The Jesus of History and the Holon of Christ

Ed. note: There’s a link from a pod at Gaia where this article of mine that was previously blogged on the now defunct (dead-link) team blog integralchristian site, so I re-post for any interested.  I thought it was on this site already, but it wasn’t, so I apologize for that lacuna.

—

There is no Jesus of History.

Let me back up for a second, lest any misunderstanding take place. By stating there is no Jesus of History I do not mean (as some have ignorantly argued) that the human being Jesus of Nazareth is a literary cipher for a series of Pagan Myths and did not in fact live as a real person.

That argument runs something like this. The Gospels portray Jesus using imagery and symbolism from other Near Eastern god-hero myth complexes: e.g. Virgin Birth, worked wonders/miracles through healing touch, dies & rises etc. Therefore Jesus himself did not exist. What this argument confuses of course is that these myths were common cultural assumptions about a Savior-Messiah figure, so that if one were to going to write a religious account to convince people of the Rabbi Jesus as Savior-Messiah figure, one would obviously use the common metaphors of the day to prove this reality.

The Roman pagan author Tacitus in the 1st century describes “a certain Chrestus (Christ) the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate….” so there is attestation outside the Christian gospels for the actual existence of Jesus of Nazareth.

When I say there is no Jesus of History I’m talking about something else.

In the last decade and a half there has been the revival of interest in the so-called Historical Jesus. Jesus is hot as one publisher told a Historical Jesus author. There are almost as many historical Jesus-es (Jesi?) as there are Historical Jesus scholars.

Jesus is alternatively depicted as (much more after jump):
–Shaman Healer
–A proto-Marxist social peasant revolutionary (ever wonder why they Che photo is so beloved….it taps into the Christ of our collective psyche).
–A traditional conservative Christian
–An apocalyptic prophet of the end time
–A Cynic philosopher who told counter-cultural tales
–A spirit-filled wisdom prophet
–A man suffering from a split personality—one human, one divine.
–A (pacifistic) Jewish Rabbi
–A member of an armed revolutionary group against the Roman occupation.
–An anti-Temple Establishment man trying to create a post-national Judaism
–A Gnostic preacher of Causal Consciousness and/or Lover of Mary Magdalene

And finally one of my personal favorites: a gay magician.

Though not known by many today this is the third great phase of Historical Jesus Research in the scholarly world. The first occurred during from about the late eighteenth century through to the publication of Albert Schweitzer’s (yes that Schweitzer) great work The Quest of the Historical Jesus. This Jesus it turned out was a 19th century European bourgeoisie rationalist not an ancient Palestinian Jew. He looked more like the ideal social person of the day than the actual man in the Gospels. Thomas Jefferson (orange meme) famously stripped the Gospels of any “irrational” pieces like healings, exorcisms, resurrection, leaving only wise rational sayings (parables)—religion within the bounds of reason alone that is.

What Schweitzer pointed out was that this Jesus was simply the projection of European enlightenment values into and onto the past. [We will return to this point later because it is still today relevant]. He boldly proclaimed that the quest was a failure—and then added his own Historical Jesus to the pile of rubble for good measure.

With the publication of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1926), Biblical scholarship moved to searching no longer for the Historical Jesus but the historical context (the life-situation, lifeworld) of the authors of the texts themselves (see Rudolf Bultmann). This followed Heidegger’s reflections on being-in-the-world, the intersubjective over the historicist objective right-hand approaches of empiricism and historical studies. As is well known the Gospels are all written 40-70 years after Jesus’ death, in vastly different social and political contexts than Jesus’ own day. What the Gospels are then are stories of what would Jesus be like if he lived in the situation of the author and the community that composed the text. Post temple destruction Palestine (Mark); Gentile Church in Turkey (Luke); a Jewish-Christian community in Syria (Matthew); and a group expelled from the synagogues (John). This phase was less the search for the Historical Jesus as the search for the Historical Church. This tradition was highly skeptical of knowing anything about the Historical Jesus and a result interest in the subject waned.

Interest was temporarily revived by the second phase of the Historical Jesus search began in the 1950-60s with the work of German scholar Gunther Bornkam, but it too eventually waned with the explosion of interest in feminist, liberationist, and postmodern readings starting in the late 60s and into the 70s.

But in our day we see the study of the Historical Jesus again waxing. The third phase gained real steam by the early 1990s. Well known names include: Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, N.T. Wright, John Meier, Elaine Pagels, Paula Fredriksen, and Richard Horsley.

The third phase of Historical Jesus scholarship has sought to overcome the problem of the first—namely the infiltration of background cultural assumptions onto Jesus. The proponents of this Third Wave argue this could be achieved through a renewed look at the social-cultural-religious world of Jesus’ own day. Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948, the knowledge of 1st century Palestine has exploded. These authors use what is known of contemporary Judaism (or rather Judaisms, as they were multiple strands of the religion it turns out) and Greco-Roman world, to decipher which points of the Gospels make sense against that background and which do not.

There has been much good work by these scholars and I do not want to diminish the efforts. I have learned a great deal from reading all these scholars. Still one can’t help noticing that the author’s own background correlates very strongly with the reconstructed Jesus.

e.g.
–John Dominic Crossan’s Jesus looks remarkably similar to a 1960s counter-cultural hippe figure. Crossan did his research in 1960/70s California. Crossan also had a falling out with the establishment of his church—the Roman Catholic. So too does his Jesus rebel against the religious establishment of his own day.
–Paul Zahl’s Jesus promotes traditional Protestant Reformed Evangelical Theology. Guess what strain of Christianity Zahl comes from?
–Elaine Pagels and Karen King, the two best known scholars behind the revival of interest in Gnosticism, are both women, who continually stress that the Gnostic Churches had equal gender parity and authority roles.

So given a quadratic and post-metaphysical understanding, I think it is safe to say there is no way to avoid such infiltration. There is no objective truth (historical included) except in intersubjective circles. Notice this trend is common across liberal-conservative spectrum. But what can be done is a much more honest assessment and critical reflection on one’s own background and belief systems.

There is a famous dictum first proposed so far as I know by the historical Jesus scholar John P. Meier: there is a difference between the historical Jesus (that is the scholarly reconstruction of Jesus) and the Jesus of history (the actual man who lived in 1st century Palestine). This is a Kantian move. There is the noumena (the thing as it really is, i.e. the real Jesus) and the thing as we experience it the phenomena (the historical reconstructed Jesus) and we shall never know the former.

But following Wilber in Integral Spirituality, the separation of these two (noumena and phenomena) is itself already another perspective. Does it really make sense to say like Donald Rumsfield that we there are “known unknowns” like the Jesus of History? The notion of the Jesus of History always already only exists in the mind of a thinker. The Jesus of History is always already a perspective before it is anything else. Meier’s dyad correctly makes a distinction between our interpretations and the earlier person or event—in this case Jesus—but it still looks for an point separate from perspectives, some Euclidean point at which you can lever the world around.

Perspectives does not mean pure idealism [see footnote on pp.250-251 of Integral Spirituality]. There are, Wilber says, intrinsic features to sensory experience and I would argue to Jesus. But these intrinsic features of the Kosmos “sub-sist” in the earlier waves they do not “ex-ist”; they do not “stand-out” in other words. Moreover, intrinsic features are themselves shaped by the level of consciousness from which they are described. They are interpretive intrinsic features which are then read back (retro-read) into the earlier situation.

I believe Jesus was a great liberator of the poor (intrinsic feature) but that feature only came to light (existed) since the rise of liberation readings in light of socio-political liberation movements of the modern and postmodern worlds.

So that leads me finally back to my original sentence. There is no Jesus of History. The separation between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of History is not wrong but itself is a product of the level of consciousness at which the claim is made (orange, formal rational cognition). An integral worldspace would negate that distinction in favor of a Kosmic Christ Jesus, a multi-perspectival Jesus.

Why the third phase of the Jesus scholarship has failed is that it has not taken into account levels of consciousness. It correctly spotted the mistake of the first phase, the lack of recognition (in integral terms) of the collective quadrants. Where it (partially) fails is not recognizing how even our understanding of the social-cultural is itself a product of the level of consciousness of the scholarship. Whether it is the social-cultural realities of our own day or Jesus’. These scholars know that our own time and temperament is never separate from their scholarship. But they have not imagined how deep that truth runs.

In other words the Historical Jesus is just another form—consciously or otherwise—of devotion to the Christ. New Testament Scholars often make the distinction between the Jesus of History and the (post-resurrection) Christ of faith. Liberal scholars emphasize the discontinuity between the two, conservatives the similarity but the deeper issue is the distinction itself is inherently problematic. The Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith are both perspectives. In fact they are mutually co-arising and therefore dependent on one another, like left and right hands.

The Historical Jesus is a type of faith then. The Historical Jesus is another form of the Image, the Higher Self that pulls us into its tractor beam. It is therefore, truly not just a scholarly quest, but a religious one as well. It is part of the Christic evolution of Consciousness itself.

Jesus never wrote anything in his life and this explains in part why he is interpreted across so many boundaries in so many ways:

–Liberator of the Poor
–Kosmic Judge of the Universe
–Gnostic Visionary
–Meek and Mild Jesus of Evangelical Spirituality
–Walking God-Man Icon
–Stern and Angered Medieval Lord

Jesus is depicted visually as African, Near Eastern, European, Asian, Latin American, male, female, trans-gendered. In beatific transcendent glory and in the deepest suffering and humiliating ugliness.

The Jesus of the Gospel of Mark is even, one scholar argues, the image behind the lone gunmen of Western movies: taciturn, he fights evil, woman-less, friendless as he rides off into the sunset with only a small boy yelling to him—Shane, Shane….Jesus is Risen.

What all of this comes down to is this: different truths arise in different levels (developmental signifier/signified), from different vantage points of the effluxive dance. Different Jesi arise in different spaces and levels.

What this outlook reveals is a holonic Jesus, a holonic Christ. It would show that there has never been and will never be a Jesus of History separate from perspectives about him taken up by others. Rather there is a Jesus arising in worldviews that believe in History.

Rather than a flatland Jesi fighting each other (liberal versus conservative, Jewish Jesus vs. Christian Jesus, apocalyptic prophet or social and ethical teacher), we start a catalogue (a glossary) of the multiple perspectives on Jesus emphasizing the place from which a person stands to make such reconstructions/claims (quadrant + altitude + state).

This view does not mean Jesus Christ can not and does not break into the conditioned and sinful parts of our heart-minds, individually and collectively. That there can not be anything new and therefore in the truest sense, revelatory. That The Christ is unworthy of discipleship for all that Jesus is is whatever we make him out to be, to fulfill our own ego needs. All of these views of Jesus and more have come to teach us something.

As Mary Magdalene (ed:sister of Martha not of Magdala–thanks to commenter who pointed out my egregious error) took a jar of perfume and broke it to anoint the body of Jesus (Gospel of John) until the aroma filled the whole house, so too must we break open the Historical Jesus so that his aroma, the Aroma of God, may fill the entire Kosmos.