Be Not a Hemorrhoid on Jesus' Arsehole
The Gospel of Unconditional Salvation, part 3 of 3
A Radical Re-interpretation of the Gospel, based on a passage from The Historical Figure of Jesus, by E.P. Sanders
The Root of the Jews
With regard to the lack of specific plans for integrating the wicked into a more upright society, we should now note that there is no instance in which Jesus requires the wicked to do what the law stipulates in order to become righteous. . . . There are two possible explanations of why this theme is missing. One is that Jesus, those who heard him, the disciples and the early Christians, all simply presupposed the sacrificial system. The wicked people who decided to change their ways . . . knew that the law required sacrifice, and so when they next went to Jerusalem they sacrificed a guilt offering. The second possibility is that Jesus thought and said that the wicked who followed him, though they had not technically “repented,” and though they had not become righteous in the way required by the law, would be in the kingdom, and in fact would be “ahead” of those who were righteous by the law. If this was the point of Jesus’ call of wicked people, he would have constituted a threat to the common and obvious Jewish understanding of the Bible and the will of God. I regard the second possibility as more likely than the first, since Jesus’ treatment of sinners drew criticism. Here we see how radical Jesus was: far more radical than someone who simply committed minor infringements of the Sabbath and food laws. Both far more radical and far more arrogant, in the common view. He seems to have thought that those who followed him belonged to God’s elect, even though they did not do what the Bible itself requires. We should recall the conclusion of one of Jesus’ parables: the servants of the king “went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad, so the wedding hall was filled with guests” (Matt. 22.10). The servants did not first require all the bad to become good: they brought them in anyway (Sanders, p. 234-5).
In all the years that I have read the Gospel, there’s been an assumption that I basically understood why Jesus got crucified, socio-politically speaking. Essentially, it was because he claimed to be the Son of God, and because he was seen as the King of the Jews, people were following him and he was becoming a threat, both to the Jewish religious power structures and the Roman Empire.
Another theory that is superficially credible is that turning over the tables in the temple turned the Jews and the Romans against Jesus. By disrupting an accepted religious-economic practice, he was becoming aggressive and seemed to be leading an uprising.
Sanders’ theory, however, landed like a missing piece that filled in a gap I hadn’t fully realized was there.
If Jesus was claiming to be a prophet who knew God’s will, and God’s will was to follow him and not to follow Jewish law anymore (“the Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath,” etc.); and if he was saying your sins are forgiven, providing a direct avenue to salvation, an open doorway to the kingdom of heaven, then it is no wonder Judean feathers were a-ruffling.
Whatever it was Jews were observing the Torah to attain, Jesus claimed he had attained it, and was promising others they could attain it too, simply by following him. By annulling the idea of a divine judgment and punishment, Jesus was neutralizing the power of the Judaic priesthood—cutting the Kabbalistic tree down at the root, with a single axe blow.
The Harrowing of Hell
This idea (the harrowing of hell) is only briefly mentioned in the gospels and was picked up later in different legends and interpretations. Short version: Christ went to Sheol (or Hades, later rebranded as Hell) between the crucifixion and the resurrection, to save a specific portion of the damned (e.g. those poor Israelites who died before Jesus came; other sources claim he went specifically to discuss matters with the fallen angels).
If Jesus’ mission included saving souls from Hades, was it completed? Or was the subterfuge of the Roman Empire and the Judaic power structures to co-opt Christianity by maintaining the cognitive structures of (a belief in) hell, to keep hell open by keeping people trapped by the idea of it?
Might this extend into the afterlife in ways we can only begin to understand?
If you believe Jesus died for your sins and that all your sins are forgiven, that potentially cancels out the idea of damnation forever. However, insofar as your belief is couched in a fear of hell, and the belief that you might go there if you stop believing in Jesus—and/or that people you know might go there too—then it becomes a double-edged sword.
Potentially, our belief in salvation is both maintaining and maintained by a belief in damnation. It is as if hell will continue to exist for all of us, as long as a single soul still believes in it, and so gets trapped there in some cognitive (or even metaphysical) sense.
This, I think, is why it has to be salvation for all, and why the one lost sheep is more important to God than the ninety-nine found.
