Finding Rabbi Jesus
I’ve been writing about the near impossibility of knowing who Jesus really was: what he did, what he taught, and what his ultimate intention was, if he had one. Our earliest writings about Jesus are by someone who never knew him, the apostle Paul. The gospels are written decades after Jesus’ death, again by people who never knew him. What the sources were that the gospel writers used are unknown and we can only speculate about.
Reading the gospels, it’s obvious that their authors, like Paul, each had their own agenda, i.e. a particular understanding of Jesus they wished to promote. Complicating things even more, we have no original manuscripts for anything in the New Testament and it’s now accepted that many of its texts were later edited by unknown scribes, and not just for spelling and grammar.
In short, immediately after his death, Jesus’ followers struggled to define who Jesus was and what his message was. Why was this so? Likely because Jesus himself had laid out no clear agenda, or at least not one that fit with the expectations of the people of Judea. Personally, I think Jesus himself had a clear understanding of what he was about, but he did not have a programmatic agenda and his message was not easily understandable for many of his listeners. Jesus was thinking and behaving far outside the conventional Jewish box.
As a result, Jesus made use of symbolic stories called parables, symbolic acts of inclusion, especially meals, and healings—parables in action, if you will—to get his “message” across. And that strategy worked, at least in touching and changing many people. Jesus’ gracious welcome, and the sense that in doing so Jesus was acting on God’s behalf, seems to be the one thing universally remembered about him. In simplest terms, Jesus communicated that God loved everyone and people just needed faith to experience that love.
Unfortunately for his followers, Jesus left no organizational plan. And that was likely intentional: he just wasn’t interested. So no, Jesus’ goal was not to found a new religion. Not surprisingly then, the story of early Christianity is as disorganized and dysfunctional as can be imagined.
It’s unlikely, for example that “the twelve” was ever as solid an inner core as the gospels want us to believe—they can’t even agree on their names! Peter was supposedly the primo disciple, yet scholars now agree that it was Jesus’ brother James who was head of the Jerusalem church, and he seems to not have been an original follower.
After Jesus’ death, his disciples remained faithful Jews. But then Paul sailed in out of the blue, announcing that Jesus revealed himself to him and told him that gentiles were to be included in this new Christian community. The church’s split over this issue was not resolved until the center of Jewish Christianity was decimated by the first Jewish Roman war and the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70.
After that, Gentile Christianity became the norm but it existed in countless different flavors. Non-canonical gospels and other writings from the first centuries testify to the diversity of beliefs and practices of the early church. A centuries-long power struggle ensued leading to infighting, persecutions, and excommunications. This was mostly ended in the 4th century with establishment of Christianity as the new official religion of the Roman empire and the adoption of creedal decrees about the content of true Christian belief. Anyone who disagreed was now officially a heretic and beyond the pale.
As this process ensued, the historical Jesus of Nazareth became an ever-smaller dot in the church’s rear-view mirror. Today, thanks to archaeology and the techniques of critical scholarship, we know more about the historical Jesus than any of those gathered to thrash out the Nicene Creed in 325. It’s not surprising that the creed says almost nothing about Jesus’ life besides his birth and death.
We know more but, as I’ve said, we don’t know enough to construct a convincing, definitive picture of the historical Jesus. And our problem isn’t so much lack of information as it is having too much. It’s as if the pieces from multiple jigsaw puzzles have been (partially) poured into the same box. The question isn’t which picture is “right” but which picture do you want to (partially) put together from all those pieces?
The question of who Jesus really was will never definitively be answered. But we can answer the question of who we want or need Jesus to be. This doesn’t mean that Jesus is a blank slate. The early Christian writings establish discernible boundaries. And reestablishing those boundaries would help knock down the more outrageous caricatures of him that keep popping up: “We don’t know for sure who Jesus was but he certainly wasn’t that” (thinking of the Rambo Jesus recently on posters and t-shirts).
Besides the questions of history and the record of the first Christians is the question of our context today. For centuries the church was able to create the context. Life orbited around the church and was called Christendom. That time is long gone, though many in the church haven’t figured that out, or nostalgically long for its return. But it’s not coming back, no matter how many copies of the Ten Commandments get hung up.
In fact, religion itself is rapidly fading away. All the so-called “world” religions are well past their sell-by date. Rituals continue to be performed, texts continue to be studied, and people return to congregations in times of crisis. But religion can’t shake its pre-modern origins. That’s the world it was created for but that’s not the world we live in now. Today that’s obvious in Westernized societies for most people under 50, at least.
Even in its heyday, though, religion was not without its critics. The fluidity of Hinduism always allowed people to live outside its traditional boundaries, including its most famous wayward son, the Buddha. The most well-known and influential ancient Chinese writing, the Tao te Ching, has little to say about religion. The prophets railed again Israel’s corruption and denounced the hypocrisy of temple worship. And the embarrassing irony now highlighted by many scholars is that Jesus himself showed little interest in formal Judaism or in founding another religion.
Thus, the growing number of the “spiritual but not religious” can find ample support in the tradition of Jesus, as well as in the many other religious renegades that have appeared over the centuries. There is still much we can learn from voices of the past, so long as we realize it doesn’t require us to return to the past.
In a nutshell, Jesus the mystic and wisdom teacher has much to offer our distressed world today. Jesus the Messiah and savior from sin and hell does not. The Jesus who says that God’s kingdom is within and all around you, and that you must lose your life in order to find it, speaks in harmony with countless other voices down through the centuries who are part of what Aldous Huxley called the “perennial philosophy.” And the teachers and followers of nondual or unitive spirituality today follow in their footsteps. It is in recognition of this transcendent tradition that Meister Eckhart said, “Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world all speak the same language.”
Robert Funk was the brilliant founder of the Jesus Seminar, the multi-year effort to gain a clearer picture of the historical Jesus. In his book summarizing its work, Honest to Jesus, Funk says with typical humor and irony:
We must begin by giving Jesus a demotion. He asked for it, he deserves it, we owe him no less.
Funk believed Jesus has much to offer us today but we can’t see it because he has been swallowed up by centuries of religious titles and symbols. He needs to be set free. He needs a demotion, but only in the eyes of the church. In John’s account of the resurrection, Mary Magdalene initially mistakes Jesus for a gardener. But when he calls her by name, she recognizes him and says in Aramaic, “’Rabbouni!’ (which means teacher).” If rabbi/teacher was an adequate title for the one who was probably Jesus’ most devoted follower, it should be good enough for us today.
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