Today, I embark on a dangerous journey. I’m going to talk about Jesus and the Bible. Specifically, I’m going to give the first of an occasional series of sermons on each of the four Gospels. As usual with these topics, I must start with a disclaimer.

I do not embrace the Christian label for myself and my sense is that most of you don’t either. In fact, other than Unitarian-Universalism, I can’t think of a religious label I would appropriate for myself, and that’s probably true for most of you, too. Still, there is something different about Christianity than any of the other world’s great religions or spiritual paths. The word Christian evokes resentment and hostility among many people, for good reason in many cases. My wish for this congregation is that we treat Christianity like other faith tradition, as a source of truth and wisdom from which we may take what we want and leave the rest, using our own experience, reason and conscience as our guide. I would say the same thing about the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. I must also acknowledge regarding both Christianity and the Bible that they both contain a lot of untruths, and while there is a lot to take from both, there also is a lot to leave.

I grew up with several prejudices about the Gospels. I thought they were four versions of essentially the same story, that they assumed the same facts to be true, and that a defining characteristic of what it means to be a Christian was an affirmation of those facts, including the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Jesus, neither one of which, by the way, I ever have affirmed.

As I will show you, although there is considerable overlap, the Gospels do not tell the same story. In literary terms, what unites them is not plot, but character. I’ll get into dates later, but each of the Gospels is a retelling, many years later, of the oral tradition begun by the followers of Jesus during and immediately after his lifetime. This retelling then was shaped in the centuries after Jesus’ life by the increasingly powerful institution of the church. It’s an understatement to say that his followers and the Christians of the first century were as diverse then as they are today, and I say with confidence that Christianity is much more diverse than most non-Christians think it is. As all good UUs know, the doctrine of the trinity itself was not established as orthodox church teaching until the 4^th century.

The four gospels known to most of us are only those that the church chose to canonize, which is to say, include in what we collectively call the bible. Scholars have found at least 24 gospels. The gospel of Thomas is perhaps the most famous. Each of these so-called extra-cannonical gospels tells yet another story of Jesus. Yet, church leaders rejected them for any number of reasons. I will devote an entire sermon on a future occasion to the gospels that didn’t make the cut, that is, the gospels too heretical to be included in the Bible. The four that made it –Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—had by the 4^th century achieved a certain stature within the church because of their widespread use and acceptance and their consistency with the teachings of the church. In fact, it was not until the fifth century – 400 years after Jesus—that the church once and for all settled on which books to include in the New Testament.

Although Jesus spoke Aramaic, all of the Gospels were written in Greek. Thus, we are presented immediately with the problem of translation. None of them is based on contemporaneously written documents. The first Gospel was not written until the mid-60s, about 30 years after Jesus. Paul’s letters were written in the 50s and early 60s, but make no pretense of being eyewitness accounts. There is no evidence that anyone wrote down anything Jesus said when he said it: no journals, diaries or even letters.

So, to understand what might have happened, think about a family reunion. My family had a big reunion just five years ago. There are pictures of that event, and it may be that some people there have recorded the event in personal diaries. Imagine, though, that those didn’t exist. If I sat down today with a sibling or cousin who was there and we talked about who was there, what happened, and what was said, I’m confident our stories would not match. No doubt, there would be great similarities, but they would not match. Now, imagine not five years but 30 or more years passing and having all of those participants not recalling the reunion to each other, but telling others who weren’t there what happened, and in a different language, and you can start to imagine some of the limitations of the gospels. For all the varied and sometime contradictory stories of my family reunion, it’s a historical fact that it happened and it is a historical fact, too, that there was a human being named Jesus who was executed by the Romans and in whose name a movement grew which has become the Christian faith.

What I’d like to do now is some comparing and contrasting of the gospels to illustrate the diversity of images of Jesus they contain. Just as aside, none of the earliest manuscripts of the gospels had names on them. That is, they weren’t titled, "The Gospel According to" Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Scribes added those titles many years later in the belief that attaching a particular Gospel to an apostle gave it extra weight and credibility. As I’ll show in later sermons, though, these titles were not randomly chosen. So, when I say that Mark wrote this or that John wrote that, it’s merely for convenience.

Only two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, have birth narratives. Neither Mark nor John tells of a virgin birth. Mark starts his gospel with Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist. "And when he (Jesus) came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove." By one reading of this account, Jesus was a normal, fully human being until his baptism. John, of course, is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth." Thus, in Mark, we have a human being who is transformed by the Holy Spirit during the act of baptism. In John, though, Jesus is God incarnate. As I said, Matthew and Luke both portray Jesus has having been conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin. Yet, even their stories do not match. In Matthew, it was an angel who told Joseph that Mary was pregnant. In Luke, the angel told this directly to Mary, and in fact, Mary plays a much larger role in all of Luke than in Matthew. In Matthew, Jesus is visited by the magi of "We Three Kings" fame who brought Jesus gold, frankenincense and myrrh. In Luke, there are no kings, but instead, Jesus is visited by three shepherds.

All four gospels have a crucifixion and resurrection. In Mark, however, there is no account of a resurrection appearance. An angel tells those who came to the empty tomb that Jesus has risen and returned to Galilee. Importantly, though, in Mark, no human being sees the risen Jesus. In Matthew, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus find the empty tomb and angels announce that Jesus has gone to Galilee and, in that account, the disciples go to Galilee and encounter the risen Jesus on a mountaintop. In Luke, the two Marys and several other women followers of Jesus find the empty tomb and again are told Jesus has risen, but not told where he may be found. According to Luke, though, the first appearance of the risen Jesus was to Cleopas and his traveling companion on the road to Emmaus. Some of you may remember that I used that story to illustrate my Easter sermon. According to John, Mary Magdalene again was the first to reach the empty tomb. She then went and told the disciples, who returned with her and verified that the tomb was empty. The disciples left, but Mary remained weeping at the empty tomb. Jesus then appeared to her. She did not recognize him at first, mistaking him for a gardener. Jesus called her by name, and when he said, "Mary", she recognized him. You may recall that neither Cleopas nor his companion recognized Jesus at first, but only after they broke break at the table.

These differences go directly to who Jesus was: was he created by God, which is the historically Unitarian view, was he God incarnate in human form, or – and this is closest to my view, was he a fully human being filled with the spirit of life? I can make sound arguments for all of these positions, and even more, based on biblical texts. Apart from who Jesus was, the gospels are just as diverse in portraying his meaning and message. Did he come to preach the end or the world? Did he come to found a new religion? I don’t think so. I think he preached a message of universal love, personal transformation and social justice that transcends all religions.

So, what happened? Let me offer an analogy to Martin Luther King, Jr. One of King’s most well-known quotes is his vision that we should all be judged not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character. On of my biggest pet peeves is when political conservatives use that quote to argue that King himself would be against affirmative action, hate-crime laws, and all other manner of civil rights legislation. In this case, we know the quote is accurate. Many of the people using it and appropriating King’s legacy to support their causes, actually knew King personally. So, today, there are many people claiming King’s legacy and using his words to support completely opposite positions.

I think the same thing happened to Jesus. In the years following his life, his followers and their followers after them understood Jesus differently, and in some cases, in ways that were completely opposite each other. These differences made their way into the various gospel accounts – not just the four in the bible, but all of them. Like any human, I think Jesus said a lot of things that, when recorded years later and without benefit of context or explanation, can be read any number of ways, some of which might be wholly inconsistent with each other. To continue my metaphor, imagine the church in the second and third century trying to settle on its position on affirmative action. They decide they’re for it or against it, and that teaching becomes the orthodoxy of the church. These early church leaders then did what we all are capable of. They took these texts and found a way to interpret all of them in a way that was consistent with their position on affirmative action. Then, for over 1500 years, they burned or imprisoned or ex-communicated anyone who disagreed with them.

So, today, to outsiders like ourselves looking at Christians, it appears that all Christians share the same beliefs. Yet, there always have been minority voices, including the two traditions we share, Unitarianism and Universalism. Take my word for this also, the Quakers are just as diverse as we are. Indeed, a large segment of Quakers do not embrace the Christian label. Likewise, mainstream faith traditions, including Catholics and protestant denominations like Methodists, Presbyterians, and even some Baptists, have large segments of their populations that share many of our core liberal religious values regarding the nature of the bible and the primacy of conscience and reason in interpreting it.

What unites these people in their Christian faith is the presence of Jesus as the center of their religious faith. Yet, these same people who embrace the Christian label for themselves understand that the stories of the virgin birth, the miracles like walking on water, and even the resurrection itself are myth and metaphors for the larger truths they see in Jesus’ ministry, which as I suggested, was about universal love, personal transformation, and social justice.

If I had my way—and we should all be grateful that I don’t—I would launch a campaign to save Jesus from the Christians who have, in my humble opinion, misappropriated Jesus’ message and his meaning. Yet, my own liberal religious values remind me that those people are just as entitled to their opinions as I am to mine, even if they are wrong. Indeed, humility counsels me to remember that they may be right.

It’s enough for me, though, to apply my own liberal religious values to Jesus and the gospels in my personal spiritual life and my desire for spiritual growth. Those values tell me to be open-minded, to apply my reason, conscience, and experience to what I read, and, most importantly, to make up my own mind about Jesus based on my own work.

That is all I ask of you today and will ask of you in the future. Don’t leave Jesus to the Christians. Let us be resolved to find truth and meaning, wherever it may be found, even if it’s in the bible.