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The Optional Jesus
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 You might think it would be
hard to claim Jesus Christ for the sexual revolution. He did refuse to
condemn a woman caught in adultery, but with the stern proviso that she go
and “sin no more.” He said that if you look at a woman with lust,
you’ve already committed adultery in your heart. He tightened up the
Mosaic law that permitted divorce. All of which offers little encouragement
for swingers.
 Nevertheless,
the gay militant writer Terrence McNally has written a play depicting Christ
as a sodomite (though protests have forced its cancellation). In a similar
spirit, Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar, wants to reject as
inauthentic any Gospel saying at odds with his own up-to-date creed, which
espouses, among other things, “responsible, protected, recreational
sex between consenting adults.”
After
2,000 years, the most unlikely people still want to claim Jesus for their side,
even when they aren’t Christians — and often, it seems, when
they hate Christianity. They usually say that the churches have twisted the
simple original message of love, superimposing layers of dogma, theology,
and repressive morality. Jesus was great, but ever since For the last
two centuries a curious breed of demi-Christian has tried to disengage
“the historical Jesus” from all that dogma and stuff. What did
Jesus “really” say and do?
The trouble
is that nearly everything we know about Jesus stems from the four Gospels,
all of which were written by believers in the Resurrection, the central dogma.
In a sense, all classic Christian theology is the working out of the implications
of the Resurrection, considered as the fact the first Christians insisted,
even under torture, it was. That
hasn’t stopped the hunt for the “historical” Jesus, the
presumably real figure behind the Gospels. Since the only documents we have
attest a life of miraculous deeds, supernatural orientation, and
eschatological purpose, the belief that a stripped-down
“natural” life of Jesus can be reconstructed is totally at odds
with the records.
![[Breaker quote for The Optional Jesus: Updating the Son of God]](2007breakers/070628.gif) In
her new book, The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus
(Free Press, $26), Charlotte Allen tells the story of the long campaign in which
scholarship has blended with wishful thinking to find, or fashion, a series of
“historical” Jesuses who have turned out to be strikingly
ahistorical. In 1909, George Tyrrell, a modernist Catholic theologian,
observed that the “historical” Jesus of the German scholars
was actually “the reflection of a liberal Protestant face, seen at the
bottom of a deep well.”
“In
other words,” says Allen, “the liberal searchers had found a
liberal Jesus. The same can be said of the Jesus-searchers of every era: the
deists found a deist, the Romantics a Romantic, the existentialists an
existentialist, and the liberationists a Jesus of class struggle. Supposedly
equipped with the latest critical and historical tools, the
‘scientific’ quest for the historical Jesus has nearly always
devolved into theology, ideology, and even autobiography.”
We have
found the historical Jesus, and he is us! He agrees with us, thinks like us, and
votes like us. Best of all, he imposes no obligations on us. He would favor, as
Funk does, “responsible, protected, recreational sex between
consenting adults.” Since the historical Jesus is progressive almost by
definition, anything in the Gospels that makes Jesus seem reactionary must
have been interpolated by his reactionary followers. (The question then
becomes why he attracted such a reactionary following, but never mind.)
As Allen
notes, the historical Jesus is based on several modern dogmas: it
presupposes that Jesus wasn’t divine, didn’t do miracles,
didn’t foresee the Crucifixion, and didn’t rise from the dead. He
just left a lot of wise sayings. Maybe he wasn’t divine, but he’s
awfully quotable. And you can edit out the quotations you don’t like:
they’re all optional.
Another
way to put it is that the historical Jesus doesn’t deserve to be
worshipped. He is not the light of the world, and never claimed to be. He can
be safely ignored.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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