New Book: The Most Controversial Claims About Jesus

The Internet has been inundated with coverage of the idiocy of a Fox News religion correspondent who attacked the author of a new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth because the author is Muslim and, according to the dim witted Lauren Green, therefore incapable of a balanced scholarly work on the Christ story.   As this blog has repeatedly addressed, the truth is that we know little or nothing about the real Christ - if he even actually existed - and that the leaders of the early Church re-wrote and revised and edited what became the New Testament to fit their agenda and the quest for power and control.   A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the new book and some of the assertions that will drive the Christofascists bonkers - not that they aren't already insane.  Here are some highlights:

The clip became an Internet sensation over the weekend, with BuzzFeed among the first to link to the segment on Saturday with the headline: “Is This The Most Embarrassing Interview Fox News Has Ever Done?” New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum tweeted that, indeed, the interview was “absolutely demented,” while The American Conservative called it “cringe-worthy,” “ignorant” and “breathtakingly incurious,” pointing out that Green showed “zero interest in the book’s argument or content.”

What is Aslan saying about Jesus? How different is the historical Jesus of Nazareth from Christ the religious figure? What were the precise events that led to his crucifixion? And what about those three kings who traveled to Bethlehem to meet the son of God?

Here are the most controversial claims from Zealot:

JESUS WASN'T BORN IN BETHLEHEM  - Few argue that The Nativity is not a lovely story, especially when it’s acted out in church Christmas pageants, complete with Mary and Joseph, and three gift-bearing kings, all in Bethlehem to coo over the newborn son of God. But Aslan writes that this story is simply a magical tale. It appears in the gospels of Matthew and Luke but it’s not mentioned by any of the other apostles. (“The name Bethlehem does not appear anywhere else in the entire New Testament, save for a single verse in the gospel of John.”)

Jesus the historical figure was more likely born and raised in Nazareth—an off-the-map village in Galilee, according to Aslan. “That he came from this tightly enclosed village of a few hundred impoverished Jews may very well be the only fact concerning Jesus’s childhood about which we can be fairly confident,”

JOHN THE BAPTIST WAS ONCE BIGGER THAN JESUS - The apostles reinterpreted John the Baptist’s (in)significance in the gospels to make Jesus seem like the one and only messiah, according to Aslan. The scholar Josephus, who witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem, writes in Antiquities that John was put to death by Antipas, a 1st-century ruler of Galilee and Perea, because he was becoming too popular due to his promises of a new world order—the Kingdom of God. “Many assumed he was the messiah,” writes Aslan, though you would never know it from reading the gospel.

According to Aslan: “The problem for the early Christians was that any acceptance of the basic facts of John’s interaction with Jesus would have been a tacit admission that John was, at least at first, a superior figure...After all, who baptized whom?”

JESUS WAS A ZEALOT REVOLUTIONARY - The real Jesus was more like Che Guevara and history’s other famous rabble rousers than the passive, love-thy-neighbor Christ figure in the bible. It’s not clear why Jesus left Nazareth for Judea and John the Baptist, but when he returned, his transformation from craftsman to self-declared prophet was not entirely well-received. So he established his ministry in Capernaum, a nearby fishing village, which - like Nazareth - was divided between the haves and the have-nots. The Capernaum have-nots did not know about Jesus’s past life as a craftsman and they were desperate for a better life.

Aslan writes that Jesus targeted “those who found themselves cast to the fringes of society, whose lives had been disrupted by the social and economic shifts taking place throughout Galilee.”

HE WAS CRUCIFIED FOR EFFECTIVELY COMMITTING A CAPITAL OFFENSE  -  When Jesus marched into Jerusalem around 30 C.E., flanked by a chorus of followers singing, “Blessed be the coming kingdom of our father David!” he was announcing himself to the city as the messiah and ancestor of David, King of Judah. Then, like a true revolutionary, he forced the city’s vendors out of the temple’s public courtyard--a “blatantly criminal act,” Asman writes. “After all, an attack on the business of the temple is akin to an attack on the priesty nobility, which, considering the temple’s tangled relationship with Rome, is tantamount to attack on Rome itself.”

With that sweeping gesture, Jesus’s message was simple: the land didn’t belong to Rome but to God, and it was time for Caesar to concede power to Hossana, the real King of Jews. This was sedition and the punishment was crucifixion. The New Testament says Jesus’s crucifixion was a cruelly special punishment for a man who sacrificed himself for humanity’s sins, but history tells us that he was no different from “any other criminal who hangs on a cross.”

JESUS DIDN'T CONDONE VIOLENCE, BUT HE DID NOT AVOID IT AT ALL COSTS EITHER -  Jesus’s aggressive “cleansing” of Jerusalem’s temple is unlike the peacemaking Christ we know from the Bible--the one who invariably loved his neighbors and “turned the other cheek” in the face of violence. For starters, there is no evidence that these references are symbolic to all of mankind, but rather that he was speaking only about his Jewish neighbors and enemies.

Add to this that his entire ministry was constructed around the promise--specifically his promise—of God’s sovereignty on earth, and we can only assume that Jesus expected bloodshed before this foundation for a new world order was laid, Aslan writes. Why else would he have warned his disciples that they, too, would “take up his cross” if they chose to follow him? As Aslan points out, his attempt to hide his “messianic secret” about the Kingdom of God from everyone but his disciples indicates that he knew what was to come--that what he envisioned was “so radical, so dangerous, so revolutionary, that Rome’s only conceivable response would be to arrest and execute them all for sedition.”

What's remarkable is that the book underscores how little is really known about Christ.  Yet wars have been fought and countless individuals have died because of a religion based on someone we know almost nothing about historically.  It's all based on the much forged and re-edited Bible.   Recognizing this truth, of course, would cause the Christofascists' house of cards faith to utterly collapse.  We can expect more attacks on Aslan and others who rock their sinking boat.

Vatican Does Damage Control Over Francis I's Role in "Dirty War"

 

 UPDATED 3-16-2013:  The questions about Francis' role in the "Dirty War" continues to have legs.  The Washington Post looks at the story here.

While much of the media continues to fawn over the newly elected Pope Francis I happily gulping down up the pablum dished out by the Vatican, some news outlets are continuing to focus on Francis I - then Jorge Bergogli's - role during Argentina's "Dirty War" when the military dictatorship kidnapped and murdered thousands of political opponents and their presumed supporters.   Apparently, the focus on Francis I's past actions that do not comport with the image the Vatican is trying to spin has hit some raw nerves in Rome.  As the Virginian Pilot reports, Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi has had a temper tantrum and is blaming calling such coverage "defamatory" and part of a "anti-clerical left-wing" campaign to discredit the new Pope.   One has to wonder why the bitter old men who elected Bergoglio pope had not considered this possible negative baggage before hand.  Particularly after having selected a former Hitler youth as pope in 2005.  A piece in Democracy Now looks at the lingering questions about events during the "Dirty War."  Here are some highlights:

While praised for his work with the poor, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio — now Pope Francis — has long been dogged by accusations of his role during Argentina’s military dictatorship. We speak to Horacio Verbitsky, a leading Argentine journalist who exposed Francis’ connection to the abduction of two Jesuit priests. Verbitsky is an investigative journalist for the newspaper Página/12, or Page/12, and head of the Center for Legal and Social Studies, an Argentine human rights organization

Horacio Verbitsky, who has written extensively about the career of Cardinal Bergoglio and his actions during the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. During that time, up to 30,000 people were kidnapped and killed. A 2005 lawsuit accused Jorge Bergoglio of being connected to the 1976 kidnappings of two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics. The lawsuit was filed after the publication of Verbitsky’s book, The Silence: From Paul VI to Bergoglio: The Secret Relations Between the Church and the ESMA. ESMA refers to the former navy school that was turned into a detention center where people were tortured by the military dictatorship. The new pope has denied the charges. He twice invoked his right under Argentine law to refuse to appear in open court to testify about the allegations. When he eventually did testify in 2010, human rights activists characterized his answers as evasive.

But when the military coup overthrow the Isabel Perón government, he was in touch with the military that ousted this government and asked the Jesuits to stop their social work. And when they refused to do it, he stopped protecting them, and he let the military know that they were not more inside the protection of the Jesuits’ company, and they were kidnapped. And they accuse him for this deed. He denies this. He said to me that he tried to get them free, that he talked with the former dictator, Videla, and with former dictator Massera to have them freed.

And during a long period, I heard two versions: the version of the two kidnapped priests that were released after six months of torture and captivity, and the version of Bergoglio.

I found documents in the archive of the foreign relations minister in Argentina, which, from my understanding, gave an end to the debate and show the double standard that Bergoglio used. The first document is a note in which Bergoglio asked the ministry to—the renewal of the passport of one of these two Jesuits that, after his releasing, was living in Germany, asking that the passport was renewed without necessity of this priest coming back to Argentina. The second document is a note from the officer that received the petition recommending to his superior, the minister, the refusal of the renewal of the passport. And the third document is a note from the same officer telling that these priests have links with subversion—that was the name that the military gave to all the people involved in opposition to the government, political or armed opposition to the military—and that he was jailed in the mechanics school of the navy, and saying that this information was provided to the officer by Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio, provincial superior of the Jesuit company. This means, to my understanding, a double standard. He asked the passport given to the priest in a formal note with his signature, but under the table he said the opposite and repeated the accusations that produced the kidnapping of these priests.

[The two priests] They were tortured. They were interrogated. One of the interrogators had externally knowings about theological questions, that induced one of them, Orlando Yorio, to think that their own provincial, Bergoglio, had been involved in this interrogatory.

There's much more that deserves a full read.  The sad truth is that the Church has often sided with cruel and repressive regimes when it has been thought that such alliances with evil would protect the Church's wealth and power.  Wealth and power are at the end of the day the Church hierarchy's true god.