During the indoctrination phase, Jesus was presented to me in much the same way as Holden Caulfield…a slayer of hypocrites. He was cool. He overturned tables and told the authorities to get bent. I was totally down with the Loosen up, Sandy, baby Jesus. I was on his side. So, when they told me that he got himself killed, I was sad and thought it was a terrible injustice. I could understand the concept of a martyr. I even thought it was cool that all you had to do is add an ‘r’ to my name and I would be a martyr. What kind of bastards would kill someone nice and truthful like Jesus?
Then they told me that we had to celebrate his death because it was Good Friday. I was like, “What? What? We’re going to celebrate him getting whacked? Are you nuts? No.”
Thus ended my embrace of this particular narrative.
My mind doesn’t work that way, and let the devil take me.
If you wanted me to observe this day, you needed to call it “Bad Friday,” because the problem was obviously that a good man can’t tell truth to power without losing his life. When they told me that Jesus had to die so that he could wipe away my sins, they might as well have told me that he had to die so he could outplay Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the paint.
No amount of explanation could convince me that the death of Jesus was a “good” thing. When I realized that this wasn’t some minor detail but the entire point of the religion I was supposed to believe in, I just took a walk.
For a little while I felt bad about it, particularly because it upset my parents. But I eventually realized that Thomas Jefferson saw things about exactly the same way, and I’ve been okay with it ever since.
The inner meaning of the biblical stories have been lost. There have been times when I felt these books should be set aside for a few hundred years until they can be seen through new eyes. Over the years, I’ve met some special spiritual teachers who were able to show deep meaning in these stories. However, none of them told the stories as if they were to be believed. My current teacher often prefaces his teachings by saying something along the lines of, “This is not a story to be understood in the outer world. This is about a time before there was time.”
Have you ever read about Zoroastrianism and how it influenced the movement that would become Christianity?
Yes, I have a degree in Philosophy. I have read extensively about Zoroastrianism.
I was in a world religion class and the Christians were really shocked when they learned about it.
It was really interesting to see the reactions.
I assume you are talking about the Creation story.
This is oversimplified but the basic story is that the Jews were influenced by Zorastrianism during the Babylonian exile. Many of the ideas–the universal savior Shoshans, resurrection on the 4th day, wholly man and wholly divine savior sent to usher in the new age, the dualism of light and dark, good and evil, angels and devils, etc would influence the formation of Christianity.
Well, yes. You can read Joseph Campbell for more on that.
Campbell was wonderful. James Carroll has written on this too–and his own journey with changing beliefs.
Thomas Paine had a similar experience:
That’s a level up in theological sophistication from my stumbling block. I wasn’t even thinking about God or God’s power over all things. I was thinking about the idea that we would call this day “Good.” I couldn’t get there.
Well, if it’s called Holy Friday in French, Spanish, and Orthodoxy, and Mournful Friday in German, doesn’t that suggest that the name Good Friday is nothing to do with the meaning that Christianity attaches to the “goodness” of the day, but is simply an oddity of the English language i.e. something to do with an outdated meaning of the word “good”, or “good” as a garbling of a different word?
Perhaps. If they had called it “mournful” or “holy,” I wouldn’t have had a problem with it.
Yes, Middle English is sprinkled with “Good” words meaning “God”. An example is “Goodwife” which is not opposed to “Bad wife” but “lawful wife”. A Goodwife or “wife in the eyes of God” was what we now call a “Common Law wife”. Poor people couldn’t afford the fees to be married in Church and just lived together. After a while the law recognized the union but the Church did not, because the priest had not done his spiel and (most importantly) collected his fee, 10% of which went to Rome (or King Henry if Anglican?). How eyes of God but not of the Church? Well, that’s just one of the many ways that God and the Church didn’t connect. A monk named Martin Luther once compended a long list.
I’ve always thought it’s called “Good Friday” because the reality is so horrible. Kind of like the cross only becoming a symbol used by Christians centuries after execution by crucifixion had disappeared as common practice.
The Bible is simply filled, end to end, with violent events and images. Now, it is pretty much agreed that most of it did not actually happen, but it was an important part of the illusion that was necessary for the writers to be able to craft the proper narratives for their times. The entire premise of Christianity, all the way back to its beginnings, is based on blood sacrifice.
Another good reason that we have so much cherry picking among the various groups who claim to be under the umbrella of Christianity.
A little etymology:
Like most mythological constructions, and we are talking “mythology” here in the post-Enligtenment anthropological sense of the word here, it is an intentional paradox aimed at a transformation of values. It does not take much imagination to understand how that transformation of values might be helpful for a persecuted social group. Indeed, this central core of Christian theology was central to the SCLC’s mobilization of Southern Christians into the civil rights movement.
For Christians, Christ pronouncing forgiveness == “Forgive them, Lord. They know not what they do.” is a redemption of all of history and not just those few Roman soldiers and Jewish establishment who in the story set the events in motion. Dr. Martin Luther King understood the power of that pronouncement of forgiveness to set attitudes free and change lives by allowing segregationists to break free of the dead hand of the past. It is a profoundly non-conservative message.
The Princeton doctrine of Biblical inerrancy was intended to defend the Bible’s privilege in intellectual argument and to make it conservative.
Good Friday occurs within the dramatic framework of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Black Saturday (the experience of the absence of God), and Easter Sunday. That mythological structure likely owes itself to the structure of some pagan European holidays because it is anchored on Easter, a pagan spring festival.
It is only in Princeton Theology that it is supposed to make sense.
The cool thing about the Princeton seminary, aside from the fact that it is across the street from the Episcopal church I attended as a child, is that it has one of those pedestrian crosswalk buttons that changes instantaneously when you press it. You can really mess with people driving on Mercer Street that way.
And did the drivers “forgive you, for you knew not what you did?”
The Catholic Encyclopedia has this:
Good Friday, called Feria VI in Parasceve in the Roman Missal, he hagia kai megale paraskeue (the Holy and Great Friday) in the Greek Liturgy, Holy Friday in Romance Languages, Charfreitag (Sorrowful Friday) in German, is the English designation of Friday in Holy Week — that is, the Friday on which the Church keeps the anniversary of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Parasceve, the Latin equivalent of paraskeue, preparation (i.e. the preparation that was made on the sixth day for the Sabbath; see Mark 15:42), came by metonymy to signify the day on which the preparation was made; but while the Greeks retained this use of the word as applied to every Friday, the Latins confined its application to one Friday. Irenaeus and Tertullian speak of Good Friday as the day of the Pasch; but later writers distinguish between the Pascha staurosimon (the passage to death), and the Pascha anastasimon (the passage to life, i.e. the Resurrection). At present the word Pasch is used exclusively in the latter sense. The two Paschs are the oldest feasts in the calendar.
From the earliest times the Christians kept every Friday as a feast day; and the obvious reasons for those usages explain why Easter is the Sunday par excellence, and why the Friday which marks the anniversary of Christ’s death came to be called the Great or the Holy or the Good Friday. The origin of the term Good is not clear. Some say it is from “God’s Friday” (Gottes Freitag); others maintain that it is from the German Gute Freitag, and not specially English. Sometimes, too, the day was called Long Friday by the Anglo-Saxons; so today in Denmark.
In Ireland it used to be dry Friday, because the pubs were closed…
It’s striking how much of Christianity has roots in Paul rather than in the teachings and traditions that preceded him. I think the “goodness” of Good Friday has got to be assigned to that category.
When Jesus was executed by the Roman state, there must have be widespread confusion among those who had believed him to be the messiah of prophecy, or that he had a special relationship with God.
I find it interesting that Paul’s interpretation — sacrifice and atonement — gained prominence only after a lot of time has passed between the event and the explanation. I have my doubts that formula would have satisfied the people who were closer to the scandal of Jesus’ death.
I recently re-read “The Transmigration of Timothy Archer” by Philip K. Dick, which looks at how people come to believe the things that they do, and how much our emotional needs are in the driver’s seat. Dick wrote about the subject without an attitude of superiority: He found himself compelled to believe extraordinary things and sought to understand how that had come to be.
“I have my doubts that formula would have satisfied the people who were closer to the scandal of Jesus’ death.”
It didn’t. The first schism in this newborn sect of Judaism involved doctrinal disputes between Jesus’ brother James, the disciples John and Peter, and on the other side, Paul. Paul was seen as a Johnny-come-lately, with suspect motives, and, as time went on, suspect beliefs. He believed himself the spiritual superior of the apostles who had actually known Jesus, and were now trying to perpetuate his doctrine that the world would end soon, and a physical Kingdom of God would take its place. This kingdom would be open only to orthodox Jews such as themselves, leavened with some of Jesus’ peculiar details (baptism, speaking in tongues, etc.) Paul, on the other hand, being a thoroughly Greekified Jew, was intent on accepting as converts, ANYONE. In the end, Paul lost the battle, but won the war, so to speak, and Christianity shed its roots and became a pagan amalgam of Jewish (specifically Pharasaic), Greek and Roman doctrines that we see today. The actual details of Holy Week were made up maybe a 100 years later by people who were familiar neither with Judaism or with Palestine, as can be detected with even a nominal comparison of the various Synoptic gospels and John.
How did you react when you found out what Pass Over meant?
Not sure what you mean.
The basic story of Moses is fairly straightforward. I did not believe that he parted the Red Sea, but it didn’t seem like an important point.
Regardless of the historical truth, the enslavement of Jews in Egypt is so central to Jewish identity that it doesn’t matter whether it really happened or not.
Or are you talking about the slaying of the first born?
The “passing over” is part of the Exodus story, in the 10th of of the plagues sent against the Egyptians, where the lord personally went through the land and killed all their firstborn sons. The Hebrews, under Moses’s instructions, had marked their doorposts with lambs’ blood, so the Angel passed over their houses. It’s pretty disgusting to celebrate that, though in a larger moral sense I still prefer Judaism to Christianity.
Yes, that is what I meant by referring to the firstborn sons. I don’t think of Passover as a celebration of the massacre of Egyptian babies. I think of it as the celebration of freedom from slavery.
But if you want to get all Django Unchained, I won’t mind.
Oh, it is about freedom from slavery, and it’s great. But there is a Django moment in the Haggadah that does make me pretty uncomfortable.
And what bothers me is how we actually name the festival “passover”, i.e. “the festival where their sons were killed and not ours” instead of the gentler “festival of unleavened bread” or something like that. Especially when crazed Israeli and Brooklynite rightists use the idea as a reason for permanent war with–well, whoever. (I don’t see any ancient Egyptians around.)
To me the story always meant something complete different, and very terrible to contemplate. It meant that you always had to tell and act the complete truth, regardless of the consequences, and held up Jesus as the great example of this. It meant that a follower of Christ had to be completely fearless of his/her own health and safety, and stand with the poor, sick and oppressed whatever the powers of the day might say.
I then saw what “Christians” actually did, and came to feel that organised Christianity as a religion was actually an elaborate ruse to get out of this terrible responsibility. It was a ploy by which you could do the exact opposite and yet still claim to be a Christian by kowtowing to the (Christian) powers that be.
The next bit was more problematic: The Christian claim that even if you are wronged, tortured and killed, you would eventually be resurrected and live triumphantly in God’s Kingdom. I struggled to find evidence for this, but I suppose it depends on how you read history: Is it one sordid march from atrocity to atrocity, or is there some gradually process of human growth and enlightenment…
I actually cling to the latter view. Not sure about the torture bit though. I can see why the vast majority of “Christians” copped out. But the hypocrisy! Why not just admit you don’t have the guts and move on? I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for all those “Christians” who condemned others whilst not having the guts to follow Christ in the first place.
No wait. Perhaps this is it…
one step firther into paranoia…
on dark days i see the whole Xtian shebang as a lightly veiled warning to stay in line, or this is the fate which will await you… and has for all manner of culture-jammers born too far ahead of their time, hardly peculiar to christians either.
it’s horribly rational, and fits with so many actions by the church.
i remember asking our ‘divinity’ teacher, an anglican priest why we had to learn about a 2000 year-old story about a shepherd, where was there any relevance to today’s realities. (i was 13).
he literally had no answer, class was over… along with any pre-nascent respect for confabulations.
later in life i appreciated jesus-as-myth in a positive way, as archetype of man as a perfectly kind person, divorced from any need for historical verificability.
the story of jesus embodies and mirrors the evolution of our species as a whole, especially our intolerance for rebellion from tribally agreed ways of looking at the world.
celebrating his kangaroo trial and execution is as darkly disturbing as having crucifixes on preschool walls in catholic countries.
just as the whole ritual of consuming transubtantiated flesh and drinking ersatz blood wasn’t dark enough…
seeing the attitude towards the occupy-the-steps-of- st. paul’s cathedral in london shows the unforgiveable hypocrisy abounding.
maybe the new pope will surprise me… on more than a symbolic level.