there is all that much teaching at all. Christianity is less pedagogy than it is resonant myth, and I mean 'myth' in its most gleaming definition.

Paul's letters are teacherly, sort of, but they are not resonant with all readers, including readers who like the ministry of Jesus better than Paul's more authoritarian social doctrines. There is a lot of pure politics in Paul. There is unfathomable mystery to the figure of Jesus.

There remains the problem of interpolation over many centuries by people with varying agendas. The version in the canonized Bible now may or may not have been the "books" used by the Christian communities of the century of and century following the life of Jesus. There are passages of significant beauty and of garbled nonsense as well.

And not least, we cannot say with certainty that the Jesus referenced in these texts is an actual person. We are told that that is the case, but it is quite another matter to say we clinically 'know' it to be the case.

Lincoln was at Gettysburg; we have photos and an address written in his hand. No such record is extant regarding the life of Jesus. There is the long trail of awed comment on his ministry, there are those imbued to help others banking off his model -- and they seem to me to be genuine in their impulse to do good -- and of course there are the unstable and insecure nutbags who warn us of "witches praying over Hallowe'en candy." Jesus, if he was a real person, was likely a Jew.

As it's given to us, the gospels in varying degrees of detail and emphasis, suggest a man in his very early 30s who pointedly and often cleverly distrusts the local authorities of the realm in a time when the Roman Republic had become the Roman Empire and individual freedoms and dignities were hard-won things, and damned rare. We see an intelligent, charismatic figure emerge from (evidently) Galilee, we get the boats and the water and the anglers, we get a strikingly vivid woman in the Magdalene, we get another woman rescued from a hole and stones and certain death, we get the sick and the afflicted healed, we get a maniacal king threatened by a baby in a humble manager, we get a very well-placed donkey for the final number into town, and two thousand years of redemptive blood.

Sincere spirit in a world of warfare and poverty appear to register more deeply than corrupt application of power and conquest by remote tyranny. The frail and the unlistened-to are raised higher in esteem and given citizenship in a broader communion. Forgiveness appears to take precedence over condemnation. The truth itself is suggested to be in faraway desert caves or in any case well out of town, and certainly involves express nonalignment with organized temples, churches, etc.

Paradox is also a theme, as even though uplift and belongedness inspire individual and community change and maybe world peace, efforts toward those goals are met with violent resistance.