jesus!

This is another "what I believe" post, except that frankly I'm weighting it a little heavier than just "that's just like my opinion, man."

One big point out of the way first: the idea that Jesus is "fictional," "a myth," etc. This is just dumb. It's natural to want to swing the pendulum in the other direction in response to the extremists' Cross-fetishism, and it's maybe not an easy thing for the layman to have a good grasp on which Biblical figures are historically suspect or not, but there is less evidence for the existence of scores of Roman emperors and Egyptian pharaohs than there is for the existence of Jesus, and no one challenges them. Early Christianity was my area of focus as a historian, and I have yet to see a compelling argument for the possibility that there was no Jesus of Nazareth. Furthermore, early Christianity makes much, much more sense with a real Jesus, one that early followers or potential converts could be expected to have encountered or heard stories about.

The bulk of the New Testament consists of letters written by post-Crucifixion convert Paul and narratives about Jesus's life -- the Gospels -- written a generation or more after his death. The best way to think of the Gospels -- both those included in the New Testament and the various extracanonical ones -- is as texts produced by various leadership-communities: small local Christian churches led by, founded by, or inspired by a particular early Christian leader. It's important to remember that no book of the New Testament was written during a time when there was a uniform Christianity -- even the process of assembling the New Testament, as one of many steps in the process of attempting to create a universal (that is, "Catholic") Christian church, was a highly politicized one. Compromises were made. Including the book of Revelation is a key example. But putting that aside, the point is that the books of the New Testament were written during a chaotic period in which there were many disparate Christianities, some of which competed with one another, others of which operated with little contact with or awareness of each other.

Keep in mind that by the time the New Testament was formalized, by the time Christianity was anything close to unified, the Christian community was already older than the United States is now. Non-historians -- in my experience, even historians who don't specialize in early Christianity -- tend to brush this off because in light of how old Christianity is now, it seems like such a short time. But a lot happens in three centuries. (I'm aware that it is more accurate to paint Western Christianity as "constantly trying to construct orthodoxy" than as having ever achieved unity and orthodoxy, but I am trying to keep this post streamlined.)

While these books, including the gospels, were written primarily for use by the communities that produced them, they're also full of what we'd now call spin. Think of the different ways to talk about American history, Constitutional law, or freedom of religion in the United States, and the ways our narratives of those topics are shaped by our politics -- especially, but not exclusively, when we are either trying to sway someone to our way of thinking or writing something for an audience that is already in our choir. These are the same forces shaping the gospels. Where they agree -- like with the many points of agreement among the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke, the three oldest gospels in the New Testament) -- it's probably in large part because there was a common narrative about Jesus that had been accepted by most of the communities.

There is significant evidence that Mark is the oldest gospel, and may have been used as a source by the authors of Matthew or Luke. Here are some things to consider about the oldest Jesus narrative:

* In Mark, there is no birth story -- no shepherds or wise men, no divine conception, no virgin birth. The first time we see Jesus is as an adult. Only Mark refers to Jesus as "the son of Mary." Only Mark calls Jesus a carpenter, gives his brothers names, and refers to his sisters. Mark's story, in other words, is about a more human and grounded Jesus who had normal human roles in addition to his work as an itinerant rabbi.

* In Mark, Jesus is never referred to as God, nor portrayed as having existed before his life on Earth.

* This is not to say that Mark is not a supernatural narrative. Far from it. All the more reason why these exclusions are significant -- this is not an attempt to tell a non-supernatural story about a supernatural figure, but a story about a figure with divinely-granted healing abilities (part of the standard "wandering religious leader" package for the time) with no claim to divine birth, much less to being God in human form.

One of the most interesting ways in which Mark accords with Matthew and Luke is how significant John the Baptist is in all three gospels. In Matthew and Luke, the supernatural birth narrative serves to downplay John the Baptist in a sense -- he is still just as present in the story, given a good deal of screen time, but his supernatural role is that of the Messiah's advance man. Mark is more clearly consistent with the idea that John the Baptist was the leader of a major religious-political movement at the fringes of Jewish society, and that after John's death, many members of that movement either joined Jesus or, in time, became members of the early post-Crucifixion Christian communities. The attempt to keep these Baptist followers within the Christian fold is one of the many, many forces that shaped early Christianity.

The story of Jesus is complicated, mysterious, and frustrating, in part because one of the things we can be surest of is that he was deliberately enigmatic in many of his pronouncements, and in part because it is difficult to be sure what he said or did, and what was attributed to him the way we attribute everything to Mark Twain now. It is clear that he was a travelling minister who intentionally, even ostentatiously, violated many of the social and religious norms of his community -- though he is sometimes lazily characterized as an ascetic due to his homelessness and dependence on donations by followers, he ate and drank enough that some onlookers considered him a drunk. He loved the marginalized and he loved to frustrate people who thought they had figured things out. He told parables, many of which are as opaque today as they must have been at the time, and even if we assume that many of the sayings credited to him were things he never said, it still seems likely that he contradicted himself often and with little concern.

His ministry was brief -- maybe three years, probably less -- and though he probably began as a follower of John the Baptist, I think he parted ways with John over a theological or political disagreement (for these two, I don't know that there was much difference between theology and politics). Eventually he was executed by crucifixion, likely for sedition.

I think any stories about Jesus that precede the start of his ministry around age 30 have symbolic meaning at best. They do contribute important frames to our understanding of Christian origins -- for one thing, the portrayal of Herod's persecution of the Jews in his province underscores the idea of Jesus as a member of an oppressed group, a would-be revolutionary leader whose work was left unfinished at his death.

All the more reason why the so-called Christians who invoke him so often while condemning gay marriage or refusing to support basic human rights are such abhorrent fuckwits.

Above all else, this needs to be understood: The "All Lives Matter" crowd are shitting on the face of Christ. The "remember, police officers get shot too, where are our protests?" people are wiping themselves with the Cross. There is little in American life today that is more scornful of Jesus's teachings, more incompatible with his message, than the political and social stances adopted by his most vocal mourners.

Catholic theologian John Dominic Crossan popularized (and I think coined?) the best phrase I've heard for summing up Jesus's message: "open commensality." Open commensality means inviting everyone to the table. That's not a metaphor. He ate and drank with prostitutes, lepers, tax collectors, and criminals, despite being a strongly religious man in a culture that for centuries had emphasized ritual cleanliness and purity -- in other words, he did something that would be very difficult for us to do, but in a time and place that made it much, much harder for him. Further, while today we might expect to be praised for outreach to the downtrodden if we could find the right spin, he constantly had to defend himself for it, and there's ample evidence that this is something his followers continued to struggle with (and which likely informed the discussion of who, exactly, can become a Christian, but that's another matter). Open commensality means you don't draw lines between yourself and other people. It's not the judgmental "tolerance" some Christians are starting to support, but a state of being filled with such compassion that you don't need to tolerate anyone because you cannot perceive in them anything to tolerate, anything you need to be judgmental about.

His strongest words of criticism were always reserved for the wealthy, the powerful, and those who presumed to condemn others.

The one thing we can be surest of where Jesus is concerned is that if you are one of these All Lives Matter types, one of these healthcare-denying, gay-marriage-opposing, "what about Straight Pride Day, what about White History Month," "why do poor people get free cell phones?", abortion-shaming types, and you have the gall to publicly align yourself with Jesus and his legacy, you have surrendered to the evil in your heart.