Jesus
From Philosopedia
Jesus (8 or 2 B.C.E. - 29 or 36 C.E.)
Jesus, a/k/a/ Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus the Nazarene, is the figure around whom Christianity is based. He is the Christ (the Anointed, the Messiah) and is commonly referrred to as Jesus the Christ, or Jesus Christ (by many who think he has a last name).
Contents |
Life
Approximately thirty centuries ago, the Chinese invented kites made of bamboo, silk, and paper. The individuals responsible may have been forgotten, but their positive contributions are still appreciated. Long after that, a thousand or so years, a human being by the name of Jesus allegedly was born. Few agree as to when he, or He (for some claim he was God in disguise), was born.
Charles Francis Potter in the 1920s and 1930s suggested that because of changes in our present calendar, Jesus was born four years before B.C. (the Birth of Christ), that he died in 27 A.D. (anno Domini, in the year of the Lord). The Cambridge Factfinder lists Jesus as having been born “c. 5 BC” and being crucified in Jerusalem “c. 30 A.D.” Other sources mention from 6 B.C.E. to 4 A.D., suggesting that he lived about thirty-three years. If He was the Christ, He was born B.C. (before Christ), freethinkers point out. Wick Allison figures the date at 6 B.C.D.
God or Man
Tacitus in the 2nd century stated only what Christians believed about Jesus. The Jewish historian Josephus wrote about Jesus, but Wells and others declare that “no one can accept the glowing paragraph in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews (C. E. 93) as coming from the hand of this orthodox Jew; it has to be regarded as at best a Christian reworking of a passage originally hostile to Jesus. That the non-Christian evidence is unhelpful has been conceded by many Christian scholars (e.g., Albert Schweitzer and D. P. Davies).” Meanwhile, Christians make the leap of faith and believe not only that Jesus the God existed but also that He, the Son, is the Second Person of the Trinity. The third is the Holy Ghost (or “Holy Spirit,” for those who do not believe in any species of ghost). Maréchal during the French Revolution cited Jesus as being the opposite of an atheist. Jesus was written about by biblical authors who did not know him during his lifetime. Roman Catholic priest Father Raymond E. Brown, emeritus professor of New York’s Union Theological Seminary, has made new and often provocative interpretations of the New Testament. In The Death of the Messiah (1994), his 1,608-page commentary on the last days of Jesus, he favors John’s opinion that some Jewish authorities wanted Jesus executed but merely questioned him after Jesus was arrested, this because he represented a blasphemer’s threat to the temple. Such a view, that there was some Jewish involvement in the death of Jesus, helps fan controversies with Jews, who generally deny that Jesus was considered a blasphemer. Brown, however, points up the anti-Jewish sentiment easily found in the Gospels of Matthew and John. When John describes water and blood coming from the dying Jesus’s body, Brown interprets this as symbolic of Jesus’s pouring out the Holy Spirit on the early church. Orthodox Christians remain wary whenever any scholar such as Brown claims that their “divinely inspired Bible” is not literal history. Jesus appears not to have been an “orthodox Jew,” according to Gerald Larue (in Skeptic, Vol. 2, No. 3). The Gospels portray him as anything but that, for he associated with the wrong people—sinners and the hated tax collectors. According to Luke 8:1-3, Jesus and his disciples traveled with women who “provided for them out of their means” (and some manuscripts read “provided for him”). Further, no Jew living during the first thirty years of the first century of the Common Era could have lived according to the codified Mishnah. The codification of the Mishnah began following the destruction of the Temple in 70 and was completed during the early third century. Thus, first-century Jewish “orthodoxy” cannot be properly defined by reference to codes formulated in later eras. Thousands were crucified around Jerusalem in the first century, according to John Dominic Crossan, a professor of biblical studies at DePaul University in Chicago. Unlike other scholars, Crossan holds that no one, including Joseph of Arimathea, buried Jesus. He thinks it likely that some Roman soldiers in deference to Jewish piety might have thrown the body into a shallow grave. In such a case, dogs would likely have eaten the body of Jesus. On Easter, then, there was no empty tomb. According to Crossan, there was not even a tomb. Meanwhile on the subject of the Jews having crucified Jesus, Sura 4 of the Qur’an states, “Killed him not, they did not crucify him, but it was made to appear that way to them.” A pundit has said that Jesus was both original and inspiring: unfortunately, what was inspiring was not original, and what was original with Jesus was not inspiring. What caught the imagination of the masses, the pundit continued, was the spin added by the greatest public relations person of all time, Saul of Tarsis: “I am the way, the truth and the light. No man cometh unto the Father but by me.” Proof of Jesus’s existence?
G. A. Wells, professor of German at the University of London, is one of many who contend that Jesus was probably not a historical person. Rather, he holds, Jesus, William Tell, and King Arthur are legendary figures. Wells, in Encyclopedia of Unbelief, lists various scholars who have written about and denied the historicity of Jesus: Guy Fau, Prosper Alfaric, W. B. Smith, and J. M. Allegro. Whether or not he lived, and who inseminated his mother, Mary, has been debated for centuries.
The dramatist Terrence McNally, in Corpus Christi, not only describes Jesus as a human but also refers to homosexuality among Jesus and his Apostles. Similarly, playwright Christopher Marlowe thought Jesus had sex with his disciple John.
Jesus, Marriage Of
In his Da Vinci Code, novelist Dan Brown plots Leonardo da Vinci’s role in keeping secret that Mary Magdalene, far from being a prostitute, was the wife of Jesus and the mother of their child. Their heirs, Brown postulates, threatened the early church, causing power struggles. As a result, a clandestine priory, of which Leonardo was a member, formed to keep the secret. The novel starts by telling the story of a renowned Harvard symbologist who is summoned to the Louvre Museum to examine a series of cryptic symbols relating to Da Vinci's artwork. In decrypting the code, he uncovers the secret of Jesus’s marriage and child, but then becomes a hunted man because such information threatened the church’s very existence.
Jesus, Resignation Of (A Fearsome Atheist Humorous Explanation)
After a fortnight of vacation to “evaluate his life” and “reassess his goals” and career, Jesus Christ today announced his resignation. Sources say that he was probably under pressure to resign after failing to capitalize fully on his success. While the religion he founded raked in billions each year, a significant number of people refused to buy into it, and earnings had been falling in recent years. “I mean, my life just wasn’t going anywhere,” the 2,000-year-old Jerusalem-born saviour said in an interview. “I had a productive period a while back. “You know, walking around on water and shit. But to be honest since then I haven’t gotten out much and haven’t really gotten anything done.” Jesus, who answers prayer requests, admitted that he had been somewhat leisurely about his work in recent years. “I sometimes just drift off and can’t seem to concentrate. I plain slept through the entire 1940s,” mankind’s Saviour told reporters, explaining how the Second World War was allowed to happen. . . . Jesus said that his resignation was not due in any way to his arrest this February for stalking. Charges are still pending on that matter, after police realized that Jesus’s omnipresence left him open to an estimated 50,000 counts of stalking. A police source, who wished to remain anonymous, stated that they were “still sorting out the paperwork” and estimated it would be at least another two centuries before all the charges were calculated, researched, and filed. . . . The retirement, effective immediately, means that Christians who are seeking spiritual aid or guidance will no longer receive an answer to their prayers. . . . Jesus explained that, in order to minimize confusion in coming weeks and also to update prayer-answering to match today’s technology he will be installing a voicemail system. . . . I don’t want to bother with any of that shit while I’m on vacation.” . . . Archbishop Jim Carrey of Westminster Cathedral told reporters that “You can expect the same great service from our voicemail system that you’ve always gotten from Jesus.” The response from Christians were varied although the changes were taken extremely well by the majority. “I just thank God for this,” said Southern Baptist Chuck Whitman. “Getting up early on Sunday was just killing me, so I’m pretty glad actually.” The Fearsome Atheist Webzine <http://fearsome.net/rants.htm>.
Jesus [Lee Jae-rok] (20th Century)
Jesus is alive and well in Seoul, South Korea. He is pastor of All Holiness Church. When a television station attempted to air a program exploring Jesus’s “heretical” statements and his gambling habits, six church leaders stormed the network and interrupted the broadcast. Several hundred members of the church overpowered fifty guards, successfully cutting the program off the air, and 1,500 of its members protested in front of the television station, demanding that the network cancel any future programs. The police sought arrest warrants for the six leaders. Meanwhile, the church was expelled from the Korean National Council of Churches, averring that its Jesus is not the Jesus who claims he is Jesus.
Jesus, Sayings Of
Q, a reconstructed Greek text of the Bible, is a hypothetical first-century work composed mostly of the alleged sayings of Jesus. First published in Belgium as Documenta Q, it is believed by some scholars that Q, which is short for Quelle, the German word for source, is a literary source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Other scholars, however, believe the work never existed. (See Charlotte Allen’s “Q: The Search for a No-Frills Jesus,” The Atlantic Monthly, December 1996)
Jesus's Children
The Cathari held that Jesus, instead of dying on the cross, married Mary Magdalen, settled in the Languedoc, and that their heirs founded the Merovingian dynasty that united Christian Europe under Charlemagne. (
The Cathari (also known as Albigenses) were a medieval, puritanical, and heretical movement called, by theologian Herman Hausheer of Lamoni, Iowa, “a repristination of Manichaeism and Gnostic christology, maintaining to be the only true church of a holy hierarchy and efficacious sacraments.” Translated, this means that the group claimed to have had proof that Jesus did not die on the cross, that he married Mary Magdalen, that they settled in the Languedoc, and that their heirs founded the Merovingian dynasty that united Christian Europe under Charlemagne.
Sherri Shepherd, on a 2007 television show called "The View," illustrated a not uncommon Christian's view when she said that Jesus predates ancient Greece.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, by studying the Inquisition notes describes the life of a medieval village.
His Omnipresence is on the Web: <http://members.aol.jesus316/index.htm>.
(See entries for Christmas; Ganymede; Homosexuality; Immaculate Conception; and Resurrection. Also, see the entry for Jesus in McCabe’s Rationalist Encyclopedia.)
(For details of Jesus's foreskin, see entry for Circumcision.)
{CE; ER; EU, G. A. Wells; FUK}
