The Dark Side of Jesus: (Contrasted Against His Light)

By Tilden Atwell

This book is about the ambivalent nature of Jesus. For example, in Matthew you have the parable of the Good Samaritan, which teaches us to love and be kind to every other human being. A few pages later is the parable of the sheep and goats, where Jesus is sending some to eternal bliss and others to eternal torment in hell without forgiveness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503519282

Tilden Atwell

Tilden Atwell was born in Annapolis, Maryland, and had a happy childhood fishing, swimming, and crabbing in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. He was educated in public schools and the University of Maryland. At the university, he attended three classes in creative writing with the renowned creative writing teacher Dr. Rudd Fleming, who told Tilden he had a genius for economy of image and that his writing was heading in the direction of poetry. “All of my life has been books, reading, teaching, and writing,” says Tilden. “I spent seven years the US Air Force, mostly in Europe and Iceland, and wrote letters, security bulletins, manuals, and nearly became a military historian.” After the air force, there was teaching and then school library work with lots of book talks, teaching reference skills, and selecting books for reading pleasure and books to back up the school curriculum. Tilden spent thirty-two years as an educator and loved his job of selecting and promoting books. He married another teacher, Shirley H. Atwell, who shared his passion for books and reading. They have a daughter, Anne, who is also a writer. They still live in Annapolis, Maryland, and are still reading, writing, and talking about books.

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Copyright © 2015 by Tilden Atwell.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014921853

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5035-1926-8

                Softcover        978-1-5035-1927-5

                eBook             978-1-5035-1928-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Rev. date: 01/06/2015

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Contents

Chapter I How Can This Be?

Chapter II Truth as Black and White?

Chapter III A Single Human Being

Chapter IV Family Relations and Cult Leadership

Chapter V Good Samaritan Versus Sheep and Goats

Chapter VI Children of the Devil

Chapter VII Jewish World View in the First Century

Chapter VIII Hell and Human Control

Chapter IX Some Modern Thinkers

Chapter X Monism and the Fear of Death

Chapter XI A Leap of Faith

To all those never given the gift of faith.

CHAPTER I

H ow can you say Jesus has a dark side as well as a light one? Are you implying that he who was sinless and always acted perfectly did or said things that were not model or perfect examples? Are not the Beatitudes, the parable of the Prodigal Son, the parable of the Good Samaritan, forgiveness for all (no matter how horrible the sin), praying for enemies, and mingling with the worst outcasts of society excellent illustrations of God’s boundless love for man? It is absolutely true that Jesus did all these things in the narratives of the New Testament . He has no one to surpass him in the magnitude of his forgiveness and love of each human being. Then how is it that, if we are to believe holy scripture, from Jesus’s lips came the most immoral, unloving, and unforgiving proclamation of punishment ever given by any character in the Bible — New Testament or Old Testament ? How is it that Jesus said the following words: These, then, will be sent off to ETERNAL PUNISHMENT; the righteous will go on to ETERNAL LIFE (Matthew 25:46)?

This is infinite punishment for finite crimes. In the Old Testament, even at his angriest, God, or Yahweh, as the Jews called him, never gave out such a penalty as this. The Christian apologists for this idea will tell you that it is not God who sends people to hell but that they send themselves there by rejecting God? Well, what man or woman in his or her right mind would choose eternal torture over eternal bliss if he or she knew what the choice really meant? And if they did not know what the choice really meant, how could they be held really guilty enough for such a punishment? What human judge could give out such a sentence? Christians have created a God here more vindictive and unjust than themselves, and certainly one that would not be deserving of any kind of worship.

What kind of loving father would allow his children to suffer forever even if they made such a choice, even if they fully understood the consequences? Maybe people like Hitler should be made to experience the pain of all the millions of individuals that he made suffer, but even this punishment would be finite in time, and it would end after thousands or millions of years, which is within any kind of equitable system of punishment. No matter how horrible a human crime is, it is always of a finite nature because human beings are finite. The Jesus who walked and talked in the parts of the New Testament, mentioned in the first few sentences of the first paragraph above, would be incapable of giving out such a sentence.

We must not forget this first Jesus of eternal mercy whom I have mentioned in this protest against the injustice of eternal punishment. Jesus was a Jew, and yet he healed the servant of a Roman soldier, an occupier and oppressor of his people and the type of person the Jews hated the most. Was this not an example of perfect love: love of one’s enemy? On the cross, he forgave those who were torturing and killing him, saying, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. What about the parable of the men who came to work at the end of the day, and the master paid them the same as the other men who had been working all day?

Is this story not a metaphor for a father who loves his children so much that he even puts justice aside for them? To back up all this evidence of his goodness, did he not oppose all violence and say I come to save the world not to judge it? Jesus was not at all the warrior king the Jews had expected, and he had not come to lead an army against the Romans and establish the world dominance of Israel. But if he said these words about saving rather than judging, how could he also say what he did to the citizens of Capernaum who rejected him (Matthew 11: 23–24)?

When the citizens of Capernaum rejected Jesus, he promised them punishment worse than that visited upon Sodom in the Old Testament. From this, it is safe to assume all of Capernaum and all its inhabitants would be cast into the fiery pit of hell. In the light of the Old Testament justice and punishment, we can assume that this included innocent women and children, who had nothing to do with rejecting Jesus but just happened to be related to those who were being punished eternally for not accepting Jesus, or maybe also those who just happened to be living in the city. This is the kind of mass punishment—which included future generations—that Yahweh, which is what the Jews called their God, practiced all the time in the Old Testament. It is evident from Jesus’s interaction with the rabbis that he knew Jewish scripture and law very well. Yahweh, however, was more merciful than Jesus, because he annihilated people and didn’t make them suffer forever.

Reading just a few random selections from the Old Testament will quickly show us how incredibly cruel Yahweh could be. He loved the smell of the burned flesh of innocent animals sacrificed to him (Numbers 29:2). He ordered Moses to have a man stoned to death for gathering wood on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:35–36). He very frequently demanded that his leaders, like Moses or Joshua, practice genocide on a people like the Canaanites, whose land the Jews were told to take for themselves. This is the God of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and in keeping with what we observe in nature all the time: the strong survive, and the weak are killed or manipulated to suit the strong’s purposes. Yahweh has made the Jews his special people and told them to kill others who stand in their way. This God, or again Yahweh, as the Jews named him, would demand that in a conquered city every man, woman, child, and even every animal was to be killed (Joshua 6:9, 20–21). This same God promulgated laws, shown in the Bible, which demanded that women caught in adultery be stoned to death, that men committing homosexual acts were to be similarly killed, that children who curse their parents would be executed, and that punishment would not be dealt only to individuals but to their innocent children and their children’s children (Leviticus 19:1–27).

The bloodthirstiness, violence, revenge, and cruelty of God on his chosen people, when they did not obey him, and the innocent, conquered people he had chosen to annihilate caused a number of early Christian thinkers to believe that this could not be the God that the meek and humble Jesus represented. Marcion, founder of a large Christian sect known as the Marcionites, wanted to eliminate the Old Testament as part of Christian literature, and for some time, it looked as if this view might prevail over the one we hold today. Christians came close to ending up with only a small part of the New Testament as their sacred literature. Christianity remained in an uproar for about three hundred years before it became solidified, and then it split into the Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church, but not before the entire church had nearly been torn apart by a struggle between the so called proto-orthodox Christians, who, more or less, represented the Christianity of today, and the Arian Christians, who believed that Christ was created by God at a certain point in time and that he had not always existed.

The Gnostic Christians solved the problem posed by the seemingly evil acts of Yahweh by believing in two Gods: the violent, evil God of the Old Testament and the good God from whom Jesus was sent. Probably they were influenced in this kind of thinking by Zoroastrianism, an ancient religion in the Middle East, which posited a god of light opposed by a god of darkness. The Gnostics might also have been influenced by the Hindus or Buddhists, since each Gnostic sect believed that it had secret knowledge of Jesus passed on by the apostles that could bring enlightenment. This secret knowledge was a knowledge that came from within each individual and could be reached with the aid of the particular sect’s holy man or men. With proper guidance, each individual could become a Jesus himself or a holy being with profound insight into the true nature of things. This sounds very much like a Buddhist searching for the Buddha within himself by looking away from the outside world and inward through meditation. In fact, Jesus does say in one place The kingdom of God is within. Some have called the Mormons modern Gnostics since to become a Mormon, one must go through a period of secret indoctrination within the Mormon temple and then guard other certain secrets from non-Mormon friends and associates, but there the similarity ends, and the Gnostics were quite different from the Mormons.

The fact of the matter, though, is if these early Christians had looked more closely at their own sacred writings, had read them a little more impartially, and actually taken the trouble to think a little bit about what they were reading, they would have realized that Jesus dealt out a punishment far more terrible that anything given by Yahweh in the Old Testament. When Yahweh had all those people killed, at least they were dead. There was no hell as such in the Old Testament. When the place where the dead go, called Sheol, is mentioned in the Bible, it is designated as a shadowy world where all men go, both good and evil.

There is a hint of an afterlife in Isaiah and the Book of Daniel, which mentions a place where there will be judgment and good things for good people and bad things for bad people at that time, but hell and Satan, as an evil being, really only appears for the first time in the New Testament. Hell and Satan are largely a Christian invention. Satan’s only appearance in the Old Testament is in the Book of Job, where he plays the role of God’s helper and investigator of men. He is God’s helper and private investigator, and God sends him to find out if Job is really as righteous a man as he appears to be on the surface, but he certainly cannot be classified as an evil being in this scenario.

There seem to be two different Jesus characters in our story: the emissary of a kind, loving, all-forgiving father and the representative of the vengeful God of the Old Testament, but far, far more vengeful still, with the kind of punishment he gives out. How can there be such glaring inconsistencies and contrasts in the book called the New Testament, and yet individuals are unaware of them as they read the