Covid19 and Christianity

 When asked recently to speak about early Christian history, I wondered how to make the topic relevant in today’s virus-decimated society.  I realized eventually that the two historical time periods have a lot in common.

Indeed, early Christian history can serve as a model for the modern world.

To understand that, we have to understand the actual history.  Of course, Christianity begins with Jesus.  Unfortunately, very little is known about him.  The biblical accounts are laced with mythology. The first Gospel, Mark, didn’t appear until about 40 years after the date of Jesus’ accepted death.  We all know how much information can get lost or altered in that time. 

Some of our knowledge comes from the Nazarenes, a pious Jewish sect that followed James and a prophet named Jesus who predicted the world was coming to an end.  That Jesus was not alone; lots of people, fed up with more than 60 years of Roman rule, were forecasting that God would destroy the Romans and recreate a Jewish theocracy.

Model of the Second Temple

Beyond that, Jesus doesn’t appear in any historical account of the day.  The only authentic data comes from Josephus, the historian of the late first century, who wrote about a Jesus who stood in front of the Temple in the early 60s and repeatedly crying that a “great wind was coming.”  Presumably, the reference was to the eventual destruction of the Temple.  Officials thought he was crazy. No one believed in him.

The only other person who wrote about Jesus was Paul, a resident of Tarsus who wanted to be included among the Jews.  Despite his claims, he was not Jewish.  The Nazarenes said Paul was not circumcised.  He didn’t know Jewish law or Hebrew.  However, he did want to be included among the Jews when the world ended.

As such, he tried to join the Nazarenes and was rebuffed.  He eventually came up with a solution: Just believe in Jesus, who was the brother of James and crucified.  Paul left us letters in which he said Jesus was born in the usual way and did nothing in his life but was so pure that God selected him to be “king of the Jews” while on the cross.  To fulfill that role, Jesus would have to return. 

Paul

This way, Paul bypassed James and the Nazarenes and eliminated the Jewish laws that restricted him.  Paul then went around the Mediterranean, setting up tiny colonies of believers waiting for Jesus to come back. 

Meanwhile, Jewish zealots, tired of waiting for God to act, attacked the Romans in 66, starting a devastating war that continued until 73 and final Roman victory.  In the process, the Temple was burned down.

The Temple revived the moribund Christian sect.  Leaders were able to argue that God had fled His house and had come to the survivors, the members of the small colonies Paul developed.

The first Gospel was then written, around 71.  Mark has no birth or crucifixion stories.  Instead, he follows Paul in that Jesus was the real king but didn’t tell anyone.  He also predicted the destruction of the Temple.  In that, he combined the Jesus mentioned by Josephus with the Jesus who was the prophet of the apocalypse.

 

Mark didn’t do mislead deliberately.  Writing in Rome, he knew the name Jesus who was preaching an apocalypse and naturally assumed the Jesus who predicted the destruction of the Temple was the same one.  Since the Temple was destroyed, fulfilling the prediction, Jesus must be special. 

A successful prediction galvanized the early Christians.  A second book, known as Matthew, then appeared around 85.  It was written to the exiles of the Jewish war, then largely collected in Alexandria, Egypt, and assured them if they followed Jesus, the new Moses, He would lead them home.  Matthew’s Jesus quotes from existing literature and is made to be more of a leader, one who could ride into Jerusalem with acclaim.  Mathew also ascribed multiple miracles to Jesus, drawing on stories about prophets in the Jewish religious texts.

Elsewhere, around the same time, a third gospel showed up.  Luke went further than Matthew by making Jesus the subject of adoration by visiting kings and a recognized figure in the country.  John, the last gospel, finished off the elevation of Jesus by having Him exist before all time.

Since the authors of Luke and Matthew did not read each other’s books, they have diverse birth stories, genealogies and other details.  However, because they both use Mark as a source, they agree in many areas. John may have been written to counter them because the author gives Jesus a different age, an alternative timeline for ministry and death as well as other changes.

Constantine

Debates over the role of Jesus continued into the 4^th century when Emperor Constantine hosted a gathering of church leaders in 325 to set the theology.  At Nicaea, Jesus became God.  Constantine was not Christian, but his mother was.  He legalized the religion. About 60 years later, another emperor made it the sole legal religion, launching the Christian era.

How does any of that connect to Covid19?

Consider the parallels.  Like Christianity, Covid19 arrived unexpectedly and in a small way. It then spread through human contact, just as Christianity did.  It rapidly upset the previous way of life.  Christianity did the same thing, albeit at a slower pace. 

Mythology has collected around the virus: it was invented in a lab; the Chinese sprung it on the world; Bill Gates is behind it; and so on.  The mass of disinformation is easily overwhelming the facts.  Christian history paved that path two millennia ago.  As one religious historian noted: “The real Jesus was sacrificed for the divine Jesus.”

Covid19 affecting children

Covid19 is already evolving into new forms, one of which apparently threatens children.  In the same way, early Christianity shattered into multiple sects.  One predominated, but others still exist.

Covid19 has also created a new norm.  Christianity did exactly the same thing.  Everything changed.  Just as conservative pagans objected then, so do conservatives today.  Then and now, people want to go back to the life they knew, to the norm they enjoyed.

That didn’t happen 1700 or so years ago.  It won’t happen now.

This is the new norm: social distancing, different forms of communication, changes in the economic model and so on.    

It took a long time before Christianity became the accepted norm.  No doubt, the new norm will be imposed at a faster pace, given the power of today’s communication and the ability to reach huge masses of people. 

There are differences of course.  I doubt anyone will worship Covid19, and I don’t want to imply that Christianity is any kind of disease.  Nevertheless, what happened in the past can clearly illuminate the present.

Christian history and Covid19 are proof of that.

Long-time religious historian Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history with an occasional foray into American culture.  He holds an ABD in American Studies from Case Western Reserve University.   He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at wplazarus@aol.com. He is the author of the recently published novels Revelation! (Southern Owl Press) and The Great Seer Nostradamus Tells All (Bold Venture Press) as well as a variety of nonfiction books, including The Gospel Truth: Where Did the Gospel Writers Get Their Information and Comparative Religion for Dummies.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.  He can also be followed on Twitter.

Trumping Voter Fraud Claims

Trump

President Donald Trump, and his supporters, continue to insist that U.S. elections are tainted by fraud.  To protect against such fraud, they want to block mail-in ballots for the 2020 presidential election.

Trump has repeatedly said, “Mailed ballots are corrupt.” That’s the chorus echoed by his followers as well as the usual claims that “millions” of illegal immigrants voted in 2016 and that voter fraud is rampant.

It’s all a flat lie.

Oregon, the state that pioneered mail-in ballots, has found a dozen possible cases of fraud in the more than 100 million ballots mailed out since 2000.

Hasen

Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, has studied voter fraud extensively and written about it.  He noted in a 2015 magazine article on voter fraud that “it would be literally insane to try to steal an election in the way Donald Trump is alleging.”

In his 2012 book in U.S. elections, titled The Voting Wars, Hasen wrote that he “could not find a single instance anywhere in the U.S. from the 1980s onward where massive impersonation fraud was used to try to steal an election.”

The number of voters using mail-in ballots already runs into the millions.  According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, in the presidential elections in 2012 and 2016, about 25 percent of all Americans voted by mail-in ballot.  In 2018, the percentage of mail-in voters reached almost 26 percent.  For residents in Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, that’s the primary method of voting. 

Overall, since 200, the commission said more than 250 million votes have been cast using this method. 

As for fraud, extremely rare.  In the 2016 presidential election, four cases have been identified. 

Rote

In Iowa, one woman voted twice – for Trump.  Teri Lynn Rote said she tried because “the polls are rigged.”  Paul Cook was arrested in Texas for voting twice.  He said he worked for the Trump campaign and was testing the security system.  It apparently worked.

In Illinois, Republican election judge Audrey Cook voted for her late husband.  They got absentee ballots, but he died before he could vote.  So, she voted for him.  That ballot was not counted.

Finally, in Florida, Gladys Coego was hired to open absentee ballots in Miami-Dade County. She filled in a ballot for a mayoral candidate and was caught. 

That’s it.

Hansen wrote, “It is still more likely for an American to be struck by lightning than to commit mail voting fraud.”

Gerken

Trump’s “allegations are false. Fraud almost never takes place through in-person voting and certainly not enough to swing an election)” said Heather Gerken, a professor of law at Yale Law School and an election law expert.  “There have been astonishingly few examples, and with good reason. It is far, far, far easier to steal an election by bribing an election official ...”

PolitiFact, a debunking website, added, there was no evidence in 2016, and there has been no evidence since, of "large scale voter fraud.”

Using voting machines are equally safe.  Statistician and voting systems analyst Philip Stark at the University of California Berkeley said optical scanners are good but not perfect. "I’ve seen error rates on the order of one-quarter of a percent," Stark said.

That’s not enough to affect a presidential election.

So why the clams of fraud with the 2020 election only a few months away?  Trump and his cohorts know fully well his odds of re-election depend on voter turnout.  He only won with a minority of the vote in 2016 because about 105 million voters stayed away from the polls.

Wisconsin Vvoters

Considering his low status in current opinion polls, Trump is doing everything he can to try to get even more  Americans to stay home.  The process was tested in Wisconsin where voters amid a pandemic were obligated to stand in line at the polls when the conservative high court there blocked mail-in ballots. 

Wisconsin voters risked illness to turn out in droves.  The turnout was estimated at 34 percent, which was less than 2016, but greater than 2012.  "All of those factors seemed to conspire to really reduce voter turnout," said Barry Burden, the director of the University of Wisconsin's Elections Research Center. "But, in the end, the voters responded."

In doing so, they unseated a conservative member of that court.

Absurd and continuous lies notwithstanding, Trump and his followers are afraid they will see the same kind of results nationwide in November.

Long-time religious historian Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history with an occasional foray into American culture.  He holds an ABD in American Studies from Case Western Reserve University.   He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at wplazarus@aol.com. He is the author of the recently published novels Revelation! (Southern Owl Press) and The Great Seer Nostradamus Tells All (Bold Venture Press) as well as a variety of nonfiction books, including The Gospel Truth: Where Did the Gospel Writers Get Their Information and Comparative Religion for Dummies.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.  He can also be followed on Twitter.