American Born Chinese

I recently saw the above-titled television show. Thinking it was about Chinese descend students in America struggling to find their identities in a foreign society, I started watching it. Instead, it was a story of a monkey prince camouflaging as a human to escape his dad, the king of the monkey heaven, and, in the process, helping a Chinese descent American boy.

Two famous Indian writings are Ramayana and Mahabharata. Ramayana depicts the life of Rama, a legendary prince in North India, and his travels throughout India. Mahabharata narrates the war between two sets of cousins. These loosely historical stories have become Hindu religious texts as they include semi-divine characters like Hanuman, the monkey god, who leads monkeys to help Rama recover his wife, Sita, from the demon Ravana, the king of present-day Sri Lanka.

Since several ancient religious texts combine human and divine and factual and fictional elements, people categorize Judeo-religious texts like the Tanak (the Hebrews’ name for the Old Testament) and the New Testament as similarly and cleverly devised “myths.” They have some fundamental truths but plenty of fictional, false, and semi-divine elements. To this degree, there have been three quests to find who the real historical Jesus was. Some, for example, have concluded that Jesus was a god-fearing peasant from Galilee who became overly zealous and tried to cause a revolution. Fearing he would threaten Rome’s peace, the religious leaders handed him to Rome as an insurrectionist, and they crucified him. Mystified, confused, and disappointed, his followers created the myth of Christ, his resurrection, ascension, and coming back, and started the religion called Christianity.

Such questioning of Christ and Christianity isn’t new. It began during the time of the apostles. Peter answered their quest:

“Not by following wisely crafted myths but by being eyewitnesses of his majesty, when he received from God the Father honor and a glorious voice declaring with majestic glory: ‘My Son, my beloved, is he. In him, I am greatly pleased,’ we proclaimed our Lord Jesus Christ to you and about his power and arrival. We ourselves heard this voice coming from heaven while we ascended with him and were on that holy mountain.” (2 Pet 1:16–18)

Peter wasn’t a fictional writer or someone who imagined weird visions because of hallucinations from drugs or bad food. He was an eyewitness to Jesus’s arrival, power, glory, and honor, and he heard God the Father himself declare his glory on the Mount of Transfiguration. God the Father said Jesus was his son, his beloved son, and in whom he was well-pleased.

These words would have recalled a familiar story to the Israelites. Centuries earlier, God appeared to Abraham and said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love . . . and sacrifice him” (Gen 22:2). Once again, God was saying the exact words. This time, it was about his own son, Jesus, whom he loved, in whom he was well-pleased, and whom he would offer as the ultimate sacrifice. Peter witnessed those words, and as such, he knew that the crucified but resurrected Jesus was God’s son, the beloved, and the Lord of the people.

Christian faith isn’t a wisely crafted myth; instead, it’s about a historical person (or, as my friend says, “HIS Story.”) It adores God’s Son, the beloved, the one who pleased God, and the one who sacrificed himself for others.