An image depicting Jesus Christ. As we prepare to celebrate Christmas,
the biggest controversy this year, at least according to some scholars,
is that there is a discrepancy between “the historical Jesus” and the
“Jesus of the Bible”. Photo/FILE
According to Christian tradition, a boy was born about 2000
years ago today. The child, variously named Jesus Christ, the Saviour or
Son of God, was to change the course of world history through his
teachings.
And at midnight today, from Honolulu to
Waikiki Bay, Mombasa to Montevideo, millions will celebrate Christ’s
birthday. Little children in New York will gaze at the chimney hoping to
see the mythical Father Christmas crawl out with a bagful of goodies.
In
Nairobi tomorrow, children will bounce on plastic castles; get their
faces painted and drain litres upon litres of fruit juice.
Churches will fill like no other time in the year. Families will come together again since the last Christmas.
Urban
dwellers will troop back “home” to the village, where livestock will be
massacred in their thousands, turned into stew to go down with rice,
mukimo, ugali or whatever ethnic accompaniments fit specific regions.
Ah,
wine, beer and hooch like muratina, kathoroko and busaa will flow
freely starting this evening, all to celebrate the birth of the Nazarene
regarded as the founder of Christianity.
Even
atheists, agnostics, nihilists and “lost souls” who, like yours truly,
yoyo between these extremes, will also take time off their daily hustles
and head to Kamakis — that nyama choma belt at the junction of Thika
Road and the Eastern Bypass — or some social place like that and
temporarily drown a year’s load of sorrows.
But
unbeknown to the millions of happy Christians, controversy has been
raging over the historicity and the virgin birth of Christ.
Bible
scholars do not fail to remind their students that the scriptures are
not journalistic accounts, so they should not be read literally, but
rather with “an eye of faith”. The fact that the Bible gives different
and contradictory accounts of the creation story and the birth of Christ
compounds the whole dogma of the birth of the man also called Emmanuel,
“God with us”.
The biggest controversy, at least
according to some scholars, is that there is a discrepancy between “the
historical Jesus” and the “Jesus of the Bible”.
The
historical account of the birth of Christ is not so well understood.
Although most serious Bible historians agree that there was certainly a
man called Jesus born around Palestine all those years ago, the where,
when and even how it took place differ across historians.
This
vagueness is made even worse by the irreconcilable facts and
contradictions about the birth of Jesus in the gospels themselves.
Scholars
say it is strange that only the gospels of Luke and Mathew report the
virgin birth, while John and Mark do not mention it at all.
Similarly,
none of the epistles (letters) carries the story. In his Epistle to the
Romans (1:3), Paul even introduces Jesus as “descended from David
according to the flesh”.
This is a surprising miss
since the idea of virgin birth is a critical tenet of the Christian
faith. You remove it, and Jesus becomes an ordinary human being, which
was what historian and theologian Barbara Thiering’s work managed to do.
And
there is more to the mystery. “Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place
in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before
they came together, she was found to be with the child of the Holy
Spirit.” (Mathew 1:18).
Then in Luke 1:30-35: “The Holy
Spirit will come upon you and the power of the most high will
overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the
son of God.”
Yet the same gospels that claim “virgin
birth”, implying that Joseph was not the biological father of Jesus,
give long genealogies of Jesus, tracing his ancestry from King David
through Joseph (Luke 4:23-38, Mathew 1:1-17).
The
discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls in 1947 threw more doubts on the
virgin birth story (see separate story). The scrolls describe the
existence of a highly secretive branch of the Essenes, one of several
Jewish sects of the time.
According to Dr Thiering, Jesus was not born in Bethlehem but in Qumran near the Dead Sea, among the Essenes.
The
conclusion is based on her 20-year study of the Scrolls. One group of
scrolls, called “the pesharim”, which loosely means “solution” in
Hebrew, contains a code (the Pesher) that gives all the interpretation
and meaning of words and practices used by the Essenes and, by
extension, the Bible.
From the pesharim, Dr Thiering
writes that the Bible has two levels of meaning: the plain level for the
“babes of faith”, and the coded level for the initiated.
Using
these codes, the scholar has given some deeply controversial
interpretations of the events described in the New Testament, which
literally demolish the whole story of Jesus as divine being.
Thiering
says that Jesus was the biological son of Joseph, a member of the
Essenes sect. She goes ahead to give the hidden meanings of some of the
words common in the Bible. In the pesher code, “virgin” among the
Essenes meant “nun”.
This is perhaps why some early
Catholic saints are called “virgins”. The term “holy one” means a
celibate, while its opposite, “sinner” means a married man.
The
special meanings, Thiering tell us, reflect the attitude of the Qumran
community towards sex and marriage. Marriage among conservative Essenes
orders was considered sinful, so that when the woman in Luke 7.39 is
described as “sinner”, it meant that she had just been married.
The scholar says that, from the scrolls, the woman was actually Mary Magdalene at her first wedding ceremony with Jesus.
Similarly, when Peter in Luke 5:8 says to Jesus “depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinner,” he meant that he was a married man.
However,
Dr Thiering’s theory has been dismissed by many Bible Scholars,
including Géza Vermes, who calls it “a fantastic figment of
imagination”.
Vermes adds that much of this
interpretation of the scrolls is based on mere coincidence. “The Essenes
believed in an Aaronic priesthood. Jesus was from the Melchizedek
lineage,” he says.
Jesus may have been celibate just
like the Essenes, but that does not mean any relationship. “It was a
time of war and it may have been the Essenes were very strict about sex.
Another difference with Christians is that the
Essenes believed that only they could be saved. Jesus’ teachings were
that all are called to salvation,” says Fr Ottone Cantore, agreeing with
Prof Vermes.
“There is not an iota of truth that Jesus
was born in the Qumran community. Just dismiss it as heresy,” affirms
Bible scholar, Prof Antonio Magnante.
In the Qumran
community, “an angel” was really a priest next to the position of the
high priest. The high priest was referred as “the most high”, of which
the literal meaning in the Bible refers to “God”.
Therefore,
when Jesus took the high priest position, he was called the Son of God.
And in the story in Luke 1, the “Angel Gabriel” was the Abiethar
priest, who some scholars, including Dr Thiering, say was Simon Magus.
According
to Dr Thiering, the virgin birth story is one of the best examples of
the Pesher coding in the gospels. To understand the idea, the scholar
says, one has to comprehend the way life in the Qumran community was
structured.
First, all members were supposed to be
celibate. This may be the origin of the practice of celibacy among
Catholic priests, which is still practised today.
Marriage
and child bearing were only allowed to those from families of priests
and kings for “the sake of lineage”. And even this was a strictly
disciplined practice.
Joseph, a descendant of King David, belonged to this group.
Dr
Thiering says that, by reporting the virgin birth, Luke and Matthew
were trying to achieve two purposes. First, they were supplying a story
for the “babes in Christ”, because it taught that celibacy was the
highest human state and that “there could be no sexual origin of the
divine man”.
Secondly, they were giving to Pesher experts information about life among the Essenes.
The
question of sex was one of the issues that divided the
“seekers-of-smooth-things” from conservatives in the Qumran community.
The question of Jesus’ legitimacy affected every event of his life,
including at his trial before the crucifixion.
Theologians
argue that there were different orders among the Essenes. One order, to
which Joseph, the father of Jesus belonged, was allowed to marry.
In
this order, there were essentially two wedding ceremonies, Dr Thierings
explains. The first betrothal took place after several years of
courtship, when a couple would “come together” but not have sex.
The
second ceremony was when a woman was three months pregnant, and with no
danger of miscarriage, when the couple would enter into a binding
marriage, for life.
The woman in such an arrangement
had to be a literal virgin before the first ceremony. The high value
placed on chastity made this obligatory. Often, in such periods of
chastity, “passions could become too strong,” says Dr Thiering, which is
implied in 1 Corinthians 7:36.
“If anyone thinks he
is behaving improperly towards his virgin, if his passions are strong,
and it has to be, let them marry, it is no sin.”
Working
from the Pesher codes, Dr Thiering asserts that Joseph, a descendant of
King David, was the biological father of Jesus. Mary, a young virgin,
was betrothed to him for several years before their first ceremony. Six
months before the ceremony, “passions became too strong and Jesus was
conceived”.
“When her pregnancy was discovered,” says
Dr Thiering, “a strict view demanded that they separate and the child be
brought up as illegitimate.”
Jesus was, therefore, a
pre-nuptial son of Joseph, and according to the Essenes’ conservatives,
he was illegitimate. James, his next brother conceived six years later,
was the legitimate one, who should be the heir of David, the Messiah of
Israel.
This explains the tension between Jesus and James in the New Testament, writes the scholar in her 1990 work, Jesus the Man.
However,
Joseph was advised by the “angel”, a human priest, as all angels in the
story are, to have some rituals, binding the relationship. After this
ritual, “he knew her not”, as Mathew 1:25 says.
Sex after pregnancy was forbidden.
But liberal Essenes regarded Jesus as legitimate. The magi who came to hail him were diaspora Essenes who held liberal views.
In
the Pesher coding, Dr Thiering tells us, “Holy Spirit”, like “Angel”,
was a title given to various members of the Essene community, depending
on their “holiness”.
According to this interpretation,
Joseph was the “holy spirit”. In those days, it was a common belief
that great leaders were incarnations of divine beings, and it is in this
sense that the title “Son of God” as applied to Jesus should be
understood.
Even without the scrolls, there are still
other quite mundane and commonsense contradictions about the birth of
Jesus. A good example is the exact time of his birth.
The
gospels paint a graphic picture of a summer or springtime birth, with
all the starry nights, the shepherds out in the night, the Magi, and
people sleeping out for lack of lodging.
Yet
Christians today are celebrating the birth of Christ smack in high
winter in Palestine and the northern hemisphere, where the man was born.
Perhaps this is not so obvious to us in these parts of Africa, but December is rather a cold month where Jesus was born.
At
this time in Palestine, it would have been too cold for anybody to take
sheep out into the field. In addition, the nights would certainly be
blackened by clouds.
From this, some scholars put the
time of the birth of Jesus at around April-May, when shepherds were
likely to move out their flock into the fields after a long period
indoors.
However, that is not really a biblical
problem. The writers of the gospels were not probably not so much
concerned with the chronological timing of the birth of Christ, again as
any serious Bible scholar knows. He was born.
Full stop. The “where” and “when” are not so important in the gospel narratives. The message is.
Dr Mbataru teaches at Kenyatta University.
-----------------------------
Controversial Dead Sea scrolls chronicle life during Jesus era
DISCOVERED
IN 1947 at Kirbet Qumran along the Dead Sea, the Dead Sea scrolls are a
set of 800 ancient documents describing the existence of a
pre-Christian secret branch of the Essenes, one of several Jewish sects
(including the Pharisees and Sadducees) of the time.
The
scrolls, some scholars say, give the historical account of the birth of
Jesus and an alternative explanation of the origin of Christianity.
The
findings kicked a major controversy centering on the major pillar of
Christianity: the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. Scholars claimed that
Joseph, a member of the Essenes, was the biological father of Jesus.
The
existence of the controversial documents and the secret society seems
to have been known even by early historians like Philo of Alexandria,
Jerusalem-born Chronicler Flavous Josephus, and the Roman Scholar Pliny
the Elder.
“They shun pleasures as a vice and regard
temperance and the control of passions as a special virtue,” Josephus,
the ancient Jewish historian, describes the Essenes in his writings.
The
documents describe the life of the “man of the lie” and “seeker of
smooth ways” who flouted the conventions of the day. Modern scholars are
curious, though, about a mysterious figure called “the teacher of
righteousness”.
The society had a highly disciplined
and socially ordered life, and some scholars agree that some mainstream
Christian beliefs and practices — like celibacy and virgin birth — can
be traced to the Jewish sect.
Although most of the
documents were greatly fragmented, some no longer than an inch, scholars
managed to put them together to get a fairly coherent picture of what
was really happening at Qumran.
It is believed that
much of Essenes’ Christianity has been suppressed by church traditions
and the need to maintain the divinity of Jesus intact, without which
Christianity would simply crumble.
Indeed, it is
asserted that when the full impact of the Qumran discovery was known,
the Catholic Church tried hard to conceal the documents, a view that Fr
Ottone Cantore, an old testament scholar at Tangaza University College
in Karen, says is not true.
According to Dr Barbara
Thiering, who studied the scrolls, much of what is taken as miracles in
the New Testament, including the virgin birth, were actually not
miracles in the literal sense, but coded messages representing some
aspects of the Essenes.
Two types of scrolls were
discovered at Qumran. The more complete bunch is variously described as
the Temple Scroll, The Community Rule, the Damascus Document, and the
War Scroll.
The other bunch, more fragmented, is known
as the “Pesharim” derived from the word “pesher”, which comes from the
Hebrew word meaning “interpretation” in the sense of “solution”.
The Pesharim gives a theory of scriptural interpretation, previously only partly known, but now fully defined.
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