Note It is Sunday, boys and girls, and you know what that means. S
Was Jesus (the Christ) a real person? This debate still rages on. And there are reputable scholars at both extremes and I recently had an interesting thought on the matter.
It seems to me that Jesus and John the Baptizer were related, working together, and were fomenting a rebellion. The idea was that a new kingdom, the Kingdom of God, was to rise up and throw out the Romans and other oppressors, so that a theocratic state of Israel, with Yahweh at the top of the org chart, would reign.
It seems that Jesus believed that Yahweh would show up and support the ejection of the Romans with magic or god-ju ju, however Yahweh acted supernaturally. So, when Jesus is arrested, he is expecting to be rescued.
In the earliest depiction of the arrest and conviction and execution of Jesus (in gMark), Jesus is shown in the Garden to be doubtful as to whether his plan was going to work. He asks Yahweh to remove the burden of leading the rebellion from him. When arrested, he is meek and mild and cooperative, just as you would expect. We’ve all seen westerns, gangster flicks, and other movies where a scion of an important family is arrested and he assumes either the family will break them out of jail or the family’s lawyers will free them. They are calm, cool, collected and not at all worried that things will turn out any other way way. “Just wait until my Pa shows up, is all I gotta say.”
In Jesus’s case, he is calm and cool, but not so collected and seems to be worried.
When nailed up and clearly dying, Jesus cries out asking why Yahweh has abandoned him. Because Yahweh’s appearance is clearly not going to come soon enough to save him.
This is the clear story in gMark . . . but not the other “gospels.”
The others proceed to make Jesus seem more godly, more in control, and less in doubt. Clearly the “follow-up” gospels were written because of perceived flaws in gMark (or all of the previous gospels). Since the dying Jesus in gMark shows a faltering of faith, I am sure that many questions were asked about just that appearance. So, gMatthew and gLuke made Jesus seem more immune to doubt, more sure of the outcome, and added a description of Jesus’s resurrection along with a divine birth story, which gMark did not. The resurrection was a strong indicator of why Jesus had faith, in that he knew that dying was temporary and he could handle the discomfort because he was coming back.
The Gospel of John, gJohn, goes over the top with Jesus announcing at every opportunity that those around him were in the presence of Yahweh and that the only way to a great afterlife was through him. This is Super Jesus who is kicking ass and taking names, but the result for the Romans was the same in all four, no?
So, my point is that gMark’s account appears to be the more truthful, because it included things the others felt were important to gloss over. I do not think that these accounts are histories, they don’t look like histories, sound like histories, or test out as histories (and if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck . . . ) I have no way of proving that they are fictitious either, but many of the signs point that way. And, only gMark lines up best with what Jesus stated his mission to be.
Jesus was a revolutionary, an insurrectionist, one who activist Jews mostly wanted to show up, except that his plan was based upon a general uprising kicked off by a personal appearance by Yahweh and that plan didn’t work. There was no Yahweh appearance and no general uprising. Jesus was just wrong about all of the main parts of his plan. He also certainly was not at all “all knowing” as his partner John was supposed to be his co-ruler (as the priestly messiah) and he didn’t foresee John losing his head or himself getting nailed up.
So, if he were a real person, his plans didn’t play out and he died as a result, as a failed insurrectionist. If he were fictitious, what motivated the author of gMark to write that ending up that way? Now that is a big puzzlement. Maybe as a warning to other wannabe messiahs who don’t gather up enough support.