What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (19 page)

So, where does all this leave us?

Astoundingly, the end of the four Gospels leaves us in pretty much the same place as the end of the Hebrew Bible: Jews in first century Judea are ruled by Rome, praying for liberation, and awaiting a messiah. So far, Christianity is a lot of running to stay in place; nothing’s changed.

Well, at the very least, God’s message has been clearly delivered. The jury is in. The fat lady sang. No more revelations, revisions, updates, modifications, alterations, extenuating remarks or expletives deleted. Jesus said his piece and that’s the absolute, final, no-kidding, last word, that’s-all-she-wrote, end of the discussion on God, right?

Excuse me, but where have you been for the past 2,000 years? The
end
of the debate? Hell, we’re just getting warmed up. Roll up your sleeves because we’re about to plunge into a hundred different ways to believe in the same Jesus.

As the small, offshoot faith begins to spread across the eastern Mediterranean in the years after the crucifixion, another figure arises who will be more critical to its success than any of the apostles. You may wonder why Jesus didn’t recruit him personally. Perhaps it’s because this figure will, in the view of many, fundamentally change the new religion into something that Jesus himself might not even recognize.

CHAPTER FIVE

Anno Domini

The codfish lays a thousand eggs, the homely hen lays one.
The codfish never cackles, to tell you what she’s done.
And so we scorn the codfish, while the humble hen we prize,
Which only goes to show you, that it pays to advertise.

—Anonymous

From Jesus to Christianity

Mark Twain famously remarked that if Jesus were alive today the one thing he would not be is a Christian. Twain wasn’t the first or the last to think this. But why is that? Apparently, people just couldn’t leave well enough alone.

No sooner did Jesus depart the scene than others began to spin, modify, edit, or shamelessly twist what he had to say into what
they
wanted him to say. Believers have been doing this down to the present day. First and foremost among them was a Roman Jew who started life as Saul of Tarsus and ended up as Saint Paul. For him, messing with the word of God was clearly a good career move.

Who is this Paul and why does anyone listen to him?

It’s argued that Paul changed the religion
of
Jesus into a religion
about
Jesus. He made it a genuine cult. The point of the religion was no longer the philosophy; it was the philosopher.

Paul was the first great Christian evangelist, and his letters are the oldest known Christian writings. While many of us would like to, we can’t ignore him because he wrote some of the most influential parts of the New Testament, and he’s the founding father of Christian theology.

Paul made four rather high-profile,
Up-with-Jesus
tours across the Roman Empire between A.D. 46 and A.D. 64, during which time he wrote letters to the bickering churches back home. According to scholarly consensus, his letters include those to the
Romans
,
1
^st
and 2
^nd
Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1
^st
Thessalonians
and
Philemon.

The man had a lot to say, and he said it over and over in a thousand heavy-handed ways. The guy was a metaphor factory. He concocted endless formulations on the theme that “I was crucified with Christ” and that Jesus now “lives within me.” He was intoxicated with his love for God, and denounced any concern other than being “saved through faith in Christ,” as if there were only one way to do this and it was as self-evident as finding the front door to your house. Paul asked people to be like himself because he was so much like Jesus. Then he told them not to be arrogant. His idea of modesty was to call himself “the very least of all the saints.” [Ephesians 3:8]. What a humble guy.

Paul was a complicated figure because he was a Jew who preached to the Gentiles. He took a backcountry faith and preached it in the big cities. He was a Roman citizen, yet he advocated a religion that put him in opposition to Roman authority. His ideas seem to fall into several categories of culture and belief of the time, so he can be puzzling to scholars and flat-out baffling to the rest of us.

Paul’s Good Intentions

To be sure, Paul had a lot of nice, constructive things to say. He reiterated Jesus’ gospel of love, generosity, forgiveness, and obedience to God. He wanted people to stop being hypocrites, and to love and support one another. He pleaded for us to walk through life with personal integrity and to reject “immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissention, envy, drunkenness, carousing,” and everything else that makes Las Vegas fun. It’s all solid, ethical teaching, though much of it is rather obvious. Is there
any
religion that encourages people to be selfish, carousing drunks? Do you know where they meet?

Everyone from Aristotle to Confucius to the Buddha agreed with these ideas. But Paul had a way of sounding like he invented them and that the only way to avoid being an angry, envious sorcerer was to obsess about Jesus night and day.

Paul asked that we not judge each other. He advised us to forgive, to love, and to live a life of decency, honor, and faith through Jesus Christ. But instead of emphasizing the values, he emphasized the Jesus. In fact, instead of emphasizing the Jesus, he focused on the Christ. Morality was not achieved so much through learning, discipline or experience, as through a kind of mind-meld with a deceased holy man. We’re supposed to live as if we were an organ in the body of Jesus—by which Paul meant the Church. The Catholic Church described itself as the “mystical body of Christ.” Some of us are eyes, some are ears, some are kneecaps, and some are just plain…well, you name the body part.

Paul often used irony to make his point, forever twisting words back on themselves. To be free, we must be slaves to Christ. To pass judgment is to be judged yourself. Faith puts you beyond the law and thus upholds the law. Through death comes eternal life, etc., etc. “If any one among you think that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise.” He was a cornucopia of Orwellian logic pretzels.

Paul believed in a punitive God and a depraved humanity, though his grim vision didn’t fully catch on until Augustine popularized his ideas in the fourth century. Paul is often quoted today and, for some, seems to carry the same authority as Jesus. This is curious. If some convert can revise the entire faith, what’s to stop others from doing the same thing? As we’ll see, not much.

Paul understood what every ad exec knows: You don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle. It’s not the product, it’s the marketing. As a result, his relentless proselytizing expanded Christianity from a tiny Jewish sect to an independent religion that would eventually pester the entire western world.

Born Saul of Tarsus in Asia Minor around A.D. 10, he was a Greek-speaking Hellenized Jew. This means he was a product of Greco-Roman life. But back in Jerusalem, traditional Jews disliked Hellenism. Yahweh had little use for Greek rationalism or Roman law. First century Jews faced a cultural dilemma similar to what Muslims confront today—a division between the old-fashioned and the new-fangled. Their way of life was at a crossroads.

The culture clash sometimes took on weird forms. The Greeks were big on health clubs, and they worked out in the nude. (The word
gymnasium
, a place to exercise, literally translates to “a place to be naked.”) This practice scandalized traditional Jews, but those steeped in Hellenic culture joined the clubs, sometimes hiding their circumcisions with fake foreskins. (And you thought your uncle’s toupee was hideous.)

As far as we know, Saul never tried this particular accessory, but he was well-schooled in secular matters. He got his religious education in Judea and eventually became a member of the Pharisee sect. Despite their reputation as theocratic stick-in-the-muds, the Pharisees were actually rather open-minded about Jewish law. They opposed a rigid, literal interpretation of the Torah (the Law), and they believed in resurrection—just not the resurrection of Jesus.

Consequently, before he converted, Saul himself hounded Christians, dragging them into prison, or worse. At least, this is what the Bible purports. In reality, there is no outside verification of the Christian persecutions Saul claims he joined. This lack of evidence problem is one we run into a lot.

The Road to Damascus

According to Scripture, one day around A.D. 36, as he led his shock troops to Damascus for another round of oppression, Saul had a revelation—a great light from heaven—and the voice of Jesus telling him to stop with the persecutions already! The light blinded him for three days; ironic given that Jesus’ specialty was restoring sight.

What Saul actually experienced is anyone’s guess. Maybe it was a holy vision. Maybe it was an epileptic fit. The point is, he was the first person to report a Jesus sighting after Christ’s ascension to heaven. As we all know, he would not be the last.

After this episode, Saul did what all bipolar personalities do—he swung from one extreme to the other. He switched from a zealous persecutor of The Way, as the early Christians called their movement, to a fanatical promoter. In fact, he joined the very group he had intended to destroy and became a preacher himself—being a remarkably quick study on the subject. Jesus’ disciples should have been this quick on the uptake.

Mind you, Paul (his new Christian name) never met Jesus personally. In fact, judging from his work, he didn’t know anything about Jesus’ life story at all. He mentions crucifixion in his letters, but that’s the only detail he seems to know about, and it comes off as more symbolic than biographical.

Hard Acts to Follow

We first meet Paul around half-way through the book that immediately follows the four Gospels—the
Acts of the Apostles.

Acts
was written by the author of Luke, who was allegedly Paul’s traveling companion. Actually, there is a lot of “allegedly” in
Acts
. Most scholars are very skeptical about its historical accuracy, whether it’s talking about the growth of the early churches or about Paul’s evangelical journeys. It’s packed with fanciful episodes that read more like propaganda than history. And, yet again, no non-Christian writings verify any of it.

Acts
begins with Jesus hanging around with his disciples/apostles for forty days after his resurrection. He dodges the question of whether or not the kingdom of Israel will be restored as everyone hopes and, instead, promises to send down the Holy Spirit—a kind of portable force-field to guide their actions. Then, finally, Jesus makes the spectacular exit we’ve been waiting for:

And when he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. [Acts 1:9]

 

Yet again, the writer is leaning on Old Testament imagery established centuries before:

I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days… [Daniel 7:13]

 

“Ancient of Days” was the prophet Daniel’s way of identifying God. And remember back when some of Jesus’ followers thought he might be Elijah reincarnated?

And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. [2 Kings 2:11]

 

Elijah was the only Old Testament prophet who didn’t actually die. He was whisked away to heaven, which meant he might return. Jesus wasn’t the first to create this expectation.

It is right after Jesus’ breathtaking exit that two angels appear and ask a very dumb question: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?” Like
duh!
Personal theory: Angels are no brighter than most messenger boys.

Fifty days after Passover, the apostles and 3,000 others are gripped by the Holy Spirit. The event is called Pentecost, and it’s marked by the sort of thing that sends most of us running for cover—a rushing wind kicks up
inside
their house of worship and everyone starts speaking in tongues. This will continue to be one of the strange things new converts do as the faith spreads across Rome. It’s interesting that the first sign of being born again is to start babbling nonsense.

Educated non-believers were understandably alarmed by such behavior. They had their own pagan rituals but, even so, Gentiles were often aghast at the noisy, primitive machinations of The Way. Blathering worshippers in the thralls of divine possession, touched by an all-powerful god…who became a man in order to save the world…but who died before he did…but who will come back any day now to save it for real and leave the spirit-possessed babblers in charge! Yeesh.

Well, religious rituals often mystify outsiders. Pentecostal snake-handlers frolic with deadly serpents to prove they have God’s blessing. Goddess cults stage belly dances under the full moon in order to commune with Isis or Ishtar or Oprah. Tantric masters re-channel sexual energies to attain erotic transcendence, and to meet women who aren’t fanatics about chastity.