freeinfidel

In first-century Judea, apocalyptic prophets with serious messiah complexes were thick on the ground. When Saul/Paul set about creating a church, did he pick the wrong one?

After the death of the Jewish despot Herod (several years before the alleged birth of Jesus, by the way), the Jewish world was in a chaotic state. Herod, in spite of his savagery, was still something of a Hellenised Jew. By and large, however, the Jewish civil war - or Maccabean revolt, if you will - that had occurred decades before had sent Judaism lurching back into a more fundamentalist form. This savage period, dishonestly sanitised and decorated with the fabricated miracle of the eight-day oil lamp, is now celebrated as Hannukah. In first-century Judea, however, the result of this reversion to a more totalitarian church was not light but darkness - a deep brooding and foreboding.

The apocalypse is nigh, was the most common message. You could barely move without bumping into a hasid, an apocalyptic prophet who wandered the land dictating how people should behave and performing (and what performances they must have been) acts of healing and miracles. Many of these hasidim were from Galilee, a province not fully under the control of the Romans and known as a breeding ground of troublemakers. Some were prophets, many were political dissenters - or terrorists and insurgents, from a Roman perspective. It was the Sunni Triangle of its day. It’s probable, incidentally, that a significant number of these agitators were called Jesus or Joshua (same word) - it was a popular name.

Let’s not argue here about the historical existence of our chosen Jesus. If you accept, just for a moment, that the gospels do represent, with some degree of fidelity, the beliefs and teachings of a popular prophet named Jesus, several characteristics of this alleged messiah become very apparent.

Jesus had no interest in creating a new church. He would have seen no point. Like so many of his contemporaries, he believed the arrival of the kingdom of god on Earth was imminent. “Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power” (Mark 9:1 - Luke and Matthew have their own versions).

The sayings and ‘teachings’ of Jesus were inconsistent, sometimes contradictory, usually vague or completely opaque. There is no sense that he was trying to establish a complete and coherent body of ideas, let alone any form of dogma or creed. Why would he? The world as everyone knew it was about to end. There would have been no point in setting up a new church. Jesus understood that the church was already established - he was born, and died, a Jew.

The problem is, as a messiah, he was an abject failure. This is difficult to comprehend partly because the gospels are clearly written (and rewritten) to make it seem as though Jesus fulfilled the prophecies of the Torah. Hence you have Jesus being born in Bethlehem (highly improbable), and riding into Jerusalem on an ass (or two, depending on which gospel you prefer), among other acts - some miraculous, some merely baffling. Yet Jesus did not fulfill the tasks foretold for the messiah, chief among which was to herald the arrival of god’s kingdom on earth.

This might encourage us to take another look at the Passion. The whole Judas story is clearly there simply to fill in the required parts of prophecy, and yet it, and other parts of the Passion story are somewhat baffling if Jesus knew himself to be the son of god and if he understood that his forthcoming death would save mankind. Moreover, it’s baffling if Jesus actually was the son of god. If we take all this to be true, then Jesus would have known that what he was about to endure was necessary, inevitable and, above all, the most glorious moment in creation. It was what he was put on Earth to achieve. And Judas would simply be playing a vital part in mankind’s salvation (in which case he should be venerated).

But what if Jesus had an inkling, at that moment, that things were not quite as he’d hoped? It must have occurred to him that the long-awaited messiah wasn’t supposed to be killed. That wasn’t in the script at all. None of the prophecies mentioned that. His agony in the garden at Gethsemane makes more sense if he realised, at that point, that something had gone horribly wrong - that the fact that he was about to be crucified had to mean that he wasn’t, after all, the messiah.

The promotion of Jesus to the rank of Christ (’saviour’) was carried out later, primarily by Saul/Paul and the writers - whoever they really were - of the gospels. They, of course, had a serious axe to grind. They were establishing a church and one, moreover, marketed chiefly to gentiles. And so we have miracles, we have attempts to edit the preachings of Jesus into some coherent form and we have the resurrection, for which there is no independent testimony and which is, in any case, open to interpretation even if we accept the gospels. (Luke and John never claim that the tomb was sealed. “He goeth before you into Galilee” could simply have meant his body was taken home for burial, and supposed sightings of a risen Jesus could have been encounters with his brother James, which is why people didn’t recognise him at first.)

Christianity was the invention of Saul/Paul, clearly a rather unstable person (some find evidence of epilepsy in his revelation on the road to Damascus: I think we also have to consider the possibility of paranoid schizophrenia). Saul/Paul latched on to Jesus. The tales told were clearly woven from many strands: we know that much of the Jesus myth is rooted in other pagan mythologies. It may also be a compilation of the stories of several prophets. No matter. Saul/Paul managed to construct an appealing myth. He managed to quash rival, Jesus-based cults (such as that of Jesus’ own family, who did not consider him divine or the messiah). And his copywriters - Mark, Luke, Matthew, John and maybe the mysterious ‘Q’ - put together a powerful marketing package. This has been continuously edited and refined over the centuries, not to get closer to the truth of what happened in the first three decades of the first century, but to strengthen the power of various brands of totalitarian organisation - the innumerable branches of the Christian church, none of which Jesus himself foresaw.

Which makes us think: did Saul/Paul pick the wrong prophet? When you look at Christianity today, it fits so poorly with the nature and behaviour of Jesus that it’s hard to believe there is any genuine connection.

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