What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? by Thomas Quinn Read Free Book Online

men were anointed upon assuming office with oils poured onto their heads. As Israel’s hoped-for warrior prince was re-imagined into a divine wonderworker, “the anointed one” became “The Anointed One.” A messiah became The Messiah . You’d think the guy could walk on water.
    Jesus and the Four Christs
     
    The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are regarded as the only “official” records of Jesus’ life, and each one presents a somewhat different view of him designed for a specific readership. Of the many Jesus stories written, these are the only four that made it through the 400-year sifting process of popular acceptance and Church approval. As I said, none of the writers ever met Jesus, and we have no independent accounts of the events of his life by non-Christians living at the time. These stories are essentially all we’ve got.
    It also helps to remember that these writers were evangelists—religious door-to-door salesmen. They weren’t writing newspaper reports of events they witnessed. They were scripting infomercials based on stories that originated through word-of-mouth…er, that is, Oral Tradition. (That sounds better than rumor.)
    The Gospel of Mark—Jesus the Folk Healer
     
    The most creative of the four Gospel writers was the man who produced his story first—the author of Mark. He wrote it around A.D. 70, but scholars don’t know who he was or if he even lived in Palestine. Geographical errors in his stories suggest he didn’t know the region all that well.
    The year 70 was not a happy time in Jerusalem, to say the least. The Romans had ended a four-year Jewish rebellion by sacking the city and destroying the Temple, thus ending Jewish control. It was a historic disaster, and the Gospel of Mark may be a product of that event. A bit of good news in a dark time.
    The most remarkable thing about this book is how unremarkable Jesus is. It’s the least fantastical of the Gospels.
    There’s no miraculous birth story. Jesus does perform miracles but, in Mark, he’s mostly a wandering sage and healer from Nazareth.
    As mentioned, Mark depends a lot on the Septuagint— specifically, passages from the books of Psalms, Isaiah and Wisdom . Mark also borrows ideas from Old Testament tales about Elijah and Elisha, a mentor-student pair of prophets whose stories included oldies but goodies like faith healings and raising the dead.
    The intended audience for Mark was country bumpkins—the poor and uneducated; the folks who could really use a savior. Mark’s Jesus worked like a down-to-earth folk healer; a man with the common touch. The kind of guy you’d like to have a beer with. Or at least a water-to-wine cooler.
    The Gospel of Matthew—Jesus the King
     
    If Mark pitched to the country cousins, Matthew went for the city slickers. It was meant to impress sophisticated urban Jews and it wouldn’t suffice to cast Jesus as a simple itinerant preacher with a bag of tricks. Matthew’s readership cared about social rank, so Jesus had to be a king. To that end, Matt adds a preamble to Mark and opens by giving Jesus a royal bloodline stemming back to Abraham, David, and Solomon. Jesus is portrayed as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy—something educated Jews knew well. And Matthew doesn’t shrink from taking verses out of context or bending their original meaning to make that point.
    While this Gospel is the most Jewish because it so frequently cites the Hebrew Bible, it was also the favorite of the early Catholic Church. Mark’s account starts with Jesus’ baptism, but Matt does it one better by beginning with his birth. It’s Matthew that gives us the Star of Bethlehem story to establish Jesus as divine from the get-go.
    The Gospel of Luke—Converting the Gentiles
     
    If Matthew established that Jesus was special from day one, the author of Luke, writing years if not decades later, and also basing his story on Mark, had to show that Jesus was special before day one. Matthew starts