Jesus to Christology

Here we are in the Christmas season again and, as always, there are the usual calls to “put the Christ back in Christmas.” This seems like a reasonable request—until that is, we begin to look into words and ideas and their histories. For me, this means looking into the history that made a radical Jewish preacher named Jesus of Nazareth into a divine figure called “Christ.” And as we learn from lexicons, the English word “Christ” comes from a Greek word, Khristos, which means “anointed;” and this, in turn, turns Jesus into the Christ, or anointed one, which in Hebrew is masiah (also mashiah and mashiach) or Messiah. In Jewish tradition, the coming of the masiah or anointed one was eagerly anticipated as the event that would unify the twelve tribes into one nation, and revive the Temple in Jerusalem. According to Reza Aslan (Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth), there were many, many figures around the time of Jesus claiming to be messiahs, mainly because Jerusalem and its temple were being profaned by the Roman occupation. The traditional job of all of these messiahs, including Jesus of Nazareth, would have been to defeat or eject the Romans from Jewish land and restore the Temple and Jerusalem to Jewish rule. That was in fact, according to Aslan, the announced purpose of Jesus himself and all Zealots: to kick out the Romans and restore the Temple in Jerusalem to its seat of worship for the one Hebraic God, Jahweh.

            This leads us to the idea of Christ. How did a radical, impoverished and probably-illiterate preacher named Jesus, who called himself the Son of Man, become the Son of God with a Greek name, Khristos? How did a strictly Jewish zealot with a mission to restore Jewish worship in its central temple become the leader of a world religion that preached not to the Jews alone, but moreso to the Romans and other “pagans” of the time who were their mortal enemies?

            Of course, these are questions that neither I—growing up Roman Catholic—nor anyone I knew even thought of, much less asked. Jesus Christ was God, the second person, the Son, part of the one but tripartite God, all of them equally God, and that was that. Always had been God. Always would be God. And it was our job not to question but to worship this mystery. The Bible—at least the Bible we were exposed to—said it and repeated it in ways that left no doubt. And for all we knew, there never had been any doubt. But once again, history informs us that there had been from the beginning quite a bit of doubt about these central tenets of our faith. And the main question related to this business of Jesus, or rather Christ, being the God-man. Simultaneously God and Man. Born of a woman, Mary, and with a father, Joseph, who, it turned out, wasn’t quite a father as we know fathers to be. Nor was Mary a woman in the conventional sense either. She was pregnant, that was for sure. That’s why the story tells us that she and Joseph were desperate to find a place to rest their weary heads for her to give birth, finally settling on this “manger”—a kind of Bethlehem stable which they occupied in the company of farm animals: sheep, goats, cows, donkeys and so on. A very humble place for a man-God. Very humble beginnings, indeed. Which is what we celebrate, supposedly, on Christmas Day: the birth of God taking on humble human flesh in the manger.

            So, what we learned was not only that this baby was divine, but that he was born in the normal way, from the womb of Mary. BUT (and this was a big ‘but’) not with the help of poor old Joseph (whose role, in the folk tradition in Italy, is humorously referred to as cornuto, a cuckold). No, poor old Joe the carpenter had no role in this begetting; rather, it was God, or the third person of God, the Holy Spirit, who surreptitiously impregnated Mary without anything so animalistic as copulation to sully the man-God’s begetting (we were never told if Mary felt the impregnation, but we were quite sure she never enjoyed it).

            Now this story, the one we celebrate at Christmas (even though most early scholars calculated that Jesus was born in March; which didn’t dissuade the Roman Church from making his official birth conform to several pagan holidays that fell on December 25, in accordance with St. Paul’s very influential notion of winning over those Romans Jesus actually hated by blending their rituals with what became his proselytizing Christian Church), begins to take on the familiar lines. Somewhere between the death of Jesus of Nazareth (and Reza Aslan, again, points out that crucifixion was reserved by the Romans for only the most dangerous rebels against their rule) and the now-familiar celebration of Christmas, something big happened to change the story. And the figure who is mainly credited with the major changing of that story is St. Paul (known in his lifetime as Saul of Tarsus).

            Saul of Tarsus was a highly religious Jew living in what is now Syria, who started out as a zealous persecutor of the early Christians. But he suffered a miracle on the road to Damascus and, realizing the error of his ways, transformed himself into the chief writer and progenitor of Christianity. It was Saul, not Jesus, who invented most of the big ideas of Christianity, what scholars now refer to as Christology. Saul/Paul wrote a lot of letters, and in these epistles (I always tuned out when the priest read the dull epistles of Paul) he really gave shape to the entire edifice that became the Christian Church (and that includes the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Roman Church, and the Protestant ones that broke away starting with Martin Luther). His basic idea was that the Christ had existed before he took the human form of Jesus, and that He was not some itinerant no-account radical preacher but the Lord or Kyrios. And the reason he was Lord and superior to all other pretend earthly Lords was that he was literally the Son of God. Remember, Jesus of Nazareth always referred to himself as the Son of Man. Not Saul/Paul. His Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, the true Lord of all Creation; or rather, the One who had introduced a whole new dispensation, a new creation, in which he redeemed humans from the sin of Adam which had separated them from God their Creator, and, simply by confessing their allegiance to Him, united all professing humans in the new, liberated creation. More specifically, Christ’s death on the cross had accomplished this. It was not a defeat at the hands of the Romans, not a humiliating punishment by crucifixion as it seemed, but rather a victory over the world and its rulers. And by uniting with this cross-nailed cosmic Christ, Christians also were united in their redemption and victory not over the Romans, but over Death.

            Again, this is all Saul’s theology. It has little to do with what Jesus of Nazareth apparently preached. It has more to do with persuading Romans and other goyim to join this new church (as does Paul’s decree that neither circumcision nor adhering to Jewish dietary laws were necessary to become Christian, causing Peter himself to refuse to share a meal with Paul’s new Christians). And the interesting thing is that there were several sects in the early church who simply did not agree with Saul/Paul’s theology. Among these, the most prominent (they were called “heresies” by the reigning Christian Church) were those following Arianism (Arians did not believe in the equality of the three persons in God, but rather believed that God the Father was supreme and primary, and had begotten Jesus Christ as his only Son); and adherents of Ebionism (which maintained that Jesus was an ordinary man born of a woman, a mortal). In a similar but opposite vein, Gnosticism’s disagreement with the man-God idea was the Gnostic insistence that the physical body of Christ was a mere appearance that disguised his real nature, which was spiritual. All of these diverse views are understandable, given the Pauline doctrine that maintained what, to most mortals, was the irrationality of a God who was simultaneously a man born of a woman who was a virgin. The Church’s resolution of these conflicts may be even harder to understand: in 451, something called the “hypostatic union” was advanced as dogma: the proposition that “Christ has one human nature [physis] and one divine nature [physis], united with neither confusion nor division,” which is a sort of ex-cathedra pronouncement that explains nothing. Finally, according to Reza Aslan, the idea that Christ was a divine being, a God-man united with Jahweh, would’ve been anathema to any orthodox Jew, as it was to several of the original disciples who had actually lived with Jesus (unlike Paul who had never met him).

            What we are left with, then, is a Christianity that seems to have departed radically from the message, and the intentions behind it, that Jesus himself preached when he was alive. No less a genius than Leo Tolstoy seems to have come to a similar conclusion in his radical analysis of Russian Orthodox Christianity.  And what Tolstoy tried to do was promote a more or less originalist Christianity that centered on the Sermon on the Mount:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: 

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right 

cheek, turn to him the other also. 

This nonviolent and rational ideal was what Christianity should have focused on, according to Tolstoy, and he wrote stirringly about its importance when compared to the rituals and miracles and mysteries that have come down through Paul and the rest of the orthodox Christian Churches, and which he dismissed as deceptive frosting for the masses.

            It may well be that Tolstoy was right in his analysis—or rather, closer to what Jesus of Nazareth actually preached and ultimately intended. Even as a Zealot, that is, Jesus may have realized that the Jews simply could not match the power of Imperial Rome in a conventional battle designed to eject them from Jerusalem, and so would have to invent a kind of spiritual/moral jiu-jitsu to do the job (the Sermon on the Mount, which if really followed, if humans related to one another with love and forgiveness rather than violence, would lead to the irrelevance of government and churches, too). As it turned out, however, it was Saul of Tarsus who invented the distortions cum adornments of Jesus’ message that would eventually appeal to Romans and turn Imperial Rome into the center of Christianity. Not, to be sure, as Jesus might have intended it, but with the divine trappings designed to appeal to Paul’s Roman converts. All of which may be something to keep in mind as we sing our Hosannas, light our lights, and eat our puddings in this dark but celebratory season of the year.

Lawrence DiStasi