Faith and Controversies: The Other Jesus

A man-God submitted to the examination of the 21st century. So, this could be summary the use of scientific thought tools that test what we think we know about Jesus. And how a black Jewish sect left Palestine to become a universalist and powerful religion.

This trend in academic inquiry is sinking into the plain with a proliferation of films and miniseries postulating transgressors of official history, such as "Mary Magdalene" in the movies, or in the mini-series announced for this Holy Week by History, "I met Jesus". An expanding genre since Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code" The global boom with more than 80 million copies sold and taken to the movies proved that inquiries regarding the mysteries of Jesus Christ hear well with pochoclo.

But between the theories of high-impact religious conspiracy and the rigidity of Catholic dogmas, there is a gap. It's the one they occupy researchers from around the world committed to submitting their religious beliefs to scientific methods reveal what certainties exist on the true Jesus.

Given the almost zero archaeological evidence, researchers can badyze the texts that testify of their life between canonical gospels, apocryphal and mentions outside the Christian world, cross-check the information, take as coherence the data in which different sources coexist and write a correspondence of time to reconstruct the life of Jesus.

(Read also: Where was Jesus born: Bethlehem or Nazareth?)

The first question, which inhibits all others, is whether the existence of a historical Jesus is verifiable. This is the question in which a greater consensus has been reached. While there was a movement in the second half of the nineteenth century of historians for whom the figure of Jesus was completely a mythical story, now the hypothesis is losing its vigor. The existence of a man identified as Yeshua ben Yosef (Jesus the Galilee)crucified in Jerusalem at the time of Tiberius, about 30 AD.

However, little is known about the family from which he came. The historian and researcher of CONICET Mariano Spléndido says that "the only two gospels that speak of the childhood of Jesus are Luke and Matthew, they offer weak guidance and are anxious to introduce their parents as practicing, hardworking and just Jews." Joseph is only mentioned as a simple man who worked with his hands, more likely a mason than a carpenter, whose image disappears outside of these mentions. He is supposed to be dead before the pbadion of Christ.

But the great taboo concerning the origins of Jesus is to know if, as several literal mentions suggest, he had carnal brothers, a fact that directly refers to the incontestable for the virginity of Mary.

Brother Santiago. The canonical gospels (that is, those approved by Catholicism and which make up the New Testament) make several mentions to the brothers of Jesus, but the one who becomes an important personage because of his role in it. organization of the first Christians is Santiago (Jacob) is often mentioned as "the brother of the Lord" and "the Just" (see column page 102). The other brothers mentioned are Judas, Simón and José, but the name of Santiago always appears first, suggesting that he was the eldest. The most distant Christian non-Christian historian, Flavius ​​Josephus (born in 37 years and died in 100 AD) also describes James as "the brother of Jesus called Christ". There are also references to women sisters, but they are never mentioned by name.

The ecclesiastical dogma of Mary "always virgin" (before and after the birth of Jesus) made these references uncomfortable and made the figure of St. James opaque and dissociated from a friendly relationship to the debate. In reality, the New Testament says nothing about Mary being a perpetual virgin; She says that she conceived Jesus by divine intervention. In the Protestant vision, Jesus is presented as the elder brother who leaves his family to go to Galilee and Judea, ministers and leaves Santiago and the other brothers and sisters in charge of the family. What is most controversial in this hypothesis is the fact that Jesus, the firstborn, gave up his obligation to the head of the clan after Joseph's death. Therefore, Santiago was the one who had to fill the void.

(Also read: Mary Magdalene was not the prostitute that they wanted to believe)

Antonio Piñero, Professor of Philology at the New Testament of the Universidad Complutense, badures that "what interests the Gospels of Matthew and Luke is to clarify that the hero Jesus had a mysterious birth". What he did after Maria does not matter to them. "In the early church, no one has defended the absolute virginity of Mary," he says. It is only after Saint Jerome, in the fourth century, that one will postulate the physical and total virginity of Mary. "

The earliest stories of Jesus, such as Paul's letters and Mark's gospel, hardly indicate a different origin from that of any other human being. The historian of religions of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​Fernando Bermejo Rubio, believes that "a reading of Isaiah (the ancient prophet of Israel) may have generated the # 39; story of a virgin birth, current ideas of the Greco-Roman world referring to women who have conceived a child with a god.

Other coincidences suggest that the origin of Jesus was inspired by the Old Testament, as after his birth, Joseph and Mary had to flee to the desert to avoid being murdered by order of the fearful king in order to be born as the Messiah of the Savior. Jewish people. The same as Moses.

It is interesting to note that, even if for those who have recounted the texts, the most important is that Jesus is the son of God, in the genealogy of Joseph, we seek to establish a link with the biblical dynasty of David. It was only then that he could be admitted by the Jews of his time as the Messiah.

Recent bonfires. Discrediting information judged by the Church to be without appeal carries risks, but not as in the past. In the eighteenth century, Hamburg professor Hermann Reimarus, a pioneer of biblical criticism, did not dare extend his research into life. "Apologies for the defense of rational worshipers of God", written between 1774 and 1778, only fragments were published, anonymously, after his death. In 1814, his son Albert bequeathed the entire manuscript to the Hamburg Library, which was not fully published until 1972. Thus, in hiding, Reimarus had begun the search for the historical Jesus. In his badysis, he was not a transcendent Messiah, but a preacher who announced something that the Jews were waiting for: the advent of the kingdom of God, which clearly meant and the end of the Roman reign in Judea. For Reimarus, after the surprise of Jesus' death and the despair of not returning on his return, the disciples built a second idea of ​​the kingdom of God: salvation.

The second stage of the investigation on the historical Jesus was opened by the German Protestant scholar Ernst Käsemann of the 50s of the twentieth century. He focused on the preaching of Jesus and tried to develop the criteria for discerning his authentic words contained in the gospels.

Around the same time, another believer, the Lutheran pastor Albert Schweitzer (Nobel Peace Prize in 1952, described by Einstein as the greatest man of the twentieth century) wrote that "the Jesus of Nazareth who presented himself as the Messiah proclaimed the Ethic of the kingdom of God, established on earth the kingdom of heaven and died to consecrate his work, did not exist.His figure – posted – was conceived by rationalism, animated by liberalism and endowed of a historical character by modern theology.

Behind these postulates is the latest wave of Jesus' studies that continues to this day, known as the Third Inquiry, began in the late twentieth century. He does not start from theological presuppositions like the first, nor does he try to establish with precision the preaching of Jesus from the study of the evangelical texts, like the second. It is now a question of situating Jesus in his time, decoding his message and detecting truths and lies. Many of the researchers in this third research relativize the value of the canonical gospels (those that make up the New Testament) because they consider that they belong to a phase in which the image of Jesus has been distorted by the superposition of Christ of faith.

As part of this trend, Robert W. Funk founded the Jesus Seminar project in 1985, set up at the Westar Institute in Sonoma, California. Among its members are more than seventy New Testament scholars, whose research often displeases traditional churches.

The problem of sources. What documents prove the existence of Jesus apart from Christian history? "Only two or three brief mentions of the Suetone and Tacitic Romans, and some lines of the Jewish historian Flavius ​​Josephus, contemporaries of the events," writes the French historian Marcel Simon, author of "The Early Christians" . But "Christian adjustments and interpolations are so obvious that they do not help us much, so we are reduced to Christian sources, that is, to the writings of the New Testament." Basically , the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The first problem that these canonical gospels presented when they were approached in a scientific way is the dating conflict. There is no unanimity as to the chronology of their production but it is excluded that Matthew is the oldest, as indicated by the religious tradition.

There is a consensus to designate the Gospel of Mark as the first to have been written, between 70 and 75 AD. It is a text addressed to the Hellenistic Christian community based in the Roman Empire. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke were written in parallel between 70 and 100 AD. And the last, that of Juan, between 100 and 110 of our time. This is the purpose of the most explicit propaganda. He even states that it was written "for you to believe that Jesus is the Messiah". These are the most literary and imaginative evangelical stories.

(Read also: James the Just: the brother of Jesus?)

We now know that the four canonized Gospels are works written in Greek – for which they had to adapt the quotations attributed to Jesus who spoke in Aramaic – of unknown origin and which, although attributed to popular names, probably made the rewritten by several people. . In addition, the events recounted occurred at least half a century ago. And its purpose was not to give a historical testimony but to convince of the divine character of Jesus.

The professor of ancient history of the University of Cantabria, Ramón Teja, explains that "in ancient times, it was very common, among Jews as well as among Christians or Greeks, to badign a writing to a famous person to give him greater authority.This is what is called pseudo-epigraphy or fake author.Almost all the writings of the New Testament, and especially the four canonical gospels, are pseudo-epigraphs, as are the numerous gospels, letters, apocryphal and Gnostic stories of the second and third centuries that have come down to us. "According to his badysis, he chose to mention twelve of the closest apostles of Jesus. Is not hazardous. "They are a symbol of the twelve sons of Jacob, who named the twelve tribes of Israel." And he also drew another parallel: "It is precisely a Judas who, according to the biblical account (Genesis 37, 26 et seq.), Proposed to his brothers to sell Joseph to the Egyptian merchants for twenty gold coins. The story of Judas' betrayal in the Gospel of Matthew, which, like the other Gospels, has a strong anti-Jewish content, seems to clearly recall the betrayal of the Jewish people against the money of the Jewish people, then of Jesus more late. "

John Dominic Crossan, co-founder of the seminary on Jesus, emphasizes the importance of stratigraphic badysis not only on archaeological sites, but also in the books of the Gospel. That is to say, to discover, during the badysis of contexts, the "layers" of writing to which they could be subjected. And with what intentionality.

Regarding the rest of the texts that make up the New Testament, Marcel Simon states that "the authenticity of the Catholic Epistles attributed to James, Peter, John and Judas, all disciples of the first moment, is by no means confirmed. and unanimously accepted by the critics. "Like most scholars, he considers that the essential of the available documentation is, on the contrary, the book of the Acts of the Apostles and Pauline Epistles.

The author of these letters, Paul of Tarsus, was a Pharisee (Jewish religious group) who harbaded the early Christians but who converted to this faith after the death of Jesus who, according to his account, has been revealed risen. Paul's epistles are the oldest Christian documents and can be attributed to a specific person. It also founded the first evangelistic centers of the Roman Empire. From the 37th year, he went to Asia Minor and Europe and maintained his seat in Antioch. The paradox is that, although he is his contemporary, he did not know Jesus, but he became the greatest broadcaster of his message among the synagogues of the diaspora.

Insurgent or pacifist preacher? Authors such as Bermejo Rubio believe that the Gospels have liquefied the anti-Roman profile of Jesus, showing him innocent in front of the empire to guarantee the survival of the believers. "These are texts composed for the internal consumption of the communities in which they were born and are therefore written to self-legitimize.The script reflects the mitemes (N of the R: mythical models present in other traditions) well that they did not have the will to deceive ". These are authors who believe that, although Jesus believed that the release of enemies would ultimately be produced by supernatural means, that does not mean that he thought men should pbadively wait for that moment. Jesus' project would have had a political and nationalist dimension. "This Gandhi pacifism," he says, "was not a postulate in the ancient Mediterranean world, nor in Judaism nor in Greco-Roman culture."

The seminary researchers on Jesus who subscribe to this hypothesis believe that there are many indications that the profile of the insurgents of Jesus was considered a danger by the imperial authorities. Namely: Crucifixion was considered for cases of insurrection to Roman rule in Israel, not for minor crimes. And the followers of the insurgents were subject to the same punishment, which would explain why, according to the Gospels, all the disciples fled. Moreover, the process of Jesus in front of the Sanhedrin, the supreme council of the Jews, reported by Mark and Matthew, is implausible. Because for the Mosaic law, blasphemy (to postulate as Son of God) was punished with stoning, and they would not have needed the intervention of the Roman authorities. This badysis does not give credit to the image of the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate as a puppet willing to obey the popular will to condemn pardon by proposing to choose between Jesus and Barabbas. And nothing indicates that it was a Roman custom at the time of Easter.

John Meier, author of "A Marginal Jew", the most comprehensive work on the figure of Jesus Christ, composed up to now of 5 volumes (the last published in 2017) differs from this look. It presents as a framework for the preaching of Jesus a rather peaceful Galilee and does not share the opinion of those who argue that the anti-Roman agitation that culminated in the war of the sixties was already manifested in this territory . He believes that his message addressed mainly the marginalized of the social and religious community and that he criticized the conventional forms of official religiosity and the interpretation of the law given by the teachers.

For the rest, it is unanimously admitted that the history of the flogging of Christ is perfectly plausible, but the controversy resumes after death. "As a rule, the victims of a crucifixion have not been buried," says Crossan. They lost the honor of a dignified burial, so the idea of ​​a grave where the body of Jesus would have disappeared would have been unlikely.
Albert Schweitzer, for whom investigating the life of Jesus as a Christian was an act of great scientific honesty, was convinced that none of this information would alter the essence of his beliefs for persons of faith. "Jesus continues to have meaning in our world because from him came a powerful spiritual current," he said, "which can not be broken or consolidated by any historical knowledge."

* Executive news editor.

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