Jesus Who?

I tend to go along with Christian tradition in supposing that Jesus of Nazareth was a singular historical person. However, an intellectually honest critical analysis of the pertinent ancient texts calls for admission that there is virtually no direct evidence to support that view. It is entirely possible that the ultimate source of the Jesus traditions was not one singular person, but several, whose teachings and life circumstances may have been concatenated or conflated by re-tellers and later literary compositors, i.e. the Evangelists, the authors of the gospels.

My view, which serves as a framework for understanding and representing the religious-ethical teachings attributed to Jesus, is that the surviving scriptures are ultimately based on oral accounts of the sayings of a remarkable, prophetic Judaic teacher who engaged in a brief but very influential ministry, which was profoundly transformative for most of the people who received his teachings. I do not doubt that Jesus, like multitudes of prophets and religious teachers before and since his time, was divinely inspired, i.e. he was consciously and whole-mindedly in communion with God. His purpose was well described as proclaiming the gospel, or the good tidings, of God.

I have no reason to doubt that Jesus, or an historical personage very like him, was crucified in Jerusalem by Roman occupation authorities in about 30 C.E. It is also plausible that a few of his devotees promulgated a tale that Jesus had gone missing from his crypt on the third day following his death. What actually happened is unknown, but this story, and the fictive denouement of Jesus' bodily resurrection that was added to the first gospel narrative, have had incalculable consequences, affecting the history of religion more than any other dogma has ever done.

Whoever the original instigator of the first-century Jesus movement might have been (if but one), I believe he was no more God incarnate than any human being potentially is. Moreover, he was not Christian. He was, apparently, a Judaic Messianist. For all we know, 'he' may well have actually been 'they' - several 'Jesuses' as it were.

Early Christianity as we know it seems to have been invented almost single-handedly by the apostate, repentant Pharisaic letter-writer Saul of Tarsus, who was called Paul in Greek. The emergent Christian religious tradition was elaborated, following Paul, by a number of evangelistic authors working with textual sources based on oral transmission - and a few scraps of written "sayings" of Jesus. Nothing resembling an established, organized church developed in these traditions until some time in the second century, in circumstances far removed from the original Jerusalem assembly of “The Way,” observant Jews who heralded the coming of the Lord, that is, the advent of the Jewish Messiah, the Son of Man who they believed would inaugurate the reign of God in Israel.

The Greek translation of the Aramaic term, “Meshiach” - Messiah - was "Christos," i.e., Christ. The theological meaning I make of the term, “Christ” is that it signifies that condition of the soul in which the human person is in conscious communion with God. Another way I have put this is “the consciousness of personal being in relationship with being itself.” To be “in Christ” is to be awakened to the reality of one’s sacred identity with God, as Jesus is said to have been. Thus, as I would interpret the evangelistic narrative, upon baptism by John, Jesus became consciously Jesus Christ, Son of God, standing for the potential of sanctification inherent in every person.

I understand the term, “grace” as signifying that spiritually transforming self-realization in which one recognizes the identity of one’s personal being with the ultimate reality of being itself. Grace is the gift of God-consciousness, and it brings about the state of being in Christ. The gift of grace is received through faith, which is precisely that orientation of the whole person prescribed in the Biblical commandment to “love God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind.”