Taking another look at Jesus
by Darrell Laurant - The News & Advance
Lynchburg, VA
Monday April 25, 2005
 

GLADSTONE - Frank Applin is full of surprises.

Break through the peel of his outer philosophy and bite into a discussion of the theoretical core, and you may find that what you first thought was an orange is really an apple.

For example:

• Although his new book, “How Far Have We Strayed?” debunks much of traditional Christian dogma, Applin is a former Catholic altar boy who still considers himself a spiritual person. Nor, he adds, “am I an atheist.”

• His wife, Janet, is a practicing Southern Baptist who works for Mail America, a company that often does mass mailings for conservative Christian groups.

• Frank Applin is a political conservative who still staunchly endorses President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. In fact, he says, he’s one of only two conservatives in a far-flung, intellectual, curious and contentious family that includes two journalists.

• Unlike most teachers, he loves substitute work (at Nelson Middle School) because “I don’t get bored teaching the same thing all the time.” Yet he bemoans what he sees as the loss of personal responsibility and work ethic among today’s youth.

To me, though, the story that serves as the best metaphor for Applin’s book is the one about the gravel pit. When he and Janet moved to her childhood home in Gladstone three years ago, Frank decided to turn a gravel pit on the property into a garden.

“The county had been dumping gravel in there for 70 years,” Janet said. “The neighbors all thought Frank was crazy.”

But the couple attacked the packed-down earth with pickaxes and finally planted seeds. And, Janet said, “we had the prettiest crop of snap beans you ever saw.”

“My theory,” Frank Applin said, “is the ground was so grateful to be loosened after all those years that it was ready to grow anything.”

One could argue that open discourse about the origins of Christianity has been similarly tamped down - not just over years, but over centuries.

“What I have a problem with,” Applin said, “is that so many Christians don’t know their own history. I once met a pastor who didn’t know Jesus was Jewish.”

Applin isn’t trying to forcefeed his ideas to anyone. He doesn’t want to convert (or unconvert) committed Christians. He just wants to open a dialogue.

“Janet’s pastor and I talk all the time,” Applin said. “He’s a good man, and I respect him. But he takes the Bible literally, so we have disagreements about that.”

In a nutshell, Applin believes that Jesus was a charismatic teacher who was close to God. He just doesn’t believe he was God - or, in fact, ever claimed to be.

This is, of course, not a small point to millions of Christians who see the divinity of Jesus as the centerpiece of their faith.

Yet Applin points to Paul as one architect of historical revisionism, noting: “Paul’s agenda was clear. Paul was more concerned with his revealed vision of Jesus as the resurrected Christ than he was with teaching the message that Jesus taught his disciples.”

Which, for Applin, provides part of the answer to a nagging question: “Why is so much of what Jesus preached (sell your goods and give them to the poor, for instance) seemingly ignored by practicing Christians?”

You may disagree with Frank Applin, but you can’t accuse him of shooting from the hip. He has two bookcases in his study full of books about Jesus and the early Christians, and he’s read every one of them.

“The problem,” he said, “is that you need a PhD in religion to get through a lot of these. I wanted to write something more understandable to the average person.”

He did that over just a few months, in a burst of creative energy after moving to Virginia.

“I can thank Janet,” he said. “I wasn’t working at the time, and she said, ‘Why don’t you work on your book?”’

“Actually, what I said was, ‘Stop talking and write it,’” Janet said.

Born in Minnesota, Applin was raised in Lousiana and schooled at the University of Southeast Louisiana and Southern Methodist University. But he never earned a PhD, which he said hampered his efforts to get his book (full title: “How Far Have We Strayed: Interpretation, Christianity and the Historical Jesus”) accepted by a mainstream publisher. Finally, he opted for the print on demand publisher Authorhouse.

“I’m not worried about the criticism I might get,” he said. “I just really think we need to talk about this.”