sunday sermon

Even though I'm a non-Christian, I'm an admirer of the man Yeshua ben Yusuf, who I think anticipated the career of Mohandas K. Gandhi by nearly 1,900 years.

I also think, as did T. Jefferson, that good old Yeshu has been hijacked from us by scriptural revisionists, starting with Paul, but that it's possible to more or less rough sort the Gospels and supporting material into Jesus and not-Jesus parts. The best way to begin this process is to throw out all the biographical material, and reduce the texts to the parables and sayings.

Jefferson wrote his own version of the gospels, available today as the Jefferson Bible, and in 1813 wrote a letter explaining his rationale for having written it in which he said:

In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and, Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics, and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their logos and demiurges, aeons and daemons, male and female, with a long train of … or, shall I say at once, of nonsense. We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines.

"Instruments of riches and power" indeed, and not just to priests.

The Jesus who emerges from the Jefferson Bible segues pretty well with the book twentieth-century scholars abstracted from the common material in Luke and Matthew (and to a lesser extent in the third synoptic gospel, Mark), the Gospel "Q," or synoptic sayings source, and both reveal a teacher who spoke plainly, in pithy aphorisms, was a radical pacifist, but a trouble-maker and anti-authoritarian, so much so that the authorities decided to get rid of him.

I can well understand, though why people who embrace the political manifestation of end-stage monopoly capitalism along with its sinking empire would also embrace the most obscure, complex, and esoteric interpretations of the sayings of a maverick rabbi. peasant agitator, and party animal who ate his meals with women, and even invited people with skin diseases to break bread with him -- a major taboo.