this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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I’m not religious and have plenty of issues with organized religion in general but I do support any Christians who aspire to live by the teachings Jesus actually preached. And it’s always good to see someone like this Reverend here, willing to call out conservatives who wear their supposed piety on their sleeves while espousing bigoted, selfish, reprehensible beliefs.
It's so God damned rare these days. Literally the only positive religious group experience I have had my my adult life was the day after the first George Floyd riots, I spent 8 hours on emergency overtime at my dispatch center. The next day I was out in the area and a local mosque decided to go around cleaning up broken glass and boarding up looted stores because "our brothers and sisters are hurting". I wish more people acted that way.
The only pastor from my parents church who had any interest in helping the community ended up getting ousted over a differing interpretation of some Bible verse or other. I had stopped going for almost a decade by then so who knows.
Now they're more interested in remodeling and expanding the church building to make it more gaudy.
You know, like Jesus said when he helped the merchants at the temple maximize their earnings potential, "rule of acquisition #10, bitches!"
Relevant link. https://youtu.be/ANNX_XiuA78?si=2eZJ1t5Gn5bmj52K
Except that we really don't know what those would have been, and there's a pretty decent likelihood that many of the most popular sayings like "blessed are the poor" and "easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle then a rich man to get into heaven" were additions after Paul and what later becomes the canonical church shift their splinter of the tradition to start collecting money from people.
"Want salvation? Too bad you have all that money - maybe we can help you out with that."
For example, in apocrypha that has a decent chance of also dating to the first century, it depicts a Jesus ridiculing the very idea of prayer, fasting, and charity as necessary for salvation, instead characterizing it as a birthright for all people and those who give money to the church as being like people who take off even their clothes to give to someone else in order to be given what is already theirs.
This is arguably an even more transgressive tradition and version of Jesus than the one Paul offered up, and was more in keeping with the pre-Pauline attitudes about "everything is permissible for me" and the resistance to his rights to profit as an apostle discussed in 1 Corinthians.
There's a significant survivorship bias in modern Christianity - for example, a tradition that changed the prohibition on carrying a purse and collecting money from people when ministering (Luke 22:35-36 - absent in Marcion's version which was likely the earliest copy) was more likely to survive and thrive than ones that had limited fundraising capabilities as originally directed.
So while yes, he may have been all about helping the poor and downtrodden, it's also entirely possible that a lot of it is a load of BS meant to separate fools from their money by an organization claiming to do those things on people's behalf (you'll notice in the Epistles vs gospels that Paul, who is supposedly collecting money for the poor back in Jerusalem, mentions a gift of a nice aromatic in Philippians 4:18, and then in the gospels written later on there's a scene where Jesus is given an expensive aromatic and chastises those who criticize him for accepting it rather than selling it and giving the money to the poor).
Personally, I prefer the nuance in something like saying 95 attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas: "If you have money, don't lend it at interest. Rather, give [it] to someone from whom you won't get it back." There's a bit more nuance in that this addresses not an obligation for everyone including those struggling with money to give to the poor via the church but rather the inherent wisdom of recognizing the diminishing returns on personal wealth for the rich and the value in directly enriching one's environment rather than hoarding a resource you can't take with you (the point of the parable in saying 63 in the same work).
So while I'm inclined to think that a historical Jesus probably was against hoarding wealth stupidly given the overlap between unique extra-cannonical and canonical sentiments, I'm quite wary that the extreme degree of bleeding heart asceticism we see promoted canonically is much more than a sales effort by a parasitic organization that went on to build the Vatican off its back.
Yeah I went through a phase of reading biblical history when I had my faith deconstructed, and you quickly realize how many different Christianities there were. As well as the political context for why these sort of ideas were able to spread in this specific part of the world at that time in history. I think the version of the story told in Jesus Christ Superstar actually does a decent job with the structures of authority and their conflicting interests. To me Jesus was likely a very charismatic "nobody" who gained a following by expressing sentiments that were kind of already floating around, until it caused a problem for the authorities who needed to keep the peace or risk Rome intervening. Whether Jesus actually said what's in the Bible isn't important, we know people thought he said that stuff and that it resonated strongly with many. We can infer things about people at the time based on what they ascribed to Jesus.
Eh, the above mentioned sect of Christianity claimed he was talking about indivisible properties of matter and naturalism as a greater wonder over intelligent design, with the sower parable (the only one with a 'secret ' explanation in the first canonical gospel) as actually being about the naturalist origins of all life and the universe while inadvertently using the language of Lucretius's "seeds of things" from 80 years earlier to do so (who even described failed biological reproduction as "seed falling by the wayside of a path").
I think we too readily cede the authority over what a historical Jesus might have been trying to say to the revisionist version that snowballed into a beast torturing and executing people for even possessing competing versions of Christianity and directly accepting money in exchange for promises of salvation and propping up tyrants over the masses.
For example, here's another saying from the above tradition:
Weird that the council of Nicaea at the prompting of an empire largely governed by those who were born into power and held it until death didn't decide to canonize that tradition, no? But could you imagine the Roman empire maybe motivated to be executing a guy that was saying it?
Also weird that Paul seems vaguely familiar with this connection between gaining wealth and ruling in 1 Corinthians 4:8 as pre-existing his first letter to Corinth where he later accused them of accepting a different gospel from superapostles and where they later depose the presbyters appointed by Rome:
when people say "the teachings Jesus actually preached", they usually mean "the canonical teachings from the bible".
Which is a pet peeve.
Also, given the highly contradictory nature of the Bible, that's not saying much.
He also told people to sell their cloaks and go buy swords canonically at the last supper in Luke, explicitly going back on things he had allegedly said earlier.
also the canon has changed over the centuries.
WWJD is actually a great moral role of thumb, the problem is that so few self-proclaimed Christians follow his teachings.
Except for the part when he called for his followers to take up swords and abandon their families (Matt. 10:34-36, among other passages).
And the part where he claimed that loving the Father took precedence over treating others with love and respect (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), which opens the door for all manner of inhuman atrocities and hate in the name of "loving God"
Matthew 10 is definitely more about conviction in the face of persecution, even from one's own family, than literally taking up swords. Just a few verses earlier, 10:16, he specifically says to be harmless as doves.
You're gonna have to find me an actual verse on that second part, as I interpret it, "loving the Father" goes hand-in-hand with treating others with love and respect.
"I come not to bring peace, but a sword" is pretty unequivocal. Plus, consider "He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one" (Luke 22:36).
And as others interpret The Greatest Commandment, "love your neighbor" only applies to people that share the same ideals or religion. After all, there are multiple references in the New Testament to "God's elect" (Rom. 8:33, Matt. 24:22) implying that those that are not "chosen" are somehow lesser. And is not exactly a new issue, as theologians have argued about predestination and God's chosen people for centuries Foster, Robert Verrell (1898). Systematic Theology. Columbia University, among many others.
It's not exactly encouraging that the Son of God can't even explain the most important commandments in a simple, unambiguous manner...
The Son of Man. I don't believe that Jesus was uniquely divine, I think he was uniquely conscious of the divinity within everyone.
Religion is a centuries-long game of telephone. Jesus never wrote anything. Prophets are enlightened examples of humanity, but with enough time the message is bent and twisted by less enlightened examples. You don't have to think he was some supernatural creature to agree with his message, and you don't have to reject the message to recognize that greedy people exploit popular movements for personal gain.
Trying to dismiss the message by poking holes in the secondhand accounts of his fan club is misguided. I should know, I spent long enough indulging in the practice myself.
Then why the hell did you bother asking for chapter and verse? Classic apologetics fan; ask for an example or evidence and then equivocate when you get exactly what you asked for.
Considering that the only thing left of the "enlightened" prophet are the secondhand accounts of his fan club, I'm not sure exactly what you think "the message" is...
I'm dismissive of "the message" not because it's easy to poke holes in the theology and historicity of the Christian bible (although it obviously is), but because there is no consistent theology or message that can traced anyone with any sort of reliability. If that's all there is to glean from exhaustive apologetics and exegesis of "the teachings of Jesus," I won't bother to go to a religion or guess "WWJD" for that; there are plenty of better moral frameworks and more consistent belief systems out there.
To point out that, even after the game of telephone, it still doesn't say what you claim it does.
Which of those moral frameworks encourages antagonizing the beliefs of strangers?
How so?
You still haven't claimed anything at all other than "WWJD is a good rule of thumb," with which I disagreed and provided examples of why I believe that WWJD is not a good moral or ethical model.
Plenty of religions and secular moral frameworks value truth and honesty over protecting the feelings of others. Do I particularly care if I change your mind? No, you are entitled to your own beliefs and that's fine. However, I've seen enough evil done in the name of WWJD and "God's love" that I'm not going to ignore the questionable (and IMO irresponsible) claim that WWJD is a good moral framework when it's presented in a public venue where others might read it.
If you don't want to be challenged on it, keep your religion to yourself.
You didn't though? You brought up a verse about swords taken wildly out of context. You seem to be confusing a general tendency for charity, tolerance, and forgiveness with the entire combined corpus of various sects. What evil has been done in the name of WWJD? Sure, the Catholic Church has been co-opted by bastards essentially since it's inception, and most other sects have their share of bastardry, but what does that have to do with emulating the most consistent elements of Jesus's teachings? Forgive your trespassers, help the struggling, love your neighbor as yourself.
And to be clear, it's not my religion. I do not profess to be a member of any Christian sect. I just think that most of the things Jesus himself said (or is purported to have said) are generally a good moral baseline. Further, based on his position on the Pharisees, I'm sure he himself would take serious issue with the evil done ostensibly in the name of his church. All the more support for WWJD.
The parts when he says how they are going to hell? Or the part when he talked about a future time when his followers would murder those that opposed him.
I think you misread the question.
Just talking about the Gospel of Mark and Revelations. You know those two minor Christian works of no real significance.
FWIW this is absent in Marcion's version of the gospel which was likely representing one of the earliest surviving versions and I'm pretty much positive this is a later redactional addition (the part about taking a purse relates to taking money from people when ministering), but in terms whether there's a canonical quote of Jesus literally telling people to take up arms, ask and ye shall receive.
But then in Luke 22:49-51 when they try to actually use those swords:
Which is also missing in Marcion's version of Luke.
It's useful to look at the gospels through the lens of redactional layers.
So for example a later editor may have wanted to include Matthew's rebuke of using swords as is mentioned in Mark and was originally omitted in first draft Luke, and then the editor thought they needed to explain why they had swords in the first place by having Jesus at the last supper command them to immediately go out and buy swords.
I'll also add that in Matthew's account that Jesus says at that moment to put away the sword because (loosely) "those who use the shall die by the sword". And he later says, as if he couldn't summon heaven's army if needed.
An interpretation could be that it's a display that these things must happen and Jesus went willingly, not forced because he was unarmed. When Jesus preached, it wasn't with sword in-hand. And in Matthew he specifies they are trying to get the better of him by doing this in the middle of the night and assume he is unarmed (as always).
Also later in the Luke he literally says that the two swords by them "is enough" so they don't go and sell their things to buy swords.
I'd advise everyone to be careful about picking specific verses since the chapter/verse system is something added later for simplicity, not how it was intended to be read.