This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
How could I overlook Sharon Stone on Shimon Peres’s 90th birthday bash? She sounded like a postcolonial studies grad student hooked on psychotropic drugs.
Sharon Stone makes Barbara Streisand look grounded and deep. How does she rate in relation to Bill Clinton and Simon Peres? If you have some time, a Peres marathon might be order. Just don’t take any of the rhetoric seriously.
Some years ago, I met Paul Verhoeven at a conference honoring the work of John Dominic Crossan, the controversial New Testament scholar. You might remember Verhoeven – he directed Stone’s epic performance in Basic Instinct. We chatted about his interest in making a movie about Crossan’s radical interpretation of Jesus. Verhoeven was grateful I hadn’t seen his movie and, though I knew of The Scene, he thanked me for not asking him about it.
Who was Jesus for Crossan? For Crossan, Jesus was a Mediterranean Jewish peasant practicing the “brokerless” Kingdom of God – at a time when Jerusalem and the Jewish population were occupied by the Roman Empire. Jesus didn’t think much of the Romans or the collaborationist Jewish leadership. He resisted both. Rome crucified him.
It turns out that Verhoeven is quite serious about Jesus and has authored a book about him - Jesus of Nazareth. As a contrast to New Age Sharon Stone’s presentation at Peres’s 90th, check out Verhoeven’s take on Jesus:
The Romans saw [Jesus] as an insurrectionist, what today is often called a terrorist. It is very likely there were ‘wanted’ posters of him on the gates of Jerusalem. He was dangerous because he was proclaiming the Kingdom of Heaven, but this wasn’t the Kingdom of Heaven as we think of it now, some spectral thing in the future, up in the sky. For Jesus, the Kingdom of Heaven was a very tangible thing. Something that was already present on Earth, in the same way that Che Guevara proclaimed Marxism as the advent of world change. If you were totalitarian rulers, running an occupation like the Romans, this was troubling talk, and that was why Jesus was killed.
There we are – back to occupation and Jerusalem, with wanted posters for a Jewish dissident. Of course, we know that Rome crucified thousands of Jews for anti-occupation activities. The idea of a singular cross is a myth.
Posters for Jews on the run from occupation – and Jewish – authorities. At stake – Jerusalem and the land. Times haven’t changed much.
Perhaps Verhoeven would have invoked Jews of Conscience rather than Che if he had spoken at Peres’s 90th. After all, Jesus was an anti-occupation insurrectionist within the land.
Have you ever asked, with Christian evangelicals, what would Jesus do?
Get your ‘wanted’ posters out.
All this rzzamatazz just proves that Prof. Hawking was absolutely, 100% correct to boycott this hasbara-fest. He has been completely vindicated. This is not the ‘prestigious conference’ we were told it was at the time Hawking’s announced his boycott. It is an exercise in schmaltzy propaganda, and no decent person should have anything to do with it. Sharon Stone once said that the 2008 Szechuan earthquake was ‘karma’ for Chinese occupation of Tibet. Would she ever DARE say anything remotely similar about Israel’s occupation? Of course she would not.
Pilate was posted to the boonies. His chief job was to keep tax money flowing to Rome. He did what he did to appease the local Jewish Establishment. He was not afraid of Jesus, who said his kingdom was not of this world, and give to Rome what was Rome’s. He knew that the Jewish Establishment could make his job hard, rather than a nice friendly collaboration under Rome’s loose provencial policy. Without such local politics involved, Pilate was reported to be a man of very quick and unambiguous decision. In this case he left the decision to the local power, and literally washed his hands of his own implementation of that decision.
For those of you who have actually read Nietzsche on Jesus and Christianity as a slave religion, you might take a look at this: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/travis_denneson/antichrist.html
Nietzsche often rendered his thoughts in aporhisms and poetic verbiage. His will to power was mistranslated by the Nazis, and, it seems to me, the Zionists. I assume most readers here know that Neitzsche despised Bismarck’s Germany.
” It is very likely there were ‘wanted’ posters of him on the gates of Jerusalem.”
Doesn’t that seem a bit anachronistic?
Verhoeven claims that the Romans arrested Jesus for preaching the kingdom of heaven. However, he had been doing that for three years, and he is described as having several positive interactions with Romans, like the centurion, and few or no negative ones, in that time. Instead, it was only after “cleansing the Temple” that he got arrested. Besides, he differed with the nationalist revolutionaries by saying to pay taxes to Rome.
It’s true that he was accused by the Romans of being a king and they crucified him. However, Herod was also a king- albeit a Roman one, and Jesus’ defense was that his kingdom was not a political one. This defense, according to Church tradition, worked when Dominition put on trial some of Jesus’ relatives as insurrectionists later on. Besides that, Jesus’ brother James was killed by the Sanhedrin when the Roman prelate Albius was away from Judea, and when the prelate returned, he dismissed the Sanhedrin leader from his post for doing this.
But, all the information gives a picture closer to that of the gospels, where although Pilate killed Jesus, the driving forces behind it were not the Romans. One may be skeptical about Pilate’s wife sympathizing with Jesus or Pilate saying he found no problem with Jesus, or even proposing to release Jesus instead of Barrabas, but the overall contours of the forces remain the same.
There are frequent depictions of Jesus with a cross on either side.
You asked a good question, Marc. In fact, we know the answer to some extent, don’t we? Aren’t the Zealots the Zionists of Jesus’ era, with the same “answer”? In both cases the goal is to create a Jewish State in the Holy Land. And Jesus’ response was that his kingdom was a spiritual kingdom, while the Zealots and Zionists saw the prophesied kingdom as a political, earthly state.
So you might as well ask how the Catholic Worker movement feels about the situation in the Holy Land. Like Jesus’ following, they do not operate as a national political system. So Jesus disagreed with the Zealots over their desire for an earthly political system, and he would have the same disagreement with the Zionists.
The second question of course is how Jesus would want the Palestinians to be treated. Of course he would want them, like everyone to be respected. But he would arguably want them to be treated as full citizens, instead of expelled. He did not talk about expelling gentiles, but rather touched and healed.