Saturday, Sep 20, 2025 at 10:00 AM

The last few years I have gone through an interesting transition. In software terms, you might say that I started digging into the source code of religion, particularly Christianity. I was raised in a nominally Catholic household, but neither of my parents were particularly devout. My parents were married outside the church, and my mother had been divorced. Like many American families, we went to church so my parents could cross off an item on their parenting checklist, but they, themselves, had no particular affinity for religion. My only real concept of God as a child was that God was a sort of psychic externalization of my parents, and since I was aware from my earliest adolescence that my parents were not exactly enlightened people, this served to completely turn me off to religion from the moment I stepped out the door on my way to college.

Fast forward twenty years. I was able to begin my investigation into Christianity from the context of having had some church attendance, being mostly familiar with the Bible, but not being in a devout family where I would be pre-committed to a particular faith expression that would bias any such investigation.

As a result, when I did come to such a belief, I did so via a different route than most do. I will explain a bit about that here, and hopefully offer some more explanation in future posts.

To start with, I will just summarize my current understanding of the scriptures, their meaning, and what value they have today. I believe this is mostly in line with the official doctrines of the Catholic and orthodox churches, but this understanding comes from my own direct reading, analysis, criticism, and reflection.

I realized that the real message of Jesus is pretty simple. That message is freedom.

The gospel of Luke spells this out most plainly when you read it as it was meant to be read, with the Acts of the Apostles as "part two." (Luke and Acts are both addressed to the same person and so were likely part of the same original document.)
You see this focus on freedom in the discussion of "slavery to sin." There is a Pharisee who disputes what Jesus is saying about the Jews being slaves. "We have never been slave to anyone." I suppose this is in reference to being led out of Egypt, etc., one of many comparisons made equating Jesus to Moses, a comparison that would have made sense to the 1st century Jewish readership that was its intended audience. Jesus says that the Jews of his time are slaves – slaves to sin. In other words, the moral degeneracy of the Judeans is what is enslaving them, and preventing them from having true freedom. This is the explanation for why the Jewish people were defeated by the Romans and Greeks, which only makes sense in the historical context of 1st century Judaism. They have fallen far from their ideals.

Jesus then "buys" the people back using the language of 1st century AD and the institution of slavery, which was nothing special at the time. The gospel writers poetically contextualize Jesus' death at the hands of his accusers as him "paying" for the sins of humanity. Some translations use terminology like "forgiveness of debts" which preserve this metaphor. Under slavery laws, you could not simply make a slave free, you had to "buy" them. So that is why the writers of the epistles say they are "a slave of Christ." Jesus is their new "owner" and so the believer is not simply "free" to do whatever they want – they must obey their new master, who is Christ. So the message of Jesus is freedom but the kind of freedom that allows one to be supremely moral.
So we have on one hand, the metaphor of Jesus as "master" who has purchased the Jewish people and freed them, taking them out of bondage. He has replaced Moses by establishing a new covenant (agreement) with God, and reconstituting the Mosaic law, distilling the law down to only two commandments. This is written into the sermon on the mount, which is itself likely a dramatization of the many sayings of Jesus.
So now, on the other hand, we have Jesus as God, and this divinity requires a bit more work to suss out from the text. There are many sections to speak about here, but I will gloss over the "I AM" to focus on another gospel, the Gospel of John.

To understand Jesus as God, we need a theology that supports this interpretation. The 1st century philosophers used as a template the theology of Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher. Alexandria being the center of philosophy at the time, and a city that had a particularly large Jewish population. Philo's works are available for a pittance on Kindle. It's plain to see from a cursory reading that Philo did a lot of the heavy lifting for early Christianity, despite he himself not being a Christian. Philo's work was to reconcile Judaism, Platonism, and Stoicism. He did so by re-interpreting the Torah in allegorical terms, and bringing in a rational, philosophical moral lens. In Philo's theology, God is both the creator and sustainer of the universe, but also an active participant in the form of the Logos – the rational order – alongside the divine "spirit" of God that inspires human beings to divine knowledge without imparting divinity upon humanity. Here in Philo we see the Tripartite structure of God – the Generator ("father"), Logos ("son"), and Inspiration ("holy spirit").

This theology is implemented in the Gospel of John. Under John, Christ is reimagined as the living embodiment of Logos in the theology of Philo of Alexandria. Logos is a philosophical concept that pre-dates Christianity but was developed further and in parallel in Greek philosophy. The opening lines of John equate Jesus with the Logos. This is somewhat misleadingly translated into English as "the Word."

Much of this was later ironed out at the Council of Nicaea and became the official church dogma. This was done for political reasons as Christianity was becoming the official state religion of the Empire.

So we can see that proto-orthodox Christianity in the beginning was a munging together of these different ideas in the various gospels. Most likely, there was some original Aramaic or Hebrew gospel that is lost to time. In the ancient world, copies would have been made and circulated around in early churches. Mark is the closest to this original, as it is the shortest and has the most enigmatic ending and the least amount of theology. Matthew and Luke are sort of variations on Mark with theological additions. John has the most theology, as well as likely capturing some early hymns and elements of oral tradition that the very early Nazarene communities would have circulated.

There were many more fraudulent gospels produced into the 2nd and 3rd centuries, but these are not really of much interest to anyone genuinely trying to understand Christianity.

The work of writing, editing, and compiling the gospels was not done by illiterate goatherds, as internet atheists are wont to claim. How would illiterates write or read the theology of Philo of Alexandria?

The reality is that the gospels are immaculate works of art, divinely inspired, which were produced by intellectual Jewish writers who believes in the Nazarene messianic interpretation of scripture combined with Hellenism, the culture of the ancient Greeks. The gospels are a product of this cultural melting pot. They were likely not produced in Jerusalem or among illiterate goatherds, but rather by intellectuals living in the big urban centers of the early Empire: Alexandria, Rome, etc. Furthermore, all of these people went to great lengths and often died for it. Many were fed to lions, publicly executed, or exiled. Of those whose writings survive, almost all of them were killed to stop the message from getting out.

Once I realized this, I knew that there was "something to" the scriptures.

That "something" is freedom. It is the basic message of Jesus which even today is inspirational, challenging, rebellious, and misunderstood. Jesus was not a hippie. He was not an authoritarian. He was not a pacifist, nor was he a militant. He was simultaneously ultra-conservative and ultra-progressive.

I will extrapolate along these lines further in future posts.

Let me just conclude with a note from current events.

In the last week, a man was publicly murdered in front of his family, simply for publicly expressing the ideas of Jesus, ideas which are shared by many billions of people. This man was not a prophet, nor was he himself perfect. But he never harmed anyone. He tried to use his words and reason to get others to see his perspective and perhaps change their minds. He was largely met with hostility and malice. And in the end, he was shot through the neck by a sniper's bullet. Why?

There is "something to it."

~ rq, 9.20.2025