No. 2 Misconception about Jesus

(This is the second in my series of ten misconceptions in Christianity today. This post suggests that the institutional church thinks it knows who Jesus was. They don’t!)

If I were to ask a pastor who Jesus was, I would receive a wide variety of answers. I would be told that he’s God or the Son of God or Lord or the King of Kings. I’d hear that he died for our sins or is the Savior or the Lamb of God or 140 more titles of which I have no interest.

I don’t have the answer either, but I need Jesus to be a historical human figure, more like a prophet than royalty or some god.

I can’t stand the Jesus Paul presents: a sacrificial lamb whose horrendous crucifixion paid the price for my sins. This idea is irresponsible and total silliness. It’s designed to keep us in a childlike state. As an adult, I need to take responsibility for my mess-ups and clean them up based on agape, unconditional love, as stated in Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18b, a love that replaced the prophets and all 613 Old Testament laws.

The church loses me when it tells me that it was God’s plan to have his Son murdered by crucifixion, a horrendous, torturous death. This makes God a child abuser, Jesus a ram, and the church a lot of money, all based on guilt.

I bought it early in my life, but when common sense kicked in, Paul and his bad ideas had to go.

Then there’s Matthew’s Jesus. He needed to make Jesus the most Jewish Jew who ever lived. Matthew quoted the Old Testament throughout his Gospel and ensured that Jesus followed what the Old Testament prophets said the Messiah would do. I call Matthew’s Jesus the “Lego Jesus” because he designed a Jesus based on a wide variety of Old Testament sayings (Lego pieces).

Luke develops a Jesus in the image of Paul’s Jesus with a bunch of stories thrown in. Then he wrote Acts, which is all about Paul, not Jesus. I don’t like Luke’s Jesus any better than Paul’s.

In the first Gospel published, in about 70 CE, Mark did a pretty good job of representing the historical Jesus. Still, what Mark did was more about pulling together all the stories about Jesus that he considered worthy than it was about writing a biography.

The Gospel of John is not a collection of stories about Jesus’s life but rather a series of wonderful metaphors for Jesus’s message about the power of agape love. I love the message, but John doesn’t help me reconstruct the historical Jesus.

There are about twenty-two other Gospels that each present their own version of Jesus, but none help determine who the historical Jesus was. They do make for some interesting reading, with a few laughs thrown in.

The institutional church has its concept of Jesus, but remember that there are over forty-two thousand different brands of Christianity today, resulting in a huge variance in who Jesus was, and none of them are historical.

My major sources for understanding the historical Jesus come from

• traveling to Israel and spending time in places where Jesus spent time. In some areas, life hasn’t changed much since Jesus’s time.
• placing considerable weight on the Westar Institute, which conducted an in-depth study of who the historical Jesus was and what he might have said or not said that’s recorded in the New Testament. More than two hundred scholars contributed to these findings.
• spending years studying all aspects of the world in which Jesus lived, even though my sources may not have included the actual historical Jesus. His environment says a lot about who he was.

I have developed my image of the historical Jesus that works for me, but no one truly knows. I’ll share that in my next post.

How do you envision Jesus?

PeaceLoveJoyHopeKindness

Bil

Get my book at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon!

P.S. People often ask me provocative questions about current events, both religious and secular. I have found that some of these questions are being asked universally. I’ll be periodically alternating regular articles with one of those questions and my answer. I invite you to send me your question to bilaulenbach@yahoo.com.

 

Photo by AJ jaanko at Pixabay