Reading the last third of the New Testament has been all about keeping openly engaged, whilst a state of disinterest overcame me in waves. Definitely had to apply a stoical mode to reading. Until the time for assessing what has been revealed or not, of what I have learnt or not, from this practice of New Testament reading.
How you relate to and conceive of God, is the primary issue. Throughout history there have been many godlike personas, in some cases a multiplicity of gods. And across that pantheon of forms, godlike behaviour was erratic and often petulant. One only has to look at the Greek Gods to see how vain and competitive they were frequently portrayed as being. Inconsistencies and individual suffering might be blamed on one errant god who was offended, or a bit pissed off that day. Your misfortune had a divine source. What emerges with monotheism, is a very particular and culturally contingent deity,.
The Judeo-Christian God of The Bible has a character with a broad yet sharp bifurcation. The Old Testament God has its wrathful form as well as the peaceful beatific form. The God of Jesus and the Gospels comes across perhaps as more benign, yet wants forcefully to yank the state of Israel back into line, through sending his 'only begotten'. The Roman occupation itself is seen as some sort of moral failing, a consequence of Israel straying from God's purpose for them. The God of the Apostles appears to use a level of threat, to punish or reward on the basis of whether you are a fully signed up believer in God. With a heavy preference towards those who are. There being no time to waste on disbelieving factions in God,'s own creation.
That Judeo-Christian God is a male creator God, an interventionist God, unpredictable, even at times petty and fickle. The contrary, and contradictory nature of this fails to impress. It cannot, to my mind, be satisfactorily be shrugged off with a - who are we to understand God's ways? If our whole conception of God describes a deity that behaves despicably, then I'm afraid you've lost me.
God may just be hardwired into the universe, not a thing, not an anthropomorphic being, with no prayers, supplications or party tricks required. Though I'd be the first to admit this is not without its own problems. I accept that all human concepts of the divine are inherently flawed. The whole New Testament and the emerging form of Christianity is built around a passive aggressive God figure. One I felt was attempting to grossly intimidate me into belief. This has rankled and rubbed me up the wrong way consistently, as I've read.
The structure and historical formation of the New Testament Gospels I still find intriguing. Mark's Gospel appears to be the most direct and uncomplicated of the four gospels. It does not include a nativity backstory or an extensive resurrection. All the other three Gospels produce their own idiosyncratically laboured twists on these. Interestingly none of their Nativity or Resurrection stories agree 100% on the details, in fact they quite widely disagree. One viewpoint might say, this is because they came via differing streams of apocryphal storytelling. Another might colour them as largely inventions of the gospel writer, riffing perhaps extensively upon hearsay or half remembered tales. These are the stories founded on the need for symbolism and myth making. Factual accuracy was therefore never their primary purpose or forte. Reading The New Testament as a literal account, would be to misread it. Christianity's power is in the strength of its myth. Whether it happened or not is impossible to verify. You have to either take that it is true on faith, or walk away
Jews interpret The Messiah as a God appointed saviour king. And this is how Jesus initially primarily presents himself in the New Testament. Israel is in existential turmoil, their is an apocalyptic, end of days tone to Jesus's entire ministry. His desperate mission is to save Israel from itself and bring them to the kingdom of God, by declaring himself the Messiah, and becoming their King. So much emphasis is placed on that framework of him fulfilling biblical prophecy. Though he tends to substantially readjust the interpretation of prophecies in order to make them fit the man he is presenting them with. That Jesus is a better fit for the moment. What he claims is not universally accepted, even at the time.
Jesus actually fails to save Israel from itself. They're not listening. His ministry gets derailed by egregious circumstances, the Jewish authorities want him removed because he was declaring himself king of the Jews. Understandably the current king was a bit riled. And with the crucifixion, then resurrection, this whole story line lurches off into an entirely new direction. There is a greater purpose to Jesus's death, he saves, not just Israel, but all humanity from itself. A little local difficulty in occupied Israel suddenly morphs and takes on this much larger universal religious mantle. One that requires quite a bit of retrofitting by the gospel writers to turn it into another prophesied outcome. This story on paper should not be believed, its preposterous. But something else is working through its mythology, that shelters under the term existential angst.
There are a lot of things that Jesus never says. He doesn't claim to be God, he adopts the generic ' Son of God' epithet. Yet this is wide open to interpretation as to what that actually means. Jesus is never seen being harshly judgemental, and regards any sinful or disapproved of minority or about sexual relationships, always with compassion. Often castigating his own disciples for their prejudicial judgements. Putting any debatable claims he made about who he was to one side, he appears an impressive man.
Those harshly worded moralistic condemnations we tend to negatively associate with orthodox Christianity, mostly finding their origins and justifications either from Old Testament prophets or the Apostle letters, not directly from the words of Jesus. He tends to step down to help the fallen, the sick, irrespective of whether they are God's Children or not. Judge not, lest you be judged. In Buddhism you are urged to resist fault finding. Self Righteousness it appears is the curse of any faith.
Jesus dies, so the Christianity we've inherited, the construction of its religious traditions and institutions, is left entirely to his Apostles and future disciples. And with increasing distance from its founder there was a inevitable hardening of Christianity's arteries. Religious hammers tending to seek out the abberant nails. Jesus wanted his disciples to be effective evangelists, to heal the human condition. Christianity has not always got the tone of its evangelism right..
Christian leadership becomes predominantly male. Traditional Jewish cultural views on the role of women in society, become widely applied within Christianity. If women did once have a role as equal disciples of Jesus, this did not appear to survive for long in the post-resurrection fall out. The feminine viewpoint is either silenced, widely disparaged or mistrusted. That men took such complete control of Christianity, has been to its eternal detriment.
When reading the New Testament, the post Jesus texts I couldn't connect with, hardly at all. But then came the bat shit crazy epilogue, the book of Revelation. It's written by John, who is not the John of St John's Gospel. The Book of Revelation is writing entirely unique in character. Apparently at that time visionary revelation stories were quite prevalent. Its not clear why this one was chosen from such a large imaginative pool? As a genre, these are not teachings, but divine warnings from the angel hood to the netherworld. The Book of Revelation provides a large amount of the religious symbolism and imagery, not just for Christian apocalyptism, but most 20th Century fantasy and horror writing, that borrows tropes, the fantastic beasts and demons from The Book of Revelation. The lingua franca of fire and brimstone, hell and damnation all starts from here. It was always meant to scare the bejeezus out of you.
It's visual imagery is utterly bonkers and mind bogglingly complex. The landscapes and effects are similar to Buddhist Mahayana Sutras, the only stylistic comparison I know of. I found when reading The Book of Revelation I suddenly felt on relatively familiar teritory. All of which is an interesting pointer to what inspires me. I'm the sort of person that responds with passion and love to ornate imagery from Alchemy, Egyptian Bas Reliefs, Baroque Churches, Orthodox Icons etc.
I understand this imagery on an instinctual level. So whatever the origins, mythology and iconography they are what connect with me, and Christianity is no different. Because for me when I apprehend Christianity through its beliefs and theology, I just feel its either awful or utterly ridiculous. When I absorb the beauty of its imaginative realm, this provides a much richer and more meaningful experience of being connected with something important.
Jesus's teachings seem to me to have an entirely different tone, to the institutions and theology that have sprung up around them. He is relatable and humane. Jesus's status as a teacher, appears to be intrinsically tied into, and dependent upon, the religious and secular conditions of his time. To simply explain and make him comprehensible.
This started as a task, to see what the New Testament was actually like, as opposed to what I thought it was like. And what I found did occasionally surprise me, puzzle me, bemuse me, only rarely inspiring me. As a book, it is a messy mish mash of stuff somewhat badly thrown together. How Christianity ever became so hugely popular appears even more of a mystery now than before. That Jesus is supposed to save us through his crucifixion continues to baffle me. I see it as this unfathomable paradox, one I just constantly shake my head over in disbelief.
I've spent the last few months reading the New Testament. And though it certainly is about something, what that something is stands on a completely different side of the canyon, to where I'm standing. And reading the New Testament has not brought me significantly closer to it. If anything that canyon has grown substantially wider.
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