The Chuch of Allan - The Plain Truth About God

A serialization of the book, The Plain Truth About God.

Chapter 11. “THE JESUS TAPES”

As we have discussed, the way we have come to know the historical Jesus is through the gospels, and as we now know, these Gospels were written relatively late in the dawning of Christianity.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, the reason for the time lag before the biographies were written was that early Christians felt no need for a biography or collection of his sayings.

This was because his followers considered the event of “The Christ” or “Anointed One” was the immediate prelude to the end of the world and final judgment of humanity.

Paul of Tarsus, in his epistles, wrote that his generation would see the apocalypse.

This was because Jesus of Nazareth claimed that the people around him would still be alive for the end days. Since there was no future, there was also no need to record any of these events for posterity.

These early Christians were more concerned with preparing themselves for the expected apocalypse and for spreading what they saw as the truth of Christianity to as many people as possible before the anticipated “End Time.”

(On a side note here, I still vividly recall when I was twelve years old in 1960; our next-door neighbor told me that the world would end on a specific date that year. She was just like any “end of the world” adherent, still trying after 2000 years to experience the rapture, and all she managed to do was scare the crap out of a young kid - me!)

At the same time these apocalyptic stories and sayings were circulating around the Christian world, another set of stories about Jesus were also being created by Paul.

When Paul of Tarsus had his vision, underwent an epiphany, and converted to Christianity, he did so with such energy and creativity that it soon made him the most prominent leader of the new movement.

In fact, Paul was so instrumental in spreading Christianity that the movement became the world religion it is today almost solely on his account.

Unlike Jesus of Nazareth, Paul’s role in the founding of Christianity is clear. The narrative of his career was collected within a few short years of his death so that, unlike Jesus, many of the writings were preserved.

Therefore, we can be definite in ascribing certain ideas and doctrines to Paul, while there is much dispute over what genuinely belongs to Jesus in the accounts of his career.

Different from the other followers of Christianity in those early years, Paul was not a native of Palestine. As a citizen of Tarsus, he was officially a citizen of Rome and was raised in a Greek culture and fluent in Greek.

Because of this, it was only natural that he would take the side of the Hellenists in the dispute over the direction of the Church.

Paul orientated towards the Greek world, and because of this, his innovations in the new religion left it a substantially different one than the material he started out with.

Where Jesus and many of his followers seemed to consider their beliefs as a “religion of the Jews,” Paul, in the debate between the Hebrews and the Hellenists, re-cast Christianity as a universal religion for all peoples.

Paul had to do a lot of juggling with the new religion because of the debate between the Hebrews and the Hellenists about the refusal of the Hellenists Christians to abide by Jewish law.

It was, after all, a foreign law to them.

The main sticking point in the dispute was the Jewish rule of diet and the act of circumcision, neither of which the non-Jewish Christians wanted to adopt.

This made the Jewish Christians consider the Greek Christians unclean!

Paul had an epiphany and came up with the novel idea that Jewish Law was worthless in gaining salvation since the sacrifice of Christ on the cross was what really mattered.

He relied on the Greek and Roman legal concept on the difference between the spirit and the letter of the Law.

He argued that even though the non-Jewish adherent had broken the letter of the Law about diet and circumcision, they had not broken the law in terms of the spirit or intent.

This outright rejection of the Jewish Law was an unheard of precedent since it allowed Christianity, which did not have many Jewish followers anyway, to spread rapidly amongst the Gentile population of the Roman World.

It should also be noted that “Jewish” Christianity was mainly restricted to rural adherents while Paul promoted “Gentile” Christianity amongst the towns and cities in the region.

(Jewish Christianity for the country hicks and Gentile Christianity for the sophisticated townsfolk!)

This led to a rapid rise in non-Jewish adherents and widened the schism between the two.

Despite his efforts to make Christianity a populous religion, some of Paul’s prejudices show themselves in remarkable ways that have caused us trouble for the last 2000 years!

While Jesus strongly focused on women and the status of women, Paul was an old reactionary misogynist.

He was against both Jesus’ radicalism towards women and the Greek liberality that allowed women a stronger voice in the community than was allowed among the Jews.

Do not forget that in the Middle East, then as now, women were culturally treated as no better than chattel and have suffered for it at the hands of men for many millennia.

Paul demanded that women be silent in church and in matters of theology.

Jesus had worked hard to erase these injustices but in the end old habits and cultural prejudices won out.

It was the same with the matter of slavery.

Jesus had nothing to say about slavery but Paul seemed to have approved of it.

While he demands that slaves obey their masters, he also understands the contradiction of one Christian owning another as a slave so he waffles.

(While he does not demand that slave-owners give up their slaves, he does say it would be the Christian thing to do.)

One of the most contentious issues from the works of Paul is the subject of the resurrection.

St. Paul, along with St. Clement of Alexandria after him (115-215 C.E.) took the allegorical / spiritual approach to the scriptures and would have been shocked to see the way today’s “Christianity” often distorts the original reality.

Paul is quoted in 1st Corinthians 15 as saying that Jesus’ resurrection, and by default our own, was categorically and supremely a “spiritual” event!

According to Tom Harper, amongst others, Paul quotes the tradition handed down to him on how various people “saw” the risen Lord as “one born out of due time.”

This was a technical term, widely used in the popular Mystery Religions of the time, to denote a paranormal, psychic vision.

Obviously, he was not talking about ordinary physical sightings at all!

When you move on to verse 35 he discusses and answers the obviously legitimate question, “How are the dead raised up?”

His argument, after all is said and done, is basically that what goes into the ground at death is definitely not what moves on to the dimension of eternal life or the life of the “age to come.”

What goes into the grave is corporeal, physical, and eminently corruptible.

What comes out is immortal, spiritual, and certainly non-corporeal. On the other hand, as the old Egyptians said: “The body to earth, the soul to heaven!”

Paul’s most emphatic statement on this was when he said; “Now this I say…flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, neither doth corruption inherit incorruption…we shall all be changed!”

This also helps explain why he was not immediately recognized when he appeared after the crucifixion.

*****When you’re dead, you’re dead! The body is gone but the spirit goes on!

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com

Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com

The Church of Allan - The Plain Truth About God

A serialization of the book, The Plain Truth About God.

Chapter 9. ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS .

There has been much debate on why there are no early records of the sayings of Jesus.

It would be natural to assume that they would be preserved and handed down to us, and this would normally be the case, but remember the early Christians felt no need for either a biography of Jesus or a collection of his sayings.

They believed that the “Christ” event in history was the immediate prelude to the end of the world and final judgment of humankind.

Paul, in his epistles, wrote that the present generation, his own, would see the apocalypse.

In the Synoptic gospels, Jesus of Nazareth also claimed that the people around him would still be alive for the “Last Days.”

Anticipating the immediate end of the world at any moment, the early Christians felt no obligation to record the life or sayings of Jesus.

There was, after all, no future anticipated for this material.

These early Christians were more concerned with preparing themselves for the expected apocalypse and for spreading the truth of Christianity to as many people as possible before the end of history.

As a result, the life and sayings of Jesus circulated in an oral form through Christian teachers and public speakers.

This oral material included stories and sayings attributed to Jesus, but they did not exist in any systematic, organized, or universal form.

Teachers and speakers alike would use these sayings and stories to emphasize the particular occasion or subject. In other words, a public speaker would use a saying attributed to Jesus as an occasion to lecture or discuss some aspect of Christianity or morality with his audience.

What the speaker talked about largely determined what the speaker chose to remember about the life and sayings of Jesus.

The very first thing that needed to be accounted for was the death and resurrection of Jesus. The history of Jesus’ death (The Passion) and the resurrection are probably the oldest of the stories surrounding Jesus.

The early Christians, however, needed more than the Passion and the Resurrection to legitimize Christ as having Divine status.

Therefore, the early Hebrew teachers of Christianity turned to the prophetic and messianic tradition of Judaism and began to develop proofs of Christ’s divinity by aligning events in Jesus’ life with older prophecies.

This process also included configuring the humbly born Jesus of Nazareth to a descendant of King David through his father, Joseph, since the messianic prophecies were clear that the Messiah would come from the line of David.

This legitimizing process continued when the religion entered the Greek world.

The Greeks associated divinity with miraculous stories and miraculous birth. From here came the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin…….. even though the virgin birth of Jesus contradicted the placement of Jesus as a descendant of David through Joseph.

We also, dare I say it, have a major problem with the physical resurrection of Jesus.

This we will discuss further when we have a look at St. Paul.

The Gospels, in spite of being a “product of their time,” and open to various revisions and alterations during their telling and eventual documentation, still came from a recognizable and firm historical reality.

This was a time of rebellion, political unrest, civil disobedience, and social discontent. It was also a time of religious questioning, and hopes and dreams for the arrival of a new King.

It was a time where the anticipation of the arrival of a new Messiah reaches a fever pitch verging on mass hysteria.

It was a time where the political freedoms of Judea were brutally extinguished by the two wars of A.D. 66-74 and again A.D. 132-135 that led to the destruction of Massada.

The Gospels were the first attempts in early Christianity to come up with a coherent picture of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

During and after this time there was a wholesale destruction of written records and documents, including, no doubt, the first few gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and even John.

The earliest of these documents, Mark, seems to have been actually composed during the revolt of 66-74 or shortly after.

Although not one of Jesus’ original disciples, Mark (whoever he was) was a disciple of Paul and his Gospel bears an affinity to Pauline thought.

Mark is the shortest of the Gospels and shows the greatest familiarity with Jewish life and thought.

The later gospels, however, show increasingly less familiarity with the Jewish context of Jesus’ life and mission until we come to the last gospel whose author is totally uninterested in that context.

All of the authors of the gospels show some unfamiliarity with Palestinian geography which indicates that they were written by non-Palestinians, either Jewish or Greek.

Mark seemed to be a native of Jerusalem, and as Clement of Alexandria stated many years later, the document (as well as Paul’s epistles) was composed in Rome, and addressed to a Greek-Roman Audience.

Judea and Galilee had recently been in open revolt against Rome. Thousands of Jews were being crucified for their rebellion against the state, just as Jesus had.

If Mark wanted his Gospel to survive and impress a Roman Audience, he could not possibly present Jesus as being politically oriented, let alone anti-Roman!

In order to ensure the survival of his message, he would have to exonerate the Romans of all guilt for Jesus’ death and blame the “death of the Messiah” on certain Jews who were against his teachings because Jesus challenged the existing power structure.

This was the start of the myth that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus.

About a decade later, the authors of Matthew expanded Mark’s gospel, this time also using “Q” and other traditional material.

Five to ten years after this, the author of Luke-Acts (a two-volume work produced by the same person) also published his own revised and expanded version of Mark, again using “Q” and even more traditions about Jesus.

As Christian teachers moved into different communities, it had a couple of results.
First, they would find need for different parts of the tradition for different circumstances.

Second, the long period of oral transmission and the decentralized way in which the stories and sayings were distributed indicate that many of these were distorted, or even made up whole-cloth, to suit particular needs.

This has led some scholars to assert that, even if there was a historical Jesus, his life and teachings are permanently lost to history.

In spite of this, there is a remarkable consistency to the teachings and actions of Jesus of Nazareth. (Except those contained in John)

This lends tremendous credence to the Christian belief that the fact of a historical Jesus is not only proven, but that he is the Jesus of the Gospels.

Therefore, it would be a fair bet to assume that Jesus was an actual historical figure who had great influence on his peers and times. As for his teachings, they have to be looked at not only by what he said, but also by what his actions portrayed.

There is much truth to the saying “Actions speak louder than words!”

The truth probably lies somewhere between the scholarly belief in the unreliability of the gospels and the Christian belief in them as an infallible, literal portrait of Jesus.

Most Christians would say that their religion is based on the teachings of Jesus, in words divinely inspired to men who wrote the New Testament.

But, the first books of the New Testament all came from one man, Paul of Tarsus.

The books were later rearranged to take some of the emphasis off Paul, but it is impossible to deny that he was the primary architect of what would become Christianity.

Paul of Tarsus, or Saint Paul, is the person most responsible for the spread of Christianity. Without Paul, Christianity may have well died as an obscure apocalyptic Jewish sect.

Paul wrote up to about half of the New Testament. His influence on the bible is hard to discount.

Many Christians will tell you that his words were God inspired, so it doesn’t matter who actually penned them, or when.

If that is true, it doesn’t explain the myriad contradictions between the ideas of Paul and the rest of the bible.

Paul knew little of the actual life and history of Jesus, and most likely never met him. What mattered to Paul was the resurrected Christ and his soon to be expected return.

Paul was very apocalyptic and believed the return of Christ to be imminent, and preached so.

In his letters and writings that became part of the Christian New Testament, Paul put forth much of the doctrine followed by Christians today.

Paul had very stern things to say when it came to matters of home life, including husband wife relationships and sexuality. He wrote that a woman “may not teach or have authority over a man” although Jesus never said that.

He also railed against homosexuality, another subject not mentioned by Christ.
Paul may well have been the first popular Christian homophobe!

One of the most important differences in the teachings of Paul, as they differed from what other Christians at the time were teaching and learning, was the doctrine of salvation through grace.

Essentially, Paul taught that the lost are forgiven through the grace of God, not through any works.

This has come to be an excuse where individual Christians and Churches separate themselves from the teachings of Jesus.

Instead of living a life that helps others, Christians were able to free themselves from the heavy responsibilities for their brothers that Jesus taught, and instead put all the responsibility on Christ’s resurrection.

But, however you come down on Paul himself and how he related (or manufactured) Christian doctrine, his influence throughout the Mediterranean and the Mid-East cannot be denied.

He dedicated a good portion of his life to traveling throughout the area, converting Gentiles to Christianity.

Churches that he started grew until Christianity overtook the Pagan traditions and eventually led to their demise.

In spite of Christianities triumph over the unbelievers, remember a very important fact!

Jesus never personally claimed to be conducting his ministry to “erase man’s sins,” just as he never claimed to be Divine himself.

Jesus constantly referred to himself as the “son of God,”—just as we all are!

TOMORROW: Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up!

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com

Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com