Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stanley A. Fry has served congregations in Brazil and the United States for a total of forty-one years. He holds a PhD in philosophy and is the author of A New Vision of God for the 21st Century. He is retired and currently lives in Rutland, Vermont.

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The Man of Light

iUniverse, Inc.

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................viiIntroduction Who Was Jesus Really?...............................ixChapter 1 The Movement Begins....................................2Chapter 2 The First Great Split..................................19Chapter 3 What We Can Know and Can't.............................30Chapter 4 How the Church Tried to Define Him.....................51Chapter 5 What Can We Do with Him Now?...........................65Chapter 6 The Man of Light-a Mythic Tale.........................80Chapter 7 Jesus for Today........................................87Appendix A: A Jesus Timeline.....................................97Appendix B: A Homily-My Man, Jesus...............................102Notes............................................................108

Chapter One

Some will be offended by the suggestion that we cannot trust everything the New Testament says about the life and ministry of Jesus. Others may have harbored the feeling that there was much there that was very problematic, for example, the miracles of healing and interference with the laws of nature. But most of the rest has gone unquestioned. Those who have further doubts about the veracity of the biblical accounts are often looked upon with great suspicion. I must say immediately, however, that I fully understand the skepticism of some and ask your patience as I seek to make clear the reasons for my suggestion. At the same time, I welcome the ready acceptance of others.

In the church we have often raised the question, without answering it, as to why the biblical learning that pastors receive in their seminary training seems to have been largely ignored when they assume their roles as pastors of churches. For example, how many parishioners have never known that the books in our New Testament, which are called "canonical," are a very small part of the literature which was produced by the early Jesus movement? Seminarians were taught that. We were also taught the history of the process by which those books were chosen to be included. But that process was rarely ever questioned, and it was much too disturbing to question it with our laymen. We had an institution to serve, as well as a congregation to protect, and perhaps we did not want to face the questions ourselves.

However, there comes a time when we must do so. As we enter the twenty-first century on the run, as it were, we are already beginning to smell the dust, and our churches are dropping farther and farther behind the world in which they are attempting to live. So I invite you to undertake, with me, an adventure that promises a new understanding and a more profound spirituality.

* * *

The name "Palestine" is the name that the Romans gave to a certain geographical area in the Middle East for purposes of governance. Most of Jesus' followers in the first generation after his death were the Jews who lived in the Palestine of the Roman occupation. They had all inherited certain expectations. Ever since the return from exile in Babylon five hundred years earlier, the Jews had experienced the occupation of their land by the Egyptians, the Greeks, and finally the Romans. By 225 BCE (signifies "before the Common Era"), they began to believe that the Day of the Lord would come, and the golden age of David would return, when the yoke of foreign oppression was cast off. They had been waiting for almost three hundred years for that day. Many charismatic personalities had appeared and were hailed as the one who was to come-a new prophet, a new king, a messiah who would deliver the people from their slavery. Jesus, almost certainly, was one of them. Matthew says he came announcing that "the Kingdom of God has come near," just as John the Baptizer had done before him

What happened in the earliest days of the Jesus movement just following the death of Jesus can best be understood in terms of Michael White's distinction between sect and cult. Of a sect he says, "A sect is a separatist, or schismatic, revitalization movement that arises out of an established religiously defined cultural system with which it shares its symbolic worldview." The Jesus movement began as a Jewish sect, a part of Judaism with its own unique take on the worldview and religious tradition of Judaism which it continued to claim. White explains that since the Jesus movement continued, in the beginning, to share the Jewish worldview, it was threatened with reabsorption and consequently developed its own rhetoric which, in turn, tended to separate it from its original worldview.

But, says White, a cult differs from a sect: "A cult is an integrative, often syncretistic, movement that is effectively imported (by mobilization or mutation) into another religiously defined cultural system, to that it must seek to synthesize its novel symbolic world view."

That is, a cult attempts to introduce a new world view into an existing world view. In order to do this, its followers try to soften the resulting tension by stressing the similarities between the two cultural worldviews.

Several different branches of the Jewish Jesus sect appear to have existed in Palestine during the first years after Jesus' death, though they left no written record. Paul's letters refer to those whom he calls the "judaizers." He also visited the Jewish church that still existed in Jerusalem for counsel. Roman sources also refer to them. Eventually, however, the Jesus movement began to transform itself from a Jewish sect into a Gentile (non-Jewish) or Roman cult. Central to this transformation was the adoption of Greek concepts into the explanations of Christian teachings, thus lessening the conflict between world views. This transformation had to proceed before the Jesus movement could find its own unique identity as a separate religion. The Council of Nicea in 325 CE may be seen as the terminal act of self-identification in this process.

Factors in the Transformational Process

One clue to this transformational process is seen in the contrast between the Gospel of Matthew, which probably was written for Jewish followers of Jesus soon after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE, and the Gospel of Luke, written for Gentile followers of Jesus, perhaps in the following decade of the 80s CE. Luke's companion work, known as the "Acts of the Apostles," describes the ministry of Paul that had taken place three decades earlier in the 50s CE, when the Jesus movement was first entering the Gentile world. Therefore, Paul was already planting the seeds as the Jesus movement began to change from sect to cult.

Much of what we can guess about Jesus has been deduced from our knowledge of the time in which he lived. For instance, we know that Aramaic was the common language of the people in Jesus' day. It was a cognate of ancient Hebrew and had been the language of the Jews since the Babylonian captivity. Thus, we can be sure that Jesus spoke Aramaic. Did he also know Greek? Possibly, if he had worked with his father in the construction of the Greek city of Sepphoris over on a hilltop near Nazareth. But there is no evidence of that. Did he know Hebrew? Not likely. It was the language of the learned in the law, and there is no reason to think Jesus was one of them. Most of the common people, in...