When he appeared, as Mark tells it, in his early or middle thirties, he came out of nowhere, with no past — except for a single reference to Nazareth in Galilee, his hometown. There is no birth narrative. There is no Virgin Mary, mangers, shepherds by night, or three wise men from the east. In this, the first story written about his life, he has no childhood. The only mention of kin is an early, dismissive refusal by him to see any of them — ‘Who is my mother or my brothers?’ No trade is noted, or education. He is what will become, in the culture of the West, the mysterious stranger. The implication is that his earlier life, about which we are told nothing, was inconsequential. Whether it was ordinary, wayward, or wasted, it did not contribute to who he is. His presence will be known, for as long as he remains, through his mission, which starts now.
[…]
From the outset, he is on his own. The solitariness is stark.
Many are around, but he alone sees the heavens part. He alone senses the pneuma descending over him — it, rather than the water, is the medium of his baptism. He is bathed in pneuma — his first companion. He alone hears the voice.
‘Sacred pneuma’ is traditionally translated from the Greek — pneuma hagion — as ‘Holy Spirit’ or ‘Holy Ghost’. In the original Greek it is not capitalised. The church tendency to conceptualise it as an entity loses the pneuma associations with wind, breath, and spirit — its range of Greek meanings. I shall leave ‘pneuma’ untranslated throughout.
Pneuma is ‘the wind that bloweth where it wills, and thou hearest its sound, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth’. This is how John, taking Mark’s cue, will timelessly project it. It is the charged wind, the cosmic breath, the driving spectral force. It is also the directing power that drives the stranger into the wilderness. And it manifests itself in unsound forms within deranged individuals. John will refer to ‘pneuma the god’.
anyone who says “the bible is clear” about an issue, is 100% of the time wrong. the bible wasnt clear once. the bible couldnt be clear about how to make a table if it came in an ikea box
The Christian Church was an upgrade of Roman syncretism, the stuff about Yahweh and Jesus was just the introductory demo scenario that comes packaged in
“The first beast comes ‘out of the sea’ and is given authority and power by the dragon. The second beast comes 'out of the earth’ and directs all peoples of the earth to worship the first beast.”
if i was jesus i would of got a disciple to tape a pistol to the back of the cross. soon as they put me up there blam blam i take out the roman legionaries. hop down and reload. steal a chariot. before pontius pilate can do anything i’ve rappelled over his balcony. blam blam. that’s his knees
also me: You know how you talk about how the Torah contains speeches, laws, proverbs, genaeologies, censuses, economic records, and romantic poetry, so everyone who learns from it will have a sense how to do that?
me: yeah?
also me: have you thought through that the Gospels are records of charismatic rabblerousing against the powers that be?
The teachings of Jesus were, in fact, a plausible development of the Judaism of its time, which was periodically, before and after, reinvented in substantial ways by prominent figures, including ones in Jewish scripture that the Christian New Testament is known for paralleling.
Though early Christianity drew most converts from gentile nations, there were in fact Jews who followed his way – the 12 Apostles were all Jews! (Paul was Roman)
The thing is really that Jews as we know them today are the product of two millennia of mimetic evolutionary pressure against taking the Jesus path where it forks.
Among the many great little stories in Jonathan Rose’s book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, one that has always stuck in my mind concerns a guy who read the Bible on his own, with dedication but without any external guidance.
On the basis of the other books he’d read, he assumed the Bible was a chronological narrative in which each section happened after the previous one. So when he got to the gospels, he assumed that they actually happened sequentially: that Jesus was in a sort of Groundhog Day time loop in which he experienced slightly different versions of the same set of events four different times, dying at the end of each version. (I guess would make sense that final loop was John, which is significantly different from the other three.)
That’s fantastic! And like most misinterpretations, it considerably improves upon the original text! :)
Really though, without context I’m not sure how else you would read it. If I was reading a book that had four repeated chapters with minor variations I would assume it was either an editing mistake, a sci-fi story, or a post-modern critique of intertextuality ??
Kinda curious now why the First Council of Nicaea didn’t just combine all the gospels into one super gospel and promote that.
What's the official Kontextmaschine™ take on Jesus?
That there was a human who corresponds to the biblical figure, who was a clever and charismatic genius living in the early Roman occupation of Judea, who challenged the sitting priesthood manning the vassal state and was executed by the Romans, in a manner at least roughly preserved in the Gospels.
That he was not in fact the son of God or capable of performing miracles, that he was not resurrected and that his death did not resolve any particular issue of sin and thus allow life after death. That Pentecost – the Apostles going into reclusion upon his execution and returning months later with the story of his resurrection and of the Holy Spirit where their teachings were exactly as divine as Jesus and God – was made up, in that When Prophecy Fails way.
That all the Gospels were written after and in service of this reading and that even where they include actual teachings of Jesus that support it they may pass over issues pertinent to the immediate cultural and geopolitical contexts that were not relevant to a greater cause or the contexts the Apostles scattered to to found churches.
That the most likely origin of “he provided more quality wine when a wedding feast found itself running out” and “he provided more food at an outdoor gathering than expected” tales has to do with his links to major local landholders – note how the “literal” reading of his parables, to be recognizable and understood, is about the operation of fields and vineyards.
That even if you take the religious aspect of the New Testament seriously it strikes me the message isn’t about the victory of the God of the Jews, it’s about the victory of the Roman Empire.
