Introduction
I have been strongly influenced by some books I have recently read. Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature triggered my interest with a remark that having a strong moral sense can incline one to violence.
So, I read Dan Jones’ Crusaders and John Julis Norwich’s The Popes. Wow! The level of violence that was perpetrated in the Christ’s name was staggering. Why?
I then bought a Kindle version of the ESV Bible and did a word search for. ‘Jesus’ and reviewed the context for all, looking for statements attributed to him as teachings. I was left with the books of Matthew and Mark. The first thing that struck me was that both books were written around 70CE and contained an established religious dogma. They put words in Jesus’s mouth as if he was already part of a well-formed religious doctrine. To me this was a huge continuity problem. My old sci fi habits of being alert to inconsistencies were triggered.
I know both books are stories and not history. That’s not my point. My point is that if the faith is based on an historic figure there should be some evidence of some kind of coherent philosophy that people found attractive. It couldn’t have been the mythologized stuff in the Bible. That came later.
Jesus is depicted as a wandering magician with great healing powers. He isn’t unique in this regard. But he also taught a spiritual philosophy which a lot of people listened to. So, what was it? Is there any evidence?
I distilled 3 pages of what I identified as his philosophy – once the repetitions, redundancies and the religious dogma and myth were stripped away. In one respect this is astonishingly scant relative to the volume of text. In another respect it’s what you’d hope to find. I eventually reduced it to less than a page – to 5 dot points. Even if I allowed that there were 10 pages in the Bible devoted to Jesus’s actual teachings that’s a miniscule amount. A Bible is said to have around 1200 pages – so Jesus’s contribution was less than 1%.
What I was left with was pretty much like a Code of Conduct and Ethics a secular humanist would be happy with – save that it was far more demanding – as befits a spiritual philosophy. It is entirely consistent with our understanding of psychology and moral philosophy. It isn’t remarkable in any way.
The difference between these ‘Jesus teachings’ and a secular humanist’s values comes down to two things – the assertion of a fundamental divine reality and high level of difficulty a follower might have in living up to them.
The two books are otherwise (like the rest of the New Testament) fully invested in developing and promulgating a mythos and a dogma upon which a religion (which substantially ignores those teachings) has been constructed.
There are several implications that arise and I will consider them below.
I am neither for nor against religion. I see it as a pre-rational narrative way of explaining how reality works – and in a way that meets the needs of those who follow a particular faith tradition within a culture. It is redundant for an educated modern mind with a grounding in philosophy and psychology – and a grasp of dimensions of reality beyond the material plane.
The code of conduct
I distilled Jesus’s teachings to the following dot points:
• Love God with all your heart.
• Love your neighbor as yourself.
• Be kind, gentle, humble, modest, honest, peaceful and generous.
• Be forgiving – love your enemies and those who persecute or wrong you.
• Do not be anxious about your life. Inquire, seek and aspire with confidence and determination.
The first two dot points are the ‘greatest commandments’ (Matthew 22:36 – 40) and the other three are essentially commentaries on them. It interests me that these ‘greatest commandments’ are not only not explored in the rest of the New Testament, they are virtually absent from any discussion on the faith. At least I have not once come across any reference to them in decades of reading on, listening to, or watching discussions on what being a Christian is. How do you “Love God with all your heart?” What does that really mean? How do you “Love your neighbor as yourself?” What does that really mean?
I have a personal investment in this theme that I should disclose. My father was an ardent Northern Irish proddy who forced me to go Sunday school under pain of enthusiastic physical chastisement. It turned out that I rather liked Jesus. He was far nicer than the adult males I encountered. But one day, when my father was ranting, I dared speak up and suggested that being forgiving was more consistent with the faith he so esteemed relative to his present conduct. That earned me a backhander that sent me flying across the kitchen. I was 6 years old.
I was promptly withdrawn Sunday school and dragged into church – a miserable place full of angry and unpleasant adults.
I grew up with an aversion to the faith, but an affection for Jesus, who I saw as a nice and kind man. That left me with an intellectual curiosity about the nature of the faith – mostly as a canny sense of needing to know one’s enemy. It has left an indelible imprint on our culture – for good and ill. As a Social Ecologist I needed to ensure I had a balanced perspective. Contemporary scholarship is extraordinary and immensely helpful.
My childhood experience was mirrored by what I later found. Jesus’s teachings have been all but expunged from the faith’s mainstream adherents. What happened?
I read extensively in Buddhism in my youth. The Buddhist ‘Code of Conduct’ was neatly encapsulated in the 4 Noble Truths and the 8-fold Path. I read a lot of commentary on how to be a ‘good’ Buddhist. It was hard. I also read on Taoism and Zen. There were consistent themes – compassion, modesty and hard personal effort, and ‘going with the flow’. Being a ‘good person’ in conformity with the values of one’s belief system was hard to do. It took effort, self-awarenes and determination. If you wanted enlightenment you had to strive for it.
But in Christianity all you had to do was believe and conform. It seemed like a scam. Was it? I have spent decades seeking an answer to that question.
The radical idea of an individual relationship with the divine
A key idea in Jesus’s teaching is that of an individual and their personal connection with the divine. God the father is a personal idea. This isn’t just God as ‘creator’. Father is a singular and personal sense of relationship. A father loves, nurtures and protects (well, in theory at least).
In Inventing the Individual, Larry Siedentop argues that Christianity initiated the evolution of the modern idea of the individual. The subtitle of the book is compelling – The Origins of Western Liberalism. This was a startling notion that I couldn’t dismiss off hand.
Creating a way of thought that emphasises a personal relationship with the divine can’t be intended as an attempt to form a new religion. It is ultimately about personal accountability rather than responsibility for, or obedience to, a family, tribe or community – and hence a formal religion.
The very idea that “God is love” is profoundly radical and transformative. It breaks any connection with the Jewish tradition. A divine loving father meets none of the criteria for any traditional notion of the divine in that part of the world. It was an idea that represented a threat to established religious beliefs, practices and cultures.
The formation of a religion called Christianity reflects a sense of entrepreneurship responding to an impulse to organize a traditional hierarchical faith. In a sense it looks like an attempt to capitalize on an emergent movement by clawing it back into the fold of institutional and state sponsored religious beliefs.
The first books of the New Testament depict Jesus as the herald of a fully formed religion – he is fully mythologized from the outset. Matthew and Mark are written with this intent. But this cannot have been the actual origin story because the gulf between a discernible philosophy and the dogma is too wide. The result is an incoherence – a discontinuity between two very different stories.
The Jesus philosophy is broken up with contradictory assertions that seem intent on undermining it. In [Matthew 5:48] the listener/reader is admonished to “…be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” That is an absurd thing to say. It is an unrealizable injunction. It is nothing a real spiritual teacher would ever say. It undermines the intended principle by making it unrealizable.
The Jesus philosophy is nowhere subsequently explored. Instead, there are demands for adherence to dogmas and mythic narratives.
The absence of insight
There are sophisticated and complex ideas in the mythic and doctrinal elaboration of the Jesus story – what you’d expect from a culture steeped religious tradition. What is missing is insight that would affirm genuine connection with a real philosophical/spiritual radical. Such people are routinely murdered by those who feel threatened by novel ideas. Socrates is an excellent earlier example. Turning Jesus’s murder into a mythic event captures his radicalism as part of a religion that then effectively suppresses his radical ideas.
In Matthew 22:37 we read, relating to the ‘Greatest Commandment’: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This from a man who refers to God as a father? Lordship and fatherhood are two very difference offices, and they could be incompatible. Lordship is about obedience and compliance. This isn’t a personal relationship. This demanding obedience to an impersonal power – a status or role.
It is true that in those days a father, as head of a family could also the religious authority. So, the idea of father and spiritual authority could be synonymous.
Introducing the idea of God as a Father is very different from the idea of God as Lord. So why introduce such an idea unless there was an intent to convey a very different, more personal sense of connection with the divine?
Matthew 4:48 is the first instance of God being referred to on a personal level. Elsewhere [Deuteronomy 32:6 and Isaiah 63:16] in the Jewish Bible God is called a father of the people of Israel, but not on a personal level.
The idea of a loving, nurturing father who excites reciprocating feelings of love is consistent with the Greatest Commandment’s injunction to ‘love’, rather than fear and obey, God. The problem is that the author of Matthew has no sense of this at all. And neither is there any commentary elsewhere.
The point I want to make here is that whatever the factual foundation for Jesus being a real person was, some 40 years afterwards it no longer matters. The myth has usurped the historic. There is no experience-based insight in the narrative.
But I think we can still see the remnants of a genuine philosophy – because a real ‘Son of God’ would not have produced such a universal code of conduct, encouraged witnesses not to talk about what he did, or deny who he was.
Mythologising is a natural human impulse. We do not reliably remember actualities, so we preserve, and then exemplify moral/psychological themes. That’s why we have novels, movies and dramas on telly. We esteem Shakespeare not just for his command of language but because his stories speak potently to our psychological and moral needs. That’s why great novelists are so loved. It is why the Bible is important to many.
But moral and psychological truths are also historic truths – they are triggered by experiences. History is, however, far more complex and problematic than we generally understand – but most folk don’t care. They will believe myth is historic because that feels good and is comprehensible.
The fact that we have a coherent universal code of conduct that would sit well with a Buddhist, Taoist or secular humanist suggests to me that there was a real person whose truth was colonized by religious entrepreneurs, mythologized and buried beneath a vast pile of irrelevant bullshit. Well, irrelevant to me and others who have a more nuanced take on things.
That’s one way of seeing things.
What was the real appeal?
Without the radical notion of a personal/intimate relationship with the divine the faith didn’t have a lot to offer. By this time the Jews had been profoundly influenced by the Greeks and the Romans. It wasn’t a culture in isolation. There’s a reason the NT books were written in Greek. So, there were Greek, Roman and even Buddhist ideas influencing how people thought about their spirituality.
Empires break down traditional cultural bonds, and it might be fair to say that the old structures and hierarchies were no longer dominant. After around 300 years of Greek influence and around 70 years of Roman presence who knows what the people of Jesus’s world really thought and felt. Was he popular because he had a new idea about what it was to be a person in that world? Was there a thirst for a new sense of meaning beyond a traditional way that now seemed old, stale and corrupt?
I participated in the campaigns for women’s, gay and Aboriginal rights in the late 1960s. We ‘alternatives’ gathered in people’s home to talk spirituality, philosophy and politics. We took illegal drugs and engaged in behaviours, and with beliefs that would have horrified our parents – had they known. It was all very messy, often dramatic, sometimes traumatic and very subversive. But it was driven by a noble and idealistic spirit. We had a sense of ‘do your own thing’ – but be a good person. There were people who promoted spiritual beliefs, practised magic and energy healing (some were good at it).
I try to imagine what it was like way back when Jesus was doing his thing. He inspired a lot of people to engage with his philosophy – especially the notion that you could connect with the divine on your own account. You didn’t need priest from a corrupt religion, and you didn’t need your father who was the spiritual/religious head of your family. God was now your ‘father’. You had direct contact. You didn’t need community or family to be spiritually strong and independent.
This was a powerful idea that couldn’t be killed, but it could be ‘managed’ and reigned in. And so it was. But because it couldn’t be killed it remained a threat to conformity and control. It was managed by torture and murder. And when some became exemplars and heroes, they were killed and then turned into sanctified heroes.
Like the idea that we had to become perfect – like God – imitating Christ wasn’t about living or teaching a Code of Conduct. It was about getting persecuted and murdered because you were saying things that the powers that be didn’t want said.
The real power of the Jesus philosophy was that you could engage with the divine on your own account with no mediation from priest or parent. God was your parent, so nothing else had power over you. Interestingly this was echoed to a degree by Martin Luther in 16th century, but he still had web of religion to entangle his efforts of genuine liberty.
Freedom to engage with the divine as we see it is something we now assume. Some elect a faith of their preference. Others want nothing of any organised religion. Others want no notion of God or gods to disturb them.
My argument is that Jesus didn’t set out to create a religion. Had that been his intent he would have done things very differently. I think he set out to liberate people from formal organised religion that offered nothing on a personal level except conformity which empowered and enabled those in power. His clear message was about being a ‘good person’ in harmony with one’s world. It’s the same message from Buddhism, Taoism and Humanism and who knows how many other ‘spiritual’ and philosophical thinkers.
So, the appeal is obvious, and the many Christians who understood it have continued to work through their faith to do genuinely good works. But we need to also understand that the very same faith has been a brutal tyranny to so many for so long. There is, I believe, a logic to this.
Christianity is a transmitter of the real ideals as well as a tyrannical suppresser of them. How else would those ideals have been given a global presence? We can’t assume all other cultures are benign should be immune from Christianity’s malign attributes. We are inclined to be ‘ethnocentric’ and assume that radical disruption is inherently a bad thing, even though its being going on for millennia and its only now we imagine it assumes a moral valency.
I think gods are real for reasons I won’t go into here. I think the god of Christians is a mythologised fiction of a very poor quality. But the ideas central to Jesus’s philosophy are about ‘God’ as conceived by the believer. It is non-specific and universal. This works well if it is allowed to be exactly what it becomes within the limits of the Jesus philosophy.
I say “works well” because this has been my experience for the last 50 years. It has taken this inquiry for me to fully appreciate that my ‘spiritual’ philosophy has been inspired by Sunday school experiences. All I got was the philosophy and none of the doctrine and dogma. Well, on a conscious personal level at least. I am still working through my unconscious cultural conditioning. That is an immensely powerful and pervasive influence that include religious, spiritual and secular beliefs and values in a completely muddled mass.
Conclusion
Religion is a massively complex thing about which we mostly have no lucid conscious ideas about which we are mostly right. That’s the nature of the beast. I don’t pretend to be right. The best I can hope is that I have progressed the conversation – for those who want to have it.
My relatively unique perspective comes from a lifetime of ‘paranormal’ experiences which convince me that the Christian ‘God’ is a clumsy fiction, but that gods and spirits are real. I entirely get the secular humanist perspective that denies that the metaphysical is real. If you haven’t experienced something you shouldn’t be expected to believe it is real, or accept claims by those who say it is.
My perspective is outside current shared knowledge, and I don’t expect anyone to flip their beliefs on my say so. I am about stimulating curiosity and doubt, not faith and belief.
Early on I said there was a relationship between the ‘Jesus philosophy’ and secular humanism, but with a distinction. If we take out the notion of the divine, we have a philosophical attitude that might be distinguished only by the degree to which either espouser expects adherents to apply effort. The Jesus philosophy implies that earnest and sincere effort is made – consistent with Buddhism. Humanists seem content to assert their values and leave it at that.
I am not implying any criticism here, just drawing what seems to me to be a pertinent distinction.
I esteem secular humanism deeply. It makes so many things possible in a secular culture that would be problematic or impossible in many or most religious ones. As a universal humanist I favour unfettered liberty to be ‘good people’.
In this essay I have wanted to show that, far from being a culprit who triggered monstrous outages against freedom, dignity and reason, whoever was the real historic source of the Jesus myth and, all that followed, he was a genuinely good bloke with ideas and ideals we value.
It has taken over 50 years of research and reflection to feel confident about posting this. For most of that time I was trapped in the fog of conditioned doctrinal and mythic influences that were so knitted into our cultural discourse I wasn’t aware of the effort I needed to be free of them.
We all need a theory of reality, and we craft it from what we inherit, experience and what we find satisfying and acceptable to us on psychological, cultural and intellectual levels. Our relationship with reality is our affair, so long as our conduct does not transgress the rights and freedoms of others.
Ideally, we should be free to do that without being subject to what other people think is okay for us to think or believe. The only thing they should care about is whether we are good neighbours, good members of our community.
This is, I think, the essence of what Jesus taught. It’s the two ‘greatest commandments’ in a nutshell. Not simple to imagine or easy to perform – but why should they be?