historical – Jesus Reconstructed

Paul’s list of the appearances of the risen Christ, part 1

Here is the first of two parts from my near final draft about Paul’s list of the appearances of the risen Christ in 1 Corinthians 15. There is additional material compared to the version now up on this website, but I reach the same conclusions. Comments and notice of typos are very much welcome.

3b. Paul’s list of Jesus’ appearances

The earliest Christian documents we have copies of are probably the letters of Paul to various Christian communities around the Mediterranean. Dating such documents is tricky, but the academic consensus is that he wrote most of them in the decade of the 50s C.E. That would be about twenty years after the presumed date of the death of Jesus and about fifteen years or more before the earliest gospel we know of, the one attributed to Mark. In other words, about mid-way in the approximately three or four decades between the reports of the resurrection and the first written narrative of Jesus’ life. Much of what we know about Christianity during those decades comes from the letters of Paul.

The Christian Bible contains thirteen letters attributed to Paul, but Biblical scholars regard only seven of them as genuinely written by Paul. His letters do not show much interest in Jesus’ life, focusing instead on the meaning of his death and resurrection and offering instructions to the communities he wrote to. Paul expected the end of the world as they knew it and the triumph of the “kingdom of God” to happen in the very near future, so his eyes were on the present and his mission of preaching to the non-Jewish Gentiles while waiting for the imminent return of Jesus as judge and ruler of all. (On another page of this website I will discuss Paul’s letters, the dates assigned to them by scholars, and why only some are regarded as genuine.)

Paul’s list of appearances of the risen Christ

In what is called his First Letter to the Corinthians Paul bequeaths us some information about the resurrection appearances of Jesus:

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. (1 Cor. 15: 3-8, all English translations from the Greek here are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition of the Christian Bible)

Paul’s language of handing on and receiving information of “first importance” implies carefully passing down a tradition with a set verbal formulation. That formulation starts with the kernel of Paul’s missionary message, that Christ died for our sins as predicted in the Jewish scriptures, that he was buried, and that God raised him from the dead, again as predicted in the scriptures. There are several shorter statements about Jesus being raised from the dead scattered throughout Paul’s letters, also likely of earlier origin. (Lüdemann, 2004: 32-33; Allison, 2005: 229-231) In this particular passage Paul goes on to include a list of appearances of the risen Jesus: to Cephas (which roughly means “man of stone” in Aramaic, as does “Peter” in Greek), “the twelve” (apostles), five hundred Christians at one time, a “James” with no further identification, “all” the apostles, and then finally Paul himself. Dale Allison (2005: 234) notes that the formula uses words and expressions that Paul does not use elsewhere in his letters, such as “sins” in the plural, “according to the scriptures,” “has been raised” in the perfect tense, “appeared to” (or “was seen by”), and “the twelve.” This is another sign that he is passing down an earlier tradition.

But is the traditional formula exactly as Paul has conveyed it? The comment regarding the five hundred, “most of whom are still alive, though some have died,” would be Paul’s, as a tradition composed to be carefully handed down would not indicate whether witnesses were still alive at a particular time. And consider that Paul includes himself at the end of the list. Elsewhere he confirms that he is a first-hand witness to an appearance of Jesus (1 Cor 9:1-2), but would an earlier tradition been have passed down to him saying that Paul himself was “last of all, as to one untimely born”? (The phrase “one untimely born” compares his experience to the abortion or miscarriage of a pregnancy, apparently meaning something that occurs before one is ready for it. See Wright, 2003: 327-329) Why would the originators of the tradition think he was last and why would they bother to describe his experience as untimely? I don’t think it’s likely they did; it is more likely Paul added himself to the end of the traditional list to defend his claim to be an apostle, despite not having been one of those originally recognized as apostles.

This raises the question of where the traditional list ends and Paul’s addition(s) begin: just before Paul is listed or at some point before that? It is important to note that Greek was written without punctuation at that time, so translators to modern English have to guess where sentences begin and end. The problem of where exactly the original tradition ended was in discussion as early as 1978 (Allison, 2005: 234), with most commentators holding that it ended either with “Cephas” or with “Cephas, then the twelve.” (Barclay, 1996: 16) Bart Ehrman (2014: 139-142) is among those who argue that it ends after the mention of Cephas. That would leave a formulation with a parallel structure easy to remember and convey to others:

Christ died/for our sins/in accordance with the scriptures/and he was buried.

Christ was raised/on the third day/in accordance with the scriptures/and he appeared to Cephas.

The first section in each line is a parallel statement about Christ (he died/he was raised). The second section ties the statement to a prophecy derived from the Jewish scriptures (for our sins/on the third day). The third section is exactly the same in each line (in accordance with the scriptures), following up the previous section. And the final section is a brief conclusion (he was buried/he appeared to Cephas). It is a tightly constructed set of parallel statements, which would be asymmetrical if much more was added after the mention of Cephas. That would suggest that the rest of the list was added by Paul from some source(s) other than the tradition as it had been handed down to him.

If this argument is correct, the tradition would be the earliest source concerning who was the first to claim to have seen Jesus after his death: Cephas/Peter. Peter as a key witness to the risen Christ fits other evidence that Peter was a central figure in the early Christian community, such as Paul’s reference to him as a “pillar” of the Christian community in Jerusalem in another letter (Galatians 2:9), his prominent role in the gospels (four Christian scriptures narrating the life, death and resurrection of Jesus) and the Acts of the Apostles (a history of the early Christian community), and letters to early Christian communities that were purported to have been written by Peter. In the gospel of Luke there is also an indication that Peter was the first to take heart after the death of Jesus, as predicted by Jesus (Simon was Peter’s original name before he was renamed Cephas/Peter):

“Simon, Simon, listen! Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail, and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” (Lk 22: 31-32)

I am not arguing that all of these stories about Peter were true, but rather that he was important enough to have such stories told about him. Based on the evidence, I think Peter was the first to experience what he took to be a resurrected Jesus, and that his claim was carefully preserved and handed down in the larger Christian community. I don’t think we will ever know exactly what Peter saw, but apparently it was convincing enough to bolster his confidence and become a turning point for him, for the other early disciples, and for the rest of Western history.

The subsequent mention of an appearance to “the twelve” also may have been a part of the original tradition. Its inclusion would not disrupt the balance of the parallel structure of the original list very significantly. Gert Lüdemann (2004: 40-43) takes the position that the “twelve” was part of the original list. He notes that the conjunction between “Cephas, then (eita) to the twelve” differs from the conjunction that precedes the sentence about the five hundred and the one about Jame and all the apostles. That word in Greek is epeita, which Lüdemann translates as “thereafter.” As I recount on another page, three of the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles all describe scenes of Peter with other apostles seeing the risen Jesus. These likely trace back to knowledge of the tradition Paul recounts.

The other appearances on the list, aside from Paul’s own experience, would then be appearances that Paul learned of after receiving the original tradition. You would think five hundred people seeing the resurrected Jesus at the same time would be dramatic enough that reports of it would reach those undertaking to write about Jesus, but there is no mention of it in any other source. A suggested reference to the appearance is in the Acts of the Apostles. (Lüdemann, 2004: 73-81; Allison, 2005: n. 140 on 235) The Acts is a narrative of the early Christian community which is universally attributed to the author of the gospel of Luke. In Acts Chapter 2:1-42 the disciples are gathered together on the feast of Pentecost, celebrated fifty days after the Jewish holiday of Passover, which the gospels depict as the time of Jesus’ death. They are “filled with the Holy Spirit” and begin speaking in other languages, which Jewish people from around the eastern Mediterranean who are present in Jerusalem hear and recognize. After Peter preaches to them, “about three thousand” are baptized and join the Christian community. But other than a miracle and the huge size of the crowd in Paul’s list and in the story, there is little resemblance between the two. In one the miracle is an appearance of the risen Jesus, in the other it is speaking in various languages under the influence of the Holy Spirit. (Wright, 2003: 324-325) And three thousand is a lot more people than five hundred.

Nor is there any other mention of an appearance to James in the early sources, unless this was James the apostle and he saw Jesus as one of several unnamed apostles present at one of the appearances to disciples depicted in the gospels. The lack of identification in the formula suggest he was a known figure in the Christian community. Most commentators take James to be “James, the Lord’s brother” that Paul refers to in Galations 1:18-19 and is presumably also the James who Paul calls a “pillar of the church” along with Cephas and John in Galations 2:9. James’ status suggests he had claimed to see the risen Jesus, but this is not made explicit in any early source. Who “all the apostles” were and what they claimed is also unknown.

In my judgment, Peter is the only person on Paul’s list whose experience, whatever it was, is convincingly attested as widely known and carefully handed down by the early Christians. His experience was the foundation for the belief in the resurrection of Jesus and the catalyst for other reports of appearances. Once the idea of the resurrection took hold, additional reports would have a ready audience among those who believed, no matter the substance of the reports or their lack of it. Paul may not have heard about these other reports until years later, nearer the time he added them to the end of the traditional list when he wrote to the Corinthians. The reports could have been second-hand or even more remote from the alleged events.

My rewrite on the evidence for the resurrection

I’ve been promising for a while now to upload my rewrite on what I’ve been learning about the resurrection of Jesus. For better or worse it just keeps growing. I was going to wait until I covered all the topics on the page that is now up, but that might take a while to finish.

Instead I am going to blog what I’ve been writing one section at a time as I near a final draft of each section. This will give those of you who are interested a preview and a chance to comment on it before I replace the page I have up now. When I am finished it will be more than one page–I think there will be at least four of them.

I will be posting about Paul’s list of appearances of Jesus in 1 Corinthians in a couple days, but to start off here is the opening section for the whole topic. Comments are welcome, and if you spot any typos please let me know.

3. The resurrection of Jesus

In the first century C.E. (Common Era, often referred to as A.D.) some people in the lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean Sea were claiming publicly that a person named Jesus had died and was raised from the dead. These claims helped spread a growing movement which heralded Jesus not only as the Christ (the Greek term for the Jewish Messiah, or “anointed one”), but as the first of those to be resurrected at the end of this age of human history, and ultimately as equal to God.

The idea of a general resurrection of all people (or, alternatively, a select group of them) at the end of this age had spread among the Jewish people in the centuries preceding the Christian movement. Jewish author Jon Levenson (2006), in his study of the development of this idea, found it to be an outgrowth of early Jewish traditions such as the goodness of God’s creation, God’s intention to do justice to humanity, and God’s saving power. But as Christian Biblical scholar N.T. Wright (2003) points out, before the Christian movement there was no expectation that a single person would be resurrected before everyone else, nor that the Messiah would be such a person.

Trying to discern what actually happened to generate the claims about Jesus is one of the great puzzles of history. Even so, I think it is an apt place to begin in sorting out what happened at the outset of the Christian religion. We might question everything that’s been written about Jesus, but we know with certainty that his early followers talked about his resurrection from the dead. And because that belief had an influence on almost everything else they said about him, it needs to be taken into account in assessing our sources when they recount his life and teachings.

The earliest Christian sources we have present three types of evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. First, the Christian missionary Paul wrote a letter recounting a tradition that Jesus appeared to several of his disciples after his death. Second, four “gospels” recounting events of Jesus’ life and death say that a few of his women followers discovered that the tomb he had been buried in was empty two days after his body had been laid there. And third, three of those gospels and one other early Christian scripture, the Acts of the Apostles, describe several of the appearances of the resurrected Jesus.

On the following pages I will examine and interpret this evidence from a historical perspective.

Changing my mind on the resurrection

Hi there. Honestly, I didn’t go into this study of the resurrection of Jesus with a desire to confirm either that it did or did not happen. I wanted to make the strongest case possible against it to see how well that case stood up. Depending on how strong it seemed, the resurrection would be either more or less defensible. My own viewpoint was that I had no idea what really happened, but it would be nice to have my mind more settled on the question.

Well, as a result of all of this reading and thinking my viewpoint is shifting. Not that I think there is proof, but that I think it is intellectually defensible to believe that Jesus really appeared to some of his disciples in some kind of bodily form after his death. Of course, that requires more than an analysis of the evidence to accept. It requires a worldview which won’t suffer too much violence to fit in such an event.

Here are a few of the things that made a difference.

N.T. Wright, in his (massive) book “The Resurrection of the Son of God,” asks the question: how can you explain the early Christians’ adoption of the idea of a two-stage resurrection–first Jesus, then everyone else–unless the disciples were absolutely convinced that they saw Jesus again after his death? Most first-century Jews seemed to believe in one resurrection, the one with everyone at the end of the age. How did the two-stage idea come to be?

His answer is that it could only have happened if they were absolutely convinced Jesus rose from the dead, even though the rest of the deceased were not yet showing up. And they would only be convinced by both the empty tomb and the multiple appearances of Jesus. One without the other would not be enough. An empty tomb would be a mystery. Appearances would be visions, like the frequently reported visions of a dead person that people do have. Only both meant a resurrection had happened.

I am not sure that argument holds up. I think an expectation that the general resurrection was imminent, plus the appearances of Jesus, would be sufficient for them to come up with a two-stage concept. But it did cause me to think about the oddity of the combination. Chronologically, it makes sense to me. First a belief that resurrection is about to happen, then the appearances, and you get a resurrected Jesus. But look at it in reverse. How likely is it not only that multiple appearances of the same dead person are reported (as in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians), but that a belief in an imminent resurrection happens to have been accepted by them beforehand?

That is what struck me. The widespread expectation of a general resurrection just happens to have developed among first century Jews before the disciples of Jesus start having visions of him? Strange historical happenstance. No other culture held such a view, expect maybe in Persia, although that is disputed.

Just last night I finished Dale Allison’s exhaustive review of the literature on the resurrection in his book, “Resurrecting Jesus.” He presents a lengthy discussion of visions of the dead in modern times, with an abundance of footnotes. People have experiences of dead people present again. The deceased seem very real to them. Groups of people can experience this at the same time. Occasionally they not only see a deceased person, they touch the person. All that makes even the gospel accounts of Jesus’ appearances more credible.

That was not news to me. But what Allison also had was a discussion of the arguments pro and con the finding of an empty tomb. Up to now (and still on my page about the resurrection on my website) I have regarded the empty tomb story as a literary fiction by the author of the gospel of Mark. Allison presented a couple arguments that provoked me to rethink this. Part has to do with burial practices for crucified criminals (it was not uncommon to bury them) and part has to do with the reality of Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdeline and their roles in the drama. I am still in the process of thinking through these arguments.

Finally, a few months back I read a book by a Jewish author, Jon D. Levenson, “Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel.” Levenson wasn’t writing about Jesus. He was defending the belief in the general resurrection as compatible with Jewish beliefs before the period of the Second Temple. For example, belief that creation is good, that God intends justice to be done, and that human life matters. All of these are beliefs I share, so his presentation made me want to believe in a bodily resurrection. His book shifted me from seeing resurrection as irrelevant to how I live my life, to an important potential buttress to beliefs I already hold dear. I think that prepared the ground for me to be more open as I considered the question. It wasn’t only about belief in what really happened at the start of Christianity, it was about how that belief could fit in with a worldview I already hold.

So that is where I am at. I am about done with reading and about to start writing up my thoughts, which is going to take many more pages than I currently have up on this site. I will let you know as I get the new pages up.

Thanks for your interest.

–Alan

Was There a Passion Narrative Before Mark’s?

I recently took down my page about the crucifixion of Jesus because I decided I should not take the historicity of Jesus for granted in my writings on this website. In these times that is something that needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed, and I am looking into how persuasive a case can be made.

But if you had read that page, you may remember that I thought it likely that “Mark,” the author of the earliest gospel (that we know of), drew upon an oral tradition or maybe a written account of the events from Jesus’ arrival in his final visit to Jerusalem through his crucifixion. Subsequent to examining the gospel accounts and writing up my findings, I obtained a book on the subject by the well-regarded Biblical scholar Raymond Brown. This provoked some new thoughts that I want to share with you now that I’ve finished reading it.

The book is thirty years old, and so does not incorporate more recent research, but it is highly detailed and well versed in the research up to that time. Brown had a sterling reputation as a rigorous scholar. He was also a Catholic priest, and although often criticized for questioning the historical basis of certain claims of the the church, he was not one to question the real existence of Jesus or the central dogmas of Christianity. For these reasons I found what he had to say in this book especially interesting.

Much of the book was a line by line comparison and commentary on latter parts of the passion accounts in four canonical gospels and the less-known Gospel of Peter. I confess I skimmed much of that material. But as the second of his two volumes it also included several appendixes with studies of particular aspects of the topic. It was a couple of these that I found revealing.

The first is Appendix VII, “The Old Testament Background of the Passion Narratives.” In this section Brown gives a thorough listing of every passage in the Jewish scriptures that the gospel passion narratives seem to refer to. There are dozens of them, which raises the question of whether Mark’s narrative was created from what he regarded as prophecies in the Jewish scriptures rather than any pre-existing oral or written account of the passion events. Brown rejected the theory that Mark based his narrative purely on an imaginative reflection on the Jewish scriptures. But he conceded that those scriptures “influenced heavily early Christian presentation of the passion” in order to expand “the preaching outline into dramatic narratives.” In other words, Mark probably knew a basic outline of what happened to Jesus at the end of his life but created much of what he wrote about it as an exegesis of those scriptural passages.

The second is Appendix IX, “The Question of a PreMarkan Passion Narrative.” This was written by Martin L. Soards and edited by Brown for this book. Soards goes thr0ugh a long list of scholars who examined the question of whether there was a pre-existing passion narrative that Mark drew on, examining their methods and findings. He concludes that there was such a narrative, but that discovering what was in it “may finally be an impossible” task. His reason for thinking there was one is based entirely on Mark’s mention of “Judas, one of the Twelve,” in his passion account. Soards asks why Mark would feel it necessary to identify Judas when he had already brought up Judas earlier in his gospel. His answer is that Mark must have relied on an earlier account in which this was the first mention of Judas. That sounds pretty tenuous to me.

What was striking was that Brown, who fully accepted the historicity of Jesus, indicated by publishing these two appendices that much (most?) of Mark’s account of the passion events was creative exegesis and that it was near impossible to recover the historical events behind it. This back in 1994, long before any mythicist arguments about the historical Jesus had become widely known. It reinforces my belief that I was correct in deleting several of my pages so that I can avoid assuming Jesus’ historicity before taking a more careful look at the problem.

Thanks for joining me on this journey! As always, I welcome your comments on this blog post.

Elaine Pagels’ new book; plus another argument vs. “mythicism”

Over the last couple of days I tore through Elaine Pagels’ new book, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus. Pagels is well known for her work on early Christianity and especially her work on the Gnostic Gospels found at Nag Hammadi. The new book is meant as a culmination of her reflections about Jesus, both as a scholar and as a human being long interested in spirituality and religion. I always enjoy reading about someone else’s spiritual journey and how it may have points of intersection with mine. Miracles and Wonder is an easy read, aimed more at the general public than at scholars.

Nothing in the book changed my mind about Jesus as an historical figure, although there was some information I wasn’t aware of. I will have to go through it again more carefully and take note of points of special interest. I did notice she still talks about the Christian “communities” that the writers of the gospels were supposedly addressing, without mentioning new research such as that of Robyn Faith Walsh showing how the authors more likely were addressing a literate audience curious about Christians. Walsh did not appear in her bibliography.

I was also surprised to see her name check the late Jane Schaberg, a former professor of mine at the University of Detroit when I was an undergrad majoring in Religious Studies. Pagels relates how she and other scholars of early Christianity ignored Schaberg’s 1987 book The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives, because they assumed the book was a “hostile polemic,” but that she regrets now that hasty assumption. I read the book about twenty years ago, during an earlier phase of my periodic immersion in questions on the historical Jesus, and found it, as I expected, to be a work of careful scholarship. I know from Schaberg, who I became friends with, that she received hate mail and death threats from people on account of that book.

So I recommend Pagels’ book as worth reading as a kind of combined spiritual autobiography and summary of widespread views among scholars about Jesus from an historical perspective. It doesn’t break any new ground or go very deeply into any topic, but is of course well informed on them.

On a different topic, I added another point to my list of reasons for rejecting mythicism and holding that Jesus was a real person. This is that Paul refers to Jesus as “born of a woman” and as a Jewish man “according to the flesh.” He certainly sounds like he thinks Jesus was a human being. I also rearranged the order of my several reasons to put what are probably the stronger arguments first.

Alan

Additions regarding mythicism and the Temple incident

I just finished revising several pages of the website in line with what I had to say in my last post about how a book by Robyn Faith Walsh overturned my picture of how the gospel authors created their compositions.

This was important because I want to make the strongest case possible for what really happened without relying on contested assumptions. Walsh (and other authors) have put in question the idea that the gospel writers were writing within and for particular communities of early Christians, relying on stories passed down in those communities. Rather, there is evidence the authors were addressing literate audiences, both Christian and non-Christian, and relying heavily on literary sources and tropes of the time.

The biggest change from this was on my page about the execution of Jesus. I deleted the passages about how the narrative of Jesus’ final days showed particular signs of oral transmission, an argument which I now regard as less convincing. I still think a story was handed down orally, but that Mark probably invented many of the memorable details.

While revising that page I also expanded the sections on Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple, adding new material that helped fill out what historical information I think we can take away from this story.

I made change to the page on Jesus as an Historical Person (formerly titled Jesus in History) as well, moving my objections to mythicism–arguments that Jesus was purely mythological and not a real person–to the beginning and clarified some of my points. I did this because mythicism seems to have a large following these days and I wanted to address it up front.

That’s it for the revising, now I can return to my draft of the next page for the site. This one is about the ideas Jesus’ disciples drew from in order to make sense of his death and the “appearances” of Jesus that followed his death. I look forward to sharing it with you.

As always, you can make comments on this blog post regarding the changes I outlined above.

My picture of how the gospel authors worked has been overturned

I just finished reading a book by Robyn Faith Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature, and it has overturned one of my key assumptions about the gospels: that they are to some meaningful extent based on oral traditions about the historical Jesus. This suddenly brought me back to where my thinking was about 15 years ago when I last delved into recent works on the historical Jesus: that it is impossible with the materials at hand to say much of anything about Jesus as a real person. We only have evidence for him as a figure in literary works.

At that time the field of gospel studies was showing multiple parallels between the incidents depicted in the gospels and earlier Jewish and Greco-Roman texts, demonstrating at least that the gospel authors borrowed liberally from other textual sources to compose their works. At that point I decided that Jesus as an inspirational figure, whether as real as Mohandas Gandhi or as fictional as Sherlock Holmes, was sufficient for the purpose of living my life.

But I must not have fully absorbed the implications of that, as I still held unto the idea that the gospel writers probably used some oral sources about the real Jesus. They shaped them to fit their purposes and inserted them creatively into their narratives and we can’t easily recover them, yes, but we can make some important educated guesses, can’t we?

I am not sure. What Walsh offered me was a different account of how the literary borrowing worked, based on what we (she, not so much me) know about the production of other literary works at the time. In the “bios,” or lives of notable people, authors usually drew from other written sources and utilized familiar tropes. It was from a video of Walsh speaking about this that I first became aware of the empty tomb trope that I reference in my page on the resurrection.

After reading her book I now have in my mind a different picture of how the gospel authors worked than the one I had long held and been unable to shed. Rather than working within Christian communities to gather and rework oral traditions to advance theological agendas, they read other texts and addressed a wider literate audience not only to advance a theological agenda but to challenge prevailing norms, satisfy curiosity about other cultures, and even to entertain.

The upshot for me is that I want to go back over my writing on this site to date, especially the pages on Jesus and History and the Execution of Jesus, and be even more cautious about my assessments of the likelihood that particular events happened. I have been unsatisfied with my use of the term “near certain” anyway, because even though I tried to qualify it the term still seemed to suggest some degree of unassailability to my conclusions. So I will replace that term with “very likely” in my rewrites.

To my relief, in a video interview released just yesterday Walsh did say she believes at least one fact about the historical Jesus: that he was crucified. So something can be said. I do think we can go beyond that, even if not as far as I hoped. It will be interesting for me to try to sort that out with this new picture in my head.

A final word here that may clarify what I am up to. A friend mentioned to me his (not uncommon) view that accepting the core claims about Jesus is important as a matter of religious faith and not on the basis of tenuous historical findings. I can accept that view, but I am not exploring this topic as part of a search for something to believe in. In large part I am motivated by the hope that both believers and skeptics of Christian claims could at least agree on some points of what Jesus was about, given how our culture is currently riven in large part by efforts to claim the sanction of Jesus for political agendas. The other part of my motivation is my desire to see if my own spiritual orientation–which I have no desire to change, although I am open to it–can fit within Christianity, at least insofar as I understand that term.

As always, my thanks to those of you engaging with what I write here.

Alan