I have to confess this essay is inspired in part by a few
lines from the 1980’s British punk band The The called “Armageddon Days Are
Here Again”. The lines are “They’ve
forgotten the message, and worship the creeds”; “If the real Jesus Christ were
to come back today, he’d be gunned down cold by the CIA”; and “If he ever found
out who’s hijacked his name, he’d cut out his heart, and turn in his grave”.
THE TWO JESUSES
In America today, there are two overall versions, each of
which have their own variations within them, one the invention of those who
apply their own bigotries to their definition of Jesus Christ, the other
somewhat closer to the actual truth.
White American Jesus
The Jesus Christ that the Christian Supremacist Right in
America follows is white and advocates libertarianism, misogyny, American
jingoism, chauvinist Zionism, American and Israeli exceptionalism, white
supremacy (read between the lines), patriarchy, homophobia (sometimes to an
extreme degree), neoliberalism, plutocracy, corporatism, trickled down
economics, guns, and a style of theocratic government which places a class of
wealthy white ultra-conservative evangelical Christians atop all others in
society imposing upon it strict guidelines of behavior supposedly guided by
their twisted ideology which is all the while set up to ensure that they are
impossible to keep, making it therefore possible to fine (rob), confiscate
from, imprison, enslave, and execute (murder) at will any who might stand up to
oppose them.
In other words, they stand for everything the “real Jesus
Christ” hated; they’re the ones who’ve “hijacked his name”. It is not the name of Yahuweh written on
their foreheads and left hands but that of their true god, wealth, or as the Revelation of John the Divine has it,
the number 666. All of them, every last
member of the right-wing Christian evangelical movement. Wealth is their ultimate god. As for why so many are less than sound
economically, well, part of the “prosperity gospel” is that their god grants
material riches to those whom he favors, and the rest of the faithful are
supposed to look up to and respect their “betters”, in the hopes that if they
humble and abase themselves enough, and are submissive to power and obedient to
Authority enough, maybe one day they too will be granted material prosperity
also.
Someone should let them know that nirvana is samsara.
This version of Jesus Christ is known as White Jesus,
American Jesus, or Republican Tea Party Jesus, and sometimes even as Supply
Side Jesus. And he is a complete
ass. Nor is he anything like the real
Jesus Christ, who, by the way, would have no idea who the hell you were talking
to or about if you addressed him as such.
Brown Palestinian Jesus
Who was the real Jesus the Christ, without the add-ons and
extensions given to him throughout the centuries since he left (died, assumed
to heaven, transported to a parallel universe)?
To start off, he was brown, maybe even dark brown, shorter
than the average twentieth century American male, and Palestinian rather than
European. He probably had a large nose,
a typical feature of Semitic people in the Southwest Asia. He almost certainly wore a beard and
mustache, but unlike as he is often portrayed, probably had short hair. As he followed the Jewish version of the late
ancient Israelite religion, he probably wore a kippah, a tefillin, and tzitzit
as part of his daily attire.
As for religious practices, he almost certainly attended
synagogue every Sabbath, fasted Mondays and Thursdays, and went to Jerusalem
for the major pilgrimage festivals whenever he could do so.
His first language was the Galilean dialect of Palestinian
Aramaic, and he no doubt learned Hebrew also.
Given that the very Hellenistic and very Roman-friendly capital of
Galilee, Autocratoris, was but a few miles from his hometown of Nazareth, he
probably had at least a working knowledge of Greek and maybe even Latin. Autocratoris had once been Sepphoris until it
was destroyed after the uprising following the death of Herod the Great. Herod Antipas rebuilt and renamed it upon
becoming tetrarch of the Roman province of Galilaea and Peraea, making it his
capital. Shortly before the Bar Kokhba
War of 132-135 CE, the name was changed again to Diocaesarea, in honor of
Jupiter and of Roman emperor Hadrian.
He did not go by “Jesus”.
Though Clement of Alexandria and Cyril of Jerusalem both argued, if not
strongly, that Iesous, the Greek form of the name Jesus, was his actual given
name, he very probably did not go by that, though Galilee in the first century
was much more cosmopolitan than its neighbor to the south and many had at least
a working knowledge of Greek in addition to the common language, Palestinian
Aramaic.
In older Hebrew, the name Jesus becomes Yehoshua. By the final centuries BCE, the more common
form was Yeshua, but the older form regained some popularity in the Hasmonean
era, especially in Galilee. The West
Aramaic form of the name was Yeshu, and it is by this name that Jesus the
Christ is referred to in the Talmud.
However, Palestinian Aramaic, especially in Galilee, shared more
features with Eastern Aramaic than Western, in which the name was rendered
Isho. That is the name by which Syriac
language scriptures that the Oriental Orthodox Churches use call him to this
day.
In the earliest days of the Church, before the books of the
New Testament as most Christians know them were written, all in koine Greek,
rather than “Jesus Christ” or “Jesus the Christ”, our subject was known as
Jesus the Nazorean, or Isho Nasraya in his native tongue. In his own day, when he was on the Earth, he
went by Isho bar Yossef. Throughout the
remainder of this piece, I will be using the name Isho, or Isho the Nazorean.
Isho the Nazorean was a Galilean, not a Jew
The composer (or one of the subsequent editors) of the Gospel of John understood this, which is
why he keeps referring to “the Jews” as antagonists of his protagonist. It is not because he is a Christian attacking
adherents to the parent religion. The
original author (there were at least two major writers/editors and possibly or
three or more) was almost certainly from Palestine and would thus have been
well aware of the difference.
In first century Palestine, the term Jew had two different
meanings. In a broad sense, it meant all
those who followed the Jewish faith, those who had inherited that version of
the Israelite faith by birth and those who had fully converted, got
circumcised, followed the Torah. In the
Diaspora, there was little distinction between those of the Jewish faith whose
families originated from different regions of Palestine, but in Palestine
itself, this was not the case.
Among the non-Samaritan Israelites of Palestine, there were
several different ethnic groups, divided by origins of their ancestors in the
second century BCE. To be a Jew in first
century Palestine meant one came from the core territory of Judaea, called
Yehud in Aramaic and Iudaeia in Greek and Iudaea in Latin. The rest of the ethnic groups were made up of
descendants of those in territories conquered beginning in the late second century
BCE by the Hasmonean dynasts who ruled what was then called Iudeaia.
The first of these were the Idumaeans in the formerly
independent land in the Negev also known by its Biblical name, Edom. Second, were the Galileans, residents of
Galilaea, or Galil ha-Goyim, “District of the Gentiles”, so-called because its
original inhabitants were an Arab tribe known as the Itureans. These Itureans were of the southern part of a
broader domain; the northern Itureans remained independent of Yehud. Third were the Peraeans, descendants of
Nabateans, an Aramean group, living in territory east of the Jordan River
conquered by the Hasmoneans in the early first century CE.
All three of these populations were forcibly converted. To help cement their hold and get rid of
undesirables, the Hasmoneans resettled hundreds of dissidents in Galilaea. Others no doubt also moved there did so of
their own accord, but those who voluntarily left the “holy land” were not
looked upon favorably, so Jews, in the first century definition, had little
trust for any Galileans.
Without grasping this cultural fact, it is impossible to
understand things in the gospels such as the Parable of the Workers, or why the
author of the Gospel of John, probably a Galilean who if he did not live in
Galilee was almost certainly from there originally (or just very culturally
aware), constantly spoke of the “Jews” as if they were a foreign people.
The Hasmoneans also conquered their neighbors to their
immediate north a couple of years later the Idumeans, but treated the
Samaritans as untouchables. In large
part this was due to rivalry going back to the ninth century BCE which had led
to there being two Israelite kingdoms in Palestine in the first place. Then there’s the fact that even after their
temple was destroyed, the Samaritans refused to accept the temple in Jerusalem
as their holy place.
Some of the anomosity was no doubt jealousy; Samaraea,
called Samerina in Aramaic and Samareia in Greek, was the senior of the two,
founded in the early ninth century by Omri the Israelite. Before the conquest, it was also the
wealthier and more cosmopolitan, and its temple atop Mount Gerizim near Shechem
dwarfed that atop Mount Moriah in Jerusalem in both size and in opulence.
An analogy from twenty-first century Palestine may illustrate the overall point more clearly. The (genetically half Southwest Asian, half European as it turns out) Ashkenazim make up the majority of Jews in both the State of Israel and throughout the world. Despite there being many other ethnic groups of Jews, the rest are often lumped together under the name Sephardim because the Maghrebim, Mizrahim, Parsim, Temanim, etc. have adopted Sephardic liturgy and ritual. The only real Sephardim are those who descend from the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492; the others are more properly called by their ethnonym. The Parsim are Sephardic in that they have adopted the liturgy and ritual, but they are remain Parsim. In a similar way, first century Galileans were Jewish in that they worshipped the same deity as and followed the religious traditions of the Jews, but they were still Galileans, not Jews.
1 comment:
American Christianity is basically a Imperial Cult, I think the reason why Gnostic Christianity was always persecuted by the powerful is because wasn't useful as a Imperial Warmongering religion.
Hekuba.
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