Hi everybody,
How do human beings become myths and legends? How do human experiences become enhanced with the supernatural and divine? How does a social phenomenon become so deeply rooted in a tradition that it rules the thoughts of a group of people?
I believe there are certain people or certain attributes that have always assisted the development of myths and legends. To my mind Jesus of Nazareth was such a person with such attributes, someone bound to become a legend. Perhaps Saul of Tarsus aided him in gaining this status…
In the unquiet times of the Roman occupation of Israel, the national pride of the Jews was hurt (Parallels to the occupation of Iraq are apparent). From the north, in Galilee, a large number of uprisings were instigated - some say up to sixty. All failed miserably in the face of the Roman legions who were sent to punish the Galileans.
Anybody who was remotely a public figure had to have an opinion - there were a number of varying groups. The very pious went off into the desert and prayed for God to send the Messiah, some progressive pious groups started a penance movement, demanding strictest adherence to the Torah, even to the point of doing more than the Law required. Some of these took to baptism as a sign of remorse and a new start. Prominent among these was John the Baptist, who also criticised the appointed Governor and was beheaded.
The local authorities were more concerned with keeping the peace and guaranteeing maintenance of the temple cult. After all, many of them earned their keep (and more besides) from the people who were driven into the temple by the verious pious movements, rquiring of them that they sacrifice for their sins. The Priests, who were in general from the jewish aristocracy, were said to be looking after themselves above all else.
A young man who had followed John the Baptist picked up the line of his predecesor after he had been captured and developed his own form of preaching. He was a healer and a carpenter who had obviously had some private tuition in the jewish law. He opposed uprisings but was in favour of resistence, he rejected the kind of progressive piety that drove people into the temple, but was a devout Jew who obeyed the law. He knew himself to have been sent by God, but he was relectant to allow the term “Messiah” to be used.
He preached a resistance by means of returning to the words of the Torah, by means of a sincere and frank religiousness, by doing good to the oppressors, praying for them and helping them. By this he turned the tables, made the oppressor unsure and insecure. Jesus told people to accept the punishment that the Romans distributed, and to give more than was required. In this way they were to accentuate the injustice done and build up a morale fibre within the population. The social core of Israel was to be made indestructable - a resistance that no occupying forces could break.
Indeed, the greatest dangers came not from the Occupiers, but their bootlickers. Not the soldiers were so much a threat as the priests and aristocracy who were willing to sacrifice anyone to make sure that Herod’s temple survived. That was why Jesus opposed the temple and called the Priests a pack of thieves, that was why he drove the moneylenders out of the temple and consequently sealed his fate. He saw the authorities as the biggest threat to his people - increasing taxes, demanding religious compliance, looking only for their own profit whilst praising themselves as being generous and pious.
Nobody was suprised that Jesus was arrested, but it came the way it had to come: Betrayed by one oof his own. He knew it would be betrayal that would bring him down from the start. Either because he was not obedient to customs, because he was not pious enough, because he didn’t toe the theological line, or because he wasn’t militant enough - which seems to be the reason Judas betrayed him. Jesus was unique enough to have more enemies than were good for him. He was unique, because his opposition to Rome was as effective as it was revolutionary.
Jesus personifies the “suffering servant” from Isaiah 53 in this way and that was probably the way his followers came to see him. In the 50 days after the crucifixion, especially because of strange occurences around his death and the empty tomb, his followers grew in the assurance that God had “redeemed” his life from the grave, as Psalm 49 and others declare.
Jesus became bigger than he ever had been whilst alive - and started a movement in motion that he hardly foresaw. There had been no doubt that God was with him, it would take a little while for people to see God through him, and another while before he became the incarnate God. Paul probably aided this development unwittingly by recognising the fact that in his mission to the gentiles, the Carpenter from Nazareth wasn’t going to be as effective as the Son of God.
Was this all manipulation? No, it just shows how things can become a self-runner.
Was the church built on deceit? No, the people probably genuinely believed the things they wrote - not in the literal sense in which we tend to read things, but in the sense of telling a story as best you can.
Can we believe in Jesus today? I believe in Jesus as the personification of what I deem to be a divine principal: Selfless Love, Agape as Paul calls it. I believe that he was right and that he had to die to prove it, and that he was willing to sacrifice himself so that it would happen. People who have followed his example have changed the world - even if they weren’t all as well known as Ghandi.
Now there’s a package for you! I hope it wasn’t too much and I’ll stop here and now before people protest.
Shalom
Bob