The Gospel According to Maura

That’s right: I’ve read The Gospel According to Matthew and I’ve started in on Mark. TL;DR: WAT?!

It seems pretty clear to me that Christianity is a Jewish movement that got taken over by internationalists, the original nationalists having been brutally killed. Jesus starts out saying that he’s not against “the law” meaning Jewish law, telling his disciples not to bother with the “gentiles” and even speaking disparagingly of them (us) on several occasions. But after the resurrection, he’s telling people to spread the word to the “nations”, i.e. everyone who isn’t Jewish.

And another striking way that it at least starts out as a Jewish project is the number of references to Old Testament prophecies. Only the kookiest of gentiles have ever really known or cared what they had to say, which surely the Evangelists knew. Those passages that say, “Look! This prophecy came true!” are an attempt to sell Christianity to Jews.

Which brings me to another bit of skullduggery: the bit about the flight into Egypt at the start of Matthew, all according to prophecy, is missing from Mark. Traditionally, Matthew is the first book of the New Testament, being considered older. Modern scholars who’ve actually compared the Gospel texts, however, think Mark came first, and was likely a source if not the source for Matthew and Luke. Mark is easily the shortest of the Gospels, with the most superfluous, unflattering, and colorful details.

The traditional bit about Jesus being some regular, blue-collar Joe? Bullpuckey. The number of times Jesus claps back at establishment (i.e. Pharisee & Saducee) types with “Have you not read [Bible thing]” is noticeable. You needed a lot of money to afford books back then, not to mention time to study them. And oh by the way, Jesus & co. came from a society that has revered literacy for going on three thousand years. The Jews even have a unique religious belief in the power of the written word; witness the story of the golem and the time I was personally told to read prayers even though I’d inevitably memorized a few. No way were even the blue-collar Joes of Roman-era Galilee going to pay attention to any aspiring prophet who didn’t have at least some credibility as a scholar.

My goodness, there’s a whole lot of healing the sick going on! And feeding the hungry! We’re talking a double-digit percentage of the text here. The modern deemphasis on that part is nothing short of criminal. We have the power to do what he did through perfectly ordinary means, but we don’t.

Something I didn’t expect was Jesus trying to keep some of his miracles secret. Sure, points for modesty, and I can’t blame him for not wanting to get killed when the news got out, but come on, they were miracles.

Mark seems to be into exorcism. Matthew seems to have anticipated the modern era’s distaste for that.

It’s true that Jesus’s take on divorce was less liberal than the entirety of Jewish tradition, saying it’s only copacetic in cases of “sexual immorality”, and that marrying a divorcée is wrong. However, he still wasn’t as bonkers about it as the Roman Catholic Church. Besides, this one has to be taken in context: what happened to women in that society who got divorced because their hubby wanted a younger model?

Jesus was kind of a cranky bastard, wasn’t he? Sometimes I sympathize with his crankiness, but often I don’t. I’m tempted to compare him to (Osamu Tezuka’s depiction of) Buddha, who comes across as less cranky. On the other hand, Buddha was awfully chummy with the powerful of his day. Jesus was having none of that and kissing no butts, even though he knew it would get him killed.

And speaking of his killers, the Romans, and especially Pilate, come across as weak-minded goons. Deadly dangerous, but still weak-minded goons.

Oh, and Jesus saying that his disciples are his family, and saying that you should be ready to break with your family in favor of him? I’m ambivalent about it. On the one hand, it sounds cult-like. On the other, what if your parents really do suck?

Speaking of people whose parents often suck, the Gospels don’t mention queers by any of our names, but Jesus does say that the people of Sodom & Gomorrah are better than people who don’t listen to his disciples. And he does lean pretty hard on loving your neighbor as yourself. So I’m satisfied that Jesus wasn’t particularly out to get us.

But you know, the whole damn Bible is such a stew of conflicting agendas and edits that it’s a Rorschach test. People have always seen what they want to see in it, and that’s only partly the readers' fault.

postscript: who isn't in the Gospels

Much ink has been spilled about how Mary Magdalene is really Jesus's wife in disguise. Seeing as how Jesus was said to be thirty years old when he started his preaching, it does seem unlikely in that society that he was never married and had no children.

But he's also on record as not being a family man. Did he divorce his wife? He was against divorce unmotivated by "sexual immorality". Did he simply walk away, as Buddha did? That seems awfully tacky for him. Or did she die before his story really starts? Or was she simply edited out? If so, was it out of misogyny or concern for her and her children's safety?

I think of Muhammad, who by all accounts was a model husband and father. Sadly, his eldest child and her husband were at the center of the earliest, most significant, and bloodiest schism in Islam, that between Sunni and Shia.