What could the friendship between Jesus from Nazareth and Mary from Magdala have been about? Of course, we have the Biblical accounts (The Gospels) written by men who, however well-intended, could only articulate the story through patriarchal lenses. Therefore, the history is skewed. I think it’s important to remember that the ancients were not likely to think in terms of history. They thought more in terms of great deeds and the popularity of the people who did them. I don’t mean to say the gospel writers were wrong. They were articulating their beliefs with the tools available to them. Meanwhile, the women were relegated to secondary roles. Knowing what we know today, I want to explore the evidence for a claim that women were fundamentally responsible for the creation of the early Christian communities.

I wonder what might be different if a woman or women had written accounts of the gospel story. What would such an account look like? But first I want to critique the gospels as they were authored by the men.

Of course, there is nothing startling about the fact that during the lifetimes of Jesus of Nazareth and Mary of Magdala, it was decidedly a patriarchal world in which men dominated women. Of course, in the Gospels, women were only recognized as messengers and food providers. We should remember that The Gospels themselves contain references to the fact that the itinerant Jesus was always followed by women. They were always overshadowed by the men, but the women actually seemed more aware of what was going on at any one time than the men. They provided more than meals. Remember, men and women did not routinely eat dinner together. The women served. The men ate.

I’m not the first to say it, of course, but by the time Jesus was already dead and his brother James was leading the first community, women were routinely present at the table. By the early 50s C.E., the Apostle Paul had already proclaimed that in Christ there was neither male nor female. The ground must have been consistently shaking by the time Peter and Paul died in the Roman arena. Of course it was. Whatever else first century Christianity brought to Rome, it was an irreversible phenomenon.

We are, and it thrills and frightens me to say it, the first actual inhabitants of a worldwide reality of genderlessness. And the pushback resistance is large and ugly and it will not go down easily before physical, mental and spiritual violence erupts across the land. Yet it is inevitable. There is no return to male dominance unless men burn it to the ground. Women know too much. They’ve seen too much. They’ve suffered too much. Yes, some women want the patriarchy because they want what they want, but their numbers are diminishing.

Isn’t it extraordinarily amazing to see a time when Jesus of Nazareth and Mary of Magdala’s vision might just be aborning.

~ David Dykes

Art notes: Photo-illustration by .

The more I pursue the historical Jesus, I see a wide gap between historical Jesus and Christianity. Millions of those who call themselves Christian have been influenced in positive ways. Down through history, many who call themselves Christian have shown compassion for those who suffer and a desire to do the right thing. Many have also shown a deep longing for equanimity among all people as well as a thorough-going concern for the care and feeding of the earth.

Sadly, Christianity seems to have always been ready to endorse war. Some Christians have a very different idea about what it means to be Christian. I can imagine that the favorite hymn of these Christians is “Onward Christian Soldiers.” This makes me think about how Christianity evolved in the generations following the death — i.e., the execution — of Jesus. Skip forward some 300 years and see Constantine who claimed that God had come to him in a dream saying, “In This Sign, Conquer!”

When I was ten years old, my family was living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The Korean War was in its last days. One day my father, who was a Methodist minister, took me with him to the train station where I saw car after car full of Army soldiers all turned out in their dress uniforms. I watched as my father gave prayers for as many soldiers as he could reach. It was a solemn occasion and I’ve never forgotten it. It wasn’t long before my Dad took me aside and told me that he was not in favor of war and would do everything he could to oppose it. He was always an outspoken advocate for peace.

I take the time here to describe another childhood experience in which I watched as my maternal grandfather, Robert Brown, walked into the living room and gave me a book titled, We of Nagasaki. I remember opening the book and reading about what happened the day U.S. pilots dropped the atom bomb on the city and killed as many as 75,000 people. The book had pictures of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s not so much that the pictures gave me nightmares — it’s just that I’ve never gotten them completely out of my mind. My grandfather never mentioned the book to me; but every time he saw me reading it, he would hug me.

My mother’s brother, Alfred, was a Methodist chaplain on the island of Okinawa in the last days of the Second World War. Not many years later, on a Sunday morning, he preached a sermon which he finalized with, “War is Hell! War is Hell! War is Hell!” We all stood there quietly as he left the sanctuary without speaking.

The historical Jesus hated war and violence. He grew up with it and saw every kind of atrocity during his life. He knew the futility of fighting. He spoke out about all forms of violence and pleaded with people to find other ways. One way he resisted violence was to join with Mary Magdala in counseling the people who lived on the western shore of The Sea of Galilee and encouraged and nurtured small communities to be able to survive Roman cruelties.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

~ David Dykes

Art notes: Pull quote art features Charles Levy’s photograph of an atomic cloud rising over Nagasaki, sourced from Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Photo-illustration by .

I have a dear friend who is a widely known architect in Denver, CO. George Hoover is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met, and I’ve met some brilliant ones. I met George and his remarkable wife, Betsy, during the ten years Debo and I attended St. John’s Cathedral. St. John’s was the most diverse congregation I had ever known. We were so involved in and led by that congregation, Debo eventually was ordained to the Episcopal priesthood after twenty years of teaching science in public school followed by five years of NASA “Teacher in Space” training.

George and I grew very close and fell into the habit of having lunch Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Avenue Grill in downtown Denver. It was our routine. We always ordered the same meal, the grilled chicken salad and two glasses each of Merlot. Our menus never varied. But our discussions did, ranging primarily from science, to architecture, to theology and ethics. One day at lunch, George leaned across the table and said, “David, the spaces we create, create us.” It was not uncommon for George to say profound things, but when he said that, it was literally life-changing. Once I heard it, I was never able to un-hear it. That’s because it was so profoundly true.

So, “We form our beliefs and our beliefs form us”. Meaning and purpose don’t drop down from heaven, they emerge from deep within us. John Locke was a great empiricist. He got us started. But, his primary observation was that the mind is a blank tablet. There is truth in his words. But, ultimately, we knit our own thoughts and feelings together into our belief. Our belief is the house of our minds. It’s where we live.

This idea that what we believe shapes us, makes me want to reflect on what historical Jesus believed? What did he see when he was growing up? What shaped his belief about life? There is no hint, no suggestion that he challenged the fundamental tenets of Judaism. There is, of course, his challenge to the religious leaders of his day that they were more interested in their own positions of power and affluence than they were the lives of the people and their suffering at the hands of the Romans. In fact Jesus’s attitude about such Jewish leaders seems to have been one of disdain — disdain that they were more interested in living like the Romans than they were in caring about the hardships of the people.

Jesus’ beliefs apparently had to do with seeing the torment and torture of his fellow Jews. They were his people, his own kinsmen and neighbors. Their suffering affected him — I think of the biblical anecdote that at one point, Jesus publicly wept over Jerusalem. He saw their hunger, their anger, their frustration and their fear.

If Jesus did teach, he must have spent an equal amount of time and energy helping his people find enough to eat. When Herod Antipas created his system of taxation of the fishing industry along the western shores of the Sea of Galilee, it was Jesus — and I am completely sure, Mary of Magdala — who gathered the people into communities who helped each other find enough to eat. Their energy and commitment to helping others began to demonstrate how communities of mutual assistance and compassion could become a way of life.

He seemed to be generous to people around him. I think he spent his time helping and reassuring his people who were being oppressed by the Roman Empire. Remember that he decided to take his case before the people and showed this by staging — I’ll say it again — by staging a demonstration against the policies and practices of his Roman overlords. Think of the courage and commitment he showed his people by purposefully, deliberately staging a big, serious, carefully designed demonstration of resistance to confront Pilate and the Romans with their evil and oppression. He called them out. He said that what they were doing with oppression and taxation was evil and that God condemned it.

Historical Jesus did what he did because of what he believed.

~ David Dykes

Art notes: Includes “Naso/Haftarah” by /

While Jesus was alive, it was the women who supported him, who promoted him and who literally funded his work. I think it likely that the women recruited Jesus to represent their interest. Was Jesus drawn to what they were doing because he shared their vision? Here’s why I think he was. Again, I’m imagining scenarios for both Jesus and Mary of Magdala.

While there may have been some men who were drawn to Jesus, it was the women who “got” what he was trying to do. And what he was trying to do was to come to the aid of the impoverished Jews who were living in communities along the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. The people were being impoverished by the exorbitant taxation that Herod Antipas, the lesser of the sons of Herod the Great, was imposing on them.

The whole economy along the western shore of The Sea of Galilee was dependent on the fishing industry. Keep in mind that Herod Antipas was the “runt of the litter” among the sons of Herod the Great. When Herod the Great died in 4 BCE, the four sons split up Judea among themselves. Antipas got the least desirable area that included the Galilee and Perea. So far as we can tell, Antipas had only one real resource; he could levy taxes on the fishing industry and the people who depended on it. He taxed everything in sight: the fishing boats, the nets, the fish themselves and every conceivable bit of income he could extract from the fishermen’s income. In other words, Herod Antipas forced the fishermen and their families into poverty — exploitation to the max.

Since patriarchal interests clouded the role of women in general as the gospels were being written in the decades near the end of the first century and the beginning of the second, the significance of the contribution of Mary of Magdala and other women are not clear. But I am convinced that their contributions were much greater than the biblical text can tell us. Since mention of Mary of Magdala is predominant in the gospels and there is a definite hint of her wealth in support of “the work,” I am comfortable imagining a very significant role that she played.

I return to the exorbitant taxation of Antipas’ program that left fishermen, boat-builders, net-makers and fish-processers marginalized. In other words, these workers were simply unable to make enough to feed themselves and their families much less have shelter and possibly even clothing. The Jewish people in the Galilee must have regarded their Roman oppressors as evil indeed. Since my own conviction is that any form of exploitation is evil, I am not hesitant to use this language.

The Gospel portrayal of Jesus as the leader of a band of men simply didn’t happen. The women did not follow Jesus; Jesus followed the women. The twelve disciples were a fabrication of the patriarchal society of the day created in retrospect to represent the twelve tribes of Israel.

What’s my point? My point is that the phenomenon of the “Jesus Movement” was focused on relieving the poverty caused by Herod Antipas’s neurotic fixation on being someone to reckon with, someone who would impress Emperor Tiberius. For Antipas, human suffering was not even noticeable. The cries of the victims of his insane exploitation went unnoticed.

To make these historical examples relevant today, I think of my own experience living in Mississippi, having moved here from Colorado in 2002. Mississippi is ranked as the highest concentration of “food deserts” in the U.S. In 2017, former NFL quarterback Brett Favre was implicated in a major Mississippi welfare scandal for helping secure at least $5,000,000.00 of “Temporary Assistance for Needy Families” funds, money designated for feeding hungry children and their families, to build a volleyball stadium at the University of Southern Mississippi, his alma mater, as well as where his daughter played.

Like Herod Antipas, the human suffering was not even noticeable. The cries of the victims of this insane exploitation went mostly unnoticed.

~ David Dykes

Art notes: Includes “Women Picking Olives” by Vincent Van Gogh, sourced from the Met Museum’s Open Access online collection: https://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ep/original/DP-17161-001.jpg

I return to speculation about what compelled historical Jesus, in the end, to choose to stage an organized, counterpoint demonstration of resistance to Pilate’s military parade into Jerusalem on the first day of Passover. Like he had done year after year, Pilate put on an ever more menacing show of force in the face of the Jews whose numbers swelled as they made annual pilgrimage to the capital of their homeland during Passover.

And, of course, there was always trouble because of the Roman occupying forces that were kept quartered at the ready to deal with any resistance. Imagine heavily armed soldiers, standing shoulder to shoulder with swords, shields and spears meant to deter any real threat of Jewish resistance.

Yet, anger and jeering rage must have laid down a reverberating beat of violence that constantly rumbled just under the surface. Still, on this particular day, Jesus and the people with him pushed through the east gate with “play weapons” made of freshly cut palm branches. The symbology of Jesus’s protest was not lost on Pilate or anybody else for that matter. They were carrying out a very organized plan of confrontation, a plan that made Pilot and his battalion look like the fools they were. Judea humiliated Rome that day and Pilate must have ground his teeth and boiled his anger to napalm grade. I can imagine him saying to himself, “The Jews have asked for this — and I’m going to give it to them!”

Jesus wasn’t a fool. He was clear about what he was doing. He had a pretty good idea about what he was risking, but he could have thought it was worth trying. In any case, his “Passover” Sabbath demonstration must have ignited the crowds, and there is every reason to believe that they overran the city — what?! 2,000? 5,000? more? They were not armed, but even five hundred men and women marching down the street could intimidate a legion, couldn’t they? The Jews weren’t turning back either. Could that mob and the impending march have actually frightened Pilate?

Before I finish — I ask myself, “What did Jesus witness during his lifetime? What had he seen? What was coming together in his mind in the particular days leading up to Passover? Was he contemplating the possible cost of creating a public demonstration by which to get in the face of the Procurator?

Growing up, he must have heard the screams, the wailing cries, as heavily armed Roman soldiers dragged people from their homes? I’m talking about the kinds of screams that you never forget, can never get out of your head; the ones that show up unannounced; the ones that rubber band you back to the horror of those moments and days. Here, I invite you to think about the massive trauma the Jews experienced at the hands of their oppressors.

Coming of age in Shreveport, Louisiana in the 60s, we would sit on every step of the four flights of marble stairs that filled the Caddo Parish Courthouse in silent protest to segregating representatives and senators. We even got spit on by some of the whiter officials there. Bitterness was in the air.

Reaching back a little further, I think of running the film again in my head of my father’s account of the time his father, my grandfather, took him to the lynching of a black man outside Pleasant Hill, Louisiana, not far from his home to show him the horror of white hatred.

~ David Dykes

We should consider Jesus to be still buried under shifting sands that have been blowing back and forth across Christianity for two thousand years. These shifting sands are made up of Christian theologies and doctrines based on supernaturalistic explanations for his life, death and resurrection. Belief in a supernatural Jesus has now come to the end of its usefulness. Modern dependence on empirical science and empirically-based history has made belief in the supernatural less and less useful. This is why studies about a historical Jesus can have profound and sustainable value in conversations about religion well into the future. Religion is a cornerstone of human creation. We create what we need and what we need creates us.

So, I write about Jesus of Nazareth because Christianity is a fact of our lives and our history, and popular Christianity has gone terribly wrong. The number of new White Christians has grown in recent years and has, for the second time, confirmed Donald Trump as their leading Christian faith disciple. The Christian church at large is alarmed by this latest epidemic of far-right, reactionary Christianity.

Reactionary Christianity has distorted traditional Christian practice beyond recognition. The Jesus they follow is more likely to carry an assault rifle and be pathologically concerned about who qualifies as a true Christian and who doesn’t. I never was much for “Christ,” but I was fascinated by Jesus from early on. I grew up in a Methodist minister’s family and come from a long line of ministers and preachers. My parents and grandparents were intelligent, kind people. While they treasured the Bible and reverenced its teachings, they recognized the evolution of human thought and belief.

I am joining with millions of people who want to rescue Christianity from the dark beliefs and ideas that have left so many millions of people confused and angry. Christianity has wrapped itself around the Earth and in one way or another influences life across the planet — in some ways good; in some ways bad. Where it has promoted compassion, respect for all life, non-violence and dignified humanity, it has been a force for Good. Where it has fed on anger, prejudice, bitterness, and violence, it has been an instrument of Evil.

Since The Enlightenment, which was followed by the Scientific Revolution, human beings have thought differently. Because religion had held the authority for belief for millennia, human beings were directed by whichever authority they listened to. In the first third of the 17^th century, René Descartes (1596-1650) crawled into his unlit oven to think about thinking. Inside that dark, quiet oven, he could be alone with his thoughts while he reasoned, “Cogito Ergo Sum“ — “I think therefore I am!” I’m fascinated by his question, “What kind of thing is a thinking thing?” — a being thing. I am compelled by the idea that in a twinkling, the human mind has exchanged reliance on external authority for internal reasoning. A revolution indeed.

So, making use of our thinking ability, let’s consider this: there is nothing that is supernatural. There are many things that we experience that remain mysterious to us. For example, last week, I thought of my daughter and was thinking about how much I love her when the phone rang and it was her. Mystery? Yes. Supernatural, No. We live in a universe that stretches in every direction away from us in what seems to be infinity. There are natural phenomena that our minds cannot comprehend. But again, nothing is supernatural.

Many people who understand that the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology are not real, but imaginary, will, at the same time, insist on believing that there is a God in heaven who has sent His part divine/part human son to earth to do battle with Satan. In all fairness, it’s all they know.

Now, we live in a world that demands we ponder, question and think carefully and critically about anything and everything around us. Forever keep in mind that we live in a natural world, a natural and expanding universe that operates on natural laws. Many of us make a conscious choice to embrace religious and moral values. And, we do so without thinking of them as supernatural. We can also believe in a creating and evolving God.

~ David Dykes

Imagine standing on a timeline that runs all the way back to historical Jesus. He’s back there. We know that. Scholars are in wide agreement that Jesus died about 30 CE. Let’s begin there, with his death, because his death tells us about his life. No miracles, no divine interventions, just history. And yet, the history of his death was, for the human spirit, worthy of dividing history.

I was born into the world when popular thought divided history into “Before Christ (BC)” and Anno Domini (AD) which meant “in the year of our Lord.” Many of us even grew up thinking AD meant “after death.” So far as we know, interest in the human Jesus did not publicly emerge until well into the 19^th century. We should also remember that the idea of fact was not recognized by most people before the middle of the 19^th century. The so-called Scientific Revolution had only emerged in the 17^th century, and people generally did not recognize the idea of “fact” before the 20^th century.

We can be thankful that Albert Schweitzer, missionary, doctor, theologian, philosopher and organist introduced us to the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, with his book, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, in 1906. He was not alone in such work, but Schweitzer caught the attention of many who were ready to separate Jesus from the Myth that had surrounded him for 18 centuries.

The Jesus of history grew up in and around Nazareth, a poor Jewish village with as many as 50 small courtyard houses that could have provided for as many as two hundred residents. It was bare, sustenance living. Scholars tell us that the residents supported themselves by farming or working as craftsmen and laborers. History shows Jesus as an itinerant teacher who probably never traveled more than about 80 to 90 miles from his home.

Apparently he mostly traveled among villages around the northern coast of the Sea of Galilee with Magdala being the largest among them. Magdala was the center of a thriving fishing industry and Jesus must have been well-acquainted with many of the people living in that region. Among those that knew him, he was considered a teacher and something of an activist and he made his resistance to the Roman occupiers known.

Forget the claims of the Gospels that Jesus was a divine son of God. And remember that in the first century, human beings would always be divinized when someone had done something truly remarkable for “the people.” For instance, in 4 BCE, Octavian, the nephew of Julius Caesar, was able to unify the Roman Republic by defeating Antony and Cleopatra in a decisive victory off the coast of Actium in western Greece. The Roman people had been exhausted by twenty years of civil war, and Octavian’s victory won him the title of “Imperator Augustus!“ It’s worth noting here that Imperator translates into English as “conqueror,” the guy who wins.

So, the people of first century Judea were ripe to dream of their own Imperator who would liberate them from 90 years of bondage to the Roman Empire. A reminder: the Romans ruled with iron weapons and iron will. So, when the poor and disenfranchised heard about this Jesus who challenged Roman dominance, they soon began to imagine him as a new Moses, a new conqueror who would liberate Israel. And when Jesus rode into Jerusalem that day on a nursing donkey in counterpoint to Pilate’s parade of Roman force a thousand strong, he was lampooning the whole empire. He was making fun of Pilate and his marauding armies. Such political mockery was a dangerous act in the time in which Jesus lived. The Roman overseers had very little tolerance for such humor.

What the followers of Jesus saw that day must have both thrilled and terrified them. For one breathless moment, they must have thought, “This time, it’s going to be different, it’s going to bring the longings of generations into reality.” And still we wait.

~ David Dykes

Art notes: Image of Nazareth by John Phillip Newman, sourced from Picryl and Wikimedia Commons

Suppose we could take a tiny vacuum cleaner and suck up every last granule of “the divine”/supernatural from the canonical and non-canonical narratives that describe Jesus’s teaching and “work”. What story line might we construct? Hint: I’m especially drawn to three “centers” of his activity: one, what came together in his growing up that formed his beliefs and “concerns” that called him away from his hometown of Nazareth and onto the open road; two, what compelled him when he traveled to Magdala on the western shore of The Sea of Galilee and then, finally, what coalesced into his daring public demonstration of resistance to Roman rule during the Jewish celebration of Passover during the third decade of first century CE?

I am drawn to a version of the Jesus story that simply ignores any belief in things supernatural in the Christian tradition. I know this is a huge undertaking and I know that there are many highly trained scholars who are presently engaging in it. Still, I cannot leave my own enchantment with it alone.

Christianity is a huge, globe-encircling body of beliefs, ideas, organizations, politics and even economics that wields great power, probably too much power. It began as a small, loosely organized collection of communities that originated in a very small geographical area now known as Palestine.

If we could conduct an interview with Jesus of Nazareth and ask him what he thinks about The Plan of Salvation, he would probably say “I don’t know what that is.” In modern scholarship there is wide agreement that The Plan of Salvation came together over time and coalesced by the end of the second century. It is not hard to imagine that it made pretty good sense to followers by the last half of the first century. We remember that the ancients assumed a three-decked universe with heaven above, hell below and earth in between. Earth was understood to be the home of humans and they quite understandably imagined Heaven to be the home of God and Hell to be the domain of Satan.

We should recognize that the Ancients believed for thousands of years that the gods determined the lives of humans. In the most general way of saying it, when things were bad, it was because the gods were angry; conversely, when things were good, the gods were happy and pleased. Christianity was among the last world religions to come on the scene. Even deifying the figure of Jesus early on when he was imagined as a gentle shepherd evolved effortlessly into a divine being who taught that eternal life was either one of peace and paradise or of torment and damnation.

In the four centuries before Christianity began, Deuteronomic Judaism had already evolved a reward and punishment Theology that crudely put, held that “Do the right thing, God is happy. Do the bad thing, and it’s going to be bad”. It’s worth knowing too, that in this scenario, you do something to blaspheme God, you know, insult his honor, that’ll get you some hard time on the rock pile. And, of course, treat God with praise and respect (yes, I’ll say it) “him” and heaven’s door will open to the faithful and pure and gets all happy and smiley. This final problem: The non-violent man, Jesus of Nazareth, who was committed to the poor, the oppressed and the suffering, seemed to have evaporated like the mist that covers the ground in the early morning and is suddenly Gone!

We recognize that millions and millions of people who call themselves Christian have assumed and continue to assume that the Plan of Salvation is in one way or another ordained by Jesus. Such belief has historically been sanctioned by the Christian Church, but contemporary studies about the Jesus of History see historical Jesus in a very different way — a way that is very compatible with the writings of the Gospels. Just imagine peeling back the layers upon layers of thought and dogma and somehow getting back to the authentic, human Jesus.

But, the real challenge is that from early on, Christians down through the ages genuinely believed that the sin, repentance, forgiveness, salvation cycle was embraced by Jesus and the first followers. This is not true. There were powerful forces at work in the first century that did not recognize Jesus as a historical person. The ancients thought in terms of Empires and their hierarchies of authority. We should remember that Kings and Emperors were of primary interest to believers from the second century down to the present. We can ask, why do people today still believe this way? It’s because the institutions of faith continue to preach and promote the plan of salvation through the Holy Communion, The Eucharist and The Lord’s Supper.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Anselm shaped and established the Atonement theology of the medieval church and it has persisted in being the central belief of Christians for the last thousand years. This has been a distortion of the real history.

Today historical Jesus scholarship has brought us a human Jesus who with Mary of Magdala was building communities of sharing and mutual support that brought hope, food and shelter to those along the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. This scholarship and the conversations generated by honest, fact-based history are redeeming the historical Jesus and bringing him front and center.

Let’s strip the varnish off this historical Jesus.

~ David Dykes