Jesus Resisted Evil / Evangelicalism is an 18th-century Invention

Yes, Jesus was executed for resisting the evil of his day. Evangelical Christianity that says otherwise is a relatively recent postbiblical synthesis.

I recently shared a post on social media. It said:

It is much easier today to say “Jesus died for my sins” than to say “Jesus was killed for standing up to evil” because the latter demands us to identify falsehood and oppose systems of oppression while the former ends up purging us of the need to do justice.

There followed a thread that included a discussion with an old friend of mine. One of my comments was:

The Bible connects Jesus’ death with sacrificial atonement; however, Protestant evangelicalism has overemphasized that connection, giving it ultimate significance in the context of hyper-individualism, when in the original context it was a way to give meaning to Jesus’ suffering, revealing one facet among many of early Christian spirituality. At the same time our shared tradition has also decontextualized Jesus’ death so that it cannot serve its obvious function in the gospels (among others) of critiquing the vaunted power of temporal empire. This has allowed us to duck prophetic calls for justice on a systemic level, which is basically what the post is saying.

After some back-and-forth, my friend’s comment included the following:

I...would greatly appreciate it if you could share one or two scripture passages that definitively undergird the notion that Jesus was killed for standing up to evil.

This post is my response.

At the bottom of your last response, you gave the following invitation: “I...would greatly appreciate it if you could share one or two scripture passages that definitively undergird the notion that Jesus was killed for standing up to evil.”

What you are asking for are proof texts when all of the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching, taken together with their overall context, indicate creative, adversarial engagement with a temporal order that included Roman imperial occupation and Jewish religious leaders who colluded with Rome to maintain their status as representatives of a permitted ethnic ancestral religion under Roman rule.

Jesus’ teachings about turning the other cheek, giving your shirt also, and going the extra mile were related to specific practices of the occupiers. His instructions were straight-up forms of passive nonviolent resistance. The beatitudes turn every system of power relations and wealth distribution on its head, including those specific to Jesus’ day. Even if we arbitrarily over-spiritualize those words, they still refer to a socioeconomic order and turn it upside-down. Luke has Jesus’ mother blurting out a song about this before Jesus is even born.

Rather than type on, I’m going to quote one of my other blog posts:

Jesus spoke Aramaic, the vernacular of his people. Hebrew was the language of the law and the prophets, sort of like Latin used to be for Catholics. But the gospels—written to explain Jesus and codify his teachings—were written in Greek, because most adherents of the spreading Christian movement spoke it, including Jewish people who heard or read their Hebrew scriptures in Greek translation.

Jesus is always using this one particular word translated into Greek by the gospel writers. The only word concept early English translators had for it—the imperial political order of the gospels—was the one they knew and used for an independent state ruled by a monarch: kingdom. This falls woefully short of the connotation carried by the Greek word βασιλεία (basileía) in the context of the Roman Empire in the Levant (eastern Mediterranean) in the first century CE.

The Latin term for empire is imperium. In Greek-speaking parts of the Roman empire, imperium was translated as βασιλεία. In non-biblical Greek texts from the era, βασιλεία is always translated into English as empire.

So, gospel writers—in a region that was rebelling against Roman imperial occupation—depicted Jesus speaking in Greek of the “empire of God,” the “empire of the sky,” an “empire not of this world.” Jesus and the authors of the gospels and epistles appropriated the political language of the imperial order to connote the spiritual realities indicated by Jesus’ teachings. This includes the New Testament language of empire, gospel, savior, lord, faith, and son of god. The political connotations could not have been more obvious.

This is lost to modern comprehension. If Christian converts in the United States were expected to declare that they “pledge allegiance to Jesus,” the obviousness of that as an alternative to the flag would be impossible to miss. If they had to swear that they would “protect and defend the Bible,” the alternative to preserving the Constitution would be similarly obvious. These would unavoidably be politically tinged statements. And that is how it was with the language of the gospels and epistles.

Bottom line: Jesus and the apostles, using the language of empire, describe an inward spiritual reality based on the observance of his teachings that transcends the oppressive realities of temporal empire. To disclose and describe such a parallel reality in symbolic terms was inherently apocalyptic, having nothing to do with a cataclysmic end of the world.*

(This Inner Reality Is Why Jesus Was an Apocalyptic Guru)

*For more on the meaning of apocalypse, see Why Apocalypse Is Not the End of the World, and What It Means.

Why I Write This Blog, and Why Christianity Needs to Evolve

Here is another quote from a different post that touches on gospel language:

Accounts of a virgin birth or being the son of a god were ancient devices used to declare that someone was really special. These were commonly understood and accepted concerning the origins of Alexander the Great, Plato, Romulus the founder and first king of Rome, and most notably, Augustus the first emperor of Rome. Today, a virgin birth is associated with Jesus. In Jesus’ day, anyone hearing of his virgin birth would immediately think of Caesar and the Roman Empire. In this way, gospel writers subverted the existing order to declare a new empire not of this world.

(God the Father, God the Son, God—and the Patriarchy)

The immediate context of gospel authorship ca. 66-90 was the Jewish War 66-70, the siege of Jerusalem by Titus’ legions in 70, the destruction of the Second Temple, the razing of Jerusalem, and the mass killing, enslavement, and displacement of its inhabitants. When the gospel writers have Jesus saying not one stone would be left on another, predicting “wars and rumors of wars,” speaking of two in a situation where one is taken and one is left, and giving instruction not to resist but flee to the hills, they were responding to their immediate context and instructing movement followers. Even a brief survey over two millennia of how these passages have been applied as supposed future predictions shows how preposterous armchair apocalyptic can be. If the gospels had been written between 1945 and 1960, and the authors depicted Jesus predicting the holocaust in 1912, no one would take that as a cryptic prediction of events nineteen centuries later.

Check out the ARCHIVE of Faith Shifter posts.

My point is that the gospels have both an economic and a political context that cannot but inform their meaning; more importantly, they use overtly political language in their original context. Jesus’ use of political language to describe an alternate spiritual reality by default critiqued the temporal reality under which he lived, and the crowds knew it. So did the gospel writers. More importantly, the Judean Jewish religious leaders knew it, and they knew it was a threat to their position.

The Temple leadership sought to convince the Roman authorities that Jesus was not merely someone who used allegories to describe a spiritual alternative to the established temporal order but was a threat to Caesar since he claimed to be a βασιλέυς (yes, emperor). We both know how ambivalent Pilate was about that.

The bottom line for this part of the post: Jesus spoke about an alternative spiritual reality in ways that very indirectly but very clearly opposed and critiqued the oppressive imperial order under which he and his followers and listeners lived. The gospel writers make this very clear. The empire was the form that systemic evil took in their lives. That was the world from which Jesus and the apostles called people to turn away. That was the evil Jesus resisted, not the hyper-individualized, puritanical “sin” of evangelical Christianity (that was invented later). The reason this understanding of the gospels is opposed is obvious: It calls us to consider our own temporal order and our own position within it. No one wants to do that, but Jesus addresses that very thing in the gospels over and over.

(Speaking of empire, see Why Christianity Is About the Corporate Empire We Live In Today.)

There is no question whether this take on the gospels results from an interpretative framework external to the text. It is impossible to derive meaning from a text without placing an interpretive frame around it. The question is, what informs that interpretive frame? You speak of “a plain reading.” There is no such thing.

(See my post: Scripture Is One Thing – Your Interpretation of It Is Another.)

An authoritative interpretation is informed by linguistic scholarship of the text and similar texts, its social, cultural, and political contexts developed through historical research, and its material context as contributed by archaeology. Authentic biblical scholarship relies on a complex of combined expertise developed over time. What comes from that expertise amounts to data about the text that inform its interpretation.

An ignorant interpretation is informed by ideas in the minds of later readers, by other texts unlike it, and by the reader’s own material, social, cultural, and political contexts unconsciously and uncritically read into the text. When such interpretations are developed into principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true, the results amount to dogma concerning the text. The text is retrofitted to the dogma which then informs its interpretation.

I’m with biblical scholar Daniel McClellan who says we need “data over dogma.”

Now about how you and I were taught to interpret the gospels. Evangelical Christianity is an eighteenth-century American/British synthesis of the following ideas:

• Sin as the sole defining problem of human existence

• A God inherently displeased with sinful humanity

• A sinful humanity inherently displeasing to God

• Factual, supernatural, eternal hell

• Emotional fervor

• Individual, personal conversion experience through faith in and surrender to Christ

• Inward assurance of salvation thereafter

• Correctness of belief

It should be noted that Christianity combining this particular set of pre-existing elements did not exist in this form before the eighteenth-century revival movement that brought them together. The scriptural basis for such a combination of elements requires carefully selecting passages removed from their contexts and assembled as a retrofit. If one were to develop an expository outline of this form of Christianity and place it next to a list summarizing the basic gospel teachings of Jesus, and the essence of the apostles’ instructions to the early church, one would find two different things.

Many of these ideas were developed long after the epistles and gospels were written. They rely on Augustine’s ideas about original sin developed in the fifth century, on theological concepts related to the crucifixion that developed in the early Middle Ages in response to immediate sociopolitical conditions, on Anselm’s satisfaction view of atonement developed late in the eleventh century, on fanciful ideas from the Inferno portion of Dante’s La Divina Commedia, on the inventive English mistranslation of the Latin biblical terms gehennæ and the Greek γέενναν (Gehenna), on the personal hang-ups that caused Martin Luther to interpret Romans the way he did, on the Pietist emphasis on individual devotion and religious fervor, on the preaching of Jonathan Edwards et al, on what works to get young, manipulable people whipped into a frenzy, on a concept of individual, personal conversion experience developed by the Puritans, on the Calvinist doctrine of the perseverance of the saints, and a Presbyterian emphasis on doctrinal precision.

See any of the following:

Eternal Damnation Was Invented 400 Years After Jesus

How Crucifixion Took Center Stage 700 Years After the Gospels

Jesus Dying in Your Place Was Invented 1000 Years After Jesus

Is Hell Real, Or About Vivid Imagination and Bad Translation?

Luther’s Personal Issues and the Protestant Concept of Salvation (coming March 19)

All these various influences were combined to produce a uniquely American, evangelical form of Protestantism that placed great importance on seasons of revival, characterized by outpourings of the Holy Spirit, as evidenced by the emotional responses of sinners having individual, personal conversion experiences. They have little to do with the many scriptural proof texts to which they are retrofitted. Put another way, none of these combined elements is contained in any authoritative interpretation of scripture.

So that’s where we are. You have your frame and I have mine. Mine used to look a lot more like yours. Thank you for the opportunity to respond to your question, and for a whetstone to sharpen my opinions.