Jesus in American Culture

Despite sharp pricks from scandalous depictions, Jesus today too often seems mastered by modern consumer culture. In that culture Jesus becomes little more than a complex object of consumption for self-absorbed fans who live vicariously through his celebrity. In a culture apparently stripped of any capacity for reverence and awe by the relentless press of the marketplace, Jesus seems increasingly a creature of celebrity and its corrosive mix of adulation, credulity, and corruptibility. For example, Mel Gibson has used his celebrity to sell his controversial and violent The Passion of the Christ. Similarly, Anne Rice has turned her vampiric notoriety to publication of a three-part life of Jesus. Thus connected to celebrity, the image of Jesus becomes corruptible through any disrepute that falls on those who associate their own uncertain celebrity with him. The result may be a rising tide of agnosticism and unbelief in the American religious marketplace.

In 1973 Jesus Christ Superstar ended with a depiction of an empty cross and, like the 1959 Ben Hur, a lone shepherd. But the ending left viewers with an enigmatic question: Who and where is Jesus? Scandalous cinematic lives of Jesus later in the 1970s and 1980s delved further into these questions in new ways. In 1979 the British comedy troupe Monty Python satirized the entire tradition of cinematic lives of Jesus in the comedy The Life of Brian. A decade later in 1988, director Martin Scorsese provoked political passions about the Christ with his The Last Temptation of Christ in which Jesus the flawed human labors to the realization that he is God's incarnate Son.

Preoccupation with the Self in the marketplace has become the hallmark of American consumer culture. The centrality of the consuming Self has infiltrated religion too, notably in the decline of religious denominations and the rise of an individualized spirituality of monadic mega-churches. Depictions of Jesus in the 1970s grew out of increasing cultural emphasis on individuality, self-actualization, and community. Several great musical productions reflect this milieu. Godspell (1973) featured an empty New York City as the central character through which danced Jesus the apocalyptic clown and his motley troupe of followers. Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) anticipated today's culture of celebrity sparked by sex and marred by violence. An essentially human and tragic Jesus appears as a celebrity seeking escape from his notoriety. His main message appears as the epitome of consumptive self-absorption: find your own salvation in the world.

The commercial success of Ben Hur in 1959 prompted a remake of DeMille's successful silent life of Jesus, The King of Kings (1927). The 1961 version retitled King of Kings portrayed Jesus as a 'rebel with a cause' - the healer, teacher, and servant of Luke's Gospel. But three hours of tepid inaction held together largely through the narrative agency of a secular yet world weary Roman centurion named Lucius flopped commercially. In 1965 another attempt to bring the life of Jesus to the big screen produced The Greatest Story Ever Told, a screenplay based on a 1949 novel of the same name. Though it featured a long list of celebrity actors - for example, John Wayne as the centurion at the foot of the cross - the lukewarm public reaction to this long and ponderous production helped cut short the full-length cinematic lives of Jesus since then.

Opening with MGM's Leo the Lion sitting in worshipful silence, clips from the 1959 remake of Ben Hur reveal an epic but reverential quest for peace of mind as the era of conformity ended. But as Ben Hur roared at the box-office, the beckoning promise of equality in American society unleashed the pent up aspirations of large segments of society previously silenced or unheard. America's epic struggle for racial equality was swiftly joined with battles for gender equality, women's rights, and sexual liberation. Jesus and religion played relatively minor roles in these revolutions. Similarly, in perhaps the most important demographic revolution of the 20th century, immigration reform in 1965 opened America to millions of newcomers from Asia and elsewhere with no prior connection to "The Book."

The 1950s gave way to the turbulent 1960s as shockwaves from demographic and economic booms and political superpower status reverberated through American society. Kennedy's presidency and assassination, the Vietnam War, and the televised social soul searching that events of the decade provoked set the stage for Jesus' appearance in new roles in American public life. His most important roles involved support of the promise of equality in America first made in the Declaration of Independence and repeated in the 14th Amendment and elsewhere. In service of this promised equality the civil rights movement resurrected Moses-Jesus who had helped ameliorate slave culture a century before. Dr. Martin Luther King took Moses-Jesus to the streets in peaceful, persistent and fruitful protest of segregation and discrimination. Jesus would no longer be slave of the white man. Like all Americans he would be free at last - even free to be black.

Critics of Billy Graham, including conservative critics, lamented Graham's raw appeals to popular emotion, his application of peer pressure, his emphasis on Christian exclusivity, and his omission of public responsibility for sin. But the sentimentality Graham reflected dominated the religious marketplace. Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking turned religion to self-help. A spate of new films about the Bible and Jesus in the 1950s trumpeted American values, the personal impact of Jesus, and his commercial appeal. DeMille's remake of The Ten Commandments showed the triumph of liberty and democracy over tyranny. The Robe depicted the power of Jesus to transform individual lives. And a big-budget remake of Ben Hur proved a wild critical and commercial success.

Increasingly in the 1920s and 1930s God and Jesus were commodified in American culture along with everything else. By the 1950s, belief itself had become the commodity without which American government and the American way of life could make no sense. Sensible belief was simply sincere, deeply felt, religious, and in conformity with the American Way of Life emphasizing domesticity, heterosexuality, individualism, manifest destiny, democracy, and especially capitalism. In this context, Billy Graham rose to prominence preaching a salvation as easy as accepting Jesus as one's personal savior.

"Sister" Aimee Semple McPherson gave those on the urban frontier in 1920s Los Angeles an inviting home where they could feel good about themselves in the embrace of Jesus' love, availability, and sacrifice. But she, like other conservatives, rejected the liberal embrace of sources of earthly wisdom and revelation other than the Bible. One such source, the new discipline of psychology, made the Self both the object of knowledge and the seat of personality. This new emphasis on the centrally located individual focused on personality rather than character, on self-differentiation and self-fulfillment rather than self-control. Consumer culture found fertile ground in this psychology of the Self and, in this context, Jesus the Personality was born.

The Fundamentalist Controversy during the 1920s pitted a liberal against a conservative Jesus. The liberal Jesus was the first Christian, a model of faith, Christian life, and selflessness. The conservative Jesus was not merely the first Christian, but God incarnate, the object of faith, the redemptor of sinful humanity. Some theologians such as the Niebuhr brothers, Reinhold and H. Richard, sought to bridge the gap, recognizing in Jesus perfect submission to God's will and redemption of both individual and social sin. In the popular mind, however, the Fundamentalist Controversy was and is linked with the facile theatrics of the Scopes Monkey Trial. As God the Book emerged in the Fundamentalist Movement to compete with Jesus, the Holiness or Charismatic Movement introduced other competitors: the Holy Spirit as a focus of Christian practice and - most vital to the success of this new movement - the worshipper as performer. The Charismatic Movement appealed particularly to lower classes, as exemplified at the Azusa Street Mission and Aimee Semple McPherson's Angelus Temple in the melting pot of early 20th century Los Angeles.

DeMille's The King of Kings was an explicitly evangelical work which he sold with glamour and sex appeal. By the film's release in 1927, Woodrow Wilson's political crusade to make the world safe for democracy had fallen flat and disillusionment and isolationist reaction had set in. The Great Depression and then the 'Good War' introduced to the 'Greatest Generation' the federal government as a great competitor to organized religion and welfare capitalism in the work of caring for people. Within American Christianity Jesus faced new competition from God the Book as the Fundamentalist Movement, in reaction to the Social Gospel and efforts to set the Bible in cultural context, recrafted the Bible as the paramount and inalterable object of belief.

Widely differing images of Jesus proliferated as the silent film era wound down. With the success of DeMille's silent 1923 The Ten Commandments, a new consortium, MGM, in 1924 optioned the rights to General Lew Wallace's Ben Hur for an astounding $600,000. The resulting film, though focused on Judah Ben Hur, included many vignettes featuring a hardly human, distant, and anonymous Jesus. Following the success of Ben Hur, DeMille filmed the iconic cinematic life of Jesus, The King of Kings, which proved to be the climax of silent film epics. DeMille's Jesus appears as miracle worker and healer. Unlike the Jesus of Ben Hur, the King of Kings Jesus proves approachable, human, and huggable, as scenes with children and first-ever cinematic close-ups of Jesus dramatize.

In the late 19th century, Victorian Americans had discovered that Jesus could instruct and inspire through literature. As the 20th century dawned, Americans found that Jesus could perform in moving pictures too. Stage performances, pantomimes, dramatic readings, tableaux vivant, and stereopticon productions presaged the first moving picture experience encapsulated in the nickelodeon's inexpensive, crude, and brief performances. Early purveyors of nickelodeon entertainment quickly realized that stories about Jesus could expand the technology's appeal to more middle class audiences. Then Jesus jumped to the silver screen. A 1905 French import, The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ, the first large-screen cinematic production, depicted in a series of tableaux vivant major episodes from Jesus' life. In 1913 Sidney Olcott sought historical authenticity in the first full-length cinematic life of Jesus, From the Manger to the Cross, some scenes of which he shot in the Holy Land. D. W. Griffith followed Birth of a Nation (1915) with a cinematic apology, Intolerance (1916), an anthology that included scenes from Jesus' life. Toward the end of the silent era in 1923, America first received Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (remade three decades later) complete with a 40 minute epilogue about a bad son, a good son, and the fallen woman the good son redeems through Bible reading.

Catholicism came to the Atlantic seaboard in the mid-17th century with English Catholics seeking refuge in Maryland. Given a small number of American Catholics and French Catholic support for the American Revolution, anti-Catholic discrimination in America remained relatively muted until poverty and famine in Ireland in the 1830s and 1840s sent a flood of Irish Catholics across the Atlantic. Large numbers of German Catholics began to arrive about the same time. Assimilation came slowly. Catholicism in Victorian American was characteristically urban, Irish, and poor. Like the denominational structures that divided Protestantism, Catholics were divided by ethnic and national groups. As American Catholicism grew, it spawned nativist critics. It also inspired many converts, partly because marriage required conversion. Also, Catholicism offered release from the demands of the religious marketplace and from the aesthetic barrenness of Protestantism, adding color, sound, and smells to the American religious experience. Moreover, the Catholic Jesus incarnated a special role for the western world illustrated both by Mary's protection of Mexico and the western hemisphere and by the large population of patron saints that accompanied Catholic immigrants.

The muscular version of Victorian Christianity exemplified in Ben Hur connects quintessentially masculine Judah Ben Hur with Jesus, the man of sorrow. The Social Gospel grounded in the same search for the historical Jesus evident in Ben Hur took shape also in an 1896 novel by Charles Sheldon, In His Steps. Sheldon's large cast of contemporary characters repeatedly posed the question "What would Jesus do?" The answer, according to Sheldon, involves paternalistic sacrifice that inevitably brings reward to the one sacrificing. Christians, says Sheldon, can together address and solve any problem, particularly poverty, by rightly filling their socially and culturally defined roles. A quarter century later ad man Bruce Barton realized explicitly Sheldon's implicit portrayal of Jesus in his novelized self-help book The Man Nobody Knows. Barton's Jesus discovers himself in the course of a ministry in which he occupies himself with modern roles such as the executive, the outdoorsman, the great salesman, and the founder of modern business.

The legitimacy evangelicals accorded the appearance of Jesus in literature in Victorian America was a turning point not only in religious attitudes toward novels and literature but in the use of new technologies more generally to market Jesus and spread the Word. Several Victorian literary lives of Jesus are especially noteworthy. Frenchman Ernst Renen's The Life of Jesus (1863) combined historical authenticity with literary imagination. New Englander Henry Ward Beecher created a meditative and conversational Life of Jesus Christ (1871) that sought to connect readers to Jesus' interior life by inviting them to "imagine" their own Gospel. Soon after, in 1875, Beecher's publisher brought out Edward Eggleston's Christ in Art, a pictorial harmonization and authentication of the Gospels through historical imagery that exemplified Victorian spirituality as it decorated middle class Victorian parlors. In the aftermath of the Civil War, literature provided also a vehicle for a new muscular Christianity to challenge Victorian feminization of Jesus. The YMCA arose in this period to guide, employ, socialize, and exercise urban young men. And in 1880, in General Lew Wallace's Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ, Jesus offered redemption for the man's man.

Victorian America produced many new faces of Jesus. One portrayal, Christian Science, emerged from 'Mind Cure' or 'New Thought' ideas, notions today linked with the 'Power of Positive Thinking.' The writings of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy revealed that disease is the result of the mind thinking incorrectly and that Jesus Christ, Scientist was the first man to recognize the divine healing power in all people called "The Christ." Eddy's writings sought to teach the mind to think positively. In this period also the domestic sphere took on new public importance as a complement to and the salvation of the commercial work place. Both at home and at work a new mass consumer, mass producer society was emerging. The modern iconic vision of Jesus advanced through new pictorial narratives told in stereopticon cards and Chautauqua vacations catering to a rising leisure class. Novels gained new legitimacy as a vehicle for portraying and marketing Jesus, particularly with the publication in 1880 of Ben Hur.

Images of Jesus were adapted to the demands of Victorian commercial culture in late 19th century America, according to guest lecturer Dr. David Morgan of Christ College at Valparaiso University in Indiana. Images played a constitutive role in shaping the face of Jesus for Protestants as well as Catholics and provided a bridge between these two markets in the development of modern imagery of Jesus. Both Protestants and Catholics used images didactically and devotionally. Protestants especially preferred to link images with text, the Word. Commercially produced images of Jesus marketed in growing urban centers to new immigrants and others offered cultural bridges from foreign homelands to the new urban frontier. In the mid-Victorian period, religious imagery emphasized mothers' nurture of children at the center of Victorian home culture. Images of Jesus directly emphasized his motherly role and appearance. Religious imagery also reflected a growing quest for historical authenticity. Protestants especially were attracted to the possibilities of new technology with the creation of 'tableau vivant' - living pictures purportedly portraying the real Jesus in authentic scenes from his life. Later in the period rising concerns about national emasculation prompted more manly portrayals of Jesus. Both masculine and feminine cultural scripts persist today.

In the Gilded or "Strenuous" Age after the Civil War a recognizably American culture first began to emerge. Mass culture and mass media - which still drive religion today - helped create a Jesus with many faces as yet another wave of evangelical revival swept the nation. Evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody cultivated the new elites and masses on the expanding urban frontier. Moody, the first international evangelical celebrity, set the stage for what was to come. He pioneered the use of advertising and publicity to stage mass urban revivals. In this period Darwin's Origin of the Species first provoked anxiety, argument, and division over the Big Question of design and moral order in the universe and the meaning of life. Northern liberals integrated Darwinian ideas with Christianity, finding Jesus incarnate in culture. Conservatives at Princeton and elsewhere rejected Darwinism as atheistic. Adventism ignored Darwinism, instead seeking separation from the world to prepare for Jesus' return.

Africans arriving in the U.S. as slaves brought with them animistic religious experiences similar to the experiences of Native Americans. As many as 20 percent of slaves imported to the U.S. had also experienced Islam. The "invisible religion" that took shape among slaves was a folk Christianity shaped by owners' desires to foster subservience and obedience and African Americans' need to deal with oppression. Black Christianity early identified with the bondage and travails of the Jewish Scriptures more strongly than the life and Passion of Christ. Jesus, for African Americans, became the combined figure of Moses-Jesus. In public life, Lincoln was Father Abraham. As the "theologian of democracy," he held the entire nation responsible for slavery and argued for the redemptive power of egalitarian democracy. His death made of him the Christ figure of American democracy.

Sin's redefinition empowered women and the clergy to take up municipal housekeeping. The ruinous institution of slavery topped the list of social concerns. By the late 18th century, American slavery was unique in the world: permanent, inherited, and based on race. By 1800 the U.S. already had begun to divide over slavery. The American Revolution exposed slavery's hypocrisy. The North, less wedded to slavery socially and economically, was able to dismantle the institution gradually, voluntarily, with compensation, and with promise of return to Africa. In 1831, Turner's rebellion ended gradualism and provoked increasing Southern defensiveness. Abolitionists faced difficulty recruiting Jesus to their cause, however, since the Gospels are silent on the matter of slavery while Paul's letters reveal tolerance of the institution. Thus, abolitionists emphasized Jesus' humanity and the golden rule. Abolition did have a violent face in John Brown, but most abolitionists sought to raise all of society from the dead. They sought to inspire a change of heart in slave holders so they would free their slaves. Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, was written to the wives and mothers of slavers imploring of them a change of heart. The South's defense of slavery was as passionate as abolitionist opposition to it. Slaves were said to be better off than the "wage slaves" of the North. Jesus had not directly justified the institution, but some argued that the golden rule, given a fixed set of fates, meant that slave holders should treat slaves as they would like to be treated if they were slaves themselves. But the wounds of slavery were not to be healed by argument.

Unlike Textual Mormonism, Temple Mormonism revealed a cosmos more akin to the Hindu or Buddhist cosmos than the Christian Cosmos. In it everything is material, growing, and evolving, even God. The faithful strive to become more like God - a process of exaltation - by following Temple practices. Jesus through obedience to the Father provides a model. On Joseph Smith's death in 1844, Mormonism split. Brigham Young led a group out of the U.S. to Utah to establish a theocracy around the temple. Smith's spouse Emma led a movement back to Textual Mormonism that rejected polygamy and re-emphasized Jesus. In this period Jesus also became the focal figure of reform movements which grew out of a redefinition of sin. Many came to see sin as the product of individual choice, rather than an original and irreparable corruption of the soul. If individuals can choose to sin, they can choose to not sin. By implication, societies too can renounce sin. Thus, was born the fight against slavery and against other social ills.

Mormonism is the story of a new and quintessentially American religious tradition, born on the romantic frontier of America's post-revolutionary democratic ferment and intent on restoring true Christianity. The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, emerged in the 1820s at the heart of the Second Great Awakening in western New York. His religious experience, visions, and ideas, drawing on the New Testament and later the Hebraic scriptures, placed Jesus at the center of "Textual" Mormonism revealed in the Book of Mormon. This focus quickly shifted to the rites and rituals of Temple Mormonism outlined in subsequent revelations in the book of Doctrine and Covenants.

Unitarians believed Jesus uniquely and completely integrated in his character all that is best in humanity, providing a perfect if ahistorical and acultural model of what it is to be human: humility, simplicity, reason, and love. They sometimes dismissed other Christians as Quadratarians: Father-God, Spirit-God, Jesus-Man, and Jesus-God. In the 1830s and 1840s elitist and chilly Unitarianism spawned in its sons and daughters Transcendentalism, encapsulated in the thought and figure of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalism posed intuition as the vehicle through which, in communing with nature, a person comes to know what is real, true, and good. Emerson's Jesus was the first man to estimate the greatness of and divinity in man. His preaching and life were meant to stir awareness in others so they too could search for the divine in themselves, others, and nature. In another counterpoint to Romanticism and Transcendentalism, the Shakers emerged from English Quakerism in the late 18th century, organizing around Mother Ann Lee. Dualities dominated Shaker beliefs about the Christ: male and female, flesh and spirit. Shakers formed rule-governed communities that, like cloistered monastic communities, sought to model true spiritual life for the world from which they had withdrawn.

The Second Great Awakening in the early decades of the 19th century transformed sin from the primordial and inescapable taint of Adam's choice to the redeemable consequence of any individual's choice. Evangelical religion sought to rouse the sinner from sinning, to convert, to have a change of heart. The Romantic Movement offered emotions as the mechanism of conversion and in its Christian incarnations Romanticism focused on the figure and Passion of Jesus. But Unitarians and others criticized the new fervor of Jesus-focused evangelicalism.

After 1800 in America, Jesus came to dominate the Trinity. The proximate cause of Jesus' new centrality was the Second Great Awakening created in the laboratory of the American Frontier and fueled by the democratic thrust of the American Revolution. Democracy and the frontier spawned increased focus on constitutionally defined social and political relations and the development of new forms of religious organization, notably the religious denomination and the camp meeting.

For most of the founders of the U.S., Jehovah was America's God, not Jesus. Unlike most of his peers, Thomas Jefferson talked and wrote much about Jesus. Though he was a critic of organized religion and the priestly class and an advocate for religious disestablishment, he believed that true religion - natural religion - would emerge from competition among religions. Nonetheless, like Franklin he believed that Jesus was important as a moral and ethical model. But in subtle difference with Franklin who argued that the preservation of social order required inculcation in the citizenry of precepts derived from moral models such as Jesus and Socrates, Jefferson contended that Jesus modeled republican virtues for the benefit of individual citizens. Neither Franklin nor Jefferson explicitly considered that Jesus could provide a model for social reform, an idea that arose later. That later Jesus as well as the Jesus of Franklin and the Jesus of Jefferson differed from Jonathan Edwards' earlier sweet Jesus who eased human acceptance of God's absolute sovereignty. All of these are present yet in American life.

In the late 18th century, the Christian God became America's God, as Billings' Chester (America's original anthem) and his hymn Independence illustrate. Yet the political realm created in the Constitution was wholly secular, excluding religion. Benjamin Franklin illustrates this distinctly American tension. He summarized his influential view of America's public religion in the dictum, "Imitate Jesus and Socrates." Franklin emphasized Calvin's absolutely sovereign God, ever present but ever distant. Jesus like Socrates provided a personally and socially important model of true humility and modesty in the face of that all-powerful and inscrutable God. Good deeds, not a good heart, Franklin believed, would lead to moral improvement and be rewarded.

The First Great Awakening legitimated emotion and emotional expression in American religion. Ironically, the Enlightenment simultaneously revealed natural religion as a rational counterpoint to the emotional religion discovered in this great revival. Doubling the irony, rationalistic strains of Deism and Unitarianism dominated the religious outlook of the founders of American political and civil society. Men such as Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson cast American society in religious terms - e.g., the City on a Hill, the New Zion - but for them Jesus represented the new nation's ethical inspiration and guide rather than the object of its guiding affections. The Revolution represented not Jesus but Jehovah God at work in America.

The First Great Awakening in the early 18th century represented a worldwide revival of pietistic religion in counterpoint to Enlightenment ideas. The Methodism of John and Charles Wesley that emerged from the Church of England, like other agents of this revival, emphasized the evangelical conversion experience open to every individual. Jonathan Edwards, as he sought to resurrect true Calvinism in early 18th century America, accidentally but unalterably refocused American attention on emotional religion. The new study of faculty psychology identified the understanding as the faculty that could guide the affections into purposive action. Hence, deeply felt emotions centered on Jesus would be the crux of the evangelical conversion experience. The hymnic tradition that grew in evangelical Protestantism - equivalent in words to Catholic painting and sculpture - provided an emotional language of lyrics and music focused on Jesus through which to inspire and celebrate evangelical conversion

Puritan beliefs emphasized God the Father. Jesus modeled absolute obedience to an absolutely sovereign God. The only access to Jesus and thence to God was through the Word, interpreted by the church and its ministers. In the New World, Puritanism made itself the basis of civil society and the enforcer of moral order. But political dominion provoked reaction in various forms. Anne Hutchinson, claiming divine revelation, found in Jesus security in a belief system otherwise fraught with anxiety. She opened a mystical vein of pietistic Puritanism in which anyone could gain access to Jesus through the Bible. Signifying this access, Puritans generally found word-centered metaphors for Jesus (e.g., shepherd, bridegroom). Quakers - lower class in origin - universalized access, renouncing all social distinctions, religious ceremonies, and any hold of the state on conscience. Ignoring the Jesus of history almost entirely they held that God implanted the Risen Christ or Inner Light in each person directly.

A segment of the film The Mission illustrates the impulses and challenges shaping the Catholic Jesus in the New World's southern hemisphere. Catholic outreach across the New World was followed by Protestant missions concentrated especially in New England, offering like Franciscans and Jesuits the salvific gift of Jesus to all souls. Calvinist settlers offered Native Americans Jesus the Word, a figure quite different from Catholicism's Jesus the Body. The intellectualism of Calvinism's focus on the Word proved an insuperable obstacle to Protestant efforts to convert Native Americans. The idea of predestination - that God has predetermined who will be saved and who will be damned - particularly befuddled Puritan missionary efforts and ultimately itself did not survive the religious marketplace that took root in the New World.

Despite Jesus' new accessibility imprinted in the Protestant Reformation, Jesus first came to the New World in Catholic missions. Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries sought, like Puritans and other Protestants later, to convert Native Americans to Christianity. Christ the Body who Catholicism brought to the New World was material, visible, and portable, but Catholic missions found conversion difficult nonetheless because of linguistic and especially cultural differences. The concept of individual sin, for example, had no parallel in the New World. But Jesus the Body fleshed out in Jesus the celibate, Jesus the martyr for his people, and especially Jesus the miracle worker offered meaningful connections to New World peoples. Mary, the universal Mother, became the New World's special patron. A clip from the film The Black Robe illustrates the challenges, commitments, connections, and passions of Jesus' North American arrival.

In the Protestant Reformation Jesus became not the Body but the Word. This happened in a variety of ways. The Anglican reformation removed the English church from the body of the Catholic Church on the word of King and Parliament. Puritanism subsequently sought to purify the English church of all Catholic elements. The Free Church reformation centered in Switzerland broke ties both to Rome and to any kind of state sponsorship, embracing persecution for one's faith. More radical reform movements such as the Quakers did away with all intermediaries, even clergy. Some went so far as to disavow the Bible itself as the 'paper pope,' an impulse particularly strong in the U.S. In net effect the Protestant Reformation sought to purge the Cosmos of saints, icons, representations of Jesus, and in some cases even celebrations of Christmas and Easter. Instead, for most Protestants the individual could obtain direct access to Jesus through the Bible.

Jesus and Mary both served as models of perfect sacrifice in the medieval Catholic Church. But their representation in art evolved. In early Christianity, Jesus was often depicted in parabolic fashion, e.g., a fish, the vine. But in the West as the medieval period unfolded Jesus increasingly was portrayed as 'Christ in Glory.' In the Eastern Church, which split with the West in the 11th century partly over issues surrounding icons of Jesus and the saints, icons continued to be accepted and venerated as direct representations of the divine. By 1500 the Roman Catholic Church had unified Europe for 1,000 years with a common religious faith and church organization, with a shared language and cosmos, and with its political influence. Corruption set in at the top and bottom of the church hierarchy, but the invention of the printing press made possible permanent reform and helped set in motion the Protestant Reformation led by Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others. The Jesus of the Protestant Reformation departed dramatically from the human and suffering Jesus of the Catholic Cosmos.

Christian orthodoxy took shape over five centuries particularly in conflicts among claims about the true Jesus. Competing groups claimed to possess the true oral tradition or the true written tradition or revelation from the Spirit or a connection to the apostolic generation or possession of Gnostic wisdom or the power to work miracles and so on. The Catholic Church had codified its faith at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE in a creed - the Nicene Creed - dominated by Jesus. But crucially Emperor Constantine's legalization of Christianity used state power to establish orthodoxy out of competing claims in the late 4th century. Subsequent Church councils further codified beliefs now backed by state power. Between 500 and 1500 CE Christianity took shape as the official religion of the Roman and then the western world. Though the eastern and western churches divided in 1054, the beliefs outlined in the Nicene Creed formed the nucleus of a Christian Cosmos fed by sacraments administered by the Church, explicated in the Church's magisterium, and ritually dramatized according to a calendar ordered by the life of Jesus and a growing company of saints, most centrally the Virgin Mary.

Like each of the synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of John was intended for a distinct audience. Unlike the synoptic Gospels, John does not depict the full sweep of the life and ministry of Jesus. Instead, Jesus, the stranger descended from the realm of light proclaims himself humanity's new access to God. The final part of the canon, the letters attributed to Paul, are the oldest Christian-origin documents. Paul lacked direct knowledge of Jesus' life and ministry but had come to know the cosmic Christ on the road to Damascus where he was set the task of taking the Gospel to the gentiles. As the canon slowly took shape over four centuries the emerging church had to address three core problems. First was the failure of Israel to embrace Jesus as the Messiah. Second was the failure of Jesus to return. Third was the definition of Jesus. From conflicts over these issues orthodoxy gradually emerged.

The Gospels themselves exhibit the "necessary work of creative interpretation" in the views they provide us of Jesus. They present us with the core mysteries at the center of Christianity encapsulated in the Incarnation and the Trinity. The answers to a host of perplexing questions - today's orthodoxies - emerged gradually over centuries. The canonic Gospels as survivors of a fierce competition among groups tell us as much about those they were for as about Jesus. Despite their commonalities, the synoptic Gospels - Mark, Matthew, and Luke/Acts - were intended originally for very different audiences.

The meaning of Jesus in American culture today emerges from the religious marketplace which is rapidly replacing traditional denominations in the United States. Students' statements today and from thirty years ago about their religious beliefs and religiosity reveal the scope and magnitude of the changing meanings of Jesus in America. With that diversity in mind, since no one has independent access to the Jesus of history, this course will survey the "necessary work of creative interpretation" carried out by particular Christian communities in specific historical contexts.

Jesus is today central in American culture as never before. He is a powerful figure inspiring presidents, film makers, artists, composers, novelists and historians alike. This course, as a work of historiography, will survey the myriad ways in which particular Christian communities in America have created contemporary meaning from the life of Jesus.