DWill wrote:Robert Tulip wrote:
Mark's effort to subvert Roman identity was partly successful, leading to the collapse of paganism, but also partly unsuccessful, in that Rome successfully assimilated the Christian moral attack, recognising its own psychological guilt for imperial murder by making the cross the symbol of redemption and conscience. This imperial guilt was then deflected onto the Jews, who were stigmatised as Christ killers so that western civilization could claim an unrepentant clear conscience about its destructive and oppressive behavior.
A simple question about the end point of your sequence: roughly in what year would this imperial guilt have been deflected onto the Jews? As an imperium, Rome didn't adopt Christianity until quite late, did it, yet the scapegoating of the Jews exists in the earliest Gospel, perhaps around 70 CE.
This is a really good question, but I don’t think it is simple. Apologies that this post is a bit long, I have just used it to set out some observations. Where I say ‘Jesus says’ I am just referring to the fictional character.
Rome had plenty to be guilty about – as Paul said, all have sinned, and there is plenty of evidence that pagan practices were specifically viewed as wrong in the eyes of Christ. But Christianity teaches that believers are forgiven and will go to heaven, based for example on
John 3:16. This is a good way to deflect a guilty conscience. It means that where believers should feel guilty they don’t because they have internalised a simple formula to justify themselves ‘whosoever believeth shall have eternal life’.
By the time Christianity became the Roman state religion in the fourth century, there was strong feeling against Jewish intransigent refusal to believe that Jesus was the Christ. It was possible for the ruling classes to morally justify their own oppressive actions, but they had to psychologically project their own evil onto another scapegoat, the Jews.
Looking at the evolution of Christian attitudes towards Judaism, we see a gradual separation and hardening. There is certainly Roman imperial guilt, given that the cross was originally a symbol of imperial condemnation, and it was converted into a symbol of salvation. (Incidentally the crucifix did not appear in art for 400 years.) Roman feeling of guilt must have involved a transformation of attitudes about crucifying people, alongside a sense of remorse that their political torture weapon murdered the Lord of Glory.
Before Constantine, the Empire did not feel guilty about disposing of Jesus, as it considered that the mandate of heaven lay with their pagan pantheon headed by Jupiter, and Jesus was just a contemptible rebel. Once Christ was accepted as imperial God, the question became who was primarily at fault for killing him. The Revelation definitely blamed Rome, Paul is strongly anti-racist, and the Gospels are ambiguous, indicating Jesus was killed by Roman troops at the instigation of 'the Jews'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemiti ... _Testament is a good source.
Paul, generally considered the earliest Christian source, emphasises the need for Christianity to be non-racist, saying “in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek”. Paul can be read as presenting Christianity as a version of Judaism that is acceptable to non-Jews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Epis ... thenticity explains that a notorious anti-Semitic text in
1 Thessalonians 2:13-16 is so dramatically incompatible with the rest of Paul’s teachings and so anachronistic that it cannot be regarded as authentic.
Revelation was widely read as principally directed against Rome as the new Babylon, and against Nero as the Beast, a line that moved into modern anti-imperialist rhetoric such as Bob Marley’s condemnation of the USA as Babylon.
The Gospels, if we accept their early versions as being written in the years after the Roman destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, are ambiguous about Judaism. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says “Salvation is from the Jews” (:4:22), but then John tells us “the Jews sought to kill him” (7:1), and continually speaks of ‘the Jews’, 71 times, casting them in a bad light for their failure to believe in Jesus.
On the one hand, Jesus says he came to fulfil the law of Moses and the prophecies of the Old Testament, and very many of the Gospel motifs are based on Jewish traditional texts. But on the other hand, Jesus follows in the tradition of the prophets in attacking prevailing Jewish practice. Just as Amos and Isaiah and Jeremiah suggested that failure to follow their own religion would lead to destruction of Israel, Jesus condemns the Pharisees for hypocrisy.
The crucifixion is blamed on the collaboration between the Jewish authorities and the Roman occupiers, with the high priests saying that if they let Jesus continue then the Romans will destroy the temple. The handing over of Jesus is compatible with the view that the Romans were the real evil power, while the Jews were simply doing what they had to do in order to prevent the emergence of a political subversive.
Jesus says he brings a new covenant, replacing Moses’ teaching on ‘eye for an eye’ with ‘love your enemies’. This is ambiguous. Replacing the law contradicts the line ‘not a jot or tittle of the law will pass away’. Also, loving enemies is incompatible with racism.
The blood guilt line from Matthew 27:25, ‘may his blood be on us and on our children’ has been a principal justification used for anti-Semitism. My view though, is that this line was not directed against Judaism in its entirety by any means, but rather against those collaborators with Rome who were allowed by Pilate into the temple for the trial. There is no indication, for example, that the Jews who accompanied Jesus into Jerusalem on his triumphant entry on Palm Sunday would have at all been the same people who mocked him before Pilate.
Jesus and John made the point that you cannot be forgiven if you do not understand your sin and feel sorry about it. While people fail to understand the sinful nature and history of the construction of the Christ myth, they live under condemnation. As Jesus put it, the truth will set you free.
Do I read you correctly here? Are you indeed saying that the construction of the Christ myth (if it was in fact constructed by a few people, as you imply) was sinful?
I regard it as sinful, because I view evidence as the core of ethics. Believing things that lack evidence is morally culpable.
The construction of the Christ myth was the basis of the collapse of classical civilization. Believing a pack of rubbish that conflicted with all reason and evidence led to an oppressive dogmatic culture in which free critical enquiry was banned and a clique of liars and frauds took power. Yes, that is sinful.
Looking at it today, people who believe adamantly in the historical Jesus tend to deny scientific reality, ignoring evidence about the likely consequences of their actions. Those who believe absurdities permit atrocities. Yes, that is sinful.
Allegorically, we might say if we live in a house that municipal authorities have condemned, and we ignore the evidence the engineer has explained, we also live under condemnation.