What have they done to my Jesus?

What has the New Testament (NT aka Christian Scriptures) done with my Jesus? This is a question many people ask when they hear that much of the NT is myth. True, the NT is wrapped up in a lot of myth. The myth about myths, though, is the word myth has the connotation that something is not true. But myths are not necessarily untruths. So, good news! Myth is not a word to fear. According to our text, Glimpses in Truth, Rudolf Bultmann wanted to take the NT and “strip away its pre-scientific worldview, while preserving the kerygma (kernel of truth) wrapped within its archaic thought-forms.” Bultmann says in his essay (Kerygma and Myth, A Theological Debate), “The real purpose of myth is not to present an objective picture of the world as it is, but to express man’s understanding of himself in the world in which he lives.”

Many of us are now aware that we live in a very different time from when the stories about Jesus were written. That world was a very different place. The writings were very different and reflected the influences of their time. The swirling influences of the day included Greek philosophy, mystery cults, a three-floor cosmological construct, etc. Once Jesus went off the scene, the world was left to wrestle and tease out what exactly his coming and going meant. They used what was readily available to them and put into words what they thought it all meant based on their existence in the world at that time. They fought it out with some schools saying Jesus was fully divine and some saying fully human and some in between or both. And we’re still having to fight it out today, outwardly and inwardly within ourselves.

Charles Fillmore, co-founder of Unity, wrestled with the human-divine paradigm. As much as the language in his books sounds like traditional Christianity, it seems like he was much like the people in the NT, trying to explain the human-divine paradox with words and expressions of the day amongst a Christian population. But it seems he ended up hitting upon some of the kernels of truth in the NT such as “let this mind be is you that was also in Christ Jesus” and “Christ in you the hope of glory,” that resonated with the idea of Jesus Christ being the “normative” Way Shower, i.e., siding with the view that it is possible to live as humans with this “Christ-in-us” the way Jesus did.

There appears to be the thread of both human and divine in the New Testament, but through the centuries, in the approvals of religious authorities of the Nicene Creed and other such creeds, varying agendas got pushed. So, who can identify the human/divine paradox if it’s buried in the creeds and not really preached or taught on a Sunday morning in the churches? While many still mentally assent to those creeds (which in fact include the fully human/fully divine nature of Jesus Christ), in actuality they might not even be aware of the question of whether Jesus was fully human and fully divine. Even today, people may in actuality lean toward a Jesus who is purely divine (the view that actually preaches better), because…well…doesn’t it give us greater satisfaction that something or someone greater and more divine than us can be called upon to help us? We humans (or some) like to put Jesus on a pedestal way far out of reach, assuming we can never be that (like Jesus).  So then the question becomes what have WE done with our Jesus? Have we put him on a shelf?

For a layperson, it might be hard to come to grips with the mythology in the NT. It might be too hard to decipher where all the mythological influences are in the NT, or where to even start.  So baby steps would have to be taken. Wait, do we need to even de-mythologize everything if there are still messages for us in those myths?

Can all this wrestling can be done in one lifetime, something that theologians have wrestled with for the last couple of millennia? What to do with Jesus? What is important is that we engage with Jesus again. Take him down off the shelf. Maybe start with do we even believe the historical Jesus existed... and just stay with that a while. And then what does that mean to you outside of what all you’ve been told in Sunday School? It's a start.

Bultmann said in his essay, “Hence the importance of the New Testament mythology lies not in its imagery but in the understanding of existence which it enshrines. The real question is whether this understanding of existence is true. Faith claims that it is, and faith ought not to be tied down to the imagery of New Testament mythology.”

So, without all the trappings and the NT “wrapper” - - would the messages of Jesus’ life overall still shine through as a matter of the heart, by faith, regardless of what century he lived and died in, even if it was today?  I’ll take his example of being human and divine and wrestle with it some more.