[February 2002 journal entry]
Proposition: I find no compelling reason to think that the first leaders of Christianity understood ‘Jesus’ any more clearly after his death than during his life (the Synoptic Gospels indicating they understood very little during his life), their self-certifying claims – e.g., appeals to miraculous confirmations and to immediate revelations from ‘God’ -- after the death of ‘Jesus’ notwithstanding. They lacked an approach to ‘Jesus’ that would call for radically critiquing their various institutionalizing tendencies. Reconstructions and interpretations of the life and thought of ‘Jesus’ by representatives/guardians of Christianity then or now were/are bound by and serve/d the interests of Christianity as a ‘religion’. The reconstructions and interpretations tone/d down and sift/ed out the radical (i.e., to the root) edges of ‘Jesus’.