Dear Deus lo Volt,
‘I just don’t know where to start.’
That’s from a sometime ago email from you & I’m connecting it to an earlier you wanting to get into Jewish Christianity. I know where you were coming from. You thought – & I’m certain still think — that arriving at a true knowledge of the historical Jesus would strengthen your faith as, presumably, a Christian believer.
It didn’t turn out that way in the greatest version of the quest — Albert Schweitzer’s. That quest, ended with the historical picture of Jesus as a failed Messiah — a conclusion as painful to Schweitzer himself as it was to the rest of the Protestant community that had fervently laid its hope on Schweitzer’s undertaking.
Jewish Christianity, also called Primitive Christianity, was led by Peter and James the brother of Jesus. That Christianity perished when Titus all but annihilated Jerusalem in 1970, driving the people of Israel out of the Holy Land into diaspora and exile. Jewish Christianity disappeared in history — though there surfaced in time the phenomenon of Ebionite and/or Nazorite Christianity. It appears that Jewish Christians had fled from the Holy Land much earlier to survive in history — to be, in a latter historical stage, pronounced heretical by the Church!
If this is true (I think it is obvious), then how explain the hiatus or historical discontinuity between Christianity as it has survived to our day and the Jewish Christianity that presumably disappeared in 70 AD?
Paul is the answer. Paul, the former tormentor of the Christians who had been converted on the road to Damascus. Whose Christianity not only survived but prevailed (he was, apart from being mystical, a theological giant). After meeting and compromise with the Jerusalem group (the first council) – the self-same Jewish Christian group led by James and Peter — erstwhile Saul preached in the Gentile world, using the roads built by Rome.
Paul never knew the historical Jesus. Instead he preached a glorified Christ whom he said he encountered in his vision on the road to Damascus. Pauline Christianity is the orthodox Christianity that has spanned centuries (twenty to this day) and has several factions. No matter the factional situation: all believe that Jesus was — is — God.
That certainly is not Jewish.
God (the Holy Spirit) does talk to prophets, visionaries, & mystics. He did so in Sinai, to Moses as a burning bush. To Muhammad as well. To Arjuna. To Zarathustra. To Jesus. We cannot experience what these people did. But we can listen to the voice in the Torah, translated as Law or Commandments. We can read Holy Writ or listen to Tradition. Martin Buber says the meaning of the word is really closer to “instruction.” For the believer the marvel, lost upon us, is that the hidden, the unknowable, one can even say if one is a natural atheist — the whole universe — talked to us!
The psychologist Jung recognized the psychological depth of Paul , and it would naturally follow of Pauline Christianity w/ its stress on man’s sinful nature. In its full development it views man as hopelessly fallen. Sin. Guilt. The blood of Christ, the Pauline says, redeemed us from sin. Amateur theologian me says (in a most diffident voice): Did it have to be violent? Isn’t Jesus so full of love apparently from all the accounts (except for the temple scene and the fig tree story) enough?
The oldest Christian tradition, before the Councils, was that Jesus was divine. Elevation of his stature as God was the work of the Councils, particularly the Council of Chalcedon (true man and true God). The believers were not even happy w/ the latter’s formulation. The idea of God incarnate, Incarnation, seems to be Johanine Christianity’s (And the Word was made flesh). The opposing view — docetic or gnostic — is that the believer sees the angel Christ (‘Christo Angelo’) in the man Jesus.
That, again, doesn’t sound Jewish.
The Christian prayer goes: ‘Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’
The Jewish Shema goes: ‘Hear O Israel — the Lord thine God is one God!’
Sounds conflicting.
I say both prayers.
Sound conflicted.
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Author’s email: [email protected]
