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

its genealogy with Abraham. So, Luke begins with Adam. It also tells the story of angels announcing Jesus’ birth, and it even has the unborn John the Baptist leaping for joy in his mother’s womb when she meets up with the pregnant Mary. Anti-choice advocates make a big to-do about this moment.
    The author of Luke was a physician, and probably a converted Gentile. He was interested in promoting Jesus to non-Jews. If Matthew’s messiah was corned beef on rye, Luke’s was ham on white with mayo. The author of Luke admits right up front that his entire story is second hand information, and he doesn’t cite Old Testament verses because Gentile audiences wouldn’t know them.
    Luke is also aimed at the pundits and opinion-makers of ancient Rome, and it emphasizes Christ’s relevance to current events, along with a concern for the poor, for women, and for everyone else. Luke was written sometime after A.D. 80, by which time Christians started concentrating on pagan recruits because most Jews were content with the religion they had.
    The Gospel of John—Jesus the Cosmic Savior
     
    Alright, then. Mark begins with Jesus’ baptism, Matthew with his birth, and Luke with a genealogy going back to Adam. The author of John tops this by making Jesus eternal, a cohort of God the Father, the “uncreated Creator.” By John’s time, around A.D. 100, the image of Jesus had evolved into ever more grand and mystical forms—from the roving healer of Galilee to God incarnate. Consequently, it was no longer his teachings you were supposed to obsess over—it was him. Jesus was now life’s be-all and end-all, soup-to-nuts, everything but the kitchen sink, plus the kitchen sink, plus the bathtub, the YMCA swimming pool, and the Mediterranean Sea. You couldn’t dwell on him enough.
    The Gospel of John begins by referring to Jesus as the logos , a Greek word meaning “the word.” This idea had many interpretations, both far out and far in. Some saw the logos as the great ordering principle of the universe. For John that meant Jesus because, for him, everything Jesus did had cosmic significance.
    The Gospel of John is spiritual, abstract, and pretty woo-woo. You get the feeling the writer would’ve been comfortable sitting on the floor of a college dorm room around 3 a.m., twisting up a fatty and having one of those conversations about the whole universe being, like, a dust speck on the fingernail of some giant super-being. Or about how everything is kinda just vibrations in the fabric of ten-dimensional space-time. Or, like, maybe we’re all just, uh…what are we talkin’ about, dude? Oh, yeah. The universe… That’s kind of where his head was at.
    Among the Gospels, John is the odd man out. Because the first three Gospels are so similar, they’re called the Synoptic Gospels ( optic = look, syn = alike), and they clash with John time and again. Example: the Synoptic Gospels have Jesus on his mission for about a year before he’s crucified, while John’s author puts him on the road for three. John’s Jesus makes several trips to Jerusalem, not just one as in the others. His Jesus is always in control and never expresses any doubt about who he is or what he’s doing, unlike the more human Jesus in Mark. You could call John’s account revisionist history, if any of this was actual history.
    To his credit, the author of John does come up with many poetic passages, some so compelling that even sign painters at NASCAR rallies advertise them. The favorite is John 3:16 —
     
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
     
    It’s a beautiful verse, and you can understand its appeal. But there’s a lot more than this to the story of God’s comeback tour.
    The New Testament
     
    From the start, the Christian faith had to pull a neat trick. It was a very new take on some very old ideas. It sounds like every TV executive’s dream: Something fresh and new