Was Jesus Christ a revolutionary?

Terry Eagleton sifts through the texts of the Gospels and comes up with some ambiguous answers

Jesus certainly kept some shady political company. One of his inner circle was known as Simon the Zealot, the Zealots being an underground anti-imperialist movement dedicated to driving the Romans out of Palestine. The Roman presence in the province was not in fact particularly oppressive. No Roman institutions, legal, educational or religious, were imposed on the people. In Jesus’s own home territory of Galilee there was no official Roman presence at all, so it is unlikely that he would have grown up at the knee of smoulderingly anti-imperialist parents. Any Roman soldiers he saw as a child would have been on holiday.
Even so, there were religious reasons why even hands-off rule by a pagan state was objectionable to God’s chosen people. The Zealots wanted a purified, traditionalist, theocratic Jewish state, and promoted a theology not unlike that of al-Qaeda today. In addition to the militant Simon, two other of Jesus’s disciples, James and John, are given a nickname (Sons of Thunder) which some New Testament scholars suspect may link them, too, to the insurrectionists. Perhaps Judas sold Jesus because he had expected him to be Lenin, and became bitterly disenchanted when he realized that he was not going to lead the people against the colonial power.
Daggers drawn
It is, however, unlikely that Jesus was part of the anti-imperial resistance. For one thing, he seems to have believed in paying taxes (‘Render unto Caesar...’), while the Zealots did not. For another thing, he was at daggers drawn with the Pharisees, who were in some ways the theological wing of the Zealots. In fact, they are the only sect whom he curses to hell.
Another reason why Jesus is unlikely to have been a Zealot is that his disciples were not arrested after his execution. Had they been known insurrectionists, the occupying Roman forces would almost certainly have moved in to mop them up. There may have been a sprinkling of anti-imperialist militants among the disciples, but the Roman authorities seem to have been clear that the Jesus movement was not out to overthrow the state. This is not why he was crucified.
Indeed, why he was crucified is something of a mystery. It was certainly not because he claimed to be the Son of God. Jesus makes no such claim in the Gospels, except once, implausibly, in the Markian trial scene; and Mark had his own axe to grind. Taken in a literal sense, the title ‘Son of God’ would almost certainly have resulted in Jesus’s being stoned to death on the spot for blasphemy, which was presumably one excellent reason why he did not make claim to it. In any case, Jesus cannot have believed that he was literally the Son of God. Yahweh does not have testicles.
Only the Romans had power of execution, and they took no interest in the theological squabblings of their colonial subjects. Or rather, they took an interest only if they threatened to breed political consequences. They would certainly have been put on the alert if Jesus had claimed to be the Messiah, since the Messiah was seen for the most part as a militant political leader who would put Israel on its feet again. But Jesus does not claim to be the Messiah either, except on two occasions, both of which are historically dubious.
It is likely that Jesus ended massive as the evangelists make out. Even so, there was a general expectation that God was about to do something dramatic. For Christian theology, he did – but it turned out to be a resurrection, not a revolution.
It may be that Jesus’s violent act of trying to clear the temple of moneychangers, which sailed preciously close to blasphemy, was enough for his antagonists to nail him. A reverence for the temple was an essential feature of Judaism, and a strike against it was a strike against Israel itself. The temple rulers controlled Israel’s currency and economy, so that the place was among other things perceived as a bastion of the ruling class.up on Calvary because of his enormous popularity with some of the poor, who had swarmed into Jerusalem for the feast of Passover, and who no doubt looked to him for some vague sort of salvation from the Roman occupation. His popular support was probably by no means as
Not ‘anti-capitalist’
Running out the moneychangers was not, however, intended as an ‘anti-capitalist’ gesture. Jesus would have understood well enough that pilgrims would not have brought their sacrificial animals with them from home, for fear that they might be found blemished by the priests who inspected them on arrival. They would consequently buy a dove or pigeon in the temple itself, and would need to change currencies to do so. Jesus was probably signifying the destruction of the temple in a symbolic way, rather than expressing his distaste for its commercial sleaze. The paraphernalia of organized religion was to be replaced by an alternative temple, namely his own murdered and transfigured body.
Quite what the charges against Jesus were is not entirely clear. The accounts of the Gospels on this score are mutually inconsistent. The general impression is that the whole of the Jewish governing caste were against Jesus, but that they could not find common ground among themselves on why they were. He was certainly accused of blasphemy. But the Romans would not have cared about that, and in any case executing someone as a pseudo-teacher or pseudo-prophet was remarkably rare in Jesus’s day.
The High Priest, Caiaphas, had therefore to concoct some charge which legitimated Jesus’s execution in the eyes of the Jews while sounding sufficiently alarming to the Romans to spur them to dispose of him. Protesting that he claimed to be king of the Jews, even though we have no evidence that he did, would fill the bill nicely. Suitably spun, it might sound like blasphemy to the Jews and sedition to the Romans. But it might also have been enough to get Jesus crucified to advise the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, that this unruly vagabond represented a threat to law and order in such politically volatile conditions.
Brutal Pilate
Pilate seems to have had a particular penchant for stringing people up. He is presented in the Gospels as a vacillating liberal of a metaphysical turn of mind, but we know enough about his historical record to be sure that he was nothing of the sort. He was, in fact, a notoriously brutal viceroy, an official who was accused of bribery, cruelty and executions without trial and who was eventually dishonourably dismissed from office. Had Jesus come up against a more liberal regime, he might well have got off.
Was Jesus, then, a ‘spiritual’ rather than a political leader? This, to be sure, is the customary reading of his exhortation to render unto Caesar what was owed to him, while at the same time granting God his due. But it is unlikely that this is how his words would have been understood in first-century Palestine. It projects back upon them a modern distinction between religion and politics which is decidedly non-scriptural. Those who heard Jesus’s words would have understood that ‘the things that are God’s’ included mercy, justice, feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrant, sheltering the destitute and protecting the poor from the oppression of the powerful. There is little opiate delusion in Jesus’s grim warning to his comrades that if they were true to his Gospel of love and justice, they would meet the same sticky end as him.
The motif of a close link between the deepest suffering and the highest exaltation is a traditional one in Judaism, as it is in the Western lineage of tragedy. True power flows from powerlessness, a doctrine which Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection is meant to exemplify.
In the so-called Beatitudes, the poor, hungry and sorrowful are declared blessed, but not the virtuous. Unlike the virtuous, they are signs of the coming kingdom because they exemplify the emptiness and deprivation which the New Jerusalem is destined to repair. The point of prophecy is not to foresee the future, but to warn those in the present that unless they change their ways, the future is likely to be extremely unpleasant.
Bathos
The kingdom did not, of course, arrive shortly after Jesus’s death, as the first Christians (and certainly St Paul) seem to have believed it would. The Christian movement begins in bathos. Its origins lie in a hideously embarrassing anti-climax, one which follows hard on the heels of the shameful scandal that the Son of God has actually been butchered.
One reason why Jesus and his followers expected the kingdom to arrive very soon is that they had no notion that human activity might have any role in helping to establish it. For the early Christians, the kingdom was a gift of God, not the work of history. History was now effectively at an end. There was no point in seeking to overthrow the Romans when God was about to transform the whole world. Jesus’s disciples could no more bring about the kingdom of God by their own efforts than socialism for deterministic Marxists can be achieved by intensified agitation.
Some aspects of the way Jesus is portrayed in these texts have an obvious radical resonance. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinfolk, without a trade or occupation, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, a thorn in the side of the Establishment and a scourge of the rich and powerful. The problem of much modern Christianity has been how to practise this lifestyle with two children, a car and a mortgage.
Jesus has most of the characteristic features of the revolutionary activist, including celibacy. Marriage belongs to a regime which is already passing away, and there will be no marrying in New Jerusalem. This is not an anti-sexual motif. Celibacy is seen by Christianity as a sacrifice, and sacrifice means giving up what is regarded as precious. St Paul, an enemy of the flesh in popular mythology, regards the sexual union of two bodies, not celibacy, as a sign of the coming kingdom. Actually working for the kingdom, however, involves surrendering or suspending some of the goods which will characterize it. The same is true of working for socialism.
‘He expected it to be soon swept away by a form of existence more perfected in its justice, peace, comradeship and exuberance of spirit than even Lenin and Trotsky could have imagined’
Even so, Jesus is not presented as an ascetic, in the manner of the ferociously anti-social John the Baptist. He and his comrades enjoy food, drink and general festivity, and he enjoins men and women to unburden themselves of anxiety and live in the present. What one might call Jesus’s ethical extravagance – giving over and above the measure, turning the other cheek, rejoicing in being persecuted, loving one’s enemies, refusing to judge, non-resistance to evil, laying oneself open to the violence of others – is similarly motivated by a sense that history is now at an end.
In his crucifixion and descent into hell, Jesus in St Paul’s view is ‘made sin’, identifying with the scum and refuse of the earth, enduring a solidarity with suffering, evil and despair in order to transfigure it through his resurrection. Like the classical tragic protagonist, he succeeds only through failure. If he lay down confidently expecting to spring up again, he would not have been raised from the dead.
Effervescent hopes
This, then, is what all the effervescent hopes of Jesus and his entourage have come to. The crucifixion proclaims that the truth of human history is a tortured political criminal. It is a message profoundly unacceptable to those sunk in a dewy-eyed delusion (idealists, progressivists, liberals, reformers, Yea-sayers, modernizers, socialist humanists and the like), though one which was perfectly understood by a Jew like Walter Benjamin. Only if you can gaze on this frightful image without being turned to stone, accepting it as absolutely the last word, is there a slim chance that it might not be.
Christianity is thus considerably more pessimistic than secular humanism, as well as immeasurably more optimistic. On the one hand, it is grimly realistic about the recalcitrance of the human condition. On the other hand, it holds out not only that the redemption of this dire condition is possible, but that, astonishingly, it has in some sense already happened. Not even the most mechanistic of Marxists would claim these days that socialism is inevitable, let alone that it has already come about without our noticing. For Christian faith, however, the advent of the kingdom is assured, since Jesus’s rising from the dead has already founded it.
Was Jesus, then, a revolutionary? Not in any sense that Lenin or Trotsky would have recognized. But is this because he was less of a revolutionary than they were, or more so? Less, certainly, in that he did not advocate the overthrow of the power-structure that he confronted. But this was, among other things, because he expected it to be soon swept away by a form of existence more perfected in its justice, peace, comradeship and exuberance of spirit than even Lenin and Trotsky could have imagined. Perhaps the answer, then, is not that Jesus was more or less a revolutionary, but that he was both more and less.

Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester. This is an edited extract of his introduction to The Gospels, published as part of its ‘Revolutions’ series by Verso, London and New York, 2007, www.versobooks.com

17 May 2008 RELIGION

Who needs religion?
Most people, in most times, in most cultures, it seems.
David Boulton examines the persistent religious itch.
THERE was a time, beginning around the 1850s and culminating perhaps in the 1920s, when it really did seem that the jig was up for organized religion – at least in the Western world. Poet Matthew Arnold had caught a whiff of its death in 1859 with Dover Beach, where he mourned ‘the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar' of the sea of faith, ‘retreating, to the breath of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world'. Others rejoiced at the death of God and mocked those who mourned his passing. But whether they mourned or celebrated the twilight of gods, devils and things that go bump in the night, educated folk shared a sense that religion was on its way out.
In Europe a new secularist nationalism was replacing the tired old frameworks of superstition. In Britain churchgoing went out of fashion, morality began to be defined in humanist and humanitarian terms and for a time, in the industrial north, the Socialist Sunday School movement, singing from its god-forsaking hymn-sheet, looked like rivalling the ‘I am H-A-P-P-Y' Sunday schools in the churches and chapels.
In the US a large slice of the then hugely influential Unitarian church, having disposed of two persons of the trinity, decided that even one was one too many and moved on to a kind of religious humanism where God was replaced by a gaseous ‘Somethingbigger- than-ourselves'. (It is hard to recollect that the American liberal tradition was once far more powerful than Bible-bashing fundamentalism). And from 1917 on, tens of thousands of churches in the USSR were turned into museums and warehouses as religion was commanded to wither away – helped, when it failed to wither fast enough, by a sharp dose of the gulags.
But tides turn, and this one rolled back over Arnold's naked shingles of the world with an even louder roar than that which had marked its retreat. The growing complexities and insecurities of the 20th century paved the way for a triumphal return of the old certainties, promises, reassurances. God was resurrected. Today, 20 million grown-up Americans and 33 per cent of the Republican Party believe the Rapture is imminent, when Christ will return to allow born-again evangelicals to share with him in divine governance of the universe. Hollywood finds the flagellation of Jesus a bigger turn-on than the female orgasm. The Rapture books in the Left Behind series – you'll be left behind unless you get washed in the blood of the lamb – outsell Harry Potter.
In Britain, the churches continue to empty, but the ‘ mind/body/spirit' shelves in our bookshops groan under the weight of tomes recommending a thousand varieties of bottled spiritualities – three for the price of two. One in ten men and one in four women tell pollsters they think there's something in reincarnation. One in three women say they believe in angels, particularly the guardian variety. Churches, both Orthodox and those planted by Western telly-evangelists, flourish in the new Russia. Africa is awash with mission-planted happy-clappy churchianity. God is invoked by all sides in what is sometimes still called, with apparently unconscious irony, ‘the Holy Land'. And above all, a century after free-thinkers organized God's funeral, two monstrous, murderous religious fundamentalisms square up to each other, for God's sake and in his name, to devour the world's precarious stability.
Those who made their humanist sand-castles on Dover beach as the sea of faith retreated, failed to anticipate that what had ebbed could flow back with a vengeance, demolishing their works and their dreams.
Is religion, then, inevitable? Do we need it, as we need food, drink and sex? Do we, after all, have some kind of god-shaped gene which defies even the most ingenious genetic modification? Are we made with a religious itch which we must scratch – perhaps ‘the itch whereof thou canst not be healed' which, along with ‘the emerods' and ‘a sore botch in the knees and in the legs', God promised fallen humanity in Deuteronomy 28: 27- 35? After all, religious belief and practice seems to have been part and parcel of virtually every human culture from the Neanderthals onwards. Where it has been suppressed, it has bounced back with renewed strength or virulence. Can it be just one long mistake? Was the whole of humanity on the wrong track from the year dot till the formation of the Rationalist Press Association?

Colombian cyclist takes out holy insurancebefore the big race. Chris De Bode / Panos
If we are to take the question seriously, we have to be clear about what we mean by ‘religion' and ‘ God'. Most dictionaries define religion in relation to belief in, obedience to or worship of ‘a divine ruling power' or ‘some higher unseen power'. The binding or ‘ligature' to which the Latin religio relates is traditionally understood as a bond between humanity and the gods. But that leaves out faith systems like Buddhism, which are usually regarded as religions although gods are either absent or optional extras. Anthropologists rather than theologians tend to see religion as that which has bound not humans to gods but humans to humans: belief systems providing tribal or ethnic solidarity, defining one group against another. Religion then becomes naturalized rather than supernaturalized, culturally evolved on earth rather than revealed from heaven. By this measure, galloping consumerism is worship of a god called Mammon: the IMF is the high temple of the god of Growth.
Recently the God revered by dictionary editors as ‘some higher unseen power' has begun to be understood and defined in the academies – if not yet in the pews and on the prayer-mats – more broadly and less mystically. Since the 17th century there has been a developing tendency, at least within the Christian tradition, to naturalize (or de-supernaturalize) him, along with religion itself. Gerrard Winstanley equated God with Reason. William Blake saw him as the imagined embodiment or incarnation of values generated by the wholly human spirit: ‘mercy, pity, peace and love' – to which the visionary poet would no doubt have added justice if he'd found a way of scanning it into his spare, translucent line.
But only a blinkered, anorexic humanism chooses to ignore the heritage of religious culture
God as poetry, a figure of speech, a linguistic symbol, has been the focus of modern Christian thinkers from the young Hegelians of the early 19th century to radical Anglicans like Don Cupitt and postmodern Quaker humanists in our own time. Movements like the Sea of Faith networks in Britain, Australia and New Zealand/ Aotearoa and religious humanist groups in the US understand God as a poet might understand her muse: an imagined source of inspiration firmly embedded and embodied in the creative consciousness of the human animal. The vanguard of radical naturalism may be pretty small beer numerically compared with the big battalions of the old supernaturalism now threatening us with Armageddon, but it illustrates the capacity of religion to critique, naturalize and re-invent itself.
Or are we kidding ourselves? Do we make too much of the thin smear of liberal jam between the thick wodges of fundamentalist crust which constitute the religious sandwich? Probably. There's nothing liberal, modern, progressive, rational, truthful or beautiful about the tide of Christian, Islamic, Hindu and Zionist bigotry which is turning half the world into Arnold's ‘darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night'.
Do we need it? Apparently most of us do. It once seemed that reason was leading us to lose faith in religion, but we woke up to find, instead, that we had lost faith in reason. So all the old appurtenances of religion which we had chucked out through the doorway came creeping back through the window. We blind ourselves to the irrationalism, the bigotry, the fantasy of it all, and allow ourselves to be seduced once again by George Herbert's ‘ furniture so fine', God's ‘glorious household-stuffe': the music, art, pageantry, ritual, architecture – and, above all, by the blessed assurance that somewhere in this mystic mix there's a promise that ‘all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well'. We know we don't have to take it literally. We know that the things we are liable to read in the Bible ain't necessarily so. But religion gives us suitably solemn funerals, suitably sentimental nativity plays, provides us with life markers. It gives us our roots and our reassurance that there is meaning, even if it is located above the bright blue sky and we don't have a clue what the meaning means.
For all of us, perhaps, the itch whereof we canst not be healed is the deep-seated need to find or create purpose and meaning in the crazy business of living. As modern humans – homo sapiens – developed the closely linked capabilities of language, imagination and reflective consciousness perhaps a 100,000 years ago, they acquired the capacity to ask, and then couldn't stop asking, ‘What's it all about? What, when, how, why...?' Facing an apparently hostile, wholly inexplicable universe, they told stories, sang songs, danced dances, invented rituals to impose a framework of meaning on an otherwise chaotic existence. They used symbols and symbolically mediated behaviour to signify who they were, creating art, ornament, design, a sense of beauty and truth to map their world, give it shape, coherence and purpose.
Today's itch may lead us to seek meaning and purpose in the quest for social justice, or art, science, astrology, shopping, or sex, and drugs. But only a blinkered, anorexic humanism chooses to ignore the heritage of religious culture: its myths and make-believes. We still need a little salve-ation, healing, from time to time; a sense of at-one-ment with ourselves and the rest of the universe; redemption as restoration; an assurance that our ludicrous inability to be the people we would like to be is ultimately forgivable and forgiven.
We may no longer look for all this to the old all-smiling, all-smiting Authority riding his chariots of wrath through thunderclouds on the wings of the storm; or to his enfeebled, cock-and-ballobsessed church; or to his rival priests, preachers and holy assassins who think they are his vicarious representatives on earth. But we can still draw inspiration and sustenance from the old, old stories – not forgetting that they are old, and that they are stories, and that we made them up.
Enabling dreams of Paradise, a world where swords will be beaten into ploughshares, a counter-reality which glimpses an alternative republic of heaven on earth, where peace is built on justice rather than conquest... this, not virgin births, second comings, holy wars and infallible books, is the real stuff: hard-core religion in action. And we have a basic need for that, even if we know the need can never be wholly satisfied, the itch never healed.
David Boulton is a former Head of News, Current Affairs and Religion at Britain’s Granada TV. His latest book is The Trouble with God and his next The Republic of Heaven, a study of Philip Pullman’s trilogy ‘His Dark Materials’.