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Justice in the Resurrection
In the trial and execution of Joshua ben Adam a man was brought to justice This kind of thing happened all the time, and in this world continues to happen all the lime. Civil and religious structures cannot exist without "law and order". Those who break the law have to be brought to justice. This means punishment or pay-back time.
In the case of Joshua being brought to justice, we will miss the whole point of the story if we caricature the legal authorities as out and out "badies". On the contrary, these were the best religious and civil authorities that the civilized world of the day had to offer. The main actors in this drama of bringing a man to justice were not evil men bent on perverting the course of justice. but simply men who had the responsibility of carrying out justice according to law.
During Joshua's public ministry be was constantly accused of being "a glutton and a drunk", a Sabbath breaker, and a violator of the holiness code, especially due to his custom of eating with unclean people. When he caused a great disturbance in the temple precincts by overturnng the money exchange facilities and chased people away with a whip, be was accused of profaning the temple. According to a strict interpretation of the Torah, all these offences carried the penalty of death. If there was any difficulty making any of those charges slick, there was one law whose clarity could not be avoided: the Torah decreed that if there arose a prophet who led people astray from obedience to the law, he most certainly be put to death. (See Deuteronomy 13: 1) So the Jewish authorities finally arrived at this simple consensus: "We have a law. and by that law he ought to die. (John 19:17)
Joshua was handed over to the Roman authorities, not because there was any distinction between civil and religious powers in those days. but simply because Rome had reserved to itself the right of capital punishment. Rome had very severe laws relating to all matter of sedition, rebellion, and unlawful assembly. Galileans were especially suspect. The Romans had already executed a large number of re. hellions spirits from Galilee. That Province had become notorious us a breeding ground of insurgents, Zealots and Messianic crackpots. Furthermore, the Roman law decreed that Caesar was the divine "son of God". No rivals were to be tolerated - anywhere! No Galilean rabble-rouser was going to stand a chance of survival in this climate. Even if Pilate did not relish putting Joshua to death, he had no option as an instrument of Roman law.
In any case, Joshua was just another insignificant man brought to justice. (We say insignificant since there was almost no mention made of him in any contemporary Jewish or Roman circles.) But for the astonishing intervention of Easter he would have disappeared from history without leaving a trace.
However impressive the Galilean teacher may have been to his little band of supporters, he appeared pathetically weak as he was quickly arrested and hurried off to a brutal execution. All faith and optimism on the part of the disciples vanished. They fled into hiding like cats, not waiting around to witness the final scenes in their doomed cause. If they as much as showed their faces around Jerusalem they were liable to be rounded up and crucified as sympathizers according to the Roman practice.
There was one final insult to add to the dead and buried cause of Joshua hen Adam. He not only died totally discredited in the eyes of the highest judicial authorities in the world, both religious and civil, but as it appeared, he was totally discredited in the eyes of God. The law of Moses had decreed that anyone hanged on a tree was cursed of God. (See Deuteronomy 21: 23). The later accounts of his body being embalmed and laid in a rich man's grave are not well attested. It is quite likely that his body endured the ultimate insult of Roman crucifixions -- no decent burial, but thrown into pits to he scavenged by dogs and carrion.
In any case, the death of Joshua was the ultimate scandal that early Christianity wrestled to come to terms with. Lapide suggests that a very large portion of the New Testament was driven by the effort to explain it. But the untimely death of Joshua was a brutal, senseless tragedy. It had no meaning in itself. Death is an enemy which seems to empty life, goodness, love and whatever is beautiful in life of any meaning. Millions of others, most of whom have been unknown and unsung, have suffered the same fate as Joshua hen Adam. They have been cruelly tortured, burnt alive, butchered, or left to perish of hunger, thirst, or the depravation of human company. It has been done to them too in the name of justice, the law, God! The world seems to he ruled by idiots and bureaucrats who, the moment they get behind the wheel of this juggernaut called "the justice of the law", run people down. Religious authorities have not been exempt from grinding up their share of human bones. The death of Joshua ben Adam stands as a paradigm for the justice of this world, the justice of man, the justice of the law.
When the powers of this world had brought Joshua ben Adam to their idea of justice, a higher court was convened to bring him to another kind of justice.
The Lord executes justice...for all who are oppressed. (Psalm 103: 6)
He will deliver the needy when he calls for help, the afflicted also and him who has no helper...he will rescue their lives from oppression and violence, and their blood will be precious in his sight. (Psalm 72:12-14)
The man whom the rulers of this world condemned to the most ignominious death was now "declared to he the son of God by the resurrection from the dead". (Romans 1:3) God highly exalted him and gave him a name which is above every name. (Philippians 2:9) "He raised him from the dead...far above all rule and authority and power and dominion." (Ephesians 1:20, 21) "God made him to be both Lord and Christ - this Joshua whom you crucified." (Acts 2: 36)
In the resurrection "the justice of God is revealed". (Romans 1:17) This justice is a scandal to the world, not just because it totally reverses the judgment of the world, and not only because it is a saving justice for the oppressed, but it is a scandal because it is "the justice of God apart from the law". (Romans 3:21) Unlike the justice of the law, it is not a justice that is calculated, measured out, and pays back lit for tat. It is the justice that the Old Testament prophets began to anticipate, that Joshua ben Adam tried to illustrate in quite outrageous stories or tried to act out in his compassion for the oppressed. It was the justice he still trusted in when he was overwhelmed by utter failure and total disaster.
The thing which made Easter so electrifyingly liberating was the perception that the resurrection of Joshua was of monumental significance for the entire human situation. Joshua's exultation to the right hand of God was the revelation of God's final solution to the human condition. For the God who has called the human t-ace from the evolutionary mud of creation into consciousness and the awareness of himself has a destiny for this creature which will not be abandoned:
Thou hast made him a little less than God,
And dost crown him with glory and majesty!
Thou has made him to rule over the works of Thy hands;
Thou hast put all things under his feet. (Psalm 8: 5,6)
Like The Hound of Heaven - "with majestic haste and unperturbed pace"-- the Creator has pursued that goal through the long course of history, sometimes losing the battles but never losing the war.
Can a woman forget her nursing child,
and have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget,
but I will not forget you. (Isaiah 49: 15)
For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord,
plans for welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope. (Jeremiah 29: 11)
The justice of God is not a justice of the law. It is out of all proportion to anything remotely deserved. It breaks through all categories of what is logical or measurable. Like life itself, it is a gift of inconceivable generosity. It is all this because it is a justice based on fidelity to his own covenant of love.
The Lord's loving kindnesses indeed never cease,
For his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
Great is Thy faithfulness. (Lamenations 3:22,23 )
The good news of Easter is that death is not the final word. Life was not intended to end in the tragedy of the grave. The justice of God turned what was a paradigm of all human tragedies into the celebration of the triumph of life over death, of love over hate. The words of Joshua were vindicated: "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot destroy your life". (Matthew 10:.38) "God is not the God of the dead but of the living." (Matthew 22:32) Or as he said on the day of his death to the dying thief, "You will be with me in Paradise today." (Luke 22:43)
THE RETREAT OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
The Retreat from the Centrality of the Resurrection
The message of resurrection was absolutely central to the first Christians. That is quite clear from the accounts given of their preaching in the book of Acts. The central thing was not the divinity of Christ nor his atonement on the cross. These were issues which developed later and assumed the ascendancy. But the original gospel was the word of the resurrection.
If the resurrection had remained central, that great gulf between Joshua's preaching of the kingdom and the church's preaching of other things -- a problem which many scholars are now very aware of - would not have developed. For the heart of Joshua's preaching of the kingdom was the scandal of God's saving justice, and in the gospel of his resurrection the same justice of God was revealed. (Romans 1:17) The kind of justice Joshua gave his life for, God executed in his resurrection from the dead.
But it did not take long before other issues supplanted the centrality of the resurrection. In our issue of Verdict called A Theology of Resurrection which we published 15 years ago, we documented the testimony of both Catholic and Protestant scholars that the church did not have a theology of resurrection. It is well known that Catholicism made the Incarnation central to its theology while Protestantism had made the atonement of the cross the central thing. The resurrection was largely relegated to the field of apologetics wherein the so-called proofs of the resurrection were used to establish the claims made for the divinity of Christ and the exclusive role of the church as possessor of the keys of heaven.
The retreat from the centrality of the resurrection began when the church tried to mitigate what appeared to be the scandalous features of Joshua's birth, life and death. The resurrection had convinced Joshua's followers that God himself had exalted him to the status of "son" or "Messiah". No honor was too great to be conferred upon him, and this pressed them to embellish his history in keeping with his status.
To start with they had to deal with the scandal of a Galilean Messiah. Galileans were held in very low esteem by the orthodox Jews of Judea. Galileans had the stigma of being something like provincial hicks. It was generally held that no prophet would come from Galilee; and to suggest that the royal Messiah would come from Galilee was almost akin to blasphemy. Then added to that was the scandal of Joshua's very irregular conception. So about .50 years or two generations on from Easter we have the introduction of very contrived stories in Matthew and Luke to show that Joshua was not born in Galilee at all. but in Judea (an account not supported by either Mark or John). We will pass over for now how the church softened the scandal of his baptism by John (Why baptize a sinless man?), and the scandal of his radical table fellowship, and we come to the greatest scandal of all: How could an utterly discredited Galilean who died in such public disgrace possibly be the Messiah?
The church explained away the scandal by saying that the death of Joshua was a sacrifice to pay for the sins of the world. That is to say. Joshua was not only murdered at the hands of man carrying out the law, but he was slain by God himself as he carried out his far more terrible law. The whole focus hereby turned from the saving justice of the resurrection, which is a justice "without the law", to the punitive pay-back kind of justice.
The Retreat to the Justice of the Law
What all this means is that the Christian religion made a full retreat to the old justice of the law which ben Adam repudiated and which God exposed and shattered in the justice of the resurrection. As we will see, the church breathed new life into the old justice of the law and earned legalism far beyond anything Judaism had ever known. Focusing on salvation by death on the cross rather than by the life of the resurrection, the whole system of Christian theology became a schema of Latin justice from beginning to end.
The whole Christian theological system, whether Catholic or Protestant, begins with the premise of God having a law which requires of man perfect obedience to his every decree to the utmost degree.
There was supposed to be a time when man and woman were sinlessly perfect and qualified to render that kind of obedience to God's law. There was said to be no death or imperfection in the world anywhere - presumably there was a time when even the fish in the sea did not eat one another!
God's law decreed zero tolerance! One strike and you're out! So for a single misdemeanor these first humans were locked out of God's favor, abandoned in this earth like some kind of leper colony, and sentenced not just to temporal sufferings, misery and death, but to eternal damnation along with all their offspring who inherited their original sin. Death also spread across the whole face of nature as a result of one act which incurred the full penalty of the law.
(This myth of the Fall, recited above, is just the orthodox Christian version of a recycled old Babylonian myth which should have been discarded ages ago as sheer intellectual rubbish. But as we will see, it gets far worse.)
The penalty for the smallest infraction of an infinite law had to be an infinite punishment.
Since the honor and integrity of this law had to be maintained. God could not forgive unless the demands of his law were fully met and the penalty for transgression be paid in full. Someone had to win for us divine acceptance and unlock the gates of heaven.
The condition of salvation is exactly what it always has been - perfect obedience to the law of God. In the active obedience of his life, Christ perfectly kept the law for us in every decree to the utmost degree. Then in the passive obedience of his cloth he paid the infinite penalty of our sins. According to this premise, he had to be an infinite person to satisfy an infinite law.
The justice of God's law, having been satisfied by his infinite merits, God is now able to forgive us without violating the honor of his law. He can save us in a way which vindicates his regime of legal justice. According to all the "good" theologians, our salvation is only a means to a higher end - the vindication of this justice of the law.
It is in the application of Christ's merits that a difference developed between Catholics and Protestants. The Catholics said that in response to faith God justifies the sinner by making him just by in infusion of the grace won for him on the cross. The Protestants said that God forensically declares him just by imputing to him the merits of Christ's active and passive obedience, after which he begins the process of making him just by an infusion of grace. We won't go on with all the subtle legal argument about imputare and efficare, faith formed with charity versus faith alone, the ordo salutus what not. The whole dispute was based on the premises of the Latin legal frame-work which both sides accepted. This entire frame-work must now be discarded. It is not only based on a world-view which is already at least two thousand years out of date, but on religious imagery of a Fall and a lock-out from God that Joshua ben Adam totally discarded.
Now let us refocus the main point in this brief sketch of Christian orthodoxy. From beginning to end it is a gospel according to law and a system of legal justice. The resurrection scarcely comes into this theology at all. How could it be otherwise since in the gospel of resurrection "the justice of God without the law is manifested". (Romans 3:21) That is to say, the resurrection is the scandal of a saving justice which transcends all legal categories because it is a justice based on the unconditional acceptance of divine love which never at any time contemplated locking anyone away from an unbrokered fellowship with God. It would be more excusable to believe in the Flat Earth, and certainly less psychologically damaging, than to carry on with views of God's justice that are in some respects worse than bad paganism.
The Retreat to a Deified Messiah
Scholars now generally agree that the earliest believers, being Jews, held to a strict Jewish monotheism. Joshua was believed to be "the son of God" in their traditional sense of being elected and anointed as the Messianic king. Any fair reading of the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) finds no evidence that these authors believed that Joshua ben Adam was God. A man of God, certainly! God in the form of a man, certainly not! James Dunn (Unity and Diversity in the New Testament) takes the view that the development toward a full-blown Incarnational theology (ie., Jesus is God) was an inevitable and necessary maturing process of the Christian faith.
In one sense the transformation of Joshua ben Adam to the Jesus God was inevitable, given the retreat to a religion of a legal, pay-back justice centered in Christ's death. If you then put that in the context of the myth of the Fall and a law demanding an infinite penalty for human sin, who else could pay the price and unlock the gates of heaven but a member of the Godhead? There is a certain logic to this legal religion, but it is completely out of kilter to the scandalous, liberating justice of the resurrection. It is the theology of God in a legal box, and an old Latin one at that!
We need also consider how turning Joshua ben Adam into one who comes into this world as God greatly diminishes the original story of the resurrection. Where is the glorious surprise and scandal of God's justice if the man who rises from the dead is God himself?. Given that his birth was supposed to be so supernaturally spectacular with angel choirs and royal visitors etc., and given that he walked on water and confidently foretold his own death and resurrection, Easter was no surprise but a foregone conclusion. And does God need anyone to raise him from the dead? And if God highly exalts the risen one and gives him a name which is above every name (clearly the language of adoption), is not this rendered meaningless if he was God to start with? Is this merely a ceremony wherein God puts his name where it always was, and puts himself on the throne of the universe where he always was? Or was the resurrection the surprising, scandalous generosity of God in raising from the dead and oppressed and discredited man who staked everything on God's faithfulness?
The resurrection of God in the guise of human nature is too much like all the old pagan myths of dying and rising gods which were venerated in every culture of the pagan world. The Greek cities into which the Christian gospel spread were full of these myths. But transforming the risen one into the Deity himself puts an infinite gulf between him and the rest of humanity. As we have said, there is no surprise if it is the immortal Deity himself who rises from the dead according to the teaching of the Christian religion. Neither is this kind of Easter good news to ordinary mortals like the rest of us who are victims of human tragedy - unless we are lucky enough to be Christians who believe all the right things about the Incarnation, Trinity, and belong to the true church outside of which none can be saved. For what the Deification of the risen one inevitably does is to torn the good news of Easter into an exclusive monopoly by a totalitarian religious system. Everything in this appalling system is based on merits and pay-back justice. Christ, according to this system, was raised from the dead and exalted to the highest place in the universe because he merited it. The resurrection itself along with the atonement on the cross is all a system of merited justice. But on top of this, this Christ is said to have a surplus fund of merits which be will now dispense through ministrations of the church upon individuals who comply with the required conditions such as joining the church by baptism and believing the received teaching on the divinity of Christ, etc. So the message of Easter got tamed into an exclusive religious cult which is light years removed from the original article.
The more we recognize that Joshua ben Adam was truly human and only human, the more we will appreciate that the story of his resurrection is God's word of love and hope to the whole human race without distinction. This was never meant to be made into an exclusive, much less a triumphalistic cult. The resurrection belongs to people everywhere without distinction of race, religion, gender or anything else. It speaks clearly to every human being that God will execute justice for. all that are oppressed. When God gave us life he did not intend that his boundless generosity should end in the tragedy of death. This is the. meaning of Joshua ben Adam's resurrection and it carries with it the same spirit of generosity and reckless self-giving which marked the life of the man who staked everything on God's justice.
The more we recognize that Joshua ben Adam was truly human and only human, the more we will appreciate that the story of his resurrection is God's word of love and hope to the whole human race without distinction.
The justice of God is not a justice of the law. It is out of all proportion to anything remotely deserved. It breaks through all categories of what is logical or measurable. Like life itself, it is a gift of inconceivable generosity. It is all this because it is a justice based on fidelity to his own covenant of love.
The thing which made Easter so electrifyingly liberating was the perception that the resurrection of Joshua was of monumental significance for the entire human situation. Joshua's exultation to the right hand of God was the revelation of God's final solution to the human condition. For the God who had called the human race from be evolutionary mud of creation into consciousness and the awareness of Himself has a destiny for this creature which will not be abandoned:
The good news of Easter is that death is not the final word. Life was not intended to end in the tragedy of the grave. The justice of God turned the tragedy that was the paradigm of all human tragedies into the celebration of the triumph of life over death, of love over hate.
R. Brimsmead
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THE RESURRECTION
THE STORY THUS FAR
This special issue on the Resurrection is Part 9 of a series on The Scandal of Joshua ben Adam.
For the historical Jesus of Nazareth we have used his real Hebrew name Yashua which is translated directly into English as Joshua. In his native Aramaic tongue Joshua called himself bar Nasha which also in the Hebrew is ben Adam - without definite article because it was not a title. It simply means son of man (Adam), human one. or this man. No one emphasized the genuine reality of Joshua's humanity as much as Joshua himself.
Every important feature of Joshua ben Adam's life was a scandal.
His conception and birth was surrounded by very irregular, probably tragic circumstances.
The fact that he was a Galilean was a scandal. Galilee was the northern province of Israel whose more rugged and independent spirit was despised by the Jewish elite in Judea. It was taken for granted that no prophet, to say nothing of a Messiah, could ever come from that hillbilly province in the north.
Then there was the scandal of his public ministry. After being baptized by John (a baptism of repentance!) he gained the reputation of "a glutton and a drunk". He scandalized everybody by ignoring the holiness code which forbade, among other things, eating with unclean people. Joshua's radical egalitarianism and non-discrimination were the actions of a man who ignored the canons of honor and shame.
But every other scandal was put in the shade compared with the scandal of his death. He was condemned and executed as just another (dime a dozen in those days) Galilean rabble-rouser. His hanging on a tree was a sign that be was turned by God. So he died utterly discredited, abandoned by all and apparently forsaken by God.
Everything would have ended right there and everybody would soon have forgotten everything about this unfortunate man if it were not for Easter. It was the resurrection which convinced Joshua's totally dispirited little band that Joshua was signally honored by this resurrection by Almighty God. No honor was too great for them to bestow on him. The pressure to embellish his story and to explain away those scandals was too much for them. Finally they even took away the scandal of his being truly human like the rest of us. (Is anyone who is more than human truly human?)
There was one final scandal which was removed in all this: and that was God's own scandal of the resurrection. But the gospel of resurrection did not remain central in the church's life for very long. The central issue became Joshua's divinity and his blood atonement to pay for the sins of the world. In the history of theology, Catholicism's theological center was the Incarnation whilst Protestantism's theological center was the substitutionary blood atonement. The resurrection hardly came into it at all accept in Christian apologies as if the resurrection was there simply to prove the Christian religion's exclusive possession of the truth.
It is the thesis of this Paper that the only way to restore the centrality of the resurrection is to let the scandal of who Joshua ben Adam was stay as it was. I realize that many are apprehensive, even fearful, that the good news contained in the resurrection story is going to be lost unless they hold strictly to that religiously sanitized version of Joshua's life and death. But what this Paper will show is that the resurrection is a far greater story if the scandal of Joshua ben Adam is not dissipated by the misguided effort to embellish his history. When the resurrection is re-told against its genuine historical background, we will recapture the laughter of the greatest scandal of all-the scandal of God's Justice
THE COLLAPSE OF RESURRECTION APOLOGETICS
The one area in which the resurrection has been given a prominent rote is in Christian apologetics. The so-called historical proofs of the resurrection have been marshaled, not to explore the meaning of the mystery itself, but to validate the church's claims about the divinity of Jesus, the authority of the church and its possession of an exclusive and absolute truth. This represents an enormous prostitution of the Word of God.
It is clear from the book Of Acts that the preaching of the Word, the preaching of the gospel, and the preaching of the resurrection was the same thing. The Word Of God was the word of the resurrection. It was an Easter gospel pure and simple. There were no arguments put forward about the divinity of Jesus, much less about his virgin birth. Nothing was said about salvation by blood atonement. There was no teaching about Incarnation or Trinity, both of which were unthinkable to Jews anyway. Now it would be reasonable to expect that this Word of the resurrection should remain central and that everything in the life and thinking of the church would serve this Word. But it was not to be. Claims about the divinity of Jesus. the Trinity, the blood atonement, the sacraments and the authority of the religious hierarchy became the central issues. The resurrection was simply the miracle of all miracles which validated this religious system, and of course, people's subjection to it.
The whole edifice of resurrection apologetics was bound to collapse because it never did have anything to do with faith in the Word of resurrection at all! As we will see, apologetics is the fruit of unfaith, that is to say, it is an expression of unbelief which has only succeeded in producing a great pile of religious manure at the tomb of Joshua ben Adam.
The resurrection is an article of faith like the existence of God. Neither are provable, and if they ware provable they would not be articles of faith. That Joshua ben Adam died was an historical fact openly disclosed to all, followers and opponents alike. But the same thing can never be said about his resurrection from the dead. It is not historically accessible like his death. We are not saying the resurrection is not real, anymore than we are saying that God is not real. But what we are saying is that all attempts to prove that the resurrection was an historical event are as ill-fated as all the attempts to prove the existence of God.
We must go further even and say that the God which is proven to exist by any kind of demonstration would be a God not worth believing in, because a God subject to definitions, propositions, explanations, and human demonstrations would no longer be the God who is infinite, transcendent and unimaginable.
The same is true of the resurrection Of Joshua ban Adam. The kind Of resurrection that is provable from an historical point of view, the one backed up by signs of earthquakes, appearing angels, an empty tomb and tales about fish and chips on the beach is like the God who is humanly provable. Neither are worthy of our credence or allegiance.
Consider the following obstacles which stand in the way of a resurrection which is historically provable:
1. No one witnessed the resurrection of Joshua ben Adam. No one ever came forward to say he or she saw it happen.
2. The four Gospels were written between 70 and 100 AD. They are not eye-witness accounts, and they do not claim to be eye-witness accounts. They contain the traditions of second or third generation Christians writing from 40 to 70 years after the event.
3. Not one among the original group who saw the risen Joshua has left us his statement concerning what he saw. We don't have access to Peter's testimony. There is no record left by James or any of the eleven apostles. We simply have a tradition passed on to us by a later generation that Mary or Peter or some others said that they saw the risen Christ. We have no direct access to the testimony of any of those eye-witnesses.
4. There is one solitary eye-witness in the entire New Testament: he is the apostle Paul, the Diaspora Jew who had never met Joshua ben Adam except in some kind of post-Easter revelation. According to the tradition recorded in the books of Acts, this appearance of the risen one happened to Paul on his journey to Damascus. Paul himself says nothing about the Damascus Rood, but about 50-60 AD he wrote just two brief statements: "I saw the Lord" (1 Corinthians 9:1) and "He appeared to me." ( 1 Corinthians 15:8 ) Those eight words are all that we have from anyone claiming to be an eye-witness of the resurrection. And of course, we need to take into account that Paul does not qualify as an original eye-witness who could say of the Easter event in Jerusalem, "I was there." We are left therefore without a single eye-witness who says, "I was there." We have only got second or third generation reports saying, "Peter said he saw him," "Mary said she saw him" etc. If it came down to a matter of proof in a court of law, how much of the foregoing testimony would qualify as admissible evidence?
5. The only testimony available to us is the testimony of a believing community which was committed to the mission of convincing the world that Joshua ben Adam had risen from the dead. None of the New Testament writers would qualify as detached, unbiased witnesses. We don't have anything from the other side, that is, from the opponents of the Joshua ben Adam movement. They too saw him die. But the risen Joshua did not appear to confront his accusers. He only appeared to a small inner circle of believers. So there is no such thing as heating both sides of the case.
6. Finally, the different New Testament writers give us a very confused and inconsistent account of the resurrection. Their divergent testimony is sometimes impossible to harmonize. On some vital points their evidence is mutually exclusive. The evidence of these discrepancies is not obscure. Anyone with a very modest education can read the four accounts of the resurrection in half an hour and map out the main contradictions within an hour or two, Of course, if one is already convinced that such obvious mistakes could not exist in the inerrant Bible, why look into the proverbial horse's mouth? And who hasn't been guilty of confusing religious gullibility with faith? Anyhow, here is partial list of the problems:
(a) What was the number and identity of Joshua's women friends at the crucifixion and at the tomb? It only takes a few minutes to see that the four Gospel accounts don't harmonize. If you say, "This is a minor point which does not matter," then don't appeal to the evidence of either their number or identity.
(b) Did the women observe the crucifixion and burial from afar, or did they stand close to the cross? The Gospels give the two accounts. If it's not important, then why appeal to this evidence in the first place?
(c) Was the body of Joshua anointed on the Friday afternoon, or did the women come to do it Sunday morning? Again, the Gospels give divergent accounts.
(d) Did one angel or two angels greet the women at the tomb? Or were they young men? There are different accounts.
(e) Did the women (or one woman) see the risen one? Two evangelists say No. Two evangelists answer Yes. Paul apparently sides with the two evangelists who do not include the woman among the witnesses. (See 1 Corinthians 15)
(f) Did the angel/angels or young man/men tell the women that Joshua had risen and then invite them to see the empty tomb, or did the women first find the tomb empty and after that have the celestial messengers tell them that Joshua had risen? Again, one evangelist gives us one account, and the other gives us the order in reverse.
(g) Did an earthquake greet the arrival of the women at the tomb, and was the stone rolled from the mouth of the tomb before or after they arrived? The Gospels give both accounts.
(h) Now for the big one: Did the angels instruct the women to tell the disciples to go to Galilee where he would appear to them, and did these appearances in fact take place in Galilee? Or did the appearances take place in and around Jerusalem? According to Mark who was lair copied by Matthew, the disciples were instructed to go back to Galilee where the risen Joshua would meet them. The journey from Jerusalem to Galilee would take from 7 to 10 days. But according to Luke and John, the appearances did not take place in Galilee, but in and around Jerusalem. Mark and Matthew do not know about any Jerusalem appearances, in fact, they rule them out. This brings us to the discrepancies about the timing of the resurrection appearances.
(i) If the appearances took place in Galilee (at an unnamed mountain according to Matthew). then at least a week would have had to elapse between the actual resurrection and the appearances. But according to Luke and John, the first appearance to the disciples took place in or around Jerusalem the evening of Easter Sunday.
(j) Did Joshua appear to his disciples before he ascended to heaven to receive all power and authority, or did he appear after he was enthroned, glorified, and given all power and authority? Matthew has it one way and Luke another. Is the resurrection and ascension essentially one event (Matthew), or two events forty days apart (Luke - Acts)?
(k) Did the risen Joshua give his disciples the power of the Holy Spirit when he first met with them (John), or did he give them the Holy Spirit 50 days after the resurrection and 10 days after his ascension from Bethany (Luke - Acts)?
(l) Woe the disciples commanded to return to Galilee to meet the Lord and receive the great commission there (Matthew), or woe they commanded to stay in Jerusalem until the coming of the spirit on the day of Pentecost (Luke)? Or did the disciples go back to Galilee, resume their old trade of fishermen, then meet the Lord by the Sea of Tiberius where they got their commission rather than on the mountain? (See John 21, which scholars generally agree is a late edition or appendix to the fourth Gospel.)
While it may be possible to harmonize some of the above points, it is clearly impossible to reconcile mutually exclusive data. The above list is by no means exhaustive, but just a brief summary of the main points. All these points, of course, have been well canvassed in many books written by New Testament scholars. There are not many dinosaurs left who think they can harmonize the four Gospels on the resurrection.
The accounts are so divergent that it does rule out any collusion between the different witnesses. This may impress the jury that the stogies are not the product of a caucus, but it still remains that the resurrection is not accessible to historical proof.
The first Gospel (Mark) was not written until about 40 years after the death of Joshua. The other three followed over the next thirty years. Scholars now agree that the Gospels were confessions of faith coming from divergent Christian groups. They were not intended to be biographies. They contain interpretation of history us well us history, end the element of interpretation was determined to a large extent by the views which had developed in the disparate groups within the early Christian movement. Often the different books tell us more about the beliefs and actual historical situation in the particular group at the time of its writing than the actual historical situation of Joshua ben Adam half a century earlier.
It is not fair when we judge those New Testament books by our canons of historical accuracy or literal interpretation. These people of the first century used midrash and pesha methods to interpret Scripture and tell stories. We live in another kind of world, and it is hard for us to understand how those writers had a liturgical agenda or a midrashic agenda which gave priority to certain meanings rather than to strict historical accuracy. For instance, Matthew may tell us that a sermon or an appearance of Joshua took place on a mountain because this kind of place is full of symbolic meaning for any Jew. He uses the mountain symbolism to make a theological statement rather than an historical one.
I say this to make it clear that I am not scolding the New Testament authors for writing conflicting accounts of the resurrection. It probably would not concern them that their accounts did not tally, because unlike us (who need to be scolded for using the material in a way for which it was never intended) they told folk stories which appeared meaningful to them and seemed to make the mystery of the resurrection more tangible to the common people, most of whom could neither read nor write. Of course the story got embellished! Of course it tended to become hagiography more than biography!
From the standpoint of historical science, how much about the resurrection is provable? We can prove that there were a group of people around 30 AD (give or take a few years) who were convinced that Joshua ben Adam rose from the dead. This faith founded a movement of unstoppable conviction, joy and courage to face torture, death or anything else. They left us their testimony that Joshua had appeared to a small number of their group after he was crucified and buried. That much we can prove. But because that much can be proved beyond a shadow of doubt, it is not an article of faith. Even non-Christians believe that too.
The resurrection has to do with something transcendent and immortal, something utterly beyond our present experience or the capacity of our imagination. How can proof of such a thing be possible? What would constitute proof? What categories of science or any other evidence could we fall back on to prove that which transcends the realm of finite science or anything else within the parameters of human experience? Asking for proof of the resurrection is like asking for proof of the existence of God. If God himself were to tell us that he exists, we would only have his word for it!
It is significant that the ones to whom the risen one first appeared left no written account of it. Apparently they did not believe that the revelation could be adequately expressed in the mundane form of a written text. No one attempted a written account of it until 40 years later! Ah, yes, there was Paul who 20 years later said it all in four words: "I saw the Lord" or "he appeared to me." Beyond that he did not say a thing-- nothing about an empty tomb or a resuscitated corpse who appeared to eat fish and all the rest.
What the first apostles proclaimed was the gospel of resurrection which was called the Word of God. As we showed in our last issue of Verdict, the Word of God cannot be laid out in cold text to be dissected and analyzed, nor can it be reduced to a matter of propositions and descriptions. This is sillier than saying that love and hope and courage and beauty can be encompassed by verbal definitions. Those who stood nearest to the resurrection said the least about it. They did not try to explain it They confronted a reality beyond rational explanation. The hush of awe and wonder remained with the movement for 40 years. The later the accounts of the resurrection, the longer the explanations became. Matthew and Luke's account of the resurrection is twice as long as Mark's; and John's account is longer still.
THE LEGEND OF THE EMPTY TOMB
There were no stories about the empty tomb until Mark wrote his Gospel about 40 years after Easter. In his great chapter on the resurrection in I Corinthians 15. Paul argues for the reality of the resurrection but not for the reality of an empty tomb. According to Paul's reasoning, an empty tomb would serve no useful purpose. He contrasts two very different bodies. There is, he says, a flesh or a flesh and blood body, and there is a spirit body. The first is mortal and corruptible. The other is immortal and incorruptible. The flesh and blood body, says Paul, cannot inherit the life of the eternal kingdom.
Paul uses two analogies to show that there is no continuity between the two different bodies. First he uses the analogy of the grain of wheat which dies before it brings forth an entirely new form of life. But move importantly, he draws an analogy between the resurrection of Christ and the general resurrection of his people. The bodies of those who have died have been devoured by worms, sharks, and fires. The elements of their bodies have been recycled back into the elements of the cosmos. Their resurrection has nothing to do with the resuscitation of their old corpses. Those old mortal flesh and blood bodies do not live again. And if this be analogous to the resurrection of Joshua, why would one think that his earthly flesh and blood body would have to be revived again?
In I Corinthians and I Thessalonians, which represent the earliest Paul, the apostle speaks of the resurrection of the dead in terms of a very traditional Jewish eschatology. He expects to be alive when it happens, as all the first Christians did, because they viewed the resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of his people as being two parts of one end-time event But as Paul's thinking on this question matured, he began to conceive of putting on the new body at the moment of his departure from this life:
For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens...while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord...I.....prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord. (2 Corinthians 5:1-10). But if I live on in the flesh, this will mean fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which to choose...having a desire to depart and be with Christ...yet to remain on in the flesh is more necessary for your sake. (Philippians I: 22-24)
These passages show quite clearly that Paul sees no continuity between the mortal body of flesh (the tent to be dissolved) and the eternal, glorified body. The old tent of the fleshly body is not raised up again. There is no way to fit the notion of a resuscitated corpse into Paul's vision of the resurrection, whether it be the resurrection of Christ or his people. The two must stand together because the first is the pattern of the second. ( see Philippians 3:21 )
If we ask Paul, however, what is a "spirit body" or a "glorified body" or a building of God eternal in the heavens"? He just says it is a mystery. He makes no attempt to explain the new form of the resurrected life, and he would totally agree with that unknown New Testament author who also said, "It does not yet appear what we shall be." (1 John 3:2)
As we have said, the first empty tomb story appears in Mark about 40 years after Easter. We know that Matthew copied Mark about another 15 years on, and he embellished the story even further. By the time the story got to the Fourth Gospel near the end of the century, the risen Joshua not only ate fish with his disciples, but he demonstrated that he had real flesh and bones. He even displayed the marks left in his body by his brutal execution. This added feature of the marks of the crucifixion still on the body became fuel for wild legends saying that Joshua did not die on the cross, but merely fainted and then revived some time later.
If the Roman soldiers had hacked off one of Joshua's fingers in the process of a brutal crucifixion, would he have appeared to his disciples minus a finger? Can this be the "spirit body" or the immortal body of which Paul spoke? Peter was also crucified - upside down as tradition has it -so is he also destined to retain those grim reminders of his execution?
So the further we get away from the original witnesses, the more embellished and fantastic the stories become. Yet these are the "proofs" which have been served up by apologists for the resurrection. When we have to reckon with the scrutiny of modern Biblical scholarship, these embellishments to the resurrection story are not aids to faith but a serious hindrance to it.
THE CRASS RESURRECTION TRADITIONS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
It is not hard to understand how the legends of the empty tomb and the revival of the corpse got started. The authors of these stories succumbed to the demands to answer more and more questions to satisfy human curiosity about the nature of the resurrection. They used some established Jewish traditions close at hand.
Scholars tell us that the idea of the resurrection of dead bodies came from Persia and entered into the Jewish tradition during the inter-Testament period. It made its first appearance in the apocalyptic book of Daniel which was written during the lime of the Maccabees (about 200 BC). In the stream of Jewish apocalyptic literature which followed (Ezdras, Enoch, Jubilees, Testament of Judah, etc), the idea of resurrection was increasingly embellished with descriptions of the resuscitated bodies of the dead. The popular doctrine of resurrection championed by the Pharisees in Joshua ben Adam's day presumed that even a person's sexual nature would be preserved in the resurrected life.
Some lay to defend the "fleshly reality" of the resurrection by appealing to the sanctity of "Hebraic anthropology". It is said that the Hebrews had a holistic or monistic view of man in contrast to the dualism of Greek thinking. It is further argued that this Hebraic view about the oneness of the body and the soul comes with the divine imprimatur.
A few years back, Hebraic thinking became a kind of shibboleth among exponents of Biblical theology. That God communicated his truth to the world in the Hebrew language was taken as an indication that Hebrew thinking about the nature of man and other things was superior to everything else. So Hebraic thought was in; Greek thought was out. This trend was not without some merit, but it got out of hand. Then that formidable Scottish scholar James Barr got out his shotgun and blew all the feathers off this trendy bird so that it could not fly again.
It could just as easily be argued that God communicated a more advanced truth to the world in the Greek language of the New Testament. Does that in any way endorse Greek thinking? Of course not! But as Barr pointed out, the Bible doesn't represent just one strand of thinking when it comes to the nature of man. Various ways of thinking are represented throughout the Bible. Whilst that form of Greek dualism which is totally negative about the body is generally not advocated by the different Bible writers, both Testaments certainly reflect the idea of man being a dichotomy of body and spirit, body and soul or body and mind. For example, The dust shall return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it. (Ecclesiastes 12:7 ), The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak· (Matthew 26:41 ), The spirit fights against the flesh and the flesh fights against the spirit. (Galatians 5:17 ), Though the outward man perish, the inward man is renewed day by day. (2 Corinthians 4:16 ), Do not fear those who kill the body, but are unable to destroy the soul. (Matthew 10:38 ), Deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved...(l Corinthians 5:5 )
Two of the above statements are attributed to Joshua ben Adam. In the light of the above, we would argue that what is preserved in the "resurrection" is not the flesh, the old body, or the outward man, but the spirit, soul, inward man, or essential personal identity. All illustrations will fall short, but I would suggest that in our modem age the computer is a good illustration of the relationship between the body (including the brain) on the one hand and the mind on the other. The body and brain is the organ of the mind just as the computer hardware is the machinery through which the memory is stored. If the computer hardware becomes obsolete, you throw it away but keep the memory or essential data that has been written within it.
Another observation concerns the Hebrew world-view. If the resurrection is supposed to sanction Hebraic anthropology, why wouldn't it also sanction the Hebrew world-view of the three- story universe? Doesn't Luke say that Joshua ascended up to heaven in a cloud? That is the language of a Flat Earth society. It might have been meaningful to ancient man, but a heaven in the sky and a God up there is not a helpful metaphor in this post-Einstein age.
Neither does the word "resurrection" serve us all that well. Wherein it conveys the image of a body emerging from the grave it is false and misleading. Those who insist on sticking rigidly to a language because it is in the Bible could just as well use the language of the Bible to prove that our thought processes and emotions do not take place between our ears, but down in the heart, kidneys and bowels. That is what Bible writers actually believed. But it is easy to demonstrate that Paul was not stuck with the language of resurrection. He found other ways to convey the idea of making the transition from this life to rite next dimension of reality.
In summary, what can we say about this empty tomb tradition? It is fine provided it is nothing more than a metaphor. If it is taken literally, it is a very shaky refuge for faith.
Some scholars suggest that crucified victims were generally not given a proper burial. That was part of the humiliating punishment. These scholars contend that the bodies of the crucified were generally thrown into open pit graves if the carrion and dogs had not already eaten them. Archaeologists have discovered evidence for only one crucified man even though thousands were put to death by this method? But is it all that important whether my remains are eaten by the flames or by the fish? As Luther once said, it would be a foolish soul who wanted to have back the old sack of dung.
Suppose archaeologists did discover the bones of Joshua ben Adam, as some say they have discovered his shroud, would that destroy your faith in the resurrection? Far better a faith which is not at the mercy of someone finding bones or fossils. So whether Joshua's tomb was empty or not is irrelevant
THE BELIEVABILITY OF THE RESURRECTION
What we have said in the forgoing chapters is not designed to weaken, much less destroy any one's faith in the resurrection. The purpose of all that shoveling was to get rid of some accumulated traditions which hide the reality of the resurrection. No point in hiding the light under a manure heap!
One of the most inspiring little books I have ever read on the resurrection is authored by Pinchas Lapide, a non-Christian Jew. It is entitled The Resurrection of Jesus. Whilst Lapide does not believe that Joshua ben Adam was all that be was made out to be, especially by Gentile Christianity, he does believe that Joshua actually rose from the dead. He does not believe all the embellishments of the Gospel accounts. These are what he calls Christian midrash. But he does believe there is a reality behind the appearances of the risen Joshua which will not go away.
Before we get to Lapide's reasons for finding the reports of Joshua's resurrection believable, we observe that he is fully conversant with all the literary problems such as the divergent and irreconcilable accounts of the resurrection given in the four Gospels. Of this he says:
While Paul, who is closest to the events, needs only four sentences (1 Corinthians 15:3-7) to express his faith in the resurrection, Mark, decades later needs eight. After him, Matthew expands the report to 20 verses, followed by Luke who is able to report later more than twice this amount - 53 verses. The Fourth Gospel, edited two generations after Easter, long after the last eye-witnesses were deceased, devotes two full chapters of altogether 56 verses to the theme, in order to describe what its author could know only by hearsay. The later a report, the more is to he narrated; the further the distance from the event itself, the more colorful is the description.
The reason some Gentiles find all this a stumbling block to faith while he does not is because they do not understand the nature of Jewish midrash. Joshua and all his first followers were Jews; in fact, the risen Joshua appeared only to Jews They were all perfectly familiar with midrash. Their native tongue was Aramaic, and they only had access to Aramaic versions of the Scriptures. These translations were called Targums. The Targums were not strict translations, but contained a lot of midrash - a kind of Jewish interpretation/commentary on the original Hebrew text of Scripture which only a few scholars were still able to read.
The Jewish sacred tradition was full of midrash. Lapide gives examples. For instance, the account of man's creation is stated in just a few words. But the Rabbis had traditions which interpreted or expounded the story more fully, such as the saying that God created man last "in order that later on no months can he found which spread the rumor that...Adam had helped him." "Or God created man last so that he would not he arrogant because even the worm was created before him".
In a midrash on the story of Abraham and Isaac, the Jews would read how Satan tempted Isaac to flee from being a willing sacrifice, saying, "Don't you know that this old dumb senile man who calls himself your father is leading you to slaughter? Why should you die in the bloom of your years. You still have a beautiful world before you." etc.
So as the sacred stories were re-told, the teller would bring them alive and make them relevant to the hearers by suitable embellishment and interpretation. Is this not what any good story teller or preacher does even today? He may paint a picture of the experience of the prodigal son, for instance, putting him into a more modem setting so that the hearers can better relate to the story. No one expects him to stay rigidly with the text, but he brings it alive by recasting or even reshaping the original story so as to make it live again in his re-telling. So too when the early Christians told and re-told the story of the resurrection to new audiences in different cultural settings they used midrash. They knew they were using midrash, and their audiences knew they were using midrash.
No, the first evangelists were not indulging in a purely fictional narrative, says Lapide. "To blame the rabbis and evangelists for deception [ on account of using midrash] or to accuse them of lying would have been as foreign to the Jews and Jewish Christians of that time as an accusation of 'embellishment' against Van Gough or of the corruption of history against Shakespeare's Macbeth would be to us." (p. 111)
The fact also that the resurrection of Joshua is not provable is no barrier to Lapide believing it. He says that God exposes himself to skepticism and disbelief because he renounces anything that would compel men to believe. Proof cannot be given of the resurrection. He cites the words of Karl Jaspers: "A proven God is no God." (p. 118-9) Lapide regrets those apologetics which turned the resurrection into "a polemic, spiteful reaction against those who denied the Easter faith" and "objectified [it] into a historical event which supposedly does not need any faith to be considered as true." (p. 99)
*In his little book about the South Pacific, James Michener tells about a Polynesian preacher giving this charming pidgin English "midrash" of Calvary: "Master he look down he see Picaninny belong him in pain too much. He sing out, 'Son, how's things?' Picaninny belong him sing out, 'O.K., Boss!' " (Return to Paradise, p. 157)
Now for the reasons Lapide believes that Joshua ben Adam was raised from the dead:
1. Resurrection is True to the Old Testament Faith.
Lapide acknowledges that the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead solidified late in the history of Israel. Although the clear expression of it appears in the very late book of Daniel. the idea that God will rescue his people out of death is implied in many Scriptures, and re-enforced by stories of Enoch, Moses, Elijah and Elisha. Job expressed the hope of seeing God beyond his present mortal existence. (Job 19:.25-27) Israel's return from captivity was depicted in terms of the Lord opening their graves. (Ezekiel 37:11-14) Isaiah declared, "Your dead will live; their bodies will arise". (Ch. 26:19)
In the inter-Testament period the implication of these and many other Scriptures became the basis of a very strong belief in a resurrection from the dead in the last days, and the possibility that it could happen for special individuals at any time.
2. Resurrection is not Incredible.
Lapide calls attention to the wonder of life arising from dead matter over a period that lasted billions of years. Then "consciousness gradually arose, and out of consciousness, love and self-knowledge...Is not every tree, every flower, and every child a wonder of God..." And then he asks:
Why should the resurrection of a personal ego after passing through death be more miraculous than the gradual awakening of a human being out of the lifeless matter of the fertilized ovum? And if the physicists affirm that in this inexhaustibly large universe not a single ounce of substance is lost but just changes its form, why should the most precious gift that God wanted to give us, a spark from his fire, the breath from his spirit, disappear without a trace after our earthly decease? To argue otherwise would not only give the lie to all confidence of salvation but would also contradict the elementary logic of natural science. Thus the hope of the resurrection is a reasonable faith which should be sufficient for a meaningful, fulfilling life on earth. (p.150-150)
At this point Lapide sounds like Pascal who said that for a person who has died to live again is not more astonishing than having a person who has never lived actually live.
3. The Resurrection is the most Reasonable Explanation for the Transformation of the Disciples.
Whilst Lapide, like all the literary critics, can see the obvious discrepancies and embellishments ("Christian midrash") in the New Testament accounts of the resurrection, he also confesses his belief that there is a hard core reality there which can't be explained away. Included in the New Testament reports of the resurrection are things which would never have been included if the authors were simply trying to fabricate a story. For example, Joshua's terrible cry of God-forsakenness would not have been included in a mere fabrication. It seems to contradict what the disciples believed about him and had come to expect of him. Neither would they have included the testimony of the women in a fabricated story because everybody in that culture knew that the testimony of women was not accepted as credible evidence.
But the big thing which moves this Jewish historian is the astonishing transformation in the disciples. I will quote him at some length because no Christian apologist has ever said it better:.
Despite all the legendary embellishments, in the oldest records there remains a recognizable historical kernel which cannot simply be demythologized. When this scared, frightened band of apostles which was just about to throw away everything in order to flee in despair to Galilee: when these peasants, shepherds, and fisherman, who betrayed and denied their master and then failed him miserably, suddenly could be changed overnight into a confident mission society, convinced of salvation and able to work with much more success after Easter than before Easter, then no vision or hallucination is sufficient to explain such a revolutionary transformation...
If the defeated and depressed group of disciples overnight could change into a victorious movement of faith, based only on autosuggestion or self-deception --without a fundamental faith experience -- then this would be a much greater miracle that the resurrection itself...
Any kind of deception is excluded in any case, be it the theft of the body, trance, or the invention of a miracle...
I cannot believe in the empty tomb nor in the angels in white garments nor in the opening of the heaven nor in the absurd miraculousness of the so-called Gospel of Peter. All that belongs to the pious fraud of later generations which themselves no longer felt the direct impact -- but tried to whip up enthusiasm by means of embellishing the truth. If one removes cautiously all these literary additions, a certain 'something' remains for us which in the apostles' simple manner of expression has been called resurrection.
Lapide almost become amusing when he critiques those Christian demythologizers and liberal scholars who say that Joshua rose "in the kerygma", "in the hearts of his people", or in the sense that his message goes on. To which this Jew responds:
But most of these and similar conceptions strike me as all too abstract and scholarly to explain the fact that the solid hillbillies from Galilee who, for the very reason of the crucifixion of their master, were saddened to death, were changed within a short period of time into a jubilant community of believers...
One thing we may assume with certainty: neither the Twelve nor the early church believed in the ingenious wisdom of theologians[ Indeed, they hardly would have understood what the gentlemen of scholarship want to say in such a roundabout manner...
However, for the first Christians who thought, believed, and hoped in a Jewish manner, the immediate historicity was not only a part of that happening but the indispensable precondition for the recognition of its significance for salvation. For all these Christians who believe in the incarnation ( something which I am unable to do ) but have difficulty with the historically understood resurrection, the word of Jesus of the "blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel" probably applies. (Matt. 23:24 )
Wow !
4. The Resurrection is Consistent with God's Justice.
It is inconceivable to Lapide that God would call man, not just to life, but to consciousness and the knowledge of God, and then abandon him in the grave. If death is the final word in a world exposed to catastrophe and misery then the ground of all hope has fled.
If desertion by God and suffering mortal tortures are the end of a great hope-filled person, how can people continue to hope for goodness and justice amidst a world that remains both inhumane and alienated from God. (p. 146)
In the case of Joshua ben Adam, Lapide sees his death as the senseless killing of a man of God by the religious and civil elite. But something happened in the midst of this tragedy to convince Peter and the others that this martyr's death was not the last word from God. That something was his resurrection.
In other words, can swindlers let themselves be tortured and persecuted in the name of an illusion - up to joyful martyrdom ? (p. 141 )
If God is all-just and all-merciful, then death in this world cannot be the final end. ( p. 54)
This is really Lapide's first and final argument. At this point, Paul the Pharisee would applaud his fellow Jew. If you were to ask the great apostle who God is, he would answer, "God is he who raises the dead". Any other God is not worth believing in.
THE RESURRECTION AND THE SCANDAL OF GOD'S JUSTICE
Justice in the Old Testament
Justice, from the Hebrew tsadaq, is the most important word used by the Old Testament to portray the character of God. It is also the most misunderstood concept of the Old Testament.
Justice, or righteousness, is also the most important word used by the Old Testament to express the essence of the human obligation. But whether tsadaq is referring to God or man, it simply means doing the right thing.
There are two kinds of justice, or two ways in which doing the tight thing is understood. These run right through the Old Testament literature and stand in a real tension to each other.
And it will he righteousness [justice] for us if we are careful to observe all these commandments. (Deuteronorny6:25)
So you shall keep my statutes and my judgments, by which a man may live if he does them. (Leviticus 18:5)
This legal kind of justice is emphasized in the priestly portions of the Old Testament literature. It is all about rewards and punishments, an eye for an eye, atonement or pay-back justice.
We cannot dismiss this kind of justice out of hand as if it served no useful purpose. If Israel was to exist as a civil society, some minimum standards had to be enforced and some external discipline had to be maintained. But as Paul was to observe in his letter to the Galatians, this justice of the law was a temporary, pedagogic regime imposed on minors until they became of age. (See Chapter 3:21-25)
The Old Testament portrays another kind of justice. It is featured in stories of God's mighty ants on behalf of his people. It is often sung about in the Psalms. But above all, it is a justice which is championed by the Old Testament prophets.
This is a justice which means doing the right thing in terms of being faithful to a relationship -which the Old Testament often calls a covenant It carries the idea of loyalty to a personal commitment, faithfulness to a personal promise, and fidelity to personal obligations. This is the justice of love which is illustrated by the covenant of marriage or the obligation of parenthood. It is a justice which transcends all legal categories. It is not based on performance according to legal roles, but it is based on unconditional acceptance, on being there for the other in time of need for better or for worse. This kind of justice does not mean getting even, paying back, making atonement, punishment for mistakes and the like, for --
He has not dealt with us according to our sins,
Nor rewarded us according to our iniquities...
For he knows our frame;
He is mindful that we are but dust. (Psalm 103:10-14)
This is the kind of justice which burned with compassion for a tribe of slaves and acted for their deliverance from oppression in the Exodus from Egypt. God did not do this for them because they were righteous or better than anyone else. He did it because his justice is biased in favor of the poor and the oppressed, the fatherless and the defenseless, and everyone who calls upon him for mercy and forgiveness. For them the justice of God means salvation, deliverance and acceptance. (See Psalm 51:14; 1(13:6; Isaiah 56: 1)
This is the kind of justice which the prophets called the people of Israel to practice. These fearless visionaries for a new kind of social justice poured scorn on Israel's cultic justice. They ridiculed the justice of religious assemblies, offering of sacrifices and the sacred fasts:
Yet they seek me day by day, and delight to know my ways,
as a nation that has done justice,
And has not forsaken the ordinance of their God...
Why have we fasted and thou dost not see?
Why have we humbled ourselves and thou dost not notice? Behold, on the day of your fast you find your desire, And drive hard all your workers..
Is it a fast like this that I choose, a day for a man to humble himself?. Is it for bowing one's head like a reed, and for spreading out sackcloth and ashes as a bed?
Will you call this a fast, even an acceptable day of the Lord?
Is this not the fast which I chose,
To loose the bonds of wickedness,
To undo the bands of the yoke,
And to let the oppressed go free,
And break every yoke?
Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry,
And bring the homeless poor into the house:
When you see the naked, to cover him:
And not to hide yourself from your own flesh? (Isaiah58:2-7)
Perhaps the Old Testament passage which best encapsulates the meaning of God's justice is this one:
"The Lord executes justice.., for all who are oppressed".
(Psalm 103:6)
The Justice of God in ben Adam
With Joshua ben Adam, God's justice and God's kingdom were one and the same thing. (See Matthew 6:33) The good news of the kingdom which was always on his lips was the good news of God's justice. True to that spirit of justice, he went about helping "all that were oppressed" (See Acts 10: 38; Luke 4:18 )
Joshua's method of teaching was parable. He was a master story-teller who would begin by saying, 'There was this man who had two sons..." or 'There was this landowner who needed some hired help..." He was also the master of hyperbole and deliberate exaggeration. Some of his sayings would either make people laugh or gnash their teeth. If his authentic stories don't strike you as being quite outrageous it is either because you can't appreciate the cultural setting of the story or because you have become too accustomed to having the story sanitized by religious dribble. His parables were a calculated, powerful assault on all the accepted canons of justice. He turned everything on its head. The revered role models of his society - priests, Levites, Pharisees, rulers, rich landholders, sons who were obediently respectful of established custom, etc., - became the objects of derision: but those whom society regarded with contempt --wasters, scoundrels, tax-collectors, Samaritans and other bad characters - became unbelievable heroes.
Joshua was also a master of contrast. He set the two kinds of justice - the legal justice of his opponents and the saving justice of his kingdom - on opposite sides of the battle field.
Except your justice exceeds the justice of the Scribes and the Pharisees you shall not enter the kingdom. (Matthew 5:18 )
The justice of the Pharisees was a justice which consisted in strict obedience to the written text. Paul, the Christian Pharisee, called it "the justice based on law" in which he had once been "blameless." (Philippians 3: 6, 9)
Joshua told the story of two men praying at the temple. One was a Pharisee who gave thanks to God for his blameless life according to the stipulations of the Torah. The other was a tax-collector who was so ashamed of his ways that he beat his breast and threw himself on the mercy of God. In this story the villain went home with the status of a man who had done the fight thing, but the man who was blameless in terms of the justice of the law went home condemned.
According to Joshua ben Adam, the justice of God is not the kind of justice which can be weighed out, measured and calculated by any kind of. law. It is not that "eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth" kind of justice spoken of in the law of Moses. It is rather the overwhelming, uncalculating and scandalous generosity that gives and hopes for no repayment returns good for evil, keeps no score of wrongs, sends rain upon the bad people as much as the good, and absolutely never runs out of mercy and the readiness to forgive. God's justice is all this because it is the justice of love, the commitment to save all who are oppressed.
In his story of the father who joyously welcomes home the son who was a waster, there is no suggestion of acceptance based on pay-back justice or atonement for the father's outraged honor. With an almost shameless disregard for his own reputation and dignity - luxuries which love cannot afford - he runs to welcome home the waster as if he is some kind of hero. The docent, law-abiding older brother is offended by what he perceives as the father's total disregard for the canons of justice. ( Is this waster about to get another bite at the family estate? ) Unless we have some empathy for the older brother's grievance we haven't begun to understand the quite outrageous nature of the story.
By this and other brilliantly crafted stories, Joshua penetrates to the heart of the cancerous "justice of the law". His is not an attack on the law as such, for he knows that no society is going to exist without minimum standards about what is tolerable within a society. That is not the issue. What Joshua exposes is using the law (which in his context includes religion, doctrines, and theology as well as ethics) as the mediating agent of personal relationships, whether with God or neighbor. When the law is allowed to intrude as the mediating agent in human relationships, it not only keeps us at arms length from God, but it keeps us at aims length from our brother, father, wife or any other neighbor. It intrudes as a barrier preventing the immediacy of an unbrokered relationship. When law is allowed to determine the way we relate to other people, we cannot help but be judgmental, unforgiving, discriminatory, and above all, falling to be caring and compassionate. First the justice of the law brings division and separation, then despising others and hatred, and finally persecution and killing them in the name of God and the law. In short, the justice of the law makes us inhuman. It not only hides us from our own flesh according to the complaint of the prophet Isaiah (Chapter 58.'7), but it hides us from God. It puts us in an isolation cell, which is exactly what every religious cult happens to be!
All the world is queer except you and me,
And even thou art a little queer..
Joshua told the story of the Pharisee and the tax-collector for the benefit of those who were confident they were just whilst they despised others. But the story shows that one can do the fight thing (justice) or one can despise others, but one cannot do both.
In the story about the two brothers - the waster and the one who was obediently correct - it is shown that the brother who was "faithful" to the law never had a loving bond either with his father or his sibling. When the father tried to remonstrate with him saying, "Son, you have always had me with you", that apparently did not count for a thing. He only wanted the justice of the law. This attitude cut him off from any sympathy with his brother. It shut him out of fellowship with his father. He didn't enjoy the music and dancing of the party. He had nothing to celebrate. The justice of the law had put him in an isolation cell.
When Joshua talked about the kingdom of God being present, what be meant was that God's justice was to become visible and given a human face. This cannot happen by our being legalistic, religious or perfectionist, but by being truly human in God's image and likeness. In the first place this means admitting our finitude, our frailty, our need of deliverance from the things which oppress us. Then as we receive, we are called to be just us willing to pass it on. "Freely you have received, freely give."
Being human is just like having two arms. With the one we receive and with the other we give. To be human is to be weak and helpless. We not only need God; we need others and cannot live without them. Even if one just wants to make money and have a good time, one needs others to do that. But to be human also means to have remarkable abilities to help others. 80 being human means to be totally dependant and rich in ability at the same time.
According to Joshua, we give God's justice a human face by being endlessly forgiving, unconditionally accepting, and graciously non-judgmental. It means living without looking down on any person as inferior or up to anyone as superior. It means being willing to relate to others without religious tests, without titles, without any thought of pay-lack justice. God's grace may be scandalously free, but it is not cheap. It is a hard act to follow, in fact it is an impossible act to follow unless we can believe in our hearts that God's justice is something which never falls or runs out but triumphs over any human tragedy, including especially the tragedy of death. This brings us to consider the final showdown between the justice of the law and the justice of God.
Part 9b
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No Living By the Book
CHAPTER 1 : BEN ADAM AND SCRIPTURE
Rabbinic Judaism and classical Protestantism had this in common -- they both held a high view of their sacred Scriptures, and they both aspired to be a religion of the book.
Not so with Joshua ben Adam and first century Christianity!
Joshua ben Adam was certainly well enough versed in Scripture to meet Bible-quoting Rabbis on their own ground. In these cases he used Scripture with great creativity and originality, especially to show that the spirit of Scripture must take precedent over the legal requirements of the written text. For example, mercy must take precedence over sacrificial requirements, human need must come before Sabbath regulations and love of neighbor has to be seen as the whole point of the Law and the Prophets. In some cases, Joshua did not hesitate to say that some laws or actions of the ancient Scriptures were no longer appropriate -- such as "an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth" justice, or acts of destroying people's lives.
There were four aspects of Joshua's public ministry which put him completely at odds with Judaism's religion of the Book:
1. As a sage and story-teller, Joshua did not take his point of departure by using a text of Scripture. In his core sayings and parables, the Scripture is conspicuous by its absence.
2. The province where he spent most of his public life and drew most of his support was in Galilee. This was a region noted for its more cavalier or lax attitude toward the religious traditions of Judaism. The crowd who followed Joshua, for instance, was declared to be under a curse because they were ignorant of the Torah or holy Scripture. (See John 7:49 ) There is no evidence that Joshua assumed the role of a Bible teacher to remedy their Scriptural deficiency. It is significant that the only people he chided for their ignorance and misuse of Scripture were the orthodox elite.
3. Joshua did not write anything, nor did he instruct his apostles to write down what he said or did. The creation of the New Testament was no part of Joshua ben Adam's vision, so consequently we are left without a single eye-witness to his history. This man had a profound antipathy toward a religion of the Book.
4. Joshua was continually challenged, "By what authority do you say this or do that". He never answered by appealing to the authority of the Bible. He laid no claim to a vision nor to any kind of special revelation. As Albert Nolan has brilliantly put the matter. But did Jesus claim authority, any kind of authority at all, even implicitly? Would it not be closer to the truth to say that what makes Jesus immeasurably greater than any other man is precisely the fact that he spoke and acted without authority and that he regarded "the exercise of authority" as a pagan characteristic (Mark 10:42 Parr)
I can find no evidence that Jesus ever expected his audience to rely upon any authority at all - either his own or that of others. Unlike the scribes, he never appeals to the authority of the Rabbinic traditions, nor even the authority of Scripture itself. He does not expound the truth by interpreting or commenting upon the sacred text. His perception and teaching of the truth is direct and unmediated. He does not even lay claim to the authority of a prophet, the authority which comes directly from God. Unlike the prophets he does not appeal to a special prophetic calling or to a vision in order to authenticate his words. He never uses the classical prophetic introduction, 'God says...' And he refuses to produce any kind of sign from heaven to prove that he can speak in the name of God. In the end, when he is faced direly with the question of what authority he might have, he refuses to answer the question (Mark 11:33 Parr). People were expected to see the truth of what he was doing and saying without relying upon any authority at all. Linnemann, in her brilliant study of Jesus' parables, concludes that "the only thing that could give weight to the words of Jesus were the words themselves" .
Jesus was unique among the men of his time in his ability to overcome all forms of authority-thinking. The only authority which Jesus might be said to have appealed to, was the authority of the truth itself. He did not make authority his truth, he made truth his authority. And in so far as the authority of God can be thought of as the authority of truth, Jesus might be said to have appealed to, and to have possessed, the authority of God. But when we speak of the authority of truth (and therefore the authority of God) we are once again using the word "authority" as a metaphor. Jesus did not expect others to obey him; he expected them to 'obey' the truth, to live truthfully. Once again it would be better to speak about power here rather than authority. The power of Jesus' words was the power of truth itself. Jesus made a lasting impact on people because by avoiding all authority-thinking he released the power of truth itself—which is the power of God and indeed the power of faith. (Jesus Before Christianity, pp. 121-124)
CHAPTER 2 : PAUL AND SCRIPTURE
Paul uses three Greek words which are related to Jewish Scripture -- the only Scripture then in existence for either Jew or Christian.
The first is the word nomos, translated as law. This meant the Jewish Torah. In its narrower sense, the Torah meant the five books of Moses. But in the broader sense it meant the entire corpus of Jewish Scripture. (See John 15:24 and Galatians 3:21-23; 4: 21-30 for examples of how Law and Scripture are used interchangeably.)
The second word Paul uses is gramma It is generally translated as written code. A more exact translation would be written text. In Romans 7 Paul uses nomos and gramma ( law and written text ) to mean the same thing. That is to say, living by the written text is living under the law.
The third word is graphe. It means writing or Scripture. In one place in the New Testament gramma is translated as Scripture, and in many other places the verbal form of gramma refers to what is written in holy Scripture.
The point is that all three words ~ law, written text and Scripture -- are closely related and are sometimes used interchangeably. This may seem a very simple, even obvious point, but in the entire Christian tradition the radical implications of this point have been completely passed over. The Protestant tradition especially, with its great veneration of the Bible as the rule of life, has gone completely contrary to Paul.
When Paul declares that believers in the gospel of Christ are not obligated to live by the law or the written text of the Jewish Torah, he means that they are not obligated to live by the Scriptures as a rule of life. For sure, Paul could appeal to the Scripture as a witness to Christ and as something that has been fulfilled by Christ. He could call it holy Scripture, just as he could declare that the law was "holy, just and good." Law or Scripture was an agent or child-minder put in charge until the coming of Christ (Galatians 3:21-25). But whether Paul talks in terms of the law, the written text, or Scripture, he is adamant that the Christian does not live by these things as a rule of life.
Consequently one can read through all of Paul's letters to the young churches, and never once does he rebuke them for neglecting to live by the Scriptures, nor does he exhort them to a more diligent study of it. He lists many of their faults - in one letter a list of about twenty-two and in another about eighteen -- but any suggestion of their failure to live up to the instructions of holy Scripture is never mentioned. The reason ought to be obvious. Paul did not believe in living according to the written text of a book, but by faith in the living Christ and the leading of the Spirit. (See Galatians 2:19~20; 3: 21-25; 5:18)
How could a devout Jew such as Paul, and a Pharisee at that, ever come to take the radical position that living in faithful obedience to the written text was no longer appropriate? How could he dare to say that living by the Torah or holy Scripture was like a woman living under a tyrant husband (Romans 7), or like being kept in the servitude of a childminder or even a jailer? (Galatians 3: 21-24)
So how, we ask again, did Paul start relating to the Bible so differently? What made him change his mind? It is not enough to say that the change was brought about by his new found Easter faith because his opponents in the Jerusalem church were believers in the Easter faith too. We will miss an important point here if we rush to the superficial answer that he was taught this law-free gospel by revelation, and that was all there was to it.
I want to suggest that Paul was led to change his view of Scripture just as other Christians have been dragged kicking and screaming to change their view of Scripture. How did Christians get rid of their Flat Earth world-view? Not by more Bible reading, surely! Luther chided Copernicus as "that big fool " for saying that the earth went around the sun. He scornfully dismissed the great man on the authority of the Bible which said that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth. How come that eventually all Christians came to side with Copernicus rather than Luther on the matter of the new cosmology? They simply adjusted their interpretation of Scripture to meet the historical reality of the new facts.
Or take the matter of the age of the earth. For 90% of its history, the church has believed in a very young earth. Until the age of Darwin -- another big fool in the estimation of most churchmen of his day -- it was orthodoxy to believe in a world that was about six thousand years old. Most Christians now, in this age of the Hubble telescope, have come to terms with an enormously expanded concept of space and time. To match the new scientific world-view, Christians generally no longer interpret the first book of the Bible literally. If they lake: the creation story seriously at all, it is interpreted as religious poetry or liturgy. Did Christians come to this new position by studying the Bible? You'd have to be joking! Rather, they were overtaken by the march of history which compelled them to interpret the Bible differently.
For nearly two millennia the church used the Bible to legitimize religious intolerance, the institution of slavery, and the deprivation of all kinds of human rights, especially the rights of women. As late as the first half of this century the Popes were still denouncing the right of freedom for the individual conscience as a pestilent error because it allowed everyone go to hell in his own way. Less than two hundred years ago churchmen were still waving the Bible around in support of slavery. Doesn't even the Ten Commandments say to let slaves have a Sabbath rest? Not emancipation, just a day of rest! Doesn't Paul instruct slaves to obey their masters, and masters to treat their slaves kindly? As for women, the New Testament seems clear enough. "I do not allow a woman to teach." "Let women be silent in the church, and if they have any questions, let them ask their husbands at home."
There are not many Christian dinosaurs left who want to live by the letter of holy Scripture on any of the above points. What caused Christians to start discovering religious tolerance, a case for abolishing the institution of slavery or equal rights for woman in the Bible? Obviously these new ways of reading the Bible were forced upon the church by the march of history. The old views had simply become incompatible with a more enlightened human consciousness which grew out of the historical process. Change was not brought about by new revelations coming from the Bible. It was simply a matter of historical reality forcing Christians to interpret their Bibles in a way that was more compatible with an age of scientific and social progress.
And so it was with Paul too. Even before he became a Christian the gospel had been making significant inroads among the Gentiles. According to Acts 10, Gentile believers received the witness of the Spirit without becoming converts to the Jewish Torah. These new historical events demonstrated to Paul that God made no distinction between people on the basis of whether or not they kept the Law. So he adjusted his interpretation of Scripture to comport with historical reality. Some of his Jerusalem brethren were slower to sense this new direction of history, and some of them never did accept the law-free gospel going to the Gentiles.
Besides finding a few things in the Old Testament which could legitimize the new situation - such as the story of Abraham believing God and being counted righteous before he was circumcised-- Paul found things in his own Rabbinic tradition to legitimize the new situation. To start with, the best Rabbinic tradition said that Gentiles were not required to become Jews and keep the Law in order to share in the life of the world to come. This tradition said that if they lived by the general revelation given in the Noachian commandments, God would accept them.
Further, there was a Rabbinic teaching which said that those who died were no longer under the Law. So Paul argues in Romans 7 that believers have been mystically united to Christ's death and are therefore no longer under the Law. And finally, there was a tradition among some Rabbis which said that the Law would be superseded in the new age of the Messiah. So Paul could reason that the Law was in place only until the coming of the Messiah, and now that he has come "we are no longer under the supervision of the Law." (See Galatians 3:19-25)
Yet the impact of the new historical developments in the world cannot fully explain Paul's passion far the law-free Gospel, nor the vehemence with which he defends it. To appreciate this we have to look at Paul's own personal history. This is what lay behind his great antipathy to life under the authority of the written text of the Torah. As Paul presents it, his very dedication and zeal for the Law turned him into a persecutor of innocent people. As he describes the situation in Romans 7, the Law had such complete dominion over him, that he could not see that anything was sin unless he could read it in the written text, and he could not see that anything was good unless that too was spelled out to him in the Book. The good that in his inmost soul he aspired to do he did not do, and the evil which he hated he did in spite of himself. Like every pious Jew, he aspired to have the Law clothe him as with a robe of honour, but instead he was forced to lament to that it clung to him like a wretched, stinking corpse.
Paul was not arguing that the Law was an ass, but that it deceived him and made him into a religious ass who went on a rampage causing havoc and harm to innocent people. Paul did not discover what evil was by an even more scrupulous attention to the Book of rules, but by confronting a superior society and a new kind of humanity which could even forgive and accept him in spite of his crimes against the risen one and his people.
The worst evils are not committed by those who say, "An evil force made me do it", but by those who like Paul the persecutor say, "God made me do it". "The Bible made me do it." "The Law made me do it." "I was just carrying out orders from above." That's what all the men at Nuremberg said before they were hung. And what did good John Calvin say when he burned Severtus at the stake for denying the Trinity? "The Bible made me do it." What was Luther's excuse for his disgraceful conduct with Zwinglius over the Lord's Supper? "The Bible made me do it." What reason did that JW father give for letting his daughter die for want of a blood transfusions "The Bible made me do it." The pages of history are stained with the inhumanities, persecutions, injustices and just plain follies of Christians trying to live by the Bible.
The classical Protestant doctrine of "the second use of the Law" (meaning that the Law's function is to point out sin) is a complete fallacy. It is based on an interpretation of Romans 7:6 and Galatians 3:24 which has nothing to do with the real historical context. As for the classical doctrine of the so called "third use of the Law", ( meaning the Law is a rule of life) that is what Paul's opponents were teaching among his converts at Galatia. Damn you Judaizers, he wrote in letters of fire. Damn your living by the rules of the Torah. Damn your keeping holy days. Damn your circumcision. I hope you put your sharp knives to better use and lop it all off! That was the gist of his protest.
In short, Paul was vehemently against living under the Law. He was against the ethics of a written text. He wouldn't have a bar of a rule-book religion. If we don't understand this we haven't even gotten into the vestibule of Paul's house of thought. As for Christians making a new Law out the things Paul wrote in one- off letters, that would have to be the ultimate betrayal of the man and the most appalling use of his writings. It would be like turning Adam Smith's libertarian economics into a socialist text book in the academy of Karl Marx.
CHAPTER 3 : THE FOURTH GOSPEL AND SCRIPTURE
The so called Gospel of John (author/authors unknown) was written about the end of the first century AD. It is generally recognized as the most anti-Jewish document in the New Testament. It reflects the complete break which had recently been made between the synagogue and the church.
Up until the disastrous war with the Romans in 70 AD, a conflict which resulted in the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, the Jewish wing of the church had continued to participate in Jewish life and worship. The Nazarenes, as they were generally called, for the most part lived amicably with their fellow Jews. After all, the Nazarenes were just one of many Jewish sects which were tolerated within Judaism.
After the destruction of the temple, this relatively relaxed attitude toward divergence from orthodoxy began to change. When the national identity was threatened by the dissolution of the temple cult, the nation felt that it could not afford the luxury of division. It seemed too that Judaism had lost almost everything which held it together and gave it a sense of identity except its sacred Scripture. At this time of crisis, Rabbinic Judaism, emphasizing a religion of the Book, assumed the ascendancy.
On the other hand, the church was teaching that the Book had found its true meaning and fulfillment in Christ. For the church, Torah had taken a very subordinate position to him. This caused a growing tension with Rabbinic Judaism. Eventually, round about 88 AD., the Jewish Christians were expelled from the synagogues. That was the situation which formed a back-drop to the Fourth Gospel.
The Book of Jubilees, written way back in the second century BC, had declared that the Torah was the agent by which God created the world. Torah was also said to be the light which lights every man coming into the world. So too a lot of other teaching within Judaism likened the Torah or Scripture to the bread and the water which had miraculously sustained Israel in the wilderness for forty years. The Torah was lauded with such titles as the good Shepherd and Light of the world. All this was re-emphasized by Rabbinic Judaism in the post- 70 AD era.
The Fourth Gospel takes up Judaism's expressions of praise for the Torah, and systematically applies them all to Christ. He, and not the Bible, is the Word of God. He, and not the Torah, is the agent through which God created the world. He, and not the Torah, is the true Light which lights every man coming into the world. He is the true Bread from heaven which gives eternal life. He, and not the Book, is the Light of the world, the Water of everlasting life, good Shepherd and everything else claimed for the Torah.
The Fourth Gospel accuses Rabbinic Judaism of searching the Scriptures in the mistaken belief that in them they find eternal life. (See John 5:39) Life, according to this Gospel, is found in a Person, not in a Book. So too, the revelation of God takes place in the flesh of a living Person and not in a Book. Only the son of God can make the Father known, and whoever sees the son sees the invisible God. That is the theology of "John".
The Fourth Gospel is a sharper and more sustained refutation of the religion of a book than Paul's. Without a shadow of doubt, the church at the close of the first century was not advocating a religion of a book. The church in this era had no New Testament to replace the Old. The widely scattered groups had at best only small pieces of what later became the New Testament, and some of them had none of what was later included in the Canon.
CHAPTER 4 : THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION AND SCRIPTURE
How did the Christian Church, especially in the Protestant version of sola scriptura, manage to do a full circle back to Judaism's religion of the book? What led it to develop a Christian "Torah" in the place of the Jewish one, and thereby substitute a new tyranny in the place of the old one?
Even in political revolutions there is a natural tendency for today's liberator's to become tomorrow's oppressors. Each revolution tends to evolve into a new establishment. The protesting sect becomes an established church which then lives to defend its own orthodoxy against the new sect. So what happened to the original Christian movement is nothing new. Even Chairman Mao searched for a key to an on-going revolution which eluded the other Communist regimes.
What we want to do in this section is to understand the dynamics at work in the subtle substitution of religion in the place of revelation, of Torah in the place of the living Word, and salvation by a system instead of salvation by faith.
(a) The Failure of Tradition
In his book, The Meaning and End of Religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith points out that no great spiritual leader founded a religion or preached one. On the contrary, he says, "they severely criticized or attacked the religious environment in which they found themselves." (p. 128) For example, "Zarathushta did not preach a religion. The only religious traditions and practices that he knew he attacked, with an ardor born of his vivid faith." (Ibid. p. 88.)
Zarathushtra, Buddha and Joshua ben Adam did not believe that ultimate truth can be adequately expressed in the mundane form of a written text. Theirs was a new and dynamic vision, a personalized encounter with something or Someone ultimate and transcendent. Their charismatic insight, conviction and faith moved others to follow in their footsteps. In each case a movement was born.
Wanting to cherish the insight and faith of their prophet, the followers would begin the process of gathering the memories of the teaching, and embarking on a process of conceptualizing, systematizing, creedalizing and institutionalizing their particular spiritual tradition.
This written out teaching or instruction is what the Hebrews called Torah. (Torah literally means teaching or instruction.) Its force is somewhat diminished when translated into the Greek word nomos, and then further diminished when translated again into the English word law. So when we read the word law in our English New Testaments, we need to be aware that it means religious teaching, and not just the rules of that teaching but the stories as well. (See Galatians 4 as a good example of how Law includes not just rules but stories too.)
The Torah - the written text of the religious tradition - is at best a witness to the living Word, but at worst it becomes a substitute for it. Devotion to the religious tradition has a tendency to take the place of the living encounter which gave birth to the tradition in the first place.
The New Testament, of course, proclaims that salvation comes by faith in Christ rather than by doing the works of the Torah. The new community of faith soon became altogether too confident that they could tell the difference between faith in Christ and devotion to a Torah. They could not see that they were developing a Christian Torah to replace the Jewish one. Faith was too easily substituted for the faith, that is, the Christian teaching or instruction. Salvation by faith in Christ came to mean salvation by making all the right noises about Christ. Hence the endless disputes and Church Councils defining ever more precisely the person of Christ, his two natures and his position in the Trinity. All this became another Torah to live by and another religion to follow as a means of salvation.
Take as another example, the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone. Being acceptable to God in spite of his being unacceptable came to Luther with the power and conviction of a mighty personal revelation. The spirit of his faith attracted a following and spawned a movement. His insight into the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith alone was systematized, creedalized, sloganized and institutionalized. This created a Lutheran Torah. Then it became all too easy to put faithful adherence to this teaching in the room of the original spirit of faith.
As W.C. Smith puts it, "Some even talk of being saved by Christianity, instead of by the only thing that could possibly save us, the anguish and love of God...A Christian who takes God seriously must surely recognize that God does not give a fig for Christianity...God does not reveal religions; he reveals himself...faith...is concerned with something, or someone, that far transcends anything that be denominated a religion". (Ibid, 127-8)
I remember encountering a clergyman who was deeply committed to the Westminster Confession of faith. He confided to me that he was experiencing considerable angst keeping his congregation straying from the Confession, including practical matters such as the role of women in the church. He was amazed by my suggestion that living under the rigid rule of Westminster Torah was no different in principle to living under any Torah, including the Jewish one.
(b) The Failure of Written Text
It appears that the early church understood Paul and the Fourth Gospel's break with the Law only on a very superficial level. In the climate of anti-Semitism which deeply infected the church, it became all too easy to think that it was the Jewish character of the Law which made it an instrument of bondage. Early church fathers such as Ignatius, Justin and Irenaeus railed against any "Judaizing" Christians who were still disposed to live according to Jewish ways. On the authority of St. Paul, life "under the law" was said to be cursed, presumably because it was Jewish. But at the same time these church fathers saw nothing wrong is subjecting their communities to the rigid rule of new Christian laws. Whilst they derided the observances of the Jewish calendar, they imposed the most stringent observances in respect of the Christian calendar. The hair-splitting doctrines of the church (orthodoxy) became more oppressive than the Rabbinic stipulations about right living (orthopraxy)..
Christianity failed to understand Paul's critique of life "under the law." He did not break with his old existence because it was Jewish. That part to him remained "holy, just and good" The deficiency of the law, according to Paul, lay in its form as "written text." (See Romans 7 and 2 Corinthians 3 ) No written text can give life, says Paul, not even if it is written by the super apostles in Jerusalem! Not even if it is written with God's own finger like the Ten Commandments! And we might add, Not even if there was a verbally inspired Bible! ( John 5:39) The real new testament, declares Paul in his letter to the Corinthians, cannot be written in ink. It can only be written by the spirit of God in people.
That which is laid out in a written text is laid out like a corpse. It may have the form of the truth just as a corpse has the form of a person. This may sound like a harsh judgment, but what it is intended to show is that the written text is an inadequate vehicle for the spirit of God. It should never be equated with God's Word which the New Testament says is "spirit and life."
Human life too transcends any written code. Millions of laws are enacted, revised, updated and redrafted through the legislative bodies of the world. The task is never done because it is not possible to create a system of law which does justice to the infinite variety of human situations. There will always come a time when carrying out the written code will lead to the neglect or abuse of the neighbor; there will always be a situation when blind obedience to what is written will be without human sensitivity and compassion, even (or especially) when it is God's law. As an old wisdom saying puts it, "Law is for the guidance of the wise and for the blind obedience of fools."
Spirit is always greater than letter. In his epic Chesapeake, James Michener tells the story of how a little Quaker woman was the first to raise her voice against the institution of slavery in the United States. Churchmen tried to silence her with Biblical proof-texts in support of slavery. "Won't you agree, - they argued with her, "that you contradict St. Paul. She frankly acknowledged that she did, but said that slavery was clearly contrary to the spirit of the Nazarene Teacher. In the Christian culture of her day, it took a lot of courage and conviction to place spirit in opposition to the written text.
If living by the law proves inadequate even in civil life where the rule of law is pre-eminently suited, it is even more inadequate in the spiritual life. The regime of a Torah may make a person religious but it cannot make a person spiritual.
Perhaps the only domain where the law is suited for having absolute jurisdiction is in playing games or on the sports field. No game is possible without rules, and being victor or victim according to the arbitrary rules is the nature of the game.
I can’t resist making a comment on literary research, especially the Jesus research. Some of the scholars working in this field are big on what have been called "the rules of the road," that is, the scholarly methodology. They work to a kind of literary Torah to identify the authentic sayings of Jesus—such as the law of embarrassing information, the law of multiple attestation, etc. These may be useful tools, and I for one am very grateful for the valuable material gathered by those using the tools of form criticism, redaction criticism, historical criticism, etc. But there are times when the best laws of literary criticism break down too and can even get in the way of getting to the historical Jesus. One proof of that is that some of the best books of scholarly information end up being quite depressing rather than liberating. They fail to keep their scholarly rules subordinate at all times to the spirit of the man whose history they are trying to recover.
Take as an example the Matthean passage which has Jesus say, "You are petros [meaning rock], and upon this rock I will build my church." The old Protestant argument about two different rocks in this statement, a petros masculine rock and a petra (feminine) rock, is literary nonsense because of course the first word rock had to be masculine because it was the name of a man. The statement is just a neat literary play on words. But the Catholic use of this Scripture flies in the face of the whole spirit of this son of man whose entire life and teaching was against any hierarchal orders of superiors and inferiors. The very idea of Joshua ben Adam designating a chief apostle among the rest is a total misfit. The statement from Matthew was written at a time when some Christians were in serious contention as to whether Peter or Paul was the leading authority in the church. Matthew simply reflects the view of mainstream Jewish Christianity. The disputed statement cannot be authentically attributed to Joshua ben Adam because it is totally alien to his spirit no matter what all the Torahs of literary analysis might say on the point. So if one is to dig in the cave of history for the authentic Joshua ben Adam, let him use the best tools available in literary and historical criticism, but let him also understand that most of all the cave needs to be illuminated with the candle of Joshua ben Adam’s spirit.
If the human spirit transcends the confines of any written code, if not even God can make a law which is adequate for every human situation, then how can mere Scripture encompass the spirit and life of God's Word? Is this to be reduced to a mere propositional revelation, and laid out in a cold text to be analyzed and dissected? "Forgive them, for they know not what they do!"
(c) The Failure of Vertical
According to the psychologist Julian Jaynes (The Birth of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind), prior to the birth of human consciousness, humans lived by the voices of a bicameral mind. Those voices re-enforced the commands passed down from gods, kings, priests and superiors. There was no individuality, no freedom, no guilt. It was essentially an animal existence which was lived out according to the pecking order of a vertical authority.
Since the birth of human consciousness in the breakdown of this bicameral mind, human societies and groups nave been prone to search for the security of those authoritative voices, whether in dreams, incantations, ritual, hallucinations, hypnotism, priests, holy books or even drugs. There is a longing to creep back into the womb of that lost paradise of innocence where we don't have to take the responsibility for discerning between good and evil. The freedom to be human is too terrifying. We would rather follow orders from authority figures and systems.
The basis of all authority in religion is the monarchical sky-God. Since he is in heaven and not on earth, the Christian religion says that the church or the Bible - or both - exercise infallible authority in his name and during his absence.
Living under the law, the written text, or Scripture - all the same thing- is living under a vertical authority. If, as Nolan says, Joshua ben Adam rejected all forms of authority thinking, then he rejected living by all vertical authorities which have their basis in the world-view of a monarchical sky-God. A vertical authority makes freedom impossible, and in that it makes freedom impossible, it makes love impossible, because love is not commendable.
If we are to be truly human, the monarchical images of the sky-God must go, and the supremely human One in whose image and likeness we are made must be allowed to relate to us without the mediation of an imposed authority. That includes the Bible.
It is doubtful whether Paul or any other New Testament writer thought through the failure of the law in terms of it being a verbal authority. A lot more water would have to flow under the bridge of human history before the inhuman character of all vertical authorities would be demonstrated.
(d) The Failure of an Exclusive Revelation
The core reason why Christianity returned full circle to become a religion of the Book was the absolutist and exclusive claims it made concerning the person of Christ.
We have seen that the first century closed with the Fourth (Gospel refuting Rabbinic Judaism's claim that divine revelation - God's word, light and life - is disclosed in a Book . Divine revelation, declares the unknown author, takes place in a person.
So far so good. In that it placed the locus of divine revelation in a living person rather than in a book, the primitive church was true to Joshua ben Adam's radical break with the world of religion. But the meaning of Joshua's gospel about God's kingdom being present on this earth in and through people was given a turn of interpretation which destroyed Joshua's vision. It happened when the church began making the claim that the revelation of God in and through human flesh was exclusive to one person. Higher and higher claims were made for this man until he became God in the highest sense, the second member of the divine Trinity.
How a humble Galilean man who shunned all titles of honour was finally proclaimed by his followers to be God in the highest sense is an astonishing religious development. Many scholars now agree that the deification of this historical man could not have taken place among his original Jewish followers. No face-value reading of the Synoptic Gospels (written between 70-90 AD) indicate that these Jewish Christian authors were claiming that Joshua ben Adam was God. A "prophet mighty in word and in deed", yes! "A man approved of God," "chosen of God," "anointed of God" (Messiah) and "son of God", yes!
The term "son of God" had been used in the Old Testament to apply to Israel and to the anointed king, meaning Messiah. Then there is the further historical evidence that the Ebionites, the Jewish descendants of the original Jerusalem church, refused to be reconciled to the Christology of the Gentile church.
All the evidence indicates that it was Gentile Christianity which transformed the meaning of "the son of God" using the thought forms of a culture permeated with myths of gods who sired human sons who also died and rose to whence they came. The emperor too was worshipped as the divine "son of God." This was a culture which regularly fumed their legendary heroes and their great ones into gods. It was in this milieu that Gentile Christianity transformed Joshua ben Adam into the Jesus God of Christian myth.We need to be aware too of the images of God and the world-view which logically demanded the religious myth which developed. Given the images of a God separated from us by an infinite gulf, who else could pay for sin and bridge the infinite gulf between heaven and earth but a redeemer who was not just a man but God himself?
Even today where this religious world-view prevails, the most urgent questions to be addressed are these: What about Christ's vicarious role? His sacrificial role? What about his bridging the gap between heaven and earth? Of getting us to heaven? Of making us acceptable to God? Of resolving the tension between God's vengeance and God's love? Of undoing the effects of the Fall -- original sin, the curse of death and the essential absence of a God who lives in heaven rather than in this abandoned leper colony of a world?
These are powerful religious images. The Jesus myth sprang from the pressing need to craft a Jesus who answered these questions. He had to be God to answer the questions posed by that world-view. Hence the success, the superiority and the triumphalism of the Christian religion.
The valid contribution of the Christian faith was the insight that God reveals himself in a living person rather than in any sacred icons, including a book. The Achilles heel of the Christian religion was in making the revelation of God exclusive to one person. The consequences of this was an absolutist and exclusive religious system which denied the possibility of salvation or any true knowledge of God outside of the Christian faith.
With the exclusive status of Jesus firmly established at the center of the church's faith, salvation too was dependent upon making all the right noises about the person of Christ. His pre-existence, his virgin birth, the hypostatic union of two natures in one person and his place in the Trinity had to be meticulously defined by Church Councils and Creeds over a period of about four hundred years. It all had to be nailed down to the detail of a diphthong in the Greek language. Anyone who erred in the least degree in any decree concerning Jesus' place in the Godhead was counted as cursed by God and deserving the severest censure of the church. It was only a matter of time before the church saw itself as God's agent to enforce this absolutist system on pain of death.
It was the church's exclusive Christology which drove it to create an elaborate doctrinal legalism of written texts and creeds. The Christian religion returned full circle to create a religion of the Book.
THIS ENTIRE WORLD-VIEW BASED ON THE STORY OF THE FALL AND THE NEED OF A SPECIAL MEDIATION BETWEEN MAN AND THE SKY GOD, ORIGINATED AS A BABYLONIAN MYTH.
IT RESULTS IN POSING ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS ABOUT GOD’S RELATIONSHIP TO THE WORLD. CONSEQUENTLY IT COMES UP WITH ALL THE WRONG ANSWERS.
CONCLUSION
It may be said that Joshua ben Adam saves us in the sense that he takes away the false images of God. Of a God in heaven, essentially absent from the world on account of human sin. Of a God who must have something horrible done to his son in order to make us acceptable to him! Of a God whose estrangement from this sorry world must be overcome by some strange bloodletting of his own devising. Of a God who because of one human misdemeanor in Paradise, cursed the world with the virus of original sin and death, and now needs some priestly mediation to restore what was lost.
This entire world-view, based on the story of the fall and the need of a special mediation between man and the sky God, originated as a Babylonian myth. It was copied and spread from culture to culture. It made its way into Hebrew scripture. It permeated the world in the first century, and has continued to permeate and poison the world until the present.
But it is a world-view at least two thousand years out of date. It results in posing all the wrong questions about God's relationship to the world. Consequently it comes up with the wrong answers in a religion of mediation vicarious satisfaction, blood atonement, payback justice, sacraments, priestcraft and all kinds of vertical authorities which keep people enslaved.
When all have the religious accretions and embellishments been stripped away from the historical Joshua ben Adam, how much do we have left? Admittedly, not a lot, but enough to give us the key to his vision of God and man, and enough to convey to us the spirit of his life and teaching.
Admittedly the historical quest leaves us with an outline which must remain sketchy and less than we would need if he were to remain the exclusive locus for the revelation of God. But he made no such claims. Where the details of ben Adam's life are sketchy, you can flesh it out because you are a ben Adam too, the son (or daughter) of God as he was, free as he was to be truly human in God's image and likeness.
Part 9a
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Ben Adam and Islam
There are now about one billion Muslims in the world - one billion children of God who cannot, by any means that Christians have been able to devise, be penetrated with the Christian message.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam share a common Semitic heritage in the one God of Abraham, Moses, Joshua ben Adam and Mohammed. Christians have been less successful in converting Muslims than they have been in converting Jews. There are about as many conversions away from Christianity, but in any case the inroads in either direction are insignificant. Both sides have tried killing each other or convincing each other, but fifteen centuries has been enough time to prove that nothing has been accomplished either way. Even in this information age, Christians are not about to witness any breakthrough with Islam, or vice versa.
Thankfully, there is now some dialogue resulting in progress in mutual understanding and respect, but each side competes for converts from disintegrating pagan cultures (such as in Africa). The allegiance of these people is largely determined by whether Islam or Christianity gets to them first. Once they are locked into either religious tradition further conversion is well nigh impossible.
It has been all to easy for Christians to sit in an isolated Christian culture subscribing to the old orthodoxy of no salvation except by conversion to Christianity. We send out missionaries to convert the heathen, but now right next door to us in our global village we are confronted with another religious community who have been just as successful in converting the heathen as Christians have been.
Confronted with the reality that a billion people are certain to live and die outside the Christian tradition, a lot of Christians have been moved to re-appraise their view of how God relates to people in another religious tradition. Christians who have inherited a Lutheran or Calvinist position on the Supper rarely accept their close neighbours’ point of view on their little difference. But we are grappling here with a problem of communicating with people who, religiously speaking, live in another universe. There are cases of Christian missionaries working in a Muslim culture for several generations without making a single convert.
Saint Paul likened religious tradition to a dividing wall of hostility which his Christ had come to abolish. (Ephesians 1:15) But the Christ of Incarnation, Trinity and blood Atonement has become an insurmountable Berlin Wall to both Jews and Muslims. It required more centuries to build this Christian tradition than it took to build the Great Wall of China. It was a long way from the diverse and fragmentary New Testament documents to the Councils of Nicea (325 AD) and Chalcedon (451 AD) which established the tradition of Incarnation and Trinity, to say nothing of how many more centuries to Anselm and Calvin to establish the penal theory of Atonement. Those who are naive enough to think this very complex theological edifice is all simply and clearly spelt out in the New Testament need to give more credit to the magical power of the religious spectacles (and prejudices) that they have inherited!
Given their strict and uncompromising monotheism (meaning God is one), Muslims have not been able to come to terms with the Christian Incarnation and Trinity (meaning God is Three). Neither have they been able to come to terms with divine forgiveness through blood atonement. If the Gentile Christians couldn’t convert even their fellow Jewish Christians to Incarnation and Trinity, what hope is there to surmount this barrier with Jews and Muslims? As for divine forgiveness, Jews and Muslims say their God forgives simply on response to repentance.
For this they not only have ample support in Jewish Scripture (Psalm 57:16-18; 86:5; 103:3-14; Isaiah 55:7; Hosea 14:1-4; Micah 7:18 etc.) but from Joshua ben Adam as well. He called on people to reject the principle of pay-back justice (atonement) and to exhibit the spirit of never-ending forgiveness, after the example of God.
The prophet Micah said that the only thing God requires of humanity is to deal justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly. A good place to begin with humility is in this matter of religious exclusiveness. The long held attitude that people must believe what the Church believes or be damned (stated all through the Decrees of the Council of Trent, for instance) is arrogant, insensitive and inhuman. As the old Testament parable of Jonah brilliantly shows, one cannot start out insisting people are doomed without ending up wishing they are doomed!
Islam arose soon after the Trinitarian and Christological controversies had been settled in the great Church Councils. As we have already pointed out, these were highly complex dogmas based on hair splitting definitions of Greek and Latin words as well as arguments drawn from Greek philosophy. For example, no one really understands the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity unless he appreciated the subtle difference between the Latin persona and the Germanic person.
Religions don’t develop in a vacuum or drop out of the sky like a rock. Islam arose as a simple desert faith which had an appeal unmatched by the abstractions of Western Christianity. Some features of Islam, remarkably like the remnants of Jewish Christianity, suggest some Jewish and Christian influences at work in Mohammed’s background.
As the Christian West was heading toward its Dark Ages, Islam revitalized culture and learning. Whilst Christian Europe stagnated in one of the most dreadful periods of human history, the Arabs were the first to create hospitals as well as universities which kept learning alive. The Renaissance, indebted to this Arab influence, gave birth to the Enlightenment and the age of Science. Islam has felt the impact of these developments and like Christianity will have to deal with the issues of scientific literary criticism, religious freedom and the inhuman face of Fundamentalism.
Whilst the Jesus of Christian faith is an insurmountable barrier to Muslims, the same thing can’t be said of Joshua Ben Adam. Islam already accepts him as a prophet and a Messiah. Dare we say that when it comes to what is often considered the cardinal things of the Christian tradition (Incarnation, Trinity and Atonement), Joshua stands closer to the Muslim tradition? But if we were to put to Joshua the question as to which tradition was right, he would surely answer us like he answered the Samaritan women who asked him to settle a religious dispute in his day. (See John 4) He would give us one of his classic wisdom sayings which transcends religious disputes. He would show us that religion should have nothing to do with determining the way we relate to one another because religion has absolutely nothing to do with determining the way God relates to us.
When Joshua Ben Adam encountered Samaritans, Romans or Syro-Phoniceans he was oblivious to the fact that they were outside his own religious community. He acted as one who believed that there were no barriers to God’s unconditional love.
God is neither a Jew, Christian or Muslim. It is not religion which bears God’s image but humanity. Wherever the spirit of authentic humanness is manifested, there is the evidence of God’s living presence. The human spirit too obviously transcends all religious barriers.
Ben Adam and Atheism
For long ages it was a capital crime to be an atheist in a Christian society. It is still punishable by death in some Islamic societies. Hopefully all of humanity will one day learn that killing people in God’s name is a manifestation of neither a divine or human spirit.
The earth would be a lot poorer without the honest, forthright thinking, philosophy and scientific research of atheists. They have been courageous enough to look at the empirical evidence on things like the origins of life and the age of the earth. They have called the oppressive Sky-God into question. Thomas Jefferson once said that "it would be more pardonable to believe in no God at all than to believe the atrocious writings of the theologians". George Washington, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln all said similar things. Of course the world would be a much poorer place if it was left in the hands of the devoutly religious.
How can we blame intelligent humans for not believing in the Celestial Dictator - the God of the Fall, original sin, pay-back justice through bloody sacrifice and that sadistic nonsense of Hell?
Australia recently witnessed the passing of one of its really great humanitarian sons - the late Dr. Fred Hollows. His friend, national television presenter Ray Martin, said in a eulogy at his death that Fred Hollows worked too much, swore too much and drank too much. But none could doubt his love for people and his dedication to so many in desperate need of medical attention in remote areas of the world, including places in Australia. The whole nation, including the Christian community, was moved at his passing and rose to salute his reckless, self-giving to the visually impaired in far off places. His spirit of self-giving for people lives on in humanitarian work now done in his memory.
Fred Hollows did not believe in God, at least not the kind that was ever presented to him. Yet his dedication to his fellow humans wasn’t natural. In the face of this larrikin rebel we glimpsed the face of God, the ubiquitous, transcendent spirit of him who inspires all that is truly human. Surely we can say that he is in solidarity with all who are human, and that he is the friend of all who are a Samaritan neighbour. We can’t say it better than this:
"He who loves lives in God and God lives in him." (1 John 4:16)
"In as much as you have done it unto the least of those my brothers, you have done it unto me." (Matthew 25:40)
Part 8
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NO BARRIERS
Christians persecuted Jews for centuries in the name of the Christian Jesus but the historical Jesus (Joshua ben Adam) was a Jew rather than a Christian in his core beliefs about God, Man and Woman, Justice and Election. The Jesus of Incarnation, Trinity and Atonement by blood sacrifice has been an insurmountable barrier to Jews, Muslims and Atheists. Joshua ben Adam removed all religious barriers - religion never has and never will bear God's image and likeness; only humanity can do that.
God is the friend and inspiration of all who have a love for humanity despite their religion or lack of it.
INTRODUCTION
The "son of man" did not come to destroy men’s lives but to save them... (Luke 9:56)
This "son of man" saying is not well attested in the New Testament tradition. It is only recorded in some Lukan manuscripts. Yet the saying does appear to have an authentic Joshua ben Adam ring to it. It is another one of those sayings which breathes his same life-affirming and life-promoting spirit.
The context in which this saying appears is quite remarkable. A Samaritan village had treated Joshua ben Adam as persona non grata because it was religiously offended by Joshua’s intention to proceed to Jerusalem - a rival religious centre. James and John were so offended by the religious snub that they wanted the Samaritans zapped with fire just as Elijah was reported to have done to some recalcitrants in his day. The apostles were not the first and certainly not the last ones to propose killing people who rejected their great Teacher.
Here were the Samaritans on one side and the apostles on the other side acting in a life threatening manner due to a religious barrier. But Joshua never allowed religion to colour or determine in the least degree the way he related to Samaritan, Roman or Syro-Phoenician pagan. He saw only too clearly that if religion is allowed to determine the way we relate to others it can all too easily end in religiously inspired violence.
This is amply illustrated in the history of Church. It often exhibited hostility toward those who rejected its message. As soon as it acquired the power, the Church became an instrument of violence toward "unbelievers" outside its ranks and to any voice of dissent within its ranks. It is a matter of historical fact that the Church made more martyrs than it produced from its own ranks.
For two millennia the Jews suffered at the hands of the Christian West. The church branded them as Christ-killers. They were victims of Pogroms, persecutions, banishments, scape-goating and an appalling amount of blood-letting which went on in bursts of religious frenzy century after dreary century. The seeds of anti-Semitism, watered and nurtured for so long within the bosom of Christian civilisation, bore at last the fruit of the Holocaust from which Christians recoiled in shock and horror.
There was a time in Christian history when Christian spokesmen used to seriously debate whether or not Jews had souls or were truly human. Jews were vilified, dehumanised and demonised for century after Christian century - all in the name of the Christian Jesus. It ought to be a matter of serious reflection among Christian people as to why their core teaching of Incarnation and Trinity seemed to inspire rather than subdue so much religiously inspired violence toward people who could not be persuaded that Jesus was God or that God was three persons rather than one.
No church which took the authentic history of Joshua ben Adam seriously could have engaged in the least approach to destroying human lives in his name. He related to people with compassion on the sole basis that God was their Father and he was their human brother. With him there were no religious barriers.
The Christian persecution of the Jews was a tragic irony because Joshua ben Adam had more in common with Judaism than he did with Christianity. To this astounding evidence we now turn.
In the first place ben Adam was a circumcised Jew who observed basic Jewish customs like attending the synagogue and reading scripture on Sabbath. For sure, he confronted Israel with a serious critique of some of its ways, but in doing this he was not doing anything different from the prophets before him.
Furthermore, he had a significant Jewish following. He was not put to death in response to any popular demand but at the instigation of the priestly elite whose priestly forebears had also killed some of Israel’s greatest prophets.
After Easter, Joshua’s Jewish following grew rather than diminished. It included a great company of Pharisees who were ardent believers in life after death through resurrection. The message of Joshua’s resurrection was seen as a confirmation of their tradition. This Jewish following, called Nazarenes, did not abandon their Jewish identity. Their leader was James, Joshua’s own brother. James and his group were widely respected in Jewish society. The priestly elite conspired to kill James about 30 years after they had killed Joshua. For this they earned intense resentment from a lot of ordinary Jewish people.
The real break between the synagogue and the Nazarenes was precipited by the disastrous Jewish-Roman war which led to the sack of Jerusalem and its temple in 70AD. Because the followers of Joshua ben Adam did not take up arms against the Romans the Jewish patriots denounced them as traitors. But the point remains that Joshua would not have attracted a significant Jewish following if his life and teaching was incompatible with the core Jewish faith.
That core faith, embodied in the old Testament, was an inclusive or universal vision for the whole of humanity. That vision had been subverted by an exclusive or cultic religion which had gained the ascendancy in the Judaism of Joshua’s day.
There were four core aspects of this inclusive or universal vision: these were the Hebrew vision of God, Humanity, Justice and Election.
THE HEBREW VISION OF GOD
The foundation of the Hebrew faith was its uncompromising monotheism: "Hear O Israel, the Lord is One…" This was the Jews’ great legacy to human history .
In the ancient world each tribe had their own gods. They were personifications of the powers of nature - wind, fire, storm, earthquake, changing seasons, sexuality and fertility, etc. Religion was nature worship in one form or another. This was humanly degrading and against human progress. To this day religion has continued to oppose social progress, human enlightenment or scientific achievement.
Monotheism alone has not stopped people slaughtering one another in the name of one God, but imagine what it must have been like where there was a polytheistic stew of tribal gods! The xenophobic tendencies of homo sapiens was aroused to the point of blood savagery by tribal deities demanding mayhem as a religious duty. The slaughter of other tribes was a means of demonstrating that the tribal god was superior to all the others.
If this religiously inspired violence was to cease, it had to start with a vision of one God who could unite humanity into a universal brotherhood*. Monotheism began as a faith among some desert tribesmen. To this polytheistic world which had sacralized nature in endless icons, altars, temples and rituals, the Hebrew faith must have appeared as austere as the desert environment from which it emerged. With Moses and the Hebrew prophets the process of desacralizing or demythologizing nature began. Joshua ben Adam carried this process to completion.
The basis of desacralizing and demythologizing nature was in the clear distinction made in the Hebrew faith between God and nature. Whilst it is true that the Hebrews borrowed the creation myth from their neighbours, they thoroughly exorcised every trace of pantheism or panentheism* from their re-worked story. In the Hebrew version, nature was not God nor any part of God. He was a transcendent person who was altogether separate, distinct and above anything that was made.
This strict monotheism with its equally strict distinction of the one transcendent, personal Creator and nature is the core of the Old Testament. This was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He was also the God of Joshua ben Adam.
Yet Old Testament theism has nothing to do with the concept of an absentee landlord which tended to develop in later Jewish apocalyptic or which resurfaced again in eighteenth century deism.
Old Testament monotheism is not only a vision of God’s transcendence (his distinction from creation) but also his immanence* (his presence within his creation). Like the mighty wind, he is represented as a spirit who is everywhere present. There is not a place anywhere in the universe where God is absent. (Psalm 139) The ruach (spirit) of God is said to sustain every living creature. If he withdraws his sustaining presence there is no such thing as life. God is the healing, life-giving presence within his creation. (See Job 27:3; 33:4; 34:14,15; Psalm 103:3-5).
Joshua ben Adam’s proclamation of God’s kingdom near, among and within his people was an extrapolation of the Old Testament vision of God’s omni-presence. When Israel demanded a king like the other nations, Samuel the prophet complained that God was already present as the people’s king. In response to his core Jewish tradition, Joshua saw God active everywhere in the world. He called on his generation to believe that God’s kingdom was already in the midst of his people. The Abba Father of Joshua ben Adam was present to feed the birds, care for the sparrows and to number the hairs of every human head. To him, faith was not like getting on a long distant telephone call to a God who was way "up there" or "out there", or to one who had to be contacted through a network of mediating priests, angels, Mary or even himself. For Joshua ben Adam, God’s immanence means that everybody may have an unbrokered access to God’s presence. As the Old Testament repeatedly says:
Where can I flee from Thy presence? (Psalm 139:7), The Lord is near to all who call upon him. (Psalm 145:18). He heals the broken-hearted, and binds up their wounds..... The Lord supports the afflicted..... He gives to the beast its food and to the young ravens which cry. (Psalm 147:3,6,9). The Lord is good to all, and his mercies are over all his works. (Psalm 145:9)
This authentic Hebrew vision of God was the stuff of Joshua’s spirituality and teaching.
THE HEBREW VISION OF HUMANITY
Next to monotheism, the Hebrew vision of humanity being made in God’s image and likeness was it’s greatest contribution to human thought. It represented an enormous break with nature worship because it set humanity above nature and provided a basis of human equality.
Humanity Above Nature - In a world given over to nature worship in one form or another, the arrival of this Hebrew faith must have sounded like a total blasphemy which threatened bountiful harvests, regular seasons, successful reproduction and all the bounties of "mother nature". This was not another religion to keep the nature gods in a generous mood. It declared that man was not the servant but the master of mother nature. (Genesis 1:27,28 & Psalm 8) Nothing was a sacred image and likeness of God except humanity.
Human Equality - This Hebrew vision of humanity also implies something very different to the natural vertical order of domination of the strong and the submission of the weak. It implies a new horizontal, on-the-same-level order of love and respect. Here is a view of humanity which transcends nationality, race, gender and culture. The image of God is neither Jew nor Gentile, African or Caucasian, black or white, male or female, old or young. That which invests humanity with dignity and value is not any racial, sexual, cultural and certainly not any religious identity. It is purely and simply the human identity which bears the signature of the Creator. No vision of an egalitarian society has ever been able to improve on this Old Testament foundation.
Joshua ben Adam’s "son of man" consciousness (so basic to who he was and what he taught) had his roots in this creation Psalm: "When I consider thy heavens the work of thy fingers, The moon and the stars which thou has ordained, What is man that thou doest take thought of him, And the son of man (Hebrew: ben Adam) That thou doest care for him? Yet thou has made him a little lower than God, And has crowned him with glory and majesty, Thou doest make him to rule over the works of thy hands; Thou has put all things under his feet..." (Verses 3-6)
A "son of man" consciousness based on a Scripture like this was the reason why Joshua dared to go to the greatest religious regulation - the Sabbath itself - and put humanity above it instead of under it. (See Mark 2:27,28). Times, places, foods and anything else in the created order must serve humanity rather than being served by humanity.
THE HEBREW VISION OF JUSTICE
In the Old Testament, justice is unquestionably the core attribute of God. (Psalm 89:14)
Contrary to what is often taken for granted, justice generally does not have any retributive connotation such as punish, anger, repay etc. Justice is God’s saving, even forgiving action of behalf of all that are oppressed. The best paradigm text for the meaning of justice is Psalm 103:6
The Lord executes justice and judgement for all that are oppressed. (See also Psalm 9:9; 10:18; 72:4; 37:21; 146:7; 102:19,20)
The oppressed are variously identified as the afflicted, the poor, the strangers, the outcasts, the widows, the fatherless and others in need. It includes those in need of forgiveness. God’s forgiving mercy is his justice at work:
Bless the Lord O my soul.....Who pardons all your iniquities; Who heals all your diseases; Who redeems your life from the pit; The Lord performs acts of justice and judgements for all who are oppressed..... He has not dealt with us according to our sins, Nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.....As far as the east is from the west, So far has he removed our transgressions from us.....For He Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust. (Psalm 103:1-14)
In Christian theology, forgiveness is seen as something in tension with God’s justice, a tension which could be resolved only by atonement . But no such tension appears in the Old Testament passages linking justice and forgiveness. Justice is God’s saving action at work for all that are oppressed. So too when God judges, he saves, delivers, and rescues the oppressed:
Judge me O God and plead my cause..... deliver me..... (Psalm 43:1). Deliver me by your justice. (Psalm 71:2 See also 7:8; 10:18; 51:4; 72:4)
The paradigm event of God’s saving justice in Hebrew Scripture was the Exodus. By an act of judgement and justice God delivered a weak and afflicted people from the hand of oppression.
The Exodus not only exhibited God’s saving justice, but is became the model of how those who have been delivered were to image their God:
You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not afflict any widow or orphan. If you afflict him at all, and if he does cry out loud, I will surely hear his cry; and my anger will be kindled.... for I am gracious..... (Exodus 22: 21-24). You shall not oppress one another. (Lev. 25:14). Escaped slaves must be given asylum and not be oppressed. (Det. 23:15,16)
Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. (Psalm 82:3)
Hebrew justice means loving the neighbour as oneself. (Lev 19:18) It means being human and acting humanly. It is a social, humanitarian justice based on every person’s entitlement to be accorded the dignity of being made in God’s image and likeness. Justice is the mark of the ideal King: He shall judge the people with justice, and your poor with judgement..... He shall judge the poor of the people, he shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor. (Psalm 72: 2, 4). Did not your father [the King]..... do judgment and justice. He judged the poor and needy. (Jeremiah 22: 15,16)
Above everything else, "justice and judgement" is required of the King. (see 1 Kings 10: 9; 1 Chronicles 18:4; 2 Chronicles 9:8; Daniel 4:27) The big complaint of the prophets is that the rulers do not mirror the saving event of the Exodus. They fail to exercise saving justice to the poor, the disadvantaged, and the oppressed. So the prophets begin to hope for an ideal King, a son of David who would "execute judgement and justice on the earth." (Jeremiah 23:5).
When Job was forced to defend his righteousness he did not appeal to his religious rectitude but to his humanitarian justice: I delivered the poor who cried for help, the orphan who had no helper. The blessing of the one ready to perish came upon me, and I made the widow’s heart sing for joy. I put on righteousness and it clothed me; My justice was like a robe and a turban. I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. I was a father to the needy and I investigated the case which I did not know. And I broke the jaws of the wicked, and snatched the prey from his teeth. If I have despised the claim of my male or female slaves. When they filed complaint against me, What then could I do when God arises and calls me to account, what will I answer him? Did not he who made me in the womb make him. And the same one fashioned us in the womb. If I have kept the poor from their desire, or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail, or have eaten my morsel alone and the orphan has not shared it..... If I have seen anyone perish for want of clothing, or that the needy had no covering, if his loins have not thanked me, and if he has not been warmed with the fleece of my sheep, if I have lifted up my hand against the orphan, because I saw I had support in the gate. Let my shoulder fall from the socket and my arm broken off at the elbow..... Have I rejoiced at the destruction of my enemy, Or exalted when evil befell him? The alien has not lodged outside For I have opened my doors to the traveller..... (Job 29:12-17;31-22,29,32)
This brings us to the moral outrage of the Old Testament prophets and their running conflict with priestly religion. The prophets accused their nation of being deceived with religious lies. (Jeremiah 7) The people were trusting in religious institutions, sacrifices and rituals to save them while they failed to "practice justice between a man and his neighbour". They oppressed the alien, the orphan, and the widow. (Jeremiah 7:5,6)
In the prophets, being holy like God meant practising humanitarian justice modelled on the Exodus. But the priestly tradition taught that being holy like God meant strict adherence to a holiness code concerning separation from ritual uncleanliness, temple sacrifices, and religious festivals. King’s, princes and people found this more congenial to practice than humanitarian justice. The prophets confronted a situation where religion was flourishing. It had become a "cop out", a palliative substitute for the sterner stuff of authentic justice.
For this reason the prophets railed against the offering of sacrifices and poured scorn on the religious festivals. They ridiculed the practice of religious fasting and called the holiness code of the priesthood into question. In short, they made war on Israel’s cultic, religious "righteousness", declaring it a putrid, heap of selfish lies.
What are your multiplied sacrifices to Me? says the Lord. I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams. And the fat of fed cattle, And I take no pleasure in the blood of bulls, lambs, or goats. I hate your new moon festivals and your appointed feasts… Yes, even though you multiply prayers, I will not listen … Seek justice, Reprove the ruthless; Defend the orphan, Plead for the widow … Your rulers are rebels And companions of thieves, Everyone loves a bribe. And chases after rewards. They do not defend the orphan. Nor does the widow’s plea come before them. (Isaiah 1: 11-23)
I did not speak to your fathers, or command then in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices. (Jeremiah 7:22)
I hate, I reject your festivals, nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer up to me burnt offerings and your grain offerings, I will not accept them..... Take away from Me the noise of your songs..... But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness as an over-flowing stream. (Amos 8: 21-24)
With what shall I come to the Lord. And bow myself before God on high? Shall I come to him with burnt offerings, With yearling calves? Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams, In ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts, The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? [note: this rejection of both animal and human sacrifice and the whole priestly concept of blood atonement] He has told you, O man, what is good, And what does the Lord require of you But to do justice, and to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God. (Micah : 6-8)
Thou does not delight in sacrifice otherwise I would give it; Thou art not pleased with burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A broken and a contrite heart O God; thou wilt not despise. [note: God forgives in response to repentance, not any priestly blood atonement] (Psalm 51: 16,17). To do judgement and justice is desired by the Lord rather than sacrifice. (Proverbs 21:3). For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; And the knowledge of God, more than burnt offering. (Hosea 6:6)
Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bands of wickedness; to undo the heavy burdens, and let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Is it not to deal your bread to the hungry, and bring the poor which are cast out into your house, and that you hide not yourself from your own flesh. (Isaiah 58:5-7)
To understand this deeply humanitarian justice of the prophets is to understand the fire in the belly of Joshua ben Adam. His was the spirit of the Hebrew prophets. This too was his vision of justice, and these Old Testament passages were obviously his meat and drink.
Joshua confronted what the prophets confronted - a society caught up in a cultic, tribal "righteousness". The priestly tradition of strict adherence to purity codes and rituals had gained the ascendancy in Judaism. The more religious the culture became, the more unjust and inhuman it was. Righteousness or justice (the same word in Hebrew and Greek) had become confounded with religious rectitude or meticulous orthodoxy.
Joshua accused his opponents of grossly distorting the real spirit and intent of the Jewish Law. Whilst they religiously tithed even their garden herbs, they neglected justice, mercy and faith. (Matthew 23:23) He flung the words of the prophet at them "I will have mercy rather than sacrifice". "Has this house, which is called by My name, become a den of robbers in your sight." (Jeremiah 7:11; Mark 11:17) Apparently borrowing the saying of the great Rabbi Hillel, Joshua said, "Whatever you want others to do for you, do so for them". But then he added this definitive comment, "This IS the Law and the prophets", that is to say, this is the whole spirit and intent of Scripture. (Matthew 7:23)
Joshua didn’t want people calling him the Messiah. Yet he did the work of the Messiah. He executed justice and judgement on behalf of the oppressed. (Jeremiah 23:5; Luke 4:18) "He went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed." (Acts 10:38)
Clearly Joshua ben Adam was moved by the authentic Hebrew vision of justice.
THE HEBREW VISION OF ELECTION
The election of Israel was often interpreted by the Jewish people to mean some kind of divine favouritism or the rejection of others. This misunderstanding of election, vehemently scorned by the prophets, led to a great deal of racial arrogance, national pride and contempt for other people. This conceit was no different to the "special people syndrome" found throughout history in tribes and nations all over the earth. What race or religious group has not conceived of itself as the first, the best and the chosen of God?
This "better than the rest" attitude is distinctly out of harmony with the vision of one God, one humanity in his image and likeness, and one kind of justice for the whole human race. So God is represented as saying to Abraham, "In you shall all the nations of earth be blessed". (Genesis 12:3) This world-vision was often subverted by cultic pride, but it was never totally lost, certainly not whenever the prophets spoke. Their passion for justice went beyond national boundaries:
The Lord will make himself known to Egypt, and the Egyptians shall know the Lord on that day.....he will respond to them and heal them..... saying, "Blessed is Egypt, my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my inheritance". (Isaiah 19: 21-25)
The Lord of hosts will prepare a banquet for all peoples on this mountain.....And on this mountain he will swallow up the covering which is over all peoples. Even the veil which is stretched over all nations. He will swallow up death for all time. The Lord God will wipe tears away from all faces. (Isaiah 25: 6-8)
And many nations will come and say, Come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord And to the house of the God of Jacob That he may teach us about his ways, And that we may walk in his paths..... And he will judge between many peoples And render decisions for mighty distant nations, Then they will hammer their swords into ploughshares. And their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, And never again will they train for war. (Micah 4: 2-3)
There is no doubt where Joshua ben Adam stood on this matter of election. He exhibited the inclusive, universal vision of the prophets. Along with John the Baptist, he taught that kinship of spirit rather than of blood made anyone a child of Abraham made anyone children of Abraham. (Matthew 3:9; Mark 3:35; John 8:39)
His home synagogue at Nazareth was enraged when he reminded them how God visited pagans rather than Jews in the days of Elisha. His parables depicted Gentiles sitting down at the banquet with Abraham, Issac, and Jacob whilst the "chosen people" were left outside. He offended national pride by declaring that the faith of a Samaritan, a Roman, or a Syro-Phonecian pagan was superior to anything he had encountered in Israel. He swept aside all racial, religious and gender barriers. He related to people with compassion on the sole basis that the one Father of all humanity demanded justice without discrimination.
In conclusion, we have to say that judged by the core teaching of God, man, justice, and election drawn from Jewish Scripture, Joshua ben Adam was profoundly Jewish.
THE CHRISTIAN VISION OF GOD
In the post-Easter church we can trace the progressive transformation of Joshua ben Adam from a very Jewish son of God to a Gentile "son of God". In the Jewish tradition, the term "son of God" could be applied to Adam to the nation of Israel or to the anointed King. (Luke 3:38; Hosea 11:1; Psalm 2:2,7,12) Applied to Joshua ben Adam, it simply meant he was the Messiah, the anointed King.
In the earliest New Testament writing, ben Adam is said to be "son of God" by the resurrection from the dead. (Romans 1:4) Next, Mark (author unknown) suggests Joshua was designated "son of God" by the anointing of the spirit at his baptism. Whether by resurrection, by baptism, or by both, the Christology of those first Jewish Christians was "Adoptionist", meaning that at a certain point of time God chose or adopted Joshua as his son.
When this Christian message got out into the Greek world, "son of God" was invested with the overtones of that culture. The Greeks had a plethora of divinities, many of them virgin born who suffered, died and returned to heaven. Each of these was called "son of God". Then there was the legend of Alexander the Great being virgin born and "son of God". Finally there was the cult of Caesar worship. The Roman Emperor too, was a divinity who was worshipped as both "Lord" and "son of God."
In about 80 AD "Matthew" and "Luke" (the authors are really unknown) introduced the unknown stories about Joshua becoming "son of God" by virtue of a virgin birth. The transformation of the Jewish ben Adam to the Christian Jesus, ‘son of the Virgin’ was well on its way. By the time the century ended "John" (also an unknown author) had pushed the beginnings of "son of God" back to the pre-existent Logos dwelling in the Nazarene teacher. But even "John" stops short of saying Joshua pre-existed, only that the Logos of God which dwelt in him pre-existed. (See John 1:1-14)
Nevertheless Gentile Christianity moved from a Jewish Adoptionist Christology toward an Incarnational Christology. It took several centuries before a full blown Incarnation dogma was established. In its final form the Christian Jesus, the son of the virgin, became God in the highest sense. The Incarnation dogma meant that Jesus was God in human flesh.
This kind of teaching was unthinkable to all Jews who were steeped in a strict and uncompromising monotheism. The first Christians, including the apostles, had no intention of being anything else but Jews who were faithful to their best scriptural tradition. According to the Hebrew shema God was one person. Joshua plainly spoke of God in terms of a person distinct from himself. Jewish Christians believed God had raised Joshua from the dead, but they did not blur that distinction between God and Joshua.
The vision of an Incarnation demanded a Trinity - the doctrine of God being three persons instead of one. The Trinity was an extremely intricate theology having subtle nuances never understood by 99.9% of Christians. It took several centuries to work out and consolidate as Christian orthodoxy. In the creeds of Athanasius, Nicea, and Chalcedon (over four centuries of development) God became three and Christ became a hypostatic union of two natures in one person - again so intricately worked out in subtle Greek words and Greek philosophical concepts that it was never understood by 99.9% percent of Christians. Most clergy only pretend to understand Chalcedon!
The Gentile dogma of Christ not only put up an insurmountable barrier between Judaism and Christianity, it put up an insurmountable barrier between Jewish and Gentile Christians. As a movement Jewish Christianity never did come to terms with Gentile Christianity’s Incarnation and Trinity.
The apostle Paul’s grand dream was that through Christ the barrier between Gentile and Jews would be broken down. (Ephesians 2:15) His hope of a united Church was never realised. Jewish and Gentile Christianity were never reconciled. This was the great tragedy of early Christianity.
The Christian Vision of Humanity
In the Hebrew tradition, we derived our humanness from God. Humanness was God’s image and likeness. (Genesis 1:27, 28; Psalm 8)
The Christian tradition of an Incarnation turned this completely around. It said that God was born of a virgin and thereby derived his humanness from us.
This Christian view of God acquiring our humanness had a disastrous effect on the Church’s humanity. It is no mystery why the church quickly became an expression of morbid world-hating asceticism, rigorous fasting, and given to cultic withdrawal from social and civic life. This is all too apparent in early Christian literature such as the Teachings of the Twelve Apostles, the Shepherd of Hermes, the Letters of Justin Martyr ( who had himself castrated) and the dreary Church Fathers. Reading their literature helps us to understand how Julian lamented the spread of Christianity in this renowned one-liner, "O pale Galillean, you have conquered".
Multitudes of women became perpetual virgins for the faith. Men rushed off to monasteries in droves, some to castrate themselves after the example of Justin, others to flagellate the flesh so as to conquer their natural impulses.
The New Testament book of Revelation had depicted the ideal community of humans as 144,000 celibate ascetics in the desert. Washed in the Lamb’s blood, they would spend their days supplicating God’s vengeance in the form of famine, disease and unspeakable torments upon the rest of humanity. (No hint here of Joshua ben Adam’s spirit of saving men’s lives, much less forgiving their enemies!)
For the present we shall leave alone the hair-splitting theological disputes among the hierarchy of Bishops (the laity had no say in the church) and concern ourselves with how early Christianity related to the real world. We will consider in particular the Church’s attitude to woman and human sexuality. This cannot be brushed off as an expression of a patriarchal culture, for Judaism too had a patriarchal culture, but it never exhibited the disgraceful denigration of women that went on for centuries in the church. It could only be called the blasphemy of God’s image in one half of the human race. Here is an example of the virulent misogyny which poured out of the Church fathers:
Origen (AD 185-254) "What is seen with the eyes of the creator is masculine, and not feminine; for God does not stoop to look upon what is feminine and of the flesh." "It is not proper for a woman to speak in church, however admirable or holy what she says may be, merely because it comes from female lips." Chrysostom (AD 347-407) "Should you reflect about what is contained in beautiful eyes, in a straight nose, in a mouth, in cheeks, you will see that bodily beauty is only a white-washed tombstone for inside it is full of filth."
Augustine (AD 354-430) "A good Christian is found in one and the same women to love the creature of God whom he desires to be transformed and renewed, but to hate in her the corruptible and moral conjugal connection, sexual intercourse and all that pertains to her as a wife."
Ambrose (AD 339-397) "Some of these conceptions of the soul are associated with the female sex, such as malice of thought, petulance, sensuality, self-indulgence, immodesty and other vices of that nature, which tend to enervate the traits associated with what is distinctively masculine. The distinctively masculine traits are the virtues of chastity, patience, wisdom, temperance, fortitude and justice, which make it possible for our minds and bodies to struggle with zeal and confidence in our pursuit of virtue. And these are the conceptions to which the prophet Isaiah referred in the words ‘We have conceived and brought forth the spirit of salvation’. That is, the characteristic masculine traits, conceived and gave birth to the spirit of salvation."
Jerome (AD 342-420) Although in my fear of hell I had consigned myself to this prison where I had no companions but scorpions and wild beasts, I often found myself amid bevies of girls. My face was pale and my frame chilled with fasting, yet my mind was burning with desire and the fires of lust kept bubbling up before me when my flesh was as good as dead. To the Widowed Salvine Never let pheasants be seen on your table . . . nor fancy that you eschew meat diet when you reject . . . the savory flesh of other quadrupeds. It is not the number of feet but the delicacy of flavor that makes the difference [i.e. fowl are also to be prohibited] . . . Let those who feed on flesh serve the flesh, whose bodies boil with desire, who are tied to their husbands and who set their hearts on having offspring. Let those whose wombs are burdened cram their stomachs with flesh. But you have buried every indulgence in your husband’s tomb . . . Let paleness and squalor be henceforth your jewels. Do not pamper your youthful limbs with bed or down or kindle your young blood with hot baths . . . Take no well curled steward to walk with you, no effeminate actor, no devilish singer of poisoned sweetness, no spruce and well shorn youth . . . Keep with you bands of widows and virgins . . . Let the divine Scriptures be always in your hands and give yourself frequently to prayer that such shafts of evil thoughts as ever assail the young may find thereby a shield to repel them.
Tertullian (2nd century AD) If there existed upon earth a fate in proportion to the reward that faith will receive in heaven, no one of you, my beloved sisters, from the time when you came to know the living God and recognized your own state, that is the condition of being a woman, would have desired a too attractive garb and much less anything that seems too ostentatious. I think, rather, that you would have dressed in mourning garments, and even neglected your exterior, acting the part of mourning and repentant Eve in order to expiate more fully by all sorts of penitential garb that which woman derives from Eve. The ignominy, I mean, of original sin and the odium of being the cause of the fall of the human race. In sorrow and anxiety you will bring forth, O woman, and you are subject to your husband and he is your master. Do you not believe that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives on even in our times so it is necessary that the guilt should live on also. You are the one who opened the door to the devil. You are the one who first picked the fruit of the forbidden tree. You are the first who deserted the divine law. You are the one who persuaded him whom the devil was not strong to attack. All too easily you destroyed the image of God, man. Because of your desert, that is death, even the Son of God had to die.
It has to be remembered that these were the revered fathers of the Church who gave us the Cardinal Christian doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity. A New Testament author asks how can we possibly love God whom we have not seen if we do not love the brother whom we have seen. (1 John 4:20) So we may also ask, how could we trust these men’s teachings about God (Incarnation and Trinity), whom they haven’t seen if they can’t discern God’s image in women whom they have seen?
Yet this sad spectacle of a dehumanizing misogyny was only indicative of their jaundiced view of the world and their life in general.
But we need to ask the question, where did this world-hating, life-denying asceticism spring from? It was the fruit of the veneration of the celibate son of a perpetual virgin. This ideal Christian humanity was more surreal than real. A virgin born God disguised as a human and dying on a cross to make blood atonement for sin was not history but an apocalyptic interpretation imposed on history. How could this Christian humanity of Jesus, so contrary to the real life of Joshua ben Adam, produce anything but a distortion of real human existence?
But there is a deeper reason why a theology of Incarnation – God deriving his humanness from us – had a disastrous effect on the Church’s humanity. If this is how God became "the supremely human one", then it implies that before this Incarnation God was not a supremely human reality as our being made in his image and likeness would indicate. Does the reality of an inhuman God stand behind the surreal humanity of Jesus? We say "surreal", because a man who was virgin born and God in disguise was not really human after all despite the affirmation of Chalcedon to the contrary! When the twin doctrines of Atonement by bloody sacrifice and Hell fire are added to this Incarnation, this ideal humanness of Jesus is lost because it is redefined by an inhuman reality called "God".
Anyhow, this new heavenly humanity ruled the Church through the frightful vertical authority of a celibate hierarchy. Who else could fitly represent the God who became the celibate son of God’s virginal mother? Joseph Campbell and a host of other scholars have marshalled irrefutable evidence that these Christian claims were in fact old pagan myths which had been recycled for thousands of years.
We can confidently say that Joshua ben Adam didn’t have an ascetic bone in his body. This very social ‘eating and drinking’ man sometimes outraged his male company by his egalitarian interactions with women. There is some evidence, although not conclusive, that Mary Magnalene was either his wife or lover. But even if that cannot be established one thing is certain: Joshua’s view of the essential goodness of the created order was profoundly in the best Jewish tradition. Judaism, it must be remembered was never an ascetical religion which advocated abstinence from "wine, women and song".
There is an old Rabbinical saying that God will ask us at the end of life, "did you enjoy all the good things the world gave you to enjoy". It would be too bad if we had to answer, "I was too pre-occupied getting my soul to heaven to notice".
It is quite amusing to compare the old Christian commentaries on the Song of Solomon with the Jewish ones. Thankfully the Church has made progress in its attitudes to the essential goodness of life. Modern Christian commentaries now acknowledge that the Old Testament Song of Solomon is nothing but a celebration of sexual love, something that would have appeared almost pornographic to the poor Jerome, fighting back the tormenting images of dancing virgins during his desert solitude.
The conclusion we are forced to draw, of course, is that Joshua ben Adam was far more Jewish than Christian in his view of human existence.
How can we possibly love God whom we have not seen if we do not love the brother whom we have seen. (1 John 4:20)
The Christian Vision of Justice
The Incarnation and the death of Christ as an atonement for sin is the heart of Christian theology. Christ is said to have endured God’s wrath against sin, making it possible for God to forgive us. A blood atonement is considered necessary to satisfy God’s justice.
Forgiveness and salvation is now offered on the basis that justice is satisfied. We escape from eternal punishment only because our debt has been paid - in blood!
In Christian teaching, God’s justice is equated with God’s wrath, the terrors of Judgment Day and the blood payment for sin carried out on the cross. All this redefined the meaning of Justice to something punitive. Consequently, Christian people became preoccupied with atonement for guilt through Christ’s suffering. ("Hangman’s theology") The central issue became "How can I be just before God?" How can I escape from justice and get to heaven?
So developed what Krister Stendahl called "the introspective conscience of the west". The monk Martin Luther epitomized the Christian of the Middle Ages, terrified of God’s justice and never able to get rid of guilt, never able to stand before God with an easy conscience.
Luther wondered what Paul meant when he said this about the gospel, "For in it the justice of God is revealed". (Romans 1:17) At first he complained bitterly that God was not content to torment him with the justice of his Law, but he added to that the terrors of the justice of the gospel.
Then he had what was called his "tower experience". Hartmann Grisar*, a Lutheran scholar, tarnished this hallowed legend somewhat when he proved it actually took place on the toilet. (Luther suffered from chronic constipation and spent a lot of time there). Anyway, he put the time spent there to good use mulling over the meaning of justice in Romans 1:17. Suddenly the insight struck him that this was a saving, forgiving justice. Luther was like Archemedes springing out of the bathtub saying "Eureka, Eureka". The Protestant Reformation was born!
Luther had simply re-discovered the authentic Hebrew meaning of justice as God’s loving kindness in action on behalf of all that are oppressed. Luther was certainly oppressed by this troubled conscience brought about by all the religious legalism of the Church. He was liberated through ‘justification by faith alone".
The problem was that neither Luther nor the Protestant Reformation was able to carry this vision of God’s saving justice very far because they were still stuck with the Hangman’s theology of blood atonement i.e. punitive pay-back justice). In fact, in Protestant orthodoxy, this pay-back justice of God, called the penal theory of atonement, became the center piece of theology. If the saving aspect of justice ever broke through the dark cloud of retributive justice it was for "my forgiveness", "my salvation" and "my finding a gracious God".
The social, humanitarian meaning of Old Testament (Jewish) justice never did manage to break through in the Protestant Reformation. It was at best truncated by the pre-occupation with the salvation of me, me, me.
Tragically, Luther deserted the peasants in their revolt against oppression. He ended up calling for their slaughter instead of their liberation. In the same vein he railed on the Jews and added to their intolerable oppressions.
It has been said that John Wesley was far more concerned about the blasphemy of God’s name than the blasphemy of God’s children. He had little to say about the social injustices of Charles Dickens’ England.In John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which for a long time was like a second Bible in English speaking Christianity, the hero "Christian" never did anything except get himself to Heaven.
In this brief overview it would be all too easy to distort the picture by failing to acknowledge examples of social justice within Christianity. Much of this has been motivated by the influence of the historical Joshua ben Adam which the Church has always borne witness to in spite of a theology which has a tendency to push his history into the background. Yet it remains that classical Christian theology is focused on personal salvation through blood atonement. God’s punitive justice and saving the soul for the life hereafter holds centre stage. It is for this reason that Walter Kaufmann (The Faith of a Heretic) criticizes historic Christianity for seriously falling short of the moral righteousness of the Old Testament prophets.Conclusion: Joshua ben Adam’s vision of justice was essentially Jewish rather than Christian.
The Christian Vision of Election
If Judaism was ever exclusive and contemptuous of the goyim (outsiders), we need to remember two things: first, this cultic tendency was an aberration, a failure to remain true to the inclusive and universal vision of Moses and the prophets; and second, the Jews haven’t had a monopoly on exclusiveness and disrespect for outsiders.
The Christian doctrines of Incarnation and salvation only by Christ locked historical Christianity into an exclusiveness which went way beyond anything known in Judaism. The Incarnation means that the son of the virgin was God himself. Christ is the only way of salvation. Outside of the Christian revelation is only darkness, superstition and ignorance.
So the Church proclaimed that all who believe this Christian message would be saved and all those who did not believe would be damned. It was only a matter of time before the Church used its power to have those who failed to obey its teaching persecuted, banished, tortured and killed.
The Roman Catholic Church decreed there was no salvation outside the Church. This was re-enforced by the doctrine of "original sin", meaning that every descendant of Adam bears the guilt and condemnation of the Fall. This means that the whole mass of humanity are already under God’s curse and wrath and are on their way to eternal damnation. The only way to overcome the estrangement from God is through the door of Christ and his Church. The rest are already lost! The Protestant Reformation did not discard this stance of "no salvation outside the Church". It just broadened the boundaries of the Church to include itself! It is only one step from believing all outside the Christian ranks are subjects of God’s wrath to treating them as lesser human beings. It became all too easy to accept the idea that non-Christian nations ought to subjugate and if possible (sometimes by the edge of the sword) converted to the higher culture of the Christian West. Christians even justified enslaving people of the black race because by this means they baptized them into the Church whereby their souls would be eternally saved.
In more recent times the Christian Church has become very uneasy, even embarrassed about its historic exclusiveness. Such breathtaking arrogance is not compatible with an advanced human consciousness and a modern world-view. It doesn’t fit into a global village and a multi-cultural society where we have to rub shoulders with neighbours of other culture and other religion. We know the old attitudes are not conducive to peace and harmony.
There is also something else. There is an awakening to the realization that the world mission of Christianity has failed. Whilst Christians have been successful in converting people to Christianity from more primitive, disintegrating cultures, it is a different story with the great world religions. Large scale conversions to Christianity from Islam and Judaism, for instance, is never going to take place, even in this age where there is such a free exchange of ideas and information.
The religion of millions is an accident of birth just as nationality is an accident of birth. Changing people’s religions is almost as impossible as changing their race. It is no longer appropriate to call people culpably blind or obdurate because they fail to accept our religious prejudices.
It is almost amusing to see Catholics like Karl Rayner re-interpret the Church’s doctrine of no salvation outside the Church. He acknowledges that many non-Christians exhibit the spirit of Christ. They are anonymous Christians, he says, really belonging to the Church without knowing it. Very patronising! Would these "anonymous Christians" be impressed with this charitable arrogance?
But some still persist in the old ways. A few years ago, a leading American Evangelical Christian flatly declared, "God does not hear the prayer of a Jew". There was a cry of protest from Christian spokesmen wanting to disassociate themselves from such religious bigotry? Few of them were candid enough to acknowledge that the offensive statement was a fair statement of historical Christian orthodoxy. At this point the exclusive arrogance of the Jews doesn’t look so bad. Mainstream Judaism, ancient or modern, never excluded non-Jews from salvation. As one Rabbinical authority put it, "Judaism believes that a gentile who obeys the Noachide commandments [universal human moral imperatives] has a place in the world to come". (David Berger and Michael Wychogrod, Jews and Jewish Christianity, pp. 60-63) Where does Joshua ben Adam stand in relation to all this religious exclusiveness? In his day he had no problem relating to people outside the fold. He confounded even his own supporters by declaring that the faith of some non-Jews was superior to anything in Israel. His God transcended all these religious boundaries. He had plenty of Jewish Scripture to support his stance. "The Lord is good to all, And his mercy is upon all his works." (Psalm 145:9) The God of Joshua ben Adam transcended all religious barriers. His God was not a Jew, Christian or Muslim. He was not Anglo-Saxon, African or Oriental. His saving justice knew no barriers. To be human was enough. Nothing more was needed to be a recipient of his unconditional love.
Conclusion: Even in this matter of election, Joshua ben Adam was more Jew than Christian. He didn’t teach Christianity’s Incarnation and blood Atonement which demand exclusiveness.
Part 7b
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