The Human Jesus

Most of our understanding as Christians of our religion is based on what we learned parrot-fashion in our catechism classes. Other sources include bits and pieces of excerpts from the Bible read during Sunday mass. There is also the homily by the celebrant with the purpose of interpreting these messages for the little lambs. Religious activities have taken the character of meaningless rituals that we go through out of habit rather than conviction. How many of us have read the bible from beginning to end? Of course, reading the bible was forbidden until quite recently; in my younger days, it was actively discouraged, containing as it does the rather erotic “Song of Songs” and other “hanky panky” by the lead characters.

A few years back I came across a very well researched book on the human Jesus: “Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity.” by James Tabor. He is an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian origins. The book focuses on the historical Jesus: his birth, life, and death. His conclusions are based on a careful reading of the bible and historical extrapolation. So, what does Tabor tell us about Jesus, the man? Here are a few glimpses

When was Jesus born?

Jesus was not born in 0 A.D. His probable date could be somewhere between 6 B.C. and 3 B.C. 

What was Jesus’ name?

Yeshua (Joshua) ben Yoseph, Jesus son of Joseph. When the Greeks translated his name, it became Jesus and it stuck. He was regarded as the messiah, meaning the anointed one. Since in Greek the word for the oil used for anointment was khrisma and the person anointed khristos, Yeshua ben Yoseph became Jesus Christ!

Did Jesus have any brothers and sisters?

According to the gospel of Mark, written around A.D. 70, Jesus had four brothers, James, Joses, Judas and Simon, and two sisters, Mary and Salome. With some degree of certainty Tabor shows that their father was either Joseph or his brother Clophas. Joseph is mentioned very few times in the Bible and only appears at the beginning of Jesus’ life. He probably died early and as per Jewish custom Mary married his brother Clophas and had children by him. Most people are unaware of the fact that Jesus had brothers and sisters born to Mary, his mother. The later Christian dogma that she was a perpetual virgin and the belief that she never had sexual relations with any man lie at the root of this myth. So, there evolved some clever ways of explaining Jesus’ siblings. The Roman Catholic Church called the brothers and sisters ‘cousins’. The Eastern Church explained that they were children of Joseph, but from a previous marriage. The Catholic Church had a problem with that since the Catholics wanted to make Joseph a lifelong virgin as well. With the passage of time, it became more and more difficult for Christians to imagine the members of the ‘holy’ family as any kind of sexual beings. But Mathew, referring to Joseph, indicates otherwise. “But he had no sexual relations with her before she gave birth to her son. And Joseph named him Jesus.” By implication, Joseph had sexual relations after he married Mary.

What was Jesus’ Vocation?

Jesus is referred to in the New Testament as a ‘carpenter’. “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” However, the traditional translation of the Greek word ‘tekton’ as 'carpenter' is misleading. It is a generic term referring to any kind of ‘builder’ including those who build with wood. In the context of the first century Galilee, it was more likely to mean a ‘stoneworker’. Trees were scarce in the barren and rocky terrain of Palestine and wood was hardly used for building. Hence, Jesus was more likely to be a mason working as a day laborer.

What was the religion of Jesus?

Jesus was a Jew. He was circumcised; he observed Passover, read the Bible in Hebrew and kept Saturday as Sabbath day.  He was not a member of the Catholic Church.

Last supper and death of Jesus

The last meal of Jesus with his disciples was on Wednesday. He was crucified on Thursday at 9 a.m. and died at 3 p.m. and not on (Good) Friday of Holy Week. The Passover was on Thursday and the Passover meal was eaten on Thursday evening. Jesus himself never ate the Passover meal, since he was already dead. The reason for the confusion is that the reference to Sabbath is normally to Saturday. But the Passover is also a Sabbath or rest day.

Jesus ate his last supper with his disciples on Wednesday evening. According to Tabor, our earliest account of that last meal comes from Paul, not from any of the gospels. In a letter to his followers in the Greek city of Corinth, written around A.D. 54, Paul passes on a tradition that he says he “received” from Jesus. On the night he was betrayed he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me”. These words are familiar to all Catholics as part of the Holy Mass. In fact, the most solemn moments are when the celebrant consecrates the bread and wine into the real body and blood of Jesus. Here we are asked to believe the impossible – one substance changing into another like wood into gold or water into mercury - by the chanting of a few words.

The Torah specifically forbids the consumption of blood. Consuming human flesh and blood was simply inconceivable in Judaism. Hence it is not likely that Jesus, as a Jew, would have asked his followers to drink his blood. So how did such an entrenched belief come about? What are its sources? According to Tabor, it is borrowed from Greco-Roman magical rites.

 “We have a Greek papyrus that records a love spell in which a male pronounces certain incantations over a cup of wine that represents the blood that the Egyptian god Osiris had given to his consort Isis to make her feel love for him. When his lover drinks the wine, she symbolically unites with her beloved by consuming his blood. In another text, the wine is made into the flesh of Osiris. The symbolic eating of ‘flesh’ and drinking of ‘blood’ was a magical rite of the union in Greco-Roman culture.”

Again, in the gospel of John, there is no reference to the words of Jesus as instituting the ceremony of the Eucharist. Mark, writing his gospel at least a decade after Paul’s visionary account of the last supper, inserts this theological idea of ‘eat my body’ and ‘drink my blood’ tradition, quite certainly influenced by Paul. Another important point to consider here is that in Jewish tradition, it is the wine that is blessed first and then the bread. In Paul’s account, it is reversed.

Was Jesus raised from the dead?

All four gospels report that Jesus’ tomb was found empty on Saturday morning. What was found was the linen used to wrap the body of Jesus – his body was gone.  No one leaped to any conclusion about Jesus being raised from the dead. At that point, it was a matter of a missing corpse. Although three of the four gospels have stories of sightings of Jesus to support the idea that he rose from the dead, Mark’s original manuscripts contain no such reports. What appears in Mark regarding the risen Jesus was added sometime in fourth century A.D. as a postscript by scribes who copied the manuscripts. Christianity is based on the dogma of a risen Jesus and this addition was done to support this dogma. The Greek style in which it is written is quite different from Mark’s style. So how did the belief that ‘Jesus rose from the dead’ start? Who first mooted the idea?

According to Tabor, our earliest account of ‘sightings’ of Jesus is not in the New Testament Gospels but in the letter of Paul we call 1^st Corinthians.  In the course of defending his own vision of Jesus, Paul reports that he had received the tradition and passed it on to his converts that Jesus died, was buried, and rose on the ‘third day’.

So, once again it is Paul whose ‘visions’ produce the mystery of a dead man rising.

Wages of Sin

Before we discuss how the Church has profited by the multitude of sins in its inventory, let us look at a brief catalog of the same.

Catalog of sins

Towards the end of his article ‘Drowning in Sin’, Kenneth 

Humphreys has drawn up a catalog of sins as devised by the 

Church.

1. Original sin: the act of disobedience by Adam inherited at conception; it is remitted by baptism.

2.  Actual sin: a voluntary act willed by the individual.

     

     Actual sins fall into the following categories:

a.  Venial sin: pardonable and excusable; e.g., stealing a pencil from   your classmate.

b.   Mortal sin: intrinsically and absolutely evil; e.g., planned murder.

      

     Thought crimes:

c.   Delectatio morose: the pleasure taken in sinful thought without   even desiring it;

d.   Gaudium: Dwelling with pleasure on sins already committed;

e.   Desiderium: the desire for what is sinful.

      Habitual sin: being in a state of sin until grace is restored by   penance.

       Sins of commission and omission:

f.     Sins of commission: acts contrary to some prohibitory order;

g.     Sins of omission: failure to do what is commanded.

Cardinal sins (Capital vices)

h.     Pride;

i.      Envy

j.      Avarice (greed)

k.     Anger (wrath)

l.      Sloth

m.    Gluttony

n.      Lust 

Humphreys goes on to discuss how Church profits by sin. To him, 

the Church has become very wealthy using the wages of sin.

Wages of Sin

Sin, guilt, purgatory, hell, and heaven formed a very profitable 

combination for the Church right from the outset. With eternal 

happiness in heaven on the one hand and everlasting torture in hell 

as the alternative, the Church mercilessly exploited man’s fears of life after death. No one has ever come back after death to tell us what awaits us. Using speculative philosophical arguments, Church has simply made up myths about life (?) after death. 

With the long catalog of sins the Church has produced, everyone, throughout the day and night, commits a multiple of sins that he has to be guilty of. Augustine’s perverted invention ‘original sin’ made the bedroom a den of a variety of sins for the legally married. Hell, with all possible kinds of tortures lasting for all eternity, was created along with sin and guilt, to force the faithful to go back again and again to the priests to confess and to be cleansed of sins to avoid the fires of hell. In this way, the faithful become Church addicted. Collections, donations, and contributions to the church invariably follow in the name of building churches and their upkeep, for the training, formation, and maintenance of the priestly class and the luxurious lifestyles of the hierarchy. In addition, funds are demanded for sacraments like holy mass, baptism, and marriage.

The invention of purgatory and indulgences to get out of purgatory 

to go to heaven was one of the most brilliant ideas of Church 

authorities for the financial exploitation of the naïve faithful. The sale of indulgences for the remission of sins started with this invention. The living, anxious about their deceased relatives suffering in purgatory, could offer prayer, service, and payment to the Church so that those in purgatory could have an early release to reach heaven. Papal agents like friar Tetzel sold indulgences to the gullible for the release of the souls of their beloved from purgatory. Many credulous souls fell for his sales talk: ‘As the penny in the coffer rings, the soul from Purgatory springs'.

Sin and Guilt

Born into a Catholic family, systematic indoctrination in the 

Christian belief system started as a child. This continued till High 

School. Later, during the few years I spent in a seminary, the brainwashing was complete.

After retirement, with time in hand, I started reading up on religion in general and about Christianity in particular. What fascinated me was the history of the development of Christianity.

I have made it a point to read books written by authors with an

objective and critical outlook rather than those religiously biased. 

Among the various authors I have read, two have shocked me. 

Their ideas are in total contrast to my brainwashed belief system. 

They are Kenneth Humphries and D. M. Murdock aka Acharya S. 

The former claims, with proof, that Jesus never existed while the 

latter, in a similar vein, says that Christianity developed based on 

ancient myths.

I will return to these two frequently. For the following, I am largely indebted to Humphries for ideas and certain expressions. 

The philosophers of the ancient world had no notion of "sin". The 

Greeks did not really have the concept of sin as the Abrahamic 

religions define it. They regarded various acts as impious and likely to bring down the wrath of the gods. Lack of respect for one's parents was one. Excessive pride and tempting fate were others. The Greeks felt that the gods  would punish someone who indulged in such an act. But it wasn't a "sin," exactly; it was just unwise.

The Greeks called this notion akrasia. Akrasia was defined as a lack of self-control or the state of acting against one’s better judgment. For Plato, akrasia essentially did not exist. Plato did not see how we could go against what we thought was best. Aristotle believed that our reason can be overpowered by passions so that we do not make a judgment of what is best. Aristotle’s concept is that “you never act contrary to what you think is best and so you never sin.”

The idea of sin is unique to the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. In earlier Judaism, the notion of sin as a weight to be carried was dominant: hence the ritual of sending a scapegoat, burdened with all the transgressions of the Israelites, into the wilderness. Between the sixth and fourth centuries BC there was a radical shift in perceptions. Sin was now conceived as a debt that had to be settled: it was very similar to an economic transaction. The Israelites thus saw their Babylonian exile as a way of paying off their sinning past and, a few centuries later, Christians identified Jesus’s sacrifice as the most epochal transaction of them all: Christ paid the ultimate price for centuries’ worth of errant human behavior.

Paula Frederiksen is the author of the book, Sin: The Early History of an Idea. To the question: What did Jesus teach about sin and redemption from it, and how did Christian theologians from Paul to Augustine amend his ideas?  she answers as follows:

Jesus spoke to fellow Jews largely about “Jewish” sins, framed by reference to the Ten Commandments. Paul spoke to pagans, and so he concentrates on “pagan” sins, the foremost one, in his (Jewish) view, being idolatry. Jesus tells his Jewish audience to repent, and to forgive those who repent of wrongs directed at them; Paul tells his pagan audience to repent of worshiping pagan gods via their images (“idols’) and to commit to worshiping exclusively the God of Israel.

Four centuries later, Augustine believed that sin is not so much as something that we do; rather it is a condition that humans are universally born into; he called it original sin. He also held that most of humanity was predestined to damnation. His ideas would have baffled both Jesus and Paul.

When God created man, He gave him free will to act. The temptations around are so many and so appealing, he will, in all likelihood, go against ‘God’s will’ as dictated by the perverted minds of Christian theologians. He inevitably ‘sins'. As a solution, the priestly class come forward with the notion of repentance and atonement, which involves obedience of, and payments to, the priests as well as animal sacrifices. Sin became a priestly protection racket. Religion creates the 'problem' and then offers the 'solution'!

In the twisted minds of Christian theologians, sin became more obnoxious than it had ever been. As Christianity developed, so too did sin. No longer was 'sin' just an action; transgression could occur in word or thought.

With Augustine’s theory of original sin, the natural self, with carnal instincts, had to be denied. The guilt that any transgression engendered, even for the tiniest infraction, fed the psychosis upon which Christianity flourished. Sins became cardinal or deadly. Deliberate disobedience of the will of God (as imagined by the priestly class) required the harshest punishment – eternal damnation and the everlasting torments of hell!

In Augustine's judgment – and subsequently, that of the Church – sexual desire and gratification ("lust") had to be controlled, limited and confined. Libido was stigmatized as a sin, detracting us from God. In contrast, celibacy, chastity, and virginity were lauded as being far closer to the perfection of God and were to be the choices of preference. Centuries of misery – sexual and psychological – were the consequence as millions became celibates or fought their own nature. Since such precepts severely threatened the continuation of the human race, passionless, matrimonial intercourse solely for the procreation of children remained permissible.

Thanks to St Augustine and the Church, guilt over the most fundamental of human instincts passed on to generation after generation of humanity – a pang of irrational and morbid guilt no less present among "believers" in the twenty-first century as it was in the fourth or fifth century.