THE ONE AND ONLY TWO JESUSES

Much written about “faith” has an implicit or explicit sneering and dismissive quality, heavy with an attitude of “What kind of limited person believes this stuff?” This piece may be viewed that way by some, but the intention is to identify how and why the Christian religion is often construed and used in a socially detrimental and “un-Christian” way.

It helps to start with an attitude of “What kind of being finds this faith attractive?” We know the “kind” of being—it’s a sizable portion of the world’s present and past human population, not a unique and “limited” segment. A critique of faith is an examination of the shapers and differentiators of all us humans, an attempt to suspend the common perception that faith is too sacrosanct to be viewed like other human phenomena. Faith is a solidly human phenomenon, and its misuses are predictable and understandable.

This essay is based on a reading of the portions of the New Testament that purport to be the actual words and actions of Jesus himself. Many such versions exist, and this one is based primarily on The Unified Four Gospel Harmony compiled by Daniel John.

The starting assertion, based on this chronological account of Jesus’s words and actions, is that Jesus is not quite real. He’s a mythic hero, but one with obvious flaws and inconsistencies. The flaws don’t go unnoticed, but they go largely unchallenged by his followers. It’s as if the followers always presume it is they themselves who are flawed and are therefore only imagining flaws in Jesus. The relationship between Jesus and his followers, especially the twelve apostles, is unequal to the point of eliminating the possibility of meaningfully questioning Jesus on anything. When tepid challenges are made, they are quickly resolved with whatever Jesus asserts. Ironically, the only persistent challengers are vilified as uniformly evil people, particularly the Pharisees, Sadducees, and scribes (high churchmen).

This makes of Jesus a sort of gaslighter, but not the scheming and devious sort who seeks to subvert the will and agency of another for his or her own benefit. He is a purer, more dangerous gaslighter, fully convinced of his own rightness and righteousness, and unable to hold himself fully to account for his ideas and actions.

As a result, Jesus is a poor model for a diverse culture or society. His implacable rightness makes all disagreement and discord irresolvable because above discussion. There is right and there is wrong, black and white, godly and ungodly, all determined by Jesus. Nuance, understanding, compromise, empathy itself, are all suspect, because there is nothing to be discussed, disputed, or compromised. Jesus declaims and proclaims, and the only acceptable response is acquiescence. While all religions share this feature to some extent, it’s exacerbated in Christianity because Jesus is an impossible hybrid, fully human and fully God. Maybe the historical person Jesus was not the hybrid presented, but that’s not relevant to cultural influence. Either the actual Jesus was like he appears through his attributed words and actions, or his promoters and popularizers chose to make him as he appears.

By contrast, the Greeks and Romans had pantheons of gods who made no effort to hide their abundant human flaws. They were convincing hybrids, relatable hybrids. They were immortal, but they could harm and be harmed. They were never peerless; they were one of many, all vulnerable to the others. They had superhuman abilities and powers, but often had no more than adolescent human judgment about using them. They had all the passions and pettiness and self-absorption of regular humans.

Even the God of the Old Testament was a relatable, human-like figure, even though his flaws extended to a vileness of behavior and attitude that surpassed that of most humans. God was made in our image, with all the tawdry bits amplified for effect. A person could and should fear God, since He had unlimited powers and little self-restraint, but few could feel genuinely morally deficient in comparison to Him. One of His favorite utterances was declaring Himself jealous and wrathful, and high among His preferred behaviors was acting out spitefully in jealousy and wrath at humans.

But Jesus is an impossible and unrelatable hybrid: all God all the time, all human all the time. As a result, he is all oblivious all the time as to his own nature. He is gratuitous, not in any generous way but in the sense of arbitrary. He has two contradictory personas, and he swings between them with no apparent awareness of doing so. Neither persona corresponds specifically with Jesus’s God or man qualities; both are a hodgepodge of the two.

One persona is the moral nag, and the other is savior. Which one he mainly manifests at a given time is dependent on his target audience: those he wants to save, and those he wants to condemn. One of his first public appearances, while still a child, represents his formative stage, not yet having fully developed his moral scourge or savior identity. He slips away from his parents and spends days in the Temple in Jerusalem, listening to and asking questions of the teachers there. He amazes with his precocious understanding, and he dismisses his mother’s alarm over his having gone missing by scolding her for not intuiting he had to be in God’s house. Already his disregard for normal human concerns and anxieties has manifested—the story includes no hint of his having a sense of a mother’s point of view. On the other hand, this is the one instance in which Jesus interacts with the religious establishment without castigating them for their ignorance and hypocrisy.

The story has a gap of some twenty years, and the mature Jesus reappears with his twin personas in place as he begins his ministry. John the Baptist serves both as Jesus’s introducer to society and model for his moral scourge persona. John attacks the Pharisees and Sadducees who come to be baptized by him, excoriating them as a “brood of vipers.” The story provides no speech or action by the churchmen to justify the condemnation; we are simply to assume they are evil.

So one of Jesus’s target audiences is introduced and established by John—the reviled churchmen. Throughout his three years of ministry, Jesus repeatedly condemns the Pharisees the scribes as an undifferentiated class of bad people. While he holds a similar view of the rich, he allows for the possibility that a rich person is redeemable (the odds being the same as the likelihood of a camel passing through the eye of a needle). But he never appears to regard any Pharisee or scribe as redeemable, and therefore never approaches them with a kind or loving entreaty or gesture. He writes them off, despite his repeated insistence that he is God come to Earth on behalf of sinners. Pharisees and scribes and the rich are, for Jesus, an expendable class of sinners, the “bad” sinners. He acts as unrelenting moral scourge as to them, never as savior.

But the “good” sinners, who appear to include all people but the churchmen and the rich, are his second target audience, the one for which he plays his savior persona. For these good sinners, he offers eternal life and health and comfort and sweetness and light in exchange for merely “believing in” him. They have to be sincere, to be sure; they must repent their sins, but belief alone is the means to all the lavish rewards. He wanders the countryside, bestowing favors in the form of miracles and instant cures for blindness, paralysis, deafness, muteness, demon-possession, chronic hemorrhage, even death. After a time he sends deputized proxies or disciples to do miraculous healing in his name. He restores life because someone other than the dead person believes. He assures the beneficiaries it is their faith, their belief, that qualifies them for such miraculous blessings. All they have to do is acknowledge he is God.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus remains consistent as an either/or figure. He is either all mercy and compassion, or he is all wrath and condemnation, depending on the category of sinner he encounters. He admonishes the bad sinners even for seeking the sort of miraculous signs he so freely grants to the good sinners. The churchmen are the forever bad guys, straw men, foils, labeled as hardened of heart, hypocrites, irredeemables. They don’t count among those he came to save.

The Jesus of the New Testament, as presented through only his words and actions, is also a god of Calvinistic predestination. He comes to woo those he has selected to woo and to discard the unchosen. There are no poignant passages in which Jesus approaches the churchmen with humility, love, mercy, and offer of redemption. There is never acknowledgment that the churchmen are maybe simply ordinary, flawed, pompous, privileged people trying to preserve their “earned” privilege and place in an established religious hierarchy against a perceived upstart. There is no sign that Jesus or his followers appreciate that the churchmen would inevitably resist one who breaks the laws long-sacred to the Israelites, that it is their perceived religious, social, and moral obligation to resist. Jesus “works” on the Sabbath by healing people; he ignores the laws requiring ritual washing before eating; he consorts with the low tax collectors and whores rebuked for centuries by the Jewish faith. From the churchmen’s point of view, Jesus is at least potentially a blasphemer, claiming to act as the direct agent of the God of Abraham and Moses the churchmen think they have served and honored and worshipped. There is no hint of the dawning of the thought that the churchmen might include at least some who in good faith question whether Jesus is God, or is just another false claimant come to undermine the faith and work the will of Satan.

To have been a meaningful model for Western (or any human) culture, Jesus would have had to approach the churchmen in the same generous way he approached the good sinners. Although Jesus is often haughty, peremptory, and impatient with even his own chosen apostles, he repeatedly makes an effort to bring them along, help them overcome their own doubts and fears. He relentlessly courts them, although imperiously. He explains parables to them, points out the “moral” of his often obscure allegorical tales. He reproaches them for inadequate faith and fortitude, but gives them repeated encouragement and additional chances to get it right. And these are the apostles who have had the advantage of seeing countless miracles by Jesus and bythemselves and their brothers, who have had the opportunity to talk at length with Jesus and receive his tutoring. Jesus remains ever solicitous with them.

But not with the bad sinners, the pre-ordained unelect marked for destruction. In fact, Jesus is at best disingenuous with the churchmen, and at worst outright deceiving with them. He claims he has no intention of abolishing the Law or the teachings of the Prophets, but has only come to “fulfill” them. Yet he breaks the letter of the Law repeatedly, and expects the churchmen to accept unquestioningly that he does so because he is himself God.

The closest Jesus comes to “wooing” a churchman is very early in his ministry, when Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a “ruler of the Jews,” comes to Jesus at night, apparently seeking guidance. Nicodemus acknowledges that Jesus is a rabbi and teacher, and that Jesus could not have done the miraculous things he’s done “unless God is with him.” Jesus instructs Nicodemus about the necessity of being born again. Nicodemus is confused and questions how that’s possible, and Jesus mocks his ignorance as one purporting to be “the teacher of Israel.” We are left without learning the immediate outcome of the encounter, whether Nicodemus was moved toward faith and belief, but Jesus remarks that Nicodemus does “not accept our testimony” when Nicodemus asks again how an old man can be born again. (Nicodemus appears later as a persecutor of Jesus.)

To be sure, Jesus also scolds the good sinners continuously as well, preaching they must meet impossible standards not only of behavior but of thought and attitude. He says anger towards a brother is the same as murder, that calling a brother “you fool” makes one guilty enough for hell. He says feeling lust is the same thing as adultery, and that divorce of a wife (for anything other than her unfaithfulness) is adultery. He forbids any oath on anything heavenly or earthly, insisting that anything beyond a straight yes or no “leads to evil.” He rejects the Old Testament teaching of eye for eye, commanding that one turn the other cheek to the assailant who slaps one cheek. Loving those who love you is not to one’s credit; one must love one’s enemies, be good and generous toward them, “be perfect” like God himself. Everyone is to sell his possessions and give the proceeds to charity, and rely on God to provide food, clothing, and shelter for himself and those who depend on him, apparently.

In fact, to follow Jesus a disciple must love Jesus “more than” he loves his parent or child, in order to be “worthy” of Jesus. He goes further yet, preaching “If anyone comes to Me, and doesn’t hate his own father and mother, and wife and children, he cannot be my disciple.”

These are extravagantly impractical prescriptions for normal humans, and it’s fair to think maybe Jesus only intended some of them for a few select followers who would fully dedicate their lives to him. But even a monk, nun, or mystic who dedicates life to poverty, chastity, and godly thought and prayer would be vexed to observe the “hating” rule. And not only are Jesus’s moral demands incompatible with life in an ordinary human community, but there is that recurrent element of predestination. One such expression is his saying, “For this reason I said to you that no one can come to Me, unless it has been granted to them from the Father.”

Despite the impossible demands of “perfect” godly behavior, thought, and attitude from mere humans, Jesus provides a convenient alternative to good sinners: “Everyone who believes in Me will have life, even if they die.” The Savior Jesus persona demands not rectitude or righteousness but only “belief” in his divinity. This is the persona the Christian faith and institutional church chose to promote: Jesus the Comforter, Rescuer, Deliverer. No person escapes sexual attraction, or envy, or covetousness, or self-protection or self-promotion, or anger, or the urge for revenge. No society can exist with all members trusting God or others to provide them the necessities of life. But all people grasp at the offer of comfort, everyone craves protection, completion, non-contingent love, especially for little or no behavioral effort. This craving is an impediment to human harmony in any community, since it reflects our fundamental, individual fear and vulnerability, our personal preoccupation. The Church chose to make personal fear and vulnerability the centerpiece of the Christian faith, and to make assuagement of personal fear and vulnerability the object of faith.

So we have a “Christian” Western culture based on a split-personality Jesus, with neither of his personas offering a viable personal or social model. The fundamental flaw was the creation or adoption of the hybrid Jesus, both fully human and fully God.

The mix resulted in a Jesus inadequate as either God or human. As God, he’s as vicious and unreliable as the Old Testament God, if one happens to be a bad sinner like Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, and the rich. Those are predestined for wailing, gnashing of teeth, and hell. As God, even the sacrifice of Jesus to crucifixion is hollow: he endures great physical discomfort for a few hours and resumes his impervious life as God just as before.

Christian apologists would argue that Jesus endured far more than physical misery, that he endured the weight of the sins of all humanity for all time, that he experienced on our behalf the enormity of our collective iniquity. But he didn’t and couldn’t, because he was God, and he experienced all as a hybrid and not as a human. He sent himself into the world to enact his own sacrificial death—he told his apostles repeatedly that the script was written and he was there to play it out.

As man, Jesus fails for being oblivious to what it is to be human. He apparently isn’t tempted by lust, or by things, or by comfort, so he never experiences the difficulty of overcoming those distractions. He doesn’t experience fear and vulnerability as a person does, because he’s God. But he is fixed rather humanly on status. He’s consumed by status, demands that he be recognized and worshipped as God.

This raises again the issue of the historical person Jesus as opposed to the Church’s creation or recreation of him. We don’t know what the actual person did or said, but only what was attributed to him by his followers and then by the Church hierarchy. We know that a new breed of Christian Churchmen fought for centuries over what was to be attributed to him and what was to be written out as false and heretical. We know that some of the excluded information, that which was debated and rejected from the “Canon,” emphasizes a different Jesus or aspects of him. Ironically, Jesus spawned his own perpetual cadre of competing Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, and high churchmen who have for two thousand years disagreed over who and what he was.

But all the mainstream versions of Jesus share (with the exception of a distinct minority of scholars and religionists who don’t insist on the divinity of Jesus or the supernatural acts) a promotion of the hybrid Jesus, God made man but still God. All Christian varieties have emphasized the Salvific persona, and all have downplayed the moral nag. In fact, the “faith versus works” debate in the Church continues today, although in popular Christianity it has long been resolutely decided in favor of faith or belief as the necessary and sufficient basis for salvation.

The faith versus works debate began at the beginning, encapsulated by different explications attributed to Matthew and Paul. Some say Protestants are proponents of salvation by faith alone, and that Catholics hold that both faith and good works are necessary. In practical terms, though, all Christians subscribe to the idea that “accepting Christ as savior,” even in a dying breath, is sufficient for salvation, regardless of a person’s lifelong behavior. Christianity as an institution has always depended on the promise of salvation regardless of behavior. If Christianity had ever held rigidly that we can only “earn” salvation by complying with the commands of Jesus to be “perfect” and godlike in behavior, there would have been few if any subscribers. The choice of right belief over right behavior was an intentional choice.

Our culture is both formed and tainted by this tradition. Because the moralist Jesus set impossible standards, he is essentially useless as a human ethical model. The Church realized the impossibility of human compliance with the dictates of the moralist Jesus, as a result of which it chose essentially to abandon the moral injunctions entirely. Christianity might well encourage adherents to be loving and forgiving and generous, to love others and God above self and all else, but it never really insists on such behavior. There is no sin that can’t be forgiven, no human behavior that can cancel the mercy and grace of God (other than the attitudinal behavior of disbelief).

The Western Christian edifice, as a result, rests on “right belief” alone. Right belief is always a divider of humans, while right behavior is aimed at unification. Because of the reign of right belief, it is righteous to hate the infidel, no matter that Jesus taught to love one’s enemies. Jesus appeared to “hate” the Pharisees and scribes, after all. Salvific religion is infantilizing, offering perpetual self-centered and self-satisfied relief from personal fear and vulnerability in place of insistence on constant regard for how one’s behavior affects those around him or her.

The reflexive response to “atheism” in our culture has traditionally been to associate it with either evil or nihilism, but this caricatures conscientious atheism. Twenty years ago, a group of writers (including among others Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris) mounted a new, sophisticated approach to atheistic thought by which they sought to present it as a positive moral and rational school of thought. They became known as the New Atheists. They made strides in rescuing atheism from the popular impression of it as a fringe, cranky tirade against religion along the lines of Madalyn Murray O’Hair in the 60s. Almost a hundred years earlier, Sigmund Freud had already accomplished the same thing or more with his 1927 The Future of an Illusion. The New Atheists repopularized the Freud tradition for an era more receptive to it.

Conscientious atheism attacks religion not for being naïve or stupid but for being socially dysfunctional and divisive. Returning to the words and actions of Jesus himself (those that made it into the Canon, accurate or not) demonstrates that institutionalized Christianity is a highly modified reconstitution even of the Church’s own Jesus. While Jesus was always unsuitable as cultural and social model because of his hybrid nature as neither fish nor fowl, the Church made him even less suitable by minimizing human-to-human responsibilities and decency and overemphasizing personal salvation.

A religion, like a society, would ideally embrace a sort of contract, a mutual undertaking that requires responsibility and effort in order to obtain promised benefits. Ethics can be viewed as a person’s sense of the contract in relation to other people. Political science can be seen as the corporate version of the contract, involving one’s sense of what the community or state or polity owes to its members and what the members owe in return to the state. In popular Christianity, there is a promise of comfort and salvation and protection and love held out in exchange for an attitude or state of mind called belief.

It’s analogous to claiming “I believe in America and that I’m an American, so I’m entitled to Social Security, protection of my rights and privileges and property from internal and external threat, and I can choose whether to pay taxes or obey the laws.” A nation would never accept that attitude, but Christianity routinely does. In the Catholic tradition, a person was at least once expected to humble herself before a priest periodically, confessing her shortcomings in relation to God and other people. Both priest and confessant knew she’d be back next month or next year confessing similar shortcomings, because she’s human. Protestant churches haven’t even traditionally required the token gesture of priestly confession, accepting instead a bland request for the forgiveness of unspecified sins in a group setting. A person is told to be good and honest and Christ-like, but there’s no actual monitoring or enforcement mechanism. Even if there were, the Church would assure you of salvation if you repent and believe.

In legal terms, Christianity could be challenged as a bogus and unenforceable contract on the grounds of “lack of consideration.” A contract must involve a true and meaningful exchange (consideration), a reciprocal passing of value for value between parties. You might maneuver some old and infirm person into agreeing to pay you $100,000 for a smile and a kind word. If the old person rethought and reneged, and you tried to enforce the “contract” and compel the payment in court, it is unlikely you’d prevail. There has been no exchange of approximate value.

Christianity creates and sustains a distorted sense of social and moral contract, and as a result it contributes to distorted ethics and to antisocial behavior. Christianity purports to offer entitlement to great reward for no more than “belief.” Much of our current “church and state” conflict hinges on this Christianity-inspired sense of entitlement, with Christians contending their “faith” overrides any other human or social obligation because it has to do with faith and God. There is an obliviousness to the fact that one’s “contract” with God as promised by a church has no rightful role in secular culture and commerce. The obliviousness extends to a likely majority of the Supreme Court, which is poised to hold that a web designer of wedding sites can refuse to do business with a gay couple.

This elevation of “belief” to primacy even in secular matters has been a scourge throughout our history. It has been used and continues to be used in support of slavery, racism, nationalism, imperialism, denial of support and services to citizens, homophobia, and other social ills. This has been facilitated by the Church’s abandonment of any comprehensive moral requirements or even introspection among its adherents. The moral nag Jesus is bastardized into a champion of right belief over all.

Not only has the moral nag Jesus been discarded, but the Salvific Jesus has been made into a cozy and teddy-bear-like figure. Christianity not only infantizes adherents, but the person of Jesus himself. Christmas is the apogee of turning Jesus into something threatless and cute, a cuddly baby. There is no hint of a threatless Jesus in his actual words and actions in the New Testament. Even Christ on the cross is depicted as all-suffering, all-victimized by brutish humans, all-scorned and rejected for no good reason at all. It’s likely rare that any Christian priest or minister advocates compassion and understanding for the “murderers” of Jesus at Easter, despite the fact there might well have been among the Pharisees those with real and earnest and decent and fully human concerns that Jesus was a threat to the then-dominant religious “beliefs” of the Jews and a betrayer of the faith of the Jewish fathers. A Pharisee might in good faith be unconvinced by a thirty-something itinerant preacher claiming to be God and breaking the “sacred” rules. Jesus himself often warned that there would be others coming with false claims of being the Messiah, but it never seemed to occur to him that he might reasonably be seen in that light.

It’s difficult to conceive of a socially and spiritually and morally constructive world-view based on the actual words and actions of Jesus. We aren’t gods or God. God isn’t human. A hybrid is neither fully God nor man, not convincing as God or man. Jesus imposed such an impossible code of behavior that the Church pretty much washed its hands of a moral code for its members. Jesus pre-judged whole classes of people as irredeemable, condemned whole towns not receptive to his or his disciples’ message. He dangled the seductive promise of endless, blissful, human-like existence in exchange for the right belief that he himself was magnificent, ridding Christians for millennia of the inconvenience of behaving responsibly towards anyone but co-believers.

This view isn’t godless atheism—it’s the making of the case that Christianity is a refuge from humanliness.

Written January 16-22, 2023
©2023 Lawrence Helms