Easter and Commie Jesus: New Testament or Second Bill of Rights?

or Jesus told me to vote for a Caesar that would take your money and give it to me

WWJD? He'd have you vote for Progressive Caesar.

Been noticing a lot of memes about what a communist Jesus was and how he thought everyone should be communist.

This got me thinking about, among other things, the shift in thinking over Christianity's first century from a communal bunch of disciples waiting for the Second Coming to more independent Christian households looking to occupy themselves as the salt of the earth.  The statement "If anyone will not work, neither let him eat"* has such a realist, capitalist character to it for the years in which Christian communities started to dig in for the long haul (which would last thousands of years).

Another distinction: Obama's
kingdom IS of this world.

It is only in the early years of Christianity that there is the general expectation that converts will give up their worldly goods to the community of believers--an expectation so irresistible that new converts lie about the goods they elect to keep to themselves.  The emphasis on helping the unfortunate and vulnerable becomes a more general injunction to not "be so heavenly that one is no earthly good" (as the modern saying goes).

A related meme I saw recently was one showing the Pope flying in his private airplane and comparing him to Christ who supposedly would have been toting around the poor with him in his private airplane.  Jesus did travel by private boat, and while we don't know that he never took "the poor" with him, we are given the impression that he often sought conclusion and often traveled with only his inner circle of disciples with him.

Jesus irritates Judah Iscariot at some point by accepting a lavish gift from an acolyte.  Judah maintains that the gift could have helped so many poor people, and Jesus claims (in so many words) that the wasteful misuse of wealth was inspired by the Holy Spirit.  The narrative indicates that like a scandalous televangelist Judah was planning to misuse the funds himself.

Jesus routinely lives by the hospitality of others.  It would appear that Lazarus and his sisters own property and not only entertain Jesus but large groups of his followers.  How much the travels of Jesus and his companions are funded by the businesses of his followers we don't know.  Some of his inner circle abandon their fishing businesses in Galilee and we don't know how well those businesses ran themselves.  It should be said that Jesus probably spent many a night on the ground and was likely at least as accustomed to poverty as to opulence.  He has a reputation as a partyer, as he didn't seem to avoid feasts where there were wine, women, and song.  He no doubt seemed wasteful to many.  His own mother fully expected him to solve a wine shortage at a wedding.

Given the interaction between Iscariot and Jesus, and the reminders in the gospel narratives that the apostles were often missing the point of what Jesus was saying, it could make one wonder whether the idea that Jesus wanted them to live as a commune until his return was as mistaken an assumption as the idea that he was returning to them in the same generation.

But there is an interesting tension in people's thoughts about the person of Jesus, specifically with those who are looking for grounds to reject organized religion or traditional religion.  Many of those who do, it seems, will gravitate to Jewish Jesus or to New Age Jesus, that is, to a story of Jesus as merely a Jewish reformer in the spirit of Gamliel or a story of Jesus as a Hindu guru who is trying to convey New Age truths to backward monotheists.  Some people, inexplicably, assent to both narratives in  some vague conceptual fog, allowing them to criticize Saul of Tarsus for being too Jewish (in his morés about gender roles) and for being too anti-Jewish (in his supposed expanded concept of grace beyond what Reformer Jesus intended).  Jesus becomes at once becomes an advocate against the Christian concept of grace and a reformer rejecting Mosaic morality.

This is all a thought-provoking backdrop, I think, to the cultural battle over whether Christianity means entrusting the government with our Christian duties (as Elizabeth Warren seems to believe).  Is the Mosaic  respect for property rights (thou shalt not covet, thou shalt not steal) something unbecoming to modern Christians, making libertarianism (along with the republicanism of the Federalist Papers) antithetical to Christianity?  Or is both libertarianism and Christianity in accord with voluntary support for the poor?  Are they not both antithetical to involuntary support for the poor?  The only act of coercion attributed to Jesus was against the commercialization and merchandizing of spirituality in the Temple.  In this he does not seem to be railing against either commerce or capitalism but against a Temple-trader monopoly that allowed people to be charged/taxed with exorbitant fees to fulfill their religious obligations, and against the the profanity of it being allowed in the Temple itself?

There is a conflict in many Christians between the reality of being community members providing for their families and the austerity suggested by Christ in abandoning familial responsibilities for the cause, between trusting fully in grace and the perfection of "go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven", between the simplicity of penitence and the implication that heaven will reject the one that doesn't loudly and proudly claim Jesus as his spiritual leader.  Between the gospel spoken of by Paul in his letter to the Galatians and the hard gospel described in John MacArthur's The Gospel According to Jesus.  Between the burden that is easy and light and the small gate to the narrow road.

Ironic anti-capitalist
merchandizing of spirituality
Also, buy the baseball cap

And what about Jesus' death?  I don't think it makes much sense to most people, Christian or not, that God would require a man, perfect or otherwise, to suffer an agonizing death before being willing and able to forgive transgressions.   Perhaps it is something that we can only understand imperfectly, if at all.  If it is unlikely that the Apostles were willing to die terrible deaths themselves for a man whose resurrection was faked, maybe the man that survived crucifixion might be a little on the inscrutable side.  I don't think people have tried that hard to understand the nature of the "good news" that he taught before he died for our sins.  What basis for forgiveness did he teach?  How did he say people could be put right with their Creator?  What specifically was the good news?

But it seems more than a little insipid to say that he simply said that people should all be nice to each other and that this is the crux and gist of his message.  And at least as insipid--and irresponsible--to suggest that his message was essentially that people are obligated to trust in a worldly empire that defines and enforces a right to other people's money.  Are we to no longer make distinction between what is Caesar's to take and what is God's?  "Render unto Caesar that which is God's, because Caesar is God's man"?

All of this makes me wonder whether it is neither the case that Jesus was simply a wise teacher, nor that Christendom (or the New Age movement, for that matter) has well understood the spiritual life offered by Jesus.  It's a deeper mystery that shouldn't be exploited -- not for the financial gain of "ministers," not for the opportunism of "altruistic" politicians, and not for the self-righteous glory of social reformers.

Anti-capitalist propaganda equating supply-side economics
with a celebration of wealth and a lack of concern for the poor.

Bible Miniseries Racially Charged With Obama-Satan

Satan?  Or have the Presidential years been really unkind to Obama?

Scorsese's Jesus

I don't think I would noticed a resemblance (at least not based on this picture alone) if people weren't implicating "The Bible" mini-series as anti-Obama propaganda.  Supposedly a little child pointed out the resemblance between Obama and Satan, as well as asking why all the good people looked white.  How race-conscious do you have to be as a child to notice everybody's race?  Still, generally they (and I'm talking Hollywood, not just Christian filmmakers) have almost always chosen actors they felt would have broad appeal as the protagonists, and these have tended to white people with movie star looks.

I know at least one person who thought Joseph, Mary, and Gabriel in this latest miniseries looked overly Nordic. (Hmmm, is that Gabriel, or Thor?)

Check out Last Temptation of Christ. Willem Dafoe looks pretty darn white to me.  And look at the cast of ethnic characters standing behind the Scotsman (Judas):

The Disciple Judas in Scorsese's 'Last Temptation'

I've tended to notice this tendency in most all Bible dramas that I've seen.  Proof to most critical race theorists that Christendom is institutionalized racism, rather than a very common shortsightedness.  It seems like this haunts most Biblical productions to a great degree except for one:  The Passion of the Christ.

There's something different
about Caviezel in this picture.

The director of Passion took great pains to overcome the past productions' tendency to "whitewash" (pun intended) the cultural and ethnic context of Jesus' life and death.  The movie is a constant reminder to Jesus and his disciples were, ethnically and religiously, Israelites.  Jim Caviezel gets valmorphanized with a new nose right out of the Shroud of Turin. Everybody's speaking (a reconstruction of) Aramaic, the language of the Jews at the time, and a true effort to convey the religious context of 1st Century Judaism is attempted.  Gone is the image of WASPs speaking King James English in proper British accents.  Jesus is finally an Israelite, and so are his Galilean disciples.  Any European-looking people?  Yes, playing Romans, who speak Latin.

Oh, and one more person:

This clean-shaven Caucasian is none other than Lucifer, the Accuser of the Brethren.

Ironic that the one real attempt to give us Semitic Jesus instead of white-bread Jesus comes from the man vilified as an anti-Semite from the movie's very release (long before his nervous breakdown)? Or more ironic that given this, Hollywood and its progressive entourage focused entirely on a scene with a Judaean mob?  I think it was either Time or Newsweek with a long article that argued that the scene was inherently anti-Semitic in character--without the author explaining why he was attacking the Gospel of John (the source of the scene) as racist.  All the artistic freedom Hollywood was frothing with over Scorsese's unusual weirdfest went out the window.

Gibson's Kepha ("Peter" in Aramaic) to the left of Jesus
(on Jesus' right hand).  The first Pope looks kind o' Jewish. 

Of course, it didn't help that Gibson's later maniacal episode had him regressing into his father's anti-Zionist paranoia.  Yet, how eagerly the powers that be focused their attention on this episode as having the utmost significance, even though the Judaean religious leaders are hardly the only Israelites in the movie.  So much more attention in fact, than they ever give to the Islamic leaders/activists and African American ministers that spout the same paranoia.  Curious.

But Christians all over America were still embarrassed that Gibson gave the anti-church crowd what they wanted (over 2 years later) by opening up a full can of crazy.  As they will probably be embarrassed that someone didn't speak up during the making of this latest Bible miniseries and say, "Hey, can we make the Devil at least as white-looking as the other main characters?  As a rule of thumb, it would distract people much less if the Devil is always at least as Caucasian-looking as Mary the mother of Jesus.

Odeya Rush

Speaking of which, I'm not sure if even the Israeli actress Odeya Rush is as conscientious a choice as Mel Gibson would have made (although Caviezel seems like a bad choice without the makeup).  However, she is slated for the title role in the prequel to Passion of the Christ., which is Mary, Mother of the Christ.  The continuity with Passion will be in the screenwriting not the directing.  (One Bible blockbuster sandwich, hold the Mel.)  To demonstrate how pervasive the anti-Passion propaganda has been, check out Odeya Rush's suspicion these many years later:

Rush said that she was somewhat reluctant when she was initially handed the script, but found it completely devoid of anti-Semitic sentiment.*

Odeya Rush was 6 years old when that movie came out.  Her knowledge of Passion was founded on hearsay.  The "anti-Semitic sentiment" that caused such an uproar for the first film was from the Gospel of John.  Hopefully, she would find all the Gospels devoid of the sentiment.

Jim Caviezel

... and Jim Caviezel

Post-script:  The Gibson/Caviezel portrayal is not only the least European Jesus we've seen, surpassing even Pasolini's unibrowed Spaniard in The Gospel According to Matthew, it is one of the most accessible, down-to-earth, naturally human portrayals ever, far removed from Zefirelli's hypno-tranced messiah.  Speaking of the White Jesus of Easters Past, here are Jeffrey Hunter from King of Kings and the Swede Max von Sydow from The Greatest Story Ever Told.   

Above:  Max von Sydow looks almost Middle Eastern next to this Son of Odin. 

Follow-up: Mehdi Ouazzani, the "Obama-Satan" actor has played many different ethnicities--mostly European.  I guess there would have been fewer complaints had he kept his sinister mustache for the Lucifer role.  He could've twirled it while offering Jesus the kingdoms of the earth.  

Obama "look-alike" Mehdi Ouazzani

Errata: I originally confused the roles of Victor Argo (Peter/Cephas) and Harvey Keitel (Judas) in Last Temptation.



Jesus Hood and his band of swarthy men: