The Textual Debate

The debate revolves around a textual variance in Mark 1:41. The word found within the majority of texts is Splanchnizomai (σπλαγχνίζομαι) which is translated as something like “moves with compassion.” But within the Codex Bezae, a 5th-century manuscript, we find the word Orgistheis (ὀργισθείς) which means “moved with anger” or “moved with indignation.”

According to the rule Lectio Difficilior Potior (the more difficult reading is the stronger) many scholars choose the minority reading of Orgistheis. The idea is that Scribes sometimes acted like editors to smooth out difficult texts. Seeing Jesus put into a bad light, they would change some words, like a PR agent working on Jesus’ behalf. Because there was a change, one way or the other, these scholars think that it doesn’t make sense for a scribe to change the text from compassion to anger, since that would make the text more difficult from a PR perspective, so the more difficult reading is held as being the most likely.

Daniel Wallace, in his extensive note in the NET bible, says that the correct reading is anger. Though the number of manuscripts is overwhelmingly in favor of the reading for compassion, the internal evidence is overwhelmingly in favor for a reading of anger.1 He also point out that some of the work of the skeptic, Bart Ehrman, on this point has been some of the finest work on the question.

I don’t have Bart’s books or papers, but I did find a conversation he had about this in 2005. He said, “since becoming angry is the more difficult reading to understand, it’s more likely to have been the original reading. The logic is you have to ask yourself: If you were a scribe changing the text, which text would you have been likely to have changed? If you had the text in front of you that said ‘Jesus became compassionate,’ would you be likely to want to change that to say became angry? Whereas on the other hand, if the text originally said ‘Jesus became angry,’ would you be likely to change it to say he became compassionate? So as it turns out, there’s other evidence that that, in fact, is exactly what Mark originally said, that Jesus became angry”.2

Another supporting view that is used is the contextual evidence found in Mark 1:43. The word embrimáomai (ἐμβριμάομαι) is used. Strong’s says it comes from the word brimáomai (βριμάομαι), which means “to snort with anger” and that the word means “to have indignation on, i.e. (transitively) to blame, (intransitively) to sigh with chagrin, (specially) to sternly enjoin:—straitly charge, groan, murmur against.”3 In B.B. Warfield’s book The Emotional Life of Our Lord, it says that this word “is never used otherwise that of hot anger in the Classics, the Septuagint, and the New Testament… save when they denote snorting or growling proper".4

Besides this, we have this word exebalen (ἐξέβαλεν) which means to cast out. In Mark 1, it is also used in verses 12, 33 and 39. In verse 12, the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness where he endures the temptations of Satan for 40 days. In 33 and 39 we see the same word used to describe Jesus driving out demons. The word exebalen implies a violent force—it is the same word used for casting out demons or tearing something up by the roots.5

Jesus, then, in verse 43, seems to be have indignation at the leper he just healed and forcefully sends him away. All of this supports the indignation or anger translation of verse 41.

Why is Jesus Mad?

What is the deal with Jesus being mad? Here’s my take.

We could be tempted to view Jesus as being angry at the leper. But then he kind of turns into a monster. Is he disgusted by the man and, even though he’s healed him, he wants him out of his presence?

But this isn’t really in alignment with how Jesus views illness. Jesus views illness as a foreign invader, as a marring of this image of God. Jesus doesn’t view illness as a medical condition, but as a foreign occupying force in God’s good creation.

Looking at the passage, the leper comes to him and ask for help. Jesus is moved with indignation and BECAUSE of his indignation he heals the man. This wouldn’t make sense if he was mad at the man. He’s mad at the situation. He’s mad that a man can even be a leper to begin with.

For me, it almost feels like the anger of the Lord is a key factor in this cleansing. I need to think about this more, but this reminds of a lot of Yahweh in the Old Testament, lashing out in anger, blotting out the unholy in His anger.

The Interesting Bit Here

What’s really interesting about this that Jesus touches the leper, but before he does he declares that the man will be clean. This flips how Jews understood cleanliness.

Haggai 2:11-13 says:

1 “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Ask the priests what the law says: 12 If someone carries consecrated meat in the fold of their garment, and that fold touches some bread or stew, some wine, olive oil or other food, does it become consecrated?’”

The priests answered, “No.”

13 Then Haggai said, “If a person defiled by contact with a dead body touches one of these things, does it become defiled?”

“Yes,” the priests replied, “it becomes defiled.”

So, according to Haggai, holiness cannot be transferred by one that is clean but impurity can be transferred by something unclean. In other words, the Sacred cannot transfer to the Profane to make it Sacred, by the Profane can transfer to the Sacred to profane it. But in Jesus we see something completely different.

Jesus is angry that the profanity of sin has spread to infect this poor man. In his anger, He imparts his cleanliness into the man and completely wipes out his uncleanliness. He then compels the man out of the house, imploring him to keep the law and present himself to the priest.

This is important. Jesus is something completely different in the history of the world. He isn’t one who is profaned by the world, but is one who sanctifies and brings the world back into the original vision of Eden. And more to the point, he isn’t only compassionately doing this, but he is doing it with aggression and with pointed purpose. He is a not some passive character, helping an unfortunate soul when they come to him, but is an active, aggressive force looking to take the world over by force.

Because God wrote His law on human hearts (Romans 2:15), and because humans are uniquely moral, the world is never merely “data” to us. We experience it as charged with meaning and moral weight. In that sense, mythology—and story more generally—can be understood as a kind of natural revelation: a human attempt to articulate what we already sense, though it varies wildly in accuracy and efficacy.

This is a two-part post. In Part 1, I’m laying the groundwork by focusing on meaning-making and moral imagination. In Part 2, I’ll turn to sympathy, mercy, and the ways modern man routinely misplaces sacred weight with failed ultimacy and false religion.

Usually when I preach or write, I make some pop-culture reference, because a good story often illustrates what a dry definition cannot. As I began ruminating about quotations on human nature, I found myself thinking, “Doesn’t Jeff Winger from Community have a rant or two about this?” Yes, yes he does—and it is such a gem that I decided to build an entire post around it. I initially reached for this monologue as a hook to draw in the reader, but I quickly realized that buried within this train of thought are several key components for understanding human nature. And those components can help me in my larger task of defending the following argument—especially Premise 1a, while also showing why Premise 1b is not an arbitrary leap.

What makes humans different from other animals? We’re the only species on earth that observes Shark Week. Sharks don’t even observe Shark Week, but we do. For the same reason I can pick up this pencil, tell you its name is Steve and go like this (breaks it) and part of you dies just a little bit on the inside. Because people can connect with anything. We can sympathize with a pencil, we can forgive a shark, and we can give Ben Affleck an Academy Award for screenwriting. People can find the good in just about anything but themselves. Look at me. It’s clear to all of you that I am awesome. But I could never admit that. That would make me an ass.

Here are the premises again:

Premise 1a: Everyone has an ultimate concern—an orienting center of value that orders their judgments, sacrifices, and hopes.
Premise 1b: Such an ultimate concern is properly described as religious in nature.

My focus in this post is still Premise 1a. But it is worth naming Premise 1b at the outset, because the connection between ultimacy and religion is not accidental. As we’ve already seen with Tillich, ultimacy is not a decorative layer added to life after the “important stuff” is done—it is the gravity that orders what counts as important in the first place. Once you grant that humans live toward an “end,” you are already admitting that some ends carry the kind of weight we normally reserve for worship—whether we call it that or not.

So then, what does a pencil named Steve have to do with human nature, Aristotelian goodness, ultimacy, and religion?

At minimum, it exposes four distinct features of the human condition:

• Symbolic perception and meaning-making

• Moral imagination

• Universal sympathy (and the risk of misplaced mercy)

• The misappropriation of myth (the drift into failed ultimacy)

In this post I will focus on the first two: meaning-making and moral imagination. Together they establish a foundation for why humans inevitably move toward ultimate concerns.

1. Symbolic perception and meaning-making

Human symbolic perception is not enough, by itself, to explain the full difference between human thought and animal behavior; but it is a necessary starting point. To think symbolically is to treat things as signs rather than as random, lifeless objects. We assign names, roles, and significance beyond utility. That tendency transcends survival. It is not merely pragmatic. It is interpretive—an attempt to discern meaning and to live in a world that is more than brute fact.

As a child, I used to think of raindrops sliding across the car window as alive and in a race. I’d assign backstories like, “I’m racing to win back the love of my wife and kids.” I’d call the race like a color commentator and narrate “amazing comebacks” and photo finishes. Of course, it was pure entertainment—but it reveals something true: symbolic perception adds meaning to something that is, on its face, arbitrary. The same is true for a pencil named Steve. If you watch the embedded video of the full Jeff Winger rant, one of the characters, Abed—who loves movies and story in general—becomes fascinated by the broken pencil. Enamored, he tries to force the two broken ends together. But why?

Karen Armstrong captures this human impulse well when she argues that symbolic perception is a major source of mythology:

We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonize about the canine condition, worry about the plight of dogs in other parts of the world, or try to see their lives from a different perspective. But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.1

While I disagree with her view of myth as purely invented—as if myth is only projection and never discovery—her sentiment remains helpful nonetheless. To be explicit about what I mean here: my “myth realism” is the claim that while many myths are humanly shaped, not all are humanly originated; some are given—whether as revelation, providential memory, or truthful pattern—before they are ever narrated. Humans do not merely receive the world. We interpret it. We story it. And the fact that we do this so naturally already tells us something about the kind of creatures we are.

But symbolic perception, by itself, does not yet explain why some meanings become binding—why certain meanings arrive with moral force rather than mere entertainment. That is where moral imagination enters.

2. Moral imagination

Once we start living by stories, we start living by standards, and that moves us toward universality. Humans do not merely notice patterns—we grasp universals, and we do it with a type of moral imagination. Universal thinking includes concepts like all, ought, and should. It is the belief that certain things should be certain ways. This is the thinking of a moral creature, because it results in phenomena like shame, obligation, guilt, and praise. And when we combine universals with meaning-making, the result is not just “story,” but a moral imagination: a world that is not only described, but judged.

Philosopher Richard Swinburne argues that humans are set apart from animals because of this capacity for universality:

Languageless animals cannot, for example, show understanding of the distinction between universality and mere normality—e.g. between “all crocodiles are dangerous” and “normally crocodiles are dangerous.” The same behavior of fleeing from crocodiles will result, and for each belief the hypothesis that the animal has that belief has the simplicity to give an integrated account of this behavior; either belief could result, by principles of inference which humans use, from sensory stimuli. Hence we cannot attribute to animals our concept of universality (which is so sharply distinct from mere normality).2

Once again, animals can display behavior similar to humans by avoiding danger and employing a kind of proto-morality, but they lack at least two distinctly human capacities. First, humans think in universals, not merely patterns or visceral reactions. Second, humans can distinguish universal/normative claims from mere description. “This is usually dangerous” is practical animal instinct. But “This is truly good,” “This is wrong,” “This is sacred,” and “You ought not do that” are universal and normative claims.

Now the question becomes clearer: why does this lead to ultimacy at all? Why does a moral creature not simply have strong preferences, but an ultimate concern?

The step that is easy to miss is that finitude forces ultimacy. A creature with meaning and moral universals cannot keep all goods equal, because life does not allow it. Time, attention, and risk require tradeoffs. What you will sacrifice sleep for, what you will endure shame for, what you will refuse to lose even at great cost—those realities function as more than preferences. They become a center. And once a center is in place, it begins to order everything else: loves become aligned, fears become intelligible, guilt and pride take shape, and life acquires a felt direction. This is why Tillich’s “ultimate concern” is so helpful: it names the reality or vision of reality that demands the whole person, organizes meaning-making, and quietly becomes the measure by which all other goods are weighed.

So if Premise 1a is true, then ultimate concern is not first a “religious add-on” some people have and others don’t. It is the inevitable gravitational center of human life once meaning and moral universals are in play. A creature that can interpret reality and judge it cannot remain neutral toward it. Such a creature will inevitably rank goods, organize sacrifices, and live toward some end that feels final.

And that brings us back to Winger’s pencil. The point is not that a pencil actually matters—it is that we cannot help but make it matter. We assign names, meanings, and moral weight with startling ease. Part of you dies “just a little bit on the inside” when Steve breaks, because humans do not merely observe reality; we invest it. And once we invest reality, we must also decide what that investment is ultimately for.

The remaining question is not whether humans have ultimate concerns, but where those concerns actually land—what captures our sympathy, what we call mercy, and what we accidentally treat as sacred. That is where the story becomes dangerous, because misplaced weight is the seed of idolatry and the profane

Premise 1: Everyone has an ultimate concern—an orienting center of value (that is, everyone is religious in some sense).
Premise 2: Every ultimate concern is expressed and sustained through a mythic framework—a creation myth and its ensuing mythos.
Therefore: Everyone lives by a creation myth and its accompanying mythos, whether acknowledged or not.

Today I will focus on Premise 1, which can be broken down a bit further:

Premise 1a: Everyone has an ultimate concern—an orienting center of value that orders their judgments, sacrifices, and hopes.
Premise 1b: Such an ultimate concern is properly described as religious in nature.

Premise 1a is much easier to defend than 1b. And while most of the connection will arise with Premise 1b, I still need to establish Premise 1a. I will begin by arguing for Premise 1a through establishing that humans are set apart from animals.

When I refer to man as animal, I am in no way detracting from the truth that he is made in the image of God, or that he is set apart from the animal kingdom. All men are animals, but all animals are not men. The same works with the Hebrew word Elohim, which is the generic term for an immaterial creature. Angels are elohim and God is Elohim, so God is (an) Elohim—but no other elohim is God. God is of a similar nature as the other elohim but is set apart in terms of moral goodness, reason, and ability. The same is true for humans when compared to other animals.

Humans are animals in the sense that nearly everything that can be applied to animals can be applied to humans: we live according to our physical nature and therefore we respond similarly to external stimuli with corresponding internal brain states. While the physical nature is similar, there is another aspect that differs: a normative or teleological nature. By that I mean this: humans don’t merely act; we can be judged in relation to what we are meant to be. Humans have an “ought” stitched into their experience. This is where the Twain line bites. Blushing isn’t merely a biological reaction; it is a moral signal. It is the body testifying that something has gone wrong—not merely socially awkward, but wrong.

What is the good? This is also called “Aristotelian goodness.” Philosophers often talk about this, and goodness is one of those words that we use constantly but still have difficulty defining. The most irreducible and proper definition is: the proper use of intended function—or, more plainly, performing the task for which a thing is designed.

What is the good of a chair? It holds the weight of people, it is stable, and it is comfortable. What is the good of a broom? It sweeps the floor well. What is the good of a beaver? It “beaves”—that is, it lives according to its kind: it creates dens from trees it fells, creates dams, and procreates. In this sense, animals often “excel” at their goodness: they tend to live according to what they are. They do not morally rebel against their nature. They simply enact it.

So what is the good of humans? That is: what is the unique function of humans? What do humans do uniquely well? Or rather, in the case of humans, what are they meant to do uniquely well?

Let us consider a couple of key concepts. First, I wish to differentiate between human attributes and human attributions (to animals). Human attributes are components that are unique to humans, while human attributions are anthropomorphic projections of uniquely human attributes onto animals.

Let us consider shame again. For the most part, shame is unique to humans. However, my dog Vash has a tendency to chew up things she is not meant to chew. She does this when she feels like she’s not getting enough attention. When she is confronted with evidence of her wrong-doing, she puts her tail between her legs, puts her ears down, and makes a sad face. She seems to display things like regret and shame.

The only reason I am able to give those attributions is because they are part of my attributes—or, in the language I’ve been using, part of my normative nature—and therefore they give clues to my (and all humans’) Aristotelian goodness. I can delineate things like shame, wrong-doing, and regret because those things are uniquely human. Of course, I am not maintaining that these components are entirely absent from the animal kingdom, only that only someone human could make the observation, “Look at that dog displaying shame.” It would seem unlikely if a dog thinks, “Wow, Vash is really displaying human levels of shame.” A human can make this observation, but only because humans uniquely understand shame.

And here is the key: we do not merely feel shame; we treat shame as something that can be right or wrong. We argue about warranted shame versus toxic shame. We say, “You shouldn’t feel guilty about that,” and we also say, “You ought to feel guilty for that.” We don’t merely experience moral emotions—we evaluate moral emotions. That already places us in a different category than mere stimulus-response creatures. It implies an inner court, an implicit standard, a sense of measure.

It seems that what sets humans apart from the animal kingdom is not merely intelligence, but a desire (and obligation) for some degree of moral goodness. Shame, regret, and wrong-doing are moral language. Humans act on moral awareness and live as if they can discern some type of universal moral law, which is often referred to as natural law. Therein presents another unique human feature: a unique type of reasoning that allows for universality—second-order mental states, or the ability to have thoughts about thoughts.

One can point to animals that display behaviors we might call “proto-moral” or “proto-rational.” Even if bonobos show social restraint and corvids show astonishing problem-solving, neither is defined by moral accountability the way humans are. They may show attributions, but they do not bear the full weight of attributes. No one would compel the beast, “you ought not to kill competing males.” It is understood the bonobo cannot—and should not—be held to the same standards as humans.

This is where the difference between even the most moral animal and the least moral human begins to separate: expectation. What is interesting about human nature is that humans are uniquely moral, but unlike any other animal in the animal kingdom, it is not surprising when humans fail to meet their unique function, normative nature, or Aristotelian goodness.

It would be anomalous if the beaver did anything but “beave”—that is, to live outside of its nature: to walk to a sand dune and eat sand. If someone saw a beaver acting that way, one would think, “That is bizarre behavior.” Whereas the opposite seems to be true when it comes to humans. Humans are expected to act according to some moral natural law, but it is considered anomalous when it is actually achieved. That is: human goodness has something to do with intellect and moral goodness, but it is not surprising when that intellect and moral awareness are used for vice rather than virtue.

The animal kingdom is brutal; it is cold and ultimately compassionless, but it is not randomly cruel. Again, one may argue that a lion entering a new pride and slaughtering all competing males is brutal and cruel. One might argue that male sharks having claspers that allow for a type of forced mating is a form of cruelty. But those same people would further condemn a man to a greater degree for doing the same things to humans. There is an expectation of moral goodness for humans to act according to moral goodness, but there is no surprise when this moral goodness is not achieved.

At this point, a skeptic might say: “But maybe this moral awareness is just social conditioning or evolutionary advantage.” And of course there is a social component to conscience. But that explanation does not remove the normative pressure; it merely describes how the pressure might be formed. Because even when we appeal to “society,” we don’t merely mean “what is common.” We mean “what is justified.” We don’t only fear consequences; we argue about whether the blame is deserved. We don’t merely say, “My tribe dislikes this.” We say, “That is wrong,” even when our tribe approves of it. Humans do not only report values—we contest them. That’s not just sociology; that’s normativity.

This is also where “function” language matters. I am not trying to make a cheap argument from biology: “humans are built this way, therefore you ought.” Rather, the point is that humans are the kind of creature who can be answerable to reasons. We are not merely pushed around by impulses. We deliberate, we justify, we repent, we excuse, we condemn, we praise. A being who can ask, “What should I do?” is already living in a world of standards, whether he admits it or not.

I want to conclude this post by parsing out some C. S. Lewis and how he explains this unique notion of humanity and begin with a quotation from The Four Loves:

When we blame a man for being ‘a mere animal’, we mean not that he displays
animal characteristics (we all do) but that he displays these, and only these, on occasions where the specifically human was demanded. (When we call him ‘brutal’ we usually mean that he commits cruelties impossible to most real brutes; they’re not clever enough).

He further explains this in The Abolition of Man: “Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.” That is, even those who acknowledge human intellect still recognize that intellect alone does not reliably govern the animal impulses beneath it.

When I wrote earlier that humans have a normative or teleological nature, I meant that in a figurative, teleological sense: humans have a unique function, and can be judged in relation to it. But humans also have a literal spiritual nature as well—and it is the existence of this spiritual nature that sets humans apart. C. S. Lewis, through the medium of his fictional work The Screwtape Letters, explains the unique nature of humans:

Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.

What all of this establishes is not yet a full theology of religion, but a foundation for it. Humans are not merely animals that react; we are animals that evaluate. We do not merely desire; we judge our desires. We do not merely act; we blame ourselves for acting. Twain’s line about blushing lands so hard because blushing reveals an inescapable moral awareness—an inner court, a sense that we have failed to be what we ought to be.

And this is precisely why Premise 1a is difficult to avoid. A beaver does not oscillate between virtue and vice; it simply beaves. But man undulates. Lewis’s description of peaks and troughs is not the absence of a standard, but repeated falling away from one. You cannot fall short of a good that does not exist. So if humans can experience shame, regret, and moral expectation, then humans must be the kind of creature for whom there is such a thing as proper function—a human good against which we can be measured.

Once that is granted, ultimate concern follows almost automatically. A creature who can discern the good and fall short of it must orient life around some highest good—some governing value that orders judgments, sacrifices, and hopes. Even when someone insists they have no “highest good,” they still arrange life around something functionally ultimate—comfort, autonomy, justice, nation, success, pleasure, authenticity, survival, or even nihilism-as-defiance. The structure remains: a top value that authorizes lower values, a center that orders the orbit.

In the next post, I want to make that connection explicit: to marry the unique function of humans—our Aristotelian goodness—with the inevitability of ultimate concern, and then to show why this concern does not remain a private preference but takes on the weight and authority we typically reserve for religion.

But Jesus, to my surprise, is described in the Greek New Testament as a skandalon.

This is weird, because the word is translated as “stumbling block” all over the New Testament. How is a giant rock in the road a scandal? I had to find out what this word meant and how it differed from the word we use today. Something wasn’t adding up.

It turns out that originally (and in contexts outside of references to Jesus) it meant the movable stick or trigger of a trap. It has the feel of an engineering term, referring specifically to the trigger mechanism.

If you’ve ever watched Alone or Survivorman (both of which I’m a fan of), you know that setting these types of traps is a difficult balancing act, involving perfect angles and precariously places loads. It requires a delicate balance. Usually, there is a deadly hazard, such as a rock, held up by a precarious assortment of sticks positioned just right so the rock stays aloft until the trigger is tripped. If set correctly, it is triggered by even the lightest touch, even the press of a mouse’s foot.

This is “passive hunting.” Hunters do not interact directly with the prey. The hunter does not reach out to the hunted; instead, the hunted reaches for the hunter. The animal is lured by the bait to the trigger, and then—WHAM! The end. The victim is not ensnared by a machine the hunter operates; they are ensnared by a machine they trigger themselves.

Naturally, this image makes for an incredible metaphor, which we can trace in both Hebrew literature and ancient Greek. In Amos 3:5, the prophet asks, “Does a bird fall into a net on the ground when there is no trap stick [mokesh] for her?” By the 5th century, Aristophanes was using the term in The Acharnians to describe verbal traps (skandalethra epōn) set by prosecutors.

So, my next question was: why in the world doesn’t the Bible use “trap stick” to describe Jesus?

Jesus is so misunderstood, He seems like the trap stick of a snare. You think you’re getting a King, then WHAM—He’s on a cross, abandoned by His friends, naked, murdered in front of His own mother. You think He’s dead, then WHAM—nope, He’s back from conquering death. This dynamic happens over and over again.

The reason the Bible translates it as “stumbling block” is valid, but it requires context. The Apostles make references Isaiah 8:14 when they call Jesus the Rock. They intentionally want Jesus referred to as a stumbling block. But I think there’s more here, because Isaiah seems to fuse the ideas together:

And he will become a sanctuary and a stone of offense and a rock of stumbling to both houses of Israel, a trap and a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. (Isaiah 8:14)

This validates my understanding. Isaiah blends the ideas through parallelism. The feeling is that the “rock of stumbling” isn’t just a random boulder in the road that trips people; it is set up to trap them.

In the context of Isaiah 8, people are afraid of the Assyrian army. They are looking for political alliances and earthly security. God tells them that if they trust in Him, He will be their Sanctuary and Fortress. But if they don’t, He will become their Rock of Offense. The same stone can be the foundation on which you are saved or the rock that crushes you. It depends on how you approach it.

In this light, the metaphor is perfect. To the proud, who step over Jesus or try to walk around Him to get to God, He is a stumbling block. He trips them; He makes them fall. But for those who put their trust in Him, they find eternal life and salvation.

If this claim is correct, then the question immediately becomes whether such distinctions are uniquely Christian—or whether they are universal features of human experience.

Christian philosopher Norman Geisler once argued that what is demonstrable from both believer and nonbeliever alike is that humankind, as a whole, is incurably religious.1 Despite this, claims about the diminishing—or even disappearance—of religion remain common. Is there anything more cringey than the phrase “I’m spiritual but not religious”?Do people still say cringey? Perhaps less cringe-inducing, but no less misguided, is the claim that one has no religious inclination at all.

But if religion really is universal, then we need to be clear about what we mean by the word—otherwise we risk mistaking denial for absence.

When I ask people to define religion, they usually point to belief in a supernatural being. I often respond by asking, So is Buddhism not a religion? Buddha himself did not consider belief in God a central—or even necessary—question, and practicing Buddhists will readily affirm that a range of metaphysical views can exist within their tradition. In pressing this question, I often find myself answering my own: perhaps religion is better understood not first as belief in a god, but as a belief system.

That clarification helps, but it also raises an important distinction. Not all belief systems are religions, but any belief system can become religious if it is elevated from a penultimate framework to an ultimate concern—one that governs a person’s interpretation of reality as a whole.

For example, a philosophy of education is ordinarily just that: a belief system. But if education becomes the primary means of human salvation and progress—if hope and meaning are located there—then it has taken on a religious character. If one believes that humanity’s moral failures can be overcome primarily through the eradication of ignorance, then education has become salvific. If one believes that reality itself is ultimately defined and mediated through education, then it has become religious. Framed this way, we come closer to what is actually at stake.

Paul Tillich’s well-known definition sharpens the point further. He defines religion as humanity’s ultimate concern. This formulation widens the lens considerably, capturing phenomena that narrower definitions miss. In this sense, the original Humanist Manifesto was correct—and refreshingly honest—in explicitly identifying secular humanism as a religion. It offered a naturalistic account of ultimate reality—a creation myth—along with a vision of salvation grounded in education, moral progress, and social reconstruction apart from divine intervention.

Up to this point, I have been making a largely descriptive claim. Let me now state it explicitly by formalizing the argument for clarity:

Premise 1: Everyone has an ultimate concern—an orienting center of value (that is, everyone is religious in some sense).

Premise 2: Every ultimate concern is expressed and sustained through a mythic framework—a creation myth and its ensuing mythos.

Therefore: Everyone lives by a creation myth and its accompanying mythos, whether acknowledged or not.

Both premises deserve careful defense, and I intend to return to each in later posts. For now, I ask the reader to consider them provisionally—not as settled conclusions, but as claims that make sense of the world we already inhabit. We behave as though ultimate concerns are unavoidable, and we sustain them not through abstraction alone, but through stories about where we came from, what went wrong, and what ought to be hoped for. If that is even approximately true, then the implications for how we understand religion, morality, and the sacred are difficult to avoid.

Émile Durkheim defined religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things—that is, things set apart and forbidden. These beliefs, he argued, unite adherents into a single moral community, which he called a Church, though it need not be organized around a literal church building. For Durkheim, the classification of reality into two opposed categories—the sacred and the profane—is the common characteristic of all known religious beliefs.2 The first religious belief, therefore, is a creation myth.

Mircea Eliade deepens this account by describing religious thought as an “ontological thirst.” For religious humanity, the sacred is equivalent to power and, ultimately, to reality itself. The sacred is saturated with being, while the profane is associated with chaos, illusion, and non-being. Religion, then, is the attempt to live as much as possible within the sacred in order to avoid the terror of nothingness.3 The first means of resisting this chaos is order—and order is established through a creation myth.

It may seem intuitive that people are inherently religious—perhaps even a brute fact—but resistance is often strongest when it comes to the claim that scientifically minded people live by a creation myth. People may deny living by a creation myth, but they cannot escape living from one. As I have argued elsewhere, myth does not mean false, and the same is true of creation myth. The Leemings’ definition is particularly helpful here because it cannot be confined to traditionally religious thought:

A creation myth is a cosmogony, a narrative that describes the original ordering of the universe. The word cosmogony is derived from the Greek kosmos, meaning order, and genesis, meaning birth. A given culture’s cosmogony describes how order and existence were established. Just as individuals and families are preoccupied with their origins, cultures need to know where they and the world they inhabit came from. For this reason, virtually all cultures have creation myths.4

Is the scientist unconcerned with ultimate origins? Of course not. Everyone is.

If everyone lives by a creation myth, the next question is what these myths actually do. Creation myths are often misunderstood as primitive attempts at science—early guesses about how the universe came to be. But their primary function has never been explanatory in that sense. They are not chiefly concerned with mechanics or chronology. They are concerned with meaning, value, and order. They tell a people what reality is, what it is for, and where humans stand within it.

More importantly, creation myths establish weight. They assign significance to certain realities and place limits on how those realities may be treated. In doing so, they generate the most fundamental religious distinction of all: the distinction between the sacred and the profane. What is sacred is that which bears weight—what cannot be used, violated, or treated as ordinary. What is profane is not evil, but common: that which may be handled, shaped, or expended without moral consequence. Every creation myth, whether ancient or modern, religious or secular, performs this work. It tells us what must be reverenced, what may be used, and what constitutes desecration. Without such a story, the distinction collapses, and with it any coherent account of holiness, morality, or love.

If all people live by a creation myth, if all people are incurably religious, and if all religious thought is structured by the distinction between the sacred and the profane, then the real question is not whether one has a myth or a religion, but whether one’s myth—and the sacred order it establishes—can bear the moral weight we inevitably place upon it and satisfy our “ontological thirst.” Our thesis is that Christianity alone, through the holy love of Jesus Christ, is capable of carrying this weight.

If the “whip of cords” was the gavel, as we argued in the previous installments, then the Temple was the courtroom.

In Part 1 and Part 2, we stripped away the idea of a “gentle Jesus” losing his temper and the Zealot fantasy of a violent insurrectionist. We examined the material culture of the flagrum versus the schoinion to prove that Jesus did not wield a weapon of war, but a satirical, improvised tool of the shepherd. But a shepherd does not clear a massive courtyard of hardened merchants and cattle simply by cracking a few reeds. The physical act was secondary to the legal authority it represented.

To understand the silence that must have fallen over the Court of the Gentiles, we must step out of the modern separation of church and state and into the integrated world of the Ancient Near East (ANE). Here, the Temple was not merely a house of prayer; it was the “Treaty Archive” of the Mosaic Covenant.

The Temple as Registry of Deeds

Biblical scholarship has long recognized that the Mosaic Covenant follows the specific structural pattern of ANE international treaties, particularly the Hittite and Neo-Assyrian models:

• Preamble: Identification of the Suzerain (”I am the Great King...”).

• Historical Prologue: A recital of the Suzerain’s past benevolence.

• Stipulations: The obligations of the Vassal (loyalty, tribute, exclusive service).

• Deposit and Reading Clause: The requirement to store the treaty document in the sanctuary.

• Witnesses: The gods (or heaven and earth) called to witness the oath.

• Blessings and Curses: The consequences of obedience or treason.1

These treaties between a Great King (Suzerain) and a lesser king (Vassal) contained a critical element known as the Deposit and Reading Clause. In the ancient world, you did not file your most important legal contracts in a secular library; you deposited them in the sanctuary of your god. The deity was the witness to the oath, and therefore the deity’s house was the guardian of the contract.

In Israel, the “Tablets of the Testimony” were placed inside the Ark of the Covenant, in the Holy of Holies (Exodus 25:16). The entire Temple complex was a shell protecting this legal core; it was an archive.

This changes the nature of the offense. When the priesthood allowed the emporion2 (market) to encroach upon the hieros3 (sacred space), they were not just being irreverent. They were tampering with the archive of the covenant in front of their God. In Hebrew, the term for this is chalal (to profane, to pollute, or to treat the holy as common).4 Holiness, which is the Hebrew word qodesh, represents a barrier between that which is separated, holy, and that which is common.5 Etymologically, chalal shares a root with “wounded” or “pierced” (chalalim). To pierce or wound the boundary between holiness and the common is to profane. It implies a violence done to the legal standing of the nation.

By clogging the Court of the Gentiles—the specific area designated for the “Witnesses” (the nations) to observe the worship of Yahweh—with cattle and coin, the priesthood had effectively silenced the witnesses to the covenant. They had committed treason in the space where the treaty was stored.

The Indictment: From “House of Trade” to “Den of Robbers”

This legal context unlocks the true venom behind the shift in Jesus’s accusation.

At the start of his ministry (whip in hand) he warned them not to make his Father’s house a “house of trade” (John 2:16). But when he return three years later, the charge had escalated to: “You have made it a den of robbers” (Jeremiah 7:11).

Modern readers often misinterpret this as a complaint about the act of robbery (that the money changers were charging unfair fees). While likely true, the phrase “Den of Robbers” (spélaion léston) refers to something far more serious.

In military and legal terminology, a “den” is not where bandits commit crimes; it is the refuge where they hide after committing them. In Greek, spélaion means cave, hideout, or cavern,6 which, in the ancient Near East, were used as bases of operations for irregular fighters.7 The Greek word léstés does not mean a simple thief or pickpocket (which would be kleptés).8 It is a bandit, guerrilla warrior, or insurrectionist. Barabbas was a léstés (John 18:40).

Jesus is quoting Jeremiah 7, where the prophet addressed a people who believed that the physical presence of the Temple guaranteed their safety, even as they committed adultery, murder, and idolatry outside of the temple. They treated the Temple as an asylum (a safe house that insulated them from the moral and legal demands of the Suzerain).

The indictment Jesus levels against the Sadducean aristocracy is the abuse of asylum. They believed the Temple would protect them even as they profaned it. They were hiding behind the altar.

The Sentence: The Overflowing Scourge

The action in the Temple is a ritual enactment of the Covenant Curses. Specifically, I take Jesus to be embodying the terrifying prophecy of Isaiah 28.

In Isaiah, the scornful rulers of Jerusalem boast of their political alliances, saying, “We have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol we are in agreement; when the overflowing scourge passes through, it will not come to us”. They had replaced reliance on Yahweh with political expediency—a “Covenant with Death”.

Yahweh’s rebuttal is chilling: “Your covenant with death will be annulled... when the overflowing scourge passes through, you will be trampled down by it”.

When Jesus stands in the Temple for the final time, the warning of the whip has passed. He is no longer the shepherd correcting the flock; he is the Overflowing Scourge. He has come to annul the “Covenant with Death”—that corrupt arrangement between the priesthood and the Roman occupiers that maintained the status quo at the expense of the Covenant.

The expulsion of the animals confirms this legal reading. Deuteronomy 28 lists the specific curses for treaty violation. Verse 18 warns: “Cursed shall be the fruit of your body... the increase of your cattle and the flocks of your sheep”.

By driving the sheep and oxen out of the Temple, Jesus is not “liberating” them; he is confiscating the blessings and starving the altar of the Temple. He declares the tribute unfit. He reverses the flow of the sacrificial system. Instead of the offering being received by the Suzerain, it is rejected and scattered.

The Verdict

The first and second Cleansing of the Temple was neither a riot nor a tantrum. They were Visitations. The first time, Jesus acted as the shepherd, driving out the cattle, looking to correct. The second time, Jesus entered, “looked around at everything” (Mark 11:11), found the Vassal in breach, and the next day returned to pass sentence.

The “whip of cords” in the first visitation was the initial pounding of the gavel—a call to order. It was a satirical scepter made of rushes that shamed the iron-fisted rule of Rome while simultaneously declaring the bankruptcy of the Levitical administration. But when the authorities refused to heed the shepherd’s whip, they ensured they would face severe condemnation.

The first time Jesus cleansed the Temple, he walked away. But the second time, he forced a terrifying question: If the Shepherd drives the sheep away from the slaughter, who is left to face the knife? By emptying the court, he provoked the authorities to wield the real Roman flagrum against the only victim remaining—Himself.

The Schoinion as Pastoral Subversion.

Luckily for us, the text of John doesn’t stop with use of the heavy, blood-soaked word phragellion. Instead, John adds a prepositional phrase that changes everything. It turns a weapon of war into something far more subversive. Jesus made a scourge—ek schoinion. "Out of cords."

The Greek word schoinion (a diminutive of schoinos) refers specifically to ropes made of rushes, reeds, or twisted grass. In the Septuagint, it describes the rigging of ships or the tethers used for animals. This material composition stands in diametric opposition to the leather and lead of the Roman flagrum.

Consider the physics of the flagrum of the Romans. The terror of the Roman scourge lay in its density. The leather thongs were weighted with metal and bones attached to it. These weights provided enough energy to wrap around a limb and crush muscle, or to catch on the skin and tear it away. A whip of rushes, on the other hand, is lightweight. It lacks the mass required to inflict deep tissue trauma. Without the lead weights, a grass whip operates on a completely different mechanical principle: noise and stinging. In an agricultural context, such whips are used to herd cattle. The "crack" startles the animal, driving it forward. If it makes contact, it stings the hide but does not injure the livestock, which would be counter-productive to the farmer’s economic interest.

This difference in material is what limits the violence. The text notes that Jesus "made" (poiesas) the whip, implying an act of improvisation using materials at hand. Standing in the Temple court, surrounded by the chaos of the market, the most readily available materials would have been the bedding from the floor or the twisted grass ropes used to bind the oxen. If he had intended to lead a violent insurrection or inflict physical harm, he could have seized a staff, a knife from the sacrifice tables, or a weapon from the Temple guards. Instead, he braided together bedding material to craft what was a "mock" whip. Because of this, I’ve always taught this passage as a miracle passage for Jesus. One simply does not fight a Roman cohort or clear a "Den of Robbers" of armed men using twisted grass unless the power being wielded is of a completely different, higher order.

Why, then, does the Gospel writer use the loanword phragellion (torture scourge) to describe a schoinion (rush whip)? The juxtaposition serves as a potent political and theological satire. In the Roman world, the flagrum was the symbol of the false suzerain (Caesar), who ruled through terror and the destruction of the body. Jesus, the True Suzerain, enters his Temple wielding a phragellion—but one made of "weak" rushes—to mock the Roman reliance on iron and lead. He demonstrates that his authority is so absolute that he can drive out the "armies" of commerce and the "vassals" of corruption with nothing more than the scraps of the shepherd’s field. This action aligns perfectly with the "Triumphal Entry" as a satire of the Roman Triumphus; just as Jesus rides a donkey (a beast of peace) to mock the war-horses of the conqueror, he wields a rush-whip to mock the lead-scourges of the oppressor. It is an assertion that the Kingdom of God functions on a different axis of power—authority inherent in the Person, not the weapon.

Who are the Animals, Anyway?

Finally, the schoinion whip reclaims the imagery of the Shepherd-King. In the Ancient Near East, the king was frequently depicted as the shepherd of his people, and the whip of cords functions as the shepherd’s tool to separate the flock. The grammatical construction of John 2:15 supports this reading. The phrase “drove them all out... with the sheep and the oxen” uses the Greek te...kai (both...and) to link the expulsion of the people closely to the animals. Jesus clears the Temple not by slaughtering the wicked (as a soldier might), but by driving the “livestock” out of the sanctuary. This was a stinging indictment of the merchants. By their profaning of the holy space, they had reduced themselves to the level of the livestock they sold. They were no longer worshippers; they were animals of the market.

Next time, we will move from the Material to the Legal. If the whip was the gavel, then the Temple was the courtroom. We’ll look at how the cleansing wasn’t a riot, but a formal lawsuit. It was “Prosecutorial Action” against a priesthood that had breached its contract.

One way He is a stumbling block for modern readers is in the idea that the Bible portrays him as the “Jesus of the Whip” and the “Jesus of the Cheek.” We saw a practical example of this stumbling block last week with the Nottingham Unitarians. When faced with the tension between the 'Jesus of the Cheek' and the 'Jesus of the Whip,' they chose to resolve it by simply removing the Whip. They stripped away the judgment to leave behind a safe, passive moral teacher, resulting in a 'weightless gravity' that could not sustain their church.

Modern readers may feel the same. How is it that he can create a whip of cords and drive out the money changers in the temple (Matthew 21:12-17; Mark 11:15-19; Luke 19:45-48; John 2:13-22) and then preach that those who are struck on the right cheek should turn the cheek and offer the other cheek also (Matthew 5:39)? Aren’t those two images contradictory?

Though I don’t wish to synthesize these two views now (since and I are currently writing a book on this and the subject is larger than you might think), I do want to begin to flesh out what I believe the Jesus of the Whip was up to in the cleansing of the temple.

The Hermeneutical Complexity of Interpretations

The narrative of Jesus of Nazareth entering the Jerusalem Temple, fashioning a whip, and expelling the merchants is one of the most vividly remembered yet hermeneutically contested events in the New Testament canon. Found in all four Gospels (Matthew 21:12-17; Mark 11:15-19; Luke 19:45-48; John 2:13-22), this event has historically served as a Rorschach test (ink blot test) for the theological and political presuppositions of the interpreter. For the pietist, it is a localized condemnation of irreverence; for the liberation theologian, it is a prototype of Marxist class struggle; for the lay reader, it is often reduced to a moment of "righteous anger," a divine "temper tantrum" where the humanity of Jesus momentarily eclipses his divinity in a flash of violent impulse.

However, it’s my view that these various interpretations fail to synthesize the larger context of the First Century Roman world with the legal theology of the Ancient Near East (ANE). The cleansing was neither a riot nor a temper tantrum nor a politically centered protest, but instead it was a calculated, formal Prosecutorial Action initiated by the Suzerain against a Vassal priesthood that had fundamentally breached the stipulations of their treaty.

If this was indeed a legal prosecution, we must analyze the weapon John claims the Prosecutor wielded—a weapon that, in the Roman mind, signaled the absolute power of the state.

The Roman Flagrum as the Instrument of State Terror

The term “whip of cords” (phragellion ek schoinion) is a choice of terminology found in John 2:15. Specifically the word phragellion, used uniquely in John 2:15, is a Latin loanword derived from flagellum.2 This word, to the imagination of a first century reader, would have been loaded with meaning.

Historical sources distinguish between numerous tools of punishment, ranging from mild to lethal. These included the ferula (a stick used by teachers), the scutica (a lash or whip), the virga (rod), and the fustis (staff or cudgel). At the most severe end of this spectrum was the flagrum or flagellum (the scourge). Roman writers like Seneca the Elder noted the terrifying nature of the scourge (horribili flagello), distinguishing it from the lash by its ability to cause deep wounds and lacerate the flesh. Horace famously argued for proportional justice, warning that one should not “flay with the terrible scourge” a person who only deserved the lighter lash.3

Citizenship played a big role in how people were punished. Citizens in the military context were only punished via castigatio, using a dry grapevine (vitis) carried by centurions. The illegal use of rods on a citizen was a serious offense, famously prosecuted by Cicero against Verres and invoked by the Apostle Paul to stop his own interrogation in Jerusalem. Non-citizens, such as foreigners, slaves, and gladiators did not share these protections and were subject to the harsher rods and scourges. In the home, a master had the discretion to choose between the stick, lash, or scourge for his slaves.

The flagrum was used in flagellation, which was feared due to its brutality. Andrea Nicolotti comments:

“Flagellation was much feared due to its brutality: it produced deep wounds and, in some cases, could even lead to death. Unlike Jewish law, which established a ceiling of forty lashes, Roman law did not provide for any limitations. Flavius Josephus offers various accounts of flagellations carried out in Palestine in which the strokes were delivered with such strength that they exposed the bowels and bones of the unfortunate suffered, and confirms that the practice of scourging, as occurred with Jesus, was used as a sort of prelude to crucifixion…”4

This is well documented throughout the historical record, with a particularly chilling account by Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History, when talking about the scourging of early Christian martyrs:

“For they say that the bystanders were struck with amazement when they saw them lacerated with scourges even to the innermost veins and arteries, so that the hidden inward parts of the body, both their bowels and their members, were exposed to view; and then laid upon sea-shells and certain pointed spits, and subjected to every species of punishment and of torture, and finally thrown as food to wild beasts.”5

Because flagellation was a punishment reserved only for non-citizens and slaves, it was a symbol of status. For a people or person to be punished by scourging was to say that people group or person had a lack of status. When the Roman soldier wielded the flagrum, he was acting as an agent of Caesar, enforcing the authority of Caesar through the threat of bodily destruction.

The Romans often used this to pressure populations into terror and panic. Josephus records of a famine during the Jewish Wars which made those sieged willing to go out of the city to look for food. But while out, they were taken by their enemies. They were first whipped, then tormented, then they died by crucifixion before the walls of the city. Titus apparently felt bad for the Jews, but he allowed for the cruel treatment because “he hoped the Jews might perhaps yield at that sight, out of fear lest they might themselves afterwards be liable to the same cruel treatment.”6

Is the Jesus of the Whip the same as the Roman of the Whip?

It seems insane that the word used by John in John 2:15 is phragellion. In light of the historical background, it seems that the author should want to distance Jesus, the same Jesus who said turn the cheek, from this tool of torture. Not only was the instrument cruel, but it was a sign of oppression among the Jews and was greatly feared and hated.

Next post I’ll get into why I think the author uses this word and why it is the perfect word choice for describing what Jesus is doing at the cleansing of the temple. Here is a hint: The answer lies in the specific Greek phrase John attaches to the whip—ek schoinion—and how a Suzerain King acts when he finds his own house in disorder.

Myth aims at transcendence because it also aims at prescription. It tells us how we are meant to behave, how we are meant to interpret the world, and how we are meant to understand ourselves within it. And no one builds their life around what they believe to be false behavior, incorrect interpretation, or deliberate misunderstanding. Whatever else myths are, they are not disposable stories. They are meaning-bearing structures people stake their lives on.

This is why phrases like “that’s just a myth” are so misleading. Even the otherwise enjoyable series, the unfortunate title MythBusters unintentionally reinforces the assumption that myth belongs to a pre-scientific stage of human development—a set of comforting stories we relied on before facts arrived. But myths have not disappeared in the age of science. They are everywhere. What has disappeared, in many places, are the primal components that once gave myth its weight. And now modern myths tend to be thin, innocuous, and impotent.

When people say “that’s just a myth”, they usually mean “that’s comforting fiction.” But that usage is historically late and rhetorically loaded. In the classical and anthropological sense, myth is closer to a society’s deep grammar: the narrative structure that tells a people what the world is, what went wrong, what matters most, and what salvation would even look like. Myth is not opposed to truth; it is often the vessel a culture uses to carry what it believes is most true. Mythology is a story (or more aptly a narrative) about the most important things in life.

The confusion comes from a category mistake. Modern readers often treat story as though it were competing with scientific description on the same field and by the same rules—as if myth were a failed attempt at chemistry or physics. But myth has never primarily attempted to be false history or primitive science. Myth is a mode of communication—a language— aimed at the kind of truth that shapes conscience, vision, and allegiance—truth that can be stated, but not exhausted, by propositions.

This is why Joseph Campbell can describe mythology as a symbolic way of pointing toward realities that exceed literal description: “... mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words.” (The Power of Myth) “Metaphorical” here does not mean false, but indirect—truth conveyed through symbol when direct language reaches its limit.

At the same time, myth should not be reduced to mere psychology or private feeling. Bruno Bettelheim observes that fairy tales are largely unconcerned with delivering technical information about the external world. Their primary task is formation—especially the inner formation of the person. But an interior effect does not imply subjectivity or illusion. Myth forms the inner life precisely because it is oriented toward realities deeper than surface facts. (The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales)

Charlie Starr sharpens this insight further when he argues that myth is not merely a pattern about reality, but an actual taste of reality itself—a sub-created, concrete experience that allows us to participate, however briefly, in the structure of being behind appearances. Myth draws the imagination toward concrete knowing in a world increasingly prone to abstraction. (Meaning, Meanings, and Epistemology in C. S. Lewis)

This is why Tolkien remains so useful. When Tolkien defines the fairy-story, he refuses to do so by cataloging fairies and elves. Instead, he grounds it in the nature of Faërie—the Perilous Realm—a reality with its own atmosphere, weight, and seriousness. (On Fairy-Stories) Such stories belong to a mode of meaning that cannot be reduced without being ruined. Myth works the same way. If one begins by assuming myth means false, one has already made the very mistake the word exists to correct.

If myth is a society’s deep grammar, then creation myth is its first syntax. Creation myths tell us what reality is made of, what humans are, why anything exists at all, and what the world is for. From that first story, everything downstream follows: what counts as sacred, what counts as profane, what we treat as heavy, what we treat as sand, what we call evil, what we call good, and what we expect from life and death.

This is why creation myths are never optional. They may be denied, disguised, or renamed, but they cannot be escaped. Modern people still live by them—often unconsciously—whether the agent is the Self, the State, or Nature itself. And while these myths differ wildly in content, they share a consistent architecture. Across cultures and centuries, creation myths exhibit four essential features (I will flesh out these ideas over the next few blogs):

1. Beauty, Non-Function, and Fall (Pathos): An Act of Beauty that both solves and causes problems. All creation myths contain, implicitly or explicitly, an essential non-function of the universe (earth) and a fall or failure of moral agents. Since states of nothingness and states of chaos are both states of non-function, they are equally impotent, as neither are useful. Falls, either natural or volitional, are a significant or persistent moral failure or act of evil. The Act of Beauty is an artistic, alluring, and dramatic boast of “using the useless”—either matter or moral agents.

2. Agent/Catalyst (Logos): The Catalyst that fixes the non-function. The Catalyst, implicitly or explicitly, becomes the standard for beauty, truth, and goodness. The nature of the Catalyst—or, in most instances, “the Agent”—is determined with a series of dichotomies: infinite (immaterial) or finite (material), intentional or non-intentional, personal or non-personal, moral or non-moral. The Agent is responsible for the creation of the universe (earth) and the creation of man. Due to the nature of myth, the Agent may change throughout a given meta-narrative. The Agent is either the source, narrator, or hero of the meta-narrative.

3. Proper Function (Ethos): The Act of Beauty is a boast of power meant to gain attention. The boast is one of authorship and therefore also one of authority. Because the Agent fixes the non-function of the universe, the Agent (or meta-narrative) claims authority to fix or explain the non-function or fall of humanity. The Agent becomes the metric for a normative ethic, which informs humans how they ought to behave. The meta-narrative explains the nature of the Agent, humans (or other moral agents), the universe (earth), or flora and fauna.

4. Promise (Mythos): The primary and underlying messages of the creation myth, the meta-narrative, as well as the myths and rituals that follow. The promise is the ritualistic telling of the Act of Beauty, while also providing the interpretation and application of it to a group of adherents. The promise may take the form of parables of caution or praise, pure exposition of teachings, or myths of the “heroes of the faith.” The promise is the code or mantra of the Agent, ideal hero, and the adherents. The code is a summary of the meta-narrative. Lastly, the promise is the promise of hope: it is meaning, and what humans should expect from life and death.

This series will use that framework as a field guide for reading modern culture. Because the real question is not whether we live by myths. The question is which myths we live by—and whether they are thick enough to carry the weight of being human.

And that is where the Christian claim becomes unavoidable. Christianity does not merely offer moral advice or spiritual sentiment; it presents itself as the interpretive key to reality. This is why the Bible—and the incarnation of Jesus Christ in particular—are so relevant. If we wish to understand myth rightly, we must study the True Myth. As Mircea Eliade succinctly explains, “In short, our best chance of understanding the structure of mythical thought is to study cultures where myth is a ‘living thing,’ where it constitutes the very ground of the religious life; in other words, where myth, far from indicating a fiction, is considered to reveal the truth par excellence.” (Cosmogonic Myth and Sacred History) Thus, to understand the true nature of myth, one must know the Bible—and understand it not as either history or myth, but as history, myth, and something more.

Christianity represents the pinnacle of myth because it represents the pinnacle of reality. This pinnacle begins with a creation myth—and insists it is true: a story in which the Agent is personal and holy, the fall is real, the promise is costly, and the Author does not remain distant, but enters the story Himself to become the best possible hero—the hero who can defeat sin and death.

That claim deserves to be examined carefully.

It’s interesting to think about, though, considering that last year’s word was “brain rot.” If brain rot indicates passive decay through the overconsumption of the internet, then rage bait feels more like the weaponization of that overconsumption. We’ve gone from being zombies to being berserkers.

How Rage Bait Traps Us

As humans, when we see something morally outrageous, it is natural to want to respond. If we see a woman being abused or a child being mistreated, we feel a visceral sense of outrage that compels us to act. We naturally want to stand on the side of justice, truth-telling, and the defense of the weak.

The OUP defines “rage bait” as content designed to hijack this natural inclination. It manufactures feelings of self-righteousness, tricking us into believing that our engagement is a moral act. But sometimes, it is worse than this. It is not just that we are tricked. It’s that we want to be tricked.

Augustine warned of a specific temptation he called curiositas (the lust of the eyes). Unlike other vices that seek pleasure, curiositas seeks out experiences that are distressing or disgusting simply for the sake of the sensation. Augustine points to the spectators of gladiator games or tragedies who are drawn to feel sorrow or anger vicariously. He asks:

“Why is it that man desires to be made sad… by beholding doleful and tragic things, which yet himself would by no means suffer? …this very sorrow is his pleasure. What is this but a miserable madness?”

In the digital age, we are the spectators in the coliseum. We do not just click on rage bait to fix the world. We click because we desire the “miserable madness” of feeling intense emotion. We desire the outrageous and the unrighteous because it allows us to feel a dark pleasure through the suffering of another. We are not just victims of the algorithm; we are its willing accomplices.

Consuming Rage Bait Makes You Sick

In the Levitical worldview, “uncleanness” was not a moral judgment of intent, but a description of a condition. If you touched a corpse then you became unclean, regardless of whether you touched the body to honor it or dishonor it, or even if you touched it by accident.

Rage bait begs for you to touch it. It is a disease designed to spread. It has nothing to do with the well-being of a society or community or individual and everything to do with hijacking emotion, through manufactured means, so that it can steal your attention from what is actually happening in your world so that you can focus on the world it creates.

When we engage with rage bait, even to fight it, we fulfill its goals. The moment we click, comment, or share it we have touched the corpse. The content, which wants to infect rage throughout the world, has now found a new host to spread to, and every time someone is infected they are more likely to be infected tomorrow.

The Death of Nepsis

The Desert Fathers of the 4th century warned of the need for nepsis (watchfulness) or “guarding the heart”. They understood that a logismos (a provocative thought or image) was the first stage of spiritual captivity. The logismos acts as an assault, which provokes you to interact with it. In interacting with it you give yourself over to a lie and consent to act out in a certain manner. This acting out leads to a captivity, which flourishes into a proliferation of out of control passions.

Rage bait is the industrial-scale automation of these logismoi. The Desert Fathers described these thoughts as “fiery darts” or “intellectual missiles” shot from a deceitful bow. In the digital age, the scroll is not passive consumption. It is an active bombardment of these missiles. We invite the archer into our pockets.

More than this, when logismos bypasses our nepsis, it ruins the silence of the soul. Sertillanges writes that the silence of the soul requires the “exclusion of foolish thoughts which lead to a puerile and dissipating indulgence in distraction.” Rage bait is the enemy of this silence. It is the amplifier of the very “disordered passions” we are called to suppress, drowning out the quiet heart with the noise of the crowd.

The Demon of Wrath

If we shift our focus, it becomes a little more alarming. A liturgy is a repetitive practice that shapes what we love and how we act. And why shouldn’t this conditioning, this algorithmic distortion of our virtues, be viewed as anything less? The digital liturgy rewards the thin-skinned and those quick to judge. It says “be slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to become angry” instead of “be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.”

Thomas Aquinas warns that while anger often masquerades as a “lust for revenge” or justice, “passion” deprives man of his reason. This is why rage bait is so dangerous, because the cause seems just, we feel justified in losing our reason.

We rage, but do we do anything? We scream, but do we pray? We share in outrage, but do we restore the victims? Love requires action, but wrath doesn’t require anything, except all of our energy. Rage bait is nothing but an invitation to enjoy the intoxicating reality of unrighteous, unearned, and unbridled wrath. Basil warns that this wrath changes a human being “as though changing a mask upon a stage,” making their eyes unrecognizable and their nature like “boars joining battle.” It is the possession of the demon of wrath.

The Ultimate Casualty

God is Good (the Good) and God is Truth. You cannot have the truth and be immoral, just like you cannot have morality and lack the truth. These two, in a way, all lead back to God, but you cannot have one without the other.

Rage bait is optimized for rage and not for the truth. It does not care about nuance, context, or humanity. It is an Architecture of Falsehood and a vast engine of desacralization. Mircea Eliade warned of a “profane” existence where acts lose their spiritual dimension. Rage bait does just this. It distorts the Imago Dei and reduces a human soul into a flat, hateful object for our consumption. We live in a world full of hallucinated monsters rather than a world full of fellow sinners.

When we live in these half-truths and act out based on them, we become the monsters we fear. We become wrathful agents for the High Priest of the Algorithm, who cares only for interaction and has no care for the eternal destinies of men.

We cannot drink from the cup of the demon of Wrath and the cup of the Lord (1 Corinthians 10:21). When we become overwhelmed by rage bait, we binge drink from the cup of Wrath while pretending to sip from the cup of the Lord.

As we move into 2026, we must refuse the cup of the profane and practice the nepsis of the quiet heart. Basil taught that we must “smooth the waxen tablet” of our hearts before we can attempt to write the truth upon them. We must disconnect from the machine that scribbles over our souls and return to sacred time. A time not ruled by the algorithm, but by the presence of God.

When you look at photos of this bar, you are struck by the contrast of a pub operating inside a High Gothic chapel. It is a visually shocking contrast of the sacred clashing with the profane. But as I dug into the history of the building and the people who made it, I found that this tension wasn't introduced by the beer taps. It was there at the setting of the cornerstone.

The Historical Roots: The Great Ejection of 1662

The story of this building, originally built in 1876, begins in 1662. The congregation of this church ties its lineage back to this year and an event called the Great Ejection.

During this year ministers such as John Whitlock and William Reynolds lost everything for their convictions and their refusal to conform to the state church. Though barred from preaching through the Five Mile Act, they continued preaching in secret.

What strikes me about this story is that these men possessed a “Heavy Thing.” They had gravity. They were willing to lose it all on the basis of what they viewed was right. Whether they were right or wrong, these men had an attractive gravity to their convictions and became, in a way, mythic founders who could act as an example and template for their spiritual descendants, something you’d expect to carry through from generation to generation.

The Weightless Gravity: The Evacuation of Conviction and Orthodoxy

Over the next two centuries, the congregation drifted. They moved from the heavy, dense weight of their founders and moved toward the lightness of Rationalism.

By 1802, the congregation had formally adopted the Unitarian label, rejecting the Trinity. The Jesus they presented was the “Jesus of the Cheek” (the passive moral teacher who says “turn the other cheek”) but never the “Jesus of the Whip” who cleanses the temple with a whip of cords. The reality of Christ is that He is both, and in no way contradictory. But with the proliferation of Rationalism and a morality void of metaphysical conviction, they reduced the complex character of Jesus into a nice, safe moral teacher. They wanted the morality of the Rabbi without the judgment of the Lord.

They became the intellectual elite of Nottingham, favoring what James Martineau called a “critical, cold and untrusting” theology to a theology of depth and weight. Their theology had decomposed to something of nice thoughts and low density, a diffuse mess of nonsense.

The Architecture of a Lie (1876)

Wanting to build a new meeting place, the congregation hired Stuart Colman to help build the new chapel. The style they wanted was a High Gothic Cathedral. They valued the aesthetic of the style, which had a resurgence during the time.

What makes this choice strange is the history surrounding the Gothic Revival style. This style was championed by A.W.N. Pugin, who believed that the style celebrated the Mystery of the Incarnation and the Mystery of the Trinity. Within this style of architecture, there were symbolic representations of both the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity. In a word, the structure represented the “whole Christ.”

By building this structure, the Unitarian Congregation effectively built a mask for their theology, covering over the fact that they had half a Jesus (both in his Divinity and in his being a Jesus of the Cheek only) with a structure that screamed for a whole Jesus. They dressed their rationalistic theology in the symbolic vestments of the mystery of the true Christian faith, borrowing the historical aesthetic of the Faith without joining in the actual convictions and historical community of that faith.

Pugin, the father of the Gothic Revival, called this type of masking “Architectural Falsehood”. He believed a building’s form must declare its function. To build a High Altar for a theology that doesn't believe in the Sacrifice is, architecturally speaking, a lie.

The Bar Was Inevitable

With all of this considered, the Pitcher & Piano seems more a logical conclusion than a tragedy. The Unitarians had already moved their focus from God’s act of atonement to a theological view focused on hollowed out acts of morality. Since they were already focused on the viewpoint of man and the desire to be the social elite, the conversion of the structure into a bar, a social setting bent on making people feel good, is a logical next step.

The tension we feel in the structure, which by its symbolic form evokes feelings of awe, is a tension that was baked into the structure from the beginning. It lures us in, promising the Whole Christ, but delivers only consumption, noise, and emptiness.

The building, constructed in 1876, is a High Gothic Cathedral style church that was converted into a bar in 1998. The pictures are jarring (Google them). A beautiful, high ceiling structure which evokes feelings of awe within the setting of a bar. Perfect for my reflection. As I dug into the history of the building, more and more jumped out to me. I'll be writing about this research in a couple of posts this week, but for now I'd like to focus on some deep dives I did on the smells a place like this may have.

This is speculation (I've never been to Nottingham, much less this bar), but I began to wonder what kinds of smells compete in a place like this. I imagine a war between the ghostlike aroma of the church that was, and the biological reality of the bar that is.

The Sacred Smell of Decay

The Pitcher & Piano was built in 1876, right in the middle of a revolution in paper production. For centuries prior, paper was made from cotton rags (a durable, acid-free material). But to satisfy the exploding demand for newspapers and dime novels, manufacturers switched to wood pulp.

Wood pulp contains lignin, a chemical that provides structure to trees. But lignin is unstable. As it breaks down and oxidizes over the decades, it degrades into distinct chemical compounds. One of those compounds is vanillin.

This is why old libraries and antique bookstores smell so good. You are literally smelling the decomposition of the printed word. In my "mind’s nose," the upper rafters of the Pitcher & Piano still hold that faint, sweet scent of vanilla—the scent of a thousand hymnals turning to dust.

The Profane Smell of the Bar

But look down at the floor, and the chemistry changes. While the ghost of the church smells like aromatic heaven, the reality of the bar smells like... feet.

These rubber mats, damp and warm, act like a sweaty rubber boot. The spilled beer naturally sours into a foul smelling liquid, much like dirty feet, because bacteria break down the leucine-rich liquid into Isovaleric Acid. This acid is the exact same compound responsible for the bad smell of toe jam under human toenails (sorry for the disgusting detail). Drains and floor mats in bars are almost identical with the bacterial environment of smelly feet.

On top of this, any carpets will produce another off smell. Beer contains a small amount of fat. When it spills onto carpets or wood floors, those fats go rancid and release another acid, Butyric Acid. It smells like vomit.

There is a deep irony in this war of smells in the Pitcher & Piano. We tend to associate holiness with sweetness, with life, while we associate the profane with filth and death. But in the Pitcher & Piano, the sweetness is a symptom of death (the chemical breakdown of a structure that has ceased to be useful, a ghost of a bygone age). The stench of the bar, however, is a symptom of life (the biological byproduct of gathering, drinking, and being human).

Touching the Profane in our Age

In many ways, this bar is a symbol of the age we currently live in. Our culture is built upon a foundation of Christian thought, yet we live in a deeply profane world. It is easy to look at the Pitcher & Piano and mourn the loss of the sacred space, wishing we could scrub away the smell of the bar and return to the pure, sweet scent of the sanctuary.

But we have to remember that the vanilla scent is literally the smell of decay. It is a world falling apart.

Perhaps the lesson here isn't that we’ve lost something pure, but that we are looking for the sacred in the wrong place. We want our faith to be like that vanilla scent (pleasant, distant, and chemically stable). But that is the smell of a museum, not a living body. The Incarnation, the central event of our faith, was a descent into the sweat, the dirt, and the messy biology of the human experience. If we want the sacred to be alive again, we won't find it by sniffing the decaying wood of the past. We have to bring it down to the rubber mats, right in the middle of the mess.

Orpheus marries Eurydice, a nymph of great grace and beauty, but their marriage is short lived. There are varying accounts of how it played out, but in the end, Eurydice stepped on a serpent (which bit her) and she died. Before Orpheus could even get to her, she was dead.

Orpheus refuses to accept her death and instead he follows her down into the underworld. As he goes, he uses his music to tame the various obstacles that block the way. Cerberus, the three headed dog, slept; Charon, the ferryman of the dead across the river Styx, takes him across the river for free; the Furies, who punish and wreak vengeance in the underworld, weep as he passes. Finally, at the end, he stands before Hades and his wife, Persephone.

He begs them to restore Eurydice, arguing that she was taken too soon. Hades agrees on one condition. Orpheus must leave the underworld but as he does, he cannot look back to see if Eurydice is following him. Orpheus turned and began his ascent to the upper world.

They ascend in silence, and the silence makes him more and more nervous. He cannot hear her and, as he comes to the light and is within steps of leaving the underworld he turns to see if she is there. Eurydice returns to the shadows and Orpheus wanders alone, being denied entry back into the underworld.

The Greek term katabasis means “going down” or “descent,” and in myth and epic literature it refers to the hero entering the realm of the dead. The descent into death is always seen as the highest test of the hero. The question for any hero is whether they can cross the line that no mortal can cross. We see this across much of the most famous myths. Odysseus goes down to speak to the dead and gain knowledge; Aeneas goes down to receive a vision of Rome and his future; Hercules goes down to get Cerberus for one of his labors.

Katabasis is the highest test for any hero because it exposes the ultimate enemy of the world. Each myth of katabasis is one which asks a question by pitting a human virtue (strength, intellect, or love) against humanity’s oldest enemy.

Orpheus’ katabasis is not achieved by his prowess as a warrior, but by his love and song. His descent is emotional and aesthetic, not a military expedition. He is not interested in glory, his empire, or knowledge. He only wants one thing, Eurydice. He goes down for love.

The central question of this myth is one which pits love against death. Can love reach past the grave and pull someone back? The answer to this question, according to the myth, is no.

Why does Orpheus fail? He is told by Hades that if he doesn’t look back then he can have Eurydice back. All Orpheus must do is have faith in the words of Hades and he will show that human love can pull back loved ones from the dead. Only, there’s a problem. Human faith is frail and filled with fear. Orpheus stands in the place of us all. Human beings fail to trust divine truth. The story ends in silence and loss. It shows that human love is willing to descend to save but is unable.

But there is one human who is faithful and who also has a katabasis. Jesus Christ. He does not descend for knowledge, his own glory, or to defend himself. He goes down to deal with the real problem itself, death and sin. Jesus Christ trusts the Father even into death and descends to the realm of the dead. Where Orpheus soothes with music, Christ’s voice shatters it forever. His love doesn’t fail; he never looks back. He carries out the work of the Father and not only saves a single soul but breaks death’s grip on all who will believe.

Christ fulfills the archetype of the descending hero, conquering death where every mythic rescuer fails. Where Orpheus looked back and lost, Christ looks through death and returned as its conqueror. He is the best possible hero.

Some say He retreated from death’s cold grip, yet others witnessed His crimson blood drip.

His broken remains were laid in solemn rest—Was the prudence of His students put to test?

A conspiracy? A cunning, whispered ruse?

Even zealots know that dead messiahs always lose.

Perhaps a riddle, clouded in mystery,

Or just a fleeting, random reverie.

Tall tales of renown blur the view,

While symbolic reimagining distorts it too.

As rival revelations errantly stake their claim,

none can bear the weight of the risen one’s name.

Shrouded in sorrow as the tomb held sway, death fell defeated:

Jesus Christ raised the third Day

The Garden is located on a mountain (Ezekiel 28:13). In the ancient Near East, such places linked heaven to earth. Michael Heiser expands this view and describes it as the gathering place for God and His heavenly council, divine beings who serve Him (The Unseen Realm, 75). God wasn't simply above the Garden in the heavenly realm but used the Garden as a central part of the governance of the cosmic order.

God’s presence and the presence of His council in the Garden show why it was such a lush paradise, flowing with streaming waters. Catherine McDowell says this is evidence of God’s blessing upon it (McDowell, The Image of God in the Garden of Eden, 38). This blessing extends to Adam, who God appoints to cultivate the soil (Genesis 2:15). McDowell compares the creation of Adam (and thus his purpose in the Garden) to ancient Mesopotamian practices, where priests crafted clay figures and performed rituals which they believed gave them life. Adam is shaped from the dust and breathed into, just like these idols. However, instead of it being a priest who shapes him, he is instead shaped by God (Genesis 2:7; McDowell, 24) and is given the life (the breath) of God himself. Because Adam's soul is given to him by God, he is tied to the life of God. As with the idols, when the image, the idol, was consecrated (given a soul in the minds of the Mesopotamians), it changed “in its status from profane to sacred.” (McDowell, 11)

Eve is formed from Adam’s “bone and flesh” (Genesis 2:23), and she joins him as a partner, a union McDowell describes as sacred harmony (McDowell, 3). They bear God’s image from Genesis 1:26-27, reflecting a kinship with God (McDowell, 2). Together, they work to maintain the cosmic order set up by God and to maintain the harmony of heaven and earth.

Nathan French argues that this harmony relies on obedience to a single command, that they must avoid the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:17; Theocentric, 97-98). In the story, the tree is the boundary between the sacred and the profane. If Adam and Eve obey, then the cosmic order stays safe and life flourishes. If they disobey then the cosmic order shifts toward death, and chaos erupts.

This is the setup for the story, which we will explore next.

Citations

• French, Nathan. A Theocentric Interpretation of הדעת טוב ורע. Religion Und Literatur Des Alten Und Neuen Testaments series.

• Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Lexham Press, 2015.

• McDowell, Catherine. The Image of God in the Garden of Eden. Eisenbrauns, 2015.

• Scripture quotations from the English Standard Version (ESV).

Joshua:
I believe theology is that discipline which strives to give a coherent statement of the doctrines of the biblical faith, based primarily on the scriptures, placed in the context of culture in general, worded in a contemporary idiom, and related to issues of life.1 That task demands a sharp view of Western culture, which I’ve honed through years of reading Homer, Shakespeare, and beyond. Today’s culture pulses with thousands of seemly insurmountable problems for us all. Jesus as the True Myth answers these. His story, a hero facing death and rising victorious, stuns me with its depth. It cuts through our shallow fixes and reveals humanity’s true shape. I want to speak this truth into our time and show how He redefines us.

Matt (Eikon Ash):
I serve as pastor at Crosby Chapel in Seabeck, WA and am an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Liberty University online. My PhD in Theology and Apologetics emerged from years of early morning Starbucks sessions across Kitsap County and late-night Costco shifts.

Hero Myth speaks to our moral conscience, reminding us how we ought to behave. Luke Skywalker first sparked my love for Hero Myth. Over time, I built a Parthenon of favorite heroes drawn from video games and classic literature, fueling my fascination with Hero Myth. All heroes share the same weakness. A hero may prolong life or limit suffering, but none can truly conquer death. Even the mighty Superman cannot defeat death. When his beloved died, he could not resurrect her, so he reversed time to prevent her death—but only for a while.

Jesus Christ is the best possible hero because He defeated sin and death, while also removing the sting of suffering. He embodies the perfect heroic code without compromise, standing as both the cornerstone and king of my Parthenon. Coffee, books, rumination, and Socratic debates with mentors formed and sharpened my thesis. Jesus transcends a mere tale of heroism but emerges as the True Myth. Every culture tells of heroes battling fate. He outstrips them all. Born humble, He defies temptation, storms the temple, lifts the fallen, dies, and rises to rule flesh and spirit. That truth drives my teaching and preaching. I fought to uncover it and now live to share it.

Together:
This is The True Myth. We stake one claim: Jesus slays death and fulfills every myth from Gilgamesh to Hamlet. We’ll wield theology, philosophy, and narrative, in prose or poetry, to thrust Jesus into 2025’s chaos. Beyond tired arguments, we’ll hunt the truest tale and reveal how He outstrips myths, answers our deepest problems, and meets a culture adrift. We start here and sift truth from noise.

Our hope stands firm. He’s no relic. The hero still speaks, still fights, still wins. Walk with us.

Jesus Christ is the True Myth. The only Myth: The Monomyth. Jesus Christ is The Hero with A Thousand Faces. He is every hero, in life or story, who fights for the true, the good, and the beautiful. And all contenders for beauty, truth, and goodness are His reflection. Jesus is a light in darkness, the hope of Gandalf’s return, an assuring still small voice, and that pestering moral whisper. Jesus is the hero who willingly sacrifices Himself for the guilty—For there are none innocent, no not one. And yet Jesus traverses a desolate wasteland to save a single lost soul…or just to get the dog. He is the hero who won’t stay-down, back-down, or walk away. And no matter how many hits Jesus takes, He always finds a way to come back. Because the only thing standing between humanity and oblivion is Jesus Christ. There's only One, and There can be only One! Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ is “the One.” Which one? All of them. Jesus is Anakin Skywalker. He is Neo, Harry Potter, the Avatar, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He is the true “The One.” The Mono-myth: the only Myth. Jesus Christ is the Chosen One of the Chosen Ones: Excalibur jumps into His hand and Mjolnir levitates at the whisper of His name. He is the Dragon-Slayer, Goblin-Slayer, Giant-Slayer, Demon-Slayer, Man-Slayer, god-Slayer, but most notably, the Sin-and-Death-Slayer. Jesus Christ is the True Myth because He is humanity’s “The One,” the one “who takes away the sins of the world.”

Because of the weight of sin, gratuitous suffering, and the looming shadow of death, we welcome the distortion of truth, the distraction from beauty, and the destruction of goodness. Once The Three are dead, “meaning” is next on the Butcher’s Bill. The last to die, of course, is hope. However, when the timing was right, and we were weak and had nearly given up, Jesus Christ fulfilled His plan to restore humanity to live for the true, the good, and the beautiful.

The story of humanity’s restoration is not a finite, random or clumsy myth of paganism or fantasy. It is eternal, visceral, and intentional: divinely purposed, thoughtfully planned, and beautifully enacted. The plan is not achieved through a flick of a wand or even a thought from an omnipotent being. Christ’s plan is not magic or miracle, nor can it be achieved without grit. Real restoration from real sin requires real consequences. The consequences of sin and death are steep because no one but the creator, is fit to be the redeemer—Do you bleed?

Deus ex machina or “god out of the machine” is a literary plot device used to resolve the impossible or escape the inevitable. For example, the Eagles saving Sam and Frodo from Mount Doom or every-dragonball-Z-movie-ever. Jesus Christ relies on Deus ex machina, but not as a means of escape. Rather, Jesus became the inconceivable; He is the Deus ex machina: the infinite God made in finite flesh come to save humanity from sin and death. Can a character from a novel fix a plot-hole of her book? Can Mario fix the glitchy code of his game? Only the Author can fill a plot-hole. Only the Programmer can patch a glitch. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The infinite, eternal, and unchanging Myth became flesh and blood; a human and stranger on the bus.

Jesus Christ is the true and incarnate hope; the path to real forgiveness of real sins. He softens the sting of death and lightens burdens. His hope is not one of failed promises or forgotten occasion. His love is not a seductive song or hypnotic poem. Christ offers pure hope, not the flash of felicity from sex or the bottle, but a lasting pleasure that refreshes the soul. Real hope means real forgiveness of real sins. Jesus Christ knows everything, fully judges your sins, and then asks you in for coffee. He is grace and mercy. The Great Physician: healing all wounds and restoring all trauma. Jesus heals sickness itself and is the only cure for death. The one who cures death, loves you and welcomes you to Sabbath; that is, Jesus welcomes you to live for the true, the good, and the beautiful, while having fellowship with Him.

Jesus Christ is the best possible Hero.

Jesus usurps titles. Any title, in life or story, that claims supremacy or uniqueness in areas of beauty, truth, or goodness, Jesus takes it for Himself because it better applies to Him. Jesus is Caesar, Sultan, Khagan, Jarl, and King. He is the true “Protector of the Realm,” “Defender of the Faith,” and “The LORD of Hosts.” Jesus is the God of Wisdom, Mercy, Strength, Beauty, and the Hunt. Jesus Christ is the God of Women, the God of Men, and the God of everything in between or beyond. Jesus is the God of Heterosexuals, Homosexuals, and everything in between or beyond. He is the God of War and the God of Peace; God of Wrath and the God of Grace.

The Unstoppable Juggernaut halts to kneel before Him. Reed Richards—The World’s Smartest Man—knowingly relinquishes his title as the Incredible Hulk also relents,“Jesus is Incredible, He is not puny human or puny God. Jesus Christ is strong.” Iron Man and Thor agree, Jesus is the strongest Avenger. Apocalypse confirms, “It is the Age of Apocalypse, but it is not my age. Jesus Christ is the Apocalypse.” And no Wolverine, Jesus is the best there is at what He does, not you.

The Amazing Jesus Christ better fulfills Spiderman’s code, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Because Jesus said it first: “To whom much is given, much is required.” Jesus fights for truth and justice more faithfully than Superman. The mantra of the Green Lantern Corp should state:

In brightest day, in blackest night,

No evil shall escape my sight

Let those who worship evil's might,

Beware my power... Jesus Christ's light!

Even if Batman, Adrian Monk, Shaun Spencer, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Phil Fernandes Columbo, and Horatio Caine—the world’s greatest detectives—combine their efforts they still could not out-sleuth Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ is a better leader than Captain Picard, Professor Charles Xavier, Hamlet, any Pharaoh or Emperor, or even King Richard the Lion-heart.

Jesus is wiser than Yoda, Piccolo, Uncle Iroh, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and that-Kung-fu-master-in-every-story-everywhere. Jesus Christ is more humble than Gohan, Ghandi, and Samwell Tarly. Unlike Moriarty, Lex Luthor, Sauron, or Emperor Palpatine, Jesus uses His wisdom and machinations for Good. Jesus is more intelligent than the combined minds of the Flood, the Q, the Watchers, the Borg, and that-evil-computer-from-every-Sci-Fi-story-everywhere.

Jesus out-eats Goku, Naruto, and E Honda.

Jesus heals better than a Bacta Tank, Med-Pac, Health-Pac, first-aid kit, med-kit, Restoration Point, Stimpac, Sensu Bean, drink of water, bite of food, snack of candy, shot of Moonshine, absorption of Fairy, use of Energon cube: more than resting, sleeping, “sleeping,” or just standing around. He heals better than any healing potion, healing jutsu, healing technique, healing treatment, healing spell, healing spray, healing crystal, healing coin, healing orb, healing staff, healing wand, healing rune, healing tank, healing pod, healing heart, or healing salts. Jesus heals better than the Doctor because He heals sin and death.

Jesus Christ simultaneously bests Himura Kenshin, Samurai Jack, Wolverine, Anakin and Luke Skywalker, Aragorn, and Westly in a dual of swords—while using only his left hand…and while blindfolded.

Jesus is more accurate than Vash the Stampede or Nicholas D. Wolfwood, Deadshot, Hawkeye, Legolas, Bullseye, Green Arrow, Katniss Everdeen, or Robin Hood.

Jesus Christ knows more jutsu than Kakashi, is more stealthy than Black Panther, and His words alone shatter Ryu Hyabusa’s famed Dragon Sword.

Jesus is more noble than Reepicheep, the Proverbs 31 Woman, Zelda, or even King Arthur.

Jesus Christ is faster than the combined “Speed Force” of the Flash, Sonic the Hedgehog, Quick Silver, Hermes, and Silver Surfer. Jesus out-slugs. Mike Tyson, Balrog, Mr. Dream, and One Punch Man.

Jesus is greater than SHAZAM: He is wiser than Solomon, stronger than Hercules, more courageous than Achilles, more powerful than Zeus, has greater stamina than Atlas, and is faster than Mercury

Jesus Christ is above the “One-Above-All” because He is the true One-Above-All. He is more powerful than Dr. Manhattan, Aslan’s Father, Leviathan, Eru Iluvatar, the Presence, or The Grand Zeno.

Jesus is better at planet-busting than Beerus, Galactus, the Death Star, the Death Star 2, the Star Killer base, the Sun-Crusher or Darth Nihilus.

Jesus Christ struts in front of cowering Typhon, Morgoth, King Kong, and Godzilla only to use Cthulhu as a footstool. Dr. Doom, Vegeta, and that-condescending-arrogant-jerk-from-every-story-everywhere, bend the knee without hesitation or contestation.

All reality and fiction will confess that “Jesus Christ is LORD.” Because they already do…

Jesus Christ is the best possible hero

Jesus slaughters the Horseman of Wholesomeness: He is more gentile and loving than Mr. Rogers, more meek and creative than Bob Ross, He enjoys education and teaching more than Levar Burton, and He appreciates and respects animals more than Steve Erwin. Jesus values nature and animals more than Swamp Thing, Captain Planet, and that “Smelly Hippie” from Futurama.

Jesus judges more justly than Lady Justice, Judge Judy, the Living Tribunal, Karen, and Judge Dredd. He punishes better than the Punisher because His wrath is controlled, limited, and motivated by goodness. Jesus despises “Law-breakers” more than Casey Jones, while also washing that law-breakers feet. Jesus Christ avenges the shedding of innocent blood better than Ghost Rider, because only His blood is innocent—Do you bleed?

Jesus Christ is the “Droids you are looking for.” It is not, “This is the Way,” but rather “Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” And it should be, “The Lord will be with you, always.” Not the Force. Jesus Christ is the true, “King of the world.” He is the “inconceivable” made flesh. If Bill Murray is asked of Christ’s battle with death, he’d say “He came, He saw, He kicked its ass!” And before Jesus ascended to the Father, He said, “I’ll be back.”

Jesus is a better companion than R2D2, Samwise Gamgee, Chewbacca, or MoMo.

Jesus’ two primary weapons, His Sword and The Holy Spirit, cannot be rivaled. The Holy Spirit is more powerful than the ability to bend all four elements, the ultimate blessing of any finite god, being infused with infinite levels of the Speed Force, the Force, or the Schwartz. Jesus’s Sword is more powerful than anything forged by man, god, or creature.

Jesus Christ is literally the basis of the “Christ-like” figure trope. Master story-teller JRR Tolkien needed three characters to mimic the offices and nature of Christ: Gandalf, who was like a Prophet, Frodo who was like a Priest, and Aragorn, who was the rightful King.

Jesus’ sacrifice is more selfless than Iron-man’s and the Iron Giant’s. His path more weary than the swamps of sadness, His punishment greater than Prometheus’, and His shame greater than the naked walk of Cersei Lannister.

Jesus follows the best possible code: The eternal law, written on the hearts of his image bearers: Humans.

Jesus is the manifestation of myth: He is Anakin Skywalker’s redemption, He is the grace given to Jean Valjean. He is the triumph of the Karate Kid, the angst of Luke Skywalker, the sense of wonder elicited from Middle Earth or Narnia.

Jesus transforms better than Mario’s Mushroom, Fire-Plant, Cape, or Star. Jesus manipulates the body more than Atom, Materia, going any form of Super Saiyan, more than transforming into The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, more than any Mask in Majoras Mask, Skyrim, or even the Mask. No metamorphosis, or Mega Evolution is greater than Him; because Jesus transforms from death to life.

Jesus Christs gives NPCs—Non-Playable-Characters— the capacity to live for the true, the good, and the beautiful. And through that, they are able to change the world.

Jesus Christ is Emmet Brickowski, Ash Williams, and Wonder Woman. He is the One. The only One. Jesus Christ is the hope of humanity,

Jesus Christ is the best possible Hero.