Blacksoil

The God of Liberation: Setting Captives Free (Jeremiah 34:8-20) - Sermon by Jeremy Dowsett, recorded on 8.04.07 at Barefoot Christian Church.

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Jesus Is Not Nice (Mark 7:24-30). Jeremy Dowsett.
Recorded on August 23, 2008 at the Blacksoil Worship Gathering.

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He Is the Image of the Invisible God (Colossians 1:9-20) - Jeremy Dowsett and Noah Filipiak. Sermon recorded on February 2, 2008 at Barefoot Christian Church

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An old college friend of mine recently found me on facebook and asked if I could direct her to some books about Jesus from a secular perspective, Jesus as a political figure. My response was as follows:

So nice to hear from you. Of course I’m not offended that you want to start with the secular. But I have to let you know that personally I think the attempt to divide the “Christ of faith” from the “Jesus of history” are nonsensical. The bottom line is that the best historical documents about Jesus of Nazareth are the gospels. There’s not much else out there about him other than a handful on non-canonical “gospels,” (which scholarly consensus date much later than the biblical gospels and letters), and the writings of the Jewish Roman historian Josephus (c. 70CE), who has more to say about the budding new Christian movement than Jesus himself.

So if you want to know about the historical Jesus, your best sources are actually the gospels. Now, obviously, these written not as straight history, but with a view to inciting faith in this Jesus cat, as both Luke and John state explicitly. So you have to decide for yourself going in what you are going to buy into and what you are going to discount. The problem of course, is that if you decide that you are going to discount anything that doesn’t fit with your view of who Jesus could have been, then you will only come out the other side with the same view of Jesus that you went in with. Most “secular” scholars are pretty guilty of this; their methodology predetermines the Jesus that they find in the gospels. The Marxists find a class revolutionary, the nihilist find a Cynic philosopher, the liberals find a Jesus who just wants us to be nice and get along, etc.

The other thing that makes this Jesus/Christ split seem untenable to me is that if you take even half of the stuff in the gospels as accurate, then Jesus clearly believed in something called the “kingdom of God” and he clearly believed that what he was doing was bringing that kingdom. He saw himself–the events of his teaching, healings, justice-bringing, community-building, his wrongful arrest, torture, and execution (and resurrection, but obviously you’re not willing to go there)–as standing at the center of the coming of God’s kingdom on earth. If he was wrong about all that, then the rest of his teachings either a) don’t make sense (i.e., pacifism only makes sense if there really is a just God who will one day make all things right) or b) aren’t really that interesting (lots of people have said we should love our neighbors and give to the poor). Plus, he was a megalomaniac on par with Manson or David Koresh, so who would want to listen to his teaching anyway?

That said, if what you’re asking me for is a treatment of Jesus by someone who doesn’t believe he was the Messiah or the Son of God, then I would suggest John Dominic Crossan’s Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. He has all kinds of crazy s?*% in there about dogs eating Jesus’ body and whatnot, but I think his portrait of Jesus as a countercultural barrier-breaker and justice-bringer is quite accurate. Marcus Borg is good along these lines too, though his Jesus doesn’t have quite as much bite as Crossan’s; he’s more of a mystical rather than social revolutionary.

But there are also Christians who believe that Jesus was a bad*ss and a radical too, you know. My personal favorite is NT Wright. He is considered one of the premier New Testament scholars in the world by believers and non-believers alike, despite being seen as controversial by both. Like me, he holds that the bad*ss, radical Jesus doesn’t make sense unless you believe the kingdom of God stuff; and likewise, the kingdom of God stuff only makes sense if Jesus’ ministry had a political element to it. I would recommend The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is, or Who Was Jesus? He also has a new book out that I’m reading right now which is more about the idea of resurrection than it is about Jesus directly, but it explains why the hope of resurrection is not the same as common conceptions of heaven and why it should lead is to be social and political activists. It’s called Surprised by Hope.

Probably more than you wanted to know. Sorry. As you can see, I haven’t gotten shorter-winded or less opinionated over the years. Hope one of these books will help you find the Jesus you’re looking for…and the Jesus that’s looking for you.

Jeremy