God Without Religion by Michael Arnheim

Author:Michael Arnheim [Arnheim, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: An Alternative View Of Life, The Universe And Everything
Publisher: Black House Publishing
Published: 2018-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

Case Study 3 — Christianity

The validity of the claims made by Christianity will be put through the wringer in Chapter 6. Here I just want to summarise briefly how this creed religion came into existence as a breakaway from a traditional communal religion. It is important to realise not only that Jesus himself lived and died a Jew but also that he regarded his mission as being essentially to the Jews.

Jesus is reported in Matthew’s Gospel to have been approached by a Canaanite woman for urgent assistance with her daughter. Jesus at first waves her aside saying, “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of Israel.” When the woman came closer “and worshipped him”, begging, “Lord, help me”, he repeats the same point in an insulting manner: “It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and cast it to dogs.” “The children” clearly refers to the Jews, while Gentiles or non-Jews are described as “dogs”. The point is not lost on the Canaanite woman, who remarks: “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from the master’s table.” Needless to say, the story goes on, Jesus then relents and the woman’s daughter is immediately healed.181

Elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus is quoted as saying:

Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.182

Far from wanting to abolish the requirements of Jewish law, Jesus is here portrayed as seeking to out-Pharisee the Pharisees.

The architect of Christianity was not Jesus but Paul, probably the greatest PR man in history, the self-styled “apostle to the Gentiles”,183 who recognised that in order for his new religion to take off it had to attract non-Jews, and for that policy to succeed it would be necessary to free converts from the onerous obligations of Jewish law, including the dietary laws and above all circumcision.

It was over this that Paul had a major clash with the leaders of the so-called Jerusalem Church headed by Jesus’s brother James. The turning point came at a meeting in 50 CE, about twenty years after Jesus’s death, when Paul reported back to the so-called Jerusalem Council of the movement. After what appears to have been a heated debate, James settled the issue by deciding “that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God” except with the most basic Jewish obligations to abstain from idol-worship, from “unchastity” and from eating blood.

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