“I couldn’t help wondering what was so ‘good’ about that Friday when the Christian leader, Jesus of Nazareth, was nailed to a cross,” writes The Gadfly columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.
My thanks to all those kind people who wished me a “Happy Easter” on Good Friday. I took their words to heart and had a nice sleep-in.
In the afternoon I planned to read a book about Christianity by an historian but couldn’t concentrate.
Those kind wishes kept rattling around in my head. They’d been delivered by people including Christians and I couldn’t help wondering what was so “good” about that Friday when their leader, Jesus of Nazareth, was nailed to a cross.
I’m guessing the “happy” bit is discovering three days later that the stone covering the tomb that held his lifeless body had been rolled away and according to some disciples he was up and about again.
Of course, we Australians were not the only ones marking the occasion. According to New York Times’ writer Ruth Graham: “President Trump’s White House spent much of this week celebrating, including at a live-streamed Easter prayer service and a dinner attended by the president. Trump told attendees he hoped it would be ‘one of the great Easters ever’.” (Well, that’s Donald for you).
According to Ruth, he and the First Lady said they were celebrating, “the living Son of God who conquered death, freed us from sin, and unlocked the gates of Heaven for all of humanity.”
She said: “Prayer sessions and even hymn-singing have broken out in the West Wing, in public and in private, and even Cabinet meetings opened with prayer ‘in Jesus name’.”
Nothing surprising there.
But what does amaze me is the paucity of genuine academic curiosity about what really happened at those crucial nascent times in religious stories. The Buddhists and the Hindus had their beginnings too far back in time to pin down the difference between the empirical and the spiritual.
The Muslims are passionate about their Prophet Muhammad and the sixth century delivery of the social and spiritual messages of the Quran. Their historical split is between the succeeding generations and is well known.
Christianity is unique in that the story of Jesus is a mixture of Judaism, which the early Apostles used to validate his supernatural relationship to their God, a notion that the Jewish religion rejects. But since both Christianity and Judaism rest on the written word, it is surely within our scientific capability to discover the truth of the matter.
In fact, that’s what the eminent Swedish historian Prof Elvar Ellegard attempted in my Easter reading. His meticulous research in Jesus: One Hundred Years before Christ is, in my view, the closest we have yet come to untangling the written sources to produce a viable reality.
His thesis is that the name Jesus (“The help of Yahweh”) applied to the Essenes’ Teacher of Righteousness who lived at least a century before a small group of Essenes in Jerusalem had “visions” of his sitting on the right hand of God and imagined he would rid them of their Roman persecutors. They, and the Apostle Paul who had a similar vision, spread the word.
New devotees included Gnostics who believed Jesus was a spirit and the individual could communicate directly with God, but organisers, including St Ignatius, favoured a Church.
So in the second century he and church followers developed an entirely fictitious story of Jesus’ life on earth – including all the usual miraculous elements of supernatural behaviour – which became the Gospels. And it worked. People love a story, the Gnostics gave up the ghost, and the rest is history.
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