Jesus Did Not Die On The Cross - How A Religious Seeker Tried This And That, Better Armed To Meet Her Maker

Christianity believes that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins, but Islam says nothing of the kind.  The crucifixion never happened because Allah would never let his messenger, the penultimate prophet die at the hands of the Jews.  

 

The Jews and their Roman allies, certainly tried to kill Jesus , say Muslim scholars - a dangerous insurrectionist, traitor, and apostate - and dying a painful death nailed to the cross would be a fitting end for someone who cursed both the Empire and the Kingdom of Heaven, but they were unsuccessful. 

The man who died on Calvary was an unwitting imposter - a Palestinian who looked like Jesus, was a demented brainless fool who had no more claim to divinity than the Man in the Moon; but Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, millennialist itinerants with a hand for verse, storytelling, and poetic license, said that he was the Messiah that the Jews had been waiting for. 

Matthew was considered to be the best storyteller in Judah, and had made a living by weaving tales of myth, legend, fantasy and promise to gatherers from every corner of both Jewish kingdoms. According to the Jewish historian, Josephus, he was unique.  In a fragment from De Rerum Judaica, the Roman translation from the Koine Greek, Josephus wrote:

Jews have never heard such marvelous tales at the hand of a master, told with such panache (ζωηρότητα). Imagine! A man who raises the dead, who makes the blind see, who walks on water, and changes water into wine! A magician!

 

'Why not?', Melinda Bates asked herself when she first heard the Koranic story of the death of Jesus Christ. 

Melinda in sociological terms was a 'seeker', a person convinced that the here-and-now simply cannot be all there is, that there must be a spiritual world above and beyond this one.  The problem was that every religion had a different take on heaven and how to attain it, making the task of seekers a complex, difficult one. 

Religious inquiry is by nature without well-defined parameters - even finding a needle in a haystack is not impossible given enough time and patience, but looking for divinity when all there is to go on is hearsay, myth, legend, and improbably storytelling, is impossible. 

For seekers, the pursuit of truth is as satisfying as the intended result.  Exposure to the 'truths' of Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Mormonism, and storefront evangelism can give one at least a brush with God. 

Tolstoy searched for God his whole life, studying history, philosophy, science, art, and religion and came up empty.  Finally at the end of his life, exhausted by the effort, more confused than ever, he gave up and concluded that if millions of people had believed in God before him, and hundreds of millions believed in him at this very moment, there must be something to the idea.  

Although this conclusion and conviction didn't last - after he wrote his spiritual confessional, A Confession, he returned to his old logical, investigatory ways, and never settled the question.  He gave some hope to the world in the words of his character Konstantin Levin who embraced doing good as the insufficient but only expression of faith he could muster. 

To her credit Melinda took each step honestly and openly.  She entered each place of worship assuming that there she would find answers, and even after years of searching,, she never approached religion with cynicism or skepticism. 

Only once, hooked up with wires, diodes, and terminals at The Washington Church of Scientology, watching the flashing, pulsating lights, and listening to the hums, pops, and whizzes of the machine to which she was attached, did she wonder if the contraption could possibly have any link to God. 

'Once you are clear' said the attendant, 'you will be free to find God, and he will make himself known to you'. 

Getting 'clear' would take time, patience, and some financial investment, but thousands before her had had the expected epiphany. 

Mormonism seemed like a good prospect - Mormons were good, patriotic, simple people of faith - but when she heard that Joseph Smith had been given the holy book of Mormon, then lost it somewhere on his New York farm, she wondered if the foundations of the religion were solid.  The idea that the Lost Tribe of Israel was the Jivaro Indians of the Amazon jungle, and that Mormon missionaries had travelled down the Napo River from Misaualli to the inner reaches of the forest to contact this remote tribe and had been eaten alive by cougars and Amazon panthers along the way was a bit far-fetched and based on nothing more than the songs of a Quechua witch doctor. 

Melinda travelled to India because Hinduism, practiced by over a billion people and one of the world's oldest religions, founded by the Aryans of Mohenjo-Daro in prehistoric times, must have the answers she was looking for.

 

However, despite the image of Hinduism as a meditative, insightful, highly spiritual religion practiced at its most evolved by Himalayan sadhus, she found only the most exaggerated, fanciful, impossibly operatic ceremonies, the wildest tales of epic battles between monkey gods and devils, fanciful notions of reincarnation and rebirth, all assured by the defining, restrictive caste system. 

'Jesus is coming today', said the Reverend Isaiah Johnson, pastor of the Shiloh Church of the Resurrection on MLK Avenue in Anacostia - a recently formed charismatic assembly meeting in an abandoned hardware store.  The pastor was sure of it, for all the signs were there - the storm of the night before, the hail, the forbidding silence after the winds had stopped, all omens and predictors of His coming. 

Reverend Johnson was true to his word, for midway through the service a woman stood up, raised her arms, stepped into the aisle and did a St. Vitus' dance of ecstasy.  'I have found him' she shouted. 'My savior has come', and the whole congregation rose to its feet and in unison shouted 'Hallelujah, praise be the Lord'. 

Melinda was caught up in the frenzy as one after another, congregants made their way down the aisle to the altar, falling on the floor and rolling from side to side, hugging and kissing their neighbors and pointing to the ceiling.  'He has come! He is here!'

Yet no Jesus had appeared to her, and it was unlikely that he would ever set foot in this den of tribal worship excess. 

She went to Jerusalem and rocked and prayed at the Wailing Wall, consulted rabbis from all Jewish denominations, was told to read the Torah for 'all answers are therein', and again disappointed, discouraged, and now after so long, disconsolate returned home. 

'Religion is for the birds', she said once back at her modest home in Bethesda, fatigued but finally resolute.  Her search had taught her one thing - the imaginative,  fanciful, marvelously woven fabulist stories of resurrection, spectral brilliance, reincarnation, Jesus in Montreal, flagellation and flogging on the Prado during Easter Week, the derivative, marvelously inventive sura of the Quran were brilliant, creative, expressions.  Yes, they were all wildly impossible, but who cares?  Religion has always been a matter of faith, and since no religion has any proof of veracity, then anything goes. 

The atheist critic Christopher Hitchens once said 'What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence', and so it was with Melinda Bates.  Her spiritual journey had been an unexpected fantastic ride through one funhouse after another.