The Age of Jesus: The Rise of the Rebel God

Once upon a time, or so the story goes, there lived a man named Joshua, son of Joseph and Miriam, and brother to Jacob.  Of course, you know that all of these names, except for Joseph’s, got changed; but before we get into the story of Jesus, I want to take a minute to explain what was lost in the changing of the names.

In the Old Testament, the original Joshua, Yshua, was the fellow who took the Israelites into the Promised Land, after Moses was found unworthy to do so.  Think about that symbolism for a second.  Here, Moses led his people from bondage to freedom, and guided them through 40 years in the desert, providing them with food, water and shelter, until nearly all the people who had lived as slaves had died; and then, he was called onto the mountain and told that he would not see the Promised Land himself, but that the staff would be passed to Joshua, who would lead the people into the Promised Land and start their lives anew in living the life that God had directed them to live.  Doesn’t it sound like you’d want to keep the name Joshua around if you were starting a religion to replace the teachings of Moses?   But, before you answer that question, let me give you one more piece of information: the word Ysha means Salvation and Deliverance, and is used as a verb in quite a lot of prayers said by Jews even now.  NOW, wouldn’t you want to keep that name?  I would, if it were me creating a religion based on one man’s teachings.

But, wait, there’s more!  Miriam was Moses’ sister.  It was she who placed Moses into the bulrushes which saved his life and delivered him into Pharaoh’s house.  It was she who found the wet-nurse to give Moses his own real mother’s milk, and to drink in with it whatever teachings she could whisper into her baby’s ear.  It was Miriam with whom Moses found safety when he was cast out from Pharaoh’s house, and it was she who led him to the mountain where he met God.  Again, if you were starting a religion, mightn’t you want to keep that name?

Joseph, well, Joseph kept his name; but the original Joseph, way back in the Old Testament was the intrepreter of dreams, touched by God in such a way that he could accurately foretell the future, and kept the Egyptians and those serving them from dying in a 7 year famine; so revered was he that he was mummified and had a snazzy sarcophagus.  My favorite story of the original Joseph, was that he had the dream where he saw the angels ascending and descending the stairway to heaven; coming from the earth and going towards heaven.  I love that.

And Jacob, who became James, that’s the most interesting one of all, for the Jacob of the Old Testament was the younger twin of the first son of his Father.  He got his name because he followed his brother holding onto his foot.  I mean, there’s symbolism there, isn’t there?  That James would follow in his older brother’s footsteps?  I think so.

But the names were changed, probably because all of those names were just so common back in Jesus’ time, and Jesus was, by all accounts, a very very uncommon man.

Jesus was incredibly precocious, teaching the Rabbis in the Synagogues, railing against the rich and the powerful, specifically calling out the people who worshipped in the Synagogues and then denying their fellow humans as hypocrites.  He healed the sick, he stopped executions, he taught over and over and over again that the first duty of all people was to help those less fortunate than themselves: to cure the sick, to house the homeless, to visit the prisoners; and he taught that it was the people who forwarded the causes of peace and justice who were blessed in the eyes of God.  In short, Jesus’ law was that people should strive to make everyone’s life as rich as it could be without depending on money or power or position.  And the more he taught, and the more he gained followers, the more attention and ire he drew from  those with money and power and position, until, finally, he was tortured and killed.  When you boil down the red writing in the New Testament, that was pretty much it.

But the Religion that came after him was soon headed by those with money and power and position, and they sought to subvert his teachings.  As I mentioned before, that whole “don’t pray in public, but pray privately, in your closet, for those who pray in public already have their reward, but those who pray in private have the rewards of heaven” bit, you can’t build a religion around that with huge cathedrals and incense and rich gardens and vestments.  It is counter to the very teachings of the man whose name is the basis of the religion.

And yet, they did it.  The twelve apostles plus Mary Magdelene, they witnessed Jesus’ life first-hand, but only four of the books survived.  In early Christianity, there were more books, more teachings; but these teachings were the teachings of a man who said that we should eschew the worldly and reach for the ethereal, and, again, you can’t build a religion in which the hierarchy got incredibly wealthy by preaching that money will damn you.  So, what could be found and purged was found and purged; and, over the next several hundred years, until the rise of Charlemagne, the religion was honed in a thousand different ways.  Were the teachings of this saint or that to be taught?  How should the relationship between Mary Magdelene and Jesus be portrayed?   Should preference be given to those who knew Jesus personally or those who came after?  And, what if those teachings directly contradicted the teachings of Jesus himself?

Now, the question becomes, how do you deify a man who over and over again said that he was not God?  Who, moreover, said that all the things that he was doing would pale in comparison with what humans could do themselves?

This is the realm of apotheosis, the deification of the man, the point where theology meets metaphysics.  But, it’s bedtime, so, this will be the subject of the next diary.

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