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 The Western Axial Age is completed in Jesus Christ Jesus'
early life and works
 His
teachings
 His
death and resurrection
 The world's reaction to these events – then and now |
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A word of caution: Jesus and Christianity - not exactly the same thing
It is important to note up front that Jesus and what has come down to us two thousand years later as Christianity are not necessarily the same thing. Jesus was certainly the founder of the Christian faith. But over the centuries that faith evolved, as all mystical teachings tend to do, into a formal religion - complete with doctrine, offices, rituals, etc. - that have very much changed the character of Christianity since its founding. Cultural and political influences have profoundly impacted the Christian 'faith' - giving it not only a very much more complex character than it had at its founding, but also a huge variation in how that faith has taken on different shapes and behaviors across the world. Jesus the mystic
Jesus was a teacher, a mystic in fact, who summed up or 'completed' the Axial Age ... especially the mystical side of the equation. He was a moralist like Confucius and Socrates in that he understood that good works were a vital part of a happy or successful life. But he went beyond that, way beyond that, in explaining how ordinary people, all of whom struggle with human sin and weakness, can achieve such success. Like Zoroaster he saw man as caught up in the middle of a great cosmic battle between good and evil, in which the larger purpose of human life was to join with the forces of good in that cosmic struggle against evil. But more like the Daoist Lao Zi, he understood that the ability to carry out this great moral assignment occurs only with the help of heaven itself ... by us forming some kind of personal union with the very power of heaven - or as most of the Jews of his time understood things, the very power of God himself. God as "Abba"
But according to Jesus, this God was not some fearsome cosmic giant who needed to be appeased by sacrifices and self-abasement. This God was to be understood as a great Father, a Father that children would even call "Daddy" - the literal meaning of "Abba" which he used constantly in reference to God - an Abba of passionate love for his children, an Abba willing to bend over backwards to help his children (any and all who would look to him indeed as Abba and thus would qualify as his children or "sons" and "daughters" of God.) Properly religious Jews of Jesus' day were scandalized that he would bring God down from heights of power to place him alongside us as Abba; they also were shocked at the implication of this use of the term 'Abba' for this would put us in the position of being sons and daughters of the Most High God. This was blasphemous to the ears of a "righteous" Jew. In the end their shock was what enabled them morally to have Jesus put to death on a Roman cross, unwittingly serving as the last grand act of atonement before God for human sin, then, now and forever. Human empowerment with God's own Spirit
Jesus preached what was basically a mysticial union between man and God in which we brought to the struggles of life our good intentions ... and God delivered to us his very own power (his Spirit .. the 'Holy Spirit') to enable us to refine (or even alter drastically) those good intentions (tained with sinful self-promotion) ... so that we should then live only by God's perfect intentions. As we found 'oneness' with him, in and through his power, our lives would move forward victoriously in this cosmic struggle against evil ... evil mostly of our own doing. Our human powers in this struggle were not unimportant. But they also were not the critical factor in the struggle - because victory in this struggle belonged not to the most powerful of people, but to the ones - whatever their background, accomplishments, their status - willing to bring themselves to full union with God simply through their trust or faith in him as Abba. Children even qualified. In fact Jesus pointed out that children's very simplicity in the way they approached life better qualified them for entry into Heaven - into the midst of the cosmic company joined with God in the struggle. Indeed, the rich and the 'accomplished' of this world would sadly have the greatest difficulty in finding their way into this cosmic company ... simply because in this struggle they would want to rely on their own achievements or powers rather than on the powers of God - something or someone they could not control and thus were not likely to trust. And without that faith-based trust in God and his fatherly care or provision ('Providence'), they would never see victory. |
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 Jesus
of Nazareth (ca. 5 or 4 BC to 30 AD?) was the source of this phenomenon
known as 'Christianity.' His Jewish Messianic movement made the
tremendous contribution to our Western understanding of life by casting
it not only in orderly but also in loving terms. Life as
presented by Jesus was not only orderly, regular, just – but it was
also a joyous, graceful event. Further, life had eternal
qualities to it – if one would but trust the gracious architect of all
life: God, the heavenly 'Father.' Jesus himself seemed to have had a very brief tenure as teacher, prophet, "Anointed One" (Christ). In his own time he was widely recognized as a charismatic Jewish teacher (rabbi) and healer operating chiefly in the Jewish province of Galilee. Many came quickly to believe the he was indeed the long-awaited Messiah — the Son of David and of God. His followers believed strongly that he had been sent by God to usher in this glorious age of God's Divine Rule: the Day of the Lord when the Kingdom of Heaven established itself throughout the earth. Indeed, Jesus himself had announced over and over again the coming of this eternal kingdom. But this eternal kingdom was not merely a place of pure order. It was even more importantly a place of pure love – a love which flowed from the essence of God to the heart of the believer. And it was a kingdom that touched the believer for all eternity. The "historical" Jesus
Jesus is a figure that is almost impossible to pin down historically ... at least in the way we do 'history' today. Jesus is one whose life is shrouded in mystery – great mystery – as is befitting one whom millions of people have attested through the ages to be the living Christ, the Son of God. It is faith – not facts – that seems to define him as a historical personage. True, we do have the accounts of his brief (3-year?) ministry contained in the 4 gospels. But these appear to be more the testimonies of faith about his very nature or being than true ‘history’ as we think of it today. The apostle Paul, whose Christian writings seem to be the earliest we have on record, was almost totally silent about the actual life of Jesus. Also, little attention to or understanding of him was made by the larger Roman world until centuries after Jesus had come and gone. We have virtually no facts about Jesus that stand apart from the testimonies of his own faithful followers and their disciples. But certainly something did happen that caused a group of most common folk to become most un-common in their awesome and fearless support of Jesus' Messianic and Divine claim. These people were willing to brave cruel rejection, pain, even death so firm was their belief in the truth of their claims about Jesus. This is faith speaking – not science. Yet faith comes to truth in its own way and in the end may be the most valid claim for truth of all. The birth of Jesus
Again: fact is difficult to come by concerning the birth of Jesus. His birth to a virgin through the work of God's Spirit is an amazing claim – one that the earliest of the Christian writers, Paul, fails to take note of. But then Paul makes almost no mention in his many letters about the actual life/ministry of Jesus. Reading his letters, one would in fact get almost no historical knowledge about Jesus except that he was crucified (put to death on a Roman cross) and raised from the dead to appear through some form of self-manifestation to many (500+) of his followers. But Mark and John, specifically writing in witness to the life and death of Jesus, also make no mention of his most unusual birth in their respective gospels. The Gospel writer, Luke, writing a history from the recordings of unspecified primary sources, depicts Jesus as born to a Mary and Joseph of Nazareth, who were forced because of a Roman census to travel (Mary near-term in her pregnancy by the Holy Spirit) across Palestine to Bethlehem. They had to make this trip because they were of the descent of the ancient Israelite king, David, and because therefore Bethlehem (City of David) was their ancestral home, where they needed to go to be counted in the census. Here in Bethlehem Mary quietly and humbly gave birth to her first-born son, Jesus, and she and Joseph brought him to Jerusalem a week later to be covenanted in accordance with Jewish customs. The presumption is that they eventually returned to Nazareth, where Jesus grew up alongside his carpenter father – who passed from the picture sometime before Jesus began his ministry as an adult. The remaining historian, Matthew, comes in on the story of Jesus' birth from a different angle – focusing more fully on how the ancient promise of an Anointed One (Messiah or Christ) from the line of David was fulfilled in the birth of Jesus (again – by the work of the Holy Spirit). Matthew does not mention the Roman political underpinning of the birth story – but instead focuses his story on the treachery of Jewish royal politics under King Herod. Indeed, in Matthew there is no mention of Mary and Joseph's original Nazareth connections – and the painful trip to Bethlehem. Nazareth gets brought into the story only later as a place of refuge away from potential persecution by the Herodians. Jesus' date of birth. When was Jesus born? A medieval monk sat down and counted the years back from his time to the time he felt that Jesus had to have been born – and that then became to him and to the Christian world since then: Year 1. But more recent scholarship has shown that he miscalculated a bit, for Herod died several years before this Year 1 – and if Jesus had been born before Herod died (as Matthew tells us) then Jesus might have been born 4 or 5, or more, years prior to Year 1. Jesus' youth
Except for a brief story told in Luke of Jesus' visit in his 12th year to the temple in Jerusalem, none of the historians (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) make mention of him again in their respective stories until the time of his baptism by the highly esteemed prophet John the Baptist. We do not know exactly that Jesus was himself a carpenter for the mention of carpentry is ambiguously assigned to him either as the carpenter, the son of Joseph or as the son of the carpenter Joseph. Probably both are true – father and son alike probably were occupied in the trade of carpentry. Jesus and John the Baptist
Did Jesus first serve as a disciple of John the Baptist before he began his own ministry? Some suggest that his baptism by John implies this. But maybe not. Many who were not his disciples were nonetheless baptized by John. Certainly their relationship is important – though not clear. Luke tells us that they were kinsmen through their mothers. But the relationship that would have meant most to them would have been with respect to their particular calling from God. This might at first glance appear to be a fairly straightforward matter in the way that John defers to Jesus at Jesus' baptism. But the searching questions that John later has for Jesus seem to make this relationship less clear. Then too, Jesus seems not to have really launched his ministry until after the arrest of John. Was there any significance in this timing? Jesus's early ministry
From Matthew, Mark and Luke we get a picture of Jesus' ministry that seems to follow a fairly closely scripted scenario: Jesus' ministry lasted only a single year, in and around Galilee – and his journey to Jerusalem was the closing of that ministry. It is from John we get the idea that Jesus' ministry lasted over two years – on the basis of his many trips to Jerusalem to be present at the important Jewish festivals. Matthew, Mark and Luke (the ‘Synoptic’ Gospels) mention Satan's wilderness testing of Jesus' in his resolve to be God's true Son – not seduced into following the agenda of the quite unspiritual ‘world’ around him. In his follow-up to this episode Luke tells of Jesus' early conflict in Nazareth over serving God versus serving the expectations of his own hometown folks – just to drive this point home. In the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) Jesus seems more ‘human’ as in his discipline of daily prayer with God, whom he knew as ‘Father.’ As a man, Jesus needed to move and shift his work as he was led forward by this prayerful relationship he had with the Father. The signs and miracles of Jesus
Jesus' ministry included healings of the sick, raisings of the dead, feedings of the multitudes from virtually no real resources, controlling even of nature and its processes. In the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) these were all given as ‘signs’ of the power of God the Father to meet human faith in providing for our needs. Indeed, Jesus stressed in his ministry the vital importance of human faith in meeting all human contingencies in life – the kinds of contingencies that we mortals spent too much time worrying about! In the Gospel of John these signs and miracles take on an added importance. In fact the Gospel of John, rather than being a true history, is really a story about these signs and miracles. In this Gospel, these signs and miracles have one purpose – to testify to the divinity of Jesus. Here human faith plays a lesser role than the sheer ability of Jesus to work these miracles on behalf of a spiritually needy people. |
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The Providence of God — and the Derivative Righteousness of Man
The all-critical nature of faith. While Jesus did not invent the notion that faith is the key to understanding and utilizing the vast powers of the universe, he certainly popularized the notion – and established it as Christianity's greatest insight. The providence of God. We were expected to have this faith – because God had over and over again demonstrated that he could be totally relied upon for all the necessities of life. God had laid out a perfect universe, had provided for all things as a part of the harmony of the whole. God had a loving regard for all creation, all creatures within it, great and small. In his divine consciousness, God was fully able to be lovingly mindful of the needs of every part of creation, from the requirements of the sub-atomic particle to the requirements the galaxies. Of course these latter examples are modern metaphors. But there is no question that Jesus understood that God had all things under his loving scrutiny and protection. Living for "other." Jesus also taught that we would be better served to spend more time in the care of others than in the care of ‘self.’ Focus on ‘self’ was merely the mark of how strongly the sin of personal anxiety gripped our lives. Giving ourselves over to others, on the other hand, was the testimony of how much we had been set free to live by the pure grace of God and his divine provision. The eternal or heavenly kingdom. Finally, Jesus tied this freedom to live beyond oneself now with the freedom to live eternally as well. Such freedom in a person's life was the sign of the presence of the true Kingdom of God. It was a spiritual kingdom – one which transcended mortal existence – and which brought the soul into a highly transcendent and ‘eternal’ existence. To achieve such eternal existence (everlasting fellowship with God) was to Jesus the goal of all life. Failure – and forgiveness
Jesus clearly understood that what all of us are up against in our need to be rejoined with our providential Father is the fallenness of human nature. We all have the instinct for sin. We all are children of Adam and Eve, still trying to control things ourselves, still turning our backs on God's providence, plotting and planning our own success (and the failure of our competitors – including even nature as competitor!). As Jesus saw things, unless we get off this self-centered track, we are fated never to connect with the higher realm of life. Unless we, during this earthly life, get beyond a "fallen" preoccupation with our mortal condition, with our earthly fortunes, we will never reach fellowship with God. If we fail to refix our gaze on "heavenly" matters, our soul will never become graduated to a spiritual state that abides in the household of God forever. Jesus understood this possibility of failure in life's enterprise. It was a very real danger to him, one that gave special urgency to his work. Jesus was not willing to see any fail. Forgive failure? Yes – a thousand times ‘yes’! It was vitally important that those who failed (namely everyone) not be crippled by sin and failure. It was absolutely necessary to put failure behind, get up again, and move on. Jesus – the "Good Shepherd"
But pretend that it was okay to fail: no, a thousand times "no." Jesus was determined to get as many "sheep" up that mountain to good pasturage – and was not going to abide any weak excuses for any of his flock not to get moving in that direction. That's what made him the Good Shepherd. In short: the message of Jesus was basically for all people to trust in the goodness of God. It was the gracious work of God — not the industrious or even moral works of man — that brought truth, goodness and beauty to human life. Life under grace ... rather than the law
Jesus often sniped at the Pharisees' vision of human righteousness arising through strict observance of the Jewish purity laws. To Jesus, the purity that God sought from his people was an internal disposition – not an external moral discipline undertaken by the religiously rigorous. Indeed, Jesus saw such rigorism as producing a distancing of the human heart from the power of God's goodness – not a movement towards it. Jesus saw this rigorism not as a measure of our faith in God – but as a measure of our determination to grasp at righteousness through our own religious controls. Jesus offered the world a quite different path to righteousness. If we would let go of our anxieties about life, our grasping natures concerning our own existence, we would discover the real power of life. Our pretentious to "control" over life were vain – 'vanities of vanities' as ancient Jewish wisdom put it. Jesus at times put this matter pretty bluntly. We could trust in our own devices – even our own 'virtues' to get us through life. But this was not really going to get us into 'eternity' – into God's Kingdom. Such worldly achievements would die with us at the end of our earthly life. Only surrender of these very self-serving instincts (including the desire to make ourselves moral 'superiors') and a willingness to take up truly sacrificial living, living beyond ourselves, would bring us full blessing, joy, peace – and eternal life. Troubles with the Jewish authorities
Clearly this message did not sit well with the "accomplished" and "virtuous" citizens of his times. Apparently he argued frequently with them. And it seems fairly clear that this was the group responsible for having him put to death as a dangerous trouble-maker. |
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A shift in his agenda: his death on the Roman cross
It seems, according to the synoptic gospels, that in the early stages of his ministry Jesus assumed (sharing the same vision as John the Baptist) that his primary mission was to bring the Jews to repentance, for repentance was necessary to prepare the people for the coming of the Kingdom of God, the arrival of the Son of Man, all of which would be accompanied by Divine judgment – a terrible event for those unrepentant individuals still tainted by sin. But even though Jesus never lost sight of this goal, it would appear from the account of the synoptic gospels that as he progressed through his ministry another agenda seemed to loom into ever grander view for Jesus: to be the Suffering Servant who would die in atonement for the sins of others. Jesus began to speak more frequently about his impending death in Jerusalem at the hands of the religious authorities, even specifically of death on the cross. Several sections of Isaiah in the Hebrew Scriptures spoke specifically concerning such a self-sacrifice of God's Anointed One. But it seems that only Jesus in his own lifetime understood that his work was to be completed not with Israel's repentance, but with his own atoning death for the salvation of the people. This was to be his messianic call: being the Suffering Servant. Rejection by "mainline" Judaism
Rabbinical Judaism fiercely rejected any kind of messianic claim on the part of Jesus. True, most Jews were indeed expecting a Messiah – but the majority were expecting one who would come as a military liberator after the fashion of David, the ancient and much revered king. When Jesus came more as a prophet – more as an Isaiah than a David – this became problematic for much of the Jewish community. Indeed, Jesus had offered spiritual counsel to the multitudes – not military strategy. In fact he clearly had distanced himself from the fierce mood of Jewish nationalism flaring up in those days against the Roman occupation. Worse, Jesus had been breezy with the Jewish Law – proposing to replace it with the law of forgiveness, healing and love. This made him and his movement totally unacceptable to mainstream Judaism. Jesus was perceived as a false prophet and his movement as a blasphemous heresy – no minor matter in orthodox Judaism. Betrayal and death on the Roman cross
At a meeting of the Jewish supreme council (Sanhedrin) it was decided to have Jesus arrested as a troublemaker and be put to death by the Roman authorities as an anti-Roman insurrectionist. Jesus had undertaken no such action or threat to the Roman social order … ever. But it served the purposes of the Jewish authorities who wanted this challenger to their well-put-together legal order be eliminated … except that under Roman dominion, they had no power to order such an execution. Sadly at the same time one of his own very close and important disciples, Judas, felt betrayed by Jesus’ failure to live up to the messianic agenda (a military uprising against the Roman occupiers of the Jewish homeland) that the Jews all seemed to anticipate. And thus Judas agreed to cooperate with the Jewish supreme council (Sanhedrin) in its efforts to remove Jesus from the scene. Jesus’s arrest. Sadly even one of his own very close and important disciples, Judas, felt betrayed by Jesus’ failure to live up to the messianic agenda that the Jews all seemed to anticipate. And thus he agreed to cooperate with the Jewish Sanhedrin in the arrest of Jesus. Jesus would then be turned over to the Roman governor, Pilate, as an insurrectionist – and the Jews would let Rome take matters from there. Jesus's death on the Roman cross. The normal punishment for insurrection was death on a Roman cross – a most horrible form of slow death meant, by its anguished display of a dying criminal just outside the city’s gates, to teach local passers-by a lesson about the dangers of attempting to challenge the Roman order. And so the drama unfolded. Jesus was crucified (nailed to a Roman cross) and when he finally died he was removed to the tomb of a Jewish sympathizer. Guards were posted at the tomb to prevent his body being removed by his followers. When Jesus's body was entombed and his grave put under Temple guard, his followers were thrown into confusion and despair. How could God have let this happen? Ironically, they all had unknowingly witnessed the last – and most important – sacrifice for the divine cleansing of human sin … then and forever Jesus’ resurrection appearances
But then reports of mysterious appearances of Jesus – the 'Risen Lord' – began to come forth. On the 3rd day after his death some women came to the grave to get permission to give his body the usual ceremonial anointing, they were shocked to find the tomb empty. The disciples, who were in hiding out of a fear that they would follow their leader’s path to a Roman cross (for the close followers of an insurrectionist usually shared the fate of their leader), were dumbfounded by the women’s news. The disciples came to check it out and also saw that the tomb was empty. Then Mary Magdalene followed ... and there was confronted by a mysterious appearance of the Lord himself. Also some other disciples encountered the ‘risen Lord’ on a trip out of Jerusalem. Then finally Jesus appeared directly to the disciples as they gathered in hiding from the Roman authorities. Such appearances to his disciples in something other than an earthly format – physically real, yet not fully, was massively shocking. This was something that none of those affected quite knew what to make of. Nothing like this was known ever to have happened before in human experience. They were awed – and transformed – by the experience. These resurrection appearances were fairly numerous1 – and completely altered the character of the movement. The sightings were understood as being God's ultimate testimony that indeed Jesus was the Son of God, sent to bring the rest of God's children to a similar life that would not end at the grave. Jesus was alive in heaven with the Father – for all eternity – as all believers also would be one day. But these sightings also altered the character of Jesus’ closest followers. Peter was changed from a cowardly braggart into a strong and truly fearless leader within the movement – fully ready to step forward to take up the ministry where Jesus had left off. So it was also for the other disciples who had been close to Jesus. They now became ‘apostles,’ ones ‘sent out’ to confront the world with God’s message or ‘good news’ for all mankind summed up in the life and death of Jesus. The Holy Spirit. This change in character was understood to be the result of the very work in them of God himself – just as Jesus had promised would happen once he had completed his earthly mission and had left them to carry on. Just as God was in Jesus, so through the same God, the One Jesus dared to call Abba, they too would be one with God. This development would be the work of the "Holy Spirit," the Holy Counselor, the Holy Comforter, the very Spirit of God himself – who would continue to teach them and lead them after Jesus was gone. This Holy Spirit was the third part of the holy union that would link them to God. This divine link was threefold: 1) the love of God as their true Abba or Father, 2) the continuing leadership or Lordship of God in Jesus as true Messiah or Christ, and 3) the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit, working within them to complete this union with God. Thus equipped – they were ready to take on the world. 1The apostle Paul records that the resurrected Lord appeared before at least 500 people, eventually himself included. |
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How the first Christians understood these signs and events
The Spirit's Testimony that Jesus Was Indeed the Messiah/Christ. Those who were willing to receive in faith this Gospel (Good News) message about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus were promised to find themselves living a new life of uncanny supernatural power. They would live under, by and through the power of God's own Holy Spirit. In reflecting on the bizarre life, death and resurrection of Jesus, his followers began to remember special ways in which his Messiahship or ‘Anointing’ seemed confirmed by events:
Jesus, the Atoning Christ. Thus to his followers Jesus was the very marvel of God. Jesus had come not as a mighty military conqueror – as all Israel had been expecting. Rather he had come as a renewer of life of the broken and afflicted (as Isaiah had frequently prophesied), as a redeemer of those held in captivity by sin, as one who opened for others the way to eternal life. Not the Messiah they had been expecting – but better, much better! Jesus was indeed the fulfilment of all that Judaism had long awaited: he was indeed the Anointed One: the Messiah (Jewish) or Christ (Greek). He was also the Lamb of Atonement whose blood was sacrificed for the sins of the world. The cross as Christianity's central symbol. In the end the irony of Jesus' death on a cross came to be understood by his followers as being the ultimate testimony of how God wanted us to give up our lives for others – even our enemies. In his own act of self-sacrifice Jesus embodied the loving essence of God. The cross, his followers now understood, was the ultimate divine sign of Jesus' own surrender of self' in service to others – the heart of the Christian spirit. Ultimately the cross became the symbol for all Christians of the hope and the victory of the Christian life ... lived in full service to both God and fellow man. The promise of eternal life. Jesus' well-attested resurrection appearances were likewise understood as God's final testimony on behalf of Jesus – that those who followed in his footsteps would not die, but live eternally, even as Jesus now lived eternally with the Father. The "gospel" (good news) of Jesus
impacts the larger Greco-Roman world To the Christian, all of this pointed to one fact: Jesus was indeed the long-awaited Anointed One: the Messiah (Jewish) or Christ (Greek). But then also, to the larger Greco-Roman world, Jesus was the Dionysian Son of Man/Son of God who had returned from the dead to save all humanity. Jesus was the embodiment of the Platonists' and the Stoics' understanding of the perfect Form, Idea, Word or Logos – eternally with God from before the foundation of the world, and with God for all eternity. Jesus summed up all the religious hopes of his time – provided that one was willing to accept him in the role of Lord of life. Modern skepticism about the recorded life and works of Jesus
It's easy to say, as many skeptics do (notably the Jesus Seminar), that the early church found it convenient to read all these developments back into Jesus' and his disciples’ ministries after-the-fact, to give rationale for the shameful loss of their beloved leader on a Roman cross. There are, they say, no ‘facts’ to validate these many Christian claims about Jesus. But the skeptics themselves can offer no ‘facts’ that validate their opinion either. And the mere coincidence of the self-interest of the church with these aspects of Jesus' life does not ‘prove’ a tampering with the facts as given. Preserving the pleasant – and unpleasant – truths
The fact that the disciples never understood this agenda of atonement during Jesus' lifetime does not flatter these individuals. They come off looking petty and foolish. Peter’s denial to a woman that he had ever had anything to do with Jesus – while his leader was undergoing humiliating cross examination by the Jewish authorities – was hardly something that anyone later trying to promote the Christian movement would have wanted to be remembered about its leadership. The way Jesus’ disciples had so clearly demonstrated themselves to be utter cowards, nearly all of them abandoning Jesus at the time of his arrest and death, would later be a matter of great shame. Thus given the opportunity of his followers (now become the new leaders of this ongoing messianic religious movement) to clean up these stories at a later time, it seems strange that they let these stories stand in all this unflattering light. But none of them seemed to have had any interest in ‘cleaning up’ the story. This attests well to the idea that Jesus was honestly represented by the stories told about him (and about themselves) by his followers. The testimonies of faith
Even though some of the stories told of Jesus by his followers seem unbelievable by modern standards, these stories must be understood as an honest effort of highly transformed people to explain the true source of their new power in life. These are the truths of faith – not fact. And powerful truths these are – as powerful as the faith that transformed their lives from slavery in the world’s ways to an incredible personal freedom in and through their trust in God through Jesus Christ. By the gift of this new faith they understood how Jesus was indeed the long-awaited Messiah, the Son of God, the one promised by the prophet Isaiah who would redeem them from their sins, reunite them with God, their true heavenly Father, and bring them into the promised Kingdom. This was the ultimate Truth of their lives. The modern bias in seeing "truth" and "fact" as one and the same
This is not the time and place to get into a huge metaphysical debate about the proper relationship between truth and fact (the issues was heavily debated by the ancient Greeks – and it is still heavily debated today by philosophers and scientists). We will look at this issue more closely later in this study. But we certainly have reached the point at which we need to mention that the modern tendency to view fact and truth as one and the same is loaded with logical errors – ones that our secular world blissfully ignores. Even the great modern Relativity Theorist Einstein – and his Quantum Theorist friends – were very aware of the dangers of assuming that what we view as ‘fact’ is indeed ‘objective reality.’ ‘Reality out there somewhere’ is not obtainable without some cultural or ‘faith’ assumptions – which of course mean that what we view as ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ is a highly interpretative matter. What we ‘see’ is actually only a mental reconstruction, tremendously affected by the limited ability of our senses (even aided by modern technological devices) – and by the way culture has taught us to see things. Modern Christianity itself has fallen into secularist thinking – to the extent that it has attempted to defend on a factual basis what was recorded in the Christian scriptures. Both the criticisms of biblical ‘fact’ by the secular world and the ‘factual’ defense of scripture by the Christian world miss the point of scripture entirely. Fact does not stand apart from faith – and failing to understand the faith basis of first century Christians makes modern factual interpretation absurd – for both Christianity’s skeptical opponents and its misguided defenders. Scripture is simply – but powerfully – the recording of the truth of faith, faith as it functioned in the Palestinian-Hellenistic world of the first century. But it is the closest witness we have to truth to go by ... and therefore in our quest for Christian truth, best understood in the cultural-historical context in which that witness was originally laid forth. In understanding this first century context, we will best understand the truth of Christianity. |
Miles
H. Hodges
