Earlier, in Part One, I wrote about belief, how it happens and how it’s expressed; and also about the existence of this man or men who has or have come to be known to us under the name Jesus Christ.
Belief is completely irrational and has more to do with conditioning and indoctrination than anything else, where religion is concerned. Irrationality is not a wholly detrimental concept, generally. But entire societies who believe in invisible supreme beings and magical stories about how the world came into existence or what will happen when we die and then act as this were a fact, killing or persecuting those who believe otherwise is pretty damn irrational in the worst possible way. More like mass psychosis, to me.
The resurrection myth exists in religions all over the globe, nearly all of which predate Christianity. When Christians solemnly declare in churches across America that Christianity is the one true faith and that all other religions borrowed from it, they are saying the most ignorant of lies. Historically, Christianity is one of the world’s newest religions, so this is not possible. Nevertheless, we have all these stories about a person whom we now call Jesus Christ. The approved canonical texts give us one narrow vision of this person. If we go outside the canon, we see an entirely different picture: a more realistic and earthly picture.
As soon as one engages in any sort of serious historical scholarship on Christianity, one quickly realizes that the process by which the New Testament became canon had nothing to do with guidance from the Holy Spirit. The process was entirely political and designed to preserve the power of the early church. It also was done using only the known available texts at that time. Later, other texts were discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt. What they describe is a very different picture of Jesus. This Jesus, the Jesus of the Gnostics (from the word gnosis, to know) is almost impossible to recognize in comparison to the canonical Jesus with whom we are familiar. The Gnostic Gospels, as they have come to be known, continue to generate controversy precisely because they are authentic and yet they so blantantly contradict established Christian tradition. What we have here is history being written by the victors of an early conflict within Christianity. Gnositicism was expunged from the official record. Serious scholarship continues on the Nag Hammadi texts.
We’ll never really know who Jesus was. The canonical and aprocryphal texts were written many years after oral tradition had run its course, no doubt adding a miracle here, a new saying there. Christianity had to compete with other religions for converts and incorporated much of other religions outright or developed its own versions of archetypal stories.
A few weeks ago, this thought occurred to me that one could take only the words of Jesus, including those from apocryphal texts, and, after burning away everything determined to be the product of the legend-making process of oral tradition, what one would have left would be a philosophy one could live by. After poring through various texts and reading a lot of what Jesus supposedly said, I don’t really think that would be possible in reality. Although it would be cool as an idea for a story. We do have some basic wisdom left to us in these texts, such as the idea of service and love for others. There is no more authority or historical accuracy in these texts any more than there is in Buddhist texts, or in the Koran. Buddha and Mohammed were certainly real people, too, and yet look at all the miraculous trappings their stories have accrued over time. It seems so obvious when it’s a tradition other than your own! But that’s the trick: to see your own tradition in the same way. I don’t think that we as an entire planet will ever truly be able to move forward into an age of peace and prosperity until we can stop the vicious cycle of indoctrinating our children with these ludicrous fantasies. And since that will probably never happen, the human condition will continue as it is unabated. Lucky us.
