Religion, and religious practices, and religious attitudes, all evolve without their followers even being aware of how far they have drifted from the original intents.
That’s not to say that this Romanized drapery is what Jesus would have worn. He would have favored something more standard classical Arab/Jewish.
So much for Imitatio Christi, living in imitation of Jesus’ life.
A mason doing restoration work at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (i.e. the church built over the place where it is claimed Jesus was buried) accidentally left a ladder behind, sometime before 1728 when it shows up in an engraving of the building. Because the six Christian groups who control the site cannot agree on what to do with it, it is still there today.
To read more on the background of the Status Quo, you could go to Wikipedia.
To see more photos, and some video of the physical fights the groups occasionally get into for various reasons, you could go here.
Before Jesus went up to Jerusalem to have himself proclaimed King of Israel, he prophesied that he would show off his powers by having “a son of man” brought back to life after “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth”.
The magic trick might have been more credible if it hadn’t been performed by Jesus on his best friend.
Luckily his best friend Lazarus was reported to have died as Jesus and the disciples were headed towards Jerusalem. Lazarus lived four miles south of the city at Bethany, with his sisters Mary and Martha. Jesus delayed his journey for a couple of days, while the disciples urged him to hurry. When Jesus got to Bethany, Mary and Martha met him near Lazarus’ tomb and made a theatrical production of grief. Jesus dramatically called for the stone to be rolled away and called Lazarus to come out, even though he was four days dead. Lazarus came out.
“Therefore many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, put their faith in him.” (John 11:45) The wording suggests that many others were unimpressed with the show, and didn’t believe it.
So the “three days and three nights” prophecy was fulfilled even before Jesus rode into Jerusalem with the crowd calling him King and God’s Anointed. He had no reason to think he himself was going to be the object of the prophecy.
Lazarus fulfills Jesus’ prophecy. Which is more than can be said for Jesus, who was only buried for some 36 hours before his corpse disappeared.
And no, “son of man” had no meaning of “Godlike” attached to it by Jews at that time. The most detailed exposition of its use in the Old Testament is in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_man. It has the connotation of “mere human”. Redacted excerpt:
“Within the Hebrew Bible, the first place one comes across the phrase son of man is in Book of Numbers 23:19:
Got that? God is not a Son of Man. (That Mithraist God-incarnate idea is Paul’s great innovation, and the beginning of Christianity.)
Burqa Pride???
The Dutch have managed to create a political statement that is confusing everyone on both the right and the left. A Labour party councillor in Amsterdam dressed up in a yellow niqab for recent LGBTQ Pride celebrations, because the Dutch government has banned face-covering garments in government buildings and on public transport.
Burqas and niqabs are not required in the Quran, but they are symptomatic of the repressed role of women in old-fashioned versions of Islam (and Judaism, and Christianity). The freedom to do whatever you like because of your religious misapprehensions is a dangerous position to support; it leads to all kinds of antisocial behaviour, including genocide, female genital mutilation, and waving a live chicken over your head to cure disease.
But Jesus, being gay and an otherwise fundamentalist Jew, would probably have approved…
Churches and Sunday Schools teach the Old Testament, the New Testament, the description of the Temple, the differences between Sadducees and Pharisees, food, clothing, etc. But no mention of the Romans.
Jesus opposed those who didn’t follow the Jewish Law, and the Romans executed him
High school Ancient History teaches the rise of the Roman Empire and its acquisition of all the provinces around the Mediterranean. But no mention of Jesus.
This is like telling the story of Osama Bin Laden without mentioning the Americans – and then telling the story of the Western occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan without mentioning Islam or religious insurgents!
Historians are apparently scared of dealing with historical realities that bear upon the creation of religions; the talking snakes and virgin births and going up to heaven in chariots don’t mesh coherently with the sociopolitical narrative, so historians ignore them.
And priests and theologians are equally scared of contextualizing their stories, because the stories only make sense if they exist as detached fairytale bubbles. Their stories are self-referential, detached from reality, about a preliterate world where gods and angels walk the earth and perform magic, where demons are the cause of illness or misfortune, and where life will somehow continue after the body wears out and dies.
But Jesus was a person in a particular time and place. He was a religious Jew, an acknowledged rabbi, living under the military occupation of an idolatrous, pig-eating Western superpower – the Roman Empire. The Romans had been controlling, taxing (and sometimes looting) Palestine for a hundred years, in the face of major uprisings once a generation. When you view the words and actions of Jesus in this light, a fresh and powerful picture appears, clearly hostile to the Romans.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE ROMANS explores the life of Jesus within this historical context.
Michael Burch, a poet, creator of The HyperTexts and reformed fundamentalist Christian, has written the most detailed exposition I have ever seen on the issue of whether “hell” is a concept that should be accepted by Christians. The exposition has a mercifully short and clear introductory section that covers the key points – and then, for those who want to consider every possible aspect, continues at length.
Hell, as imagined by Hieronymus Bosch
Personally, as a skeptic, I find the idea of hell simply ludicrous. As Omar Khayyam says scornfully to God (in FitzGerald’s translation):
Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou will not with Predestin’d Evil round
Enmesh me, and impute my Fall to Sin?
(“Gin” meaning “noose of hair or wire for snaring wild birds alive”… which might be the origin of the drink’s name, I suppose.)
Hell is hardly a logical product of an all-powerful Creator, unless that Creator is by nature a sadist. Rather the word that has been so often translated as “hell” is “sheol”, meaning “a grave” or “the place where all dead people go”… which is why, in Psalm 139:8, King David could say that if he made his bed in Sheol, God would be there with him.
Forget hell. It’s a stupid idea.
Pity the suicide bomber
Who will never see Heaven
Neither the Heaven of lover and spouse, children, grandchildren,
The Heaven of here and now, of sunrises, sunsets,
Nor the Heaven of Afterlife, if it exists.
Bitter, despairing, the suicide bomber consigns herself to hell.
Pity the coward who shoots up the outdoor cafe,
Who has no combat skills,
No worthy adversary,
No genuine enemy,
But kills only the unarmed, defenceless and innocent.
Confused and deluded, used and betrayed, he consigns himself to hell.
But have no pity for the preachers of hate,
The preachers in churches and mosques,
The preachers in Parliament and Congress,
The preachers on TV and talk radio,
The preachers of hate who profit from fear,
The preachers of death who profit from strife,
The preachers of war who don’t go to war,
The dog-shit on the walk of life.
Published online in Rat’s Ass Review – Such an Ugly Time, April 2017
Into the land for which the Jews
A thousand years before
Had killed and burned to take,
Jesus was born.
In towns controlled by Rome –
Grafting their multicultural odd gods
Onto Rome-cleansed, Rome–straightened cities –
Jesus played.
Walking four miles from Nazareth
To Sepphoris with Joseph at age ten
To work and help his father build another
Roman Jewish palace,
Jesus toiled.
In the uprisings led by Judas of Galilee
When Joseph and two thousand Jews were killed,
Crucified by the Romans, Sepphoris burned,
Jesus escaped.
In hills and deserts outside Rome’s control,
Studying prophecies and hefting swords,
Jesus preached Israel purged of Rome.
Outside the shining city on the hill,
The Passover uprising crushed by Rome,
Flanked by two Zealots, heads of the revolt,
Jesus, King of Jews, was crucified.
Preventing further fundamentalists
Leading attacks against High Priest and Rome,
Saul hunted Jesus’ Messianic dregs.
Seeing an opportune new power base,
Mixing old Jewish myths in a fresh blend
With Mithras, Isis – a One God for all –
Saul/Paul created Christ as a new God.
Both fundamentalist and Paulist Jews
Denying the Emperor’s divinity –
Disrupting commerce, peace and government –
Nero burned Jewish Christians, and
Titus destroyed the Jewish Temple, and
Hadrian deported all the Jews
From Palestine, scattering Christians and Jews
Throughout the Roman Empire and beyond.
Jews kept their heads down. Christians evangelized,
Spread through the powerless – slaves, women, poor,
Criminals and the lowest army ranks.
Seeing an opportune new power base,
Constantine changed Rome’s faith.
Controlling now (in part) the Emperor,
Popes ruled the West from Rome, built palaces,
And persecuted Jews.
(Jesus gives no opinion, being dead.)
Published: Ambit 211, UK, January 2013
Judaism
Genocide in Canaan
Gave God’s land to the Jews;
But genocides in other lands
Are Yahweh’s big taboos.
Buddhism
All life is suffering,
Yes, all our life is pain;
Then I must be a masochist –
I’d love to live again.
Norse religion
The first gods killed a giant,
From his skull to make
The sky, and mountains from his bones –
What lies! No talking snake?!
Christianity
Jesus wasn’t Jewish
And his killers weren’t from Caesar;
At least, so Paul said after
An epileptic seizure.
Islam
There is no God but One,
Perfect in every way;
All creatures do His unknown will –
So there’s no need to pray.
Mormonism
To teenage Joseph Smith
An angel showed gold plates
On which he read ‘Jesus Was Here’ –
It got him lots of dates.
Modern Paganism
Pretentious modern pagans
Without a sense of spoof
Have got no clue what Stonehenge was
When it had walls and roof.
Atheism
I don’t see gods on clouds,
I don’t hear angels sing;
There’s just one question bothers me –
How come there’s anything?
(Published online in Snakeskin, August 2016)
Throughout history, as far as we can tell from ancient literatures and from more recent preliterature societies, humans have dreamed of many of the same magical powers:
Some people were said by storytellers to have done these things. Some people claimed to be able to do them. Followers of Jesus thought he rose from the dead, followers of Muhammad thought he went up to Heaven one night, followers of Odin thought that his ravens told him all the doings of the world – and of course many, many religious authorities promise you unverifiable after-death benefits in exchange for a cash contribution in the here-and-now.
But let’s face it: the dreams are cool! We wanted to do these things as kids, and we want to do them still. And better yet: we ARE doing them. Flying, in various ways. Walking on the moon. Looking at distant lands with our “magic mirrors”, whether phones or big-screen TVs.
And we keep working on the rest: trying to talk with dolphins; bringing people back from clinical death; planning for permanent colonies in the sky; and – the big one – trying to figure out how to live forever.
The dreams are the same as the dreams of those old religions. But now we know what we have to do, to make them become reality. (P.S. It involves work, not prayer.)
The Gospel According to the Romans 