THE SECRET LIVES OF JESUS CHRIST

By Howard Chua-Eoan

Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever." That verse from the Epistle to the Hebrews has always been a little wistful, never a guarantee of theological peace even in the generations immediately following Jesus' ministry. The very division of the biblical canon into Old and New Testaments was the result of a ferocious debate over the nature of Jesus around the year A.D. 140. And as Christians multiplied, they would produce competing visions of Jesus, ranging from the Christ worshipped today to a tripartite Jesus who lived on the moon to a Jesus in Central Asia who merged with a Buddha and eventually inspired the naming of a Chinese dynasty.

THE SON OF WHICH GOD?

Marcion, probably born around A.D. 85, was a formidable scholar of Scripture and a devotee of the teachings of St. Paul. A wealthy shipowner from what is now the Black Sea coast of Turkey, he made a large contribution to the struggling Christian community in Rome and then proceeded to enunciate his vision of Christ. The kind and good Jesus, he declared, could not possibly be the Son of the implacably just, harshly rational God of the Jewish Prophets. No, that was the wrong God, merely the creator of this world. Jesus was the Son of an unknown and greater God, who out of completely unreasonable kindness and love sent his Son to deliver humankind from the legalistic master of creation. To buttress his beliefs, Marcion purged the miasma of texts Christians used as Scripture to form a "new" testament. In his eyes, it would be composed of the Gospel of Luke--the only account he trusted--and parts of 10 Epistles of Paul. No Prophets, no Genesis, no Job.

That scandalized Marcion's fellow Christians, who believed in a continuity of inspiration from Adam through Moses to Jesus. Not so, said Marcion, who deleted even Luke's accounts of the child Jesus. Jesus, Marcion believed, appeared fully grown in Capernaum to the fishermen who would become the first Disciples. The Christians of Rome promptly started to form their own canon, which included an "old" testament. They expelled Marcion from the church, handing him back his charity.

JESUS AND THE GNOSTICS

Marcion started his own church, and his ideas inspired Christians delving into the theologies of gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge, which, as opposed to faith, they argued, was the true source of salvation. For many Gnostic Christians, Jesus only appeared to be man, for the God of this world is the master of matter, and Jesus could not defile himself by actually materializing. Indeed, he was spirit and only seemed to die. Gnostic texts have Christ appearing to Peter as the Crucifixion is taking place, joyfully transcending all this world could hurl at him. The Resurrection becomes moot.

Gnostic cosmologies would overturn biblical traditions. The God of the Old Testament became evil incarnate. For if Satan could tempt Jesus with earthly power and riches, did that not mean that the world was Satan's to give? In time, Jesus would be the spirit of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, giving Adam and Eve a chance to escape from their dastardly creator with a taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

THE MANICHAEAN CHRIST

The idea of a conflict between the worlds of matter and spirit inspired Mani, a member of a Christian sect in 3rd century Mesopotamia. He saw the cosmos as divided between opposing forces: light and dark, good and evil, spirit and matter. Our age, he said, was chaotic because darkness had swallowed up portions of the light. But, he said, Jesus came into the world as part of a battle to distill light from the darkness. This dualistic philosophy was Manichaeism, and it would find adherents from North Africa to southern China.

Manichaeism's baroque mythology included a tripartite Jesus: Jesus the Splendor, who, long before the creation of the world, was sent to battle the voracious dark forces that had swallowed up the light; Jesus the Messiah, whose appearance revealed the extent of the unknown God's love for humankind; and, finally, the suffering Jesus, whose Crucifixion symbolized not redemption but, rather, the suffering of light trapped in the material world. Jesus the Splendor lived on the moon, which waxed full each month as light was redeemed from the world and sent heavenward.

It was an astonishingly successful faith. St. Augustine was a Manichaean before converting to orthodox Christianity. Horrified Christian bishops would use the word Manichaean as a catch-all invective for all satanic heresies. Indeed, long after the Manichaean Church ceased to exist in the West, the Inquisition was established to put down rashes of what the Catholic Church saw as neo-Manichaeism.

JESUS THE BUDDHA

The West, however, was not the only target of Manichaean missionaries. The religion flourished throughout Central Asia, where surviving texts preserve a Jesus who was merged with the Buddhist deity Maitreya, the Boddhisatva of the future, who, like Christ, will come at the end of the world. As the centuries passed, this Manichaean-tinged Maitreya would inspire millenarian revolts in China, one of which helped bring down the empire of Kublai Khan in the 14th century. The leader of the successful rebel coalition rewarded his allies of the "Bright" religion by naming the new regime after their faith--Ming-chiao in Chinese. And, thus, the opulent and imperious Ming dynasty, which later inspired Enlightenment philosophers in Europe with secularizing ideas, had a bit of Jesus buried deep in its heart.

--By Howard Chua-Eoan