Jesus Just Misunderstood
SOURCE: Tom Harpur, The Toronto Star (28 December 2003)
(Copyright © 2003 Toronto Star. All Rights Reserved.)
"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the devil of Hell. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God or else a madman or something worse." This is the "mad, bad, or God" argument of C.S. Lewis, in his 1952 Mere Christianity, and it's quoted often today, for example in the popular, controversial Alpha Course.
Jesus Seminar scholar, Marcus Borg, in a recent book, says the statements upon which this assertion are based - called "Christological" - for example "I am the way, the truth, and the life," or "I and the Father are one," didn't originate with Jesus. He, with most Bible scholars, thinks it's unlikely Jesus claimed to be the unique "Son of God" or Messiah. These terms are "the voice of the community in the...decades after Easter. It's not the language of self-proclamation, but the community's testimony to Jesus' significance in their lives," he argues. Thus, Jesus was neither mad nor bad. He just didn't say what the Gospels have him say.
This argument used to have some persuasive force with me although those familiar with my past christological thinking know I focused on two things Jesus nowhere makes any absolutist claim to be God. In fact, once, faced by a young man who called him "good master," he rebuked him and said "Don't call me that; there is none good except God alone." The titles Messiah, and Son of God, do not equate with any absolute deity-type claims. No Jew expected the Messiah to be God. The phrase "son of God" is used widely in scripture to describe those designated for special roles. Satan is a son of God in the Book of Job. Indeed, so is the nation of Israel. In John's Gospel it says all who receive the Christ - potentially everyone - are given the power to "become sons (children) of God." So, I always expressed a rebuttal of Lewis' too-glib aphorism by saying there were other options than those he wanted to force on us. The terms used were not as "loaded" as he implied. However, there was always another possibility. This is what now makes most sense. Lewis' either/or is arbitrarily limiting. It could read, in paraphrase, "Jesus was either a lunatic, a devil, God, or totally misunderstood."
The real problem with both the conservative position - accepting Lewis' either/or stance - and with the liberal, Borg-and-company thesis about elaborations by post-Easter Christians is that both camps operate from an identical premise. Both assume Jesus was a historical person walking around Palestine. Their disagreement is about exactly what kind of things he said or did. The conservatives take everything verbatim as if from his lips. The majority of liberal scholars strip Jesus to a bare minimum and attribute the heavy stuff to an emerging faith community. About 18 per cent is authentic, they say.
Both are wrong. The radical view - one that goes into the heart of where New Testament scholarship should be going - is the one that sees the entire story as it stands as a divine drama where Jesus, as the persona representing the Christ of the universal myth, speaks the very same lines that all the saviour figures of ancient religion spoke in the various rituals or mystery plays.
In a new book to be published this spring, I present abundant hard evidence that this is so. Instead of emasculating the Gospels by eliminating everything that smacks of the mythical/mystical - leaving a husk with little spiritual lifting power whatever - what is needed is to comprehend the esoteric (hidden or secret) setting out of which Gospel material first arose. This can't be stressed enough. It's so ancient, so prevalent in the kaleidoscope of millennia-old spiritual wisdoms, that once seen in its wider context it comes alive with incredible freshness and inspiration.
I once subscribed to the historical-critical approach to sacred texts where the aim was to "demythologize" the parts that sat ill with modern assumptions virgin births, Sons of God, sensational miracles, sacrificial deaths appeasing wrathful father-gods, etc. What I now realize is that the opposite is true. Rudolph Bultmann was mistaken. We need to re-mythologize not de-mythologize. What I mean is that rather than expunge material we judge in our "superiority" to be "mere superstition," we need to see its wise, profound meaning for our lives as allegory. The Gospels aren't history. The virgin birth never "happened" nor did the miracles, including multiplying loaves of bread and turning water into wine. But, understood in their mystical sense, these Gospel moments can still transform our lives in the most powerful, intimate way.
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