Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Jesus the Pacifist by Bart Ehrman I was raised thinking Jesus was completely relevant for our own current affairs, that his teachings were directly relevant for governmental policies and social agendas that he had preferred methods of political rules, definite ideas about competing economic systems, and strong opinions about governmental priorities.
[00:00:23] To no great surprise, growing up in Kansas in the 1960s and early 1970s, I simply assumed that his teachings provided divine support for capitalist democracy.
[00:00:34] I don't think so any longer. It's not that I think that he preferred Marxist socialism, as has been sometimes argued by academics and their eager followers, or I mean any other modern political economic system. My view is somewhat, though in a different way, more radical. I don't think he cared.
[00:00:53] It will take a while to explain this, but I want to argue, as intimated in my previous post on Jesus Indifference, that Jesus concerns were not strictly political in the ways that we think of politics today or economics. His priorities lay elsewhere.
[00:01:08] This will take several posts.
[00:01:10] To begin with, I need to start by showing that, contrary to one widely held view rekindled on occasion by popular books on Jesus such as Reza Aslan's New York Times bestseller Zealot, Jesus was decidedly not a Jewish insurrectionist interested in raising an army and overthrowing the Roman government.
[00:01:29] That was quite contrary to his message and mission.
[00:01:32] He was a pacifist who believed God himself would destroy the Romans along with the Jewish leaders and everyone else who was not living in the ways that he wanted. He didn't need any human assistance for this. He would be taking care of it himself.
[00:01:48] And that overarching view based on Jesus apocalyptic message of the coming intervention of God on the Day of Judgment when he wiped out his enemies, both superhuman and human, and established a new rule over the earth, the Kingdom of God meant that Jesus had no interest in overthrowing or even reforming the government.
[00:02:06] Jesus was a pacifist.
[00:02:09] Since there are other writers who think differently, I need to explain why I think that they are wrong.
[00:02:15] I'll start by focusing on the strongest piece of evidence that Jesus wanted to start an insurrection, the story of his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane.
[00:02:25] I dealt with the issue in that particular episode in my book Jesus before the Gospels, and I don't think I'm able to say it any better by putting it into other words. So here's what I said.
[00:02:37] In all four Gospels, at least 1 of Jesus followers is armed when he's arrested.
[00:02:42] In the Synoptics, this unarmed follower draws his sword and strikes the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear see Mark 14:47.
[00:02:52] In John's Gospel we learn that the sword bearing disciple was Peter.
[00:02:58] Jesus puts a halt to his followers violent inclination, however, and humbly submits to his arrest.
[00:03:05] In Luke's version, he does so only after healing the ear. See Luke 22:51.
[00:03:12] From the 18th century until the present day, starting with Herman Samuel Raimarius, the first scholar to write a critical study of the historical Jesus in the modern period, there have been scholars and non scholars who have thought that this incident in the garden is both altogether plausible and indicative of the character of Jesus message and mission.
[00:03:32] In this opinion, the incident must be historical for a rather simple reason. What later Christian would make up such a story?
[00:03:40] When Christians were telling and retelling their accounts of Jesus life in the years after his death, of course they would want to make him appear entirely palatable to their audiences.
[00:03:50] Nothing would make Jesus more palatable in Roman eyes than the view that he was a peace loving promoter of non violence and not a violent insurrectionist against Rome.
[00:04:02] If on the other hand, Jesus allowed his followers to be armed, that would suggest that he was in favor of them carrying out acts of violence.
[00:04:10] If later Christians would not make up the idea that Jesus promoted violence, then no one could make up the idea that his followers were armed.
[00:04:19] Following this logic, the story of the sword in the garden is not an invented tradition but a historical fact.
[00:04:26] Jesus followers therefore were armed. Moreover, if they were armed, so this reasoning goes, then Jesus must have anticipated and even promoted an armed rebellion.
[00:04:38] There's a good deal of sense to this and it's easy to see why it's attractive.
[00:04:43] Still, at the end of the day I don't find it convincing. And this is for two reasons. One that's obvious but ultimately unpersuasive and the other that's less obvious but absolutely, to my mind, compelling.
[00:04:55] The obvious objection is that throughout all of our traditions, Jesus is regularly and consistently portrayed as a teacher of non violence.
[00:05:04] Love your neighbour as yourself.
[00:05:06] Love your enemies. Love those who persecute you. Blessed are the peacemakers. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. The one who lives by the sword will die by the sword.
[00:05:19] Throughout independent accounts of Jesus life, he is shown to promote loving and submissive non violence.
[00:05:26] Doesn't that squelch the possibility that Jesus favored armed rebellion and his followers were armed?
[00:05:33] The reason that argument is not totally persuasive is that Christians may have wanted to portray Jesus as non violent and remembered him as non violent for reasons of their own. Christians themselves were often opposed by the authorities and would have wanted to stress that they were no threat and no danger in their own defence. They argued that they were peace loving people.
[00:05:54] But how could they really be peace loving if they worshipped and strove to emulate a person crucified for insurrection against the state?
[00:06:02] The Christian response could have been to emphasize that Jesus execution was a complete miscarriage of justice.
[00:06:09] In this view, he was a peace loving rabbi who urged a pacifist message of non violence.
[00:06:15] In theory, the Christians could have put this message extensively on his lips.
[00:06:21] Still, the abundant number of such pacifist statements on the lips of Jesus should give us pause and make us suspect that they might well represent accurate memories of his teachings.
[00:06:31] Especially in light of the second reason for thinking that Jesus followers did not put up an armed defense of him when the crowd came to arrest him.
[00:06:38] I think this reason is absolutely compelling.
[00:06:42] If Jesus followers tried to defend him with a sword, or more than one sword, why weren't they arrested as well?
[00:06:49] If the problem with Jesus is that he was about to lead an armed rebellion, then surely his followers would have been as much of a threat as he was, especially if they started whacking away at people's ears with swords.
[00:07:02] I don't think that Jesus followers were armed in the garden when Jesus was arrested.
[00:07:07] Why then do we have discussions of the followers swords in the various gospels?
[00:07:11] My sense is that the sword attack is a story that was invented by an early Christian, either consciously created or simply generated as someone happened to tell the story and subconsciously elaborated it. An early Christian who was trying to illustrate Jesus teaching that anyone who lives by the sword is dies by the sword.
[00:07:31] This view will require a short explanation.
[00:07:35] Many of Jesus best sayings in the gospels may indeed go back to him.
[00:07:40] The Sabbath was made for the humans, not humans for the Sabbath.
[00:07:44] Those who are well have no need for a physician, but only those who are sick. A prophet is not without honor except in his own country.
[00:07:51] A large number of these great one liners are delivered at the ends of stories for which the sayings are particularly apt.
[00:07:59] It has long been recognized that as happens even in modern contexts, sometimes a story will be told in order to set the stage for the delivery of a great climactic statement.
[00:08:10] I think that may have happened in the case of the story of the sword in the garden.
[00:08:15] Originally there was a saying, possibly something Jesus actually said about swords and not wielding them. The one who lives by the sword dies by the sword.
[00:08:25] As that saying was rehearsed over the years there emerged a story that illustrated the point that Jesus followers should not arm themselves with swords.
[00:08:33] This story was retold until it became the Gospel account that somehow someone wrongly used the sword to attack Jesus enemies.
[00:08:41] By way of contrast, Jesus himself passively submitted to being arrested.
[00:08:46] If I'm right, then the sword fight in the garden is a distorted memory.
[00:08:50] If it were an accurate memory, it is very hard to see why the disciples were not arrested.
[00:08:57] Even though Jesus did not urge an insurrection against Roman rule, or governmental restructuring or reform, or any kind of political solution at all to the current crisis, he was not favourably disposed toward the Romans either. God would be destroying them soon. In the meantime, they were simply irrelevant for what really mattered. And I'll try to explain that in the next couple of posts before showing that Jesus had a similar view to the leaders of the Jews as well.
