Opinion: On Easter, Jesus' Evolution Tells of Changing America
Stephen Prothero ("National Geographic," April 19, 2014)
Every year, in the Christian calendar, Jesus is born (on Christmas), dies
(on Good Friday), and rises from the dead (on Easter). But the popular
persona of Jesus has also been born and born again over the course of American
history.
His latest incarnation is Jesus the Husband, attested to on a papyrus
fragment unearthed in 2012 by Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King. The
papyrus—whose writer is unknown—seems to suggest that Jesus was married,
or that some early Christians thought he was. One section of it reads,
"Jesus said to them, 'My wife...'" Another section reads, "she will be able to
be my disciple." (See "No Forgery Evidence Seen in 'Gospel of Jesus's Wife'
Papyrus.")
According to the most recent issue of the Harvard Theological Review,
professors at Columbia, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
believe this so-called Gospel of Jesus's Wife fragment dates back to ancient
times. But the Vatican declared it a fake in 2012, and in a dissent also
published in the Harvard Theological Review, Brown University Egyptologist
Leo Depuydt declared himself "100% certain that the Wife of Jesus Fragment
is a forgery."
As a historian of American religion, I do not specialize in the historical
Jesus. So I will not wade into the murky waters swirling around this
"probably genuine" or "certainly fake" document.
I am more interested in placing this debate within the broader American
story of Jesus' many and malleable afterlives. In just the past few weeks,
this American Jesus has not only escorted "Mrs. Jesus" to Harvard Divinity
School. He also has appeared as a hunk in The Son of God movie, and ridden on
a rainbow-colored horse in Heaven Is for Real, a movie about the near-death
experience of a pious four-year-old boy.
Variations From Gospel to Gospel
According to the Nicene Creed of the Christian churches, Jesus is supposed
to be the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. However, biblical scholars
have long observed that depictions of Jesus vary from Gospel to Gospel.
In the Book of Luke, for example, Jesus is friendly to women and the poor,
while in the Book of John, Jesus seems less concerned about social and
economic realities than about conveying eternal wisdom. In Mark, Jesus gets
four different answers when he asks, "Who do you say that I am?"
In the American imagination, Jesus has been even more chameleonic. Here he
has been black and white, male and female, straight and gay. He has been a
socialist and a CEO, a pacifist and a warrior, a civil rights agitator and
a Ku Klux Klansman, depending on who claims to define him.
During the heyday of the sentimental novel in Victorian America, Jesus got
in touch with his feminine side, playing the role of the sentimental
Savior.
Toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, as Teddy Roosevelt
and his Rough Riders charged up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War and
Frederic Remington crafted popular woodcuts of football players, cowboys,
and Indians, Jesus flexed his muscles and carried a big stick. Instead of
being depicted alongside women and children, he was shown swinging a hammer
in his carpenter's shop or driving the moneychangers from the Temple in
Jerusalem.
>From Salesman to Hippie
During the go-go economy of the 1920s, ad-man Bruce Barton presented Jesus
as the greatest salesman the world has ever known, in his book The Man
Nobody Knows. ("Knowest ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"
read
this best seller's epigraph.)
In the early 1940s, artist Warner Sallman created "Head of Christ," an
impossibly lit and curiously androgynous Jesus that would go on to become one
of the most widely distributed images in world history, reproduced
(according to its publishers) more than 500 million times.
The counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s gave birth to a hippie Jesus,
audible in the Christian rock of the "Jesus people" and visible on Broadway in
Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell. In the aftermath of 9/11, Jesus was
terrorized in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, where his scourging
(which takes up just a few words in the Gospels) never seems to end in what
is certainly the most gruesome Bible movie ever made.
But a funny thing happened as Jesus was transformed from an abstract
theological principle into an American celebrity: The Christians who praised
and
preached him lost control of their central symbol. Over the course of U.S.
history, Jesus has been lauded not only by Christians but also by Jews and
Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists.
Yet Thomas Jefferson, who managed to find time during his sojourn in the
White House to produce two versions of the cut-and-paste scripture now
referred to as the Jefferson Bible, was no friend of organized Christianity.
In fact, during the election of 1800 (one of the most bitter campaigns in
U.S. political history), Jefferson was widely denounced as an infidel (and,
by some, as a secret Muslim). But he praised Jesus as a great moral teacher–
an "enlightened sage"–and cited him in his crusade against theological
orthodoxy. There is a difference between Jesus and organized Christianity, he
argued, before quoting the former to denounce the latter.
Claimed by Many Faiths, Factions
Since Jefferson's time, a holy host of Americans have made a similar move,
arguing that the last place Jesus would be seen today would be in an
American Christian church.
In the 19th century, rabbis argued that Jesus was a Jew whose spirituality
was hijacked by the Christian church. In the 20th century, Hindus and
Buddhists made similar arguments, casting Jesus as an avatar of the Hindu god
Vishnu or as a bodhisattva of compassion.
All this is to say that Jesus isn't just for Christians anymore. His
success in America's spiritual marketplace has transformed him into an
American
icon who refuses to be contained inside any Christian denomination, or even
inside the confines of Christianity itself.
Jesus appears regularly on magazine covers. His life is the subject of
Hollywood movies, television miniseries, and more books in the Library of
Congress than have been written about any other person. His image appears not
only on stained-glass windows in churches but also on billboards, T-shirts,
and tattooed bodies. Jesus may or may not be God, but he is certainly an
American hero.
Unfortunately, on his road to fame and fortune, Jesus seems to have lost
most of his prophetic power. Yes, Jesus was employed by abolitionists to put
an end to slavery and by civil rights activists to put an end to
segregation. But over the long haul of U.S. history, Jesus has rarely ordered
us
around. Rather than being a shaper of American history, Jesus seems to have
been shaped by it, buffeted about by the preoccupations of the Puritans, the
winds of the Enlightenment, the acids of modernity, and the not-so-biblical
logic of advertising.
Nowadays marriage is the great sacrament of the Christian church, and the
family the preoccupation of our cultural politics. In an era when the ranks
of the religiously unaffiliated are rising and attendance at Holy Communion
is stagnant at best, marriage remains a prize defended by traditionalists
and demanded by same-sex couples who want to have families of their own. So
it should not be surprising that Jesus now walks among us with a wife.
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