Can’t say we celebrate Easter in our house but still, no-one is going to complain about having to take a few days off work. So, in honour of the Easter weekend, here is my favourite take on the story of the Passion of Christ, from Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992)

The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of [rigid theocracy] – sort of an echo of what Enki did. Christ’s gospel is a new nam-shub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough: We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.

People who were used to the rigid theocracy of the Pharisees couldn’t handle the idea of a popular, nonhierarchical church. They wanted popes and bishops and priests. And so the myth of the Resurrection was added onto the gospels. The message was changed to a form of idolatry. In this new version of the gospels, Jesus came back to earth and organized a church, which later became the Church of the Eastern and Western Roman Empire – another rigid, brutal, and irrational theocracy.

(I only post these things because i know my Dad is reading …)

tags: neil stephenson, theology

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 11:10 pm and is filed under culture, literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.