A Biblical
Betrayal
December
22, 2020
The Scripture
quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible,
copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
In his book How
to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian John Dominic Crossan describes a
dynamic of how the New Testament treats Jesus that every Christian should know
and understand. Crossan explains that the historical Jesus was vocally and
physically nonviolent, that Q makes him vocally but not physically violent, and
Revelation makes him the central violent figure in the most violent book in the
Bible. I want here to trace that arc through the New Testament relying heavily
on Crossan’s exposition of his thesis. Seeing that arc may open your eyes to a
radically new (though actually ancient) and absolutely correct way of
understanding both the Bible and Jesus.
Whether we
entirely buy into Crossan’s certainty that we know who the historical Jesus of
Nazareth was or not (and I don’t), it is clear that the New Testament’s
earliest and most radical picture of Jesus presents him as nonviolent. We know
that the radically nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels is the earliest and truest
depiction of Jesus because is the most radically countercultural image of him
that we have. As I’ve said elsewhere on this blog in commenting on Crossan’s
book, God didn’t need to send us Jesus to teach us the ways of the world. We
know and follow those ways, including the world’s way of violence, all too well
already. The nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels shows us a radically new way of
being that turns the ways of the world upside down. That authentic Jesus
condemns violence as not God’s way and calls us to lives of creative,
assertive, nonviolent, resistance to evil.
The most
significant place where the New Testament gives us that nonviolent Jesus is
well known. I won’t quote all of it here, but I’ll direct your attention to
Matthew 5:38-45. Those verses include Jesus saying “love your enemy, and pray
for those who persecute you,” and “Do not resist an evildoer,” meaning do not
resist violently. Here we find the famous sayings turn the other cheek, give
your cloak as well, and go a second mile.[1]
In these famous lines from the Sermon on the Mount Jesus undeniably teaches
radical nonviolence as the way of God and the way God calls us to live.
Crossan
emphasizes another New Testament passage as well as establishing that Jesus was
radically nonviolent. In the Gospel of John, when Jesus has been arrested
essentially on a charge of sedition, the Roman Governor Pilate asks him, “Are
you the king of the Jews?” John 18:33. Jesus answers, “My kingdom is not from
this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting
to keep me from being handed over….But as it is my kingdom is not from here.”[2]
John 18:36. Jesus means that his kingdom is located on earth but doesn’t arise
or gain its authority from the earth but from God. Jesus’ followers are not
resorting to violence to free him because Jesus and his kingdom are from God,
and God is radically nonviolent. [3]
This is the New Testament’s original image of Jesus as a radical prophet of God’s
divine nonviolence.
Crossan sees that
original New Testament vision of Jesus change first in passages he attributes
to Q.[4]
Crossan points to the phrase that appears several times in Matthew (but not
elsewhere) “where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” At Matthew
13:42 and 13:50, for example, Matthew’s Jesus has bad people being case into a
furnace of fire where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. The image of
a furnace of fire where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth is
certainly a violent one. The image of a God who would cast anyone there is an
image of a violent God. Jesus’ violence here is verbal only. He talks about
people being cast into a fiery furnace, but he doesn’t cast anyone there.
Neither does he inflict any other kind of violence on anyone. Still, the
contrast between a Jesus who would talk about sending people to a fiery furnace
and the Jesus who said love your enemy so that you may be children of your
(nonviolent) Father in heaven is striking. I have in the past attributed the
lines in Matthew about a fiery furnace (also in other verses an outer darkness)
where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth to the author of the Gospel
of Matthew. Crossan attributes them to Q, which makes them older than Matthew
Either way they represent a major revision to the Christian tradition’s early
images of Jesus. His actions haven’t yet become violent, but his words have.
The Christian
Bible (though mercifully not the Hebrew Bible) ends with the book of
Revelation. Revelation is by far the most violent book in either Testament of
the Christian Bible. No other biblical book speaks of God inflicting violence
upon the earth sufficient to cause blood to flow “as high as a horse’s bridle,
for a distance of about two hundred miles” the way Revelation does. Revelation
14:20. The Jesus of Revelation is an agent of unimaginable violence. Here’s
just one example, one Crossan also uses:
Then I saw heaven opened, and there was a
white horse! It’s rider is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he
judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are
many diadems; and he has a name inscribed that no one knows but himself. He is
clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is called the Word of God. And
the armies of heaven, wearing fine linen, white and pure, were following him on
white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the
nations; and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press
of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he
has a name inscribed, ‘King of kings and Lord of lords.’ Revelation 19:11-16.
Unmistakably the rider is Christ,
and there is nothing metaphorical about the sword of his mouth. In the verses
that follow, “the beast” (essentially Rome) and the kings of the earth make war
against the rider on the white horse and his army They’re all killed, most if
not all of them by the sword of that rider on the white horse, that is, by
Christ himself. Revelation 19:17-21.
What a
transition! From a Jesus who says love your enemy through a Jesus who speaks of
casting people into a furnace of fire, to a Christ who leads a heavenly army
into a battle in which an entire earthly army if slain! What’s going on here? Which
Jesus Christ is the real one whom we are to follow? Surely it can’t be both the
Jesus of Matthew 5 and the Christ of Revelation 19. They just aren’t the same
Jesus Christ. One is the world’s greatest prophet of nonviolence. The other is
a military leader who inflicts massive violence on the earth. What are we to
make of the way the New Testament’s image of Jesus changes so dramatically from
the Testament’s beginning to its end?
Here’s what
Crossan makes of it, and I’m sure he’s right. He sees a pattern across the whole
Bible of depictions of what he calls the radicality of God later being
contradicted and denied by reassertions of what he calls the normalcy of
civilization. Throughout the Bible, he says, radical prophets proclaim God’s
demand for distributive justice and peace. Then other writers contradict the
radical truth of God by reasserting the world’s ways of violence and
oppression. In the great eighth century BCE prophets like Isaiah and Amos we
see both the radicality of God and the normalcy of civilization in the same
people, as Crossan tells us. These prophets demand distributive justice for the
poor and vulnerable, but they also say that a violent God will violently punish
the people for disobeying that demand.
What the New
Testament does with Jesus is the prime example in the Christian Bible of an
assertion of the radicality of God being later negated by an assertion of the
normalcy of civilization. The specifically Christian scriptures begin with
Jesus saying love your enemy and end with him leading an army in a massive
slaughter of enemies. Jesus proclaimed God’s radically unearthly ways of peace
through justice and nonviolence. The later Christian tradition couldn’t deal
with Jesus’ radical proclamation. They thought it didn’t work, or at least some
of them did. Roman oppression still ruled their world. Some of them, like John
of Patmos (the author of Revelation) turned to the ways of the world blown up
to a cosmic scale as the solution to the world’s problems. To them Jesus’ “love
your enemy” just wasn’t enough to set the world right, so John turned the
nonviolent Jesus into a Christ on a warhorse leading a massive slaughter of
enemies. Crossan sums up this development this way:
Revelation’s promise of a bloodthirsty God and a
blood-drenched Christ represents for me the creation of a second ‘coming’ to
negate the first and only ‘coming’ of Christ; the fabrication of violent apocalypse
to deny the nonviolent incarnation; and the invention of Christ on a warhorse
to erase the historical Jesus on a peace donkey. Jesus’ nonviolent resistance
to evil is replaced by Christ’s slaughter of evildoers.[5]
What we have
here, I believe, is nothing less than early Christianity’s utter betrayal of
Jesus. There simply is no doubt that Jesus taught, lived, and died for his
vision of God as a God of distributive justice who is radically nonviolent.
Dominant elements of the later tradition that claimed Jesus as Lord and Savior
couldn’t handle it. In them the violent ways of the world reasserted themselves
even on a cosmic scale. That betrayal, so evident in the book of Revelation,
would reach its climax over two hundred years later when Christianity abandoned
nonviolence altogether and sold its soul to become the official state religion
of the empire that had crucified Jesus. To call what happened to Jesus’ message
of God’s nonviolent nature anything less than a betrayal is to fail to recognize
just how far the Christian tradition deviated from the message of it central
figure.
So which Jesus
are we to follow? The answer seems obvious. It basically comes down to do we
follow God’s way or do we follow the world’s way. If we claim to be Christian
the answer has to be God’s way. Of course, Christians are as apt as anyone else
to live according to the ways of the world, accepting or even perpetrating
oppression and engaging in violence, as anyone else. That sad truth doesn’t
mean that doing those things is really Christian. They aren’t. The Christ of
Revelation is a monstrosity. The Jesus of the Gospels is our model of ideal
human living and the ways of God. He is for us nothing less than God Incarnate,
God in human form, Emmanuel, God with us. Our call is to follow him in
nonviolent protest against the ways of the world. Anything else perpetuates the
betrayal of Jesus that we find even in the Bible itself. Let’s not do that, OK?
[1]
For what these verses really mean see Wink, Walter, The Powers That Be, Theology
for a New Millennium (New York, Galilee Doubleday, 1998), Chapter 5, “Jesus’
Third Way,” 98 ff. They almost certainly don’t mean what if you’re like most
Christians you think they mean unless that is you’ve already read Wink.
[2] I
have omitted the phrase “to the Jews” from this quote. Jesus wasn’t handed over
to the Jews. He was a Jew. He was handed over to the Romans. I won’t go into
John’s anti-Judaism here, but it is disturbing at best and historically
inaccurate. For a discussion of the issue see Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating
the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition,
Volume Three, The New Testament (Coffee Press, Briarwood, New York,
2019), 170-179.
[3] On
the accuracy and significance of the translation “My kingdom if not from this
world” rather than the more familiar “My kingdom is not of this world” see
Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, op. cit., 184-186. There actually is something
of a problem with the way Crossan uses this passage. The most important thing
about any saying attributed to Jesus for Crossan is usually whether he thinks
the saying comes from the historical Jesus or not. The Jesus Seminar, of which
Crossan was a part, doesn’t think any saying attributed to Jesus in the Gospel
of John comes from the historical Jesus, but Crossan treats this saying as
though it did. I think the saying is correct whether the historical Jesus ever
said it or not, but Crossan may be a bit inconsistent here.
[4] Q
is a hypothetical, nonexistent document the assumed existence of which scholars
use to explain the origin of sayings of Jesus that appear in Matthew and Luke
but not in Mark. Q stands for Quelle, the German word for source.
[5] I
read Crossan’s How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian in its Kindle
form. That version of the book doesn’t use page numbers. This quote appears in
Chapter 11, “Christ and the Normalcy of Civilization,” at the 63% mark of the
book. Crossan’s reference to “Jesus on a peace donkey” refers to Jesus riding a
donkey, an animal of the farm not of war, into Jerusalem, the event we
celebrate on Palm Sunday.
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