Will the real Jesus please stand up? | HistoryExtra
"‘The version we have of Jesus now is obviously fairly nice, saintly, noble man, if that's the right word for him. But some of the other Jesuses weren’t quite like that’...
‘One of my favorite appears in the book called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and this is a Jesus who is pretty different to the one that we have grown up knowing. So he murders those who irritate them and smites those who merely bother him. And you first meet him when he's playing in a stream like lots of little boys do and he's making a dam to make the water pool. And a boy breaks his dam and he turns to him and says why did you do that you ignoramus and he, what he does is he says, he withers him and the boy sort of shrivels up in some mysterious way. And it gets so bad, you know he also smites a teacher at school and it gets so bad that Joseph says to Mary do not let him outside the door for all those who provoke him die’...
‘Actually it's not just Jesus's story that's different. Some of the the other parts of the story like for example the Virgin Mary story is quite different as well’...
'The Proto evangelium of James which is a bit of a mouthful but if you kind of know this indirectly if at school you've ever sung the song little donkey. You know the one: little donkey little donkey on you know it's the Christmas, Christmas Carol. Now there isn't a donkey in the Bible. The reason that this donkey appears is because it appears in this Gospel called the Proto evangelium of James and that tells a story about the birth of Jesus that's kind of radically different to the one that we know in the Bible. So in the gospels that we have the gospels of the books that tell the story of Jesus it just means good news gospel they kind of bounce over the birth of Jesus pretty rapidly, you know they spend more time one of them on the tax and travel arrangements of Jesus than they do on the birth itself. But what's clear is that there was quite a lot of controversy over whether a virgin could indeed have given birth. And so this gospel kind of answers that and it's from the second century scholars think. It answers that by going into enormous detail about the birth of Jesus.
So it begins with Mary and Joseph going across, walking along towards Bethlehem. They have a donkey on which Mary is sitting. And then it describes the birth of Jesus in amazing detail. So it describes how her contractions begin and she says to Joseph, the baby that is within me is pressing to come forth. It describes how they find a cave, uh so Joseph and Mary go into a cave, a midwife turns up which is very useful, and Mary gives birth. But then after the birth the midwife is amazed because she says a virgin has given birth and she rushes outside the cave to tell a woman, and she tells a woman outside and she says a virgin has just given birth. And this woman says I don't believe that. I won't believe that a virgin has given birth until I put in my hand and search the parts, that's what she says. And so she comes into the cave and the midwife is game which is not entirely to her credit and she lets this woman put her hand inside Mary to search to inside her vagina really to see if she's still a virgin. But the response of Mary's body is extraordinary because this woman's hand is immediately burnt off and the woman says because I've tested the Living God my hand falls away from me in fire. And this was one of the most popular of all of the early gospels, so the cult of the Virgin Mary that came from this, there are about 140 manuscripts of it left in languages from sort of Syriac to Latin to Greek. One scholar said it's impossible to overstate its importance on the early Church.’...
'In the ancient world they were very clear Christianity was not at all unique. So you have all these ancient non-Christian philosophers who point out that far from the idea as Christians would say that the ancient world was waiting for its savior, in fact they said that the ancient world was suffering from a glut of these men. They sort of said you can't move in the marketplaces in the east of the Empire without finding somebody who is going to promise to heal your lameness, let the blind see, blow away diseases, walk on water, raise the dead, call moldy corpses to life. They are incredibly cynical about the kind of miracles or as they see them, tricks, that Jesus performs, because they say this is the, this is the sort of thing you come across in every marketplace in the east of the Roman Empire...
A historian would… say it was serendipity [that Christianity succeeded]. Christianity managed to catch the ear of the Roman emperor Constantine in the 4th century and Constantine went on to live for a very long time and to remain powerful as did his sons. It wasn't that unusual for a Roman god to pick up an Eastern religion and run with it. Several had done so before. But what was different about Constantine is that his life was so long, his reign was so stable, that the religious changes he made persisted. And there was also the fact that Christianity unlike these other religions which were very happy to coexist with each other said that it must be the only one'...
‘Christianity narrowed from these Christianities to essentially having one dominant form’
‘Again that's a really interesting question. Not all Christianities would have done this. Again it was just the kind of Christianity that happened to dominate happened to be this form of Christianity that was extremely exclusive and considered everything other than itself to be what they called a heresy. There were other forms of Christianity that liked to read the texts of other religions, liked to read the texts of other people and that also were far less fixated on sticking to the gospels as they are known today, that you know much more inventive christianities that, but they didn't predominate. Why they didn't predominate? Again this is the kind of thing, why does one species win out over another? A mixture of serendipity and good fortune and, and again probably getting the ear of the emperor. But plus there does seem to be a power, I mean people have studied this and there does seem to be an religious evolutionary advantage in saying that only your religion is allowed...
[Heresy] originally, it really was not a ferocious word at all… I take for myself, in other words, I choose. So in the ancient Greek World heresy was considered to be a good thing’...
'It seems that social pressure may well have kind of had a very powerful effect. The philosopher Bertrand Russell who was kicked out of a college in Cambridge for thinking the wrong thing in the 1920s wrote that really you don't need to pursue people to make people change their beliefs, you don't need to pursue them with fire, you just need to take away their jobs. It, and he said it's a modern form of persecution to make people's jobs depend on ,their them having the right beliefs. And he was right in a way in that, like, if you threaten people's jobs they will often change their beliefs. But I think he was wrong in that it wasn't modern at all. if you look at the laws from the 4th century and onwards one of the first things that they do to crack down on heretics is they threaten their livelihoods'...
‘You go to Ethiopia and you find a form of Christianity where they read a story about Jesus who resurrects a cockrel from a chicken dinner and sends it into the sky for a thousand years. Or in the 1950s Wilfred Thesiger goes to the marshlands of Iraq and he finds that there are people there who know about Jesus and they believe in John the Baptist and they talk about God, and so they, Westerners often think they're Christian but they're not Christian he says because these people don't know Jesus as a a great man, instead they think he's a terrible one and they think that he's some kind of wizard and sorcerer and they have him having, he has altercations with John the Baptist.
Or if you go further east again and you get to India and you find a Jesus who instead of saying things like suffer the little children, who says don't have intercourse ever because if you do have intercourse then you'll have children and children are without exception, withered or difficult or cripples or a problem or a bother to their parents, so you shouldn't have children. When travelers from Europe encountered these forms of religion they were often horrified because they thought these people have the wrong idea. There's a lovely line from a Jesuit in Ethiopia who says in kind of astonishment, these people people seem to think that they're the correct Christians, and of course as he knew, and as they knew, everyone is their own correct Christian. There's, you know everyone as the philosopher John Locke said is orthodox to themselves’"
So much for Christianity being unique, as apologists claim
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