Posted on 03/17/2004 10:13:27 PM PST by Commie Basher
Now, my grandfather told me, when I was a child, that Jews don't believe in Jesus Christ. He didn't just mean that we disagreed with the Christians about Jesus being the son of God. He meant that Jesus was just a story, that he wasn't a real person, that he never existed.
But I've read the Gospels and I just saw Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. I have to say that I can easily understand why a Jew reading the Gospels, or seeing this movie, might feel that the Gospels and The Passion of the Christ come across as antiSemitic. The Jews of those days are portrayed like modern day Islamic fundamentalists -- willing to kill blasphemers against their religion. Even if you don't believe that Jesus existed, I don't think anyone is contesting the historical fact that Jews of that era stoned blasphemers to death. So if Jesus was a real person, and declared that he was the Son of God, there's no controversy on two facts. The first is that he was a blasphemer to the Jews of that era. The second is that the punishment for blasphemy at the time was a barbaric and painful execution. I'm certainly not one who would want to have to choose between crucifixion and getting stoned to death.
And while we're at it, what's with the Christian obsession with harping on Jesus' death? You say that Jesus came back to life after his death, that's the whole point. And that Jesus is the Son of God, which means he's immortal and still alive today. Ask yourself how Jesus feels when he sees a graphic reminder of his agony in church. No wonder the man's taking so long to come back. I wouldn't want to spend my vacation time on the planet where even all my supposed followers keep reminding me of the worst day of my life.
I happen, personally, to have had an experience I consider to be a personal conversation with God. Actually, it was more like a Vulcan mindmeld on Star Trek. On February 18, 1997, starting around noon, God's mind took over my body for about eight or so hours, and if you asked me who I was while this was going on, my honest answer would have been, "God." It's lucky for me that I didn't live in Jerusalem around CE 30 when this happened and told any of my fellow Jews what was going on inside my body. The Jews of that era would have considered my statement blasphemy and taken some efforts to put me to death.
I know some of my liberal Jewish relatives who probably wouldn't mind having me crucified because of my life membership in the NRA.
But let's take the Gospels at face value for a moment and say, yes, Jesus existed, he's the Son of God, he came to earth, we killed him (and by "we" I don't just mean Jews, but all the descendants of Adam and Eve -- that is, the entire human race), and Jesus came back to life as our Savior.
You can't expect me to believe that God didn't know what was going to happen if he incarnated on planet earth as a man and started taking on the Sanhedrin -- the Taliban of their day. God knew he could count on the Sanhedrin to defend their faith according to their customs and God knew the Roman bureaucracy would act predictably according to theirs. God knew what he was letting himself in for before he set one baby toe on earth and God chose to do it -- in fact God made sure of it. You don't go up to religious freaks like that and say, "Guess what? I'm God's son and I'm here to rewrite the rule book. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah!" You think Jesus didn't have a clue what sort of character Judas had when he picked him as a disciple? He knew, and he knew he could count on him to act according to his character. Because God had a plan and God played us all like a violin. And that's just fine, because God is God and he gets to do things like that when he wants things to turn out a certain way. Things had gone way wrong back in Eden, and God needed to set things on the right path again. You can argue the details but you can't argue that if anyone is primarily responsible for the torture and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, it's not the Jews, it's not the Romans, it's not the human race -- it's not even Satan.
If Jesus Christ was really the Son of God, then Jesus Christ died on the cross so God could live as a man, die, and then be resurrected, and that was God's plan all along. The guilt for the death of Jesus Christ stops on God's desk.
In any event, in case anyone hasn't noticed, Jews don't put anybody to death for blasphemy anymore. Trust me. You can say pretty much any damned thing you want around Jews and the only way you're going to get stoned is if you light up a joint after you do it. I've told a bunch of my Jewish friends about my experience and nobody stoned me. Not even one pebble.
Jews these days also don't ritually sacrifice goats in synagogue. You know what you get if you go into a Jewish temple nowadays? You don't get any animal sacrifices. You get a rabbi with a Gibson acoustic guitar singing Kumbaya. And the rabbi might even be a girl.
Jews today aren't the same religion as Jews at the time of Jesus. Jews today have far more in common with Christians than we do with the Jews who used to go around killing goats in the Temple and executing blasphemers.
I think we should call the religion of those who sacrificed goats at the second Temple of Solomon "Hebrews," to distinguish them from the Jews today. Jews these days have two important things in common with Christians: both Jews and Christians worship the same God as the Hebrews, and neither Jews nor Christians today go around stoning blasphemers to death.
So you know what? I don't identify myself with a bunch of goat-killing, blasphemer-executing lunatics, any more than Christians do, even though both Judaism and Christianity have their roots in the Hebrew religion.
That's not the Jewish religion I was bar mitzvahed into.
Mel Gibson's movie wasn't about modern Jews. It doesn't have anything to do with me.
The Passion of the Christ wasn't anti-Jewish because the word "Jew" has drastically changed meaning in the last two millennia. This controversy isn't about antiSemitism. It's about sloppy use of language and the resulting semantic confusion.
Let me also take this opportunity to express my personal opinion that the critical hits on Mel Gibson disgust me, charging him with everything from enabling Islamic antiSemitism to cynically serving up movie violence with no spiritual purpose simply to make money. Mel Gibson risked his own money to make this film -- just about unheard of in risk-aversive Hollywood -- and it would have taken a prophet to know in advance that his gamble would pay off. Mel Gibson could easily have ended up broke and blacklisted in Hollywood. Instead, he's proved that an independent quality film can make a ton of money and sent a message to the studios that you can make money without making (and usually remaking) crap. This is good news for a screenwriter like me who's trying to find a studio to produce my comic screenplay, adapted from my novel, Escape from Heaven.
And listen. If it's fair game for movies to portray the violence on the silver screen of Nazis torturing and murdering 20th century Jews, it's just as fair game for Mel Gibson to put the Gospels account of the ancient torture and murder of their Lord on screen. I have some news for my fellow Jews. It takes a lot of chutzpah for Jews to try telling Christians how they can or can't preach their religion. Again, as I've said, whatever the Hebrews under Roman occupation did to blasphemers, the guilt doesn't get laid at the doorstep of Jews two millennia later.
But if it makes the Christians happy, let me say the following.
Old-time Hebrews who executed blasphemers were homicidal maniacs -- even if they were goaded into it by God deciding to blaspheme in front of them. If Jesus of Nazareth really existed and was one of those so-called blasphemers caught up in this homicidal madness then executing him was a horrific, unspeakable crime, whether or not he was the Son of God or just a slob like one of us.
But we Jews don't do that sort of thing. We're not the ancient Hebrews. We've learned our lesson. We're all very sorry if the Hebrews conspired with the Romans to have Jesus tortured and executed but all those dudes are long dead and it won't happen again.
Whew! I feel so much better now that I got all that guilt off my chest.
Don't worry Neil, most of us understand that.
Well, sort of. I commend Mr. Schulman for giving Christianity enough thought to recognize a fundamental paradox; he doesn't see the resolution, but then again I doubt if many Christians really can either.
The fundamental paradox is this: if God can do anything, then why could he not simply declare people saved, without bothering with Christ's birth, crucifixion, and resurection? Why all the theatrics?
After seeing Mel Gibson's movie, I think I figured out part of the answer. Suppose you take a deck of cards and deal them out to play freecell. I'm not talking about the PC version--I mean using real cards. Can you move a five of hearts on a nine of clubs? If not, why not? Is there some bizarre cosmic force that prevents the five of hearts from moving onto the nine of clubs?
God created mankind in his own image. A key aspect of that was that God made people accountable for their own actions. Although God would be capable of merely granting salvation to all, to do so would be contrary to His purpose in giving mankind free will. God wants people to worship Him of their own accord; for Him to force that to happen would be for Him to make it impossible.
Neither I nor any mortal can understand the full nature of God's plan for the world (nor even very much of it, really) but God perceived that the human race needed rescuing pretty desparately and yet as God he couldn't simply change the rules to bail everyone out. After all, for him to use such a power would be to deny that Man was created in God's image. Therefore, he had to become human, as only one in Man's own image could rescue mankind.
While I have some terminological objections to those who say that everyone shares the blame for Christ's death (since being blameworthy requires an exercise of free will which caused something bad to happen, and people cannot by free will alter the past), Jesus was sent and sacrificed for all mankind. To use an analogy, if a firefighter recognizes that he'll probably be injured if he goes into a burning building but he'll manage to rescue some people, one wouldn't consider the firefighter's injuries self-inflicted, nor in most cases would they be blamed on the people who were rescued. Rather, the firefighter did what needed to be done, and the fates simply did not allow for a perfect outcome. The rescued people certainly owe a debt of gratitude, but that's far different from saying that they bear blame.
I've heard another reason for why God sent Jesus rather than simply declaring all men saved.
God is all Good (so He wants everyone to get to Heavan), but He's also all Just (so He is compelled to send everyone to Hell, since all have sinned).
Faced with this paradox, God in the form of Jesus paid the price of sin, thus satisfying God's Just side, so everyone can get into Heaven, which is what God's Good (i.e. loving) side wants.
I wish more inter-faith dialogue could approach this level of tolerance. The modern fad is to equate tolerance with tearing out those parts of your religion that might cause conflict with others. That's not tolerance. It's cowardice. The essay above - that's tolerance.
Since several of the comments in this thread raise questions regarding what my point of view is, I thought I'd explain by posting an excerpt from my novel, Escape from Heaven, which discusses these questions. I understand perfectly well that my novel portrays the Trinity in a manner which is heretical to mainstream Christianity and Judaism. It could be considered Gnostic or Kabbalistic.
But I didn't get to what I wrote by studying. It was pure inspiration.
Neil
Excerpt from Chapter Six:
The human drama starts with the words, “In the beginning,” but the first thing you have to understand about God is that he always was, he is now, and he always will be. When Moses asked God for his name, God identified himself as, “I Am that Will Be”—which is about as close as God could come to describing the unconditional fact of his existence to a brilliant but pre-scientific revolutionary.
From the cradle of philosophy in ancient Athens to modern rationalist thinkers such as Ayn Rand, the axiom that “existence exists” is the starting point for all philosophical examination. Yet, many secular philosophers thought the existence of God impossible because their logic told them that God couldn’t come into existence out of nothingness and any consciousness that arose out of existing nature would be subject to natural laws like we are and therefore neither unconditional nor godlike.
What they failed to consider is that existence itself is conscious: self-aware, contemplative, volitional. The words “existence” and “God” are two words identifying the same axiomatic fact. Existence itself is the body and mind of God.
For unfathomable eons, God’s experience of himself was whole and contented. He enjoyed thickening and thinning his body into distinct universes, blowing bubbles that exploded into universes bound by time and space, creating galaxies, stars and planets, watching them do their cosmic dances, then either dissipate back into his body or crunch back together for another explosion and a new dance.
Then God had a philosophical thought, a “what if” speculation, a fantasy, if you prefer. It was a thought that was to change everything, including God’s own experience of himself.
“What if,” God thought, “I could want something I couldn’t have?”
It was an intriguing idea. Since everything that existed was part of God’s body and obeyed his every command, how could anything fail to yield to his will? It was like the classic child’s question, could God make a mountain so big that he couldn’t move it?
Many times had God composed universes the way we would think of a musical composer writing a symphony. God found pleasure in the dialectic of tension and release, dissonance resolving into consonance. There was always a small thrill as God felt a universe crunching to maximum tension, then exploding. God wondered what the thrill of release would be like if there could be an even more intense build up of tension, one he couldn’t launch at will.
The new thought was exquisite in the variety of possibilities it raised.
God contemplated the new thought for what even he considered a long time. After contemplating a lot of different possibilities, and even creating and destroying a number of different universes as experiments to verify his thinking, God decided that the only thing that could possibly create the sort of dynamic he was looking for, the only thing that could build up a tension great enough for the sort of thrill he was seeking, would be to split off part of himself into a separate consciousness, independent of himself, a separate consciousness that could say to him, “No.”
With the possibility of the first “no” would also be created the possibility of the first “yes.”
Thus did the Lord trade his omnipotence, his omniscience, and his omnipresence for the possibility of finding love.
All that followed—the creation of other conscious spirits, the creation of life, the creation of angels and of men, and the even more fabulous opportunity that God offered himself, that he could merge his consciousness into one of his own lesser bodies and live for a time among his own creatures—was an adventure for God. He had given himself the gift of love, but with it came the gift of grief.
Never did God regret his decision. Not for an instant, he told me.
And Jesus spake unto me:
In the time before Time, there was but One Spirit and He was Whole and Content. This spirit was my Father, whom you now observe incarnated into a fleshly body of His own design.
My father wished a companion so he split off part of himself and created a free Spirit, the first spirit created free from prior existence becoming the Second Person—my Mother.
My father and mother, God and Goddess, played with Each Other, creating tensions and releasing them pleasurably, and They decided to make their playing with each other even more pleasurable by taking part from each of them and making a Third.
I was the First Child of God and his Goddess—the Third Person in existence, and the First Born of the race of angels that followed.
“Hold up a second,” I interrupted. “Christians always refer to you as the Second Person of the Trinity,” I said to Jesus. “You’re saying you’re the Third Person?”
Instead, Maryse answered, “Jesus is the Second Person, if you’re considering it as a royal chain of command. I do my best to be apolitical, to reign but not rule. My interests lie in the advocacy of justice.”
Jesus continued:
No one then had bodies. We were all free spirits, and gender was not yet invented. Any of us could join for a time with any other, then part again as we willed. You might think this sort of existence was perfect, but it wasn’t. We had intellect and we had fun, but we didn’t have goals and without goals we did not experience our lives as meaningful.
Mortal or immortal, no one can be content for very long without anything important at stake, and very long comes quickly when you’re immortal. We were discontent.
My father and mother saw trouble brewing with their children not having anything meaningful to do, so they decided to do something about it. My father’s introspection told him that just as he had arrived at the impulse for creation by contemplating the greater pleasures offered by the tension of denied gratification, in the same way providing the discontented angels with the possibility of denied gratification could provide their existence with a goal, a direction, a purpose. Out of this sense of purpose could grow meaning.
First he decided that the resistance necessary for delayed gratification would require creating a universe with congealed energy and a linear time line, a universe of matter and energy, space and time. He had made galaxies, stars, and planets in his previous experiments, and imported a number of already made ones into this new universe.
He spent a week evolving life on a planet around a nice, medium-sized star, designed a salad of colorful plants and a menagerie of interesting pets in a self-sustaining, self-replenishing, and homeostatic ecosystem.
Finally, he invented outer bodies that could slow down the frequency of angelic spirits, enabling matter to impose limitations on spirit—making them subject to external forces. He even fashioned a body for himself, and liked it so much that he started wearing it frequently.
On the sixth day, my father opened up Eden, the first ever theme park, and told his children that if they wanted to play in it we’d have to put on these cute new bipedal mammalian bodies he’d evolved for us to use while in the park. What they didn’t tell us kids was that it wasn’t just a playground. Eden was a kindergarden that taught through educational games, with the purpose of teaching little angels how to grow up to be big gods.
“But something went wrong,” I said.
“Not something went wrong,” said Jesus. “I went wrong. I was the first born. I claimed my rightful place as the first angel to put on a body. You know me by still another name, the name on the body I put on. Adam.”
His appearance morphed. Now he was taller, clean-shaven, fairer, more Nordic-looking.
“You ate the fruit from the tree with the knowledge of good and evil?”
“That’s a nice way of putting it,” said Adam.
Visits to Eden were set up on the buddy system. We angels each had to pair up with another buddy and put on matching bodies—one male, one female. My buddy was my best friend, Lucifer, an angel who was just a little younger than me. You guessed it. Lucifer became Eve.
Lucy was always the life of any party, the sort of angel it was always fun to be around. But she always knew I was a sucker for a game of Truth or Dare. She dared me to hack into the project Eden folder of the Tree of Knowledge—Dad’s Macintosh computer, if it helps you to think of it that way—where we found an as-yet unimplemented design for dihydrogen monoxide crystals. Snow. Lucy immediately thought of all the fun possibilities. Skiing. Sledding. Snowball fights. Making snowmen and snow angels.
You were a teenager once, you know what it’s like. Once Lucy and I got the idea stuck in our heads it seemed like wicked fun. We goaded each other into it and neither of us wanted to back down and look chicken. Our reptile brains — the serpent of legend — were tempting us.
Lucy didn’t know her way around the Tree and I did. To continue the metaphor, she was computer illiterate and didn’t know how to get past Dad’s passwords and safeguards. When it came time to go beyond joking around with each other and actually hack into the planetary operating system, I was the one who knew how to do it and did it.
So, I captured a moon, did a little work on the earth’s orbit, and the next time Dad put on his body and came down to Eden for a walk through the park, I started up the snow machine and told him to look at how Lucy and I had ‘improved’ on his design.
“Did you spank them?” I asked God.
God didn’t answer but shot me a look suggesting my question was boorish. Yes, God had said “ask anything,” but maybe I had gone just a bit too close to the line. Maryse, who has perfect manners, pretended not to notice my faux pas.
“No, Duj,” Jesus said, saving me. “Actually, Dad and Mom were pretty understanding about the whole thing, considering how totally I’d screwed things up. I’d introduced what amounted to a destructive virus into earth’s ecosystem, resulting in an ecology spiraling wildly out of control and, just a few hundred years later, in a global deluge.”
“Jesus!” I said involuntarily.
He nodded and continued:
But worse than that, I’d screwed up the Great Plan.
Lucy and I stayed on earth in our new fleshly bodies in the company of other angels who had incarnated in the park, but Dad told us if we stayed, it was under the condition that we had our access level in the Tree of Knowledge reduced until we returned to the Celestial Realm. I’d crashed Eden’s self-sustaining ecosystem and we were going to have to build a new colony on earth ourselves, by hand. We had to learn whatever lessons the earth had to give us without being able to check our answers by looking in the back of the book. No more angels would be allowed to join the colony until we had things working again; we were going to have to rely on the labor of our own human children.
Things got pretty bad. There was a lot of disagreement among those of us now on our own about what to do. There was a lot of infighting, splitting off into warring factions. You probably already know that things turned violent right from the start, when one of Lucy’s and my sons killed his brother over something as silly as which one had cooked my dad a better dinner during a visit.
Lucy was never quite the same after Cain killed his brother. She withdrew into herself and barely talked to me. She wanted to take off her body and return to the Celestial Realm. She had grown to hate earth and thought the whole Eden project was a mistake from the beginning. I insisted that there was still work to be done on earth. We had those stupid sorts of arguments husbands and wives get into where each of us was accusing the other of having caused the whole mess. Finally Lucy decided to abandon her body and returned to the Celestial Realm without me.
I stayed on earth with our kids until my own body aged beyond repair, then I returned to the Celestial Realm, leaving my human children even more on their own. With little more than a few simple rules to keep them on track, the human race fell into every sort of corruption possible.
Having lived forever, my father has a lot of patience, and isn’t one to give up or give in. If you read the Old Testament you get a pretty good idea how badly it went, how all the choices Dad had left were between bad and worse. My father was determined to get the Eden project back on track, no matter what it took, even if he had to start all over again. The worst of the lot had to be culled—forced out of their bodies and wait-listed for reincarnation — and Dad made lemonade out of the lemon I’d given him by allowing the deluge I’d caused to clean the planet of all but the best samples. There were several more times when cities of totally corrupt humans had to be culled—Sodom and Gomorrah, Canaan — but it was a holding action, at best.
It took my father a while to figure out a plan then he and mom talked it over for a while and brought it to me to see if I was willing to make up for my mistake. It was going to take all three of us, working as a team, if this was going to work. It was the last chance to save not only earth and my children now living there but the future for all the angels as well. I was so ashamed about my celestial stupidity back in the original park that I agreed eagerly, without even asking what exactly I was going to have to do.
I found myself regretting that rash decision more than once, after I found out what I’d agreed to.
Jesus continued:
“When the time came to execute the new plan, my father visited his spirit into a man named Joseph and my mother visited her spirit into a woman named Mary. Both of these humans had been approached by angels in advance to make sure they didn’t mind the joinings. You know exactly what it feels like because it happened to you for a few minutes yesterday, right?”
I nodded. “Except I wasn’t asked in advance whether I minded or not.”
“Well,” Jesus asked, “did you mind?”
I laughed. “You might as well ask whether I like flying, sex, or ice cream. I think I’d give anything to experience that ‘joining’ again.”
“I knew that,” God said to me.
Maryse gave her husband a look and punched him playfully on the arm.
Jesus continued, “While incarnate, they conceived a man child on earth, into whom I breathed my soul at the moment of birth. This was something entirely different than just putting on a body, the way I’d done the first time. I was the first spirit who, having been created in the celestial realm, was naturally conceived and born a mortal human being. I was made to be the first angel ever to die, the first angel ever to go on a suicide mission.”
“How did you stand it?” I asked.
“By the skin of my teeth,” Jesus said. “Just barely. Scared out of my wits when the time came close.”
“Then why did you go through with it?” I asked.
Because it was my fault in the first place! Because it had to be done and there just wasn’t anyone else qualified for the job. Keep in mind, nothing like this had ever been tried before. If something went wrong, existence itself might have been damaged beyond repair. But if it worked—if it could work—then all of us, angels and humans, could take on the power of imagination—learn how to dream—and be able to create universes of our own.
After the small original colony of angels had cast off their flesh and returned to the Celestial Realm, the human children that we angels had procreated on earth lived in a fleshly body that died, was a ghost for a while—sometimes wandering the earth, sometimes hanging around in dismal cities of the dead—and were wait-listed for a chance to reincarnate on earth and do it all over again. No future to speak of.
I came back to earth to bring the children of earth the good news that my father was granting them conditional amnesty and would take them into his kingdom if they’d simply agreed to get with the program again. I had to be born human rather than merely take over a ready-made human body because I was the test pilot to show the human children that they could be transported to the Celestial Realm where they could be given new bodies, grow spiritually, and evolve into gods.
They saw me die. I was dead. There wasn’t any question about it. Then they saw me alive again in a couple of days, looking like myself, without having to be reincarnated as a baby. No less a convincing demonstration of the possibility of resurrection would have worked.
But that was only part of my father’s plan.
Evolution into godhood was once again being offered to the angels. Angels could have their spirits incarnate on earth into human bodies, just like in the original Eden project. Angels who haven’t yet become human first don’t dream. As spirits they lack imagination. Without imagination, creation is impossible.
We were offering angels a chance to become human for a time, so they could learn to dream, and when they returned to the Celestial Realm, they also could become gods.
My father’s great plan was the goal of the modern revolutions: liberty, equality, fraternity. The creator of the universe, the author of history, the inventor of life, the father of the races of angels and humans, was also the first revolutionary. If my father’s plan worked, the Original Spirit would not only have a companion, children, students, and servants. For the first time, God could have friends.
“But no matter what it is, there’s always some malcontent, the fly in the ointment, a critic,” said Jesus.
“Lucifer?” I guessed.
Jesus nodded. “Lucy. Eve. My best friend. The love of my life. The mother of my children. The worst pain in the ass on earth or in Heaven.”
“Your ex-wife,” I said, understanding completely.
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