There is a generally held view that the apostolic “faith once delivered to the saints” built a strong Church that beat paganism back into the dark recesses of the then-known world.
C.S. Lewis imaginatively captured this retreat in one of his novels by having the great magician Merlin imprisoned in a block of ice. Christ is on the throne; the Devil and all his works are more or less under control. At least that’s the theory.
But what if instead of being so banished, paganism was actually absorbed into the Christian faith? What if the pure apostolic faith firmly rooted in Jesus the Messiah was already subject to early winds of change? The well-known dictum of Canon Goudge who considered that the infiltration of Roman and Greek ideas into the Christian church represents “a disaster from which we have never recovered, either in doctrine or practice” is well worth pondering.
It is the contention of many scholars and historians that the faith of Jesus of Nazareth was indeed soon corrupted and embellished. The historic Jesus of Nazareth was himself paganized and a “God-Man” emerged. “And because the concept of Jesus as the Messiah too closely linked Jesus with the ordinary world of Jewish life and politics, he was the first to go” (Douglas Lockhart, Jesus the Heretic). Note here the obvious tendency to anti-Semitism.
John sounded the alarm towards the end of the first century: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses the Jesus Christ [Messiah] who came in the flesh [i.e., the human, historical Messiah] is from God; and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus is not from God; and this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world” (I John 4:1-3).
Apostolic Christianity is quite dogmatic on this point: Jesus the Christ was a real “flesh and blood” man, a literal descendant of the biological process traced from real ancestors such as Abraham and David in “the book of the genealogy” of the Jews (see Matt. 1:1).
To confess this fact is to affirm that Jesus was a member of the Jewish race who belonged to a definite culture in a definite period of time. Specifically, it means Jesus was a man supernaturally begotten in history not in eternity. (The Bible has nothing at all to say about an “eternally begotten Son” — a curious “square circle” phrase with no recognizable meaning). It is not irreverent to ask questions such as did Jesus ever twist an ankle? Did his breath ever smell bad after a spicy meal? Did he ever get cuts and bruises on his feet? Did insects ever bite him? And what about women...was he ever affectionately attracted to them?
In 1965 the Jewish author Dr. Hugh Schonfield released a controversial book called The Passover Plot. His thesis was that the Jesus of faith had virtually eclipsed the Jesus of history. That is, the human called Jesus had disappeared beneath a theological overlay of awesome proportions. By a process of embellishment and embroidery the man Jesus had been mercilessly etherealized, to the point where we have now arrived at an idealized, less-than-human Jesus.
The result? If we are ever to know the Jesus of history we must cut through centuries of theological accretions to release him from the layers of Christological construction. Even at a most basic level many Christians seem unaware that the title “Christ” is simply a Greek translation of the Hebrew title “Messiah”; they somehow think it refers to the second Person of the Trinity. However, the word “Christ” simply means “Messiah,” one chosen and anointed by God. Jesus had never heard of a triune God.
Christianity has created the problem of a “double-natured Lord” by ignoring the Jewish man who is Messiah and by theologically working the “Christ” up into something extra-Biblical. The Jesus of theology, the Jesus of faith, the Jesus legislated into being by Constantine and the Councils as “fully God,” obscures the Jesus of history, the Jesus of flesh and blood who lived a real human life as Israel’s promised Messiah.
By ignoring the Jewish background of the Gospels, we have transposed Jesus into a Being suspended between fact and fantasy, a hybrid.
Many examples can be given to show that Jesus was a man limited by his human boundaries. Even at the climax of his life in Gethsemane Jesus is proven to be the Son of Man. As a flesh and blood man he is utterly shaken by what is before him. He quakes so much that he sweats great drops of blood. If we start from a position of later “orthodoxy,” suggests Lockhart, his prayer in Gethsemane is full of doctrinal errors, mistakes in self-interpretation which would have earned him the stake a few hundred years later! The biblical Jesus is distinctly unorthodox by our traditional standards.
It is obvious that Jesus does not consider himself God made manifest in the flesh, a member of a Trinity. The Messiah he certainly is, the One chosen to offer the supreme sacrifice for Israel and the world, but at base he is seen in Gethsemane as flesh and blood and no more. “All things are possible to You,” he prays, implying that all things are not possible to him. And then, “not what I desire, but what You desire,” indicating submission to God, and not the completion of a purpose of his own making. We see here the Son of God submitting to God, not God submitting to God.
On the cross his words, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” further divorce him from the philosophic creation that he was wholly God: For how could Jesus as God forsake himself?
How then did we get to the later developments at the time of Athanasius who declared the true Catholic faith, “That we worship One God as Trinity, and Trinity in Unity — neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the substance — for there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost, but the Godhead of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one, the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal”? Yet, even Athanasius it seems had trouble with his own definition, for he later wrote that concerning the divinity of the Logos, “the more he thought the less he comprehended; and the more he wrote the less capable was he of expressing his thoughts” (T.D. Doane, Bible Myths).
To enforce this piece of incomprehensible verbalism the Council of Nicea attached an anathema to it, so making it binding on the whole church: “The Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes those who say that there was a time when the Son of God was not, and that before he was begotten, he was not, and that he was made out of nothing, or out of another substance or essence, and is created, or changeable, or alterable.”
As Lockhard comments, “All in all, a tight little package which set the inevitable ball of heresy rolling, the flames rising, the cries and screams of innocent human beings into the fetid air of dank prisons. Because a Church Council composed of people like Athanasius had said so, Jesus was no longer the Jewish Messiah, the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, the Archetypal man...he was the alien Jewish God shoe-horned into a physical body and let loose as a refurbished pagan deity of monstrous proportions” (p. 131).
I remember as a lad of 17 years of age traveling overseas for the first time. I landed in Hong Kong and the culture shock was huge. One image will always stay with me. On a church wall high up on a mountain near the Chinese border was painted the Christ. He was Chinese — with full pig-tail and traditional Chinese dress!
We humans are quite adept at constructing a Jesus in our own image. God’s ancient complaint still stands: “You thought I was altogether one just like you!”
Yet Jesus even in his resurrected and exalted status is still the Son of Man. Rev. 1:13: “one like a son of man,” i.e. human being. Dan. 7:13: “the Son of Man came up to the Ancient of Days.” Jesus testified after his resurrection that he still has hands and feet of real “flesh and bone” (Lk. 24:39; see also 1 Tim. 2:5, the man Messiah. There is a glorified Jew in heaven).
It seems obvious that the Church Fathers developed a pagan iconography of Christ to meet certain political pressures. As Lockhart again suggests, at the bottom of it all was the Hellenistic philosophy of kingship: “As God was to the cosmos, and the king was to the state, so the divine Logos indwelt the king and in turn became a king by association. The king, acting in a Godlike manner, and as a shepherd to his people, was seen as a kind of incarnate God, a link between heaven and earth, and the divine Logos as incarnate God was promoted to universal cosmic Emperor who understandably enough, validated his almost divine deputy’s every action. A neat little package which quickly bestowed dignity and privilege, dress and insignia upon the Church’s chief ministers, and in turn allowed the king to parade himself as God’s earthly representative. Borrowing extensively from court ritual, these chief ministers of the New Creation Order successfully buried Jesus the Jew for a second time” (Lockhart, p. 27).
It is easy to see how the Roman Catholic system took form. For not only Jesus suffered such metamorphosis but even his followers. Mary his mother is now promoted to the status of “Mother of God” and the saints are intercessors.
Thus under the influence of such Hellenism this pagan iconography of Christ climaxed in the time of Constantine as a new Jesus formally emerged under the pressure of political expediency and theological fantasy.
This development had disastrous consequences for the Biblical testimony to the unity and uniqueness of God. Don Cupitt remarks that once this doctrine of the Incarnation of a preexisting Son of God was created the cult of the Divine Christ actually put Deity itself into the background, for when God the Father was reaffirmed, He was envisaged simply in anthropomorphic terms. The door to paganism had been unwittingly reopened.
Fair comment. For however well-intentioned, the focus of worship had been shifted from God to man. This shift would eventually legitimize the cult of humanism. Deity would slide into the background. The otherness of God would be lost — or as the theologians call it, the transcendence of God. His “awesomeness” would become manageable and comfortable.
Does it follow that this very failure to confess Jesus the Messiah as “come in the flesh” has fostered in some kind of an inverted way the rampant secularism of our age? For the Almighty God has assumed human form and the ultimate mystery and unity of God has collapsed into a concept of agreeable human proportions — our little “self.” In making Jesus fully God, did we make man God?
This trend can be observed in the development of art from the fourth century onwards. The taboo against depicting God in any way was forgotten. The result was a focusing of attention on Jesus and away from the great mystery of God’s otherness. Our sense of awe in worship, that which should take our breath away, so to speak, was severely compromised.
It also appears that Christian art prior to Constantine was hesitant but after him it became elaborate and aesthetically pleasing. Don Cupitt goes so far as to say that Christian art was emerging as part of a complex process by which Christianity was very extensively paganized in its faith, worship, organization and social teaching (The Myth of God, p. 142-3).
The Church has made Jesus more than he ever wished to be. Promoting the Son of God involved demoting his Father. It is time for the truth to emerge once more. It is time to confess Jesus the Messiah as “come in the flesh.” Jesus the God-Man in a Trinitarian sense must be laid to rest. Only in this way can we disengage the Biblical faith from its later additions and mythologies. Armed with the creed of Israel, Christians can attract the attention of the world of unitarian Jews and Muslims.²
by Greg Deuble
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