Will the real Jesus please stand up?

 This is a belated follow up to my previous post about the big G and his usefulness as a tool for oppression. You can’t talk about the father without mentioning the son, or his ghost, or whatever it is that folks think he is.

All myths and legends have some root in fact, and the myth of Jesus is no different. I use the word myth for a reason. The Oxford Dictionary defines a myth as “a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events”. Sound familiar? Man from humble origins upends established and hypocritical religious system while carrying out multiple miraculous acts that build up cult like devotion. Walking on water, feeding thousands with next to nothing and raising the dead. Not your average protester in other words. But who was this ancient liberal social activist really?

There seems to be a considerable amount of embellishment in the origin story, or at least basic misunderstanding of facts that lead to embellishment. His mother was considered to be a virgin, but there is a lot of debate about the translation of that from ancient Hebrew. The word in the original Hebrew texts could also mean an unmarried woman, which makes more sense if we are trying to dissect the myth from the fact. Then there is the wandering star leading the wise men to the baby Jesus, which introduces elements of UFO conspiracy to the story. I don’t have much of an opinion on that, but the wise men aspect sets up the link to ancient prophecy that caused the ructions in the religious establishment that would eventually lead to his demise as an accused charlatan/messiah (delete according to your beliefs). Along the way there are the aforementioned miracles, the social activism and the development of the cult that would eventually take over most of the known world, until Mohammed emerged to present a counter claim.

The first thing to ask is, did Jesus exist as a person or is it all a legend using an avatar to deliver a moral lesson? Well, the fact that both the Jews and the Romans wrote about him indicates that he was a real person. The Romans in particular had no need to write about a remote messianic figure when they had their own well-established pantheon of supernatural beings to worship. They wouldn’t have bothered promoting the story if there was no actual trouble-maker to focus on. The fact that they didn’t take him seriously actually adds more legitimacy to it. They didn’t think he was worthy, but he was causing such a big stir in their conquered territory that they recorded it for posterity in a “how about the nerve of this guy” kind of way.

And that is where the myth-making kicks in. Jesus might have gone unnoticed if the system he was attacking wasn’t under the control of the most powerful civilization on Earth at the time. If he was a shaman in some remote Mongolian village it would have fed the local story tellers for generations, but it would have stayed below the radar everywhere else. The power of mass information was the same then as it is now. If you want to make an impact you have to hit the headlines. If it was left to the rabbis, Jesus would never have been spoken of again, but his cult followers kept the story alive, embellished it a bit to strengthen its impact, then started spreading it out from the middle east into the heart of ancient civilisation. It was the Romans who legitimised Christianity by exposing the underground cult and later adopting it, albeit with a few devotees fed to the lions along the way. Jesus was ignored in his home territory, where he was dismissed as a con-man, and later wholly rejected by the emergence of Islam.

The myth had legs because, let’s face it, it’s a classic everyman, good guy vs bad guy, sticking it to the man kind of story that everyone loves and which, with a bit of added supernature, fitted the mold of Roman legends like Romulus and Remus. By exposing the cult in its early stages the Romans helped it grow, and as people started to move further around the world others began to latch onto it. As Douglas Adams wrote in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Jesus ‘got nailed to a tree for saying wouldn’t it be great if everyone was nice to each other for a change’. The essential nugget at the heart of it resonated with people.

That’s the ‘how’, so let’s circle back to the ‘who’ and answer some questions. Was Jesus the physical son of God? Were his reported miracles actually supernatural? Did he actually die and make a come-back?

The answer to all of these is no, no and no. Like I say, myths are based on some essential truth, but they are built up with a few added bells and whistles to make them worth re-telling. It would be a yawn to say, “yeah I knew Jesus, he was a good guy, shame he had such a big mouth”. If you think what he said and did was worth repeating you’ve got to get people on board, and they won’t listen if there isn’t a wow factor. The ‘son of God’ thing is a metaphor. He was embodying the teachings of God as written in ancient texts, which can be described as him being the ‘son of’. You see that pattern continue over time in a lower political level in figures like Ghandi, Mao and others who upend the establishment and seem to embody the zeitgeist of the time.

As for the miracles and the rebirth? Well, there are plenty of stage magicians that can recreate similar miracles. The English magician Dynamo, in particular, spent a lot of effort in the early 2000’s walking on water, emptying thousands of fish from a barrel and levitating in some pretty spectacular stunts. Jesus no doubt had some similar skills in the illusion department. Don’t ask me how they do it, but are they genuine miracles? Even the story of Lazarus must have some medical roots. Raising someone from a coma is a miracle a lot of doctors perform on a daily basis, but back then it must have seemed like the work of God. Jesus raising himself? Indian yogis do some wild stuff with their metabolism – maybe Jesus was able to ‘play dead’, even with a spear in his side, until he was cut down and was able to slowly recover in the tomb before emerging ‘reborn’.

What about Jesus the man then? What was he actually like? Born-Again Christians make a big deal about ‘knowing Jesus’, but do they really? From the stories in the bible it’s obvious he was a complex character with some serious skills in self-promotion. Narcissism is a horrible thing, but a narcissist focused on doing good would fit his profile. ‘I am the son of God’ and all that. Couple that with some exhibitionist manic-depressive episodes (the whole crucifixion thing) and you are getting close to his personality. He would have stood out in a simpler time with such a modern personality profile. There was a Jewish mystic who emerged in Turkey in 1666 called Sabbatai Zevi who was similarly endowed in the manic-depressive exhibitionist stakes, but he wasn’t the complete package and history has largely forgotten him. You need to be the real deal for messianic longevity. Who will history remember in 100 years – Muhammad Ali or Evander Holyfield? Right, Ali all the way.

Having said that that, after 2,000 years, people are starting to critique Jesus a bit. Maybe that’s the use by date for messiahs. American “Christians” in particular find him a bit too liberal for their tastes. They want their messiah to be a bit more kick-ass and little less forgiving. For a lot of them, Jesus would be seen as a socialist trouble-maker/ radical left lunatic if he was around today.

So is it time to move on? It’s always an individual choice, but here is an interesting little fact as a final twist: Buddhists recognise Jesus as an incarnation of Buddha. How meta is that from a phenomenological point of view? Maybe people should just focus on doing what is right as a human being without resorting to the cult of personality, because no matter what you believe in, actions ultimately speak louder than words.