The Revenge of the Pharisees

My mother has pointed out recently on her blog that contemporary archeology and so on has raised doubt about the the biblical account of the amount of plundering and raping and putting to the sword that the jews actually did after they came out of the desert and started upon their first ethnic cleansing campaigns. I don't doubt that, as with most oral tradition, that layers of structure and meaning were imposed on events after the fact. So that the story of the expansion into the "promised land" was later portrayed in heroic terms and given divine sanction. My mother is relieved to know that God didn't actually require the death of these innocents as portrayed in the bible. Which has stimulated me to observe that the point of the Bible is not that it is literally true (which, most likely, it is not). I doesn't even matter if someone named Jesus actually ever lived or not (although he probably did).

What does matter is the insight into life and God and all that which can be drawn from the narrative around what Jesus said and did. There are, it seems to me, two key things that Jesus taught and believed: first, Jesus rejected religious hierarchy and dogma and, second, suggested that all persons, the great and the poor the same, can approach God in open-hearted supplication. And I believe that these propositions are "true" whatever the accuracy of any book in the bible.

So I am Christian in believing in what I think are the two simple key propositions that Jesus said and lived by, but I am not Christian in the perverse he-died-in-agony-and-rose-from-the-dead-to-save-our-sins religious doctrine which has no basis in what Jesus actually said, makes no sense, and, finally, is pagan in its orientation around human sacrifice.

Let me expand on the "makes no sense" idea. The more I think of this the more perplexed I get. So the basic idea is (1) God sent his son to live among us, (2) God decided that his son should be crucified, and (3) God decided to raise his son from the dead, and (4) going through steps 1 through 3 has "cleansed" humanity of its sins. There are a large number of objections that can be made about this idea but one strikes me today in particular, which is what an "odd God" this narrative portrays. Think about it: the "odd God" that animates this story seems to be both all powerful but also strangely entangled in some sort legal regime. After all, why can't he just go straight to cleansing humanity of its sins? What is forcing Odd God to go through what is essentially a ritual -- that is, steps 1 through 3? If this idea (redemption of humanity coming from the crucifixion of Jesus) is to make sense it must be that Odd God has to go through these steps in order to get the authority or power to provide the cleansing forgiveness. If not, why bother? And the question that occurs to me is 'why?' Well, the answer is clear -- this legalistic dogma is not of divine origin at all but rather very much a religious ritual imposed by religious doctrine onto the form of Odd God. The priests and Pharisees, speaking generically -- of a class of people -- have subordinated their odd God to religious ritual. And that, of couse, is what these people must do.

Looking more specifically at the life of Jesus, we can see that this doctrine of salvation via the crucifixion is actually the revenge of the Pharisees and the priests (as a class of people, if not specific individuals) over Jesus and his core message. They, the priests and pharisees of later years, managed to distort the life of Jesus to their own ends, to turn it into the very type of rigid dogma that Jesus rejected. Then they have ruled, falsely, in his name these last 2,000 years. A complete betrayal, in my view, of everything that the Jesus described in the biblical narrative stood for!