Hello Friends,
I’m still in the same boat with my skin rash which has kept me from a party and some appointments, including one to give blood. On Friday I got some new medication that also doesn’t work (strike two). As I understand it, the doctor says the next thing to do is to try a strong steroid, like Prednisone. At this point, I’m up for anything that will work.
Meanwhile, I’ve been following the news, of course. When I read that Trump had fired the commissioner of labor statistics, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, claiming she had manipulated the jobs report, a scene from Mars Attack! flashed through my mind. I always think of this scene when a public figure tells us to ignore actual evidence and believe what they say. Of course, it’s funny in the movie, the idea of not believing the evidence around you. Not so much in real life.
MARS ATTACKS dont run we are your friends scene
I did have some fun this week. My brother and sister-in-law spent a few days with us and on Wednesday, my sisters and my brother-in-law all came over to celebrate my brother's retirement. We had a lot of good food. I made a strawberry cake that I love and was a hit. I didn’t take a photo of it, but if you like to bake, here’s the gift link to the recipe. (I don’t add the red food coloring.)
It was a pretty lazy week in many ways. A few months ago, before my skin started going crazy, I had made some totes for the women and was able to give them those. I’m trying to use the fabric in my closet. Of course, to use it on projects, I have to buy more fabric that matches. 🙃 My brother took this blurry photo and I cropped out my sisters because I didn’t ask if I could post their images. The flowered fabric was what I was using up; the gold with dots and the webbing is what I had to buy.
Today, I want to discuss the book Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesusby Elaine Pagels. I know many people whose religious trauma has turned them away from any interest in the subject. I get this and I respect that decision. It’s logical. But I have a deep fascination with the radical nature of Jesus Christ. So, I continue my search. I think at some point I will write about my experiences, but they’re a bit strange.
Thinking of people discussing their beliefs, I’m pretty worried about the idea of using the government workplace to proselytize. I’m wondering if people can put a sign on their office door or cubicle that says, “I’m not here for your missionary work.”
A New Threat For Federal Workers: Being 'Persuaded' About Their Religion from HuffPost
This week, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the agency that manages the federal workforce, released a memo titled “Protecting Religious Expression In the Federal Workplace.” In it, the Trump administration details federal workplace behaviors that are now acceptable under the guidelines.
One of them? Telling your co-worker that they should rethink their religious beliefs because yours are correct.
“During a break, an employee may engage another in polite discussion of why his faith is correct and why the non-adherent should re-think his religious beliefs,” the guidelines read.
Seriously, who wants to be harassed like this at work? It’s bad enough that people come to your door at home.
Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus
As I’ve mentioned in past posts: as I think about the change for the worse in the U.S. over the last several years, I want to include books on Christianity in my reading. After all, some of the people driving the most hateful policy changes in our country call themselves Christian nationalists, which, I am coming to believe, simply means fascist-lite. In Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus by Elaine Pagels, I was happy to see that among the many, many interpretations of the gospels (both New Testament and the apocryphal ones) there exists nothing akin to Christian nationalism. In fact, quite the opposite on all counts.
The first three gospel accounts of Jesus’s life and mission begin with his birth. Pagels points to differences in these stories and imagines why each of the writers selects their details.
In the Gospel of Matthew, we have the story of the magi following the bright Christmas star. Matthew’s “likely intention is not to deceive his audience into believing something that didn’t happen. Instead, convinced that Jesus was, indeed, God’s promised Messiah, Matthew may have assumed that events coinciding with his birth would have fulfilled ancient prophecies.” (16)
The various nativity stories lack historical evidence. There's no historical record of Jews having to travel to register for taxes at this time, though there are some later. So the story of Mary and Joseph going to Bethlehem, and Jesus being born there instead of in Nazareth, aren’t credible. Also untold in any historical record is King Herod ordering a massacre of baby boys in the period of Jesus’s birth, although Herod was “famous for his cruelty,” having had two of his own sons executed. Why, then, do the gospel writers include these events?
“They were not writing primarily to report history, or even biography. … Instead, they were writing, some 40 to 70 years after Jesus’s death, primarily to publicize his message. Simply put, Jesus’s devoted believers wrote these narratives to persuade others to ‘believe in the gospel’ – the Greek term euangelion translates as ‘good news’ – and join their new movement.” (17-18)
It’s good to remember, too, that the writers were part of a persecuted group and were staking their lives on getting this good news out. They weren’t like modern-day preacher charlatans raking in money. In Luke’s version of Jesus’s birth, he has angels announcing the good news “to people of good will”—“not to kings, but to herdsmen working outdoors at night. He directs his story, so to speak, to the 99 percent.” (49)
This effort to reach the ‘99 percent’ may explain why gospel stories vary or are even in conflict with one another. (An example of stories in conflict are Jesus’s genealogy stories—they can’t each be true.) While the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are patterned after the Gospel of Mark, the stories alter depending on the desired audience—Jews or gentiles.
There’s much to upset traditional believers in Miracles and Wonder and even a bit to give literalists a fit. The questioning of Jesus’s birth story is likely at the top of the list. As I mentioned above, Jesus’s genealogy story varies depending on the gospel, but Pagels suggests that the virgin birth story is told in Matthew and Luke because there were rumors that Jesus was a b*****d, an illegitimate child. (Perhaps Mark, the gospel written ten years earlier, doesn’t include a virgin birth or address this because those rumors hadn’t made the rounds yet. In fact, Mark includes more troubling stories including that Jesus’ family was worried about his sanity and that Jesus rejected his own family while encouraging his followers to do the same.) Pagels doesn’t make a claim for or against Jesus’s divine paternity, but rather reports which elements of the stories argue different cases. She also summarizes the arguments of various Biblical scholars. These include the fact of Roman soldiers seizing Sepphoris and frequently sexually assaulting many young people, including girls who became pregnant. Perhaps Mary, Jesus’s mother.
The Gospel of John directly speaks of Jesus as the Son of God, “manifesting divine light in human form”—skipping over family and genealogy—and so stands apart from the others (and was written some years later). (50)
Jesus most certainty existed based on Roman records of the period. Anyone with an open mind and an interest in his life can follow Pagels as she continues digging into its meaning. Miracles and Wonder moves forward from the Christmas story to discuss Jesus’s miracles and his mission; his role in bringing the good news and whether he meant that the Kingdom of God was coming immediately or whether he was telling people that it already exists in them rather than on a celestial plane; the Last Supper and what it meant; and Jesus’s death and resurrection. Again, each of these events is interpreted by gospel writers with different audiences, but with the same goal. To further examine them, Pagels also includes discussion of the apocryphal gospels such as the Gospels of Thomas, of Mary Madeline, and of Judas, all read widely in antiquity, but buried away when they were excised by the church as blasphemous. They were found nearly two thousand years later.
I enjoyed Miracles and Wonder, but was sorry to have the interpretations of Jesus’s life and of his meaning end with a discussion of films that have had very little influence over the view of Jesus today and probably no influence over believers. But these films do show that people are still working to understand the meaning of Jesus’s life.
“What amazes me is that so much energy shines through these stories of Jesus that his movement, instead of trailing off into a dead end, has forged unexpected new paths.” (107)
Perhaps this is a digression, but I was sad to learn one bit of information because I wish it had been otherwise. According to Pagels, the Trinity was originally conceived as a holy family—Father, Mother, and Son—but when Christians in later centuries translated Aramaic and Hebrew sources into Greek and Latin, the “gendered connotation of the word ‘spirit’ [ruah] was lost” (51), so the divine Mother was erased quite early on.
While I had previously read some of the arguments Pagels summarizes, the entire book was interesting to me. But then, I’m not a literalist. I believe that stories can be important ways of getting at deeper truths. And this is what Pagels also suggests. Jesus ‘lights a fire in followers’ souls.’ His words are ‘bursting with power’ and transform believers’ lives. (90)
As I reflect on this project, what fascinates me is not only the historical mysteries my book seeks to unravel, but the spiritual power that shines through these stories. This passionate, charismatic first-century rabbi interpreted the Genesis creation story that “God created humankind in his image” to mean that every member of the human race has sacred value. Other moral teachers, like Plato, had recommended helping people in need, but only people of one’s own status – certainly not indigents, the poor, or people enslaved. And other rabbis of Jesus’s time preached, as he did, the Scriptural injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself.“ But instead of focusing such charity, primarily on other Jews in his community, he shocked his listeners by urging them to lend compassion and practical help to anyone who is sick, in prison, or hungry, to a disgraced and ungrateful son, or even to an enemy. Is this what extended his reach so far beyond his own community, and even to ours today? His radical, unprecedented reading of Genesis still resonates through our social and political life as indictment – and inspiration. (246-7)
What has kept the story of Jesus alive for over two thousand years? “As I see it, [the gospels] give us what we often need most: an outburst of hope.” (248)
Note: Miracles and Wonder has a solid bibliography, a handy index, and a selection of many colored plates representing Jesus in various artistic renderings. And happily, no Christian nationalists in sight.
Jesus said, “if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” — from the Gospel of Thomas (109)
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