I found it pretty rough going.  

When I was tasked with reading the various gospels as historical documents, I was struck by the lengths the authors had gone to in their interpretations and explanations of Jesus’ every word and action.  It all begin to sound like just one big mass of “Jesus said, ‘I’ll have a hamburger and a coke.’  This was to fulfill the prophecy that…” I just wanted to hear the story itself, without somebody constantly whispering instructions in my ear on how to interpret it.  All the over-explaining only diminished the story’s credibility, in my eyes.

Learning that claims of Jesus’ descent from the topmost tier of ancient Jewish royalty were almost certainly manufactured by his first biographers, in an attempt to validate his legitimacy and teachings, also had an effect on me that was the opposite of what the authors had intended.

More troubling still was the way the people who professed to spread Jesus’ word (especially Saul of Tarsus, AKA St. Paul) seemed to have become so obsessed with propagating a cult of immortality that they blew right by the meaning of Jesus’ teachings about worldly life.

For example, when Jesus spoke about it being easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, was he necessarily speaking of an afterlife?  By “heaven,” couldn’t he just as easily have meant “enlightenment,” in the Buddhist sense of the word?

On top of all that, there was Jesus’ way of talking about “my father.”  Did that necessarily make him the “only-begotten son of God,” as was now universally asserted among Christians? After all, in the Lord’s Prayer—probably the best-documented words he ever sspoke—didn’t he teach us to say “our father,” rather than “Jesus’ father?” That sure didn’t sound like a claim of exclusivity to me.

To this day, I’m more inclined to believe that when he spoke of “his” father, Jesus was modeling the kind of relationship he wanted all of us to not only know, but experience.  Showing people that it was possible for anyone to have a direct, personal relationship with the greatest life-force of the universe seems a lot more in keeping with the selfless, sharing nature he demonstrated in other areas of his life.

Still, for a mere college kid to casually blow off thousands of years of devout, patient study and earnest faith sounded to me uncomfortably like blasphemy.  Especially so for someone who was taught in church as a child that having bad desires or thoughts was as sinful (and therefore damning) as actually carrying them out.

The result was that I didn’t know what in the world to do—or believe.  It gnawed at me, and it wasn’t the kind of thing I felt I could talk about to just anyone.