Smoke and Bounce

8:28 am EST

"CHRIST AND HISTORICITY"

"Jesus the Messiah" -- delusion? how about confirmation bias? The gospels meet the demands of the Bible as a literary volume, a text. Isn't it a bit convenient that the most important man in history, the most important "failure" in history, lived during a recorded period? Yes, you read that correctly. We don't attribute the human faculty of following animal tracks to hunt to a particular individual's influence -- even though the tactic was likely taught or imitated -- because the founder of the practice lived in a pre-recorded time. We don't note the founder of herding or seed-sowing, either, for the same reason. These men do not have identities today.

Jesus founded "irrational altruism". Now, this is a very late development in anthropological history, late enough to be recorded. Jesus stood on the shoulders of giants; the brilliant primeval Homo, the Hebrew writers of their scriptures, even the road-builders of the Roman state. What would he have been without those others? He was a man in the Anthropocene, and I'm sure he thought plenty about that; i.e., the socio-political context of his existence. His self-image surely evolved; nothing in the gospels suggests that he was a pre-cog; he eyeballed, reexamined and reevaluated his reputation and significance as his life progressed.

The situation culminated immediately before the Passion. (John 18:37) "You yourself are saying I am a king." That's Jesus at his most fatalistic, maybe his most arbitrary. The translation of this remark to Pontius Pilate might be "It's true if you say it's true." Or maybe even more ambivalently "Believe what you want to," as it were. Pilate (18:38) responded "What is truth?" -- rhetorically. Were the two men in agreement? on the same wavelength? Jesus offered no counterargument that essential truth exists. Thus the dialogue ended there, as a philosophical self-actualization. Jesus cashed in his chips, maybe. He's a consummation of the past scriptures, or as good a one as you can get, and maybe Jesus knew this, thinking if from this point on there comes a different one, a truer messiah than I... well, then, oh well. Jesus was satisfied enough with his own teachings, his own identity; he didn't think himself a liar or a jerk, so: Let them believe I am the messiah. Maybe I am. And even if I'm not, they could do worse than me.

That's not to say he looked at himself as a default -- perhaps he saw certainly the Anthropocene firmly embedded on the horizon, with its dispassionate businessmen and the like, and decided that it was an ideal time to cement ethical monotheism as a powerful phenomenon. The known world was on the cusp of an early information age, and there was a coming industrial revolution of sorts. Think of today (2013): historical events are too rigorously documented to bear any myth -- contrast this with the falling of Jericho's walls, for example. The only earthly place where the laws of nature are violated is in our hearts and minds. Not in politics, not in ecology, etc. I'll point out that it's not as if the 2013 Israeli government has any plans to add anything to the Jewish scriptures, just like they didn't add anything after the Six-Day War of the 1960s, even though surely another seizure of Jerusalem by Jews would easily be significant enough to make it into the texts were we not living in the Common Era.

At the turn of the CE, the world was becoming more... well, common. Thanks to the Romans, cosmopolitan ethnic diversity was becoming an irreversible reality, along with interracial marriage. Being human, Jesus didn't always extend himself fully to Gentiles, but sometimes he did. He likely had a sense that his faith would evaporate from world history as long as it was the sole property of the Jews. His technique for theological diffusion was to encourage the sense of God on an individual level: personal mysticism. (Our current Dalai Lama faces a similar challenge.) Jesus didn't risk speaking on political matters much; he hedged his bets on spirituality probably because he had a sense of the reality of natural history, something most intelligent people think about when face to face with ethnic diversity. He may have suspected the deep age of the universe and the true indefiniteness of its future. Did he know the Sun will burn out? More immediately, what could any man prophesy about future geopolitical events by Jesus' time? Recording history was becoming more of an exact science. (Compare the early Herodotus to the later Tacitus, for example.) With little to no room for interpolation, the spirit of Jehovah risked succumbing to literalist disillusionment. A final statement about what it all meant needed to be made. Jesus saved the mythical quality of the Scriptures by bringing them to a close. [Please note that in the opinion of this author, the Bible should end with the gospels, and that the apologies of Paul and the like should be eliminated to preserve the volume's formal literary integrity.] By contrast to Jesus, any snake-oil healer of today would be recognized as a charlatan by the educated, whose lamp is very harsh indeed. But the Bible entertains my intelligence and curiosity partly because it requires the cooperation of my imagination. Christian theology would be spittle in the wind if it were born amidst the cheeseburgers and televisions of today.

Personally, I think an invasion of space aliens would occur before Revelations was manifest, but think about how difficult it would be to objectively believe any unprecedented event like a rapture occurred! How many grainy cell-phone videos from how many different angles would it take to not suspect that it was a digital fabrication? And supposing the Second Coming was filmed by the requisite number of iPhones, the result would be so anti-cinematic, the coverage so non-artistic, that there would be no pomp.

Well, so: is Jesus' importance an accident of historical context? I would say that it is. He lived during the turning point from the oral tradition to written scholasticism. He completed the Scriptures just in time to preserve their relevance and vigor. (And they remain vigorous even in paleoanthropology: "African Eve" is a useful term you may have heard of.) Genesis provides insight into the nature of our ecology and species, though it takes thoughtful interpretation. The latter end of the Bible bespeaks of a conscientious and timeless love, and not quite too specifically or dogmatically. Jesus didn't leave the understanding of the Kingdom open to reevaluation just because he didn't know or was satisfied with what he did know; really, he empowered an animal of conscience by securing the mystery of the Kingdom from any microscope of the future.