The Power of Popular Culture Part #4 Appendix The Lost Gospel
Jesus and "other sheep not of this fold" Many times in the past, to different people, I have brought up the name of Don West of Appalachian South Folklife Center in West Virginia. How fortunate to have known him while he still lived. He died in 1992. His view of Jesus was simply that -in Christian terminology- he put it all on the line at the cross. That is, Jesus was totally committed, there was no "maybe" about anything. But Don was never a "true believer" by anyone's usual way of thinking about faith. What he was all about was trying to live up to Christ's example, however imperfectly. About life after death -"reward"- Don was unconvinced. Yet what he was sure of was that integrity mattered; it counted for more than anything else. And what greater model of integrity than Jesus? Christ showed the way. That was good enough for Don and, given his influence on my life, that has been good enough for me from that time -ca. 1968- until today. Do I disagree with some particulars in the Gospels? Of course, if I am at all honest in my research there is no other choice. And if you are not honest about your faith, what good is that faith? What Don West understood was that faith, when all is said, is not about doctrines even though doctrines may be useful to us. For a Christian faith must be about Christ first, before anything else. Not because a believer can do what Jesus did, but he or she can at least try to do something of what he did. It is interesting that, according to the author of Matthew, Jesus quoted Malachi 3:1, a passage about a messenger who prepares the way for Christ but who is not a Christian himself. This, of course, refers to John the Baptist. It also fits in well with the pericope at the beginning of Matthew about the Magi -Zoroastrians- who acknowledged the infant Jesus as a future religious leader who would inspire multitudes. Presumably Jesus also knew Malachi 1: 11, which, for me, is the key that unlocks many secrets of the Bible. Here is that verse, the English translation making use of present tense "is" rather than future tense "will be;" the Hebrew original is in present tense: "From furthest East to furthest West my name is great among the nations. Everywhere fragrant sacrifice and pure gifts are offered in my name; for my name is great among the nations, says the LORD of Hosts." This is entirely consistent with another passage found in Matthew (as well as Luke), chapter 12, verses 41-42: "At the Judgement, when this generation is on trial, the men of Nineveh will appear against it and ensure its condemnation, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and what is here is greater than Jonah. The Queen of the South will appear at the Judgement when this generation is on trial, and ensure its condemnation, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and what is here is greater than Solomon." In other words, as important as Christ is for any believing Christian, what Jesus said about people of other faiths is also important. If this interpretation of Malachi is correct then the great religions in existence at the time Malachi wrote are all under divine purview. This means the wisdom of the East is very much part of the picture. Which also suggests that any faith that shares basic and life affirming values is a faith that a Christian can learn from and make one's own to whatever extent seems wise and good -just as Schweitzer took the time, because he had the interest, to study Hindu and Buddhist traditions and go as far as writing a scholarly book about these religions. He was as critical as he was toward the Bible but the larger point is that these faiths mattered to him. It should also be noted that chapter 11 of Matthew, which cites Malachi, is also the chapter in the Gospel that includes the pericope to the effect, "alas Bethsaida, alas Chorazin." Against the unfounded opinion that Jesus never condemned homosexuality, in this extended passage he clearly characterizes sodomy as the worst of sins which, in his time, had become even more loathsome than it was in the age of the patriarchs. Its all there in black and white if you read the Bible for its actual meaning. A similar outlook can be found in nearly all of the world's religions, those that share many other values as described by Malachi. As for Christian condemnation of homosexuality, which many mainline pastors would like to sweep under the rug, the first chapter of the Book of Romans should leave no room to doubt, at least if you read the text in a good reliable translation like the NEB. As the Apostle Paul put it, and there is much more: "In consequence I say God has given them up to shameful passions. Their women have exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and their men in turn, giving up natural relations with women, burn with lust for one another; males behave indecently with males, and are paid in their own persons the fitting wage of such perversion." "Thus, because they have not seen fit to acknowledge God, he has given them up to their own depraved reason. This leads them to break all rules of conduct. They are filled with every kind of injustice, mischief, rapacity, and malice; they are one mass of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and malevolence; whisperers and scandal-mongers, hateful to God, insolent, arrogant, and boastful; they invent new kinds of mischief, they show no loyalty to parents, no conscience, no fidelity to their plighted word; they are without natural affection and without pity. They know well enough the just decree of God, that those who behave like this deserve to die, and yet they do it; not only so, they actually applaud such practices." This material is found in the second half of chapter # 1 in Romans. Incidentally, that homosexuals deserve death for their conduct was no figure of speech. Reference was to Roman law in the Augustan age, when sodomy was classified as a capital offense and when homosexuals were, in fact, killed by the state. The myth that Romans throughout all their history were tolerant of sodomy is just that, a myth. In short there can be no dispute about Christian attitudes toward homosexuals and homosexuality, real Christianity, that is, To return to Malachi 1: 11 and related texts, the religions in question can be listed easily enough, Judaism and its cognate at a later time, Christianity, Hinduism (usually called Brahminism), Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism, and the related faiths of the ancient Mid East and Egypt, to mention just the most significant of that era. There is no place for Islam. The religions that are involved share many common values, believe in many of the same things, and view the divine realm as populated by a variety of spiritual beings, such as angels in Hebrew faith and Christianity, Amesha Spentas in Zoroastrianism, and more usual gods and goddesses in the other religions -deities that meet in council to confer with the Almighty, just as in Psalm 82 and many other passages in the Bible. See E, Theodore Mullen's 1980 volume, The divine council in Canaanite and early Hebrew literature. In so many words, what counts is not metaphysics, the number of gods or the presumed order of Heaven, but behavior, morality in a broad sense, and good will toward men and women. This includes what can be called a "family of faiths," who share values but not theologies, and it explicitly excludes Islam which, in any case, exists -by its own choice- in a state of war with all other religions. There are, as any student of Islam knows full well, just two realms in the world, Dar al-Islam, and Dar al-Harb, the realm of war. Not metaphorical war, actual war -by any and all means available. Speaking for myself, because of the kind of book that it is, there is no future for the Koran -and an almost limitless future for the Bible, if, that is, you try and understand what it says in its own terms and not what various doctrines insist it must say regardless of the words on its pages. Which doesn't say all doctrines are wrong but does say that all doctrines have limitations and some of these limitations may prevent you from reading the Bible truthfully. Remember also that many Christian denominations insist that the only acceptable way to interpret the Bible is in terms of self-reference. It is perfectly all right to read a passage in Isaiah or Ezekiel to better understand a passage in Matthew or Mark, but that is the only cross referencing allowable. In my view, while that approach has its value for some types of questions, in most cases it is far superior to consult contemporaneous literature written in the same era as the Bible, and to fit things together through study of an endlessly fascinating subject, the history of the people who invented both civilization and then the Bible and the other sacred books of the classical world. When you do this the Bible becomes a new book altogether. One book is absolutely indispensable for understanding the Bible, especially the Old Testament but also shedding light on the Christian scriptures, Raphael Patai's The Hebrew Goddess, originally published in 1967 but updated in 1990. In my humble opinion no-one can possibly understand the Bible, especially the Old Testament, who has not carefully examined this meticulously researched text. Essentially it changed my life. Things do not stop with the "mysterious East" or well known faiths of Western history. We also learn -if we actually think about the words in chapter 12 of Matthew- that Christ affirmed the great value of faiths that preceded his own, in cases by thousands of years. Who, after all, are the "men of Nineveh"? Not Jews, who are in a special and separate category, there isn't the least indication of any such thing, they were Assyrians who venerated a Goddess along with God as basic to their religious faith. Which is hardly insignificant inasmuch as the prototype for the Book of Job was a text called Ludlul bel Nemeqi, "I will praise the Lord of wisdom," which was a basic scripture in all of Mesopotamia in the ancient past. In Ludlul the supplicant prays to the Goddess Ishtar to allay his suffering. For an excellent discussion of similarities between ancient Assyrian religion and the Hebrew Bible as well as the New Testament, see Simo Parpola's 1997 opus, Assyrian Prophecies. The case can be made convincingly that Ishtar played a role in Assyrian religion much like that of the female Holy Spirit in the Bible. Indeed, others have seen this congruence, hence the custom among Assyrian Christians of naming their daughters "Ishtar." And who is the Queen of the South? After all, she will also be with Jesus at the Advent. Direct reference is to the Queen of Sheba; indirect reference is to the Egyptian Goddess, Isis, who, of course, served in the Christian era as the model for the madonna and child of Christian art and culture. Quite possibly, although the archaeological record for Sheba (today's Yemen) is terribly incomplete, it is possible that the queen of that country was regarded, as was true in Egypt, as an incarnation of Isis. As for the mysterious East, the Nestorians, when their missions first reached China in the T'ang Dynasty era, they became the best of friends with Buddhist monks who, in the course of events, helped their Christian friends learn Chinese and translate parts of the Bible into that language. The result has been rendered into English as the Jesus Messiah Sutra and is the most charming and heart warming version of the New Testament imaginable. Yes it is Christian, there is no doubt about it, but it also is Buddhist and Asian. It is a direction I should like to go in. This is not exactly the faith of a hard shell Baptist, but its my real faith, and it is as grounded in the Bible as it is possible to get. Its just that when I read the Bible I see things that are as plain as day yet which hardly anyone else takes the least notice of. They can't; they have been conditioned over a lifetime to read the Bible one way, the way it is taught in church and reaffirmed in the media which, when it does present Biblical text for special occasions like Christmas, also makes use of literal-minded reading that obscures as much as it reveals. The terminology that applies is "confirmation bias." People ordinarily read in ways they have been trained to read, that is, affirming cultural traditions they have grown up with or that large majorities in a culture agree must say some things and not others. However, the first rule of scholarly Bible scholarship is "allow the Bible to speak for itself" -do not interpret it doctrinally if you value objectivity. And what the Bible actually says, rather than what we expect it to say, can be worlds apart. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
