My Take: Short-cutting Jesus

Churches are taking short-cuts with Jesus, when they should be taking the road less traveled. Mainstream Christianity, and their conservative evangelical brethren, have lost a grip on the language and culture of Jesus’ day, if they ever had it in the first place. Remember, Christianity lost touch with its own Latin and Greek roots and records during the Dark Ages, and the modern church has left well enough alone.

Rather than reconstructing all that lost knowledge, Christianity has opted to engage in a sort of quick and easy time travel exercise to reveal Jesus to modern audiences, and he turns out to be just like we always imagined him to be. It’s as if he never left us.

Catholics figured out one way to do that early on. Losing touch with Jesus just a few hundred years into their long church history, they initiated the doctrine of the “real presence” in order to assure folks Jesus was still with them. His actual flesh and blood from then on were said to be present in the Eucharist materials that priests administered to them regularly.

Protestants developed their own shortcut to Jesus, encapsulated in the doctrine of sudden saving grace. Seekers are instructed to simply believe on his name, and become born again in an instant like his earliest followers. It’s almost as if one were right back with him reaching for his arm and following his steps.

Latter Day Saints have presented the world with yet a different quick-path to the original Jesus. Jesus, LDS say, not only visited the American continent anciently, but visited North America in modern times, appearing to Joseph Smith in a grove of trees in upstate New York. Folks no longer need to worry about finding him in the maze of history, because he has found them and reintroduced himself today.

Such elegant avenues to the historical Jesus are attractive to those who have never read much history, but may be short-changing the real Jesus himself. A large and intense group of biblical scholars started digging around beginning in the early 1800s. But for 200 years now, church-going Christianity has virtually ignored the findings of thousands of deeply honest and highly skilled historians, anthropologists, archeologists, sociologists and language and literature specialists, preferring their own old-fashioned notions as to what Jesus is all about. What have they missed as a result?

An example, mainstream Christianity offers virtually nothing to explain the 18 years of Jesus’ life before he started his teaching and healing movement at roughly age 30. Do those years have no significance at all in explaining what his concerns were? We know he was already preparing when he was 12, actively engaging with professors in the temple. But what of the two decades after that? Christians can better know that today, if they care to.

Going back to the theology of the Old Testament to try to understand Moses and the prophets is an equally fraught exercise. For example, theologians of the Old Testament believe with a virtual certainty that they know what the Ten Commandments of Moses are about. They are so simple. But they are spectacularly wrong. One must turn to legal historians of the ancient world to get closer to the truth. Jesus, in fact, worked on correcting the massive misunderstanding of his own day concerning the commandments. He presented his findings in the Sermon on the Mount. But theologians have no inkling of the fact that is what his sermon is about.

It’s time parishioners ask their spiritual leaders to get in touch with a more up-to-date version of Jesus.

— Kimball Shinkoskey is a public health worker and historian of religion and democracy.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: My Take: Short-cutting Jesus