What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (4 page)

To this list of messianic biographies you can add similar life stories for Beddou (a Chinese god-man), Adonis (from Syria), Zoroaster (the Persian prophet), Bacchus (the Roman retread of Dionysus), Pythagoras (the real-life Greek mathematician), and even Socrates (the philosopher who taught Plato).

All of these are examples of the Messiah Motif; something Joseph Campbell called a
monomyth—
an heroic story template every bit as routine as those “triumph of the human spirit” profiles they make about Olympic athletes who overcome some unheard-of disease to strive forward and win the gold. It works.

And Now for Something Completely Familiar

All of this brings us back to the man of the millennium—Jesus of Nazareth—whose biography includes many of the same story points as these pagan god-men. It’s clear that certain plot elements are common to many messianic tales, suggesting that the Gospels of Jesus are as much myth as history. As Campbell would put it, it’s a story that’s true on the inside even if it’s not true on the outside. It’s not based on fact. Of course, this isn’t something you’re supposed to say in polite company, but fundamentalists are rarely timid about asserting the absolute reality of it all, so I guess we’re even.

The New Testament is a brilliant piece of work—inspiring, insightful, comforting, and educational. It has spurred millions to great acts of kindness and courage when everyone else was looking the other way. Many glean hopeful messages from its pages. And it’s given loads of British actors a chance to play starring roles in Middle Eastern dramas.

But, wow, let’s keep some perspective, kids! Fundamentalist firebrands insist every word of the book is
literally
true, as if they were eyewitnesses. They further argue that there is only one way to understand it, and they’ll be glad to show you how. Oh, and if you don’t believe them, you’re a dupe of the devil. Just FYI.

Well, I won’t consign anyone to hell. But I won’t be shy about commenting on either the Bible’s content, or how badly that content is sometimes misrepresented. As we’ll see, the Bible is a work of men, not of a god, and we know too much about it to pretend otherwise. If it were created by an all-knowing deity it wouldn’t be chock full of historical errors, scientific impossibilities, or frequent disagreements with itself. Nor would there be such a lack of confirmation of its stories. Nor would it require decades of theological training to understand it. Nor would believers spend lifetimes imparting meaning to the text, when it’s the text that’s supposed to impart meaning to the believers. Nor would…well, you get the idea.

The New Testament is a fascinating weave of history, myth, philosophy, propaganda and, on occasion, off-the-charts lunacy. It’s an adventure, and it can sometimes be hilarious. Since we live in a country with a lot of free speech lying around, why not use some of it to put the Good Book through the same wringer its defenders do with other religions and see how it holds up?

Jesus for Dummies

It all begins with the life of Jesus Christ. Most westerners know the story in their sleep, which is what a lot of us did in church. But, just for the record, let’s review the official account.

About 2,000 years ago, in the Galilean town of Nazareth, a Jewish virgin named Mary was told by an angel that she would miraculously give birth to The Messiah. Months later, the Romans decided to conduct a census for a new tax, and it required that everyone return to their city of birth to be counted. Bureaucrats! While on the road, a very pregnant Mary and her husband, Joseph, a carpenter, wanted to stop in Bethlehem that night, but found no room at the inn. They were forced to camp out in a stable, where the baby Jesus, the Son of God, was born. To mark the event, a new star appeared in the heavens, and it guided Wise Men from the East to the site of the miraculous birth. Strangely, it didn’t get much attention from anyone else in the neighborhood.

The regional king, Herod, caught news of this threatening new “King of the Jews,” and he ordered the slaughter of all male children under two. But Joseph and Mary escaped to Egypt with the baby Jesus.

They eventually returned to Nazareth, where Jesus grew up to become a simple carpenter. (I’m not sure how he could have lived in such obscurity. Apparently, everyone had forgotten that whole miracle star episode.) At around age 30 he was baptized, aptly enough, by a guy named John the Baptist, and he launched into a new career as a wandering preacher in the backwater of Galilee.

Jesus then recruited twelve disciples to follow him and spread his philosophy of peace, love, forgiveness, and obedience to God. The disciples turned out to be slow learners, but Jesus was patient with them. He claimed the Almighty was his father and that he had been sent to deliver a Gospel of hope about the coming Kingdom of Heaven. It might’ve been easier for God to just appear in the sky and say, “I’m here! Impressive, eh? Now straighten up!” But he didn’t. Like I said, he sometimes does things the hard way.

To prove he was the real deal, Jesus miraculously healed the sick, fed the hungry, and raised the dead. (Between him and all those other resurrected god-men, there must have been a lot of cadavers walking around in those days.) He then foretold of his own execution and declared that he had to die to take on the sins of the world and to offer man redemption. But he would finally rise from death to rejoin his father in heaven, and those who believed in him would do the same.

He took his message to Jerusalem, where his claim that he was The Messiah, along with his controversial spin on Jewish law, got him in trouble with the authorities. He was arrested on trumped-up charges of blasphemy, and was crucified by the Romans.

Jesus died on the cross on Good Friday and was resurrected that Sunday, just in time for Easter. He spent the next forty days with his disciples before ascending to heaven, with the promise that God’s justice was coming soon. Until then, his followers were encouraged to preach his message of love, hope, and salvation, and to not take money. Nobody pays much attention to that last part.

In the wake of all those earlier pagan myths, we can now see how many of the ideas we often think of as uniquely Christian had actually been kicking around for centuries. The stories may have arisen independently, but different mythmakers obviously fall back on the same tried-and-true storylines. Ask any movie executive.

Dummies for Jesus

The resurrected god-man myth was so familiar to the Greeks and the Romans that the early Christian Church was hard pressed to explain why their savior’s story was so special. But they did come up with an explanation—and it’s a hoot.

They claimed that, once the devil knew the life story of Jesus, he went
back in time
to plant that same storyline amongst the pagans who lived before Jesus did. The Church claimed that Satan had practiced “plagiarism by anticipation,” swiping episodes from Jesus’ life and assigning them to earlier heroes. This way, once Jesus was born, his story would already seem familiar and everyone’s reaction would be, “Been there, done that, got the toga.” It was called Diabolical Mimicry, and theologians argued this idea with a straight face. Amazingly, the Church came up with it about 1,900 years before Hollywood made
Back to the Future
movies, and it probably got just as many laughs.

The Old Testament

You can’t have a New Testament without having an old one first and, since the Christian religion was an offshoot of Judaism, the Hebrew Bible (with all the stories of Eden, Noah, Abraham, and Moses) is part of that tradition. Because Jesus was supposed to be the fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy, and God’s way of cutting a new deal (or new covenant) with humanity, the official stories about him came to be known as the New Testament. This meant that the Jewish prophecies he allegedly fulfilled, which were first compiled in a single book around 430 B.C., got stuck with being called the
Old
Testament.

At the core of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible is The Law, which is found in the
Pentateuch
—the first five books. They were supposedly written around 1200 B.C. by Moses. The fact that they describe Moses’ death is just one of the many reasons why most scholars don’t buy this. Actually, they are collections of stories produced by two rival priesthoods from two rival Hebrew kingdoms—Israel and Judah—beginning around 900 B.C.

Those from the northern kingdom of Israel worshipped a more sophisticated deity, El, the high god of Canaan. He was a calm, aristocratic god who said blissful things like, “Let there be light.”

By contrast, the southern Hebrew kingdom of Judah had a more rugged, desert culture, and they worshipped Yahweh, the more primitive god of storms and fertility. He’s the one that made man from a lump of clay, breathed up Adam’s nose to give him life (yuck) and then cloned a woman from his rib. Yahweh worked with his hands, was big on vengeance, and had problems with anger management.

When the northern kingdom was invaded by Assyria in 722 B.C., the priests fled south to Judah. Now two competing priesthoods vied for supremacy in the one kingdom, and both rewrote the old stories to justify their own authority. Eventually, around 430 B.C., these two sets of stories were sandwiched together into a single book, written in Hebrew. More books about King David and Solomon and a dozen or so prophets were later added to the mix.

Then, a landmark Greek translation of it all was produced by 70 scholars in Alexandria, Egypt around 250 B.C. It’s called the
Septuagint
—the popular Greek edition of the Hebrew Bible. This was the version of the Old Testament used as a reference by the writers of the New Testament.

The New Improved Testament

The New Testament tells us all about Jesus, or at least about the first and last years of his life—not much in between. It’s a collection of 27 books written between roughly A.D. 50 and A.D. 120. The Bible presents them in the order set by the Catholic Church,
not
in the order they were written. This was done to make it read like a chronological history of the religion. Many other writings about Jesus, some of them genuinely strange, never made it into the Scripture, though some churches include a few of them among their “apocryphal” books. It took about four centuries before the Church canonized the list of books we know today. Apparently, there was no hurry.

The New Testament has two parts: the Gospels and the epistles. The first part is comprised of the Fab Four of Faith—the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, plus
Acts of the Apostles
, by the writer of Luke. The Gospels are allegedly biographical accounts of Jesus’ life, written at least two or three generations after his time.

But the authors of these Gospels were
not
guys named Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. They were written anonymously, in Greek, and it wasn’t until the fourth century that the Church attributed them to four of Christ’s followers. It was a nice gesture, but it gave people a really false impression. Nobody knows who actually wrote them or even where the authors lived. None of them are eyewitness reports, none of the authors ever claimed to have met Jesus, and the author of Luke specifically says he got his information second-hand. Tell me if any of this is reassuring.

The Gospel of Mark is the oldest of the four, written around the year A.D. 70. Matthew came along about a decade later, and Luke a few years after that—though some think it may have been as late as the early second century. John was likely written between A.D. 90 and 100. Interestingly, each Gospel is more fantastical than the last as Jesus gets kicked upstairs from Mark’s gifted country healer to John’s cosmic savior. You can choose your favorite Jesus.

Copyright laws were not in force in those days and it’s a good thing, because a lot of the material in the Gospels is borrowed. Mark leans heavily on the Old Testament. Ideas like a voice crying in the wilderness, the raising of the dead, and details of the crucifixion scene—including Jesus’ final words—are all taken from the Greek-language
Septuagint.

The authors of Matthew and Luke then built their Gospels on Mark. They polished it up, slanted their rewrites toward their preferred audiences, and added material from something called the
Q document
—a theoretical collection of wise sayings that scholars think once existed. No
Q document
survives today, but it seems clear that Matthew and Luke took their cues from Mark and
Q.

The Gospel of John appears to be written independent of the other Gospels, which is why its stories and timeline disagree most often with the first three. When someone proudly says they believe in “every word of the Bible,” they are claiming the impossible. The Bible doesn’t agree with itself. We’ll get to all that.

Following the four Gospels is
The Acts of the Apostles
. Written by the author of Luke, it purports to document the post-resurrection work of Jesus and his apostles, as well as the history of the early Church. Scholars, however, rarely bet the farm on how credible this “history” actually is.

The second section of the New Testament is a series of letters—epistles—seven of them attributed to a restless evangelist named Paul. He produced them starting around A.D. 50, a generation
before
the Gospel of Mark was written. But they’re presented in the Bible
after
the Gospels because they cover the two decades immediately following Jesus’ life story, when Paul made a traveling nuisance of himself across half the Roman Empire.