It’s been my practice to write a series of seasonal blog posts trying to make sense of the events depicted during Holy Week and Easter. Did they happen? If they didn’t, what did happen? And what does it all mean? I’m going to take another stab at this, using some past writings but also updates based on new things I’ve learned and thoughts I’ve had.

This Sunday is Palm Sunday, in some places also known as Sunday of the Passion. At most churches palm branches will be distributed to worshipers who will be encouraged to wave them when the gospel story is read. They may also process with them in or around the church building. Liturgically oriented churches may also have a second gospel reading of all or part of the Passion story. Speaking parts may be given to various members of the congregation.

This certainly is the most dramatic Sunday of the liturgical year. People usually get into it, and it’s kind of fun. Well, at least the palm part is. Things get dark pretty quickly in the Passion reading. In any case, this liturgy is usually thought of as a kind of historical reenactment of the last week of Jesus’ life. Thus, many worshipers would likely be surprised, and perhaps dismayed, to learn that most biblical scholars today (excluding fundamentalists, of course) regard little of it that way. “You mean someone made it all up?” Well, many people were likely involved but, basically, yes.

The biggest problem with reconstructing the life of Jesus is that we simply have so little reliable information. The earliest writings after Jesus’ death (about twenty years later) are the letters of Paul, and he tells us nothing about the historic Jesus because he didn’t know him. Nor are the gospels eye-witness accounts. In fact, we have nothing in writing from anyone who knew or even saw Jesus.

Of the four canonical gospels, Mark often gets short shrift. Yet it was Mark’s anonymous author who was the first to create a “story of Jesus.” And “create” is the operative word. Mark was written forty years after Jesus’ death and shortly after the disastrous conclusion of the first Jewish-Roman war. Jerusalem was in ruins and the temple destroyed. Countless thousands were dead and thousands more displaced.

Imagine, then, trying to write, from hundreds of miles away, the history of a person who lived decades earlier in a place that has essentially been destroyed, without any witnesses and without any modern means of research. It couldn’t be done. But that’s not what the gospels are trying to be. As Mark says in its first verse, the book is a telling of the “good news” of Jesus Christ. Thus, it is a literary sermon, not a carefully investigated biography of Jesus of Nazareth.

The difficulty in reconstructing the life of Jesus isn’t surprising then. Scholars today agree that Jesus came from the furthest margins of society: a Jewish peasant who lived in the backwater of a backwater: the region of Galilee on the fringe of Rome’s despised province of Judea. To observers at the time, Jesus would have been one of a dime-a-dozen wandering mystics, teachers, holy men, and miracle workers common to the region.

This is why the biblical events of Holy Week are now seen as literary fiction. The basic plot is certainly plausible. For whatever reason, Jesus went to Jerusalem, got himself in trouble with Roman authorities by creating a commotion in the temple, which then led to his arrest and execution. But someone as insignificant as Jesus would never have rated the tumult or attention depicted in the gospels.

The details of that story are now viewed as the product of early church evangelists and writers. Their narrative source, rather than eyewitnesses, was primarily the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament. Following a long and respected religious tradition, biblical stories were used to provide the interpretive framework for this new religious event: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The question for us is whether the meaning and importance they saw (and the gospels themselves have differing views on that) is what we would now see or value. To me, there are at least two major problems, and both contribute to the overwrought nature of the gospels’ telling of the Passion story.

The first is the anti-Judaism present to some degree in each of the gospels, and especially in the Passion stories. This problem has been recognized for a long time. Since the Holocaust, various attempts have been made to remedy it, though none have been satisfactory.

Biblical scholarship has cast doubt on what role (if any) Jewish religious authorities would have had in Jesus’ death. Even the gospels strain to come up with a plausible connection, primarily because their own accounts of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee give them little to work with. It is much more likely that Jesus was executed by Roman authorities because he did something which they considered a threat to public order. The table-turning incident in the temple is one possibility.

So why the hostility to Judaism in the gospels? Because they were written at the time of the split between church and synagogue. Divorces can be angry, messy affairs and this one certainly was. That most Jews did not embrace Jesus as the Christ became an awkward embarrassment for the early church. If Jesus really was the Jewish messiah, then why did most Jews not accept him? Thus, began the meme of the messiah’s rejection by his own people, portrayed most dramatically in the fiction of Jesus’ Jerusalem trial.

The second problem is the theological interpretation of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice for humanity’s sin, like the animal sacrifices made in the temple. This makes little if any sense to modern people. More importantly, it makes God appear as an ancient bloodthirsty ogre. While some fundamentalists still revel in this image, most people find it bizarre and repulsive.

The obvious rebuttal to that portrayal is Jesus himself. This supposed divine need for justice and judgment that sent Jesus to the cross is noticeably absent in Jesus’ own life. Forgiveness and compassion are the heart of his life and ministry and his teaching about God.

As this has been rediscovered in recent years, Jesus’ death has been re-framed as the ultimate expression of that compassion and selflessness.  If Jesus’ death is saving it is because it inspires people to the life of love that is our human calling and true nature. Jesus did not die “for our sins” but because of sin. God is not “satisfied” by Jesus’ death but heartbroken.

Can the gospels’ Passion narratives be saved? The disinterest in Good Friday and the resistance to imposing the Passion reading on Palm Sunday are strong indications of how even average Christians feel. The church needs to pay attention. The symbol of the cross is important and powerful and shouldn’t be lost. Ironically, however, the stories that have swirled around it for centuries are now preventing us from seeing it.