re: Jesus's early rejection of gentiles (the woman of Canaan)
Matt 16:22
And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil. 23 But he answered her not a word. And his disciples came and besought him, saying Send her away; for she crieth after us. 24 But he answered and said "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of of the house of Israel" 25 Then came she and worshipped him, saying Lord help me. 26 But he answered and said "It is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to dogs [!]" 27 And she said, Truth, Lord, and yet the dogs eat of the crumbs that fall from their masters' table. 28 Then Jesus answered and said unto her "O woman, great is thy faith: be it even as thou wilt." And her daughter was made whole from that very hour.
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Up to this point, I believe that Jesus conceived of himself as a Jewish prophet, possibly even the Messiah (a purely Jewish human hero).
I believe that the writer of Matthew conceived the colloquy with the woman of Canaan an epiphany which converted Jesus in his own mind far beyond mere (Jewish) Messiahhood into a very close companion spirit of a universal god (in that he could cure non-Jewish persons at will). He never claims to be God, but at best the Son of God, although greater than Elias. He has no concept of a triune God and draws a clear distinction between himself and the one God (Matthew 19:17) . Now he moves beyond mere occasional psychic healing, which almost any tent-show charlatan can do, to believing that he can multiply foodstuffs and heal multitudes, move mountains and must go to Jerusalem to be sacrificed. Now he believes he is transfigured on a climb of an unidentified mountain apart not before the 12 (folie de douze) but before "the rock" (who later wanted to build tabernacles there but instead had a church built on him (literally, according to recent excavations under St. Peter's) and the "sons of thunder" (folie de quatre). [my guess is that the four were struck by lightning -- thus the name of the boanerges and the memory of Peter and John of a luminous discharge (St. Elmo's fire) on Jesus].
We can never really know, of course, but the reconstruction of a detailed account of Jesus's life reasonably consistent with what is known of memory, fantasy, self-delusion, charlatanry, schizophrenia, goodness, and the records of those who claim to have been there (John and Peter) and those who may have known eyewitnesses (Mark, Matthew, Luke, Paul) is an important intellectual enterprise for those who would understand history. I cannot believe that Jesus was any more than human -- what, after all, is greater than that. I think that Jesus started displaying symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia in his early 30's and took up the career of a hedge preacher. I believe in his good intentions. I believe that his aspirations expanded as he learned from the experience of his extraordinary influence over others. I believe that his tragic life and death were regrettable but probably inevitable, given the llimited psychiatric treatment of the time (but he could have checked out the teaching of Epictetus of Nicoplis -- had he been educated. I cannot tell whether his influence on mankind has been good or bad, but that influence, whatever it is, is the result of those who believed in him and followed him. He was willing to pay the ultimate price, but so indeed were many of his followers. Martyrdom for an idea is always risky. What if the idea is not true, as most of them were not. How foolish was Socrates for letting himself be sacrificed essentially for freedom of speech. He could have done more for it by fleeing and publishing (as Aristotle was later to do -- saying he would not let Athens commit a second crime against philosophy). How wise was Galileo to bow his head to the Pope and preventing another crime against science as the murder of Giordano Bruno. How wise was Newton to obstruct justice by concealing his denial of Jesus and his perjury, disclosure of which would have led to his discharge from his Lucasian Professorship or his Mastership of the Mint and -- in any country under papal control (as England would have been had Henry VIII not lusted excruciatingly for Anne Boleyn)-- his death at the stake.
I do believe that billions of people have been misled and deluded into believing things that cannot be proved -- i.e. into faith. I hope that they have been misled by misguided persons of good intentions. I would hate for so much of human life to be based on fraud. I would hate to think that Bruno, Cranmer, Latimer, More, Henri Quatre, Saint Louis, St. Paul, St. Peter (that faithful man!), Federigo il Secundo (Stupor Mundi), John Brown, Albert Schweitzer, St. Francis were destroyed by reliance on fraudulent misrepresentation. |
