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My friend Micheal Herman (who is new to blogging but not to wikis) has added a really interesting point in my comments about the god/human division and Pilate’s role in the whole matter:

..there are those who’ve suggested that mao tse tung was a very high tibetan teacher, come to essentially take the karmic hit for busting the tibetan practices out of tibet so that the rest of the world could get at them.

god messing in lives of people seems only to extend the division between god and people, no?

That is a very interesting perspective. I replied:

Maybe one way to think about the Christian story from that persepctive is to see Jesus as just that attempt the erase the division between God and human. I mean if Jesus wasn’t a blended being, then it’s hard to imagine who would be.

Meanwhile, Bob Hunt adds that the Old Testament God creeping into the New Testament troubles him from time to time:

It is most definitely an echo of the Old Testament God – the God I find troubling. I feel a certain cognitive dissonance when I think of these different faces of God. I can’t help but think of God as infinitely compassionate, and yet we have countless examples of God behaving in ways that appear very cruel at worst, and unforgiving at best. I suppose I have come to a tentative resolution in this regard by realizing that God is Love, yes, but Love is not only beautiful and compassionate, but also fierce and seemingly unjust.

For me though this Pilate as Mao thing has me thinking that perhaps, from the Christian perspective, the exploitation of Pilate was in the service of a compassionate gesture for human kind. Without the execution of Jesus there is no way that his message would have got out of the circle of a dozen (11 at this point, thanks to Judas hanging himself) frightened friends of Jesus. The death and resurrection of Christ is the real showstopper for Christianity. Without that, Jesus is just another anarcho-rabbi sticking it to the Man.