What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (20 page)

Even modern Christian groups, like the Emerging Church movement, have adopted mystical, touchy-feely approaches to worship. They’re turned off by stuffy, traditional church services. For them, faith is a bliss-inducing work-in-progress that involves personal connection and social activism. Priests in T-shirts and ponytails create hangouts in their living rooms where young people can kick back and rap about faith…man. Nobody has to sit up straight or polish their shoes. They sprawl out on beanbag chairs beneath glow-in-the-dark posters of the Rapture. Far out.

Jews for Jesus

Having received the Holy Spirit, it was now time for the apostles to give it a test drive. According to
Acts
, Peter (“the rock”) becomes prominent in the mother church in Jerusalem, and other churches pop up across Judea. There’s no archeological evidence for any of this; the oldest known ruin of a church is in Megiddo, Israel, and it only goes back to the third or fourth century.

Acts
claims that this new sect is in constant conflict with mainstream Judaism. Stephen, an outspoken believer, is stoned to death and becomes the first Christian martyr. With such hostility around them, virtually all services are held in private homes, believers keeping a low profile lest they make the neighbors nervous. Around A.D. 40, the term “Christian” is coined as a derisive label (like “Moonies”) for the rather loopy followers of The Way. Over time, a church hierarchy emerges.

Oddly,
Acts
never says what happens to most of the twelve apostles after the crucifixion. You’d think a dozen wonder-workers with the same healing powers as Jesus would have generated serious buzz across the Near East. Yet nobody, not the Romans nor the Greeks nor the Egyptians nor even the Bible documents anything they do.

Around A.D. 46, Paul hits the road on a two-year journey that will be the first of four evangelizing missions across Asia Minor, Greece and Italy. Most people dismiss The Way as a goofy cult. But Paul sets up house churches everywhere he goes. He preaches to anyone who will listen and even to a few who won’t. It’s hard to say how successful he was but, even in
Acts
, many listeners are not impressed, and it seems unlikely he converted more than a few hundred people.

In any case, Paul’s drive to offer the faith to all takers sparks the first great controversy of the new sect—
who gets to be a Christian?

It was a touchy subject. Jesus claimed to be the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy, so didn’t this mean you had to be Jewish first? Didn’t you have to observe all those nettlesome laws and statutes? Or could you be a Gentile and leapfrog over all that circumcision and no-shellfish stuff and just be born again?

After much debate and hair-pulling, the churches gradually decided to abandon the separatist tradition of Judaism and allow everyone to become a Christian, even the un-snipped. This decision was a key to their success. It expanded the potential market for Christianity from Jews to anyone with a pulse.

A Man of Letters

Paul proselytizes his way across the Roman Empire on four missionary treks over two decades. Along the way, he heals the sick, blinds the occasional sorcerer, and sends his instructive, high-minded, and sometimes spiteful letters to the home churches back east. He’s appalled by the nude sculptures of Greece, sex being one of his major bugaboos. He’s nearly stoned to death at one point, and he eludes other plots against his life. But he continues to establish small churches across the Empire, and they spend lots of time debating about what he writes.

His letters sometimes come off as schizoid, perhaps because Paul himself had such a mixed background. He preaches love and forgiveness. But he also rails at length against…well, pretty much everybody. We’re all sinners, hypocrites, slanderers, and gossips. We’re full of envy, murder, strife and deceit. Paul is big on earning God’s grace and being justified by faith, and anyone who doesn’t join his cause is in for a holy reaming. There’s not much middle ground in Paul’s world.

As he travels, Paul’s evangelical zeal meets with varied results. The logic-loving Greeks think he’s three columns short of a Parthenon. Jews get pissed off that he wants to rewrite the old rules or ignore them altogether. The Romans, always the Bible’s disciplinarians, only take notice when he becomes a public nuisance.

Eventually, he’s arrested and imprisoned, but is later released. Then, on his final journey, he survives a shipwreck and winds up in a prison cell in Rome. While there, he writes more letters that end up in the New Testament. According to
Acts
, he’s eventually freed, but it doesn’t say what becomes of him. One tradition claims he was beheaded around A.D. 64.

Paul on Jesus

In his work, Paul echoes Jesus’ ideas about loving all, never taking revenge against the wicked, and blessing those who persecute you. But, according to
Acts
, in his eagerness to say nice things, he sometimes strays off the reservation:

“…remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” [Acts 20:35]

 

Actually, the Gospels don’t record Jesus saying this, nor does Paul himself write this in any of his letters. In several cases, Paul insists “it is written” when it isn’t written at all. Further, if Paul never met Jesus, how could he “remember” the Lord’s words?

Paul later explains to the Romans why all men need a healthy dose of Vitamin Jesus to live a good moral life:

“For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all.” [Romans 11:32]

 

In other words, he made us heroin addicts so that we’d all seek his holy rehab clinic. Technically, God is excusing his own shoddy work—he wants moral perfection but, instead of creating it himself, he churns out flawed humans and expects
us
to achieve what
he
failed to conjure up. Despite claims to the contrary, God’s mercy isn’t free—it has to be
earned.
A work ethic for salvation. Kind of nervy given that Yahweh is a god who takes days off.

For all Paul’s insistence that Christianity be inclusive, he doesn’t want to set the bar too low:

“Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the Kingdom of God.” [1 Corinthians 6:9–10]

 

The Vulgate
—the Latin version of the Bible produced by the Church in the fifth century—adds “the effeminate” and “fornicators” to this list of offenders. This Kingdom of God sounds like a dull place. Paul continues condemning the wicked, exalting the faithful, and dreaming up a zillion metaphors for the “Christ died so we may have eternal life” idea. And, again, he lapses into an Orwellian mind-frame:

“…having been set free from sin, [we] have become slaves of righteousness.” [Romans 6:18]

 

He makes it sound a bit creepy, especially since you don’t get to vote on what constitutes “righteousness.”

Paul on Slavery

While we’re on the subject of slaves, how does Paul feel about actually owning other human beings?

“Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ;” [Ephesians 6:5]

 

Remember, Jesus’ statement that “the truth shall make you free” is a spiritual ideal, not an emancipation proclamation. It’s about the soul. Slaves can be free from sin, but not from their owners.

“Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.” [Colossians 4:1]

 

That’s right. Be nice to your slaves; but don’t feel obligated to free them. In Paul’s brief letter to his colleague Philemon, he offers to return Philemon’s runaway slave, Onesimus, whom he has converted to Christianity. He asks that Philemon accept him “no longer as a slave, as a beloved brother…” It’s a hint at the Christian attitude that, in heaven, there is no class distinction. All souls are equal—a refreshingly progressive idea.

Yet somehow this didn’t translate into action on the ground. Not only was Paul offering to return an escaped slave without demanding his freedom, but Christian Europe would eventually become the greatest slave-owning civilization in history. If we’re very generous and allow that Paul was sowing the seeds of slave abolition with this story, it fell on sterile ground. Sadly, the Bible never envisions a world without slavery.

Paul on Marriage

Of course, no evangelical harangue is complete without waxing expert on Family Values. Unfortunately, as iffy as Jesus was on the glories of wedded bliss, Paul is a whole lot worse:

“To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” [1 Corinthians 7:8–9]

 

Translation: Stay single unless you’re so horny the sheep start looking good. In that case, go ahead and tie the knot. He goes on:

“The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided.” [1 Corinthians 7:32–34]

 

And on…

“…he who marries his betrothed does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better.” [1 Corinthians 7:38]

 

And on…

“…those who marry will have worldly troubles…from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none.” [1 Corinthians 7:28–29]

 

Can’t you just feel the Family Values? Paul also has problems with sex in general, and with women in particular:

“As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak…For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” [1 Corinthians 14:34–35]

 

To their credit, most churches today leave this line on the cutting room floor. But not all of them. You might want to check the by-laws before you join.

Paul on Lifestyle

For Paul, women should be seen and not heard, and maybe not even seen:

“…if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair…” [1 Corinthians 11:6]

 

Uh-huh. Any fashion tips for the guys?

“Does not nature itself teach you that for a man to wear long hair is degrading to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her pride?” [1 Corinthians 11:14]

 

Maybe Jesus had a buzz cut.

Paul writes verses that are so poetic, half of us think they originated with Shakespeare: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,” [1 Corinthians 15:32] and “O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” [1 Corinthians 15:55] He also criticizes the tendency to overdo the speaking-in-tongues routine because, for one thing, it makes outsiders think they’re all batty:

“If, therefore, the whole church assembles and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are mad?” [1 Corinthians 14:23]

 

Yeah, they will. Still, Paul supports the nutty habit of rejecting the truth of our eyes in favor of the invisible:

“…we look not to the things that are seen but the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” [2 Corinthians 4:18]

 

Sure, and sometimes the things that are unseen are completely imaginary, which is why they’re unseen. To be fair, in this case he’s referring to the spiritual rewards that are promised after we shuffle off this mortal coil. Those are certainly invisible. But he doesn’t stop there. Paul gets a lot of the specifics he teaches from this unseen world as well. This is because he comes from the school of thought that says belief itself is a form of evidence. More on that in a moment.

Paul on Paul

“For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” [Galatians 1:11]