Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [168]
If you don’t believe Jesus was God, what does he have to offer?
Man or myth? Divine or human? Messiah or great thinker, another Buddha? From its earliest days, Christianity itself was divided over many of these questions. Almost from the start, sects like the Gnostics held views that separated them completely from the orthodox church views. Soon the “church” was a feuding, bickering bunch of thinkers who were all contributing their own take on the life and death of Jesus. Often those opinions had little to do with the biblical accounts. Within modern Christianity there are still boiling arguments over who Jesus was and what he said. For instance, one controversial group of modern Christian theologians has attracted considerable media attention with the so-called “Jesus Seminar,” which regards many of the words of Jesus as fiction, creations of the followers who wrote the Gospels. Fifteen hundred—or even five hundred—years ago they might have been expelled from the church, or burned at the stake, as heretics. Now they, and their more traditional opponents, trade arguments and counterarguments in the media and in the bookstores.
At the other extreme end of the spectrum are Christians who believe every single word of the New Testament and that each word is divine truth and should be literally followed. That can cause some trouble. The story has often been told of the old-time fundamentalist who liked to open his Bible at random and do exactly what he read. One day, he flipped around and found, “And Judas hung himself.” Turning to another page, he read, “Go and do likewise.”
In other words, there is a wide range of Christians in the world today. In America, there are more than two hundred Christian denominations ranging all along the theological spectrum. Some do and some don’t accept everything said by and about Jesus as, well, “Gospel.”
Since studious, scholarly, sincere Christians can’t really agree on what Jesus said and meant, how should the “casual” Christian, or the complete nonbeliever, look at his life and teachings? The question is perhaps even more troubling for Jews, for whom Christianity has not been such a great deal. As Rabbi Joseph Telushkin points out, “Were Jesus to return today, most Jews believe, he undoubtedly would feel more at home in a synagogue than a church…. Most statements attributed to Jesus in the New Testament conform to Jewish teachings.” (Jewish Literacy, p. 128)
However, Rabbi Telushkin also believes that there are three key areas in which Jewish teachings diametrically oppose the teachings of Jesus:
1. Forgiveness of sins. In Matthew, Jesus taught that he had personal authority to forgive sin. (“The Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.”) Judaism teaches that God forgives the sins committed against him through atonement on Yom Kippur.
2. Turning the other cheek and loving enemies. While ancient Jewish tradition included the notion of loving neighbors, loving an enemy or persecutor is a different issue. According to Rabbi Telushkin, the Mosaic Law commands a person to offer the wicked man powerful resistance. This is a conundrum for many Christians as well as Jewish believers. How does one turn the other cheek or love the enemy when confronted with the monstrous evil of a Hitler?
3. Jesus as the only way to salvation. In 1980, Bailey Smith, the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Christian denomination, made headlines when he was quoted as saying, “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.” In 1997, the Southern Baptist Convention again riled people when it announced it was still committed to converting Jews to Christianity. They believe, as do many Christians, that the only way to know God is through acceptance of Jesus as personal Savior. That idea, Rabbi Telushkin points out, denies