The Reverend Madison Shockley has a very thoughtful piece over at TruthDig. As the religious right has hijacked Jesus to justify so many less than reverent causes – Shockley helps bring us back to ground or perhaps faith or at least to reconcile us to the historical man, Jesus.

So who is Jesus Christ? The Jesus Christ of most traditional theology is a distortion of both the Jesus of history and the Christ of the Christian faith—an attempt to take the metaphor of Christ and invest it totally in the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a distortion because it makes a very Jewish Jesus into the first Christian and not the faithful Jew that he was. The truth about “Jesus Christ” is that when we look only at this hybrid concept we lose clear sight of both the human being and the mythological icon. What we hope to do in this dig is excavate separately the man (Jesus) and the myth (Christ) and unearth a new meaning for the statement “Jesus [is] Christ.”

Please give it a read.