Spinning Jesus

The history of Christianity reflects a constant drift away from the relatively simple teachings of Jesus. Paradoxically, a constant thread in the history of all religions is the recognition of this drift and the desire to return to the "true" teachings. Of course, the problem is that these teachings are "spun" out of all recognition by each generation. Not surprisingly, what is left is what serves the self interests of those who interpret the message for the masses who are kept away from reading it for themselves.

This drift started before the New Testament (NT) came together. Along with an assortment of "apocryphal" Gospels, it is the only record we have of the life and teachings of Jesus. These documents reflect a generation or more of theological reflection (mythology) surrounding His life and teachings. In retrospect, we can see that the authors of the Gospels "spun" their stories to pull the Jesus back into the world of Jewish mythology or to reconcile them with Pagan mythology. A mythical framework of the Old Testament needed to be expanded to find a "reason" for his shameful death.  He needed a miraculous birth to "fulfill" the prophecies of the Old Testament and put Him on an equal footing with the pagan heroes and gods. Back then, even Alexander, Pythagoras and the Roman Emperor were gods. How could Jesus be an ordinary human being? There was no such thing as history back then. It was all mythology.

In spite of all this vigorous spinning and mythologizing, His personality shines through. A few things stand out:

• Jesus used the religious language and assumptions that were prevalent in the time and place where he was  born. Of course, he believed in God and saw all the moral challenges in terms of Man's relationship to God. How could he otherwise? This is also true of all the other writers in the NT, who interpreted His life and teachings in terms of the Old Testament and the mythical, magical thinking that prevailed in all cultures of the world at the time.
• The central message of Jesus concerned the coming of the "Kingdom".  Although the word "Kingdom" conjures up a mystical land ruled by God in some other dimension or the distant future, the idea is more about "rulership" -- more in tune with the Islamic idea of submission to the will of God. At its core, the idea is to make an immediate personal decision to abandon evil and give over your life to doing what you know in your heart is best.
• The call to the "Kingdom" was individual and personal. Jesus stressed the need for personal, inward reform and not the natural human tendency to campaign against the wayward ways of others.  
• As a Jew, Jesus probably believed in the idea of the Messiah. His followers and perhaps his enemies suspected that he was the Messiah and that is, arguably, is what got Him killed. It is even possible that Jesus Himself believed that He was the Messiah. In my view, there is no way to know about this one way or the other. To the modern perspective, it really doesn't matter. The Jewish concept of the Messiah which Jesus may or may not have accepted has been "spun" into a tangle of mythological concepts that would have made no sense in the time of Jesus. The craziest of these Messianic fables is the book of Revelation in the NT, which is all about the hoped-for fall of the Roman Empire in a battle with heavenly forces. We can file all this away in the drawer with all the other colorful mythologies of dead civilizations. It is quite clear that Jesus would have nothing to do with the Messianic mythology of his own time and place, let alone the imaginations that arose centuries later.
• Jesus was a shit-disturber and a Skeptic in the context of his own culture and surroundings (another thing that may have gotten Him killed). Along with other prophets of the Old Testament (OT) he put the obligation to care for others ahead ritual or tradition. In modern terms, his theme was, "Come on, think for yourself. What really matters?" He took it upon himself to boil the OT down to the personal message to "Love one another". Although the Old Testament prophets repeatedly called on the Jew to act with Justice, the message was always to the chosen people and in the context of their special status before God. That special status was the essence of the message. Subtraction of this element of the mythology was where Jesus parted company with the culture that had raised him. 

Again and again, in the teachings of Jesus and the stories about him, we are told that there is no "us" and "them". This places Jesus in a unique category as far as the "Prophets of the Book" are concerned. This includes Mohammed, who claimed to be the last of the prophets. Mohammed definitely saw his own followers as being special in the eyes of God and the "others" as worthy of contempt and exclusion if not outright slaughter. For what it's worth, Mohammed seems to contradict Jesus on the core teaching -- not of merely to "tolerate" the others but that there were no "others". For this reason, you can't be both a good Christian and a good Muslim -- not that many try ...

To be sure, "us and them" thinking rapidly crept back in to the religion supposedly based on His teachings. It wasn't long before "Christians" were slaughtering each other over fine points of theology (mythology). In a few centuries, both Christians and Muslims were convinced that they had the inside track with God and that all the others could be, should be and would be put to the sword.

The message of Jesus would sleep for centuries until people started reading the New Testament for themselves.