The Church’s Scandalous Betrayal of Jesus
And the existential lesson to draw from Christian absurdities
Imagine how surprised and appalled the historical Jesus would be if he knew that billions of people have celebrated his death, such as by wearing a cross around their neck and praising him for having been crucified.
This would be like the whole world finding out about your worst day, your most catastrophic delusion of grandeur or how you underestimated your rivals, and making that humiliation the centerpiece of a religion that lasts for two thousand years and counting.
Sure, you’ll say, Jesus saw it coming, as the New Testament depicts Jesus as being all-knowing. But that’s myth-making, not history.
You can see Jesus’s legend mounting as the canonical Gospels build on each other, from Mark to John. Indeed, the greatest scandal of those Gospels is that they’re not independent of each other. There are synopses of those narratives that lay out the parallel stories in columns so you can see which words of Mark the others kept, and which they changed to suit the anonymous author’s separate theological agenda.
As Britannica points out, “more than 90 percent of the content of Mark’s Gospel appears in Matthew’s and more than 50 percent in the Gospel of Luke.” Again, that’s not…
