SOUTH African Pastor Xola Skosana has created a furore with his statement from his pulpit that:
Today I will start with a three-part sermon on: Jesus was HIV-positive.
The words, according to the BBC, initially stunned his congregation in Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township into silence, and then set tongues wagging in churches across the country.
Pastor Skosana
Some Christians have been outraged, saying he is portraying Jesus as sexually promiscuous.
HIV is mainly transmitted through sex, but can also be spread through needle-sharing, contaminated blood, pregnancy and breastfeeding.
But, as Pastor Skosana told those gathered in the modest Luhlaza High School hall for his weekly services, in many parts of the Bible Jesus put himself in the position of the destitute, the sick and the marginalised.
Wherever you open the scriptures Jesus puts himself in the shoes of people who experience brokenness. Isaiah 53, for example, clearly paints a picture of Jesus who takes upon himself the infirmities and the brokenness of humanity.
He is also quick to emphasise that he is using the metaphor to highlight the danger of the HIV/Aids pandemic, which still carries a stigma in South Africa’s townships.
Of course, there’s no scientific evidence that Jesus had the HI virus in his bloodstream. The best gift we can give to people who are HIV-positive is to help de-stigmatise Aids and create an environment where they know God is not against them, he’s not ashamed of them.
But Pastor Mike Bele, who officiates at the Nomzamo Baptist Church in nearby Gugulethu, said most clergy in Khayelitsha and other Cape Town townships are strongly opposed to associating Jesus with HIV.
I believe no anointed leader with a sound mind about the scriptures and the role of Christ in our lives would deliberately drag the name of Christ to the ground.
He blathered on:
The pastor needs to explain how it came about for him to bring Christ to our level, when Christ is supreme and is God. There is a concern that non-believers would mock Christ and try to generalise Christ as opposed to the powerful force we believe him to be.
Outside religious circles, Pastor Skosana has received support from Aids activists. Says Vuyiseka Dubula, general secretary of the powerful Aids lobby group Treatment Action Campaign:
The pastor’s sermon takes away the stigma that HIV is a sin and that it’s God’s punishment.
To associate Jesus with HIV is powerful, particularly for those who go to church. Now people are starting to think: ‘If Jesus could be HIV-positive who am I not to have it even if I go to church?’
Jan Glazewski, a professor of marine and environmental law at the University of Cape Town who has been HIV-positive for 25 years, wrote in a letter to the Cape Times newspaper that he identified with the idea that God was on the side of the poor and marginalised.
Hat tip: Marcus
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
November 3rd, 2010 at 1:33 pm
Way to go, Skosana. I admire your radical thinking and courage.
November 3rd, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Christianity has never convincingly been about identifying with the poor, ill and marginalised, as this latest conflict illustrates all too clearly.
Pastor Skosana will hopefully realise that what he takes to be the essential Christian message actually benefits enormously from leaving Jesus Christ out of it, along with all the other theistic hocus pocus.
November 3rd, 2010 at 2:32 pm
Bubblecar is not wrong, but give credit where credit is due. This guy is doing something useful and positive. I blogged about this too, and give props to Skosana .
November 3rd, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Interesting example of twisting OT scripture to “fit” xtianity’s requirements to make it seem as if the late JC was fulfilling OT “prophecy”. However Isaiah 52 states, relating to the character whose travails are elaborated in I53,
“his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being
and his form marred beyond human likeness— ”
clearly not a description even remotely close to that of the JC of the NT. It’s all just BS, all of it! It doesn’t work as truth, it doesn’t work as metaphor, it doesn’t work as allegory….
November 3rd, 2010 at 6:53 pm
test
November 3rd, 2010 at 7:17 pm
Let me quote from God, Jesus and the Bible, page 259:
“Both Acts (8:32-33) and John (12:38) equated Jesus with Second Isayah’s suffering slave. And Second Isayah said of his hero, ‘He has neither proper shape nor attractiveness, no beauty that would attract him to us…. He was despised, and we attributed no value to him…. We deemed him stricken, plagued by the gods and afflicted’ (ISA 53:2-4). It seems unlikely that two writers would independently have equated Jesus with such an unfortunate creature unless the physical description also matched that of Jesus.”
The first five centuries of Christian apologists accepted Josephus’s description of a deformed Jesus. Tertullian wrote in 207 CE, “His body was not even of honest human shape.” Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Cyril of Alexandria, Andrew of Crete, Clement of Rome, and Ephhrem of Syria agreed.
Josephus in his Halosis, quoted by Robert Eisler (The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist), described Jesus as, “a man of simple appearance, mature age, small stature, three cubits high [4ft 6in], hunchbacked, with a long face, long nose, and meeting eyebrows, so that they who see him might be affrighted, with scanty hair with a parting in the middle of his head, after the manner of the Nazirites, and with an undeveloped beard.”
Not until after the Josephus passage was effectively suppressed was the painter of the Mandylion of Edessa, discovered in 525 CE, able to depict Jesus as the Greek god that he has been in all later Christian iconography.
November 3rd, 2010 at 7:21 pm
Fair play to the pastor. Even the deluded can retain some decency.
November 3rd, 2010 at 7:47 pm
Agreed, fair play to him. If you must believe in a self-contradictory bronze/iron age collection of myths, you may as well at least pick the bits that might do some good. Shame Herr Ratface doesn’t do the same…
November 3rd, 2010 at 7:55 pm
For a fundie that’s almost sane. Almost.
November 3rd, 2010 at 9:03 pm
Just another “trendy” pastor. I’ve heard it all before!
November 3rd, 2010 at 10:53 pm
tick, tick, tick, tick….boom!! Time is about to run out! It will soon be over and the truth will be known…over and out…TROLL (ps Barriejohn…well done with the new security (captcha) we had to install it to keep out the weirdo’s too!!)
November 3rd, 2010 at 11:35 pm
For a Christian, he’s not half bad. I think he’s been very brave.
November 3rd, 2010 at 11:59 pm
OT, but I had a message via my Contact form from the troll Bob Hutton, directing me to his latest post. I’m not going to dignify him with a link, but if you google for ‘The Gospel Truth hutton’ you should find a result for him at blogspot.com. Look for a post entitled ‘Eaten for breakfast.’
Basicaly its a screed about how America has voted against the gay-enablers and other pinko liberals, blah blah. I sent in my comment:
Anyone fancy a small bet on whether he publishes that?
November 4th, 2010 at 12:19 am
There’s nothing Xtians hate more than finding a decent bloke within their midst.
November 4th, 2010 at 7:09 am
Daz, I also get unsolicited emails from the brain-damaged Bob Hutton, attempting to steer me towards his failed blog. These as automatically go into my spam folder. I really wouldn’t waste time engaging with this lying fuckwit who has a tendency to post stories about people who have been “saved”. No-one is actually named in these “case histories”, nor are any links given to verify them. So we can only assume they are a product of his sick imagination.
November 4th, 2010 at 8:10 am
Barry: How dare you cast doubt on all those authentic, heartwarming stories of poor, benighted souls “finding the Saviour”! I still have in my possession somewhere a copy of a charming little American tract on the subject of prayer, which I kept because it was so funny. It listed umpteen people who had watched while cancer disappeared, had their hair regrow overnight, gone to the railway station without money (in the case of the author, who was a dab hand at this sort of thing, evidently) and – at the very moment that he was boarding the train – had the precise cost of the fare “pressed into his palm” (things are never just given to you in Gospel tracts!). He even had a bundle “pressed into his hands” by a perfect stranger once that turned out, upon opening, to be a tailored suit that fitted him EXACTLY! Names and locations were given for all these episodes, as verification of course, but the one that took the biscuit was that of a missionary in Africa who was being chased by a man-eating tiger that overshot him and jumped straight into the jaws of a crocodile that was also about to swallow him up. Yes, how amazing; a tiger that could leap all the way from India to Africa! Perhaps I’ll send the tract to dear old deluded Bob.
November 4th, 2010 at 8:47 am
Barry – I’ve been on at Hutton for weeks now to try to get him to explain and defend some of the more ludicrous ‘facts’ he has published on his blog. He flatly refuses to post any of my points or elaborate on the claptrap he has written. The man is an inveterate coward, liar and, as you so eloquently put it, fuckwit.
November 4th, 2010 at 9:03 am
Is anyone moderating today?
November 4th, 2010 at 9:03 am
For some reason, despite the fact he has been ridiculed on this site on countless occassions, Bob Hutton keeps on coming. Whenever he gets challenged on any point, he behaves like a child, and thinks by ignoring the questions that they will just go away.
Several of the regulars on this site have gone and left messages on his site but they are swifly removed. Which is a bit rich, if memory serves me right, coming from a man who once accussed the site of not wanting to enter into dialogue.
November 4th, 2010 at 10:20 am
tony e
Regarding Bob Hutton the religious nutter, I posted something – quite restrained actually – on his dopey site. It was there very briefly. I think only 100 per cent support for nutty Bob’s mad ideas is acceptible. I won’t be back there.
I read in the Freethinker this month some fairly extensive quotes from Hutton about Claire Rayner. Hutton, daft as a brush, is salivating at the prospect of Claire being in hell. Being a moron he fails to realise that kindness inspired by fear of hell or hope of heaven is a phony version of the kindness of people such as Claire Rayner.
His god must be a real dumbfuck to be taken in by this kind of bribery.
November 4th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
Broga,
Personally, I don’t mind the idea of trolls like Bob Hutton visiting this site, it’s too easy to slip into complacency regarding religion, and as atheists we do need to be challanged. There is no debate if it’s only one sided.
However, the debate has to be above the level of ‘the scripture says this, and therefore it’s correct’. And sadly that is the level of Bob’s arguments.
November 4th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
I know, I know. I should ignore him. There’s a kind of horrified fascination involved though. The self-importance of the man, combined with the lack of reality in his mental picture of the world keeps drawing me back.