Category: Belief

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Belief Bible Study Finding God Jesus Paul

This Far, But No Farther: Paul’s Radical Ecumenism in Galatians 3:28

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

Temple worship in Paul’s time was highly segregated, but in a complicated way. Everyone was encouraged to worship at Temple (and there’s only the one Temple at this time; cities do not have their own synagogues), but not everyone was allowed to participate fully in worship. There is full segregation based on gender — men to one side, women to the other — and then within this main system of segregation you would have your Greek gentiles apart, and your slaves apart, on either side of that male/female literal and spiritual dividing line. (I have ::frequent:: stress nightmares about being the logistics manager at the Temple in Jerusalem. I’m great at my job of course; but at what price?) And then the Jesus movement happens (we can’t really call them Christians yet), everything gets thrown off balance. The Jesus movement — sometimes called The Way or Nazarenes in the 1st century CE — can’t compete with Judaism’s exclusivity, so it becomes almost radically ecumenical. Women are recognized as disciples, and even do some teaching. (This doesn’t last super long; a movement that is too egalitarian becomes challenging to harness.) And these early gentile followers (which just means “non-Jew” in this case) of Jesus would want to worship in the way Jesus did, at the Temple, because there are absolutely no other places for ritual worship. (There are house churches, but that’s an entirely different form of worship.)

Imagine falling in love, and wanting to spend your days in full communion with your love. You want to almost transubstantiate yourself into your love, and your love into you. Now imagine that the place where you can be closest to your love tells you, “This spot, but no further.” Imagine being denied full participation in the worship of your love. That’s the tension we see between Jews and gentiles. Gentiles want this immediate experience of the Divine — because ::it recently happened within memory::. Paul has an experience of the resurrected Jesus and it utterly shatters his life and blinds him. On the day of Pentecost, extraordinary things happened to the apostles. After years of divine silence, ::something:: was happening, something that included any who wanted to become a part of it. And the Temple is saying, “Okay. But: here. And no further.

“Jesus is a figurehead, in the very first days of his ministry, for an eschatological gospel: the good news of the end of the world. Not how we’re ending the world today, by killing and destroying it. This is an end of temporality: the wicked days are coming to an end, and a new era of righteousness is coming. This is what John the Baptist, likely an Essene, preached. Whether or not you believe the messianic claims made on Jesus’s behalf, he does pick up John’s cross and also preaches a gospel of repentance. Cast off what is harming you, care for those who need caring for, because all of this is going away and you won’t need your hurt any more. “Repent” literally means “turn back” or “turn away from.” (That this ended up ::not:: happening becomes a problem for the Jesus movement, but that’s for another parenthesis.) And this message resonated with Jews and gentiles alike. When Paul is writing his letters to various churches (“no, you’re doing it wrong” or “no, YOU’RE doing it wrong” or “NO, your doing it wrong” or “STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP”) he wants to challenge Jewish hegemony and insists on an almost-egalitarian ideology for these followers of Jesus. (Does he hate women? When have we ever ::not:: hated women? Is he homophobic? Aren’t we all, aren’t we all.) Insisting that categories like “slave,” and “women,” and “Greek” are meaningless within the community of believers, he tells the Galatians, as early as the late 40s CE, that anyone is welcome in worship.

Paul as Pride Grand Marshall is a fun joke. Others have spent useful time trying to either redeem Paul’s homophobia (an anachronistic term that may or may not be fair to Paul), or reify his position. In letters to the Romans, to the Church in Corinth, and to his fellow evangelizer, Timothy, Paul seems pretty clear on his stance about queer identity. Except it isn’t very clear at all. There’s an ocean of time and distance and references separating us from the mind of Paul.

In the ’90s, I worked at an HIV Day Center in Portland, Oregon. Our intake form was invasive, because we want to know the everything of the mistakes a person makes before we help them. We would ask men if they were homosexual.

Some men were! Some men outly and proudly identified as gay. Some men were not! Sometimes angrily not. Sometimes confusedly not. But our form required an additional question, which was: “Have you had sex with other men?” And a what-shouldn’t-be-all-that shocking number of men who did not identify as homosexual answered yes to the “have you had sex with other men” question. Capitalism was only just formulating bisexuality as a means of selling hair-care products to men, and no one could understand how (a) someone could not be a homosexual; and (b) have sex with men.

Is Paul homophobic? It actually doesn’t matter. We don’t need to listen to Paul’s Grand Theory of Moral Sexuality in order to listen closely to what he writes to the Galatians about radical openness. Inconsistency doesn’t affect our rightness, just like rightness doesn’t keep us from doing wrong. If Paul is wrong about women; if Paul is wrong about women and gay people and sodomy and what the church is doing in Thessalonica and even about his own transfiguring experience of the risen Jesus on his way to Damascus; even if he is wrong about all of that, we can still trust fully that whatever the ineffably divine experience of the universe is, it is open to all: to Greeks and to slaves, to queer people and sinners, to people in all their messy splendor, to every piece of creation sidelined as Other.

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Belief Gnostics God Gospels Jesus John Luke Mark Matthew New Testament

The Bad Seed

“verily thou hast done unwisely…vex me not”

The Bible we have is a book in one volume, and so we read it as if it’s a book in one volume. But it’s really a whole bunch of books, and gospels, and pieces of poems, like a Lutheran hot dish, which is why we have Protestantism.

There are more Christian gospels in the world than appear in the New Testament.

Thomas the Israelite1 wrote an infancy gospel, probably in the 2nd century CE. (Or, at least, that’s the guess, and the dating of the earliest primary document.) It’s important to know that something not being written down doesn’t make it illegitimate, any more than something written down is legitimate. No one, from the late 100s to now, has been keen on including Thomas the Israelite’s infancy gospel, or any other infancy gospel, and the excuses are largely about its timing: it wasn’t written down soon enough. It’s almost 200 years after the birth/death of Jesus, and isn’t written by Someone Who Was There. (A gospel being written by Someone Who Was There became a main measuring stick still used today when judging whether something is Bible-worthy or not. Unless it’s by a woman who was there and then we immediately jettison it, so its part of the ecosystem that the species Dans brown live on.) But even today we have books about people written by other people who Were Not There. They’re called history books and biographies.

Infancy gospels would be very important, and a lot of early Christian apologists would have loved to find a legitimate infancy gospel to fill in those missing years where Jesus appears to not do much. (This leads to everything from “Jesus traveled to India and became a Buddhist master” to “he traveled to Arabia in order to become a magus.” As inconsistent as Christian apologists are — and they are very inconsistent — they do grant that they are check-mated here and have no documentation to support their idea that Jesus didn’t do these things. I’ve got more to say about this, but it’s in that footnote you passed.)

Apologists’ inability to believe in infancy gospels doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They do. And the reason apologists might stay away is often insufferably unpleasant.

In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas2, Thomas tells us that Jesus killed the following people:

– The son an Annas, who mucks up a pretty pool Jesus created on the Sabbath, by withering him either like or literally into a fig tree. (You may remember Annas from Jesus Christ Superstar and the song “This Jesus Must Die.” One of the reasons might be because Jesus killed his kid.)

– A kid who bumped into him. (When the kid’s parents complained to Joseph — “What if he blessed people instead of cursing them?” — Joseph had a talk with Jesus, who carefully explained that he was Very Right to kill that kid, and then Jesus blinded his accusers. Joseph tried again to parent Jesus, and Jesus said, “You’re working my last nerve, Joe. Pray you don’t finish.”)

– Probably this other kid named Zeno, who “fell off the roof.” When that kid’s parents told Joseph, Jesus immediately ran to the corpse and brought it to life so it could exonerate him.

In an infancy gospel from the late 600s/early 700s, “Pseudo-Matthew,” Jesus doesn’t kill anyone. Instead, no one can eat unless Jesus is at the table, and when Jesus isn’t at the table no one eats. Also, Jesus is surrounded by “the brightness of God” day and night which would make him impossible to share a room with.

The Syrian Infancy Gospel (c. late 400s) shows that people keep dumping dirty Jesus water on sick kids, with miraculous results. No little amount of time is spent cataloging attempts by people trying to steal the bathwater to throw on lepers. (There’s also a dragon in this gospel which is defeated with some of Jesus’s soiled laundry.)

Later, Jesus becomes angry with some boys who are too good at hide-and-seek so he turns them into goats. Oh, and one time Jesus dressed himself up as a king and made his friends drag people from the road to honor him.

The Divinity of Jesus

There are competing theories in the gospel about the Divinity of Jesus. You may not know that there are competing theories, because the New Testament is presented as unified and inerrant. But you’ve got your Incarnationists over here, and your Adoptionists over there, and here’s how they differ.

Incarnationists believe that God was incarnated on Earth in Jesus, who also existed with God from one moment before the beginning of everything. So actually, there’s a schism right there with the Incarnationsts. Some believe that Jesus only existed from the beginning in the way that your ability to pull off a convincing English accent existed from birth: something you could do, but not something you were always doing. Jesus is a unique experience God has on earth. And then some, like, for instance, the writer of the Gospel of John, believe that Jesus and God are the same, and have always existed, but are separate, but not different, and God has always been God and Jesus, and Jesus has always been Jesus and God. For this narrative, btw, you need to fix a bunch of plot holes; but because the plot holes are terminal plot holes, fixing them only makes everything hole-ier. For instance, if Jesus is divine from the very beginning, he needs a pristine and spotless womb. And a pristine and spotless womb cannot even have caught a flashing glimpse of a penis let it be awashed in schiaparelli sin and that’s absolutely no house for a savior. But we also have Original Sin to contend with. How spotless and pristine can a womb be if its bearer is tainted? So now we have to remember that Mary was conceived without original sin. But she can’t be supernatural — that doesn’t exist. She’s not divine, or demi-divine. Except when she is. She’s a human woman, because Jesus has to be born of a human woman. But she has to be so extraordinary as to almost negate her humanity. And then if this were a sonata, I’d put one of those repeat signs so you would know to go back and repeat this again, every 50 years, until you die.

It’s bonkers.

Adoptionists believe that Jesus was born entirely human. Mary is human, Jesus is human, God is God, and doesn’t notice Jesus until (a) his baptism in the Jordan by John; (b) his crucifixion; or (c) his resurrection. In this case, God notices how great Jesus has been and gives him Employee of the Year. The Gospel of Mark in the New Testament is an Adoptionist gospel. (People will argue with me and I just won’t listen.) Mark knows nothing about Jesus’s birth, the angels, the annunciation, the magi, the stars. Mary, his mother, is mentioned only once and she has no speaking lines. Jesus becomes divine at the moment of baptism, when the “heavens [are] torn apart,” the Spirit descends (who is this “spirit”? Another time, my ducks), and a voice comes from haven, saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (All quotations from Mark 1:9-11 in the NRSV.)

Matthew and Luke are also sometimes viewed as Adoptionist. Jesus does not become divine until Mary conceives. Matthew and Luke do not say anything about Jesus’s eternalness. So we’ll add a (pre-a) to the above list and say “until his conception.”

John is the only wholly Incarnationist gospel we have in the New Testament.

This is a little bit of an issue for the gap we have when we take all gospels together. Combined, here is what we know:

pre-birth to birth: check
1ish to 12: absolutely nothing
12: check (he’s a rabbi now)
12 to 29: absolutely nothing
30 to 33: busy

We have nothing in the New Testament that fills those gaps. If Jesus was an incarnation of God — God made Flesh — you’d think that would be remarked on. Initially some very excited shepherds visit. We get some Persian magician-spies. And that’s it. This extraordinary event — a magical star, angels everywhere, prophecies — is forgotten. Kinda like the One Ring, I guess? But not really. Here’s a kid, born of a young woman, who might or might be a virgin depending on how you translate, and he’s not lying at the bottom of a river covered in silt. He’s around! He’s in his community! And unlike the way we’ve pubertized magic in popular culture, where wizardy kids don’t have control over their sexua– sorry, magic, until pubert– sorry, until they learn to control their orgas. Shit. Unlike that, there’s no sense that Jesus has to “control his powers” because Jesus is God and God is not a horny teen witch. (Unless he is!)

So if we’re to understand Jesus in an Incarnationist context, this knowledge gap is puzzling. However, if we are rational Markan Adoptionists, then that gap is explained by an entire Portnoise of all the very boring same things that all teens do. He’s not the Christ yet. He hasn’t been adopted by God down by the river.

Infancy gospels are an Incarnationist genre. They’re wild, and I love them. They’re also necessary for belief, but not convenient for it. They sit uneasily next to stories of Jesus’s meekness and humility, and run counter to his own ambivalence about his divinity. They’re flawed portraits by flawed people, looking for a savior who might look like them.

Footnotes

1 Some of you may know about the gnostic Secret Gospel of Thomas. Thomas the Israelite, to whom this infancy gospel is attributed, is not that Thomas. Unless he is. But mostly probably not.]

2 None of the gospels we have — both in the New Testament and those left out — came with titles. They didn’t have chapters or verses, either. All of that stuff is added later, and titles like Pseudo-Matthew were/are used primarily to scare people away and reaffirm that they’re Not Really Gospels. But they are.

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Belief Christ Finding God Jesus

What Happens When the Wire Snaps?

What kept nagging at me — after the rush of religion and feeling like I had found a church and a faith I could work into my own belief system — was the ultimate question of the Divinity of Jesus.

I want to be very clear: A man named Jesus — or Yeshua, or Immanuel — lived. He was a Jew, likely with an affinity for the Essenes* (through his cousin John the Baptist**), who preached a gospel of social justice***. He was seen more as a political irritant and agitator than an important religious figure during his lifetime, and he was ultimately found guilty and executed by the state.

[* There are some scholars who doubt the existence of the Essenes entirely, believing they were actually renegade Zadokides — sons of a Jewish priest named Zadok. I’m agnostic on this.]

[** It’s unclear what the relationship was between Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. A blood relationship of some kind is hinted at; however, ideas of family and allegiances were sorted and settled in ways that are not common to us. Cousin seems to fit; but it just as easily could not.]

[*** He’s not consistent about social justice all the way through — or, his biographers and recounters, at least, were not consistent. Jesus, after his death and with no way to counter or correct, became the necessary catalyst for a variety of faith understandings that continue up through today.]

How can a religion that tries to emphasize love and caring be based on the violent death of a single man? Why does our religion require that violence? Why did ::God:: require that violence? I have not yet been able to reconcile these ideas in a way that makes Christianity loving and welcoming. “Please come to our murder cult! We wear the object our savior was killed on; you can get one bedazzled if you want.”

As with all religions, there are schisms, and Judaism is no different. By the time of Jesus, there was a desperation for the Messiah to come as a warrior and right all the wrongs committed against God’s chosen people. Followers of Jesus, especially those writing some years after his execution, used Jewish writings to point out how Jesus himself was the Messiah.

(This proved to be hard to sell to the Jews of the time, who had their own myths and accounts of what the messiah would be and do, and Jesus fulfilled none of those things.)

And this is, I think, a key point to keep in mind: The Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible are two ::entirely:: separate collection of documents — but in a curious way. Judaism has no interest in, or need of, Christianity. It stands on its own*. The Christian Bible is reliant on the Jewish Bible because it is what underpins and proves the Divinity of Jesus as the Christ. For those curious about or fascinated with the evolution of religious belief, the Book of Mormon shares the same reliance on the Jewish Bible that Christianity does. It also needs the Christian Bible, too. These are appeals to authority. Neither holy book needs the Book of Mormon.

[* That’s actually a bit of an oversell: Judaism comes out of the crucible of other ANE (Ancient Near East) cultures and religions. In some ways, the Tanakh — the Jewish Scriptures — is attempting to correct the beliefs of the other cultures around it.]

So, the more I thought about Christianity — and especially the way it has evolved (or, less charitably, metastasized*) — I began to really put my whole heart into working out what, exactly, Jesus’s role is in salvation.

[* When Europeans began stealing land from Native Americans, they brought with them their most holy dictum: The earth was made for man to subdue. So the wilderness of North America symbolized the chaos out of which God brought order and goodness. Christianity was used extensively to justify and encourage slavery. And it is used now to attack more than it is used to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. #NotAllChristians]

I remain a theist. I continue to believe that what we are all participating in is some sort of Great Divine Mystery, one that we’ll either never solve, or we’ll solve, but not in our current existence. I don’t believe there is a place where people are punished for whatever we want to believe sin is. I also don’t believe in some limitless field of perfect with streets of gold and everyone somehow living eternity in perfection*.

[* Reading the Bible through a lens of poverty, the ridiculousness of heaven starts to make more sense. Streets paved in gold; everyone wearing a crown; jewels everywhere: heaven is filled with the things denied to you in this life.]

But I believe we do go on. I just don’t know how. Or what it looks like. And I will either die, and know the answer; or I’ll die, and stop asking.

Jesus said extraordinary things about caring for the poor and the “least among us.” But I do not believe he was the Son of God. I’m more squishy about some of the miracles — a good miracle is a good miracle — but I absolutely do not believe his arrest, torture, and execution by the state was the mechanism of salvation. I think it was just the murder of a man who caused too many problems.

So where I find myself now is uninterested in Christianity, but very much a believer in God. I think Christianity is an attempt — I think ALL religions and philosophies are an attempt — to explain various experiences of the Divine. I just don’t know what form God takes, and I don’t pretend to understand God’s likes and dislikes. I think God is simply delighted by everything. “Do it again,” G.K. Chesterton imagines God saying.

(“It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.”)

I’m less worried about how to label myself. That seems a waste of time. But I don’t think I can, with good conscience, say I am a Christian any longer.

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Belief God Parables Seeking Souls

Some Unorganized Thoughts About Riots and Race

The Wikipedia page for the Boston Tea Party has an entire section solely about the destruction of the tea. White men, some disguised as Native Americans (not out of respect for the Native Americans, btw; scapegoats are made, not born), looted a ship and destroyed some tea. I don’t mean to teasplain the Boston Tea Party to you. For years, it was one of the “fun” sections of U.S. history classes because it occurs in the middle of terrible trade negotiations with Britain and everything was the Stamp Act.

I want to go back to something real quick: I said “white men” above and while all lives matter (hashtag “nonsense”), in the case of 18th century America, it’s the white men who matter because women and black people were property. And they weren’t members of the coterie of rioters who took two seconds to brainstorm a political act of dumping tea into the harbor. (If anyone tries to explain to me that the Boston Tea Party was a plan long in the making I will open my mouth to laugh and never stop laughing until I die, mouth still wide open with a rictus smile.) Benjamin Rush, one of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence (no, not that white guy; the other white guy), ironically argued that the tea itself carried within it “the seeds of slavery” to Britain. Tea-drinking became unpatriotic in this country until the South discovered sweet tea. We like to think on the Founding Fathers as these mythological and ideological giants with wooden teeth and ragged wigs but they were just dumb men in boats. There’s that painting of George Washington crossing the Hudson (that’s a river, right?) or maybe it’s the Delaware look: all you need to know is he’s in a boat on some water. You’ve seen this picture I know you have and he’s sort of standing and pointing the way forward with his nose but gurl, there are only two directions in which one can cross a river and it’s either forward or backward. “Go that way!” George points. “WE KNOW,” say the rowers.

Our country, America, was literally built because white looters looted an entire continent of its black people to do the work of assembling this nation (i.e., everything except worrying about how much cash the master was rolling in). And before that, white Englishmen and French dudes and sure, Germans, why not, and absolutely some Vikings — a rainbow of white people; a rich tapestry in shades of vanilla — looted land away from the tribes already living there. Remember how Olde Timey colonists argued that the land was better tended under colonial hands because the locals weren’t doing anything with it (even though it was Native Americans who taught agriculture to the invaders)? And yet I’ve had a hole in my downstairs ceiling for approximately 14 years and no one has come to fix it and colonize our house. It’s probably because we’re white.

Our country was also built on riots and protests — specifically, the American Revolution, which is just a protest with a better tech-savvy teen as the spin-doctor, but also that Tea Party business which is the sweet spot of both rioting and looting.

By white people. White men.

(Oh, but real quick, and because maybe one of you has read this far and is about to scroll to the comments to teach me history: Women colonists were politically active in their way, too. There’s a fantastic cartoon, published in Britain in 1775, titled A Society of Patriotic Ladies at Edenton in North Carolina. See right below this parenthetical.)

White people love two things: Owning people (black people, children, Asians, women) and taking things that aren’t theirs (this country, that country, a whole bunch of other countries, and Hawai’i). Wait, we also love making black boys gladiate for scholarship money. Oh, and we LOVE eating outdoors, where the bugs are. There’s always that nightmare moment, when meeting friends for brunch, where the server says, “Would you like to eat indoors or out on our patio?” Because everyone wants to eat in the fresh air so common in cities where restaurants are built on streets that cars exhaust their way to and fro on. (“Up and down, up and down/I will lead them up and down/I am feared in field in town/Goblin, lead them up and down.”) Oh, we also love making rules, saying they are for everyone, and then only employing them against some ones. All lives matter, yes, but some lives matter more, or differently, or we’re more willing to give those lives — white lives — more of the benefit of the doubt than, say, a black man birdwatching.

“He had drugs in his system,” someone solemnly told me about George Floyd. Okay. I have drugs in my system, too. I break my nightly fast with some Zoloft, some Klonopin, and something I can’t remember the name of for my manic depression. I also smoke weed, which I think I’m not supposed to say anymore, so this will be the last time. Not because of the legality or illegality of cannabis, but because there are racial overtones to the way we describe a plant that has sacred and medicinal power for the Native Americans who were already here. I am privileged to even have psychiatric care, but my doc is younger than I am and active, so he prescribes a lot of things like “exercise” and “activities” and what I want is a brain that slows down for just half a moment. “So I can breathe,” I almost wrote, until I thought better of it.

White men made things like atom bombs and concentration camps and, ironically, very tall cans of iced tea. Black people brought us Dr Shirley Jackson, a theoretical physicist; and pacemakers (invented by Otis Boykin); and added a richness to our music — color, texture, tone, and true ache.

We are rioting and we are protesting because for too long in this country White Men have made it impossible for those who are not White Men to live full lives with the full complements of safety, security, respect, and love. Imagine being a large black man for 15 seconds: whether you actually are or not, in your mind you know that you make other people very afraid. And it happens when you’re a large black boy. And it happens when you’re just plain black.

Another thing white people love to do is re-translate the past so as to assuage some of the guilt that is rightfully white people’s own, their own, their own (“because it is bitter, and because it is my heart”). So, back to the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution: that looting and those riots were justified. When Colin Kaepernick simply took a knee, that was the highest disrespect to ever happen in the history of this country that practiced a cruel form of slavery (“There are uncruel forms?”) for far longer than was cute and kept Japanese American citizens in concentration camps. White rules weigh differently than others’ rules, it would seem.

OH. And. Another thing we love (we’re busy little bees, aren’t we? Take a break, white people! You’ve earned it) is starting fires in black neighborhoods and then try to say that black people are starting those fires because it’s not a riot without a fire and a broken window and those protesting in Minneapolis weren’t burning and breaking enough so some enterprising white police officers said, “We’ll help!” And they did. And they blamed it on those rioting and protesting the murder of a man who fine, had drugs in his system; and who fine, maybe did some not great things in his life. I regularly embezzled money from the Skippers Fish n Chips I worked at in Medford, Oregon, in my early 20s. I thought VERY hostile thoughts about a person taking too long to descend the stairs at the Metro only to discover they were blind. Each of us is the most beautiful thing in the universe, and each of us has done something we either deeply regret or someone else judges to be very wrong. Up until homosexuality was finally made legal and all students had to take Gay not as an elective, but as a required course, my very existense was illegal. And like I said, I’ve had my fair share of drugs in my system, too.

Two final anecdotes:

1) When Joe Bevel and I were driving cross-country (btw, I don’t have a driver’s license), I got stopped by TWO separate police officers within 15 minutes because I was on a road that I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to be on yet. It was very early morning, so essentially dead night, and not only did I get out of my car to approach the second officer who stopped me (I had to ask him where the turnaround was to get me to the exit to get off the highway), the first cop just called me an idiot (in a delightfully grating Midwest accent) and didn’t even ask to see my license (which, again, I do not have) or registration (which I think we had? It was my dead mom’s truck and she had dementia so who the fuck knows). I got to drive the rest of the way home with my brother, illegal the whole way, and I was safe. (I’ll also never drive cross-country again or travel anywhere farther than 1 hour away.)

2) Zach has his Old Complaint, a gastrointestinal issue that remains an Unsolved Mystery to this very day. Last month, Zach had his worst attack yet, and he had been moaning and crying out in pain so loudly that someone called the police to do a wellness check on us. (I want to break in here because you might be thinking, “Mike, why was Zach crying and moaning and screaming–” did I mention screaming? “–for so long; how could you sit through that and read The Portrait of a Lady you monster?” and I’ll tell you: Zach actively doesn’t want help at those times; he wants to be left alone. And it’s been going on for several years now and I am sort of used to it. One of the first mornings Joe Bevel lived with us here in Maryland, Zach was having an attack but it was more of a moaning/groaning sound and Joe thought, “Um.” Because to Joe Bevel, it sounded like Zach was having some Private Alone Time with some adult-style documentaries, and not that Zach was experiencing waves of discomfort and nausea.) The police came, and once they saw we were two just-past-middle-age white men, we were fine. They left. They asked if we wanted an ambulance, which we politely declined because I ran the numbers real quick and we were not then, nor are we now, millionaires.

All lives actually do matter. It’s not nonsense, like I said earlier. And that’s why we’re protesting and rioting: we can’t say that all lives matter until we start treating all lives as if they all mattered. As if each was the most precious resource we have. As if losing one of us is losing all of us. “Oh,” a professor says in the play W;t, “it’s an allegory of the soul!” And it is.

Categories
Belief Bible Study Christ Gospels Mark Matthew New Testament

What Happens When Jesus is Racist?: The Syrophoenician Woman

We are spoiled for choice when it comes to reckoning with Jesus of Nazareth. For atheists, he was just another Jewish apocalyptic preacher. (I think there was a time when “Did Jesus exist?” made the rounds as a question and almost all historians of the Ancient Near East (ANE) agree that a man named Jesus actually existed; the miracle stories they leave to theology.) For believers, that flow chart branches a lot. Was he wholly divine? Was he wholly human? Was he both? Was Jesus also God, or was Jesus next to God? Your New Testament will be no help on this by the way.

For me, at this moment right now, Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish apocalyptic preacher who worked on behalf of the poor, the cast-aside, the hungry, and the needy. (I will no doubt have completely changed my Christology the next time we meet.) I, personally, don’t need him to be the Son of God, but would not be dismayed if it turns out he is. I don’t need him to be divine. How any of us think about Jesus — if you think about Jesus at all — is what you get to do with your one wild and precious life and no one should stand in your way*.

[Except don’t be a dick? If your belief in Jesus compels you to gatekeep Christianity, silence women, preach a Prosperity Gospel, and harm queer people all across the spectrum, then I feel comfortable saying your belief is bad and it is doing bad things to your soul.]

Both Mark and Matthew understood that there was a divine component to Jesus. Mark locates it at the baptism by John. Matthew (and Luke) locates it at Jesus’s very conception. John is way out on his own with the suggestion that Jesus of Nazareth was ever-present from the beginning. (One of the reasons why I say your New Testament will not help you is that none of our gospel writers really agree on the fundamentals of what Jesus’s purpose was. And that’s even before we get to the letters of Paul — the earliest Christian writings we currently have. What is interesting in Paul, though, are these glimpses of the oral traditions passed around these newly forming Christian communities after the crucifixion. In one of his letters, Paul quotes a creed that we have never seen anywhere else, in the Bible or any other ANE writings, that suggests that the very first Christians located Jesus’s divinity at the resurrection. All of this is called Adoptionism, and the Adoptionism argument is: was Jesus actually God, or did God adopt Jesus because of his righteous ways.)

The above is a long throat-clear/level-setting for what I really want to write about, which is the exorcism of the Syrophoenician (or Canaanite woman’s daughter. Because I think it captures an actual event (minus the exorcism), and shows us Jesus as a human being.

The story shows up in Mark (Mark 7:24-30) and Matthew (15:21-28). They are almost the same story; however, Matthew adds some stuff that Mark doesn’t. (In fact, all the gospel writers after Mark in the New Testament use Mark as their rough draft and add their own bells* and whistles.) The bones: Jesus is among the Gentiles in Tyre and Sidon***. A Gentile woman (Mark calls her Syrophoenician; Matthew calls her a Canaanite) begs Jesus to heal her demon-possessed daughter. Jesus initially refuses, and his reason isn’t super explicit, except he uses a racial slur against the woman (likening her and other Gentiles to dogs). But this woman isn’t easily cowed. She argues back, insists that even a Gentile is worthy of healing, and Jesus changes his mind. In Mark he says, “Go; the demon has left your daughter.”

[* For one thing, because Matthew is pushing an Incarnation Christology — God came to earth in the form of a human baby — he has the Canaanite woman say, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” (Matt 15:22)

[** LENNY: I can’t help it! It gets me mad! It gets me upset! Why, Meg’s always run wild–she started smoking and drinking when she was fourteen years old, she never made good grades–never made her own bed! But somehow she always seemed to get what she wanted. She’s the one who got singing and dancing lessons; and a store-bought dress to wear to her senior prom. Why, do you remember how Meg always got to wear twelve jingle bells on her petticoats, while we were only allowed to wear three apiece? Why?! Why should Old Grandmama let her sew twelve golden jingle bells on her petticoats and us only three!!!

BABE: I don’t know!! Maybe she didn’t jingle them as much.]

[*** There is some geographical parallelism in Mark. Jesus will offer a teaching or a feeding to the Jews, and then he’ll be taken by boat to the Gentile communities to work a miracle, teaching, or feeding there, too.]

What do we do with this passage? What do we do when Jesus is racist?

My study Bible used to be a New International Version (NIV), though I prefer a New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) now, and the modern editors of the NIV have added a heading to the Mark account, “Jesus Honors a Syrophoenician Woman’s Faith,” and in Matthew, this story is labeled, “The Faith of a Canaanite Woman.” The NRSV does a little better. (Though it’s important maybe to point out that these section headings do not appear in the original texts. Also not in the original texts: chapters or verse numbers. Those all came later.) For Mark, the NRSV labels it “The Syrophoenician Woman’s Faith” and in Matthew it’s “The Canaanite Woman’s Faith.”

The NIV is an Evangelical Bible, and is translated with a theological purpose. The NIV doesn’t want to focus on Jesus’s racism and his human crankiness. Jesus doesn’t “honor” the Syrophoenician woman’s faith at all. In fact, a better heading for this section might be, “Jesus is a Jerk and Regrets It.”

(I will absolutely be executed as a heretic when our country finally settles on theocracy as its main governing position.)

I think, as believers anywhere along that path, it is our duty to sit with this story. Not smooth it over. Not erase this flash of cruelty. Not make it about the Syrophoenician woman’s faith — which is strong — but about Jesus’s humanness. I am far more comforted by a human Jesus than I am by a divine being who hasn’t fucked up. This passage, in both Mark and Matthew, is often used to describe Jesus’s conversion of the Gentiles to…well, we can’t call it Christianity yet because Jesus is still alive. But essentially, he’s converting/convincing people to his way of thinking about God’s laws and what is required of people here and now on earth. But that’s an Evangelical reading, which never sits well with me. It takes the focus away from what the text literally tells us.

One way New Testament scholars decide if something was actually said/done by Jesus is to see if it’s something that goes against what the gospeler is trying to get across. (I haven’t said this in a while, but: The Bible — the WHOLE Bible — is a political document with differing points of view and a variety of biases.) Mark’s purpose is to write a gospel that can be used in concert with existing Jewish liturgy and to announce that Jesus is the Christ/Messiah. The Syrophoenician woman’s story is a strange interlude, and shows Jesus acting in a way that is unusual and uncomfortable. So — I feel this maybe actually happened, because it’s an uncharacteristic portrait of Jesus. (And by “actually happened” I believe a Gentile woman approached Jesus and begged for a healing. She believed her daughter was demon-possessed, and she was in a time/culture that allowed for demonic possession. Mark is absolutely obsessed with demons. Did her daughter have a demon? I don’t know. I don’t think so? But that’s my own bias. Did Jesus heal this girl in some way? Again, I don’t know. These are issues of theology rather than textual investigation.)

And if Jesus is wholly human AND wholly divine — he is just being his Father’s son here. God throughout the Hebrew scriptures calls for outright genocide, not the “mild” racism on display with Jesus here. God is often cranky. He is jealous and vindictive and absolutely picks favorites. Why wouldn’t Jesus, too, have some of those traits?