The Antithesis Of What Jesus Taught And Lived

With Christianity having gone so wrong in America that Evangelicals have elevated the devil’s own to messiah status, it’s fitting and proper this Christmas for thinking people to reflect on Jesus’ birth and death.

Christians believe that Jesus "died for our sins." To my mind, that is nonsense. Jesus died because of the sins of the people of his time, not for the sins of the people of all time. Even so, given the irrelevant accretions of centuries of Christian theology, many people have (pardon the pun) thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

They go so far as to maintain that there never was a historical Jesus. They hold that Christianity's bizarre core tenets of Jesus' virgin birth, resurrection from the dead, and physical ascension into heaven prove that the whole story was made up to lure simple, gullible minds into a male-dominated, hierarchical and increasingly wealthy and powerful Roman Catholic Church.

In the Middle Ages, contemplatives who dared to challenge the Church's doctrines about Jesus were often burned at the stake. But in this secular age, one only risks ridicule, or being ignored. Given the resurgence of a totally inverse Christianity, one that perversely embraces power and wealth rather than radically eschews it as Jesus did, secularists ignore this regurgence at their peril.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the American Declaration of Independence, is quoted in his posthumously published letters as saying: "In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills."

That may have been true for Jefferson, but most people either find the Bible an impenetrable thicket, or swallow the whole thing. For me, the issue is not so much the veracity of New Testament stories and sayings, but the question whether Jesus was really meant to die on the cross.

In the fourth century, the coalescing (or congealing) "Holy Roman Church" decreed that Jesus was God, not man. Prior to that, there was a huge debate, with different groups arguing both sides. From then on, it was heresy to say Jesus was a man. That was the second big mistake, after the guilt-driven and guilt-inducing idea that Jesus died for our sins.

I think most people who know the story of Jesus are stirred by it because, consciously or unconsciously, they feel that he was a real person. Some religious figures, such as Gautama Buddha, attain such lofty spiritual heights that they no longer seem human, even if they aren't deified. But despite all the crud of Christianity, Jesus retains his humanness.

So was Jesus' mission to be crucified for humanity's sins, sacrificing himself so that everyone from then on could be saved, or is that the biggest hoax in history?

Once the Roman Empire embraced the new religion of Christianity, Jesus teaching, which was deeply and essentially internal, was externalized. That enabled the emerging hierarchy from priests to popes to manipulate and dictate to the masses in a fusion of church and state, much as MAGA madmen are planning on doing today.

Scholars agree that Jesus did have a political strategy--to change the character of the Roman Empire by changing the character of people's hearts. That alone contradicts the mythology of his martyrdom. Jesus did not intend to die on the cross, but believed, until the night before his arrest, that his prophecy of renewal was being fulfilled.

Even as a boy I was struck by Jesus’ suffering in the garden of Gethsemane. I wondered, why did he sweat blood? Now I know that under extreme stress the capillaries in the forehead can break and mix with sweat, so it appears one is sweating blood. It’s called hematohidrosis.

The question is, if Jesus had known all along he was going to die on the cross, why did he suffer so the night before his arrest? After all, he displayed tremendous equanimity before Pilate, thereby proving that he had accepted his fate.

The answer is that something had gone terribly wrong in Jerusalem and Jesus knew it. Rather than the fulfillment of his prophecy, it was the destruction of it. His followers, from his disciples, down through history to the present, were unable to face the truth, and so inverted it, maintaining the absurd idea that he was meant all along to die for our sins on the cross. (Jesus actually taught that we each have to face and take total responsibility for our own sins.)

Jesus saw that things had gone terribly wrong, and there was nothing he could do. He accepted his fate, and did not turn against God or people. That testifies to his greatness. Afterward, his disciples and others inverted his crucifixion (literally, in the case of guilt-ridden Peter), and invented a meaning for it.

The failure of Jesus' mission was too much for his disciples to bear. Rather than face their own failings, mourn their loss, and question why things went wrong, they declared that he died for our sins, and started a religion that has ended in hate, power and greed -- the antithesis of what Jesus taught and lived.

Martin LeFevre

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