THE JESUS YOU THINK YOU KNOW

It is quite interesting and amusing to read comments from non-Muslims trying to teach Muslims what ‘proper’ Islam is. Sigh…all these kutbah, usrah and fatwah that the non-Muslims try to throw into our faces. Pathetic. Sounds just like a goatherd trying to teach a brain surgeon proper brain surgery

The problem is, many Christians themselves do not know much regarding Christianity and keep quoting fairytales and folklore, which they believe to be the word of God (and ditto for the Muslims and Buddhists).

Anyway, maybe you can have a look at the following and probably it can help you get a better understanding of what to some of you is your own religion.

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Fox News host Megyn Kelly caused some controversy when she declared, on her Wednesday evening show: “Jesus was a white man, too. It’s like we have, he’s a historical figure. That’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa. I just want kids to know that.”

Santa comments aside, Kelly’s insistence on a white Jesus has offended a number of people, who counter that Jesus’s Middle Eastern ethnicity would likely have given him a darker complexion than that of, say, Kelly herself.

But the question of Jesus’s ethnicity turns out to be far more complicated than simply identifying his ethnic background. It gets into issues of history, religion and the particular metaphysics of Christianity. I discussed the issue with Reza Aslan, a scholar of religions and author of the recent bestseller “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.” His answers surprised me. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

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But I want to make a larger point, which might be interesting to you or may not be interesting. What I just described is Jesus. What Megyn Kelly described is the Christ. And they’re different people! In other words, the Christ can be whatever you want him to be.

When you go to, for instance, the Church of the Annunciation at Nazareth. They have commissioned Christian communities from all over the world to paint a depiction of Jesus and his mother Mary. They’ve displayed all those paintings, and when you look at, for instance, the painting from the United States, what you see is a blonde and blue-eyed Jesus.

When you look at the painting from Guatemala, what you see are Jesus and Mary as migrant farm workers. I don’t mean they look like migrant farm workers. I mean they are migrant farm workers. When you look at the painting from China, Jesus and Mary are Chinese, literally Chinese. When you look at the painting from Thailand, Jesus and Mary are blue, as though they are Hindu gods.

So, it’s a much more interesting issue that arises from her statement: Megyn Kelly is right. Her Christ is white.

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As everybody knows, before Roman Orthodoxy, there were a thousand different kinds of Christianity. It could mean whatever you wanted it to mean. And that is precisely why it is now the largest religion in the world, because it has the ability to be whatever a worshipful community wants it to be.

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But the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history are two different characters. And that’s okay!

They are two different characters, and that’s sort of the principle argument of my book, that Jesus of history was a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews. That’s the Jesus of history.

The Christ of faith can be anything, anything that you want him to be, and has been whatever you want him to be throughout the last 2,000 years of Christian history. He is a rebel against the state, he is the state, he’s both of those things.

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There is a misperception that prophets create religions. Jesus did not create Christianity; his followers created Christianity. Jesus was a Jew preaching Judaism. The prophet Mohammad did not create Islam; his followers created Islam. Prophet Muhammad was reforming the Judeo-Christian traditions of the Arab region. The Buddha did not create Buddhism. The Buddha was a Hindu; he was reforming Hinduism. His followers created Buddhism.

Religions are man-made – literally – man-made institutions that are built long after the death of the prophet for which they are named. So the reason that I, as a scholar, don’t have a problem with that differentiation between Jesus and Christ – these are two different things, and you can go back and forth between them – is based precisely on that one fundamental fact. Which is that Jesus didn’t create Christianity — his followers created Christianity. And so, of course, Christ of Christianity is different from the Jesus of history. And that’s okay.