A Man And A Myth

 

The Dog And The Wolf, XV, 5.

Gratillonius to Corentinus:

"'You tell me Christ walked the earth as a man... I've been thinking what manhood was His, to die on the Cross when He could have called the legions of Heaven down to save and avenge Him.'" (p. 296)

That is the myth. My interpretation of the texts is almost the exact opposite:

that Jesus, like the Baptist, began by proclaiming the imminence of God's kingdom on Earth;

that the popularity generated by his preaching and healing made him wonder about his own role in the kingdom;

that he allowed the impulsive Peter to persuade him that he was the Messiah;

that he interpreted the Messiah not as a conquering Davidic monarch but as the Suffering Servant;

that he deliberately provoked the authorities, expecting to be rescued by the legions of Heaven;

that he died realizing that this approach had failed;

that his disciples coped with this setback by reinterpreting scriptures as prophesying suffering, death and resurrection as the way to Messiahship;

that the man on the road to Emmaus, if he existed, was a stranger who inspired two disciples by confirming the Suffering Servant Messiahship and who slipped away when he realized that they were latching onto what he was saying and that he had nothing else to say to them;

that Peter and Paul had traumatic visionary experiences;

that crucifixion victims were thrown into mass graves but the pious story of a decent burial in an unused tomb could easily have grown in the oral tradition before the Gospels were written;

that neither Peter's Pentecost sermon nor Paul's letters mentions a tomb burial;

that Paul describes a physical body going into the earth like a seed and a different kind of spiritual body emerging like a plant (different from a resuscitated corpse);

that Mark, writing later and elsewhere, introduced the empty tomb story and wrote that the women told no one in order to explain why this story had not been heard before;

that the other Evangelists got the empty tomb story from Mark and introduced the tangible resurrected body.