This is part one of a three-parter; part two ("The Onside Kick") is here and part three ("Due To Hap Happenstance?") is here; your HerbNation HOMEPAGE is here.
JC,
Behind The Counter, Scanning Fish
The following has been called "a re-interpretation of the 'facts' surrounding the Jesus case." It may seem non-fictional, like it belongs in a newspaper. But where it belongs, I suppose, is entirely up to the reader.
How so?
Well, we've been presented with a big story, a story ripe with good intentions, and yet if the first Christians were doing then what today's Christians are known for doing now--i.e. obeying the law, paying taxes, maintaining their morals, etc.--then why were they thrown to the lions? Because whereas a small part of what Jesus brought to the table was your good ol' "Blessed are the meek/turn the other cheek" sorta stuff, of much greater significance was His leveling of some very serious charges against an invading military force: the Romans.
A good place to start buttressing this notion is number-crunching with foodstuffs, namely: the Loaves and the Fishes. Did Jesus perform a miracle by feeding thousands with only eight loaves and eight fish, or was He instead suggesting a non-violent protest or boycott against an occupying army? Here's an example: a fisherman catches eight fish and a baker bakes eight loaves of bread. They get together to exchange their wares, but first they pay the equivalent of four fish and four loaves in taxes to some armed strangers. After all is said and done in this first scenario, the men each have two loaves and two fish. But Jesus said, "No. Don't pay this tax. Instead, trade loaves for fish straight across; in other words, render unto Caesar his coins, leave Caesar's coins alone, and simply barter." What happens in this second scenario, the one Jesus suggests? Of course there are more fish and more loaves to go around, twice as many if there's a fifty percent tax. Miracle, or simply a matter of economics?--you be the judge.
What Christ meant when He supposedly said "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's..." is better illustrated by something He did rather than what He supposedly said. What Christ did was all the dirty work. He paid his dues. That's right: He apprenticed to be a carpenter till He was thirty. But then--just when all that hard work was gonna pay off, right when He was about to start raking in all those big journeyman bucks--He instead chucked it all. Why? The taxes the Romans squoze out of His father weren't prohibitive enough to discourage His father from continuing to build houses, but by the time Jesus came of age, these taxes were too high. Jesus figured He could maintain a more peaceful lifestyle--maintain a higher quality of life--fishing without taxation than carpentry with taxation (without representation). I base this on the assumption it's easier to run a tax-friendly fish business than a tax-friendly house-building business... given that the auditors--if they suspect tax-evasion--can burn down freshly-built houses, but can't burn down the ocean.
So even though fishing didn't pay nearly as much as carpentry, Jesus pitched it all and said, "Let's fish." Then He told others to go fish, or bake loaves and trade Him their loaves for His fish. Why? The more people bartering, the better the barter-market, the less chance of any one individual getting audited (it's why shark-wary fish school together), and the greater chance that the "auditors" will return to Rome for good.
II
Jesus was a Gandhi before His time. Jesus was one of the original protesters. In the same way Malcolm X said the only thing he liked integrated was his coffee, Jesus once said, "Don't get Me wrong, though: I still like a Caesar's salad."
In an historical sense, the Romans faced an unprecedented predicament. Previously, when one tribe or nation conquered another, they killed some, married some, and basically enslaved the survivors. The Romans, having made leaping improvements in military technology, managed to defeat many more people than they could effectively enslave.
So they dubbed those whom they conquered "citizens" rather than "slaves."
This trend-setting policy of encitizenship worked like a charm. Whereas a taskmaster was required for every twenty or so slaves, a tax collector could service the likes of two hundred or more citizens. Also, citizens tend to work harder and more efficiently because they "feel" freer than slaves allegedly feel. This "feeling of freedom" is in part augmented or enhanced by concessions such as religious freedom. Knowing this, the Romans, despite having their own gods, let their conquered peoples practice any kind of religion they desired--provided they paid their taxes. The Romans let the Sadducees and the Pharisees continue to preach Judaism, for instance, just so long as they, the Romans, continued to get their cut.
Apparently Jesus didn't approve of this church/state relationship, as evidenced by Him overturning the Caesarian money tables in the temple.
The appeal of such a Tumultuous Personality must have had something to do with taxes. If not, then why did the Romans throw the early followers of our Lord to the lions? If "Religion" is part of your answer to that question, then why didn't they throw the Sadducees/Pharisees to the lions?
Risking overstating the obvious, Rome wasn't an empire for five hundred years because it capriciously crucified its taxpayers. Rome crucified its non-taxpayers. Jesus' main message must have been to discourage the payment of taxes to a government whose primary way to generate revenue was the method of threatening folks with death for not paying taxes. Christ saw this--Christ saw the Romans threaten and kill--and He said, "Don't deal with them. Don't use their money. We can't forcefully drive them off our land, but we can starve them off..."
III
For as long as parents have imparted survival skills to their children--for whatever reasons--the telling of stories has been one method of doing so. If these stories prove their worth generation after generation, they're pretty hard to stop.
The Romans faced another harrowing predicament: those who penned the New Testament labeled them the "antagonists." Angered, the Romans tried to stop the story of Jesus from being told and re-told: quite a few of their rebuttals were penned in the blood of the early Christians.
But it was an unstoppable story.
Or was it?
For three hundred years the Romans desperately fought to eradicate the story of Jesus. Nothing seemed to do the trick. Finally, they tried a new tact: institutionalize the movement. Or, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. As part of creating Catholicism, the Romans translated the Word of God, and while doing so, they changed a few words to redirect and de-politicize the major thrust of Jesus' message. As it turned out and in part due to the Romans legitimizing Christianity, the fall of Rome was delayed for another hundred years.
Good politics, but with what does that leave us? It leaves us with a much-disfigured, vague outline of the original story. It's up to us to re-focus the picture. It's up to us to reason why re-telling a story would be worth dying for.
"Perhaps it was a really juicy story," one might posit.
Juicy enough to die for? Probably not.
"Could it be all those miracles Jesus performed?"
Again, not too plausible, but an avenue worth exploring nonetheless.
When Jesus fell asleep in the boat and His friends complained they "hadn't caught a thing all day," Jesus told them to cast their nets one more time; they did, and their nets came back overflowing with fish. This can be seen as an exaggeration or keeping a positive attitude when times look rough and those around you don't seem to be pulling their own weight (i.e. snoozing). Or, if we're to take this "miracle" at face value, then what did Jesus' friends eat at The Last Supper? Did they really drink His blood and eat His flesh? It seems the Bible Itself asks Its readers to flip-flop between miraculous and symbolic interpretation.
But would re-telling either of these stories be worth dying or killing for?
"Excuse me, Mr. Centurion, but did you hear about the Man from Jerusalem who walked on water?"
"That's it, buddy: time to cut off your head."
"Wait a minute! All He did was something akin to pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Aren't you overreacting?"
"Sorry. I've got my orders. Put your head on that tree stump, please."
It just doesn't seem likely. It seems much more likely that some "miracles" in the New Testament were mere publicity stunts designed to attract larger crowds to the meetings. What else good would it do for Someone to walk on water?
levitator w/rabbit
Or how 'bout turning water into wine--if that doesn't sound like a parlor trick, I don't know what does.
Another case in point: Jesus re-attaching a Roman soldier's ear after Judas had supposedly severed it. If we could somehow find and exhume this soldier, and if he had been properly embalmed, we'd no doubt find remnants of both his ears. Miracle? Maybe... but what if neither ear had ever been cut off in the first place?
The tabloids burgeon with similarly extraordinary tales. Stories of corpses brought back to life--only to quickly die again--constantly yellow the pages of today's supposed "journalism." Debunking this and the previous example follow the same deductive path: was this dead person ever actually alive for a second time? Hard to prove either way, because he or she is definitely dead now. Was this healthy ear ever cut off? Hard to prove either way, because Jesus did such a good job re-attaching it, there aren't any surgery scars.
IV
In summary, it seems some of the "miracles" in the New Testament too conveniently function better as publicity stunts than they do as "miracles"; while other "miracles" were probably embellishments by Roman (or other) translators. The Loaves and the Fishes: miracle, or simply a tricky way to de-politicize the significance of thousands of people assembling for a common cause?
Yes, the early Christian had a clear picture of who the enemy was: he spoke a different language and he hailed from a different country. Today's true Christians fight on a much foggier battlefield: the enemies are supposedly also "Christians," speak the same language, and are supposedly citizens of the same nation (who just happen to economically rule over almost all of its citizens). Faced with this, most of today's "Christians" cop the following attitude: "I of course need to work on my walk with the Lord, and it's the struggle of constantly trying to be like Jesus that keeps me going. I falter, I stumble, but Jesus is always there to help. Without God, when I try to balance things in my life, of course I fail. But Jesus is my safety net. Jesus is where the buck stops. With Jesus, I don't have to say, 'The buck stops here.' With Jesus, I can pick and choose when I want to take responsibility for my actions."
The apostle John predicted that in the end times the world would be filled with such false "Christians." He also saw how the Romans could tax carpentry but not tax fishing, and he correctly predicted that someday governments would have so much totalitarian control, that they could and would tax every product or service bought, sold or rendered. This he predicted would be done with the Universal Product Code, or the Mark of the Beast, or the Social Security Card, or the combination of all three or somewhere in the middle.
Were Jesus alive today and still into fish, He'd probably need some carpal tunnel surgery right about now. Because of all that scanning.
VIEW part two: "The Onside Kick"
VIEW part three: "Due To Hap Happenstance?"
BACK to the beginning of this whole thread: "Incident at Wal~Mart"
OVER to HerbNation HOMEPAGE