Day Fifteen

It should really not come as a surprise to anyone to learn that Jesus of Nazareth was not the first Christian. Neither should it come as a surprise that he was not the archetypal Christian. Jesus was not a Christian. He would not have even known what you were talking about. Jesus by all accounts was unapologetically a Jew. As a result, he did not write the New Testament, he did not read the New Testament, and he never knew of the spin that Paul and the evangelists put on the meaning of his life. So the first thing we need to understand when trying to learn more about the historical Jesus is that his frame of reference was the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians have come to refer to as the Old Testament.

All of the research indicates that at the time of the “Christ event” the widespread belief was that the Earth was flat. Do we believe that today? Even after the flat earth notion was dispelled, the belief that the Earth was the center of the universe was propagated—principally by the Church. Do we believe that today? Ironically, the literal interpretation of Genesis’ creation stories (yes, there are two to be found in the first two chapters) are being espoused by contemporary creationists in defiance of all reason and experience while there is very clear evidence that the authors clearly intended the stories to be taken as metaphorical. Honest contextual criticism cannot arbitrarily ignore the worldview held at the time of writing.

A good example of how such ignorance can skew the accuracy of interpretation is the currently popular Left Behind series. I daresay that those who are caught up in this fad haven’t given the study of eschatology a moment’s thought, and yet what the first and second century common era authors believed about the end times is critical to an accurate interpretation of the entire New Testament, especially The Revelation to John. It is important to note that we have still not addressed Jesus’ worldview because he was not the author of what was written about him. What has been addressed is the issue of the worldview held by those who did write the story because their understanding of the nature of reality was very, very different from ours.