ON THE QUALITY OF THOUGHT ATTRIBUTED TO JESUS
AT 55 : January 15th 2001
It has been recognised for some time that much of the Bible, and of the opinion surrounding it, is unsatisfactory often to the point of absurdity or even falsity. But while some believers accept this they, nonetheless, tend to claim that the teachings of Jesus are a sound basis for thought in general and ethics in particular.
The purpose of this article is to suggest that what is attributed to Jesus includes much that is explicitly silly or implicitly evil .
The various Bibles that we have are anthologies - collections of books selected to present a broadly, but highly complex, theme expounding both God's supposed impact upon Man and Man's supposed response to God. It is no good arguing that the authenticity of the Bible, as a divinely inspired whole, is corroborated by the perceived coherence of the tale it tells; books not considered consistent with this perceived tale were rejected as non-scriptural by the people who compiled the Bible some centuries after Jesus. In any case there are books included in some versions of the Bible but not in others. The coherence, such as it is, comes from editorial selection ('spin') rather than from inspiration.
All translators of the highly slanted anthology that is called the Holy Bible have two problems to address. In the words of those who have given us the New English Bible (published by the OUP and CUP 1961/1970) :
"The two basic questions facing the translators were: What do we translate? and How do we translate it?"
The formidable team of scholars who attempted the new translation make no claim absolutely to have solved either question. In plain English, they claim only to have done their best with somewhat uncertain source material.
It is interesting to pick out alleged facts about Jesus, and statements attributed to Jesus, in the gospels - for example the gospel attributed to Matthew. (All scriptural references in this article are to the Gospel According to Matthew). Some reported facts and statements in that gospel, if true, show Jesus in rather an unconvincing light and rather less than the fount of wisdom and the beacon of hope he is held up to be.
To pick out this or that is tricky; an old friend (a lay preacher) was never tired of saying that "a text without a contest is a pretext". What he did not say is that the usual editions of the Bible - consisting as they do of very brief verses in short chapters - actually invite such selection and implicitly encourage it. The King James version is indeed notable for some of the most marvellous sound bites in the whole of English literature. The NEB translators have, in a seemingly honest attempt to produce something more coherent but horribly dull, relegated verse numbers to the role merely of 'textual map references' in what they present as continuous prose. All that said, we have to beware both of quoting out of context and of obscuring perfectly clear statements and significant omissions, by clouds of context wishfully interpreted by 'the eye of faith' (i.e. making things mean what you want them to mean).
Here are just a few examples of texts (all from the gospel attributed to Matthew in the Gideon version that we have in most of our hotel rooms) that show the quality of Jesus, as a thinker and teacher, in rather a poor light.
5:5 "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth." Theologically there might be something to be said for 'Blessed are the meek for they shall go to heaven'. There is admittedly no evidence that this is so but theologians are not much bothered by a little thing like evidence when making their pronouncements. Meticulously crafted fantasy is more compelling than the hard graft of experience and valid inference therefrom. The scriptural formulation is quite contrary to experience; it has been amended by an unknown humorist to read "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth - but not for long". This jokey addition brings the text down to the real world we notice all around us.
The flimsy other-worldliness of 5:5 is not a one-off slip ; the same attitude is developed in 19:21 in which we are invited to give all we have to the poor (thus making ourselves poor and thus acquiring the right, in principle, to have it back again from the remaining rich).
Other-worldliness turns downright nasty in 19:29 in which we are invited to abandon, for the sake of piety, all the people closest to us . How much misery this injunction has generated in families who have lost members to crazy cults ..... is beyond calculation.
Contempt for the real interests of real people (women in this case) is also demonstrated - in 5:27-28. In this verse lustful attitudes are, by omission, all but equated with lustful acts. Clearly a woman featuring in one's lustful thoughts need not know about those thoughts and is, to that extent, unharmed by them. The victim of a lustful act is, on the contrary, more or less hurt thereby; she might endure anything from moderate insult to horrible physical and psychological harm. To even begin to equate the thought and the act is, in case of lust, simply to assume that womenıs real interests are of little account.
There are some other negative features of the teachings attributed to Jesus. Two others only are mentioned here.
6.1-4 tells us to do good but in secret. This seems, at first sight, to be an instruction to be properly modest and not boast about one's generosity. A moment's reflection reveals that most of the good, that is done, actually is done in the light of others' good example. Goodness is mostly caught rather than taught. How can one's good deeds be a effectively a good example if they are kept secret? The advice to do good only in secret is silly advice; better advice would be to let one's goodness be known but not boasted about.
There are many examples of wrong advice - wrong both in the sense of incorrect and in the sense of ethically objectionable - to be found in the Bible. Perhaps the worst piece of advice put into the mouth of Jesus - worst in the sense of being of widest application - MAT 6:34 -"Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof".
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The only possible excuse for this verse would be the then fashionable hope that the Second Coming was imminent and that, thereafter, everything would, magically, be different. In the event we have no Second Coming even after nearly two thousand years - perhaps the greatest anti-climax on record and the most outrageously flawed advice based upon what was, in the event, a fraudulent prospectus.
In every department of real life in the real world to "take no thought for the morrow" is the height of irresponsible folly ..... choice of marriage partner .... child raising and upbringing ...... health care ..... general thrift .... productive investment .... economic planning ..... environmental care ...... etc etc. It is hard to think of any aspect of life in which thought for the morrow is not, to some degree, appropriate.
As is so often the case, when confronted by Biblical nonsense, believers tend to say "Well, it doesnıt really mean that". One has to ask 'if what is meant that you should not be obsessional about the future at the expense of the present' then why is that not what is actually said in the Bibles we have? Do the Biblical authors actually intend to be misleading?
The cultural baggage with which we are all loaded makes it all too easy to think of Jesus as a wholly great teacher. Perhaps he was but from what is reported of him (in the biographical scraps known as the Synoptic Gospels) you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Perhaps we can settle for supposing that Jesus has had a bad press at the hands of the gospel writers; perhaps he really should have written something for us, himself, whereby dependably to assess him a first hand.
The next issue, Number 56, will appear on February 15th 2001.
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