Rabbi Jesus, crushed sexual organs, and…working on something special
I haven’t been posting much in the last month or so — other than talking to you from bed in our recently rebranded podcast. I haven’t been posting but I have been writing…working on something a bit more literary that I hope will capture our insane world better than the historical/journalistic approach I’ve taken up until now. I’m not quite ready to share it yet, and to be honest I’m not sure if it’ll even work. But if it does I’ll share soon…
I will leave you with this though.
For this thing I’m working on I’ve been getting into the comic world of old school pre-exile/pre-rabbinical Judaism. One book I’m reading right now is Rabbi Jesus by Bruce Chilton, a priest who teaches religion at Bard. He’s a biblical historian and a believer and his book tries to understand Jesus and his message by putting what’s written about Jesus in the Gospels into proper historical context — in the context of how the Jews, and hence Jesus himself, lived two thousand years ago out there in the Galilee and Judea, provinces in the time of Jesus were first divided between two Roman client states and then ruled in part directly from Rome.
Rabbi Jesus melds the religious and the historical, and it comes out great.
Chilton focuses on Jesus’s bastard beginnings, which put him into a very low caste and excluded him from the religious life in his village. That exclusion forced Jesus into fringes of Jewish society. But it didn’t make him break from Judaism, it radicalized him and pushed him to fix it. Chilton argues that Jesus didn’t want to create a new religion. He wanted to improve Judaism by doing away with its petty legalism and obsession with precise rituals and rigid castes and exclusionary rules. Jesus was first and foremost a Jew. And as he got older he became a Jewish religious leader, a rabbi.
When I started paying attention more closely to the Judaism that’s described in the text of the Torah I was surprised by just how insanely obsessed it is with purity. I mean purity not in the modern sense, in terms of hygiene, but in terms of spiritual purity: purity that makes you clean in the eyes of YAHWEH and is achieved according to his laws: through constant immersions in water and animal sacrifice and the shunning of people deemed to be impure: non-believers, the blind, midgets, men with psoriasis, crushed testicles. In Leviticus it says it plainly: if you are a midget and/or have crushed testicles (aside from other issues) you cannot serve in YAHWEH’s temple. It also says very picky about any kind of fluid discharge. Say a man jerks off and spills his seed. Well, he is now unclean and has to sacrifice two pigeons or two doves to become cleansed again in the eyes of YAHWEH. And it’s not just sperm. Multiple pigeons have to be sacrificed for all sorts of other discharges: runny noses, menstrual cycles. The rules are really incredible. The ancient Hebrew pigeon economy must have been booming.
If I read Chilton right, the big innovation that Jesus tried to bring to Judaism was to deemphasize this obsession with ritual purity — all while staying within the general practice of Judaism of his time. Jesus practiced Judaism. And that’s something that Chilton says his fellow Christians have obscured and denied.