One of the definitions of "reasonable" is to be "moderate, fair." So how would a "reasonable" Jesus appear (assuming that he was still the son of God and therefore a supernatural being capable of miracles)?
I see "Reasonable Jesus" as being one who would uphold the law and expectations, not one to court controversy. If Reasonable Jesus were asked to comment on divorce he'd ask them what Moses commanded them (as in Mark 10:1-10) but simply tell his audience to obey that law. He'd agree that taxes should be paid even though no one really liked paying taxes (Matthew 22:15-22). If a woman who committed adultery were brought before him (John 8:1-11) he'd consider stoning to be the acceptable form of punishment. This would be a version of Jesus who would read from Isaiah but choose not to claim he had fulfilled his words before his audience (Luke 4:14-30).
Still, this version of Jesus would have supernatural power. If 5 thousand hungry people were before him, he wouldn't hesitate to use this power to feed them. But I think instead of multiplying a single meal into sufficient food for the entire assembly, he'd perhaps magically supply sufficient money for everyone to go buy their own food. And once word got out that he had a bottomless supply of money he'd be certain to win followers!
But although this silly version of Jesus I'm describing could still find followers by his very nature he wouldn't attract controversy. This is not someone who would unnerve the religious establishment by speaking into the heart of the law in a way they didn't anticipate - Reasonable Jesus wouldn't say anything out of line from the establishment. This is not someone whose movement would be considered a potential threat to the authority of the Roman occupation. He would never inspire a movement to have him crucified.
And of course, you know all of this. We know that the things Jesus said did upset the leaders and the establishment. We know he even upset the man in the street by the number of times people tried to have him killed. He cautioned his disciples, "Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division." (Luke 12:51)
But I think given enough passage of time and familiarity, what once seemed unreasonable can become reasonable. Those of us with many years in the church aren't shocked when we hear Jesus say things that were outrageous in their original context. We don't dwell in the same time and place as his original audience - we are all-too-aware that we are outside of the original context in which those words were spoken. Heck, even outside of the church, Jesus' principle of "the Golden Rule" (Matthew 7:12) is a widely-admired belief that people of other faiths or of no faith background consider a sound - reasonable - teaching.
I think our danger is that we can read Jesus' words and simply nod along thinking, "yes, that's reasonable." We only become flummoxed when Jesus suggests following him brings on challenges such as:
"If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." (Matthew 19:21)
Well, that sounds very hard and we're not accustomed to being challenged by anything said by Jesus in scripture, so we will ourselves to sidestep or minimize it. We know the Jesus of the Bible is not the "Reasonable Jesus" I invented; but I think sometimes we'd rather have a Reasonable Jesus who doesn't make great demands on us and whose supernatural power is held back. I'm sure I've made that mistake many times. So for me, as I attempt to make sense of the world and to recognize how Jesus is working today - the challenge to me is to not expect everything to be reasonable.
4 comments:
It is arduous to be both a genius and a believing Christian.
Kierkegaard was a towering intellect who made what I consider to be the best way forward for intellectuals but it still seems to require belief in prior eras/dispensations. Virtually all historians believe Jesus existed as a flesh and blood human being in Palestine although I find some of the external writings attesting to him to be tendentious.
It appears to me that the writings of Saint Paul, another person who actually existed according to most historians, are at least equally influential as the Biblical versions of the life of Jesus. To my knowledge, Saint Paul is the only Biblical writer who actually existed and whose works bear his name although there are several Pauline books that are considered to have been written by others. This is sort of a staggering thought as is the archaeological and historical accumulation of knowledge indicating that the Old Testament was written far later than formerly though, even as much as two to 600 hundred years later. All scripture is inspired by God(less) but this has little or nothing to be with the Bible being "inerrant" which it clearly is not by any reasonable standard involve lack of mistakes or errors beyond those of scribes.
This is a blog by a Canadian expat living in Japan where most of the writings and readers attempt to find meaning in a Bible that is fully errant. His intellect and demeanor remind me of you. There's a lot of greatness in Canada even if you are only "allowed" one drink a week by Trudeau.
Many on the site below are former evangelicals who often end up agnostics, non-trinitarians, Buddhists or Quakers, or Anglicans really. Church traditions have been tremendously influential and underscore many aspects of Christianity either barely treated in the Bible or which seem to be exempt at all such as Mariology and really the Doctrine of Inerrancy. I do like how you mix you faith and charitable beliefs in your blog.
https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com
It should have said "Goddess"not God Less, lol. Females are all but absent from the Bible in terms of being people with names. The several main named ones tend to be prostitutes/spies/murderesses/connivers/idolaters and witches. Jezebel is the most interesting and probably got an unfair treatment in the Bible but she and Delilah all fall into that same mode. One woman converted to Judaism and was named for that. Others are more or less, just wives of patriarchs or daughters, like those of Lot, although they were not named as I recall and maybe Haggar is the only one who comes off favorably but there's very little about her in non-Muslim traditions.
In the N.T., you have Mary and Elizabeth and the other Mary but there's very little in terms of information about these women apart from church tradition. Asherah, meaning "groves" or goddess in Hebrew appears to have been the consort of Yahweh/El but her name is almost always rendered as groves in Biblical translations.
But, I don't know, even as OTR fans and comic book and adventure fans, aside from sex, to many of us, let's admit it, male protagonists are more compelling, I think, because a huge aspect of any adventure tale is OCD, mixed with prodigious strength, going back to Ulysses and the other Greek heroes, only one of which is seemingly on par with the "men" and that is Aphrodite.
Aphrodite/Venus stories are by far the most interesting tales involving female goddesses, anywhere really, as female goddesses were deprecated in Germanic religion and I don't think there is any other mythological literature even remotely on par with the Greeks. The Greeks used these tales to try to find reason or reasonableness in their gods and yet, they generally fail to find much except generally misplaced righteous indignation by Diana, Juno and Athena.
In most accounts, Aphrodite was an uncreated being, who started the Trojan War essentially, and who then was the founding goddess of Rome and mother of Aeneas. There were several interesting lesser goddesses/witches but the main goddesses on Mount Olympus do not have tales that commend them or that really even show any measurable power apart from punishing people in ways that were almost always metaphorical and way over the top in terms of the alleged misdeeds committed. Juno, Athena, Aphrodite and Discord get pretty much the entire blame for the Trojan War along with Helen, who may have been a goddess in some traditions. Demeter must have been elsewhere also with Diana. Rationalizing gods/Gods seems to have been essentially aligned with the beginning of sedentary culture and a huge upswing in human achievement as seemingly telling stories and conceptualizing a creator are two things that only Humans do among the animal kingdom.
And by OCD, look at Leinigen vs. the Ants. No female who has ever existed would have stayed and fought for that plantation and not many males either which is one thing that makes the story so exceptional. He appears to have been a capable and strong man but he also refused to listen to others and almost died and who probably lost just about anything anyway.
The OCD aspects shows the refusal to stand powerless before nature. This was Leinigen's crowining achievement in life. Many of the William Conrad characters in Escape and in Gunsmoke exhibit these qualities. The book the Poseidon Adventure (not the amazing movie with the hopeful ending) is a perfect example of there. After losing several in their party died attempting to climb to the bottom of the upturned ship, the survivors noticed that all of the people who survived the initial destruction who had chosen to wait to be rescued, had in fact, all been rescued anyway. Their leader, a clergyman, commits suicide before they arrive while cursing God. It would have made for a lousy movie but it was an amazing book.
88 percent of the survivors who reached the summit of Everest have been male. Most adventure sports and martial arts and adventure tourists are male. Testosterone seems to fundamentally change the reasoning process and value system of human beings and chief among these effects are OCD, recklessness, anger and lawlessness seem to be tied to this hormone/life experience of being male and some estimated 95 percent of violent offenders in the U.S. are male. Kudos to Canada for its kinder, gentler and more humane penal system while still being firmly rooted in common law traditions.
Maybe that's a new layer for me in OTR, trying to discern why the protagonist/antagonist did what they did. To me, part of the process had become wondering about the importance of gender conflict. Two Came Back is a stellar story to me in this aspect. If the woman had been "nice" maybe she wouldn't have ended up with the headhunting tribes. The Vincent Price episode about uranium in the Amazon is another fascinating story related to male OCD, as is the Suspense story with the protagonist engulfed by sand looking for a mythical treasure ship in the desert. Chicks tend not to engage in such actions because, eh, almost nothing is worth the risk of immediate or sudden death but these things seem to almost compel men all of whom I salute for building the infrastructure of really the entire world. I still see those guys out in 100-degree heat with jack-hammers patching the roads and bridges of our country which is currently in a huge re-building mode and they are everywhere.
Janey needs air conditioning.
It should have said "Goddess"not God Less, lol. Females are all but absent from the Bible in terms of being people with names. The several main named ones tend to be prostitutes/spies/murderesses/connivers/idolaters and witches. Jezebel is the most interesting and probably got an unfair treatment in the Bible but she and Delilah all fall into that same mode. One woman converted to Judaism and was named for that. Others are more or less, just wives of patriarchs or daughters, like those of Lot, although they were not named as I recall and maybe Haggar is the only one who comes off favorably but there's very little about her in non-Muslim traditions.
In the N.T., you have Mary and Elizabeth and the other Mary but there's very little in terms of information about these women apart from church tradition. Asherah, meaning "groves" or goddess in Hebrew appears to have been the consort of Yahweh/El but her name is almost always rendered as groves in Biblical translations.
But, I don't know, even as OTR fans and comic book and adventure fans, aside from sex, to many of us, let's admit it, male protagonists are more compelling, I think, because a huge aspect of any adventure tale is OCD, mixed with prodigious strength, going back to Ulysses and the other Greek heroes, only one of which is seemingly on par with the "men" and that is Aphrodite.
Aphrodite/Venus stories are by far the most interesting tales involving female goddesses, anywhere really, as female goddesses were deprecated in Germanic religion and I don't think there is any other mythological literature even remotely on par with the Greeks. The Greeks used these tales to try to find reason or reasonableness in their gods and yet, they generally fail to find much except generally misplaced righteous indignation by Diana, Juno and Athena.
In most accounts, Aphrodite was an uncreated being, who started the Trojan War essentially, and who then was the founding goddess of Rome and mother of Aeneas. There were several interesting lesser goddesses/witches but the main goddesses on Mount Olympus do not have tales that commend them or that really even show any measurable power apart from punishing people in ways that were almost always metaphorical and way over the top in terms of the alleged misdeeds committed. Juno, Athena, Aphrodite and Discord get pretty much the entire blame for the Trojan War along with Helen, who may have been a goddess in some traditions. Demeter must have been elsewhere also with Diana. Rationalizing gods/Gods seems to have been essentially aligned with the beginning of sedentary culture and a huge upswing in human achievement as seemingly telling stories and conceptualizing a creator are two things that only Humans do among the animal kingdom.
This was originally comment two but for some reason, I forgot to post it.
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