Searching for an ‘historical Jesus'
Part 3 :The argument from embarrassment

In part one of this piece I described an ongoing feud between those who debunk the existence of an historical Christ figure (the man behind the mythology) and religious ideologues whose agenda is to prove that the myth is history. Such Christian apologists sometimes resort to the historical method called ‘the argument from embarrassment' (always employing the method against sources outside the church documents). If this method is applied impartially, using it to examine church documents as well, the result is a convincing portrait of an historical Christ figure. This would be someone no one has ever known, since his existence would be a terrible embarrassment for churches (and thus the church apologists must dedicate themselves to proving the existence of a creature from mythology, which is also embarrassing when you stop to think about it, not to mention fruitless, a losing strategy).

An introduction to Mark's Gospel

It is important to understand that Mark's Gospel is not a ‘biography'. It does not claim to be a biography, at least not as we understand the term. The Gospel of Mark is a carefully constructed literary work, a piece of propaganda, designed to sell people on a certain ideological position (just as all gospels do, including those outside the canon). Throughout the book the author carefully constructs literary devices known as ‘chiasmus'. These Chiasmus are so important to the structure of the book that it is impossible to understand the meaning of the gospel of Mark without being aware of the presence of these structures, since much of the meaning is embedded in the structure. We know that life does not order itself to fit into tidy literary structures, and so we know that the gospel of Mark is not a biography, it is a piece of literature which does not literally describe things as they actually happened, since life does not order itself to neatly fit into Chiasmus in someone's book. So then we also know right from the start that the gospel of Mark does not contain ‘history' in the normal sense of the word, in that much of what we will find in the book is fictional.

As Mark's gospel plainly states, you should never teach anybody anything without using a parable, and thus a lot of what you read in Mark's gospel never actually happened in the real world. It is one of the unfortunate things about Christianity that it became ‘literal' in its reading of documents, and thus we find that tales of someone busting two loaves of bread into pieces for thousands and walking on water and so on are taken literally, when if you examine the structure of the manuscript you find that these were parables that Mark made up, and then placed carefully into chiasmus in order to make a certain point. This was a common literary technique during the ancient times, and so Mark could expect his readers to be able to read his manuscript and appreciate his meaning by appreciating the structure of the document where so much of the meaning is embedded. This is no longer true today, and given literalism in the church, most church believers who have ever read the gospel of Mark have never, ever understood what they were reading because they were unaware that this was no biography, but structured fictional parables, arranged in chiasmus, a common literary technique in the ancient times.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the author of the manuscript was apparently not highly educated in that scholars of the original language state that the book contains bad grammar. The book also contains superstitions typical of the first century, in that epilepsy is said to be caused by possession by a ‘shaking devil' and the cure for this condition, and so many others, is said to be the rites of exorcism. Some of the chiasmus in the document are also difficult to interpret, so that author is not always successful, and this could be a cultural thing (first century readers might have gotten the point, or perhaps someone familiar with certain details revealed by archeology might understand the point while I, still in the dark, do not get it).

There are some classic examples of chiasmus that help to reveal how much of the meaning in the gospel of Mark is found to be hidden in the structure of the document. One example of this can be found in one of Mark's polemics condemning certain writings in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) as being not laws of God at all, but ‘human traditions and the commandments of people.' In the seventh chapter Mark condemns the food laws contained in books such as Leviticus as classic examples of ordinary human cultural rules masquerading as the ‘law of God'. Nothing you can eat will make you unclean, but it is unclean thoughts that come out of a person, such as stealing and murder, that make a person unclean, the author states, and then makes the matter clear by stating that ‘in saying this, he (Yeshua) declared that all foods were clean.' Mark also alludes to the teaching of the prophets, and here is referring to that school of Jewish prophecy that so constantly attacked the validity of the Torah regulations. We find in Jeremiah the statement in the 7th chapter, the 21st verse, that the animal sacrifice laws of the Bible did not come down the mountain from Moses, that God gave no instructions about sacrificing animals, and then in the 8th chapter, the 8th verse, he continues the sermon by declaring that no one should they were wise by declaring that they had the Torah, the law of God, because it was full of forgeries. Mark places his attack on the validity of the food law regulations side by side with this allusion to the attacks of the prophets on the validity of the animal sacrifice laws, and this is intended to strengthen his argument. "You hypocrites," he writes, ‘who nullify the prophets to support your human traditions...through your human commandments you have made the laws of God null and void." Now one of the devices common to chiasmus is to put two things right next to each other, in order to make a point, and in this case, provided that the reader is familiar with all the prophecies and psalms and so on which attack the animal sacrifice ritual, and provided that a reader understands that these people went ahead and sacrificed animals anyway, thus ‘nullifying what the prophets told them', well then this arrangement makes perfect sense, and his allusion to the prophets to support his own attack on the Kosher laws also comes sharply into focus.

A chiasmus often consists of a kind of sandwich, with two loaves of bread and some filling in the middle. So you could have two outside brackets wrapped around a central parable in the pattern A B A, with ‘A' being the two pieces of bread mirroring each other on either side of the chiasmus. Later in the manuscript Mark makes up a parable about the cursing of a fig tree, and then attacks the animal sacrifice ritual in the temple (Yeshua overturns the money tables where people went to exchange currencies so that they could then buy animals on sale at the temple in order to sacrifice, since this had become big business, and he also attacks the pigeon sellers, who sold cheap pigeons for sacrifices at the temple, to those who could not afford an animal, thus also capturing the low end of the animal sacrifice market). Yeshua then leaves the temple and the fig tree that was cursed is shown withered and dead. So the Chiasmus pattern here is...A BC A, with the fig tree cursed (A), money changer tables attacked (B), pigeon sellers attacked (C) and then the fig tree shown withered and dead (A) which mirrors the cursing of the fig tree on the opposite side of the chiasmus, and completes the structure. The fig tree parables (which never really happened in real life) are used as bookends which are wrapped around two symbolic parables having to do with attacking the animal sacrifice ritual in the temple (they were running ‘a den of thieves' whose goal was selling animals and making money, than making the temple ‘a house of prayer').. The additional meaning of the parables is found in the structure, the chiasmus, in that what the author is saying is that this attack on the animal sellers and sacrifice ritual of the temple, by exposing them as a ‘den of thieves', would result in the complete withering and collapse of that entire temple religious system.

Similarly there are two parables about Yeshua breaking bread and feeding thousands with just a small loaf. These two parables become the bookends wrapped around a chiasmus structure. This structure is a little more complex in that on the outside, as the bookends, you have two made up stories about breaking bread and feeding people, then you have steps going down to the center, on the subject of being possessed by demons and being blind, then at the center of the chiasmus, you have an allusion to the prophets attacks on the animals sacrifice ritual and Marks attack on validity of the food laws in the Bible, placed side by side for maximum impact. Then as we exit the right side of the chiasmus we once again get parables about curing blindness and getting the devil out of people, and the second bread breaking parable completes the chiasmus on the right. This is followed by an interesting recapitulation, in that Yeshua and his disciples are then pictured on a boat, and Yeshua, takes up the subject of ‘bread' and tells his disciples ‘beware the yeast of the scribes and Pharisees.' His disciples take him literally, and think that he said this because they forgot to bring any bread on their trip. This angers Yeshua who gets frustrated that they keep taking him literally. ‘Why are you talking about bread,' he tells them. Do you not remember what just happened, he asks them. Then we are told his disciples understood that he was not talking about real literal bread but he was talking about the teachings of the scribes and the pharisees (the religious preachers of the day). Now when you consider how this parable telling you not to take ‘bread' literally is placed outside this ‘bread chiasmus', and when you understand that the central focus of the chiasmus concerns food, and an attack on the food laws of the Bible, which we are told are nothing but human cultural rules, not a law of God, then you can understand that the meaning of the whole entire structure is summarized on the boat parable, where we are told that the ‘bread' which forms the brackets of the chiasmus, is not to be taken literally, but instead is symbolic of the attack on the food laws, which is ‘the yeast', or the bad human traditions being taught by the religious preachers. Furthermore, the author goes out of his way to scold people angrily for thinking that parable structure was about real bread, so you are being told directly to interpret it symbolically (this is the purpose of the explanatory summation parable on the boat). What this means is that at no time did Yeshua ever break small loaves and feed thousands of people, but this is symbolic (the point being that, if you read those parables, his disciples were so dim witted that no matter how many times you told them a teaching they just never seemed to learn...you see the bread breaking parables are hyperbole, in that the disciples saw all those thousands of people eating that bread and yet they never understood and then on the boat they still don't understand, until finally they got bawled out and told not to take that bread literally. Then finally they understand the meaning of the parable which is to watch out for what is written in the Bible, because it contains many phony forgeries.

These are some classic examples of chiasmus, and the importance of structure in Mark's gospel. Understanding this is important not only to understand the gospel message (much of which is embedded in the structure) but also if we are going to use the gospel of Mark to reconstruct an ‘historical Yeshua', because, you see, most of that stuff in the gospel did not happen literally as it was described. It is not a biography, but a collection of carefully crafted fictions. However even though the events in the gospel are made up fictions (he never was breaking bread, he never was on a boat afterwards with his disciples, none of this literally happened), even so there is some historical value here nonetheless, in that the author is giving us some information about the controversies raging in the early church. Now we must assign a probability to whether or not these controversies can be traced back to a real person, and certainly they did not emerge from a vacuum. Furthermore these controversies consist of attacks on the authority of the Bible and the religious powers who are charged with hypocritical misuse of the Bible and ignoring the warnings of their own prophets, and so this was a subversive document, not an elitist creation.

What Mark's gospel is telling us does agree with what you read in some of those Jewish documents outside the Bible where we are told that Jesus of Nazareth was leading Israel astray and down the wrong path, so their rabbis conspired to have him crucified. If he was teaching Israel to disobey the Torah, if he was picking up the themes of Jeremiah and the earlier prophets, then this does make sense, and the Jewish writings actually tend to give greater credibility to Mark's portrait of Yeshua as one of those harsh critics of the Bible. This we can determine even though nothing in Mark's gospel actually took place literally the way it is described, but what Mark's gospel does is describes the raging controversies, using a literary work loaded with chiasmus and fictional stories involving Yeshua (he walks on water, he does bread miracles). The sad thing is that not one of those stories should be taken literally, and when a person takes them literally they lose the whole meaning of the gospel of Mark, since it remains hidden to them, hiding in plain sight you might say, hidden in the chiasmus structure of the document.

I point out to the reader that I do not choose Mark's gospel for my primary source for the reconstruction of these controversies (which I then will postulate go back to a person who was the trouble maker) because I feel that Mark's gospel contains the ‘most historical description of literal events just the way they happened.' No, far from it, and since I such a great admirer of that literary work I would never anger Mark by being stupid disciple who doesn't catch on, and thus does foolish things like take his made up bread parables literally, when he is trying so hard to use clever chiasmus to make his point. And that clever bread chiasmus, his allusion to Jeremiah and the other prophets, his attack on the food laws, that bit he tacked onto to the end on the boat just to make sure nobody took his bread parables literally, well its a masterpiece of the form, the best example in the entire book, and I would never ruin such a thing by taking it literally. The controversy story that is embedded in the chiasmus you can take literally, since it is obvious that a controversy was raging in the early church movement over the validity of the Bible sources, and this controversy is also found in other sources both within and without the Bible, so we know that the controversy was a literal controversy, even if Mark's parables never actually literally happened.

And so I will summarize the point here by once again justifying my use of Mark's gospel for this purpose, by pointing out that the entire manuscript is a controversy story, told with chiasmus and fictional parables.

And an understanding of these complexities in the manuscripts, a deep reading of the gospels and other early Christian documents, also justifies my criticism of the Jesus Conspiracy theory,, in that what we have here is not some forged collection of documents that were cooked up by a scheming collection of elites, but an intimate familiarity with the material reveals a diverse movement riven with controversy and conflict over the most fundamental doctrines, incorporating attacks on the tools of the elites, such as religious indoctrination, not something one would expect to be forged by scheming elites, and something for which the Jesus Conspiracy theory has no adequate explanation.

Who were the churches of Mark's gospel

We need to understand just who these people were who were the churches that used Mark's gospel. We know that they had a radical idea of rejecting the literal interpretation of the Bible as ‘God's Word'. The believed the prophets, in that the Bible contained forgeries (as Jeremiah called them), which are also referred to as ‘human traditions' and the ‘commandments from other people' as they are called in Mark's gospel.

However it does not follow from this that these people were ‘radical liberals'. The truth is a little more complex than that. While they damned the temple cult, the animal sacrifice, the food laws, they were also sexual prudes who thought that the laws concerning sex came right down from Moses. So let's just say that they were very selective in their criticisms of the Bible laws, and while they damned other people for following certain laws, they were equally stubborn in following those laws they considered divine in origin. Understanding this complexity in their doctrine is going to be crucial if we hope to reconstruct the historical Yeshua (we need to understand these people to make sense of some of what they wrote).

They were very superstitious when it came to such things as all those numbers and weeks of years in the book of Daniel, which according to their own unique math was about to happen at any moment, and thus they were burning with a kind of apocalyptic fervor, while they watched closely for an abomination in the temple, at which time, we are told, they already had plans to head for the hills (they almost seem in that sense like survivalists, who seemed to believe they could ride out the end of the world by hiding out up in the mountains.) They also considered the Sabbath laws to be valid laws from God, and for this reason their justification of breaking the Sabbath, concedes the point that the Sabbath is valid, and they then proceed to make excuses to justify Sabbath breaking (which is different than simply declaring the Sabbath invalid). This also introduces a complexity, but serves as an introduction to how we must read a document like Mark's gospel, if we hope to have any chance to reconstruct an ‘historical Yeshua.'

The argument from embarrassment

The church movement out of which arose the gospel of Mark were very embarrassed churches. That Yeshua character was a source of nothing but trouble and controversy, and these people were also finding themselves involved in wrangling feuds with other people around them over one damnable thing after another. And it was embarrassing for them, and so they wrote that gospel of Mark, in part, to explain the doctrines (such as that bit about not believing every law in the Bible) and also to spend a lot of their time carefully making excuses for a lot of those embarrassing stories that were going around.

Now one way to deal with a humiliating story is to deny that it ever happened. It is interesting to note that the churches that produced the gospel of Mark, the churches which then used it, nurtured it, and spread it all over the empire in the times that followed, did not deny that these humiliating and embarrassing things happened, since, you see, everyone knew that it had happened, so there wasn't much point in trying to deny something like that. No, that wouldn't work. The same problem arises in the controversy story in the beginning of Matthew where we are told that the reason Yeshua came from Nazareth was because Herod was killing all the babies in Bethlehem. You see any true Messiah had to come from Bethlehem. All good fundamentalists knew that. According to the controversy stories, people were saying, ‘no prophet ever comes from Nazareth...check your prophecies and you will see that he came from the wrong town.' Poor Matthew could not deny that Yeshua was ‘Jesus of Nazareth.' Everyone knew, and so given just how accurate that Bethlehem prophecy was, or so he thought, he had to make up some stupid story about some huge massacre of the infants that never happened (ask the Jewish people, you know, about how every year they remember that massacre of the infants just like they remember Purim or Massada). Josephus never knew about any massacre of the infants and he covered all of Herod's reign, and neither did anyone else. Poor embarrassed Matthew made the story up as an excuse for some damned embarrassing reason. And so using the historical method known as ‘the argument from embarrassment' we can say that the Jesus character was ‘Jesus of Nazareth' (and the Jewish writings outside the Bible always call him ‘Jesus of Nazareth', which, if you understand the insult here - not Jesus of Bethlehem, but these Jewish writings never call him "Jesus' without reminding everyone that he was ‘Jesus of Nazareth', well, look, everyone knew, and it was embarrassing, because it was true.)

And so you can see how using the ‘argument from embarrassment', which my historical method of choice for my search for the historical Yeshua, we can actually begin to do a valid reconstruction of history (by valid I mean high probability, since nothing is sure and certain in history, only more or less probable, with those embarrassing things always being the most highly probable of all, making this the best method to use for this particular purpose). As well, given how terribly embarrassed Mark's church and Matthew's church were because of that ‘Jesus of Nazareth' character, and all his bad ways, well what other historical method could I consider using other than that ‘argument from embarrassment.'

So to begin our reconstruction we can say with a great deal of probability that this Yeshua was that ‘Jesus of Nazareth'. So at least we can say we know what town he came from. He was from Nazareth, and as people said, according to one of those controversy stories, ‘can anything good come from Nazareth?' which is much like saying today, ‘Can anything good come from Harlem.' And that explains why it was so ‘embarrassing' that Matthew had to make up some phony story about Herod killing all the babies to explain that bit about the family fleeing to live safely in Nazareth, you know, far away from the Jewish people, and outside Herod's control.

We also know from Mark's gospel that "Jesus of Nazareth' attacked the validity of the Bible, or perhaps we should say, that this was the source of much controversy at the time. The Jewish writings outside the Bible state that this ‘Jesus of Nazareth' was crucified on the charge of ‘leading Israel astray' and so this does tend to lend greater credibility to what is suggested in the gospel of Mark. Here the gospel of Mark is not embarrassed but adopts an aggressive attack posture, on the grounds that at least in this case, the best defense is a good offense. So they wanted to criticize that doctrine about the food laws being forgeries. Haven't they read the prophets, those prophet nullifying hypocrites? What did Jeremiah say? What did the prophets say? What did the psalmists say? Here the gospel of Mark churches land a hard right upper cut to the jaw and go on the attack, and its a very cleverly designed argument, a finely crafted attack, and those people they were fighting with about that controversy, would go away from that quarrel smarting and licking their sores after being tarred and feathered as hypocrites who did not listen to the prophets. It was such a good argument that Matthew had to destroy that chiasmus by changing it to be about whether or not you should wash your hands before you eat food, instead of being about declaring the food laws of the Bible invalid.

Now we know from other documents, both inside and outside the Bible that this controversy over the validity of the Bible was raging in the early church. We also know from some Jewish and Roman sources, that this Yeshua character enraged the authorities and got himself crucified, and it is not a stretch to imagine that he must have been saying something naughty, something against the status quo. Given that this controversy was raging at the time, and given that Mark's church tells us ‘that's what he said', and given that Matthew's church changes all those sorts of things around (‘no he didn't') and given that Matthew's fundamentalist church also lied about the massacre of the infants to make an excuse for that embarrassing Nazareth business, I think we can say that Mark's church is more credible on this than Matthew's fundamentalist church, a church which tries to get out of embarrassment by lying over and over again, and we also know that the Jesus Conspiracy theory is a really worthless explanation for all these documents and their contents, and it is most likely that this was one of the doctrines of the historical Yeshua. This would have placed him within the traditions of such critical prophets as Jeremiah, or Isaiah, or all those psalmists who wrote songs damning the animal sacrificing laws of the Bible (yes, they actually wrote songs about that...)

While the gospel of Mark churches were radical when it came to those pigeons, those animal selling money changers at the temple, those food laws, for some strange reason, peculiar to themselves, they thought that the Sabbath, well that law came right from God. You just couldn't deny that fact. For this reason they would not come right out and attack the Sabbath itself, but given how that Yeshua was always breaking the Sabbath, they instead had to come up with excuses to justify his conduct. They tell us what their opponents were saying, which was that ‘six days there are to do what you must do, but NOT ON THE SABBATH.' Alright, so there were six perfectly good days of the week for that Yeshua to practice faith healing, or harvesting grain, which were against the law (the punishment for breaking the Sabbath was the death penalty, by the way, just so you know how strongly people felt about it, and this might explain why the Gospel of Mark churches went onto the defensive in that particular controversy).

Well there are six perfectly good days every week, and thus no excuse for someone to harvest grain on the Sabbath, or just go about their business just like it wasn't a Sabbath, and so the opposition had the strongest argument in that controversy. It was up to that embarrassed, defensive gospel of Mark Church, which also conceded ground on that Sabbath argument (by not daring to challenge the validity of the Sabbath law) to then make up valid sounding excuses. One excuse they came up with, to explain grain harvesting on the Sabbath, is that if someone is hungry, they should be allowed to harvest some grain on the Sabbath. After all, David ate the special holy bread, and that was wrong too, but David was really hungry, and so when people are hungry you need to make an exception to the rules, thus making the Sabbath serve people than having people serving the Sabbath. This is an interesting argument, although that bit about David eating the special holy bread, because he and his men were hungry, while it does involve rule breaking, and it does involve eating, thus being similar to harvesting grain on the Sabbath, still isn't quite the same thing, since six days that Yeshua had to harvest. Let me play the devil's advocate here...Why didn't he get his act together and get that harvesting done the day before the Sabbath so he could just stay home and do nothing like he was supposed to. Just because someone can't get their business done on time isn't an excuse to start loosening the rules for people, otherwise the whole thing will start to go to hell, and next thing you know, people will be traveling on the Sabbath, or gathering fire wood for a stove on the Sabbath, and where will it end. Poor excuse from the Gospel of Mark churches. I give that quarrel to the opposition. It would be different if the Gospel of Mark churches had been brave enough to challenge the validity of the Sabbath itself, but they were to conservative about that one law to do so, and instead they tried some feeble argument to have that Sabbath rule made more relaxed, and the opposition just wouldn't buy such a feeble argument.

]The second excuse for Sabbath breaking we are given is that if a goat fell down a well, and it was the Sabbath, you wouldn't wait for the next day, and then rescue that highly valuable goat. No, you would run right over to that well and pull that goat out of the well, Sabbath of not. Apparently people did things like that, and it was okay, because that was a real emergency. Once again this a feeble argument, because there was nothing that Yeshua did that was such an emergency that he just had to get it done on the Sabbath. Six days there were for him to go about his business, but NOT ON THE SABBATH. Look, it wasn't like it was some big emergency, like it would be if a goat fell down a well, and he just had to get that done on the Sabbath. It could wait a day. Once again the Gospel of Mark churches come up with a feeble excuse that does not fit the evidence, since I must agree that there was no big emergency. That could have waited till the next day.

The third feeble excuse for breaking the Sabbath is that ‘Yeshua was Lord of the Sabbath.' What they are saying here then is that Yeshua was one of those ‘do as I say, not as I do' type of teachers. He could break the Sabbath because he was special, but everyone else had to keep the Sabbath. Once again this argument is worthless. If the Sabbath is a law, then Yeshua should have led by example, by keeping that Sabbath himself instead of breaking the Sabbath and setting a bad example.

I suggest that Yeshua did break the Sabbath. Yes, he was a notorious Sabbath breaker, as those excuses made by that defensive, embarrassed Gospel of Mark church would indicate. He did scandalous things like harvest grain on the Sabbath, and he just went about his business on the Sabbath, never bothering to wait a day, and so he was just terrible that way, unless maybe, he was a special case, that one person who could break the Sabbath while expecting everyone else to keep the Sabbath (‘do as I say, not as I do'...this hardly makes for a fine moral teacher). We must assume then that only the Gospel of Mark churches were embarrassed by that Sabbath breaking and as for Yeshua, he just didn't give a damn about the Sabbath, and thought it was another one of those human cultural traditions, and he was one of those people who didn't give a damn about cultural traditions. This was exactly the position taken in one of those church letters where we are told that to one person, a certain day is a special day, and to another person, every day is just the same....let each person do what they want. This was probably a better explanation for the conduct of Yeshua than those feeble excuses cooked up by that gospel of Mark church, which is still valuable, since, given the argument from embarrassment, this allows to assign a very high probability to the fact that Yeshua was a Sabbath breaker, who by breaking the Sabbath, flaunted the most sacred cultural conventions.

I feel that this discussion of the Sabbath breaking is significant since it allows us to assign a personality type to Yeshua. He was obviously a person with a strong conviction that he should break the Sabbath, because he didn't have to do it, yet he did, and it was wrong of that Gospel of Mark church to water down and dilute the effect of his protest actions by refusing to take an equally strong stand against the Sabbath, as just another cultural tradition. Furthermore, we can tell from this that Yeshua was a risk taker, in that Sabbath breaking was a death penalty offense, and so we can tell that he was one of those in your face type people, who when he believed strongly in something, just plunged ahead with his plans (full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes). In this way he would one of those trail blazers, one of those first brave people to do what probably a lot of other people wished they could do (you know, break the damn Sabbath and treat it like just another average day).

Every social change and every new freedom for humanity requires some trail blazer to open up the way, and usually such trail blazers either wind up dead, or beaten to a pulp, or spend a long time in prison. And so we can assume that he was one of those people who knew that they could wind up dead, beat up, or in prison, and because he knew that someone had to be the trail blazer, and because he believed so strongly in the cause of breaking the Sabbath, he screwed up his courage, and then began to lead Israel astray (as those charges against him read). You know setting a bad example. Sooner or later all those other people who wanted their freedom from that damnable religious tyranny would start to come out on the Sabbath, but some brave soul would have to start the ball rolling, and that we can assume, was the personality type of Yeshua. And if he did this, then it makes even more likely that he also attacked the food laws, as Mark gospel states that he did, and this also tells us that Matthew's gospel has it all wrong, and that Matthew's church was just lying when they told everyone that he was a fundamentalist when it came to the infallibility of scripture. After all they did not crucify people in history for praising the perfection of the Bible, they hunted down people and persecuted them for denying the inspiration of scripture, which once again should cause a person to assign a higher probability to Mark's version of events over that doctored version in Matthew.

This is all very interesting, but the gospels become truly fascinating when sexual innuendo and sexual scandal collides with the sexual prudishness of the gospel writers, and then we really get some embarrassing controversies coming to the fore, as well as some ridiculous sounding excuses, these ridiculous sounding excuses being, after all, the stock in trade of embarrassed gospel writing evangelists.

We are told that Yeshua had a reputation which was described as follows : ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Keep in mind that a tax collector was considered a scum bag and outcast, so to bring this up to date you could say ‘Look, a friend of pornographers and porn stars'. You know. Really naughty people, the worst people in town, and we are told that they had parties where they would be drinking together. Then there were those scandalous stories concerning naughty women, who would also be at those ‘drunken parties' they were having, and we are told that one woman gave him a foot massage with perfumed oil, and then began kissing his feet. We are told that "she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment.' We are told that people were saying that "If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him.' We are also told that religious people were complaining that Yeshua and those with him compared poorly to the fine religious people in that they partied and celebrated instead of practicing mortification and self flagellation and harsh denial, like all good religious people would do.

There are only three parables of this type which deal with the subject of sexual scandal. The subject is downplayed, but then sexual scandal is the sort of thing that people usually try the very hardest to keep completely hidden.

That Yeshua was surrounded by sexual scandal and innuendo, and that he actually put himself in that position, are acts of his that I would assign a very high historical probability. For you see, it would be better if the evangelists never even mentioned that hint of sexual scandal, and yet they did, just as it would have been better for Matthew to deny the Nazareth story instead of making up that ridiculous story he cooked up at the beginning of his manuscript. Consider the following contemporary example. You have a politician and an act of fellatio, and just a terrible whiff of sexual scandal swirling around the country. The best, and always ideal solution for such controversies is to issue a denial. ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman.' But let's say that it can't be denied. Then its time to spin doctor. So the rule of thumb is as follows, if you can deny, then deny, and when that isn't possible then spin doctor and make excuses and so on. You know, just like gospel writers do. If you can't deny that someone broke the Sabbath, then make up a bunch of stupid sounding spin doctored excuses.

Then to take the principle to the next step, if you can't deny the sexual scandal then you should do everything possible to downplay the scandal, and you should spin doctor it. However this is a sexual scandal so it should only be acknowledged briefly, and then not mentioned any more, unlike that other Sabbath scandal, which, being about the Sabbath, and not about sex, can be mentioned many times, over and over again, while that sex scandal should be downplayed, by only being mentioned briefly, and then hopefully, buried. It can't be buried completely so as to go right out of the gospel, because that would not be possible, it has to be dealt with, but the briefer the better. It should just be spin doctored, and then done away with and hopefully that will be enough to squelch any more of that most terrible of all scandals, the whiff of sexual scandal.

That gospel writers were spin doctors is obvious, as you can tell by considering their spin doctoring of the scandal of the Sabbath. That they would also spin doctor stories that carry with them sexual innuendo is no big surprise, and what you would expect. Now the investigation of the true nature of these scandals is complicated by the fact that the canon, the selection of documents that compose the Bible, was voted on in the fourth century by sexually neurotic priests, who are well known for their hostility to human sexuality as well as their paranoia concerning the damnation following upon sexual acts (the ‘illegal orgasm' which would lead to ‘eternity in hell'). For this reason, when they choose from the plethora of documents produced by the early church movements, their selection was completely slanted towards documents that exhibit the same sort of sexual hostility they themselves possessed. For this reason you won't find a really good word about an orgasm or a set of genitals in the entire Christian canon, and the source of all evil is said to be genitals and the ‘sinful flesh'.

Not all documents of the early church share this attitude of irrational paranoia over something as harmless as an orgasm (you know that the law states, ‘do to others what you would have others do to you', and while you wouldn't want anyone hitting you over the head with a brick, you probably wouldn't suffer much harm from an orgasm...it is painfully obvious that, given the billions of orgasms taking place on daily basis, with even little chickadees, and yes even simple creatures like fleas ‘doing it'. Whatever nature says takes priority over what it is said in some priestly documents, since nature cannot be forged, and the natural world never commits perjury, nor does nature make excuses or spin doctor. ‘Evil flesh', as religion calls it, is the responsibility of the creator of all such evil, since no one ever chose their flesh, and so then if it is evil, then there are grounds for a class action lawsuit for malicious negligence. As for that extremist Right Wing Authoritarian doctrine of burning evil flesh forever and ever, I suggest that a god try that one, instead of lording it over the weak and the helpless. You see, in Christianity, its good to be a god, with no worries about burning, since burning is reserved for those who are born helpless and then treated to brutality and mindless cruelty for something that never was their own fault. All that Christian stupidity concerning how ‘God wanted you to have free will, so as to be able to freely choose to burn or not to burn,' does not in anyway excuse the offensive irrationality of what is after all an RWA doctrine intended to brutally control human beings by launching a senselessly cruel attack on the natural order. So hostile is Christian attitudes towards natural sexuality that in the fundamentalist gospel of Matthew we are told that even to look at a naked body is to become guilty enough to burn in hell. Now we know that people are hardwired to respond to sexual cues, and so this will require the severe repression of natural responses that is characteristic of Christian hypocrisy when it comes to sex, because that simply cannot be switched off like a light switch. Thus it finds expression in repressed envy and they self righteous hypocrisy and hysteria which constitute the reaction of damaged Christians to any sort of sexual signal, and the natural response is twisted and perverted into the magnificent psuedo rage of the truly upstanding and moral Christian (let us then cover up the breasts on a statue in Washington because it is sinfully shameful).

The Gospel of Thomas did not make it through the voting process in the fourth century, and it is easy to understand why it failed to make the cut. It simply did not toe the line when it came to promoting Greek Stoic attitudes of hostility to towards human sexuality. The Thomas Gospel contains many of the same parables as one finds in the Gospel of Mark, but like all the Gospels and letters that survived the voting process, the Gospel of Mark is sexually prudish, even going so far as to toughen the already paranoid sexual laws of the Old Testament, and so Mark made the grade, while Thomas was declared a heresy and burned in the fires.

According to the Gospel of Thomas the goal of ‘salvation' was to return to the Garden of Eden, and this meant doing away with sexual prudishness and returning to a natural and shameless attitude towards sexuality and human nudity. Here the Gospel draws its inspiration from the Eden parable, where the intervention of the evil snake figure leads to the fall of humanity, with the result of the fall the introduction of the notion of sexual prudishness and shame. (Note that the promise of the snake in the Eden parable is that it will make people ‘wise like God', which is the promise of religion. This religion peddled by that snake figure produces sexual neurosis in the couple, and so this famous Eden parable is an ingenious description of the true role of religion in that religion introduces sexual hostility and then peddles this neurosis as ‘wisdom from God.')

"The serpent was the most cunning of all the creatures YAHWEH GOD had made...and they knew that they were naked; so they stitched together fig leaves and covered themselves with loin clothes...and they hid in the trees...'Who told you that you were naked?' God asked them, and the woman replied, 'the snake deceived me.'"

In the Gospel of Thomas, we read the following...

"His disciples said, "When will you appear?" Yeshua 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 God and will not be afraid... Whoever has discovered the body is worth more than the world... The disciples said to Yeshua, "Tell us what the end will be." "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."

The early Christian movement was very diverse, as the discoveries of their previously destroyed manuscripts in the middle of the last century reveal. The sexually paranoia and hostility towards the ‘evil flesh' of the Bible represents only the triumph of one small clique of Greek Stoic priests. The Right Wing Authoritarians triumphed over the rest of the Christian movement only because, being RWA priests, they naturally allied themselves with Caesar and thus had the power of the state at their disposal as they moved Christianity sharply towards the right until it finally became the state religion. As the Thomas Gospel reveals, there were other churches present whose view of Christianity did not incorporate the sexual hostility that dominated the church throughout history, and which continues to dominate in what little remains of the carcass of the church today.

In the Bible Gospels we are told that Yeshua had a reputation as being ‘a drunkard and glutten', that he was found in what we would call compromising positions with women who were known for ignoring social conventions concerning sexuality, and we know that both he and his disciples were known for having parties where they were ‘drinking and eating.' It is the task of prudish gospel writers to spin doctor these scandalous stories, just as they spin doctored every other controversy story.

The gospels tell us that proper religious people practiced stern denial and self mortification, but Yeshua and his disciples, ate, drank, and partied and celebrated. This was obviously wrong, and the gospel writers deal with the problem by offering the excuse that they were partying because they were celebrating the Kingdom of Heaven. Once that was over, then they would change over and all Christians would practice stern denial and self mortification as proper religious people should.

"The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day. Mark 2:16

The term ‘wedding guests' describes the nature of the parties being celebrated by Yeshua and his followers, parties which the gospels tell us, included the drinking of alcohol, common at wedding parties, as well as a lot of ‘eating' (leading to charges that this was a religion for ‘drunkards and gluttens', as the critics were saying, and as the gospel writers report, since the charges could not be denied, being to well known). Now we must note what the excuse given by the gospel writer reveals. First of all, life with Yeshua was like a long wedding party, with lots of that naughty drinking and eating, and very little stern denial, flagellation, and self mortification, you know, the kind of sorrowful, dreary, somber practices common to all pious religion. But that was okay, since it was a wedding, a long wedding party that lasted for about three years (or about as long as Yeshua was around, since he apparently like to party). Now the gospel writer is writing after the fact, looking back you might say, and so what he is writing also carries a coded message to the church. He is saying, ‘back in those days people drank and partied all the time,' and then he goes on to say, ‘but that's over.' From now on Christians must practice mortification and somber denial. This reveals an agenda on the part of the gospel writer, since what he is saying in regards to all that partying, as though life was long wedding party, is ‘Don't do that anymore. Stop it. Be somber and practice mortification. The wedding party is over.' So one can see that the gospel writer really didn't approve of all that partying and drinking, in that he forbade churches to behave like that at the present time, since, according to this ridiculous excuse, that partying was just a temporary thing, in the past, and while it must have been okay back then it would certainly be wrong today.

We are also told about those foot massages, and people were saying, ‘this man is no religious figure, or else he wouldn't let one of the loose women of the town give him a foot massage.' As I said above, given how prudish our gospel writers are, and how much they disapproved of those long, endless parties, one can understand that if they embarrassed themselves by even mentioning that foot massage, they only did so because they could not just simply deny that such a thing had happened (‘I did not have any sort of relationship with that woman'). When denial is out, spin doctoring is in, and so the excuse that gospel writers give us is that Yeshua was found to be partying with such people because he came to save their sinful souls from hell. In the third of these parables the question is posed, ‘why does he hold these parties with the worst people in town.' You know, ‘loose women', bad men, the very most ‘sinful' people in town. It was bad enough that Yeshua treated life like one long, long wedding party, and it was bad enough that he did so much drinking, and it was even worse that he ignored the Sabbath, and considered the Bible to be a collection of ‘human traditions.' Did he need to add to his offenses by partying with the town ‘sinners'. Well the stupid, ridiculous excuse offered by those gospel writers is that the was getting those foot massages and doing all that partying with those people because he ‘came to save the lost souls of sinners.'

Apparently, when you are going to save a sinner's soul from hell, the best way to do that is to party with them, and go drinking with them, maybe get the occasional foot massage from a ‘sinner.' Well you do want to fit in, right, or perhaps he was trying to ‘win their trust' before he nailed them with that somber, joyless Christian ‘morality.' I would suggest that he went drinking and partying with ‘sinners' because in those days if you wanted to drink and party you pretty much had to party with ‘sinners' because you sure as hell wouldn't want to party with those religious people. Well think about it. If he was alive today, would he be drinking and partying and getting foot massages from the born again soul saved believers? Well you can see my point.

And so I suggest here that the excuses offered up by those embarrassed prudish sexually neurotic evangelists were just as worthless when it came to ‘explaining' those drinking parties as they were in ‘explaining' why he had to break the Sabbath (you know, it was an emergency, or the rules need to be slackened a little for hunger, or perhaps he was just the Lord of the Sabbath, thus giving him the right to break the Sabbath while everyone else had to keep the Sabbath). Similarly, he came to preach sexual hostility and paranoia and the joyless existence, while drinking and partying like every day was a wedding for three years, celebrating with the worst people in town, while forbidding churches throughout history from even thinking about doing the same thing (that was then, this is now...do as I say, not as I do...ah yes, the morality of ‘Jesus').

Using the technique of the argument from embarrassment and applying it to those gospels (for a refreshing change of pace) reveals what I am going to call ‘the ‘Jesus' no one ever knew.' And how could we ever have known him, this ‘Jesus of Nazareth' whom the Jewish writings outside the bible tell us ‘led Israel astray'. He was to well hidden, and he was hidden because he so embarrassing, and so we are left with feeble excuses for his conduct, conduct that could not be hidden, because, at the time the gospels were written, the scandals were still to fresh in everyone's mind, to well known to simply be denied. No, they could not be denied, and so they had to be spin doctored, and that spin doctoring is what we now call a ‘gospel'. And an Orwellian term it is that states that something is ‘the gospel truth' since to often the only truth to be found in such gospels is the truth that the gospel writers don't really want us to know, and which we can only find by reading gospels critically. Yes, they tell us more than they want us to know, those gospel writers, and by ignoring their worthless excuses and instead analyzing the controversies they tried so hard to spin doctor, a portrait emerges of a human being which I find to be very compelling, and, unlike ‘Jesus Zeus Christ', this hidden Yeshua is a human being I think I would be very fond of, someone I would actually have enjoyed meeting, and partying with, before they finally nailed him up, and then perverted and corrupted his legacy, making him into ‘Jesus Apollo Christ', the symbol of the Right Wing Authoritarian reaction that he tragically became.

Have a nice Easter.