The Scandal of Joshua Ben
Adam, Part 4
By Robert D. Brinsmead VERDICT,
August 1998
·
The Roots of Blood
Atonement
·
No Payback Justice:
No Atonement in Ben Adam's Teaching
·
The Christian Chamber
of Horrors
A
certain man was going down from
Joshua
ben Adam's sayings and parables exposed human evil in
a devastating way. Yet he rarely used the word sin. It was not a normal part of
his vocabulary as it was with his contemporaries and the early Christians.
Sin
belongs to the vocabulary of religion. Religion is pre-occupied with sin, and
so are all religious people.
The
Judaism into which Joshua was born had invested certain days, places,
institutions, foods and customs with sacred significance. These religious icons
had to be reverenced and observed in a prescribed way. Any noncompliance was
thought to be a sin against God incurring defilement and guilt. The sacred
things were also important to sacralize
Many
people at the bottom or on the margins of Joshua's society could not avoid
"sin" because they were ignorant of the Torah (the religious rules).
If they were also sick and destitute this was regarded as a sign of God's
displeasure. They were then trapped in double guilt.
The
more privileged people spent a lot of effort observing the purity code to avoid
defilement. This pre-occupation with religion and sin blinded them to how
inhuman they were. Their whole value system was distorted. As Joshua said, they
strained at gnats and swallowed camels ("unclean" animals). A speck
of sawdust in a brother's eye was deemed a greater offence than a log in their
own eye. Whilst they fussed over the minutia of religious sin, they neglected
the big issues of human existence like justice, equality (love your neighbor as
yourself), forgiveness and compassion.
Real
evil, according to Joshua, has nothing to do with the religious icons whether
they are foods, rituals, garments, days, places or anything else. Evil has to
do with the way we treat people, nothing more and nothing less. The living God
has given us a living icon or image of himself and it is people. Nothing else
matters!
Joshua
makes this point in the story of the man left half-dead at the side of the
road. The parable turns the value system of Joshua's day on its head.
The
Priest and Levite represented the religious elites, the recognized
"goodies" of that society. They failed to do the human thing, presumably
because they had to keep themselves free and pure for their service to God. The
Samaritan on the other hand had a standing akin to a prostitute or a Mafia man.
He was the recognized "badie" in the story.
Yet he had pity on the wounded victim. He put his life at risk when he stopped
to help. He did the human thing.
Joshua
told this story in answer to a question about finding eternal life. The story
tells us that religious affiliations, practices and belief systems don't really
count. The only thing which matters is doing the human thing.
The Christian Situation
The
Christian may thank God that he is free from the religious regulations of the
Old Testament. But there are plenty of Christian icons to take their place.
The
Christian religion is divided into numerous sects, big and small. Each group
has its own special religious icon. It may be a mode of baptism, a Eucharistic
tradition (The Supper), the keeping of a certain day in a distinctive way, an
apocalyptic schema, a religious institution, a unique theological belief or a
religious practice.
Each
group derives from its icon its reason d'etre.
It uses the icon to sacralize its own identify as
superior to the rest. The icon is the rallying point of tribal righteousness.
And consciously or unconsciously, the hierarchy or powerholders
in the group use the icon to keep the people captive within their system.
If
someone in the tribe calls the surpassing glory or importance of its icon into
question, all hell breaks loose and there are broken bones and dead bodies all
over the place. It would be all too easy to give some real life examples from
church after church, but it is all too sensitive and embarrassing, so we will
spare everybody because there has been too much human pain already in
inquisitions, heresy trials, purges, burnings, drownings,
floggings, shunnings, defrockings,
social pressures, name-callings, intimidations, guilt trips and the like.
But
who ever heard of such things happening in a church because some members were
judgmental, unkind, uncaring, hard hearted, unforgiving or in any other way not
truly human? Even robbing the bank won't disturb the tribe nearly as much as a
sin against the tribe's icon. The religious authorities perform as if the
integrity of God's throne is at stake when it's only some human throne which
deprives people of the freedom of being human.
The
Christian religion has produced the same inhuman distortions which Joshua ben Adam exposed in his day. If sin is
forsaking the religious icons to join the human race, then let us "sin
bravely" as Luther once said.
There
is only one evil, and that's the failure to be human.
NO ATONEMENT
For
the son of man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as
a ransom for many. (Mark
This
is Joshua ben Adam's mission statement. It is about
living and dying in the service of people. It is not just his own mission
statement however, because he offers it to everyone who is willing to share his
vision of human liberation.
Joshua
did not die for some sacred thing or religious idea. There has never been a
shortage of people willing to die for religion. Millions have died to defend
their holy places. Just as many have died to preserve their
sacred practices. They have died for the Sabbath. They have lost their
lives for the sake of circumcision. They have put their life on the line for
religious ideas, especially ideas about God. But Joshua died for none of these
things. He died solely for people.
The
word ransom in Joshua's mission statement is a simple metaphor for liberation -
nothing more! At the very commencement of his public work he cited these words
from the book of Isaiah:
The
spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach the gospel to the poor; he has sent me
to heal the broken hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and
recovering of sight to the blind, and to set at liberty them that are bruised.
.. (Luke 4:18)
This
was a moving, breathtaking vision of human liberation. It envisaged deliverance
from guilt, false views of God, distorted value systems, hunger, sickness,
destitution, religious bondage and inhuman power structures. He was concerned
with the whole human condition.
When
Joshua launched this mission to liberate people from their inhuman situation,
the religio-political climate was extremely volatile
and dangerous. John the Baptist had recently lost his head. The religious
authorities and the Romans were ready to pounce at the first suspicion of a
disturbance. Joshua worked judiciously, moving from place to place lest he
attract too much attention.
Judged
by the canons of his time his teaching was blasphemous and his mission
seditious. How could any system, least of all the brutal inhuman system of his
day, tolerate the kind of human liberation he envisaged?
Ben
Adam was not blind to the risks. He worked to sow as much seed as he could
before the inevitable storm broke over his head. After a short period of public
activity the power elites conspired to put out his light.
Following
a hasty
Ben
Adam's death was a hurried and brutal affair. Crucifixion was a degrading and
humiliating way to die. It was the Roman penalty for sedition. It was all too
much for Joshua's inner support group. One betrayed him, another disowned him,
and they all forsook both him and his doomed cause. His untimely death was a
senseless, wrongful execution. It was also a religious scandal and a public disgrace.
The Scandal of His Death
Removing the Scandal
The
post-Easter community was hard put to rationalize the scandal of Joshua ben Adam's death. In the earliest preaching they said he
was wrongly condemned, but they did not say there was any redemptive value in
his violent death. Their good news was their declaration that God reversed the
human verdict by raising Joshua to his own right hand.
Later,
however, the early Christians did try to bring some meaning out of this
scandalous crucifixion. It was said to be a blood sacrifice, offered on the
Divine altar, as an atonement or payment to God for the sins of the world.
The
idea of a blood sacrifice for sin is not fully developed in the New Testament.
Luke, who wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else, makes no mention of
it at all. But the idea was developed over the centuries until it reached its
final expression in what became known as the substitutionary
or penal theory of atonement (This theory of atonement reached its full
development within Calvinism. To their credit, most Catholic theologians
stopped short of the very legalistic "substitutionary
atonement."...)
The
basic historical facts of Joshua ben Adam's death are
quite plain. He was condemned to death in a Jewish court and executed by the
Romans. The whole idea of an atonement by blood
sacrifice in some kind of divine arrangement is not history, but an apocalyptic
interpretation of history. It was a religious interpretation of a tragedy, an
interpretation motivated at least in part by a need to rationalize a scandal.
Instead of seeing men engaged in an act of senseless killing, God was seen
killing his son to pay for the sins of the world. What God did was illustrated
by the Old Testament story of Abraham killing his son as a sin-offering to God.
The Roots of Blood Atonement
Since
blood atonement for sins is not evident in the historical facts of a man dying
by crucifixion (a very common occurrence in those times), it raises the
question, How did the idea of a blood sacrifice to
God, arise? Where did it come from? Some may content themselves with the
thought that the revelation miraculously dropped from heaven. We know however,
that God generally works through less spectacular human processes. Ideas don't
generally leap out of the ground from nowhere or drop suddenly out of the sky.
They evolve as humanity and human history evolves.
The
early Christians had a world-view which they shared with everyone of their age.
They shared assumptions about the way justice operated in the universe which
were the common currency of their era.
1. Pay Back Justice
The
practice of blood sacrifice, both of humans and animals, runs right back
through history to the most primitive cultures. It has been found all over the
earth. It has even persisted in places like
The
blood sacrifices were linked to primitive notions of pay-back justice. It was
thought that the order and balance of the cosmos was maintained by a justice which demanded "and eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth." Nature demanded it. The gods of the cosmos demanded it. If a head
was stolen from a tribe, another head had to be stolen back. If there was no
retaliation to balance the order of the cosmos, the gods would be angry.
The
Old Testament also said that God required this same "eye for an eye"
justice.
Much
of the popular culture of our day shares this primitive idea that justice means
"getting even," "getting what's coming", "what goes
around comes around." The school science class even proved to us that this
is natural: "Every action brings an opposite and equal reaction." So
also the conventional wisdom says, "You reap what you sow," "You
get out of life exactly what you put in," "Everyone eventually gets
what he deserves," "There is no free lunch," "Pay-back time
comes sooner or later."
2. Suffering and
Death are Pay-Back Justice
Whether
it was the gods or spirits of the cosmos or the God of the Old Testament, they
were all seen as the enforcers of pay-back justice. They "got even"
by punishing human sin with calamities, sickness, famine, suffering and death.
The
ancient world of the nuclear Near East had their Creation myths. Those myths
were recycled again and again from country to country, millenniums before the
Hebrews were even able to read them in the Babylonian writings or copy them (in
modified form of course) into their own literature. The substance of all the
Creation myths were the same: for a misdemeanor the first man and women were
expelled from a perfect environment (the garden of innocence) and the
punishment ever after has been suffering and death for the whole human race.
The
ancient world had their Flood myths too. The Babylonian version said that the
gods drowned the world in a flood because the people down below were disturbing
them with too much noise. When the Hebrews recycled that myth they said that
their very moral God drowned the world as punishment for sin.
With
monotonous regularity, especially in Ezra's version of history called The
Chronicles, the Old Testament shows that calamities, famine, captivity,
suffering and death was God's way of punishing sin. Whenever
It
became all too easy to conclude that health, prosperity and power were God's
reward for righteousness, while sickness, poverty and suffering were evidence
of God's displeasure. Although the book of Job challenged this prevailing idea
of pay-back justice, it dominated the culture. It existed in the time of Joshua
ben Adam. When a tower fell on people or they were
slaughtered in a skirmish, it was generally felt that someone had done
something to merit this manifestation of pay-back justice. If some people were
destitute, sick, blind or leprous, this too was seen as God's pay-back justice,
either because of what they did or what their ancestors did.
The
notion of pay-back justice may not be as overt in our modem society but it is
still there, especially in the prison system where people "pay for their
crimes." When misfortune strikes, the sufferer asks,
"why me? What did I do to deserve this?" Or there's the
popular notion of what goes "around comes around." God or fate keeps
the scales of the universe balanced, and sees to it that everyone gets exactly
what he deserves. "Every action bringing an opposite and
equal reaction."
3. Hell, the Final
Pay-Back
The
ancients believed that the gods would get their full and final revenge
(pay-back) in the final punishment of Hell. Any suffering in this life was only
a down payment. If there were anomalies in this life, like a wicked man
prospering, the accounts would be settled at the final pay-back time.
The
ancients were familiar with volcanoes belching up fire and lava flows from the
bowels of the earth. In their myths, the sky above was the abode of the gods,
while the seething caldron beneath the earth was the place where the gods would
send those who displeased them. When Cortes and his Catholic Spaniards arrived
in Aztec Mexico,. they found
a civilization which had nine levels of hell for the suffering of souls. Hell
and pay-back justice was as fundamental to the world-view of Joshua ben Adam's day as a post-Copernican world-view is
fundamental to ours.
4. Blood Sacrifice
The
only way to survive in a universe of pay-back justice was through the offering
up of blood sacrifices to the gods or spirits of the cosmos. The
idea of offering up human sacrifices runs right back through the most primitive
cultures. Bloody human sacrifices have persisted until very recent times
in
Joseph
Campbell, an authority on myths, gives accounts of the practice of sacrificing
infants, children, captives, slaves and sometimes even kings and nobles. The
practice existed in many cultures all over the world. It seemed that the gods
had an insatiable appetite for screaming children or terrified adults fed alive
into fiery pits, dismembered on altars, or cut up piece by piece while alive
and writhing in unspeakable anguish. Atonement, paying for sin, was necessary
to propitiate the gods and restore balance to the cosmos. Any serious debts to the
gods had to be paid in blood.
More
humane cultures like the Hebrews substituted animal sacrifices for human ones,
but the Old Testament records that even the Hebrews reverted to human
sacrifices from time to time. There were enlightened voices like the prophets
who were scornful of sacrificial rituals, but the cult of blood sacrifices
remained firmly entrenched in the imagination. One Old Testament story vividly
illustrates atonement through human sacrifice:
During
the reign of David, there was a famine of three successive years: so David
sought the face of the Lord. The Lord said, "It is on account of Saul and
his blood-stained house; it is because he put the Gibeonites
to death "... David asked the Gibeonites,
"What shall I do for you? How shall I make atonement so that you will
bless the Lord's inheritance?" The Gibeonites
answered him, "We have no right to demand silver or gold from Saul or his
family, nor do we have the right to put any one in
In
a series of songs about 'a suffering servant', an Old Testament poet depicts
the sins of the nation being paid for by its exile in
As
for the religions of
"The recurrent mythological event of the death and resurrection
of a god had been for millenniums the central mystery of all the great
religions of the nuclear Near East..." (Campbell Occidental Mythology "P. 334)
Pay-back
justice! Paying for sin by blood sacrifice! A holy martyr paying for a nations sin! Incarnate gods dying for human sin! It was all
there in the culture of the first century. It was part and parcel of the
world-view of that age. Those ideas, to use an expression from
This
writer knows what it is to sing from the heart songs like Rock of Ages:
"Let the water and the blood from thy riven
side which flowed Be of sin the double cure, wash me
from its guilt and power..."
Trusting
in Christ's flagellations as a remedy for guilt is better than trying to deal
with guilt by self-flagellations or having a bad conscience which Shakespeare
said, "doth make cowards of us all." But there is another way. It is
so radically different that its like living in another
universe - which indeed it is. It is the world-view of Joshua ben Adam. To this we must now turn.
No Pay Back
Justice: No Atonement in Ben Adam's Teaching
"You have learned that they were told, "Eye for eye,
tooth for tooth.'" But what I tell you is this: Do not set yourself
against the man who wrongs you. If someone slaps you on the right cheek turn
and offer him your left. If a man wants to sue you for
your shirt, let him have your coat as well. If a man in authority makes you go
one mile, go with him two. Give when you are asked to give and do not turn your back on a man who wants to borrow. You have learned
that they were told, "Love your neighbor, hate
your enemy..."
"...But what I tell you is this: Love your enemies and pray
for your persecutors; only so can you be children of your heavenly Father, who
makes his sun rise on the good and bad alike, and sends the rain on the honest
and the dishonest. If you love only those who love you, what reward can you
expect? Surely the tax-gatherers do as much as that.
And if you greet only your brothers, what is there extraordinary about that?
Even the heathen do as much. There must be no limit to your goodness, as your
heavenly Father's goodness knows no bounds..." (Matthew 38-48)
In
these sayings, Joshua is not indulging in some nice little moralisms.
In these words, backed up by actions and parables which turn all canons of
accepted justice on its head, ben Adam sets himself to pull down the entire world order which has
pay-back justice, retaliation, getting even, revenge and blood atonement at its
heart.
Ben
Adam stood in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets who repudiated the
blood sacrifices. They called for human compassion and social justice. So did
Joshua, but he went to the heart of the matter by
setting aside the whole notion of atonement. You will not practice pay-back
justice, says Joshua, because God does not practice that kind of justice. He
showers his gifts on the just and the unjust alike. He keeps no score of
wrongs, holds no grudges and does not balance his accounts by returning evil
for evil. He does not keep a black book to record our debts, and does not
expect repayment for his scandalous generosity to the least deserving. Like the
father of the prodigal son, he abandons concern for his own honor. He throws
away all caution about his good reputation because he is moved totally by love,
a forgiving heart and a reckless generosity that tosses out all known canons of
justice.
Everybody
in Joshua's day lived in a match-box sized universe in matters of space and
time. But he challenged the match-box sized moral order of his age, a world of
tit for tat and a God who was a penny-pinching debt collector or celestial
Shylock who insisted in having his pound of flesh.
If
you behave like God, says Joshua, you will genuinely love and help those who
try to harm you. Instead of even a thought about pay-back justice, you will
freely forgive. There must be no limit on how many times you forgive, nor any limit on the size of the debt you forgive.
Furthermore,
you must not wait until your debtor repents for his wrong and begs your
forgiveness, but from your heart you must forgive him even while he rains his
blows upon you. This Joshua did in his dying agonies when with his last breath
he asked God to forgive his heartless tormentors.
This
he also did when he welcomed dishonest tax collectors, prostitutes and
power-holders to his table. Such ready acceptance so moved one hardened
scoundrel named Zacchaeus that he openly announced he
would change his evil ways.
There
is nothing in Joshua ben Adam's whole character and
teaching that could give support to a world-view, especially the Christian one,
which has atonement (pay-back justice) at the center of it. The man was a
giant, of colossus on the landscape of history. He had a new vision of
humanity, a new vision of God and a totally new world-view. Atonement or
pay-back justice had no place in his view of interpersonal relationships,
whether those relationships be between one human party
and another or between the human
party and God.
Excursus on The Chamber of Horrors
The
structural outline of the Christian "gospel" is really very simple.
It is a story in three parts: about the Fall, Hell and
the Cross. The Fall tells of a human fall into a
sinful state which is shared by everybody. Hell tells us about the final
penalty for sin. The Cross ("the good news") tells
us about Christ paying the penalty for sin so that we need not pay it
ourselves.
Despite
the differing ways this three-part story is told or applied, the bare-bone
outline is the same whether it is told by a Catholic catechism or Campus
Crusade for Christ pamphlet. In either case it is totally incompatible with the
life and teaching of Joshua ben Adam.
1. The Fall
When the Hebrews recycled the old Babylonian
myth of the Creation and Fall of man they made some
considerable improvements to the story. The Hebrew version embodied some of the
great Hebrew insights.
First, it embodied its heritage of
monotheism. Second, it did not blur the distinction between their one God and
his creation. Third, their God did not act capriciously in his dealings with man,
but in a strict moral justice which was according to law.
Many whose religious traditions are rooted
in the Old Testament story will admit that the story is a myth which is neither
literally true or in harmony with scientific reality. They point out that the
real purpose of myth is to embody important truths about God and man. We
readily agree that myths have been indispensable vehicles to convey important
truths. We would even agree that the Creation/Fall myth served a useful purpose
to give people a sense of their origin, calling and destiny. But we also need
to confront the serious fallacies conveyed in this very foundational story.
In the first place, it is completely
erroneous to suggest that any human sin (least of all one misdemeanor) brought
all the disruption and death into this world. Millions of years before any man
walked this earth there was upheavals, wholesale
destruction of species, and enough death going on in the world to make rivers
of fossil fuel.
Secondly, if God is the author of life he is
also the author of death. There could have been no development and improvement
of any species without death. To put on mankind the responsibility for causing
death is not only an appalling burden, but it is both harmful and false.
The worst aspect of the story, however, is
that it conveys a concept of retributive (pay-back) justice so horrific that it
defies even the rudiments of good sense. For one misdemeanor a man and women
lost paradise for themselves and the entire human race. The punishment was
suffering and death not just for themselves but for billions of other people
for millennium after millennium.
My Great Grandfather was put on a convict
ship in
2. Hell
According to this recycled pagan myth,
pay-back justice had barely begun with all the temporal misery, suffering, and
death of this world. The full penalty of the human fall, whose guilt rests upon
everybody, is said to be damnation in Hell. In Christian orthodoxy, Hell is a
place of never ending punishment, of unspeakable, never ending torments.
With Hell, God's pay-back justice takes on
infinite proportions. Sin is said to be an offence against an infinite majesty
meriting infinite punishment. So God spends eternity getting even, paying
people back for offending him.
Enough said, because the Christian doctrine
of Hell is an absolute disgrace. The church has to be charged with polluting
the earth with religious sadism and pornography. No human mind should ever be
made to entertain such sickening inhuman images whose portrayal has caused many
to faint, go mad, live in terror, obey religious strictures out of fear, or
turn away from believing in God altogether. Millions have become atheists
rather than believe in fables so insulting to all sense of human decency.
Thankfully, not all Christians have believed
or have continued to believe in this kind of Christian orthodoxy. An awakened
human consciousness leads more and more churchmen and theologians to
re-interpret Hell in a more humane way or to abandon the idea completely. It is
after all an old pagan myth which has been used in the Christian religion to
take pay-back justice to an infinite degree of infinite nonsense.
3. The Atonement
In Christian theology the Cross and Hell are
the two sides or the two stages of one reality. The Apostles Creed says that
Christ descended into Hell. He took upon himself God's wrath against sin, the
infinite sufferings of Hell, in order to save us from that punishment. Out of
love God is said to have provided this bloody sacrifice of his own son to make an atonement (pay-back, compensation, payment) for human
sins. Christ too was said to be one with the Father in becoming the bloody
victim of atonement. The transaction is said to be substitutionary.
Christ, the innocent one, was treated as we deserved that we, the guilty ones,
might be treated as he deserves. God rolled on him the sins of the world and
punished him as if he were every sinner... (It is said that Christ's human
nature was sustained by his divine nature to endure an infinite punishment
making a sufficient atonement for the sins of the world).
If it be asked, "Why was this atonement
necessary?" the answer is that God could not forgive sin unless he
satisfied his law or his principle of retributive justice. Anselm said that
reparations or an adequate compensation had to be made to God's outraged honor
due to man's sin.
The real reason God offers the bloody
sacrifice of his son and Christ offers himself as the victim, therefore, is not
to save people but it is to justify the divine administration, to satisfy God's
justice, to honor and glorify God, etc. Charles Hodge, the Calvinist systematic
theologian, goes even further. Since God is the unmoved Mover who cannot be
influenced by anything outside of himself, says Hodge, when he loves or is
merciful toward us he is only being loving and merciful to himself. So the
bottom line of atonement is that Christ did not primarily die for people at all
like Joshua ben Adam did, but he died for the
principle of law and pay-back justice.
If God cannot forgive us unless Christ pays
our debt, then he does not really forgive at all. If a debt has been paid, then
there is nothing to forgive. Atonement and forgiveness, therefore, are mutually
exclusive.
The one mitigating feature of this Hangman's
theology are the statements saying that God loved us
and gave his son to pay our penalty. It's a good thing most people never get to
read the statements of the theologians which could easily destroy allusions
about God's love being altruistic. Many who still live
with a legalistic world-view or in a universe which has pay-back justice at its
heart, do find support and comfort in God's offering up his son as an
atonement. Thankfully they have never been exposed to "good" divines
such as Augustus Strong (Systematic Theology) who says that justice rather than
love is the primary attribute of God.
Summary
The Fall, Hell and
the Atonement by blood sacrifice are the outline structure of the Christian
religion whether Catholic or Protestant.
Each of these three elements is a recycled
pagan myth.
Each has pay-back justice at its heart.
Together the parts form one structure. The Fall is the beginning of the story. The story has a Hell of
an end. In the middle is Atonement by means of a blood sacrifice. From
beginning to end it is a Chamber of Horrors. It is totally incompatible with
the life and teaching of Joshua ben Adam.
As we have seen, ben
Adam totally demolished the world-view of his day. He removed pay-back justice
from his vision for a new human society. There was no pay-back justice in his
vision of God. His teaching was like new wine which, he said, must not be
placed into the old wineskins. But that is exactly what happened. The church
put the new wine of amazing generosity and love into the old wineskins of pagan
myths and pay-back justice.
