Jesus, Uninterrupted

It’s strange how once people have decided that they have pigeonholed you, they then proceed to build a relationship on the phantom they have created, with what is merely a figment of their imagination. So it is with my boss, whom I have known and worked with since I was twenty-nine years old and he was twenty-five. It’s a wonder that people can know someone for decades, and yet not even begin to know them. I hope I know him better than he knows me. He certainly has given me the opportunity to see his actions and hear his opinions these nearly thirty years. When you're the boss, you think you can say anything. But when you know Who is really in charge, you dare to say anything (that He gives you to say).

Unbelievers and skeptics abound, and as scripture says, some of them are "like shooting stars bound for an eternity of black darkness" (Jude, 1:13 Jerusalem Bible). That sounds like the description of a comet that makes its turn around the sun from outer space and then heads back out to the deeps, never to be seen again. Who says the ancients didn't understand a thing or two about natural science?

Some of these are caught between unbelief and the itch to believe, calling themselves agnostics. That's my boss, for you. Like a comet with a very long elliptical orbit, he comes close and wanders far in wanting to know the truth, but it seems he never dares more than take a brief peek.

Often he's on his way to the outer darkness, but he still wants the approval of idiots like me, a detestable but economically viable Christian, and so he tries to reconnect on what he thinks is some commonality between us. Usually it's some book he's been reading about history, anthropology, or religion. He thinks those are my interests. That's the pigeonholing I mentioned earlier. I oblige him, and listen to his banter with as much interest and sympathy as I can muster. You never know where the Lord is going to open a door…

Lately, he's been reading the book Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them), a book by Bart D. Ehrman, a New Testament scholar at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. On a couple of occasions he has kept me on after a meeting, to tell me all the interesting things he's finding out about the origins of Christianity in this book—things he's always suspected were true, but now he thinks he has the evidence. Being a moral person, of course he considers it his duty to share these discoveries with me, a benighted Orthodox—in some ways the best, in other ways the worst kind of Christian.

I've taken a look, not at the book itself, but at the Wikipedia article about it, linked above under the book's title. I've also found some interesting book reviews, like the one from which I'd like to quote this brief passage.

In a series of dramatic revelations for the ignorant (the very definition of a hardcover best-seller, I’d say), Ehrman notes that there have been a lot of changes to the Bible in the past 2,000 years. I don't want to come between Mr. Ehrman and his payday, but this point has been made much more eloquently by, among others, Benson Bobrick in his wonderful Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired. [This book] has much of the same information as Misquoting Jesus, minus the idiocy.

—Alex Beam, “The new profits of Christianity”, The Boston Globe, April 12, 2006.

Now, I would never call my boss ignorant, but this reviewer does call a spade a spade when he describes at least some readers of this book in those terms, as he points out that little if anything new was presented in Jesus, Interrupted that hasn't already been presented to public scrutiny elsewhere.

My response to the claims put forward by my boss about what went on in the early Church falls into two categories: Some things he has read are correct, other things he has read are disastrously wrong. The author of the book he's reading is not above suspicion of slanted historiography. But this is too complex an idea for one, who wants to believe the unbelievable, to digest. On moral issues of his choice, he asserts there is a lot of gray area. On speculative issues like this, gray is not a possibility; everything is either black or white, all true or all false.

What a bother it all is! As scripture says, "be warned that writing books involves endless hard work," (Ecclesiastes 12:12), and this, as everything else, says the wise author "is vanity" (ibid., 1:2).

Why is this? Because, as the same author says, "there is nothing new under the sun. Take anything of which it may be said, 'Look now, this is new.' Already, long before our time, it existed. Only no memory remains…" (ibid., 1:9-11).

Now, this is all I have to say about the book, even the very idea of, Jesus, Interrupted—as if such a thing were even possible! What I do assert, however, is a completely different proposition.

Jesus, uninterrupted.

Do I have to write a book to prove this proposition?
I think not. It's already been amply documented in The Book I Didn't Write, A History of the Life of the Most Active Man the World Has Ever Seen, From Its Beginning to Its End. How's that for a title?
It reminds me of the title of a book I have in my personal library written by the great non-conformist Greek Orthodox philosopher Apóstolos Makrákis, Triluminal Science, Surveying the Universe and Explaining Everything (ISBN 9780938366188). Not too pretentious, eh?

Seriously, how futile the attempt to refute in one short book what is written abroad in the history of the world, the real world in which lives the real Christ in His real Church, an uninterrupted life, both of the Risen Christ (it's not just a slogan, cf. John chs. 20-21), and of the Everlasting Gospel (cf. Revelation 14:6) in the Church against which the gates of hell will not prevail (cf. Matthew 16:18). We are not here talking about the claims of Roman Catholicism, nor of any other mimic of the Truth, but rather of That "which has existed from the beginning, that we have heard, and we have seen with our own eyes; that we have watched and touched with our hands: the Word, Who is Life…" (1 John 1:1 Jerusalem Bible).

Yes, this and no other, is the reality:
Jesus, uninterrupted.