#anyway gay communist alien jesus ftw

[cyrusreblogs]

I mean that sounds like a plausible take, I guess — I don’t have enough knowledge of the context or history to know which of the things Jesus said were original. I think the proto-communism/communalism of Acts is pretty cool. I honestly kind of enjoy Jesus being a sarcastic asshole mostly because the evangelical context I grew up in was basically unaware of sarcasm & the contrast between the golden serious idea of Jesus & him calling Simon-Peter as dumb as a rock is pretty funny to me. Makes me a little reflective in this moment because I typically don’t care for that approach to philosophy, particularly ethical/relational philosophy, & I never liked Socrates’s stupid smug jokes at the expense of others.

Most of my attachment to Jesus is as a cultural figure, particularly in the ways queer Christians & liberation theologians have interpreted him. I can’t get away from my own cultural Christianity, and I usually characterize the distance I do want to maintain from mainstream American Christianity by saying that I like what Jesus had to say but I don’t care for the idea that he was any more the son of god than any of us are. Maybe even that isn’t really true though — I’m only passingly familiar with accounts of Jesus himself, and most of the bits I’ve read in the Bible and really mulled over are in Ecclesiastes or Song of Solomon.

Might be time to reassess. I love the idea of portraying Jesus in a contemporary setting as an asshole street preacher predicting the apocalypse and easily dismissed by most people. People who predict the apocalypse are rarely 100% wrong — there’s always a major disaster right around the corner. I just think — if someone has divine abilities, that doesn’t make their words any more credible. It’s like saying that because someone can do magic, they’re definitely also psychic. Or because someone is a genius scientist, they can definitely solve geo-political problems. People do jump to those kinds of conclusions, but they don’t naturally follow, and I’m mistrustful of any logic that links them intrinsically.

I don’t think I’m ready to let go of the progressive Jesus headcanons entirely, because as an aspiring storyteller I think they can be evocative & persuasive & I want to meet people where they’re at, but I guess I need to stop conflating them with the historical or strictly biblical Jesus, which I think I’ve done because of how much the reactionary Jesus headcanons are conflated with those 2 distinct entities. It’s politically charged, disputed territory. I don’t want to cede that ground because I think it’s equally valid to create an image of Jesus as a communist & minority community organizer as it is to create an image of him as a reactionary capitalist enforcing punishment for crimes of survival & sexual difference. Both ideas are projecting a lot of modern constructs onto him & neither of them really work with the source texts gracefully.

I guess what I’m discovering here is that I am in favor of a multitude of inaccurate Jesuses totally divorced from historical context, and also I am curious about the historical context because it informs those inaccurate Jesuses and can make them feel more believable. Not sure how I feel about that. Not sure how you feel about that!

My friend @apenitentialprayer (who you should be following if you're interested in Catholicism) asked me to expand on my belief that Genesis 3 is an etiological myth for puberty. The following understanding is emphatically not my own, but it comes from my rabbi and I'm not sure whether he published it so I don't have a citation.

Anyway, the basic argument is that we should read the phrase "knowledge of good and bad" (הדעת טוב ורע) ha-da'at tov v'ra (Genesis 2:17) in parallel with "[he] learns to reject the bad and choose good" (לדעתו מאוס ברע ובחור בטוב) l'dato ma'os bara u'vahol batov (Isaiah 7:15). In Isaiah, learning the difference between good and bad (more literally knowing the difference; da'at in Gen 2:17 has the same root as dato in Is 7:15 (dato is a conjugation of yada)) is a metaphor for maturing. If we read the phrase "knowledge of good and bad" in Genesis 2 in the same way, then we can reasonably infer that the consequence of eating the fruit of the Tree is maturation as such rather than the acquisition of forbidden knowledge.

So, what happens when we do that? Human beings in the Garden of Eden have two things in common with God: immortality and the image in which they are made. When they eat from the Tree they gain "knowledge of good and bad" which we've inferred means aging and (specifically) going through puberty. After puberty humans acquire a third divine characteristic: the ability to create life.

The curses that follow for the man and woman then describe the inevitable consequences that they will face by going from childhood and adulthood. The woman will carry babies and have pain in giving birth. She will desire (תשוקה) t'shukah (the verb is used for non-sexual desire in Gen 4:7 and for sexual desire in Song 7:11) her husband. The man will have to labor to bring for the food previously provided by his Parent (i.e. God). And of course both will die (which does happen to children, but is not an inevitable part of childhood the way it is for adulthood).

(Note that the interpretation that the Serpent is Satan comes from later Christian eisegesis is not actually a part of the myth as presented in Genesis 3.)