Jesus and the Tenth Plague

Jesus predicates his mission on the truth of the Hebrew scriptures, which themselves are full of alarmingly amoral depictions of God. Most of all, the central event of Christianity, the Last Supper/Eucharist/Mass, is considered the fulfillment of the original deliverance of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. Apart from the many problems accompanying the stories that we keep in the Old Testament, the Tenth Plague, the slaughter of the firstborn because Pharoah refuses to let Moses & the Hebrews go -- supposedly, only into the desert to offer sacrifice -- is morally disproportionate. Christians used to have no problem with this -- the Egyptians were abominable idolators & God was actually showing restraint in only putting to death the firstborn when he had the right to destroy the Egyptians entirely. It poses a problem for those whose societies emerged from a lengthy period of religious warring. Even Vatican II was finally obliged to concede ground to those raised in other religions. Jesus shares the belief of his people that God was just in condemning to death firstborn sons as a punishment & a demonstration of God's power.

So contemporary theocrats get around the compassionate precepts of the gospel, and the non-violent ones, by appealing to Jesus' acceptance of the scriptures as definitive. The liberal or generous advice, then, becomes advice solely on how one is to conduct oneself on a personal level, and then only with relation to people who aren't neo-pagans or idolators or violators of God's law.

It is impossible to disentangle Jesus from the God whom he called 'Father' & from the conflicts between differing versions of Christianity, wars that peristed into this century, even into the present day. If the condemnation of the firstborn at Passover is an act of divine justice & love, then any acts that offend the contemporary sense of compassion or mercy can be given the same character -- this is God's law, which is an expression of love. And the gospels give us no indication of a teaching which changed that. The much-blamed Constantine was not an emperor who kidnapped Christianity; rather, as the Eastern and Western empires became wholly Christianized, they took the whole sense of scriptures, and could not come up with a New Testament Jesus, as we have, who is not in accord with his Father in the Old Testament. The Crusaders were right about Jesus: we are the ones who are wrong.