Jesus Before Christ: Restoring a Jewish Context for Being Christian Today

By Michael Jost

Jesus Before Christ has a new eBook edition. The book will be very useful for those Christians who want a better understanding of their own Christian background, but it is aimed at the skeptical believer, the church dropout, and those who reject the religion but seek to understand the meaning of the Jesus Way. It is both a personal memoir and a provocative study. The publishers, the Foundation for Contemporary Theology, believe it will also appeal to those of other faiths or of no faith who may have an interest in the themes explored in these chapters.

Les Switzer, executive director of the Foundation, undertook the task of editing, revising, supplementing, correcting and reconstructing the narrative, where necessary, to get the first edition ready for publication. Switzer also edited the second edition—clarifying a few issues (including some tables), and correcting or revising various statements in response to comments. In addition, Switzer added several references and simplified the language in places to render the text more accessible to the reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989888523

Book preview

Author

PREFACE

Michael Jost, our friend and colleague at the Foundation for Contemporary Theology in Houston, Texas, spent many years thinking about how we as Christians understand our faith, and he put down his thoughts in manuscript form before he died. This book, which is both a personal memoir and a provocative study, is the result of his effort.

Michael wanted us to explore with him what he called the religion of Jesus and to let go of what he called the religion about Jesus. He began his own quest by returning to the roots of Christianity. The earliest followers of Jesus were Jewish and called themselves people of the Way (Acts 9:2; 19:9; 19:23; 24:22; cf. Mark 10:52). The earliest use of the term Christian (Acts 11:26) referred to Paul’s ministry to God-Fearers, non-Jews worshiping in the synagogues and in other meeting places outside Judea. These God-Fearers were mainly Greeks (a generic term for non-Jews), who were interested in the Jewish faith but, for various reasons, did not want to undergo full conversion.

Michael’s study of Christianity in its earliest stages generated new questions for him. What emerges in this book is a Jewish context for thinking about Jesus and his teachings. Michael is not alone in his views. Scholars have been interrogating the conditions that gave rise to Christian orthodoxy for a long time now, and several books have been published recently that seek in various ways to re-envision new paradigms for American Christians engaged in church and society in the 21st Century.* Nevertheless, we believe Michael offers a distinct contribution to this ongoing conversation.

Michael’s contribution is to argue for the Jesus Way—the practice of being Christian that is Jewish in origin and practice—for today. And he does it with a flair that is both personal and simply written for an audience of ordinary folks—folks who may have little if any knowledge of the Bible or biblical history, may not understand theological terminology, and may not even be religious but are interested in how and why these texts became the foundation of Christianity.

Michael acknowledged various people who advised him along the way, and we wish to honor these wishes. He wanted to thank Bob Tucker and members of his study group, Michael’s own Sunday school class at First Congregational Church in Houston and, in particular, several individuals, including Allan and Shirley Smalley, John Berry, Bob Wilbur, Vince Maggio, Art Mouser, Kathy and Steve Inglis, Roy Meinke, Les Switzer, Mary Jo Vague, George and Jeanne Wolbert, George Grimm, Sally Foster, Cordelia Chase and others whose names, Michael wrote, I have inadvertently omitted. Most of all, he wanted to thank his daughters Ellen and Charlotte and the love of my life, his wife Amanda.

Les Switzer undertook the task of editing, revising, supplementing, correcting and reconstructing the narrative, where necessary, in the process of getting the first edition of the manuscript ready for publication. Bob Tucker, former executive director of the Foundation, his wife Maggi Tucker, Amanda Jost, and Karyl Paige, a member of the Foundation’s board, helped edit several penultimate drafts of the manuscript. Rabbi Seymour Rossel examined rabbinical citations from the Oral Torah and made numerous valuable corrections to the manuscript, especially in Chapter 2. Switzer is grateful to Ann Economou-Clarke for designing the front cover and the title page, and to Michael Clarke, who took charge at a crucial stage in the production process leading to publication.

We maintain contemporary standards in avoiding perceived bias in the use of language. For the most part, personal pronouns have not been used (such as he or she) when referring to a generic noun, and humanity or humankind is used instead of mankind. Before the Common Era (BCE) and Common Era (CE) are used instead of Before Christ (BC) and The Year of Our Lord Anno Domini (AD). We have also occasionally changed spelling and punctuation and rendered into modern English translations of a few citations from the Oral Torah to assist readers.

In the end, however, this is Michael’s story. While he wrote it for those Christians who want a better understanding of their Christian background, his text is targeted at the skeptical believer, the church dropout, and those who reject the religion but seek to understand the meaning of the Jesus Way. As members of the Foundation, we believe Michael’s ideas will also appeal to those of other faiths or of no faith who may have an interest in the themes explored in this book.

The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV—1989 edition) has been used for most biblical references except in a few cases where the text calls for a need to use the Authorized King James Version (KJV) or the Jewish Study Bible (JSB—1999 edition), the standard English-language translation for the Jewish community. All references to the Oral Torah are designated by name as coming from the Mishnah, the Midrash Rabbah or the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds. Some of Michael’s resources were available only online. This is problematic because some uniform resource locators (URLs) may not work in the years since he cited them. In all cases, however, the interested reader can visit the website that published the material and track it down.

The Foundation for Contemporary Theology is pleased to sponsor this second edition. It is a fine expression of the Foundation that has worked, for more than a quarter of a century, to fulfill our founder Wes Seeliger’s stated purpose: To present the most compelling theological issues of our time and to promote in-depth reflection by the largest possible audience.

 Les Switzer Executive Director

 Foundation for Contemporary Theology

*The trend in recent religious scholarship in America has shifted somewhat from a critical focus on the origins and evolution of early Christianity in its many forms to various prescriptions of what a non-traditional Christian stance might look like today—from our experiences in spirituality and our personal and corporate prayers to our patterns of worship and community life. E.g., Hall Taussig, A New Spiritual Home: Progressive Christianity at the Grass Roots (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 2006); Diana Butler Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church Is Transforming the Faith (New York: HarperSan Francisco, 2006); Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008); Robin Meyers, The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus (San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 2012).

Introduction

This book is concerned with the texts and contexts surrounding the person called Jesus and the stories about him, and it invites the reader to explore what may be a different way of thinking about Jesus and the evolution of early Christianity. The book is written for those Christians who want a better understanding of their Christian background, but it is aimed specifically at the skeptical believer, the church dropout, and those who reject the religion of Christianity but seek to understand the meaning of the Jesus Way.

If you are in any sense dissatisfied with what you have been told to believe, you may want to read this book. If the answers you have been given about the Bible or Jesus or what Christians believe are not enough for you, then buy this book. If you were once active in church only to have found it more and more meaningless, you may find out why by reading this book. If you are a former member of the church and have dropped out, this book is for you.

Membership in mainline Protestant denominations—like the Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Lutheran or United Church of Christ—has been dropping since the 1960s, and there are many reasons for this decline. Some formerly active church members could no longer believe what was being preached and accepted as true. Others were worn out by constant demands on their time, talents and treasure. Still others could no longer pray to the God being preached. The behemoth that was once the Liberal Church Establishment has become a helpless giant ensnared in a trap of its own making. One author sums up the present situation: The liberal church stumbles along, muttering creeds they no longer believe, trying to peddle a fuzzy, feel good theology that distorts and ignores the Bible as much as the Christian Right.¹ Mainline churches tend to value conformity over diversity, stasis over movement, dishonesty over honesty. The milquetoast of the past is preferable to salsa of the present.

Ordinary churchgoers are not invited into a new way of thinking. Dissent is discouraged. There is little space for questioners to voice their own opinions in public within the institution. Religious dogmatism—whether the church in question is perceived as liberal, moderate or conservative, Roman Catholic, Protestant or Eastern Orthodox—requires unquestioning allegiance. Given the rigid stance of most Christian churches, many of us have chosen to leave, however reluctantly, and join those already in the Church Alumni Association.²

Theological rebels are seen as problem makers. I attended a Jesus Seminar conference in New York City in January 2003. Most of the theologians there noted that they had been invited to leave their home churches, and some had been threatened by their denominations with heresy trials. Yet, when these theologians gave talks at universities or other public venues, the lectures were filled to overflowing with former church members and curious Christians seeking new meaning for their faith struggles.

Numerous religious commentators—both in academic life and in popular culture—have noted an extraordinary development in contemporary American religious life. It is particularly evident among American Protestants—still the majority of self-identified Christians in this country. Never before in our history has there been such an astonishing reverence for the Bible and an equally astonishing ignorance (or misrepresentation) of the Bible and of the history of Christianity.

No text has been so abused as the Bible, so the first six chapters of this book are concerned with the religion about Jesus—a deconstruction of some classical myths about the development of the Bible, the origins of Christianity, the earliest congregations and the evolution of Christian doctrines. Most laity do not realize that the religion today we call Christianity was not developed until several centuries after the death of Jesus. The doctrines we defend today as biblical are not biblical.

We live in a hurting and uncertain world. People hunger for a sign of God’s presence and unconditional love, and many are eager to sign on to dogmatic statements of belief with the minimum of forethought or examination. Bible study classes in most Christian churches are effectively devotional in content, and class leaders are usually laypersons using a prepackaged church curriculum aimed at avoiding controversy. Rather than being challenged, members have their preconceived assumptions and prejudices reinforced over and over again.

Jesus himself would never have understood the Christian belief system, because he was not founding a new religion. He was born a Jew, raised as a Jew and died a Jew. Chapters 7 and 8 invite the reader into a different way of thinking about the person who was Jesus and his teachings. It is an introduction to the practice of the religion of Jesus and why its recovery is so important for Christians today.

A theology professor I encountered in seminary once said, Any God that can be killed should be killed, but killing an idea without offering alternatives is really not a Christian response. So the last chapter offers some personal reflections about what an American Christian stance for the twenty-first century might look like if Christianity were a movement from a religion about Jesus towards a religion of Jesus. It is meant to encourage you, the reader, to embark on your own journey of rediscovering a follower of The Way.

¹ Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, in an on-line document downloaded at http://www.allsaints-pas.org/pdf/TAOS%20Hedges, 20.

² Church Alumni Association is a term coined by John Shelby Spong, now the retired bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark.

Chapter 1

Issues of the Bible

The Bible has usually been a spiritual guide for Christians seeking the mysteries of the divine, but it has also been used as a proof text for numerous issues we have manufactured for ourselves. Some believers proclaim it to be the Word of God while others simply affirm it as their sacred writings. Most people, however, have never given a thought to the evolution of the foundational document of our religion. If asked anything historical about the Bible, the average churchgoer would probably draw a blank. Most of us assume, as Jude (1:3) puts it, that the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints was born fully developed and identical with today’s beliefs and practices. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Bible was not written as a whole. It evolved over more than two thousand years and through many different languages and cultures.

How do we know this? Men and women employing the tools of modern critical scholarship have been examining the Bible since the eighteenth century. These were and are faithful people attempting to understand the origins and meaning of the single most important document in western culture. Scholarly inquiry takes biblical texts far more seriously than a wooden, literal interpretation of a relatively few verses.

The Bible carries truth without being literally true. This truth resides below the words in the world of metaphor, parable, poetry and figurative language. The Bible contains some history, but it is not a history book. It contains insight within the human stories it preserves, but it is not the human story. It is not God’s dictation book. It is a collection of texts that, despite contradictions, relate our human efforts to understand the divine. The Bible was never meant to be more than a guide to accompany us on our own personal and collective spiritual journeys.

The Bible as the Word of God

Georges Sorel, a French political and social philosopher in the early twentieth century, was very interested in the power of myth as propaganda: he asserted that the historical facts underlying an event were not as important as what people believed about the event. People acted on what they believed happened, not on what actually happened.

Many believers today continue to insist biblical texts are inerrant and infallible.³ Claims by messengers of the Religious Right that they have a corner on interpreting the Bible rest on well-tested techniques of propaganda—popular myth and the boldness of their assertions.

The Bible, when it is perceived as the Word of God, can easily become an idol—a phenomenon often referred to as bibliolatry. Joel Osteen, the minister of Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, reputedly the biggest Christian congregation in the country, makes the following confession prior to each sermon. He has the congregation stand, hold up a Bible and say:

This is my Bible. I am what it says I am. I have what it says I have. I can do what it says I can do. Today I will be taught the Word of God. I boldly confess my mind is alert, my heart is receptive. I will never be the same. I am about to receive the incorruptible, indestructible, ever-living seed of the Word of God. I will never be the same. Never, never, never. I will never be the same. In Jesus’ name, Amen.⁴

Osteen literally turns the Bible into God. On his website, in the section What We Believe, he states as the first principle:

We Believe…the entire Bible is inspired by God, without error and the authority on which we base our faith, conduct and doctrine.⁵

Deconstructing Texts in the Hebrew Bible

Osteen’s assertion can be maintained only through an elaborate system of rationalizations. Let’s take as our first example the creation story in Genesis—or rather the two creation stories in Genesis. One begins with Genesis 1:1-2:4a and the other begins at 2:4b. The first one talks of a six-day creation ending with the creation of humankind on the sixth day, after all the animals are created. The second one begins with the creation of an androgynous human being, followed by the creation of the animals, ending with the separation of male and female with the creation of Eve.

Here is the description of the creation of humankind in which male and female are created separately (Genesis 1:26-27):

Then God said, Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

The second story in Genesis 2:5-7 begins with the creation of a single human being:

… when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground—then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.

The first human being, Adam, was created prior to any plants and animals in this story, whereas all the plants and animals were created before humankind in the first story.

One cannot speak of male and female until much later in Genesis 2:20-4. God creates the animals—seeking to find a mate suitable for the human being—and Adam names each one. But no mate for Adam is found among the animals, so God puts the human being to sleep, takes a rib and forms Eve. The original human being ceases to be androgynous:

The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken. Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.

Note that the original human being can be recreated only by the union of male and female. This profound insight serves as a central tenet of modern psychology, especially in schools of thought influenced by Carl Jung.

One of the key differences in each of these accounts is the name of God. In the first story God is referred to as Elohim. In the second account, God is referred to by the name YHWH (we pronounce the term as Yahweh). Scholars sought a reason for this difference. Eventually these studies identified four major sources for the Hebrew Bible and discovered that they had been edited and re-edited several times. Scholars have named one source E because of the use of Elohim. The sections that used the sacred tetragrammaton of YHWH for God were called the J source (The letter j in German sounds like a consonant y in English). The designation P was used for those parts of the Hebrew Bible written by a priestly school belonging to a later date than either J or E. Those parts of the Bible edited after the composition of the Deuteronomy manuscript in the reign of Josiah, king of Judah in the seventh century BCE, were designated D (see Chapter 2).⁶

At some point editors took the stories from each of these traditions, blended and weaved them into the texts we have today. The blending of differing traditions, however, caused some problems. Everyone is familiar with the story of Noah and the ark. He was commanded to take the animals on the ark two by two, right? Not