It really happened. I was dreaming during my afternoon nap and my wife assures me that I was also snoring, “really sawing logs”. Psychologists tell us that our dreams are simply our brains trying to resolve conflicts. If that is true, I think I know the issues with which I was struggling, the things which generated this noise troubled dream. Immediately upon awakening, the dream and my answers still vivid, I began to write this material to further deal with the issues. Issue One: We were at a small dinner party a few days ago and I heard still another smug, self-satisfied person make a statement that he and his wife were members of a “Christian” group. This always raises my hackles as I am convinced by repeated experience through discussions that most such “Christians” have no idea what their use of the word even means. So these blithe, neo-con, religious bigots stumble through life like a bull in a china shop constantly insulting the feelings and religious beliefs of nearly everyone with whom they come in contact. This is the best reason I can imagine for a U.S. Constitutional Amendment prohibiting, on pain of immediate public stoning, all proselytizing and broadcasting of religious messages on the public airwaves by radio and Television “evangelists” a.k.a. bigots, hate mongers, and inciters of religious riots. Any such telecast sermons should have to pass a Censorship Board of Religious Accuracy and Content. Issue Two: That is my segway to the currently popular opportunities given freely by TV media outlets to the blond writer Ann Coulter to promote her newest vitriolic version of “Mein Kampf”. I think that it must be the uniqueness of an attractive blond woman spewing fourth such poisonous diatribe and obvious lies that attracts television “journalists” to Miss Coulter like manure attracts flies. Such uniqueness does not mean that her ideas have merit or that they need to be promoted. Democrats are not “godless” because they hold different social values from Republicans. I do not believe that women whose husbands were killed in NYNY in 9/11 “enjoy” their status. I think it much more positive to suggest to Miss Coulter that she consult with her doctor and ask for a brain MRI. I think she either has a tumor and may be in need of a lobotomy, or she has suffered a severe blow to the head and a section of her skull is depressed and pressuring her brain into permanent malfunction. Issue Three: The news article out of India accompanied by sniggers and smiles and asinine remarks illustrating religious bigotry and intolerance for the religious beliefs of others. The story was that a woman married a snake. This happens all the time in the United States. The difference is that in India the snake is clearly defined, but in the US, he is allowed to remain hidden in the grass until his unique personality quirks and misbehaviors make him stand out from the background. I am convinced that my brain was trying to struggle with these three conflict issues and resolve them as I awoke with these questions and answers bright and fresh. Do you believe in God? Yes. I believe in the God you don’t think you mean when you say you believe in God. I believe in the God you think you don’t mean when you say you believe in God. I believe in the God that predates the God of the Old Testament and Moses. I believe in a monotheistic God that is not human, nor has an appearance of humans. I believe in a God that does not mess around in human affairs. Are you an Atheist? No. A theist believes in God. An atheist believes in no god. Are you an agnostic? No. A Gnostic believes because he believes that he knows something that you don’t. An agnostic does not believe that anyone knows anything he doesn’t. Are you a Christian? I consider myself a Christian, but probably not the kind of Christian you think you mean when you say the word “Christian”. Let me illustrate. Christianity comes with as many stripes as a zebra. First, there were the Followers of Jesus. This group was not technically “Christians” as the term had not yet been invented. Christ is a Greek word, and Greek philosophy and language had not yet been applied as a hammer on hot steel on an anvil to the message of Jesus. Next, I think, were the Gnostics, Egyptian Coptics, Ethiopian Coptics, Ebionites, Marcionites, Carpocratians, Docetists, Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, and the Johnny Come Latelies of the Protestant Reformation: Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Shakers, Baptists, Church of Christ, Assembly of God, Nazarenes, Pentecostals, Adventists, Unitarians, Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, Christian Science, and ‘leventy-leven different “Evangelicals.” It takes four pages in my phone book to list them all. I’m sure that I’ve left out dozens more. Jesus was born and raised a Jew. He studied at Temple. Later He was called rabbi. This meant that He followed the dietary laws, had been circumcised, and went through bar mitzvah as a young man. He was a typical young Jewish man of his times, and in no way did He stand out as being different. This means Jesus was an ordinary and unremarkable Jew of His time. Anyone who lived very far outside the expected norms would have been exceptional. I think it entirely likely and probable that Jesus was married at a very young age. Possibly as young as twelve, but most likely right after His bar mitzvah. This gives an opportunity for Jesus to have fathered many children over a subsequent seventeen year period. If Jesus had been celibate, or unmarried, that would be exceptional and stand out, and be the cause of much gossip and discussion. Further, He would be the prime example during a later period to be cited and followed given the anti-sex crusades of the Catholic Church in later centuries. Jesus’ later adult life was about His message. His message was one of reformation of the Jewish faith. Even so late as the crucifixion of Jesus, the Christian religion had not yet been invented. The group that followed Jesus was at best a minor sect that very nearly faded away under the assaults of the loss of their leader, the Roman assault upon and destruction of Israel in AD 70, the Diaspora across the Roman Empire of the remaining Jews. Hundred of thousands were sent around the empire to labor as slaves. Six thousand were sent to Corinth alone to work at digging the canal there. If ever there was a miracle on this earth, it was the survival of the sect of Judaism called “Christianity.” Most of what I know about the Hebrew faith is embodied in the 10 Commandments. It is estimated that the Hebrew faith at the time of Christ was about two to three thousand years old. It had undergone many changes from the time of Moses. So Jesus came, or was sent, to reform the then extant and “as applied” Hebrew religion as it existed and based upon the Ten Commandments. This means that something was wrong with the original message (Ten Commandments), or their interpretation and application, or their transformation over the centuries and through periods of war, loss and enslavement by other cultures. Jesus arrived at a time when the Jews (Hebrews) had again been defeated, conquered, and were paying tithe, taxes, to the Roman Empire in the form of gold, goods, and slaves. The Roman were there and they were not going away. They had the power and were not shy about using it to get what they wanted. Roman culture lay over the land like a thick wool blanket in summer’s sun. It was suffocating and it was dominant. The intrinsic differences between the two cultures were immense. The Romans were tolerant of all religions, although the Jews were already a painful goad in the Roman buttocks in AD Zero. The most important difference between the Hebrew faith and that of the Roman culture lay in the concept of divinity. For the Romans, divinity came with results - winners take all, only those “blessed by the Gods”, only those that enjoyed the “protection of the Gods“, only those that were “innately divine” (Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and others) could survive the complex series of events that brought them to positions of ultimate power. By definition Caesar was divine and was to be worshipped because he had become Caesar. Beyond this, the Romans demanded onto pain of death that its citizens and conquered peoples pay proper obeisance (respect), homage (sacrifice) and taxes to the state and to the divine Emperor. To do less was a threat to the power of the state. You could pay your taxes, or you could be sold into slavery to pay your taxes. As stated before, the Romans were tolerant in that they would accept the mildest of acknowledgements, a kind of a wink and a nod of respect to their religion. Buy a sacrifice (a dove), light a candle (yes, this is a form of sacrifice), drop a coin, maybe only a genuflection in the direction of the altar, icon, or idol. This puts a new light on, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”. It could easily be read as “Do what you have to do to survive.” By way of contrast, the Jews had had long and repeated experience with those claiming to be “divine”. The Jews had developed a social and religious mechanism to weed out and properly deal with those that claimed divinity- immediate stoning unto death. No arrest, no trial, no witnesses, no proofs, no verdict, no sentencing - just grab a rock and heave! Immediate execution by stoning was a form of public lynching uniquely developed in a desert environment with plenty of rocks and few trees, and where ropes were too valuable to waste on the insane. This clearly explains why Jesus would never claim divinity for Himself. He most likely did not believe it to be true, and if He did He wouldn’t admit it aloud because He knew what would be the immediate result of such a claim. Even His own disciples might very well reach for a stone. They were, after all, good Jews. The followers of Jesus did not therefore consider Him divine during his human lifetime. Even later Thomas doubted. Acts 2-4 and Luke 24 are references. No Jew would then, or now, agree to considering another Jew to be divine. Jesus could then only be seen as being thoroughly human by followers who had intimate knowledge of Him and His person gained by living in close quarters and by camping out with Him as they traveled about the countryside together. A common latrine has a certain leveling result of attitude. Jesus may, indeed, have doubted and struggled with the idea of His own divinity. He may not have even thought of Himself in that context. It would have been too akin to ideas being actively promoted by their detested Roman masters. Some would also argue that this whole argument of Jesus’ divinity is a false concept adopted from the dominant Roman paganism as a way to be more familiar to and acceptable to populations of the Roman Empire. That Empire, after all, lasted for another thousand years, and the populations of that empire were the target audience of the new “Christian” religion. Divinity, and the idea of divinity could have been adopted as protective coloration, as a sales technique, or because it was the expected “norm”. None of these reasons make it so. To make an attempt to understand what reforms Jesus wanted to make in the Hebrew religion, we must and can only examine what He said. In this we are hampered by the innate inaccuracies forced upon us by the oral tradition which transmits His words to us. There lies the rub. The problem is all the subsequent lies which well intentioned “followers” of later years inserted in the messages which have distorted the original beyond recognition. While there is some evidence that Jesus was literate, He did not apparently trust the written word enough to use it to transmit His messages. He apparently did not even dictate to a scribe. His followers and audiences were most certainly nearly entirely illiterate. This apparent distancing of His message from the then common written forms (Latin and Greek) was unusual in a culture that had great respect for the written word (Hebrew), and could be because His own expectations for His message were limited. Or because His expectation was that the oral tradition was good enough. If Jesus did not write, others did. No evidence exists to date, however that any of this writing was contemporaneous with Jesus while He lived. We only have estimates that writing down of His messages was begun thirty to forty years after His Resurrection. This very well might have been a reaction to observable changes as the message was repeated, an attempt to go back and secure the original. Unless we have new spectacular archeological finds sometime in the future, the earliest surviving written documents telling us of Jesus’ messages that we know about are copies made from earlier copies made from still earlier copies. The closest we can approach Jesus is about 150 years. The problem with copies of copies of copies is change from one copy to the next, and still more change to the next copy, and so on. These changes were made by the scribes and copyists. We know that scribes routinely made changes to fit their own personal philosophical or religious beliefs, to better fit the result of their work to the belief system of the person paying for the transcription and copy service (The King James Bible is a prime example of this.), and to “enhance” the message - to lie. Some lies are known to be deliberate and there even exists, I am told, written statements of admission of guilt of such behaviors. In this day and age of “cheap” books it is important to remember that this condition has not always been so. At the time of Jesus, books were extremely expensive. Velum, parchment, and paper were all hand made. Ink was hand made. Writing was elaborately done, one letter at a time. Preparation of materials was lengthy, transcription took a very long time, even for short books. That time had to be paid for. Scribes were well paid specialists, perhaps analogous to computer programmers today. How then is one to discern the truth? Many people choose to give up thinking and thoughtfulness and say, “Well, it must have been divinely inspired.” These same pagans pray to their computer keyboards and monitors. Not only is this a lie, but it is the very worst kind of lie. This is one “sin”, which if Hell existed, would deserve a first class, one way, immediate transmit ticket to that very destination. Instead, we can apply Occam’s razor. Slice thin and look for the simplest rational answers. Jesus was apparently a very charismatic speaker, and soon attracted by word of mouth, large crowds (for that time and place) who came to hear his messages. Since Jesus did not have an electronic voice amplification system for His speeches in the valleys of ancient Galilee, it is likely that he relied on sentences that were short, to the point, and easy to repeat and remember. For very large crowds, even quiet ones, there had to be individuals (probably the disciples) who had the task of repeating each sentence to carry His words to the back of the assembly. These groups met mostly outdoors, probably in the shade of olive trees. Ever notice that a voice outside does not carry far? Especially in an orchard? Besides, repetition was good for the disciples. How else were they to learn and remember? So, apply this. When I see in the Bible short, sharp, pithy sentences attributed to Jesus as issuing from His mouth, “love your neighbor”, I have a stronger tendency to believe the accuracy. When I see in the Bible long, detailed, convoluted, finely reasoned, blunted and smoothed arguments which supposedly issued from the mouth of Jesus, I have a very strong tendency to believe that a lying Greek, Roman, or Egyptian scribe was hard at work in his scriptorium and he was desperately trying to make his point under the pretext of a “higher authority” than his own. It is hard to find an authority higher than God’s. Plus, the scribe got paid more, for a longer period of time, if the book was thicker. A situation very similar to a grad student padding his papers, especially for profs who grade by weight rather than content.
(c) Copyright 2006: George Wallace recently published a book on religion which lashes out at nearly all of the comfortable ideas about God, the trappings of organized religion, and the priesthood. His pithy comments and suggestions for a return to a God-centered personal religion will interest everyone. This article may be freely reprinted so long as all copyright attributions, and the full content of this resource box are included. www.OhGodIsThatYou.com
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