Jesus H. Christ the Lord
Jesus H. Christ (c. 0-33 A.D.) was born two thousand or so years ago, give or take a few years. The actual date of his birth is unknown, but by tradition it is celebrated on December 25. The first accounts of Christ's life were written long after his death, and possess a somewhat surreal quality; thus, some historians wonder if Christ even lived at all.
Jesus was presumably conceived without benefit of sexual intercourse, in the womb of a woman we know only as the Virgin Mary. The circumstances of the pregnancy must have puzzled and perhaps even confounded Virgin Mary's fiancé, Virgin Joseph. When Mary came to him with the news that she had been divinely inseminated, he was prepared to call off the engagement, perhaps not quite believing her story. But an angel instructed him in a dream to go ahead with the marriage, and Joseph always did whatever he was told in dreams.
Christ was born in the little town of Bethlehem in Judea. Mary and Joseph were traveling at the time Mary went into labor. Because of rent controls and high hotel taxes, it was difficult for them to find a room. They ended up staying in a stable. The lord's cradle was a manger.
Advance notice of Christ's birth spread internationally. Several astrologists came to pay homage to the newborn, guided to the correct stable in Bethlehem by the light of a supernova that had exploded thousands of years earlier. They brought with them gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
Feeling insecure about the birth of anyone who might challenge his authority, King Herod sought to kill the Christ child. To that end he ordered the murder of all the recently born male children in his kingdom. But Joseph received a warning about the danger—again, in a dream—and spirited his family out of the country. Eventually Virgin Mary, Virgin Joseph and the Christ child resettled in Nazareth.
Jesus discovered his vocation early in life. Consciousness of his holy parentage, combined with a natural self-righteousness and eagerness to hector others, suited him for an evangelical career. The message he promulgated was one of unconditional love, unconditional forgiveness, that the last shall be first, and the immorality of being rich.
To communicate these themes, Jesus Christ pursued several sales strategies:
1. He delivered various proto-Marxian sermons to the people, explaining that the meek, the humble, the persecuted, the mournful and the merciful would have first place in Heaven. He said that it was wrong to have lust in one's heart, to remain angry with one's brother, to ever get a divorce, or to ever pursue revenge. Instead, he said, if someone slaps you on one cheek, offer the other cheek. If someone steals the shirt off your back, give him your coat also. Judge not others lest then ye be judged, Jesus added. Remove the beam from your own eye before worrying about the mote in the eyes of others. Love your enemies.
To pound his themes home in a form most accessible to the people, Jesus told many parables. One related the story of the vineyard owner, Fred, who hired men to work in his vineyard. Fred hired the various workers at different times of the day, some as late as five o'clock in the evening, but paid all of them the same wage for the day regardless of how much work they had done. When the workers who had spent the most time in the field grumbled that they were being paid at a much lower hourly rate than the workers who had been hired later in the day, Fred was unmoved. The wage was the wage that had been agreed upon, he pointed out; and it was his right to be more generous toward the less productive if he wished. From this anecdote Jesus drew the lesson that "the last shall be first and the first shall be last" and that considerations of profit and loss need not be endemic determinants of market process.
2. He performed various astounding magic tricks to increase his spiritual credibility. For example, to feed a large crowd of admirers that had not brought any snacks with them, Jesus miraculously multiplied a small supply of loaves and fish. He also cured the lame and the halt and the blind, brought dead men back to life, and walked on ice.
3. He was crucified, which made a martyr out of him. Then he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, etc. An apostle named Thomas who doubted that Jesus had risen from the dead was chastised for his skepticism. Ever since then, anyone who refuses to believe outlandish claims in the absence of solid evidence has been sneered at as a "doubting Thomas."
Christ was apparently sincere in his teachings, which have had a great influence, in particular among those "poor in spirit" who feel that they've lost out in the lottery of life, that they deserve something for nothing, and that people who are better off than they are should be kicked to the end of the line. Christ's biography as a charismatic and peripatetic homeless person has also been very inspiring to many.
It is clear that if pious notions of the sort peddled by Jesus H. Christ could succeed in taking over Western culture within just a few short centuries, the far more potent and life-serving ideas of Objectivism, a philosophy that fosters not human weakness but human strength, not the worst within us but the best, must be able to accomplish a similarly large-scale takeover even more quickly.
Merry premises. |
