Orthodoxy unfortunately bestowed upon us Christians two distortions of our Savior, and these have led to a misuse of Christianity and misunderstanding of its message. What I call "Generalissimo Jesus" comes from the figure of Jesus presented in The Book of Revelations, written around 95 CE and a disputed text not admitted into the Christian Canon until the Council of Carthage in 397 CE (though Martin Luther in the 16th century reclassified it as a "disputed text"). Revelations presents a mythologized Jesus, re-imagined as a warrior-god of martial justice, leading the Heavenly Host in a Manichaean fantasy of elemental war between Good and Evil. This image of Jesus from Revelations is a source for the inspiration of the Crusades, in which mentally polarized Christians put thousands of Jews, Muslims, nature-worshiping pagans, and Christians of other sects to the sword. Few progressive Christians would argue with me that this version Jesus, dreamed up by a dubious seer, John of Patmos (Revelations is also known as The Apocalypse of John) has anything to do with the Jesus who taught the Jewish peasants of Galilee the hope of love amidst their suffering at the hands of Romans who onerously taxed them and continually abused them with their Legionary enforcers.
With the aspect I call "Christ the Asker of Sacrifice", I am entering into a conflict with a larger portion of the devout. Many early Christians, and later, Christians deemed heretical by either Catholic or Protestant authorities, offered up their lives to their persecutors in the name of what they believed in, because they thought they were following a light to which others were blind. These martyrs took as their model Jesus himself, who died on the cross as punishment by the Romans for his stated beliefs, which ran counter to Roman sociopolitical ideology and that of the colluding ruling native party in Palestine. The Christians who died in the arenas, torture chambers, execution blocks, burning stakes and crucifixion mounts were truly brave, forthright, and noble souls. Their courageous deaths for the cause of what they believed to be the light of truth even inspired some of the witnesses of their grisly and heartbreaking deaths to convert.
But my question is this: are such acts of self-sacrifice what Jesus the Rabbi would have wanted? Wasn't Jesus trying to teach a spiritual way of living, practicing attitudes and insights that brought about inclusive harmony with one's fellow human beings? Shouldn't Jesus' death have been the final one in the name of faith? Was his famous dictum, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is His" merely referring to the bankrupting taxes the Romans were imposing on the poor? Might Jesus have also meant: make the motions of obedience to the transitory tyrants of this ephemeral world, so long as you love each other as God loves you?
Think of what these martyrs might have accomplished in the form of uplifting their spiritual communities had they not cut short their lives in the name of their faith. In one sense, they can be said to be committed to honesty even unto the pain of death. But if they had made a hollow show of making an offering to the reigning emperor as "deity", their lives would have been spared. After all, no one can really control what a person thinks or believes inside. For the sake of the living, the martyrs could have chosen life and pretended to be sincere in the renunciation of their faith to satisfy the authorities, of whom the latter otherwise had no appreciation for the subtleties of human compassion which were the stock and trade of Christian communities. We must consider that if most Christians had not pretended to foreswear their faith and put on a show of worshiping whatever cretinous emperor was then in power, there would not have been enough Christians to survive in order to carry on the faith itself.
One has to take into account, in light of modern psychology, that perhaps there existed an unconscious reason for those Christians who did choose to interpret Christ's sacrifice on the cross as a model to follow in their own individual lives. These martyrs may have found that life in the world in which they lived had become simply unbearable. Early Christian communities were human oases for both the socially downtrodden and the better-off, the latter of whom had developed a moral conscience that could no longer exist mentally in the highly privileged graces of Rome. Under the Imperial social order, very few were extended human decency, and loyalty to wealth and power were the only de facto virtues of Roman society. For many early Christians, the agonies of the greater world about them, so committed as it was to moral turpitude, may have looked like it would go on forever.
If this was their perception (a quite forgivable one), it can be understood today why some might have chosen martyrdom, not only for the conscious reason of wanting to be true to the perceived tenets of one's faith, but also for the inward need to escape from a world that had become unbearable and seemed hopeless. Indeed their religious leaders may have encouraged them to submit to martyrdom as a microcosmic act of sacrifice to God, congruent with Jesus' death, which they understood to be a macrocosmic offering on the altar of salvation. These religious leaders and their desperate followers may have believed that through these deaths by martyrdom, God might be cajoled into bringing an end to the immoral society of their oppressors.
Which brings us back to Revelations, a book that taught Christians that the injustices in the world could only be solved by divinely intervening violence. With regard to today's suicide-bombers and the grief to the innocent they cause in the name of faith, the concept of martyrdom within any religious tradition must be seriously re-examined. Even the Christian martyrs of long ago caused collateral damage in the form of the grieving parents, spouses, children and friends they left behind by their voluntary deaths.
Giving one's life to save another is one thing, and such an act is a fundamental form of human altruism, something Jesus, no doubt, would have approved, if he believed that circumstances and the greater good necessitated such an ultimate act of kindness. However, giving up one's life as an embodied symbol of faith seems problematic in terms of the purpose of the path Jesus the Rabbi taught while he walked this Earth.
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