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Mexican Lifestyles Books 'Christ Was Not A Christian' He And Paul Opposed 'religion,' Were 'killed By Religion'
Mexican Lifestyles Books 'Christ Was Not A Christian' He And Paul Opposed 'religion,' Were 'killed By Religion' | 'Christ Was Not A Christian' He And Paul Opposed 'religion,' Were 'killed By Religion' |
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| Written by ALLYN HUNT | |
| Saturday, 22 March 2008 | |
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Good Friday ends the traditional 40-day period of fasting, penance and contemplation known as cuaresma in Spanish.
One of the most contemplative writers of our time regarding Christianity is Garry Wills, author of the book and the declaration "Christ Was Not a Christian." In a number of his more recent writings on religion, which includes "What Paul Meant," this Catholic of piercingly, and well-grounded, independent thought has turned accepted theological assumption on its head. He wants people to know some basic history: there was no Christian church during the time of Jesus and Paul, for the word Christ--not a proper name but a Greek title (Khristos), like "lord," which came to mean "Messiah was not used. Neither were the words "religion," and "church" in the teaching vocabulary of these radical breakaway Jews. Wills points out that Jesus and Paul opposed "religion." They taught that the worship of God was not something "based on external observances, on temples or churches, on hierarchies or priesthoods." And both were "killed by religion," he writes. And Wills puts no great faith in widely accepted English translations of Paul's writings, because they infect the original writings with later, skewed "developments." Rather, he plumbs the work of scholars such as John Gager and Krister Standahl in order to "transport" his readers "back into the Spirit-haunted, god-driven world of Paul in the heady first charismatic days of Jesus' revelations." And he prefers the words of the man secularly known as Saul of Tarus for they "stand closer" in time "to Jesus than do any other words in the New Testament." The Gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke and John so doted over by traditional "biblical literalists," have been shown by modern scholarship to not possess "simple biographical" basis," but are "sophisticated theological constructs written by their putative authors, all drawing on second- or third- or fourth-hand accounts and all written from a quarter of century to a half a century after Paul's letters." Those Pauline letters themselves were recorded probably less than two decades after Jesus' death. "To read the gospels in the spirit with which they were written," Wills has written elsewhere, "it is not enough to ask what Jesus did or said. We must ask what Jesus meant by his strange ("metaphorical") deeds (slipping away from his parents when he was 12 during the family's visit to a big city, purposefully letting them leave without telling them he is staying behind; storming into a rich new "church," which took pride in its success, to whip those taking collections, shouting, "Make not my Father's house a traders' market" [John 2.16] or a "thieves' lair"[Mark 11.17]). "If Jesus is a mere man ... he is deranged," Wills writes. But of course Christians believe he wasn't he was both man and divine thus, very different than you and me. And knowing what he knew, they can hardly think he would act like some common politically bleached religious leader of his day or of today. That is why "He shocked people by his violation of the external holiness code of his day, Wills notes. That is why "Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor reproached (him) for puzzling men by being 'exceptional, vague and enigmatic.'" Wills writes, "For two years Jesus slipped through all the traps set for him. He moved like a fish in a sea of his lower-class fellows. "He kept on the move, in the countryside. He went into cities as into alien territory. He was a man of the margins, never quite fitting in, always 'out of context.' He sought the wilderness, the mountaintop. "Jesus ghosted in and out of people's lives, blessing and cursing, curing and condemning. If he was not God, he was a standing blasphemy against God. The last thing he can be considered is a 'gentle Jesus meek and mild.'" (Among Wills' many "secular" books are the much applauded Pulitzer Prize-winning "Lincoln at Gettysburg: Words that Remade America," and "Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.") |
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