Robert D Brinsmead

Preface:  Preserving and defending the best of Western Culture

In recent years, Western culture has been under attack from within by the so-called Progressive Left which haspromoted identify politics, gender fluidity, cancel culture, a climate emergency and a Censorship Industrial Complex that cannot tolerate any dissent.Thishas stifled free speech and promoted more and more government control over human activities. In all of this, the great gains which Western culture has made in the development of liberal democracy, bringing religious, political and economic freedoms, have come under a sustained and serious attack.

A fightback movement to defend and preserve the great freedoms made by Western culture is now underway.  An example of this is the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) which has launched two significant gatherings in London in 2024 and 2025.  The movement to defend and preserve Western culture has been supported by such people as Jordan Peterson (Twelve Rules of Life) from Canada, Michael Shellenberger (Apocalypse Never!) in the US, Douglass Murray (The War on the West) in Great Britain, and John Anderson (ex-Deputy PM of Australia) and Greg Sheridan (God is Good for You) in Australia.

A point that is frequently made by the defenders of Western culture is that Western culture was shaped over many centuries by Christian or Judeo-Christian values. The conclusion is drawn that if the Christian influence is allowed to disappear, along with the Bible as the most significant piece of literature in Western history, then the mighty gains made by Western culture are in danger of being lost.

In assessing Christianity’s enormous role in Western history, it is important that we recognize there are two aspects of the Christian tradition that has impacted Western culture. Firstly, there is the matter of the teachings of the historical Jesus; and secondly, there is the Church’s central doctrine of the post-Easter Christ.

The Christianity which made the exalted titles of Christ the centre of its teaching was not a friend of democracy. That Church was supposed to reflect on earth the rulership of Christ as the Lord of the universe, and that certainly was not thought to be a democracy. So it was that the Church, viewed as the agent of Christ’s monarchial rule, was a hierarchy in which the laity or “common people” had no say at all (“Ours is not to reason why…”).  Women were instructed by the words of Holy Scripture to “submit to their husbands in everything” “as the church submits to Christ”; and by the same token slaves were instructed, “Obey your earthly masters…just as you would obey Christ.” (Ephesians 5:22; 6:5).  The denigration of women by the Fathers of the Church in the early centuries of Christianity exhibited an appalling level of misogyny. Any dissent with the Creeds of the Church became punishable by death in a theocratic union of Church and State which ruled for a thousand years.  This was a time when the Church made more martyrs than it ever produced from its own ranks.

1

This totalitarian rule of the elite was the triumph of Hellenism’s Platonic concept of the ideal government.

As for that great book called the Bible, for a period measured in centuries the Church never wanted the ordinary Christians to read and interpret the Scriptures for themselves.  It was locked away in the foreign languages of Hebrew, Greek and Latin which only the elite could read anyway. It was over a thousand years before the Bible began to be translated into the vernacular languages of the people, but that event was at first greeted by executing some of the translators and even some of the people who were found with a translated copy of the Bible in their homes. For over a thousand years people were told what they had to believe on pain of being put to death or severely punished for any thinking deemed to be heretical.  The brilliant physician and theologian Michael Servetus was burned at the stake in John Calvin’s Protestant Geneva because he questioned the Church’s longstanding doctrine of the absolute divinity of Christ. Even at the dawn of the Enlightenment at the close of the 17^th century, a young man by the name of Akenhead was hanged in Scotland because he dared to suggest that Moses did not write the first five books of the Bible. (Today, one would be hard put to find one Christian scholar who would say that the first five books of the Bible were written by Moses). Religious tolerance never dawned on the Western world until more than two hundred years after the Reformation of the 16^th century.

The New World of America was founded by the Pilgrim Fathers who sought to escape from the religious persecution in the Old World of Europe. Having established the first British colonies in America, the Puritan settlers made it plain by their ill-liberal actions that neither Catholics nor Quakers were welcome to settle there. Religious liberty was something to be enjoyed by the Puritans who thought they were in possession of the Truth, not by those whom they thought would contaminate their new-found Promised Land with Popish errors or new-fangled heresies like those of the Quakers. (William Penn was a great Quaker in whose honour Pennsylvania was eventually named).

Religious liberty was not achieved in the New World settled by those Protestants fleeing religious persecution until the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the forming of the Constitution of the US (1787) guaranteeing freedom of speech and the separation of church and state. This achievement of the founding Fathers proved to be one enormous achievement for Western civilization.

What is generally not realized by those pushing for the preservation of Christian values is that none of the founding Fathers of America – Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, or Benjamin Franklin- were traditional Christians. They did not believe that the man called Jesus was God or claimed to be God. In this matter Jefferson said: “It would be more pardonable to believe in no God at all than to believe the atrocious teachings of the theologians.” In the same vein, in a later generation Abraham Lincoln said, “Christianity is not my religion.” It is for this reason that the founding Fathers of America were called Deists. It was a somewhat misleading label because it masked the fact that the founding fathers held that the teachings of Jesus, to use the words of Jefferson, embodied the most sublime ethics and the highest moral code that was ever offered to mankind. Jefferson and Adams spent much of their time in retirement exchanging their ruminations about the historical Jesus, with Jefferson finally producing The Jefferson

2

Bible. It was simply a collection of what he saw as the authentic parables and aphorism of Jesus which embodied a vision of an inclusive love and a radical egalitarianism. This is what had inspired Jefferson to draft these immortal words into the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Neither the granting of full human rights to women nor to black Americans took place in the generation of those who had drafted the Declaration of Independence. The intent of its words, however, had laid the foundation for full democratic freedom for all at last.

Jefferson always wanted to make it clear that he was not renouncing Christianity but only trying to return to the wisdom teaching of the man who was supposed to be its founder. (For further reading on the founding Fathers, see Jeffery J. Butz, The Secret Legacy of Jesus: The Judaic Teachings that Passed form James the Just to the Founding Fathers).

In the 19^thcentury which followed the founding Fathers, some Christian scholars began what in later years was dubbed the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Over the last two hundred years, more and more scholars from every major branch of the Christian Church have concluded that matching the historical Jesus to the Christ of faith is like trying to match a poet of love with a warrior of vengeance.

Part 1: What the Scholars are Saying about the Doctrine of Christ

[ All statements cited in the following compilation are presented without quotation marks, but the sub-headings in bold print are my own, and all comments within the square brackets as used here are my editorial comments.]

Burton L. Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth

[Dr. Mack, professor of early Christianity at the School of Theology at Claremont]

The assignment of names and the arrangement of the New Testament writings are misleading.

Scholars agree…most of the writings of the New Testament were either written anonymously and later assigned to a person of the past or written later as a pseudonym for some person thought to have been important for the earliest period.  Striking examples of the latter are the two letters said to have been written by Peter, both of which are clearly second-century creations.

Thus, over the course of the second and third centuries, centrist Christians were able to create the impression of a singular, monoline history of the Christian Church. They did so by carefully selecting, collecting, and arranging anonymous and pseudonymous writings assigned to figures at the beginning of Christian time…It is neither an authentic account of Christian beginnings nor an accurate rehearsal of the history of the empire church. Historians of religion would call it myth. pp.7,8

3

The primitive Jesus movement did not think of Jesus as the Christ.  It was his teaching rather than his person that was important.

The way that Luke tells the story in his two-volume history of Christian origins, for instance, is that after his death but before his ascension Jesus announced the establishment of the First Christian Church of Jerusalem by means of the outpouring of God’s Spirit on the day of Pentecost (Acts 1-20). We now know that Luke [whoever he really was] wrote his gospel and the Acts of the Apostles in the early second century, seventy-five or more years after the time of Jesus, and that he had his reasons for wanting to imagine things that way…there is not a trace of evidence in any of the early Jesus materials to support such a view. No early Jesus group thought of Jesus as the Christ or of itself as a Christian church…

It is neither possible nor necessary to say very much about the historical Jesus.  The first followers of Jesus were not interested in preserving accurate memories of the historical person. Jesus was important to them as the founder-teacher of a school of thought…. the matter of first importance was the teaching, not the historical teacher…  p.46

Q [the scholarly symbol which identifies the earliest writings of the Jesus school] will put us in touch with the first followers of Jesus. It is the earliest written record we have from the Jesus movement, and it is a precious text indeed. That is because it documents the history of a single group of Jesus people for a period of about fifty years from the time of Jesus in the 20s until after the Jewish-Roman war in the 70s…they did not need to imagine Jesus in the role of a god or tell stories about the resurrection from the dead in order to honour him as a teacher. The earliest layer of the teachings of Jesus in the Q are the least embellished of any of his sayings in any extant document. That means that the Q puts us as close to the historical Jesus as we will ever be. Thus the importance of Q is enormous. It has enabled us to reconsider and revise the traditional picture of early Christin history by filling in the time from Jesus until just after the destruction of Jerusalem when the first narrative gospel, the Gospel of Mark, was written.

Q is from the German word Quelle, meaning “source.”  The text got its name when scholars discovered that both Matthew and Luke had used a collection of sayings of Jesus as one of the “sources” for their gospels, the other being the Gospel of Mark… A critical edition of the unified Greek text is being produced by the International Q Project under the direction of James Robinson at Claremont.

Q brings the early Jesus people into focus, and it is a picture so different from that which anyone ever imagined as to be startling.  Instead of people meeting to worship a risen Christ, as in the Pauline congregations, or worrying about what it meant to be a follower of a martyr, as in the Markan community, the people were fully preoccupied with questions about the kingdom of God in the present and behaviour required if one took it seriously… pp.47,48 

The cult of Christ began among the Hellenist Jewish believers who fled to Antioch in Syria.

Beginning somewhere in northern Syria, probably in the city of Antioch, and spreading through Asia Minor into Greece, the Jesus movement underwent a change of historic consequence. It was a change that turned the Jesus movement into a cult of a god called Jesus Christ. At first sight it is

4

difficult to imagine that the Christ cult was at the one time a Jesus movement, for the change was so drastic and appears to have happened so suddenly…

The Christ cult differed from the Jesus movements in two major respects. One was a focus upon the significance of Jesus death and destiny. Jesus’ death was understood to have been an event that brought a new community into being. This focus on Jesus’ death had the result of shifting attention away from the teachings of Jesus and away from a sense of belonging to his school.  It engendered instead an elaborate preoccupation with notions of martyrdom, resurrection, and transformation of Jesus into a divine, spiritual presence…

…the Christ cult[was] already in existence before Paul encountered it. The Christ people must have been making their presence felt in a way that aroused Paul’s hostility when first he encountered them. And yet, they must have been attractive enough to occasion his later conversion…Because these people were the ones who first used the term Christ when referring to Jesus, we must think of them as the first Christians… pp.75-76

And Jesus Christ soon became his proper name. p.91

The transformation of a Jesus movement into the Christ cult, where the Christ was acclaimed as the lord of the universe, marks an important juncture at the beginning of Christianity. p. 96

The first Jesus people knew nothing of Paul’s very different kind of teaching.

…Paul’s conception of Christianity is not evident among the many texts of the early Jesus movements… It is the difference between the picture painted by the Jesus movements and the picture painted by Paul that requires explanation. p.99

Lorraine Parkinson, The World According to Jesus: His blueprint for the best possible world

 [Dr. Parkinson did her doctoral research of the historical Jesus at the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique francaise de Jerusalem, and continues as a teacher and writer and offering interim ministry in the Uniting Church congregations in Australia.]  

The doctrine of Christ divides and separates human beings.

Many Christian scholars are writing about the need to put aside traditional dogma which divides and separates human beings in the name of a Saviour Christ.  Such dogma has now been regarded as irrelevant to life by at least two generations of Western Christians, many of whom have clearly voted with their feet…Biblical scholarship ancient and contemporary is as sure as it can be that the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel represents Jesus’ own teaching.  Most argue that the contents represent core sayings of the historical Jesus, even though many see the form of the collection itself as a literary creation of Matthew. p.3

Jesus was not an apocalyptic preacher about the violent end of an evil world.

I do not subscribe to traditional doctrines of incarnation which understand Jesus to be the divine second person of the triune God… Contrary to expectations inspired by Paul’s writings and passed on

5

 by gospel writers, I oppose the idea that Jesus believed his vision would be fulfilled through an apocalyptic eschatological intervention by God at an End-time in history. p.6

Jesus did not see himself as the messiah figure.

…Jesus did not see himself as a messiah figure who would soon return after his death when God intervened to save the world… By taking Jesus’ teaching with absolute seriousness, it is possible to see in them enormous potential for the unity of humanity, not only within Christianity itself, but beyond particular religions and cultures… There are several key aspects to this development, including a move away from Christological understandings of Jesus and God. p.8-10

There is no vision of a perfect world or even a perfect Jesus.

[I] will not argue for Jesus as an eschatological teacher who believed that the present world would end with the intervention of God to destroy evil and restart the world in the pristine perfect mould of a second Garden of Eden.  There is no evidence from history or science that the world ever was perfect… Followers of Jesus do not have the potential to develop a perfect world, but through their change of mind and heart each can help bring about the best possible world in their own time and place. This is the all-inclusive possibility behind the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. p.17,19

His followers in this age have been freed from the impossible call to follow Jesus the Christ. They have freed Jesus himself from the moribund trappings of Christology. They now recognize that Jesus’ teachings come from an imperfect human being whose ideas are specifically formulated for imperfect human beings. p.229

Michael Morwood: It’s Time: Challenges to the Doctrine of the Faith          

[Michael was ordained to the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church, Australia,  but has worked over the last 25 years as an independent author and faith educator]

It is time to question Christology.

It is time to break from the worldview of two thousand years ago with its notions of a Supreme overlord God who lived in the heavens and who disconnected access to “Himself” because of some supposed sin by the first human. It is time to question the Christology that is tied to that outdated worldview and interprets the importance of Jesus – and the institutional Church – in terms of unique access to that heavenly deity. p.21

…an elsewhere overseeing Lord of the universe does not fit anymore. It is too tied to images of earth as the centre of the universe and of heaven as God’s dwelling place above the earth, and to the up-down language associated with those images…it is time to take seriously …that this Mysterious Presence we call “God” is everywhere and it is beyond all our human concepts…to an understanding and appreciation of the Divine Presence always here, always and everywhere active in an expanding universe and in the evolution of life on this planet. p.23 The obvious lesson from Jesus’ Jewish background is that the Divine Presence at work in the human community was, is and always will be primarily concerned with life on earth. If we do not place Jesus in this prophetic tradition with Judaism, we will not appreciate the central thrust of his teaching and

6

ministry or what he was prepared to die for. Instead, we will be distracted, as the Christian religion has been for two thousand years, by notions that Jesus was really concerned about getting people into heaven and meeting “God” there, rather than experiencing the Divine Presence here, and making the “kingdom of God” evident here on earth. p.39

It is clear that he did not see himself as a mediator between people and a distant God…It is time to ask why doctrines about Jesus winning access to heaven became the dominant theology of the Christian religion and how Christianity became so distracted from the basic message of Jesus. pp. 51, 54

The focus of the Jesus movement in the first 20 years was the presence of the kingdom of God in the here and now.

…the focus of the Jesus movement in this twenty-year period [after the departure of Jesus] was on the “kingdom of God”. The movement gathered around the belief that Jesus, the “son of man”, the human one, preached with urgency and intensity the need to establish
God’s reign on earth.  This movement was a way of life and was radical in its embrace of the preaching of Jesus. It seems highly likely, from what scripture scholarship can ascertain, that in this twenty-year period Jesus was considered by members of the movement to be a Jewish prophetical figure.  As in the preaching of Jesus, there is no evidence that the movement was concerned with access to the heavenly realms. The concern was to change this world.  The focus was on the preaching a way of life that would express the Divine Presence in human living and loving. pp. 55-56

Jesus did not participate in establishing a new religion.

It is important to acknowledge that this was a Jewish movement.  It was not a new religion. There is no evidence to suggest that any members of the movement thought they were part of a new religion. There are no written narratives from this time about Jesus’ birth, no annunciation story, no virginal conception. There are no resurrection stories. p.56

Paul’s writings represent a monumental shift away from the teaching of Jesus.

Then, beginning mid-century with Paul’s writings, and culminating in John’s gospel at the end of the century, a monumental shift in thinking about Jesus occurred…

…let us keep in mind that the first followers of Jesus were Jews. This was a Jewish movement…The followers of Jesus did not separate themselves from Judaism until after Paul died. [And even then, they did not leave Judaism willingly but were expelled by the controlling rabbis around 85 CE] p.56

The Christ of Paul was crafted to address the Greco-Roman worldview of attaining immortality in a heavenly realm.

Paul attributed to Jesus the same titles already bestowed on the Greek-Roman semi-gods and on the Roman Emperors, such as Saviour, Son of God and Lord.  Paul used another title, one with a long history in Judaism, to bring his message about Jesus to Jews, pagans, Greeks and Romans.  It was “christos”, “the anointed one.” Paul presented Jesus as “the Christ”. As we saw earlier, he bestowed on “christos” a meaning, a role and significance far beyond how Jesus would have applied the word to himself.

7

Paul’s preaching about “the Christ” shifted the focus from Jesus revealing God here-with us to Jesus as the unique pathway to the God who lived in heaven. Paul effectively fit Jesus into a worldview and into concerns Jesus had shown no interest in. Paul’s preaching and writing led the early Jesus movement into concerns about the God who withheld forgiveness for sin and who had denied access to his heavenly home. In using a term familiar to Jews for responding to the Greeks, Paul surely hoped his teaching about “the Christos” would bridge the gap between two significantly different religious worldviews. Unfortunately, the effect was quite different. His Christology ultimately set the scene for the break from Judaism with the claims that only through faith in Jesus “the Christ” could anyone be sure of God’s forgiveness and gain access to heaven. It also set up the centuries of argument about who Jesus had to be in order to accomplish the task of bridging the chasm between heaven (God) and exiled humanity on earth.

While it is beyond the scope of this book to explore the development of Christology in the Christian Scriptures in any depth, it is imperative to identify how some of its key aspects changed the way Christians came to think about Jesus… pp. 61-62

Paul’s focus on the death of Christ devalued the teaching of Jesus.

Paul consistently substitutes “Christ” for “Jesus”. This is an extraordinary development.  In changing Jesus into “the Christ” who supposedly won peace with and forgiveness from God, Paul effectively devalued Jesus and his preaching. Paul’s Christology is totally at odds with how Jesus perceived his role. It is clear that Jesus never told people that God’s forgiveness was conditional.  It is clear he never told people there was no hope of them being at peace with God unless he sacrificed his life for them. It is clear that he neither believed nor taught that God had disconnected from people. pp. 66-67

John’s gospel puts words in Jesus’ mouth which are a long way from the reality of Jesus.

John’s Gospel, in line with Paul’s theology, asserts that only through belief in Jesus as the heavenly “Christ” figure could people receive “power to become children of God”…

Scholars know that the speeches put on Jesus’ lips throughout John’s gospel are not the words of Jesus. The words are a long way removed from the reality of Jesus, “the son of man” who preached the urgent need to establish God’s reign on earth. The speeches call attention to Jesus, not to the kingdom of God.. “I am this…I am that…Before Abraham I…I go to prepare a place for you…Unless I go the Spirit will not come…” These are not the words of Jesus who walked the roads of Galilee. They are speeches composed in the light of Paul’s Christology and designed to give the new religion strong institutional identity apart from Judaism. They are composed in a worldview that understood God really lived elsewhere, that this God has “sent” the pre-existent Christ down from the heavenly realm, and that the Christ had to go back to the heavenly realms in order to “send” God’s Spirit down upon the followers of Jesus, and only on them!

Thereafter, institutional Christian leadership locked itself into this theological worldview. This theology was then cemented into creeds and doctrines that supposedly can never change. The reality is that this theology and Paul’s vision of “the Christ” on which it depends cannot withstand any realistic scrutiny in the twenty-first century. A God who lives in heaven? A God who locked people out? A world devoid of God’s presence? A God who would not forgive? A God who

8

gets angry? God’s Spirit waiting in heaven for something to happen on earth before “coming down”?  A God who allows access to “Himself” only if people join a particular religion? … an outright contradiction of Jesus’ belief that the Divine Presence was always present and active in people here on earth. pp. 80-81

Jesus was not on about getting people into heaven.

It is time to rescue Jesus from this distracting issue about getting people into heaven.  It is time to rescue Jesus from the Pauline “Christ” theology…it is time to stop using “Christ” as Jesus’ name. “Christ” does not elevate Jesus. It distorts his role, distracts from the urgency of his message… pp. 86,87

Paul did not build his theology on what Jesus said or did in his lifetime.

Paul never quoted Jesus for any of his theological beliefs. His authority for what he preached about “the Christ” did not come from anything Jesus said or did in his lifetime. The [four] gospels followed Paul. The authors wrote back into the story of Jesus a Christology that Jesus knew nothing about and made it appear he was well aware of it. p.88

 The doctrine of Jesus dying for our sins to satisfy the justice of God did not come from Jesus.

 It did not come from Jesus. Jesus would surely have been horrified that anyone would change his notion of a living and compassionate God into a deity who required a price to be paid before granting forgiveness. He made clear in his parables that his notion of God’s extravagant forgiveness and graciousness exceeded any human concept of justice. The doctrine came from Paul and his notion of “the Christ” winning access to the heavenly home of God.  It was Paul who taught that the world was essentially sinful because of Adam’s fall.  It was Paul who cemented the belief that there was no possibility of forgiveness from God without Jesus dying for the sins of humanity…It came from Paul who transformed Jesus into a semi-god acceptable to the Greek-Roman world…Jesus did not believe he had to die in order to win God’s forgiveness. pp.114-115

Patricia A. Williams, Doing Without Adam and Eve

[Patricia Williams has taught philosophy in universities in the United States, Canada and Australia, and is also the author of Where Christianity Went Wrong.]

Jesus was not the Christ who died for our sins.

According to all the Gospels, John the Baptist proclaims God’s forgiveness outside the Temple, baptizing the penitent in the cleansing waters of the Jordan. Jesus pronounces forgiveness without resorting to any rituals.  All the Gospels show John the Baptist and Jesus distaining atoning sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. For Christians, the fact that Jesus dismisses the need for atoning sacrifice should reveal that atoning sacrifices are unnecessary… Jewish prophets cry that the blood of sacrifices avail nothing (Isa. 1:11; Jeremiah 6:20; Amos 5:21-24). Jesus stands in the mainstream of a long and powerful Jewish tradition. Because…John the Baptist and Jesus ignored sacrifice, there is no reason for us to think of Jesus death as a sacrifice.  pp. 184-5

9

The Destructive Power of Religion: Violence in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Edited by J. Harold Ellens

[Dr Ellens has been a Biblical scholar, professor of Philosophy, Theology and Psychology as well as being an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church.]

Jesus was turned into Christ after his death.

As noted, the all-but universal assumption on the part of contemporary historical critics is that others turned Jesus into Christ and then into God after his death. p. 92 [This comment was made by Jack Miles in his essay, The Disarmament of God.]

James M. Robinson, Jesus According to the Earliest Witness

[Dr. James Robinson is very well known as one of the foremost Historical Jesus scholars of our time.  He has led an international group of scholars who have recently reconstructed the compete Sayings Gospel Q, the name given to the earliest writings of the Jesus movement.]

Sayings Gospel Q is the earliest witness to the historical Jesus.

A Sayings Gospel, in distinction from a Narrative Gospel, contains sayings ascribed to Jesus, with hardly any of the stories so familiar to us from the four Narrative Gospels of the New Testament.

The Sayings Gospel Q is even older than the Gospels in the New Testament. In fact, it is the oldest Gospel known!  Yet it is not in the New Testament itself – rather, it was known to, and used by, the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke in the eighties and nineties of the first century when they composed their Gospels.  But then it was lost from sight and only rediscovered in 1838, embedded in Matthew and Luke. It was nicknamed “Q,” the first letter of the German word for “source (Quelle), to refer to the second “source” used by Matthew and Luke, whose first source was Mark…

After all, Q is a product of the Jewish Jesus movement that continued to proclaim his message in Galilee and Syria for years to come, but from which practically no first-century texts have survived. The New Testament is mainly a Gentile collection, and hence only preserves the sources of Gentile churches. p.235

Jesus is not mentioned as Messiah or Christ in these earliest writings.

Nowhere in the Sayings Gospel Q is Jesus referred to as Messiah, “Christ.”  As a matter of fact, it is a bit inappropriate to refer to the Jews who produced this Sayings Gospel as “Christians,” since that name emerged not in Galilee, but in Antioch in the Gentile-Christian church of Barnabas and Paul (Acts 11;26). Similarly, other dimensions associated with later faith in Jesus as the Messiah are missing: neither is Bethlehem mentioned, where David was born and hence his successor is to be born, nor is the holy family, much less the genealogies that trace Jesus back to the patriarchs. p.xi

10

In the earliest layer of Q Jesus claimed no title, and seemed not to have been involved in our Christological reflections at all. (The Gospel of John has misled us into thinking he was obsessed with his own status, which is almost all Jesus talks about there)… Paul provided the core of our Christian faith, not Jesus. pp.230, 231

Perhaps the most striking thing about epithets for Jesus in Q is the complete absence of the title “Christ.” This fits the absence of a birth narrative in Bethlehem, the prophesied birthplace of the Messiah. p.238

Sayings Gospel Q was written by eyewitnesses of Jesus, but the canonical NT Gospels were not.

Furthermore, since Q consists of sayings ascribed to Jesus, it is ultimately based on his Galilean disciples – their memory, reformulation, and reuse of what Jesus had said.  On the other hand, none of the canonical Gospels was written by an apostle or eyewitness. p. 174

The Sayings Gospel Q was excluded from the canon of Scripture because its Jewish authors came to be excluded from the Church as heretics.

The mutual acceptance of Jewish and Gentile Christianity at the “ecumenical” Jerusalem Council [ in around 50 CE: see Acts 15] had long since broken down, with the successful Gentile Christianity rejecting the unsuccessful Jewish Christianity as heretical, in effect no longer Christian. Thus the exclusion of its older Gospel from the canon was inevitable. p. 8

David Galston, Embracing the Human Jesus:  A Wisdom Path for Contemporary Christianity

[Dr. David Galston has been the Executive Director of the Westar Institute and the Executive Director of The Quest Learning Centre of the Uniting Church of Canada where he has served as a minister]

Many theologians are terrified of the historical Jesus.

It seems that the historical Jesus means the end of Christianity, which is why, perhaps, many theologians are terrified of him. p.4

Jesus needs to be given back his humanity… p.6

When the founding figure of the movement like Christianity turns out to be someone quite different from the one depicted by traditional ideas of the movement, a clash occurs – not only between contemporary thinking and the traditional, but also between the founder and the tradition. This is what happens when the historical Jesus meets Christianity…. Once the individual or a community has accepted that Jesus was human like anyone, it becomes increasingly impossible to engage realistically in Christian worship and language. True, many among such folk continue to go to church because friends remain there. Or perhaps such a person does not go to church, and never did, but there is an even better excuse. p.9,10

The gospel writers clothed Christ with the garments of Caesar and royal imagery.

11

The gospel writers took the imperial garments of Caesar, and inadvertently, if not intentionally, slipped them over Jesus.  The problem of the historical Jesus begins with the recognition that while an imperial Jesus became the sine qua non savior of the world, this imaginative figure never actually lived.  p.l4

…the titles used to venerate Jesus were the same titles used to venerate emperors, heroes, and pagan gods…The image of Jesus Christ set against this background is a legend born from the mixture of Roman imperial theology and Jewish messianic history. The point is, how can one retrieve a human being out of that?  p.33,34

Jesus was Jewish and not Christian.

We can be assured by reason alone that in his lifetime the historical Jesus did not hold confessional Christian beliefs.  It is not necessary to offer this conviction for debate. As plainly as can be stated, and absolutely, the historical Jesus was Jewish, and not Christian. p.18

The four NT gospels were not written during the lifetime of Jesus.

No matter what scholarship is involved, liberal or conservative, no one claims that the gospels were written during the lifetime of Jesus. The gospels simply are not a verbatim record of what Jesus said; they are a record of what early Christians believed Jesus said.  They are the record of early beliefs about Jesus. p.37

Anyone who picks up on the voiceprint of the historical Jesus need not determine exactly what he said or what he did – such cannot be determined anyway – in order to know what he was about. p.48

Jesus was a wisdom teacher, not an apocalyptic prophet proclaiming the end of the world.

The apocalyptic Jesus model does very poorly when addressing the main thing to be said about Jesus; that he spoke in parable… it is a very difficult form of language to hold to the one reductive, interpretation that apocalypticism demands. It is impossible to claim that the end of the world is coming with the ambiguities implied in parables…

Apocalypticism, then, is the theology of the early Christian movement but not the teaching of the historical Jesus. pp.74-7

Apocalyptic concerns overrode wisdom teaching within a few decades of his death, and on this rock Jesus became a religion. p.92

To be a follower of the historical Jesus does not require beliefs about him; it requires ears to hear him…

What is found in the parables and aphorisms of Jesus is a biting trinity of satire composed of paradox, hyperbole, and irony. [Galston says that the gospels, especially Matthew, do not always understand Jesus’ sense of humour, and turns his parables into apocalyptic allegories illustrating the end-times. We should therefore beware of the Gospel authors attempts to explain the meaning of his parables]. pp.104-109

12

I will suggest that from its earliest phases to the present, Christianity has been mainly an apocalyptic religion in its theology and worship forms…Christianity as a world religion was born out of and formed with the structures of apocalyptic thinking…the Christian proclamation of salvation is difficult to make without an apocalyptic structure… as a historical  being [Jesus] does not really offer a foundation for an apocalyptic model at all.  pp.143-147

The message of the historical Jesus is not about the Christ.

…the historical Jesus had no idea he would be the Christ within a new religion…The Christ is not the gospel of the historical Jesus, and this disjunction creates some genuine problems…As a teller of parables, Jesus mocked the imperial ideas of God, particularly evident when associating the presence of God with a mustard plant or with yeast… In the Church, Jesus has become Caesar by another name…

The difficulty is that the Christian tradition began with the Christ confession. The confession is the bedrock of Christianity…if the historical Jesus community drops the title Christ, is it still Christianity? pp. 189-192

There is no mention of Christ in the earliest writings of the followers of Jesus.

Q holds no Christ language, no crucifixion and resurrection narrative, and only a few hints of miracle lore associated with Jesus. p.219

Hugh J. Schonfield, Those Incredible Christians 

[Dr. Schonfield is a Jewish scholar and a best-selling author who is widely recognized as an authority on Jewish Christianity]

Pauline Christianity was not the Apostolic teaching.

We are permitted by the New Testament, dominated by Pauline material, only brief and inadequate glimpses of the very substantial Nazorean movement to which the Apostles appointed by Jesus in his lifetime belonged…In many matters Paulinism was in conflict with native Christianity, and ultimately got the upper hand through its greater appeal to Gentiles and because political conditions made it increasingly difficult  for the legitimate Church to exercise an effective corrective influence.  In the end the relationships were reversed. Pauline heresy served as the basis for Christian orthodoxy, and the legitimate Church was outlawed as heretical…  p.74

Paulinism triumphed only after the Apostles of Jesus were dead.

Paul was a remarkable individual and something of a religious genius, so that it came to be assumed that he had the mind of his master as he claimed in addressing his converts. Yet this was not the opinion of those who had known Jesus personally, and they did not hesitate to say so. For the Apostolic Church much that Paul taught was grievous error… Paul never companied with Jesus or heard what he said day after day… What the native Church’s emissaries contended was so logical, however, and so convincing, that before Paul’s death Paulinism was defeated over a wide area, and many of his converts were won over…Decades elapsed before the teaching of Paul was reinstated and his letters treated as inspired.  The writing of the Acts of the Apostles was a contribution to this

13

rehabilitation. By this time the original Apostles had long been dead, and the churches of the West, now predominantly non-Jewish in composition, were almost entirely out of contact with the Nazoreans as an outcome of the Jewish war with Rome. pp.76-78

Marcus J. Borg, Essay in The Search for Jesus: Modern Scholarship Looks at the Gospels, [Moderated by Hershal Shanks]                                                                                                                                      

[Dr. Borg is a distinguished Lutheran author in what is known as the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus movement. He has been a Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University.]

The Christian message was not the message of the historical Jesus.

To summarize and put it bluntly in three quick statements as I’m going to may seem almost brutal. In all likelihood, the pre-Easter Jesus did not think of himself as the Messiah or in any of the exalted terms in which he is spoken of. Second, we can say with almost complete certainty that he did not see his own mission or purpose as dying for the sins of the world. Third and finally, again with almost complete certainty , we can say that his message was not about himself or the importance of believing in him. p.87                                                                                                                                                          

Jesus was a wisdom teacher.

…the greatest consensus among contemporary New Testament scholars is about Jesus as a wisdom teacher, a consensus that has emerged in the last 20 years. The most characteristic forms of Jesus’ speech as a wisdom teacher are parables (basically short stories) and aphorisms (short sayings), both of which crystallize insight. Aphorisms are great one-liners. I think it’s fascinating that one of the most certain things we can know about Jesus is that he was a storyteller and a speaker of great one-liners.  p.100

We don’t know who wrote the NT Gospels.

We don’t know anything at all about who they were. With almost complete certainty, we can say they did not bear the names by which the gospels are known. None of them knew Jesus while he was alive. They weren’t the 12 disciples. That is, John wasn’t written by one of the Twelve; Matthew wasn’t written by one of the Twelve. So in that sense, they are all anonymous documents. p.139

Comment by Hershall Shanks, Editor of the The Search for Jesus   

[Dr. Shanks has served as Editor of Biblical Archaeology Review and Bible Review]

 Defining the historical problem: we only have access to reports from the third stage of the Jesus movement. A great Catholic scholar, Joseph Fitzmyer…points out that there are three stages in the development of the gospel tradition.  In stage one, we have what Jesus said and did in the first third of the first century.  Stage two consists of what the disciples and the apostles taught and preached about what Jesus said and did.  Stage three is the sequential narratives by the authors of the gospels, what they sifted out from the teachings of the disciples and apostles.  Only stage three has been preserved.

14

And this, in a sense, defines our problem. Starting from stage three, how do we get back to stage one, what Jesus said and did? p.4

James G. D. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the NT

James Dunn(1939-2020) was Lightfoot Professor of Divinity, University of Durham, Member of the Church of Scotland and the Methodist Church of Great Britain.  Dr. Dunn did not call the Christology of the Church into question.  He is cited here because he makes an important contribution to understanding how that the post-Easter Jesus movement very quickly split into two groups that were known as Hebrews and Hellenists who exhibited some serious differences and tensions with each other.

What the Church of the Second Century called “heretical Jewish Christianity” was close to the faith of the apostolic church at Jerusalem.

[Dunn is cited here to show that the teachings of the apostolic church in Jerusalem did not subscribe to the orthodox Christian teaching about Christ. He identifies three significant characteristics of what the Church of the second century called “heretical Jewish Christianity”: (1) adherence to the law of Moses;  (2) the exultation of James and denigration of Paul, and (3) adoptionism – the belief that Jesus was a naturally born son of Joseph and Mary, indicating that he was the son of God only by adoption. In the next century this came to be called the heresy of “adoptionism.” (pp. 240 – 242)]

If these are indeed the three principal features of heretical Jewish Christianity, then a striking point immediately emerges:  heretical Jewish Christianity would appear to be not so very different from the faith of the first Jewish believers.” p.242

Heretical Jewish Christianity could claim a direct line of continuity with the most primitive form of Christianity…If the earliest church is the norm of orthodoxy, then Ebionism measures up pretty well; if primitiveness means purity, then Ebionism can claim to have a purer faith than almost any other. But Ebionism was rejected – why? Because its faith did not develop as Christianity developed.  It clung to an expression of Christian faith which was acceptable at the beginning of Christianity in a context of Judaism.” p. 245 [ Dunn’s apology for the church’s departure from the apostolic teaching  is not very satisfying! He could have investigated whether the Hellenist Jews who fled to Antioch should have embarked on what turned out to be a speculative 400-year journey in Christology which ended in declaring that Christ was God in the highest sense. That was a journey that no Jew who stood in the tradition of the apostolic church at Jerusalem could ever take].   

The conflict between James and Paul can hardly be overstated.

[In 2 Cor. 10-13] Paul also accuses them [the missionaries from the Jerusalem church] of preaching another Jesus, of having a different spirit, of proclaiming a different gospel…the sharpness of the antagonism between Paul and Jerusalem can hardly be overstated. p. 25   [ Dunn’s comments on Paul’s last visit to Jerusalem according to Acts 21 are as follows:] Then when Paul was arrested and put on trial, we hear nothing of any Jewish Christians standing by him, speaking in his defence – and this despite James’s apparent high standing among orthodox Jews. Where were the Jerusalem Christians? It looks very much as though they had washed their hands of

15

Paul, left him to stew in his own juice. If so it implies a fundamental antipathy on the part of the Jewish Christians to Paul himself and to what he stood for. p.256 [Emphasis by Dunn]

In the earliest stage of the Jesus movement two factions emerged – the Hebrews and the Hellenists.

Whatever the precise facts, the clear implication of Acts 6 is that the Jerusalem Hellenists maintained separate synagogues…Obviously many Hellenists had been converted and identified themselves with the new sect of the Nazarene. One conclusion follows almost immediately: that the earliest Christian community embraced two fairly distinct groups more or less from the first- Hebrews who spoke Aramaic (or Hebrew) as a badge of their Jewishness, and Hellenists who preferred to or who could converse only in Greek. …the Hellenists must have lived rather apart from the rest: otherwise how could the Christian widows have been so completely neglected (Acts 6:1) – not just some of them but the whole group… p. 268-9

These latent tensions within the earliest Christian community came to a head in the failure of the ‘community of goods’ – the separateness of the two groups resulting in the Hellenist widows being missed out in the daily distribution from the common fund…But almost certainly the failure to cater for the Hellenists and the subsequent complaints of the Hellenists were only the surface expression of these latent tensions, the symptoms of a deeper division. p.269

The persecution that was directed at Stephen and the Hellenists was not directed at the apostles or the Hebrew church in Jerusalem.

Stephen’s views [in attacking the temple – see Acts 7] seem to have led directly to an open split with the earliest community of Christians; the differences which first became visible in Acts 6:1 now deepened into a more obvious and clear-cut division. The depth of this division is indicated by the  account of Stephen’s trial and death. The Hebrew Christians seem to have shown no solidarity with or support for Stephen in his trial…Luke’s silence is ominous…Is Luke perhaps trying to cloak the fact that the Hebrew Christians had virtually abandoned Stephen, so antagonized were they by his view on the temple?…Stephen’s views had at least lost him the sympathy of the local Hebrew Christians, who may have felt that Stephen had gone too far,  and had jeopardized the existence of the whole new sect…

Finally we may note that the persecution following Stephen’s death seems to have affected only or principally the Hellenist Christians…Luke maintains that the whole church was scattered abroad, ‘except the apostles’ (Acts 8:1); but that persecuting authorities would concentrate on the numerous followers and ignore the leaders of any proscribed movement is very hard to accept and contrary to sound pogrom strategy….the fact seems to be that the Hellenists were almost wholly driven out of Jerusalem… pp.273-4

Paul’s persecution was not directed at the apostolic church of the Hebrews, but only at the Hellenists who were first to be called Christians at Antioch.

[Calling one faction the Hebrew Christians as James Dunn does above is a little bit misleading because the Hebrews of the apostolic church in Jerusalem led by James were not Christians but Jews. They had no Christology and did not call themselves Christians.  The label of Christians was given to the Hellenists after they had fled to

16

Antioch, a city in Syria not far from Damascus (see Acts 11:26). Saul, who was called Paul in Greek, set out to arrest and haul Christian converts in Damascus back to Jerusalem for trial before the Sanhedrin. If Paul wanted to arrest the Hebrew believers, there were already a few thousands of them in Jerusalem that he could have arrested.  The Pharisee Gamaliel, at whose feet Paul had been instructed in the Law, had already counselled the Sanhedrin to stop persecuting the apostolic church in Jerusalem (Acts 5:34-39). So Paul was obviously not trying to arrest members of the apostolic church in Jerusalem (Acts 8:1). According to Acts 9:31, a new era of peace and growth opened up for the apostolic church led by James, the brother of Jesus. We have to conclude that Paul’s persecution was directed only at the Hellenist Christians.  It was to this group that Paul was dramatically converted].

Helmut Koester, History, Culture and Religion of the Hellenistic Age

[Helmut Koester was the Chairman of the Editorial Board, Harvard University, for this publication in 1982] 

Indeed, Christianity, which had its beginnings in the early Roman imperial period, was rapidly Hellenized and appeared in the Roman world as a Hellenistic religion, specifically as an already Hellenized Jewish religion. p. 40

Christianity, after all, became a Hellenistic movement through and through, largely because Judaism had already marked the path into Hellenistic culture. pp. 97,98

All the books of the New Testament without exception were originally written in Greek; there is no early Christin Greek writing which can be shown to have been translated  from Hebrew or Aramaic…Christian authors normally quote from the Septuagint… p.110

Christianity became deeply enmeshed in the syncretistic process, and this may well have been its particular strength. Christianity began as a Jewish sect with missionary ambitions, but it did not simply arise out of Judaism, nor directly out of the ministry of Jesus. On the basis of these beginnings, however, Christianity, more than any other religion of the time was able to adapt itself to a variety of cultural and religious currents and to appropriate numerous foreign elements until it was ready to succeed as a world religion- thoroughly syncretistic in every way. pp. 166-167

The myth of Dionysus dying and revivication was widely known. p.183

Mary, the mother and goddess of heaven in Christianity, is little more artistically than a copy of Isis. p. 188

Parallels with Christian statements abound in this narration of the initiation into a mystery religion. One should not deny that the New Testament and the mysteries speak the same language. p.191

…Christianity was deeply in a process through which it became one with the Hellenistic world and its religious concepts. p.201

To claim, therefore, that Christianity was specifically the religion of the poor and underprivileged is nonsense and can be easily refuted. p.201

17

PART 2: The Triumph of Hellenism              

The word Christ is not Jesus’ second name. It was a title that was bestowed on him after his death. It was a title in the same way that words such as Caesar, Emperor, Governor or President are titles rather than personal names.

Christ was the Greek word used to translate the word messiah which literally meant the anointed one in the Hebrew scriptures. While the anointed one could refer to any person such as a prophet, priest or king, the word was mostly used in the Hebrew scriptures as a title for an anointed king (Psalm 2:1). Even a Persian king by the name Cyrus the Great could be called God’s messiah (Isaiah 45:1).  In Jewish apocalyptic writings of the second century BCE, however, the messiah begins to take shape as some kind of warrior king who would defeat and punish Israel’s oppressors in an end-time conflict and be given dominion over the nations (Daniel 7: 13:28). That was the most common expectation which prevailed among the Jews in the time of Jesus.  

When the title of Christ was at first bestowed on Jesus by some of his Hellenist followers, it simply meant that he was this apocalyptic messiah.  In calling Jesus the Christ, Saint Paul nowhere said that he was God.  It would be another 400 years before the Christian Church was able to draw up a whole series of Creeds to elevate the status of Christ to become God in the highest sense and co-eternal in the Blessed Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Constructing this high Christology was not completed until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE finally declared that Jesus Christ was both fully God and fully human in one hyperstatic union of two natures in one person.   

These Creeds of the Church which were drawn up by the Greek-speaking Fathers of the Church from the second to the fifth century were all about Christ. They said nothing about the teachings of the historical Jesus, and they didn’t sound anything like the teachings of Jesus.  For almost two thousand years, the deity of Christ as expressed in the Creeds remained like the immovable rock of the Christian religion. It remained unmoved when the Roman Catholic church went through the break with the Eastern or Greek Orthodox Church in the 10^th century, or its break with the Protestant churches in the 16^th century.  For almost two millennia, no branch of the branch of the Church considered as genuinely Christian challenged the Christology established by the Apostles Creed (second century), the Nicene Creed (fourth century), the Council of Chalcedon(fifth century) and the Athanasian Creed (sixth century). 

In the beginning of this third millennium of Christian history, however, there are voices everywhere in all branches of the Christian church that are calling Time-up on this central teaching of the Christian religion.  As the foregoing compilation of statements from a wide variety of scholars and churchmen indicate, the trend towards calling the doctrine of Christ into question transcends all the old religious boundary lines. This is not a matter of being Catholic or Protestant, Conservative or Liberal, Jewish or Christian – or even non- Christian. It is a matter of putting the evidence of critical enquiry above the authority of (1) who said it, (2) how many have said it, or (3) what authority has said it. When the Enlightenment of the 18^th Century rejected these three arguments as a valid foundation for what is true or false, it freed the human mind from centuries of enslavement to dogmas and myths that were heretofore unquestionable.

18

As a fruit of that Enlightenment, over the last two-hundred years a movement has been afoot that has been dubbed the Quest for the historical Jesus.  It has unearthed a wealth of historical information – information about the early Jesus movement,  about the apostolic church led by James, the brother of Jesus,  about Paul’s conflict with James and Jerusalem in conflict with Antioch,   about Jewish Christianity being rejected by the great church as heretical, about the first writings of the Jesus movement called Sayings Gospel Q,   about the identity and influence of Apocalyptic writings as a genre of literature that is different to ordinary prophetic literature, and about a wagon load of heretofore unknown Gospels and other documents dug up from the sands of the Middle East in recent times.

When the Christian Church was drawing up its Creeds about the divinity of Christ, the Church Fathers kept insisting that this was the original apostolic faith which Jesus passed down to his disciples and which they in turn passed down to the church as an unchanged and unchangeable package of truth.

With a great deal of certainty, we can now say that this view of church history is a complete myth.  

It can now be said with a great measure of historical certainty that the doctrine about the divinity of Christ does not go back to Jesus and does not go back to the church that was founded by the apostles in Jerusalem.  It goes back to some Jewish Hellenists who fled to Antioch where they cradled the beginnings of this doctrine about Christ.

The Apostolic Church at Jerusalem was not a Christian Church. Its Jewish members were not called Christians but Nazarenes.

The apostolic church that formed in Jerusalem after the death of Jesus was not a Christian church. It was called apostolic because the apostles who had been disciples in the school of Jesus were among its founding members. James, the brother of Jesus, was its leader, and its people were not called Christians but Nazarenes or people of the Way.  Its members were Aramaic-speaking Jews who still worshipped at the temple in Jerusalem as “the house of prayer for all people,” and continued to observe the Jewish customs such as circumcision, sabbath observance and eating kosher(see Acts 21:20). The only exception was that following the example of John the Baptist and Jesus (and before them, the Essenes and the Hebrew prophets) they did not bring any animals to be sacrificed at the temple because they rejected the sacrificial cult of the priesthood.  They had no intention of departing from Judaism or the network of Jewish synagogues to form another religion, much less one that was hostile to Judaism.

We need to bear in mind that in that time any group of Jews could form a synagogue to exist within the network of almost 400 synagogues which existed in Jerusalem at that time.  Any new group could either be called a synagogue or a church as both words simply meant a congregation or an assembly.  

Under the leadership of James, this apostolic group grew to include thousands of Jews (Acts 21:20).  Far from forsaking Judaism, their vision was for Judaism to become that light on Mount Zion which would attract people from all nations to the worship of the one true God (See Isaiah 2: 2-4: Micah 4:1-3).

 Apostolic teaching was focused on the teaching of Jesus rather than his person. 

19

Sayings Gospel Q, the existence of which was first understood in the 1830’s, was written by the earliest followers of Jesus.  Although it was written some years after his death, Q had nothing to say about a Christ figure, and very little to say about the person of Jesus. It was Q which first reported that Jesus taught in parables and used wise and witty sayings called aphorisms.  The apostolic church and the so-called Jewish Christianity (a misnomer) that sprang from it did not believe that Jesus was a divine being or virgin born.

The death of Jesus as an atonement for sin is so central to the Christian religion that it may come as a shock to us that Q has nothing to say about the death of Jesus, even though Q was written after that event. It was as if the authors were thinking, “Why dwell on the death of our teacher rather than his most memorable sayings which bring to us the spirit and life of his teachings?” These early witnesses never reported that Jesus did any great miracles except refusing to do any to prove the authority of his teaching.  Like a true man of the Age of the Enlightenment, Jesus claimed no authority for what he said other than what he said.

The absence of any teaching about the death of Christ as an atonement for sin was consistently maintained in all subsequent Jewish Christian writings such as a catechism written around the turn of the first century called The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, or the Gospel of the Ebionites which cited words from Jesus condemning the cult of sacrifice.  Apostolic teaching never attached any saving significance to the death of Jesus because Jesus, like the Hebrew prophets before him, taught that God’s loving kindness was the sole basis of forgiveness without the need of any animal or human sacrifice (Micah 6:6-7; 7:18-19; Matthew 5:9:13).   

After the apostolic church experienced some initial persecution, the Jewish Sanhedrin was counselled by Gamaliel to leave the apostles alone (Acts 5:34-39; 8:1). Although the church in Jerusalem suffered some sporadic persecution after this, it was soon able to settle into a period of peace which enabled it togrow in number and influence within Judaism until it numbered several thousand Jews (Acts 9: 31: 21:20). Far from intending to leave Judaism, the goal of James was to convert Judaism to the teachings of Jesus.  James the Just, as he was widely known, became such a highly respected figure in the whole Jerusalem community, that his death at the direction of the High Priest in 62 CE caused such a flood of protest to Rome that the High Priest was dismissed from the office he had held for only three months.

In all, there was nothing distinctively Christian about the apostolic church. Contrary to the claim of the Church Fathers that the Creeds of Christendom were apostolic, there is nothing in the Creeds of the Christian church that is compatible with apostolic teaching. There was never such a thing as apostolic Christianity. The very term is an oxymoron.  It is even preposterous to claim that that the Jerusalem church could have continued within the network of Jewish synagogues for more than fifty years, or that its leader could have been so highly regarded in the wider Jewish community, if it had been preaching a Christology declaring, contrary to the Jewish Shema, that Jesus was God (Deuteronomy 6:14). The claim that the Christology of the Creeds was handed down to the Christian Church by the apostolic church was an enormously misleading fabrication.  The only way the so-called Fathers of the Church could make the claim look credible was to bury the real identity and teaching of the apostolic church and to compose books to which they attached apostolic names. It is amazing how

20

the church was able to cover the tracks of this great cover-up for the best part of two-thousand years.

We can say this now with a great deal of confidence based on a massive amount of historical information available on James the Just and so-called Jewish Christianity (See What the Scholars are Saying, Part 1, The Identity of the Apostolic Church, bobbrinsmead.com).

If the doctrine of Christ did not begin with the apostolic church at Jerusalem, where and under what circumstances did it begin?   

As James Dunn points out in our forgoing collection of scholarly statements, “two fairly distinct groups more or less from the first” appeared in the post-Easter Jesus movement.  In Acts 6, these two groups are clearly identified as Aramaic-speaking Jews called Hebrews (Ebraious) and Greek-speaking Jews called Hellenist (Elleniston).

The Hebrews were the primary group which founded the apostolic “church” in Jerusalem – bearing in mind that this was only a gathering that still existed within the Jewish network of synagogues.  The Hellenists were a secondary group composed of Greek-speaking Jewish converts who had joined the Jesus movement.  Jewish Hellenists had existed as a significant faction within the Jewish nation for over two hundred years.   

The mention of any conflict between the Hebrews and the Hellenists is first mentioned in Acts 6 in the context of an incident which on first blush looks like some minor friction about Greek-speaking widows being neglected in the food distribution.  As Dunn points out, since the Hellenist widows were being neglected as a group, this indicated that the Hellenists had separate synagogues. That would be consistent with them having a different language.  Then Dunn goes on to point out that this friction in the matter of food distribution was a “symptom of a deeper division.”

According to Acts 6-7, the apostles of the Jerusalem group acted to resolve the matter of the food distribution by ordaining seven deacons from among the Hellenists to wait on the tables in the food distribution. This indicates that the apostles were the recognized leaders in the Jesus movement.  It appears almost hilarious that the ordained “table waiters”, led by Stephen, became such flaming evangelists that they appeared to be creating more impact among both Jews and Gentiles than the apostles who had ordained them.

However, rumours soon spread that the teaching of Stephen seemed to be undermining the temple and the law of Moses (Acts 6:14). This created some tension between the Hebrews who were led by James and the Hellenists who were led by Stephen. While James never opposed a mission to the Gentiles, he wanted all Jews within the Jesus movement to be seen as loyal to the Jewish law (see Galatians 2:12,13; Acts 21;20,21).

The preaching of Stephen not only made the Jerusalem apostles apprehensive (for they were still worshipping at the temple and were loyal to the Law), but it raised the ire of the Jewish Sanhedrin which acted by calling Stephen to answer before its Council.  Stephen’s speech to the Council was taken to be so blasphemous in its attack on the temple that he was summarily stoned to death without obtaining a required approval from the Roman authorities.

21

It appears that the Jerusalem church led by the apostles had kept a cool distance from the trial and execution of Stephen. To cite Dunn again, “Stephen had gone too far, and had jeopardized the existence of the whole new sect.”  There was an unavoidable political aspect to this tragic incident. James did not want the success of his mission within Judaism to be jeopardized by reports that the movement he led might lead his Jewish converts to become slack in their observance of the law or do anything that could form a breakaway movement from Judaism.

Acts 7 concludes by saying how Saul of Tarsus (or Paul in Greek) was present to approve of Stephen’s execution.  Paul followed this up by launching a crusade to persecute the Hellenist group. The persecution did not include the Hebrew group led by James (Acts 8:1).  Gamaliel, under whom Paul had trained as a Pharisee, had already counselled the Sanhedrin not the harass the Jerusalem church (Acts 5:24-38). Soon after this, this Hebrew faction began to enjoy a period of peace in which it grew in both numbers and in good standing within the Jewish community (Acts 9:31; Acts 21:21). On the other hand, the Hellenist faction whom Paul was zealously pursuing, fled to Antioch in Syria to evade the persecution which followed the martyrdom of Stephen. It was here at Antioch that these Hellenists began to be called Christians (11:26) When we look at Stephen’s closing remarks to the Council, it seems that his repudiation of the temple was based on his conviction that Jesus had become the Messiah according to Daniel 7: 13-28.  The Hellenists began to be called Christians in the city of Antioch because their gospel was now all about Christ – proving it, defending it, and explaining it.  It was Antioch rather than Jerusalem which became “the cradle of the [Christian] church.” Encyclopedia Biblica, Vol 1, p. 186

It was to this faith which the Hellenists had cradled at Antioch that Paul was suddenly converted after trying to destroy it. It was to these Hellenist Christians to whom Paul returned after his conversion rather than to the apostles at Jerusalem (Galatians 1:17,18), and it was by the church at Antioch that Paul was ordained to preach to the Gentiles (Acts 13:1-4). The conversion of Paul did not end the tension which had developed between the Hebrews at Jerusalem and the Hellenists at Antioch. It continued as a tension between James and Paul.  In his letters to the churches in Galatia and Corinth, Paul accused his Jerusalem opponents of preaching “another gospel” and “another Jesus.”  This tension between the church at Jerusalem and the church at Antioch was never resolved. 

The primacy of the Jerusalem church and its influence within the growing Jesus movement ended with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. Then the growth of the Hellenist church which was focused on the doctrine of Christ blossomed among the Gentiles. On the other hand, by the end of the first century, the Hebrews whose roots were in that original Jerusalem church, found themselves expelled from Judaism and rejected as heretics by the church of the Hellenists.  Having no home in either the synagogue or what had become the Church of the Gentiles, they became known as Jewish Christians or Ebionites. Among them were the descendants of Jesus’ own family who were called the Desposyni.

The Phenomenal Spread and Influence of Hellenism

Hellenism is derived from the word Hellenic which simply means Greek. It was an international movement which spread the Greek language and culture throughout the Greek Empire, beginning with the reign of Alexander the Great in 336 BCE.  The movement thrived not only for the 300 years

22

of the Grecian Empire, but it also dominated civilization during the rule of the Roman Empire which followed.

Alexander was more than a military genius who in the twenty years of his reign was able to establish an empire which stretched from India to Greece. He was inspired by a vision to spread the Greek language and culture throughout all the nations within the orbit of his empire.  During his teenage years and before he ascended the throne of his father Phillip of Macedon, Alexander had been taught by none other than Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher.  Aristotle had been taught by Plato, and Plato had studied philosophy at the school of Socrates. These three, who were to become the fathers of Western philosophy, played a huge role in this international movement called Hellenism. Alexander’s vision to spread the Greek language and culture throughout his empire proved to be far more successful than his military exploits.  To this day Western civilization is still called Greco-Roman civilization.

From the beginning, Hellenism was well-received by most nations within the Greek Empire. They benefited by its wide range of cultural interests which included art, sculpture, architecture, theatre, poetry, rhetoric and oratory, medicine, science, gymnasiums, mathematics, and more.  Hellenism was like a BCE-Age of  Enlightenment which led to the formation of all kinds of Associations and Clubs, some of which created impressive public buildings such as theatres, auditoriums, gymnasiums, libraries, museums and meeting halls to accommodate a great range of activities including  theatres for the performing arts,  gymnasiums which included libraries to cultivate the mind as well as body, schools of philosophy and religious gatherings.  There were so many features of Hellenism which appeared to enrich and advance the human condition.

We must not, however, confuse the international movement of Hellenism with the era of classical Greece which came much earlier. The origins of Greek democracy happened in Athens a century before the rise of Hellenism. That eminent trio of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle who played a significant role in the dawn of Hellenism, were not the fathers of democracy. Socrates said that democracy was the worst form of government because it was the government of the least qualified. Plato taught that the ideal government would be a government of the wise elite who were the only ones fit to govern.  Plato’s idea was more like the kind of government envisaged in our day by the World Economic Forum that meets in Davao to dream of an elite cabal qualified to make decisions for the great mass of people “who will own nothing and be happy.”

A most important feature of Hellenism, therefore, was its vision for the ideal kind of ruler or government.  This is why Hellenism is reckoned to begin with the reign of Alexander the Great. He became the embodiment of the ideal king by virtue of being considered a divine man.  According to the legend of his birth, his mother Olympia was engaged to be married to Phillip of Macedon, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through a mysterious divine encounter.  This meant that Alexander would have a divine father and a human mother.  Alexander himself claimed that he was the son of the Greek god Zeus, and he acted in confidence of this belief. It was said that he never suffered a military defeat in his 20-year reign which created the largest empire that his age had ever seen.  His extraordinary prowess seemed to prove he was the divine man he was claimed to be. This belief and expectation of a divine man ruler would become the hallmark of Hellenism for centuries to come. When Alexander’s successors eventually divided the Empire into the Seleucid

23

Empire centred in Syria and the Empire of the Ptolemies centred in Egypt, the rulers retained their divine status in the tradition of Alexander.  It was not that the Greek rulers had originated the cult of the divine man ruler, because this kind of ruling cult had already existed during the reign of the Egyptian Pharaohs. It was, however, made a core feature of Hellenism that was eventually passed on to the emperors of Rome.   

This core Hellenist belief in the divine man was not confined to those who became kings or emperors. It was extended to a whole range of persons who were regarded as exceptionally gifted or charismatic, whether male or female. Plato, the philosopher, was seen as one of these divine men.  According to legends which developed about his birth, he too was a virgin-born divine man. Something similar was claimed for Asclepius, an exceptionally great healer.  The stories of his compassion for the poor and miraculous healing of the sick are not unlike the stories told about Jesus the Nazarene some centuries later.  Hellenism was chock full of stories about heroes who had a divine and human parents or were otherwise divinely gifted to be more than human.  Apollo and Hercules were among the great heroes of Greek mythology who were also revered divine men.  It was said that Zeus, the father of the Greek gods, had from time of time consorted with at least a hundred women, some of whom were virgins, to conceive godmen who were sons of Zeus.

Not inclined to be exclusively Greek, Hellenism embraced ancient gods from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor and Rome.  Hellenism had a rich variety of religious tales and mystery religions to appeal to all tastes, and it was always ready to add more.  Central to each, whether it was the cult of a ruler, a philosopher, a healer or one who became a hero (always after their death), was the cult of a divine man. In Hellenism, the distance or distinction between the world of the gods and the humans was small enough to mingle or be conflated.  Here was a culture where the great mass of people would expect that those who governed them had the credentials of a divine man. Wide credence was given to reports of miracles and legends to endorse this status.  

 Homer’s classic tales called the Iliad and the Odyssey, were often used as primary readers for those who wanted to learn Greek. Although they were mythic tales based on a smattering of some historical events, the Iliad and the Odyssey were not without some timeless insights and lessons about human behaviour.

Being open to so many divine man rulers, heroes, teachers, and healers, Hellenism was both polytheistic and pagan.  With its enormous variety of divine man myths and mystery religions, it had to be tolerant in view of its diversity. People could choose which gods or heroes appealed to them just as in our time people are free to choose which celebrities they are inclined to adore or admire. Historically, it has generally been the great monotheistic religions that have tended to be intolerant of the differing others or even aggravate others by claiming to be in exclusive possession of the truth. This is what seems to have happened when the Greek emperor Antiochus 1V, calling himself Antiochus Epiphanes (the manifestation of God), invaded Israel in the 160’s BCE. When he was not accorded the deference that his divine title demanded, he was not amused but tried to force the Jews to abandon the most essential features of Judaism.  A similar issue arose between the Roman Emperors and the Jews over a hundred years later. This brings us to think about the stark difference between Hellenism and the Hebrew faith that was always going to provoke conflict.  The core of the Hebrew faith rested in what Judaism called theShema: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.” (Deuteronomy 6:4) This meant that any person

24

anointed to be the king of Israel was a “son of God” only by adoption (Psalm 2:1). God alone was divine. There was no prophecy or expectation in Hebrew scripture of a divine man becoming king or a person born of divine and human parents.  While Hellenism was chock full of virgins or other women giving birth to divine men, there was no such thing in Hebrew scriptures, despite the mistranslation and misinterpretation of Isaiah 7:14 which appears in that Hellenist version of scripture called the Septuagint.

This stark distinction between what is Hebrew and what is Greek should not to be missed.

Hellenism did not die when the Greek Empire was replaced by the Roman Empire. The influence of the Greek language and culture penetrated and dominated Roman civilization. Rome was able to sweep away the political structures of the disintegrating Grecian Empire, but it could not destroy the language, the worldview and culture of Hellenism. The Greek language and culture remained the common language and culture throughout the Roman World. 

Rome did not produce philosophers to replace Socrates, Plato and Aristotle whose influence lived on to become the fathers of Western philosophy.  Rome had no dazzling array of myths to outshine the Greek myths with its pantheon of gods, divine man heroes and mystery religions. Rome did produce some of its own virgin-born heroes such as Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, and a new divine man such as Augustus and the cult of Caesar worship. Yet the new gods were only the old Hellenist gods dressed in new garments. The Caesars of Rome donned the old Hellenised garments of divine man rulers in the tradition set by Alexander the Great.  

We must now proceed to see how Rome was conquered not only by the old forms of Hellenism, but by a new form of Hellenism which was first crafted at Antioch.

Jewish Hellenism

From the time Alexander set out to spread Hellenism throughout the Greek Empire, the Jewish nation could not avoid being penetrated by Hellenist influences.  During the 300-year reign of the previous Persian Empire, the Jewish nation had adopted the Aramaic language of the Persian Empire, and as the apocalyptic book of Daniel indicates, it absorbed some of Persia’s Zoroastrian worldviews.  It is hardly possible to adopt a language without being influenced by its associated worldview and culture.

From the beginning of Alexander’s empire, a significant number of Jewish people lived abroad in what was called the diaspora.  Most of these would have learned to speak Greek, or in some cases, Greek would have become their only language. When some of these returned to their homeland, a Greek-speaking faction would have formed within the Jewish nation. Whether they lived abroad or in their homeland, the Greek-speaking Jews always tended to be more affluent, more educated, more cosmopolitan, more liberal and more open to Hellenist influences than the more conservative Aramaic-speaking Jews.  This difference between the Hellenists and the more conservative Jews who were called Hebrews tended to create some tension between these two Jewish factions. In the third century BCE, the Jewish Hellenists undertook a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures which became known as the Septuagint version.  It was called the LXX for short due to the legend that it was miraculously translated by seventy scholars within 70 days. In reality, the task of translating all the books in the LXX took over a century to complete. The legend, however, helped

25

formulate the view that all the books in the LXX, including the translation, were supernaturally inspired.  Having a book created by men who were divinely inspired was consistent with the Hellenist expectation of having a ruler who was a divine man.   

As Helmut Koester writes in his impressive volume, History, Culture and Religion of the Hellenistic Age, “It is difficult to overestimate the significance of the LXX for Hellenistic Judaism …the LXX became the source for the theological language of Judaism and thus also of early Christianity.” p.253.

 To support their doctrine of Christ, the Hellenists not only used the LXX, but they also needed a method of interpreting it according to the conventional wisdom of Hellenism.  That was provided by Plato who was given the status of a divine man philosopher. The influential scholar who provided the Jewish Hellenists with a vital link to Plato was a Hellenist Jewish philosopher by the name of Philo of Alexandria.  He was by far the best-known writer of Biblical commentary in the era when the church at Antioch was getting established. Believing that Moses and Plato were equally inspired, Philo’s aim was to harmonise the Law of Moses with the teachings of Plato. To do this, he used a method of interpreting the LXX allegorically, figuratively or typologically.

To understand how Philo’s interpretive methods were based on Plato, we need to know something about Plato’s dualism of Forms and Patterns. By Forms he meant those eternal or heavenly Realities which he said were meta-physical.  By patterns he meant that the things of this earth which, being physical, were transitory and inferior, mere shadows, types, patterns or allegories of the Forms. This dualism of Plato came to dominate Western thinking for so long that most Western thinking came to  be dubbed “footnotes to Plato.”

What Philo did in his Biblical commentaries was to use Plato’s dualism to interpret the scriptures in an allegorical, figurative, or spiritual way.  It became a method of interpretation that reduced the value of the present creation to something that was inferior, temporary, or even a worthless prison for what Plato called the immortal soul. Everything that happens in this present created order, according to this dualism, was said to be a mere shadowy pattern, type, figure or allegory of the meta-physical Realities.

This denigration of the created order in Hellenism was as profoundly incompatible to the Hebrew faith as the Hellenist view of the divine man.  In Hebrew thinking, the created order is said to be “good,” and all its material blessings like sowing and harvests, eating and drinking, making love and raising families, were to be celebrated as real gifts given in real history. This same appreciation of both the goodness of creation with its life cycle of birds and lilies in the here and now, rather than being denigrated, is powerfully reflected in the teachings of the historical Jesus.

When Philo, however, applied Plato’s dualism as a method of interpreting the LXX, he demeaned its entire history as having no meaning except to exist as types, figures or allegories of some heavenly Reality. It was this method of reading scriptures which provided the Hellenists at Antioch with a way of finding types, figures or allegories of Christ all over what came to be called the Old Testament. A prime example of turning the Old Testament into a mere “shadow of good things to come” is provided in the NT book of Hebrews. It turns the entire sacrificial system of the Jewish priesthood into a type, pattern or allegory of the sacrificial death of Christ.  Using this Hellenist method of interpreting Hebrew scripture (using the Greek LXX version of it) one was able to run through the

26

entire Old Testament and find figures and patterns to represent Christ everywhere.  As for instance, Paul can say that Adam was a figure of Christ (Romans 5: 12-18), the seed of Abraham was the promise of Christ (Genesis 15-17; Galatians 3:8 ), the rock that followed Israel in the desert was a figure of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:4), or the lamb sacrificed on the eve of the Jewish Passover was a figurative depiction of Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross ( 1 Corinthians 5:7). As Paul wrote to his church in Corinth, “Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:3). Yet he declines to cite any scripture to support his claim. Then Paul goes on to say, “On the third day he rose from the dead, according to the scriptures.” Again, Paul does not cite any scripture which prophesied that Christ would rise from the dead on the third day unless he was using the OT story of Jonah in the belly of the fish as an allegory.  Or perhaps it was the comment in Hosea 6:2: “In the third day he will raise us up.’’ In context, this is only talking about the nation of Israel.

Using the same figurative or allegorical method of interpretation, the unknown author of the Gospel of Matthew cites a whole series of events recorded in the Old Testament as being prophesies of Christ. For example, he cites the prophet Hosea saying, “Out of Egypt have I called my son” as if that was a prophecy of the parents of Jesus fleeing to Egypt to escape the murderous Herod and then returning with the child when the king had died.  In context, however, Hosea is simply writing of Israel’s Exodus from Egypt.  Matthew turns that history into a figurative prophecy of the Christ. 

The number 1 exhibit for this figurative method of finding Christ in the OT, is Matthew’s story of the virgin birth of the Messiah, citing Isaiah 7:14, “A virgin shall conceive and bear a son.” In context, this passage is not remotely a prophecy about the birth of a future Messiah, but the prophet Isaiah’s own wife who is called an almah, or young woman in the Hebrew language. Before this son would be old enough to know the difference between good or evil, the kings of both Israel and Judah would be deposed by the invading Assyrians (See Isaiah chapters 7,8).

Hebrew scriptures know nothing about a future king of Israel being a virgin-born divine man after the manner of a Hellenistic king.

Christians need to face up to the embarrassing fact that there are no proof texts that can be drawn from the OT which prove that Jesus was the Christ. The historical Jesus never claimed to be the Christ, and the first church of his apostles in Jerusalem, being Hebrews, made no such claims for their teacher.  It was the Hellenists in the church at Antioch who interpreted the OT scriptures as if it was all a shadowy figure, type, pattern or allegory about the coming of Christ. It was a mode of Biblical interpretation that was developed by Philo and based on Plato’s dualism of eternal Forms and temporary patterns, figures, and types. The Hellenist converts at Antioch read the OT, the only scriptures then in existence, as if its only purpose and meaning was to provide a shadowy pageant of the coming of Christ and his subsequent rule at the right hand of God. By interpreting the Hebrew scriptures figurately, typically or analogously, the Hellenist Christians    found proof-texts for their doctrine of Christ all over the Scriptures.  Given their Hellenists glasses (made courtesy of Plato and Philo) they could begin at almost any piece of Scripture and preach Christ from it just as the first Hellenist evangelists did with the Song of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53(Acts 8: 30-35). This passage in Isaiah 53 is part of series of Songs about the faithful remnant of Israel who is called the Servant, which the context defines as being a remnant of Israel who remained faithful to Yahweh during their 70-year captivity in Babylon.  Phillip, an early Hellenist evangelist, interprets the Song of the Suffering Servant as being prophesy of Christ. In it’s historical context,

27

however, Isaiah 53 is not a prophesy about some person who would appear 500 years in the future. It is a song in Hebrew verse to honour those Jews who had patiently endured their captivity in Babylon.

How the Hellenists developed their Christology Step by Step:

As we have already seen, the doctrine of Christ did not begin with the Hebrew church in Jerusalem but in the Hellenist church at Antioch. It was not the Hebrews of the apostolic church in Jerusalem who embarked on a 400-year journey of turning the humble Nazarene teacher into God Almighty, but it was the Hellenists who were first called Christians at Antioch.

The first step in the whole process of constructing what was to become an elaborate Christology was taken when the Hellenists bestowed the title of Messiah or Christ upon the post-Easter Jesus.  As Paul was later to write, “He was declared to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead.” “God…has raised up Jesus again, as it is also written in the second Psalm, You are my Son, this day have I begotten you.”  (Romans 1:3; Acts 13:33).  In these early beginnings, this was still the Hebrew concept of becoming Son of God by adoption as it was with David when he was anointed king of Israel (Psalm 2:1).

The NT letters of Paul, written in the 50’s CE, never say that Christ was God or suggest that he was a virgin-born son of God. Neither does the first NT Gospel called Mark which was written in the 70’s.   We need to keep in mind that up until the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE, the apostolic church of the Hebrews at Jerusalem and the church of the Hellenists at Antioch were still existing within an accord despite some tension between them (see Acts 15 and 21; Galatians 2).  Any accord with the Hebrews would have been impossible if the Hellenist churches were teaching contrary to the Hebrew Shema which declares that God is one (Deuteronomy 6:4). As for the teaching of the virgin birth, that never appeared while members of the family of Jesus remained alive.

Yet bestowing the illustrious title of Christ on the post-Easter Jesus was the most significant of all the steps to be taken on the journey of turning the humble Nazarene teacher into the ruler of the Universe.  Giving him the title of Messiah was the most decisive step of all because it changed the focus of the gospel away from the teachings of Jesus to the teacher himself.  The messenger now became the message. In giving the teacher this celebrity status, the Hellenists had turned the teachings of Jesus into the cult of an illustrious person as it was with all the old Hellenist cults.  From this point forward, it remained only to embellish and raise the status of Christ higher and still higher until there was no higher place to go.  

It would take some time before the enormous implications of changing the message of the man into the message about the man would be realized.  When the Creeds of Church were drawn up between the second and the sixth century, they were all about the person of Christ. Not a thing was said about the teachings of Jesus.

This was like having the followers of the Buddha forming a cult of his person and losing sight of his teachings. Or forming a cult of Einstein that bypassed what he said about Relativity.     When the Hellenists had bestowed the title of Christ on the post-Easter Jesus, it raised the question of how being crucified could possibly fit the job description of the promised Messiah.  Under Roman

28

Law, only a person of the lowest class could be crucified, and under Jewish Law anyone who was hanged on a tree was cursed. The Hellenists’ apology for a crucified Messiah consisted in raising the bar of Christ’s exaltation even higher. They said that his death was no ordinary death, but one that was ordained in the foreknowledge of God to be an atoning sacrifice for human sin.  This elevated the death of Jesus to being the supreme apocalyptic, end of world, Judgment Day event in which Christ was offered up by Almighty God to bear the punishment for human sin.

 No one who was there to witness the crucifixion of Jesus, of course, could have seen it as the reconciliation of the entire cosmos to God taking place in this crude and ghastly Roman execution. If a crucified Messiah appeared to be an impossible oxymoron, the apologia of the Hellenists glorified it as the centrepiece of the gospel according to Saint Paul and the centre-piece of the Christian religion for centuries to come.

It has been an enormous shock to finally discover, as the Quest for the Historical Jesus has discovered, that neither the original apostolic church at Jerusalem, led by the brother of Jesus, nor the earliest writings of the Jesus movement, viewed the death of Jesus as any different than the death of John the Baptist or any other prophet. More than that, they knew firsthand that both John and Jesus were against the offering of any sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin.  They did not, as the Hellenists did, invest the killing of animals at the temple with the sacred significance of being a type or allegory for the death of God’s son. John and Jesus revived the teachings of the Hebrew prophets who taught that forgiveness of sin was based solely on the loving kindness of God rather than any animal or human sacrifice. (Isaiah 1; Amos 5 and Micah 6-7). In his baptism for the forgiveness of sin, John had substituted the water of baptism in the Jordan River for blood shed at the temple. Jesus went further by requiring neither a ritual of blood or water as necessary for the forgiveness of sin, citing the words of the Hebrew prophet, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice.”  

 The Hebrews of the apostolic church had no need to develop any apologia for the death of Jesus as the Hellenists had done.   

The Law had stipulated that an animal offered at the temple for sacrifice had to be without blemish. Since all the sacrifices were interpreted by the Hellenists as being as an allegory or figure of the death of Christ, this led the Hellenists to develop a doctrine of the absolute sinlessness of Jesus. If he was to become “the Lamb of God which takes away the sin of the world,” this seemed to suggest that he must have been the only sinless person who had ever lived upon the face of the earth.

The absolute sinlessness of Jesus was to become a dogma of the Hellenists, but its full flowering required time to develop. When the NT Gospel called Mark was written around 70 CE (at least 40 years after the death of Jesus), the author begins his Gospel with the baptism of Jesus at the hands of John the Baptist.  This baptism was called “a baptism for the forgiveness of sin.” (Mark 1:4). According to Mark, it was after Jesus arose from the cleansing waters of the Jordan, that “a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.’” (1:11-12). After this event, Mark relates how a man kneeled before Jesus, saying, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life.”  To which Jesus replied, “Why do you call me good? There is none good but God alone.”  (Mark 10:17,18). Then around two decades after Mark was written, another Gospel appeared called Matthew. Although this author copies Mark, he also wants to correct some things in Mark’s presentation.  For

29

instance, Matthew adds an apologia for the baptism of Jesus lest an impression is left that Jesus might have needed any kind of forgiveness.  Matthew also changes Mark’s story where Jesus declines to be called good, saying, “Why do you ask me about what is good?”  (Matthew 19:17 NIV) Most of all, rather than starting his Gospel with the baptism of Jesus, as Mark does, Matthew begins with a narrative of Jesus’ virgin birth. This was something about which neither Paul, who wrote in the 50’s, nor Mark, who wrote in the 70’s, had anything to say. For that matter, no teaching about a virgin birth arose while the family of Jesus was still alive and while the apostolic church in Jerusalem still existed to exercise some restraint on the Hellenist churches. Those restraints were removed after Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE and the Jerusalem church was almost wiped off the map.

With his narrative of the virgin birth, Matthew was able to upgrade Mark’s account to portray Jesus as an absolutely impeccable, all-knowing divine man, who unlike the Jesus of Mark, did not need to ask questions about what others were thinking or saying. He moved Mark’s account of Jesus being adopted as son of God at his baptism to becoming Son of God substantially by means of a virgin birth. More than anything else, the virgin birth narrative of Matthew was pure Hellenism whose entire history was chockful of myths about divine men who were born of women who bore sons who were sired by the gods  – Alexander the Great, Plato, Asclepius, Apollo, Heracles, Dionysus and a host other godmen in the Hellenist pantheon of gods. Some of these Hellenist gods were believed to be divinities who had died and risen again. Many of these myths existed throughout the Middle East in the first century. (See Tryggve N.D. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising God’s in the Ancient Near East”) The newly minted myth of the virgin-born Christ was able to surpass the old Hellenist myths that were losing their lustre and appeal. Nothing could stop this Christian Hellenism from penetrating and conquering the Roman world that was ripe and ready to embrace the new myth of a virgin born ruler and Saviour. 

Around the turn of the century another NT Gospel according to an author called John elevated the status of Matthew’s Son of God still higher by moving this Sonship back to his pre-existence in heaven. This gave him the status of being God incarnate.  Unlike his portrayal in the other three Synoptic Gospels where Jesus hardly says anything about himself, the Son of God in John’s Gospel gives a series of long monologies calling himself the Bread from heaven, the Water of life, the Light of the world, the good Shepherd, and the pre-existing Son who was one with the eternal Father before the world began.

With all this, was there any higher place for Christ to go beyond John’s Gospel?  Yes, there was, and taking this next step would take another two hundred years to achieve.

Early in the fourth century CE when Emperor Constantine became a Christian, there was a Presbyter by the name of Arius and a Bishop called Athanasius who were embroiled in what became the mother of all disputes about the Son of God’s relationship to the eternal Father. Since Christ was said to be “the only begotten son of God” (as in John 3:16), this indicated to Arius that the eternal Father must have preceded the Son and be greater than the Son. It is certainly not hard to find statements in the NT that might appear to support the teaching of Arius. This would have been the view of most Christians up until this controversy arose. Athanasius fought the teachings of Arius tenaciously until the whole Christian Church was seriously embroiled in the controversy of whether the Father was in any sense before or greater than the Son.   Athanasius argued that if the Son was not God in very essence or substance, having existed eternally

30

with the Father, then Christ could not have bridged the infinite gulf that existed between God and man. Therefore, he said, our eternal salvation was at stake in being correct in this very heady flight into the realm of high Christology.   

If Christianity was to become the official religion of the Roman Empire, Constantine wanted the church to be confessing one united faith. So, he called the bishops of the universal church together in the Council of Nicaea in 325 to settle the Arian controversy. The emperor himself presided. He placed armed guards around the venue to prevent the participants from escaping until the Arian controversy was settled. Most of the bishops supported drawing up the Nicene Creed which supported the Christology of Athanasius. Constantine immediately issued an Edict declaring that anyone teaching contrary to the Nicene Creed would be put to death. The faith that had been worth dying for had now become the faith that was worth killing for. The victory over Arianism, which took another 400 years to eradicate from all the Barbarian kingdoms, was won by the edge of the sword more than by the power of persuasion.

In the Nicene Creed of 325 CE, Christ was given the ultimate status of being the eternal Son of God, “God of very God” with no higher place to go. Yet some things remained to be clarified.  Was he two persons living in a single nature, or was he one person who had two natures, one divine and the other human?  Was he half-God and half-man or fully God and fully man?  The Council of Chalcedon in 451 finally decreed that Jesus Christ possessed two natures – perfect God and perfect man – in a hyperstatic union in one person called Jesus Christ. The wording used in drawing up this clarifying Formula relied heavily on Greek philosophical reasoning that saddled the Church with a contradiction as profound as the Church’s doctrine of the Trinity. Not a few Christian scholars would now prefer to call the Formula of Chalcedon a myth rather than a mystery.

After drawing up its Creeds about Christ, the Church found that the best way to stop any further arguments about Christology was to put dissenters to death.  An absolute intolerance of any further dissent about Christology settled over Christendom for centuries. This tyranny of thought was neither removed by the Renaissance nor the Reformation of the 16^th century. It continued until the Enlightenment of 18^th century gave birth to the age of free inquiry and religious tolerance. This triggered the beginnings of an unfettered research into (1) how Christology was developed over a period of some centuries, and (2) how the Christology which developed was made to look Apostolic.

How Hellenist Christianity Made the Doctrine of Christ Look Apostolic:

It can now be said with a great deal of confidence that the apostolic church in Jerusalem that was led by James, the brother of Jesus, did not believe that Jesus was a virgin-born divine man. Even a conservative scholar and churchman such as James D. Dunn has frankly said that the apostolic church in Jerusalem never taught that Jesus was divine.

How then did this Hellenist Christology get passed off as apostolic teaching for two thousand years? One of the most significant ways this was done was to ascribe apostolic names to the authors of the four Gospels of the New Testament.  Two hundred years of literary scholarship has shown that no names were originally attached to the four Gospel.  They were all written in Greek by unknown authors after 70 CE and after the leaders of both factions of the Jesus movement, Hebrew and

31

Hellenist, had died.  The process of attaching names to the Gospels did not start until the end of the second century.  The name of the apostle Matthew was attached to the first NT Gospel and the name of the apostle John to the fourth Gospel.  The names of two associates of the apostles, Mark and Luke, were attached to the other two Gospels.

This made it look as if the very first Gospel of the NT, which teaches that Jesus was a virgin-born divine man, must have been apostolic teaching. That, of course, is a complete myth. The real authors of the four Gospels were, in fact, unknown Hellenists who neither lived in the generation of Jesus nor in the land were the language of Jesus was spoken.

Associated with attaching apostolic names to the four Gospel was the order in which the Churchmen  arranged the NT canon. In making Matthew the first book of the NT, this tended to destroy any true sense of how the history of the early church unfolded.  To start with, the first NT writings were the letters of Paul which were written in the decade of the 50’s, about a generation after the death of Jesus.  All the other documents of the NT were written after 70 CE.

Putting Matthew as the first book of the NT makes it all too easy to assume that Paul learned about the birth, life, Last Supper, death and resurrection of Jesus from the apostolic witness of Matthew. This Gospel, however, was not written until a generation after Paul had died. When the correct order in which the NT documents were written is understood, it becomes easy to see that Paul did not get any information from Matthew about what Jesus said at the Last Supper. Paul did not copy what Matthew wrote, but Matthew copied what Paul wrote.

Paul said nothing about the virgin birth of Jesus, and neither did Mark. Mark was the first Gospel, and it was written around 20 years after Paul wrote his letters to the churches. Matthew not only copied Mark to derive much of his basic material to write his Gospel around 85-90 CE but was the first NT writer to introduce the story of the virgin which neither Paul nor Mark knew anything about.

By discarding the order in which the NT documents were written, rather than clarifying the way the history of the church unfolded, the arrangement of the NT documents tends to obscure or even bury the real history of the Jesus movement. By putting the story according to Matthew first, this creates the desired effect of placing his nativity story as the starting point of the Christian movement. The account of the virgin birth, however, came near the end of the first century.  

Matthew was written at a time when the Hellenist faction of the Jesus movement was beginning to create a burgeoning Gentile Church within the Roman Empire. That world was already a Hellenist culture in which its heroes and gods were divine men of miraculous birth. How could the claims about a Jewish Messiah be given a serious hearing in this kind of world unless this Messiah also had some spectacular birth credentials?  Matthew provided Jesus with those credentials. Matthew also did this at a time when the family of Jesus had passed on and the influence of Jerusalem Church post-70 had seriously waned due to the utter destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. The Fathers of the great Gentile Church which grew from its beginnings in Antioch could never have made the Creeds of Church look apostolic unless its NT documents had largely written James, the brother of Jesus, out of the story. It is only in recent years that a massive amount of research and some excellent publications have restored James to be seen as the towering figure of the mother

32

Church of Jerusalem for the first 32-years of its history.  If any later titles such as Bishop or Pope are to be used, then it is correct to call James rather than Peter the first Bishop or Pope.

It was less than thirty years ago that an ossuary or bone box of the first century turned up in a collector’s warehouse in Jerusalem. Carved on the ossuary were words in Aramaic saying: James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus. The discovery caused a sensation on realizing this could be the only piece of extant evidence for the existence of Jesus. Most Christians were not even aware that Jesus had a brother called James because the NT mentions this almost subliminally.

In his 900-page tome called James, the Brother of Jesus, the Jewish scholar Robert Eisenman tells us that outside of the NT, far more is known about James than is known about Jesus. He points out that James is the strongest piece of evidence we have that Jesus ever existed. Known as James the Just, he was the leader of the first church in Jerusalem for 32 years.

 Much is now known about James’s extra-ordinary way of life.  He was so widely respected in the general Jewish community that when he was put to death at the direction of the High Priest in 62 CE, there was such an uproar of protest among the Jews that the Roman authorities intervened to have the High Priest dismissed from office. According to Josephus, it was widely believed that the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans came as result of killing James.

Why then is the NT so silent about the leading figure in the first generation of church history?

It was not an accident that James was written out story of the apostolic generation. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE, the influence of the Jerusalem church waned, but the Hellenist church at Antioch moved ahead to become the great Church of the Gentiles. The victors wrote up the history.  They could never claim that their doctrine of Christ was apostolic unless James was written out of the story.  Who could be more apostolic than James who had drank of the same mother’s milk as Jesus and who became the leader of the apostolic church in Jerusalem for the first 32 years?  

If James had to be written out of the story to make the Church’s doctrine of Christ look apostolic, what could be done with the apostle Peter who had that falling out with Paul at Antioch (see Galatians 2)?  Instead of trying to write him out of the story, in the early part of the second century two epistles appeared that were said to be written by Peter. NT scholars generally recognize that 1 Peter and 2 Peter were written long after Peter was dead.  Bart D. Ehrman sums up the evidence saying, “Modern people would simply call it a forgery.” (Forged, p.77).  Its obvious purpose was to re-create Peter into an apostle who commends Paul, talks like Paul and sounds like a Hellenist Christian. Despite Peter being an illiterate fisherman, whose native tongue was Aramaic, 1 Peter was written in some of the most advanced Greek of the NT and cites passages from the LXX version of the Old Testament—in Greek, of course! Having written James out of the story, a legend was created which put this re-made Peter in the chair of James as the first leader or Pope of the Jerusalem church.  

It required legends like this and a re-writing of history to make the Church’s doctrine of Christ look apostolic. The claim was as outrageous as re-writing the  history of Karl Mark to make him look like an advocate of Adam’s Smith’s free enterprise capitalism.

33

Cracks in the Wall of Christendom

It was the Hellenist faction of the Jesus movement who turned Jesus into Christ and then into God after his death.  Jesus said nothing about Christ and neither did the apostolic church.

The doctrine of Christ is a Hellenist myth from beginning to end. 

In a recent publication called Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari presents an astonishing account of the existence and power of myths. He shows how humans are different to other animal species in that they can be held together in large communities such as nations and international movements because they have imaginative faculties that live by stories or myths that bind them together. Joseph Cambell’s life’s work was to compose a whole series of volumes about the myths of mankind.

The human mind tends to adhere to myths and believe in them more strongly than observable realities. As Montaigne put it, “Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.” 

In the Christ myth, the Hellenists “forged the most compelling myth in the history of mankind.”(Maccoby) It conquered the Roman Empire and became a dominant force in Western civilization. The myth of Christ inspired the human spirit to do both bad and good things. On the negative side, devotion to the myth of Christ inspired a lot of book burning, including the destruction of the great library of Alexandria, and a dreadful amount of intolerance and persecution in pogroms against the Jews, crusades against the innocent Cathars in the North of France and the Muslims in the Holy Lands, the burning of heretics at the stake and the terrors of the Inquisition – all crimes against humanity done in the name of Christ. For more than a thousand years, the rule of Christendom (which means the domain of Christ) was among the greatest totalitarian regimes of mind and body control that this world has ever seen. During this period the Church made far more martyrs than it ever produced from its own ranks. During this reign of the Church as the servant of Christ, the most unforgivable crime, punishable by death at the stake, was to question any facet of the doctrine of Christ.  

On the other hand, Christ also inspired the human spirit to enrich the culture with great music, art, architecture, institutions of education, health and human wellbeing, most of which appeared after a dreadful era of ignorance and superstition called the Dark Ages. The positive side of the Christian influence drew much of its inspiration from the teachings of Jesus which the Church had preserved in the NT to accompany its central doctrine of Christ. Paul, the brilliant Hellenist theologian of the Christ myth, neither referred nor deferred to the teachings of Jesus. He obviously thought that the earthly revelation of Jesus had been surpassed by the heavenly revelation of Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17) that came directly to him in visionary episodes (12:2-4). Following the example of Paul, none of the great Creeds of Church, developed between the second and fourth century, had a thing to say about the teachings of Jesus. Preoccupation with the Christ myth as the centrepiece of the Christian faith seriously downgraded the importance of teachings of Jesus. Or at best, those teachings could only be partially understood when they were read through the glasses of the Christ myth. Despite all these factors which tended to subordinate the teachings of Jesus to the basement of the Church, the Church always had its thinkers who

34

seemed to be moved by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount more than they were moved by Paul’s preaching of Christ.

What has happened in the last two hundred years is that the Quest for the Historical Jesus has gone into that basement, besides a lot of other historical “basements”, to look at the teachings of Jesus in their true historical context.  

The overwhelming consensus of the Quest is that the historical Jesus is not the Christ of faith.

This means that the teachings of Jesus are not supportive of the Christ myth or compatible with the Christ myth.  We may have assumed, as the Church has generally assumed, that the teachings of Jesus and the Christ myth belong together like twins from the same mother, but this is not what the Quest has found.

The very term Jesus Christ is an oxymoron. Jesus was an historical person; Christ is a Hellenist myth.  

Jesus and Christ present us with entirely different images of God.

This stands out starkly in Jesus’ teaching about a kind of love that rejects violence, pay-back justice and dominion over others.

We only need ask, how many people did Jesus kill when he was here on earth?  None of course, because he was non-violent. How many people will Christ kill when he comes to earth “in flaming fire to take vengeance on all them that know not God”? (2 Thessalonians 1:6-8) This event is presented in Christian teaching as the mother of all holocausts. Jesus and Christ confront us with entirely different images of God.

 Is divine violence destined to be the final solution to human violence? Do the violent images of Christ throw some light on why so much of Christian history was violent?

In the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:36-48), Jesus rejected any “eye for an eye” pay-back justice in favour of a restorative and redemptive justice of unconditional forgiveness (see also Luke 6: 28-36). Yet the Christ of Paul is said to propitiate the wrath of God with an atoning sacrifice for sin (Romans 3), and a forgiveness based on punitive justice.  The whole book of Revelation, said to be “an apocalypse of Jesus Christ”, is about pay-back time, vengeance, and retaliation from beginning to end. So, a violent atonement and a violent end of the world are just two parts of the one myth!  

The students in the school of Jesus were taught to renounce achieving dominion and control over others because true greatness is found in serving others rather than in controlling them (Matthew 23:13). On the other hand, Christ is frequently presented as having dominion over all and ruling all nations with a rod of iron (Revelation 2;17; 19:15).  The God we see in the real man called Jesus is very different to the kind of God who is revealed in the Christ myth which re-enforces all those unfortunate images of a domineering, controlling kind of God. That is why so many serious cracks are now appearing in the doctrine of Christ. No myths last forever, not even “the most compelling myth in the history of mankind.”  All is not lost because there is so much to be gained. What remains in the New Testament documents without the Christ myth has always been its real treasure.  Thomas Jefferson likened the authentic parables and sayings of Jesus to finding diamonds that have been scattered among the dung of inferior minds. He suggests

35

that these diamonds are not so hard to find.  One only needs to listen carefully to identify the unique voiceprint in the words of the great teacher.

To be continued

Movements which bind large numbers of humans together in support of a common cause are based on a narrative that captures the human imagination (See Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind). 

The Climate Emergency movement is an illustration of the power of a narrative. The mass of people caught up into believing there is a climate emergency are not driven by any clear understanding of the complexities, much less the uncertainties of climate science. They are driven by a very basic narrative that goes something like this:  Human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) – mostly caused by burning fossil fuel – are a pollutant which is overheating the earth and causing a climate emergency.

The reason why this climate alarmist movement has been so successful is because its proponents take every opportunity to repeat this narrative and remind the public of the urgent need to reduce its carbon emissions. Some highly credentialled scientists now express the view that this narrative embodies the greatest scientific delusion in human history. If the central thesis of this narrative is a Goebel-size Big Lie, it has become widely believed on account of its being endlessly repeated. One fact is certain: if a government is needed to control carbon emissions, it will have to be a centralised regime that controls almost every aspect of human existence – what we can eat, what we can drive, how much we can travel, and in the end, and what we can think or say on social platforms.  

The only way to effectively counter this narrative is to propose a better one. A mass of scientific data and arguments will not change the public perception that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant. What is required in this battle for the mind is a clear and convincing narrative about the benefits of having more CO2 rather than less.

This counter narrative is suggested by the basic facts of photosynthesis. Plants draw in CO2 from the atmosphere, breathe out the oxygen, then in a process using sunlight, plants use the carbon as food to grow and flourish. In this way, plants use CO2 to green the earth and to provide food for all creatures great and small.

Before CO2 began to be demonized as a pollutant, these basic facts about photosynthesis used to be taught to children at school.

The facts about photosynthesis suggest a counter narrative along these lines: CO2 is the food plants use to green the earth and give us food to eat as well as oxygen to breathe. More CO2 means a greener earth and more food for humans as well as beasts. CO2 is therefore vital for the health and well-being of the earth.

Such a narrative, based on the facts of photosynthesis, was the substance of the 1998 Oregon Petition drawn up by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and signed by 32,000 scientists to protest the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.  Unfortunately, the Oregon Petition was never seriously

1

considered, but buried by an avalanche of ad hominin attacks, misinformation, de-platforming, and threats to the reputation and academic careers of anyone who dared support it.   

Not to be silenced, Freeman Dyson (1923 – 2020) was a Princeton physicist who never ceased to champion the narrative that more CO2 would far outweigh any possible harmful effects. Being a scientist of legendary stature, Dyson was impossible to silence. He lived to see a group of highly credentialled scientists form the CO2 Coalition to challenge the narrative which demonises CO2 as a dangerous pollutant. The group includes such names as Richard Lindzen PhD. (Atmospheric Physicist), William Happer PhD. (Physicist), Gregory Wrightstone MS (Geologist), Patrick Moore PhD. (Ecologist) and John Clauser PhD (winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics).

As its name indicates, the CO2 Coalition publishes papers and articles to defend CO2 as a natural, non-toxic gas which is highly beneficial. Among other things, the CO2 Coalition has delved into the geological record of the earth to show that in past ages, such as the Cambrian and Jurassic periods, atmospheric CO2 levels were many times higher than they are today, yet life proliferated and the earth flourished when CO2 levels were so much higher than they are now.  Rather than the present CO2 levels being too high, the geological record indicates that CO2 levels are now at levels where plants are impoverished. This is now being proved every day by horticulturists who raise the CO2 levels in their indoor greenhouses 2.5 times and raise plant productivity by 40%. The CO2 Coalition reports on hundreds of other experiments which prove that raising CO2 levels raises the growth and productivity of plants. More CO2 also means that plants can survive with less water and endure harsher conditions. These are enormous environmental advantages.

The CO2 Coalition keeps its narrative about the benefits of more CO2 out front and central even when it reviews complex scientific data. Greg Wrightstone’s book, Inconvenient Facts, deserves its ranking as an Amazon top seller in the climate debate. In all the detail of his 145-page book, this author succeeds in keeping the basic facts understandable and the narrative about the benefits of more CO2 central.

This good news narrative about the benefits of CO2 means that there is no need to reduce our standard of living, turn off our air conditioners, cease travelling by plane, stop eating meat or putting up with a government controlling almost every aspect of our existence under the pretext of controlling carbon.  

There has never been a time on earth when so many people have lived longer, been better fed, housed, educated, entertained, or enjoyed the bounties of earth as much as now.  Are we ready to trade all this in for massive government meddling to reduce our CO2 emissions that don’t need reducing? If CO2 levels were reduced to pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm, that would decrease world food production by around 15% – enough to starve a billion people.

 As the great optimist Julian Simon put it when the dark clouds of climate alarmism were beginning to gather some 40 years ago: “We – humanity – should be throwing ourselves the party to outdo all the parties, a combination graduation-wedding-birthday-all rites-of passage party, to mark our emergence from a death-dominated world of raw-material scarcity.  Sing, dance, be merry – and work. But instead we see gloomy faces. They are spoilsports, and they have bad effects. The spoilsports accuse our generations of having a party – at the expense of generations to come.  But it is those who use the government to their own advantage who are having a party at the expense of others – the bureaucrats, the grants-grabbers, the subsidy-looters. Don’t let them spoil our merry day.”   The Ultimate Resource, page 408   

2

There are those who reject any climate emergency, but, unfortunately, they are not yet ready to embrace the liberating narrative about the benefits of more CO2.  They still think that present CO2 levels are a problem which needs to be addressed, but in ways that will neither damage our standard of living nor hurt the environment. This finds them stuck between a rock and a hard place.  They still have one foot firmly stuck in the camp which demonizes the gas of life which enables plants to feed the world and green the earth. To say with the CO2 Coalition, “We need more CO2 rather than less,” is a step too far them. This leaves them without a winning narrative.

It’s the narrative, Stupid!

_{Bob Brinsmead is an Australian horticulturist and freelance writer.}

3

A

       Part 1 –  The Identity and beliefs of the Apostolic Church

Robert D. Brinsmead

Introduction

The Enlightenment of the 17^th and 18^th centuries was one of the greatest events in human history. It changed the world for the better and led to enormous improvements in the human condition. It unlocked the rational powers of the human mind to triumph over superstition and ignorance. Basing arguments only on the established authorities (argumentum ad verecundiam) was now rejected for arguments based on empirical evidence. This gave birth to the age of science and a new age with the freedom to inquire into matters heretofore closed to human investigation by the authoritarian keepers of sacred traditions. It became inevitable that the rational principles of the Enlightenment would finally get around to an inquiry into religious traditions, including Biblical literature.

The quest for the historical Jesus, as distinct from the Christ of religious faith, began in earnest at the dawn of the 19^th century. It began to inquire whether the actual historical Jesus of Nazareth was altogether the same as the Christ of orthodox Christian faith.  Some of the early pioneers met stiff opposition. They were treated as pariahs and outcasts even in their academic circles.  But the quest proved to be unstoppable.  After two hundred years the quest for the historical Jesus is now stronger than ever. There have been some massive advancements in acquiring better historical, archaeological, and literary information about the times of the historical Jesus.

The scholars involved in the quest come from many backgrounds – Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and those who can’t be labelled except as being historians. It is quite remarkable that on so many of the major issues, there is more consensus than disagreements. This is demonstrated below in the collection of statements which I have called What the Scholars are Saying (Part 1).

This documentation covers the matter of the apostolic church in terms of its leadership and beliefs. The collection of statements from a variety of scholars discloses some startling historical facts that have been buried for two-thousand years. They also disclose that this apostolic church had an entirely different view on why Jesus was killed than came to be given in the orthodox Christian view. The conclusions reached by many of the scholars come down to this one-liner:  It is better to listen to what Jesus said rather than to what is said about him. This is because two- thousand years of Christology (theories and speculations about the status of Christ) have only served to obscure his teachings.

Real scholars are not Apologists who try to defend a “truth” they already possess. Being human like the rest of us, scholars are as prone to be biased like the rest of us, but they do make a conscientious effort to resist any confirmation bias and go where the evidence leads, using those well-known tools of literary criticism that are fruits of the Enlightenment.

1

 At the end of the day, we all have to make up our own minds, but all the hard digging scholars have done in specialized fields can at least help us to make an informed judgment based on evidence – like all good heirs of the Enlightenment.

[ All statements cited in the following compilation by various scholars are presented without quotation marks, but the sub-headings in bold print are my own . All words within the kind of square brackets used here are my own editorial comments].

       John Painter, Just James, the Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition

The Gospel of Mark has a negative view of the family of Jesus

Mark…is not positively inclined to the leadership role of the family of Jesus in the early church. Mark is not more sympathetic to the leadership of the twelve. They are not identified with the eschatological family and are even more stringently criticized in Mark 3:20-21. [In a footnote Painter cites J.D. Crossan for holding the same conclusions]…

The treatment of the natural family may well signal a rejection of James and his successors. Might it be that Mark looks to Paul as the one who manifests the leadership arising from the eschatological family? There is a strong case for seeing Mark as a pro-Pauline Gospel because the Pauline gospel is understood more adequately in Mark than in any other Gospel. p.30-31

Set in the Markan framework the reference to the family being outside (3:31-32) takes on a more negative sense, especially in the light of 4:11. The family members now emerge not simply as outside the company of 3:32 but as “outsiders.”  Yet this Markan evaluation of the family is not really any more negative than the view of the twelve that emerges in Mark 4. The twelve were supposed to be the “insiders,” but by their failure to understand the parable of the soils they showed themselves to be the “outsiders” (4:10,13). p.31

Mark leaves the reader with a negative view of the family. p.34

John the Baptist belonged to the wider family of Jesus

According to Luke’s understanding, John the Baptist also belonged to the wider family of Jesus. p.37

James was the towering leader of the earliest church

…it is necessary to recognize him as a towering figure in the earliest church. p.1

In the traditions recorded by Eusebius, (Hegesippus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen), James was the first bishop of the Jerusalem church. p.4

Although the point of the infancy stories in Matthew and Luke was to affirm the significance of Jesus, they had the effect of minimizing the importance of the family, apart from Mary. p.4

James is cancelled and the family are depicted as unbelievers

2

James the brother of Jesus is not mentioned by name in Luke. p.39

Our study so far has argued that the evidence used to document the unbelief of the family, the brothers in particular, will not bear the weight of the case that has been built on it. p.41

In Acts the family of Jesus appears among his followers, and James is portrayed as the leader of the Jerusalem church. There is nothing to suggest that this view represents a radical change with the Jesus movement. There is no evidence of a “conversion” of James from unbeliever to follower, nor is it clear that Peter was the first the leader of the Jerusalem church, giving way to James only after a decade or so of leadership…James in mentioned, and without identifying him as the brother of Jesus [either in Luke or Acts]…means that the reader is not prepared for the appearance of James in Acts 12:17. p.42

Paul identifies James as the leading pillar of the Jerusalem church

[Acts 12:17 has Peter sending a message of his release from imprisonment, saying, “Announce these things to James and the brothers.”] That this refers to James the brother of Jesus, not James the son of Alpheus, is confirmed by Paul.  He identifies James the brother of the Lord as one of the apostles and the first of the three pillars of the Jerusalem church (Gal 1:18-19: 2:9). Later tradition also names this James as the first bishop of the Jerusalem church. This information cannot be gleaned from Luke-Acts. The reader may well ask whether Luke intends to obscure this or expects his readers to be aware of the connection. The singling out of this James by name is an indication of his prominence in the Jerusalem church. p.43

Tension between Paul and the Jerusalem apostles obscured

The account in Acts has obscured the conflict between the Hebrews and the Hellenists and leaves no trace of tensions between Paul and Barnabas or Peter and James. Such tensions are apparent in Gal 2:11-14, as are the greater tensions between Paul and Peter and Paul and James.  p.49

The Jerusalem decree [Acts 15] may be a creation of Luke…Paul shows no awareness of the content of the decree in his letters. His own views are contrary to those expressed in the decree. p.52

Acts is not plausible, presenting an over simplified account of the situation. p.56

Was James a Nazirite like his cousin John the Baptist?

Eusebius quoted Hegesippus as follows: “Control of the Church passed together with the apostles, to the brother of the Lord,  James, whom every one from the Lord’s time till our own has named the Just, for there were many Jameses, but this one was holy from birth; he drank no wine nor intoxicating liquor and ate no animal food; no razor came near his head.” p.122

When Paul was arrested, James and the elders made no representation on his behalf… his relationship with James and the elders was less than cordial. p.57

Luke tends to remove tensions between Paul and the Jerusalem Church

Luke’s account is so driven by his tendency to remove tensions between Paul and the Jerusalem church that the actual historical sequence is no longer recoverable in Acts. p.59

3

Matthew asserts the role of Peter over the family of Jesus on the one hand and Paul on the other

Matthew is an expression of the Petrine tradition, reinforcing Petrine leadership against the tradition that sought to reinforce the leadership of the family of Jesus and against the Pauline understanding of Christianity.…Matthew sets the authority of Peter and the twelve over the authority of the family of Jesus. In this Peter is seen in opposition to the authority of James and his successors…Nevertheless Mathew preserves more adequately than any other source the way James interpreted the teaching of Jesus. pp.89,90

Testimonies to the leadership of James are numerous.

The leadership of James in the Jerusalem church from the beginning gives weight to the view that the family of Jesus were followers of Jesus during his ministry. There is no doubt that Mark was critical of the role of the family. Mark was critical also of the twelve… but Mark’s critique of the natural family and the twelve does not simply develop out of the teaching and practice of Jesus. It reflects his attitude to the leadership struggles going on in the church of his day. p.97

Hegesippus claims that leadership in the post-ascension church “passed to James the brother of the Lord and the apostles.” p.124

Eusebius concludes as follows: “This account is given at length by Hegesippus, but in agreement with Clement. Thus it seems that James was indeed a remarkable man and famous among all for righteousness, so that the wise even of the Jews, thought that this was the cause of the siege of Jerusalem immediately after his martyrdom, and that it happened for no other reason than the crime that they had committed against him.” p.130

According to Eusebius, Josephus confirms the assertion that the siege of Jerusalem was a consequence of the crimes against James: “And indeed Josephus did not hesitate to write this down in so many words: ‘These things happened to the Jews to avenge James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus who is called Christ, for the Jews put him to death in spite of his great righteousness.’ p.132

Symeon, cousin of Jesus (son of Clopus, brother of Joseph) was elected leader

[Painter cites Eusebius as saying that after the death of James, the apostles and disciples unanimously elected Symeon son of Clopas and cousin of Jesus to be a leader or bishop of the Jerusalem church. (p. 144) Symeon was said to be of the family of Jesus because, according to Hegesippus, Clopus was the brother of Joseph, father of Jesus]. p.144

The unanimous decision taken was that Symeon the son of Clopas was worthy of the throne of Jerusalem. In this case Eusebius has stressed the formal character of the decision. All of the surviving apostles, disciples, and members of the family of the Lord gathered in Jerusalem to take counsel together to judge who was worthy, and to the tested approval of all it was agreed that Symeon was worthy of the throne of Jerusalem. p.145

Family of Jesus retained leadership of the Jerusalem church

Symeon was chosen because he belonged to the natural family of Jesus. In the earliest Jerusalem church the family of Jesus provided the leadership.  From the first, James was the natural leader in that church. When he was martyred he was succeeded by another, though more distant, member

4

of the family, confirming the importance of the leadership of the family of Jesus in the Jerusalem church. p.153

Symeon himself was martyred in the reign of Trajan. p.157

Historically, it seems certain that the Sadducean high priest Ananus [same High Priestly family mentioned in the Gospels as involved in the death of Jesus] was instrumental in bringing about the death of James. p.158

The role of James and the family became obscured in Catholic tradition

[ Painter cites The Gospel of Thomas,12: “The disciples said to Jesus, ‘We know that you will depart from us. Who is to be our leader?’  Jesus said to them, ‘Wherever you are, you are to go to James the righteous, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.’]  The recognition of the leadership of James and the veneration of the family of Jesus signal that this tradition originated in a form of Jewish Christianity with a continuing memory of the role of James and the family. p.163

Pauline opposition to the authority of James, the disappearance of the Jerusalem church, and the emergence of Peter as a more ecumenical transformation of the James tradition seem to have led to the suppression of James in the emerging Catholic tradition.. This was made easier by Luke’s attempt to obscure the conflicts within the early church in his accounts in Acts.  His harmonization obscured the leadership of James by assimilating the roles of Peter and James, but the cracks in this treatment appear when his account is read in the light of the letters of Paul. p.178

The Gospel of the Hebrews is another witness to James

[Painter says that the existence of this Gospel is supported by Papias, Hegesippus, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius, Epiphanius, and Jerome] p.183

The quotation important for our study is fragment no. 7 which was preserved by Jerome. “The Gospel called according to the Hebrews which was recently translated by me into Greek and Latin, which Origen frequently uses, records after the resurrection of the Saviour: ‘and when the Lord had given the linen cloth to the servant of the priest, he went to James and appeared to him. For James had sworn that he would not eat bread from the hour in which he had drunk the cup of the Lord until he should see him risen from among them that sleep. And shortly thereafter the Lord said, Bring a table and bread! And immediately it is added: He took the bread, blessed it and brake it and gave it to James the Just and said to him; My brother, eat thy bread, for the Son of man is risen from among them that sleep.’”

…It is implied that James was present at the last supper…The point of the passage quoted is to place James in a preeminent place among the disciples of Jesus…Already it sets James apart from all the others…he first went to James and appeared to him…This fragment is important for the study of James because it portrays James as belonging to the circle of the disciples of Jesus during his ministry and those present at the last supper. It puts in question the notion that James joined the believing community only after the resurrection of Jesus and the appearance of Jesus to him…Nevertheless, the tradition of the first appearance to James runs contrary to the witness of the Gospels.  pp.184-185

5

The NT Book of James was not written by the brother of Jesus

What counts most strongly against the recognition of the epistle as a work of James the brother of Jesus is that it is unattested until 180 CE when Irenaeus quoted James 2:23…Not until the mid-third century is the work appealed to as scripture. p.235

The vast majority of modern scholars question the authenticity of the letter, although its authorship by James the brother of Jesus is not without significant defenders. p.239

James did not travel outside Jerusalem

Nowhere in the New Testament is there evidence to suggest that James travelled outside Jerusalem to spread the mission to Jews of the diaspora or to Gentiles. p.239

Painter’s summary of how the New Testament tends to ignore James

James is unjustifiably ignored in the New Testament sources…The negative view of the family of Jesus during the ministry of Jesus is unjustified….Mark is critical of both the family and the twelve in order to elevate whoever does the will of God, and may well have Paul in mind…The tradition of reading the New Testament that has prevailed until modern times is dominated by the legitimating the authority of Peter and the twelve. Consequently the negative attitudes to them in Mark and John tend to be moderated. This has not been the case for James. The grounds upon which the case for thinking that James was opposed to the mission of Jesus during his lifetime will not bear the weight of scrutiny. There is no more reason for thinking that James was a convert only after the resurrection of Jesus than for thinking that this was true of Peter. The view that James came to leadership after the forced departure of Peter is groundless…

The fortunes of James, and his influence in the church at large, were largely bound up with the fate of the Jerusalem church. All the evidence suggests that James focused his attention and energies on the life and growth of that church, although this did not preclude the impact of his influence from extending beyond those borders. pp.271-272

James is undisputedly recognized as the first bishop of the Jerusalem church…James was the leading authority of Christian Judaism, and there is evidence of conflict with the emerging Great Church. Because Christian Judaism became alienated from the Great Church quite early, the authority of James fell into other hands. p.274

          Bruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner, Editors, The Brother of Jesus

James was the leader of Jesus Movement

James emerges as the leading figure in the Jerusalem church. This perception of James is strengthened by paying attention to traditions about James outside the New Testament…

James emerges as the first leader of the Jerusalem church, the successor of his brother. In this role he was effectively “his brother’s keeper.” p.24

6

 [According to a fragment from the lost Gospel to the Hebrews, as translated by Jerome] James is presented as the first believing witness to the risen Jesus, he is also portrayed as one who was present at the Last Supper. pp.29,30.

[According to the Gospel of Thomas] “The disciples said to Jesus, ‘We know that you will depart from us. Who will be our leader?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Wherever you are, you are to go to James, the righteous for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.’” p.33

[According to Eusebius] “This James whom the people of old called the Just because of his outstanding virtue, was the first, as the record tells us, to be elected to the episcopal throne of the Jerusalem church.” p.33

[According to Clement in his Outlines] “After the ascension of the saviour, Peter, James, and John did not claim preeminence because the saviour had specially honoured them, but chose James the Just as the bishop of Jerusalem.” p.33

[According to the evidence drawn from Eusebius, Clement, Hegesippus, the Gospel of Thomas, a careful reading of the Paul’s letters (Galatians and Corinthians) and the book of Acts, and the Pseudo-Clementines, a late fourth century work of Jewish Christians but drawing on sources of the second century, the essayist says] the leadership of James should not be denied, being too firmly entrenched in a wide variety of traditions. p.45

Family were followers of Jesus during his ministry

James and the brothers of Jesus were followers of Jesus during his ministry…Their reported presence among the believers in Jerusalem immediately after the resurrection confirms their participation in the Jesus movement from the beginning. p.57

Eusebius…makes the point that, after the destruction [of Jerusalem], the apostles and disciples of the Lord assembled with the family of Jesus, presumably in Jerusalem. There Symeon, son of Cleopas and cousin of Jesus, was unanimously appointed the second bishop of Jerusalem in direct succession to James. p.59

NT Gospels were written after the destruction of Jerusalem

Apart from the letters of Paul, the writings of the New Testament come from the period following the destruction of Jerusalem, and emanate from the church of all nations. Thus they do not represent the perspective of the earliest church in the period in which James and the Jerusalem church were dominant…With the destruction Jerusalem, the dominant role of the Jerusalem church came to an end. p. 59-60

When, in the second century, the view developed that Mary had not only conceived as a virgin but had remained a virgin, the status of James and the brothers was significantly downgraded. p.61

We can be reasonably sure that James was already a follower of Jesus before he saw him risen from death, as were all other recipients of resurrection appearances with the exception of Paul, who himself admits the exceptional nature of his case (I Cor. 15:8)…contrary to the usual view, James was among the disciples who accompanied Jesus and learned his teaching, at least for a significant part of Jesus’ ministry(Richard Bauckham). p. 109

7

But in James’s view, Gentiles remain Gentiles; they are not to be identified with Israel (Bruce Chilton). p.144

The meaning of Nazarene does not indicate a place

Indeed my suggestion that James was a Nazirite, and saw his brother’s movement as focused on producing more Nazirites, enables us to address an old and as yet unsolved problem of research. Jesus, bearing a common name, is sometimes referred to as ‘of Nazareth’ in the Gospels, and that reflects who he was specified in his own time. There is no doubt but that a geographical reference is involved (see John 1:45-46). But more is going on here. Actually, Jesus is rarely called ‘of Nazareth’, or ‘from Nazareth,’ although he was known to come from there.  He is usually called ‘Nazoraean’ or ‘Nazarene.’ Why the adjustive, and why the uncertainty in spelling? The Septuagint shows us that there were many different translations of “Nazirite” that reflects uncertainty as to how to convey the term in Greek. (That uncertainty is not in the least surprising, since even the Mishnah refers to differing pronunciations [see Nasir 1:1]) Some of the variants are in fact very close to what we find used to describe Jesus in the Gospels.

In the Gospel according to Mark, the first usage is in the mouth of a demon, who says to Jesus (Mark 1:24)

                            We have nothing for you, Nazarene Jesus!

                            Have to you come to destroy us?

                            I know who you are – the holy one of God!

In this usage, “Nazarene” in the first line clearly parallels “the holy one of God” in the last line.  The demon knows Jesus’ true identity, but those in the synagogue where the exorcism occurs do not. And they do not hear the demons, because Jesus silences them (so Mark1:25). This is part of the well-known “Messianic secret” in Mark.

For James and those who were associated with him, Jesus’ true identity was his status as a Nazirite. (Bruce Chilton) p.156

James was the most prominent leader in Christendom.

James the Just was, in the time between Jesus’ resurrection and his own death [62CE], the most prominent and widely respected leader in Christendom. p. 185

                Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus

James the brother of Jesus has been suppressed in the NT re-write of history

Once the New Testament reached its final form, the process of James’ marginalization became more unconscious and inadvertent but, in all events, it was one of the most successful rewrite- or overwrite-enterprises ever accomplished.  James ended up ignored, an ephemeral figure on the margins of Christianity, known only to aficionados. But in the Jerusalem of his day in the 40’s to 60’s

8

CE, he was the most important and central figure of all – the ‘Bishop’ or ‘Overseer’ of the Jerusalem Church…This [rewrite or overwrite] was necessary because of the developing doctrine of the supernatural Christ and the stories about his miraculous birth. p.xviii

Because of James pre-eminent stature, the sources for him turn out to be quite extensive, more for any other comparable character, even for those as familiar to us as John the Baptist and Peter.  In fact, extra-biblical sources contain more reliable information about James than about Jesus.  p.xix

In fact, taking the brother relationship seriously may turn out to be one of the only confirmations that there ever was a historical Jesus. p.xx

James is suppressed but provides the best insight into what Jesus might have been like.

It is through the figure of James that one can get a realistic sense of what the Jesus of history might have been like. p.xxix

James is mentioned in the Gospels, but here the material is marred by doctrinal attempts either to defame the family and brothers of Jesus or to disqualify them in some manner. p.xxviii

Who would have known the character of Jesus better? His closest living relatives, who according to tradition were his legitimate successors in Palestine, and those companions accompanying him in all his activities? Or someone who admits that he never saw Jesus in his lifetime, as Paul does… Furthermore, it is claimed that the doctrines represented by James and the members of the Jesus family generally were defective in their understanding of Paul’s Christ Jesus and inferior to boot. p. xxix

It will transpire that the person of James is almost diametrically opposed to the Jesus of Scripture and our ordinary understanding of him. p.xxxii

…The highly Hellenized Movement that developed overseas, which we now call ‘Christianity’, was, in fact, the mirror reversal of what actually took place in Palestine under James. p.xxxiii

James is not only the key to a re-evaluation and reconstruction of Jewish Christian history and the Jewish-Christian relationship, he is also the key to the Historical Jesus. The solution to this problem has evaded observers for so long primarily because they have attempted to approach it through the eyes and religious legacy of James’ archrival and sometime religious ‘Enemy’, Paul.  it is through James, Jesus spiritual heir and actual physical successor in Palestine, that we are on the safest ground in approaching a historically accurate semblance of what Jesus himself, in so far as he actually existed, might have been like. p.8

James the Just in early Christian traditions

Origen gives the tradition as follows:

“So great a reputation among the people for Righteousness did this James enjoy, that Flavius Josephus, who wrote the Antiquities of the Jews in Twenty Books, when wishing to show the cause what people suffered so great misfortunes that even the Temple was razed to the ground, said, that these things happened to them in accordance with the Wrath of God in consequence of the things which they had dared to do against James the brother of Jesus who is called the Christ.”

9

Then he adds:

“The wonderful thing is, that though he did not accept Jesus as Christ, he yet gave testimony that the Righteousness of James was so great; and he says that the people thought that they had suffered these things because of what had been done to James….”

Jerome. too, gives us a version of this tradition about James:

“This same Josephus records the tradition that this James was of such great Holiness and repute among the people that the downfall of Jerusalem was believed to be on account of his death”. pp. 234-235

James, ‘Holy from his Mother’s womb’, was a Nazarite

By Eusebius’ testimony – and also Jerome’s- Hegesippus goes on… ‘He[James] was holy from his mother’s womb.’ p.238

Nazirite/Nazarene are related terms

In the context of the way Eusebius and Jerome use the term ‘Holy’ as descriptive of James…one might also use the equivalent of ‘consecrated ‘.. or ‘set aside from his mother’s womb.’..the notion of ‘being consecrated’ or ‘separated’ (‘set aside’) is the basis of what generally goes by the term ‘Nazirite’, which is based on the same root as ‘Nezer’. In fact, this is the way Epiphanius understands the term as he applies it to James. He even calls James ‘a Nazirite’, by which he specifically means consecrated, thereby signalling the Hebrew sense of the underlying root…

Interestingly, when speaking of James as ‘a Nazirite’, Epiphanius gives John the Baptist as another example ‘of these persons consecrated to God’.  In doing so, he cites Luke 1:15, which pictures the Angel predicting that John ‘will drink neither wine nor strong drink’. p.240

Jesus the Nazarene does not indicate a geographical location of his birth

It was Matthew who first spread the misconception that the title ‘Jesus the Nazoraean’ should in some manner relate to ‘Nazareth’, by quoting the prophecy; ‘He shall be called a Nazoraean’               (Nazoraios) which, closing his narrative of Jesus’ early years, he associates with ‘withdrawing to parts of Galilee (Galilaias) and going to live in a city called Nazareth (Nazaret)’ (2:22-23). This cannot be the derivation of the term, as even in the Greek, the spelling ‘Nazareth’ and ‘Nazoraean’ differ substantially…The problem is that there is no scriptural passage , ‘he shall be called a Nazoraean’ in the Old Testament.” [Eisenman then goes on suggest that there are OT passages that speak of Samuel or Samson being dedicated from their “mother’s womb” as a Nazirite, and that Matthew may have seen in such passages a prophecy of Jesus]. p.243

[On page 248 Eisenman says that the existence of a town called Nazareth in this period “cannot be confirmed.”]

Christians of all ages have generally thought Jesus ‘the Nazarene´ denoted a geographical notation, misunderstanding the ideological implications of the terminology. p.250

James is eliminated from the story by Luke

10

[Eisenman reviews evidence from the Gospel of Hebrews (the Palestinian tradition) that Jesus first appeared to James to break bread and giving him to eat. He then claims that Luke’s story of Jesus appearing to Cleopas (uncle of Jesus) and an unnamed person (whom he suggests is James) so that James is “eliminated in the redaction process” and thereby “conveniently rubbed out in the Lukan redaction.” p.763  Then Eisenman goes on to say that in the Nag Hammadi literature, “James is clearly ‘the Beloved Disciple.’] p.763

Paul accuses James and the Jerusalem Church of not discerning the Lord’s body in the Supper

Paul is actually calling down the blood-libel accusation of being ‘guilty of the blood’ of Christ on his opponents, particularly, seemingly those within the Movement or ‘Church’ itself, even the very Leadership itself, including James, who do not interpret ‘the cup of the Lord’ or ‘see through to the body of the Lord’ in the spiritualized manner he does. p.765

All the NT Gospels have an anti-Semitic mindset

With rare exceptions, the point of view is almost always anti-Semitic, pro-Gentile, anti-national, and pro-Roman…John, while differing markedly as to specific historical points and development, still comes from the same Hellenistic, anti-Semitic mindset – even more extreme. p.793

….the Gospels as we have them – whoever produced them – at their core are just too anti-Semitic to have been produced by anyone other than Gentiles. p.800

 James and the family of Jesus were consistently written out of the story

The Gospels just cannot present the real James as an Apostle, brother and principal successor of Jesus – despite the fact that this is absolutely attested to without embarrassment by no less a witness than Paul himself – because of their anti-family, anti-national, and anti-Jewish or Palestinian Apostle orientation, the family of Jesus already having been presented as distinct from Jesus’ true followers and real believers and therefore, the need for this fictional James the brother of John and the fictional nomenclature ‘Zebedee’. p.846

Once James has been rescued from the oblivion into which he was cast, abetted by one of the most successful rewrite enterprises ever accomplished – the Book of Acts (and one of the most fantastic) – it is necessary to deal with the new constellation of facts the reality of his being occasions. It will also no longer be possible to avoid, through endless scholarly debate and other evasion syndromes, the obvious solution to the problem of the Historical Jesus – the question of his actual physical existence as such aside – the answer to which is simple. Who and whatever James was, so was Jesus p. 963    

[These final words constitute the confronting theme of Eisenman’s massive study on James, the Brother of Jesus: “Who and whatever James was, so was Jesus.”]

                        Keith Akers, The Lost Religion of Jesus

Jewish Christians detested Paul

11

The Jewish Christians detested Paul, whom they regarded as an apostate. p.14

Jewish Christians saw Jesus as the anointed Prophet

{In their view] Jesus was a prophet who came to reform the Mosaic law- to return the people to the original law of God which had been given to Moses but then distorted by those who followed after Moses. p.14

[ Jewish Christians regarded Jesus as an anointed one, which word in the Hebrew scripture also means messiah. As such, “Christ” is seen not as a one off anointed one, but one who has often appeared in ancient times, and also that all believers are anointed as ‘Christs’] p.28

The Ebionites [ post-70 Jewish Christians] are not the only Jewish Christian group in the first centuries of Christianity but were the most important. The Ebionites are mentioned by more of the church fathers than any other such group…There are other groups usually classified as “Jewish Christian” – namely the Elchasaites, the Nazoraeans, and the Ossaeans…all of these groups were similar to the Ebionites on at least these three points: they adhered to the Jewish law, they were vegetarian, and they rejected animal sacrifice…the Ebionites are the best and most important representatives of early Jewish Christianity.” pp.29,30

Ebionites were condemned by the Great Church

No one has a problem with identifying Jesus and his followers as Jews in the first century; but, by the fourth century, those Ebionites and other Jewish Christians who still claim allegiance to the Jewish law, in however Christianised form, find themselves condemned as heretics by the church and condemned to oblivion by scholars.” p.30

Anti-Sacrifice was an essential feature of the Ebionites

The Ebionites unequivocally condemned one of the central aspects of Judaism, namely the practice of animal sacrifice; and they kept their grievance against animal sacrifice in their traditions long after the practice of animal sacrifice had ended when the temple in Jerusalem, the site of the sacrifices, was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70. They also condemned some of the Jewish scripture as being false texts – not part of the law of God but the creation of human scribes. These are hardly the actions of a group whose defining characteristic was Jewish legalism.  Loyalty to the law of Moses did not mean blindness to everything being broadcast as part of the Jewish tradition in the first century. p.33 [In other words, they read the scriptures critically, and in this they were the early pioneers of what is now known as the literary or historical criticism of the Bible].

Two essential features of the Ebionites

I argue in this book that Jewish Christianity in the first century (Jesus and his first followers) was the direct spiritual ancestor of Jewish Christianity in the fourth century (the Ebionites)…Jewish Christianity is a single continuous entity, defined by two characteristics: loyalty to the Jewish law and acceptance of Jesus as the prophet of this law. Perhaps the Jewish Christians distorted or elaborated on the tradition in some ways; but in the end it was the Jewish Christian Ebionites, and not the gentile Christians, who most faithfully preserved the traditions handed down to them by Jesus. p.33

Claims about priestly additions to Moses are now endorsed by contemporary scholars

12

Their view that the sacrificial system did not originate with Moses and was falsely attributed to Moses was unorthodox but, it should be noted, hardly without justification – many scholars believe the same thing. pp.33-34 [Ed. note: see Richard Friedman’s highly acclaimed classic, Who wrote the Bible? as a scholarly endorsement that the elaborate sacrificial cult was added to the Law centuries after Moses].

The view of the Christian churches, that Jesus was understood better by his gentile followers than by those who actually share his religion, is highly questionable. p.34

 Some of the Ebionite traditions go back to the Essenes and even to Pythagoras

Philo states that the Essenes rejected animal sacrifices, despised wealth, and lived communally, did not make oaths, and rejected slavery…Josephus agrees on all these points…Porphyry and Jerome go further and say that the Essenes were vegetarian…Philo describe the Essene opposition to war in simple and moving terms: the Essenes refused to attend to “any employment whatever connected with war.” p.38

[Akers says that Essenes should not be confused with the Qumran community who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. This community supported animal sacrifice and was not pacifist in that it supported achieving its goals through violence and warfare. It also encouraged slavery, and supported the making of oaths. The Qumran were therefore more like an unrepresentative offshoot of the Essene movement].

The Essenes had no private property at all. p.38

Josephus states flatly that the Essene lifestyle and the Pythagorean lifestyle were the same. [Pythagoras was a Greek philosopher of the 6^thcentury BCE]

Pythagoras was an opponent of slavery; he taught his disciples to avoid oaths, that their language should be such as to render them worthy of belief even without oaths…he was an opponent of the materialism or the pursuit of wealth and luxury…he counselled against seeking revenge or doing harm to one’s enemies; he also did not wear wool, wearing a white robe of linen instead.  Most importantly, he was a vegetarian and condemned animal sacrifices; he ordered his closet disciples to abstain from all animal food and from wine. This sounds enough like the Essenes and the early Christians that it is hard to resist the conclusion that there is an ideological or organizational connection somewhere between these groups.” pp. 39-40

The Jewish Christians did not drink wine, did not eat meat, despised wealth, were pacifists, and opposed animal sacrifices. The Jewish Christians prohibited oaths (Mathew 54:37). p.40

…Jesus or the Jewish Christians may have been heavily influenced by their [these] ideas. We lack any direct testimony linking the Essenes to Jesus. p.41

Ebionites believed John the Baptist was a vegetarian

The Ebionites did not think that John [the Baptist] ate insects! The Ebionites were vegetarians and, therefore, denied that John the Baptist, a favorite Christian hero, ate locusts.  p.42

John the Baptist offered water baptism to replace blood sacrifice

13

For John the Baptist, baptism was an alternative to animal sacrifice…This contrasts with the later church’s doctrine of the atonement, in which it is Jesus’ death that achieves forgiveness of sins, much as animal sacrifices were supposed to do in the Old Testament.  Later in the New Testament, the shedding of Jesus’ blood atones for sin as a replacement for animal sacrifice…

The rejection of animal sacrifice, or at the very least an alternative to animal sacrifice, must have existed before Jesus’ death, rendering the whole concept of an atonement superfluous. What Jesus’ death is supposed to have replaced, was already replaced when John baptised Jesus. p.43

Jesus became Son of God by adoption at his baptism

The Ebionites chose the moment of Jesus’ baptism by John as the key moment in which Jesus became God’s son, rather than the moment of Jesus’ birth. Jesus became God’s son by being “adopted” by him (a ‘spiritual birth’ so to speak) rather than being literally fathered by God and born of a virgin. This idea is called adoptionism. p.46

The original Ebionites rejected the idea of the virgin birth and thought that Jesus was the human offspring of Joseph and Mary. p.48

Ebionites were defined by poverty

The main Jewish Christian group was called the “Ebionites” – a name derived, as we have already seen, from the Hebrewebionim meaning “the poor. The Jewish Christians who thought of themselves as followers of the true prophet (Jesus), therefore, did not conceive of themselves as merely giving to the poor, being nice to the poor, or defending the poor: they were the poor…

The Ebionites claimed their spiritual descent from the time when the primitive church really was sharing everything in common from that pivotal event when the followers of Jesus “were of one heart and soul.” The followers of Jesus laid everything they owned at the feet of the apostles, and everyone received according to their need (Acts 2:44-45, 4:32-35). pp.49-50

Ebionites read scripture critically, especially in the matter of violence and sacrifice

The Ebionites condemned many of the texts in the Jewish scripture as false texts: they believed they were not inspired by God but were false and shouldn’t be part of the scripture at all…if the Ebionites believed that sacrifice or warfare was wrong, how do we explain the existence of commands in Jewish scriptures to offer animal sacrifices and commands to engage in bloody warfare? Commands to make animal sacrifices are found throughout Leviticus, and accounts of wars sanctioned by God are found throughout Joshua.

 The problem of dealing with troubling passages in scripture is an old one. One answer, taken by both the Jewish philosopher Philo and the Christian writer Origen, is to call troubling passages allegorical. Thus, Origen (who was a pacifist) interprets much of the violence in the Old Testament wars of Joshua as allegories, so that the “extermination of our enemies means destroying wrath, lust, melancholy, and other vices…

The Ebionites were not alone in feeling uncomfortable about these texts. However, they did not take this allegorical path…[They claimed that] the written tradition (the Jewish scriptures) had been corrupted by false texts. pp.77-78

14

[Ed. Note: These Jewish Christians engaged in what we now call “literary criticism”, and in this they judged scripture by the teaching of Jesus who rejected both violence and the retaliatory justice “an eye for an eye.”(Matt. 5:38) Jesus also repeatedly said, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice.” (Math.9:13; 12:7).  He forgave sin freely quite apart from the rite of sacrifice].

Gandhi noted that “the only people on earth who do not see Christ and his teaching as nonviolent are Christians.” p.89

Pacificism was clearly a part of Jewish Christianity. p.92

Jewish Christians were against the cult of sacrifice

In the Recognitions…in a celebrated passage describing a speech by James, the brother of Jesus, delivered in the temple seven years after Jesus’ death, James denounces animal sacrifices and predicts the destruction of the temple. p.92

Opposition to the cult of sacrifice was always a central feature of Jewish Christianity

…the distinctive origin of Jewish Christianity lies to a large degree in its opposition to animal sacrifice. p.101

[ Ed. note: Keith Akers seems to suggest that this opposition to sacrifices sprang from an ethic of vegetarianism. Or was it the reverse, namely, that the opposition to the cult of sacrifices as a means of obtaining forgiveness was the reason for vegetarianism?  i.e., No sacrifice in that ancient culture meant no meat to eat. Akers appears to turn this issue back-to-front. He seems to make vegetarianism the cause of the opposition to sacrificing rather than making the opposition to sacrificing the cause of the vegetarianism].

The Temple protest of Jesus was all about his opposition to the cult of sacrifice

Jesus was attacking the practice of animal sacrifice. “I came to abolish sacrifices,” says the Ebionite Jesus, “and unless you cease sacrificing, my anger will not cease from you.” (Panarion 30.116.5) Now there is a pronouncement explosive enough to cause the temple hierarchy to want Jesus crucified. p.113

The primary practical effect of the so-called “cleansing of the temple” was (in John) to empty the temple of the animals that were to be sacrificed, or (the synoptics) to drive out those who were taking them to be killed or were selling them to be killed.  We must remember that the temple was more like a butcher’s shop than any modern-day church or synagogue. “Cleansing the temple” was an act of animal liberation. p.117

 [Ed. Comment: Akers’ book is brilliant in presenting the evidence that it was Jesus’ passionate protest against the institution of sacrificing at the temple which led directly to his being put to death. Unless Jesus’ ultimate concern in his temple protest was that forgiveness of sin is always freely available and needs no atoning sacrifice (as if our alienation from God and one another is something that it can be bought or sold), then Jesus would be giving his life for no higher cause than being some kind of Pythagorian reformer or animal liberator].

15

… the whole sacrifice business was a fraud anyway, God never having required sacrificing.  Now here is something almost worth being crucified over! p.118

[Akers goes on to make the point that in Jesus’ dispute with the chief priests who challenged his right to stage his protest, he asked them about John the Baptist?  Why did he bring John into the dispute? Because it was John who initiated the movement against blood sacrifices]. p.118

At every juncture, it is the priests who are seeking to have Jesus killed. It is not the Romans (yet), nor the “multitude” who are after Jesus; indeed, Jesus seems to be protected by the “multitude.”

…The priests want Jesus killed, and even after Jesus is dead, they want to destroy his followers. Is all this effort simply to safeguard some dishonest moneychangers?  It is much more plausible that Jesus’ objection to the practice of animal sacrifice itself, and that his actions during the volatile Passover week were the immediate and most important cause of his death. p.119 

Leadership of James followed the death of Jesus

According to Eusebius, James assumed his position of leadership immediately following Jesus’ death (Ecclesiastical History 2.1,2, 7.19), and received leadership of the Jerusalem church directly from his brother, Jesus.

Eusebius quotes Hegesippus to illustrate what kind of person James was: “James…was holy from his mother’s womb; and he drank no wine nor strong drink, nor did he eat flesh. No razor came upon his head.” p.163 

The death of James was at the hands of Ananus, the high priest (son of Ananus, father in-law of Caiaphas who condemned Jesus to death)

Josephus, however, straightforwardly blames the high priest…Ananus…He had brought James the brother of Jesus and some of his companions before him, accused them of breaking the law, and had them stoned to death (Antiquities 20.9.1)…once again showing the continuity of opposition between the followers of Jesus and the priests in the temple. p.167

…the killing of James was an action that did not have support of most of the Jews. Josephus, Eusebius, and Origen all agree on this point…Josephus states that Jerusalem was destroyed as punishment for the murder of James, an innocent man. p.168

Eusebius describes James as a vegetarian who would not even wear wool (Ecclesiastical History 2.23. 5-6), implying that James was perhaps less than enthusiastic about the slaughter of animals in the temple. p.168

Ebionites and the Jerusalem church

It is practically indisputable that the Ebionites – whatever one may think of their later development – captured a number of essential points about the history of early Christianity. The themes of the rejection of animal sacrifice, endorsement of vegetarianism, and the adherence to the leadership of James were not latter sectarian quibbles from the second and third centuries.  All of these appear at the very earliest stage of Christian history and are acknowledged as such, even when they are

16

opposed by Paul and by later orthodox writers. The Ebionite portrayal of the history of the church has a power that cannot be denied. p.170-1

Ebionites and the Family of Jesus

…if we follow the succession of church leadership from James, we find that it goes to other relatives of Jesus, the ‘desposynoi’…who become the founders of Ebionism… Hegesippus tells the story of how some of the grandsons of Judas (another brother of Jesus) were arrested and brought before Domitian, who after interrogating them released them as harmless; Hegesippus remarks in passing that these grandsons “ruled the church,” both because they were relatives of Jesus himself and because they were witness to the faith (Ecclesiastical History 3.20.1-8)…These relatives lived both in Nazareth (in Galilee) and in Cochaba,  a town on the east side of the Jordan river (Eusebius, Ecclsiastical History 1.7.14)  Ephiphanius reports that two groups of Jewish Christians (Ebionites and Nazoraeans) also lived in the town of Cochaba, and indeed that Ebionism began in Cochaba….the relatives of Jesus settle in precisely the village where the heretical Ebionites originated…If one tried to draw a true line of “apostolic succession” from Jesus to James and his successors, this line goes directly to the Ebionites…The most obvious explanation is that Jesus’ family was part of the earliest Christian church, that that some of the relatives of Jesus, the successors of James, then became the leaders of the Ebionites. p.178-80

The Jewish Christians had Jesus own relatives among their number, and thus an unbroken chain of tradition extending back to Jesus himself. p.184

There was “no room in the inn” for the message of the Jewish Jesus in either Judaism or Christianity. p.I85

[Akers says that Jewish Christianity developed a large popular support during the time of James’ leadership. For a time it indicated that it could have become the future of Judaism.  It was not until about 85 CE that it was rubbed out as an alternative to Rabbinic Judaism. One of the factors in this  rejection of the intra-Jewish Jesus movement  was its pacifism in the face of the war with Rome. The tide of support turned against Jewish Christians when they were increasingly regarded as traitors to Judaism].

The evidence indicates that the Nazoraeans – if in fact they were different from the Ebionites at all – were doctrinally similar to the Ebionites, Elchasaites, Nasaraeans, and Ossaeans….All the Jewish Christin groups, though splintered into rival sects, agreed with the Ebionites on the fundamental points of favouring vegetarianism and rejecting animal sacrifice. p.183-4

How the Jewish Christians’ response to Marcion was better than the Church’s response

[Akers shows how the Jewish Christians/Ebionites neither accepted Marcion’s total rejection of the Old Testament, nor the total inspiration of all scripture which was formulated by the church in response to Marcion in about 135 CE.  The Jewish Christians/Ebionites read the OT critically, rejecting “false texts”. They neither accepted the violent images of God in the Scripture, nor the texts which supported animal sacrifices].

17

Both the orthodox church and the Ebionites rejected Gnosticism…the Ebionites differed from the gnostics on two critical points: the Ebionites accepted the law of God as the law of the Creator of the universe, and thought of the Creator and the creation as fundamentally good. p.195-7

[The pastoral letters attributed to Paul were] concerns for the church a hundred years after Paul lived – the most likely date for their composition. The ‘pastoral’ letters also specifically repudiate many of the gnostic doctrines that Marcion attributed to Paul…Acts, which was written later than either the authentic letters of Paul or the synoptic gospels, also bears the imprint of the struggle with Marcion.  p.197-8 

[ Ed. note: These second century NT writings, which also included 2 Peter, countered Marcion by composing letters in the name of Peter and Paul declaring that every bit of Scripture was inspired of God. This literary device may have scuttled Marcion, but in the coming centuries it saddled the Church with texts of Scripture used to support violence, intolerance, slavery, subordination of women, religious persecution, anti-Semitism, and more].

No Original Sin in Jewish Christianity and the Christhood of all believers

Jewish Christianity rejected all ideas of “original sin,” simply because Jewish Christians accepted the Jewish framework in which humans are created in the image of God and are, therefore, not inherently depraved or sinful…The first sin is not due to eating a mythical “apple” but rather due to the consumption of meat, among other things, long after the Garden of Eden…The Ebionites affirmed that they themselves were “able to become Christs” (Hippolytus, Refutations of all Heresies 7.22), and thus proclaimed the Christhood of every believer.”p.201

Ebionites…owned everything in common. p.210

Jeffrey J, Butz, The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christianity 

James has been marginalized

After years of research, I have come to the conclusion that the role of James in the early church has been marginalized over the centuries – both consciously and unconsciously – and continues to be repressed today. p.xi

It is, above all, the Jewishness of Jesus and James that was a major reason for James’s leading role in the early church being suppressed. p.xv

…Jesus not only had siblings, but that some (if not all) of his brothers played significant roles in the leadership of the early church. In fact, James was considered by many early Christians to be the first “bishop” of the church, the successor to Jesus following the crucifixion, making James in essence the first “pope”. Not Peter as Catholic tradition has maintained. p.10

Josephus actually discusses James at greater length than Jesus. p.16

18

Many early church Fathers also discuss James, including Clement, Eusebius, Hegesippus, Jerome, and Origen. James is also highly regarded – indeed revered – in many of the apocryphal books that were excluded from the New Testament…There are also references to James in the now highly regarded Gospel of Thomas. p.16

James was the most influential leader in the church for more than a generation

James is looked to as the apostle par excellence by early Christian sects such as the Ebionites and Elkesaites. p.16.

“After the ascension of the savior, Peter, James, and John did not claim pre-eminence…but chose James the Just as Bishop of Jerusalem.” Clement of Alexandria, Hypostases. p.65

The conflict between James and Paul

F.C. Baur was the first to propose, in the early 1800s, that there was outright opposition between Paul and the pillar apostles. p.71

The growing animosity between Paul and the Jewish Christians comes even more sharply into focus in the account of Paul’s final journey to Jerusalem, where his very presence in the Temple sparks rioting in the streets by the Jewish Christians, and Paul has to be taken into protective custody by a Roman tribune. On the very steps of the Temple, the growing animosity between Paul and Jerusalem comes to a shocking head. p.85

A Pauline or Jacobine Jesus?

Jesus may have been much more Law conformist than the Pauline tradition has led most Christians (and Protestants especially) to believe. p.94

James was a resident of Jerusalem for 32 years 

…for at least thirty-two years – from the time of Jesus’ death until his own death, which can reliably be dated in 62, James was a permanent resident of Jerusalem. p.95

James was always Believer

James could not have become a believer post-resurrection. He would never have gained authority over Peter and the other apostles so quickly, especially if he had been a nonbeliever while Jesus was alive. p.100

The distinctive teachings of Jewish Christianity

[ James could have been one of the twelve according to Butz – Eisenman affirms it. This is the claim of the Apocryphon of James and the Apocalypse of James which claims James and Jesus were full blood brothers nourished by the same mother’s milk]. pp.126-128

The ground-breaking work on the nature of Jewish Christianity, Patristic Evidence for Jewish Christian Sects, by A.F.J. Klijn and G.J. Reinink, identifies five distinct Jewish Christian communities that existed in apostolic times: the Ebionites, the Elkesaites, the Nazoreans, the Cerinthians, and the Symmachians.  Though there is some diversity in the beliefs of these groups, James Dunn has

19

identified three common characteristics that warrant placing each community under the umbrella label of “Jewish Christian”:

1. Faithful adherence to the Law of Moses.
2. The exaltation of James and the denigration of Paul
3. A Christology of “adoptionism”- they all believed that Jesus was the natural born son of Joseph and Mary and Mary and was “adopted” by God as his Son upon his baptism by John. p.131

The most important scripture for the more staunchly Jewish Christian communities was the aptly named Gospel of the Hebrews. Unfortunately, no copies of this gospel are extant today…That the Gospel of the Hebrews was originally written in Hebrew is certainly significant, as all four of the canonical gospels were written in Greek, perhaps indicating that the Gospel of the Hebrews could be earlier than the canonical gospels. [ Butz goes on to quote a portion of this lost gospel which was translated by Jerome wherein it states that the resurrected Jesus first appeared to James and that James was present at the Last Supper]. p.133

…if the first followers of Jesus – including the apostles and Jesus own family – were thoroughly Jewish in their belief and practice and opposed to Paul’s interpretation of the gospel, then just what is “orthodoxy” and what is “heresy.”  Is Christianity, as it has come to be practised for close to two millennia, in fact based on a heresy?  And is the “heresy” of Jewish Christianity in fact the original orthodoxy? … these questions are being addressed more and more by scholars, and if we want to learn the truth about Jesus and James, we must address them too. p.138-9

“…believe no teacher, unless he brings from Jerusalem the testimonial of James, the Lord’s brother…”  St. Peter Preaching at Tripolis, Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions. p. 142 [ Ed. note:  Perhaps this throws some light on why Paul strenuously objected to demands that he produce a written testimonial of support from James or the Jerusalem apostles. See 2 Corinthians 3]

Jesus did not intend to start a new religion

[After affirming the thoroughly Jewishness of Jesus, Butz states]  …the last thing Jesus wanted to do was start a new religion. p.248

All of the evidence we have uncovered attests to the fact that James and the apostles retained their Jewish practice and belief.  p.148

Conflict between Paul and James and the Jerusalem church

In fact, it could be said that the purpose of almost all of Paul’s letters was to counteract the authority, beliefs, and practices of James and the Jerusalem church. p.149

…they [Jewish Christians] did not regard the death of Jesus as atoning for their sins. p.151

[Ed. note: This statement by Butz simply reflects the overwhelming consensus among the scholars that Jewish Christianity attached no soteriological significance to the death of Jesus].

20

Simply put, we know that Paul faced opposition. That opposition was, in fact, the impetus for the writing of almost all of his letters. Now, if we look at the situation objectively -just based on a common sense approach to these basic facts – who else could these opponents possibly have been other than Jewish Christians, and not just any Jewish Christians, but the apostolic leadership itself. p.159

The Jewish Christians…thoroughly rooted in the teaching of James and the other apostles, thought of the Pauline churches as the heretics. p.162

Paul’s teachings are being seen by a rapidly growing number of modern scholars and writers as a distortion of what Jesus taught, and the development of the Christian church as a travesty of the original Jewish beliefs and teachings of Jesus. p.172

James was a Nazirite who died at the hands of the same priestly family who had Jesus killed

Mainstream Anglican scholar Bruce Chilton, one of the organizers of the International Consultation on James, has come to the conclusion that James was indeed a Nazirite, that he most likely had some connection with this strict sect…For James and those who were associated with him, Jesus true identity was his status as a Nazirite. p.164

[ Butz relates how both Jesus and James were put to death at the instigation of high priests who were related by marriage. Jesus was handed over to the Romans under the leadership of the high priest, but James was stoned under the orders of the high priest without Roman consent. Butz cites John Dominic Crossan as saying, “That both brothers, Jesus and James, should be done away by Caiaphas and his brother-in-law Ananus is surely more than mere coincidence.” p.164-5]

                       Jeffrey J. Butz, The Secret Legacy of Jesus

The siblings of Jesus were full-blood siblings

It cannot be emphasized enough that whenever siblings of Jesus are mentioned in the New Testament, nowhere does it ever imply that they are anything other than full-blood siblings of Jesus. p.13

James was so highly respected in Jerusalem generally, that his killing aroused a huge protest

…when James was unjustly executed by the new high priest Ananus in the year 62, high raking Pharisees in Jerusalem protested to Rome, resulting in Ananus’s abrupt removal from office. p.57 [ Butz cites a comment on this by J.D. Crossan: “We need to think more about James and how he reached such status among Jewish circles that…his death caused the High priest to be deposed after only three months in office.” p.16]

The Jerusalem church was a Nazarene synagogue

Under James’s leadership, the original followers of Jesus were not even called Christians…Jesus’ original Jewish followers were known as Nazarenes…Many scholars now make the argument that the name Jesus of Nazareth was a mistranslation of the original phrase, Jesus the Nazarene, and that it did not

21

refer to the town of  Nazareth at all… In Hebrew, Jesus and his disciples were called the Notsrim which can be translated as “keepers,” or “preservers.”pp.57,58

…the Jerusalem Church was indeed a synagogue…the Nazarene synagogue, or Yachad, was just one of numerous synagogues in Jerusalem. p. 72 [Ed. Note: The words church and synagogue are derived from the same Greek word, ecclesia].

After the year 70 the Nazarenes began to be called Ebionites

…the Ebionites and the Nazarenes are one and the same. p. 124

But the critical year of 70 CE is as good a marker as any to indicate the transition from Nazarene to Ebionite… p. 137

But in the aftermath of the year 70, tensions between Jewish and Gentile Christians only heightened.  The Ebionites accused Paul’s Christians of apostasy for having abandoned the original Torah-based teachings of Jesus and James. p.140

The Ebionites are formally denounced for the first time in the writings of the church father Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (ca. 130 200 CE (Against Heresies), the first great heresy hunter… [He writes] “They practice circumcision, persevere in the observance  of those customs which are enjoined by the law.”  Irenaeus also notes that thy pray facing Jerusalem. p.141

The actual reason we have no direct records of the Ebionites after the year 70 is that their writing were suppressed and burned by the heresy hunters, including their most precious gospel, commonly called the Gospel of the Hebrews p. 142

The Ebionites fled to Pella under the direction of Bishop Symeon [cousin or brother of Jesus who was elected to replace James] sometime around 66, set up (or reconstituted) their auxiliary base at the Wadi Cherith for about eight years, and then at least a contingent led by Bishop Symeon returned to reestablish a permanent base on Mt. Zion, likely around the fourth year of the emperor Vespasian in either 73 or 74 CE. p.144.

While Symeon continued to provide overall leadership of the Ebionite Yachad from Jerusalem, both Hegesippus and Julius Africanus confirm that the Desposyni [the relatives of Jesus] presided over the Ebionite communities in the Diaspora. p.152

According to Eusebius, the third persecution under Trajan, resulted in the martyrdom of Bishop Symeon, who was accused of being both a Christian and a Davidide. p.162

…the Ebionites were increasingly despised by both Jews and Christians… Not only were the Ebionites disenfranchised from emerging Christianity, but after the year 90 they were also barred from the new Jewish synagogue system that replaced the temple. pp.166-167

[Jerome translated the Gospel of the Hebrews into both Greek and Latin, and although that too has been lost, a portion of it as translated by Jerome still survives] …it makes the remarkable claim that James was present at the Last Supper!. This would mean that James was one of the twelve, and not a later convert who did not believe in Jesus during his lifetime, as it traditionally claimed by the Church.  p.180 

22

The memories of the Desposyni were too dangerous for the newly emerging Catholic Church

The reason why these church fathers had no interest in seeking out any remaining Desposyni is obvious. The Desposyni retained memories (dangerous memories for the leaders of the newly emerging Catholic Church) that the origins of Christianity were quite different from what the Church was proclaiming.  The Desposyni were an embarrassing reminder that Jesus had a family that included brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews, and this was quite contrary to the new dogma of the perpetual virginity of Mary. Not only that, but these relatives of Jesus were among the first and most important leaders of the Jerusalem Church. Their existence belied the claim of the Church of Rome that Peter was the first pope. The Desposyni were skeletons in the closet of the Roman Church that could not be let out.  The new breed of heresy hunters, including Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius, did their utmost to ensure that the key to that closet door would be thrown away forever. p.187

[ Butz outlines three groups of Jewish Christians: the Elkesaites who embraced Gnosticism, the Nazoraeans who moved toward the Catholic faith, and the Ebionites who remained the main group. p. 193.  He then lists the Top 10 ideas of the Ebionite: 1. Jesus the true prophet promised Moses.  2. Jesus is not God – Christ entered him at baptism. Adoptionism. 3.   Jesus was not pre-existent. 4. The  whworld has been given over to Satan. 5. The value of poverty.  6. The practice of vegetarianism and rejection of animal sacrifice. 7. The claim there are false texts in Scripture Matt. 15: 9, 13; Ezekiel 20:25 Jer.7, 8.  8. Baptism is necessary. 9. Jewish Law is still in force. 10. Paul is a false apostle. p.195- 208]

[According to Eusebius, a minor group of Ebionites did believe in Jesus’ virgin birth, but not his preexistnce as God. p..214. Butz calls them Nazoraeans to distinguish them from the original Nazarenes. pp. 215-217.]

[Ed. note:  This piece of history may help to explain how Muhammad, who incorporated a number of Ebionite traditions into his teachings, taught that Jesus had a virgin birth without being divine. Muhammad’s teacher, Waraqa, was a priest of an Ebionite sect in Mecca known as Nostrania, a sect to which Muhammad’s family clan had belonged for several generations. The name of the sect was obviously derived from the labels originally give to Jewish Christians –  Nazarene or Notzrim. See Joseph Azzi, The Priest and the Prophet, perhaps the best book every written on Muhammed’s family tree].

[Butz suggests that the book of Matthew was written by the Nazoraens in Syria, causing a split from the Ebionites, pp. 217-2-9]

 Like the Ebionites, Muslims believe there are errors and distortions in the Torah as well as the gospel. p. 240

                                     Barry Wilson, How Jesus Became Christian

The Jesus movement was not the same as the Christ movement

23

This Christ Movement [of the Hellenizers and Paul] came to cover up the original teachings of Jesus…the original message of Jesus and the Jesus Movement, Jesus’ earliest followers in Jerusalem, became switched for a different religion…The Christ Movement replaced the original Jesus Movement …there was an important shift away from the teachings of Jesus to those about the Christ. That is, beliefs about the person of Jesus conceived of as a Christ came to obscure what he said and did. Thus, the religion of Jesus, the one Jesus practiced and taught, became transformed into a cult about the Christ…

Paul’s religion was not the religion of Jesus…the divine Gentile Christ was switched for the human Jewish Jesus.  A religion about the Christ substituted for the teachings of Jesus… It was a huge switch   – the Christ for Jesus, Paul’s religion for Jesus’, and the Christ Movement for the Jesus Movement, the Christ Movement for the Jesus Movement…Simply put, Jesus got upstaged by Paul. pp. 2-6

James was a Nazirite

James, in fact, was a Nazirite or ‘super Jew,” like his cousin John the Baptist. As we said, a Nazirite was a Torah-observant Jew who had taken a special vow of dedication to God. Their rabbi was Jesus, and it was his interpretation of Torah that commanded their allegiance…

As James, so Jesus. The best indication of what Jesus of the 20s actually taught is likely to be James. His brother. James knew the man and what he stood for. He knew that Jesus knew and practised Torah as they did…James is the best clue we have today concerning the beliefs and practices of the Jesus of history. p.98

The Ebionite view of Jesus

Jesus was fully human, they thought, born in the usual way, having Mary as his mother and Joseph as his father. Their preferred gospel text was the Gospel of Matthew, written in Aramaic but without the virgin birth story, which like Luke, includes a virgin birth narrative. In fact, they did not accept the virgin birth story at all since this mythology does not find its roots in Jewish thinking.  So, unlike later Christians, they did not see Jesus as a divine being. Nor did they think that Jesus “preexisted” his human form in any fashion. That is, he was not God incarnate…According to Ebionite sources, Peter even referred to Paul as “the man who is my enemy.” (Letter of Peter to James 2:3). pp.100-101

Christology replaced the teaching of Jesus

[The cult of the person of Jesus as the Christ Jesus developed after his death] These beliefs originated from the Christ Movement led by Paul. The image of Jesus changed dramatically over the course of just over one hundred years. Jesus became seen as a divine being holding cosmic importance.  Along with that development went another: a repudiation of his Jewish heritage…The image of Jesus changed radically, while his roots within Judaism were forgotten.  By the mid-second century, Christian leaders were touting Jesus as an incarnate saviour who redeemed humanity by his death and resurrection. Who he was thought to be came to obscure what he had taught and practiced. This represents a remarkable shift in emphasis – away from the religion of Jesus and toward a religion about Christ. pp.103-104

[ The Creeds say nothing about teachings of Jesus] pp.104-5.

24

This is one of the greatest mysteries of the New Testament and early Christianity: how a Gentile God came to replace a Jewish Jesus. p.108

Most Jews of the Diaspora were vegetarians due to sacrificial traditions

As in all ancient societies, meat was only available through the temples, as a sacrifice. There were no convenience or grocery stores around the corner selling meat.  If someone wanted a meat meal, they would have to take an animal to a temple to be sacrificed. The problem for Jews living in the Diaspora was that the only nearby shrines were those dedicated to Roman, Persian, or Egyptian gods, notably to Dionysus, Mithra, and Isis, among a host of other lesser- known beings.  Eating meat from these sources would involve these deities in the dinner, and this would be idolatrous. In practise, therefore, most observant Jews in the Diaspora would have been vegetarians. pp.112-3

Paul’s teaching facilitated assimilation into a Hellenistic culture

Paul accomplished by argument what Antiochus Epiphanes had tried to achieve by force:  a religion detached from Torah, assimilated into common Hellenistic culture. p.115

Paul unleashed a powerful new religious dynamic within the world of his time.  It was appealing and inviting. p.129

The Jesus of history disappears in Paul’s thought

In reading Paul’s letters, it is surprising how little is made of anything that comes from the Jesus of history.  There is not much in Paul’s writing that would give us grounds for thinking that Jesus had anything important to say. As we have noted, Paul disclosed only that Jesus was born, was Jewish, and died. Moreover, he did not ground his own message in the teachings, observances, or sayings that come from the religion of Jesus.  There are no parables, no Lord’s Prayer, or no Sermon on the Mount. There is nothing that would reflect the relationship one would expect from a disciple of a rabbi. There is just what Paul says he got mystically from the Christ whom he claims reveals himself to him.  Devoid of linkage to the Jesus Movement and to Judaism generally, Paul’s Christ Movement would have appeared suspiciously like a Hellenistic mystery religion. p.146

Jesus was not the message of Jesus

So the claim that Jesus had come to found a church now appears somewhat questionable. Nor did the parables of Jesus focus on Jesus himself, other than a teacher, preacher, and teller of stories. That is, they did not erect an elaborate belief system as a condition of membership in the Kingdom. The parables of Jesus do not reinforce the need for such beliefs as his preexistence, special virgin birth, divinity, role as the crucified Christ, or savior of humanity.  This highly elaborate ideological superstructure is missing from the parables of the Kingdom… So the institution of a structured church and complex belief system about the person of Jesus are not vindicated by a critical study of the parables. p.133

25

James is overshadowed by Paul

Moreover, the Conventional Model ignores the significant role of James and his leadership in Jerusalem from the 30s to the early 60s.  Why was he so overshadowed by Paul?  We didn’t hear much about James ten or twenty years ago.  Why has his story only now resurfaced? p. 133

The Jesus movement and the Christ movement become fused in the book of Acts

…there were two rival and parallel movements in the 6os: the Jesus Movement in Israel, and the Christ Movement in the Diaspora. They were not the same religion: one came from Jesus; the other came from Paul. One was within Judaism; the other was not. One focused on the teachings of Jesus; the other focused on the figure of Christ…The Jesus Movement, for instance, had to vie with other forms of Judaism in Israel. This was not the competitive forum for the Christ Movement, however, which had a different sphere of operation.  The Christ Movement strove for converts against Roman mystery religion while competing with Diaspora Judaism for the God-fearer segment of its congregation…

Paul’s primary focus was on what the mystical Christ of experience had conveyed to and through him. That represented a distinctive source of information: direct encounter with the Christ.  He received and conveyed a message no one in the Jesus Movement had ever heard or expressed. As a result, his beliefs differed as did his practices…the two Movements were not “branch operations” of one common enterprise p.134

In linking the Christ Movement to the Jesus Movement, what the writer of Acts has succeeded in doing is fusing together two separate religions. p.138

The New Testament reflects Proto-Orthodoxy

The gospel writings did not create the church. Rather, these influential documents are the church’s creation – and not the church as a whole but only one faction with the early Christian clustering of communities. The present New Testament reflects the writings preferred by the Proto-Orthodox, the heirs of Paul’s Christ Movement. p.149

[NT is not without some Jewish Christians perspectives, as in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount and the Book of James. Outside the NT, in the early second century the Didache or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (which was like a catechism for new converts), was a document of Jewish Christianity. See Wilson pp.151–8]

The idea of a virgin birth was not rooted in Jewish thought…The virgin birth concept was Gentile in origin. p.218

The Christ of Paul, revealed in private visions, replaced the historical Jesus

The religion of Jesus and his earliest followers became upstaged as an imaginative and startlingly new religion entered the arena – Paul’s Christ Movement.  Shunning the Jesus Movement leaders, he crafted his own cult.  He took as his source of inspiration mystical communiques from the Christ – not the teachings of the Jesus of history or the practices of Jesus’ earliest followers in Jerusalem. He thought he enjoyed a separate and special pipeline to the divine, receiving different information and insights than others of his time. The mystical Christ, however, a dying-rising savior, shared many of the same characteristics as other figures well known within the Roman world through the cults of Dionysus, Isis, and Mithras. Paul’s group was not a form of Judaism but a separate Hellenized religion that paid no attention to the teaching of Torah or Jesus. p.238

Paul built his view of Christ on models found outside Judaism, in the mystery religions of the time. The Christ is like Dionysus or Mithras or many other figures – heroes who die and rise again to save

26

humanity and whose followers can achieve salvation through participation in the hero’s life and death. When Christos translated Mashiach, it transported the concept from a Jewish environment into a vastly different world. p.247

The transformation brought about by the Christification process was so successful that the religion of the historical Jesus was replaced by the cult of the Christ.  In so doing, the early church “killed off” the historical Jesus, focusing, instead, on the worship of the Christ. The myth of the Christ was so effective that it is very difficult now to reconstruct the contours of the authentic teachings, sayings, and doings of the historical Jesus. p.248

[Wilson makes the point that what became mainstream Christianity knocked off all competition from all other versions of Jesus, and all expressions of the old pagan religions galore. p.254]

Christianity also closed down the schools of Greek philosophy – the Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, Pythagoreans, Sceptics, Epicureans, and Hedonists, whose ancient centres dotted the Mediterranean world…Gone, too, were the vast temple complexes of the ancient mystery religions – Isis, Dionysus, Mithras, and myriad others.  Every major competitor was eradicated by the new Christianity…except for one competitor: Judaism. p.254

What we have today in Christianity is largely Paulinity, a religion about the Gentile Christ that covers over the message of the Jewish Jesus of history…Going forward, we need to recover the humanity and Jewishness of Jesus at the popular level, not just in acadamia…

In other words, we should endeavour to focus again on the message, not the messenger. p.256

Recovering the Historical Jesus means reading the New Testament with critical awareness

We are now familiar with many of the problems involved in the quest for the Jesus of history – that he wrote nothing and that the sources are later, representing third- or fourth-generation writings. There are also inconsistencies in their depiction of Jesus, and both Matthew and Luke take it upon themselves to “correct” Mark, making additions and deletions to suit their own agendas….The gospels themselves were written after Paul, and, to some extent, they too show evidence of Christification, especially the Gospel of John…The Christification layering process is to be found within the pages of the New Testament itself, with Paul’s Christ superimposed on the Jesus of history. That means that as we read the gospels, judgments have to be made concerning what might reflect what Jesus himself actually could have said and did, versus what authors forty or eighty years later wanted him to have said. p.258

…early Christian texts tended to cover over the involvement of Jesus’ family in his mission. This was due to the desire of the Christifiers to downplay the role or James and the Jesus Movement in favor of Paul’s religion; James would have none of the Christ cult beliefs and practices. p.260

A human Jesus. This is not a modern invention. It is the original Jesus. That was precisely how his earliest followers – including his brother – understood him. It is only Paul, the Christifiers, and their successors who thought otherwise. p.261

Neither Jesus, his brother nor his disciples were Christians

27

…Jesus, his mother, his brothers, his disciples, and Mary Magdalene …were not initiators of a new religion, and they were never, ever Christians. They remained Jewish throughout their lives.  These individuals were, however, the victims of the Christifiers who remade the image of Jesus into a Gentile God, stripping him of his Jewish identity and humanity, with powerful consequences that still reverberate today…

In these astounding parables [of Jesus] the message of the Kingdom of God has nothing to do with an elaborate infrastructure of belief about a Christ figure, worship of Jesus as divine, baptism, communion, belonging to the one true church, or assent to creedal statements that precisely affirm the correct Trinitarian formula thrashed out by a committee of select bishops in the fourth century. That superstructure simply does not exist in Jesus’ message.  It was the creation of the later Christifiers. pp.262-3

The Lord’s prayer is not uniquely Christian

[The Lord’s prayer in the Sermon on the Mount] is not directed to Jesus, but to God.  It is not said “through Jesus” or “in Jesus’ name” …this one is addressed directly to God, not through an intermediary. P. 261

      James D. Tabor, Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity

Paul, the real founder of orthodox Christianity, was in conflict with James and the apostles

Not only do I believe Paul should be seen as the “founder” of the Christianity that we know today, rather than Jesus and his original apostles, but I argue he made a decisive bitter break with those first apostles, promoting and preaching views they found to be utterly reprehensible.  And conversely, I think, the Jerusalem church, as well as Peter and the other apostles, held to a Jewish version of the Christian faith that faded away and was forgotten due to the total triumph of Paul’s version of Christianity; Paul’s own letters contain bitterly sarcastic language directed even against the Jerusalem apostles. He puts forth a starkly different understanding of the message of Jesus – including a complete break from Judaism. p. 6

The book of Acts obscures the original version of Christianity

Our primary source for the story of the origins of the Christian Church was written by an anonymous devotee of Paul decades removed from the events he purports to narrate.  Some scholars have even called the book of Acts the great “cover up” and as we will see, this language might be considered relatively mild…the author of Luke-Acts knew precisely what he was doing, and his deliberate obscuring of the original version of “Christianity before Paul” is one of our great cultural losses.  So long as the portrait of Paul in Acts prevails, it obscures for us the Christianity of Jesus and his earliest followers. p. 9

The source of Paul’s Gospel was his independent visionary episodes

28

Paul’s relationship with the original apostles was sporadic and minimal. He is emphatic about this point, swearing with an oath to his followers that the gospel message he received directly from Christ  came as a heavenly revelation and was not in any way derived from consulting with, or receiving authority from, the original Jerusalem apostles (Galatians 1:16-18).  Paul spoke of the Jerusalem leadership sarcastically, referring to James, Peter and John as the “so-called pillars,” and “those reputed to be somebody,” but adds, “what they were means nothing to me” (Galatians 2:6,9) p.18

Paul’s conflict with the Jerusalem apostles became bitter

Sometime in the mid to late 50’s A.D., Paul made a clear and decisive break with the Jerusalem establishment. In one of his last writings, an embedded fragment of a letter now found in 2 Corinthians, he declares “I am not the least inferior to these super-apostles,” and ends up calling them “false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ” (2 Corinthians 11: 5, 13). He had become terribly bitter against his fellow Jewish Christians whom maintained their Jewish faith…

Most scholars have interpreted this bitterly denunciatory language as directed against a group of unnamed Jewish opponents, not the Jerusalem apostles.  I think this is mistaken. The radical nature of the break that took placed between Paul and the original apostles is so threatening to our most basic assumptions about Christian origins that it is easy to think that it just can’t be true, but the evidence is there…After all, the entire New Testament canon is largely a post-Paul and pro-Paul production. pp.18-19

Paul’s Jesus Christ is not the Jesus of History

Jesus will always be the centre of Christianity, but the “Jesus” who most influenced history was the “Jesus Christ” of Paul, not the historical figure of Jesus…All of us, whether Christian or not, whether wittingly or unwittingly, are heirs of Paul, since the parameters of Christ and his heavenly kingdom created by Paul were what shaped Christian civilization. p.21

James, the brother of Jesus, was written out of the story

Paul calls him “James the brother of the Lord,” and it is James, not Peter, who takes over leadership of the movement following Jesus’ death…in later tradition he is called “James the Just” to distinguish him from the other James, the Galilean fisherman, the son of Zebedee and brother of John, and one of the twelve apostles…

The Roman Catholic Church looks to Peter while the Protestants have focused on Paul, but James seems to have been deliberately marginalized…

…the original apostolic Christianity that came before Paul, and developed independently of him, by those who had known and spent time with Jesus, was in sharp contrast to Paul’s version of the new faith. This lost Christianity held sway during Paul’s lifetime, and only with the death of James in A.D. 61, followed by the brutal destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70 did it begin to lose its influence as the centre of the Jesus movement.

The source of Paul’s gospel was his ecstatic visions

29

…the form of Christianity that subsequently developed as a thriving religion in the late Roman Empire was heavily based on the ecstatic and visionary experience of Paul. Christianity, as we came to know it, is Paul and Paul is Christianity. The bulk of the New Testament is dominated by his theological vision…It is difficult for one to imagine a version of Christianity predating Paul…The original apostles and followers of Jesus, led by James and assisted by Peter and John, continued to live as Jews, observing the Torah and worshipping in the Temple at Jerusalem, or in the local synagogues while remembering and honoring Jesus as their martyred Teacher and Messiah.  They neither worshipped nor divinized Jesus as the Son of God, or as a Dying-and-Rising Saviour, who died for the sins of humankind. pp.24-25

James took over the leadership of the church after the death of Jesus

Since the late 1990s there have been over a dozen major scholarly studies of James published. Prior to this, to my knowledge, not a single major scholarly study of James had even been published…

The author of Acts surely knew, but was not willing to state, that James took over the leadership of the movement after Jesus’ death. In his early chapter he never even mentions James by name and casts Peter and John, the other two “pillars,” (according to Paul in Galatians 2:9,12) as the undisputed leaders of the Jesus followers, effectively blurring out James entirely.. His major agenda in the book as a whole is to promote the centrality of the mission and message of the apostle Paul…This suppression of James is systematic and deliberate…”  p. 29

This makes it all the more strange that the first time James is ever mentioned by name in Luke-Acts is when he mysteriously is presented as the undisputed leader at the Jerusalem council of A.D.50- twenty years after the death of Jesus!..With no introduction, after everyone had spoken, James declared his “judgment” on the matter!!!; (Acts 15:13-21). Luke does not even identify James as Jesus’ brother. James just appears, suddenly, never mentioned by name before, and he is in charge of the entire movement, rendering a formal decision like a judge presiding over a Jewish court of law…

The irony of Luke-Acts portrayal of James is quite amazing. James is mentioned only twice, both times in the book of Acts in an account that stretches over a thirty-year period. James is not even identified as Jesus’ brother, yet those two scenes [Acts 15 and 21], separated by ten years, offer us the strongest kind of historical evidence that James presided over the Twelve as leader of the Christian movement.” pp.34

[After citing the Gospel of Thomas, Clement of Alexandria of late Second Century, Eusebius the first great church historian of the fourth century, Hegesippus, a Christian Jew of the early second century, plus Jewish Christian literature in a corpus of literature gathered together in the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, Tabor says:]

Jesus passes to James his successor rule of the Church;  James is widely known by the surname “the Just One because of his reputation for righteousness both in his community and among the people; and Peter, John, and the rest of Twelve, as well as Paul, look to James as their undisputed leader…It is quite remarkable that the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus, who had no affiliation with the Christian movement, relates the death of James, not recorded in the New Testament, in some detail. Josephus reports that the Jewish people viewed James’s death at the hand of the Jewish Sanhedrin,

30

led by the high priest Ananus, with such disfavor that their protest caused Herod Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great, to have Ananus removed from his priestly office after only three months. p.38

James’ association with the historical Jesus is superior to Paul’s Christ of visionary experience

Although James has been all but written out of our New Testament records he nonetheless remains our best and most direct link to the historical Jesus. However one evaluates Paul’s “Gospel,” it is nonetheless a fact that what Paul preached was wholly based upon his own visionary experiences, whereas James and the original apostles had spent extensive time with Jesus during his lifetime… the difficulty we face is that Paul’s influence within our New Testament is permeating and all pervasive…Mark’s story of Jesus is almost wholly Pauline in its theology, namely Jesus as the suffering Son of God who gave his life as an atonement for the sins of the word…

1 Peter, a document one might expect to reflect an alternative perspective, is an unabashed presentation of Paul’s ideas under the name of Peter.  Paul’s view of Christ as the divine, preexistent Son of God who took on human form, died on the cross for the sins of the world, and was resurrected to heavenly glory at God’s right hand becomes the Christian message. In reading the New Testament one might assume this was the only message ever preached and there was no other gospel. But such was not the case. If we listen carefully we can still hear a muted original voice – every bit as “Christian” as that of Paul. It is the voice of James, echoing what he received from his brother Jesus. p.39

[Tabor does find echoes of the teachings of Jesus in both the epistle of James and the Didache, or Teachings of the Twelve Apostles.  In neither of these sources are there anything that repeats the distinctive Pauline theme of forgiveness and salvation through Christ’s blood atonement. Tabor says that the Didache was written no later than at least some of the NT documents.pp.39-47]

The original gospel is not about the person of Jesus but the teaching of Jesus

For James, the Christian message is not the person of Jesus but the message that Jesus proclaimed. James’s letter lacks a single teaching that is characteristic of the apostle Paul and it draws nothing at all from the traditions of Mark or John. p.44

The most amazing thing about the Didache…is that there is nothing in this document that corresponds to Paul’s “Gospel” – no divinity of Jesus, no atonement through his body and blood…there is no emphasis whatsoever upon the figure of Jesus apart from his message…Paul had his own fiercely independent “Gospel,” which contrasted sharply to the Christianity of Jesus, James, and their earliest followers. p.46-47

The four Gospel are anonymous productions written after the generation of the apostles

It comes as a surprise to many people familiar with the names of Matthews, Mark, Luke, and John to learn that all four are anonymous productions, written in the generation after the apostles, and based on a complex mix of sources and theological editing. Scholars are agreed that none of the gospels is an eyewitness account and the names associated with them are assigned by tradition, not by an explicit claim by the authors. In other words, the names themselves are added as titles to each book but are not embedded in the texts of the works themselves.  Each gospel writer had his own motive and purposes in telling the Jesus story in a way that supported his particular perspectives.  None of them is writing history but all four can rightly be called theologians. From a distance their differences might be minimal, but once carefully examined they are quite significant, revealing a process of mythmaking that went on within decades of Jesus’ death. p.71

31

Paul’s gospel was not the message of Jesus

Paul never quotes directly a single teaching of Jesus…As we have seen, the “Gospel” for Paul was not the message that Jesus preached, or anything Jesus taught, but rather the message of what the man Jesus had become… This reflects and reinforces his view that the revelations he has received from the heavenly Christ are far superior to anything anyone received from the earthly Jesus. p.132-3

The idea of eating the body and blood of one’s god, even in a symbolic matter, fits nothing we know of Jesus; or the Jewish culture from which he comes. p.151

Paul’s differences with James and the mother church at Jerusalem were never healed 

Things came to a confrontation sometime around A.D. 55-56.  Our first evidence of the tension is in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, but the full extent of the Paul’s break with the Jerusalem leadership comes out in 2 Corinthians 10-13…

In the early nineteenth century, the German scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur, who is the “father” of critical studies of Paul, had proposed that Paul’s opponents in 2 Corinthians 10-13 were none other than James, Peter, and the Jerusalem Twelve…I believe that Baur was essentially correct. What we find in these chapters is Paul’s completed repudiation of the Jerusalem apostles and his determination to operate independently in the future, without regard to their approval and directives. pp.217-18

Tabor points out four distinctive teachings of Jewish Christians who became known as Ebionites

Despite their diversity there seem to be four general ideas that Jewish-Christian groups agreed upon: the eternal validity of the Torah of Moses, the acceptance of only the gospel of Matthew in Hebrew [ in which there was no virgin birth], the complete rejection of Paul as a heretic and apostate from the Torah, and the belief that Jesus was a human being, born of a mother and a father, chosen by God but not divine. The best known group, and the one that drew most fire from orthodox Pauline circles, were the Ebionites.  They most likely got their name from the Q teaching of Jesus: Blessed are you poor ones (Hebrew: ‘evyonim),” a designation that appears dozens of times in the Psalms and Prophets as a description of God’s true people in the last days. Irenaeus, one of the earliest sources on the Ebionites, describes them as follows:

“They use the gospel according to Matthew only, and repudiate the apostle Paul, maintaining that he was an apostate from the Torah…they practice circumcision, persevere in those customs which are enjoined by the Law, and are so Judaic in their style of life that they even adore Jerusalem as if it were the house of God.” (Against Heresies 1: 26.2)

The main issue that arises with regard to the Ebionites is whether their ideas represent a largely unbroken perspective and orientation stemming back to Jesus, James, and the original Jerusalem apostles, or whether they are a later sect of Jewish Christianity that radicalized itself in the second and third centuries.  Given what we have seen in Paul’s own letters, including his charge that the apostles who oppose him are “servants of Satan,” it is certainly plausible to assume that the Ebionites represent a link to the Jerusalem apostles, at least in their main ideas…

A much more positive view of the Ebionite “gospel” is now embedded in the fourth-century documents we call the Pseudo-Clementines, which are made up of two major parts, the Homilies and the Recognitions. A document embedded in the whole called the Kerygmata Petrou, or the Preaching of Peter, is particularly valuable in this regard. This document claims to be a letter written

32

by Peter to James the brother of Jesus. Peter complains that his letters have been interpolated and corrupted by those influenced by Paul so that they have become worthless. He urges James not to pass along any of his teachings to the Gentiles, but only to those members of the council of the Seventy whom Jesus had appointed.  Paul is sharply censored as one who put his own testimony based on visions over the certainty of the direct teachings that the original apostles had from Jesus. The argument that Peter makes is quite telling.  He suggests that if people follow someone like Paul, who claims to have had visions of Jesus, how might one know he was not actually communicating with a demonic spirit impersonating Jesus? In contrast, if one goes by what Jesus actually taught to the original apostles, there is no possibility of such deception.

Scholars do not consider these materials to be authentic first century documents, but they do appear to reflect later legendary versions of the very disputes that did occur during the lifetime of Paul, Peter, and James. They preserve for us some memory of the conflict of which Paul’s letters provide only dim and one-sided glimpses. What is particularly striking about the Pseudo-Clementines is the strong emphasis on testing everything by James: “Believe no teacher unless he brings from Jerusalem the testimony of James the Lord’s brother.” (Recognitions w:35). p.234-5

[in 2 Corinthians 3, Paul rejects that he has any need for testimonial letters to endorse his ministry].

                Patricia A. Williams, Where Christianity Went Wrong

Jesus was not an Apocalyptic prophet

The crucial issue is whether Jesus is primarily a prophet of the end time or primarily a reformer…[my] conclusion is that Jesus is a reformer who mocks the Jewish dream of the end time…[this] throws light on other issues as well. p.19

The authors of the four Gospels are anonymous

…almost everyone knows that anonymous people wrote the Gospels, the names have been added to them long after their composition. p.20

True scholars try to be unbiased researchers rather than apologists

…scholarship means research by trained historians, biblical scholars, and theologians, but only if they begin their research without knowing what conclusions they will reach…Apologists begin research already knowing the conclusions they will reach because they already know what the truth is, a truth usually given them by their particular Christian denominations.  They do their research in order to show others that the truth they already have can be derived from the relevant materials, usually the Scriptures. p.37  

Jesus sometimes uses hyperbole in his teaching, but rarely speaks about himself

In the synoptics, Jesus speaks in short, pithy, sometimes very funny sayings, filled with wild exaggerations like someone’s eye having a log in it and camels going through needles’ eyes. Jesus also reverses social expectations, justifying tax collectors and condemning Pharisees. Jesus rarely speaks about himself, but he says a lot about the empire of God. His mission takes one year. p.38- 9

33

The Gospels have disagreements

The synoptics and John disagree with each other over many other details…Disagreements also occur among the synoptic Gospels…

While he[Jesus] is alive, no one writes down Jesus words or records his deeds…After his return is delayed and after the Romans destroy Jerusalem in 70 CE, someone in the second generation after Jesus’ death composes the first Gospel.  The author composes with the expectation that Jerusalem’s destruction is now the sign of Jesus’ immediate return. This Gospel, later attributed to Mark, is in the present tense in Greek, with constant use of the word “immediately”. Time hurries on. No time to write a lot, at leisure.  Barely time to get the story down at all.

Thus, a gap exists between Jesus and the Gospels.  Jesus speaks Aramaic, the Gospel writers Greek…The Gospels appear after the destruction of Jerusalem. pp: 40,41

Paul’s gospel results in the virtual disappearance of the historical Jesus

The earliest source for scholars’ knowledge of Jesus is Paul, who writes during the 50s, close to the death of Jesus and before the destruction of the Temple…Paul evinces no interest in Jesus’ life, neither his deeds nor his sayings. This is because Paul believes he has his own, private, revelation(s) directly from the resurrected Jesus…Paul’s gospel is of Jesus’ descent from heaven, death, and ascent back to heaven. In Paul, the historical Jesus, man of Galilee, preacher of the empire of God, disappears. Paul is not much help to scholars who seek to paint an accurate portrait of the life of Jesus. pp.42-43

John the Baptist offers forgiveness without sacrifices at the Temple

John announces forgiveness of sins outside the Temple system, without requiring sacrifice. p.46

The kingdom of God is present rather than imminent

If the imminence of the end time is Jesus’ central message, twenty long centuries have proved him wrong. p.66

[Williams argues that Jesus “mocks” the widely held Jewish belief of the end time – such as the victory of Israel over the national enemies, the vindication of the righteous and the punishment of their opponents]

Thinking Jesus believes in the dream of the end time is one place Christianity goes wrong. p.67

Jesus rejects the need for any sacrifice

If Jesus thinks sacrifice for sin unnecessary, Christianity has been arrogant to contradict him. This is another place where Christianity has gone wrong.” p.68

Jesus rejects the dream of the End Time

[Williams likens Jesus’ post-baptism wilderness experience to a transforming New Death Experience which leads him to begin a ministry separate from John]  

So, when Jesus returns from the desert, he does not rejoin John.  He has seen differently, and he returns to preach a different message. He still speaks of the empire of God, but it is not the empire envisioned by John or

34

the Essenes in the dream of the end time. Rather, he speaks of a tiny, hidden, but precious empire, worth giving up everything else to acquire, here and now, as Jesus himself has done.  Jesus has cut John’s message in two.  Like John, he preaches the forgiveness of sins and brings forgiveness to those who come to him, without requiring sacrifice. But he rejects the other half of the message, the sudden advent of God in wrath to establish an empire of the repentant at the end of time. Moreover, he rejects the whole idea of it as an empire similar in many respects to that of Rome around him, just has he rejects the idea of resurrected life as similar to the lives around him.

Jesus not only proclaims a different empire, he mocks specific, familiar elements of the empire of the end time.

The depth of the chasm that separates Jesus’ thought from the dream of the end time appears in his preaching. When he contrasts the righteous person with the sinner, he reverses the dream’s stereotypes, condemning the righteous Pharisee and condoning the sinful tax collector….Many of Jesus’ stories mock the dream of the end time, whose fiery judgment separates people into two groups, vindicating the righteous, and condemning the unrighteous to everlasting death and torment…Jesus life mocks the dream…His mockery of the dream makes many Jews angry, no matter what their faction, for the dream of the end time in one guise of another heralds the liberation, purification, and restoration of Israel that almost every Jew desires…If Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, he does so in mockery of the Davidic hero and coming Messiah who will raise a mighty army of the righteous to liberate the land. Men on donkeys are unlikely to defeat Roman legions. Moreover, Jesus tells the Jews to love their enemies rather than to drive them out of the Holy Land…Jesus makes his entreaty for peace because he knows the cosmic holy war dreamed of by the militants will never come.  God’s empire is already here. Jesus’ plea for peace also accords with Jesus’ stance against violence…His mockery of the dream angers almost every faction…He leaves this life as a witness that God’s empire is present and available now. pp.75-80

[Williams accepts the straightforward meaning of Jesus coming to be baptized by John for the remission of sin, believing that all human beings are sinners.  Hence his saying in Mark 10: 18, “Why call me good? There is none good but One, that is God.”]

If Jesus does not consider himself sinful, he is an appalling hypocrite. Jesus considers himself sinful, so at his baptism he confesses, trusting God’s mercy and compassion. p.91

Jesus calls the righteous to repent, the Pharisee who has kept the law, the elder brother who has obeyed his father, and the early laborers who have worked hard all day for their wage.  He asks them to repent their exclusiveness, their lack of compassion and generosity, and their condemnation of others. p.92

Jesus proclaims forgiveness of sin apart from any need of a sacrifice

Jesus’ behaviour angers and frightens the Temple authorities. They may well have already been angry because Jesus, like John the Baptist, proclaims forgiveness of sins outside the Temple system. p.106

Repeatedly, Jesus declares that God has forgiven sins without requiring sacrifice.  In the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-14), the father (God) forgives the son immediately and orders a banquet of welcome for him…  If Jesus does not consider sacrifice necessary for the forgiveness of sins, we are foolish at best and arrogant at worst to interpret his own death as a sacrifice for sin… Jesus does not die for the forgiveness of sins…Jesus forgives sin without requiring sacrifice or Temple. pp.111,112

 Jesus parodied the need of a pascal lamb or any kind of sacrifice

Jews abhor the idea of consuming blood because they think the blood of an animal belongs to God.  To drink human blood, even symbolically, would be not only loathsome but also blasphemous…Earlier, I have argued that Jesus often mocks the dream of the end time.  Perhaps he also mocks the Temple sacrifices, which he, like John the Baptist before him, considers unnecessary. Perhaps, while eating supper with his disciples after the Temple incident, Jesus mockingly raises the bread and says, “This is my sacrifice, the body I bring to break at God’s altar.  Perhaps later he raises the wine, mockingly saying, “This is my sacrifice, the blood I bring to spill at God’s altar.”  Or words to that effect…He breaks the bread in lieu of killing an animal and drinks the wine

35

instead of pouring out blood…. Such a parody of sacrificial worship, using Jesus typical techniques of exaggeration and reversal is quite funny, as Jesus’ sayings and actions often are. Moreover, it is life affirming, as Jesus’ banquets have always been…

The meat people eat in the first century is sacrificed meat.  To a Jew, to sacrifice is to kill as kosher, so the meat is pure, acceptable to God as an offering, to Jews as foods. Jesus’ kosher banquet of bread and wine does not need priests to kill it. It does not require Temple rites. To the temple authorities, priests all, this mockery  and repudiation is highly insulting. Maybe this mockery is what Judas betrays. p.114

Jesus does not anticipate his sacrificial death at the final supper.  He does not die as a sacrifice for sins. He believes God has forgiven our sins already, without sacrifice. p.115

Jesus preached about a kingdom already present and spread out upon the face of the earth

The dream of the end time magnifies factionalism and arrogance.  The dream says God sides with the righteous and will fling the fullness of divine wrath upon the wicked in a devastating war.  In the end, God will vindicate the righteous and punish the wicked…[Jesus] does not speak of the empire of God as arriving in a wrathful war with the righteous or repentant saved and the wicked damned…He speaks of God’s empire as small, hidden, precious, and present now, worth all a person has now, in this life. However, he is aware that not everyone sees it and that some who do see it think it evil…

Jesus thinks the end time dream is a hallucination, and he begs the dreamers to open their eyes to the empire of God spread all around them, precious, present, and accessible now. God’s empire as Jesus sees it is a reverse image of the empire dreamed of by the factions.  The dream speaks of hating once’s foes.  Jesus calls people to love their enemies and pray for their persecutors. The dream speaks of war and destruction. Jesus calls for peace and bounteous growth, like that of a mustard seed springing into leaf or yeast making bread rise.  The dream is of exclusion. Jesus is inclusive. The dream cries for the vindication of the righteous.  Jesus tells of the exoneration of sinners. The dream longs for God’s justice. Jesus trusts God’s mercy.  p.116-119

It is the righteous, those who feel they are right, who are in peril

The righteous are those who work hard, obey the law and follow the rules.  According to Jesus, people who consistently do these things risk overlooking the empire of God. The righteous are those who believe their group has the truth and right way of doing things and all others are wrong.  According to Jesus, people who believe these things are in grave danger of missing the empire of God…and possibly have rejected it as evil. p.134

Christianity goes wrong about two weeks after Jesus’ disciples believe he is resurrected. It goes wrong in the Holy Land as his Jewish disciples equate the resurrected Jesus with the Messiah figure of Daniel 7, then with the earthly Messiah figure of David.  It goes wrong in the Greek and Roman cities and towns as his Gentile disciples think of him as the true emperor who has ascended to the gods, and as they equate that figure with the logos, the creative word and wisdom of God.

When these concepts are attached to Jesus, they invert his message.  They turn Jesus into the savior of the world and a sacrifice for sin.  In stark contrast, Jesus’ message is that people do not need a saviour, and salvation does not require a sacrifice.  God is present and available, here and now, and forgives the sins of those who ask, without priestly mediation and without sacrifice. p.147

                       Patricia A. Williams, Doing Without Adam and Eve

John and Jesus reject Sacrifice

36

All the Gospels attest that Jesus and his mentor, John the Baptist, reject the need for atonement. Both ignore the method of atonement practiced by first-century Jews (and Gentiles), animal sacrifice by a priest in the Temple or temples). According to all the Gospels, John the Baptist proclaims God’s forgiveness outside the Temple, baptizing the penitent in the cleansing waters of the Jordan. Jesus pronounces forgiveness without resorting to any rituals. All the Gospels show John the Baptist and Jesus disdaining atoning sacrifices for the forgiveness of sins.  For Christians, the fact that Jesus dismisses the need to atoning sacrifices should reveal that atoning sacrifices are unnecessary.

…long before the death of Jesus, Jewish prophets cry that the blood of sacrifices avails us nothing (Isa.1:11; Jer. 6:20; Amos 5:21-24). Jesus stands in the mainstream of a long and powerful Jewish tradition…

Conventionally, religious Jews respected the Temple and supported it financially. They went to Jerusalem for the great festivals and bought unblemished animals in the Temple for sacrifice. The Gospels never show Jesus or his followers participating in Temple sacrifices. Rather, Jesus famously overturns the tables of the moneychangers whose work made Temple sacrifice possible.  Jesus angers Temple authorities rather than supporting and respecting them. p.184-188

There is no reason for us to think of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice. p.185

 As I explain below, his death occurs because his behaviour threatens the power and prerogatives of those in authority. During most of his ministry, Jesus ignores the Temple. His mentor John the Baptist did the same. Both forgave sins outside the traditional structures of sacrifice and finance. By doing so, both men must have angered Temple authorities. Each person accepting forgiveness outside the Temple is one less person purchasing animals from the Temple’s flocks and herds and giving a portion of the sacrificial meat to Temple priests.  By ignoring the Temple, John the Baptist and Jesus undermine the structures of religious power and wealth in first-century Judaism. p.191

                              Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Jewish Christianity

Acts of the Apostles was written by the victorious party

…A literary work which is based upon a variety of sources, traditions, and fragmentary reminiscences, and which actually represents the accepted views of Christian beginnings held by only one of the parties of early Christianity, namely, the victorious party. p.3

Ebionites were the name given to Jewish Christians

The claim that Jesus was the messianic Son of man was, however, open to other interpretations, one of which was provided by the Jewish Christians, or Ebionites.  They acknowledged neither the divine sonship nor a preexistence nor a virgin birth…they held completely different ideas concerning what constituted the cardinal points of the gospel message. p.8

Ebionim or “Ebionites” is a re-hebraized ancient title of honor which the remnant of the primitive church adopted, probably after their flight from Jerusalem, on the basis of Jesus beatitudes concerning the “poor”        ( Matt. 5:3; Luke 4:18; 6:20)…Later the hatred and satire of opponents reduced “Ebionite” to a nickname and term of abuse…so that the Jewish Christians themselves avoided it. p.11

James was the leader of the Jerusalem church

The Jewish Christian legends, reported by Hegesippus and preserved by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History (2,23,6), made him a vegetarian, a teetotaller, and an ascetic, in accordance with their own style of life: they claimed that he prayed so long in the temple for the forgiveness of the sins of his people that his knees

37

became calloused like those of a camel. Because of this excess in intercessions, he seems to have been honoured as a kind of paraclete and to have received the honorary titles ho dikaios (“the righteous”) kai oblias. p.20

[ According to Jewish Christian history] It is not Peter, as in Luke’s presentation, but James the brother of Jesus, who appears as head of the community. He is made Bishop of Jerusalem by Jesus himself (Rec. 1.43).  Peter has to submit to James annual reports in writing concerning his speaking and other activity…Holding the highest office and the highest teaching authority, he issued testimonia (letters of accreditation) indicating that one who had been approved (probatus) was “fit and faithful for the preaching of the word of Christ.”…Accordingly, there was in this literature a kind of monarchical episcopacy, as it must have existed in the Transjordan Ebionite community in the second century, and it was claimed that this kind of episcopacy prevailed in the era of the primitive church…Others, such as Theodore Zahn, have spoken of James as “the Pope of Ebionite fantasy.” pp.39-40

Since there is a series of independent testimonies from the ancient church – and not merely the Hegesippus tradition – which regard James as the first bishop of the Jerusalem, this was not necessarily an invention. p.40

Jewish Christians were against the cult of sacrifice

 One must not, however, see in these Stephen-Hellenists of Acts 6-7 mere antinomians; rather, their critical stance toward the law was related solely to the laws pertaining to the cult and sacrifice, as Luke’s version of the speech makes clear.  In any event, this resulted in Stephen’s martyrdom, for the persecution of the Stephen-Hellenists by the Jews was “an absolutely necessary act of national and religious self-defence” (Schmithals, Paul and James p.26].  See Footnote, p.43

[Schoeps points out that in the Ebionite tradition recorded in the Recognitions 1, it was not the speech of Stephen that unleashed a period of persecution against the Hellenist Jewish Christians, but a speech by James which] gave expression to the anti-cultic tendency of Jesus’ gospel, which has been suppressed by Luke. p.46]

Paul claimed an expanded view of an apostle.

Paul thus advocates an expanded idea of apostleship which also includes those who have received a special commission from the risen Christ. [the Homilies argue against apostleship based on visions as opening up to  uncertainty and confusion]. p.50

 The Ebionites rejected bloody sacrifice as crass paganism

Jewish Christianity clearly knows as little of a supernatural birth as of soteriological interpretation of Jesus’ death on the cross, such as the view which regarded Jesus as a vicarious atoning sacrifice. Since they rejected bloody sacrifices altogether as crass paganism, the Ebionite Jesus can neither have taught this nor by his death have put his seal on it – in contrast with the primitive church preserved in l Corinthians 15:3. On the same basis they celebrated the Lord’s Supper as a mere remembrance of table- fellowship with Jesus and replaced the cup of blood with a cup of water (according to Irenaeus and Epiphanius)…Another result of the belief in the mere humanity of Jesus (psilanthropism)  was that even that which the Great Church regarded as self-evident, viz., the sinlessness of Jesus, was not accepted by them, since their gospel allowed Jesus himself to admit unwilling sins or sins of ignorance. Consequently, the Clementines know no other Christology than the adoptionism of the appellatio (“calling”) to divine sonship of the one who was born as a man. [Footnote 3 cites F. Scheidweiler who says, “In all probability, we have before us in the Christology of the Ebionites the original conception of Christ.” p.62

The frustration of these [apocalyptic] expectations – the delay of the Parousia – did not have the same result among the Ebionites as it did on the Catholic side in the consolidation of the institutional church.  It meant rather that with the slackening of eschatological tension in the fourth and fifth centuries the Ebionite movement came to its end.  The delay of the Parousia made possible the development of the Catholic church, but the Ebionite communities which derived from the primitive church in Jerusalem were not able to survive this brute fact since they had deliberately remained at a more primitive state of Christology, a stage based on the expectation of the Son of man. p.65

38

Ebionites said the bloody animal sacrifice was abolished by Jesus

Of primary importance [to the Ebionites] is the bloody animal sacrifice, abolished by Jesus.  According to Recognitions 1.35 ff, the real point of Jesus’ mission is the annulling of the sacrificial law combined with complete loyalty to and affirmation of the rest of the Mosaic law. Animal sacrifice, it is claimed, was permitted on a temporary basis by Moses only because of the people’s hardness of heart; Jesus abolished it and replaced the blood of sacrificial animals with the water of baptism. Thus the logion of Matthew 5:17 reads in the Gospel of the Ebionites, with a characteristic alteration: “I have come to annul sacrifice, and if you will not cease to sacrifice the wrath will not turn from you.” It is not impossible that the historical Jesus once uttered a statement of this kind, for such a saying would not be found in their gospel without some basis.  At least some of the Jewish Christians must have understood Jesus’ policy of not changing anything in the law as not covering the regulations concerning bloody animal sacrifice…

Accordingly, one must consider the possibility that in this respect the Ebionites were actually orthodox pupils of Jesus who rejected the sacrificial cult so emphatically because their master had already done so. Lohmeyer thought that there was a firm connection between Jesus’ struggle against the cult and the attitude of the first Christians.

Whether or not one agrees with Lohmeyer, the Ebionites’ appeal to Jesus on the question of sacrifices may have had some basis in fact. In any event, the reason the Ebionites were bound to reject emphatically the Pauline soteriology, which conceived of Jesus’ death as a bloody, atoning sacrifice, becomes even clearer. In their view, Christianity had been freed from the Jewish sacrificial worship not through the universally efficacious sacrifice of the Son of God, as the church which followed Paul believed, but rather through the water of baptism whereby Jesus had extinguished the fire of the sacrificial cult.

Concerning the genesis of this Ebionite antipathy toward sacrifices it may only be noted here that in Jesus’ day there was probably still a hazy recollection that the sacrificial legislation was the product of Josiah’s reform and of the exilic age and had been inserted into the Mosaic legislation for the first time under Ezra. [Schoeps goes on to suggest that in this the Ebionites were forerunners of modern literary criticism of the Pentateuch which contends for later additions to the Law of Moses]. p.82-3

Ebionite rejected of monarchy and the Davidic heritage of Jesus

…the Ebionite hostility toward the Israelite monarchy is made explicit. In their eyes, Solomon was discredited primarily because he had built the Temple. Their opposition to King David was based not only on revulsion for adultery, regarded as one of the worst sins, but also on a certain tendency toward pacifism that was related to their aversion to war and bloodshed which they denounced as the result of false prophecy (Hom. 3.25). A further result of this aversion may also have been that Jesus never appears in the Ebionite testimonies as the “Son of David.” Both the infancy narratives and the genealogy are missing from their gospels…The restoration of the throne of David was no longer associated with the Ebionite conception of the Son of man.  p.87

[Ebionites rejected the OT’s depictions of God that appeared to be unworthy, stories of patriarchs eating meat, polygamy, etc.  They rejected the account of the Fall of Adam and any prophecies deemed false, all illustrations of their reading the Scripture critically. p.88-93]

They were convinced that they were judging the law on the basis of Jesus himself; they saw in his life and teaching the real fulfillment of the Mosaic law.  What was of divine origin, he confirmed; what was not, he annulled. p.97

The Ebionites were vegetarian

The Ebionites required abstinence from meat, and this was apparently related to their rejection of the bloodshed involved in animal sacrifice. p.99

 The names Nazorean, Nazarenes-, Notzrim were not related to a place

39

[These were the names used or given to the early Jewish Christians. See Acts 24:5] This name, long used in Syria to designate Christians in general, was probably not derived from the place of Nazareth, but should be considered as a substantive formed from the root nsr meaning “to keep,” “observe,” so that those who bear the name are to be thought of as “observers of secret traditions.” p.11

Poverty was a cherished virtue

The “better righteousness” of the Ebionites is further manifested in their cherishing of that virtue which their name reflects: poverty…The practice of having no property, i.e., poverty with respect to this world’s goods – the so-called primitive Christian “love-communism” – had already been established briefly with full compliance in the earliest period of the primitive church in Jerusalem under the slogan “all things in common” (4:325:11). Apparently, the view that the end of history was imminent made any kind of earthly possession seem unimportant and unnecessary…Apparently, the social conditions of the later Ebionites were extremely impoverished and wretched. p.102

The Rechabites, Essenes and Ebionites were in opposition to the sacrificial cult

[All these groups perceived that] the Mosaic origin of the cultic laws is a fiction, or, to employ Ebionite terms, the product of false periscopes. In spite of overstatement in the declarations of Amos 5:25 and Jeremiah 7:22 that God did not command any sacrifices at the time of the exodus from Egypt, these statements show an awareness that the regulated sacrificial cult was a recent institution introduced by the priests. Actually, the cult was relatively unimportant up to the time of Jeremiah, and it was by no means regarded as the result of divine revelation. And in Ezekiel we find the devastating statement that the sacrificial system has statutes which are “not good,” and “commandments by which they cannot continue to live” (20:25 f.). This seems to me to be the ultimate origin of the Ebionite doctrine of the false pericopes. pp.118-9

The Rechabites had a negative attitude toward the sacrifices and the Temple, an attitude which can also be seen in the Essenes and which finally recurs in Ebionitism as a developed theory.

I have discussed elsewhere the sources which suggest the possibility of a genealogical relationship between the Rechabites and the Essenes.  It is much more certain that there was a relationship between the Essenes and the Ebionites, as Epiphanius affirms…Philo and Josephus –who have knowledge of the Essenes only for the last fifty years of their approximately two-hundred-year existence –depict the Essenes as people who dwell in the cities on the periphery of the Holy Land, who abhor property and riches and who therefore employ a kind of community of goods.  They have a high regard for abstinence from pleasures, prescribe daily washings for purification, and revere the lawgiver Moses most highly, next to God himself.  Moreover, they seem to have rejected animal sacrifice and to have had reservations about the Jerusalem Temple…I am of the opinion that the beliefs of the Rechabites, Essenes and Ebionites were in fact historically related…

I am convinced that it can be demonstrated with certainty that the Ebionites offered frontline opposition to the powerful movement of pagan Gnosticism. pp.119-121.

[Ebionites saw Jesus as “the prophet” to restore law of Moses by purging it from false additions and corruptions.p.134]

                   Maurice Casey, From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God

Jesus did not use the term “Christ” in reference to himself

Mark’s seven occurrences [of the word “Christ”] do not include a single example of Jesus using the term with reference to himself, and the word “Christ” does not occur in Q. That takes us straight to two of our main conclusions:  Jesus does not apply the term “messiah” to himself, and the early church applied it to him

40

abundantly…We must therefore accept the radical view that passages such as Mark 8.29-30 and Mark 14.61,62 were produced by the early church. pp.41-43

The title “the Christ” was not used by Jesus, but it became central to the Christian community before Luke wrote his Gospel. p.99

Son of Man does not function as a title

The Aramaic term bar nash(a), “son of man”, was a normal term for “man”: further, it now seems clear that it was not also a title in the Judaism of the time of Jesus…In the Gospels, however, the term “son of man” does not function as normal term for “man” at all: it functions as a title, and it generally refers to Jesus alone.  Jesus cannot have used the term like this. pp.47

We must conclude that Mark 14.62 and other “son of man” Parousia sayings were produced by the early church. In these sayings, “son of man” is a title. p.54

Jesus lived as a Jew under Jewish Law and kept the sabbath

Jesus attended the synagogue on the sabbath (Mk 1.21ff)…His disciples likewise observed the sabbath…We must conclude that Jesus and his followers upheld the observance of the sabbath. pp.70,71

From being a Jewish prophet to becoming a Gentile God took time

It took some 50 or 60 years to turn a Jewish prophet into a Gentile God. Cultural change was as important as the passage of time. To analyse Christological development against this background of cultural change, I use a three-stage model.  In the first stage, the Christian community was Jewish, a subgroup within Judaism, as the Jesus movement had been.  In the second stage, Gentiles entered the Christian community in significant numbers, without becoming Jewish.  In the third stage, Christianity is identifiable as a Gentile religion…Moreover, all our New Testament documents were written when stage-two of Christological development was in full bloom… this [third]stage was reached when Johannine Christians were thrown out of the synagogue, and that this was a direct cause of the evolution of belief in the deity and incarnation of Jesus. pp.97-98

Resurrection belief was not based on the resurrection stories of the four Gospels

The belief that Jesus had risen from the dead was held at a very early date, but this belief was not based on the resurrection appearances now found in the four Gospels… There is no mention of an empty tomb [in the earlier reports]. The resurrection narratives in our Gospels cannot be factual reports, for they do not coincide with each other, and they contain internal inconsistencies…These discrepancies are too great to have resulted from accurate reporting of a perceptible event. pp. 98-99

The deity of Jesus was not in dispute either in in Acts or in Epistles of Paul

The disputes extant in Acts and the epistles are about halakha [Jewish term for right living practices] rather than Christology, and if there had been a general perception among Jewish members of the communities that other Christians were hailing Jesus as fully God, there would have been disputes severe enough for us to hear of them. p.115

The consequent decline in the observance of the Jewish Law in the Christian community drastically increased the requirement for a higher Christology. p.138

Jesus was now [in the Fourth Gospel] a figure so elevated that observant Jews such as Jesus of Nazareth and the first apostles could not believe in him. p.159

Belief in the deity of Jesus was only possible in a Gentile environment

…the deity of Jesus is a belief which could have developed only in a predominantly Gentile church. p.169

41

The deity of Jesus is, however, inherently unJewish. p.176

                Geza Vermes, The Authentic Gospel of Jesus

All Gospels were written in Greek by anonymous authors and addressed to a non-Jewish audience

Our four Gospels…were composed in Greek; they are not translations from a Semitic original. It is true that we learn from the second-century Papias, quoted by the church historian Eusebius in the fourth century, that the evangelist Matthew was acquainted with a collection of Aramaic sayings of Jesus…

Mainstream scholarly opinion holds the Gospel of Mark to be the oldest [of the Four Gospels]. It was addressed to a non-Jewish audience shortly after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. pp.x,xi

The identity of the fourth evangelist is uncertain.  He is held by Christian tradition to be identical with the apostle John, son of Zebedee, but this claim is not backed by any solid historical evidence. This Gospel has little in common with Mark, Matthew and Luke and the doctrinal development contained in it points to a period after the Synoptics in the beginning of the second century AD (roughly 100 – 110). The bulk of the long, rambling and repetitious speeches of Jesus included in John reflect the ideas of an author steeped in Hellenistic philosophical and mystical speculation, who reshaped the portrait of Jesus two to three generations after his death. The writer can scarcely be identical with the apostle John who is described in the Acts of the Apostles as an ‘uneducated, common man’ (Acts 4:13). The violent antisemitism of the fourth evangelist makes it even questionable that he was a Jew. p.xii

There are differences in Mark, Matthew, and Luke to illustrate the growing status of Jesus

[ On the occasion of healing an epileptic boy]: The disciples of Jesus, after their failure to expel a demon from the dumb boy, were challenged by local scribes. Jesus apparently did not know what the debate was about, nor was he aware of the length of the boy’s illness, and consequently had to inquire. Such questions are typical in the account of Mark, who had no scruples in admitting lack of knowledge on the part of Jesus (cf. Mark 9:33) By the time Matthew and Luke wrote their Gospels, an imperfection of this kind could no longer be attributed to the Son of God. In consequence, they omitted the questions…

‘And they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, What were you discussing on the way’? Mark again depicts Jesus as ignorant of the thoughts of his disciples.  As before, the question is omitted in Matthew and Luke.  In fact Luke (9:17) explicitly denies any lack of knowledge on Jesus’ part: ‘Jesus perceived the thought of their hearts.’ This is a later attempt to rectify the tradition of Mark. pp.19,20

Jesus was not anti-Pharisee

…the anti-Pharisee slant must come from a source later than Jesus.  p.54

The Gospels, written by Palestinian outsiders, were sometimes ignorant of Jewish culture

…imprisonment for debts was not part of the Jewish legal system. [This gloss about imprisonment for indebtedness] is more likely to belong to the cultural and social framework of the Gentile church than to the authentic pronouncements of Jesus. p.91

The Parable of the Ten Virgins is not truly representative of the real Jesus

42

…the selfish wise virgins and the cold and heartless bridegroom do not reflect the ideas of kindness and benevolence which typify the piety taught by Jesus; rather they are a travesty of his teaching on generosity and confident prayer. p.149

Mark does not understand the Jewish laws of divorce

As for Mark’s reference to a woman divorcing her husband, it envisages a legal context alien to the world of Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries in which a woman could not initiate divorce proceedings. p.181

Jesus did not argue his teaching from the Bible

…the Old Testament did not play an important role in the preaching of Jesus: he did not argue his doctrine from the Bible.  Compared with the Scripture-based teaching style of the Pharisees and the scribes this is quite remarkable. p.212

Son of Man is not a title

[ “Son of man” (bar nasha) as used in the Aramaic sense]: It is highly unlikely, therefore, that Jesus used ‘son of man’ as a title. p.236

The phrase ‘son of man’ can be a circumlocutional reference by a modest speaker of himself.  p.238

…the Son of man …came to give his life as a ransom for many’, words added by Mark and Matthew to the original logion preserved in Luke which reflect ‘the redemption theories of Hellenistic Christianity.’ p.241

[Vermes says that the apocalyptic Son of Man taken from Daniel 7 was applied to Jesus by the early church, including Jewish Christianity, but was not the perspective of Jesus.  See pp.252-3]

Messianic claims of early church have an astonishing lack of biblical proof

Bearing in mind that the crucifixion of Jesus was perhaps the greatest difficulty which the early church had to overcome in proclaiming him as the Messiah promised to the Jews, the absence of detailed biblical proof concerning this essential doctrine is astonishing. p.215

The focus of the Lord’s Prayer is the kingdom of God, not the return of Christ

The fact that the object of the supplication is to bring about the Kingdom of God, and not the return of Christ (the Parousia), clearly distinguishes Jesus’ perspective from that of the early church. p.225

The Passover Meal in the Synoptics is not compatible with what is written in John

It is also remarkable that the Gospel of John contains no report of a Passover meal shared by Jesus with the apostles. This is no doubt due to the fact that according to the Fourth Gospel the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus took place the day before the feast, and consequently there could not be any question of Jesus partaking in a real paschal dinner. John specifies that the Jewish dignitaries who handed over Jesus to Pilate refused to enter his palace, the praetorium, so as to remain ritually clear so that they ‘might eat the Passover’ (see John 18:28)…Of course, if the chronology given by John is correct, the meal which Jesus had on the evening before his death was not a Passover supper. Consequently, the words allegedly spoken during it were uttered by him in different circumstances on another occasion, or are largely the product of the early church…

If Jesus was crucified the day before the Passover, he could not have taken part in a seder meal; he was dead by then, and consequently the story must be a later creation of the church. pp.302, 306

The Parousia idea did not originate with Jesus

The Parousia idea represents a later stage of doctrinal development in the early church. p.340

43

Peter, the rock, was an invention of Matthew

The episode of Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ is contained in all three Synoptic Gospels, but his appointment to be the rock does not figure in either Mark or Luke.  Their silence on something as important as Peter’s nomination as head of the ekklesia strongly intimates that Matthew 16:17-19 must be a secondary accretion.  The lack of any mention of the church in the other Gospels, including John, also points in the same direction. In short, the words about Peter’s promotion should be credited not to Jesus, but to Matthew or his editor in AD 80 or later. p.362

The Church, mentioned only in Matthew, was not a concern of Jesus

The word ekklesia (church) is absent from Mark, Luke and even from John…On the basis of the verbal statistics – no mention of ekklesia in three out of the four Gospels and a mention in only two passages in Matthew – we may safely conclude that Jesus himself left no teaching about a church. Neither did he employ any other term to denote a corresponding institution…In brief, there is no evidence to support the idea that the foundation of the church was among the major concerns of Jesus. p.365

The ministry of Jesus lasted for only a year

With a single Passover recorded in the Synoptics, the public career of Jesus has to be of a maximum of one year’s duration. Indeed, it is not out of the question that it may have lasted less than twelve months. p.370

The Gospels present a Hellenized version of Jesus

…the Synoptic Gospels in their present form consist of an adjusted, supplemented, and corrected version, a thoroughly revised edition, of the original message of Jesus. The words, idioms, and images which a first-century A.D. Galilean master addressed to his compatriots and co-religionists were rephrased in the Gospels to suit a totally different public, imbued with Hellenistic thought, in the Greek-speaking part of the Roman empire.  To cater for the requirements of this new audience and readership, ideas foreign to Jesus were introduced into the Gospels. Consequently it is up to us now to differentiate between the genuine and the accrued message.  p.372

The use of form criticism shows how many sayings attributed to Jesus were originated by the church

[Form criticism is about reconstructing the Sitz im Leben, or life situation of the church when the Gospels were written].  “…it ipso facto leads to the rejection of the genuineness of a substantial amount of material attributed to Jesus by the evangelists. These teachings were to undergo numerous mutations after his death in the course of their transmission first to Jews in the Holy Land, later to diaspora Jews, and finally to Gentiles, both inside and outside Palestine. These mutations constitute a kind of continuously widening spiral in time and through changing cultures. p.374

Therefore, it is wiser to lower one’s aim and try to reconstruct, not the ipsissima verba, but the general gist

of his message. p.375

Jesus preached only to Jews

[Citing Matt.15:24; 10:5-6 15:26:7:6; Mark 2:27] There Jesus bluntly asserted that his mission was exclusively intended for Jews…He gave the same pro-Jewish directive to his apostles too….In these unequivocal utterances Jesus is presented as the champion of absolute Jewish exclusivism…the view that Jesus ministered only to the lost sheep of Israel, and instructed his disciples to do the same is the historically correct alternative.  Disturbing though this may sound to the uninformed, the order to proclaim the good news of salvation to all the nations, must be struck out from the list of the authentic sayings of Jesus. pp.376-380

The teaching of Jesus was not the teaching of a fully evolved Christianity

Compared with the dynamic religion of Jesus, fully evolved Christianity seems to belong to another world. With its mixture of high philosophical speculation on the triune God, its Johannine logos mysticism and Pauline

44

Redeemer myth of a dying and risen Son of God, with its sacramental symbolism and ecclesiastical discipline substituted for the extinct eschatological passion, with its cosmopolitan openness combined with a built-in anti-Judaism, it is hard to imagine how the two could have sprung from the same source.  p.415

Look for the teaching of Jesus rather than a teaching about Jesus

 [Vermes concludes The Authentic Gospel of Jesus with this simple yet powerful one-liner:]  ‘Look for what Jesus himself taught instead of being satisfied with what has been taught about him.’ p.417

                   Geza Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus

The Gospel of John is third generation writing and highly evolved

…the so-called Gospel of John is something special and reflects not the authentic message of Jesus or even the thinking about him of his immediate followers but the highly evolved  theology of a Christian writer who lived three generations and completed his Gospel in the opening years of the second century A.D…It is obvious to anyone acquainted with the doctrinal traditions of the church that the theological understanding of Jesus – who he was and what he did – by historic Christianity ultimately depends on the Gospel of John and the letters of Paul. p.8

I subscribe therefore [in view of evidence of first fragments of this Gospel and citing of it] to the opinion held by mainstream New Testament scholarship that the work was published in the early second century, probably between the years 100 and 110…The same majority opinion considers the identity of the author unascertainable. p.11

2 Peter makes Paul’s writings part of Scripture

The Second Letter of Peter…dating to A.D. 125 if not later… [says that] the letters of Paul…are referred to as “Scripture” (3:15-16).  In all the other books of the New Testament, and even in later Christianity, only the Old Testament bears this title. p.121

 Christology evolved over time in a complex process

The fact that Jesus was admired, or suspected, as a potential Messiah started a complex process of theological speculation, which in the course of three centuries culminated in the elevation of the carpenter from Nazareth to the rank of the second person of the triune Godhead, the Holy Trinity. p.257

       Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels

Jesus was neither the Christ nor the Jewish bogey-man

If, after working his way through the book, the reader recognizes that this man, so distorted by Christian and Jewish myth alike, was in fact neither the Christ of the Church, nor the apostate and bogey-man of Jewish popular tradition, some small beginning may have been made in the repayment to him of a debt long overdue. p.17

Carpenter can mean a learned man

45

Now those familiar with the language spoken by Jesus are acquainted with a metaphorical use of ‘carpenter’ and ‘carpenter’s son’ in ancient Jewish writings.  In Talmudic sayings the Aramaic noun denoting carpenter or craftsman (naggar) stands for a ‘scholar’ or ‘learned man’.  p.21

[ Vermes says that Jesus has the identity of an exorcist, healer, and teacher]

[ Galileans were regarded by other Jews as unsophisticated provincials. p.57]

Jesus was a Galilean Hasid

[Galilee produced a number of charismatic holy men or Hasidim – examples of these being Honi and Hanina ben Dosa who, like Jesus, became legends in that age. pp.69-78] Jesus of Nazareth takes on the eminently credible personality of a Galilean Hasid. p.83

Son of Man was not a title

…in Galilean Aramaic the son of man occurs as a circumlocutional reference to the self…there are also instances in which the avoidance of the first person is motivated by a reserve and modesty. p.168

The biblical Aramaic idiom, ‘one like a son of man’, in Daniel 7:13, though not individual and Messianic in its origin, acquired in the course of time a definite Messianic association. However, none of the interpretative sources employ it as a title, or place it on the lips of a speaker as a self-designation. The clear avoidance of the titular use, even when the subject is a precisely defined person, cannot be attributed to hazard, and the only rational explanation that springs to mind is that bar nasha was found unsuitable for titular usage because it was too commonplace, and possibly because of its occasionally pejorative meaning… p.176

Since the ‘son of man’ is not a Greek phrase, but Aramaic, if it is to make sense at all it must be Aramaic sense. pp.177

[Ed. note: Vermes is regarded as somewhat of an authority on the meaning and usage of son of man.  Maurice Casey (already cited) takes the same position, which may be summarized as saying that the term son of man as frequently used by Jesus is simply a modest circumlocution of himself like saying “this man”.  It was his later followers who turned “son of man” into a Messianic title].

 The OT and Jewish meaning of the term, son of God

Whereas every Jew was called son of God, the title came to be given preferably to the just man, and in a very special sense to the most righteous of all just men, the Messiah son of David. p.195

The gulf between son of God and God could have been bridged only in a Gentile environment

A final word must be said about the bridging of the gulf between son of God and God.  None of the Synoptic Gospels try to do this. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to contend that the identification of a contemporary historical figure with God would have been inconceivable to a first-century AD Palestinian Jew.  It could certainly not have been expressed in public, in the presence of men conditioned by centuries of biblical monotheistic religion. Paul, the Jew from Tarsus at home in the Greco-Roman world, shies away from it…

It was not until Gentiles began to preach the Jewish Gospel to the Hellenised peoples of the Roman empire that the hesitation disappeared, and the linguistic brake was lifted…

When Christianity later set out to define the meaning of son of God in its Creed, the paraphrase it produced – ‘God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, consubstantial with the Father’ – drew its inspiration, not from the pure language and teaching of the Galilean Jesus, nor even from Paul the Diaspora Jew, but from the Gentile-Christian interpretation of the Gospel adapted to the mind of the totally alien world of pagan Hellenism. pp.212-213

Seed of David and Virgin Birth are incompatible

46

The conflict between the story[of the Nativity] and its purpose is obvious:  on the one hand, the divinely conceived child of a virgin mother, and on the other, the wish to prove Jesus’ legitimate Davidic descent as set out in the genealogical table.  For it is clear that if Joseph had nothing to do with Mary’s pregnancy, the intention prompting the reproduction of the table is nullified, since Joseph’s royal Davidic blood would not have been passed on to Jesus.  Even more perplexing, Matthew’s table of ancestry differs from Luke’s, not insignificantly, but to such an extent that the two lists are mutually irreconcilable. Taking into account the child’s virgin conceptions, what can have been the point of such involved calculations….no biblical reason existed for inventing a virgin birth since it was not, and never had been, believed in biblical or inter-Testamental Judaism that the Messiah would be born in such a way. p.215

The earliest Semitic version of Matthew, the Old Syriac Gospel found in a monastery on Mount Sinai, is based on a text emended in this way; nevertheless, it manages to reassert that Joseph was the father of Jesus. “Matthan begot Jacob, and Jacob begot Joseph. Joseph, to whom was betrothed Mary, the virgin, begot Jesus who is called the Messiah (AT).” p.216

A final argument directly in favour of the paternity of Joseph is that the Ebionites, the Palestinian Judeo-Christians whom the Gentile Church declared heretics, accepted Jesus as the Messiah, but maintained that his conception was a natural one and that he was his parents’ real son. p.217

Vermes’ estimate of Jesus:  He excelled even the Prophets but makes no Messianic claims

No objective and enlightened student of the Gospels can help but be struck by the incomparable superiority of Jesus. As Joseph Klausner wrote in the final paragraph of his famous book, Jesus of Nazareth, published in its original Hebrew edition exactly fifty years ago [ from when Vermes cited this in 1973]:

“In his ethical code there is a sublimity, distinctiveness and originality in form unparalleled in any other Hebrew ethical code; neither is there any parallel to the remarkable art of his parables.”

Second to none in profundity and insight and grandeur of character, he is in particular an unsurpassed master of the art of laying bare the inmost core of spiritual truth and of bringing every issue back to the essence of religion, the existential relationship of man and man, and man and God.

It should be added that in one respect more than any other he differed from his contemporaries and even his prophetic predecessors. The prophets spoke on behalf of the honest poor, and defended the widows and the fatherless, those oppressed and exploited by the wicked, rich and powerful. Jesus went further. In addition to proclaiming these blessed, he actually took his stand among the pariahs of his world, those despised by the respectable.  Sinners were his table-companions and the ostracised tax-collectors and prostitutes his friends…

Whereas he explicitly avoided the title ‘Messiah’, he was very soon invested with it, and in the Christian mind has since become inseparable from it.  By contrast, although he approved the designation ‘prophet’, this was one of the first of his appellations to be discarded by the Church, one that has never since been readopted. pp.223-224

                        Geza Vermes, The Religion of Jesus the Jew

Christology obscured the human Jesus

Today as in past centuries, the believing Christian’s main New Testament source of faith lies, not so much in Mark, Matthew and Luke and their still sufficiently earthly Jesus, as in centuries of speculation by the church on the theological Gospel of John with the eternal Word become flesh, and perhaps, even more on the letters

47

of Paul with their drama a death, atonement, and resurrection. The Christ of Paul and John, on the way towards deification, overshadows and obscures the man of Galilee. p. 210

There was no deification of Jesus or virgin birth among the first Jewish Christians

…Judaeo-Christianity of the first vintage… followed the teaching of Jesus without such ‘Christian’ accretions as the doctrine of the virgin birth or the deification of Christ.  These people were unpopular both in the Jewish camp, and among the members of the Gentile church; though they probably remained closest to Jesus, the Jews considered them as Christians and the Christians as heretics. p.213

Jesus was not the founder of Christianity

Shortly before his death, the great British New Testament scholar, C. H. Dodd, produced an excellent little book on the life of Jesus.  But if the thesis developed in the present study is even partly true, the title Dodd chose, The Founder of Christianity (1970), must be judged a misnomer. Though admittedly not totally unconnected, the religion of Jesus and Christianity are so basically different in form, purpose and orientation that it would be historically unsafe to derive the latter directly from the former and attribute the changes to a straightforward doctrinal evolution.

It would seem no less unjustifiable to continue to represent Jesus as the establisher of the Christian church (or churches?)…A great challenge, perhaps the greatest of them all, which Christianity of the Pauline-Johannine variety has therefore still to confront does not come from atheism, or agnosticism, or sheer materialism, but from within, from the three ancient witnesses, Mark, Matthew and Luke, from whom speaks the chief challenger, Jesus the Jew…

But it would seem also that muted sounds are audible in Jewish scholarly circles suggesting that the antique taboo on Jesus, mistakenly held responsible for Christian anti-Semitism, is beginning to fade and that hesitant steps are being made to re-instate him among the ancient Hasidim in fulfillment of Martin Buber’s ‘prophecy’: ‘A great place belongs to him in Israel’s history of faith.’

Nor is this all. For the magnetic appeal of the teaching and example of Jesus holds out hope and guidance to those outside the fold of organized religion, the stray sheep of mankind, who yearn for a world of mercy, justice and peace lived in as children of God. p.214- 215

[Vermes was a NT scholar who devoted much of life to the study and writing of a serious of books about the historical Jesus.  He was obviously an enormous admirer of the historical man. He would agree, however, with the Jewish Christians in not subscribing to the doctrine of the absolute sinlessness of Jesus.  Vermes finds a flaw in his Jewish chauvinism. Jesus did not preach to Gentiles or allow his disciples to preach to them either. And who could forget what he is reported to have said to the Gentile woman who begged from him a healing favour: “It is not right to take the children’s’ bread, and throw it to the dogs”( Matthew 15:26). Then there are some reporting of outbursts of impatience or anger, or perhaps an element of ill-timed rashness in his Temple protest at the time of the Passover when even the Romans were on edge in anticipation of any civil disturbance].

The humanitarian spirit and piety of Jesus has never been never totally lost in Christianity

48

…in fairness, it must be emphasized that notwithstanding all its alien dogmatic and ecclesiastical features, Christianity still possesses fundamental elements of the piety of Jesus, such as his emphasis on purity of intention and generosity of heart, exemplified in a Francis of Assisi who relinquished wealth to serve the poor, and even in our century, an Albert Schweitzer, who abandoned fame to heal the sick in God-forsaken Lambarene, and a Mother Teresa who, age-old, cares for the dying in the filthy streets of Calcutta…the magnetic appeal of the teaching and example of Jesus holds out hope and guidance to those outside the fold of organized religion, the stray sheep of mankind, who yearn for a world of mercy, justice and peace lived in as children of God. pp.214-215

                      Geza Vermes, Jesus and the World of Judaism

Jesus was not a Christian

Jesus was a Jew and not a Christian. It implies a renewed quest for the historical figure reputed to be the founder of Christianity. p.1

Galileans were regarded as unsophisticated provincials

In Jerusalem, and in Judaean circles, they had also the reputation of being an unsophisticated people.  In rabbinic parlance, a Galilean is usually referred to as Gelili shoteh, a stupid Galilean. He is presented as a typical ‘peasant’, a boor, a ‘am ha-arez’, a religiously uneducated person. p.5

 Jesus exhibited some Jewish chauvinism

Jesus was a Galilean Hasid: there, as I see it, lie his greatness, and also the germ of his tragedy. That he has his share of the notorious Galilean chauvinism would seem clear from the xenophobic statements attributed to him. As one review of Jesus the Jew puts it, interestingly enough, by the Gardening correspondent of the Financial Times! – ‘Once he called us “dogs” and “swine” and he forbade the Twelve to proclaim the gospel to …Gentiles.’ p.11

Judaeo-Christians questioned the authenticity of the Gentile Christ

Another historical consideration remains, involving the question of why the Judaeo-Christians, the first of Jesus’ followers, withdrew so relatively fast from the main body of the church.  Rarely confronted, this problem is nevertheless of methodological importance because the most likely reason was that the Ebionites became convinced that they were witnessing in the Hellenistic communities a fatal misrepresentation of Jesus, a betrayal of his ideals, and their replacement by alien concepts and aspirations. p.26

Neither social reformer, political revolutionary, or founder of an ecclesiastical body

He was not a social reformer or nationalistic revolutionary, notwithstanding recent claims to the contrary. Nor, provocative though it may appear to say so, did the urgency of his religious vision allow any place for founding, organizing, and endowing with permanency an ecclesiastical body of any sort. p.50

There are parables attributed to Jesus that are not genuine

[e.g., the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids in Matt.25:1-13] Did Matthew or his later editor not realize that his parable is a travesty of Jesus’ teaching on generosity and confident prayer contained in the same gospel? p.51

Son of God in Hebrew or Aramaic cannot mean a deified person

To the Greek speaker in Alexandria, Antioch or Athens at the turn off the eras, the concept huios theou, son of God, would have brought to mind either one of the many offspring of the Olympian deities, or possibly a

49

deified Egyptian-Ptolemaic king, or the divine emperor of Rome, descendant of the apotheosized Julius Caesar.  But to a Jew, the corresponding Hebrew or Aramaic phrase would have applied to none of these.  For him, son of God could refer, in an ascending order, to any of the children of Israel; or to a good Jew; or to a royal Messiah; and finally, in a different sense, to an angelic or heavenly being.  In other words, ‘son of God’ was always understood metaphorically in Jewish circles.  In Jewish sources, its use never implies participation by the person so-named in the divine nature.  It may in consequence safely be assumed that if the medium in which Christian theology developed had been Hebrew and not Greek, it would not have produced an incarnation doctrine as this is traditionally understood.

50

HOW THE JESUS MOVEMENT OF JAMES WAS UPSTAGED AND BURIED

                                BY THE CHRIST MOVEMENT OF PAUL                                                         

                                                                     Robert D. Brinsmead

Identifying the Apostolic Church

The Apostolic church was formed in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost (See Acts 2). The founding members were a core group who had heard and followed the teachings of Jesus prior to his death. Among them were the family of Jesus (including at least his mother and brothers), plus the apostles who had been hand-picked by Jesus himself to witness his life and teachings.

The members of this group were all devout Jews who had no intention of leaving Judaism, much less did they have in mind the founding of a new religion.  This group came to be called a church, but they could just as well be called a synagogue because both words simply mean an assembly or congregation.  For the next 40 years this Jerusalem church, which soon grew to have thousands of Jewish adherents, enjoyed the revered status of being the mother church among all the house churches (gatherings) that soon began to spring up around Palestine and abroad.  

Some scholars are now calling this first generation of church history “the dark age” of the church because its real identity and status (especially of James and the family of Jesus) soon came to be quite intentionally buried and remain buried until recent times. The reasons why James, the family of Jesus, and the apostolic church came to be written out of the story of the church needs to be clearly understood and identified.

In the first place, the person whom the apostles unanimously elected to lead the church was James, the brother of Jesus. Not Peter or John!  James was a towering figure who presided over the mother church to make decrees for the guidance of all the other churches that were scattered throughout Palestine and abroad for a whole 32 years, that is, until his untimely martyrdom in the year 62 CE. Even Peter and Barnabas trembled and changed their course of action in response to a delegation from James who arrived in Antioch (See Galatians 2).  More than this, by the time of his death, James was probably the most widely respected figure among the whole population of Jerusalem and Judea. The siege of Jerusalem by the Romans which soon followed his execution was widely attributed to his unjust killing. In response to the general protest over his execution, the High Priest responsible for ordering his death was summarily dismissed from office by the intervention of the authorities appointed by Rome.  That gives us some indication of the level of regard even the general population had for the man who was called James the Just. 

Immediately after the death of James, Symeon was unanimously elected as the leader of the Jerusalem church.  He was known as a cousin or brother of Jesus. This illustrates how that not only James, but the family of Jesus continued to play an important leadership role in the apostolic church.  One would never know this by reading the New Testament Gospels or the Acts of the Apostles – all written by unknown churchmen after 70 CE.  The reasons for this suppression of their role in the apostolic church will become obvious when we look at what this apostolic community believed.

51

Up until the outbreak of the Jewish war with Rome in 70 CE, so many thousands of Jews had joined the Jerusalem church (see Acts 21:20) that it seemed possible that the Jesus movement might have gone on to become the dominant force within Judaism.  Far from having any intention of leaving Judaism to start of new religion, these Nazarenes aspired to make Judaism that “light on the hill” to attract all nations according to the prophecy of Isaiah 2:1. (Compare this prophecy with the words of Jesus to his followers in Matthew 5:14).  

However, when the war with Rome appeared on the horizon, the Jews in general favoured military resistance. The pacifist Nazarenes, following the teachings of Jesus about non-violence, were accused of being traitors. Support for the Jesus movement began to wane. In the post-70 reconstruction of Judaism, with no temple or priesthood surviving the devastation, the Rabbinic party gained the ascendancy. They began expelling the Nazarenes (whom they called the Notzrim) from their synagogues around 90 CE.

At the same time, the Nazarenes were being condemned as heretics by the Gentile Church which by now was well on the way toward establishing a new mother church in Rome. Clement was enthroned as bishop of Rome in the last decade of the century.  By this time also, the mainstream of the Nazarenes were becoming known as Ebionites, a term meaning “the poor ones.” They were also being called “Jewish Christians.” Although this term is still widely used and may be acceptable for identification purposes, we must remember that these people never called themselves “Christians,” a word that could only be derived from the Greek language rather than from the Hebrew or Aramaic language of the Jews. But whatever we call them, Ebionites or Jewish Christians, they claimed to be direct descendants of the apostolic church in Jerusalem.  Among them were the Desposyni, the direct descendants of the Jesus family. They too found no home within the Christian Church.

The Faith and Practice of the Apostolic Church at Jerusalem

James was a Nazirite like his cousin John the Baptist. He neither drank wine nor ate meat. Nazirites were also called Nazarenes, both words being derived from the same Hebrew word that signifies a dedication to God by a special way of life. Later churchmen such as the unknown author of Matthew’s Gospel created some literary confusion by implying that the word Nazarene was derived from the name of an insignificant village called Nazareth where Jesus grew up. The unknown churchmen who wrote the New Testament Gospels (all in the era after the destruction of the Jerusalem church in 70 CE) were non-Palestinians who were writing in Greek to make Jesus as appealing as possible to a Gentile audience within a Greek culture.

All the members of this apostolic church of Jerusalem were devout Jews who worshipped at the temple in Jerusalem and continued to live according to Jewish law except for one thing – as followers of the teachings of Jesus, they did not participate in the sacrificial cult (More on this later). 

The real historical shock – of seismic proportions for the entire Christian religion – is to discover (after two thousand years of history) – what “the apostolic church” believed and taught.  It did not believe that Jesus was a divine being. It did not believe that he was either pre-existent or virgin born. These followers of Jesus believed he was the natural born son of Joseph and Mary, the son of God by the kind of adoption that is open to the entire human family.  Nor did this apostolic church believe or teach that Jesus was the Christ who died for their sins, or that there was any more soteriological significance to the death of Jesus than the death of John the Baptist, James, or anyone else.  Neither did this believing community commemorate the death of Jesus with bread and wine as a sacrament or a symbol of eating his body and drinking his blood.  To put the matter bluntly, there was nothing distinctively Christian about the beliefsor practices of the apostolic church.

52

 It should be sobering to reflect that in the great Christian world of the Western civilization, for more than a thousand years, it was a heresy punishable by death to believe what the apostolic church at Jerusalem believed. We should not forget that Protestant Geneva, under the leadership of John Calvin, had the brilliant physician/theologian Michael Servetus burned at the stake because he did not believe that Jesus was God.

To state what should now appear obvious, it was an enormous embarrassment to the great Church which developed after 70 CE that the descendants of the apostolic church at Jerusalem, including the descendants of the family of Jesus (the Desposyni), found their spiritual home among the Ebionites. They never joined the great Christian Church. By the end of the first century, just 70 years after a wholly Jewish church had formed on the Day of Pentecost, not one Jewish person was found among the leaders of the Christian Church. Those who got to write up the history and teachings of the Christian Church wrote James and the Desposyni out of the story. As a well-known saying puts it, it is the victors who get to write the history. 

Up until 70 CE, the mother church at Jerusalem was very much in the ascendency of the Jesus movement.  A scattering of house churches raised up by Paul was not only small in comparison, but only one stream of thought among many other streams of thought that were developing from the original Jesus movement. No one could have predicted how quickly the Jerusalem church would lose the ascendency and almost disappear from history after the catastrophic 70 CE event, and then how quickly Paul’s teaching would emerge from the pack to make him the real founder of a new religion called Christianity. Within a few years, there was not a single Jewish descendent of the apostolic church among the leaders of the great Church.  

To give an illustration of what an astounding metamorphous this was, consider how two religious movements arouse in USA in the first half of the 19^th century. These were the Mormons and the Seventh-day Adventists.  By the end of that century, as we would expect, the leaders of both these religious movements were still Americans.  It would be hard to imagine that within 70 years the headquarters of either religion would be in a foreign country, speaking another language, with neither of them having one single American person being among its leaders. Of course, such a thing did not happen.  Yet this is what happened in the case of the apostolic church in which all the founding members were Palestinian Jews. By the end of that century the mother church was not in Jerusalem but Rome, speaking a language other than the language of the founders of the Jesus movement, and with not a single Jewish person among its leadership. Rather than this appearing like a natural growth and development of the original Jesus movement, it appears more like the original Jewish movement had been hijacked to become a new Gentile religion.  

It was nearly two hundred years ago that the German scholar, Frederick Baur, drew attention to the tensions which developed between James and Paul being far more serious than a surface reading of the New Testament documents would indicate. Baur argued that the so-called “super-apostles” whom Paul denounced in his Corinthian letters, especially 2 Corinthians 3 and 11, were none other than James, the brother of Jesus, and the other Jerusalem apostles. That view appeared to be so shocking, that it was not until the more recent research into James was undertaken, that Baur’s view of things has appeared to be credible.

This schism between James and Paul (and the communities they represented), came down to three issues: (1) the source of their teaching (2) the focus of their teaching, and (3) the reason behind the death of Jesus.  

1.The Source of their teaching

53

The leaders of the apostolic church led by James had been disciples of the historical Jesus. The source of their teaching was simply what they learned from him during the period of his public ministry.   

In the case of Paul, it was quite different. He declared that his teaching was not something he received from any human source – certainly not from the historical Jesus whom he never met, nor from any of the apostles who had been his disciples. To cite his own words, “I must make it clear to you, my friends, that the gospel you have heard from me is no human invention.  I did not take it over from any man; no man taught it me; I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” “I shall go on to tell of visions and revelations granted by the Lord. I know a Christian man who fourteen years ago (whether in the body or out of it, I do not know – God knows) who was caught up into Paradise, and heard words so secret that human lips may not repeat them.”(Galatians 1:11; 2 Corinthians 12:1:4)  Concerning his teaching about the Lord’s Supper, he says:  “The tradition which I handed on to you came to me from the Lord himself.” (1 Corinthians 11: 23). The Jerusalem apostles were at that last Supper with Jesus, and it would be too easy to assume that Paul received his information about the Supper from the disciples who were there.  But no, Paul tells us that his teaching about the Supper came directly to him from the Lord himself.

So, the source of Paul’s doctrine, according to Paul himself, was his own private revelations that came to him in visionary epiphanies or trances.  Unlike the teachings of James and the apostolic church at Jerusalem, Paul had little interest in what the historical Jesus had to say (2 Corinthians 5:16). His focus was on visionary things about the heavenly or post-historical Jesus who had the status of Christ.

Jewish Christians were known to argue against Paul’s teaching on the grounds that private visionary experiences were not as safe as the teaching which had come directly from the mouth of the historical Jesus.

2. The content of their teaching

In the whole history of what came to be called Jewish Christianity, the focus was always on the teaching of Jesus.  Very little was ever said about his person or details about his life.  There was absolutely no Jesusolatry (the veneration or worship of Jesus) in either the apostolic church or the heirs of that church, for that would have been anathema in any Jewish community.  A prime example of their writings is Sayings Gospel Q which is considered to be the earliest writing about Jesus by his Jewish followers. Except for a brief mention of Jesus doing some exorcisms and a few modest healings, Q is simply a collection of his most memorable sayings, indicating that the most impressive thing about Jesus to the authors of Q was what he said. In the Q, nothing is said about him being the Christ, and nothing is said about his death on the cross. 

Even when Sayings Gospel Q was used as a source for the parables and aphorisms found in Matthew and Luke at least a generation later, these parables and aphorisms still leave the distinct impression that the Teacher does not direct attention to himself. The gospel of Jesus does not become the gospel about Jesus.

With Paul, however, it was entirely different. Whereas the Jewish community of the Q had nothing to say about Christ or the death of Jesus, Paul never stops talking about either. That was his gospel.  In his own words, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (1 Corinthians 2:2) “Christ died for our sins…” (I Corinthians 15:3). “Christ… gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age…If we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned.” (Galatians 1: 3,8).

54

Paul obviously thought that the insights which came to him in his visionary flight to Paradise meant that his insights into this heavenly Christ superseded what the Jerusalem apostles could have learned at the feet of the earthly Jesus (2 Corinthians 5:16).   

If Paul talks about Jesus, it is always Jesus Christ. It is almost as if Christ becomes his second name when in fact it is a title and a status.  Christ is a Greek word used to translate the Hebrew word for Messiah. Although the Hebrew word simply means one who is anointed by God’s spirit (who might be a prophet, priest, king, or anyone else) it came to be associated with the expectation of a warrior King like David who subdued the national enemies, or even another warrior like Judas Maccabees who expelled the Syrian ruler Antiochus Epiphanes from Palestine in the second century BCE.  In the Greek, the word Christ more easily takes on the broader status of a cosmic Lord, King, Ruler, and Saviour who has universal dominion – all very monarchical terms invoking the imagery of a Roman Caesar. It could be said that Jesus could not have been invested with a more fearsome and terrifying title than this heavenly Christ who would soon return to wreck unimaginable vengeance and terror upon most of mankind for rejecting his authority.  Turning the gentle, nonviolent Jesus into the warrior Christ was all a part of Paul’s Christology which would work out to create so much tyranny and bloodshed when Christianity became the only tolerated religion in the Western world of Greco-Roman civilization.

Yet for all Paul’s elevation of Jesus to the status of Christ, he did not ever say that Christ was God. It needs to be recognized, however, that Paul’s Christology had started a process that would make the full deification of Christ inevitable. That process would take another 300 years before Church Councils and Confessions declared that Jesus Christ was God in the highest sense, the second member of the Blessed Trinity. By this time the Christian religion had evolved into a religion which was not only separate to Judaism, but hostile to both Judaism and to Jewish Christianity.

From the start, Christology was an imaginative, speculative, and a myth-making process in which each speculation led to another. The first step in formulating this elaborate Christology was taken when Paul declared that “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.” (I Corinthians 15:3).  As repeated in a litany of Pauline sayings:

              “Christ…gave himself for our sins.” (Galatians 1:3

              “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is

               written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.’” (Galatians 3:13)

               “God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement.” Romans 3:25

               “He was delivered over to death for our sins…”  Romans 4:25

               “He did not spare his own Son, but delivered him up for us all.”  Romans 8:32

                “One died for all, and therefore all died…God made him who had no sin to be sin for us.” 

                  2 Corinthians 5:14,21

This teaching of Paul was essentially apocalyptic. This is a word which means an unveiling or disclosure of secrets relating to the end of the world.  Anyone who had seen Jesus being crucified could have seen nothing more from what was visible, namely, the gruesome execution of an innocent man, a thing that happens all too often in this world.  It required nothing less than an unveiling or disclosure of a divine secret to see that the cross was the altar upon which God offered up his Son as an atoning sacrifice to redeem the human race that became separated from God in the Fall of Adam at the dawn of history. In Paul’s apocalyptic view of things, the Fall of man and the downward spiral of history is fundamental to his view that the death of Christ is a stupendous end of the world event (Hebrews 9:26) in which God calls the world to Judgment in the person of the one

55

who has become its Second Adam. By his atoning death on God’s supreme altar of sacrifice, he pays the full toll of retributive justice on account of human sin.

When that view of the death of Christ was combined with his rising from the dead, it created the confident expectation of the imminent return of the glorified Christ to consummate the final end of the world. In all, this may have been a brilliantly crafted, out-of-this-world apocalyptic myth, but it was not the down-to-earth teaching of the historical Jesus who never trafficked in apocalyptic myths.

Paul’s teaching about Christ dying for sins led on to other speculative things such the absolute sinlessness of Christ’s earthly life to give value to his sacrifice. That led on to speculations about his virgin birth in the generation after Paul (Matthew 1; Luke 1). For the sacrifice to be of infinite value, it led to the view that the one making this sacrifice would need to be a pre-existent divine person, i.e., Son of God in more than just an adoptive sense.  There was no end to erecting this elaborate Christology until, in the fourth century, Church Councils and Confessions declared that Christ was “God of very God,” and therefore God Almighty in the highest sense. When in 451 CE the Council of Chalcedon nailed down the doctrine of the hyperstatic union of the divine and human natures of Christ in one person, the entire edifice of Christology was complete. Thereafter the Church would allow nothing to be added to this Christology and nothing could be taken from it. It was a 400-year journey which turned a Jewish prophet into a Gentile God.  

This kind of Christology became not just a faith worth dying for but a faith worth killing for. By the time this edifice of Christology was complete, the great Christian Church was ready to start shedding blood in defence of every aspect of this Christology. More than a thousand years later, the brilliant physician Michael Servetus was brought to trial in Protestant Geneva for questioning this orthodox Christology. John Calvin asked Servetus if he would confess that Jesus was “the eternal son of God.”  When Servetus replied, “I believe that Jesus was the son of the eternal God,” he was sentenced to be burned at the stake. In Pogroms, Inquisitions and Crusades, millions of people were slaughtered on the Church’s altar of Christology.  Voltaire drew the conclusion that if a group of people start out believing that God will severely punish those who don’t believe what they believe, they will eventually be willing to assassinate those who don’t believe what they believe.   

This Christological journey was one that the apostolic church under the leadership of James did not take, and Jewish Christianity after James could never take. If it was only a matter of confessing that Jesus was a man “anointed of God”, which translates as Messiah in Hebrew or Christ in Greek, then the Jewish believers might be called Christians in that limited sense.  But when Gentile Christianity went down this road that led to the veneration of Jesus as God Almighty, it was a road that no Jew who recited the Shema daily could ever take.  

The two factions of the early Christian movement, represented by James and Paul, inevitably became two irreconcilable religions.

From beginning to end, Christology was the product of the Hellenist imagination. It was speculative, apocalyptic, and turned a Jewish prophet into a mythical figure from another world. Starting with Paul, the whole process of making Christology central tended to cast the teachings of the historical Jesus into the shade. When the Creeds of the Church were drafted in the third century, they were all about Christology. No mention was made of the teachings of Jesus in any of the great Creeds of the Church.

In his book Honest to Jesus, Robert Funk makes this brilliant summary: “The narrative gospels [Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John], provided the incipient creed, as formulated by Paul, with a historical redeemer, although the evangelists [who followed Paul] set that figure in a mythical

56

narrative frame. The narrative gospels – the ones included in the New Testament – can therefore be understood as counterbalancing the mythical gospel of Paul. Yet they are also a compromise: they combine a historical figure with a mythical redeemer.  Nevertheless, without them, the Christ figure might well have been conceived as entirely mythical, without any anchor in history.”  p. 256.

3.The reason behind the death of Jesus

As shocking as it may appear to anyone steeped in Christian tradition, the apostolic church, led by James for more than a whole generation, did not teach that Jesus was the Christ who died as a bloody sacrifice to atone for our sins. Neither did the Jewish Christians who succeeded the Jerusalem church teach anything like this.

This raises the question, What was the reason behind the death of Jesus?

To address this question, we need to start with John the Baptist, the cousin and mentor of Jesus.

John was widely regarded as a prophet, and the first one to emerge in Judaism for over four hundred years. John lived an austere and simple life in the desert. He never shaved his head or drank wine because he was a dedicated Nazirite “from his mother’s womb”- just like the OT prophet Samuel.   John also had a lot in common with the Essene sect of Jews who also lived an austere kind of life in the desert.  The Essenes shared their few things in common and were committed to non-violence. Most significantly for our inquiry, they distrusted the temple priesthood at Jerusalem and were against the institution of animal sacrifices.

This appears to be the reason why neither John nor the Essenes ate meat. As the common culture of that world had existed for centuries, no Jew or Gentile would eat meat unless the animal had been ritually slaughtered as an offering to whatever god was being worshipped. For the Jews, the only place an animal could be sacrificed according to priestly law, introduced in the time of King Hezekiah, was at the temple in Jerusalem. The temple at Jerusalem was not just a place of worship like a church.  It was also like a great smelly abattoir where animals were regularly offered up to God and slaughtered for food and other acts of worship. The blood, thought to contain the life, could not be eaten because it belonged to God.  A portion of the flesh, however, was given to the priest, and the rest became available to be eaten by the party who brought the animal as an offering.  Those who did not sacrifice did not eat meat, although fish and fowl were excepted. When Paul wrote his letter to the Roman Christians around thirty years after the death of Jesus, he acknowledged that the Jewish Christians there did not eat meat (See Romans 14).

John went further in his protest of animal sacrifices than merely refraining from eating meat. He commenced a ministry of baptism in the Jordan River “for the remission of sin.” (Mark 1:4) The site was not very far from the great temple in Jerusalem where animals were regularly slaughtered for the remission of sin, according to priestly law (see Hebrews 9:22). John substituted water for blood, and people began to flock down to the Jordan valley for John’s baptism instead of going up to the temple at Jerusalem with a sacrifice. If this outrageous protest of John was not arrested, the entire cult of sacrificing animals which supported the prestige and power of the priesthood – not to mention their treasured meat supply – would have been in serious jeopardy.  

John’s prophetic ministry carried on where the prophets of the Old Testament prophets left off. They also enraged the priesthood when they said things like this:

“The multitude of your sacrifices- what are they to me? Says the Lord. I have more than enough of burnt offerings, or rams and the fat of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and

57

lambs and goats.  When you come to meet with me, who has asked this of you, this trampling of my courts? Stop bringing me meaningless offerings!” Isaiah 1:11-13

“Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them… Though you bring me choice fellowship offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them…But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.”  Amos 5:22-24

“With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God?  Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil.  Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has showed you, O man what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with God.” Micah 6: 6-8

“For I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”  Hosea 6:6

These great prophets of the 6^th to 8^th century were not just objecting to the sacrificial cult on the grounds that the rituals were being used as a substitute for moral rectitude; they were also protesting that the sacrificial rituals had been greatly multiplied and added to the law of Moses by conniving priests seeking to enhance their prestige and power. (See Jeremiah 7:21-23; 8:8; Amos 5:25; Ezekiel 20:25. See also Richard Elliot Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?) A memory of this prophetic protest, for which some of the prophets lost their lives, was never entirely extinguished in the four hundred years since the voice of the prophets was silenced. The Essenes who rejected the sacrifices at the temple were the proof that the protest of the prophets remained like the simmering emblems of a fire.

 The point not to be lost is that John the Baptist carried on where the OT prophets left off.  He was against the cult of animal sacrifices.  John gave real teeth to his protest when he began his innovative public ministry offering a ritual of water in the place of a ritual of blood for the remission of sins.

John was the cousin and mentor of Jesus who joined John’s reformatory movement when he too underwent John’s baptism for the remission of sins. For the authors of the New Testament Gospels, this was an embarrassing historical fact that did not sit comfortably with their narrative of a sinless Christ who was sacrificed for the sins of mankind.  Jewish Christians, however, always took this baptism of Jesus at the hands of John “for the remission of sin” at face value and without the least embarrassment. Including the apostolic church led by James, the brother of Jesus, Jewish Christians never believed in the myth of Jesus’ absolute sinlessness. They took at face value the words of Jesus himself, “Why do you call me good? No-one is good – except God alone.” (Mark 10:18)

It should be transparently clear that Jesus embraced John’s rejection of animal sacrifices. He never brought an animal to be sacrificed at the temple, nor did his disciples do that either. What was surprising is that he went further than John in that he forgave sin readily and unconditionally without either a blood sacrifice or a water baptism (John 4:2).  He was the profligate forgiver of sin. He not only readily forgave the sins of those who simply asked, but he forgave the sins of people before they asked (Matthew 9:2; Luke 19:5; 23:34). That was the whole point of his eating with “custom collectors and sinners,” for in that culture, one would not eat with those who were not forgiven.

 In his parables and aphorism, Jesus never suggested that a sacrifice was required as a condition of forgiveness or acceptance with God.  Whether it was his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) or Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6), he said that the children of God should not practice an “eye for an eye” kind of retaliatory justice because God does not practice that kind of justice. “Be merciful,

58

therefore, just like the Most High is merciful” was his kind of restorative justice.  Again and again during his ministry, Jesus repeated the words of the Old Testament prophet, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice.” (Matthew 9:13; 12:7)

According to the three Synoptics Gospels, Jesus attended the Passover celebration only once during his short public ministry. The annual Passover Supper or Seder was a huge event in the Jewish calendar when each household would eat a sacred meal to celebrate the departure of their Hebrew ancestors from their bondage in Egypt.  Each family would eat a lamb that had been sacrificed and sprinkle its blood above the door posts of the house.

Jesus, true to form, celebrated this Passover meal in which there was no body or blood of a sacrificial lamb.   His mentor John the Baptist had not participated in the animal sacrifices at the temple and neither had Jesus at any time in his public ministry. Just as John the Baptist had replaced blood with water, Jesus replaced eating the meat of a sacrificed animal with bread and its blood with a cup of wine. Or was it the Ebionites maintained, a cup of water?  It was all part of his rejection of the cult of sacrifice.

 The reason why the authors of the three Synoptic Gospels had to duck and weave around the historical facts of this Supper was for the same reason they were constrained to duck and weave their way around the historical facts about Jesus’ baptism by John “for the remission of sin.”  They had all embraced Paul’s myth of the Christ whose death was a sacrifice for the sins of the world. We say “myth” because the historical Jesus had consistently taught by his words and actions that God requires no sacrifice. Not to be deterred, writing around fifty years later, Matthew writes: “He took the cup [of wine]…saying…This is my blood of the covenant  which is poured out for many for the remission of sins.” (26:27,28). Here Matthew was citing Paul’s account of the Supper written a generation earlier.  And where did Paul get his information regarding what Jesus had said at the Supper?  He could have asked James, the brother of Jesus, or others who were at this Supper. No, for Paul did not get this information from any human source but directly from God in one of his visionary epiphanies (1 Corinthians 11:23-24).

This is how Paul’s mystical or mythical version of the Supper got tacked on to what should have remained a simple historical version of what happened.  Instead of that, what we get is a mystical doctrine of the Supper totally at odds with both the teaching and practice of the historical Jesus, and for that matter, contrary to John the Baptist and the great Old Testament prophets who all railed against the claim that any bloody sacrifice, animal or human, was ever required by God to access forgiveness of sin (Isaiah 1:11,18; 55:7; 43:25: 44:22; Psalm 51:16; 103:3; Micah 6:-8: 7:18-19). Never in any of the prophetic literature is forgiveness of sin conditional on making a sacrifice because forgiveness proceeds only from the loving kindness (hesed), faithfulness (emunah) and saving justice (tsedaqah) of God. It is only in the priestly literature, which the Jewish Christians claimed was corruptly added to the Law of Moses, that forgiveness of sin is conditional on a bloody sacrifice (Leviticus 4).  Here is the core reason for the conflict between priest and prophet in the OT era.

In the one and only time Jesus visited the temple during in his public ministry, he staged a protest that was serious enough to get him arrested and killed. All three Synoptic gospels agree on that. On this fateful day, Jesus took his passionate protest one step further than John the Baptist’s protest beside the Jordan River. Jesus took this long-simmering protest against the sacrifices right into the precincts of the temple itself – and right at the most sensitive time of the Passover festival when crowds of people made even the Roman authorities nervous of any public disturbance, especially by Galileans.  As Vermes puts it, Jesus was in the wrong place at the wrong time to put on his public protest.  Let us once and for all get rid of the red herring accounts of what this protest was all about. It was a passionate protest against the animal sacrifices. During his ministry Jesus had preached the

59

gospel of unconditional forgiveness, “without money, without price,” and most all, without a sacrifice.

Think this very basic issue through:  

Did Jesus go up to the temple in Jerusalem to become a sacrifice, or to protest any need for a sacrifice?

 All the historical facts indicate it was the latter. It had to be a protest consistent with the whole tenue of his teaching and practice which proclaimed this:  God does not want a sacrifice. The OT prophets said it. John the Baptist said it. And no one said it more clearly than Jesus in both word and action.

The fourth Gospel comes nearest to telling what happened in this temple protest when it says “he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle.” (John 2:15).  Yet all four evangelists skirt around the core issue of the temple protest by suggesting that Jesus was protesting the way the animals to be sacrificed were being sold and money was being exchanged for the coin of the temple. This would be like saying that when Martin Luther protested the sale of Indulgences, he was only protesting the way the Indulgences were being sold rather than the sale of Indulgences in the first place. Any bad institution will produce bad conduct for sure, but the way to deal with a tree that bears corrupt fruit is to lay the axe at the root of the tree. In the case of Jesus, the corrupt tree was a very old one.  It was the cult of sacrifice.

The NT evangelists very deftly avoided the real issue of the temple protest by suggesting that the issue which attracted the protest of Jesus was some corrupt merchandising of animals to be sacrificed. They put the side-issue in the room of the real issue. Yet the evangelists were unable to identify the real issue because all of them had embraced Paul’s grand narrative that Christ himself had become the supreme sacrifice for sin.  

Whether one is a theologian or a scientist, one must either adjust one’s grand narrative (worldview/religion) to fit the facts or adjust the facts to fit the narrative. The evangelists simply did what most of us do:  they adjusted the inconvenient facts about the historical Jesus to fit Paul’s grand narrative of the mythical Christ.

The way all four Gospels tell the story leaves the impression that the corrupt trading of animals in the precincts of the temple was the reason for Jesus’ protest rather than the revolting institution of slaughtering animals for the remission of sins. As the true protégé of the Old Testament prophets and John the Baptist, Jesus was utterly and passionately opposed to the cult of sacrifice. That was what his protest in the temple was all about.

That brings us back to that basic question: Did Jesus die to become a sacrifice for sin, or was he put to death because he made a protest against the cult of sacrifice?  

An Excursus on the History of Sacrifice

No advanced human consciousness such as exhibited by Jesus could entertain for a moment that such a wretched, stinking and barbaric practice as sacrificing animals for the forgiveness of sin was worthy of anything except total rejection. Yet the message declaring that the death of the Christ was the supreme sacrifice for sin had the effect of investing all of those wretched, stinking and barbaric OT sacrifices, most of which had been added by the priests in scurrilous circumstances, with the sacred significance of foreshadowing the supreme sacrifice of Christ.

60

In his book, Human Sacrifice in History and Today, Nigel Davies documents how the revolting practise of human sacrifice once existed, in one form or another, in every continent on earth. Sometimes it was slaves, prisoners or captives who were burnt alive or cruelly slain as offerings to please the gods – gods who were nothing except a projection of primitive man’s lust for violence and bloodshed.  Sometimes it was children, especially firstborn children, who were butchered on altars or thrown as screaming victims into fiery pits such as Topheth in the worship of Baal or Molech. It was a widespread custom to bury children alive under the foundation of buildings in an act of worship of imaginary divinities. If famine, pestilence, or war became a threat to a community’s existence, then a more valuable offering, someone higher in rank, was deemed necessary as an offering to appease the gods.  That might be a firstborn son, someone noble in rank, or in the most extreme circumstances, even the king himself would shed his blood in a sacrifice to save his people.   

Then above and beyond all these human sacrifices, the human religious imagination created myths about gods who suffered by being hacked to pieces by sinister opponents or torn to pieces by wild beasts; and then these dying gods would be raised again, sometimes on the third day, to share their victory with their adoring worshippers. Some of these mythical heroes were virgin-born (or women impregnated by the gods) godmen who suffered, died, and rose again. The names of some of these gods were Osiris in Egypt, Tammuz in Mesopotamia, Baal who was often confused with Israel’s Yahweh, Adonis in Syria, and Dionysus in Greece; and some of these mythical virgin-born heroes, too numerous to mention, were Heracles and Apollo in Greece, Mithra in Persia and Romulus in Rome. Most of these myths featured sacrifices which glorified bloodshed and violence.

As human consciousness developed and advanced, especially in the hub of civilization in the Near East, animals began to be substituted for humans on the sacrificial altars – just as Abraham was said to do when he sacrificed a ram in the place of his son. There was hardly a tribe or a city that did not offer bloody sacrifices of either humans or animals of some kind long before Moses or the Hebrew nation existed, making it certain that the Hebrews borrowed the practice of sacrifice from their pagan neighbours. 

In the culture of that world, the custom of sacrifice was as ingrained as deeply as the lust for violence and bloodshed. After the Hebrews escaped from Egypt, they were not ready to give up the practice of sacrifice altogether. It was the view of the Jewish Christians (now supported by the best literary scholarship), that Moses had permitted only a very rudimentary ritual of sacrifice as a concession to human weakness – just as Jesus said about the laws of Moses permitting divorce.  As for human sacrifice, that never fully died out among the surrounding nations, including the Hebrew nation, until the time of the Exile in the 6^th century BCE. The Old Testament prophets sometimes cried out against the continuing practice of offering children to Baal in the fiery pit of Topheth right up until the time of the Babylonian Exile.  More than that, the prophets complained that the priests were multiplying sacrifices and adding to the law of Moses to enhance their own prestige and power (See Jeremiah 7:21-22; 8:8; Amos 5:25 and Ezekiel 20:25).    

The age of the great Hebrew prophets was an age that witnessed a huge advance in human consciousness. The cult of sacrifice was devalued, if not totally rejected, as a hindrance to moral and humanitarian reform. This awakening to a more humane consciousness was felt across the whole Near Eastern cradle of civilization. Persia was being swept by the more enlightened teachings of Zoroaster, Greece by enlightened philosophers such as Socrates and Pythagoras.  Pythagoras rejected the sacrificing of animals and eating of meat. He even wore linen garments instead of woollen ones as part of his protest.  Some of these thinkers were killed for their rejection of human superstition and ignorance, just as some of the Hebrew prophets were killed by a priesthood jealously guarding their hegemony.

61

Against this dark and revolting background of violence and bloodshed associated with the cult of sacrifice, what else could the spirit of one of the most gentle and non-violent persons who ever walked the earth do but want to wipe the revolting cult of sacrifice from the face of God’s earth?  

It was an appalling mistake to turn the protest of Jesus about sacrifices into the myth of his own sacrificial death. That, as Patricia Williams says, is “where Christianity went wrong.”   

1. In the first place, this view of the death of Jesus invested all the sacrifices in the Old Testament, including the ones added by the conniving priests, with the sacred significance of foreshadowing the death of Christ. Instead of sweeping this whole evil history of sacrifice away, it glorifies that barbaric institution by turning it into a sacred typology.
2. In the second place, turning the death of Jesus into a sacrifice to atone for sin is contrary to the teaching of Jesus who taught that God requires no atoning sacrifice. On that basis he urged his listeners not to engage in an “eye for an eye” kind of retaliatory justice. “Then you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” (See Matthew 5:36-48; Luke 6:2-36)     
3. In the third place, if the particularly violent death of Christ was required as a sacrifice for sin, then God’s remedy for evil was an act of supreme violence. We could say the same thing about the doctrine of Christ’s return to earth which is the reverse side of a blood-soaked atonement. His return is also said to be an apocalyptic event of unimaginable violence for all the inhabitants of the world except a remnant of believers. In both scenarios – the first and second comings of Christ – God’s final solution to the problem of evil is said to be violence. This is inimical to the historical Jesus whose non-violence inspired the non-Christian Gandhi. He once quipped that the only people who can’t see that Christ was non-violent were Christians. Of course, the Christ that Gandhi was referring to here was the historical Jesus rather than the mythical Christ of Paul and the book of Revelation.  

Paul even taught that the pre-existent Christ who was present with the Israelites during their sojourn in the wilderness was violent.  The only conclusion we can draw from Paul is that Christ, as the Angel of the Covenant, was the one who executed about 30,000 Israelites for different kinds of disobedience during their journey to the Promised Land. (See 1 Corinthians 10:1-22). In Paul’s theodicy, the divine remedy for evil is violence – whether in the Wilderness years, the act of atonement in the death of Christ, or the return of Christ to take vengeance against all unbelievers (2 Thessalonians 1:7-9) – an event which seems to put all the violence of the Old Testament on steroids.  This is all totally at odds with the whole spirit and teaching of the historical Jesus whose non-violent ethics were based on his non-violent view of God (Matthew 5:36-48; Luke 6:27-36).

Conclusion:  The Major and Minor Themes of the Christian Religion

Christianity exists like a piece of music which has a major chord and a minor chord; or like a document which presents a majority report and a minority report. 

The major feature of Christianity is all about Christology.  Starting with Christ’s death as an atoning sacrifice to redeem mankind from the Fall of Adam, it proceeds from that to his pre-existence, virgin-birth, sinless life, ascension to the right hand of God to be the only mediator between God and humanity, his Godhood in the highest sense and his Second Coming.

62

The full package of Christology was four hundred years in the making, and by the time it was complete, acceptance of this doctrine of Christ was advanced more by the edge of the sword than by persuasion. For over a thousand years, questioning any aspect of the Church’s Christology was punishable by death. During that long period when the Church reigned supreme throughout Christendom, as Hans Kung put it, the Church made more martyrs than it ever produced from its own ranks.

Paul was so taken up with the myth of Christology that he said almost nothing about the historical Jesus and his teachings. He tells us that Jesus was born of “born of a woman, born under the law” (Galatians 4:4) and died by crucifixion, but nothing about his life or teaching in between.  Paul evidently thought he had received a more advanced revelation of the heavenly Christ and therefore had little interest in the earthly Jesus (2 Corinthians 5:16).

It is the same with all the great Confessions which the Church drew up in the fourth century. The only thing that the Apostles Creed says about the historical Jesus is that he was born of the virgin Mary and died under Pontius Pilate. Nothing is said about the life and teachings of Jesus between his birth and death. Very Pauline indeed!  All the Confessions of the Church are the same. They are all about Christology and have not a word to say about the teachings of Jesus.

If it were not for the three Synoptic Gospels, the Christian religion would have little more history to it than the myths of the dying and rising divinities of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and the rest of the ancient world.

The four Gospels of the NT were all written after the Roman destruction of the Jewish world of Jesus and his apostles in 70 CE. They were penned in Greek by unknown authors who lived in countries foreign to the land and language of the Jews.  But more importantly, all four Gospels were written by Christians who had embraced Paul’s view of things. Given that this was their grand narrative, it was inevitable that they would massage whatever information they could gather about the life of Jesus to fit that mythical framework. Every good storyteller – and the evangelists were great story-tellers – will tend to embellish or massage the details of a story to fit the theme of the story.  What we get in the Gospels, therefore, is a compromise somewhere between myth and history.

Yet the Gospels were brilliantly composed by some elite churchmen of rare literary skills.

We say “elite” because they were written in an age when only three percent of the general population could even read or write, to say nothing of being able to a compose a work of literary excellence.

 It is especially true of the three Synoptics Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) that they gather up enough of the parables and aphorisms of Jesus to reveal a teacher of extraordinary wisdom and wit.  He sometimes can use hyperbole in a way that is quite funny – and unforgettable for that reason – such as sayings about camels going through the eye or a needle, removing the log out of your eye before trying to remove a speck from another’s eye, casting pearls before swine, straining at gnats and swallowing camels, not letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing, giving to everyone who wants to have a lend of you without hoping to get anything back (ouch!), and lots more. Then there are some amazing examples of his conviviality (Crossan calls it commensality, meaning classless dining), deep understanding and empathy of the human condition, compassion for the poor, the sick and those on the margins of society, and such high moral sentiments and spiritual insights that we may know we are in the presence of an extraordinary mind. Yes, we can be grateful that this much of the historical Jesus was preserved in the NT Gospels.

63

Then, as Thomas Jefferson said, mingled with the parables and sayings of a brilliant mind, there is the clearest evidence that these sublime utterances are mingled with material from inferior minds. Yet, as Jefferson pointed out, if one listens to discern the voiceprint of the authentic Jesus, it is not so hard to pick out the diamonds from among the dung.

Most importantly, the unforgettable parables and sayings of the historical Jesus don’t sound anything like Paul’s heavenly Christ. In the words of Robert W. Funk: “The gospel of Jesus is not mythological. The major mythic themes of the kerygma [message of the early church] and creed are missing from his pronouncements…The language of Jesus is exhaustively focused on the mundane, the ordinary, the non-mythological… [Jesus] does not appear to resort to anything outside the domain of his secular lifeworld: his message does not traffic in mythology at any level.” (The Incredible Creed, May-August 1997)

Leo Tolstoy puts it more bluntly: “We must first understand that all the stories telling how God made the world six thousand years ago, how Adam sinned and the human race fell; and how the Son of God, a God born of a virgin, came on earth and redeemed mankind; and all the fables in the Old Testament and in the Gospels, and all the lives of the saints with their stories of miracles and relics – are nothing but a gross hash of superstitions and priestly frauds. Only to someone quite free from this deception can the clear and simple teaching of Jesus, which needs no explanation, be accessible and comprehensible. That teaching tells us nothing about the beginning, or about the end of the world, or about God and His purpose, or in general about things which we cannot, and need not know…it is only necessary to treat others as we wish them to treat us. In that is all the Law and the prophets, as Jesus said.”

There is a silver lining, however, to be seen in Paul’s theological myth that has always tended to cast the teachings of Jesus into the shadows. If it were not for the success of this myth in capturing the Greco-Roman world, any record of the teachings of Jesus might have been lost.

In his book, Paul and Jesus, James Tabor argues that Paul has made a greater impact on Western Civilization than any other person in history, including either Plato or Jesus.  Paul must be credited with forging “the most compelling myth known to mankind.” (Maccoby).  While it was never a compelling myth to the Semitic world of Jews or Arabs, it was ideally suited to capture the Western World of Greco-Roman civilization, which in Paul’s day, was a Greek-speaking world steeped in Greek culture. Here was a culture that was steeped in myths about dying and rising divinities, and virgin-born godmen (or women impredgnated by gods) achieving miraculous healings (Asclepius), exhibiting extraordinary wisdom (Plato), founding the eternal city (Romulus) or bringing the peace and prosperity of the Pax Romana to the world (Caesar Augustus). Then there were the mystery religions with baptismal initiations in which the devotees could share in the death of the god, or in cultic meals where the worshippers would eat the body and drink the blood of a venerated god.

For a Gentile world growing tired of the old gods and mystery religions, Paul had a newly minted dying and rising divinity whose death one could share in baptism, whose flesh could be eaten and whose blood could be drunk, as in Mithraism for example. None of this would be anything but repugnant to a Jewish culture, but to a Gentile culture, here was a freshly minted Christ “who looked suspiciously like he had just stepped out of a Greek myth” (Geering). By placing his myth of Christ in the historical context of Judaism, Paul gave it something the old myths had lacked – a real historical context. His Christ was a real dying and rising divinity who had recently appeared in Palestine, and his recent sacrifice for the sins of the world and resurrection from the dead guaranteed that he had become the Lord who will soon return in power and glory to consummate the end of the world. What did such a gospel need except some reports of some spectacular miracles? In an age of

64

primitive ignorance and superstition, one had to offer signs and wonders if one expected to be heard in the crowded religious marketplace (Mark 16:17; Romans 15:18,19).

On the other hand, the mundane teaching of Jesus, which he refused to back up with any signs and wonders (Mark 8:11-12), would never have captured the attention of the Greco-Roman world.  Without Paul’s compelling Christ myth, the teachings of Jesus would have looked as appealing as a root out of the dry ground and could have become buried in the sands of history.  

Yet there have always been some Christians who have lived more in the spirt of that minority report. They have thought that living out the humanitarian spirit of “the good Samaritan” and the Sermon on the Mount is far more important than the theology of Paul and theories of the blood atonement.

Since the genie of the Enlightenment has escaped into the field of literary and historical criticism, the quest for the historical Jesus has continued unabated. It is becoming hard to find a scholar who has engaged in the quest for the historical Jesus who has not concluded that the Christ of faith is not the historical Jesus. What has been found is simply this:  the historical Jesus said nothing about Christ, nothing about the Christian religion, and gave us a model prayer in which there is nothing distinctively Christian.  

When Gandhi was once asked what the main thing was that prevented the teachings of Jesus reaching the people of India, he simply replied, “Christianity!” A religion which proclaims that Christ is the only path to God smacks of an exclusiveness, intolerance, and hostility to other people’s expression of faith. It sounds so embarrassingly arrogant in our everyday world where we rub shoulders with people of other faiths or no faith. Making exclusive religious claims is certainly not a way to win friends and influence people in our Global Village.

On the other hand, it might be time for Christians themselves to bring that minority report out of the basement and take another good look at the teachings of Jesus.  We may even be surprised to find there are Jews like Vermes, Hindus like Gandhi, and atheists like Jack London who became switched on to what Jesus had to say.  As Vermes puts it, “The magnetic appeal of the teaching and example of Jesus holds out hope and guidance to those outside the fold of organized religion, the stray sheep of mankind, who yearn for a world of mercy, justice and peace lived in as children of God.” (The Religion of Jesus the Jew, pp.214-215) Or as Stephen Mitchell puts it, “Here, in the essential sayings, we have words…that can shine into a Muslim’s or a Buddhist’s or a Jew’s heart just as powerfully as into a Christian’s. (The Gospel According to Jesus, p.7)

To be Continued

65

The title of this article implies that there was a gospel preached before there was such a thing as Christianity or the Christian Church. This original gospel (meaning “good news” or “glad tidings”) was the teaching of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. It was not a teaching about Jesus as the gospel came to be in Christianity, but simply the teaching of Jesus.

The best scholarly research into the historical Jesus indicates that he had little to say about himself. The core parables and aphorisms of Jesus were not about Jesus. As shocking as this may sound to Christian ears, the gospel of Jesus had nothing to say about his death or resurrection, nothing to say about about the Church, nothing to say about about his so-called Second Coming, and most importantly, nothing to say about Christology.

The bottom line of all the best research into the historical Jesus indicates that Jesus was not on about himself, did not preach about himself, and used parables that made no mention of his person or work.

The very core of this “gospel before Christianity” is found in just two slightly different versions of these words of Jesus in his so-called Sermon on the Mount:

You have heard that it was said,’Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist[respond with any kind of payback or retaliatory justice] to an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also…You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be the sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your comrades, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be complete [inclusive and unconditional in your love], therefore, as your heavenly Father is complete [inclusive and unconditional in his love]. Matthew 5: 38-48

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who ill-treat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. Give help to everyone who needs it without hoping you will get anything back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ do that. And if you help those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners help their own, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and help them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great in that you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Luke 27-36

In these few words cited above we have the substance of the Gospel according to Jesus. Not according to Paul. Not according to the Christian Church. Just the gospel according to Jesus himself.

This teaching of Jesus was new – astoundingly, breathtakingly new. It was not found in any sacred scripture of that day. His critics recognized it was new, and Jesus himself likened it to new wine that should not be put back into the old wineskins of the old religious paradigms.

Instead of addressing what Jesus said, his opponents played the ad hominem card. They raised all sorts of questions about the bona fides of the teacher. By what authority does he teach? Where does he come from? Who was his father? Has he ever been trained? By what authority does he say such things?

Jesus refused to address the matter of his authority. He also refused to perform a miracle as a sign of his authority – at least this is clearly stated in the Synoptic Gospels. Unlike the Old Testament prophets, he did not say, “The word of the Lord came unto me saying…” He did not preface what he had to say with “The Bible says…” Unlike St. Paul, he did not cite a vision or a revelation from heaven. All these kind of appeals to authority are the stuff of religion. As Alfred Nolan points out in Jesus Before Christianity, Jesus believed that the authority for what he said was found in what he said. The words were self-authenticating in that they appealed directly to one’s innate sense of what is truly human and right.

That age was not ready to accept that the truth about what is said does not depend upon the authority of whoever said it. If what is being said is true, it would be just as true if it came from the mouth of an ass. The scholars in the Middle Ages would debate how many teeth a horse had according to Aristotle instead of looking into the horse’s mouth to count the teeth for themselves. Truth was supposed to rest on some authority. A thing was “proven” to be true by virtue of who said it, not by the examination and testing of what was said.

As soon as mankind was ready to grasp that it must pay attention to the what instead of the who, the age of the Enlightenment and real human progress was born.

Some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in history have been made by persons saying things outside of the area of their recognized expertise. In the matter of science, which is simply the world of reality, the truth of any finding is independent of the researcher or the presenter. The question of whether the revolutionary insights of Copernicus or Darwin or Einstein were true could not be decided by asking questions about who they were. We do not prove that the earth moves around the sun or the theory of Relativity (E= MC2) by making claims about the miraculous powers of Copernicus or Einstein. The ancients were all too prone to say that extra-ordinary wisdom came to the progeny of women who had been impregnated by the gods – as they said of Plato the philosopher, Asclepius the healer, or Alexander and Augustus the rulers. The translation of the Latin logo for the Royal Society (the oldest scientific body in the world) says, “Take no man’s word for it.” Who said it is irrelevant. The only thing that needs to be evaluated is what is said.

So Jesus, truly a man before his time, refused to appeal to any authority for what he said other than what he said. His critics, however, focussed on asking, “Who is the person saying these things?” Unfortunately, the followers of Jesus did the same thing. They responded to their critics by making all kinds of claims about the person of Jesus. By doing this they bought into this false premise that the truth of what was said depended on who said it.

Literary scholars have found that the first written record of Jesus was simply a collection of his sayings which they now call Sayings Gospel Q (Q is short for the German word Quelle, meaning Source). But it wasn’t long before the followers of Jesus had much more to say about who Jesus was supposed to be – as if that would give authority to what he said. At first they said that he was proven to be the Messiah – the Jewish word for Christ – by his resurrection from the dead. To this they added stories about some of his miracles, none of which were in the original Sayings Gospel Q. After three generations had passed it was being said that he was a virgin- born sinless being who came down from another World. Finally, after a process that took about 400 years, he was declared to be God Almighty in the highest sense, or the second member of the blessed Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Church and State united to decree that anyone who denied this should be put to death. This state of affairs continued in the Christian West for more than 1000 years.

What happened in all of this was that the spotlight shifted from what Jesus said to who Jesus was. The teaching about Jesus replaced the teaching of Jesus. The messenger became the Message, the iconoclast became the Icon, and the gospel of Jesus became the gospel about Jesus.

Beside the Gold Coast Highway just south of Surfers Paradise there is Pentecostal Church on which there is a large sign which reads: “Our Message: Jesus.” That expresses in a nutshell the reality of the great shift from the message to the Messenger.

The supreme example of this monumental shift from the what to the who is demonstrated by the great Creeds of the Church, all of which are wholly taken up with Christology – the Christ of faith. None of the Creeds have a thing to say about what Jesus said. So the first centuries of Church history were taken up with debates about the person of Christ and the so-called heresies of Adoptionism, Doceticism, Nestorianism, Sebellianism, Arianism, Modalism, etc. There was a furious debate about whether Christ was homoiousios (of like substance) with God the Father or homoousios (of identical substance) with God the Father? Athanasius passionately argued that our entire salvation rested on the subtle difference made by this little Greek diphthong that was formed by the single letter “i”.

After the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) finally settled the fine points about the person of Christ (Christology), Christians began debating the fine points about the work of Christ (Soteriology). These debates were designed to address the question, How do we access the salvation provided by Christ’s atonement on the cross? To what extent does accessing the salvation provided by Christ’s death depend on the sacraments and priestly ministrations of the Church? Do we find a gracious God by a faith that is formed by charity (the Catholic Council of Trent) or by faith alone that will afterward be formed by charity (the Protestant Reformers)? What are the steps the believer must take to access the saving merits of Christ’s work? Some of the most significant debates were featured in the contests between Augustine and Pelagius, Anselm and Abelard, Rome and the Reformers, Calvin and Arminius. These controversies merely drew up some of the major battle lines for further divisive arguments.

Once salvation was made to depend on the who – having the right Christology and the right Soteriology – then there was no end to clarifying and redrafting the conditions upon which salvation is attained, a process that eventually spawned 30,000 different Christian denominations with 30,000 different ways to interpret who is Christ, what he did for our salvation and what conditions must be met to obtain that salvation. Accessing this “free” salvation (they all say it is free!)
is not unlike accessing a government grant. Most applicants end up throwing their arms up in despair when they get into doing all the conditional paperwork, so they simply rely on professionals to make sure all the i’s and t’s of the application papers are dotted and crossed.

However, if we return to what Jesus said, all this hair-splitting of Christology and Soteriology becomes irrelevant.

Unfortunately, when we look at the earliest writings of the New Testament, which are the letters of St. Paul, we find that he has no real interest in the historical Jesus (See 2 Corinthians 5:16). He only has an apocalyptic interpretation of Jesus as the cosmic Christ of faith, and this replaces the teaching of Jesus – entirely! Kaseman was right when he said, “Apocalyptic was the mother of all Christian theology.” We now know that in the time of Jesus and Paul, Judaism had been immersed in apocalyptic hopes and an apocalyptic worldview for about 150 years. This had reached a fever pitch in their day. Unfortunately, the creators of Christian theology were incurably wedded to this apocalyptic worldview. So they interpreted the Jesus event through the lens of their apocalyptic expectations.

Apocalyptic is all about a mythical flight from reality into a world where all the known laws that govern this real world do not apply. To put it bluntly, apocalyptic is an escape from reality into a world of religious make-believe. Another name for it is mythology.

Let’s take the crucifixion of Jesus as an example of apocalyptic mythology. If we had been present at this historical event, we would have seen what was open for anybody to see – the brutal killing of an innocent Jew by the Roman authorities at the instigation of his Jewish opponents. We would have seen a tragic miscarriage of justice to be sure, but a thing that has happened all too often in this world. So basically, we would have seen nothing more than a barbaric execution.

Apocalyptic, however, claims to unveil/disclose a hidden meaning and action of the unseen world (This is the basic meaning of the word apocalyptic). Rather than just seeing Roman soldiers killing this Galilean teacher, apocalyptic sees that something else of enormous cosmic significance is taking place. It is as if the veil that hides the unseen world is torn away to disclose that this cross on which Jesus hangs is the divinely chosen altar on which the Christ offers up himself to Almighty God as a bloody sacrifice to propitiate God’s anger on account of human sin. Somehow the cross becomes the stupendous end-time Judgment in which Jesus Christ is punished by Almighty God and thereby suffers for the sins of the world so that somehow we might find forgiveness and a gracious God rather than face an angry Judge. We say “somehow” because there are different theories of the atonement ranging from those that are rather crude to those that are more refined. None of them, however, change the basic idea of the cross being a cosmic event that is efficacious for human salvation.

This interpretation of the death of Jesus is not real history and can’t be proved by any appeal to the facts of history. On the contrary, it is about an imaginary event that takes place in a mythical world where the normal laws of reality do not apply. It is a flight from this real world into a world of religious make-believe.

So Paul preached an apocalyptic interpretation of the death of Jesus which was a flight from real history. By his own testimony he did not get his “gospel” from the apostles who had known Jesus, but he got it directly from Heaven through his private visionary experience. (Galatians 1:12; 2 Corinthians 12:1-4) He had little interest in the historical Jesus. (See 2 Corinthians 5:16) In his first Corinthian epistle he denigrated those who like Apollos were attracted to the wisdom teaching of Jesus. Paul said he wanted to know nothing except his apocalyptic vision of “Christ and Him Crucified.”

So in Christian teaching, Jesus becomes the exalted apocalyptic Son of man instead of the ordinary son of man which he modestly and repeatedly claimed to be. This apocalyptic Son of man was eventually – about three generations later – said to be no man’s son, that is, virgin born. Rather than being an ordinary man with ordinary DNA, along with 23 male-derived and 23 female-derived chromosomes, he looks suspiciously like a god who has just stepped out of a Greek myth. He becomes the apocalyptic Christ who by his passion and resurrection changes God’s relationship to the world by bridging some infinite gulf between God and man – a gulf that is purely mythical and that never existed anyway. And finally, apocalyptic must have a Second Coming to bring a final holocaust of unimaginable horror on all them that “obey not the gospel.” (2 Thessalonians 1: 6-9) Apocalyptic is always about God’s final solution to those who oppose God and the people on God’s side of the battle between good and evil.

Leaving all this aside, we return to what Jesus said in the first place. The great shift from what Jesus said to who Jesus was certainly sent the Church on a long detour. The Romans might have crucified Jesus at the instigation of some of his opponents, but the followers of Jesus did worse when they buried what Jesus said beneath their apocalyptic theology and Creeds.

Despite this, the teaching of Jesus was never wholly suppressed. Some of his core aphorisms and parables were preserved in the earliest Sayings Gospel Q, apparently by his earliest Galilean followers. This document had nothing to say about Christology (who Jesus was) and nothing to say about apocalyptic. It was simply a collection of Jesus’ most memorable sayings, indicating that the most impressive thing about the man was what he said. These sayings found their way into two of the Gospels that were composed two or three generations after the death of Jesus by unknown authors. To give these books “apostolic authority,” the Church claimed one was written by the disciple Matthew, and the other was written by Luke, a companion of Paul. None of the New Testament, however, was written by eyewitnesses of the historical Jesus. With the exception of Paul’s letters to his young churches, the New Testament documents were composed two or three generations after the Jesus event. It is even remarkable that these core sayings of Jesus made it into any of the New Testament Gospels – they are absent from Mark and John – because they stand in very real tension to the teaching of the developing Church.

As Robert W. Funk puts it, “The gospel of Jesus is not mythological. The major mythic themes of the kerygma [message of the early church] and creed are missing from his pronouncements…The language of Jesus is exhaustively focused on the mundane, the ordinary, the non-mythological… [Jesus] does not appear to resort to anything outside the domain of his secular lifeworld: his message does not traffic in mythology at any level.” (The Incredible Creed, May-August 1997)

The core of the Sayings Gospel Q is found in both Matthew 5:37-48 and Luke 6: 27-36 as cited above. Some of the aphorisms and parables of Jesus, found elsewhere in the Gospels, re-enforce this same core teaching about an inclusive and unconditional love. The word love is a translation from the Greek word agape which conveys the idea of a compassionate concern or caring for the well-being of others.

By inclusive we mean that it is a love that includes both friend and foe, those who are for us and those who are against us. Jesus radically revises the Old Testament commandment, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” The Law of Moses repeatedly sanctioned, even commanded Israel to hate and exterminate its enemies, including women and little children, without taking any pity on them (Deuteronomy 7:16). The Psalmist reflects this attitude when he prays, “Do not I hate those who hate you, O Lord…I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies.” (Psalm 139: 21-2). Jesus would have none of this tribal kind of love, but said, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you…If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even the financial predators and the charlatans love those who love them. In the teaching of Jesus, the neighbour whom we are to love includes the differing, even hostile others, the good and the bad alike.

By unconditional we mean “no matter what,” “under all circumstances.” Here is a non-violent love that never retaliates, never demands an atonement of pay-back justice, but forgives and never condemns.

Is this kind of ethic unique? It is not entirely unique because even before Jesus there were some, even among the noble pagans, such as Pythagorus, who were able to conceive of an ethic like this. But it seems that Jesus was the first to link this ethic of non-violent love to a theology of non-violent love. According to these sayings of Jesus, we should love our enemies without thought of retaliation because God does exactly this. God sends the rain and sunshine on the good and the bad alike. Or as Luke’s Gospel has Jesus say: “The Most High is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

There is no teaching of apocalyptic in the teaching of the historical Jesus. Apocalyptic is completely at odds to an ethic and theology of non-violence. Some of the New Testament story-tellers embellished the saying of Jesus with some apocalyptic threats which are clearly antithetical to his core teaching. The temptation to put a “Jesus said” in front of their own apocalyptic hopes was apparently all too much for some to resist. For example, in the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matthew we have a Jesus who tells us not to judge others, while in Matthew 23 we have a Jesus who bitterly denounces his opponents and damns them to hell. That is why it is important to examine critically what is said instead of deferring to the authority of who was supposed to have said it. In this way we may follow the lead of Thomas Jefferson who said that picking out the genuine sayings of Jesus is as easy as picking out diamonds from a dunghill. The genuine sayings of the historical Jesus have this unmistakable voiceprint that clearly distinguishes them from the moralistic glosses of the unknown author passed off as Matthew. So too, the genuine parables of Jesus have the voiceprint of a brilliant critique of conventional wisdom. The badies of that culture become the goodies, while the goodies become the badies; the expected losers turn out to be the winners, and the winners become the losers. Matthew’s contrived parable of the ten bridesmaids lacks this element of surprise and Jesus’ biting critique of conventional wisdom. Instead, Matthew has Jesus giving us a dreary bit of moralism – to say nothing of its context about an apocalyptic Second Coming which is about as far from the genuine teaching of Jesus that one could get.

And how might we come to such astonishing conclusions? It is by simply paying attention to what is said rather than by accepting anything on the basis of who was supposed to have said it. We have absolutely no eyewitness accounts of Jesus, and no extant record of him has ever been found. Some years after Jesus died, there were apparently all too many people willing to put words into his mouth as if that would give authority to their own religious agendas. That is why we must pay attention to what is being taught rather than who said it – or who was supposed to have said it. At the end of the day, it does not matter who said it.

In Jesus’ new teaching about God, we penetrate to the heart of what Jesus called “the gospel” – good news that calls for unprecedented celebration. It is not a gospel about himself as that sign on that Pentecostal Church proclaims. Jesus does not call us to practice non-retaliating love in the hope that God will one day mete out retribution upon our enemies on our behalf. Unfortunately, this is what Paul teaches when he says, “Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written, ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay, says the Lord.’” (Romans 12:19). Unfortunately, Paul was never able to move away from a God of vengeance and wrath. His letter to the Romans abounds in statements about God’s wrath toward sinners. His doctrine of Christ’s blood atonement is about an act of violence that is said to placate God’s wrath, and his doctrine of a Second Coming expresses an expectation of the same kind of violence against the great mass of mankind (See 2 Thessalonians 11-8-9).

It is impossible to reconcile Paul’s apocalyptic theology of violence – which was to become orthodox Christian theology – with the theology of non-violence so clearly announced in the gospel of Jesus. In one fell stroke Jesus gets rid of all the angry, threatening spirits and gods that have haunted humanity from the beginnings of human history. What Jesus said is that behind all reality there is an Ultimate Reality of inclusive and unconditional love that is never violent and never resorts to retaliation against human imperfection. This love is not contrary to justice because it is a healing and restorative kind of justice rather than a punishing kind of retributive justice. This is the teaching that is reflected in all the genuine aphorisms and parables of Jesus – such as the parables of the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan and the Vineyard Workers.

In linking his ethic of non-violence to a theology of non-violence, Jesus rules out a theology of retaliation and pay-back justice. His teaching rules out any theology of forgiveness of sin made possible through an atoning sacrifice. The Christian Church went into the world to preach a Gospel about a Christ who by his death on the cross bridged the gulf between God and man, but in the Gospel of Jesus there never was a gulf between God and man. No mediators, priests or brokers are needed to access God’s love and forgiveness. Jesus taught that God is among us and in us, nearer to us than our breathe or heartbeat, a Spirit of forgiving generosity that does not have to be won by a brutal and bloody human sacrifice. To be embraced by an eternal love that will never leave us or forsake us is grounded in the unfettered and overwhelming generosity of God. The ethic of Jesus was grounded in and flowed from this kind of theology.

When Jesus talked about God – the highest Good – he had this unique way of reasoning from a mundane level. For instance, he would say, If you being imperfectly human know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will God be ready to give good gifts to you. If we can accept that a true love of neighbour will be inclusive and unconditional, how much more will the love of God –the supreme Good – be inclusive and unconditional? If we being imperfectly human can promise to love another human being “for better or for worse,” or if there are parents who will love their children no matter what- like that father in Jesus’ parable of the wayward son – then how much more – infinitely more- will God’s love be inclusive and unconditional. And non-violent toward all – always.

By linking his ethic of love and non-violence to a theology of love and non-violence, Jesus makes his theology as rational and as winsome as his ethics. This is why his teaching has appealed to theists and atheists alike. It has the ability to appeal to people of all religions and of no religion. Especially at this moment in history when the world is struggling with the issue of religious violence, here is a teaching that strikes at the heart of all religious violence.

There is a ring of truth to what Jesus said that has commanded the respect of a whole range of thinkers outside the Christian faith – Thomas Jefferson, Mahatma Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, Jack London, Ralph Waldo Emmerson and Geza Vermes, just to mention a few. Jefferson said that the teaching of Jesus was “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has even been offered to man.” Gandhi said “he was one of the greatest teachers humanity ever had.” They did not say such things because they were impressed by who Jesus was supposed to be according to Christian teaching. It was solely what Jesus said that spoke so powerfully to their reason and human consciousness. As Jefferson concluded, his words expressed “sublime ideas of the Supreme Being, aphorisms and precepts of the purest morality and benevolence…humility, innocence, and simplicity of manners…with an eloquence and persuasiveness which have not been surpassed.” Or as Stephen Mitchell puts it, “Here, in the essential sayings, we have words… that can shine into a Muslim’s or a Buddhist’s or a Jew’s heart just as powerfully as into a Christian’s.” (The Gospel According to Jesus, p. 7).

In summary: the gospel of Jesus is a teaching about the non-retaliating, non-violent, unconditionally forgiving love of God for all mankind; and the ethic of Jesus is about behaving toward others just as God behaves toward us.

Robert D. Brinsmead
Irenic Publications
September 2018

©

1

Contents

2

Chapter 1
WHY CARBON SHOULD BE CELEBRATED

For some years now, the public has been bombarded with a lot of negative press about carbon and carbon dioxide. Talk about “carbon pollution,” “carbon emissions,” “carbon footprint,” “decarbonizing the economy,” “greenhouse gas emissions,” and “reducing emissions” has been so negatively loaded and repetitious that carbon is now widely regarded as some dirty black pollutant that should be shunned and banished from the environment. It is as if the language of the public discourse has been deliberately manipulated to demonize carbon.

Changing public perceptions by the manipulation of language is exactly what George Orwell warned us about some years ago. The negative sloganeering to demonize carbon emissions is like that famous scene in Orwell’s Animal Farm where the pigs teach all the other animals to keep chanting “Four legs good, two legs bad.” It has been said that a big lie will go seven times around the world before the truth can get its boots on. It’s time for the truth about carbon to get its boots on.

Basic Facts About Carbon
There are 118 elements listed in the Periodic Table. Carbon is listed as number 6 with the letter C. Carbon is the 4^th most common element in the Universe, following hydrogen, helium and oxygen. It is also the 15^th most abundant element in the earth’s crust.

When elements are chemically bonded together they are called compounds. There happens to be about 10 million carbon compounds – more than all other compounds combined.

There are three reasons for this:
In the first place, carbon exists in different forms which are called allotropes of carbon. As an example, diamonds are an allotrope of pure carbon. Diamonds are transparent and the hardest of all natural substances. On the other hand, graphite is also another allotrope of pure carbon, but it is opaque and one of softest of all natural substances.

In the second place, the carbon atom has 15 different neutron formations called isotopes (⁸C²²C). Consequently, there are 15 isotopes of carbon, the most common of which are identified as ¹²C, ¹³C and ¹⁴C. In the third place, the electrons of the carbon atom have some unique “hook up” features which enable it to more easily bond with other elements in a diversity of ways.

All of these unique features of carbon add up to making it the most amazingly versatile, adaptive and bondable element of the Periodic Table. This is why carbon compounds are the most numerous,

3

Back to top

making carbon chemistry by far the largest field of chemistry. It is the reason why most new alloys, fibres and polymers used in thousands of products are made by finding new ways of bonding carbon with other elements.

A great leap forward for mankind occurred in 19^th Century Great Britain when it was discovered how to make an alloy called steel by bonding carbon with iron in a coal-fired blast furnace. That discovery launched the world into a new age of using steel to construct rail tracks, bridges, ships, fortified concrete structures, motor vehicles and lots more. New carbon-based products started as a trickle but by now have become an avalanche of new alloys, fibres and polymers. Carbon is now used to make specialized kinds of insulators, conductors and semi-conductors – a feat that uses carbon to do very opposite things or even both things together.

Without carbon technology there would be no modern transport industry, or construction industry, electrical industry, communications industry or space industry. Just about every new man-made product – from the heat shields on the NASA spacecraft that is now exploring the sun to the tennis racquets we give our kids for Christmas – are made with new carbon materials. Given carbon’s amazing versatility, will we ever run out of new ways to bond carbon to the other 117 elements? That is like asking if we will ever run out new ways of using the 26 letters of the
alphabet to make new books.

Life itself is carbon-based.
As we have seen, Homo sapiens (“the wise ones”) have learned how to use carbon in so many ways to make so many things. That is an impressive feat, but it cannot match the far greater feat of using carbon to make life. All life as we know it is carbon-based. Any good text-book on biology will tell us that. All living things, whether they are plants or animals, humans or micro-organisms, have one thing in common: everything that lives is made of carbon. It is estimated that there are at least 39 trillion cells in the human body. Whether they are blood cells, bone cells, nerve cells, skin cells or brain cells, like the cells of all other living things, they are all made of carbon-based compounds. The human body is about 20% carbon. Aside from oxygen, it is the most common element in the human body, and for that matter, it is also the most common element in every other form of life.

Whether it is the spectacle of giant whales sporting in the ocean, bees harvesting pollen from blossoming trees, children screeching with laughter in the playground, birds calling each other to mate or hunt for food, our little Blue Planet is the only place that we know about in this big wide universe that puts on this astonishing display of living, working, playing, singing, dancing, even thinking and loving carbon organisms.

Knowing something about the origin of carbon adds a beautiful touch to this mystery of life. According to physical cosmology theory, carbon was formed by the stupendous heat of supernova. That is the name given to the disintegration of a giant star. While the heat energy of our sun is powerful enough to convert (fuse) hydrogen into helium, it required far more energy than this to turn the gases of a giant star into carbon. When a massive star died, its carbon dust was scattered

4

Back to top

through the universe to eventually become the stuff from which life was made. As the celebrated scientist Carl Sagan used to say, “We are made from star dust.” If we can celebrate life, why not also celebrate the stuff upon which all life is based?

Carbon sustains all life
Every form of life – plant life, animal life or microscopic life – is not only made of carbon, but it has to grow and be sustained by ingesting carbon. There are no exceptions. Every carbon-based organism must feed on carbon – or die.

The animal kingdom gets this carbon from plant food. Even the meat-eating animals called carnivores are just as dependant on plant food as the herbivores because they eat the animals which eat the plants. No plant food means no animal food, and of course, no human food.
Food is composed of carbohydrates, proteins and fats (plus minerals, vitamins and other micronutrients). These three food groups are all carbon-based, although as even the name indicates, carbohydrates contain the most concentrated source of carbon – sugars (e.g. sucrose, glucose, galactose, lactose, fructose, mannose, etc.), starches and fibres. Fats are hydrocarbons and protein contains carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen. So the whole food chain (or the food pyramid as some call it) is a carbon-based fuel that has been designed to sustain a carbon-based organism.

By now, any escape from this ubiquitous, demonized stuff called carbon should at least be starting to look like a mad hatter’s dream. But just to ratchet up the difficulty of engaging in ridiculous stunts to reduce our carbon footprint or de-carbonize our way of life, let us pause to reflect that we not only eat this so-called pollutant for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but every morning we get out of a bed
that’s made of the stuff, in a house that’s made of the stuff, full of furniture, fittings and gadgets that’s made of the stuff. And if it is not enough to recognize that our bodies are full of the stuff and that we must eat the stuff, we need to also recognize that we even dress ourselves in the stuff. The clothing we put on, whether made of natural fibres or synthetic fibres, is all made of some kind of carbon fibre. Carbon is involved in every aspect of human existence.

Carbon sustains all plant life.
Plants too have to be sustained by carbon like everything else that lives on earth. They cannot absorb carbon through their root systems, however, no matter how much carbon there may be in the soil. While the roots of a plant take up water, nitrogen and a relatively tiny amount of essential minerals, it is the leaves of the plant which have tiny stomata which open to absorb carbon dioxide from the air. By using sunlight in a process which is called photosynthesis, the plant absorbs the carbon and breathes out the oxygen, then synthesises that carbon with the water and minerals taken up by the roots to make carbohydrates, proteins and fats for all creatures great and small. This carbon which is absorbed from the air in the form of carbon dioxide provides more than 90% of a plant’s nutritional needs.

5

Back to top

The food we eat is for the most part processed carbon dioxide. It would be hard to think of a greater irony than having the stuff we have demonized ending up on our tables as delicious steaks, mangoes, avocados and all manner of delicious deserts and treats. Not a bit of food, whether that is good food or junk food, could end up on tables unless there were first some carbon dioxide emissions to feed the plants which feed us. Every day the atmosphere needs to be replenished with billions of tons of carbon dioxide to nourish the plants, otherwise we would all starve.

The irony of having to eat the very stuff we demonize as a pollutant is a reminder of this piece of good advice: “Let your words be ever soft and sweet because the time may come when you might have to eat them.”

Where do all the carbon dioxide emissions come from?
All the rotting vegetation returns to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. All breathing creatures on land and in the sea (and that includes most micro-organisms whose biomass is far greater than all the visible creatures) give off carbon dioxide or methane (CH₄) – except that cyanobacteria exhale oxygen. Humans too give off carbon dioxide not only as they breathe, but in all their industrial and other activity wherein we burn hydrocarbons such as coal, oil or gas for energy. Active volcanoes also give off carbon dioxide emissions. In the early beginnings of earth, there was enormous volcanic activity. This was the atmosphere’s original source of carbon dioxide. There are still more than 3 million volcanoes under the oceans, and it is not yet known how many of these are active at any one time.

The world’s oceans, lakes and rivers, which make up 71% of the earth’s surface, store about 50 times more carbon dioxide in them than is stored in the atmosphere. An exchange of carbon called the carbon cycle is constantly taking place. All plants on the earth and in ocean, lakes and rivers ( the greatest biomass of these are microscopic plants like fungi and algae) take up carbon dioxide and give off oxygen as a waste product, and all the living creatures on earth and in the sea take up oxygen and give off the carbon dioxide as their waste product. For all plants great and small, carbon dioxide is the gas of life, and for all creatures great and small, oxygen is the gas of life. The carbon cycle is driven by the simple principle of giving and receiving: all living creatures give off carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere to feed the plants, and the plants turn this into carbon-based food to feed the creatures.

It is therefore no more correct to call carbon dioxide a pollutant than it is to call oxygen a pollutant. Carbon dioxide is a natural, odourless, invisible, non-toxic plant food. It is just as essential to life as oxygen and water.

All human carbon dioxide emissions, including all the emissions which come from burning fossil fuel, amount to about 3% of all carbon dioxide emissions going into the atmosphere. The oceans, lakes and rivers, which make up what is called the hydrosphere, produce at least 10 more carbon dioxide emissions than is produced by all human activity. With 50 times more carbon dioxide in the hydrosphere than in the atmosphere, the oceans are like a great body of carbonated water that are constantly exhaling and inhaling carbon dioxide. As they warm, they exhale more of it just as a warm carbonated drink de-fizzes more quickly. As they cool, the oceans absorb more carbon

6

Back to top

dioxide. No one calls the carbon dioxide emissions from the oceans a pollutant and any suggestion to reduce these oceanic emissions would rightly be seen as ridiculous.

The soil of the earth, which is called the lithosphere, produces even more carbon emissions than the oceans. Most of this carbon dioxide comes from rotting vegetation, termites and micro-organisms which make up the biggest part of the biomass. Some of it comes from creatures exhaling, and some comes from volcanic eruptions.

There is currently about 3,200 billion tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Since there is one ton of carbon to every 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide, there are about 870 billion tons of carbon in the world’s atmosphere.

This may sound like a lot of carbon dioxide, but it is actually only a very tiny 0.04% or 400 parts per million (ppm) of the atmosphere. This is just one molecule of carbon dioxide in every 2,500 molecules of air. Given that the air we breathe is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 0.9% argon, carbon dioxide, taking up only 0.04%, is a miniscule amount. Yet no life could exist without it because
carbon dioxide is the primary source of plant food.

7

Back to top

Chapter 2
HOW CARBON EMISSIONS BENEFIT AGRICULTURE AND GREEN THE EARTH

Since the beginning of our Industrial Age around 1800 CE, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 ppm to a little over 400ppm. This is a rise of 45%, most of which has happened in the last 50 years. Most of these elevated carbon dioxide levels are due to mankind’s increasing use of hydrocarbons such as coal, oil and gas. We have been digging up and pumping out hydrocarbons from the ground and returning it to the atmosphere.

Although there may be some question whether these rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are partly or entirely due to human activity, it makes no difference to the fact that higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere means more plant growth and bigger food harvests.

Craig Idso, PhD (an agricultural scientist) is a world leader in carbon dioxide research and the longtime editor of CO2 Science. He has spent more than 30 years either doing or reviewing thousands of trials to find out how a whole range of different plants respond to higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Although all plants do not respond to the same degree, he has documented how species generally have better growth and produce higher yields when they are fed with more carbon dioxide.

His findings have been replicated in other trials all over the world. As a recent peer reviewed report puts it, “Numerous studies of CO2 enrichment in chambers (e.g. greenhouses) have demonstrated dramatically improved crops yields. Ainsworth-Long (2005) performed a meta-analysis of 124 papers on 40 species tested at 12 sites, 7 in USA, 3 in Europe, 2 in New Zealand and Japan, using free-air CO2 enrichment (FACE). The actual increases achieved (above the ambient level of the CO2 at the time of the study) varied from 30.5% to 60% with a median of 50-55% (550ppm) and an average of 49.2%.” (Climate Change and Health: CO2 Coalition)

Growers who operate indoor greenhouses to raise crops such as tomatoes and flowers now prove the benefits of carbon dioxide enrichment on a daily basis. By raising carbon dioxide levels by up to 300% (1,200 ppm) they raise the volume of their tomato harvests by about 40% without any further inputs.

In 2015, former IPCC delegate Dr. Indur Goklany, wrote a paper calling for a reassessment of the benefits of carbon dioxide. He said: “Carbon dioxide fertilizes plants, and emissions from fossil fuels have already had a hugely beneficial effect on crops, increasing yields by at least 10-15%.” He also said that these carbon dioxide benefits were worth $140 billion p.a.

In a Forward to the Goklany paper, the world renowned Princeton physicist, Freeman Dyson wrote:

“Indur Goklany has done a careful job, collecting and documenting the evidence that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does far more good than harm. To any unprejudiced person reading this account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial… I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly

8

Back to top

demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence.” Princeton, September 20

The world has enjoyed record food harvests, especially in the basic grain crops, over the last three years (2016, 2017 and 2018). Record aerial carbon dioxide levels (an increase of 11% over the last 20 years) correlate with record food production.

On top of increasing crop yields, elevated levels of aerial carbon dioxide has been found to significantly increase the level of flavonoids, vitamin C, vitamin A, glutathione, protein, isoflavone, glucosinolates and other antioxidants . To cite just one example: “Growing spinach at 800ppm increased the fresh weight by 67%, the soluble protein concentration by about 52% and vitamin C by 21%.” (Climate Change and
Health).

The good news about carbon dioxide keeps coming. Trials have shown that plants which which can draw on higher levels of aerial carbon dioxide require less water. This is because increased levels of aerial carbon dioxide cause the stomata on the leaves of plants to open less, and because of that, transpire less. These water savings on a thirsty planet are enormously significant. It also means that some plants can now thrive in more arid conditions, or that trees that could not survive can now survive under very dry conditions. Plants nourished with more carbon dioxide are fortified to withstand harsher conditions generally – not just a drier environment, but one that is hotter, colder or has lower nutrient levels. Carbon dioxide makes plants tougher and more resilient.

All these factors played a role in enabling the world to achieve record food harvests. The world is now growing more food than ever and despite the population growth of another billion people in the last 25 years, the percentage of people not getting enough food is the lowest it has ever been. During the last 25 years carbon dioxide levels of the atmosphere have risen by 11%, and this has boosted food production by about the same amount. That extra carbon dioxide is feeding an extra billion people. Just think about that for a while before supporting any reduction to carbon dioxide emissions.

During the 1960’s it was widely feared that the world would not be able to grow enough food to support a projected 6 billion people, to say nothing of 7.7 billion people who now live on the planet. Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb (l968) predicted that hundreds of millions of people would perish of starvation before the end of the 20th century.

A contemporary of Paul Ehrlich was an agronomist by the name of Norman Borlaug. During the 1960’s he quietly launched what became known as the Green Revolution in high-yield agriculture on three continents (Mexico, India, Pakistan, Philippines, Africa). As world population doubled over the next 40 years, thanks largely to the work of Borlaug, world food production trebled using the same amount of
land. Borlaug was hailed as “The man who fed the world,” and credited with saving a billion people from starvation. He received the Nobel Prize and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Besides developing better strains of grain and using pesticides judiciously, Borlaug realized that high yield agriculture could not be achieved without the aid of nitrogen. Although there is a lot of nitrogen in the air, plants other than legumes cannot access it. Their roots must take it up from the soil, but Borlaug also knew that soils generally contain far too little nitrogen for optimum plant growth. While animal manures can provide some of that nitrogen, Borlaug soon figured out that there was nowhere near enough land to support all the animals required to produce enough nitrogen to meet the challenge of feeding the world.

Fortunately for Borlaug, a method of creating lots of cheap nitrogen fertilizer using fossil fuel had recently been developed. Here was a method of taking the nitrogen that is so plentiful in the air and putting it into

9

Back to top

the soil where it was accessible to plants. Borlaug demonstrated that this simple action alone would dramatically raise food production by an average of 30%.

With the world population now approaching 8 billion, a new phase of the Green Revolution is already under way. Just as Borlaug took nitrogen in the air and put it into the soil to feed the plants, the new phase of the Green Revolution is about taking carbon out of the earth and putting it into the atmosphere to lift food production.

Ecologist Patrick Moore PhD points out that in earlier geological ages such as the Cambrian Era there was a lushly vegetated earth teeming with life and with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels orders of magnitude higher than now. In our present Pleistocene Era, these carbon dioxide levels have been limping along barely above a level where plants would starve. On the other hand, if present carbon dioxide levels were doubled, all plant life would thrive and crop yields would receive a massive boost.

By highlighting the agricultural benefits of higher levels of carbon dioxide, scientists like Craig Idso and Patrick Moore are carrying on the work of “the man who fed the world” in the last half of the 20^th Century. The new phase of the Green Revolution in this 21st Century requires higher rather than lower carbon dioxide emissions.

Increased aerial carbon dioxide levels are not only boosting world agricultural yields, they are also dramatically greening the earth. Leaf density of the rainforests has significantly increased. The fringes of desert regions have greened, especially because trees benefit from higher aerial carbon dioxide levels more than most other plants.

In April 25, 2016 the journal Nature Climate Change published a report on the findings of 32 research scientists from 8 different countries. By analysing NASA satellite data with high resolution imaging technology, they found that the earth had greened by 14% in the 30 years from 1980 to 2011. They said that the expansion of green areas were as large as 2 continental USA’s. That’s also double the size of
Australia. To what did the researchers credit these astonishing gains? They estimated that 9% was due to more nitrogen, 8% was due to global warming, 4% was due to land change, but a whopping 70% was due to more aerial carbon dioxide.

So this demonized dirty black polluting stuff called carbon is quite literally greening the world. This throws a new light on what has been dubbed “the social cost” of dumping 10 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. About half of this is being hungrily gobbled up by plants which are now using it to create an exciting new chapter of the Green Revolution. With carbon emissions feeding the world and greening the world, the political discourse should be lauding “the social dividend of carbon.”

The politicians and the scientists who go on decrying “the social cost of carbon” have all this up-sidedown and back-to-front. Instead of being demonized, carbon should now be celebrated as mankind’s best friend. We have all heard it said that diamonds (which are wholly carbon) are a girl’s best friend. Carbon is mankind’s best friend and the planet’s best friend.

10

Back to top

Chapter 3
HOW CARBON EMISSIONS BENEFIT THE CLIMATE

The impacts of carbon dioxide on the climate have so dominated the political discourse and have so demonized carbon that the beneficial impacts of higher carbon dioxide emissions have not received the consideration they deserve. Once the facts about carbon dioxide’s enormous benefits are understood, it becomes much easier to defang this monster called climate change.

There are two very straight forward questions which need to be addressed in the climate change debate: (1) Is carbon dioxide a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that causes global warming? (2) How much warming will result from rising carbon dioxide emissions?

The answer to the first question is “yes.” It would be hard to find a scientist, even among the so-called climate sceptics, who would challenge the thesis that carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that causes some global warming. The main heat-trapping gas, however, is water vapour. It comprises about 90% of all greenhouse gases, although this can vary a lot between the tropics and the poles where the air is cold and dry.

Unfortunately, the very term “greenhouse gases” has been tossed around for so long in such a fear generating context that greenhouse gases have become demonized too. This is really quite silly because water vapour is by far the largest greenhouse gas. The reality is that without this greenhouse “blanket”, earth’s surface would become so hot by day and cold by night, that no plant or animal life could survive on it.

An inland desert provides a partial illustration of what happens where there is too little greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Due to its very dry air, the desert can become extremely hot during the day, and then quickly turn deadly cold at night. This is because there is not enough water vapour to moderate the temperature extremes.

It is generally agreed that most of the warming from carbon dioxide occurs at night, in winter and in the colder high latitude regions, due to their being less water vapour and its greenhouse effect in those times and places. This greenhouse warming is beneficial to agriculture because more carbon dioxide emissions lengthens the growing season and boosts food production in the cooler agricultural regions of the world.
It also benefits human health because this lessening of the diurnal temperature variation has been proven to lessen the risk of heart attack, stroke and some other health risks. (See Climate Change and Health).

Sensitivity
Climate Sensitivity is the technical term used to refer to the amount of warming likely to occur if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are doubled, i.e., from 280 ppm to 560 ppm. The carbon dioxide levels are presently 409ppm.

There is a general agreement on all sides of the climate change debate that a doubling of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, if everything else remained the same, would warm earth’s surface by 1.1° C.

11

Back to top

The reason why there is a general agreement on this point is because the effect of this additional carbon dioxide can be scientifically measured and replicated according to true scientific principles.

If the 1.1° of warming resulting from a doubling of carbon dioxide from 280 ppm to 560 ppm were all there was too it, then there would be no grounds for alarm because that very modest amount of warming – 45% of which is already achieved – would cause far more good than harm. It would boost food production and greenery in general as well as having human health benefits. After all, the Pleistocene Era in which we now live is recognized by geologists as the coolest Era since plants evolved.

The theory of dangerous anthropogenic global warming (DAGW) rests on the unproved assumption that the 1.1° of warming caused by doubling carbon dioxide levels will have “positive feedbacks” – meaning that others factors in the climate system will kick in to multiply the modest carbon dioxide effects.

Specifically, the theory of DAGW rests on the assumption that the 1.1 degree of carbon dioxide-induced warming will result in more evaporation of water, and that this increased water vapour (the most dominant greenhouse gas) will multiply that 1.1° of warming by anything from 3 to 6 times. This is like saying that carbon dioxide is like the little dog that wakes up the big dog (water vapour) which does more
damage after being woken up by the little dog.

This assumption about the “positive feedbacks” of water vapour (to which has been added some now discredited speculation about the behaviour of clouds) has been fed into the climate Models which project a sensitivity of anything from 3° upwards. Those who are sceptical of these DAGW projections, and for very good reasons, have become known as “climate change sceptics.” They don’t question that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. They don’t question that man-made carbon dioxide emissions have a warming influence. They don’t question that a doubling of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would, if everything else remained equal, cause 1.1° of warming. They are simply sceptical of a theory of “positive feedbacks” which turn a modest and beneficial amount of warming into a dangerous amount of warming.

As for the claim about there being an overwhelming scientific consensus about the climate science, it is really a very misleading if not a dishonest bit of band-wagoning. There never has been any consensus on the issue of sensitivity, and sensitivity is precisely what the crux of the argument is about. Even the IPCC reports, all five of them, indicate there is no consensus on this question of how much warming? There is
not even anything like a consensus among the DAGW advocates. As time goes on, however, more and more scientific papers are moving toward a lower sensitivity.

The hypothesis about the “positive feedbacks” of water vapour is being blown out of the water (pun intended). Sceptics of any high or dangerous sensitivity make the perfectly valid observation that the process of evaporation itself has a cooling effect, that the clouds formed by additional water vapour have a cooling effect during the day, and that increased precipitation (rainfall) permits more evaporative cooling at the surface. It appears that the best scientific papers now being published estimate sensitivity to be about 1.3 -1.5°.

And we need to remember that 45% of this warming has already occurred. If there are other “negative feedbacks” not yet understood, sensitivity may prove to be even lower. That is because in all complex natural systems, there are checks and balances to maintain normalcy. In other words, the “feedbacks” should tend to moderate rather than exacerbate the effects of rising carbon dioxide levels. This is why some very highly qualified atmospheric physicists and climatologists (e.g., Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer) argue for “negative feedbacks.”

The final evidence of how much warming will be found in measuring the temperature itself over a period of time. According to the Satellites that measure temperatures (UAH and GISS) there has been little or no

12

Back to top

statistically significant [exceeding 0.20] temperature gains for 20 years even though carbon dioxide levels have increased by about 11% over that period.

There is one more reason to be less apprehensive about rising levels of carbon dioxide. Its warming effects are logarithmic, meaning that the effect of carbon dioxide diminishes as the levels rise. (See D. Weston Allen, The Weather Makers Re-examined, 201-3)

Climate change alarmism reminds us of Mark Twain’s quip: “Reports about my death are greatly exaggerated.” Freeman Dyson has said, “The possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated.” Over an entire generation, the public has been bombarded with scary scenarios of climate catastrophes, none of which have happened.

We were told that the Arctic would be free of ice by 2013. It hasn’t happened. The UN warned that by the year 2010 there would be 50 million climate refugees. There’s not even been one.

They said the polar bears would disappear. They’ve doubled in numbers since the scare mongering started.

The experts said that global warming would reduce agricultural yields. There have been world record harvests instead.

The IPPC declared that all the glaciers of the Himalayas would soon disappear. Even the IPCC had to admit it got that one wrong.

Londoners were told that their children would never see snow again. That prediction soon got buried in record snow falls.

Who hasn’t heard that the small islands of the Pacific would soon disappear below rising sea-levels? Those Islands are not only still there, but most of them are growing.

It has been said repeatedly for a generation that the world is warming at an unprecedented rate. Any kid just leaving school can look at the weather Satellites records from UAH or GISS and see that there has been very little global warming since they were born.

Then there was that Australian of the Year, Tim Flannery, who told us that even the rain that fell on the ground would not fill our dams. He had hardly finished telling us this before the La Nina rains flooded an area of Australia larger than France.

Who hasn’t heard that hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts and other weather disasters are becoming more frequent and more destructive? Even Barack Obama came out to Australia and repeated that factoid. Yet all the authentic public statistics (which are not difficult to find) show that these destructive events have actually decreased in the last 20 years.

There are now whole books that have documented this litany of failed climate predictions. Would you buy a used car from these climate change salesmen?

James Lovelock (“may his tribe increase”) was once the father-figure of global warming alarmism. He went on record saying that the world would soon become so hot that there would soon be only a few pairs of breeding humans left in the Antarctic. Statements like that went seven times around the world

13

Back to top

before the truth could get its boots on to say (from the same humbled James Lovelock), “We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world by now.” “I was needlessly alarmist, but I wasn’t the only one.” “Twenty years ago we thought we knew what the climate was doing, but the climate is doing its own thing.” “I’ve grown up a bit since then.” Would that we had more scientists like him rather than those who act like politicians who can never admit that they got it wrong.

There is one stark fact that is enough to blow all this angst about carbon dioxide emissions away. Over the last 20 years mankind has dug up and pumped out of the ground 1/3rd of all the hydrocarbons it has ever used. The atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have increased by 11%. If Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth was correct, we should have had this unpreceded global warming.

The DAGW Emperor has no clothes.

The only rational conclusion we can draw from all the evidence is that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are good for the planet and for all life upon it. Increased carbon dioxide emissions are giving us more food and a greener earth. They are making it a little warmer at night, a little warmer in winter and a little warmer in those cooler regions where it is needed most. Their overall impact on human health is very positive.

Can we have too many carbon dioxide emissions?
According to Patrick Moore PhD. (Ecology), the optimum atmospheric carbon dioxide level for plants is somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 ppm. This is indicated by thousands of trials and also by the wide use of carbon dioxide to boost plant yields in indoor greenhouses. If at first blush that much atmospheric carbon dioxide appears to be too high, consider that during the geological Cambrian Era (about 500 million years ago) there was up to 17 times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than we have today. Yet that era is called the “Cambrian explosion” because it was the time when a great diversity of life forms exploded into existence all over the planet. In the later Jurassic Era atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were still many times higher than today. With all that aerial carbon available the earth was lush with plant life and massive forests proliferated. For the last 150 million years, however, plant life has been drawing down carbon from the atmosphere. Much of this carbon has been buried in the earth as coal deposits instead of being returned to the atmosphere. Marine life too has been steadily drawing
down carbon from the atmosphere for shell making, and by this process turning the carbon into billions of tons of carboniferous rocks.

We are now living in the Pleistocene Era which began about 2 million years ago. It is also called the era of the Ice Ages in which 30% of the earth has been covered in ice for 100,000 years periods, with warmer interludes lasting about 10 thousands years. In this present Pleistocene Era carbon dioxide levels have plunged to their lowest level ever – 150 ppm during a recent glaciation. At that level, plant life cannot continue to survive. Fortunately, aerial carbon dioxide levels rose to 280 ppm in our present Holocene, but that is still bumping along just above the level of plant starvation (This information about the geological eras is drawn from Dr. Moore’s paper cited above).

Some scientists appear over-anxious to tell us that our present 400ppm levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are the highest they have been for a million years. What they don’t tell us is that this geological blink brings us to the middle of the present Pleistocene Era when carbon dioxide levels were not only dangerously low, but the lowest they have ever been in the history of our planet. The scientists who dish

14

Back to top

out this kind of spin should know that life began, exploded and flourished on this planet when the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were orders of magnitude greater than they have been for the last million years.

By digging up the hydrocarbons buried in the earth, mankind is not proving itself to be the one rogue species that destroys the earth. Rather, by replenishing those depleted aerial carbon dioxide levels, mankind is proving to be the only species which can arrest the dangerous decline of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Here in the ground below our feet there is the greatest battery for storing energy that has ever been devised. Plants capture the sun’s energy more efficiently than anything mankind has been able to invent. The energy stored in nature’s great underground “battery” is carbon-based energy which plants drew down from the atmosphere. When we use that carbon-based energy we are simply activating the carbon cycle by returning that carbon to the atmosphere. This carbon cycle is the life cycle. We feed the plants, and the plants feed us.

There are two great advantages of using this carbon-based energy. In the first place, this source of cheap and abundant energy has enabled mankind to achieve a level of unprecedented prosperity, comfort and longevity. At the same time, it is has raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to dramatically increase food production and the greening of the earth. This man-made achievement is something to celebrate:
“We – humanity – should be throwing ourselves the party to outdo all parties, a combination graduationwedding-birthday-all-rites-of passage party, to mark our emergence from a death-dominated world of raw-material scarcity. Sing, dance, be merry – and work. But instead we see gloomy faces. They are spoilsports, and they have bad effects.

“The spoilsports accuse our generations of having a party – at the expense of generations to come. But it is those who use the government to their own advantage who are having a party at the expense of others – the bureaucrats, the grants-grabbers, the subsidy-looters. Don’t let them spoil our merry day.” (Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource, p.408)

Breaking Through With the Good News about Carbon Dioxide
There are some news and current affair commentators who seem to be willing to put their head up above the parapet to question the wisdom of reducing our carbon dioxide emissions at the expense of the economy. They are against the Paris Agreement to reduce emissions, at least as far as making these reductions legally binding. But they are not breaking through to enlighten the public that higher emissions are highly beneficial.

If the thesis of this paper is correct –

• that carbon dioxide emissions are highly beneficial rather than harmful,
• that carbon dioxide emissions are not just another plant food but the primary plant food,
• that carbon dioxide emissions have raised world food production from 10 -15%,
• that reducing aerial carbon dioxide levels could starve a billion people,
• that rising carbon dioxide levels are dramatically greening the earth,
• that aerial carbon dioxide levels are a long way from reaching optimum levels,

15

Back to top

• that reducing the carbon dioxide fertilization of plants would sabotage the “Green
  Revolution” this century just as reducing nitrogen fertilization would have sabotaged the
  Green Revolution last century,

Then the only conclusion we can come to is that more carbon dioxide emissions are needed rather than less.

Why then should it even be implicitly conceded that reducing carbon dioxide is a desirable thing? For instance, nuclear energy may be beneficial for a number of reasons, but why use the argument that its zero carbon dioxide emissions is any advantage? Gas may be a better energy source than coal for a number of reasons, but why argue that its lower carbon dioxide emission is one of them? New coal-fired
power stations (HELE) may be more efficient and have better scrubbers to reduce real pollutants, but why concede that lower carbon dioxide emissions makes them superior?

Whatever the arguments there may be for other sources of energy, why drag along the old bogey about the advantage of lower emissions? Since carbon dioxide is an odourless, colourless, non-toxic gas which is just as natural and essential to life as oxygen and water, why concede that anything that gives off carbon dioxide is not “clean energy”? Making any concessions toward “reducing carbon dioxide emission,” “reducing greenhouse gases” or “reducing our carbon footprint” plays into the hands of those who have coined these phrases to demonize carbon and brainwash the public. The time has come to cut through by saying it clearly and repeatedly, “Carbon dioxide is good for you” and “We need more of it, not less.”

16

Back to top

Chapter 4
WHY THE BENEFITS OF CARBON EMISSIONS ARE NOT EMBRACED

When that hugely respected American scientist, Freeman Dyson (a self-confessed Democrat and supporter of Barack Obama) looked at how carbon dioxide was being demonized, he said, “The people who are supposed to be the experts and who claim to understand the science are precisely the people who are blind to the evidence…I hope that a few of them will make the effort to examine the evidence in detail and see how it contradicts the prevailing dogma, but I know that the majority will remain blind. That to me is the central mystery of climate science. It is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that the whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?”

Dyson went on to explain how the global warming science had become a shared story that a lot of people, including a lot of scientists, have embraced. It is a story that holds them together in loyalty to a cause. It has even become a story they will defend against dissenters as fiercely as religious zealots used to burn heretics at the stake.

What Professor Dyson is really suggesting is what a lot of observers and even participants in the DAGW movement like James Lovelock have concluded: the so-called science has become a religion. By religion we mean a worldview – something of ultimate concern, the meaning-giving centre that becomes like a pair of powerful glasses which determines the way we see ourselves, the world and everything else. In that sense everyone, including the most confirmed atheist, has a religion or a worldview.

The reason some people can’t see the real facts about carbon dioxide is because DAGW is one of those shared stories that has penetrated human consciousness to the level of becoming a worldview. It has become a belief system which appears to explain what is wrong with the world and what must be done to fix it. In other words, it addresses some of the questions traditional religion used to answer. No
wonder it has been called “the religion of the 21st Century.”

We human beings are capable of changing our opinions, even as John Maynard Keys famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind.” But an opinion that has become an integral part of our worldview is different. Trying to convince any DAGW believer that carbon dioxide emissions are beneficial may be as difficult as trying to change the opinion of a Catholic or a Muslim on a point that is a vital part of their religion. Try telling an orthodox Jew that a ham sandwich is kosher or a Jehovah’s Witness that a blood transfusion is beneficial!

The powerful role of shared stories is the theme in Yuval Noah Harari’s bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. He points out that our nearest cousins in the animal kingdom are the chimpanzees which happen to share 89% of our genes and DNA makeup. The chimps bond together in bands of no more than about a hundred after which they break up into smaller bands. Harari’s raises the question of how
Homo sapiens (the wise ones) were able to bond together in groups big enough to become a city or even a nation. Why are the sapiens the only animal species that can do this? His answer at first blush seems to be almost too simple, but the more he makes one think about it (using numerous examples) the more it appears to be transparently correct. Only humans have the imaginative ability to visualize entities that
can’t be seen or that don’t even exist. This gives them the ability to tell stories that capture and live on in the human imagination in a way that shapes a worldview with a value system and a sense of destiny.

17

Back to top

Shared stories can not only hold a whole city together, but they can hold a whole tribe or nation together with shared values and a sense of identity. They might even hold an empire together. They can bond a large community of people across international boundaries, as it happens for instance with Catholics or Sunni Muslims. It is not some genetic inheritance that holds them together. They are simply held together by a shared story that gives them a common worldview. The dissenter, reformer or heretic who is thought to threaten the bonds of the shared story is instinctively resisted, whether by brutal force, ridicule or ostracism – think Socrates being made to drink hemlock for desacralizing the Greek myths, Jesus getting himself crucified for blasphemy, Galileo being forced to recant to save himself from being burned at the stake, or something as mundane as Peter Ridd being expelled from James Cook University for exposing the story of his peers about the Great Barrier Reef in crisis as a fallacious myth.

All the great religions – and even the smaller religions or sub-religions – are held together by shared stories. Judaism has been held together by its shared story of the Exodus of the Hebrew people from Egypt. Buddhism has its story of the Prince who left the comforts of a palace to find enlightenment. Christians share a common story of the man whose kind of love triumphed over death. The Muslims have their story of Muhammad being visited by the angel Gabriel as he fasted in a cave during Ramadan. The Mormons have their story of Joseph Smith’s miraculous translation of a lost sacred text. Whether or not any of these bonding stories are well-attested historical events makes no difference to the enormous power they exert to bind large national or international communities together.

Man-made climate change has its own story to tell the world. Its narrative is about the way industrialized civilization is dangerously warming the planet. It presses a lot of guilt buttons about our consumerism, the economic rat race, the folly of “keeping up with the Jones,” the yearning for a simple life more in harmony with nature. This climate change story also has a redemptive plan to save the planet. That too can press the buttons of our nobler aspirations. Here are all the features of a religion. Perhaps the less said about the ruthless aspects of religion the better – like suppressing, ridiculing, labelling, ostracising, expelling, silencing, and destroying dissenters. These features too are the tell-tale signs that appear when something has become a religion.

18

Back to top

Chapter 5
WHAT IS DRIVING THE WAR ON CARBON?

Some of the main thought leaders who worked at crafting the story about our dangerously warming planet were not even scientists. They were a cabal of socialists or One-World-Government dreamers centred in the UN and its ancillary organizations. Their real aim, sometimes blatantly stated, was to dismantle the free-market economic order and to replace it with a more centralized collectivist order. Another name for this outlook is neo-Marxism.

One of the chief strategists in this vision to construct a new World Socialism order to replace the failed one behind the Iron Curtain was Maurice Strong, a Canadian businessman and self-confessed neoMarxist. Strong was a brilliant networker in UN circles. His reign as the chief organizer behind a bewildering array of world conferences, UN climate science organizations and programs lasted from 1962 to 2005.

“He organized the 1972 UN conference in Stockholm, where the UN Environmental Program (UNEP) was proposed, and he became its first head. UNEP later made wildly exaggerated claims about ‘acid rain’… In 1990 Maurice Strong said: ‘Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilization collapses.’ It was Strong who arranged and chaired the 1992 Rio Earth Summit [ which launched Agenda 21], where it was decided that the term ‘Climate change’ would refer only to change caused by human activity, and change due to natural causes would be referred to as ‘natural variability.’” (D Weston Allen, The Weather Makers Re-Examined, pp. 251-2)

With the collapse of the “acid rain” scare that dominated environmental issues for a few years before it was proved to be nonsense, Strong began casting around to find better evidence to support his worldview that free-market Capitalism exerted a destructive and damaging effect on
the world. He found a valuable ally in Bert Bolin, a Scandinavian meteorologist who had studied at the Stockholm University where 60 years earlier Arrhenius did some ground-breaking work on carbon dioxide. Strong began to work with Bolin and others at the UN to build a case against carbon dioxide.

Just as Strong had organized the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and became its chairman, so again he played a huge role in setting up another UN sponsored organization called The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 and became its first chairman. From the beginning, this UN organization was stuffed with money and dominated by green socialists bent on highlighting the environmental sins of the free-market economic system.

The charter of the IPCC stated that it was all about investigating the human influence on the climate. A huge number of scientists from all over the world were corralled to participate by submitting and reviewing papers.

If scientists are asked and rewarded handsomely with grants to find a human influence on the climate, then that is exactly what they are going to find. They were not asked to find the evidences of natural variability which is obviously a much larger field than merely looking at the
human influence. Some researchers and reviewers were apprehensive about this bias toward

19

Back to top

highlighting human influences and demoting natural influences. They even complained that more balanced studies were being sidelined. Not a few of them resigned from further participation in the IPCC program. (See D. Weston Allen, The Weather Makers Re-examined, for a more detailed critique of the IPCC)

During this period, one of the participating scientists wrote to a colleague saying that they needed “to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” For even the IPCC’s earlier Assessment Report still featured a climate graph on its front cover showing that the Medieval Warm Period
was as warm as our present era. That kind of graph did not sit well with the agenda to magnify the human influence and minimize the influence of natural variability. For if it was conceded that the Medieval Warm Period was as warm as today, then it would weaken the case that the
present warming was mostly caused by mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions.

A climate researcher by the name of Michael Mann became the hero of the day. He and several colleagues (Bradley and Hughes) came up with a study to support an entirely new climate graph. It showed temperatures maintaining a flat line for the last 1,000 years, and then suddenly rising like a hockey stick blade at the end of the 20th century in lockstep with rising carbon dioxide levels. This Hockey Stick graph did everything the drivers behind the IPCC program wanted. It got rid of that troublesome Medieval Warm Period which would always throw their story into some doubt. And it showed temperatures perilously rising to unprecedented levels, correlating with mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions. This Hockey Stick graph was then featured on the front cover of the next IPCC Assessment Report.

A number of experts in statistical analysis in Canada and also in Europe, on reviewing Mann’s Hockey Stick research data, found that the statistical methods used by Mann were invalid. The Hockey Stick was more like a contrived cut and paste trick than authentic science. By this stage, however, nothing was going to stop the IPCC cart rolling triumphantly on.

In its 4th Assessment Report the IPCC declared that it could now say with 90% certainty that most of the global warming over the last 50 years was due to a human influence. This was upgraded to 95% certainty in the 5th Assessment Report (2013). The story was quite clear now:
there can be no doubting that our carbon dioxide emissions were pushing our world toward a climate apocalypse.

Move over mighty sun, great ocean currents and all other celestial and terrestrial influences on the climate! All these past drivers of the climate were now supposed to be put in the shade by man’s mighty carbon dioxide emissions. (They were not going to spoil their story with any
reminder that the natural carbon dioxide emissions from land and sea are about 33 times greater than all human emissions combined).

With the story telling us that mankind’s industrial emissions are exposing the world to a climate apocalypse, then it logically follows that we can also stop this climate apocalypse. “Yes we can” said Obama in his first Presidential Inaugural address. He said that beginning with his Presidency the world would begin to cool and the oceans would cease to rise. Here was someone greater than King Canute!

20

Back to top

If there was any doubt about where this narrative of dangerous man-made climate change was heading, Sir Nicholas Stern put those doubts to rest by declaring, just after the 2007 IPCC Report was published: “Climate change is the result of the greatest market failure in history.” With this amazing one-liner we are given the answer to the great climate whodunit story. It’s the MARKET -not the sun, not cosmic rays, not the variability of the earth’s orbit around the sun nor the earth tilting on its axis, not the planetary alignments, not the changing ocean currents,
volcanoes or any other natural forces that have brought on Ice Ages and warm periods in the past. The one thing that has caused this “unprecedented”, “runaway”, “tipping-point”, “destructive climate change” is the market. Yes, blame it all on the free enterprise system that has lifted more human beings out of poverty, improved the human condition and increased the human life span more than anything else in human history!

It’s the market silly! The official submission from Bolivia to the UN Paris Conference on climate change says this: “The structural cause that has triggered the climate crisis is the failed capitalist system. The capitalist system promotes consumerism, warmongering and commercialism, causing destruction of Mother Earth and humanity…For a lasting solution to the climate crisis we must destroy capitalism.” (The Australian, 13/11/20150)

That’s exactly the conclusion the UN framers of the climate story had come to and wanted others to conclude. It’s a no brainer. If our free-market capitalist system is the cause of the climate disaster, we must Get-up (pun intended) and get rid of it. That is exactly what Maurice
Strong said must happen: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that industrial civilizations end.” That was the direction of his 40-year career networking at the UN, from his setting up the Earth Summit in Rio (1992) to his setting up the IPCC in 1988, the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and lots of other UN programs in between. But he was not the only dreamer of a One-World Socialism.

Here are some amazing statement about this climate alarmism:
From a UN climate official Ottmar Edenhofer: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole. We redistribute the
world’s wealth by climate policy.”

From Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change: “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, with a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that
has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution. This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”

The thesis is summed up in Naomi Klein’s recent book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.” The message here is crystal clear: Come dance on the grave of the free market capitalism and save the environment. In a preview documentary of her book she said, “It’s the best chance we have to build a better world.”

21

Back to top

The UN’s climate science has always been driven by the UN’s worldview. That worldview also determines the way the science is used. Timothy Wirth, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Issues, said this: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” Richard Benedick, a deputy
assistant secretary of state who headed policy divisions of the U.S. State Department did his bit to let the cat out of the bag with this statement, “A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect.” (Cited in EIR Science, March 16, 2007, CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal of our Time, by Zbigniew Jaworowski, Ph.D. )

The August 7 Newsletter of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (a British think-tank chaired by Lord Nigel Lawson) recently published several articles and reports about scientists and government advisers who believe that only a new collectivist order of global socialism can save us from the climate apocalypse. One of them is Australian scientist Will Steffen whose name is attached to a group of
scientists who claim that only “collective solutions”, and “new governance arrangements and transformed social values” can enable us to decarbonize our whole way of life. He could have suggested that we stop breathing!

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber who is deeply involved in European and UN climate affairs says that national governments “will have to give up a good deal of their national sovereignty and establish a true regime of global governance.”

Another German government adviser expresses the view that “decarbonisation can only be achieved by the limitation of democracy.”

Did Maurice Strong, Naomi Kleim, Nicholas Stern and all these other neo-Marxist dreamers draw their pessimistic conclusions about the free market system from their study of the climate, or did they bring their pessimism of the free market to their study of the climate? It is clear that their story of climate catastrophism grows out of their core belief that there is something radically wrong with the whole capitalist system. They want to replace it with their new kind of World Socialism.

This story of the man-made climate disaster has been widely embraced because it taps into the mood of cultural pessimism that has become endemic. Cultural pessimism is a belief that everything is in a state of decline, going downhill and getting worse. This pessimistic mood flies in the face of the real evidence about the improving state of the world and the human condition on so many fronts. As Thomas Macaulay has said, “On what grounds when looking back we see nothing but progress can we look forward and see nothing but decline.”

As an illustration that feelings are not always in line with the facts, ask the average housekeeper if the food she has to buy to feed the family is more expensive now than it used to be. More often than not she will say that food is becoming more expensive. In actual fact the cost of food today in real terms is about 1/3^rd of what it was 50-60 years ago. The cost of most other things has declined too.

There is a widespread belief that as the population grows and industry expands, the world’s forests are disappearing at the rate of knots. Who hasn’t heard the stories about how many trees equal to filling so many football fields are disappearing every hour? But during the last 34 years (1982 -2018), while the population of the world increased by more than a billion people, the tree cover of the earth has increased by a stunning 7.1%. That’s about 2,250 million square kilometres of extra tree cover.

It seems that everyone knowns (unless they are the knuckle dragging climate sceptics) that cyclones, droughts, floods, tornadoes and other weather disasters are becoming more frequent and intense

22

Back to top

because of all the human greenhouses gases. Right? Wrong again! Destructive weather events have actually decreased during the last 20 years.

Why do so many of us so readily believe the bad stories? “We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.” (Talmud) In his truly monumental work, The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman makes the same observation: “Pessimism and optimism are attitudes the scholar brings to his analysis of events, not conclusions that arise from that analysis… For the cultural pessimist, the bad news is actually good news. He greets economic depression, unemployment, world wars and conflicts, and environmental disasters with barely concealed glee, since these events all foreshadow the final destruction of modern civilization.” (pp.3,9)

In looking at the conception and development of the story of a climate apocalypse, we are not looking at some kind of a conspiracy to create a hoax. Conspiracy theories totally miss the point. We are looking at the conception and the development of an idea that is part of a belief system that nothing can dislodge except a return to the myth-busting rationalism of the Enlightenment, or otherwise the inevitable train smash that eventually happens with every apocalyptic movement.

Science values scepticism; religion damns it.

In his book, The Demon Haunted World, Carl Sagan makes an interesting comparison between religion and science. Religion tends to laud faith and damn scepticism. Not so with science. As Huxley famously said about science, “Scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.” If this is true, then the DAGW science walks like a religion and quacks like a religion. It is a religion. It says “The science is settled!” “The debate is over!” That kind of talk sounds like the Church of Climatology. Anyone who dares to be sceptical of the “settled science” is liable to be derided as a “flat earther,” “a knuckle dragger,” “a denier” [like a Holocaust denier] who should be suppressed, expelled, even jailed, as some now suggest, for a crime against the planet. Unbelief in the dogma of emissions reduction is regarded as almost as appalling as questioning a dogma of the Medieval Church used to be. Expressing any scepticism about the climate science dogma has become a career hazard, a grant-getting hazard, a political hazard and a reputational hazard. This is not the way science works; it’s the dark side of religion at work.

Further evidence that it is more religion than science is the ad hominem approach to any contrary argument, article or research paper. Instead of dealing with the arguments or evidence, DAGW devotees immediately begin digging up dirt on the messenger: sinful scientists can’t be trusted, only saintly DAGW ones. Even when their saints falter, like substituting real temperatures to “hide the decline” in inconvenient proxies when concocting hockey-stick temperature charts, the climate church whitewashes and protects them.

23

Back to top

Chapter 6
HOW THE WAR ON CARBON IS A WAR ON HUMAN FREEDOM

The first experiment in World Socialism was driven by a grand narrative that was scripted by Karl Marx. Marx’s parental background was Jewish. Marx’s father converted to Evangelical Christianity and young Marx was baptized into the Lutheran Church. Marx fashioned his socialist narrative along the same lines as the Christian story of Paradise lost and Paradise restored.

Whereas the Christian narrative begins with the fall of man from the ideal human state at the beginning
of history, in Marx’s script it was the fall of man from a classless society into a state of alienation. In his
story, the “original sin” that destroyed the classless society was not eating from the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, but “eating” of the tree of capital and labour. This created on the one hand
bosses who owned the means of production and workers on the other who became alienated from the
true enjoyment of their own productive work. The way to restore the lost Paradise, according to the
story of Marx, was to destroy the whole system of capital and labour which creates class and alienation,
and to restore the classless society of human equality. “Workers of the world unite” became the mantra
of the Marxist religion.

In going head-to-head with the capitalist World centred in the United States and Western Europe, the
Communism that developed behind the Iron Curtain always claimed the high moral ground, especially in
its ideals of human equality. Its motto, “from each according to his ability; to each according to his need,”
seemed to reflect the way of life among the first Christians in Jerusalem who held all things in common
ownership (Acts 2:44-46).

Capitalism, on the other hand, didn’t appear to claim any high moral ground that could match Marxism.
Some would even argue that there was no moral high ground in a system which fostered the belief that
“greed is good.”

It was soon found, however, that when a central planning authority took charge of the economy and a
collective system took over the farm or the factory, the individual was expected to lay aside his own
dreams and freedoms for the good of the collective. The collective mattered, but not the individual. The
individual became seriously devalued and dispensable. People lost the dignity of their individuality, and
the system ended up disposing of millions of people as if they were trash.

Things became so bad that the authorities had to build the Berlin Wall to prevent the workers escaping
from their workers’ Paradise. The bitter irony of this must not be missed. Marx had scripted a story that
created a dream about a better world for the workers. From the beginning, the story line was that
Marxism would create a better world, with better working conditions and a better standard of living for
the workers.

For all of its shortcomings, the capitalist world of the market economy had one thing going for it, and that
was freedom. Human beings perform at their most creative and productive best only when they are free.
No collective ever painted a Mona Lisa, designed the Sydney Opera House or discovered the theory of
Relativity. Most of the great discoveries, inventions and scientific breakthroughs in history were not
arrived at by some collective, but by free individuals – like a Thomas Edison or a Steve Jobs expressing
their creative genius. Whoever or whatever takes individual freedom away kills the goose that lays the
golden eggs for the benefit of the whole society.

24

Back to top

Thanks to the freedoms of the capitalist system, no generation has ever been as well fed, clothed,
educated, medicated, travelled, entertained or has had as many years to live as this generation. When
Julian Simon did a survey of the health and wealth of the people in the different nations of the world, he
found that it was a general rule that the less oppressive the government and the more freedom the
people of a country enjoyed, the healthier and wealthier were the citizens.

Milton Friedman summed it up like this: “When a society places freedom before equality, then it
gains a great measure of both, but when a society places equality before freedom, then it attains
neither.”

The old Marxist dream of creating more goods and services for its workers is now dead and buried,
but that does not mean that the dream of socialism is dead. When the Berlin Wall and all that it
symbolized collapsed, many socialists poured out from its ruins only to pour into the environmental
movement. That is how the term “watermelon Greens” originated, meaning that inwardly they
were still socialists. Yet instead of pushing the old Marxist line that the greedy capitalist world of the
free market gives the workers of the world too little goods and services, the new Green socialists
started complaining that the Free World was creating too many goods and services. It pushed the
new line that there was too much affluence, too much consumption of the world’s scare resources,
and above all, such a prodigious use of carbon-based energy, that the free-market was creating a
climate apocalypse.

We have already traced how this neo-Marxist story line was crafted by a cabal of neo-Marxists
working in the UN network of climate change organizations and conferences. Instead of running the
old story line that sweeping away the free-market will create a better world for the workers, they
spun the story that their new World Order of Socialism was needed to create a safer and healthier
environment. It’s called sustainability.

Here is a new twist to the old narrative about the fall of man and original sin, but it now dressed up
in green garments. The original sin becomes the hubris of mankind’s thinking it could get above
nature in order to rule and subdue it (Genesis 1:27-29); and redemption is returning to the Gates of
Eden by living in harmony with nature. You bet it’s a religion!

This neo-Marxist dream is a far greater threat to human freedom than old-time Communism.
The old Marxism did not set out to be anti-human. It wanted to improve the human condition far
beyond anything capitalism could do. The same thing can’t be said about environmental socialism. It
is deeply misanthropic. It sees mankind in terms of being the scourge of the environment and a
cancer of the earth. Short of eradication, it says that mankind should have its numbers drastically
reduced. The affluence and extravagant consumption of the earth’s resources has to stop. But in this
worldview, it all has to start with reducing carbon dioxide emissions, decarbonizing the economy and
reducing the human carbon footprint on the earth. If this war on carbon is going to starve a billion
people and destroy industrial civilization, some would even say, “Hoorah! that is what we want.”

The old socialism behind the Iron Curtain ended up destroying people because it thought the
Collective was more important than people. The new socialism makes its environmental cause more
important than people. A classical illustration of this is Greenpeace’s opposition to Golden Rice

25

Back to top

which has been genetically modified to correct a Vitamin A deficiency that is killing more than a
million people a year. But because Greenpeace is ideologically opposed to the GM technology, it has
prevented Golden Rice from being grown in Third World countries. This is the enormous error of
elevating any ideology or ism to become more important than people. Another name for this is
Fundamentalism.

Carbon and carbon dioxide are so bound up with every aspect of life – as this paper has shown – that
it is not possible to control carbon without controlling every aspect of human existence.
Those who plan this neo-Marxist future for us, on the pretext of saving us from the climate
apocalypse, at least can recognize that to achieve the level of decarbonisation required, they will
have to (1) radically curtail our economic freedoms, (2) drastically wind back our political freedoms,
and (3) most threatening of all, reach into the inner sanctum of our minds to change our values,
reform our behaviour and re-educate us to have a different worldview.

We say, “most threatening of all,” because the values and worldviews that the socialists envisage
are the domain of religion. That domain includes freedom of conscience, freedom of speech and the
freedom of each individual to choose his own values. This is absolutely the domain of the individual
where no collective of any kind has a right to intrude or impose its will.

This trilogy of human freedoms – religious freedom, political freedom, and economic freedom –
represents the greatest achievement of Western Civilization. These freedoms were conceived only
after long centuries of the struggle of the human spirit against the oppressive union of Church and
State that began with the conversion of Constantine the Great. These human freedoms never saw
the light of day until the Enlightenment had followed on from the Reformation. It was then that a
galaxy of intellectual giants conceived of frontiers of human freedom that had heretofore never
been crossed.

Blazing the trail toward a new dawn of religious freedom was John Milton in England and Anne
Hutchinson and Roger Williams in America. Yet the freedom they envisaged could not be realized
until the founding fathers of the Unites States of America had achieved the separation of Church and
State. Without this world-first breakthrough, religious freedom would have been stillborn.
Opening up a new frontier of political freedom were the fathers of liberal democracy – Jefferson,
Voltaire, John Locke, John Stuart Mill and others of that ilk. The liberal democracies they fathered
were about the freedom of political ideas, the freedom of political association, the freedom to vote
for whom one choses, the freedom to run for political office and the freedom of speech. It created a
free “market” of political ideas where this philosophy would prevail: “I may disagree with what you
say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Before Marx had formulated his Communist Manifesto in 1848, Adam Smith, a leading figure in the
Scottish Enlightenment, had already drafted his vision of economic freedom in his Wealth of
Nations. This was a brilliantly reasoned defence of a free market economy as a means of creating the
greatest wealth to benefit the greatest number of people. It was this idea of economic freedom
which opened up the heretofore untapped potential of human ingenuity and creativity.

These freedoms achieved by Western Civilization belong to the whole human race. Any nation that
embraces them rightly belongs to what is called the Free World. These freedoms have brought with

26

Back to top

them the greatest improvements of the human condition that has ever been seen in human history
– in nutrition, in hygiene, in medicine, in education, in travel, in technology, in access to information,
in entertainment, in longevity and above all, in human rights. Much remains to be done to make
conditions better for everyone. But nothing is to be gained by going back to fondle the old chains of
an oppressive socialism.

The Free World had to fight bitterly for this heritage of freedom in its conflict with the National
Socialism of the Nazis and World Socialism behind the Iron Curtain. These great enemies of human
freedom were enemies outside the gates of the Free World. But now we face a new phase of the
war because this time the enemy is not hammering at our gates but is an enemy trying to destroy us
from within our gates.

The neo-Marxists have employed the myth of carbon pollution as a weapon to beat up on our hard
won freedoms, to beat up on our values and everything else that has made us free and prosperous.
We call their weapon a myth because carbon and carbon dioxide are as pure as the driven snow and
as essential to life as oxygen and water. Far from being harmful, carbon dioxide emissions are
enormously beneficial. The story of the dangerous effects of carbon dioxide is a delusion. It’s a
cuckoo in the nest of human freedom. The false information of this myth acts on the body of our
society like a virus acts on the immune system to cause the body to start destroying itself.
The Free World fought off the enemy from without and preserved its heritage of freedom. The
question now is whether it will rise to the challenge of fighting off the enemy within to preserve its
heritage of freedom.

How can we look at what has gone on in the international Climate Conferences from Rio to
Copenhagen, or from Paris to Bangkok and not conclude that the nations are doing things to destroy
the gains of a free civilization. This UN crusade to stop climate change has become a trillion dollar
industry that does nothing more to change the climate than a pagan rain dance. Yet it is doing an
enormous amount of environmental damage in program after program.

It is also doing enormous amount of damage to science by compromising its independence by
massive government patronage. It has turned science into a political weapon with scientists
becoming paid advocates of government policy. This now makes the separation of Science and the
State as necessary as the separation of Church and State.

The war on carbon is doing great damage to the economy as illustrated by what it has done to
escalate electricity prices. Rising energy costs, all politically created, threaten to de-industrialize
whole nations. That is exactly how Maurice Strong thought it should happen, starting with his first
international Conference in Rio (1992) where the insidious Agenda 21 program was launched.
The greatest threat of all, however, is the threat to human freedom. Why allow ourselves to be so
deluded that we would surrender the freedoms inherent in self-government to a UN government?
The only way a free people could be enticed down this road is brilliantly stated by H.L. Mencken:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led
to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

It is not possible to control carbon and its emissions without taking control of every aspect of human
existence. Carbon emissions enters into absolutely everything we do right down to our breathing. If

27

Back to top

we spit we make carbon emissions. If we travel to work, buy a pair of shoes or other goods and
services of any kind, we cause carbon emissions. If we go to a football match we become part of an
event that causes massive carbon emissions. If we go to church we cause carbon emissions. Even
when we die we will add to those carbon emissions.

We are all carbon-based organisms which run on food which is made of carbon, we live in houses
built of carbon materials, dress in carbon fibres, and participate in the great dance of life made
possible by the constant exchange of carbon. It is called the carbon cycle. We can’t avoid being part
of it and can’t live without it. How then is a war on carbon possible without a war on life itself? This
is madness gone mad.

At least Will Steffen understands that de-carbonizing the economy will mean massive social
engineering and re-education to change human values, to change human behaviour, and to change
governance away from the principle of self-governance to more centralized control. To be sure, Will
Steffen clothes what he thinks must happen with the kind of obfuscated jargon that will not frighten
the horses. He could, however, just cut to the chase and say that what he is really on about is
establishing a carbon dictatorship that abolishes that whole trilogy of religious, political and
economic freedoms.

Why not simply call it for what it is? – a carbon police State. Or an eco-Taliban.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Mayweather, we can’t sell you a plane ticket to Sydney to see your daughter because
you have already exhausted your carbon rations.”

“No Kidman, we can’t allow you to run another 100 head of cattle unless you pay a massive
Flatulence Tax for all those extra carbon emissions from the cattle.”

“Bristleway, you are being sent to our re-education camp for six months to overcome your
inclination to scepticism.”

“Your family must cut back on eating meat and choose a more climate friendly diet. Remember, you
can get carbon credits by becoming vegetarian and even more if you become vegan or a locavore.”
“No Jones, you must shelve your dream of owning that little red sports car.”

“Believe what the Science believes, no more, no less; that the Science is right and always right,
confess.”

“Isn’t it time you went to carbon confession?”
“Don’t tell the carbon police that I’m away on fishing trip in a power boat. That’ll blow my carbon
credits for the whole year.”

Says Patrick Moore Ph.D., one of the four co-founders of Greenpeace: “I fear for the end of the
Enlightenment. I fear an intellectual Gulag with Greenpeace as my prison guards.”

The radical Left is already running amok inside the city, preparing the way for this neo-Marxist
takeover. They have already taken over most of the Universities and most of the Media. Their
sacred cow is the climate change dogma because it is their big stick to beat up on Capitalism,

28

Back to top

Western Civilization and all the freedoms of the Enlightenment. Using political correctness, identity
politics, the manipulation of language itself, plus the tactics of censorship and intimidation, they are
shutting down freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and an individual’s right to her own
worldview and values. Anyone who has not seen this going on right now in Universities and other
speaking venues would have to be living under a rock.

At stake here is the right of every individual to choose their own story and to live their own story. At
stake too is every person’s right to form their own worldview, determine their own values, live by
the dictates of their own conscience, and enjoy the right to free speech and free assembly. All this
comes under the umbrella of what is broadly called freedom of religion. On that freedom depends
our hard won political and economic freedoms.

This rock of human freedom, however, has proved to be a hard old rock. The first experiment in
World Socialism came to grief on it. We can be confident that neo-Marxism, which is being carried
on the wings of climate change catastrophism, will also be smashed to pieces on that same old rock.
We have nothing to fear for the future except we forget that freedom was our civilization’s finest
achievement. To cite Macaulay again, “On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but
improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

Further Reading

29

Back to top

Articles
Patrick Moore, Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
Matt Ridley, Global Warming versus Global Greening
Indur Goklany, Carbon Dioxide: The Good News
CO₂ Coalition: Climate Change and Health

Websites
CO₂ Science (Craig Idso –the world’s leading expert on C02 benefits to agriculture and plant life)
CO₂ Coalition (Carbon Dioxide Benefits the World)

Newsletter
GWPF Newsletter (Highly recommended)

Books
D. Weston Allen, The Weather Makers Re-examined (Irenic Publications)
Jennifer Marohasy (Editor), Climate Change. The Facts 2017 (Institute of Public Affairs)
Stephen Moore and Kathleen Hartnett White, Fueling Freedom. Exposing the Mad War on Energy
Alex Epstein, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
Ian Plimer, Heaven and Earth. Global Warming: The Missing Science
Indur M. Goklany, The Improving State of the World. Why we’re Living Longer, Healthier, More
Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet

30

Back to top

Download the PDF File below:

To read this paper in full, click on the attachment below:

Click on the link below to read this essay in full:

Since the 16^th century three great paradigm shifts have seriously called into question the religious traditions of the Christian West.

Whilst the scientific disciplines have been able to adapt to these paradigm shifts, the religious establishments have been thrown into disarray and insecurity, and especially because they have been shackled by their own claims to either ecclesiastical or Biblical infallibility.

The first great paradigm shift was the Copernican Revolution.

The heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus freed humanity from the mythic heavens of supernatural beings, be they gods or demons, and gave us the secular heavens governed by the laws of physics. No longer was the earth to be seen as Dante’s centre of the universe with heaven above and hell beneath. In the new cosmology, the sun did not rotate around the earth as the Church and the Bible implied, but the earth actually moved (contrary to what the Church and the Bible emphatically stated) around the sun.

The religious authorities of the 16^th century clearly perceived that the heliocentric theory of the universe was a dire threat to their grand narrative of the world. The integrity of the Christian message was tied to a worldview that was part and parcel of that narrative. As one great churchman had put it, “There are four principle winds, four pillars that hold up the sky, and four corners of the universe; therefore it is only right there be four Gospels.”

Of all of the great ideas in history, this notion, set forth by Nicholas Copernicus, in his book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium in 1543, was probably the most important, for its consequences were so far reaching. It set off a huge wave of controversy. At first it was just a ripple. But this ripple soon grew into a huge tidal wave of opposition to this heretical idea.

In order to appreciate why this idea was so vehemently opposed, one needs to understand the official cosmology of the church and its reasons for promoting this cosmology. This cosmology was largely derived from Dante’s Divine Comedy, which itself was, ironically, derived partly from Muslim teachings…

Dante paints a vivid picture of the universe, with the Earth at its center, hell being located in the very center of the Earth, and heaven, above… This view of the universe was so congruent with Christian doctrine that it would not easily yield to a new view of the universe no matter how much evidence there may be in support of a new view. Ever since its publication, the cosmology of Dante’s book had been an important part of the theology of the Church, both Catholic and Protestant. With mankind’s position, balanced precariously between heaven and hell, it painted a vivid picture and reinforced the basic belief system of the church. Morality, cosmology, and theology were completely intertwined.

At first the opposition came only from Protestant circles. One of the first to speak out against this new heresy was Martin Luther. He called Copernicus a fool, pointing out, that the biblical story of Joshua clearly states that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the Earth. Other Protestants soon joined in. Calvin cited the opening verse of psalm 93-“The Earth is stabilized that it cannot be moved.” Church officials began to search the bible with a fine tooth comb, looking for passages that “prove” Copernicus is wrong. Eventually the Catholic Church joined in the battle, banning Copernicus’s book in the year 1610.

Copernicus’s heliocentric theory was so violently opposed, not so much because it contradicted the bible, which it does, but because it made nonsense out of the official theology of Christianity…

Here are the main objections to the heliocentric theory, as pointed out by the pope himself. If Earth is just another planet, circling the sun with the other planets, how can the Earth be a place of iniquity and sin, with devils below and angels above? He said that Copernicus’s theory makes a mockery of the ascension of Christ, because if the Earth is orbiting the sun, how could Christ have ascended up to heaven? If the stars are not the lights of heaven, but actually other suns, as the theory suggests, then God, in His infinite goodness, would have created inhabitants on them too. How could Christ have died for the sins of all of the inhabitants of these other planets? Many Copernicans believed that the universe was infinite. This was one of the worst heresies of all. If the universe is infinite, then where can the throne of God be located? No wonder the pope said that the Copernican heresy is the greatest threat there has ever been to Christianity and should be wiped out at all costs.

The church’s position was totally wrong, back to front, upside down and contrary to reality.

It took the Church a very long time to sense that it had lost its battle with the Copernican worldview. Yet even whilst finally admitting that Copernicus was right, it still tried to carry on with its mythic narrative of the universe as if nothing had happened to render it so much meaningless mumbo jumbo.

The Copernican Revolution was only the beginning of a far greater over-turning of the Church’s grand narrative of the world.

The second great paradigm shift was Darwin’s 19^th century biological revolution.

Wallace and Darwin clearly demonstrated that life forms such as plants, animals and humans did not suddenly appear on the earth in response to some creation fiat. Creation was not something that happened as recently as 4004 B.C. according to the grand narrative of the Christian religion. Creation was now to be seen as a process that has been going on for billions of years and as something that will continue into the future.

The Priestly author of Genesis 1 (P) dreamt that creation was finished by the seventh day. This writer, of course, was totally oblivious of the space/time realities of a modern scientific cosmology. We now know that if the expanding activity of our universe were to cease, the universe would collapse into the Big Crunch.

The Darwinian Revolution calls into question the age-old dogmas of the Fall of man from an original perfection, original sin, a literal Garden of Eden, the origin of death in the sin of Adam and the grand narrative of Fall and Redemption that Milton outlined so well in his Paradise Lost.

According to this very old religious narrative, death originated in the sin of man at the dawn of history. It is a monstrous dogma because it makes man ultimately responsible for death and everything else that goes wrong on the planet. The Biological Revolution presents an entirely different worldview wherein great carnivores like saber tooth tigers and dinosaurs roamed the earth long before humans were around. The complimentary science of geology found evidence of catastrophic upheavals and mass extinctions of life forms taking place long before humans had arrived on the scene.

The old narrative about the origin of death in the Fall of man has been exposed as a nonsense myth that is no better than the myth of the little three-story universe of the pre-Copernican age. Just think for a moment what the 16^th century divines were alleging. The earth is more than a million times smaller than the sun, yet it was supposed to generate sufficient gravity to cause the sun to orbit the earth.

The old creation myth is up-side-down, back-to-front and nothing like reality.

“Perhaps the greatest gift Darwin gave to humanity was the opportunity to see in all of life an ongoing, intelligent, creative drama.  Rather than thinking of a form of life as having been put on Earth in a fixed form at the beginning of time, we now see each form of life arising out of the Great Adventure.” Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story, p. 138

The third great paradigm shift was the universe of the Big Bang.

Prior to Einstein and Hubble, our Milky Way Galaxy was thought to comprise the entire “steady state” universe. We now know that our Milky Way Galaxy is just one of billions of other galaxies all containing billions of stars like our own sun. So far from being an enormous entity at the centre of the universe, planet earth has receded into being an almost infinitely small speck of star dust in one tiny little solar system within the Milky Way Galaxy. Further, there is no longer a “steady state” universe as formerly supposed, but one that is still rapidly expanding as the galaxies are driven apart by dark energy by at least the speed of light. These time/space realities indicate that our universe began with the Big Bang around 15 billion years ago.

The implications of these three paradigm shifts for theology are breathtaking. What a mind-blowing view of creation is now revealed compared to that little three-storied universe of the divines who relied upon the worldview of the Bible!  What do the time/space realities of a post-Hubble universe do to the old theology that is based on a primitive worldview?

Gone forever is this puny three-tiered universe of heaven above, hell below and humans in the middle, and wondering which way they will go.

Gone forever is the power of the old myths peddled by the Church and derived from a primitive worldview.

Copernicus and Galileo banished the mythical heavens of gods and demons and gave us secular heavens governed by the laws of physics. We now know that there are no laws operating out there/up there that are not operating down here, and there is no God up there that is not down here.

Gone forever are the ideas of a literal Fall of man, original sin and mankind being the originators of death.  The Biological Revolution sweeps away the mythic nonsense of pre-Enlightenment humans. Called into question are such doctrines as a bodily resurrection and ascension to heaven, eschatology and ideas of a Second Advent.  This is the time to let the fresh breeze of reality sweep away the mythic cobwebs from modern minds.

What is the wisdom of basing an entire theological edifice on an Adam who never existed and a literal Fall into original sin that didn’t happen?  Trotting out these old theological premises now is like bringing out the old mumbo jumbo used to fob off the challenge of Copernicus.

As we stand astonished before these three paradigm shifts that have swept away the myths of centuries, what remains of value is the life and teachings of the real historical Jesus.  None of his teachings, however, appear in any of the Creeds of the Church.  Those Creeds are concerned only with a mythical world and the mythical dogma about a mythical Person.
Clearly, what can’t survive are the following mythical ideas:

1. The mythical Second Adam. If the first Adam is mythic, so is the second one.
2. The pre-existence of Jesus. Jesus was not a space man. He didn’t live eternally in a heavenly world, nor was he born supernaturally on this planet in a way that defies the laws of genetics and DNA. The virgin birth stories (whether from Greek mythology of Christian mythology) are as mythical as the old cosmological order of gods in the sky and demons below us.
3. Jesus’ physical body did not rise from the grave and ascend into heaven. Physical objects don’t fly off into outer space. Even if his ascending physical body moved with the speed of light, he would not have moved far in two thousand years within a universe where some of nearest stars are millions of light years away.
4. His death was not required to undo Adam’s Fall and to open some mythical Pearly Gates in the sky.
5. Gone are all eschatological speculations about Millenniums, Raptures and a Second Coming. This latter is a doctrine of horrendous genocidal brutality. It teaches that at the Second Advent, all those living on the earth except for the elect believers will be delivered to destruction and everlasting punishment. No Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot inaugurated a mass extermination on this scale of all creatures living upon the earth. Billions of men, women and little children are all supposed to perish together at this glorious Second Advent. Such views rise out of incorrect ideas of the earth’s beginnings. If the notions of the beginnings are so obviously wrong, the notions about the conclusions to history will also be wrong.
6. Claims that Jesus is God or the second person of the Divine Trinity are also mythic imaginations that have more to do with old pagan myths than the Church has been prepared to admit. In any case, these are myths that belong to an outmoded cosmology.

Surviving the three great paradigm shifts associated with the breakthroughs of Copernicus, Darwin and Hubble is the real Jesus of history. Here is a flesh and blood Jesus with human parents, 46 chromosomes, normal cellular DNA and real brothers and sisters. This real Jesus of Nazareth, like the great prophets of the Old Testament before him, dared to teach the scandalous idea that being truly human (concerned about compassion and justice for all) was all-important whilst being religious had no importance at all. He brought to his very religious and myth-dominated culture a new vision of unconditional love, forgiveness and justice that would embrace the whole human family without discrimination on account of creed, social standing or race. Unlike the Church that followed on after him, he freed rather than enslaved people to religious dogma and myths.

“I have a dream…” Martin Luther King Jr.

“You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one…” John Lennon, Imagine

I too have dreamed…

There was a tribe that lived happily together in the rainforest. They were like one big happy family who worked, played and sang together under the stars.

One day a shaman arrived declaring that the Great Spirit of the forest had a plan to bestow his endless favours on everyone who put devotion to the Great Spirit above everything else, even above family or friends.

The shaman said that the great One had set aside the beautiful white sandstone rock from the cliffs beside their river as a sacred symbol and reminder of the great One’s presence and promise. Every family in the village should now set up an uncarved slab of this rock before each family hut as the sign of devotion to the great One and as a sign that they were the great One’s special people on earth.

At first it made the tribe very happy to think they had this sign and sacrament of the great One’s presence among them. And they dedicated themselves to the great One’s praise and devotion.

After the passage of time, someone discovered that there were two distinct kinds of sandstone rock that could be hewn from the great cliffs that rose up beside the river flowing through the village. One had a yellow tinge containing what looked like tiny flecks of metal. The other sandstone had an off-white texture with a light greyish tinge.

An argument developed in the village about who had the right kind of rock. Some of the villagers had one kind of rock and some another. Some of them were persuaded to change their rocks, but others clung tenaciously either to one kind of rock or the other. In their zeal to honour the great One, some began to accuse and criticize those deemed to have the wrong kind of rock. They even said that those who did not have the right kind of rock should be expelled from the village.

Still later, it was discovered that not all the yellowish or the greyish sandstone was the same. At least a dozen different kinds of sandstone rock were identified. The tribe became divided according to how many kinds of sacred rocks were identified. It seemed that the more dedicated the people were to the great One, the more divided they became over the issue of the right kind of rock to use as the symbol of the great One’s favour and presence. Discord about the sacred rocks led to strife, endless arguments, mutual hostility and shunning of those judged to have the wrong kind of rock. In some cases it even came to bloodshed.

Because their zeal to honour the great One was done in the great One’s name, no one felt guilty about hurting their own tribespeople in this way. They were simply putting the great One first and making devotion to the great One take precedence over all human relationships. Each group within the tribe said that they alone had the true sacrament of the great One’s presence whilst the others were either deluded or disobedient. The once happy tribe was racked with bitter divisions and hatreds over this issue of identifying and distinguishing what was supposed to be sacred rock and what was supposed to be common rock.

And so it came about that the very thing that was supposed to unite them only succeeded in dividing them.

Violence in the Name of the Sacred

I dreamed again…

All over the earth it seemed that people were divided by a multitude of sacred things. Whilst some were divided over the issue of sacred rocks, others were divided over the issue of sacred animals. Others again were divided about sacred places.  Then there were sacred times, sacred food, sacred water, sacred ceremonies, sacred garments, sacred books, sacred dogma, sacred mediators and all kinds of sacred institutions to guard and promote whatever  was deemed to be sacred.

All over the earth people were condemning, despising, banishing, imprisoning and killing other people whose sacred things were different. It seemed that the more devout people were, the more they mistreated those deemed to have sacralized the wrong rocks, animals, places, times, and water, food, garments, dogma, books and what have you. And all this inhumanity, of course, was done in the name and for the honour and glory of their Transcendent One.

It seemed that those who were religiously committed were not civil, and those who were civil were no longer religiously committed.

Then there arose a sage of obscure parentage from an obscure village in an obscure province. Except for having a simple and remarkable wisdom, he was a very ordinary man who refused any title of honour except to be called ben Adam in the Hebrew tongue of his ancestors or bar nasha in the Aramaic tongue of his people. In either case, it only meant that he was just a son of [ordinary] humanity. His full name was Joshua ben Adam in Hebrew or Yeshua bar Nasha in Aramaic.

Josh or Yesu began teaching a strange new thing called the good news of the kingdom of the Abba. (Abba was another Aramaic word which meant dearest papa or daddy). Anyhow, this was a message about a new kind of universal brotherhood. He invited the somebodies and the nobodies, the politically correct and incorrect, the insiders and the outsiders, the elite and the marginals to celebrate its arrival with eating and drinking together, without distinction of creed, class or gender, and without any of the old animal-like pecking order of superiors and inferiors.

In this new brotherhood/sisterhood, no one would hold anything against anybody on the grounds of any thing, especially in regard to silly or trivial distinctions between things deemed sacred and profane, clean and unclean.

The sage said that people were the sole bearers of the image of the transcendent Abba and the only sacrament of his presence – and nothing else was sacred. Henceforth the only way to honour and serve any Transcendent reality was to honour and serve one another, but especially people who were sick, poor, ignorant, despised, lonely, forsaken, cast out, oppressed and needing any kind of human help. In this new order of humanity, the only way anyone could love or reverence the Unseen Abba was to unconditionally love, forgive and minister to ordinary people as the bearers of the Abba’s image and presence.

The teaching of this sage was deemed to be so dangerous by both the religious and civil authorities of his day that he was hurriedly executed for blasphemy and sedition. What he said could not be put to death, however, and his spirit lived on proving that there is something stronger than death. This spawned a movement that proclaimed his greatness.

At first they said he was the Messiah of his own tribe. As his fame spread to the Greco-Roman world of that day, his legend also grew. He was given the title son of God, a title that was identical to inscriptions on the coins bearing the image of Caesar Augustus. He was even said to be virgin born like Augustus, Alexander the Great and all the great heroes and divinities of Greek mythology. By the fourth century the movement that bore his name had become a great Institution. It used its full authority to proclaim that the humble peasant was God Almighty in the highest and most absolute sense

The creeds and dogmas of this great religious Institution were now totally focused on the worship of this man. Those creeds and dogmas said absolutely nothing about his message. The man had replaced the message. The iconoclast had become the icon. Soon this great Institution was condemning, banishing, flogging, burning and killing legions of people in his name with pogroms, burnings, Crusades and Inquisitions.  It set up more sacred things than ever in his name. It created more sacred books, sacred creeds, sacred garments, sacred ceremonies, sacred water, sacred meals, sacred times, sacred places, sacred relics, sacred traditions and myths than any of the old shamans could have shaken a stick at. And it imposed this plethora of sacred things on millions on pain of temporal punishments and eternal damnation.

Could anything be more antithetical to this humble sage, this ordinary man – because son of man was all he ever claimed to be – than this hierarchical Institution that was so chock full of so many sacred altars on which to slaughter so many innocent people?

Imagine…

Then there arose a wind of awesome destructiveness. I was amazed that it did not blow down a single tree, destroy a single flower or hurt a single person. But it blew away every single myth, legend and sacred thing that had been erected in Josh’s name and every other name. The wind seemed to be laughing as it swept all this stuff up in its furious path, and I thought that it sounded like the laugh of Josh when he knocked over all that religious stuff at the temple in Jerusalem so long ago (That’s another story, that I can’t stop to explain just now).

When this wind had passed, nothing remained but the clearest light of a candle in the dark. It was the light kindled by Josh so long ago and nothing had been able to put it out. And the only sacred thing left now was ordinary human people doing very ordinary human things for one another.

ABOU BEN ADAM

Abou ben Adam (may his tribe increase!)

awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,

And saw, within the moonlight of his room,

Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,

an angel, writing in a book of gold.

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adam bold,

And to the Prescence in the room he said:

“What writest thou?” The vision raised its head,

And, with a look made of all sweet accord,

Answered, “The names of those who love the Lord.”

“And is mine one?”said Abou, “Nay, not so,”

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,

But cheerily still, and said, “I pray thee, then,

Write me as one who loves his fellow men.”

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night

It came again, with a great awakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blest,

And lo! ben Adam’s name led all the rest.

Leigh Hunt

Henceforth, according to the prophet from Galilee, the Father was not to be found in a distant heaven but was entirely identified with the cause of men and women. Jesus’ doctrine of the kingdom meant that God had become incarnate: He had poured himself out, had disappeared into mankind and could be found nowhere else but there…The doctrine of the kingdom meant that henceforth and forever God was present only in and as one’s neighbour. Jesus dissolved the fanciful speculations of apocalyptic eschatology into the call to justice and charity.

Thomas Sheehan

The environmental movement began as a protest against Western culture’s alienation from nature. This alienation was said to have its roots in the Judeo-Christian heritage that sets man apart as a special creation above the natural kingdom (see Genesis 1:28, 29). Environmentalism advanced the antithesis that puts an all-wise Mother Nature on a pedestal above the human race. The natural is lauded and, to quote an old one-liner, “only man is vile.”

There is a very pervasive anti-human bias in environmentalism, and it is expressed in a bias against human technology, economic growth and human prosperity. Global warming theory is popular because it is just another big stick to beat up on human activity. Human activity cops the blame for everything from the disappearing green tree frogs to almost any natural disaster.

It is as if Augustine’s old doctrine of original has come back to haunt us again. It was a doctrine that said every single calamity on the earth, including the disaster of death itself, was all man’s fault – or was it woman’s fault? Anyhow, in this present orgie of human blaming, eagerly supported by media sensationalism, the alienation of man from nature has become worse than what it was before environmentalism tried to correct it.

I want to propose that we look at our human relationship to nature in a new way. This will be like putting on a whole new pair of glasses that puts biotechnology and every other kind of human technology in a much more positive light.

I propose that we recognize that the same natural evolutionary process that brought bees, birds and mammals into existence, has also brought Homo sapiens into existence. By saying this I am not trying to empty this emergence of everything of its awe and wonder. I am just pointing out the scientific reality that humankind emerged through the same natural processes as every other living thing. This means that the human species is nature too.

If every other form of life made up of living cells with genes and DNA is what we call nature, then Homo sapiens, whose genes are 98.7% the same as the chimpanzee, is also nature. When ants accomplish an amazing feat of technology in constructing a termite’s nest, or elephants make water holes with their feet, or beavers construct a dam across a stream, we call that nature. On what basis can we then say that human technology is man-made rather than natural? This is philosophical and scientific nonsense, yet we keep repeating this nonsense like the slogan of the pigs in Animal Farm, “Four legs good, two legs bad” – as if what is done by a creature with four legs, six legs or no legs is natural and must be good for the environment, whereas what is done by a creature with two legs is man-made and must be bad for the environment.

If human intelligence evolved through the same natural process that produced a fox’s cunning and a beaver’s dexterity, then all human intelligence is natural and all human technology is natural. I am not saying it is necessarily good, but it’s undeniably as natural as the technology of a bee hive, the weaving of a spider’s web or the navigational equipment of migratory birds.

In human consciousness nature has finally become conscious of itself. “We may think of ourselves,” says the great mythologist Joseph Campbell, “as the functioning ears and eyes and mind of this earth.” Heretofore nature could only act in a random order of hit and miss. As such, nature has often been wasteful and prone to structural flaws, as the ABC science reporter, Robyn Williams, has made all too clear in his recent satire, Unintelligent Design. But now Mother Nature has acquired in this human mind what Julian Simon has called “the ultimate resource,” and a power that the brilliant Princeton physicist, Freeman Dyson, has described as being “infinite in all directions.”

“Nature has structural flaws and physical limitations” writes Greg Easterbrook (A Moment on the Earth) “Genus Homo may be able to change that. People may be here because nature needs us – perhaps needs us desperately…There is no reason in principle why nature ought to oppose the arrival of the high-speed analytical powers of the mind. Nature may have been dreaming of these very powers for 3.8 billion years.” (pp.668-669). This is why the late physicist Heinz Pagel could write in Dreams of Reason that it is high time that we discard “the radical distinction between mind and nature.” This includes, of course, the distinction between natural and man-made. RDB