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THE TRUE VALUE OF THE HISTORIC JESUS AND THE CROSS

Perhaps no personality in history figures more prominently in western civilization than that of Jesus of Nazareth. It is remarkable how a man who left no personal writings, was never a military or political leader, knew no wealth, held no temporal power, died a traitor's death, and had only the briefest of ministries in a backwater province of the Roman Empire should rise to a higher level of prominence than the greatest leaders in history. Even to this day, while historians may study figures like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napolean Bonaparte, it is the apparently "insignificant" itinerant preacher from Galilee that over a billion people on this planet still venerate, love, and worship as God.

For nearly two decades I never imagined anyone really seriously challenged the notion that there was such a man as Jesus of Nazareth, yet there are those who suggest there was no such figure at all. A few scholars have suggested that Jesus of Nazareth was a mythological godman figure akin to Dionysus, Osiris, Mithra or Bacchus of ancient Pagan mythology, but that never made sense to me. No religion is formed in a vacuum; there has to be someone—a real flesh-and-blood person—around whom to base a faith on. Islam had the Prophet Mohammed. The Jews had Moses. Hindus had Krishna and the Buddhists Buddha, and Christianity had Jesus. It seemed absurdly obvious. Whether this man actually did and said all the things attributed to him in the gospels might be debatable, but that he actually existed hardly seemed a worthy point of debate. Even many hard-core atheists, from what I can tell, seem willing to accept the historicity of the man. Many are even willing to admit he may well have taught parables and moral lessons as he was recorded to have done in the Gospels (though there was no room for miracles or a sense of the Divine in their world view). Atheists and Christians may battle over the reality of the resurrection and such things, but a serious debate as to whether such a man actually existed seemed an argument with nowhere to go.

Yet even in the heyday of my most fundamentalist, evangelical Christian phase, I had one problem with the idea of a historic Jesus. It's not that I doubted his existence; it was simply that I could never seem to perceive him as a real person. Others talked about him like he was their next door neighbor or closest friend. They described him in glowing terms as though he had just spent a weekend at their cabin and went into great detail about what he was like. My dear late grandmother even claimed to have seen him once in her yard, smiling at her from a bush. When I inquired how she knew it was Jesus—a man I assume she had never met—she told me she knew it was him because he looked like the "pictures" she'd seen of him. By this, I assumed she meant he appeared as the blue eyed, blond-haired Nordic youth of Victorian era European painting—prints of which my grandmother kept around the house.

In any case, it appeared that everyone knew Jesus pretty well, which caused me no lack of frustration. It seemed that no matter how hard I tried, I could never make Jesus "real" to me. He always remained a kind of theoretical figure or, at best, a conglomerate of loosely fitting images I had gleaned from movies and books, along with a few details I added from my own imagination. While I could get a mental image of Jesus when I closed my eyes—the Scandinavian Jesus I'm afraid— part of me always knew he was make believe—sort of like a child's image of Santa Claus. As such, I rarely prayed to Jesus, though I frequently invoked his name like some magic incantation when addressing God (whom, curiously, I had less trouble getting a "feel" for.) It was almost as if Jesus' historicity served as an impediment to me getting to "know" him.

Eventually I realized what the problem was. If Jesus was a historical figure, then, like any historical figure, there had to have been a certain "way" he was. He would have possessed certain mannerisms, had a specific vocabulary, and probably spoke with a dialect and accent. He also displayed a particular personality which, ironically, never came across to me in the Gospels. I knew he seemed to have a certain affection for children—but then so did Hitler (at least the Aryan kind)—and that he had a temper. He was clever and wise one moment and incomprehensible, vague, and obtuse the next. He was cunning and bold, yet at times diminutive and quiet. In effect, he was so many different ways that it was hard seeing him in any particular way at all.

In this he was like any other historical figure. No matter how much one studies a person's history and personal life they can never really know the man as he actually was. Even the most exhaustive and careful research will reveal only, at best, an approximation of what the person was like, and even then that will be highly subjective. To see what I mean, compare all the actors who have ever portrayed Abraham Lincoln on the silver screen and see if any two of them agree in their portrayal. I've enjoyed certain portrayals more than others and considered some more apparently authentic than others, but none of them seemed to bring the man to life. There is too much of the actor's own personality in their portrayal to convince me that I'm really looking at a legitimate facsimile of the real Abraham Lincoln. They are all just illusions; make-believe Lincolns that survive while the real man we call the 16th president of the United States lies dead and buried in a Springfield, Illinois cemetary.

This is true of Jesus of Nazareth as well. How could we really know a man who lived and died two thousand years ago? With Lincoln we at least have photographs to see what he looked like and his personal correspondence to get some idea of how his mind worked, but with Jesus we haven't even that; just some quotes and teachings—assumedly genuine—and a very brief synopsis of a short public ministry. There is nothing about what made the man "tick;" no colorful anecdotes that might give us a clue about Jesus the person. Did he have a sense of humor or was he a rigidly serious man? Did he like to tell stories? Was he a good cook? Did he enjoy athletic events? Was he strong and callused, or slender and waif-like as portrayed in many paintings? Finally I decided it was pointless to try to have a relationship with a man one can't even begin to "know" in any real sense of the word. Jesus would always remain hypothetical to me; a historical figure who said wonderful—and sometimes strange—things and performed incredible miracles a very long time ago. Fortunately, that was enough at the time. It was all the Jesus I needed.

Eventually I became conscious of how others interpreted this man from Galilee, however, and it quickly became apparent to me that Jesus meant different things to different people. There was the conservative Republican Jesus and the liberal Democratic Jesus; the environmentally conscious Jesus and the social activist Jesus, the proto-feminist Jesus and the gay rights Jesus, the judgmental Jesus of outer darkness fame and the compassionate, good shepherd Jesus. Apparently, Jesus is able to reflect whatever it is we need in a Savior at any given moment. To those who need forgiveness, he is the Savior of reconciliation who intercedes with the Father on our behalf. To those who are starved for companionship, he is the Jesus who walks with them and helps them pick out their daily wardrobe. To the sickly, he is the great physician. To the self-righteous, he was the one who separated the sheep from the goats, casting the latter into outer darkness and blessing the former. Like I said, Jesus was a man of a thousand faces, each of which could be made to fit any temperment, need, or desire. It was quite a revelation.

What all this did was help me eventually come to see that Jesus needn't be a real person at all. He works just as well—and, in some ways, even better—as a myth who simply serves to reflect our preconceived ideas and biases about him. I was seeing before my eyes all sorts of make-believe Jesuses at work and Christianity appeared all the stronger for it. What, then, did Christianity even need with a historical Jesus? It seemed quite capable of getting along fine without him.

I don't know if there was a real, literal person named Jesus of Nazareth. It may be that beneath all the layers of mythology and legend building there is a real man buried there, but I am convinced now it hardly matters. It is not the historical Jesus that we need. That Jesus, if he existed at all, was but a flesh and blood man like ourselves, prone to the vagaries and cruelties of life, with little to offer us today. It is instead the mythological Jesus that gives us the strength to carry on. That is the Jesus that supposedly intercedes on our behalf to an angry God. That is the Jesus that saves, heals, prophesies, enrages, teaches, bewilders, and understands and cares about our most intimate pains and sorrows. The historical Jesus has nothing to offer us; it is the mythological Jesus that gives us what we need. In a curious twist of irony, it is the mythological Jesus that is real and the literal one that is the illusion.

That is the Jesus that spirituality pursues. Like the Buddha and Krishna and a whole host of real or imagined figures in history, they all give life for they are a part of ourselves. We create them from our own needs—not as illusions or unreal things—but as mythological allegories who serve a very real purpose; a purpose far beyond that that would be possible were these men reduced to mere historical figures. So, yes, we can say there is a real Jesus because he lives within our mythologies. Whether he also lives in our history is of only secondary importance, and then only as far as he points us back to the mythological character the literal man gave birth to. That is where we will find the literal Jesus—living in our literal hearts, for that's were we find ourselves.

But if Jesus is not a literal person, it might be asked, what of our faith? More importantly, what does the cross mean, if there was no flesh and blood man to die upon it? It seems a horrible, sick joke if it did not happen in reality; a terrible lie that billions of people around the world accept as truth. Yet is a literal cross really necessary to achieve its purpose of reconciling a "fallen" humanity with its Creator? I submit that just as the mythological Jesus serves a purpose in drawing us nearer the divine, so too does a mythological cross. So too does the image of a suffering and dying servant on the cross. After all, the passion play, with all its drama and pomp, makes a powerful statement that can bring grown men to tears and turn the most hardened hearts to God. Surely it must have some value. To jettison it is to eviscerate the very heart of Christianity and, I believe, eliminate something important that speaks to the deepest part of the human soul.

However, I wonder if we truly understand what it means? Whether one believes in a literal Jesus or not, I submit that his death on the cross—be it metaphorical or historical—still serves an important function, though not one traditionally taught by orthodox Christianity. It wasn't to pay for the sins of mankind or to appease the anger of a holy and righteous God as though the Father was a type of Olympian deity demanding His ounce of flesh. The death of even the most perfect man that ever lived could not undo the cumulative selfishness and wickedness of humanity. It could not erase the wrongs that have been done, nor could it restore that which has been thoughtlessly destroyed. It has no ability to resurrect the countless millions of slaughtered innocents throughout history, so as a mechanism of setting things right, it has no apparent intrinsic value in itself. Clearly, the atonement is an anachronism from the age of tribal religion, when appeasing the Gods was necessary to guarantee their cooperation in the harvest or bring rains to the fields. We live in a more sophisticated age now, one would like to believe, in which such concepts are seen as evidence of a primitive, fear-based mindset.

So what am I suggesting here? That we should abandon the symbol of the cross if we are to truly perceive the God of unconditional love that is at the heart of spirituality? Not at all. It is not my intention here to dash the symbols of Christianity upon the rocks of modernism, for the symbol of the atonement is an important one for over a billion people on this planet. The cross is a potent symbol that must be accepted as a valid expression of the divine in all men. We would make a mistake to simply abandon it for in so doing we would miss out on the deeper spiritual meaning for which it serves as a symbol. In fact, its meaning and value as a metaphor transcends even its historicity, making it more than a mere event in human history. It serves best not as a means of undoing the mistakes and brutality of humanity, but as a mechanism for healing humanity, and in this it must be honored and adored.

Consider what the greatest impediment to spiritual growth is. The usual answer is sinfulness, perhaps followed by apathy, but I don't believe either is correct. Even a sinner may confess his or her sins and continue upon their journey. The apathetic have little interest in spirituality in any case, and so nothing is likely to nudge them along the path of spiritual awareness. Instead, I submit it is the sense of guilt and recrimination many of us constantly carry around that really retards spiritual growth. It is the overwhelming sense of "unworthiness" when it comes to God that prevents us from having a close, personal relationship with the Divine and so retards spiritual growth in the process.

We know what we have done to one another: the bitterness, the pettiness, the rudeness, cruelty and spitefulness. Yet we cannot find a way to "repair" the damage. So much of what we have done wrong in our lives is not "fixable." It may have happened years ago, or to people who are no longer even alive and, as such, there is no way to set things right even if we wanted to. And often, even if we do have the opportunity to undo a past wrong, those we have victimized may not grant us the forgiveness we so crave; the scars may be too deep to be healed so easily if, indeed, they can be healed at all. And so we carry a load of guilt over things that cannot be undone and words that cannot be unsaid, often for years. We yearn for an absolution humanity cannot or will not grant us, and so we attempt to perform our own personal penance as a means of obtaining some peace. This may help for a time, but eventually the old feeling of unworthiness returns and we are left once more feeling hollow and unforgiven. Trapped in a world of our own creation, we recriminate against ourselves, deciding we are wicked sinners incapable of good and, as such, a hideous disappointment to the very Creator who wrought us from the dust of the Earth. Some of us even become depressed and, in extreme cases, convince ourselves we are not worthy of being loved at all. No matter how hard we try, we just aren't capable of being what we believe we must be to find acceptance in God's eyes. Yes, He may love us—at least in theory—but we know He's actually disappointed with us. We know that He must be, for we are in ourselves.

That's where the value of the cross lies. If we imagine that Jesus, in "taking our sins upon himself," permits us to believe we are forgiven, we free ourselves from the self-imposed bondage of guilt and self-condemnation that drives a wedge between Him and us. In doing so, we finally have a "remedy" to take the guilt away. We may not be able to forgive ourselves for what we have done, but if we convince ourselves God forgives us through the atonement, we can begin to do just that. It's an old teaching within the church that once a person confesses their sins and asks for forgiveness, it's important they move on and no longer dwell on those confessed wrongs (hence the references in the Bible to "forgetting" our sins or "casting them away.") This is precisely what the atonement is supposed to do: get you to put your sordid past behind you so you can move on. Since people can't accept the idea that God doesn't judge and that He isn't angry, they must have some "mechanism" outside themselves to achieve this same effect, and a perfect, righteous sacrifice does exactly that. The "cure" then, is purely on an emotional level and, since the emotions effect our spiritual well being, it impacts us to the very core of who we are. It is the only means by which we might healed emotionally so we can move on.

In the same way, the resurrection serves much the same purpose. Just as the cross stands as a symbol of God's forgiveness, the resurrection demonstrates that forgiveness. It is symbol that all is well and will be forever. It is the metaphor for hope that we all need to continue on the journey; God's seal that everything is going to be okay.

That is the value of myth. It works in whichever context it is needed for it is God's divine mechanism by which He reveals the deeper truths about Himself. It is a tool that is far more persuasive and effective than any other. It provides us with a means of reconciliation with God, not just through the context of Christianity, but through many traditions and faiths. It permeates human thought throughout all cultures and societies, manifesting itself in different ways as it sees fit, but always managing to achieve its purpose of making itself known.

The cross still stands. Not as a symbol of God's forgiveness of a fallen humanity, but as a symbol of fallen humanities' forgiveness of itself. It is the only way to God as long as one believes it is, and once that need is met or no longer required, it still stands as a symbol of love. It could not be otherwise for it is a symbol of God, and God is love; love made manifest through the symbols of our culture by a God that understands our need for such euphemisms. That is the nature of love. That is the nature of God.

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