What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (6 page)

In the oldest manuscripts, the New Testament says Jesus of Nazareth was actually born
Yeshu
, which translates to “Joshua.” This was a problem. For Jews, Joshua was already a household name. He fought the battle of Jericho under Moses. Well, just as the Screen Actors Guild won’t allow two actors to join under the same name, Bible translators had to distinguish the Hebrew Bible’s Joshua from their new messiah. So, they changed the latter’s name to Jesus. It’s probably just as well. Mexico would lose some of its charm if it were full of guys named Josh.

As for Jesus’ last name, it’s not like his parents got mail addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Christ. Technically speaking, Jesus was
the
Christ—the English word for the Latin word for the Greek word for the Hebrew word for “messiah.” It meant “the anointed one.” Kings and holy men were anointed upon assuming office with oils poured onto their heads. As Israel’s hoped-for warrior prince was re-imagined into a divine wonderworker, “the anointed one” became “The Anointed One.” A messiah became
The Messiah
. You’d think the guy could walk on water.

Jesus and the Four Christs

The Gospels of Matthew
, Mark
, Luke and John are regarded as the only “official” records of Jesus’ life, and each one presents a somewhat different view of him designed for a specific readership. Of the many Jesus stories written, these are the only four that made it through the 400-year sifting process of popular acceptance and Church approval. As I said, none of the writers ever met Jesus, and we have no independent accounts of the events of his life by non-Christians living at the time. These stories are essentially all we’ve got.

It also helps to remember that these writers were evangelists—religious door-to-door salesmen. They weren’t writing newspaper reports of events they witnessed. They were scripting infomercials based on stories that originated through word-of-mouth…er, that is, Oral Tradition. (That sounds better than rumor.)

The Gospel of Mark—Jesus the Folk Healer

The most creative of the four Gospel writers was the man who produced his story first—the author of Mark. He wrote it around A.D. 70, but scholars don’t know who he was or if he even lived in Palestine. Geographical errors in his stories suggest he didn’t know the region all that well.

The year 70 was not a happy time in Jerusalem, to say the least. The Romans had ended a four-year Jewish rebellion by sacking the city and destroying the Temple, thus ending Jewish control. It was a historic disaster, and the Gospel of Mark may be a product of that event. A bit of good news in a dark time.

The most remarkable thing about this book is how unremarkable Jesus is. It’s the least fantastical of the Gospels.

There’s no miraculous birth story. Jesus does perform miracles but, in Mark, he’s mostly a wandering sage and healer from Nazareth.

As mentioned, Mark depends a lot on the
Septuagint—
specifically, passages from the books of
Psalms, Isaiah
and
Wisdom
. Mark also borrows ideas from Old Testament tales about Elijah and Elisha, a mentor-student pair of prophets whose stories included oldies but goodies like faith healings and raising the dead.

The intended audience for Mark was country bumpkins—the poor and uneducated; the folks who could really use a savior. Mark’s Jesus worked like a down-to-earth folk healer; a man with the common touch. The kind of guy you’d like to have a beer with. Or at least a water-to-wine cooler.

The Gospel of Matthew—Jesus the King

If Mark pitched to the country cousins, Matthew went for the city slickers. It was meant to impress sophisticated urban Jews and it wouldn’t suffice to cast Jesus as a simple itinerant preacher with a bag of tricks. Matthew’s readership cared about social rank, so Jesus had to be a king. To that end, Matt adds a preamble to Mark and opens by giving Jesus a royal bloodline stemming back to Abraham, David, and Solomon. Jesus is portrayed as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy—something educated Jews knew well. And Matthew doesn’t shrink from taking verses out of context or bending their original meaning to make that point.

While this Gospel is the most Jewish because it so frequently cites the Hebrew Bible, it was also the favorite of the early Catholic Church. Mark’s account starts with Jesus’ baptism, but Matt does it one better by beginning with his birth. It’s Matthew that gives us the Star of Bethlehem story to establish Jesus as divine from the get-go.

The Gospel of Luke—Converting the Gentiles

If Matthew established that Jesus was special from day one, the author of Luke, writing years if not decades later, and also basing his story on Mark, had to show that Jesus was special
before
day one. Matthew starts its genealogy with Abraham. So, Luke begins with Adam. It also tells the story of angels announcing Jesus’ birth, and it even has the unborn John the Baptist leaping for joy in his mother’s womb when she meets up with the pregnant Mary. Anti-choice advocates make a big to-do about this moment.

The author of Luke was a physician, and probably a converted Gentile. He was interested in promoting Jesus to non-Jews. If Matthew’s messiah was corned beef on rye, Luke’s was ham on white with mayo. The author of Luke admits right up front that his entire story is second hand information, and he doesn’t cite Old Testament verses because Gentile audiences wouldn’t know them.

Luke is also aimed at the pundits and opinion-makers of ancient Rome, and it emphasizes Christ’s relevance to current events, along with a concern for the poor, for women, and for everyone else. Luke was written sometime after A.D. 80, by which time Christians started concentrating on pagan recruits because most Jews were content with the religion they had.

The Gospel of John—Jesus the Cosmic Savior

Alright, then. Mark begins with Jesus’ baptism, Matthew with his birth, and Luke with a genealogy going back to Adam. The author of John tops this by making Jesus eternal, a cohort of God the Father, the “uncreated Creator.” By John’s time, around A.D. 100, the image of Jesus had evolved into ever more grand and mystical forms—from the roving healer of Galilee to God incarnate. Consequently, it was no longer his teachings you were supposed to obsess over—it was
him.
Jesus was now life’s be-all and end-all, soup-to-nuts, everything but the kitchen sink, plus the kitchen sink, plus the bathtub, the YMCA swimming pool, and the Mediterranean Sea. You couldn’t dwell on him enough.

The Gospel of John begins by referring to Jesus as the
logos
, a Greek word meaning “the word.” This idea had many interpretations, both far out and far in. Some saw the
logos
as the great ordering principle of the universe. For John that meant Jesus because, for him, everything Jesus did had cosmic significance.

The Gospel of John is spiritual, abstract, and pretty woo-woo. You get the feeling the writer would’ve been comfortable sitting on the floor of a college dorm room around 3 a.m., twisting up a fatty and having one of those conversations about the whole universe being, like, a dust speck on the fingernail of some giant super-being. Or about how everything is kinda just vibrations in the fabric of ten-dimensional space-time. Or, like, maybe we’re all just, uh…what are we talkin’ about, dude? Oh, yeah. The universe… That’s kind of where his head was at.

Among the Gospels, John is the odd man out. Because the first three Gospels are so similar, they’re called the Synoptic Gospels (
optic
= look,
syn
= alike), and they clash with John time and again. Example: the Synoptic Gospels have Jesus on his mission for about a year before he’s crucified, while John’s author puts him on the road for three. John’s Jesus makes several trips to Jerusalem, not just one as in the others. His Jesus is always in control and never expresses any doubt about who he is or what he’s doing, unlike the more human Jesus in Mark. You could call John’s account revisionist history, if any of this was actual history.

To his credit, the author of John does come up with many poetic passages, some so compelling that even sign painters at NASCAR rallies advertise them. The favorite is
John 3:16
—

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

 

It’s a beautiful verse, and you can understand its appeal. But there’s a lot more than this to the story of God’s comeback tour.

The New Testament

From the start, the Christian faith had to pull a neat trick. It was a very new take on some very old ideas. It sounds like every TV executive’s dream: Something fresh and new that’s exactly like last year’s hit. And, like a lot of what ends up in primetime, Christianity benefited from being a spin-off.

Jesus billed himself as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. He was, after all, Jewish. And that was a good thing for him. Even the Romans, who opposed the political rebellions in Palestine, respected the depth and antiquity of Jewish philosophy. When they first took over Palestine in 63 B.C., they ended desecrations of the Jerusalem Temple and protected its worshippers. A century later, a great Jewish thinker named Philo of Alexandria even got himself an audience with the emperor. Okay, it was with Caligula, the imperial pervert. But still, that’s something to write home about.

Anyway, let’s begin at the beginning.

Virgin Birth

Every event in the life of Jesus was deemed so significant that it was given a formal title by the Church. The first such event is when the archangel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that she’s about to give birth to The Messiah. It’s a moment aptly entitled
The Annunciation
.

And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High…and of his kingdom there will be no end.” [Luke 1:31–33]

 

This is a high bar for any kid. But Mary isn’t too thrilled with the news despite being spared the hassle of picking out a baby name. At this point she’s still only engaged to Joseph, and she’s a virgin. Yet here’s Gabriel already talking babies. What will everyone think? What will
Joseph
think? If your fiancée got pregnant and told you it was a miracle, would you roll with that or would you go looking for this “Holy Spirit” guy with a shotgun?

Well, maybe there’s more myth than fact to this virgin birth claim because the concept is borrowed, rather dubiously, from the Hebrew Bible. Matthew even points this out:

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel.” [Matt 1:23]

 

This quote comes from
Isaiah 7:14
in a story set around 725 B.C., when the prophet Isaiah warns the king of Israel that, before this predicted child grows old enough to know good from evil, Israel will be wiped out by Assyria. It had nothing to do with predicting Jesus; the name Emmanuel is a good hint. What’s more, the word translated from the Hebrew as “virgin” technically means “young woman.” The specific word for virgin isn’t used here. No virgin is prophesized, so, no miracle is necessary.

If you’re a Catholic, there’s also a question of why there was no equally prominent “Annunciation” for when Mary was born. According to Church lore, she was also the product of a virgin birth: The Immaculate Conception. (Contrary to popular belief, the term refers to the conception of Mary, not Jesus.) That event should have been a clue that something special was up with this family. But no big deal was made about it. Sounds more like myth than history, doesn’t it?

There are several more problems with the virgin birth idea anyway. For one, it’ll get you an “F” in biology. Second, it means that even abstinence is no guarantee against teenage pregnancy. Third, virgin birth is just a raw deal. The pain of childbirth without the joys of sex? Who thought this was a good idea?

What’s more, Jewish tradition didn’t require that The Messiah be born to a virgin at all. Impregnating mortal women was something Zeus did, not Yahweh. Jews expected a king to be sent
by
God. He wasn’t supposed to
be
God. Again, we see the influence of Hellenism (Greek thought) on Christianity. This may be one reason why the new religion didn’t sit as well with devout Jews as it did with Gentiles. Christianity is in many ways a Greek religion.

The Annunciation
raises yet another question. Why should God go through the machinations of being born into this world at all when, in the Hebrew Bible, he appeared in human form
three times
with no special fuss? He walked in Eden, lunched with Abraham before Sodom and Gomorrah got snuffed, and wrestled with Jacob in a cave before Jacob was renamed “Israel.” Now, suddenly, God needs virgin births and angels and whatnot to make a grand entrance. Did he have an entourage plucking the blue M&Ms from his stash, too?

The orthodox explanation is that these earlier appearances were just that—appearances. God didn’t come as a flesh-and-blood man the way he did as Jesus. How they know this, I don’t know. But if God was only an image, it didn’t stop him from snacking on a meal of veal with Abraham. I’m not kidding. Check out
Genesis 18.