Was Jesus a Real Guy?

Okay, if you pay any attention to what I post on social media, you know that I'm not a Christian. Not an atheist either, but that's a discussion for another day. What I want to ramble on about today is the question of whether Jesus really existed. 

First, let's look at whether or not the gospels and epistles can be considered historical documents. A common misconception about historical documents is that "historical" = "true". Many of the sources for our information about historical are considered unreliable. I'm currently listening to series of podcasts on the history of Rome - it's instructive to hear how many sources either contradict themselves or are obviously biased accounts. A significant number of accounts of important periods in Roman history were written a century or more after the events that they describe. Historians compare the different accounts, sifting through them to attempt to ascertain the probable truth amid...everything else. One of the  criticisms of the Bible as a reliable source is that none of the New Testament was written contemporaneously with the events that they describe. But this was not unusual. The historical records are full of information that was compiled after years or decades of word of mouth stories being passed down. 

Another criticism is that the Bible is just one source. Christian dogma asserts that all the various books of the Bible were inspired by God, but from a neutral perspective, they are all separate books, written for different reasons with different points of view. Biblical historians are of the opinion that Mark was written first, with Matthew and Luke, influenced by Mark and a hypothetical source they call "Q", were next, and John last. Thus, for the gospels alone there are five distinct authors, and five distinct sources for any information about an historical Jesus. There are also other documents besides what made it into the Bible, the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha also contain accounts of Jesus' life. Then there's the epistles written by Paul, which predate the earliest gospel by about 20 years. In my opinion, and the opinion of many Biblical historians, Jesus did exist.

Not so fast there! I'm not saying that  the historical Jesus is identical to the Jesus described in the Bible, I'm merely saying that I think it likely that there was someone around 30 C.E. in the Roman province of Judea upon whom the Jesus of the Bible was based. I also think that it's likely that he actually said a lot of what the Bible said he said, at least in broad terms. Do I also think that after his death stories, myths and legends arose regarding his birth, his life and his ministry? I would be astounded, knowing human nature, if this had not happened. How many times have you heard of a politician or other public figure exaggerate the facts of his own life, or the events surrounding the founding of a large company blown up with the bad bits erased? Given that the very first written references to Jesus (Pauline Epistles) had almost 20 years (and a further 20 for the first gospel) of oral history to develop before being committed to pen and paper, it would be surprising if accretions of myth and legend hadn't attached themselves to him. 

Read from the perspective a disbeliever, many parts of the New Testament are clearly written to address and debunk what came to be regarded as heresies. Christianity, unlike just about every other major religion, was very concerned with the minutia of doctrine, with what people believed, rather than what they did. The history of the first few centuries of Christianity, before coalescing into an organized "church" was one after the other of intra-Christian disputes that most people today wouldn't think important, let alone understand. For example, one of the major divisions in the 300's C.E. was called the Arian Controversy. At one time I was taught that Arius believed that Jesus was not, as many believed, God. But the difference between the Arians and the Niceans (adherents to the Nicene Creed) was more subtle than that. Arius and his followers still believed that Jesus was God the Son, part of the Triune God, but that the Son was subordinate to the Father. That's it. There was no practical difference, just this one nitpicky thing. The controversy over whether Jesus' mother's title should be "God-bearer" or "Christ-bearer" was another bare knuckle brawl. And the New Testament is full of references to these intra-Church fights, worded in such a way that you'd hardly know there were serious debates over what made a "real" Christian behind them. So, what's the point of this whole previous paragraph? The very real possibility that not only were the gospel writers putting words in Jesus' mouth to bolster their own opinions, but that later copyists were altering the text for the same reason. If you don't buy into the belief that the Bible is a seamless whole inspired by the Almighty, then it's just people's opinions. As far as that goes, the words of Jesus are just Jesus' opinions. 

In the main, I think Jesus' gospel message as reported in the Bible is probably pretty close to what the person whom the Biblical Jesus is based upon said. There's little things here and there that were probably added in order to advance somebody's doctrinal position, or their opinion of who Jesus was. What's problematic are the supernatural aspects. Everything mundane that's written about an historical Jesus could be 100% true, which does nothing to confirm that the miracles were as well. The big difference is that the words of Jesus, while they can't be verified with complete confidence, are at least plausible - people talk all the time, charismatic preachers gather followers all the time, prominent people have an influence beyond their lifetimes all the time. What doesn't happen all the time is dudes getting up after being dead, raising other people from the dead, miraculous healing, transmutation of matter (e.g. water into wine) or the used-to-be-dead dude levitating through the clouds into what was purportedly Heaven, which can be confirmed isn't anywhere close if it exists at all. If any of that happened, it can't be confirmed, and despite claims from religious leaders (not just Christians) none of it has been replicated under controlled conditions. 

So if you believe Jesus lived, I agree with you. If you follow the broad outlines of what he is recorded to have said, it's not a bad way to live, though I feel no compulsion to do so myself. I also have no problem if you believe the supernatural aspects, just don't talk to me like it's indisputable. 

So, You Want to Join a Cult -Part XXVII - No Kool-Aid Necessary

One of the things that people misunderstand about cults is that what makes a cult cultish isn't what they believe, it's what they do. You want to believe that the earth was populated by aliens from the planet Xrts'dic 3 billion years ago, or that you get reincarnated as a rabbits? So what?, as long as those beliefs aren't hurting anyone.  Most Christians believe a number of things in common, despite differences in church governance and ritual. One of those things is that God exists as something called The Trinity, which oversimplified means that God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit are all God, not three separate gods and that neither is superior to or pre-existed the other. The doctrinal nuances and niceties are over most people's heads and what people actually believe would probably be considered heretical. The Way International didn't believe that God was a Trinity, but that Jesus was simply a man. For many mainstream Christians this was enough to label them a cult. Just as those same Christians labelled Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses as cults due to their non-mainstream view of God and Jesus. I'm not going to discuss the details of why The Way International believed that Jesus wasn't God, because I don't think it is relevant to their categorization as a cult. My own view is that the writers of the gospels and epistles, far from being inspired by God to put together a coherent narartive, were all fallible human beings who had different ideas about the nature of God and Jesus. Their disagreement needed to be explained somehow, early orthodox Christians harmonized the contradictions by coming up with The Trinity; unitarians, ignoring or explaining away verses they didn't like, came up with their own doctrine. 

No, what makes a cult is something that has little to do with the minutia of doctrine. Is there a charismatic leader who is deferred to? Does it claim to have special knowledge that no one else has access to? Does it work to cut you off from previous ties? Does it attempt to regiment and control aspects of your life? By no means does it have to be as extreme as the People's Temple in Guyana. It doesn't have to require you to dress in yellow robes like the Hare Krishna group. You aren't necessarily locked away in a "compound" like David Koresh's Branch Davidians. Usually the signs are a lot more subtle. 

When I was first involved in The Way while living in New York the cultish nature wasn't as apparent. The Long Island fellowships had grown quickly and organically and for a long time were functionally independent. When I was in the WOW Ambassador program I rationalized the level of control being because I was in a structured program, it wasn't until I moved to Lincoln that I saw that living a normal life, i.e. job, education, relationships, etc, was going to be hampered by involvement with The Way. 

Start from the beginning

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-i.html

Part XVIII

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2022/05/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-xxviii.html

Managers - Post Pandemic #2 - Maintaining Discipline and Morale

Many years ago I worked for a manager who virtually everyone viewed as a "good" manager. He had a winning personality, was pretty light on discipline and for the most part let everyone do their jobs as they saw fit. If you were getting your job done you'd certainly appreciate the absence of micromanaging and how insignificant deviations from policy were overlooked. And even two decades later, most people, if asked, would rate him a good manager. The corporate hierarchy thought he was a good manager. The problem was that his happy-go-lucky attitude not only benefitted the employees who did their job well, but it also benefitted those who chose to flout the rules. Not only did he decline to micromanage the high performing employees, but the slackers benefited from his hands off management as well. 

In this particular business, everyone theoretically worked at least one weekend day. Hours would vary somewhat based on the customer flow on a given day, but 9-5, Monday-Friday schedules weren't supposed to happen. Except that they did. One particular department manager worked part-time hours, Monday-Friday, no weekends, no evenings, no holidays. She took smoke breaks at least every hour. We were required to take a 30 minute lunch break mid-shift if we were scheduled 7 hours or more per day; she was allowed to schedule herself for 6 hours and 59 minutes (and could be found in the break room fairly often regardless). Other managers noticed. 

The point is not that any of those things shouldn't have been allowed, but that for the rest of the managers, they weren't allowed. And that it was noticed and that people grew resentful. 

So, post pandemic?

National unemployment is between 3-4%. Locally it's around 2%. As I laid out in Managers - Post Pandemic #1 http://aesduir.blogspot.com/2022/04/managers-part-xxv-post-pandemic-1-why.html people are quitting jobs rather than put up with "shit". The "churn" that has always existed has slowed down to where there's often a large time gap between a resignation and a replacement. So what does a manager do? What I've been hearing is that managers are ignoring what ordinarily would be unacceptable - coming in late, incomplete or inaccurate work, you name it. Managers are reasoning, that as tough as it is to find replacements, it's better to put up with a substandard worker than no worker at all. While I admit that in some situations this may be appropriate, in most, this would be dead wrong. Just like in my example about the "good" manager, employees notice when other employees are held to different standards, and even worse, are earning the same pay rate. A few years ago I had a problem employee in the deli of the store that I managed. He was part of a three-person team that worked the evening shift. He was lazy, incompetent and kept wandering off to use his cell phone. At some point I warned him that he would be terminated if he used his phone while on the clock again. Before the shift was over he started texting right in front of me! We were shorthanded for the rest of the week. At the end of the week one of the two remaining evening shit workers remarked that they were getting more done faster than when they had three. The remaining crew appreciated that I had gotten rid of the weak link, even though that meant more work for them. By keeping people who are not doing the job, managers are risking alienating the high performing employees. 

The final point in this post is about managers who are simply afraid that they'll need to fill in, work extra hours, or are concerned that the skill needed to replace someone is a little rusty. I've been in this position a few times in my management career. Do I really have time to drive to Humboldt every morning and deliver those papers? Can I really get all my other responsibilities done if I have to run the Frozen Department? I encountered both of those in two different management positions. In both I put up with substandard work for a long time until I was forced to take over and found out it wasn't so bad! If you've read my series on management you'll know that my theory of management is that it isn't necessarily a manager's job to get in there with the troops and work side by side - it's a manager's job, by training, coaching and delegation, to get things done. But sometimes, you have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty until you can hire and train a replacement.

White Jesus

Do White people really believe that Jesus was White? As a person of European extraction I certainly pictured him as having White European features back when I was a Christian, but I don't think I ever would have made his whiteness a hill that I'd die on. Surely there are people would though. I was also aware that other cultures pictured him in ways that reflected the way they looked. I saw more than one depiction of a Black Jesus. I've seen Asian Jesuses. I think that anyone who gave it any thought would suspect that he resembled the people who inhabit that part of the world, i.e. Arabs, Iranians - dark complexion, dark hair, dark eyes. 

There is no physical description of Jesus given in the Gospels, which would indicate that his appearance wasn't unusual for his time. There is a description in Revelation of a apocalyptic Jesus that gives him hair white as lamb's wool and feet like brass. I've heard some people say the "wool" describes a Black person's hair, and the brass indicates a dark color. I don't know. Maybe. It's the Book of Revelation; everything's weird in that book. 

A couple of things that come to mind when I hear the two extremes: (1) Jesus was white and (2) There are no white people in the Bible:

One is that the concept of "whiteness" is a fairly recent invention. During the European age of colonization and conquest Europeans used it to distinguish between themselves and the people that they needed to dehumanize in order to subjugate them. While skin color was definitely a factor in the whiteness scheme, it was not the only consideration. For example, the Irish, as far as skin color goes, one of the palest ethnicities around, were for a long time not considered White. In the United States, which had been dominated by Northern European nationalities, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Italians, Greeks, and other Mediterranean people were not considered White. A lawsuit in the early 1900's established that Arabs were White (in order to claim the societal benefits of Whiteness). 

So "Were there White people in the Bible?" is a meaningless question. If one is seriously curious, one might want to know if there were people in the Bible who, based on current understanding of who is considered White, would be considered White if you saw them on a 21st Century street. Again, hard to say. Rome, for example, was not a homogenous empire comprised of one ethnic group. At its greatest extent it included North Africa and the Middle East, surely some of the people identified as Romans in the Bible were what today we would call White, but just as surely there would be some with typical African features, or dark hair and "olive" skin. Without detailed physical descriptions, we just don't know. Recently I've been following a "History of Rome" podcast and have been looking up images of some of the emperors. While some of them appear stereotypically White, one or two look like they could be part African. 

Finally, why do we assume that everyone in the Biblical era looked like people from that region today? And why do we assume that everyone from that region today looks the same? There are indigenous fair skinned, blond, blue-eyed people in that region today, and images from that era are notoriously ambiguous about things like eye, skin, and hair color. (There are also dark haired, dark eyed, swarthy people native to Northern Europe) Modern Jews, who are descended from people in that region, have a wide variety of physical types among them. 

So was Jesus White? No. Maybe. What's White mean? Who cares?

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXVI - Sunk Costs

One of the things you learn in economics courses is the concept of "sunk cost". One of the things that you learn about it is that most people don't understand it. Sunk cost is the money that you have "sunk" into a project or a purchase that you will never get back, no matter what you do. The sunk cost fallacy is when the money that you already spent becomes the justification for continuing to spend money, even though you really don't want or need to continue. An example of sunk cost would be sitting through a terrible movie because you already paid for the ticket; or you paid for repairs for your junk car last month, and it needs repairs again, so instead of getting rid of this money pit of a car, you keep repairing it, not wanting to "waste" the money you already spent; or holding on to an asset that in all likelihood will never again be worth what you paid for it because you don't want to "lose" money by selling it for less than the purchase price. In all of these examples the money for the movie ticket, for the car repairs, for the purchase of the asset has already been spent in the past no matter what you do in the present. It's gone. 

My point of view regarding my involvement in The Way International was very much a sunk cost fallacy. There were red flags aplenty, many reasons why my involvement was a bad idea, but I had rationalized that I had put so much time and effort into it, that it wouldn't make sense to back out. I had completely changed my religious world view, I had antagonized my family and abandoned my friends, I had quit college and moved halfway across the country to participate in a program that turned out to be a joke, I had seen people who supposedly were Godly leaders seriously falling short of even the most basic of expectations, yet here I was, signing up for another year of commitment to this sketchy organization, and not only that, I was taking the first steps to joining their so-called leadership training program, a lifetime commitment. If I had made all of those big moves, I "reasoned", why wouldn't I want to double down and not "waste" the time and preparation I had invested so far. 

One thing that is clear in retrospect, but I wouldn't admit to myself back then, was that I simply didn't want to admit to everyone who thought that getting involved in The Way was a bad idea, that it was a bad idea. 

So here I was, now in a "Way Home" in Lincoln Nebraska. There were no restrictions on how many hours I could work, or a minimum number of hours I was required to "witness" every week, I could travel to visit family - in short, none of the formal strictures that defined the WOW Ambassador program. But there was still an expectation that the Way leadership had first call on my time. If there was a meeting, I was required to attend, if there was a class, I was required to participate; the whole purpose of the home in which I lived was to serve the needs of the Way hierarchy. One of the first things that I noticed was that things were conducted much more formally than I had grown used to. In New York, which was one of the first areas to experience large numerical growth in the seventies, the wide spread of fellowships had outpaced the ability of Way headquarters to staff them with Way Corps graduates, or even Way Corps students. This resulted in a very organic leadership structure, largely free of a lot of egotism or central control. In Sidney, isolated as we were from other Way people in the state, we were similarly informal in our activities. The state leader of The Way had graduated from the Way Corps several years earlier, and was in his third year a Limb (state) Coordinator. Branch, and even home fellowship, meetings were highly structured, and lacked the spontaneity that I came to expect. Despite my initial resistance to this approach, I became somewhat enamored of it myself and began to enjoy being "the leader", the local "man of God" after I had been appointed Twig Leader of a small fellowship. 

One of the things that was always at the forefront of the minds of Way leaders was outreach and growth. The way these things were measured was twofold: running PFAL classes and "splitting" twigs. PFAL classes I have discussed before. If your twig fellowship could find seven or more people to take the class, you were outreach heroes. It really didn't matter much if the class graduates wandered away afterward, the important thing was that we had run a class. Splitting a twig indicated that you had too many people to comfortably participate in a home fellowship and that you had enough to start up a new fellowship in another home. When I arrived in Lincoln, there were six or seven home fellowships as part of the Lincoln branch and a similar number in Omaha, with a few isolated twigs in smaller towns around the state. Around halfway through the year Rev. Ronnie, our state leader, decided to split all the fellowships. Now we had double the numbers of twig fellowships, double the numbers of leaders, but not double the number of people. This became an issue the following year when the new incoming state leader discovered that the Lincoln Branch and the Lincoln Twig Area (basically a half-size branch) didn't contain ten thriving fellowship requiring two Way Corps overseers, but four feeble little home fellowships. 

An issue, however, that was to cause problems before the "ministry" year was out was that a lot of us were young people (I had just turned 23) and been (mostly) celibate for the previous year. There was an overabundance of young, single people looking for boyfriends and girlfriends, and of course, sex. This reality, coupled with The Way's hypocritical and inconsistent views on pre-marital sex and even dating, was going to result in a big change in my relationship with The Way.

Start from the beginning

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-i.html

Part XVII

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2022/04/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-xxvii-no.html

Managers - Part XXV - Post Pandemic #1 - Why Has the Pendulum Swung?

Over the last few years I have been writing a blog about management theory, management styles, management responsibility etc. But things have changed a lot since the unemployment rate started dropping precipitously around 2015 and things really got shook up when businesses were forced to close as the pandemic took hold, and people scrambled around to find work in industries that hadn't closed up for the duration. One of the results was that the power balance between management and labor shifted in many lines of work. 

In "Managers Part III - Sources of Power" https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2016/07/managers-part-iii-sources-of-power.html I laid out four main ways that managers exert influence over their employees, one of these is by rewards and punishment that I expound upon in Part IV https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2016/07/managers-part-iv-reward-coercion-based.html  one of those punishments, of course, is the threat of getting fired. The popular interpretation of the current dynamic is that employees no longer care about getting fired, since they can easily find another job that pays the same or better than the one that they have now. All sorts of theories are floating around regarding the "why" of all this, the most common being that employees have, after having their eyes open during the pandemic, finally set boundaries between their work and personal lives and are no longer letting management abuse them. Sounds about right...right?

The problem with this view is that people quitting jobs, in particular low wage jobs, is nothing new. What's new is that there isn't a similar flow of people looking for low wage jobs as there was ten years ago. Every job has a churn rate. "Churn" refers to the amount of turnover that a business might expect in certain positions. During my time as a manager with several companies over the decades, the need to hire people never went away. We never reached a lasting period of stability where we had a staff that we could depend on; people were always leaving and we were always recruiting replacements. There were always people who refused to work certain shifts, or would quit without notice, or just were unhappy with the requirements of the job. The difference was that we knew that there would always be someone else who would apply for the same job - in fact there was usually a backlog of applicants, always many more than we needed to fill a position. In most situations management had the upper hand in that the employee needed the job more than management needed that specific employee. One exception was people who didn't really need the job, for example, high school students, or someone who was working a second job, not to make ends meet, but to save up for some luxury purchase. Counterintuitively the situation got worse for employees the higher in rank and pay that they rose, since the availability of non-entry-level positions was even rarer, unless of course you processed unique skills that were rarer than the available openings where those skills were required. 

So, what's the difference.

2% unemployment.

Yes, I know that the official unemployment percentage isn't a true reflection of the number of people who are out of work, but if the methodology is consistent it gives us a point of comparison. For instance, it was around 10% after the housing bubble burst in 2008. 5% is considered, statistically, full employment. Unhappy employees aren't any more unhappy than they were before Spring 2020, but the options are different. Terry Pratchett said in one of his Discworld novels that magic is simply knowing one extra fact, and in 2022 that extra fact is that if you quit your entry level job today, you'll be able to find another one before lunchtime. The extra fact that managers know is that if one of their people quits, it may be a long time before they are able to hire a replacement. And the second extra fact that employees know is the managers' extra fact: it's hard to find replacements. What we are left with is what I ended the first paragraph with: the power balance between management and labor shifted in many lines of work. 

How has this shift in the power balance manifested itself? One manifestation is the increase in wages, especially at the lower wage levels. Companies who are competing for a scarce resources are going to be willing to pay more for that resource. This only kicks the can down the road, however. If everybody is having trouble hiring, and everybody is reacting by raising wages, then, while employees are benefitting by getting paid more (leaving inflation out of the picture for now, which if it continues will negate the wage increases) management is still in the same situation: unable to replace workers who quit due to low unemployment. So coercion based management just isn't going to work any more. (I'm not saying it was ever a good way to manage, but it was pretty common, and even among good managers, termination was a motivator of last resort) Now, the reward side of reward-coercion-based management is kicking in. A reward need not be a bonus, or an extra vacation day, or anything like that, but can take the form of tolerating behavior that, just a few years ago, would have been intolerable. Like looking the other way when employees socialize when there's work to be done, overlooking rudeness to customers or bad customer service, failure to adhere to any number of company standards and policies, refusal to work scheduled shifts, or just being incompetent at the job. The positive side of this is that bad managers, the egotistical little tyrants who revel in terrorizing and abusing their employees no longer have the upper hand. Employees no longer have to put up with abuse of any kind if they choose not to; they aren't required to allow customers to treat them like dirt; they don't have to sacrifice life for a job. Employees are less likely to be told "You don't like? Go ahead and quit" and more likely to be begged to "You don't like it? We'll fix it, please don't quit". 

In upcoming posts I'll discuss both sides of this new dynamic.