So people ask me, "Gabe, what is so heretical about your book?" And so I give them the following reasons: (Spoiler Alert.) "In my book...."
1. Jesus was not conceived as the result of a union between God or an archangel or the Holy Spirit or some unknown Roman soldier and a virgin. He was conceived the old-fashioned way, as the result of a union between a lawfully married husband and wife. Yes, Joseph and Mary, who were Jewish, were married before Jesus was conceived, and he was the firstborn son of Joseph, not God, and he was Jewish, too. On the other hand, it is quite possible that he was conceived on the night that Joseph and Mary got married, and that up until the honeymoon, Mary was a virgin. That does happen sometimes, that women keep their virginity until after the wedding ring is securely on their fingers. But that does kind of takes the magic out of it, doesn't it?
2. Jesus was not an only child. (Actually, many Protestants already know this.) He had brothers and probably sisters, and all five brothers were named in the canonical gospels. Ergo, Mary did not stay a virgin after he was conceived. If there really were a real "Virgin Mary," it would be Miriam, Jesus' fiancee, who waited for thirteen years to marry him.
3. There was no Slaughter of the Innocents. King Herod had other troubles than with tiny peasant boys. Several of his grown sons tried hard to usurp his throne and he had to have them executed. There were factions that campaigned against him, and they had to be put down. Five would-be Messiahs rose up during his last few years on the throne, and they and their thousands of followers had to be executed. What were a handful of little peasant toddlers going to do to him, that he should call for their extermination?
4. Jesus was educated, had gone to school, knew how to read and write, and knew his scriptures and his Oral Law which was made into the Talmud. In fact, I have a little book called The Wisdom of the Talmud and many of the sayings written therein were things that Jesus was said to have quoted in the regular Bible. Since it is highly unlikely that Jewish scholars would have quoted Jesus, Jesus would have quoted them.
5. The Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes were actually Essenic hymns, not things that originated with Jesus. Actually, very little of what was written in the Bible are things that originated with Jesus. He was a great quoter.
6. Judah did not betray Jesus. Jesus asked him to turn him in to the Jewish authorities if the Romans were going to arrest him for treason, because he stood a better chance of getting a fair trial if he went before Jewish judges than Roman ones. Judah did what Jesus asked, and has taken the heat for the "betrayal" ever since.
7. It was not Jesus' intention to die for our sins. Judaism already had mechanisms in place for the expiation of sins. It was Jesus' intention to, if necessary, trade his life for the lives of his followers, friends, disciples and loved ones, since, if you cut off the head of a snake, the body will die. King Herod, when he was alive, had a nasty habit of executing all of the would-be Messiahs' followers, but by the time his son, Prince Antipas, came to rule Judea, dissidents were imprisoned, not executed, and he was still in power when Jesus rose to prominence. However, it was entirely possible that the thousands of people who followed Jesus would be put to death if he led an uprising against the Herodians, the Romans and the Status Quo, and Jesus wanted to avoid that. Therefore, since "it is better for one man to die for many, than for many to die for one man," Jesus was willing to offer his life, if he had to, to save the lives of thousands.
8. The Jews were not to blame for Jesus' death. They weren't even present at the time that Pilate ordered his execution. Pilate worked out of Antonia's Fortress, the Roman military headquarters in Jerusalem, a place where no decent Jewish person would go, because it was made for and inhabited by the Roman military who were pagans. The people who clamored for Jesus' death were, therefore, Romans.
9. Jesus did not suffer greatly after the trial. Whether he was God's biological son or not, he was God's favorite son, and God, as his spiritual father, simply would not allow his son to suffer, any more than you or I would allow our children to suffer.
10. Jesus did not die on the cross, nor were crucifixions nearly as gruesome as they have been made out to be. The object of a crucifixion was to make the felon serve as an example to the public, and let them die slowly. Jesus "died" way too quickly, which is why I say that he was knocked out and then, through a series of amazing events (thunderstorm, earthquake, the fortuitous presence of enough people to help him, who was unconscious, down from the olive tree) he was rescued and escaped. His disciples, being frightened little men, would not have known that he escaped, would have believed the prophesy about how the Messiah was supposed to be three days in the grave before arising from the dead, and they could only write what they believed was true, whether it was really true or not. And that is how the stories began.
So the question on the table is, do these heretical ideas warp, ruin and otherwise destroy the story of Jesus as the Son of God.? No. Even if Jesus was not the only begotten Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God...and on the third day he rose again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom shall have no end, he was and continues to be the Son of God and God's favorite son. He might have died on the cross or olive tree, or he might have died in his sleep some thirty-three years later in Britain just before the Jewish Wars broke out. He might have bodily ascended into heaven from a mountaintop during Penacost, or his immortal soul might have floated gently up to be enveloped in the folds of the Aurora Borealis and thence become One with God on his 66th birthday. He might have been a blissed-out and benign demigod, or he might have been an average man who gives hope and divine forgiveness to other average men. We don't know. We cannot know. And that's all right. Even without the dog and pony show, the smoke and mirrors, and the ecumenical song and dance, he was and is still the spiritual Son of God and an inspiration to what we all should be.
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