Christ Mass – what Jesus means to me

OK, so it is that time of the year and I guess a few thoughts about the meaning of Christmas are in order, now that I’ve survived the day itself.

Who was Jesus? Did he even exist? We don’t really know for sure, because there is virtually no contemporary confirmation of his existence – the gospels we have, and the accounts of Romanised Jewish historian Josephus, were written after his death.
As much as I hate Communist Parties, I have always liked the British Party’s (CPGB – no longer extant, I believe) line on the existence of Jesus.

Like good commies, they start with a material analysis of Palestine at the time – a colony ruled by harsh Roman overlords and their local Jewish lackeys, the ruling class Sadducees and Pharisees whose names have become synonomous with hyprocrisy.

At the same time, there were powerful Jewish nationalist resistance movements, called by the New Testament ‘Zealots’ – probably the contemporary equivalent of the term ‘terrorist’. Simon the disciple was one. Apparently they were violent assassins. There were also millenialist religious movements like the Essenes who were predicting the immanent arrival of the Messiah. This potent mix blended politics and religion into a volatile climate populated with renegade rabbis and bands of religious assassins. This eventually resulted in the Maccabi Revolt in AD 68 that was crushed by the Romans, who then destroyed the Temple.

So, according to the CPGB, there were probably a number of religious Robin Hood type characters, who later became conflated into one character, Yeshua HaMassiach, who may or may not have existed. When the nascent religion was Hellenised, the Jewish word ‘Messiah’ was translated into the Greek ‘Christ’. But the cultures are very different and that translation changes the nature of the beliefs. After this, the new religion adopted a whole lot of beliefs from Near Eastern mystery cults, such as the idea of the virgin birth and the martyred son of God, which appear in other religions in the region before Christianity. By the time the first gospels were written, in Greek, the ‘real Jesus’ was already a shadow hidden beneath a whole raft of cultural mediation. Once the gospels were purged at Nicea in AD 325, this process was consolidated.

Good story, isn’t it? I like it.

Interestingly, the Monty Python team demonstrate this really well in The Life of Brian: Palestine on the brink of revolution, people looking for a messiah (“He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”) and various groups of self-important and out of touch revolutionaries:

“But I thought we were the Popular Front for the Liberation of Judea?”

“No, we’re the Peoples’ Front!”

“So who’s the Popular Front?”

“There he is!”

“Splitter!!!!”

I guess you have to have some experience of Trotskyist groups and various and sundry Workers’ Internationals to Retile the Fourth Floor to get that fully.

Sorry. Discursive.

But the romantic in me believes, or wants to believe, that there is some kind of deeper reality, a poetic truth beneath the materialist analysis. Maybe Robert Anton Wilson is right: The date now is really AD 70, the Temple has just been destroyed, by the Romans as agents of the demiurge, the petty little god Satan who keeps us trapped on this material plain. Jesus’ return, and the Kingdom of Heaven, is immanent, but we are trapped by two thousand years of history that didn’t really happen: it’s all an illusion. And Christ can only return once we wake up and realise that the modern world is just a nightmare.

Or if that shit’s too freaky for you, at least accept that there was a radical preacher at that time, who came to teach anarchist spirituality: that there is no God but the God you find inside you, no authority but the authority you decide to recognise: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesars….”.

So: all hail the anarchist Jesus!