2. The "Historical Jesus" Is a Project and Product of Empire.
We clearly see Protestantism's subservience to empire in the way many Christians get lured away from the Jesus Christ attested in their own Scriptures to follow alternative versions invented and pushed by the powers dominating the Western political economy.
First we have the false "Jesus" pressed into service as empire's mascot. Forms of this "Jesus" have been developed by secular powers for 1500 years. Where centuries ago Jesus supposedly favored the divine right of kings, under Modernity, he is a cartoon who preaches, justifies, and enforces its dominant ideologies: nationalism, capitalism, colonialism, militarism, patriarchy, and racism, while enforcing the restrictive personal/sexual and social morality demanded by the overseers of the political and economic establishment. Here is a "Jesus" engineered mainly to promote the preservation of the status quo. He represents an imaginary past where everyone knew their place and gladly did what the wise rulers told them to do. He is the "Jesus" that conservatives take on the duty to defend (implying that he can't do so himself) and try to impose on the rest of society. He is no more than a hood ornament on their limos and bulldozers. I sometimes refer to him as the fascist "Jesus."
The advocates of this "Jesus" may claim to be all "Bible believing" and "Full-gospel," "orthodox," and "traditional." Sometimes their Savior comes blatantly wrapped in a flag and packing an AR-15. But he is more likely to look gentle, meek, and mild, a sentimental blue-eyed and blonde cypher needing the protection of realists who have the guts to do what needs to be done. And the people he apparently needs defending against are the usual Gay, Trans, liberal, Muslim, Commie, immigrant, atheist, feminist, poor, Black suspects. Anyone the economic and political establishment wants you to hate, the "Jesus" does too.
Their white nationalist "Jesus" contradicts the biblical Jesus so obviously and thoroughly that he doesn't withstand even the most perfunctory scrutiny. A reader taking the New Testament at all seriously has to dismiss him as a ridiculous caricature. Yet he remains the "Jesus" a lot of Christians were taught to follow, and many still either accept him or reject him as the only "Jesus" they know. In seminary I met a guy who had been to his family's evangelical church twice a week for his whole life, but when we read the Sermon on the Mount in class he said he had never heard it before.
Alternatively, we have various versions of a "historical Jesus" manufactured by secular scholars. During the Enlightenment, in an attempt to reduce all things human to left-brained, "objective" categories that made sense to the new scientific outlook, those advocating for these new ways of thinking set up the arbitrary and extraneous standard of "historicity" by which to measure truth. Eventually this set of methods became generally accepted as the only way to establish the "truth" of anything, placing in question the reliability of the narratives about Jesus in the Christian scriptures. This meant that they stopped listening to the Biblical text as a whole or respecting it as holy or sacred. Indeed, under Modernity "sacred" no longer functioned as a meaningful category. They replaced the organic historical community of disciples with objective, secular scholars who applied their own methods to produce their historical "Jesus" and present him to Western culture as the real one. Extracting the Bible from its context in community and tradition, they addressed it with the same cold and calculating approach Modernity took to everything else: as a dead object. The text became something for experts (or anyone else) to poke at, speculate about, disassemble, and either dismiss altogether or reconfigure into something more suitable to them. They proceeded to drill their way into the gospels, seeking to extract from within them a "historical Jesus" they could put forward as verifiable, tossing everything else into the trash as "later additions." They continue to congratulate themselves that they function freely, without "dogma," even though their entire project is determined by the rigid scientific doctrines, criteria, and procedures which have characterized Modernity.
For some historical Jesus critics, this was almost an apologetic exercise. They wanted to use scientific tools to prove that Jesus really did exist in history and some words and actions could be attributed to him. They wanted to save at least something of Jesus from being relegated to fiction after immersion in the acid-bath of historical method. This new "Jesus" would seem to be validated by science, making him more credible to Modern people, supposedly giving them a way to stay Christian. Their intent was to invent a new and better "Jesus" as an alternative to the one propounded by conservatives. What they did not realize is that their methodologies themselves are the empire. Thus they inevitably ended up with a "Jesus" no less acceptable to the empire. If anything, their new "Jesus" was simply a cheerleader for different elements in Modernity's ruling class, namely those academics, intellectuals, professionals, and others who felt the strict, judgmental, moralizing, establishment "Jesus" wasn't meeting their needs.
The "historical Jesus" is thus a product of Modernity and its violent, extractive methodologies. And since he is presented as the only alternative to the reactionary "Jesus," he is in many ways more dangerous because his followers seem to feel like they are bravely resisting empire when in reality they are participating in and profiting from it. The "historical Jesus" is at least as unthreatening to Modernity as is the "Jesus" of the establishment. The basic powers of Modernity are not questioned, let alone threatened. At most they want to project a marginally kinder and gentler Modernity. The manufactured and commodified "historical Jesus" signals a performative resistance to empire which nevertheless fails to identify, let alone jeopardize, empire's deeper roots. He only makes empire more entrenched.
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Both the fascist and the historical Jesuses are really ways this empire would have us avoid the far more challenging and critical canonical Jesus. All Modern Jesuses are built on the same foundation and assumptions: they are focused on the individual self that Modernity has decided now takes the place of God. Modernity is fine with Christians arguing over which of these "Jesuses" is better, as long as everyone continues to assume this foundational idolatry.
The canonical Jesus, conversely, has never been acceptable to empire. This is especially true for Modernity because the canonical Jesus preaches both the relinquishment of the ego-centric self, with its fears and desires, and an alternative to empire he calls the Kingdom of God, a commonwealth of equity. He displaces the ego from its throne in our souls, which renders his followers essentially uncontrollable and thus subversive and intolerable to all earthly empires. If Modernity was going to exert control over the Church, as several empires had done before, it had to jettison the canonical Jesus.
Modernity's whole consumer ethos encourages individuals to evaluate Jesus like any other product for sale in the marketplace. They may lift up the parts of Jesus' story they agree with or that support their views, and they reject or critique what they don't like. Customers should have the Jesus they want. Following the example of Thomas Jefferson, individuals with at best only a tangential relationship to the community of people called to follow Jesus take it upon themselves to go through the gospels and assess what they do and don't agree with, removing, changing, and adding things that improve the story for them, and go from there, until we are lost in waves of speculative bullshit. (At the same time, they get indignant at evidence that the Church has altered scriptural passages... even though these stories belong to the Church!)
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