Jesus of Nazareth presents himself as a very obliging figure; he’s prepared to be whatever you want him to be. World teacher and avatar; anarcho-Zealot revolutionary or proto-anticapitalist rebel (“Jerusalem Slim” the IWW hobo “Wanted for Sedition”); Apollo or maybe Dionysus; assemblage of holy relics (and sixteen foreskins); Docetic phantom or Gnostic magician; humble carpenter and Hellenistic philosopher; Middle Eastern dying-&-resurrecting fertility-deity archetype or homosexual; magic mushroom; even very God of very God and divine Savior.
Jesus seems willing to act as Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, Method-ist, Nestorian, Monophysite, Arian, Holy Roller, Ranter, Anabaptist, Southern Baptist, Pentecostalist, Chaldaean, Russian or Greek Orthodox, Hindu Avatar, Islamic Prophet, Taoist sage, or even a Jew.
He’s the Prince of Peace, or else he wields a sword. He’s pro-family, or else orders you to spurn your father and mother and follow only him; he’s for icons or against them; he loves organ music or detests it; he upholds the Law or preaches antinomianism; he serves alchemical wine with the bread and roast lamb, or he sticks to prosaic grape juice and vegetables; he practices and enjoins strict chastity or he marries Mary Magdalen; he died and rose again, or else emigrated to Kashmir (where his tomb is still to be seen), or maybe Southern France.
I have to admit that for a long time I found none of these versions of Jesus totally convincing—all equally persuasive but also unpersuasive—until a few years ago when it occurred to me one day to think of him as a failure. A failed messiah.
Suddenly he became attractive to me. All at once he came to life. I could take him seriously at last. Perhaps even “believe in him.”
Jesus promised his disciples he would “come again while some of ye yet live”—but 2000 years have gone by and there’s no sign of him. Assuming he was actually crucified—or that he secretly conquered the world and is reigning in glory over the Eschaton—there exists no evidence of his resurrection and ascension into heaven (which is where exactly?)—and in fact there’s no hard evidence that he ever really existed at all. (The paragraphs concerning him in Josephus were obviously forged by later Christian apologists.
It seems unlikely that he intended to found a new religion, but if he did we can say confidently that the result left a lot to be desired. Instead of universal peace, love, tolerance and care for the poor, the movement turned to holy war, murder of heretics, dissidents, pagans, sinners, Jews and witches; paranoid self-loathing and smug righteousness; and theological justification for usury, feudalism, imperialism, colonialism, nationalism and capitalism.
Of course some religious art and music have been produced over the centuries. If only the Church had restricted itself to stained glass and polyphony, they’d be no reason not to love it. Instead it has meddled with morality and dwelt morbidly on sin, guilt, hell and damnation. How much nicer it all sounded in Latin, which no one could understand, especially when sung in four-part counterpoint. The Catholics were, I believe, quite correct not to translate the Bible into vernacular tongues. Have you ever actually read the Old Testament? Shocking! Smite the Amalekites, indeed! And the Gospels are chock full of contradictions and obfuscations.
Jesus takes on a new luster, for me anyway, when contemplated as an existentialist (anti)hero, a sort of crypto Nietzschean bohemian drop-out preaching the will to powerlessness, a forerunner of Thomas JJ Altizer’s “God is Dead” movement, a hopeless advocate of Flower Power, a Rastafarian ganja-head, the original hippy peacenik. I don’t need to believe in his miracles, just in his good intentions—and besides, neither really worked. The savior who couldn’t even save himself…I can grok it.
Having considered all this, I next realized that Jesus was not only a Failed Messiah, he was probably also a False Messiah. I trust my readers are familiar with Gershom Scholem’s masterpiece on Sabbatai Sevi, the false Messiah who converted to Islam in 1666 whose followers still exist as a Jewish-Sufi-Antinomian-Freemasonic sect in Turkey called the Dunmeh. Sevi in turn inspired another wild False Messiah, Jacob Frank of Poland, who converted to Catholicism. The Frankists (who may now be extinct, though I hope not) seem to have practiced an even more extreme form of antinomian excess, a kind of heretical magical tantra. Some of his followers were involved in the French Revolution, and there’s a rumor that Sigmund Freud’s ancestors were Frankists.
The true role of the False Messiah is to proclaim the esotericization and abrogation of the Law. As the Ismaili leader Hasan II, the Assassin Qa’im(a sort of Messiah) of Alamut put it, “The Chains of the Law have been broken.” If “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” then you are (in potentia) already “perfect,” and all that you desire is holy. Thus Moslems can drink wine, Jews can eat pork, Christians can achieve erotic bliss, having all become “as gods.” This theosis, to use the technical term, constitutes the esoteric message of the False Messiah. The predicted “end of the world” always seems to be a flop, but in truth the world of compulsionhas indeed ended and the disciple of the messiah becomes the messiah, the liberated child of God, an angel of light. In effect the False Messiah becomes Blake’s Satan, not the embodiment of evil but of the Divine Imagination, “beyond good and evil,” the Nietzschean free spirit, the one who overcomes the merely human and realizes the true alchemical self. In short, in the eyes of the world, a dangerous criminal.
This messianic project, as we’ve already explained, is a failure. It doesn’t matter however. What counts is the “gratuitous act” of self-liberation, the assault on Heaven, the glorious defeat, the legacy of infamy. Now we can say that Jesus was an anarchist, a queer, a magician, a mushroom, etc—and it will have some resonance. All this will constitute a real Faith, one which we can be proud to claim as our own.
It’s been proposed that Christianity is an “impossible” religion. Now we can admit that this is true, and that explains why we might want to practice such a farrago of surrealist nonsense. Credo quia absurdum est—but it’s not the doctrine of the Trinity that’s absurd, nor the “scandal” of resurrection, nor the transubstantiation of bread and wine, nor the injunction to be “perfect.” The absurdity is Jesus himself, and that is why we can at last embrace him.
