Banned Questions About Jesus

Christian D Piatt

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780827202702
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

• Did Jesus ever have sex?
• Was Jesus ever wrong?
• Do people have to choose to follow Jesus to go to heaven?

Ever get the feeling that you can't ask those kinds of questions at church? But if we can't ask the tough, keep-you-awake-at-night questions within our faith communities, then what good are those communities? Listen in as more than a dozen contributors-whose ranks include a lawyer, a recovering achiever/lapsed vegetarian, ministers (ordained and not ordained), and more-discuss the questions your Sunday school teachers were afraid to answer.

1. Why would God send Jesus as the sacrificial lamb of God, dying for the sins of the world, instead of just destroying sin or perhaps offering grace and forgiveness to the very ones created by God? Why does an all-powerful being need a mediator anyway?

Chris Haw

Who is…?

Chris Haw

I apparently grind my teeth at night, perhaps
in anticipation of my eternal destiny.

A. I have found it important for my mind to get the “sacrificial lamb” idea back into working shape by, for example, considering how Jesus also died from the sins of the world. A terrible steamroller of mob violence, groupthink, and sacred violence struck down Jesus—as it struck down many others. A multitude of our sins, not God, killed Jesus. What is hopeful, however, is how he did not squirm under the temptations to violate love (even toward his enemy) and reduce himself to the level of his torturers and accusers. This fortuitous and righteous display of love is not tangential to his mission—for God is love. This witness is salvific not only because it is a good example to live by—which it is—but also because it is now part of the human story. Humanity has a chance—for at least one of its members lived in truth.

As to a “mediator” this seems (at least) like a confusion of words: Forgiveness needs mediation like a sentence needs words. When I forgive you for stealing my couch, I need the mediation of an action or a word to make my forgiveness real—or else it is mere sentiment in my mind. But to go even further beyond a mediated forgiveness, and enter into truth and reconciliation, you are going to need to also return my couch! Is that not how the metaphor of the “Word of God made flesh” works? We need at least one human not only to receive God’s mercy—which has been latent in the universe since before it began—but also to return God’s couch, so to speak; Jesus, the tradition seems to say, is the human to have done so.

And for what it is worth, the “sending his son” verse should not be understood as God killing someone. (Did God’s denunciation of human sacrifice not begin with the binding of Isaac?) No, We killed God’s Son, and it was sinful and unjust; Jesus’ freely accepting his (pseudolegal) mob scapegoating does not legitimize it but instead attempts to overcome it with love. Thus John 3:16–21 should be understood constructively as God sending us righteousness incarnate—the way of true love in visible expression—not a great person to torture and satiate a bloodlust.

Lee C. Camp

Who is…?

Lee C. Camp

I like playing the upright bass.

A. There is a long and complex tradition of varying interpretations of the meaning of the death of Jesus. The early church primarily thought of the death of Jesus as a victory over the powers of sin and death. Sin was not understood merely as the willful act of breaking God’s rules, but as a power that enslaved and corrupted God’s good creation. Personified in Satan, that power was always pulling humans down to the grave, punishment, and wrath. In Jesus, God overcame the rebellious powers through suffering love.

In the medieval era, another trajectory became predominant in the West. Anselm of Canterbury argued that a God-man was necessitated because of the great gravity of sin: Sin dishonored God, and humankind had to make some reparation, some satisfaction for sin. Humankind was unable to make such a repayment, and thus Jesus became the substitute, restoring the honor due to God through his obedience unto death. By the sixteenth century, John Calvin focused on punishment: Because of the immensity of humankind’s sin, God’s wrath demanded punishment. Jesus became the substitute punishment.

Peter Abelard, a contemporary with Anselm, argued that it was neither reparation nor punishment that God demanded, but repentance. Thus the loving example of Jesus effects a change in the heart of humankind, bringing about such repentance.

There has been renewed attention to this doctrine in the last number of decades: Numerous interpreters are assessing the variety in the Christian tradition not as mutually exclusive and competing interpretations but as metaphors—each having its own particular strengths and weaknesses—that give us different glimpses of the profound historical fact of a crucified Messiah.

Jarrod McKenna

Who is…?

Jarrod McKenna

I think Žižek is right in insisting trivial “interesting facts”
about the author function as a form of propaganda to show
we are “balanced,” that is, “he’s not just a crazy activist
he also likes Scrabble and long walks on the beach.”

A. Ever read Leviticus 16? Odd text. Yet French anthropologist René Girard reminds us that, despite how primitive Leviticus 16 might seem to us, every culture creates “scapegoats.”

Scapegoats are those we blame to keep us in the dark to what has shaped us, namely, the systems that demand victims. Nero put early Christians to the stake. Europe burnt powerful women as witches. Magisterial reformers drowned the Anabaptists. Colonizers deliberately infected indigenous peoples with smallpox. Nazis took millions of Jews to the gas chambers. Jim Crow America lynched black America. The Australian government imprisons “boat people” seeking refuge. A Christian school fires a teacher because of her sexual orientation despite her passion for Jesus. To maintain their place in the “cool group,” kids universally seek out and identify “geeks.” Guantanamo tortures innocents, fearing they are terrorists. All this is done to keep us “safe,” to maintain “order,” to protect “us,” and restore “peace.” In the face of this reality, our reality, “total depravity” seems optimistic.

The gospel is not that some deity takes out its rage on an innocent victim so he doesn’t have to take it out on all of us eternally. This is a diabolical lie dressed up in Christian drag that reverses the gospel, making it the same old bad news, while concealing that Jesus is victorious over it. God doesn’t need blood. God doesn’t need a mediator. We do!

In Jesus, God knowingly becomes the scapegoat, as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). The lamb of God is NOT offered to God by humanity but is God offered to us to enable a new humanity. God is reconciling the world to Godself through Christ by knowingly becoming our victim, exposing this idolatrous system that promises order, safety, peace, and protection in exchange for victims. In the resurrection, we are all confronted with the grace of our Creator in the forgiving victim who sends the Holy Spirit to shape a new world where no more blood needs to be shed.

Christian Piatt

A. The two-dollar phrase for the concept raised in this question is “substitutionary atonement” or “blood atonement.” The idea that the sacrifice of a living creature was required to appease God for one’s sins has been around for a lot longer than Christianity has. Mentions of animal sacrifice can be found throughout the Old Testament, and Abraham’s faith is even tested when he’s asked to sacrifice his own son.

This value of sacrifice as part of one’s faith was also common in the Roman culture, in which the types of sacrifices usually were specific to the characteristics of the gods being worshipped. So a god of the harvest would require an offering of produce, and so on. Some pre-Christian cultures, such as those from Carthage, even practiced human sacrifice, though the Romans generally condemned it.

In the fourth century C.E., Gregory of Nyssa proposed that Jesus’ death was an act of liberation, freeing humanity from enslavement to Satan. Seven hundred years later, Anselm developed what was then known as the “satisfaction” concept, which is closest to what we think of now as atonement theology. Jesus, being both human and perfectly divine, was the only sacrifice that could appease the offense to God by human sin. This idea pointed to Romans and Galatians as support for this interpretation.

Around the same time, a theologian named Peter Abelard proposed that it actually was Jesus’ response of pure—some might emphasize nonviolent—love in the face of violence, hatred, and death that was transformative in the human psyche, reorienting us toward a theology of sacrificial love over justice or atonement. Walter Wink has gone a step further and claimed that atonement theology is a corruption of the gospel, focusing on an act of violence rather than the values of peaceful humility and compassion lived and taught by Christ.

Pablo A. Jiménez

Who is…?

Pablo A. Jiménez

I am a Latin percussionist.

A. Metaphors, metaphors; religious language is poetic. Given that God is “Other,” we can hardly understand who God is. Therefore, we use metaphorical language in order to convey our ideas about God. This language is always contextual. This means that we usually compare God to things we know, particularly to creation. In theology, this is called the analogia entis, a Latin phrase, which means the “analogy of being.”

Therefore, it should not surprise us that ancient religious language is based on metaphors. The question addresses three common metaphors. The first is an agricultural one, in which Jesus is compared to a lamb that is sacrificed for the benefit of the community. The second is a legal metaphor that compares the sinner with people condemned to death for their crimes. The third is a political image, which describes Jesus as the mediator between the people and God, the powerful King.

Every generation has the responsibility of rethinking the faith, searching for new and more effective metaphors to describe the relationship between God and humanity. However, before tossing out the old metaphors, we need to understand their meaning. In a way, theology is a dialogue across generations, time, and space. Before developing our own theological language, we must try to understand what other generations said about God, Jesus, and other common theological themes.

Amy Reeder Worley

Who is…?

Amy Reeder Worley

I am from Mount Sterling, Kentucky, the home of Mt.
Sterling Court Days, a festival where a person can
buy a gun, ammo, tube socks, black market CDs, and
corndogs, all within one mile of the courthouse.

A. The idea that Jesus died as the “sacrificial lamb of God” is called “substitutionary atonement,” which is a fancy way of saying that Jesus was crucified as a sacrifice to pay the “sin debt” of humanity. Although for many Christians atonement is essential to Christianity, it wasn’t articulated fully until a thousand years after Jesus’ death in a treatise by Anselm of Canterbury. Regrettably, many people are unaware of a body of biblical scholarship skeptical of subst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Why a Book about Banned Questions
• 1. Why would God send Jesus as the sacrificial lamb of God, dying for the sins of the world, instead of just destroying sin or perhaps offering grace and forgiveness to the very ones created by God? Why does an all-powerful being need a mediator anyway
• 2. Many Christians embrace the phrase, “I believe Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, and I accept him as my personal Lord and Savior,” but I can’t find this anywhere in the Bible. Where did it come from
• 3. In John 14:6, Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Do people have to choose to follow Jesus to go to heaven? And what does it mean to choose his way
• 4. Did Jesus ever have sex? Did he have sexual fantasies and desires
• 5. Why did Jesus have to suffer so much before he died? Or did he have to
• 6. What happened during the “missing years” of Jesus’ life, unaccounted for in the Bible
• 7. How would we actually know if Jesus came again? Wouldn’t we just kill him all over again
• 8. Why should I believe that Jesus was resurrected? What does it mean to the Christian faith if he wasn’t resurrected
• 9. A woman in Mark 7:25–30 and Matthew 15:21–28 asks Jesus to heal her daughter, but his first response is to deny her help and call her a dog. Isn’t this a cruel, and pretty un-Christlike, response
• 10. Does it really matter if Jesus was born to a virgin or not? What if Mary wasn’t a virgin or if Joseph (or someone else) was the father
• 11. Did Jesus really live a life without any sin? What do we base this on? And does it matter? Why
• 12. Why did Jesus cry out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” from the cross? Did God really abandon him? If so, doesn’t this mean that Jesus wasn’t actually God
• 13. Why doesn’t there seem to be any physical evidence of Jesus’ life
• 14. In Isaiah, Satan is referred to as the “Morning Star” and so is Jesus in Revelation. In 1 Peter, Satan is compared to a lion, and in Revelation, Jesus too is called a lion. Are these parallels intentional? Why
• 15. Aren’t Jesus’ miracles similar to other healings and miracles recorded outside the Jewish and Christian tradition
• 16. The Bible says that Jesus had siblings. Does that mean that there are people alive today who are from his family’s bloodline? Where are they? Who are they
• 17. When Jesus participates in the Last Supper, doesn’t that mean he’s eating his own body and drinking his own blood
• 18. Mormons believe that Jesus appeared to thousands of North American natives. Why do so many other Christians not believe this happened
• 19. What’s the big deal with the Shroud of Turin? Is it real or fake? If it’s fake, why create it in the first place
• 20. Why did Jesus instruct people at times not to tell others who he was? Wasn’t this contrary to the idea of spreading the good news of his presence on earth
• 21. Did Jesus understand himself to be God, like God, in line with God, or something else? Did he understand this from birth? If not, then when did he begin to understand it and how
• 22. Is it possible that Jesus married and had children
• 23. If Jesus could resurrect people, why didn’t he do it more often
• 24. Galatians 3:22: Is it the faith of Jesus or faith in Jesus that’s the key
• 25. Was Jesus a pacifist
• 26. Why would Jesus supply wine for a party as his first “miracle”? Doesn’t this seem more like a trick than a miracle? And does this mean he condoned drinking
• 27. Where was Jesus for the time between his death and resurrection
• 28. Most of our images of Jesus portray him with long blond or brown hair, blue eyes, and white skin. But what did Jesus really look like
• 29. Who do people of the Jewish faith believe Jesus was? A prophet? Just a man? Why don’t they believe he was the Messiah
• 30. When Jesus was resurrected, why did he still have wounds on his body
• 31. Does Jesus ever refer to the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) in his ministry? If so, does he identify himself as part of that Trinity? If not, where did it come from
• 32. What are the Jesus papers? Are they true? What do they mean to the Christian faith
• 33. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus drives the money changers out of the temple just before he dies, but in John, this happens at the beginning of his ministry. Why are these accounts different
• 34. In Mark 9:37, Jesus says, “Whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” Is Jesus saying here that he is not actually God
• 35. Aside from the women and the disciples, are there any recorded stories of personal interaction between Jesus and other people after he was resurrected? Why wouldn’t he appear to more people? And why did he stay on earth for forty days? Is that symbolically important
• 36. Was Jesus ever sick? If so, why not just heal himself
• 37. After Jesus’ baptism, he is tempted in the desert several times. How is this different from when he teaches in Matthew 5:28 that “everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart”? Aren’t these basically the same thing
• 38. In several places in the gospels, Jesus suggests that even he doesn’t know when he will return again to earth. Why not? Is God keeping it a secret from him? And if Jesus actually is God, shouldn’t he know everything
• 39. Did Jesus believe God wanted him to be crucified? If so, why did he ask God, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me” in the garden of Gethsemane
• 40. Was Jesus ever wrong? About what
• 41. Some gospel accounts trace Jesus’ lineage to King David through Mary’s family, while others trace it through Joseph. Is one of these wrong? And why trace it through Joseph if he wasn’t Jesus’ father by blood
• 42. Did Jesus study other religions? Which ones
• 43. In John 20:2, it mentions “the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved.” Who is this? Why not name that person? Was it a man or woman? What kind of “love” is the author talking about
• 44. It seems like there are a lot of parallels between the stories of Jesus and the Egyptian mythology character, Horus. Could timelines be wrong somewhere, and could it be that the stories of Horus and Jesus actually are referring to the same person
• 45. Why were books like the infancy gospels of James and Thomas not included in the Bible, especially since they include stories about Jesus’ childhood not included in the other gospels
• 46. Jesus forgave people of their sins before he died. How could he do this if he actually had to die in order to save us from sin
• 47. Jesus broke certain biblical laws by healing on the Sabbath, associating with non-Jews, and not keeping all of the kosher laws. So how do we know which rules to follow and which are irrelevant to us today
• 48. Why would God put an unwed teenage mother through the difficulty of pregnancy, childbirth, and trying to explain how she got pregnant
• 49. Why did Jesus heal some people by touching them, some when they touched him, and others without even meeting them? And then why use mud to cure a man from blindness? Did he really need this
• 50. Did Jesus have a clue that people would call him Messiah or God Incarnate? Would he have tolerated these labels
• Contributors List, Biographies, and Suggested Resources
• God Image Survey