Straight talk about Jesus the Christ

1. Jesus was a Jew. He wasn’t some blue-eyed, blond haired Midwestern Protestant magically transplanted to the Middle East 2000 years ago. Every culture creates its god in it own image. Northern horticultural societies created a vegetative god that told them when to plant. Ancient sheepherding societies created a shepherd god, etc. The problem comes when you want to expropriate someone else’s god. When the Romans conquered the Jews in 70 A.D., some of them thought the early Christian societies were kind of neat, and they wanted to memorialize them, sort of like the way well-meaning liberals in America in the nineteenth century thought some of the traditions of the Native American peoples were neat and should be remembered before they were hounded into extinction. So they hired Mark, Luke, Matthew and someone who has come to be known as John, to write up the story. Of course, these writers did not want to offend their Roman patrons, so they avoided any direct description of the political context of Jesus’s life and death. Later, Jesus came to look and talk and think a lot more like a Northern European, and the Jews got blamed for killing him.

2. Jesus was killed for trying to overthrow Roman authority. We know this much from the Gospels: Jesus was part of a huge demonstration in Jerusalem just before Passover. He rode into town on a donkey, and his many followers laid palm branches at his feet. He lost it when the demonstration got to the Temple. He violently attacked the chief priests and tried to drive the moneychangers out of the Temple. Roman authorities brought him to Pontius Pilate, the Roman Head of State. There was no doubt a complaint by the Sanhedrin, the judicial and ecclesiastical council of roughly 70 Jewish elders. The revolt of Jesus was directed against Rome and against the Sanhedrin, because after Rome conquered Israel they insisted on appointing the Sanhedrin. Jewish tradition was that rabbis selected the Sanhedrin. For Rome to impose their choice of Jewish leaders upon the people of Israel was considered unacceptable blasphemy. The actions of Jesus in attacking the priests in the Temple would completely resonate with the Jewish people, and, perhaps, Jesus may have thought, it could be the single spark that might start the prairie fire. Unfortunately, for Jesus, he was ahead of his time, and there was no widespread revolt in support of his action. The authorities moved quickly to arrest and execute him, because they appreciated that a revolt like his could spread. In 66 A.D. the Jews did revolt against the Romans, and on April 15, 74 A.D., the last of the Israelites commited suicide on Masada, rather than live under Roman tyranny. The Romans committed genocide against the Jews: murdering the people, destroying the Temple and dispersing the population.

3. Jesus was crucified on a cross. This was a common Roman punishment. Two other people are crucified by the Romans on the same hill as Jesus at the same time. Spartacus, the leader of the slave revolt against Rome, and all of his followers were crucified.

4. The gospels were written from a Roman perspective to excuse Roman behavior and blame the Jews for not recognizing their messiah, and, thereby, condemning him to die. It is probably the most epic example of blaming the victim. The Jews, who are oppressed by the Romans, are blamed for not following Jesus in revolt against the Romans. Therefore, according to that logic, it is the Jews that killed Jesus, and not the Romans. The first gospel by Mark was probably written just a few years after the fall of Jerusalem and the defeat at Masada. Luke and Mathew follow shortly, and John is much later. All the accounts of Jesus were gathered together by the Roman Emperor Constantine and approved by the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Nicaea in 325. The Church issued a core statement of doctrinal beliefs and an approved version of what was to become the New Testament at that time, and Jesus became a Christian and he was no longer a Jew.

5. “The Passion of the Christ” as presented by Mel Gibson is not the first attempt to portray the passion of Jesus. The Oberammergau Passion Play was the longest running pageant or play in history. It was performed in the evening in an outdoor theater in Austria every ten years since 1633. It had no dialog. Mel Gibson doesn’t use English, he uses Aramaic and Latin, not to give the drama more authenticity, but to make the language (and ideas) unimportant. What is important in Gibson’s version is the passion, the empathy with the suffering that goes on for almost three hours. Hitler loved the Oberammergau Passion Play, and he was probably inspired by that passion and mysticism in constructing his nighttime Nuremberg Rallies. After World War II performance of the Oberammergau Play was discontinued. It was thought to be anti-Semitic.

6. Finally, it speaks volumes to note that the leading best seller in fiction in this country is “The da Vinci Code,” an intelligent and witty thriller based on the possibility that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were a couple and had children, and at the same time the biggest religious money-maker of a film is about Jesus being beaten and crucified. These two cultural artifacts represent a dangerous gulf between two parts of American culture. It reminds one of the gulf between the intellectuals and the masses in the Weimar Republic in Germany in 1929, when all the smart and witty people were making fun of a ridiculous man with a funny moustache threatening to make war on the world.