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| 2005/12/15-16 [Reference/Religion] UID:41029 Activity:very high |
12/14 emarkp, how do you reconcile the supposed authority of the various
and sundry versions of the Bible with the glosses and errors made
by the various scribes who contributed to the current version of
the KJB? Also, what do you think of Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting
Jesus"? See:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5052156
\_ I assume you mean KJV (which is the common acronym for the King
James Version of the Bible). Beyond that I'd be happy to discuss it
with anyone who signs his name. -emarkp
\_ Sorry, it didn't really fit on the line. --erikred
\_ Okay. I understand the process by which we have the Bible.
That is, while I believe the authors were inspired by God,
they were still mortal and fallible. Hence I don't claim that
the Bible is inerrant. Also, there are many conflicts in
manuscripts, so I don't think there's an objective way to
determine which translation is superior. I disagree with
Wescott and Hort's rules for disambiguation. That's the point
of the Book of Mormon and modern revelation--the more
witnesses of truth you have, the better shot you have of
understanding it. I haven't listened to the npr story, but
I'm downloading the audio and will listen to it later. -emarkp
[addendum: I prefer the KJV because of the language--I find
NASB and NIV boring.]
\_ Cool, I hope you enjoy it. So, would you consider yourself
less of a strict interpretationist (sorry, I lack the
proper Biblical scholarship lexicon) and more of a,
I dunno, Gnostic? Or Bible as philosophy sort? --erikred
\_ I don't know if I could pigeonhole myself so easily.
Educated believer? I believe that Christ is my Savior
and performed miracles. I don't believe the earth is
only 6000 years old, but Adam and Eve did exist as
individuals. I believe that there was a great flood and
Noah built an ark, but it may have been localized
(that's more and more likely IMO) instead of worldwide.
I believe we're children of God, but that Evolution is
fact. -emarkp
\_ Fair enough. Thank you. --erikred
\_ Quite honestly, emarkp has never been nearly as
radicalized as been expressed by some on the motd.
\_ Did Adam have a navel?
\_ Does it matter?
\_ YMWTR "The Natural History of Nonsense" by
Bergen Evans.
\_ hmm... i would subscribe to Christianity if I knew
any churches that would actually support this
particular, and if I may say so, enlightened view
of the Bible.
\_ Well, we're called Mormons. Feel free to ask
more. -emarkp
[Addendum: I'm sure there are people in other
faiths that address the Bible similarly.]
\_ Is riding around on bicycles a matter of policy
or of convenience? Does your religion have
any official position on cars vs. bikes?
When I find a religion that believes cars are
as evil as I believe they are, I might just
join.
\_ Uhm, cars are nonsentient -- they can't be
evil. That's like believing wrenches are
evil, or lollipops are devilspawn. The sad,
sad thing is that you were admitted to
Berkeley. I guess they'll take anybody
these days.
\_ Do you want to fight?
\_ Over what? That you're clinically
deranged or that cars aren't evil?
\_ either. both. sticks. whatever.
maybe I'll just kick my chairs
ass again.
\_ GUN DUEL!!!!!
\_ Are you scared?
\_ Are nuclear weapons evil? How about
a rack on which hundreds had been
tortured? I don't think the definition
is as simple as you do, but then again
I don't believe in God, so "evil" is
kind of a strange concept to me.
\_ Objects are not evil. People are.
You find this a difficult concept?
Why would a rack or a weapon or a
whatever object be evil? So without
a concept of good and evil your moral
sense is based on what? The laws men
make? So there can be no bad laws?
Or it just comes magically from
within?
\_ Actually, evil applied to nouns
is an accepted usage. It's not
the same meaning as morally evil
but it's a meaning all the same.
\_ It's a useless meaning in the
context of a conversation about
good/evil in a religious
context. Context counts.
\_ Utility mostly. The most utility
for the most people. I find nuclear
weapons odious because of their
capacity to cause great suffering
for so many so easily. I concede
that they may have collectivly
kept WWIII from happening.
\_ Nuclear power doesn't cause
suffering. People do. Nuclear
science/engineer can be used to
kill people. It can be used as
a power source. So can fire. I
wouldn't get rid of fire because
arsonists burn down orphanages
or claim fire is evil or odious.
Don't blame the tool, blame the
wielder. Smart people invent
a lot of cool stuff for us. It
is unfortunate that some people
will always find an evil way to
put any technology to use.
\_ What's the significance of the miracles? Would you
still have believed if he didn't do miracles? How
does this fit into the faith concept and telling
people not to expect proof? Why did Jesus rise up
from the dead, what was the point? Why do you
believe he even did miracles or rose when we have
no reliable sources? Why did dying on a cross have
any significance, especially since he didn't die?
\_ The greatest miracle was the suffering he went
through in the garden and on the cross which paves
the way for our forgiveness, and his physical
resurrection afterwards. That gives us all hope
of resurrection and Eternal Life. And yes, he
really did die. -emarkp
\_ How/why did it "pave the way" to anything?
Many people have suffered as much or more than
someone being crucified. Hell, even in the
story he has a couple other nobodies suffering
along with him. We also have no reliable source
for verifying his death or resurrection so it's
pointless even if it had a point to begin with.
\_ That's why the Garden of Gethsemane and the
resurrection are part of the story. -emarkp
\_ You're not really answering. (1st q,
and I don't see why the garden was
much of a suffering either.) And for the
"rez", again it seems pointless to
come back and just basically say "hay
look at me! lol" to a few people and then
"ascend". There's more evidence of Elvis
resurrecting.
\_ How can you pick and choose and still call yourself a
resurrecting. (btw: My point is less that
*you* shouldn't believe, but that it is
reasonable and logical for me not to
believe. Would you accept that?)
\_ Certainly, it's impossible to
objectively prove the efficacy of
Christ's sacrifice, or the validity of
his claims. They can only be verified
by being sampled and the proof is
inherently subjective. It's not
rational in the strictest sense. My
proof of Christ's sacrifice is the
spiritual witness I've received.
Period. -emarkp
\_ In regard to miracles, a few things we see from
the bible:
(1) God is sovereign, and God decides when and
where to perform miracles.
(2) Miracles often did not lead to faith. The
Israelites had seen many miracles when led
out of slavery in Egypt, yet their faith
was constantly lacking, and that prevented
them from entering Canaan, the promised land.
(3) A display of faith by a person often
prompted Jesus to perform a miracle for
said person.
(4) Pharisee witnessed many of Jesus's miracles
but claimed that Jesus's was in league with
demons and that that was Jesus's source of
power to perform miracles.
(5) Miracles does not solve the problem of sin.
(5) Miracles do not solve the problem of sin.
(6) While faith includes some elements of
belief, it is more than that. In James,
in discussing faith and deeds, the bible
says that "Even the demons believe [God] -
and shudder." "Faith without deeds is
dead." "Show me your faith without deeds,
and I will show you my faith by what I do."
In regard to Jesus giving his life on the cross,
the two important things are:
(1) He has led a sinless life, and only a
sinless life has the power of redemption.
(2) He died for all mankind, but at the same
time he died for each one of us. I have
heard one school of thought that says
that during the three days between his
death and resurrection, Jesus endured the
combined sufferings caused by the sin of
each and everyone of us.
that during the three days (and time may
have different meaning in the spiritual
realm) between his death and resurrection,
Jesus endured the combined sufferings
caused by the sin of each and everyone of us.
\_ I always thought this was the gist of the
passion in the garden. It's not that our
sins nailed him up. It's that he took our
sins upon him, willingly. Are you a
Calvinist?
\_ Both are true, in my mind. I do
not know what a Calvinist mean.
(note: I removed the part about
each one of us nailing Jesus to
the cross because of our sin,
which was what the above poster
was responding to. I removed
it because I had wanted to keep
things simpler, but above poster
already responded to it.)
\_ Do you believe in ghosts? Spirits?
Evil as an entity?
\_ Cars!
\_ Yes, I believe in the existence
of a spiritual realm.
\_ How does a death have "power of redemption"?
What is that anyway? What does his death
save, and from what, and by what/whom?
I don't see the relevance of his suffering.
The fundamental concept of "dying for us"
is meaningless to me. And afterwards he
comes back fine anyway. That controverts
the whole notion of sacrifice, which
involves loss. If I, as an atheist, were
to sacrifice my life to save others while
believing that I'm throwing away the only
thing I've got in the universe, well I
think that would mean a lot more than
someone who believes he's gonna float
to heaven.
Re: miracles, I guess we can say they
had no significance of themselves, and
were not any form of proof.
BTW: I applaud you for getting into this
because many would not and it really helps
understand what is going on in your heads.
\_ You raise many deep questions. In
regard to miracles, I've said all I
wanted to say, so you are free to
draw your conclusion. In regard to
your other questions, I think we
should not think too abstractly such
that we are no longer grounded in
this world. This life is not a game
where one score points to get into
heaven. It has meaning in and of itself.
What does redemption mean in this
world? How is it tied to guilt and
sin? How is it tied to justice? How
is it tied to love and faith and hope?
One other thing to ponder is that Jesus,
as Christ, was not omnipotent or
omniscient. He has emotions, sorrows
and joys. He cried. He loved. He was
a flesh and blood person. Not
all Christians will agree with me on
this, but I believe his divine power
and divine self knowledge comes from
his oneness with the Father through
following the word of the Father, love
of the Father, and faith in the plans
of the Father.
following the word of the God, love
of the Father and of us, and faith
in the plans of the Father.
-----------------------\
Adding to the above,
I really appreciate your question regarding redemption,
because it led me to examine things and discover new
revelations.
"For God so LOVED the world that he GAVE his one and only
Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have
eternal life." John 3:16
"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels,
but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a
clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy,
and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and
though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains,
but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all
my goods to feed the poor, and though I GIVE MY BODY TO
BE BURNED, but have not love, it profits me nothing."
Corinthians 13
"Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers
over a multitude of sins." 1Peter 4
I think the above passages would help us understand
redemption. With justice and retribution, you injured
or caused someone a loss, you pay for it, you murdered
a man, you pay with your life. This country's laws are
still very much based on that. Redemption, on the
other hand, both in the scripture and in our world,
cannot be seperated from love and sacrifice, both of
which are necessary. When you love someone, you can
forgive the person; when you forgive the person, you
renounce the justice and redress you were due. The
Les Miserable story of the bandit beating up and robbing
the father to steal his silverware, and when he was
caught, the father telling the police that he gave the
bandit the silverware. And of course there are countless
real life examples.
LDS? If you let people ignore the inconvenient bits of
the Bible, people can make it say anything they want.
What's the point of pointing to it as a source of truth
at all?
\_ I don't pick and choose. The LDS church has no
position on the age of the Earth or Evolution. I
don't ignore "inconvenient" parts of the Bible, etc.
-emarkp
\_ I wasn't talking about specifically age or evo.
You said you believe the Bible is divinely
inspired, but inaccurately transcribed. So you
get to say to any of the OT stuff you don't agree
with "that's superceded" and any of the NT stuff
that contradicts itself "that's human error" You
don't find that remarkably convenient? -pp
\_ But that's exactly the point! The Bible pretty
clearly describes creation. If you're going to
say "oh, it was just symbolic, it was really
evolution.. see 'days' really meant..." and so on,
then what's to stop doing that to any part of the
Bible? And if, as you already said, you believe
it has human-introduced mistakes... it really
doesn't feel like a useful text.
\_ You realize the stories of Adam and Eve and
Noah are quite obviously not real, right? -tom
\_ you're just pissed off that you don't have
a navel.
\_ I realize that much of them is not literal.
"not real" is not a terribly precise statement.
-emarkp
\_ OK, how's this for precise. The human race
is not descended from two individuals.
(Verifiable by DNA analysis). The rest of
the Adam and Eve story (and the idea of
original sin) makes no sense in that
context. Also, there was not a guy named
Noah who gathered up all the animals by
twos because the world (or even a region)
was flooded. (Also verifiable by DNA
analysis and fossil/sedimentary records).
-tom
\_ DNA has been traced back through women
to a trivial number of individuals in
Africa. I'd like to see a URL that
shows DNA or fossil/sediment record
evidence showing that "not even a region"
could have had a flood that limited the
animal population to a trivial number of
each species. I'm certain you won't find
this. Also, there is actually sediment
evidence showing that there likely was a
flood of some sort on a large scale in
the distant past although not necessarily
in the last 6000+ years.
\_ I disagree with your statement out the
DNA evidence of a single couple as
parents of all humans. In the case of
Noah, that's why I'm open to the "local
flood" idea. -emarkp
\_ The local flood idea requires zero
leap of faith. Floods large enough
to destroy a tribal civilization's
whole world are common enough that
it seems reasonable that many
civilizations will have stories about
it which are based on fact.
\_ The history of religious dogma is
an evolution from claims which
became easy to disprove (such as
heliocentricity) to claims which
are more difficult to disprove.
Once a piece of dogma has been
proved incorrect beyond a reasonable
doubt, it seems fanciful in the
extreme to weaken the same piece
of dogma to make it less disprovable.
Unless you're just believing what
you want to believe. -tom
\_ EMarkP: Do you think William Cosby
has accurately told the story ofNoah?
has accurately told the story of Noah?
\_ "When you forgive the person, you renounce the
justice and redress you were due."
This is the part of the Bible I find most compelling
too, but the part that many people who call themselves
Christians don't put into practice. I'm curious if you,
whoever you are (emarkp?), supported the war on Iraq.
- quaker
\_ I accepted the Afghanistan war, but I did not like
the war on Iraq from the start. The administration
was too eager to go to war, too flippant in regard
to the potential consequences, suffering and loss
of lives, both American and Iraqi, too arrogant in
our capabilities, which I believe was the cause
of many of the mistakes we made. The purpose of
the war was unclear, the motives questionable.
My current church is a small Chinese church
affliated with ELCA. I went to a Baptist church
affliated with ELCA. I went to a baptist church
while in grad school. I didn't go to church
regularly while in Berkeley, but when I went, I
went to 1st Presby, or the Chinese for Christ.
church. Before college, I go to a Presby church.
Before college, I go to a presby church.
My girlfriend went to a quaker church while in
college in taipei, where she accepted christ.
\_ I see no conflict between saying to Osama Bin Laden, "I
love you as a person and forgive you of your crimes" while
shooting him between the eyes. It is up to me to forgive
all men. But while I can forgive, I will still protect my
family. [BTW, I can't find that verse anywhere--you want
to give chapter and verse?] -emarkp
\_Everyone should shut the hell up and just read the Jefferson
Bible or the Gospel Of St Thomas.
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/Jesus-Without-Miracles1dec05.htm
- danh |
| 5/25 |
|
| www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5052156 Terry Gross Detail from the cover of 'Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why' Detail from the cover of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed t he Bible and Why. Fresh Air from WHYY, December 14, 2005 Scholar Bart Ehrman's new bo ok explores how scribes -- through both omission and intention -- change d the Bible. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible an d Why is the result of years of reading the texts in their original lang uages. Ehrman says the modern Bible was shaped by mistakes and intentional alter ations that were made by early scribes who copied the texts. In the intr oduction to Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman writes that when he came to underst and this process 30 years ago, it shifted his way of thinking about the Bible. Ehrman is also the author of Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scriptur e and the Faiths We Never Knew, which chronicles the period before Chris tianity as we know it, when conflicting ideas about the religion were fi ghting for prominence in the second and third centuries. The chairman of the religious studies department at the University of Nor th Carolina in Chapel Hill, Ehrman also edited a collection of the early non-canonical texts from the first centuries after Christ, called Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament. Read an excerpt from Misquoting Jesus: Chapter One The Beginnings of Christian Scripture To discuss the copies of the New Testament that we have, we need to start at the very beginning with one of the unusual features of Christianity in the Greco-Roman world: its bookish character. In fact, to make sense of this feature of Christianity, we need to start before the beginnings of Christianity with the religion from which Christianity sprang, Judais m For the bookishness of Christianity was in some sense anticipated and foreshadowed by Judaism, which was the first "religion of the book" in Western civilization. Judaism as a Religion of the Book The Judaism from which Christianity sprang was an unusual religion in the Roman world, although by no means unique. Like adherents of any of the other (hundreds of ) religions in the Mediterranean area, Jews acknowled ged the existence of a divine realm populated by superhuman beings (ange ls, archangels, principalities, powers); they subscribed to the worship of a deity through sacrifices of animals and other food products; they m aintained that there was a special holy place where this divine being dw elt here on earth (the Temple in Jerusalem), and it was there that these sacrifices were to be made. They prayed to this God for communal and pe rsonal needs. They told stories about how this God had interacted with h uman beings in the past, and they anticipated his help for human beings in the present. In all these ways, Judaism was "familiar" to the worship ers of other gods in the empire. All other religions in the empire were polytheistic -- acknowledging and worshiping many gods of a ll sorts and functions: great gods of the state, lesser gods of various locales, gods who oversaw different aspects of human birth, life, and de ath. Jews insisted on wors hiping only the one God of their ancestors, the God who, they maintained , had created this world, controlled this world, and alone provided what was needed for his people. According to Jewish tradition, this one all- powerful God had called Israel to be his special people and had promised to protect and defend them in exchange for their absolute devotion to h im and him alone. The Jewish people, it was believed, had a "covenant" w ith this God, an agreement that they would be uniquely his as he was uni quely theirs. so, too, there was only one Temple, unlike in the polytheistic religions of the day in which, for example, there could be any number of temples to a god like Zeus. To be sure, Jews could worship God anywhere they lived, but they could perform their religious obligations of sacrifice to God only at the Temple in Jerusalem. In other places, though, they could gather t ogether in "synagogues" for prayer and to discuss the ancestral traditio ns at the heart of their religion. These traditions involved both stories about God's interaction with the a ncestors of the people of Israel -- the patriarchs and matriarchs of the faith, as it were: Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rachel, Jacob, Rebecca, Josep h, Moses, David, and so on -- and detailed instructions concerning how t his people was to worship and live. One of the things that made Judaism unique among the religions of the Roman Empire was that these instructio ns, along with the other ancestral traditions, were written down in sacr ed books. For modern people intimately familiar with any of the major contemporary Western religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), it may be hard to imag ine, but books played virtually no role in the polytheistic religions of the ancient Western world. These religions were almost exclusively conc erned with honoring the gods through ritual acts of sacrifice. There wer e no doctrines to be learned, as explained in books, and almost no ethic al principles to be followed, as laid out in books. This is not to say t hat adherents of the various polytheistic religions had no beliefs about their gods or that they had no ethics, but beliefs and ethics -- strang e as this sounds to modern ears -- played almost no role in religion per se. These were instead matters of personal philosophy, and philosophies , of course, could be bookish. Since ancient religions themselves did no t require any particular sets of "right doctrines" or, for the most part , "ethical codes," books played almost no role in them. Judaism was unique in that it stressed its ancestral traditions, customs, and laws, and maintained that these had been recorded in sacred books, which had the status, therefore, of "scripture" for the Jewish people. D uring the period of our concern -- the first century of the common era, when the books of the New Testament were being written -- Jews scattered throughout the Roman Empire understood in particular that God had given direction to his people in the writings of Moses, referred to collectiv ely as the Torah, which literally means something like "law" or "guidanc e" The Torah consists of five books, sometimes called the Pentateuch (t he "five scrolls"), the beginning of the Jewish Bible (the Christian Old Testament): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Here one finds accounts of the creation of the world, the calling of Israel t o be God's people, the stories of Israel's patriarchs and matriarchs and God's involvement with them, and most important (and most extensive), t he laws that God gave Moses indicating how his people were to worship hi m and behave toward one another in community together. These were sacred laws, to be learned, discussed, and followed -- and they were written i n a set of books. Jews had other books that were important for their religious lives togeth er as well, for example, books of prophets (such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, an d Amos), and poems (Psalms), and history (such as Joshua and Samuel). Ev entually, some time after Christianity began, a group of these Hebrew bo oks -- twenty-two of them altogether -- came to be regarded as a sacred canon of scripture, the Jewish Bible of today, accepted by Christians as the first part of the Christian canon, the "Old Testament." Excerpted by permission of HarperCollinsSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollins Publishers. No part of this excer pt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. |
| www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/Jesus-Without-Miracles1dec05.htm The Hyde Collection Back when the WHAT WOULD JESUS DO bracelets were appearing on the wrists of young people all around the country, I found myself in an argument wi th an old friend, a fellow Virginian who, like me, is the lapsed son of a Baptist preacher. We had both fallen pretty far, far enough to spend m any nights together in the local Irish pub, putting away Guinness and co mmiserating about how the Church had crippled our spirits and misunderst ood our complicated souls. The crux of our argument was over the bracele ts' merit and utility. My friend saw them as just another example of hol low piety. For my part, I said it would indeed be a positive step if Chr istians actually began to follow the teachings of the founder. Something similar was no doubt on the mind of another Virginian, Thomas J efferson, when he took a pair of scissors to the King James Bible two hu ndred years ago. Jefferson cut out the virgin birth, all the miraclesin cluding the most important one, the Resurrectionthen pasted together wh at was left and called it The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth (fifteen y ears later, in retirement at Monticello, he expanded the text, added Fre nch, Latin, and Greek translations, and called it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth). In an 1819 letter to William Short, Jefferson recol lected that the cut-and-paste job was the work of two or three nights on ly, at Washington, after getting through the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day." Jefferson mentioned The Philosophy of J esus in a few other personal letters, but for the most part he kept the whole matter private, probably guessing that the established Church woul d see the compilation as one more example of his "atheism." Nor did Jeff erson care to give Federalist newspapers another reason to remind him of alleged sexual relations with his slave Sally Herrings, an entanglement certainly out of keeping with the philosophy of Jesus. But Jefferson's severe redaction was probably a retaliatory act, as much as anything, against priests and ministers"soothsayers and necromancers ," Jefferson called themwho had unleashed attacks on his character duri ng the acrimonious presidential election of 1800. Jefferson believed tha t an authentic Christianity had long ago been hijacked by the Christian Church. The teachings of its founder had become so distorted as to make "one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites." Jefferson would no doubt have agreed with Tolstoy that the Christian Church had su pplanted the Sermon on the Mount with the Nicene Creed to create a syste m of beliefs that Jesus himself wouldn't have recognized, much less laid claim to. "I abuse the priests, indeed," Jefferson wrote to Charles Cla y in 1815, "who have so much abused the pure and holy doctrines of their Master." By stripping away the gospelers' claim that Jesus was the divi ne son of God, and by strip-ping away the subsequent miracles they inven ted to prove it, Jefferson boasted that he had extracted the "diamonds f rom the dunghill" to reveal the true teaching of Jesus for what it was: "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offe red to man." Up until that point, Jefferson had claimed Epicurus as his patron-philoso pher. Two thousand years earlier, Epicurus had taught that life would be much easier to endure if we stopped fearing God and deathabout which w e can know and do nothingand followed instead a program of prudent self -sufficiency. "Everything easy to procure is natural," Epicurus wrote, " while everything difficult to obtain is superfluous." Such a philosophy certainly would have appealed to Jefferson's agrarian vision for the new American nation. But after suffering the personal attacks of the 1800 c ampaign, Jefferson discovered that the philosophy of Epicurus didn't go far enough. "Epictetus and Epicurus give laws for governing ourselves," Jefferson wrote to William Short, "Jesus a supplement of the duties and charities we owe to others." Jefferson no doubt felt that not a few peop le owed him some charity. Jefferson's tombstone at Monticello does not remind visitors that the dec eased was once president of the United States. Rather it states that Jef ferson authored the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom. So it was fitting that in 1904 the Government Printing Office published 5,000 han dsome, leather-bound copies of The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth for the first time, one hundred years after Jefferson pasted it together . To read the Gospel storythe "good news"through Jefferson's lens is inst ructive in a number of ways, the least of which is its representation of Jesus' "life." Many New Testament scholars agree that the infancy narra tives of Matthew and Luke are pure myth. And no one has solved the myste ry of the "missing years"the two decades between when Jesus supposedly taught in the temple as a precocious child and when he came ambling alon g the Jordan river, asking to be baptized by the fiery zealot, John the Baptist. From then until his execution a few years later, Jesus^' life w as a combination of walking, eating with followers and social outcasts, preaching, fishing a little, telling stories that no one seemed to under stand, and offering largely unsolicited diatribes against the powers tha t be. That is to say, the life of Jesusif unconventionalwas neverthele ss ordinary enough. Thousands of homeless men and women do pretty much t he same thing every day in this country. But to find the historic Jesus within the fabulous accounts of the four Gospel writers is indeed an exe rcise of looking for diamonds in the compost heap. The life of this itinerant preacher was much less important to Jefferson tha n what he taught. Somebody, after all, spoke the Sermon on the Mount, or on the plain, or wherever it was spoken, and somebody told fascinating parables that explained nothing and left everything up to "he who has ea rs." What's more, Jefferson's objection to the version of Christianity t aught in American churches was precisely that it did put so much more em phasis on Jesus' life and, consequently, his sacrificial death. By excis ing the Resurrection and Jesus' claims to divinity from his private gosp el, Jefferson portrayed an ordinary man with an extraordinary, though im probable, message. Indeed, reading Jefferson's gospel one hundred years after its publicatio n, it's hard not to become depressed, as did the Rich Young Ruler, about how nearly impossible Jesus' program would be to follow. To read the Go spel of Matthew or Luke is to be dazzled by one miracle after another. I n that con-text, the actual teachings seem almost mundane. But to read J efferson's version (what Beacon Press now publishes as The Jefferson Bib le) is to face a relentless demand that we be much better peopleinside and outthan most of us are. Which leads, as Jefferson must have suspect ed, to this unfortunate conclusion: the relevance of Christianity to mos t Americansthen and nowhas far more to do with the promise of eternal salvation from this world than with any desire to practice the teachings of Jesus while we are here. But Jefferson's gospel also leads to an impressive clarification of what those teachings are. In a ll of his teachings, the Jesus that Jefferson recovers has one overarching theme^the world's values are all upside down in relation to the kingdom of God. those whom we think of as the most powerful, the first in the nation-state, are actually the last in the kingdom of God; being true to one's self is more important than being loyal to one's family; those who think they know the most are the most ignorant; the natural economy followed by birds and lilies is superior to the economy based on Caesar's coinage or bankers who charge interest. He has nothing but contemp t for men who would kill a woman because of adultery when they themselve s have thought about cheating on their wives, or for temple officials wh o tithe mint and cumin but would do nothing to help a poor woman with a child. "Stop talking about righteousness," this Jesus is saying, "and be righteous." But of course nothing could be more di... |