Christianity, In a Nutshell, From a Nut
I resolved to spend some time in 2015 getting acquainted with religion. This was largely an intellectual undertaking. I sought to understand what I did not, and since I grew up and live in a predominantly Christian country, this is the religion that stands out, because our culture's viewpoint on it is so varied and rife with conflicts. My ideas in here are largely my own, but I sincerely doubt anything I'm about to say is new. And in a blog post, I certainly can't say everything, but to those who want to learn, I'm a fellow student, and I'd like to share some disparate thoughts.
(I'm going to play the pronoun game in this post, e.g. "and He said" merely because this feels like good grammar to me. I'm a writer with some thoughts to share, not an evangelical forcing rhetoric down anyone's throats. That said, I'm not a good writer, so I might have missed a few in here. Whoever has eyes to read...)
My understanding of Christianity has actually been quite fluid since I started. I started by reading bite-size chunks of the Bible from daily devotionals. The thoughts are simple, and usually their meaning was clear, but for many of them, I wondered about the context. Why should I care why this was written? Who wrote it? Why did they write it?
So, I expanded by starting to read other's interpretations of the events in the Bible. This served two purposes: absorb other people's opinions on the matter, and I got some context for the history in which the events of the bible took place. The Holy Bible is not a difficult book to find or read, but it is exceptionally hard to understand and interpret if you don't understand the realm in which all of it is taking place.
Let's break down the bible. There is the Old Testament, which is actually the Septuaguint, which was a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures from the Tanakh, which is the Jewish bible. Why is the first 3/4's of the official Christian bible the contents of the Jewish bible? Simple: the scripture about Jesus tells us that his coming fulfilled a prophecy in the Jewish bible. So we need the whole thing because of a few passages?
In short, yeah, that's about the sum of it. Christians believe there's a continuity here: namely, that the one true God was the Hebrew God until Jesus came to earth, and suddenly, boom! the Hebrew God changes into the God of everyone, not just the Hebrews? I don't really know what's true, but I'm pretty sure God didn't go through any metamorphosis; rather, the imagination of man wrought this change upon Him.
There's more practical problems here: the coming Messiah, as prophesied in the Tanakh, was supposed to restore Israel to the Jewish people. It makes sense that members of the population under Roman occupation would to be very happy to hear that Jesus was possibly that man, and this likely drew people to Him. But as it stands, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans about 40 years after Jesus was crucified. Oops.
There are enough factors here that we can assume the Tanakh is not relevant to develop a direct understanding of Christianity. I've spent much time with the Tanakh, annotated by Rabbis with notes I don't fully understand. This is not to say the Jewish bible should be scrapped altogether, but we're examining Christianity here, not Judaism.
So, on to the New Testament: in it we have four Gospels, each of which recounts the story of the life of Jesus from a different perspective. Each culminates in His death. This is rather like one of those Hollywood films where you get to see the same story play out multiple times from different vantage points. They're each different enough to be interesting, but there's enough redundancy that I hope Mel Gibson doesn't make three other movies.
Next, the Book of Acts. This starts with the death of Jesus and goes on to describe the apostles dispersing through the world. History suggests that 10 of the 12 went to their deaths, martyred in the name of spreading the gospel. The exceptions: Judas killed himself, and John lived out his later days on Patmos, and gave us, among other things, the unintelligible nonsense contained in the Book of Revelations.
The apostles are more interesting to me than Jesus, because they were the critical piece of spreading Christianity throughout the world. There is a theory that no man named Jesus ever existed. Perhaps he was just a figurehead created to give a voice or credence to a new religious movement. Academia has done little validate this claim: we have enough independent historical sources confirming the existence of a man named Jesus of Nazareth crucified under Roman governor Pontius Pilate, around the time indicated in scripture.
So, we can say at least this: Jesus was a man. According to the story, He had some followers during his life that later chose to die in His name. Imagine that, when you die, you want to convince 10 other people to die after you, in horrible fashions. Simon Peter was crucified upside down, since he didn't feel worthy to die in the same manner as his God. Ostensibly, Jesus influenced those men in a way that I don't think any of us could ever pull off ourselves. If this sequence of events actually did play out (and they did, evidenced by the fact that Christianity is now everywhere), then there is power in what Jesus did, whether from man or from God.
How true are any of these stories? We have no real evidence to say for sure. I've met a few religious people who are excited about the prospect of archeology validating the historical authenticity of the events in the Gospels. I've nothing against the field of archeology investigating any particular matter, but does your faith really seek out evidence? In John 4:48, a listless, resigned Jesus tells a man asking for a miracle, "Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will never believe." (John 4:48) Discipleship does not call for intellectual verification of the premise you're asked to accept; it calls for putting these intellectual hesitancies aside. As a person who strives to be an intellectual, I find it vexing to deal with religious people who push their views but haven't learned this difference.
After the Book of Acts, the rest of the New Testament is a compilation of Christian writings, most of which are epistles attributed to the apostle Paul. Again, in evaluating Christianity, there are linkage issues with Paul and Jesus. The two never knew each other, or at least, he never was a man who followed Jesus while he was alive. These writings give insight into some of the thoughts of the early Christians, but they are distinct from the gospels in that we don't believe they are second- or third-hand accounts of the life of Jesus, but writings disseminated much later to specific audiences with specific agendas. Like the Tanakh, these writings have their place, but I have little to say about them since they don't have relevance here.
So, as much as it feels like something of a cliché, we've essentially distilled the Holy Bible down to what really should have been its focus: on Jesus Himself. For those who might be interested in reading this story in its simplest of terms, I refer you to The Jefferson Bible. Thomas Jefferson assembled this by curating from the gospels all of the bits of moral philosophy that Jesus taught. All the mystical stuff, like the healings and the resurrection, are omitted entirely. You could probably read the whole thing in roughly 12 minutes.
It's well-known that He was Jewish, so His disciples referred to Him as "Rabbi", which means "Teacher". I've been to enough different church services over the past year that I have to wonder how the attendees and sermons at many of these places might be different if we all called our priests "teachers".
In the time since I've started this, I've found that knowledge of scripture leads people to assume that you're religious. This makes me wonder if there ever was a time in history when a person could strive to have well-rounded knowledge about many things, accept only a few of these, and not be judged incorrectly when they happen to offer advice that's relevant to a situation but not necessarily congruous with what they've personally accepted.
So people ask me what I am. Here is my answer: I study ancient scripture of many flavors, so I am a student.
But, what would I call myself, if I called myself anything? Nothing. To the Christian believer, this is blasphemy. To deny the Teacher in the presence of others condemns me. But as I write this in the wee hours of the morning, I'd say it twice again before the cock crows. I cannot refute the claims of those who might condemn me, but only offer claims of my own. I'll offer the spiritual full disclosure clause that seems ever-present in the gospels: I make these claims of my own authority, so it's with no authority. This comes from me, not God.
From the Beatitudes:
"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled." -Matthew 5:6. It's also rephrased in Luke: "Woe to you who are full now, for ye shall hunger."
I mentioned this a friend who asked me what I was. She laughed and said, "Well, that's a funny way to put it, to kind of intellectually fend off people who might try to convert you."
I thought that was a funny idea, but it needs to be clarified: I don't have a way to "put it". That's the way it is. To call myself a Christian is to be filled. Is this bad? Not by itself, but risk accompanies it. If I come to believe that by accepting Christianity and adopting many of their routines that I've truly done something to connect with God, then I'm no better off than before, when I didn't call myself a Christian. (Though perhaps now I have an arguably better set of friends.) In this case, I call myself a Christian to gain favor in the eyes of other men.
This path is not inevitable, but it is characteristic of many people who enter organized religions. Imagine that all of the Christianity, in the entire world, is composed of a house of 12 people on my block, who call themselves Christians and practice the philosophy. I doubt anyone would take issue with this. In fact, some local birdcage liner would probably feature them in a lovely cover story.
The problems come at scale. Any human institution that grows large enough tends to lead to corruption, or at least attracts those with a tendency towards corruption. The best you can hope for is that the corruption does not contaminate the original purity, but you also have to believe that avoiding this is even possible.
Jesus seemed to know this well. My favorite passage in the Bible is John 5. Go read it if you'd like to, but here's the story: Jesus heals a paralyzed man on the Sabbath, and tells him to pick up his mat and walk. He does this, but it's against Jewish law to carry your mat on the Sabbath, and he happens to be walking in an extremely public, extremely holy place. So in short order, the Jewish ruling members of the Temple (the Pharisees) floating around the large crowd see him and confront him about it. He tells them, "Uh, this guy healed me. Not sure who he was, he just disappeared into the crowd. And he told me to carry my mat."
Well, these Pharisees are the persistent types, so eventually they figure out who it was, and they confront Jesus Himself. I think Jesus' reaction, in the context of this story, isn't surprising: he had healed man who had been paralyzed his entire life. What did it matter what day of the week it was? The debate that ensues is characteristic of the debates Jesus had with those in authority: His answers tended to confound, disillusion, and in the most delightful of circumstances, render speechless those he addressed.
So what do we get from this? Jesus was some kind of superman who used his mystical powers to not only heal the infirm but to also screw with the heads of those in authority at the time. This is truly a man after my own heart.
From this particular passage, Jesus says this to the Pharisees, most of which one could say to a stave off a would-be group of aggressive missionaries:
"I do not accept glory from human beings, but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts. I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. How can you believe since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?"
Even to those who don't believe in God, there's something to be said for the value of deference to something that humanity hasn't grasped. This could be scientific; even with the precise equations of quantum mechanics, ambiguity still lurks and mysteries abound as to how things really work, and scientists wonder how they could possibly be that way. Should we spend our lives acting like we're in control of what's around us?
Jesus seemed to understand that there was a difference between faith, and the mechanisms of humankind that are built surrounding that faith. To the person who wants to understand faith, this division must first be understood.
The most interesting findings in archeology over the 20th century have been the discovery of several non-canoncial gospels. These are books which were written around the same time as the gospels included in the Bible. Like those in the Bible, they recount the life and teachings of Jesus. We haven't had access to the contents of these writings since the first few centuries, since all copies were destroyed.
So why did we get some of them in the Bible, and not others?
The formation of the New Testament, and the books that were included, happened roughly 300 years after Jesus died. All of the writings that were available at the time were tossed onto a big table, and some people chose which ones got in and which didn't. This group of people was presided over by Roman Emperor Constantine; if anyone in the group disagreed with Constantine, they were kicked off the council or killed. (For those of you who've seen The Da Vinci Code, this much is true; but nothing can be concluded from evidence about Jesus having a wife or a bloodline.)
It doesn't seem that Constantine chose the writings he did to go into the Bible based on their authenticity, but simply based on the doctrines they contained. He chose to omit certain writings because they didn't serve his mission of uniting the Pagans and Christians in Rome under a single religion. Constantine himself was a pagan who converted to Christianity almost, if not literally, on his deathbed. This hardly screams a life of piety.
So this is Bible, on which Christians have their hopes set. You accept this set of writings as truth, but in doing so, you do not revere the Teacher, but instead you revere Constantine.
Aha! But you can refute my argument by saying that everything that has transpired since the death of Jesus has been the will of God. Constantine may have been a pagan heathen, but he was playing out the set of events that God had willed, much in the way He must have willed Judas. By guiding the actions of man, God gave us the book He wanted.
If this is true, then isn't the discovery of the contents of the non-canonical gospels also the will of God? And if this is true, then shouldn't we seek them, since they do come from God? But of course, now I'm just being clever, and that only serves to annoy or confuse large groups of people at social gatherings.
I am surprised at Christians who won't even consider the contents of the non-canonical gospels. Without resorting to philosophical tricks, a simple question: revealed to us are more testimonies and details about Jesus, which were lost for almost 1600 years. What force on earth would prevent you from investigating?
When Jesus was addressing a large group of people, many of whom were skeptical of his claims, He said, "Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own." (John 7:17) Take nothing on faith, then! We can approach these new gospels as a child approaches water with her toe, and see for ourselves.
The Book of Revelations is a curious affair, and one that I'd rather skirt entirely, but alas, much of the information we get bombarded with surrounding religion is about the end of the world. So our exploration inevitably leads into this territory. What is this book? It would be easy to blame all of this apocalyptic garbage we hear on Revelations, but Jesus Himself does talk about the end of the world in the gospels. To his entourage he says, "Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom." (Matthew 16:28)
Jesus really seemed to believe that the kingdom of heaven would come to earth within a generation of His death. Naturally, as the years crept by after He was gone, His followers grew understandably disheartened that this hadn't happened yet. In an effort to give hope to the missionaries in Asia Minor, John composed the Book of Relevations.
Categorically, Revelations is actually in a specific literary genre that was popular that time, much like we have romances, mysteries, and so on. Writings in this genre were called "apocalypses". Interestingly, there were other apocalypses written (Peter and Paul both wrote one) that weren't included.
A friend of mine quipped that, if a far future civilization were given a stack of our DVDs, a player, and some Rosetta stone to understand them, it would be impossible to figure out who we were, as a people. I laughed hard at this. You can imagine people 2,000 years from now viewing your typical beat cop show. What to make of it? Well, these people clothed in this blue garb with these little silver shields that carry primitive weapons to make holes in people seem to be protectors. Then you get something like Training Day, where you have corruption of some of the protectors, but good prevails; if these descendants of ours are anything like us, this shouldn't confuse their understanding. Then you pop in something like The Naked Gun, and suddenly no one knows what to think!
Each of these detailed the return of Jesus in its own way. Revelations is a florid depiction of possible events that was intended to give inspiration to those working to spread the word of Christ. It was never intended to be taken as a prophesy of literal events that we can expect to transpire.
And yet even today, Revelations continues to inspire in ways that I don't imagine the original author would have ever envisioned. As Jesus is ascending into heaven for the last time, an Angel says to those watching, "Why do you stand here looking into the sky?" (Acts 1:11) I don't believe we can know for sure if Jesus will ever return, but until that time, it's on us. We are each of us on our own...or together. Why are you staring at the sky?
One of my favorite passages from the Bible is a simple analogy. This takes place in a conversation between Jesus and a man named Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a Pharisee, and historians believe he may have lent a hand in cutting down Jesus' corpse from the cross. But when they meet, Jesus scans him with His Jedi mind power, and decides he's cool. So He begins to teach him.
In this passage, there is the infamous John 3:16. Author and pastor John Maxwell, who I admire greatly, refers to this as Jesus' "mission statement". Jesus, Inc. is funny to imagine, but of course that's because I'm only associating mission statements with modern businesses. It makes sense to me that if you want to do something important in your life, you should probably be able to describe it in one or two sentences.
I like what follows shortly after. This was written by the author of the Book of John, who is widely believed to be John:
"This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their evil deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God."
Of course, assuming that the author is writing while divinely inspired, then we have to assume that this is a dramatic reduction of what God actually wants to communicate. He must put His thoughts into words, and those words must be accessible to human understanding. We must not think of literal light and dark, but instead of a concept beyond ourselves, incomprehensible by ourselves, that a being of superior intelligence would resort to using light and dark as a close analogy.
Perhaps we cannot know what the light really is, but I do believe it is every person's duty in life to seek to understand what separates the light from the dark in this world.
Go your way and sin no more.
(I'm going to play the pronoun game in this post, e.g. "and He said" merely because this feels like good grammar to me. I'm a writer with some thoughts to share, not an evangelical forcing rhetoric down anyone's throats. That said, I'm not a good writer, so I might have missed a few in here. Whoever has eyes to read...)
My understanding of Christianity has actually been quite fluid since I started. I started by reading bite-size chunks of the Bible from daily devotionals. The thoughts are simple, and usually their meaning was clear, but for many of them, I wondered about the context. Why should I care why this was written? Who wrote it? Why did they write it?
So, I expanded by starting to read other's interpretations of the events in the Bible. This served two purposes: absorb other people's opinions on the matter, and I got some context for the history in which the events of the bible took place. The Holy Bible is not a difficult book to find or read, but it is exceptionally hard to understand and interpret if you don't understand the realm in which all of it is taking place.
Let's break down the bible. There is the Old Testament, which is actually the Septuaguint, which was a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures from the Tanakh, which is the Jewish bible. Why is the first 3/4's of the official Christian bible the contents of the Jewish bible? Simple: the scripture about Jesus tells us that his coming fulfilled a prophecy in the Jewish bible. So we need the whole thing because of a few passages?
In short, yeah, that's about the sum of it. Christians believe there's a continuity here: namely, that the one true God was the Hebrew God until Jesus came to earth, and suddenly, boom! the Hebrew God changes into the God of everyone, not just the Hebrews? I don't really know what's true, but I'm pretty sure God didn't go through any metamorphosis; rather, the imagination of man wrought this change upon Him.
There's more practical problems here: the coming Messiah, as prophesied in the Tanakh, was supposed to restore Israel to the Jewish people. It makes sense that members of the population under Roman occupation would to be very happy to hear that Jesus was possibly that man, and this likely drew people to Him. But as it stands, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans about 40 years after Jesus was crucified. Oops.
There are enough factors here that we can assume the Tanakh is not relevant to develop a direct understanding of Christianity. I've spent much time with the Tanakh, annotated by Rabbis with notes I don't fully understand. This is not to say the Jewish bible should be scrapped altogether, but we're examining Christianity here, not Judaism.
So, on to the New Testament: in it we have four Gospels, each of which recounts the story of the life of Jesus from a different perspective. Each culminates in His death. This is rather like one of those Hollywood films where you get to see the same story play out multiple times from different vantage points. They're each different enough to be interesting, but there's enough redundancy that I hope Mel Gibson doesn't make three other movies.
Next, the Book of Acts. This starts with the death of Jesus and goes on to describe the apostles dispersing through the world. History suggests that 10 of the 12 went to their deaths, martyred in the name of spreading the gospel. The exceptions: Judas killed himself, and John lived out his later days on Patmos, and gave us, among other things, the unintelligible nonsense contained in the Book of Revelations.
The apostles are more interesting to me than Jesus, because they were the critical piece of spreading Christianity throughout the world. There is a theory that no man named Jesus ever existed. Perhaps he was just a figurehead created to give a voice or credence to a new religious movement. Academia has done little validate this claim: we have enough independent historical sources confirming the existence of a man named Jesus of Nazareth crucified under Roman governor Pontius Pilate, around the time indicated in scripture.
So, we can say at least this: Jesus was a man. According to the story, He had some followers during his life that later chose to die in His name. Imagine that, when you die, you want to convince 10 other people to die after you, in horrible fashions. Simon Peter was crucified upside down, since he didn't feel worthy to die in the same manner as his God. Ostensibly, Jesus influenced those men in a way that I don't think any of us could ever pull off ourselves. If this sequence of events actually did play out (and they did, evidenced by the fact that Christianity is now everywhere), then there is power in what Jesus did, whether from man or from God.
How true are any of these stories? We have no real evidence to say for sure. I've met a few religious people who are excited about the prospect of archeology validating the historical authenticity of the events in the Gospels. I've nothing against the field of archeology investigating any particular matter, but does your faith really seek out evidence? In John 4:48, a listless, resigned Jesus tells a man asking for a miracle, "Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will never believe." (John 4:48) Discipleship does not call for intellectual verification of the premise you're asked to accept; it calls for putting these intellectual hesitancies aside. As a person who strives to be an intellectual, I find it vexing to deal with religious people who push their views but haven't learned this difference.
After the Book of Acts, the rest of the New Testament is a compilation of Christian writings, most of which are epistles attributed to the apostle Paul. Again, in evaluating Christianity, there are linkage issues with Paul and Jesus. The two never knew each other, or at least, he never was a man who followed Jesus while he was alive. These writings give insight into some of the thoughts of the early Christians, but they are distinct from the gospels in that we don't believe they are second- or third-hand accounts of the life of Jesus, but writings disseminated much later to specific audiences with specific agendas. Like the Tanakh, these writings have their place, but I have little to say about them since they don't have relevance here.
So, as much as it feels like something of a cliché, we've essentially distilled the Holy Bible down to what really should have been its focus: on Jesus Himself. For those who might be interested in reading this story in its simplest of terms, I refer you to The Jefferson Bible. Thomas Jefferson assembled this by curating from the gospels all of the bits of moral philosophy that Jesus taught. All the mystical stuff, like the healings and the resurrection, are omitted entirely. You could probably read the whole thing in roughly 12 minutes.
It's well-known that He was Jewish, so His disciples referred to Him as "Rabbi", which means "Teacher". I've been to enough different church services over the past year that I have to wonder how the attendees and sermons at many of these places might be different if we all called our priests "teachers".
In the time since I've started this, I've found that knowledge of scripture leads people to assume that you're religious. This makes me wonder if there ever was a time in history when a person could strive to have well-rounded knowledge about many things, accept only a few of these, and not be judged incorrectly when they happen to offer advice that's relevant to a situation but not necessarily congruous with what they've personally accepted.
So people ask me what I am. Here is my answer: I study ancient scripture of many flavors, so I am a student.
But, what would I call myself, if I called myself anything? Nothing. To the Christian believer, this is blasphemy. To deny the Teacher in the presence of others condemns me. But as I write this in the wee hours of the morning, I'd say it twice again before the cock crows. I cannot refute the claims of those who might condemn me, but only offer claims of my own. I'll offer the spiritual full disclosure clause that seems ever-present in the gospels: I make these claims of my own authority, so it's with no authority. This comes from me, not God.
From the Beatitudes:
"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled." -Matthew 5:6. It's also rephrased in Luke: "Woe to you who are full now, for ye shall hunger."
I mentioned this a friend who asked me what I was. She laughed and said, "Well, that's a funny way to put it, to kind of intellectually fend off people who might try to convert you."
I thought that was a funny idea, but it needs to be clarified: I don't have a way to "put it". That's the way it is. To call myself a Christian is to be filled. Is this bad? Not by itself, but risk accompanies it. If I come to believe that by accepting Christianity and adopting many of their routines that I've truly done something to connect with God, then I'm no better off than before, when I didn't call myself a Christian. (Though perhaps now I have an arguably better set of friends.) In this case, I call myself a Christian to gain favor in the eyes of other men.
This path is not inevitable, but it is characteristic of many people who enter organized religions. Imagine that all of the Christianity, in the entire world, is composed of a house of 12 people on my block, who call themselves Christians and practice the philosophy. I doubt anyone would take issue with this. In fact, some local birdcage liner would probably feature them in a lovely cover story.
The problems come at scale. Any human institution that grows large enough tends to lead to corruption, or at least attracts those with a tendency towards corruption. The best you can hope for is that the corruption does not contaminate the original purity, but you also have to believe that avoiding this is even possible.
Jesus seemed to know this well. My favorite passage in the Bible is John 5. Go read it if you'd like to, but here's the story: Jesus heals a paralyzed man on the Sabbath, and tells him to pick up his mat and walk. He does this, but it's against Jewish law to carry your mat on the Sabbath, and he happens to be walking in an extremely public, extremely holy place. So in short order, the Jewish ruling members of the Temple (the Pharisees) floating around the large crowd see him and confront him about it. He tells them, "Uh, this guy healed me. Not sure who he was, he just disappeared into the crowd. And he told me to carry my mat."
Well, these Pharisees are the persistent types, so eventually they figure out who it was, and they confront Jesus Himself. I think Jesus' reaction, in the context of this story, isn't surprising: he had healed man who had been paralyzed his entire life. What did it matter what day of the week it was? The debate that ensues is characteristic of the debates Jesus had with those in authority: His answers tended to confound, disillusion, and in the most delightful of circumstances, render speechless those he addressed.
So what do we get from this? Jesus was some kind of superman who used his mystical powers to not only heal the infirm but to also screw with the heads of those in authority at the time. This is truly a man after my own heart.
From this particular passage, Jesus says this to the Pharisees, most of which one could say to a stave off a would-be group of aggressive missionaries:
"I do not accept glory from human beings, but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts. I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. How can you believe since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?"
Even to those who don't believe in God, there's something to be said for the value of deference to something that humanity hasn't grasped. This could be scientific; even with the precise equations of quantum mechanics, ambiguity still lurks and mysteries abound as to how things really work, and scientists wonder how they could possibly be that way. Should we spend our lives acting like we're in control of what's around us?
Jesus seemed to understand that there was a difference between faith, and the mechanisms of humankind that are built surrounding that faith. To the person who wants to understand faith, this division must first be understood.
The most interesting findings in archeology over the 20th century have been the discovery of several non-canoncial gospels. These are books which were written around the same time as the gospels included in the Bible. Like those in the Bible, they recount the life and teachings of Jesus. We haven't had access to the contents of these writings since the first few centuries, since all copies were destroyed.
So why did we get some of them in the Bible, and not others?
The formation of the New Testament, and the books that were included, happened roughly 300 years after Jesus died. All of the writings that were available at the time were tossed onto a big table, and some people chose which ones got in and which didn't. This group of people was presided over by Roman Emperor Constantine; if anyone in the group disagreed with Constantine, they were kicked off the council or killed. (For those of you who've seen The Da Vinci Code, this much is true; but nothing can be concluded from evidence about Jesus having a wife or a bloodline.)
It doesn't seem that Constantine chose the writings he did to go into the Bible based on their authenticity, but simply based on the doctrines they contained. He chose to omit certain writings because they didn't serve his mission of uniting the Pagans and Christians in Rome under a single religion. Constantine himself was a pagan who converted to Christianity almost, if not literally, on his deathbed. This hardly screams a life of piety.
So this is Bible, on which Christians have their hopes set. You accept this set of writings as truth, but in doing so, you do not revere the Teacher, but instead you revere Constantine.
Aha! But you can refute my argument by saying that everything that has transpired since the death of Jesus has been the will of God. Constantine may have been a pagan heathen, but he was playing out the set of events that God had willed, much in the way He must have willed Judas. By guiding the actions of man, God gave us the book He wanted.
If this is true, then isn't the discovery of the contents of the non-canonical gospels also the will of God? And if this is true, then shouldn't we seek them, since they do come from God? But of course, now I'm just being clever, and that only serves to annoy or confuse large groups of people at social gatherings.
I am surprised at Christians who won't even consider the contents of the non-canonical gospels. Without resorting to philosophical tricks, a simple question: revealed to us are more testimonies and details about Jesus, which were lost for almost 1600 years. What force on earth would prevent you from investigating?
When Jesus was addressing a large group of people, many of whom were skeptical of his claims, He said, "Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own." (John 7:17) Take nothing on faith, then! We can approach these new gospels as a child approaches water with her toe, and see for ourselves.
The Book of Revelations is a curious affair, and one that I'd rather skirt entirely, but alas, much of the information we get bombarded with surrounding religion is about the end of the world. So our exploration inevitably leads into this territory. What is this book? It would be easy to blame all of this apocalyptic garbage we hear on Revelations, but Jesus Himself does talk about the end of the world in the gospels. To his entourage he says, "Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom." (Matthew 16:28)
Jesus really seemed to believe that the kingdom of heaven would come to earth within a generation of His death. Naturally, as the years crept by after He was gone, His followers grew understandably disheartened that this hadn't happened yet. In an effort to give hope to the missionaries in Asia Minor, John composed the Book of Relevations.
Categorically, Revelations is actually in a specific literary genre that was popular that time, much like we have romances, mysteries, and so on. Writings in this genre were called "apocalypses". Interestingly, there were other apocalypses written (Peter and Paul both wrote one) that weren't included.
A friend of mine quipped that, if a far future civilization were given a stack of our DVDs, a player, and some Rosetta stone to understand them, it would be impossible to figure out who we were, as a people. I laughed hard at this. You can imagine people 2,000 years from now viewing your typical beat cop show. What to make of it? Well, these people clothed in this blue garb with these little silver shields that carry primitive weapons to make holes in people seem to be protectors. Then you get something like Training Day, where you have corruption of some of the protectors, but good prevails; if these descendants of ours are anything like us, this shouldn't confuse their understanding. Then you pop in something like The Naked Gun, and suddenly no one knows what to think!
Each of these detailed the return of Jesus in its own way. Revelations is a florid depiction of possible events that was intended to give inspiration to those working to spread the word of Christ. It was never intended to be taken as a prophesy of literal events that we can expect to transpire.
And yet even today, Revelations continues to inspire in ways that I don't imagine the original author would have ever envisioned. As Jesus is ascending into heaven for the last time, an Angel says to those watching, "Why do you stand here looking into the sky?" (Acts 1:11) I don't believe we can know for sure if Jesus will ever return, but until that time, it's on us. We are each of us on our own...or together. Why are you staring at the sky?
One of my favorite passages from the Bible is a simple analogy. This takes place in a conversation between Jesus and a man named Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a Pharisee, and historians believe he may have lent a hand in cutting down Jesus' corpse from the cross. But when they meet, Jesus scans him with His Jedi mind power, and decides he's cool. So He begins to teach him.
In this passage, there is the infamous John 3:16. Author and pastor John Maxwell, who I admire greatly, refers to this as Jesus' "mission statement". Jesus, Inc. is funny to imagine, but of course that's because I'm only associating mission statements with modern businesses. It makes sense to me that if you want to do something important in your life, you should probably be able to describe it in one or two sentences.
I like what follows shortly after. This was written by the author of the Book of John, who is widely believed to be John:
"This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their evil deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God."
Of course, assuming that the author is writing while divinely inspired, then we have to assume that this is a dramatic reduction of what God actually wants to communicate. He must put His thoughts into words, and those words must be accessible to human understanding. We must not think of literal light and dark, but instead of a concept beyond ourselves, incomprehensible by ourselves, that a being of superior intelligence would resort to using light and dark as a close analogy.
Perhaps we cannot know what the light really is, but I do believe it is every person's duty in life to seek to understand what separates the light from the dark in this world.
Go your way and sin no more.