Reflection for Sunday August 7th 2011

I am going to talk to you about Jesus with a different slant, and maybe also about a totally different Jesus than we presently know. In 1970 Albert Nolan, O.P., the Master General of the Dominican Order, wrote a book titled Jesus before Christianity. It influenced many Christians to realize that most of us had never really met Jesus before Christianity. We had been presented with what I am going to call a “churchified” Jesus. That’s not necessarily wrong or bad, but with the excellent Jesus scholarship of the last twenty-five years we have begun looking at Jesus in a new way. In the past, the message was pretty much controlled by what we were supposed to pay attention to and what we could largely ignore.

The message I am going to try to summarize from various scholars will sound perhaps to some of you a little different, a little new, and maybe even a little heretical. I am not here to question the divinity of Christ. It is much deeper than that. We have presented Christ more as the founder of “Churchianity” (a word I coined), than as the founder of any kind of reformed revolutionary movement in history. Many of these scholars say we have domesticated Jesus.