Jesus Was A Pussy
Today I read another H. G. Wells book - 'The Conquest of Time' which covers a variety of topics, including evolution, general relativity, religion and society. Wells provides a very entertaining footnote on Christianity, Jesus and St. Paul, which I felt compelled to reproduce. Enjoy:
Christians read their Bible very carelessly. Most of them do not read it at all, and even professional Bible readers seem to be in the habit of thinking about something else while they read it. But they feel very strongly about it, and the more so nowadays in these dangerous times when you cannot be too careful what magic powers you offend.
...The accounts we have of Jesus and Paul are given to us in four "Gospels," which vary widely in style and contradict each other upon a number of particulars. It is generally regarded as impious to ask why Almighty Providence should have imparted the good news of man's salvation in this slovenly fashion. Jesus, I was taught, was the son of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost. I understand that is the universal Christian teaching. Yet for some fantastic reason the Gospel according to St. Matthew begins with the genealogy of Joesph, who seems to have very little to do with the business. The Gospel of St. Luke gives another and different genealogy for this irrelevant putative parent. It is, I suppose, blasphemous to compare the two. So I will not exhort the devout to make this comparison for themselves if only they will permit me to make it.
A plain account of the origin and relationship of the Holy Ghost should be of far more interest to Christians who have to believe in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. It is never given. It would have saved endless bloodshed if it had been stated without ambiguity. I may perhaps be permitted to remark that in the opening paragraphs of the Gospel of St. John the Holy Ghost has an odd resemblance to the Logos of the Stoics, and that he does not seem to have entered the Trinity until well after the New Testament was written. St. Athanasius, or some other person using his name, found the information supplied by the inspired word of God so unsatisfactory that he had to supplement it by his own well-known Creed, "which except a man believe faithfully he cannot be saved."
None of these Gospels, it is now generally admitted, were in existence until a number of years after the Crucifixion. They seem to have been compiled from earlier documents and patched up independently. Their defects and patchings and obvious interpolations give them a sort of independent authenticity. No cunning fellows would have produced this naive jumble of muddle-witted stuff. The first three Gospels do convince me that there must have been a Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified, that he had a following who believed in him personally and intensely and who, after waiting some time for his return, set themselves to put on record all they could remember about him before it was completely forgotten. Their minds were pathetically and unintelligently loyal to their vanished leader. They stuck in all sorts of things to enhance his credit - those irrelevant Joesph genealogies, for example; they polished up his wonders and miracles. It was in the current tradition that anyone with a "message" to mankind should justify his pretensions by some high-class conjuring, and the Gospel writers thought with their times. John the Evangelist may have produced his Gospel later than the others; he was evidently under the sway of Paul's theology, and he touched up the story more impressively, making Jesus the Christ beyond all question.
For the amplification of such questions the reader is referred to the Bible Encyclopedia. Our interest here is in the real Jesus who appears dimly but confusingly through these tattered, worn, and maltreated documents. It is plain that he belonged to an older order of intellectual life, in which wisdom was transmitted by word of mouth. He was a precocious child, and when he was twelve years old he slipped away from his parents when they visited Jerusalem, and was found after an anxious search sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions.
For some years after that his story is obscure; he grew in wisdom and stature, but it did not occur to him that it would be a real economy of effort and prevent endless misunderstandings to write down the "message" with which he was beginning to feel he was entrusted. This strengthens our realization that he conceived of his message as an oral message because he could not read or write. In the entire Gospel literature there is only one statement that even seems to contradict this. When he defended the woman taken in adultery, he bent down and wrote with his finger in the sand. What did he write? Surely from the Christian's point of view it was the most precious piece of writing in the world! - if it was anything but a mere scribble in the sand.
For some years after that visit to Jerusalem, the Gospel narrative fails us altogether. It was a time of profound political unrest, and it is natural to infer Jesus was talking politics and developing his ideas in Nazareth. There was much talk of the coming of a Messiah. John the Baptist was stirring up people, urging them to repentance and expectation. The Messiah was at hand. John denounced the uxorious follies of Herod the tetrarch of Galilee, and was put in prison. Jerusalem, however, was in the hands of a Roman garrison. The King Herod of the Nativity, who had given an air of independence to Judaea, had long since passed away and Caesar had strengthened his grip. Jesus emerges in the Gospel story, a figure of power and inspiration, preaching the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. Plainly it is an earthly kingdom he has in view. Read the Gospels. He is a figure of righteous anger. He curses the barren fig tree. His march upon Jerusalem was a militant one. He created a riot in the temple, driving out the merchants and overturning the tables of the money-changers. The people rose with him, so that he filled the authorities with dismay. He went into the garden of Gethsemane, and his following was armed with swords and staves; Simon Peter had a sword with which he cut off the ear of the high priest's servant . But the mass of the people had veered from their first enthusiasm, and it became clear the the insurrection was ending in defeat.
The story of the trial and execution is all the more convincingly a story of real events because of the manifest discrepancies - the behaviour of the thieves, for example.
At the end upon the cross came a bitter cry: "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" and then a last cry of despair.
At least, so say Matthew and Mark; but Luke has substituted other words less perplexing for the faithful, and St. John, well saturated with Pauline doctrine, gives a third alternative to the believer and makes him say "It is finished." and bow his head and give up the ghost. There are three sets of last words, each one flatly contradicts the others and makes them impossible, and no Bible reader ever seems to have observed that. We seem to have every stage in this fourfold record between the tragic truth, the more edifying concoction, and the purely doctrinal falsification. St. John is very emphatic, almost over-emphatic, that he was an eyewitness of the Crucifixion. It is almost as if he knew of the other versions of the story and wanted to write them down.
Plainly the very real and convincing personal story that emerges from the stained and mutilated Gospel records, with their foolish glosses of "which was done that the Scriptures might be fulfilled," and their strenuous doctrinal intensifications, is one of a social and political revolt and defeat.
It is to be noted that Jesus was an exceptionally weak man in many ways. The devout talk incredible nonsense about his sufferings on the cross. But he suffered far less than the two thieves who were crucified with him; he was dead in six hours; it was unnecessary to break his legs. The two thieves had their legs smashed to hasten their deaths, because the morrow was some particularly important sort of Sabbath for the Jews on which it would be improper to let men die. But he did not even have his legs broken.
Crucifixion, it has to be noted, was a death involving hardly any bloodshed. The efforts made by the Gospel copyists and improvers to bring a little blood into the story, and so fit in the growing myth of Christianity with the blood bath of Mithraism, are manifest and pitiful. All this is plain and clear to any intelligent person who brings a modicum of common sense to the reading of the New Testament.
On these considerations we base our statement that later on Saul of Tarsus exploited the still very considerable Nazarene movement for his own elaborate theological inventions. He did not know Jesus, but he knew that there was still a widespread distressful feeling that this valiant leader would return. The imaginative history of mankind is full of those sleeping heroes who will come back to us. Interwoven with Saul's sense of a large possible following were the theories of the seed-time sacrifice of a human being that haunted so much of the old-world religions and still survive in the Mass. (It would, by the by, be a useful exercise for the habitual Bible reader to find out how often this cardinal Christian ceremony, so important that one cannot die without it, is mentioned in the Gospels.) But to Saul, who was a hot persecutor of revolutionaries, it came as a brilliant stroke on the high road to Damascus that Jesus could be represented as that annual sacrificial seed-time king. And disregarding that human effort at a revolution for righteousness that is still so traceable through the Gospel jumble, and which he was temperamentally incapable of understanding, he made that pitiful failure and execution the sole significant fact in the career of Jesus.
And here again the New Testament is our evidence for another contrast between Jesus and Paul. Jesus, it has been pointed out, belonged to the ancient tradition of oral teachers. He never wrote anything, and probably could not write. Paul, on the other hand, was a copious able writer, The student of the Scriptures passes from the muted passionate rebellion against the wrongful things in the world that underlies the Gospels to the brilliant speculations in the Epistles, of a worldly intellectual who felt no scruple in nailing Jesus forever on the cross of his defeat.
