Jesus Against Christianity: Reclaiming the Missing Jesus

385 Pages·2001·20.51 MB·English

by  Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer

JESUS AGAINST CHRISTIANITY
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J E S US
A G A I N ST
C H R I S T I A N I TY
R E C L A I M I NG
T HE M I S S I NG J E S US
Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer
TRINITY PRESS INTERNATIONAL
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Copyright © 2001 Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
written permission of the publisher, Trinity Press International.
Trinity Press International, P.O. Box 1321, Harrisburg, PA 17105
Trinity Press International is a Continuum imprint.
Cover art: Head of Christ, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. © 2001 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Erich Lessing/Art
Resource, NY.
Cover design: Trude Brummer
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jack.
Jesus against Christianity : reclaiming the missing Jesus /
Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56338-362-4 (alk. paper)
I.Jesus Christ—Historicity. 2. Christianity—Essence, genius, nature.
I. Title.
BT303.2 .N45 2001
232—dc21 2001027329
Printed in the United States of America
06 07 08 09 10 9 8 7 6
CONTENTS
Introduction vii
1. God, Judaism, and Justice 1
2. Diverse and Contradictory Images of God 11
3. Can This Really Be God? Part 1: Land Thievery, Genocide,
and Other Tales 24
4. Can This Really Be God? Part 2: The Exodus Is Not a Story
of Liberation 38
5. Can This Really Be God? Part 3: Troubling Images of God
from the New Testament 54
6. The Many Gods of Monotheism: Why the Bible Is Often
Wrong about God 63
7. Messy Monotheism: False Portraits of God and Scripture 76
8. From Liberation to Exile 90
9. Undermining the Sanity of God 99
10. Powerful Problems 114
11. Jesus: Jewish and Human 137
12. The Success of Failure 143
13. Murder and Method 150
14. Jewish Expectations, Opportunists, and Roman Power 166
15. My Three Sons, Pilate, and Messianic Pretenders 181
16. Religious Complicity 193
17. Subversive Healing, Competing Torahs, and the Power
to Exclude 203
18. Jesus, Violence, God, and History 215
19. The Many Faces of Violence 231
20. Violence, Toll Collectors, and Tenants 245
21. No Messiah—Apocalypse Never 260
22. Images of Abundance and Love of Enemies 276
23. Reassessing God's Power 291
24. Abundant Life, Invitational Judgment, and God's
Nonviolent Power 309
25. Taking Jesus Seriously 329
Index 355
INTRODUCTION
I have always loved mysteries. In a mystery novel, we meet fascinating
characters along the way, move through complicated plotlines, and laugh
and cry as events unfold on page after page that make it difficult or
impossible to set a book down. Clues nestled within texts are sometimes
missed and sometimes seen, sometimes crucial and other times irrele-
vant. The end leaves us exhilarated or exhausted, boasting or baffled, glad
to be done or lamenting the final page. Jesus against Christianity:
Reclaiming the Missingjesus attempts to solve the mystery of Jesus' disap-
pearance from Christianity. It is a story with obvious clues, hidden clues,
and surprise endings. I read most mysteries to escape temporarily from
life, but I want to solve the case of Jesus' disappearance in order to make
sense out of my life as a person of faith. The goal is not to flee from the
world but to find meaning and direction with Jesus as my guide.
Our world is falling apart under the collective weight of gross inequal-
ities, massive injustice, violence, faulty definitions of life's meaning, and
distorted faith. Jesus' disappearance from and clash with Christianity is
both a mystery and a problem. The mystery concerns how and why Jesus
vii
viii JESUS AGAINST CHRISTIANITY
disappeared. The problem is that Christianity is often so at odds with
Jesus that it has little to offer in the way of solutions to these problems;
it even aggravates many of them. Jesus can help us make sense of God,
life, and our role as faithful Christians in a turbulent world if we let him
into our lives and our churches.
Jesus is missing and we miss his guidance. He is missing because
Christian theologies, creeds, and actions are disconnected from his life as
a revelation of God. The Christ of faith is the object of worship and the
subject of our creeds and New Testament Gospels. This Christ, however,
is often at odds with the historical Jesus and the God revealed through his
life. Jesus, who was experienced by some as good news and revelation of
God and by others as a subversive threat worthy of scorn and death, has
all but disappeared from Christianity. It should not surprise us that Jesus
was killed by his enemies. More surprising and at the heart of this book
is how Jesus has been distorted by his admirers, from New Testament
times to our own.
No mystery novelist's plotline can top the bizarre disappearance of Jesus
on his way to becoming the object of Christian devotion. Jesus of Nazareth
would wonder why Christians sing carols of his birth in Bethlehem. He
might be amazed to see his family tree rewritten to include David in his
ancestral line. Would Jesus and his biological brothers and sisters be
amused or disgusted by claims that he was born of a virgin based on
competition with Rome and a misreading of an obscure verse from an
oracle written more than seven hundred years prior to his birth?
How would Jesus make sense out of Christian creeds that ignore his
life and confess an ahistorical birth? Like a peanut butter sandwich with-
out peanut butter, the Christian creeds are destined to disappoint. They
jump from "born of" to "suffered under/' leaving out the most important
ingredient. The Christ of faith enshrined in the creeds has literally dis-
placed and rendered the life of Jesus meaningless. In this context, the dis-
appearance of Jesus from the creeds, from our churches, and from our
lives is a logical, even irresistible progression. If Jesus' life is not important
enough to make it into the creeds, then why should it be allowed to shape
the content of our faith that, according to creedal logic, is based solely on
the experience of the risen Christ?
How would Jesus respond to the Gospel writers deflecting blame for his
execution away from Rome and onto the Jews, or later Christians making
his executioner, Pontius Pilate, a saint? Would Jesus, who warned about
the dangers of wealth, be more scandalized by Christians celebrating his
Introduction ix
birth with an orgy of consumerism or the date of the celebration itself,
which marked the birthday of Mithras, the Roman god and guardian of
imperial troops? Jesus preached and lived creative nonviolence. He was
executed by the Roman empire. He would be amazed to share his birth-
day with Mithras, whom he displaced by imperial decree after Emperor
Constantine had a dream in which the cross became a sword.
Distorting or ignoring the historical Jesus results in numerous expres-
sions of deformed Christianity. The Jesus of history would be dismayed to
hear his name invoked by white militia movements, moral crusaders, anti-
gay activists, and right-wing politicians. He would be equally troubled by
the accommodating theologies of many wealthy churches where Christ
displaces Jesus and the Spirit that guided his life, where church growth
eclipses discipleship, and where affluence cripples spirituality and reinforces
a deepening social divide. Jesus would wonder why nonviolent activists
root his and their own nonviolence in images and expectations of a violent
God. Why, he might ask, do people buy WWJD bracelets, WWJD mugs,
WWJD shoelaces, WWJD pens, WWJD calendars, WWJD lapel pins,
WWJD rings, WWJD T-shirts, WWJD hats, WWJD playing cards, WWJD
stuffed animals, and WWJD tote bags without paying attention to my life?
Why invoke my name when you have so little interest in the social setting
in which I lived, who killed me and why, my confrontation with the pow-
erful forces of oppression, the alternatives I proclaimed and embodied, and
the images of God that shaped my life and faith?
Like good detectives we will need to investigate these questions. They
point to important historical markers that offer insight into Jesus' faith,
his life choices, his opposition to the Rome- and Temple-dominated
order, the motives of his murderers, his vision of God's alternative order,
and his experience of God. They also contain helpful clues about why
Jesus is missing from Christianity They can help make sense of the con-
tradiction between the obscurity of Jesus on the one hand and the popu-
larity of WWJD bracelets and frequent appeals to his name on the other.
It is very difficult to get an accurate picture of the historical Jesus. Luke
Timothy Johnson is widely praised for his criticism of historical Jesus
scholarship and his claim that looking to the historical Jesus for guidance
in matters of faith is misguided, impossible, or dangerous.1 The fact that
many individuals and groups shape Jesus, Christ, and God in their own
image, however, underscores the need to take the historical Jesus seri-
ously. The alternative to a serious probe is to let Jesus or Christ or God
be anything to anyone at any time. Thomas Merton asks: