Thesis 2: Worshiping a Middle Eastern Man
This is a sensitive essay to write, because I know that many believe that Jesus is the Savior of the world and that he holds a very special place in their hearts. I don’t mean to offend anyone in writing this, but this is important for me to say.
Jesus, and the whole idea behind him, makes me feel awkward.
It’s awkward to me that people literally worship a man from history. I’ve been taught my whole life to not worship people or things, except for Jesus. People ascend the pulpit and profess their unquestioning love for this man they’ve never met. They pray in his name, they claim he never sinned and was perfect in every way, and they call him “beloved.” His smiling face adorns the halls of every church and most Christian living rooms, and large statues of him stand in church visitors centers and throughout the world, much like statues and idols of old. He’s worshipped in every sense, the way that people have worshipped the statues and pictures of dictators, monarchs, and the gods of the other 4,200 religions on earth.
It’s awkward to me that a whole religion focuses on a Middle Eastern man born 2,000 years ago. I recently walked through a Muslim Mosque where I was taught by a kind lady about “Jesus the prophet” grouped with many other ancient Middle Eastern men. I think in Christian’s minds we see Jesus as the soft-spoken European man depicted in many of the paintings and videos he stars in. It’s hard for them to picture a man of Middle Eastern descent in the dirty desserts living in an ancient Roman territory.
It’s awkward to me that those who claim to know Jesus so well know hardly anything about the historical Jesus, the man who actually lived on the earth. Thousands of books have been written about him from an unbiased scholarly perspective, but these books are often dismissed as heresy (since they aren’t the Bible). Most Christians have no idea that Jesus most likely wasn’t born in Bethlehem (it was written in by Luke to fulfill a prophecy), that he never was taken to Egypt as a baby (again, written to fulfill a prophecy), that he never claimed to be a god (a Jew claiming to share godhood with the one God of Israel would have been stoned immediately by the infamously monotheistic Jews), that he didn’t start a church, that he was a revolutionary tried and killed for crimes against the status quo of his government, and that Jesus was a follower of John the Baptist and not vice versa. For being the center of a religion, it’s amazing to me that Christians know hardly anything about Jesus’ actual life, family, profession, or historical context. It’s more amazing to me that they don’t even bother looking into it.
It’s awkward to me that the Jesus we “know” has very little resemblance to Jesus at all. Gospel writers, most who never even met Jesus, created conflicting accounts of a Jesus figure that could rally the Christians together and not be as politically charged as he was in life so that he’d be more palatable to the young Christian church’s Roman overlords. Over the centuries Christian writers and councils and leaders changed the words of the Bible and changed the doctrines behind it to build Jesus into things that he never was. Jesus was a man in life. He was built up to become a God over the next centuries with ever-expanding powers and qualities.
It’s awkward to me that the kind, gentle Jesus portrayed today is the very same being who is portrayed in the Old Testament as a jealous, genocidal, fickle God with thousands of nit-picky rules about the Sabbath, haircuts, periods, and diets, and a penchant for picking favorites.
I suppose that if I could invent a religion, I wouldn’t have it focus on the worship of someone. I’d have it focus on being a community of people striving to be better, to help each other, to improve the world, and to find joy and purpose in this life. Bringing the Middle Eastern man-turned-god from 30 AD who was called Jesus into the center just feels strange to me, and I think it always has.
It’s all just kind of awkward.
