Truth and Distortion

 

Historical Jesus

“Jesus was a first century Jew, and when we try to make him a twenty-first century American, we distort everything he was and everything he stood for.”

Bart D. Ehrman (Did Jesus Exist: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth)

          Bart Ehrman is a New Testament scholar at Princeton Divinity School. He is author of many books about the historical Jesus—about what Jesus of Nazareth said and did, and how truths have been distorted to make the story better. Isn’t that what story tellers do? Literary license is not mortal sin!

          Ehrman writes, “Jesus would not recognize himself in the preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world. He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise. He did not support acquisition of wealth or the good things in life. He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy. He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday…” It goes on for a while. Ehrman says that ministers who go through divinity schools in America are taught to think critically and historically about the Bible, but they seem to table what they’ve learned when they become pastors of churches in favor of preaching what people want to hear.

          Ehrman’s bottom line is the quote above which needs repeating: “Jesus was a first century Jew, and when we try to make him into a twenty-first century American, we distort everything he was and everything he stood for.” I think this is the major reason America has gone astray in its governance and its moral integrity. We’ve made Jesus in our own image with the “abundance doctrine,” and put words in his mouth he never said. We’ve concretized him as a pagan image to our own values. Mega churches are major corporations with lobbying arms and investment portfolios, not houses of worship of a simple carpenter and apocalyptic prophet who maintained an open table and healed for free. In other words, we’ve lost the real Jesus and gained an effigy of American exceptionalism akin to the golden calf of the Old Testament.

          Jesus’ world was nothing like ours, and his beliefs were nothing like ours. He was an itinerant preacher who loved God, and who provided a window for us to see what God’s love looks like. He tried to teach us how to show our own love for God by helping each other. I wish we could get back to that.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane