Welcome to the "Jesus before Christianity" Blog

Albert Nolan's book Jesus before Christianity, though its 2001 edition marked its 25th anniversary, still speaks loudly to us in the post-9/11 age. So much has changed since the original 1976 publication of this compelling re-interpretation of the Christian Gospels in the light of what then seemed the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation — as Nolan himself acknowledges in his 2001 introduction. We still await the coming of the "kingdom" Jesus spoke of, just as we did then. But now, it's fair to say, the "impending catastrophe" which is the divine kingdom's possible alternative in the short run (see p. 171) is a different form of explosiveness.

To say that that current potential for destruction equates just to foreign terrorism, or religious fundamentalism abroad, or Islamic enmity toward the West is to ignore that, even here in America, we are at each others' throats. Just listen to any radio talk show on any given day, if you don't believe that we have turned into an in-your-face culture, ready to fight our "enemies" at the drop of a hat.

In his book, Nolan shows that Jesus stood for just one shocking, yet not so surprising, thing: faith in the redemptive and restorative power of human compassion and solidarity.

Here in the blog I'd like to try to unpack that overarching Gospel truth. My motives for doing so are many. Perhaps the most important is that I find I'm of two minds about Nolan's interpretation. I would like to try to resolve that duality.

One part of me resonates deeply with the clarity with which Nolan shows Jesus' divinity to be real ... as long as real divinity is understood to be, first and foremost, the power of truth. Nolan writes:

Those who were convinced by Jesus were convinced by the persuasiveness of the truth itself. Jesus was uniquely in harmony with all that is true and real in life. His spontaneous compassion for people precluded any kind of alienation or artificiality. His spontaneous faith in the power of goodness and truth is indicative of a life without falsehood and illusion. One could say that he was absorbed by the truth, or, better still, that in him the truth became flesh. (pp. 168-9)

On the other hand, there is a second part of me that raises all sorts of objections. What those specific objections are will, I hope, become evident as I proceed to make my posts to this blog. More briefly, I suppose the things I fret about to fall in two broad categories. First, as a practicing Catholic I wonder whether such of Nolan's strategies as skirting the issue of whether Jesus actually underwent a bodily resurrection or actually performed miracles that defy nature's laws doesn't eat away at the foundations of the Christian belief system as I have received it.

Second, I wonder whether I have it in me to honor the truth that, per Nolan, "our search, like his [Jesus'] search, is primarily a search for orthopraxis (true practice) rather than orthodoxy (true doctrine)." Though I am now a Catholic, my family's roots are in Protestantism, in which the practice of Christian "good works" takes a backseat to "faith alone" as the road to salvation. But Nolan leaves no doubt that "faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead" (James 2:17).


But orthopraxis means not putting first in one's life — not just in one's stated belief system, in one's life — anything other than what Jesus stood for. The "something in your life which operates as your source of meaning and strength, something which you regard, at least implicitly, as the supreme power in your life" (p. 165) must not be a false god-with-a-little-g. "If you think of your highest value as a cause, an ideal or an ideology, you will have a god with a small letter," Nolan continues (p. 166). Assuming, that is, that what you put in first place is not what Jesus put in first place.

I'm not entirely sure what false, little-g god I erroneously put in my own personal first place; it's something I hope to discover more about as I blog. For now, the best guess I can make is that my false god is the soliciting and gaining of the approval of others. It's not just the approval of specific people in particular circumstances, though, that I seek. No, I carry around with me, in my head, a sort of all-purpose, disembodied judge whose potential disapproval forestalls me from doing anything as confrontational as, say, Jesus' gleaning grain on the sabbbath or cleansing the Temple courtyard of the traders and money-changers.

One of the passages from Nolan's book which "convicts" me of this notion about myself is where Nolan writes that the Jesus of the Gospels is:

... a man who is independent of others because of a positive insight which has made every possible kind of dependency superfluous. There are no traces of fear in Jesus. He was not afraid of creating a scandal or losing his reputation or even losing his life. ... Jesus did nothing and compromised on nothing for the sake of even a modicum of prestige in the eyes of others. He did not seek anyone's approval, not even the approval of "the greatest man born of woman" [i.e., John the Baptist]. (p. 144)

There's a paradox here. On the one hand, Jesus preached solidarity. On the other, he got downright confrontational with, say, those who extorted money from the poor. The Temple traders and money-changers were, in today's lingo, "gouging" the have-nots. The chief priests and elders in the official hieararchy of the Temple were, in effect, conniving with them ... as later they would connive with the Roman governor, Pilate, to have Jesus executed. Up with that Jesus would not put, so he got in-your-face about it.

And here I am, claiming that today's rampant in-your-faceness is not what Jesus would want.

Is that claim justified by Jesus before Christianity? Or is it something I'm reading into the book, based on my own false, never-get-confrontational god? In this blog I hope to work toward locating some sort of way to answer these and similar riddles.


In so doing, I plan to examine the Nolan book backwards. I'll start with the last, concluding chapter, "Faith in Jesus," and work my way back toward the first, introductory chapter, "A New Perspective." In some cases, I may combine chapters, as with the ones titled "The 'Kingdom' and (something)," where the "something" can be money, or prestige, or power: false gods which are to be replaced by the solidarity Jesus extols.

To me this backwards approach makes sense, because there is really no "mystery" to what Nolan is saying, no "twist" ending to his narrative. What Nolan says at the end is just an elaboration and restatement of what he says at the beginning, as if to say, "QED." But the "proof" he gives, though he builds it logically à la that of a geometric theorem, is ultimately not one that depends on scientific or historical reasoning. It depends on our recognition that what Jesus says about life just rings true, and there's an end to it.

So a reverse exposition of Nolan's points might quite possibly "prove" to be a valuable alternative way to grasp why it is that Jesus' "claim to first-hand experience of the truth was no hollow boast" (p. 169). For ultimately, Nolan says, if we don't believe that Jesus' "authority" and "power" came wholly and purely from who he was, and not from any outside source, then we will never be able "to find our God in Jesus and what he stood for" (p. 167).