The Fractured Kingdom: Uniting Modern Christianity through the Historical Jesus

By Jean-Pierre Isbouts

Bestselling biblical historian Jean-Pierre Isbouts weaves the origin stories of Christianity and the Lord's Prayer into a reinvigorating and urgent rallying cry for unity in the modern church.

Modern Christianity is in the midst of a veritable schism along the fault lines of society's culture wars. Only if we understand the origins of this split can we find our way to unity. Though few may realize it today, Jesus’s ministry unfolded in a crisis very similar to the one society is now battling. In fact, were it not for the truly catastrophic conditions in early 1st century Galilee, his reimagining of the three quintessential virtues of the Torah – social justice; compassion toward one another; and an abiding love of God – would have likely failed to attract a wide following.

Brilliantly tracing Jesus’s vision for the “Kingdom of God” from its origin up through modern times, Dr. Isbouts leads us to a possible antidote for the fiercely partisan moment in which we find ourselves: the Our Father. Then taking readers on a historically exhilarating tour of the Lord’s Prayer, The Fractured Kingdom shows us why the only doctrine Christians agree on might be our last hope for forging a more equal, compassionate, and loving society. What results is an eminently readable and undeniably essential work that addresses some of the most pressing issues now confronting communities of faith around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Release date: Jun 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781640656444

Jean-Pierre Isbouts

Jean-Pierre Isbouts is an art historian and a professor emeritus at Fielding Graduate University. He is the author or coauthor of multiple history books, including Mapping America, Mapping the Holy Land, National Geographic’s The Ultimate Visual History of the World, The Biblical World, In the Footsteps of Jesus, and The Story of Christianity, which together have sold more than two million copies, and together with Christopher Heath Brown, the coauthor of the art books The da Vinci Legacy: How an Elusive 16th-Century Artist Became a Global Pop Icon, The Mona Lisa Myth, and Young Leonardo, and the coproducer of The Search for the Last Supper and The Search for the Mona Lisa specials shown on Public Television. Dr. Isbouts has been on numerous radio and TV shows, is the host of several series for The Great Courses, and has directed several programs for Disney, ABC, Hallmark, and the History Channel, working with actors such as Leonard Nimoy, Charlton Heston, Dick van Dyke, and Morgan Freeman, and produced recordings with orchestras around the world. Dr. Isbouts lives in Santa Monica, California.

Book preview

A cover page shows a cracked brick wall with a cross engraved on it. The crack runs horizontally run through the cross. The cover page reads From the Bestselling Author of In the Footsteps of Jesus and The Biblical World; The Fractured Kingdom; Uniting Modern Christianity Through the Historical Jesus; Jean-Pierre Isbouts.The title page reads The Fractured Kingdom; Uniting Modern Christianity Through the Historical Jesus; Jean-Pierre Isbouts.

Copyright © 2023 by Jean-Pierre Isbouts

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Figures—Page 4: Credit National Archives (photo no. 306-SSM-4D-66-27); pages 14 and 172: Leandro PP/Shutterstock.com;

page 182: © Ritmeyer Archaeological Design.

All other images are by the author, © MMXXIII Pantheon Studios, Inc.

Morehouse Publishing, 19 East 34th Street, New York, NY 10016

Morehouse Publishing is an imprint of Church Publishing Incorporated.

Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein

A record of this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-64065-643-7 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64065-644-4 (ebook)

This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

If a kingdom is divided against itself,

that kingdom cannot stand.

And if a house is divided against itself,

that house will not be able to stand.

Mark 3:24–25

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

GLOSSARY

INTRODUCTION

PART I - REDISCOVERING THE HISTORICAL JESUS

|1| - A LAND IN CRISIS

|2| - THE LOST YEARS OF JESUS' YOUTH

|3| - ALONG THE BANKS OF THE JORDAN

|4| - JESUS LAUNCHES HIS MINISTRY

PART II - THE LORD'S PRAYER: A BLUEPRINT FOR UNITY

|5| - OUR FATHER, HALLOWED BE YOUR NAME

|6| - YOUR KINGDOM COME

|7| - GIVE US EACH DAY OUR BREAD

|8| - AND FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS/SINS

|9| - DO NOT BRING US TO THE TEST

|10| - DELIVER US FROM EVIL

|11| - RECONSTRUCTING THE PASSION

THE SPLINTERING OF CHRISTIANITY

CHRONOLOGY

FURTHER READING

NOTES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GLOSSARY

INTRODUCTION

The narrow road was located just off Coldwater Canyon, the exclusive enclave running across the rugged Santa Monica Mountains that since the 1930s has been the destination of choice for Hollywood royalty. As the road dipped past the entrance gate and moved deeper into the crevice, the sound of traffic fell away, and we were surrounded by soaring cypresses that sheltered a beautiful home. Its multiple levels cascaded gently down the canyon.

The house that Ben-Hur built, Charlton Heston said proudly; it’s the proceeds from that picture that allowed me to build it.

We had been invited to the home of the Academy Award–winning actor because I had written and directed two programs of Charlton Heston’s Voyage through the Bible with him, which unexpectedly had become a commercial and critical success. What’s more, Charlton—Chuck to his friends—found that he liked the narrative cadence of my writing.

You write the way I speak, he said. Not many people get that.

We had decided that we would collaborate on a book about his and his wife Lydia’s years in the film industry, titled Charlton Heston’s Hollywood. I thought it would be interesting to use Heston’s career as a prism to project the history of postwar Hollywood from the 1940s to the end of the twentieth century. After all, he was the only American actor who could claim a career spanning from Cecil B. DeMille to James Cameron, two directors at the opposite poles of American cinema.

How shall we begin? he asked.

I explained that I had brought a video camera, which I would use to conduct a series of interviews with him over the next few weeks. My office would arrange for the tapes to be transcribed, and then I would use the material to start crafting the story.

Sounds like a plan, he said.

As we settled down in his study and the video gear was being set up, we spent a moment talking about the movie memorabilia that decorated the walls. I had, quite literally, grown up with Heston’s films—from The Ten Commandments to Ben Hur, and from Khartoum to The Omega Man and Soylent Green.

That was my best performance, he said, following my gaze to a poster of Khartoum on the wall. Working with Larry Olivier was a wonderful experience.

But an hour into our first interview, when I asked him what he thought was his most memorable achievement, he surprised me. You see, he said, the early 1960s was a very difficult time in our country. For the first time, we could see on television what was happening in the South, in real time. The Alabama police using German shepherds and water cannon to tear into peaceful Black protesters, for example. I felt I had to do something to meet the moment. So I went down to Oklahoma City, where they were planning a demonstration against some restaurants that refused to serve Black patrons.

When MGM learned of Heston’s planned visit, the studio bosses were none too pleased. Ben Hur was still in release, and El Cid was in postproduction, with a scheduled premiere in just six months. But Heston was not to be dissuaded. Come on, guys, he told the studio, "El Cid isn’t going to be in the theaters for another six months. Ben Hur has been playing since 1959; everyone’s seen it already anyway. Are you telling me people won’t go back for a second look because I picket a couple of restaurants?" So the studio demurred, Heston went to Oklahoma City, and the protestors got what they wanted: massive publicity.

Two years later, in 1963, Heston agreed to take over as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) when word reached Hollywood that Martin Luther King was planning a march on Washington, DC. King wanted Americans of every race, religion, and background to join—including stars from Hollywood. I thought it over, Heston said, and began to spread the word, in the hope of organizing a delegation of Hollywood actors. For some this came as a surprise, because Heston was associated with SAG’s conservative wing and tended to favor Republican policy issues. In contrast, the Guild’s progressive wing was headed—naturally—by Marlon Brando. Look, Chuck, Brando said during a planning meeting at Heston’s house, we should chain ourselves to the Lincoln Memorial . . . or lie down in front of the White House and block Pennsylvania Avenue. No, said Heston, if we are going to go, we are going to do it peacefully.

And, much to his surprise, the crème de la crème of Hollywood actors, twenty in all, decided to join him in Washington, DC, including Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, Jim Garner, and Sidney Poitier. Heston was deeply moved by the experience. Here were people of all walks of life, he said: liberals and conservatives, Christian and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Blacks and Whites, all walking arm in arm for civil rights. Heston was at the head of the march, right behind King. It was, he said, my finest moment. ¹

A black and white photo of Charlton Heston during the 1963 Civil Rights march in Washington, D.C.

Charlton Heston during the March on Washington.

Would such a moment be possible today? Could our nation, liberals and conservatives alike, once again walk arm in arm in support of social justice and civil rights? It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that our country is more divided than at any time since the nineteenth century. According to a 2022 poll, some 62 percent of Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, believe our democracy is in jeopardy. ² And yet, we are facing an extraordinary opportunity: to rebuild a nation that has been ravaged by a pandemic and a recession, torn by political partisanship, and deeply cleft along the fault lines of social and economic inequality.

How can we rise to the occasion? What kind of moral compass can help us to navigate the immense difficulties ahead, and heal our great divide?

To compound the problem, the Christian community in the United States and the world at large is more divided than ever. Not since the Vietnam War has American Christianity been so split between progressives and conservatives, and not since the Civil War has this divide led to such fierce acrimony, hatred, and even violence.

Some might point out that this has been the case from the very beginning, and that the Christian world has always known divisions. Even during its founding years, the traditional strand of Christianity formulated by Paul of Tarsus, that of universal salvation through faith in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, was challenged at every turn by other Christian factions, or other Christianities in the words of Bart Ehrman. Paramount among these were Gnostic Christians who had different ideas about Jesus’ teachings, and what they meant for the people of the Roman Empire.

From the fourth century onward, the very nature of Jesus’ divinity, as the Son of God, became the subject of a fierce debate that literally ripped the nascent Church apart, producing factions such as Arianism, Monophysitism and Nestorianism. As we will see, the divisions were brought into sharp relief with the rising conflict between the Western and the Eastern Church, and ultimately created the Great Schism of 1054. Five centuries later, Western Europe was torn in half when Martin Luther denounced the papacy for its exploitation of the faithful and launched the Reformation. ³

In America, differences between various Christian factions were seeded almost from the beginning. The New England Colonies had sprung from a variety of English religious groups, including Quaker and Puritan sects, with the specific purpose of creating an egalitarian society based on strict religious values. The South, on the other hand, retained much of the class distinctions that had ruled society in Great Britain. Its landed gentry, about 5 percent of the population, owned vast plantations and controlled much of the political, social, and religious scene, including the power to appoint local Anglican ministers. By contrast, the Middle Colonies (including present-day New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware) were more moderate in scope, arguably because of their mix of French, German, Irish, and English immigrants. These colonies nurtured a large and vibrant middle class of hard-working and fiercely independent tradesmen including toolmakers, tanners, butchers, brickmakers, carpenters, clockmakers, and fishermen, many of whom were either Catholic or Lutheran.

The nation’s founding fathers, however, adhered to neither creed. Many of them were avowed Deists who believed that while God created the universe, He did not intervene in human affairs. It was therefore up to humankind, guided by rational thought, to create order in the chaos. In drafting the Constitution of the United States, for example, Jefferson and his fellow authors did not look to the Bible but to the tracts of the liberal Enlightenment, including Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Loix ("The Spirit of Laws," 1748). ⁴ Thus was born the first nation on earth to be governed by the idea that every citizen had certain inalienable rights, including the right to life, liberty, property, and worship, provided it did not trespass on the rights of others.

The religious differences between the colonies mattered little while they fought a bitter war to achieve their independence from Great Britain. But the wholesale destruction of churches during the American Revolution, combined with a brain drain of Methodist and Anglican clergy who fled back to the English mother country, created a religious vacuum. This prompted the rise of a new and indigenous form of American Christianity: of believers who met in tents or camps using a largely improvised combination of prayer, preaching, and hymns. Freed from the doctrinal debate that characterized European Christianity, the simple joy of communal singing and