seminary but had chosen church politics for his career rather than Christian practice.
Though he was the Son of God, the church always depicts Jesus as having the role in this life of a mendicant travelling teacher trying his best to teach goodness in a wicked and jealous world. He lived in a tiny village in Galilee called Nazareth for most of his life, then having decided the time was right, as Son of God he undertook his mission to get himself crucified as a human sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind.
Theologians tell us this was God’s plan, and it was necessary because the first man, Adam, had become a sinner by disobeying God in the Garden of Eden. Now, surely, an all powerful God could think of something less barbaric than a human sacrifice to resolve a problem that he had created himself. He must have created the problem in the first place because he is an all knowing God and must have known when he made Adam that he was, or would become, disobedient.
When they are stuck for an answer, Christians simply say that “God only knows”. It is not for us to know these things. Nevertheless, bishops and monks everywhere for a couple of thousand years have tried to work out why God had to do things this way and they put forward their theories as “Theology”.
Unspoken Theology
One theory however is not allowed: that the whole shemozzle is a load of baloney and the efforts to explain it a pitiful waste of the brain power of clever men.
The Jews were a subject people, a colony of Rome and governed by unscrupulous colonial administrators called Prefects and Procurators, expected to get rich by exploiting the natives. Jews had to pay taxes to their foreign masters, whose heavily armed soldiers kept public order by force—the Pax Roman, the peace of Rome.
The Jews yearned to be free, to be saved! They hoped for a Saviour, a Jewish prince who would lead a revolt against the hated enemy and set up a kingdom of God, for Jews—the Children of Israel—were God’s own people. Uprisings were an everyday occurrence. Guerrilla bands hid in the rugged mountains swooping down periodically to attack the enemy soldiers, or Jewish collaborators. Within half a century there was a massive rebellion which took the Romans four years and many soldiers to crush. Seventy years after that there was yet another nationwide uprising which required another four years and twelve legions to defeat. Several “robbers” (bandits) and minor rebels are even mentioned in the Christian New Testament.
Jesus was not merely a travelling teacher and he was not a mendicant in the sense of being a beggar. He was a Jewish leader as the gospels admit when he deliberately enters Jerusalem as a king and accepts the acclamation of the multitude who cry out, “Osanna! Free us! Save us!” To any unbiased historian, this would be evident, but it is not to Christians who have been indoctrinated with Christian mythology—often since birth.
Christian scholars can see no significance in Jesus never entering a large town except Jerusalem. Indeed, nearly all of the places mentioned in the gospels seem to be fictional. They exist now, because the fourth century Christian nobility of Rome—led by Constantine’s Mother, Helena—who went on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, to their astonishment, could not find them. So they invented them. Nazareth and Capernaum were founded in the fourth century. They did not exist as towns in the first century.
Jesus did not enter the towns because they were policed by Roman soldiers, they were where Greek culture was imposed by the coercion of the legions and the consent of the priesthood. Excessively pious Jews had resisted the imposition of Greek customs and gods since the time of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC. Before the Romans occupied the land, they had revolted against their Greek overlords. Jews still celebrate the victory of the Maccabees against the Greek kings in the second century BC even today at the festival of Hannukah.
Now the clergy know all of this and some of them sometimes even explain it in print, but to chidren in Sunday school, Palestine is presented as an idyllic place spoilt only—for the simple but honest yokels who toiled there as farmers and fishermen—by the wicked Pharisees, a lot of wealthy hypocrites who pretended to be pious but were really jealous of anyone who was really godly—especially Jesus!
Jesus is presented as Cinderella with the Pharisees as the ugly sisters. Or he is the Ugly Duckling tormented by other ducks, the Pharisees, but eventually turns into a beautiful swan, though he has to be tortured to death first. The fairy tale nature of the story is enhanced by fairytale elements which punctuate the gospel narratives throughout—magical cures, threefold tales, put upon but loyal women, stupid companions and a treacherous one.
But whereas most fairytales are rejected in adulthood, this one is not because it is presented as true history, the work of God Almighty himself. It has to be believed on pain of everlasting torture in the fires of Hell. Few people are strong willed enough to resist such threats and indoctrination, and continue to believe the myth even if they decline to attend mass.
Naturally it is all false. Fairies do not really exist and nor do Sons of God. Jesus did exist but he was not what the clergymen pretend he was.
