THE BIBLICAL JESUS WAS NOT THE PRINCE OF PEACE
When a Christian commits an act of violence many Christians charge them with being unChristian. But are pugnacious Christians out of line with the Earthly actions of Christ?
The person who allegedly tried to target Trump and company in Washington DC claims to have done so following Christian values. Most are outraged as they uphold the common premise that Jesus was the Prince of Peace, who taught the world to turn the other cheek in his Sermon on the Mount. This belief is so widely held that when deeply Christian Jimmy Carter asked Bill Maher if he agreed that Jesus was a man of peace, the notorious atheist automatically conceded the obvious point.
But is that the full story presented in the Gospels?
It is not. Jesus states that he came to earth not to grant peace, but to bring division and the sword, including turning family members - in-laws included -- against one another. He angrily denounces those who fail to follow him as patent fools, and on one occasion as Satanic (which the Nazis used to label Jews as being the spawn of Lucifer. When his entourage enters Jerusalem their leader is asked if they have enough swords on hand, and he says yes. Later one of the disciples uses a blade to seriously injure a person.
Most telling is a story as well-known as it is so discomforting that its implications are commonly swept under the rug. When Jesus is upset at goings on at the Holy Temple he does not do what true men of peace such as Gandhi and King would have done. Stage some form of nonviolent protest and/or petition the authorities. Instead, the wrathful divine being fashions a weapon of pain and fear, a whip, and intentionally violently assaults the merchants and their animals, driving them away. Being the perfect Son of God who is God, the action is beyond criticism. Thus validating armed force based on sincere personal religious opinion as a potential pious Christian act.
The Biblical Christ is God via the Holy Trinity. Prior to his earthly ministry, God orders the liquidation of all non-Jewish inhabitants of the Promised Land in an unprovoked war of conquest via ethnic cleansing. Earlier the deity had destroyed entire cities, and then all but a few of the world’s peoples and land animals. Dreadful plagues are visited upon the peoples of Egypt, including the non-Jewish slaves. Jesus never denounces his past actions, and the violence that is chattel slavery continues to be explicitly endorsed in the Christian testaments, Jesus never having said it is wrong.
If the transcendent power described in scripture was a consistent advocate for and practitioner of nonviolence and toleration, with perhaps an exception for self-defense, then Jesus as a promotor of peace would be Christian dogma. But the Bible has Jesus ranging from oratorically loving and forgiving to physically violent. So core attributes of Christianity are matters of optional opinion, not firm doctrine as per the Original Sin requiring all to seek the Grace of Christ. Center-left Christians wish to see Jesus as what they would like him to have been, a kindly, pacific advocate of tolerance. That is a simplistic, cherry-picking sanitization of the complex person portrayed in scripture, and therefore nonBiblical. Those who are closer to the mark are Protestant conservatives. They plausibly cite how Jesus followers being an armed party justifies the 2nd Amendment. And why his harsh actions at the Temple favor a muscular, warrior Christianity that does what is needed to assert divine mores and authority. Christianity has long had an anti-Semitic component, and Christians have waged many clergy backed wars between themselves -- Christian Europe was often a vast battleground -- and upon others. The latter includes ethnic cleansing of entire continents as per Manifest Destiny. During the Crusades Christian soldiers literally ate Muslims without Papal rebuke, look it up. There is the Catholic elimination of the Cathars, the Inquisition, and the largely Protestant War on Women as witches. Southern Americans logically cited the Bible as backing their continuation of a brutal slave terror state. The Russian Orthodox Church is all for dictator Putin’s vicious war of conquest on Ukraine.
Jesus was a complicated figure who demanded compliance with his views, by peaceful means when oratory sufficed, but with weaponry when deemed necessary. The DC assailant was a reckless, dangerous fool for many reasons. But that does not mean he as a believing Christian was totally out of line with a mythical simplistic pacifist Jesus, who was by no means such in scripture. Without a persistent practitioner of peace having been portrayed in the Gospels, the behavior and views of the Christian creator are a matter of varying opinions that can neither be shown to be false nor verified. It follows that Christianity is not a way to peace that one can count on.