My Jesus is better than your Jesus!

Have you ever wondered why Jesus comes in so many flavors? In this country alone, we preach and promote hundreds of different Jesuses.

And it goes without saying that my Jesus is better than your Jesus!

Even within the same sect, people claim their Jesus is different from and better than, the Jesus worshipped by other sect members. In the Roman Church, for example, there is a Jesus of the Vatican who is pretty rigidly Catholic on most things. In Catholic colleges and universities, you'll find everything from an historical Jesus to a mythical Jesus none of which care much whether you're Catholic or not. The various orders in the Roman Church all understand Jesus a bit differently and speak of Jesus in different ways and believe Jesus demands different things of them.

On the Protestant side, some denominations profess a specific creed, such as the Apostles' or Nicene Creed. In those dogmatic affirmations, Jesus is identified as God. But for most people, the creeds are not something they worry about. In mainline Protestant groups some folks may think Jesus is God, but a lot of others conceive of Jesus as a really nice guy who doesn't demand very much of anyone -- just that they go to church a couple of times a year and put a couple of bucks in the offering plate.

But then there are those who insist it is important to understand Jesus in a particular way. For example, a few weeks ago in our town, the Protestant Episcopal Church split. A large percentage of the membership felt that the national Episcopal Church was no longer preaching the true Jesus because they accepted gays as members and as clergy. So this group took their Jesus and started their own "Anglican" church where you can be sure as hell they won't have gay priests because their Jesus thinks that is wrong, wrong, wrong.

What's interesting, though, is that the people who stayed at the old church did so because they understood Jesus to be welcoming of all people, including gays. Their justification for staying was the same as the justification of those that left: This is what Jesus wants us to do.

Both can't be right, can they?

Then you've got the Baptists. There are almost as many different kinds of Baptists as there are breeds of dogs. And they all define Jesus differently. The largest group of Baptists are wrapped up in the Southern Baptist Convention, which thinks of Jesus pretty much as a white, southern, anti-gay, anti-abortion, Republican.

In some of the northern Baptist groups, Jesus is more likely to be a Democrat. In the black Baptist churches, Jesus is seen as a fighter for civil rights and a leader in the battle against oppression. Some black Baptist churches hang pictures of a black Jesus on their walls.

As you move further off center, you'll find conservative groups like the Pentecostals where Jesus is pretty rabid about homos and abortionists and speaks in tongues and uses loud, rock and roll music in worship. He is almost always a Republican.

The same is true in the growing crop of independent mega-churches. Some of them, however, have also made Jesus into a super salesman, or gift-giver. Just turn your life over to Jesus and he will give you anything your little heart desires. This Jesus, while again homophobic and anti-abortion and a Republican, is also kind of like Santa Claus - and you don't have to wait until Christmas; just pray.


Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, has authored a number of books, some of which have earned him various prizes. A few years ago, he wrote Jesus and Yahweh - The Names Divine, a fascinating study which is designed to help us re-think our understanding of Jesus [and Yahweh.]

First of all, he differentiates between Yeshua of Nazareth, "a more-or-less historical person," and Jesus Christ, "a theological God." Yeshua of Nazareth, Bloom says, is not historical but "more-or-less historical" because "nearly everything truly important about him reaches me from texts I cannot trust."

Nevertheless, from the texts he cannot trust, Professor Bloom stresses that Yeshua was first and always a Jew - nothing more, nothing less. And that fact is critical.

"Jesus Christ," on the other hand, "is a theological God presented by rival traditions: Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, normative Protestantism--Lutheranism, Calvinism, and their variants--and sects old and new, many of them American originals."

Bloom says that for most Christians, Jesus Christ is not Yeshua but this theological God. For most Christians, Jesus is not to be understood apart from the "mysteries of the Incarnation and the Resurrection." But while those "mysteries" define Jesus Christ, they are not essentially related to the man, Yeshua of Nazareth.

Yeshua of Nazareth has been lost in a theological and historical haze.

Although most scholars today recognize that Yeshua was Jewish, says Bloom, Yeshua has been transformed: "he is American: he is multi-everything. We may as well have a Southern Baptist or a Pentecostalist or Mormon or Muslim or African or Asian Jesus as a Jewish one. ...

"[Jesus'] personalism is nineteenth-century American ... Eighty-nine percent of Americans regularly inform the Gallup pollsters that Jesus loves each of them on a personal and individual basis."

How can this be, wonders Bloom, when the Synoptic gospels clearly indicate that, so far as Yeshua was concerned, it all began and concluded with Yahweh alone.... If there is a single principle that characterizes Jesus, it is unswerving trust in the Covenant with Yahweh." [My emphasis]

And that, says Bloom, is the basis of Judaism. "No Jew known at all to history can be regarded as more loyal to the Covenant than was Jesus of Nazareth. That makes it an irony-of-ironies that his followers employed him to replace the Yahweh Covenant with their New Covenant." [My emphasis]

What happened to Yeshua? How was he taken over and transformed by early Christians into something unrecognizable - no longer Jewish but a Greek mystery redeemer; no longer an upholder of the Torah, but a replacement for the Torah; no longer a practicing Jew but a denouncer of the Law; no longer a prophet preaching that salvation issues from obedience to Yahweh, but rather a priest who insists salvation is a gift given for simply believing in his own mythical death and resurrection; a gift that can be repeated over and over in the ritual eating and drinking his blood - the very idea of which would make any Jew toss his cookies!

How did we get from there to here - from Yeshua of Nazareth to all these Jesuses hanging around today? And what do all our various Jesuses mean? And can any one of them provide a way out of the morass that engulfs our planet?

Not so long as my Jesus is better than your Jesus.

Maybe Christians need to re-read the Synoptic Gospels with new eyes and heads free from the theological Jesus. (The Gospel of John must be excluded as it was written much later than the Synoptics and in John, Jesus has already been transformed into a gnostic, mystery redeemer.) And even though these texts can't be "trusted" because they are evangelical tracts written to entice people to believe and have never been verified by an independent source, they offer the only information we have about Yeshua of Nazareth.

Who was he, really, according to Matthew, Mark and Luke? Is a mutual understanding of Yeshua possible if we leave off the theological framework that reconfigured him into a Christian god that displaced the old Yahweh with a new and improved version?

And is there anything Yeshua can teach us as to how to live in relative compatibility as one human race?

Or will it all end with a bang and a then a whimper - "But, my Jesus was better than your Jesus!"