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JESUS: The Spirit of the Lord Is on Me


("I am a Christian woman, and what I do know about Christianity is that we bear no prejudice, and everybody is welcome." — Lady Gaga)*

JESUS: The Spirit of the Lord Is Upon Me

Inside the synagogue, Mary inches her way to the front. She has heard from a passerby that her son is back from his travels and is now in the synagogue to preach from the scripture, as wont his usual way. And sure enough, Jesus is reading from the book of Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, he has consecrated me to bring good news to poor people, to set the oppressed at liberty, to proclaim a year of favor from the Lord.”

He speaks with authority, the words coming out of his conviction, not like the scribes who ordinarily read the scripture on the sabbath. Jesus compares himself to Elisha the prophet, and to Elijah before him, and how the Lord will judge even the Jews. (There were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed but only Naaman the Syrian. Lk 4.27). He mumbles thru his breath, “No prophet is accepted in his hometown... “

But a congregant overhears what he has just said. “How dare you compare yourself to the prophets? You are just the son of Mary, and we know your brothers and sisters!"

"Today this scripture is fulfilled in me... "

"Blasphemy! He blasphemes!" The crowd surge toward him to kill him but he runs to the back door and to the secret tunnel the rabbis use to escape Roman soldiers.
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Notes:  "My view of Jesus is that he was an apocalyptic prophet who expected that God would very soon intervene in the course of history to overthrow the forces of evil in a cataclysmic act of judgment, in order to bring in a miraculous utopian kingdom on earth in which there was no more pain, misery, or suffering." (Bart Ehrman, The Bart Ehrman Blog, May 28, 2017, ehrmanblog.org)

 Jesus, like the saints, was an observant Jew who believed within the parameters of his tradition. And all saints are beatified for their orthodox belief within their faith (Karen Armstrong).

 Jesus son of Mary not Joseph. Aside from the irrational and unhistorical religious tales contained in both the official and unofficial corpus of early Christian texts, we have virtually nothing to help us answer any question about the alleged historicity of Jesus.

 In the words of the atheist bible scholar who believes in a historical human Jesus, Bart Ehrman:
 What do Greek and Roman sources have to say about Jesus? ... They have absolutely nothing to say about him. He is never discussed, challenged, attacked, maligned, or talked about in any way in any surviving pagan source of the period... In no first-century Greek or Roman (pagan) source is Jesus mentioned. (Michael A Sherlock, Was Jesus the illegitimate son of a lying adulteress?, Dec 22, 2015, michaelsherlockauthor.wordpress.com)
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* from Christianity’s future looks more like Lady Gaga than Mike Pence, by Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, Jan 25, 2019, CNN, cnn.com

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