The New Testament Re-evaluated
Note.
This essay, originally written in 1989, was to a very large event based on the writings of Karl Kautsky. Kautsky was a Marxist historian of some merit who famously got denounced by Lenin when he voted with the Kaiser's regime in support of World War One. His work, the Origins of Christianity, first appeared in German in 1908 and was widely regarded as a landmark of scholarship. When I was a student at Nottingham University in the late 1960s I was a very close friend of a theologian, who told me that the Kautsky book pre-dated modern Biblical criticism by 60 years. I have added some other interpretation of my own, partly based on my earlier studies of economic history, partly based psychotherapy and partly based on critiques of professionalism in the "caring services".
Brian Davey. March 2003
........In Kautsky's approach the Gospels were an account written down way after the events and then interpreted and translated and rewritten by generations of scribes. Mark's Gospel is sometimes held to have the closest links with the events - there being a tradition that it was based on Peter's reminiscences shortly before his death in Nero's persecution in A.D. 64. This would date the gospel as being a record written down for the first time 30 years after the events. This would be like remembering what happened in 1973, with little or few written records
Through the blurred telescope of history
When we look back through the telescope of history we read accounts as through blurred glass - our difficulties of comprehension are in grasping the events in the context of the times. These times are different social, economic and political conditions with which we are not familiar, differences in cultures and ideas, differences in standards of living, of class and social status. And our comprehension is blurred by the fact that generations of scholars, interpreters and translators also understood things in the particular context of their own time and their own social position. Since these men were scribes, educated, and mostly closely allied with very powerful social forces, it is not to be wondered at that our attempts to understand what happened are difficult. One of the social groups that Jesus rages against continually are scribes - but Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were scribes.
Out of this blurred picture it is not surprising that when the Holy Church no longer held things together through its bureaucratic and ideological authority, for example after the Reformation, there was room for an infinite number of different kinds of schisms. There is room for many, and often completely opposing, readings of the Biblical text.
The New Testament on Usury
To illustrate this point let us briefly examine the issue of usury in the Bible. Now in today's world, in the capitalist West, usury is an irrelevance as a political issue except for the very poor, for whom loan sharks are the modern day equivalent. Of course, mortgages and interest rates are very hot topics - but to institutions that do not generally turn ones indebtedness into forms of bondage or send round the heavy mob. Usury in impoverished and peasant societies has a totally different significance. The merchant and moneylender (often the same person) has great social power and is a burden on the backs of the poor. (They may be a burden to the rich too - since pre-capitalist ruling groups did not use money for re-investment in production from which they could, then re-pay debts. Instead loans paid for military campaigns or luxury consumption so that huge debts to money lenders came to be difficult problems for powerful people. The hatred of money lenders, by both the powerful and. the poor combined, formed the economic basis for anti-Semitism for it was the Jews, as a dispersed 'people class', with a commercial and money orientated way of life, who were identified as the pre-eminent money lending social group - c.f. Shylock in the Merchant of Venice).
Such issues are not entirely irrelevant in Islam to this day where a debate still goes on about how to reconcile the Prophet's prohibiting usury with modern banking. Now we can read the Bible today oblivious of such issues and thus entirely fail to notice that there may be a quite literal meaning to Matthew's version of the Lord's Prayer when it says, in the King Jame's Version "And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors" Matthew VI 12.
In the New English Bible of 1961 this has been changed to "Forgive us the wrongs we have done, As we have forgiven those who have wronged us." Yet this may be an example of the kind of rewrite that happened earlier, as scholars assumed something had one meaning, as they could not believe it's the other possible meaning.
This idea may be the real meaning of the description of the kingdom of heaven as being a place where a certain king forgives his servants their debts, but also expects them to forgive their own debtors in return - (c.f. Matthew XVIII 23 - 35). This might also be connected to telling people they should sell all they had and give to the poor, the impossibility of the rich entering this Kingdom, and the driving of the moneychangers out of the Temple.
But it is quite possible that later scholars just could not believe that Christ should be so disrespectful of private property so that something Jesus said was turned upside down in its meaning - and translated into another description of the Kingdom which would not go down badly in the boardroom of a transnational enterprise. Thus in Matthew XXV 14-30 the Kingdom is likened to a man who expects his servants to make a good return on the talents he gives them. This man rages at someone who has the gall to say he reaps where he has not sown, and gathers where he has not strawed and tells him, in terms reminiscent of Mrs Thatcher, "thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with take./Take therefore the talent from him, and give into unto him that have ten talents/ For unto everyone that have shall be given, and he shall have in abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath/And cast we the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth" Matthew XXV 27-30.
Is this, we wonder, the same Kingdom of Heaven as the one where debts are forgiven? Where the money lenders in the Temple are described as thieves? Most likely Jesus was being ironic - or a later scribe did not believe Christ was being critical of an unjust economic order and inverted the meaning in translation.
Jesus as psychotherapist
Much of the ministry of Jesus was based on his success in casting out devils and curing lunatics - the word is used explicitly in Matthew. And Jesus had first had 'to get the devil out of himself', to put Satan behind him. One of his earliest recorded remarks is "...Ye will surely say unto me this proverb Physician, heal thyself..." Luke IV 23. We can speculate that many of his successes in physical medicine are due to the psychosomatic basis of some physical illnesses: for example, hysterical blindness is not uncommon.. This is speculation, but in psychiatric problems it is common for people to survive the damage of childhoods in which they were treated as if their feelings counted for nothing, and lives in which they are treated by their 'social superiors' like dirt, by harbouring a compensatory egoistical grandiosity in which they see themselves as being" so much more important than other people really. When given an opportunity, a little bit of social importance which seems to show that they are not nobodies, such people often experience the totally opposite belief sense in their own self importance. Indeed they can become very self inflated. Working with very humble people Jesus was thus confronted with the following:
"Then there arose a reasoning among them, which of them should be the greatest"to which his response was "He that is least among you shall he great" Luke IX 46-49.
In fact, the prescription to do to others as one would have done to oneself is a radical egalitarian doctrine. Especially when, as we shall see, Jesus clearly saw this as part of a process in which his Kingdom would have no place for the rich, the powerful and the hypocritically righteous scribes, lawyers and Pharisees. His would be a Kingdom for the common people with whom he lived.
"But their scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples saying', Why do you eat and drink with publicans and sinners?/ And Jesus answering said unto them, They that are whole need not a physician; hut they that are sick/ I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance." Luke V 30-32. For reasons that I shall look at later, on scholar of early Christianity, the Marxist, Karl Kautsky suggested in his work that the words "to repentance" were added later. The point about this is that Jesus preferred the company of people who were 'not respectable' His ministry was aimed at ""the poor, the broken hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering sight to the blind and to set at liberty them that are bruised" Luke IV 18.
The link between healing the sick and dealing with sin is clear. Like Freud, unless Jesus could find someway of dealing with the guilt and fear suffered by the powerless, he would not have been able to help such people cope or do anything curative to psychological problems of internalised anger and fear. And we can interpet Christ's attitude as being that he identified with the common people who got into scrapes with the law - prostitutes, the sick, the lame and outcast. In contrast, for all the statements about loving one's enemies, we can see a clear hatred in his attitude to the educated. For it was they who exalted themselves and used their position as administrators of the law to exploit the poor - the poor who were driven as the poor often are, to get into scrapes and difficulties, or like Mary Magdalene to turn to prostitution, in order to survive. Understanding the situation of the poor he was able to counter their sense of fear and guilt pointing the finger back at the powerful as the real source of their problems. Let those without sin cast the first stones, let them cast the beams out of their own eyes. Judge not so that you be not judged, may have been his popular way of addressing the issue of the sins of the poor. Also, as already suggested, he provided a viable way to enable his followers to eat and survive.
There is plenty to suggest he did not stand puritanically aside from real life. For example he compares the rejecting response of the hated lawyers and Pharisees to himself and to John the Baptist "For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine and ye say, He hath a Devil/The Son of Man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners" Luke VII 34, Christ may not have been a drunkard but some people alleged he was too fond of his wine.
It doesn't seem unlikely to me that Christ had an attitude once articulated by Marx - that if the law abiding wanted to feel righteous they should remember that criminals keep in business police, jailers, lawyers, executioners, judges, locksmiths. All manner of such worthy people would be out of work and unable to feel upstanding and righteous without crime. Not that he necessarily advocated breaking" the law at first, though I shall argue his trial was probably based on just that, but rather that he advocated turning' the 'disobedient' to a wiser primitive communism of consumption.
We might easily then have had a movement in which Jesus' forgiveness was a form of indulgence towards the 'sins' of the poor as he saw such law breaking as having" no real comparison as compared to the hypocrisy of the rich, to educated and powerful people - the know what's best for you. The people at the bottom of social hierarchies typically find forced to endure the humiliations of people who 'know better' - and it was people like this who Jesus denounced over and again in the Gospels. It is clear that he hated scribes, lawyers, Pharisees and priests, as complete hypocrites. He raged at them continually in a way he did not when it came to the poor. So it is 'the righteous' who he regarded as his real enemies. This enables us to put a different understanding" on the way in which Jesus 'forgave' the sins of the poor.
And there is enough evidence that there was a hatred that they felt the other way. The "righteous" doubtless felt that he had no right to go around telling people that they were basically O.K. - to use the jargon of a modern psychotherapist - or defending them by pointing to the abuses of power by those above them. The real people called to repentance were probably the educated classes!
A Kingdom guaranteeing the poor something to eat
It is also quite likely that his Kingdom was to be a real earthly Kingdom. When we read the Gospels in our well fed homes we do not notice the full significance in the continual references to food and drink, to bread wine and fishes, throughout the gospels. It is not without significance that the first miracle was turning water into wine. It is important that Jesus was able to organise a feast that fed the 5,000. The last supper been properly seen as immensely inportant for Christianity but all that Christ may have meant when he said "Take eat, this is my body" is that bread and wine is the stuff that makes up anyone's body, or, in the prosaic words of the German philosopher Feuerbach, "We are what we eat".
This puts the communion meal and the last supper in its proper context. Today the communion is a ritual taking of bread and wine. However, the common meal was at the centre of early Christianity. At the last supper, when it was not yet actually determined what would be the fate of a social and political movement that was making a bid for power, that had just occupied the temple and chucked out its commercial activities and incurred further wrath from the priests and professional classes, Jesus spoke of the Kingdom that he promised as being "nigh at hand". It would be "before this generation taste death". (Luke XXI 32 ). The disciples were to enjoy a Kingdom in which they "may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel."
The basis for this went further than a common meal. It also entailed a sharing of goods in common. The Apostles shared a common purse, called 'the bag' in the gospels. In fact, Judas Iscariot was the holder of this bag.
If one wanted to enter the Kingdom as a rich person one would have to sell what one had and give to the poor. In the Acts of the Apostles this form of primitive communism of consumption was described as follows "And all that believed were together and held all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men, as every man had need/ And they daily continuing with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart" Acts II 44-46.
Such a movement would be very popular among the poor as a form of economic insurance and way of living in hard times.
Later gospels would rewrite the message but in Luke it is put pretty plainly "Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now, for ye shall laugh...But woe unto you that are rich! For ye shall receive your consolation. Woe unto you that are full, for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep. Woe unto them when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets. " Luke VI 21 -26.
The occupation of the temple
The Gospels are possible to interpret in many ways. One interpretation, that of Kautsky is that, with a mass following when he entered Jerusalem, Jesus had decided to go beyond words. He had decided to drive the thieving moneylenders and commercialists out of the temple to strike a blow at both money power and the hypocritical religious powers.
This was an act which would only be possible with the backing of considerable popular support. Roman troops would not have stood idly by. Would today's police?Such support was there in the mass response on the entry into Jerusalem and later. Immediately after the occupation of the temple the priests could do nothing "for all the people were very attentive to hear him" Luke XIX 48.
What followed is called the passion and passions must indeed have been running high. Jesus continued to occupy - teach in - the temple. No mean feat when the temple as a hub of commercial and financial activity would have been guarded by the Roman imperial power with troops.
In a tense and unstable political situation with Jesus at the head of a mass movement it is possible to interpret most of the events that followed in a political way. In a situation of great tension, where the mobilised crowd was still very dangerous, the Roman and Jewish authorities bided their time and waited for an appropriate moment to act. In such a time of tension Jesus would probably be in partial hiding at night in order to avoid arrest. Peter and John's instructions to prepare for the last supper by following a man with a pitcher of water are reminiscent of the sort of arrangements that would be made by a movement in partial hiding. (Luke XXII 8-12). What Judas Iscariot then betrayed was the hiding place of Jesus at night time on the Mount of Olives. In the tense times it is not to be wondered at that Jesus would suspect betrayal. Moreover, identified as a leader with a mass following, he would have been obliged in self defence to prepare for this eventuality.
At the end of the last supper Jesus says something that fits this account very closely - and does not fit a "turning the other cheek" interpretation at all. "Then he said unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one./ For I say unto you it must now he fulfilled in me what is written namely: And he will he counted among the lawless. For what is written of me shall be fulfilled/They said however, Lord here are two swords. And he said unto them. That is sufficient. " Luke XXII 36-38.
At this point the disciples returned to the Mount of Olives and the betrayal takes place. Clearly the swords already referred to are used - for the ear of a servant of the high priest is cut off.
The rewritten account
None of this is, of course, consistent with the usual story. But then the usual story, a rewritten hash of contradictory messages, is not consistent itself. I have concentrated on Christ's hatred for the Pharisees and scribes, the middle and professional classes. Such classes collaborated with Roman rule and got their protection from it. At a time when revolts against Roman rule were common, Jesus would almost certainly would find himself at odds with the Romans. In the standard anti-Semitic account of the gospels it was the Jews who abandoned Jesus and pushed for his crucifixion, According to some theologians this 'Love thy Enemy' philosophy disappointed people who wanted a rebel Messiah to lead them against the Romans. This view is supported by the 'Render unto Caesar' approach to taxation written in the Bible. It might also be claimed that the Jews turned against him because of his high moral standards which shamed them and fanned their hatred.
But the standard account leaves unexplained why the Romans should have crucified Jesus. It leaves unexplained the occupation of the temple and the expulsion of the moneychangers. In those times moneyed people thrived on the poor's need for cash to pay their taxes. The merchants would do good business out of the need for the poor to sell goods, to raise cash to pay taxes. It is not uncommon for tax collectors in pre-capitalist societies to combine their job with money lending and with buying and selling. These were very lucrative when done in combination. So when Jesus threw the moneylenders out of the temple it was not consistent with the doctrine of taxation ascribed to him. In any case imagine all of this occurring today without police intervention and arrest!
As a historical account the Gospels, rewritten in later years for a Gentile, Roman and Greek religion, detached from its Jewish roots, writes out Roman responsibility for the events, and makes the standard anti-Semitic story.
It is a story that reads as, Kautsky pointed out, as utter nonsense. Thus although Pilate can find no guilt in Jesus he nevertheless condemns him at the behest of the chief priests, and the rulers and the people. It is at a hearing held, apparently, in front of the whole population of Jerusalem. For a Roman Governor to be swayed by a mob is very unlikely - since when did imperial rulers follow legal procedures swayed on the spot by public opinion? And it is odd that this mob, which earlier appeared to have acquiesced in the occupation of the temple by same person, has now changed heart completely in the other direction.
Moreover, after his shouting for his condemnation, the mood of a large number of people changes yet again. At least we are told that the women, the daughters of Jerusalem, bewail and lament him. (Luke XXIII 27-28)
The ludicrous dialogue between Pilate and the Jewish 'multitude' is nothing short of ludicrous. The Roman governor who pronounces death declares himself innocent while the mob take full responsibility for the death of an innocent man. And the mob takes responsibility in a form of words that sanctioned anti-Semitism for centuries. "Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children." Matthew XXVII 25. - It's like saying "We'll take responsibility for his death, and our children will too!" What a convenient line for the ant-semites! What a whopping historical lie.
Note the 'all'! Obviously the daughters of Jerusalem, who were earlier lamenting Jesus, had change their mind.
At this point Pilate releases Barabbass. The description of Barabbass is itself interesting and no mere passing detail. In Mark, the Gospel said to be narrated from Peter's reminiscences, we have an intriguing description of the circumstances of the arrest of Barabbass: "And there was one named Barabbas, which lay bound with them that had made insurrection with him who had committed murder in the insurrection." Mark XV 7. Which insurrection? Nowhere in the other-Gospels is an insurrection mentioned. But here it is referred to not as 'an' insurrection but as 'the' insurrection.
(I have checked Luther's German Bible translation of 1450. It says "Es war aber einer, genannt Barabbas, gefangen mit den Aufrührerischen die im Aufruhr einen Mord begangen hatten." This is even briefer and translated also refers to "the" insurrection. "There was one named Barabbas, taken with the rebels, who had committed a murder in the insurrection"
People who speak of the Bible being the literal word of God might like to remember that it comes to them via translators, out of Hebrew, Greek and Roman.)
In the Gospels these things are left unexplained but one is also left with suspicions as to why someone should be crucified as under a sign which mocked him as "The King of the Jews". Crucifiction was the execution for a political offence and the notion that Jesus might be claimed to be the King of the Jews may have been the one he had to answer. There is just enough left in the Gospels to be able to read the original story underneath the rewritten account.
The resurrection
But what of the resurrection? Christianity was very successful in later centuries, because of its radical message that met the needs of the poor in a vicious empire going into social collapse. It's message made it ideal to be a religion for the slaves. However, the initial defeat and crucifixion of its leader was a not a good start. Those terrible words of defeat and anguish on the cross are still there for all to see. They still read paradoxically as the last thing that one would expect Jesus to say if he was anything by a man. "My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?" Luke XV 34.
Given its later huge success, and given its moral strength, it would seem impossible that its leaders would play a hoax on history. But this is not impossible. At the time Matthew was writing his Gospel it was, we are told, reported among the Jews that Jesus' body was stolen from the grave. (Matthew XXUIII 15) and the Gospels go to great length to knock that rumour on the head. Desperate times might tempt to desperate measures. In the Japanese film Kagamusha, a medieval Japanese warlord arranges a double for himself to pose after death. His death is kept secret on his last instructions to win time to save his country from attack. Stealing bodies and denying death can be a politically expedient thing to do. But one does not have to believe this, which is only one possible explanation for the belief in the resurrection.
Seeing and hearing the dead. Jesus - as a grief reaction
Another possible approach is to understand the sighting of Jesus as the belief of the grief reactions of very distressed people, taken as fact by a very credulous age. The credulity of the age was such that the belief in people being raised from the dead was quite common anyway.
Jesus himself had 'raised Lazarus from the dead'. Such things, probably based on people in comas, or who were unconsciousness, recovering, led to a general credulity. People want to believe such things because they are afraid of dying. Who can blame them? But the point is that the wish does not then make it so.
We are told that Christ was first seen alive by Mary Magdalene in the Garden. Now it is not uncommon in great grief for people to hear the voices and see again people they love in their bereavement, in their periods of extreme distress. And we should recall, that Mary Magdalene was cured by Christ of no less than seven devils (Luke VIII 2). It would not be inconceivable that her legendary love for Jesus would have created the most profound distress. In this condition hallucination of Jesus, as part of her mind refused to accept his death, would be quite possible.
It is clear that the subject of Jesus living again was the subject of some controversy - the story of doubting Thomas demonstrates this. The insistence of Thomas on proof is a scientific approach to the issue. The subsequent story of his coming to be convinced, may have been written as a little homily to reassure other doubters - whether of the hoax, or of hallucinated sightings of Jesus. In fact, even tactile hallucinations are not unknown.
Whatever the initial roots of the idea once it was established that Jesus had 'risen again' - it became part of the story and a way of explaining the paradox of a movement so successful, whose leader had died in defeat. It fitted too with the idea of Jesus being a Son of God in a unique sense. (Jesus said we are all children of God. When he said, therefore, that he was the son of God, was he making a claim to be different in status to anyone else? Nowadays it is not uncommon in various meditative traditions to say that we are all "children of the universe").
Undermining the original radicalism of Christianity
The Christianity that was now spread into the Roman Empire had many attractions to poor people and slaves. But in order to sustain their social, religious and political movement the early Christians had to either resist rich people or win them over. And very soon the early converts like Paul, who as Saul, had persecuted the new movement were won over. But they were won over in a particular way. They were not anti-Roman or attached to the Jewish roots of the religion. Nor were they so rebellious towards authority - in any case such rebellion had ended very nastily.
For the first Christians it probably looked as if there was an accommodation taking place with those very same educated men that Christ had railed against. This kind of thing is seen over and over again in history. A radical movement loses its radicalism. Christianity won converts from more and more wealthy and powerful people - but in the process its radical dream was eroded.
For these wealthy people, there may have been some similarities to today's rich people in America. Such people can find no meaning for living in the amassing of money and consumer goods, and they flock to their psychotherapists in the search for that meaning.(Or give their money to evangelists on the make). The grotesque luxury consumption of the rich of that time, as in our time, provides no moral basis for living. Instead rich people found their meaning in the bravery of a social movement that challenged the morality of the existing order.
However, the rich people, who patronised this church would have had little attachment to the common meal. They were not people worried abut where the next meal was to come from. Moreover, the main condition for their involvement was an abandonment of the practice of "holding goods in common". The common meal degenerated into a mere ritual that theologians had to find other (bizarre) reasons to justify. (Possibly rooted in infantile oral fantasy). The holding of goods in common evolved into the charity and 'good-works' which is a hallmark of churches to this day - often founded in ways that buttresses the institutional infrastructure of the Church.
Today liberation theologians in South America are denounced, sentenced to silence or censored, if they see 'sociological' rather than 'theological' interpretations of the New Testament. The Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is concerned to shut them up.
What went wrong? Undoubtedly the social and economic conditions of the time could not sustain a movement of this sort or the purity of this message. Christianity developed as the Roman Empire collapsed into the Dark Ages. The parasitical plunder of its provinces by Rome to feed the luxuries, the troops, and the bread and circuses led inexorably to its collapse. (Rather like American global dominance is currently eroding the ecology and economy of the planet). When it was weakened in this way the Roman Empire became the prey to outside invasions which further accelerated the process of collapse. In parallel to this process the Church bureaucracy merged ever closer into the power structures of society.
In particular we have seen how the movement got its initial force by its being a genuine movement of the people which rode on a challenge to the people who, as the educated, righteously knew best and exploited the poor. In the Acts we see several times reference to how uneducated were the first missionaries of the church - but they were not uneasy at how uncouth and unsophisticated their doctrines seemed, In a certain degree it would have been their early strength. It would have kept their movement in touch with ordinary people not to have the airs and graces of the sophisticated Greek philosophies and Roman ideas. It could not and did not last. The Gospels came to be written down by the hated scribes. The educated men became the interpreters, the learned authorities who knew how to interpret the Gospels and the original stories. In the process they largely inverted their meaning.
Brian Davey
First written 1989. Partially edited and rewritten 2003.
© BRIAN DAVEY