The Telling: Considering Jesus of Nazareth Part One

Enrique Simonet: He Wept Over It, 1892

I didn’t know if I would do it or not because I don’t like to do things over and over from perceived tradition, but once again, as Lent ends, I am watching the long film Jesus of Nazareth. It is a Telling, and one of the best Tellings of the Gospel. Unlike most Bible movies which I flatly have a hard time watching, I believe in this one, and so because I believe in it, it opens up questions worse movies don’t create. Jesus of Nazareth is a piece of art. It is not a window onto what actually happened. It is not even how things “ought to have happened” And there are things that seem improbable or left out which make me wonder about the mystery of Christian origins. I am an occultist and a heretic, and as an occultist raised in Catholicism who still finds Catholicism deeply valuable, I must look at this story and see what is hidden and what is left out, for the occult is not outside or separated from the last two thousand years of Christianity, but interwoven with it as it was interwoven with the religions before.

We all know that the Church began—well, it began many times if you read the Scriptures, but the official date is Pentecost. The church began on Pentecost in the Upper Room when the Holy Spirit descended and yet, as I watched the movie and remembered the Bible, I wondered about the exclusive truth of this Jerusalem Church. This was a church where the one hundred twenty disciples, most of whom are never mentioned in the Gospels and certainly not in this or any other movie, receive the power to speak to the crowd in Jerusalem in every language making the Church international and centered in Jerusalem from the beginning. Though later it is a matter of Jew and Gentile, from the very beginning, the whole business is an international one. And we mustn’t imagine that Judaism was then as it is now. It was at its heart and origin Mediterranean with no long history or persecution at the hands of European Christians.

The land of Israel was primarily divided in Jesus’ time into Galilee, Samaria and Judea. Judea was the heart of the Jewish world though it could not have been exclusively Jewish. Samaria was Samaritan (for our purposes, Samaritans are a type of hybrid Jew) though one wonders if it was wholly Samaritan and Galilee was defined as being Greek, meaning it was Hellenistic in culture and would have the most mixed multitude. It would have been international. Far from Jesus growing up in backwater, he would have come from a fairly integrated place. His followers in Galilee would not have needed a holy spirit Pentecost wind to understand multiple languages.

Watching Jesus preach and teach to the crowds in this movie, something occurs to me that doesn’t occur in just reading the bible, which is that, rather like now, the question of who is a “real follower” is quite open. How many of those hundreds or maybe thousands of disciples listening to Jesus stayed, and how many turned away, and what does turning away and staying mean? Was the line as clear as we would like it to be? In the Gospel of John, when Jesus feeds the five thousand and says they must eat his body and drink his blood, many turn away in a very clear cut away, but I imagine many were just simply confused.

And we, two thousand years later can also be confused because the temptation is to dig through all this story, history, history specials, conflicting Gospels and conflicting churches for the real Jesus, the true story. I have said it before and will say again. That is all hidden from us because the true story in veiled in mystery. The true story, the heart of the labyrinth is not on a hill outside of Jerusalem, but in our midst, which is just was Jesus was trying to tell us, and is telling us still.

I imagine many were simply confused about the crucifixion and the resurrection. The land of Israel is not a large one, but it is full of mountains and hills and valleys, so there is very little travel as the crow flies, and in the time of Jesus there was certainly no telegraph, no internet or television, nothing to tell one what had happened quickly. Surely there were people who considered themselves followers of Jesus who simply saw him travel for Jerusalem, not entirely sure of what was going to happen to him and received, in one foul swoop as most young Christians do, the entire news of his death, resurrection and possibly ascension and the beginning of his church. Is it possible that even before Jesus departed for Jerusalem there were those living as the Church? There is an odd passage in Matthew where Jesus is giving advice to the disciples about how the Church is to be run. He mentions the Church, seemingly anachronistically, and though I have counted it as a mistake to think of Jesus as the founder and not the inciting spark of Christianity, though many people including me have pointed to Jesus’s mentions of the Church as rewrites placed in his mouth by those who came after, could there have been some nascent churches existing in Jesus’ lifetime?  The Bible tells us that it was Peter’s baptizing Cornelius and the council of Jerusalem later in the Book of Acts that opened up the Church to Gentiles, but the Gospels also tell us that Jesus went across the sea to the Gadarenes, who herded pigs, and cured a man of demons by sending them into the pigs, and that this same man (or men in some Gospels) went off and preached Jesus. Who were these Gadarenes? They don’t seem like Jews.

 But what was first century Judaism? I don’t think it resembled modern Judaism any more than first century Christianity resembles a Southern Baptist barbecue. Biologically we all climbed out of the same soup and our ancestral microbes resemble each other more than they resemble us or we resemble the things we spread from, and this is true of religion and ethnicity as well.  Modern Judaism came into existence as the bloody rival of Christianity for three centuries until Christianity won and the fight became very, very…. very one sided. Judaism grew to reflect  1. the absence of a temple, 2. the presence of deep persecution as a minority and a scapegoat in a story not of their invention, 3. a new central home in a very white Europe and 4.  decidedly being NOT Christianity and strictly having a theology which could never allow for the possibility of Christianity.

 The Judaism of Jesus’s day would not have had any of those points.

Christians and Jews like to pretend that the ancient people of Israel were strictly monotheistic and strictly monolithic, but neither one of these things could have been true. We know ancient Israelites worshiped the same gods as their neighbors and actually were their neighbors. Canaanite, Judaen, Israelite are not so much different ethnicities as different modalities of the same thing, and the first century people of Palestine, especially of Galilee, would have known very well about Greek thought and religion and culture. The fact that Christianity would take on more pagan aspects or that Jesus immediately takes on pagan myth aspects needs not have been something occurring from the outside slapped on by later Gentile Chrisitans, and it is only a bad thing if you are an Orthodox Christian who believes there was ever a pure Judaism and these two things were holy and right while everything else is pagan, mistaken, deficient and wrong.

The emergence of Christianity as mythic, mystery based and distinctly different from any Judaism we know today could have been quite natural and from the beginning. Mount Carmel, where Jesus was Transfigured and where he also reveals himself to the disciples as the Messiah before going south to Jerusalem, was also the shrine to the Great God Pan. Rather than imagining the disciples like rigid yeshiva boys or country Amish who knew nothing of Greek culture and completely despised it, what if they were rather sophisticated and naturally absorbed it? John’s Jesus speaks in almost Gnostic terms, and in his version of the triumphal entry, where Jesus gives the speech about how a grain must died to become wheat, we are told that Philip speaks Greek and brings Greek disciples to Jesus. What if this was at the heart of the irreconcilable difference between nascent Christianity and what would become rabbinic Judaism?