The Spiral Path

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Archive for the category “Mark (Jesus’ great nephew)”

01 Sep 2012

RS27: The Way, the Truth, and the Life

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New Brunswick (c) Jamie MacDonald 2012

A:  Tell me about the healing miracles that took place around you.

J:  A lot of people over the centuries have tried to figure out the healing miracles reported in the Gospels.  Not many have noticed that the claims made by Mark are very different from the claims made by the other gospel writers.  To understand the healing miracles that took place during my ministry, the only reliable source is Mark’s gospel.  My friend Lazarus — the beloved disciple — was also a reliable source.  But his collection of essays and parables and sayings — the collection that’s been tentatively reconstructed by scholars and labelled the “Q source” — no longer exists in its original format.  So for anyone who wants to understand what I actually taught about healing and illness, they’d need to look more closely at what Mark says.

A:  I did an analysis of the healing stories in Mark, Matthew, and Luke for a New Testament course.*  My professor got very huffy with me because I launched into a very un-scholarly attack on Luke’s motives in the middle of the paper.  But I don’t regret pointing out the truth about Luke’s desire to paint you as a “Divine Patron of Healing.”  Luke had an agenda, and his agenda had nothing to do with teaching regular people how to be in relationship with God.

J:  Luke was a disciple of Paul.  Young, brilliant, devoted to the cause of the Seekers of the Rock.  He was very young — still in his mid-teens — when Paul died.  As he grew older, he earned more responsibility in the “great cause” of spreading the agenda of “The One True Religion.”  When my great-nephew wrote his anti-Pauline book — the Gospel of Mark — Luke got the job of undermining Mark’s message.  The last thing the Seekers wanted was another resurgence of interest in what I actually taught (as opposed to what they said I taught).

A:  Well, you were a difficult fellow.  And according to them, you were seriously broken.  So from their point of view they were helping you!

J (chuckling):  With friends like that, who needs enemies?

A:  You said recently (“The Messiah Who Misbehaved”) that Paul looked at the miracles of your ministry and decided you really had been the prophesied Jewish Messiah.  But not in a good way, because you hadn’t followed the proper script, the proper path that was expected of you.  So what did you do instead?  What did you do that got everybody’s knickers in a knot?

J:  Well, that’s the thing.  What I did was so simple it’s been missed by most Christians all this time.  What I did was get off my ass, stop feeling sorry for myself, stop wasting time on useless religious rituals and prayers, and go out and help people.

A:  Come on.  That’s way too simple.

J:  The complete story is that I went out and helped other people in a holistic way, using all my heart, all my mind, all my talent, and all my strength to forge a bridge of healing with others.  In other words, I helped people soul-to-soul.  I helped people recognize the “rainbow bridge” within themselves, the pathway to “the kingdom of the heavens.”  People were so shocked at this idea that sometimes they burst into tears.  This one idea was — is — so powerful to the process of healing that I could see dramatic changes in their physical and mental state overnight.  People need to know in their gut that God actually believes in them.

A:  You’ve mentioned the rainbow bridge within, and this makes me think of the sign of the rainbow in God’s covenant with Noah (Genesis 9:8-17).

J:  This covenant between God and all Creation as it exists on Planet Earth — a covenant of trust and healing with humanity plus every living creature and the earth itself — is the only covenant that appears in the Bible that I actually endorse.  And the enduring sign of this covenant is the rainbow.  So naturally, when I spoke of people entering “the kingdom of the heavens,” I had the sign of the rainbow in mind.  In my day, the rainbow was seen by all cultures as the pathway that connected Heaven and Earth, the pathway travelled by divine messengers.  In the Greek world, the messenger who travelled the rainbow bridge was Iris.  In the Egyptian world, the messenger was Hermes Trismegistus.  In the Jewish world, the messenger was Abraham.

The main point here is that almost everybody, regardless of religious tradition, believed that God or Spirit or Source or Oneness or whatever label you used for the Divine, was somewhere far away, somewhere not of this Earth, somewhere not of this place or this time.  Sometimes the distance between Heaven and Earth could be closed, said the priests.  But this “closing of the gap” was believed to be rare, an event reserved for extraordinary events and times such as the birth and death of a great king.  It was unthinkable that God would enter the world, quietly and humbly, to heal the scabrous skin of a “leper.”  God just didn’t do that sort of thing, said the great theologians of my time.

A:  How did you see the connection between Heaven and Earth?

J:  For me, God was not “up there.”  Neither was God “in here,” in the way the Gnostic tradition speaks of “the spark within.”  God the Mother and the God the Father were — are — the world around me.  The world outside all other beings.  Neither pantheism nor panentheism, but something different.  Creation as family.  It’s the closest analogy there is.  Creation as family, with God the Mother and God the Father as parents who create a vast home for us, a home of “earth and air and water and fire,” parents who then step back from us, their angelic children, to allow us to understand and know ourselves as unique beings, unique consciousnesses within the family of Creation.  We are not them.  And they are not us.  But together we live and work together as a family.  They need us and we need them.  It’s as simple as that.

This what your inner soul believes about who you really are.

This what your inner soul believes about who you really are.

A:  So for you the world around you was not a tainted and corrupt lower sphere, a vile place to be controlled and transcended, but a strange sort of family home.  A place with many rooms to be explored and understood.  A place where God speaks in many languages and many voices.

J (nodding):  Yes!  A place where we experience the trajectory of true healing in ways that are difficult to express in words alone.

A:  Including the mysterious role of forgiveness.

J:  It felt to me, during my time as Jesus, that building a relationship with God and God’s angels is very much like building a bridge.  Building a bridge between your heart and another person’s heart, even if the other person is a person-of-soul who has no physical 3D body!  You are you, and she is she, so you can’t be that other person.  But you can build a bridge to that other person.  You can build a bridge of words and choices and actions and memories, a bridge of courage and devotion and gratitude and trust, and the bridge is a great source of strength, a way to “close the gap” between Heaven and Earth so you never feel alone.  The bridge “feels” like the rainbow that lights your heart when you look into the sky after a passing storm.  Maybe it sounds like a mushy Hallmark card, but I don’t care.  This is what it feels like to know God’s presence in your life.  It feels like this ephemeral thing of great beauty that alights upon your heart and soul in those times when you most need to feel the quiet touch of God’s hand upon your shoulder.  What travels along this rainbow bridge is not a messenger but Divine Love itself.  If you could see Creation with the eyes of an angel, you would see networks — highways — of rainbow light, bridges that connect the heart of each soul to the hearts of all other souls.

A:  Like an angel Internet.

J:  Actually, that’s exactly what it is — a world wide web of pure Divine Love that’s been built one small bridge at a time.

This is what I meant when I talked about the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  It’s not what Paul meant when he talked about the Way, and it’s not what John meant.  But, for me, the covenant with Noah was the only scriptural proof-text that made any sense.   The Way means helping God in the great and mysterious and multiple tasks of healing.

First step: help heal the physical body — the physical bodies of humans and other creatures and the planet itself — as Noah once helped God heal the bodies of all creatures on Planet Earth (metaphorically speaking, of course, since the biblical account of Noah and the Great Flood was not an actual historical event ).

Second step:  start to build the rainbow bridges of the heart so you can hear what God is actually saying to you!

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*Excerpt from a 2009 paper entitled, “RADICAL MESSIAH: AN EXAMINATION OF HOW THE HEALING MIRACLE STORIES ARE USED IN MARK, MATTHEW, AND LUKE”

. . .   The basic shape of Mark’s argument is presented in his opening verses (Mark 1:1 – 2:12).  These verses offer five different healing miracle stories in quick succession after a brief introduction that starts in the countryside (not the Temple) with John the Baptist (not with a priest).  These five narrative healing stories (plus eight more individual healings and assorted crowd scenes in Mark) have distinct features that make unique claims for the Jewish Messiah: (1) Jesus heals the most disadvantaged and scorned of people – the mentally ill (demoniacs), women, lepers, and paralytics (and in later chapters, Gentiles), most of whom are likely extremely poor (cf. the Beatitudes in Luke 6:20-23) – using only authority, forgiveness, word, and touch, but not prayer.  (2) He heals them in synagogue, household, and outdoor settings, far removed from any sanctioned Temple, whether Jewish or Gentile.  (3) All but one healing in Mark – the healing of the Syro-Phoenician girl (Mark 7: 24-30) – require that Jesus be physically present beside (or at least in visual proximity to) the person who is being healed, thus emphasizing the importance of personal relationship and compassionate presence as part of the miraculous healing process.  (4) He heals on the Sabbath, regardless of what Torah and priestly custom say.  (5) He rejects the purity codes of “uncleanness” as they pertain to illness, and does not equate “cleanness” with healing.  (6) He does not follow the traditional medical treatments recommended in either Greek medical texts or Jewish mishnah (Cotter, Appendices A & B), and he does not use either magical amulets or Jewish religious rituals (eg. sacrificial offerings), all of which suggest he is getting divine assistance in a novel form that bypasses all previously known ways of God’s acting in the world to relieve suffering, and that obviates the need for the Jerusalem Temple. (7) He does not ask for monetary payment, and he usually does not ask for an “honour payment” of public recognition; both of these values subvert the honour/shame paradigm.  (8) He does not heal everyone who comes to him in the beginning, only “many” of the people who gather in the crowd scene of 1:32-34 (although by 6:53-56, he is healing everyone).  (9) Jesus does not himself bring anyone back from the dead. (In the story about Jairus’s daughter, in Mark 5:21-24, 35-43, Jesus says the girl is not dead, but sleeping; and in the Passion sequence, the young man at the tomb says that “Jesus has been raised,” not “Jesus has raised himself”).  (10) All of the diseases that Jesus heals are attributable, in modern terms, to disorders of the endocrine system and central nervous system, and none involve sudden regeneration of lost limbs (which would be a truly non-Newtonian event!) (11) Jesus has no patience for “supernatural appurtenances” or the praise and honour that accompany them, yet is able to heal his patients instantly – no waiting period is required, no cleansing period is required, no special invocation of biblical memory is required, no special anything is required, except for one thing: faith on the petitioner’s part (plus, it goes without saying, divine intervention on God’s part).

Mark’s claims pose problems for the growing Christian community.  In Mark’s gospel, Jesus is clearly chosen by God to carry out a mission of (1) healing and (2) teaching, but he’s not very sellable.  He’s not very divine.  Further, he is a Jewish Messiah who is in the Torah’s face, who is blatantly cherry-picking which laws of Torah to keep (eg. Exod. 20:12-16; Deut. 6:4-5; Lev. 19:18), and which ones to reject (eg. Exod. 31:12-17; Lev. 13:9-17; 15:25-30).  (This tendency of Mark does not go down well with Matthew, who is intent on showing that Jesus  fulfilled Jewish prophecy and preached the proper understanding of Torah.)  In addition, Mark does not try to link the way Jesus healed people to the way in which Hebrew prophets such as Elisha healed people.  Elisha, by way of contrast to Jesus, never personally meets with his illustrious patient, the Syrian general Namaan, but instead sends messengers to tell Namaan that he can be cleansed of his skin disease if he ritually bathes seven times in the Jordan River (2 Kings 5:1-14).  A short while after this, Elisha punishes his greedy servant by giving him Namaan’s leprosy (as if leprosy is wrapped up in a neat little box that is within Elisha’s power to give!).  Mark’s Jesus, one intuits, would not have taken kindly to a healer who claimed to have the power to purposely afflict a man and all his descendants with leprosy (2 Kings 25-27); nor would Mark’s Jesus have appreciated the way in which Elisha commissions his servant to take the staff of the man of God (a staff presumably imbued with divine healing powers) to try to heal the Shunammite  woman’s dead (or possibly comatose) son.  Elisha’s commission fails, and only when the boy’s mother insists does he physically visit the boy to say prayers, and so bring him back to life.  According to Wendy Cotter, the Shunammite woman is not Jewish (52); however, the passage in 2 Kings shows she has faith in the god of Elisha.

At this point, it’s hard not to think of Mark’s tale of the Syro-Phoenician woman and her gravely ill daughter (Mark 7:24-30), which is the only occasion in Mark when Jesus performs a distance healing, that is, a healing on a person he hasn’t seen or touched.  This is a confusing passage.  We have some of the same elements as in the raising of the Shunammite woman’s son: a Gentile mother requests a healing from a man of God; the healer’s initial response is somewhat dismissive; the mother persists; the healer relents, and the child is healed.  If Mark were trying to draw a connection between Elisha and Jesus, he would have shown Jesus following the mother to her home and healing the girl with prayers.  Yet Mark, it seems, would rather show Jesus doing a distance healing than a prayer healing.  Remarkably, Mark places the power of faith and compassionate presence ahead of the power of prayer when it comes to healing (a point further reinforced by Mark’s reiteration in 6:1-6 of one of his major premises, where he implies that Jesus has no power to heal those in his hometown because most lack faith (cf. Mt 13:58))!  In Mark, prayer is important when it comes to Jesus’ personal relationship with God (eg. 1:35; 6:46;14:32), but Mark doesn’t show Jesus speaking prayers when “healing action” is taking place.  Rather, Mark shows Jesus using authority (commanding demons to come out) (1:23-27; 5:1-20; 9:14-29); giving forgiveness (2:1-12); speaking words that build on or interact with the petitioner’s own faith (1:40-45; 2:1-12; 3:1-6; 5:24-34; 5:35-43; 10:46-52); touching or laying on hands (1:29-31; 6:54-56; 7:31-37; 8:22-26); and using a combination of two or more of these (eg. 5:35-43; 9:14-29).  Interestingly, when the disciples ask Jesus in Chapter 9:28 why they could not cast out the “demon” of the epileptic boy (9:14-29), Jesus says to them, “This kind can come out only through prayer [and fasting].”  But does Jesus mean prayer in the midst of an exorcism (similar to a televangelist’s faith healing), or does he mean prayer of the sort he conducts in private, a practice of spiritual discipline (as we would understand that term) which gradually enhances one’s ability to hear and understand God?  It is not clear from the text.

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Posted in Divine Love, Gospel of Mark, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Matthew's and Luke's intent, Realspiritik, relationship with God and tagged , | Leave a Comment
02 Aug 2011

JR62: Seventh & Final Step: Remove the Thorn in Jesus’ Flesh (That Would Be Paul)

A: We’ve talked a lot on this site and on the Concinnate Christianity blog about the differences between your teachings and Paul’s teachings. Many readers will say there’s not much evidence in the Bible for the differences you and I claim. What would you say to Progressive Christians who want to “have their Jesus and keep their Paul, too,” who want to make you, Jesus, more credible, without actually giving up any of their cherished Pauline doctrines?

J: They make me look like a dweeb, to be honest. An ineffectual, wimpy, turn-the-other-cheek kind of guy.

A: Which you were not.

J: They say they want to save me from the fundamentalist Christian right and the secular humanist left, yet they’re forcing me to sit down at the Tea Party table with Paul, which is the last place I want to be. I’m a middle of the road social democrat, and I believe with all my heart and soul that a society can’t function in a balanced way unless rights and responsibilities are given equal weight in all spheres of life. Paul was a man who taught about rights, rights, rights and not nearly enough about responsibilities. He and I had very different values.

A: Paul talks about punishments.

J: Yes. Paul talks about divine punishment and divine testing. He talks about his freedom — his right — to speak with divine authority. He talks about the need for self-discipline. He talks about divine rewards. But, you know, when you look carefully at what he’s written, he doesn’t speak to the soul of his listeners. He doesn’t challenge them to see each of their neighbours as a separate person worthy of respect. Instead he does the opposite: he encourages them to see themselves as non-distinct members of a vast “body of Christ.” Paul, instead of insisting that people build solid interpersonal boundaries — the foundation of safety and respect and mutuality between individuals — tells people to dissolve those boundaries. It sounds good on paper, but “Oneness” does not work in reality. If you encourage the dissolution of interpersonal boundaries, you’ll see to your horror that the psychopaths in your midst will jump in and seize that “Oneness” for themselves. They won’t hesitate to use it to their advantage.

A: Because they have no conscience.

J: Humans (as well as angels on the Other Side) are all part of One Family. But this isn’t the same as saying humans are all “One.” As anyone who comes from a big family knows, respect for boundaries is the grease that keeps you from killing each other.

A: It can be tricky to manoeuvre all the boundary issues in a big family.

J: Yes. You need all the brain power you can muster to stay on top of the different needs of different family members.

A: Spoken like a man who came from a big family.

J: When you’re the youngest son in a family with three older brothers and two sisters (one older, one younger), you catch on fast to the idea of watching and learning and listening to the family dynamics so you don’t get your butt kicked all the time.

A: It’s real life, that’s for sure.

J: That’s the thing. It’s real life. It’s not about going off into the desert to live as a religious hermit. It’s not about living inside walled compounds or hilltop fortresses. It’s about living with your neighbours and learning to get along with them through communication and compromise and empathy. It’s not fancy, but it works.

A: The Gospel of Mark makes this message very clear.

J: Christians have long assumed that the author of Luke truly believed in my teachings and was trying his best to convey them in a fresh way to a new generation of believers. Luke, of course, had no interest in my teachings, and was instead trying to promote Paul’s package of religio-political doctrines. This is seen most obviously in the so-called Great Omission — the complete absence in Luke of Mark’s most important theological statement. Luke cut and pasted many parts of Mark’s gospel, and thereby changed their meaning. But he didn’t even try to include the dangerous theology found in Mark 6:47 to Mark 8:27a. He ignored it and hoped it would go away.

A: Why? Why did he want it to go away?

J: Mark’s gospel, as we’ve been discussing, was a direct rebuttal of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Paul wrote first (years before Mark), and in the middle of his letter he included 3 linked chapters on freedom and conscience, authority and obedience, sin and salvation, as these themes revolve around food — idol meat and, more importantly, the blood and bread of Christ (1 Cor 8:1-11:1). We can call this set-piece the “Idol Meat Discourse.” In this set-piece, Paul makes a number of claims about God that Mark, following my example, found particularly galling. Mark countered those claims by writing his own 3-chapter set-piece (Mark 6:30-8:26). I’m going to call Mark’s set-piece “the Parable of the Idol Bread.” This was Mark’s head-on attack on Paul’s Eucharist.

A: Mark didn’t support the sacrament of the Last Supper?

J: Mark knew that Paul’s speech about sharing in the blood and body of Christ (1 Cor 10:14-22) was a thinly veiled Essene ritual, the occult Messianic Banquet that had grown out of earlier, more honest offerings of thanks to God. I rejected the notion of the Messianic Banquet, with its invocation of hierarchy and status addiction. Mark rejected it, too.

A: Right before Mark launches into his Parable of the Idol Bread, he includes an allegorical tale about a banquet held by Herod and the subsequent beheading of John the Baptist (which we know didn’t actually happen).

J: Yes. Mark uses a lot of sophisticated allegory in his gospel. (Plus I think the less loving aspect of him wanted to see John’s head end up on a platter, which is where he thought it belonged.) Mark leads up to his set-piece — which, of course, is an anti-Messianic-banquet — by tipping off the reader to an upcoming inversion of religious expectations. He’s telling them not to expect Paul’s easy promises and glib words about “Oneness.” He’s telling them to prepare themselves for an alternate version of Jesus’ teachings about relationship with God.

A: What was that alternate version?

View of the Galilee from Mount Tabor ((c) Free Israel Photos)

View of the Galilee from Mount Tabor. Photo credit Free Israel Photos.

J: It was a radical vision of equality before God, of inclusiveness and non-Chosenness. It was a vision of faith without status addiction. Of faith and courage in numbers. Of freedom from the slavery of the Law. The love of a mother for her children (including our Divine Mother’s love for her children!). A relationship with God founded on trust rather than fear. The healing miracles that take place in the presence of love rather than piety. The ability of people to change and let go of their hard-heartedness (ears and eyes being opened). The Garden of Eden that is all around, wherever you look, if you’re willing to see and hear the truth for yourself. The failure of both the Pharisees and the Herodians to feed the starving spiritual hearts of the people. The personal responsibility that individuals bear for the evil things they choose to do. The importance of not idolizing the words of one man. (There’s no lengthy “Sermon on the Mount” in Mark as in Matthew; in fact, there’s no sermon at all, let alone a set of laws carved on stone tablets!).

A: That’s a lot to pack into three short chapters.

J: This is why I refer to Mark’s set-piece as a parable. As with any properly written parable, the message isn’t immediately obvious. You have to use all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength in order to suss out the meaning.

A: I noticed when I was doing my research papers for a New Testament exegesis course that the setting of Mark’s Parable of the Idol Bread is crucial. Not one but two major teaching events with miraculous endings take place out in the middle of nowhere near the Sea of Galilee. There’s no proximity to important sacred sites such as Jerusalem or Jericho or the Dead Sea or the River Jordan. There’s no Greco-Roman temple or Jerusalem Temple. There’s no holy mountain. There’s no sacred stone. There’s no palace or patron’s villa. But there’s a lot of green grass, with enough room for everybody to recline in groups (as in a Roman banquet) and share the event together.

In the middle section, in Chapter 7, Mark shows you leaving Galilee to carry out more healing miracles, but these healings take place in Gentile areas — everywhere but the sacred site of David’s city. You can tell Mark doesn’t think too much of Jerusalem’s elite.

J: Mark had a scathing sense of humour, much like Jon Stewart’s. When he wrote his gospel, he was thinking of it as a parable and a play at the same time. He wanted the actions of the actors to speak to the intent of the teachings.

A: Actions speak more loudly than words.

J: Yes. He wanted people to picture the actions, the geographical movements, that changed constantly in his story but never went close to Jerusalem in the first act of his two-act play. His Jewish audience would have understood the significance of this.

A: Tell me about the Idol Bread.

J: The meaning of the bread in Mark’s parable makes more sense if you look at the Greek. In Mark’s parable, and again later at the scene of the so-called Last Supper in Mark 14, the bread in question is leavened bread — artos in the Greek — not unleavened bread, which is an entirely different word in Greek (azymos). Mark shows me constantly messing with the bread and breaking all the Jewish laws around shewbread and Shavuot bread and Passover bread. At the teaching events beside the Sea of Galilee, the bread is given to the people rather than being received from the people in ritual sacrifice. It’s torn into big hunks. It’s handed out to everyone regardless of gender or rank or clan or purity. It’s handed out with a blessing on a day that isn’t even a holy day. Nobody washes their hands first. Everyone receives a full portion of humble food. Everyone eats together.

A: If the fish in this parable are a metaphor for courage and strength (see Mark’s Themes of Understanding and Strength) then what does the bread represent?

J: Artos — which is very similar to the Greek pronoun autos, which means “self” and, with certain prepositions, “at the same time; together” — is a metaphor for the equality of all people before God. Everybody needs their daily bread regardless of status or bloodline or rank. It’s about as status-free a symbol as you can get.

A: Something tells me that got lost in the Pauline translation.

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Posted in Church of today, Essenes, First Corinthians, Gospel of Mark, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Mark vs Paul, Matthew's and Luke's intent, Mother God, Paul vs Jesus, relationship with God and tagged , | Leave a Comment
28 Mar 2011

JR28: Paul’s Easy Salvation

A: You’ve said that Paul’s Temple teachings were very different from your own Kingdom teachings — so much so that when your great-nephew “Mark” read what Paul had written in the letter called First Corinthians, he blew a gasket and started work on his own version of your teachings. Why was Mark so upset about Paul’s Temple teachings?

J: Mark knew that one of my basic teachings had been about the Jerusalem Temple and the stranglehold the Temple and its priests exerted on regular Jewish people. It was much the same equation as Martin Luther faced when he decided to go public with his rejection of Papal and Vatican corruption in the early 1500’s. Luther didn’t reject the idea of faith in God — far from it. But he rejected a number of official claims made by the Church. He thought the Church was no longer representing the ideals of true Christian faith. So he protested.

A: This was part of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

J: Yes. But Luther was protesting from within the Church, not from outside it. He was an Augustinian monk and priest, highly educated and highly devout. He held a doctorate in theology. So he wasn’t easily dissuaded from the idea — once he saw it — that the Church wasn’t “practising what it preached.” I had the same problem with the Jerusalem Temple and the priestly hierarchy in my time. Once I saw the problem, I wasn’t easily dissuaded. Much to the chagrin of my aristocratic family.

A: You’ve said your mother was descended from the priestly bloodline. That must have given your family a lot of status, a lot of authority.

J: My family was somewhat on the fringes of the power and authority that priestly families were entitled to. This was partly due to the fact that my mother’s line wasn’t descended from the “first son of the first son.” We were related to the “junior sons,” so to speak — pretty good as far as pedigrees go, but not “the best of the best.” Another factor was our geographical location. I wasn’t born and raised in Jerusalem — one of the hotbeds of Jewish political intrigue. I was born and raised in the city of Philadelphia, on the other side of the River Jordan. It was a Hellenized city, but also quite Jewish in its cultural norms, so I was raised with a strange mix of values and religious teachings. That’s what allowed me, when I reached adulthood, to be more objective about trends in Jewish thought — by that I mean the blend of religious, political, cultural, and social ideas that were intertwined in people’s hearts and minds. I was far enough away from the Temple — physically and geographically — to be sceptical about the grandiose claims being made by the Temple priests.

A: In the Gospel of Mark, it’s quite apparent what the author thinks of the Temple. Mark shows you visiting all sorts of Jewish and Gentile locations to teach and heal, but the one place you don’t visit till the end is Jerusalem. Things start to go badly for you as soon as you get to David’s city. This is a strange claim to make if you’re trying to promote the idea that Jesus is the prophesied Saviour of the Jewish people.

J: Well, my great-nephew did think I was an important teacher, a rabbi who could help the Jewish people become free from oppression, but his understanding of my role was not the traditional Jewish understanding of who — or what — the Messiah would be. Mark was a very spiritual fellow — a free thinking Jewish scholar who made his own observations and his own decisions. He got a little carried away, I think, with the idea that I was an important teacher, but on the whole he embraced my ideas about the Kingdom and did his best to live them.

A: Mark wrote his gospel before the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE.

“Jesus said: Grapes are not harvested from thornbushes, nor are figs gathered from thistles, for they yield no fruit. A good person brings forth good from his treasury; a bad person brings forth evil things from his mind’s corrupt treasury, and he speaks evil things. For out of the excesses of his mind he brings forth evil things” (Gospel of Thomas 45 a-b). The photo shows a marble Mithraic relief, (restored), from Rome 100-200 CE on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. The Mithraic Mysteries, in so far as we know what they entailed, showed uncanny similarities to the teachings of Paul. The teachings of Jesus, meanwhile, explicitly rejected the occult practices and secret rituals of mystery cults. Photo credit JAT 2017.

 J: Yes. And this is an important detail to bear in mind. Paul and Mark both wrote their comments about the Temple before the Temple was physically destroyed. This fact is important to bear in mind, especially when you’re trying to understand what Mark is saying. Mark was seriously — and I mean seriously — pissed off about Paul’s “moveable Temple.” For Mark, as for me, the only way to free the Jewish people to know God and be in full relationship with God was for us to confront the harm and the hypocrisy of the Jewish Temple — a huge, bloated, phenomenally expensive physical structure that had robbed people of their livelihood through high taxes and ongoing dues, payments, sacrifices, and obligatory pilgrimages. Herod the Great spent a fortune — a literal fortune — on his building projects. His children continued his habit of profligate spending on status symbols to impress the rest of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, the widows and orphans and foreigners we were supposed to look after — according to Exodus — were going hungry and selling themselves into slavery because of their poverty. This was unacceptable to me and to many others. I certainly wasn’t alone in being outraged at the unfairness, the hypocrisy, the status addiction, and the corruption.

A: Chapter 13 of Mark has long puzzled Christian scholars. It’s viewed by reputable scholars such as Bart Ehrman as a “little apocalypse” because it seems to prophesy the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. They use this chapter as part of their proof that you yourself claimed to be an apocalyptic prophet. How do you respond to that?

J: Without wishing to be harsh, I’d say these biblical scholars need to refresh their memory on what the earlier Jewish prophetic books and Jewish apocalypses actually said about the role of the Temple in the prophesied End Times. It’s clear that highly revered earlier writers such as First Isaiah and Second Isaiah and Zechariah believed the physical Temple on Mount Zion (i.e. Jerusalem) would be absolutely central to the ideal future restoration of Judah in the End Times. Yet Mark uses imagery from apocalyptic texts like Daniel to turn these predictions on their head. Mark 13 shouldn’t be called the “little apocalypse”: it should be called the “anti-apocalypse” because of the way it intentionally subverts and repudiates the prophecies of Zechariah. Mark may be attacking Paul’s theology throughout his own gospel, but he uses well-known Hebrew prophecies to do it. Mark’s own Jewish audience would have understood these references. They would have understood that Mark was openly attacking traditional Jewish teachings about the future End Times when God would one day return and “fix everything.”

A: Traditional teachings that Paul continued to endorse in his letters (1 Corinthians 15).

J: Yes. Paul enthusiastically taught his followers about the coming End Times — a traditional Jewish teaching in itself — and on top of that he added a wonderful new theological guarantee. He promised people that if they gave themselves over fully to a belief in Christ, then God’s Spirit would be able to live inside of them in the “Temple” (1 Corinthians 3:16-17; 6:19-20). Paul took the sacredness of the Jerusalem Temple and made it “moveable,” an inner sanctuary of purity for the Spirit, just as the Essenes had already done in their Charter (1QS 3 and 1QS 8). He didn’t try to undermine the importance and authority of the Jerusalem Temple. He actually added to it (as the Essenes had done) by elevating it to an inner mystical state that could only be known to true believers who followed Paul’s teachings. This is a simplified version of Paul’s Temple theology, but you get the picture. He’s offering his followers the ultimate in “easy salvation.” “You no longer have to go to the Temple; the Temple will come to you.”

A: And once you have the Temple, you can access all those spiritual goodies that Paul promises (1 Corinthians Chapters 2, 12, and 14).

J: It’s a theology that’s very appealing to people who want all the benefits without doing the hard work.

A: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — your teachings are much harder to stick to than Paul’s are. It’s impossible to follow your recommendations for connection with God without making spiritual commitment a regular part of everyday life. Once a week on Sundays — or twice a year at Christmas and Easter — won’t do it. You ask a lot of regular people.

J: Only because I have faith in you. Only because I have faith.

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Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, Essenes, First Corinthians, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Mark vs Paul, Messiah, Paul's teachings, slavery and tagged | Leave a Comment
02 Feb 2011

JR6: John and the Gospel of Thomas

A: I had a letter from a reader in the U.S. who’s curious about the Gospel of Thomas, so I thought we could switch gears a bit and talk about the manuscript known as the Gospel of Thomas.

J: Okay. Where do you want to start?

A: Well, for readers who aren’t familiar with it, maybe we could start with some background.

J: I happen to know you already have a book on your desk with the relevant facts, so perhaps you’d like to talk about the history of it.

Papyrus fragment from Wikimedia Commons: Gospel of Jesus' Wife (author unknown)

Papyrus fragment: Gospel of Jesus’ Wife (sourced from Wikimedia Commons, author unknown). This fragment is not from the Nag Hammadi collection, but is a good example of an early Christian text written in Coptic on papyrus. This fragment has itself been the source of much recent controversy.

A (referring to textbook): The discovery of the Gospel of Thomas was one of those serendipitous finds, so extraordinary that you’d expect to see it in an Indiana Jones movie. But the history isn’t disputed. Late in 1945, two Egyptian men discovered a large sealed pottery jar hidden beneath a large boulder near the village of Nag Hammadi in southern Egypt. They smashed the jar and found 13 leather-bound volumes inside, which were later sold. These volumes, which date from the mid-4th century CE and contain more than 50 texts, soon attracted the attention of scholars. The collection is called the Nag Hammadi library, and it’s proven to be a goldmine for scholars of early church doctrine. The texts are considered to be Gnostic Christian rather than orthodox Christian, and some scholars have suggested the texts were hidden to protect them from a wave of persecution against Gnostics. The most famous of the books is the collection of Jesus’ sayings — your sayings — called the Gospel of Thomas. There’s disagreement among scholars as to whether the Gospel of Thomas should be considered a Gnostic text. Some believe it should instead be considered a text originating in a different but very early school of Christianity — not quite Gnostic but not orthodox, either. Anyway, it’s unique because it doesn’t follow the narrative format of the four gospels we know from the Bible. Instead, it’s a collection of sayings. Some of those sayings have sparked renewed mystical and creative interest in Jesus’ original teachings. The movie Stigmata is an example of that interest.

J: And don’t forget all those Da Vinci Code type books.

A: Those, too. You don’t want to be learning your history from these books and films, but it’s fun to sit down with a cup of hot tea and an entertaining novel on a cold snowy day.

J: Like today.

A: Yes. That’s quite the storm out there today. A storm front all the way from Texas to Nova Scotia. I hope my boss calls to say we’re closed today. Then maybe I could do a little reading. Catch up on the Gospel of Thomas — which, to be honest, I haven’t looked at in about two years. Last time I read it, I hadn’t figured out the Gospel of Mark. But I think it’s time to revisit the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas and try to figure out how they relate to Mark. All I really know at this point is what you’ve told me in the past about the authorship of the Gospel of Thomas.

J: You mean the fact that the apostle John wrote the Gospel of Thomas.

A: It’s so confusing. Who wrote the Gospel of Mark? Oh, that would be Matthew. But not the Matthew who wrote the Gospel of Matthew, because that author would be Paul’s disciple Barnabas. And don’t forget that Luke and Acts weren’t written by a physician named Luke. And the newly discovered Gospel of Thomas wasn’t written by Thomas, but was actually written by John. It’s enough to give a person a headache.

J: It’s interesting, isn’t it, that John’s name is actually on his other writings — the Gospel of John, the letters of John, and Revelation.

A: Yes. How is it that John’s name got preserved in so many places, and Paul’s name got preserved in so many places, and your name didn’t get preserved on any writings at all? We have texts we call “Pauline,” and we have texts we call “Johannine,” but we don’t have any “Yeshuan” texts. In fact, we don’t even have an adjective in English that corresponds to the name Jesus, so I have to use an adjective based on the Aramaic form of your name, Yeshua. Yet I know you did a lot of writing. So what happened? What happened to your name? And what happened to your writings?

J: Long story. It’s complicated. It makes more sense if you understand the cast of characters, the people I actually lived with and worked with. It makes more sense if you understand the personal motivations for each person involved.

A: Including your own motivation.

J. Yes. Mine, too.

A: Okay. Let’s start with your motivation, then. Can you describe briefly the core of your motivation?

J: To bring healing to disadvantaged children so they didn’t have to go through what my daughter had to go through.

A: Oh.

J: Theologians have been pontificating for centuries about who I was and what I was trying to do. But nobody’s taken the time or trouble to ask me. They all want me to be a reflection of themselves — somebody who’s more interested in how many angels can fit on the head of a pin than somebody who’s interested in the core questions about humanity. Life and love. Healing. But after my daughter died, I couldn’t have cared less about the Covenant or the Law. The Covenant did nothing to help my daughter. In fact, I’d say the Covenant was partly to blame for her death. After you’ve had a child die — a child you care deeply about — your life changes. It’s no great mystery. I embarked on a journey of spiritual questioning and spiritual agony because I felt I owed it to my beloved child. It’s as simple as that.

A: I understand.

J: Yes, because you’ve gone through the same thing. Nobody but a bereaved parent can completely understand. To lose a beloved child is to have your heart ripped out. Except that you don’t lose your heart. If you accept the grief and you accept the loss, you end up finding your heart. It bleeds a lot, but it’s there.

A: Many of the theologians who’ve written about you over the centuries have been neither parents nor bereaved parents.

J: Augustine of Hippo was a bereaved parent. This didn’t help him find his heart, unfortunately.

A: Perhaps he was in denial. It’s not uncommon for bereaved parents to withdraw completely from their emotions because it’s too painful. They retreat into logic and end up focussing on the “mind” and “reason” so they don’t have to feel anything anymore.

J: Exactly. Unfortunately, the orthodox Church is riddled with the immature “victim” psychology that comes with being emotionally crippled, with abandoning healthy, mature relationships with each other and with God.

A: Explain what you mean by “emotionally crippled.”

J: I mean men and women who are emotionally immature, emotionally stunted, emotionally dissociated. Adults who don’t have the courage of their own hearts and souls. It’s hard work to deal with grief. And love. And Pauline Christians aren’t good at it because they haven’t been taught how. Whenever I hear the phrase “one body in Christ,” I think of a zombie — a lifeless corpse walking around with no heart and no capacity for empathy or deep compassion. There’s lots and lots of talk in the Church about free will and reason and blind faith, but if you look closely, you’ll see there’s little talk about emotional maturity or emotional healing or faith based on empathy rather than on pure logic. That’s why the Church doesn’t teach people about forgiveness. Forgiveness is part of a messy package that includes love and grief and pain. Forgiveness is very hard work at an emotional and spiritual and psychological level. It has no appeal for people who are emotionally immature.

A: People like Paul.

J: And people like John the Baptist.

A: Hey — that’s a non sequitur.

J: Not when you know that John the Baptist and John the Evangelist were one and the same person.

A: I take it that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated?

J: There are always wars and rumours of wars. Always deaths and rumours of deaths. Sometimes the one prevents the other.

 

Update on August 9, 2015:  For an interesting commentary on the Gospel of Thomas, please see the article called “The Gospel of Thomas: Jesus Said What?” by Simon Gathercole in the July/August 2015 Biblical Archaeology Review.  In this article, Dr. Gathercole talks about the history of the Gospel of Thomas’s discovery, discusses theories for its date, and reviews some the Gospel’s major theological themes.

On the question of whether the Gospel of Thomas can be understood as a Gnostic work, he says this:

“Nevertheless, it has always been something of an embarrassment for the “Gnostic” view of Thomas that there is no talk of an evil demiurge, a creation that is intrinsically evil, or of other familiar themes such as “aeons” (a technical term for the divine realms in the heavens).  Properly Gnostic gospels such as the Gospel of Judas and the Nag Hammadi Gospel of the Egyptians, have very complicated accounts of how multitudes of deities and aeons come into existence from a demonic power before the birth of the world.  There is nothing of this in Thomas, though.”

 

Update on February 26, 2018: Over the past few months, starting in mid-2017, I’ve been adding verses from the Gospel of Thomas to the photo captions of the Jesus Redux posts. Since I don’t read Coptic, I must rely on translations into English from a number of reputable scholars (though occasionally I piece together my own translation based on information that’s arisen through my mystical conversations with Jesus). Here’s a list of some of the sources I’ve been using throughout this process:

Davies, Stevan. The Gospel of Thomas: Translation and Annotation by Stevan Davies. Boston & London: Shambhala, 2004.

Ehrman, Bart D.. Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It Into the New Testament. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Grondin, Michael W.. “An Interlinear Coptic-English Translation of the Gospel of Thomas.” 1997-2015. http://gospel-thomas.net/x_transl.htm. (I find Grondin’s site incredibly helpful.)

Meyer, Marvin, ed.. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures. 1st Edition. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Pagels, Elaine. Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. New York: Random House, 2003.

Patterson, Stephen J.. The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus. Salem, Oregon: Polebridge Press, 1993.

Skinner, Christopher W.. What Are They Saying About The Gospel of Thomas? Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2012.

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Posted in forgiveness, Gnosticism, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Thomas, historical Jesus, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, Jesus' original writings, John the Baptist, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Matthew's and Luke's intent, My Spiral Path and tagged , | Leave a Comment
23 Jan 2011

JR3: Some Family History of Jesus

“Jesus said: It is not possible for anyone to enter a strong man’s house and take it over forcefully unless he first ties his hands. Then he can steal from that house” (Gospel of Thomas 35). Photo of a side entrance of the Royal Conservatory of Music, Bloor Street, Toronto. Photo credit JAT 2017.

 A: On my Concinnate Christianity blog, I take aim at the Apostle Paul and try to show some of the ways that his teachings were very different from your own. I wonder if we can talk some more about that.

J: There’s a lot there to talk about.

A: One of the things that has surprised me most over the past few years is the shortage of people willing to examine the differences between you and Paul. Even serious biblical scholars — people like the scholars of the Jesus Seminar — have a blind spot around Paul. They seem to want to pretend that Paul was preaching the same core teachings as you. But it’s not that hard to draw up a list of the similarities and differences between First Corinthians and Mark. In fact, it’s one of the easier academic analyses I’ve tried in the past few years. The differences are blatant. I mean, scarily blatant. So I’ve gotta ask — what the heck has been going on? Why are so many Christians, even the ones who label themselves Progressive, so completely unwilling to be objective?

J: Brain chemistry.

A (rolling eyes): Why did I know you were going to say that?

J: It’s the brain chemistry. It’s the way most people have wired their brains — or have allowed their brains to be wired for them. Their biological brains are loaded with software packages about God and religion, and there’s a conflict between the existing software — provided in the beginning by Paul — and the “new” software I and other angels have been trying to reintroduce. Of course, it’s not really “new.” It was old when I was teaching it 2,000 years ago. But the Church tried very hard to eradicate it early on, and to keep eradicating it each time it sprang up again. So to today’s readers it seems “new.”

A: Can you give us an analogy that will make sense to today’s readers?

J: Yes. It’s like the difference between early Macs and PC’s. Groups were fighting over which platform was better. At that point PC’s couldn’t read Mac software. Mac software existed, and Mac software was useful and real, but PC’s couldn’t read it. So a lot of users missed out on good programs. The human brain can end up like that — wired so it can only read one kind of software, though others kinds of software do exist. For many Christians, their brains have become so used to the ideas of Pauline Christianity that they literally can’t “hear” any other ideas about God. Their brains can’t process the information. They’re literally the people who have ears but cannot hear. They’re not able to understand the “new” message at first because their brains aren’t used to hearing that kind of language.

A: What you describe sounds a lot like brainwashing. People conditioned to the point where they can hear only one kind of “truth.”

J: You could put it that way.

A: That’s scary.

J: Yes. But it’s not new. It’s a very old way to control a large group of people. You don’t have to put chains on everybody in your culture to get them to do what you want. A clever tyrant controls the mind — keeps the body free, but controls the mind. Nothing new there.

A: Except that 2,000 years ago your culture had real slavery — the kind where human beings were bought and sold and forced to do all sorts of things against their will.

J: The kind that continues in many parts of the world today.

A: Yes, that too.

J: One reason my great-nephew Matthew — the man you know as the author of the Gospel of Mark — went ballistic when he read what Paul was writing about “Jesus Christ” was Paul’s take on slavery. Paul never comes out and says that slavery is wrong. Instead Paul tries to preserve the status quo by persuading slaves to understand slavery as an illusion — something not worth fighting about because they have something more valuable than freedom: the higher “truth” of salvation.

A: Right. But can we back up the truck for a minute? I’d like to go back to that historical tidbit you just dropped in. The part about your great-nephew Matthew.

J: Matthew was the grandson of my brother Andrew. Andrew was the only one of my siblings who believed in my teachings.

A: And this Matthew who was your great-nephew . . . is this the same man who wrote the Gospel of Matthew?

J: No. The author of the Gospel of Matthew was not named Matthew. Just as the author of the Gospel of Mark was not named Mark.

A: Okay, well at least that part is known to scholars. But this is all very confusing. Is it okay with you if I keep calling the author of the Gospel of Mark, “Mark”? It’s much less confusing to call him Mark.

J: Sounds like a plan.

A: So you’re saying that your great-nephew wrote the Gospel of Mark.

J: Well, one of my great-nephews wrote the Gospel of Mark. I had a lot of great-nieces and great-nephews, but only the children and grandchildren of my brother Andrew carried on my teachings the way I taught them. More or less. The rest of my family didn’t like me very much.

A: You and I have talked about this a lot. But can you talk a bit today about why your family didn’t like you?

J: Basically because I was a shit-disturber. I disagreed with most of the values my family raised me to believe in, and I went on record to say my family and their social class were wrong about the way they were treating other people and God. I grew up in an aristocratic family where we held slaves and where we believed we were chosen by God. I said that was wrong. My family didn’t like it. I was embarrassing them.

A: The way a man from the state of Georgia, for instance, would have embarrassed his wealthy plantation owning family in the 19th century if he’d joined the Abolitionists.

J: Or if a son of the Kennedy clan had disavowed the Kennedy myth and run away to live in Canada in a small town where nobody cared that he was a Kennedy.

A: As Canada is to the U.S., so Galilee was to Judea.

J: As Port Hope is to Washington, so Capernaum was to Jerusalem.

A: So you picked Galilee on purpose because it was not a major centre of religious and political influence.

J: And because the people in Galilee had different priorities. They were interested in real healing, real teaching, and they had no use for arrogant priests or rabbis who had their heads stuck up their asses.

A: You always have such a way with words.

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Posted in First Corinthians, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, Jesus' teachings, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Mark vs Paul, Paul vs Jesus, slavery and tagged , | Leave a Comment
04 Apr 2010

CC7: Radical Jesus in the Gospel of Mark

Today I’d like to talk about the Gospel of Mark.

As I mentioned above in my March 3, 2010 post, I think one of the biggest challenges facing the church in the third millennium is our theology. We believe our theology is an honest representation of what Jesus taught. Because we believe this, we don’t want to challenge our theological doctrines and beliefs. If it was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for us, goes the thinking. And who can blame Christians for wanting to hang onto the teachings that Jesus taught? After all, isn’t that the point?

For me, it’s definitely the point. I discovered to my dismay, however, that what Protestant theology classes teach in Canada in the third millennium is Paul’s theology, not Jesus’ theology.

We’re so used to thinking that Paul was a faithful believer in Jesus that few Christians until recently have examined the gulf that exists between the teachings of Paul and the teachings of Jesus. If you want to read an exploration of the differences between Paul’s Christ Movement and James’ Jesus Movement, I recommend professor Barrie Wilson’s book How Jesus Became Christian (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2008). Wilson bluntly shows that Paul was trying to found a new religious movement that was in competition with the early Jesus Movement of Palestine. Further, Wilson shows how the author of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles wrote these two books to bridge the gulf between the two religious movements, and make them seem like a unified religion. But they’re not. And they never were.

Why do I agree with Wilson? I agree with Wilson because I’ve studied what I believe to be the earliest layer of writings based on the teachings of Jesus, and when I compare what’s contained in this early layer with what’s contained in Paul’s uncontested letters, I see almost no theological similarities.

For the record, I believe the earliest layer of writings based on Jesus’ teachings to be (1) the parts of the letter of James that Jesus himself wrote (I’ll come back to that in a later post); (2) the parables and anecdotes written down by the beloved disciple Lazarus in the earliest version of the”Q” source (again, food for future thought); (3) the sayings written down by the apostle John in his unattributed “proto-Gnostic” Gospel of Thomas; and (4) the Gospel of Mark.

Of these early writings, the Gospel of Mark would have been written last, about 30-35 years after Jesus’ death, by a person we call Mark. We don’t know much about this fellow Mark except that he was brave enough to write a radical theological statement in Judea during the dangerous and tumultuous decade of the 60’s when Jews were fighting Jews, and Jews were also fighting Romans.

This fish plate, with a small cup in the centre (probably for sauce) comes from the Roman Campania and is dated 330-300 BCE. (This plate is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum, photo credit JAT 2017.)

Most New Testament scholars who analyse the different books of early Christianity will tell you they subscribe to the theory of “Markan Priority.” This is the theory that states that Mark was written before either Matthew or Luke, and that the authors of Matthew and Luke both used a “cut and paste” approach to Mark’s narrative by cutting out sections of Mark’s book, rearranging and changing those sections, and adding their own material. If you want to learn more about this fascinating bit of biblical history, I recommend the recent book by Pheme Perkins: Pheme Perkins, Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007). She provides a readable introduction to the main threads of scholarly research that every serious New Testament inquirer needs to know about.

(I didn’t find out about Perkins’s book until the second year of my graduate studies. I really wish I’d had it on Day 1. It would have saved me a lot of initial confusion!)

A lot of scholars and ministers don’t like the Gospel of Mark. (My New Testament professor, for one, doesn’t like Mark.) People think it’s too blunt and choppy. Fans of Luke, whose use of Koine Greek is more sophisticated, complain that Mark isn’t a very good writer. Others dislike the Christology of Mark. In Mark, Jesus is a confusing fellow. The apostles are confusing fellows. Jesus’ family members are confusing. Jesus’ female followers are confusing. The original ending of Mark at 16:8 is confusing. The Gospel of Mark is downright confusing if you’re looking for biblical evidence that conforms to orthodox Western Christian beliefs about Jesus.

Here’s a thought: maybe the Gospel of Mark is confusing because people have been shoehorning it into Paul’s theology, and have forced Mark to say something about Jesus that Mark himself wasn’t saying.

Maybe in the church of the third millennium we should allow Mark to tell us what he’s been saying all along.

Maybe we should be honest about the fact that Mark’s Jesus is a Jewish Messiah — a very human teacher and healer — not a Saviour, as in Paul.

Maybe we should be honest about the fact that Mark’s Jesus is not a monotheistic Jew, who believes only in God the Father, but is instead a quasi-monotheistic Jew who believes in both God the Father (Abba) and God the Mother (Ruah, Spirit, Holy Dove).

Maybe we should be honest about the fact that Mark’s Jesus is not a wandering Cynic philosopher, nor an apocalyptic prophet, nor an illiterate Jewish carpenter. There’s a great deal of proof in Mark to indicate that Jesus came from a wealthy, literate family. Jesus was a physician-scholar.

Maybe we should be honest about the fact that Mark’s narrative shows a sophisticated understanding of psychodynamics. Mark’s cast of characters behave in realistic, believable ways. He doesn’t pretend that Jesus’ students liked or appreciated his teachings. He doesn’t pretend that Jesus’ family liked or appreciated his teachings. Mark tells the painful truth, because the truth was painful.

Mark’s biography of Jesus is short (relative to other biographies of the time, including those written by Matthew and Luke) for two reasons: (1) he assumed his biography would be read in conjunction with the parables and anecdotes contained in “Q,” and (2) he wrote his narrative with the intention of creating a long parable of the kingdom.

(These two points are my own thesis.)

The first point has more evidence to support it, since scholars have been working hard to reconstruct the contents of the early “Q” source, and they’ve already shown the links among Q, Mark, and the later gospels of Matthew and Luke. There is every reason to suppose that Q was circulating in Judea at the time Mark’s gospel was written.

The second point has arisen through my own work as both an academic researcher and a mystic. It’s my contention that Mark understood what many have failed to understand about Jesus’ teaching parables: the long kingdom parables, most of which probably originated in “Q” and were later cut-and-pasted into Matthew and Luke, only make sense when you listen with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, and all your strength to Jesus’ message about God (Mark 12:28-34). If you listen only with your mind, you won’t get it. If you listen only with your mind, and reject the input of your heart and your soul, the parables are almost gibberish. They’re illogical. They’re contrary to accepted wisdom. They don’t seem to be wisdom teachings at all. Therefore, they’re easily dismissed by those who’ve placed their bets on traditional wisdom.

Through the medium of a long parable, a teacher can say a lot of harsh things about other people’s religious beliefs, and not get caught. Jesus’ long kingdom parables hide the truth about God in plain sight.

This isn’t the same approach as the early Gnostics took. The early Gnostics believed in the existence of hidden, esoteric knowledge that could only be revealed to specially chosen initiates. They sometimes took steps in their writings to conceal their esoteric knowledge through the use of symbolism.

Jesus took no such steps. He wasn’t interested in hiding the knowledge, or making a “special club” of apostles to whom he would reveal his special secrets. He was forthright in his teachings about a loving Mother God and Father God who are not transcendent. (In Plato and in Paul, God was transcendent). A Mother Father God who are not unemotional. (In Plato and in Paul, God was detached from emotions like agape and forgiveness). A Mother Father God who are not pure Mind. (In Plato and in Stoicism, the Divine was pure Mind). A Mother Father God who do not choose some humans over other humans. (In most religions in Jesus’ time, Jewish and otherwise, the gods or God chose certain people or groups over other people). A Mother Father God who reject the pursuit of status addiction as the driving force of a loving human community (in dramatic contrast to the honour-shame values of Mediterranean culture in the 1st century CE). A Mother Father God who teach inclusive, egalitarian, relationship-oriented community life as the model for spiritual living.

These teachings are evident throughout Mark. But these teachings, then as now, were not popular with religious folk who wanted their religious accomplishments to raise them above their peers, to give them more status than others had, to take status away from others — to reveal how to climb the ladder of spiritual ascent.

This ladder of spiritual ascent was the darling of Plato and his many Platonic, middle Platonic, and NeoPlatonic followers, including orthodox Christians, who, from the time of Paul onward, have had a profound love affair with the doctrine of spiritual ascent — the belief that we have to climb the spiritual ladder one rung at a time to get closer to the Divine.

You have to remember here that Plato wrote about 400 years before Jesus. Plato’s idea of spiritual ascent was well known and deeply embraced by the Greco-Roman culture in which Mark wrote his breathtakingly radical book. So when Mark wrote a biography about a spiritual leader who rejected ascent, and instead embraced a horizontal path of service, Mark was pushing against the currents of his time.

When you carefully read Mark 9:2-9 — the Transfiguration — you’ll see that not only does Jesus reject the offer of staying on the “holy mount” and living in a tent there, but he comes down from the mountain and immediately makes himself religiously “impure” by touching and healing a boy who has epilepsy — a boy who in first century Palestine would have been seen as either “unclean” or as “marked by the gods” in the eyes of both pious Jews and Gentiles, a boy who would have been rejected and ostracized by people of status.

Mark’s Jesus is a human physician, trained in Torah, who thinks compassion, inclusiveness, courage, healing, forgiveness, agape, and service are the path to knowing God the Mother and God the Father.

Mark’s Jesus is a radical dude.

This topic is so big that one or more books could be written on it. I’ve barely scratched the surface here. But I wanted to introduce the idea that the Protestant church of the third millennium has some options open to it. One of these options is to courageously alter the theology we teach. We can alter our theological doctrines to better reflect what Jesus taught, and still have a biblical foundation for that teaching. We can reappraise Paul, and we can reappraise the earliest layer of writings based on Jesus’ teachings. We can reclaim the kergyma, or early teachings, of Jesus. We can have a church founded on teachings about our communal relationship with God the Mother and God the Father.

We can at last allow ourselves to accept the wondrous gift of God’s love.

Happy Easter Sunday to you!

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Thomas, Letter of James, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Mark vs Paul, Matthew's and Luke's intent, parables, Paul vs Jesus, Plato, spiritual ascent and tagged , | Leave a Comment

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