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Too Radical for PETA
Remember PETA’s "Jesus was a vegetarian" campaign several years ago, which attracted so much attention with its billboards and press releases? Well, it’s over.

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has not exactly repudiated this campaign, but they are no longer loudly proclaiming "Jesus was a vegetarian" — and haven’t done so for some time. They now present a variety of reasons for being a vegetarian, so that even if you don’t think that Jesus was a vegetarian, you should be vegetarian yourself. "Even if Jesus did eat the Passover Lamb 2,000 years ago," says PETA's "JesusVeg" web site, "that should not placate us regarding the 20 billion of God's creatures who are abused for food each year."

Bruce Friedrich of PETA was recently on Lee Strobel's cable TV show, "Faith Under Fire" talking about Christianity and vegetarianism. He didn't really try to make the case for the vegetarianism of Jesus, and Strobel (a fairly fundamentalist type) commented on that.

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LEE STROBEL: Okay, another one of your billboards, Bruce, says, "Jesus was a vegetarian". And I've seen your stuff online where you argue very strongly that Jesus was a vegan. Uh, do you still hold to that position? What evidence do you have that Jesus refrained from eating meat?

BRUCE FRIEDRICH: Well, once, once, once again Lee, we're trying to raise a, an issue and to get people talking about the issue and thinking about the issue. There is some scholarly research that argues from a historical standpoint that Jesus was a vegetarian, although, what we're trying to do is to get Christians thinking about what we should be eating today. [There was no further discussion of Jesus’ vegetarianism during the rest of the show, except by a meat-eating Christian who attacks the idea of Jesus’ vegetarianism, with again no direct rebuttal on this issue from Bruce.]

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I’m not sure how much I can complain about this — someone has to make the case for vegetarianism to fundamentalist Christians who think that Jesus ate the Passover lamb, or fish, or whatever. I usually find myself more conservative than PETA, especially on the question of tactics. For the sake of getting attention, they will do a lot of things which are either dangerous, strange, or just downright offensive. When PETA activists say "I’d rather go naked than wear fur," together with legally but provocatively-posed models willing to share this sentiment illustrating the first option, I find this, well, embarrassing.

However, all of this puts me in an interesting position: now that PETA has essentially jettisoned their "Jesus was a vegetarian" campaign, and now that I find myself promoting this idea of Jesus’ vegetarianism, I find myself in the very odd position of actually being more radical than PETA on at least this one issue.

Why did PETA change?
Wow, how did THAT happen? I don’t know why PETA did this, but I can put two and two together. There are three reasons I think are likely: (1) Ebionites are not as "sexy" as Essenes; (2) negative reaction from orthodox Christian meat-eaters; (3) negative reaction from conservative Christian vegetarians.

First of all, a bit of history. As much as I’d like to claim credit, I had nothing to do with PETA’s original "Jesus was a vegetarian" campaign (not even close). I first found out about PETA’s campaign through the media, long before The Lost Religion of Jesus had been published. I then sent Bruce Friedrich a copy of the manuscript (which maintains that Jesus was a vegetarian).

PETA’s argument at the time relied heavily on the Essenes, which I thought was a distraction. If you talked about the Essenes then you also had to talk about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Qumran sect, and so forth — which becomes really complicated, because you have to explain why the Qumran sect was not vegetarian, but that Jesus and the Essenes were.

The Ebionites, by contrast, were clearly connected to Jesus and were clearly vegetarian, which is what I talked about in The Lost Religion of Jesus. Of course, nobody has heard of the Ebionites, whereas lots of people have heard of the Essenes, which creates a problem. "The Ebionites were vegetarian, and were the true followers of Jesus" doesn’t quite have the ring that "Jesus was an Essene" does.

Once the original "Jesus was a vegetarian" campaign was underway, two more things happened to PETA: there was negative reaction from Christian orthodoxy, and there was a negative reaction from other Christian vegetarians.

The negative reaction from Christian orthodoxy came from indignant Christian meat-eaters and the response went something like this: "Jesus was NOT a vegetarian, because the Bible says he wasn’t. What about eating the Passover lamb? What about the loaves and the fishes? What about eating fish after the resurrection? This is a denial of the Bible, it’s sacrilegious, it’s basically evil."

The negative reactio