False Questions: Jesus and Our Spiritual Path

False Questions

Jesus and Our Spiritual Path

Clement T. DeWall

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© Copyright 2014, Clement T. DeWall

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ISBN: 978-1-60414-835-0

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Historical and Cultural Context

The Physical World

God

Human Nature

Children of Abraham

The Son of Man and the Apocalyptic World View

The Forced Conversion of Galilee

The Jewish View of Pagans and Proselytes

CHAPTER 2

A Divided Christianity

A. Christian Belief

The Apocalyptic Message of John the Baptist

Jesus’ Apocalyptic Message

Paul’s Apocalyptic Message

Other Apocalyptic Writers

How the Apocalyptic Outlook Changed

Jesus Seen as the Son of Man

Interpretations of Jesus and His Crucifixion

Our Answer

B. Christian Authority

The Authority Given to the Apostles

Peter’s Primacy

Leadership of the Twelve After the Resurrection

First Letter of Clement

No Overseers in Paul’s Churches

The Pastoral Epistles

The Didache

Ignatius of Antioch

Our Answer

CHAPTER 3

Jesus as the Messiah

A. Jesus as the Son of David

Contradictions with History

Incompatibility of Matthew and Luke

Why the Evangelists Could Have Created Their Stories

The Genealogies

Matthew’s Prophecies

Luke’s Leitmotif

Summary

B. Jesus as the Suffering Servant

Mark’s Use of Psalm 22 as an Outline for the Passion

The Contrast between the Passion in Mark and Luke

The Suffering Servant of Isaiah

Our Answer

CHAPTER 4

The Passion

A. The Plot to Kill Jesus

The Cleansing of the Temple

John’s Version of the Cleansing

Differences Among the Synoptic Gospels

Proposed Reasons for the Decision to Kill Jesus

The Temple Complex

Reasons for Jesus’ Actions

Jesus and the Merchants

Jesus and the Money Changers

The Temple Tax

Follow the Money

The High Priesthood

Our Answer

B. The Death Sentence

The Theory of Peasant Rebels

The Charge of Insurrection

The Theories of Secret Teaching and No Burial

The Charge of Being King of the Jews

Pilate: Are you a king?

Our Answer

The Sign Above the Cross

The Release of Jesus’ Body

Release of the Body

The Burial

CHAPTER 5

Sin and Salvation

A. Baptism and Forgiveness

Jewish Proselyte Baptism

The Baptism of John the Baptist

Christian Baptism

Christian Baptism: Jesus’ Teaching

Christian Baptism: Apostolic Teaching and Practice

Our Answer

B. Belief and Forgiveness

The Creed

The Parable of the Unjust Servant

The Woman with the Alabaster Jar

The Lord’s Prayer

Our Answer

C. Forgiveness in Christian Churches

Public Penance

Indirect Forgiveness by Remission of Punishment

Early Church Practice

Our Answer

CHAPTER 6

Spiritual Adoption

The Audience and Teaching of Jesus

What Happens at Conversion

Our Answer

CHAPTER 7

End Times

John of Patmos

The Letters to the Seven Churches

Plagues and Punishment

Evil Is Overcome

Our Answer

Lessons from the Book of Revelation

CHAPTER 8

Our Spiritual Path

A. Seeing

B. Forgiving

C. Blessing

D. Giving Thanks

APPENDIX A

Mistranslated Words

APPENDIX B

How to Interpret the Bible

Problems in the Bible

Interpreting the Gospels

APPENDIX C

Matthew’s Use of Isaiah 7:14

Suggested References

Books

DVDs

To my wife, Eileen Mackin who helped make this book possible

Introduction

In the 1960s I taught a religion class to juniors at Mt. Carmel High School in Denver, Colorado. The course for one semester was a summary of Catholic Church history. In the section describing the split between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox, I found a statement reading something like this: On July 16, 1054, Pope Leo IX excommunicated Michael Cerularius, the patriarch of Constantinople. This meant nothing to my students without more background material. Since history was barely discussed in my theological studies, I had to do some research.

I found ample material in a three-volume work, A History of the Church, by Philip Hughes. I discovered that Pope Leo IX had died on April 19, 1054, and there was no pope at the time Cerularius was excommunicated. The textbook was worse than slanted; it was false.

History can have more than one version, and the version taught is the one the winners write. For the story of the schism, two versions of history emerged, the Catholic and the Orthodox.

The two versions became apparent when I read another edition of Philip Hughes’s work. The earlier one presented only the Catholic side, with the Greeks and Cerularius in the wrong. Hughes corrected this slanted picture in his later edition, showing how the Catholic cardinals accused Cerularius of bogus crimes and errors, and had no authority to excommunicate.

My beliefs changed as I got deeper into history. Since my teaching days I have reversed many of my theological positions. In the last fifty years theology and biblical studies have made significant strides because of discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, archeological research and studies of ancient manuscripts and languages.

Significant advances in theology are not surprising, but it is surprising that many theologians, religion teachers, ministers and priests have not changed. Just why, I don’t know. Maybe educational institutions have lagged behind. Or maybe the clergy have been taught the latest research while failing to pass it on. Perhaps the clergy think the laity cannot handle new insights. Whatever the reasons, there is a discomforting disconnect between scholarship and commonly held religious beliefs.

While modern theology offers new insights, it also asks new questions. I hope you will find your own answers and begin to question — to question the answers others give you — and to question my opinions as well. Beyond that, I hope you will learn to question the questions that others think they are answering for you. If the questions are irrelevant, so are the answers.

This book is about questions — questions to explore Jesus and his message.

I use the Bible and other ancient documents as my primary sources. These documents are not histories in the modern sense, but they are part of a historical record; and they must be interpreted and evaluated according to specific rules. My rules have been placed in Appendix B. You may disagree with them and have your own, but you cannot competently interpret historical documents with no rules at all. If you find sources that contradict each other, it is not sufficient simply to choose one over the other. Competence demands that one make decisions based on logic and methodology.

To avoid bias as much as possible, it is necessary to use the most reliable and complete data available and to use it logically. Even when this task is complete, we must still ask more questions and seek better answers.

CHAPTER 1

Historical and Cultural Context

We begin with the backdrop of the Bible, Jesus and his message.

The Physical World

The Hebrew world had three levels:

1) The earth on which we live was in the middle or second tier.

2) Below the earth was the world of the dead and of evil spirits, variously called limbo, Hades, hell, or other names.

3) Above the earth was heaven or the heavenly realm, the home of God, the angels and heavenly beings.

On earth we are separated from hell by the ground or the sea. We are separated from heaven by the firmament, which is a solid sky. The creation of the firmament is described in Genesis 1:7, when, on the second day of creation, there was water all around the earth, both below and above; God then slipped in the firmament, like a dome or upside-down fish bowl, over the earth to divide the waters above from the waters below. The Hebrews imagined that when God wanted to send rain, portals would be opened in the firmament to let the waters above fall to the ground. The stars were fixed or fastened into the sky, and in some cultures they were thought to be living beings.

The Jews retained this three-tiered image of the world in the first century. At Jesus’ baptism Luke says that heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him. (Luke 3:21) Matthew says that the heavens were opened to Jesus and he saw the spirit descend like a dove. (Matthew 3:16) In each case there was a hole opening in the firmament or sky, enabling the spirit to pass through or someone to see into heaven.

John of Patmos employs similar imagery in Revelation 19:11, when he sees the heavens opened. In Revelation 4:1 he is able to see into heaven when a door was open.

God

Judaism is credited with advocating monotheism, the belief in only one god, in the midst of a polytheistic world. This was not so in the beginning of Israel’s history. Throughout the Old Testament there are numerous signs that the Hebrew religious mind embraced henotheism, a belief in one god among many others. At certain periods of history the God of Israel may have been worshiped along with a consort.

The Israelites had numerous names for God; unlike Christians, Creator or Maker was seldom used. In the early stages of the development of Christianity, many debated how the world came into being. The result was the Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing. This view is found in the first lesson in the Baltimore Catechism:

1. Who made us?

God made us.

In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. (Genesis 1:1)

From the quotation of Genesis 1:1, the act of creation is the beginning of the existence of all things. The belief in creation out of nothing is an assumption underlying the question.

The quotation of Genesis 1:1 is probably the one most familiar to Christian Bible readers. It is not, however, the most accurate. The New Revised Standard Version translates this verse as In the beginning when God created… But if you read the NRSV footnote, you will find an alternate translation, When God began to create… This latter formula seems to be the preferred translation among Jewish scholars, and does not support creation out of nothing.

In the Old Testament God is sometimes described as war-like and cruel, ordering the slaughter of whole tribes, including women and children. In these stories the authors interpreted events as they perceived them. We must not interpret their perceptions as historical facts.

Human Nature

Genesis describes God forming the first man out of the dust of the earth and breathing into him the breath of life. (Genesis 2:7) This is the typical view of human nature in the Bible. A human being has two parts, a material body and the breath of life. In both Hebrew and Greek the word we translate as spirit has breath as its basic meaning. It also meant wind, imagined as a giant breath. For the Hebrews you had to have both body and soul (or spirit or breath) to be a human being. The Jews did not in their early history believe in life after death. The book of Daniel was the first to postulate a resurrection of the body.

This belief had repercussions in Christian theology. Gnostic Christians after the first century believed that they could experience the risen Jesus directly and spiritually, independently of the hierarchy of bishops and priests. The bishops, who were the predecessors of the Catholic hierarchy, reacted by insisting that the only true experiencers of the risen Christ were those who witnessed his physical resurrection. To be in union with Christ, it was necessary to accept the authority of the bishops, who were the successors of those who witnessed the (bodily) resurrection.

The resurrection of the body is a fundamental doctrine in the Apostles’ Creed and other creeds as well. The Catholic Church still teaches that we will get our bodies back at the end of time, and Pope Pius XII taught that God creates each human soul at the moment of conception. Therefore we have one life to live, with the specific