The Stoic Canon of the Christ Cult

      Volumes have been written on the canon, a very small selection of the great mass of documents that were produced by various churches in the first few centuries of the existence of the new movement. Given that I analyze and critique these books it might be good to ask ‘why devote attention to this very narrow selection of texts.' For in agreeing from the start to restrict our analysis only to the ‘Christian Canon' we give our consent to a process of selection and nullification that took place many ages ago, and which in the end produced the documents finally selected and ‘canonized' in the fourth century by the victors in the internecine struggle that took place in the early centuries of the church.

      This power struggle was eventually won by a very small clique of celibate priests who belonged to what might be termed the Christ Cult movement in early Christianity. These texts were their selections, although the process in actual practice must have proved to be a little more complicated than a simple ‘power grab' followed by enforcement of ‘orthodox' decisions by a priestly hierarchy who, through their alliance with Caesar became the power elite of the church The church has never been homogenous, although the power center of the church has always tried to maintain homogeneity, and for this reasons there are social pressures that come into play when decisions such as that of ‘canonization of books' must be made. Those factions strong enough in the early church to make their presence felt could only be ignored at the peril of the leadership that emerged (if they wanted to maintain some sort of legitimacy).

      The early church was very diverse, but the canon is not. We do not find Gnostic texts included the canon. For example the Gospel of Thomas shares the parables found in the canonical gospels (the gospel it most resembles is Mark). However absent in this gospel is the notion of deference to authority, and given that the church structure was to become authoritarian and hierarchical it is understandable that a Gnostic document such as Thomas would be an unwelcome addition to canon. Gnostic documents put the emphasis on personal experience, while the canon puts the emphasis on authority figures, a clear polemical device that serves the interest of the priesthood, and not the individual, since it is church leaders who are the beneficiaries of this power structure. The polemical connection is to clear to require any more comment than that.

      The gospel of Thomas rejects authority and exalts the individual, and such things were not welcome in the canon for obvious reasons. For example we read, ‘If your leaders say to you, ‘Behold the Kingdom is in the sky, then the birds will get there before you...Rather the Kingdom is inside of you...When you know yourselves you will be known, and will understand that you are children of the living God...but otherwise you will live in poverty...Jesus said to them, ‘I am not your teacher.'..." There is also a clear allusion to the return to the Garden of Eden in Thomas, in direct conflict with the hostility to ‘the flesh' so characteristic of Greek Stoic philosophy, the church canon (not to mention certain other sects of Gnostics). "His disciples said, "When will you appear? Jesus said, "When you strip and are not embarrassed, and you take your clothes and throw them down under your feet like little children, and trample them, then you will see the Child of the Living One and will not be afraid... Whoever has discovered the body is worth more than the world...Have you already understood the beginning so that you now look for the end? For where the beginning is, there the end will be also. Blessed is the one who takes his stand at the beginning, for that person will know the end and will not experience death." You can hardly imagine something like that being included in the documents of the church which emphasize the philosophy of hostility towards ‘the flesh' (as the source of all evils) and to use an analogy, urge the wearing of fig leaves for ‘the sake of decency.'

      The material that is included in ‘the canon' is heavily slanted towards the viewpoint and outlook of the early Christ Cult, which was characterized by the conservative social outlook of the Greek Stoics, an extremely high theological position and a corresponding High Christology. God was perfectly omnipotent, perfectly all knowing, completely in control, and according to the theology characteristic of this Christ Cult in its highest expression an omnipotent God actually ‘divinely predestined' everything that was to take place on the earth ‘before even creating the world.' At the same time God would also have to perfectly embody every perfect quality, being altogether perfectly good, perfectly just, perfectly kind, and so on. The problem with this position becomes apparent when we consider the problems of human suffering and human pain, starvation, wars, famines, diseases, all of which according to this theology were knowingly created by a supremely powerful divine being ‘before the world began', a being which would never have to endure such sufferings but nevertheless in act of divine fiat saw fit to inflict such things on small helpless beings who then, as now, are in no position to protest or do much of anything else. It is also characteristic of this Christ Cult to insist that what they refer to as ‘the plan of salvation' was also ‘divinely ordained and predestined' before the creation of the world. Therefore, we must assume, with God being flawless, the universe must have been created evil, and God then was the source and creator of evil, which creates problems when they later wish to insist that God is also completely fair and just. Add onto this the fact that it was also ordained that salvation would consist of ‘the sacrificial payment for sins in the atoning death of the Christ figure' and one can also see that God was the original creator and source of sin, having created people with what the Christ cult referred to as ‘sinful flesh', this condition no doubt being also ‘divinely ordained from the foundation of the world' (but then wasn't everything).

      If one wishes to put the viewpoint of the triumphant Christ Cult into historical context, in terms of philosophy it belongs to the school of thought Greek Stoicism, and this philosophy, with its suspicion of human sexuality and the human body and its strictly conservative ideas about social order and its rigid resistance to change or revolutionary ideas is found to permeate almost every letter that eventually made it into the Christian canon. This is no surprise since this philosophy was the belief system of the celibate stoics who eventually triumphed in the power struggle in the early church, and the canon, naturally enough, came to be made in their own image. Winners, they say, write history, and they also wrote the Bible, and given that this is true it leads to many legitimate questions about the legitimacy of the canon. The Christian canon as it has come down is representative of the viewpoints of one very small faction and given the narrowness of its point of view and the highly questionable nature of its internally inconsistent philosophical position, it can be justifiably argued that it has exerted an influence over both church and society far out of proportion to its actual importance for far to long.

      And this in and of itself is more than enough reason to subject this narrowly restrictive Stoic canon to the rigors of critical analysis, not because it is so important on its own merits, but because it has been declared important, and then proceeds to exert an influence over human societies and individual lives. The early church was diverse and this diversity of voice was deliberately destroyed, such reactionary social attitudes towards diversity being characteristic of schools of Stoicism in ancient Greece and also of the Stoics who rose to the top of the power structure in the church. Indeed, even the hierarchical and patriarchal structure of the church itself which lent itself so well to exploitation by the Stoics in the early Christ cult is itself an expression of the conservative Stoic world view and its hard nosed attitudes about social control and strict order, duty, responsibility, and obedience and deterrence to all authorities by those who were ‘divinely ordained' to fill their roles as dutiful slaves or dutiful women working at home, or dutiful peasant farmers content with their lot and subject to the powers ordained by God, including of course, the powers that rose to the top of the church and then worked hand in hand with the elites of society in maintaining patriarchy. Greek Stoicism was elevated to the status of Divine Commandment through the nifty trick of declaring the writings of the Christ Cult and the Stoics to be exclusively ‘the Word of God' through the device of canonization.

      The influence of Stoicism is most clearly evident in the selection of letters found in the Church documents. Absent here is any trace of the types of disturbing social critique and the lashing out at authority characteristic of earlier Jewish prophecy, where nothing in human society is regarded as sacred and no authority of any kind escapes a scathing tongue lashing. Rather than justifying social injustice, and calling for the lowly to be content with being lowly, as Greek Stoics in church letters do, prophets held that if society was unjust then those in power were to be held responsible. It went with the territory. That radical liberation writings were not included in this narrow selection of church letters is not a reflection of the preference of God for Greek Stoicism and patriarchal social structures, as the polemical device of canonization would like to suggest, but rather was a function of the fact that the winners get to pick what goes into the canon, and the winners in this case were extremely conservative Stoics. Now even Stoics, like the prophets before them, find things in society to criticize. Thus only the flesh, the human genitalia and the body are subject to harsh critique in this collection of documents, in classic Stoic form. Even the selection of names attached to what were actually anonymous or pseudipigraphical compositions (they were all named after what were purported to be ‘authorities' to be obeyed, apostles and ‘brothers of Jesus' and so on) all this is also a reflection of Stoic thinking and the desire to create a social order where deference to the priests and political authorities were paramount. The authority of powers on earth was the authority granted to them by God, as established and enforced on the orders of ‘Jesus', various ‘brothers of Jesus' and ‘apostles' and other such people who get to dictate to society based on who they are, or so the mythology suggests, in fine polemical form.

      Biblical criticism was practiced among the earlier Jewish prophets, but such things were downplayed in the canon. For example we find in the Jewish canon, which is more diverse than the Christian, the prophet Jeremiah rejecting the Moses myth and the entire Levitical temple system. There is only one example of a rejection of the Christ Cult found in the documents of the church, in the Gospel of Mark, and that this gospel is even included in the canon is an illustration of the delicate balancing act that even the most powerful Stoics in the early church had to maintain in order to avoid questions about their legitimacy. The Gospel of Mark was around for a long time, and thus had of its own accord achieved a kind of canonization through usage, and it would be dangerous to dispose of the document, although historical evidence indicates that it almost disappeared entirely (while surviving manuscripts of Matthew and Luke exist from the first and second centuries, the Gospel of Mark reappears in the manuscript evidence only in the third century, just in time to become popular enough to force inclusion into the canon.)

      I say force inclusion, because this document is not in step with the characteristic Christ Cult that is in evidence in almost every other document in the Church collection. It is anomalous and given the intolerance for diversity displayed by the Stoic hierarchy its inclusion can only be explained by the fact that it was accepted as Canonical in its own right, through usage, and could not simply be disposed of. A similar social force must have been at work to preserve such radical documents as some of what we find in Jeremiah with its sweeping denunciation of the Moses myth and the entire temple cult system, given that the priests of the temple cult were responsible for the Jewish canon. No equivalent rejection of the Christ Cult or any questioning of its legitimacy is preserved in the letters of the church, a trick which might be taken to lend an air of authority to the Christian sacrificial Cult but is actually representative only of the predominant position acquired by the adherents of the Christ Cult at a certain point in history when the power of the state and the power of the Stoics in the priesthood came together at the time the canon was being declared.

      So a balanced presentation is not characteristic of the Christian Canon, and as a result the canon of the church is much more lop sided and nonrepresentative than one could argue is the case with the earlier Jewish canon which represents a much broader range of opinion (leading naturally enough to charges of ‘contradiction' - but in the case of a canon, only if one wishes to maintain the fiction that a canon represents the Word of God, infallible and inerrant, does a charge of contradiction have any validity-better by far to have diverse, and thus contradictory voices in a canon than to have the oppressive burden of single voices masquerading as authority through the simple device of silencing all opposition and then claiming the ‘authority' of ‘sacred scripture' given that, through this kind of trickery, the canon then would speak with only a single voice.)

      Criticism of the Christ Cult is not tolerated in the canon. Certainly criticism of the Torah is found, but for social reasons it is normally found to be directed only at the clean and unclean regulations and the food laws (unpopular among Gentiles, and so wide open for attack). Jeremiah like criticism of the levitical sacrificial system is not tolerated, and it is even the case that we find such foolish documents as the Letter to the Hebrews included in the canon, a document which laid the groundwork for the sacrificial system of the Christ Cult, and which while acknowledging the prophet Jeremiah, diligently avoids the rejection of the levitical cult, understandably in this document, since the whole book of Hebrews will revolve around the legitimacy of the Moses cult and the cow sacrificing cult in the temple to make the claim that the Christ Cult is just the natural end result of this earlier system. While Jeremiah will be quoted in this document it will only be to insist that Jeremiah predicted that the (legitimate) levitical Moses cult would be superseded by the sacrificial Christ cult, and the critique of the legitimacy of the earlier cult of Moses is understandably deliberately not acknowledged in the letter of Hebrews. This same nullification of protest and radicalism in Jewish prophecy will be characteristic of the letters collected as canonical, and such conservative readings of scripture are about what one would expect to be the choices of such conservative Stoics with their strong aversion to the questioning of religious tradition and their extreme dislike of social discord or protest, characteristic of Jewish prophecy but notably not characteristic of the letters of the Christian canon.

      So I mention all this to simply make the point that my interest in critical methods of Biblical analysis directed towards this canon is not a function of my great fondness for the canon, but rather is function of the fact that the canon is over hyped and granted undue importance, but nevertheless it gains importance simply through the stunt of being declared ‘canonical' and since so many gullible people are willing to follow the line, and restrict themselves, their lives, and their philosophy to the narrowness of the thinking of the Christ Cult and the narrowness of Stoic philosophy one is forced to become a biblical scholar, like it or not.

      One of the functions of the canon is to narrow the ground of discussion to within the parameters laid out by the Christ cult, but due to the inclusion of such non cultish documents as Mark and the prophets of the Jewish canon it is possible to widen the terms of debate even while ‘remaining within the canon.' However, what is to say that one must ‘remain in the canon' in the first place? To restrict all thought to the terms and frames of reference of ‘a canon' is to legitimize the canon, and to do this is refuse to acknowledge the diversity present in the early church, not to mention the diversity present in human thought, aside from whatever this or that movement in the early church might have thought.

      People are so accustomed (one could even say brainwashed) by the terminology and frames of reference of this Greek Stoic Christ Cult that is almost impossible for anyone to imagine making any sense out of the Gospel without speaking of it using the language of ‘sin sacrifice' and the terminology of this one particular church cult. But it is easy to picture the meaning of the gospel in terms completely absent the questionable high theological assumptions of this cult or its narrow focus on priestly animal sin sacrifices.

      For example, if we assume that God is not omnipotent, then the universe and all the evil in it becomes a type of ‘mistake'. Something has ‘gone wrong' in this place, and while this sort of thinking (a God capable of not having ‘foreknowledge' of errors or disasters) might seem shocking to those immersed in the high theology of the Christ Cult it does have the advantage of not being so internally inconsistent as the convoluted thinking of high Christology (where a perfect and all knowing God created evil before the world began, and also kindly created salvation from the evils (usually of sinfully wicked flesh) before the world began, and nevertheless is perfectly good and just, an impossible nut to crack, and the best argument against the high theology of the Christ Cult as presented in the canon). This is particularly true when one considers that the punishments meted out for being not being ‘saved' are hideous, and that human beings are ‘born in sin', another little gift of the God of the Christ Cult, and when one considers that anyone with a modicum of compassion, and not inclined to abuse a power relationship, could easily come up with a design for the universe absent this cruelty and injustice and such a God is easily stripped of ‘glory' and instead appears ruthlessly cruel and arbitrary.)

      Now as for the meaning of the crucifixion, once again if we think in terms of normal human justice (a gospel then, that truly a little child could understand) it is possible to understand and preach a gospel devoid of all the levitical sacrificial elements that so characterize the writings of the Christ cult in the letters collected as canon in the Church bible. Now to do so is to reject the importance, position and power of priests and preachers, who, in the Christ Cult sacrificial system, are truly the most important people in the world, the sole voice of the only truth, not to mention the sole baptizers, the sole dispensers of the sacraments of sacrifice, and the sole source of the forgiveness of inborn sin declared to be the nature of humanity at birth by the same priests (the polemical connection between the dogmas of the Christ Cult and the self interest of the Christian pulpit are to clear to require any more comment that that.)

      Now I do not restrict myself to canon or to the language and mythology of the Christ cult of sin sacrifice and sin payment, for these very reasons. What I usually do, myself, is to point people to the general story line of the gospel of Mark, the one gospel absent the elements of the sacrificed God Christ cult in the canon. According to the story line, Yeshua was a radical protestor against the Torah and religious orthodoxy, something along the lines of Jeremiah, in the Jewish prophets, or Spinosa, or to use a modern analogy, Salmon Rushdie, who, as far as I know, is still hiding out in the wilderness. Now the technique of such stuck in the mud conservatives as the Greek Stoics with their rigid ideas of social order was to crucify slaves if they got out of line, and so we can first make note of the fact that according to the gospel then, Caesar and his priests crucify slaves but God raises slaves from the dead. The meaning of such symbolism, stripped of orthodox levite dogma, then becomes obvious. It is a symbol of divine justice, and an overthrow and judgment against the oppressive and corrupt power systems of the earth, this being in line then, not with Leviticus, as is the case with the Christ Cult, but rather with the spirit that informed Jewish prophecy with its disturbing and radical social protest. So then do we need a letters of Hebrew or book of Romans Levitical cow sacrifice before we can even begin to understand the meaning of such a thing as the crucifixion? Are we lost without the terminology of the cult of animal sacrifice and the Christ cult or without the rigid patriarchal world view of Greek Stoicism. Hardly.

      Of course, in thinking along these lines we have gone beyond the canon, indeed, given that the canon is hostile to such notions, we have no choice. But then the function of the canon is to stop us from thinking in these terms in the first place, created as it was by celibate Stoic priests during the time of their marriage to Caesar, who was the one who kept crucifying all those slaves, and let's face it, wouldn't be comfortable with a radical gospel message that kept reminding him of how rotten and corrupt his ways were. That Caesar could live with Leviticus, just as I am sure Ahab or other such rulers could live with the Levite system, even if they couldn't live with prophets is obvious. When we look over the sweep of history and notice how popular and easy to live with Caesar always found that Christ Cult of sacrifice to be and it becomes obvious that the narrow selection of Stoic Christ Cult documents and the nullification of the radical stream of Jewish prophecy was no accident, but rather all this happened by design, and the function of the canon as an oppressive tool, designed in fact to alter and even destroy the obvious meanings embedded in the symbolism of the crucifixion becomes equally obvious.

The Campaign to Impeach George W. Bush
Click here for more information


Related Pages:

Search for the historical Jesus

Salvation by works and the doctrine of Predestination

God for an hour - a protest against the doctrine of predestination and omnipotence

Jeremiah rejects the Moses Myth and Leviticus

A commentary on Mark's gospel