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11 Sep 2012

RS32: Resurrection of the Son of Man

free_israel_photos_jerusalem_old_city_all_1024

Old City of Jerusalem ((c) Free Israel Photos)

A: Did you know ahead of time — before you went to Jerusalem — that you were going to die? Most Christians believe you were prophesying your own death in Mark 8:31.

J: Well, I did know my time was running out, but I kept that suspicion to myself. So the question about the Son of Man in the Gospel of Mark is a separate question. When Mark talks about the Son of Man being rejected, killed, and resurrected, Mark isn’t talking about me or any other human being. For me, and also for my great-nephew Mark, “Son of Man” meant humanity’s highest potential, humanity’s ability to transcend terrible suffering and turn it into something positive and life-enhancing. Not “life” as in existing and surviving, but “life” as in choosing to do what’s right with courage and conviction and respect for all creatures.

Like Job, a person who refuses to take “no” for an answer in his quest to be in full relationship with God is going to go through some difficult times. To search for love and trust in a world that rejects love and trust is no easy task. There will be no support from “the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes” in this quest. Those in authority will do their best to destroy you and your dogged determination to find the truth about your heart and soul. They certainly won’t reward you for teaching others how to hear God’s voice. But at the end of the day they can’t stop these truths from being constantly reborn in the hearts and minds of those who believe in humanity’s highest potential.

This is the kernel of divine truth that lies at the heart of the resurrection story. The truth about Divine Love can be temporarily crushed — killed by the elders, chief priests, and scribes — but it always returns. It always reignites in the hearts of those who are listening to God through the lens of the heart.

A: But Peter and James and John didn’t like what you were saying.

J: That’s an understatement. Compare what Mark says about choosing between status and “life” (eg. Mark 8:34 – 9:1) to what John says throughout his gospel. For John, it’s all about the status. Status so pure and so elevated it will save you.

A: A lot of Christians have been confused by Mark’s statement that those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life based on your teachings will save it. But it makes perfect sense in the context of choosing between status (“gaining the whole world”) and losing your ability to love and trust (“forfeiting their life/soul”). Seems pretty clear, actually.

J: These passages (plus some others) in Mark have often been interpreted as an endorsement of asceticism. I want to emphasize that I didn’t ever teach or endorse the practice of asceticism. And I didn’t teach the practice of self-dissolution. I taught the practice of denying the cravings of status addiction. I taught the practice of “taking up the cross.”

A: Can you explain that in more detail?

J: The Romans in the first century CE were brutal tyrants, despite all their talk of honour and law and Pax Romana. Their culture was profoundly status-oriented.

A: As many cultures continue to be to this day.

J: Yes. Romans held great store in the rights of citizenship. If you were a Roman citizen, you had special rights and privileges. Citizenship was a sign that you were favoured by the gods. But if you weren’t a citizen — and most Jews in the province of Palestine weren’t — you had no recourse to the laws that applied exclusively to Roman citizens. If the Romans didn’t like you, they could crucify you. Tens of thousands — hundreds of thousands — of people who weren’t citizens ended up on crosses throughout the Roman Empire. Theoretically, however, citizens couldn’t be crucified. So the cross became a symbol of disenfranchisement — of being cut off from the ancient rights and privileges that had accrued to various ancient peoples over the centuries. Second Temple Judaism had built up a strong body of laws. But these laws meant nothing if the Romans took a dislike to you. A lot of disenfranchised Jews ended up on crosses.

A: Yet you were a Roman citizen. And they put you on a cross.

J: Yes. Which is why they had to take me down after only a few hours. But the cross isn’t what put me at death’s door. I was almost dead by the time they tied me up there.

A: Tied? I thought the Romans nailed people in place.

J: It was a bit of a rush job. They would have come back later to properly nail me down if they hadn’t been forced to take me down from the cross after an old friend alerted the authorities to the crime of crucifying a Roman citizen.

A: Why were you almost dead?

J: I’d been in prison for three months. I’d been stabbed in the lower abdomen by John. I’d been poisoned by Peter. But I didn’t have the decency to die in prison. So finally, late in September, James got fed up. He bribed some officials to send me out with a batch of prisoners who were scheduled to die. He didn’t think anyone would recognize me and raise a ruckus. He was wrong.

A: So your own brother was the one who tried to make you die an ignominious death on the cross. That’s just . . . well, there are no words for such a betrayal.

J: My older brother Judas was in on the original plan to capture me and put me in prison. But when the rest of the story unfolded . . . he couldn’t take the guilt. He committed suicide.

A: You say you’d been in prison for three months, and you were tied to the cross in September. That doesn’t add up with the Passover timeline.

J: John created the Passover timeline. It suited his mystical belief that I’d been overlighted by God. He also couldn’t remember, from a factual point of view, when I’d been arrested. His memory for poetry and scripture was excellent, but his memory for historical facts and dates was very poor.

A: So in his mind your arrest did take place in the early spring at Passover.

J: Yes. And, as always, he was persuasive in his charismatic prophecy, so people took him at his word. He said it happened at Passover, so this date was quickly embraced by new followers after my death. From everyone’s point of view, there was a lovely mystical symmetry — even a mystical necessity — in this date.

The truth is that I didn’t go to Jerusalem for Passover in my final year. It was a shocking heresy on my part, but I couldn’t agree to go to the Temple to participate in a festival I believed was morally wrong. I couldn’t agree to participate in a ceremony that celebrated the escape of one group of people through the death of innocent children — children who were murdered by an avenging God. And all the other plagues . . . the whole thing felt wrong to me at a gut level.

A: Starting to see why your family hated you so much. You rejected one of their cherished traditions. One of the traditions that gave them status.

J: I rejected traditions founded in hatred and vengeance. But there were other traditions worth keeping. This is why I went to Jerusalem seven weeks later for the celebration of Shavuot (Weeks) — what Christians later called Pentecost. Shavuot was a whole different kettle of fish. Shavuot was about gratitude — thanking God for the bountiful gifts of food in the first harvest. I had no use for the Passover laws, but I saw how Shavuot could be a time of real healing and redemption for Jews of faith — like an ancient but very Jewish version of Christmas, with people sharing their gifts and their hearts with each other and with God.

My problem was that I said this out loud. I gathered my friends and family and followers together, and presented them with this “new version” of Shavuot — a supper where we would sit together as equals and invite God the Mother and God the Father to share a humble meal of bread and water with us.

A: The Last Supper.

J: And it was, indeed, my last supper as a human being where my body wasn’t filled with pain and fear. I was arrested later that night.

A: Had you decided before you went to Jerusalem that you were going to suggest this “new Shavuot”? Or was it a last minute idea — a sudden flash of inspiration?

J: I knew before I went. I also knew I’d make a lot of new enemies for daring to change old customs in this way. But it was the right thing to do. So I did it.

A: So you knew ahead of time you risked arrest, even death.

J (nodding): I knew.

A: And you didn’t try to stop it.

J: Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t trying to be a martyr. And I didn’t want to be arrested and tortured. I saw no joy or fulfillment in that prospect. On the other hand, I wasn’t going to back down. I wasn’t going to lie to other people about who God is. I wasn’t going to pretend that all Jewish traditions were blessed by God, because, you know, they weren’t. I wasn’t afraid to tell the truth.

The truth about love and trust, about humanity’s ability to love God and trust God, about God’s choice to love humanity and trust humanity, always manages to be reborn. No death can stop it from happening.

The Son of Man always returns in the hearts and smiles and courage of those who love. It’s our inheritance as children of God.

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Posted in Divine Love, Gospel of Mark, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus' family of origin, Jesus' teachings, John the Baptist, Kingdom teachings, Realspiritik, religion and mental Illness, Son of Man, status addiction and tagged ethical mysticism, Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

09 Sep 2012

RS31: Jesus and the Book of Job

A: We’ve been talking a lot about your teachings on life and death, healing and miracles. Tell me why John the Baptist tried to kill you.* It seems a strange thing for a religious prophet to do.

J: John didn’t act on his own. It would be fair to say that my brother James and my former friend Peter used John. As we’ve discussed, John was suffering from major mental illness — schizophrenia combined with narcissism. If you played on his paranoia and his narcissism, you could get him to do your dirty work for you. This is what James and Peter did. They used John to try to get rid of me.

A: You describe Peter as your former friend.

“One of the ideas that sets the poem of Job apart from the Book of Job the Patient and from other ancient Near East poems about righteous sufferers is the book’s detailed pronouncement by the Lord that people who behave badly as Job’s friends need to apologize to both Job and to the Lord and to be retrained by an expert in the field, Job himself (chap 29).” (From commentary on the book of Job by Mayer Gruber in The Jewish Study Bible, TANAKH Translation, ed. Michael Fishbane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 1505.) Photo credit JAT 2015, Lake Minnewanka, Alberta.

J: There’s a reason the Gospel of Mark portrays Peter in such an unflattering light in the final chapters of his book (Mark 14). Mark 14 should be subtitled, “The Truth About Peter That Peter Doesn’t Want You to Know.”

A: Peter comes across as a coward and a liar and a collaborator, a man who sits with the high priest’s guards and warms himself by their fire.

J: Yes. “Warming himself at the fire” is an ancient idiom for “saving himself by selling out to the enemy.”

A: Peter doesn’t seem like the kind of man you or any sane leader would entrust with the job of carrying on your teachings.

J: Peter was a fickle, vain, posturing man — a lot like Wormtongue in Tolkien’s The Two Towers — and he only gained a position of authority in the Kingston movement after I died and he could spread his lies about his “humility” and his “chosenness.”

People wonder why Mark shows me rebuking Peter with a remark about Satan. But it’s not a supernatural claim about Peter. It’s a psychological claim.

A: Mark 8: 31-33 says, “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things'” (NRSV translation).

J (nodding): Mark is telling his audience that Peter, who later claimed to be a faithful and devoted apostle, was, in fact, “the adversary” — like the adversary named Satan who tried to ruin Job’s life with his incessant legalistic wrangling, his incessant lack of faith in the mystery of love, his incessant rejection of God’s right to choose how he (they) will intervene in the world.

Later Christians have read the reference to Satan as a supernatural claim for the Devil. But in the book of Job, Satan isn’t the Devil. He’s the wily Materialist who sits on God’s council of heavenly advisers and insists that the man named Job is devoted to God only because he has many blessings — healthy sons and daughters, great herds of livestock, and many servants. Take away those blessings, says ha-Satan (the Accuser), and Job will curse God instead of loving him. It’s simple Cause and Effect.

“Have you not read this scripture: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’?” (Mark 12: 10-11). Photo credit Image*After.

But this isn’t what happens. Job tries and tries to understand the Law of Cause and Effect and invoke it for his own benefit, but his efforts fail. God — not the man named Job, and not the Materialist philosopher ha-Satan — gets the final say. In the end he chooses to restore Job’s blessings, but only because he chooses to, not because he’s been forced to by clever and lawyerly invocations of Law.

I had a lot of respect for the Book of Job. I didn’t understand it at all when I began my journey of faith. I understood it completely by the time I died. God doesn’t promise anyone an easy or pain-free journey. Faith has no foundation at all if it’s built on the premise that you’ll escape all pain by following the Law. Faith requires humbleness. Faith requires respect for all life in Creation, including behemoths and leviathans and — God forbid! — daughters who are named and given land alongside their brothers upon their father’s death.

Some commentators think God is pummelling Job at the end with reminders about God’s power. They think God requires Job’s submission to this power. But the speeches by God at the end of the Book of Job aren’t about power. They’re about humbleness. Humbleness as God and God’s angels understand it, not as religious leaders have taught it.

A: Humbleness as an intense awareness of who you are and who somebody else is. Knowing your strengths, and being proud to use your strengths in service to others, but also knowing your limits. Knowing who you’re not as much as knowing who you are.

J: Yes. This point is drilled home in Chapter 40 (verses 1 to 8):

And the Lord said to Job:

“Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?

Anyone who argues with God must respond.”

Then Job answered the Lord:

“See, I am of small account; what shall I answer you?

I lay my hand on my mouth.

I have spoken once, and I will not answer;

twice, but will proceed no further.”

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:

“Gird up your loins like a man;

I will question you, and you declare to me.

Will you even put me in the wrong?

Will you condemn me that you may be justified?” [emphasis added]

A: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge,” God says to Job in 38:2. The rejection of “words without knowledge” is very strong in your original teachings. Also the refusal to blame God for the mistakes made by narcissistic human beings.

J: A human being who believes he/she can control the Law of Cause and Effect is not a person of humbleness or faith. Job had to go through a lot of suffering to get this point through his thick head. But eventually he got it. Just as I eventually got it.

A: So I’m thinkin’ Peter never got it.

J: Bottom line, you can’t be in relationship with God if you think you are God, if you think you’re so wonderful and special that the very laws of Creation will bow down to your wishes.

It. Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.

A: Would it be too much of a stretch to say the Book of Job is an anti-narcissism diatribe?

J: No, it’s not too much of a stretch. Job’s four interlocutors — Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, Zophar the Naamathite, and Elihu son of Barachel — are brilliantly drawn “portraits” or “archetypes” for brain patterns that would be described today in psychiatric terms as DSM-IV disorders. Just because ancient writers and teachers didn’t have a DSM-IV doesn’t mean they couldn’t see these patterns of behaviour through careful observation.

A: I see a Ph.D. dissertation for somebody in that remark.

J: The important thing to bear in mind is that a person like Peter, who was narcissistic and convinced of his “right to be right,” will always, of necessity, be a coward. He has to be a coward, because only a coward won’t admit his own mistakes. The refusal to admit one’s own mistakes (especially to oneself) is a hallmark of narcissism.

A: It takes guts to be honest about your own mistakes. That’s one thing I learned the hard way.

J: Me, too, in my time.

A: Yet it’s deeply healing to be honest about one’s own mistakes.

J: It is. This is part of the reason for the great success of the Twelve Step method — you have to let go of your denial and be honest about the harmful choices you’ve made in the past.

A: But if another person tries to confront the denial, they can put themselves in harm’s way. You’ve talked in the past about your brother’s narcissistic rage reaction. I’ve been on the receiving end of similar rage reactions — most recently from one of the owners of the business where I work — and these rage reactions . . . they sure aren’t pretty. They’re violent in a way that’s hard to describe.

J: We talked a few days ago about the way in which a status addict tries to acquire status points by stealing part of another person’s inner self-image (Father of Lights and Mother of Breath — Again). Narcissists are always status addicts, so this “stealing mechanism” is an important part of their psychological profile. Narcissists are always trying to build themselves up by tearing other people down. It gives them a sense of power. Unfortunately, if you dare challenge the myth of their “rightful” power, they’ll go berserk. Literally berserk. Blood lust comes over them. A temporary form of insanity. If swords (or guns) are handy, they’ll use them. If iron swords aren’t handy, they’ll use whatever they can find to try to annihilate you, to rob you of your entire being so you’ll disappear into a cloud of nothingness. They’ll try with all their might to reach into your core self and rip out your heart so they can eat it and claim your power.

A: Yuck. Gross. It’s like that gross heart-eating scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. But, you know, come to think of it, it’s exactly what my boss tried to do to me in January. She did her best to annihilate me. Didn’t work, though, because I forgave her for her brutal attack. I’m still there, and I’m still looking her in the eye.

She hates that. She hates it when I look her in the eye.

J: She knows at a deep narcissistic level that she has no power over you. This frightens her. It undermines the lies she tells herself. Your very presence reminds her she isn’t the nice person she claims to be. So she hates you. She has to hate you and she has to blame everything on you and the co-workers who stood up for you because otherwise she’d have to look at herself in the mirror and admit her own mistakes. She’s not going to do that. Not while she’s arranged her whole world to protect herself from the truth about her own motives. She thinks she’s safer this way, but she’s not. She thinks if she can “get rid of” the people who witnessed her narcissistic rage reaction in January (by forcing them to quit), all will be right with the world, and she can return to her merry little narcissistic belief that she’s the most wonderful boss there could ever be.

Her guardian angels have other ideas. For more details, please refer to the Book of Job, which could also be titled, “You’re Not Going to Want to Hear This, but God Has an Opinion on Your Narcissism.”

* Please see the February 6, 2011 Jesus Redux post John the Baptist and Jesus and the May 15, 2011 post John, Paul, and James: The Lunatic, the Liar, and the Lord.

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Posted in Bible, Cause & Effect, faith, Favourite Posts, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, humbleness, Jesus' family of origin, John the Baptist, Law (Nomos), Mark vs Paul, Materialism, narcissism, occult themes, Realspiritik, religion and mental Illness, Son of Man and tagged ethical mysticism, Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

18 Jun 2011

JR51: Fifth Step: Keep Christmas, Toss Easter

Christmas tree. Photo credit JAT 2012.

A: So far we’ve talked about rescuing the soul, restoring the mystery of divine love, inviting our Mother to the table, and insisting on balance as four ways to help heal the church. What else do you have in that angelic bag of surprises you carry around?

J: The liturgical calendar of the Church must be changed.

A: You mean the calendar of religious events and themes and holy days that tells people what they’re supposed to be celebrating when.

J: Calendars are very important to the healthy functioning of the brain. So the Church still needs a calendar to help focus events for the year. I’m not recommending that the Church do away entirely with the idea of having a yearly cycle of events. Far from it. I’m suggesting that the Church revise the calendar and bring it into alignment with the needs of the soul.

A: What would that mean in practical terms?

J: It would mean you’d get to keep Christmas but you’d have to put Easter in the garbage bin.

A: Get rid of Easter? I can see the steam coming off the heads of conservative Christians already.

J: It would be kinder, in the eyes of many Christians, for me to suggest that Holy Week be “reformed” rather than axed altogether. But Holy Week is a celebration of Pauline Christianity at its worst. The overriding theme of Holy Week is salvation — escape — not healing or redemption. Every year it sends the wrong message to Christians. It sends the message that the focus of their relationship with God should be the Saviour — his death and resurrection and coming again. This was never the message I taught during my ministry as Jesus. Nor is the meaning of my time on the cross being properly taught and represented by the Church. There’s no way that Holy Week can be fixed. It would be the same as asking people to celebrate “the joy” of an S.S. death camp like Auschwitz. (I say this as facetiously as possible.) There is no joy to be found in the traditional teachings of Holy Week.

A: I’ve noticed a tendency among more liberal ministers to treat the “events” of Holy Week in a more symbolic way — to de-emphasize the crucifixion and instead emphasize the themes of renewal and rebirth and regrowth in the spring.

J: It’s very helpful and hopeful to talk about the themes of renewal and rebirth. I have no problem with that per se. I have a problem with a continuing effort among theologians to attach those themes to me. I am one man, one angel, one child of God. I’m not the Fisher King. I’m not Horus. I’m not the dead and rising Sol Invictus. I’m not the resurrected Christ. I’m just a stubborn s.o.b. who won’t shut up. I wasn’t even crucified in the springtime. I was crucified in the fall. The early church’s efforts to place the time of my crucifixion in the spring were largely centred on John’s writings. John had his own reasons for wanting to place the time of my crucifixion at Passover. But John wasn’t a man who cared about historicity or facts. He wrote what he wanted to write about me. It helped him sleep better at night.

A: A minute ago you mentioned joy as if it’s somehow significant or important to the healing of the church.

J: Joy is crucial to the experience of faith.

A: How do you define “joy”?

J: I use the word “joy” to express the gratitude and devotion and trust that all angels feel in their relationship with God the Mother and God the Father. I don’t use it as a synonym for worship or praise. I don’t use it as a synonym for the excitement of being part of a large crowd (which is more like hysteria). For me, joy is a word that conveys the happiness and deep contentment we feel as angels. It’s the feeling you get when you feel really, really grateful and really, really SAFE at the same time. It makes you smile from the inside out.

A: Christians have long believed that the purpose of angels is to offer praise and worship to God. Do angels worship God?

J: Noooooooo. You never see angels down on their knees with their heads bowed in humility. What you see is angels living their purpose of love in everything they do. As angels, we show our never-ending love and appreciation of our parents by choosing thoughts and words and actions that bring more love into Creation. We live in imitation of our parents’ courage. We’re not carbon copies of our divine mother and father — that is, we all have our own unique temperaments and personalities and talents and interests — but we’re all alike in that we all choose love. There are many different minds and many different bodies in Creation, but it can be said in all truthfulness that there’s only One Heart. It’s the feeling of joy that comes from our choice to share One Heart that makes us feel like a big family. We all belong to one family.

A: Where you feel safe, despite your differences in talent and temperament.

J: Yes. This is the underlying intent of divine love. It’s the choice to see another soul as, in fact, another soul — as someone who’s not you, who’s not a mere extension of you. It’s the choice to respect differences between individual souls, while at the same time choosing to help other souls be their best selves.

A: Can you explain what you mean by that last statement?

J: Here’s the thing. No one soul can “do” all things or “be” all things. Every soul has unique strengths. But every soul also has unique absences of strength. Angels are always giving and receiving help within the family. An angel with a particular strength will offer that strength to help brothers and sisters who need assistance with something they’re not very good at themselves. The same angel who offers a strength to another will in turn be very grateful to receive help from another soul in an area where he or she needs some help. There’s no sense of shame or guilt or inadequacy among angels when they have an absence of strength. They accept who they are. They don’t judge themselves or feel sorry for themselves or describe themselves as flawed or imperfect or unworthy. They gratefully and humbly ask for — and receive — help when there’s something they don’t understand or something they want to do but don’t have the skills for. It’s all about education, mentorship, and personal responsibility, even among God’s angels. As above, so below.

A: At the start of this conversation you said that Christians could keep the celebration of Christmas. Why? Why keep Christmas and not Easter?

J: December 25th is a day marked by all angels in Creation. It is the day when Divine Love was born.

A: I thought you said we have to get rid of all the invented myths about your ministry. Isn’t this one of them?

J: I wasn’t born on December 25th. I was born in the month of November. When I refer to the day when Divine Love was born, I’m talking about God the Mother and God the Father. I’m talking about the day when their Divine Love for each other first emerged in Creation. It was the day when everything — absolutely everything — changed. It was the day — the actual day in the far, far distant past (before the time of the “Big Bang”) — when they made the choice to live for each other. It’s the day when the Christ was born — NOT, I’d like to reiterate, the day when I, Jesus, was born, but the day when Mother-and-Father-Together-As-Christ were born. When their new reality was born. When their new relationship was born. None of us would be here today if they hadn’t made that choice.

A: So you’re saying that God the Mother and God the Father have an actual calendar of the kind we would recognize here on Planet Earth, and that the day of December 25th is marked on this calendar? This seems like too much of a coincidence.

J: God isn’t using a human calendar. Humans are using a divine calendar. God the Mother and God the Father are pretty good at math, you could say. It wasn’t difficult for them to set up indications of their calendar system all over the known baryonic universe. Planet Earth runs on the same calendar system that angels use. More or less. There are cycles that can’t be argued with, cycles that are fixed by astronomical and mathematical realities. Solar and lunar and galactic cycles dictate the calendar, not the other way around. Humans didn’t “invent” this calendar. They simply noted its existence.

A: Ah. The Preexistent Calendar. I’d love to see what the theologians will do with this theory!

J: The cycles are real and meaningful to all souls. The Church liturgical calendar needs to honour and respect these cycles. Obviously there can’t be too many “fixed liturgical days” because there has to be room for change in patterns depending on latitude and longitude. The time of regeneration, rebirth, and regrowth changes depending on where you live. The Church has to make allowances for these scientific realities.

A: Any other suggestions?

J: Yes. The Church should get rid of Holy Week entirely, including all the bells and whistles such as Lent. In its place, they should institute at a different time of year a brand new 3-day Festival of Redemption. Like Christmas, it would be a “fixed” celebration, celebrated by all Christians at the same time each year.

A: This is an entirely new idea. What would the purpose be?

J: The Festival of Redemption would be a time for Christians to stop their busy everyday lives and get together for workshops, seminars, and conferences on the theme of helping each other heal. Workshops could be held locally in the homes of individuals. Or they could be held in larger venues, such as university campuses. Not everyone would want to experience this festival in the same way — and this is as it should be because souls have different needs and different learning styles. In fact, there should NOT be one particular fixed geographical location or “pilgrimage” site for this Festival. Having “special sites” would undermine the purpose of the Festival. The idea that only some sites are “sacred” or “specially blessed by God” is a human idea. Every square inch of Creation is sacred and blessed by God as far as the angels are concerned.

A: Something tells me the Biblical idea of specific sites sanctified by God is another idea that’s going to be going into the garbage can along with the Easter eggs.

J: Hey. Don’t throw out the chocolate bunnies. They’re one of the only parts of Easter worth keeping. That and the big family dinners.

A: Amen to that.

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Posted in "4 S's", angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), Christ archetype, Church of today, Divine Love, historical Jesus, Jesus Redux, John the Baptist, Peace Sequence, relationship with God, Soul, worship and tagged Christ Archetype, Divine Heart, historical Jesus | Leave a Comment

15 May 2011

JR39: John, Paul, and James: The Lunatic, the Liar, and the Lord

Religious statues in doorway of church in Quilinen France

“Jesus said: No prophet is accepted in his own village. No physician heals the people who know him well (Gospel of Thomas 31).” Photo credit Hemera Technologies 2001-2003.

A: By now people will have noticed that you and I aren’t apologists for conservative or evangelical Christianity. I was thinking again today about C.S. Lewis’s “Trilemma” argument that claims to prove the divinity of Jesus — the “lunatic, liar, or lord” argument (presented in his book Mere Christianity). For Lewis, and for countless other conservative Christians, you — Jesus — have to be lord. Why?

J: Orthodox Western Christianity can’t survive in its present form if there’s no Saviour. The Saviour myth — Jesus as Saviour, Jesus as Lord — provides the perfect camouflage for all the lunatics and all the liars who have shaped orthodox Christianity over the centuries. This applies to both the Roman Catholic church and to mainstream Protestant denominations. Nobody wants to rattle all the “lunatic, liar, and lord” skeletons in the closet.

A: How many skeletons are there?

J: Too many for me to list here. But I can tell you who the earliest ones were.

A: Okay.

J: The earliest “lunatic” was John — by that I mean John the Baptist, who reinvented himself as John the chosen apostle after my death. John was seriously mentally ill, and I make no apologies for being honest about this fact. The word “lunatic” is too harsh, of course, and I wouldn’t use this word in the context of mental health discussions today. There’s far too much stigma around mental health issues already. But pretending that mental health issues don’t exist and pretending that mental health issues don’t touch all families is naive and cowardly. Mental health issues have always been a reality in human society. They’ve always been a reality in religious organizations. Religious organizations are never been exempt from these realities. Pious theologians hurt regular people when they go through contortions to try to “redeem” apocalyptic texts such as Revelation. The book of Revelation was written by John when he was floridly psychotic. This book hurts people. It scares people. It should come with a warning tag on it, but it doesn’t.

The honest truth is that some mentally ill people end up trying to hurt others, especially if psychosis has set in. Not all mentally ill people by any means. But some mentally ill people. Mental health professionals are trained in risk assessment, and they know that only a small percentage of mentally ill individuals are at risk of harming others. This is a reasonable, responsible, and appropriate approach to mental health. The church should take this approach in reassessing the writings of its own theologians — starting with John. They should look at what John actually said instead of pretending that John was so mystically elevated compared to his peers that regular people couldn’t understand his symbolic, mystical messages. The reason they couldn’t understand him is because he was having hallucinations and delusions.

A: Ever the honest fellow, aren’t you?

J: Lies don’t help anyone.

A: Speaking of lies . . . .

J: Nobody who’s been reading this site or your Concinnate Christianity site will be surprised to learn that the earliest “liar” in the church was Paul himself. I won’t go into detail on the Paul question today. If people are interested, they can check out some of our earlier posts about his motives.*

A: Okay. So what’s with the “lord” thing? How does that tie in with the “lunatics and liars”?

J: Well, this brings me to my older brother, James. James and I had . . . well . . . a very complicated relationship. He didn’t believe I was the Saviour as such — not in the way Paul described me. In fact, James despised Paul, and did everything he could to confront Paul’s teachings. But contrary to what scholars such as Bart Ehrman and Barrie Wilson think, my brother James was not a follower of my teachings. He taught his own version of reformed Judaism that undercut my central teachings. He liked me only slightly more than he liked Paul. Unfortunately, he and Paul had a lot more in common than either one realized.

A: In what way?

J: Quite honestly, both were pompous narcissists.

A: That’s not a very nice thing to say about your brother.

J: Maybe not, but it’s true. James was the eldest child and the eldest son born to an elite family of Jewish aristocrats. His maternal grandfather had at one time been a member of the Sanhedrin — the ruling council in Jerusalem. He wasn’t raised to be compassionate and trusting towards God. He was raised to be pious and fearful of God. He was considerably older than I was. He was — like so many eldest children — conservative, highly responsible, obedient, cautious, and “certain” of his role in life. He believed in law, and in particular in the laws of Moses. He was a devout Sadducean Jew.

A: I thought the Sadducees didn’t believe in resurrection. How did James reconcile himself to the strange events that occurred around your crucifixion and “resurrection”?

J: He didn’t. He tried very hard to downplay the rumours that swirled around my “death” and temporary reappearance. He, along with Peter and John, worked very hard to spread counter-rumours. It was he who came up with the idea of saying my body had been stolen from the tomb by my disciples (Matthew 27:62-66). Of course, my body hadn’t been stolen because I wasn’t even dead. Yet. James had more reason than anyone alive to know that I was a real human being and not a god-in-human-form who’d been resurrected from the dead. James, along with Peter and John, and with the help of my older brother Judas, were the ones who had me arrested in the first place.

A: Why?

J: For the simplest of human reasons — pride. Pride and “family honour” and that most terrible of dysfunctional human behaviours — the narcissistic rage reaction. I pushed all my brother’s buttons, and he had a narcissistic rage reaction. If you’ve ever been standing in the way of such an event, you’ll understand what I mean when I say the rage becomes all-consuming and self-absorbed in a way that’s difficult to describe. It’s like the entire universe shrinks to one spot of pure, blind, selfish hatred, and nothing else matters but revenge. There’s no logic to it. Not from anyone else’s point of view, anyway. But from the narcissist’s point of view the logic is diamond-hard. He (or she) becomes fanatically convinced that he’s right and everybody else is wrong. If he’s a religious man, this is the time when he’ll start saying that God is on his side and God demands revenge. Such a person is capable of the most murderous acts imaginable.

A: Including acts against one’s own family.

J: Especially against one’s own family. The people at greatest risk from an extreme narcissist are the people closest to him (or maybe, as I’d like to emphasize, her). Family members and group associates are the ones most likely to observe the mistakes, hypocrisies, memory failures, and lies made by a narcissist — none of which a narcissist wants to hear about. Those who make the mistake of pointing out a narcissist’s errors in judgment (including errors by proxy) may well find it’s the last mistake they make. Extreme narcissists can and do kill when they feel their “honour” has been “unjustly” attacked. My brother James was such a person.

A: He convinced himself that he was doing the right thing in having you arrested.

J: Absolutely. I was attacking the cultural and religious belief systems that gave him great status. I was attacking his right to be called “lord.” All along I was at greatest risk not from the Romans and not from the Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem (where I spent very little time), but from my own family and friends. They were the ones who had the most to lose if I continued teaching my new brand of Judaism.

A: Where there are no lords.

J: And where “lunatics” are healed and liars are called to account for their lies.

A: Sounds like a place of rainbows to me.

* Please see Materialism, Pauline Thought, and the Kingdom

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Posted in Book of Revelation, Favourite Posts, historical Jesus, James brother of Jesus, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, John the Baptist, narcissism, Paul, religion and mental Illness, resurrection, status addiction, the right to be right and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

03 Mar 2011

JR17: Interpreting Jesus’ Parables: Some Guidelines

A: Tell me about your parables. Why did you switch from short wisdom sayings to narrative parables as a method of teaching?

J: I switched because wisdom sayings are the easiest thing to pervert if you’re a leader. They’re a convenient source of mind control or brainwashing, if you will. A clever leader can always find a wisdom saying or a biblical law to back up his or her desired position. Such leaders know that regular people will feel guilty and ashamed if they believe they’ve broken an important moral law. Regular people back down quickly when they think they’ve broken moral codes, moral imperatives. That’s a good thing, by the way.

A: Explain who you mean by “regular people.”

J: Balanced individuals. Emotionally mature individuals. People who respect both themselves and the needs of the wider community. Compassionate people. People who reject libertarian values.

A: You once wrote some scathing comments about the Ten Commandments to show how even these supposedly unbreakable laws are interpreted differently by those who are in power and those who don’t have any power.

J: As many political revolutionaries over the centuries have pointed out.

A: And more recently, liberation theologians.

J: The problem with these short wisdom sayings is that they can be given any context that’s convenient. Interpreters of wisdom sayings can claim the sayings must be interpreted literally, if that suits their purpose. More commonly, interpreters claim the sayings are symbolic — filled with hidden esoteric meanings that only the most advanced religious initiates can fully understand. Needless to say, this leads to no end of abuse. If wisdom sayings can be moulded like putty to suit any need, then they have no meaning. There’s a reason that most major world religions are centred around only a few small books of sacred teachings plus vast libraries of commentary and interpretation that run into the thousands and millions of pages. Each new generation of theologians wants to prove how clever they are at “reinterpreting” or “revealing” the hidden message of the short sayings. It’s a cottage industry.

This rock sample on display at the Natural History Museum, London, UK is a perfect visual metaphor for the parables written and taught by Jesus. As you begin to study the parables, you’ll likely see them as a whole and durable stepping stone that combines traditional teachings such as moral obedience with new strands of thought such as forgiveness. Eventually, if you persist in your efforts to know God, the older themes of purity, piety, and perfection wash away and leave only the enduring networks of love, healing, and forgiveness in your heart. When Jesus’ parables start to “pop” like this for you, you know you’ve found the pathway of your own soul. Photo credit JAT 2024.

A: I noticed a while back that if you try to read the whole book of Sirach at one time (the apocryphal book of Wisdom of Jesus, Son of Sirach in the Oxford NRSV Bible) your head feels as if it’s going to explode.

J: That particular scroll was quite popular in Judea and Galilee at the time I was teaching.

A: The author of Sirach just goes on and on and on with endless lists of pithy little wisdom sayings. “Don’t do this.” “Don’t do that.” It’s impossible. Impossible to live up to. They ought to call this book “An Instruction Manual on How to Feel Guilty For Daring to Breathe.”

J: Yes. My mother was fond of quoting from it.

A: I can see how it would appeal to parents trying to govern their children with a firm moral hand. There’s something for every occasion.

J: Yes. Every time you got caught doing something wrong, you could count on getting a lecture, a beating, depending on the severity of the crime, and righteous repetitions of Sirach’s easy-to-remember moral laws.

A: They do stick in one’s head, don’t they? Sort of like “earworms” — those catchy but annoying songs we so often can’t get out of our heads.

J: One of my mother’s favourite moral imperatives was the importance of polite speech. The NRSV translates this favourite of hers as “Pleasant speech multiplies friends, and a gracious tongue multiplies courtesies (Sirach 6:5).” All my life I could hear her voice reciting that phrase whenever people around me started to get rude.

A: I think we all have memories of our parents’ favourite quotations. One of my father’s favourite sayings is, “When all else fails, read the instructions.” I think of this every time I get stuck on a task that would have been a lot easier if I’d read the directions before I started.

J: The problem with a book like Sirach — and it wasn’t the only book in my time to drone on and on about righteousness and obedience — is that it provides no guidance whatsoever, no practical advice at all on how to hear the inner wisdom of your own heart and soul. It’s a “top-down” list of laws, not a “bottom-up” search for meaning, life, purpose, and love. A computer could be programmed to follow all these laws, and would follow them successfully where they don’t contradict each other (as they often do.) But that’s not life. That’s not love. And it’s sure not divine wisdom. It’s just . . . obedience. Blind obedience. There’s no need to draw on your deepest reserves of courage and faith and devotion if all you’re doing is blindly following the laws. And there’s no need for forgiveness. There’s no room in there anywhere for insight. Insight — what writers in the past have called divine wisdom — is a complex blending, a complex interaction of positive emotions plus clear, logical thought plus mature, respectful behaviour. It’s holistic understanding. It’s something more than facts, more than knowledge. Insight is deeply intuitive while at the same time deeply objective. Insight is that hard-to-describe “aha!” moment when understanding suddenly “clicks.” Insight helps you feel more grounded, more connected to reality and to life, not less connected. Insight is the opposite of dissociation.

A: So you were trying to teach people how to find insight, not obedience.

J: Yes. And you can’t teach what insight is by reciting long lists of wisdom sayings. Insight involves the emotions of courage, trust, gratitude, and devotion, so if you’re going to give people practical tools for finding their own talent for insight, you have to speak to those emotions within them. You can’t just speak to the logical mind of the student. You have to speak to the whole of the student’s core self. You have to give them the opportunity to practise hearing. Really hearing. Hearing with their whole being, not just with their logical minds. You have to make them sweat a bit as they struggle to hear the meaning inside their own hearts. If they’re reading or listening to a parable using only the logic circuitry of their brains, they won’t understand the message of the parable. The message isn’t hidden. Nor is it intended to be hidden. But it is intended to make students stretch, to work their “heart” muscles as well as their “intellectual” muscles. It’s intended to encourage them to look at a difficult question from more than one angle. It’s intended to encourage honesty. A parable is meant to be painful, it’s intended to hurt. It doesn’t gloss over the painful truth. It highlights the painful truth, and asks the student to struggle with love and forgiveness despite the pain. That’s what a parable is meant to do.

A: It’s interesting that a person who’s dissociated from his or her core emotions will read your parables in very concrete, literal ways. They won’t get the emotional subtext at all.

J: That’s because they’re using their logic circuitry in unbalanced ways. They look at the “facts.” For them, it’s all they can see or hear. They assume that because there are facts and logic in the parables, the parables can be fully understood in purely logical terms. But they can’t. People get very angry, very hostile, when you tell them they’re being superficial in their reading of the parables. If they can’t feel loving emotions themselves, they want to deny that such emotions exist. They don’t want to admit to themselves or to anybody else that they’re mentally, emotionally, and spiritually imbalanced.

A: They don’t want to admit that they can’t love — that they don’t understand what love is.

J: Yes. And they’ll do everything in their power to avoid facing the issue.

A: Is their inability to love related in any way to their souls? Do they have defective souls that somehow missed out on the whole “love” thing when God was creating their souls?

J: No. Definitely not. Each and every soul in all of Creation knows how to love and forgive. Human beings can blame their upbringing and their own choices — combined in many cases with biological dysfunction in the central nervous system — for their inability to love as adults. People who’ve chosen to be dissociated from their loving emotions shouldn’t be proud of this choice.

A: Usually they have some pretty powerful excuses for their refusal to accept and heal their core emotions.

J: Nobody said it would be easy. That’s a point I tried to make again and again — the healing journey isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.

A: This morning I was rummaging through the Gospel of Thomas, and felt drawn to two parables on pages 68 and 69 of Stevan Davies’s book. When I read these two parables — sayings 63 and 64a in the Gospel of Thomas — I hear you talking about the excuses people make to avoid dealing with the pain of their emotions. I hear you talking about the fact that it’s easier for a “successful” person — a person obedient to logic and the law — than for an impoverished person out on the street to make excuses about sitting down at the table with God in a full relationship of love and trust. I hear you talking about the choices people make. The one thing I do not hear is the explanation that Stevan Davies offers for Saying 64a: “The point of the parable,” says Davies, “may be to hold up the host as an example of one who has failed to think things through (page 71).” To my way of thinking, Davies’s interpretation is logical, but way too literal, way too concrete. He doesn’t get this parable at all.

“Jesus said: Once there was a rich man who had lots of money, and he said, ‘I will invest my money so that I can sow, reap, plant, and fill up my silos with crops so that I won`t lack anything.’ So he thought, but that night he died. He who has ears, let him hear (Gospel of Thomas 63).” “Jesus said: A man entertained guests. When dinner was ready he sent a servant to invite his guests. The servant went to the first one and said, ‘My master invites you,’ but he replied, ‘I have to collect money from some merchants, and they are due to arrive this evening. Therefore I have to do business with them, and I must be excused from the dinner.’ The servant went to another said, ‘My master invites you,’ but he said, ‘I have just bought a house, and I have to spend a day there, so I cannot come. I must be excused.’ He went to the next and said, ‘My master invites you.’ This one replied, ‘My friend is about to be married, and I must organize the dinner. I can`t come. I must be excused.’ Again he went and said to another, ‘My master invites you.’ He replied, ‘I have just bought a village, and I have to go collect the rent. I can’t come and must be excused.’ The servant reported back to his master, ‘those whom you invited to the dinner are unable to come.’ The master said, ‘Go to the roads outside and invite anybody you can find to the dinner (Gospel of Thomas 64a, translated by Stevan Davies).”

J: John the Baptist hated my parables. He didn’t understand them, and got very frustrated when some of my students understood something that he — the chosen Messiah — couldn’t grasp.

A: There are no teaching parables in the Gospel of John.

J: He stopped accepting the legitimacy of my parables when he realized I was using them to teach a message that was for all intents and purposes the opposite of his own message. He was also envious and angry because he didn’t understand the emotional meaning interwoven with the logical one.

A: It’s clear enough that in Saying 64a you’re turning the imagery of the Essene Messianic Banquet on its head.

J: That part John understood. He and I were constantly sparring on that issue.

A: No Messianic Banquet for you? No bread and wine? No body and blood? No occult ritual for specially chosen initiates?

J (grinning broadly): Hey. God invites everybody — all people — to the table of divine love, divine trust, divine forgiveness, and so on. If you’re too busy to come . . . well, that’s your problem. Healing and empathy take time. Relationship with God takes time. You want to know what God’s love feels like? You gotta take the time.

A: Obedience and righteousness can’t replace the benefits of good old fashioned time spent with loved ones, time spent with God?

J: Nope.

A: Following all the wisdom sayings in Sirach can’t replace the benefits of time spent in love with God?

J: Nope.

A: Logic alone can’t lead you to God?

J: Nope.

A: So fear of God probably isn’t going to help much either, then?

J: The one thing you’ll never see in my parables is a man who fears God. You’ll see a lot of pain, a lot of grief, but you won’t see fear. In the Kingdom of the Heavens, the methods for dealing with the pain and the grief are forgiveness, honesty, compassion, healing, and equality. This is the feeling of redemption. Redemption is what you feel when you achieve the remarkable insight that forgiveness, not fear, not righteousness, is the only path to being in full relationship with God. Nobody can “give” you this insight from the outside. You have to find it within your own heart, mind, body, and soul. Other people can help you find it, can help you work towards it. However, nobody but you can give you the actual insight. It has to be up to you to accept God’s invitation to come to the table.

A: Where I assume blood and body aren’t on the menu.

J: The table of God’s love is filled with so many wonders, so many joys! Everything that God touches — not just the Eucharistic bread and wine — is filled with divine love. There’s no end to the mystery of redemption, the mystery of love and forgiveness.

A: That sounds suspiciously like a mushy Hallmark card.

J: Angels are incredibly mushy.

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Posted in building your intuition, Davies (Stevan), forgiveness, Gospel of Thomas, historical Jesus, insight, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, John the Baptist, parables, Purity Piety Perfection, redemption, relationship with God and tagged Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

27 Feb 2011

JR16: Riddles in the Gospel of Thomas

A: This morning I was looking through my somewhat dusty copy of The Gospel of Thomas*. In the notes by translator Stevan Davies, I found this statement about the 113 original sayings: “The correct interpretation of the sayings is not the final goal but the means to the goal, the discovery of the Kingdom of Heaven. Thomas’s Gospel is an exercise book, a list of riddles for decoding. The secret lies not in the final answers but in the effort to find the answers (page 2).” How would you respond to that?

“Jesus said: The Kingdom of the Father is like a merchant with goods to sell who found a pearl. The merchant was thoughtful. He sold the merchandise and bought himself the pearl [Gospel of Thomas 76A].” Jesus’ sayings about pearls are difficult for us to understand today because pearls are fairly common and inexpensive. In Jesus’ time, however, pearls were exceedingly rare and couldn’t be faked or counterfeited by clever human beings. Finding a pearl in the Mediterranean was no easy task, either, as most shells brought up through the risky diving process contained no pearls at all. So to randomly find a miraculous pearl was a sign of God’s blessing and truth, a far more valuable gift than the usual man-made goods. From a theological perspective, the merchant decides to set aside his “earthly treasures” and buy into God’s economy, where the benefits are sure and lasting and unrivalled in their beauty. It’s also important to note the merchant makes his choice voluntarily. No one forces him into it. (Shown here is a 17th century pomander made of gold, enamel, and pearls. It’s on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK. Photo credit JAT 2023.)

J: Well, the way these sayings have come down to modern readers certainly makes them seem like a list of riddles for initiates to decode. There’s no doubt that most Christians today are confused by the sayings found in the Gospel of Thomas. Many earnest attempts have been made to interpret the sayings. The problem for today’s commentators is that they — the commentators — lack context. They don’t understand the context in which I spoke the sayings, or the context in which John the Baptist wrote down the sayings. Most Christian commentators are also desperately trying to make the Gospel of Thomas fit comfortably within the traditional orthodox Christian framework. Since the traditional orthodox Western framework is based on the teachings of Paul, rather than on my teachings, it’s a tall order to try to force the Gospel of Thomas into an orthodox understanding of God.

A: Yes. I know what you mean. People seem to want to read the Kingdom of Heaven sayings in a traditional eschatological way. They want the Kingdom to be about a future time, a future place. They want the Kingdom to be the special heaven that’s close to God, the place where God’s specially chosen people will end up on Judgment Day.

J: An idea that’s very old, in fact. And not restricted to orthodox Christianity, either. The Essenes of my day believed deeply in both eschatology and apocalyptic visions of the future End of Days.

A: How widespread were those Essene ideas?

J: The people I was teaching seemed to know a lot about the Essene prophecies for the coming End Times. Of course, that’s not surprising, since John the Baptist was part of our teaching circle.

A: You say that John the Baptist wrote down the sayings found in the Gospel of Thomas. Yet biblical scholars have remarked on the fact that there’s no congruence between the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John. The sayings found in Thomas appear frequently in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. But not in John. If John wrote down the sayings collected in the Gospel of Thomas, why don’t any of those sayings appear in his later writings?

J: As I mentioned a few days ago, John and I had a complicated relationship spread over several years. When I first sought out John, I was the student and he was the teacher.

A: Even though he was only 18 at the time?

J: Lifespans were much shorter then for most people. It wasn’t unusual for young adults to take on great responsibilities. If they waited too long to get on with life, they might be dead. So yes — there were teachers who were quite young. What mattered in John’s case was his education, his mastery of the material. It was clear he was highly trained in Jewish religious texts. Who was going to argue with a guy who had memorized big scrolls like Isaiah and could recite them verse by verse?

A: How old were you when you first met John?

J: I was older. About twenty-three, twenty-four. By that time I’d been married, divorced, had lost my daughter to illness, and had spent about a year at a Hellenistic “medical school.” I was so old in heart and spirit that I felt about 50. I was also half bald by then. Probably from all the family stress I was under.

A: I can see how it would have been appealing to sit under a tree and talk about God with other like-minded people.

J: Yes. I was an emotional wreck. And, like so many other people whose lives have been torn apart by tragedy, I needed answers. That’s why, when I heard about John’s amazing new teachings, I sought him out.

A: What was your initial impression of him?

J: He had this serene, otherworldly quality about him, as if he was above all the turmoil and tragedy of the world around him. When you asked him a question about current life, current realities, he always answered with a religious verse. He was so confident that all the answers could be found in the holy texts.

A: What did he look like?

J: He was a big man. Very tall, very robust in stature. I’d use the word “hearty.” Hearty as in big, friendly, strong, salt of the earth. Not polished. Not sophisticated. Homespun and down to earth. I thought he was wonderfully natural in comparison to the elegant Hellenistic Jews I’d grown up with.

A: Again, I can see the appeal.

J: His voice was a rich baritone. He’d been trained in the arts of speaking and rhetoric, that was for sure. He understood cadence, rhyme, repetition — all the tricks of persuasive speech. He was always throwing in bits and pieces of wisdom — small, apt phrases and wisdom sayings. It made him sound very wise. Until I started to notice he had no original thoughts of his own. He could recite ancient wisdom sayings, but he couldn’t process new ideas, new insights. That was part of the mental illness that was slowly simmering on the back burner of his mind.

A: He kept saying the same things over and over.

J: Yes. Also, he couldn’t seem to learn from his own mistakes. Or from the mistakes of others. That was his narcissism. His narcissism got in the way of his ability to admit he’d made mistakes.

A: Eventually you overtook him in the role of teacher in your group. Is that right?

J: The group started to fracture. He had his own loyal followers, who insisted he was still the leader, the long-prophesied Jewish Messiah. Some of the group began to listen to some of the new things I was saying about God. I was actually saying something new about God. John was not. People split down the lines of “belief in tradition” versus “belief in change.” Those who believed in change payed less and less attention to John. He hated that.

A: Describe his reaction to your teachings and in particular to your healing ministry.

J: When I first started doing some teaching, John didn’t mind. He believed at first that I was mimicking his own wisdom, that I was “copying” him. I was tentative at first. I stuck to fairly traditional teaching methods, such as short wisdom sayings. I created some new sayings — nothing too radical at first — and John liked these. He wrote them down when they appealed to him.

A: Did he claim these sayings as his own?

J: He was having trouble separating his own thoughts and feelings from other people’s thoughts and feelings. There was a blurring of boundaries. When he heard me speaking these things, he believed I was somehow transmitting his own thoughts. Broadcasting them. This is a typical symptom of schizophrenia, although these days people with delusions more often believe the TV or radio or Internet are broadcasting their thoughts.

A: So he identified with those sayings?

J: Yes. If you pay careful attention to the tone of the Thomasine sayings, you’ll see that he picked all the sayings that are vague and somewhat cliched.

A: Like traditional wisdom sayings that were widespread in the Ancient Near East.

J: Yes. He picked the short, pithy phrases that resonated with his early training, his early education. Phrases that sound wonderful at first, but say nothing specific. No names, no dates, no places. Lots of metaphors. More poetry than anything. Feelings without facts. Sort of . . . dissociated. Otherworldly. Detached. Serene. But not very helpful when you have difficult questions you want answers for.

A: There’s a marked lack of context in the sayings from the Gospel of Thomas. They could have been written almost anywhere by anyone. There’s a quality of “timelessness” to the book. And I don’t mean that in a good way. I mean the tone is kind of spacey, kind of “out of it.” Not fully engaged with reality or with life.

J: That’s how John came across. It was a sign of his major mental illness, and shouldn’t be mistaken by others as wisdom. No one who’s suffering from schizophrenia should be placed on a religious pedestal and labelled “wise.” People suffering from schizophrenia need firm, compassionate care, not reinforcement of their delusions.

A: Mental illness was not understood 2,000 years ago.

J: Well, as with all things, that depended on the person. Not all people then believed that psychotic behaviour was a sign of demon possession, just as not all people believed that physical infirmities were a sign of divine judgment from God. Cultural ideas about mental illness usually dictate how a mentally ill person is treated by the majority. But there’s always a minority who understand mental illness to be just that — an illness. You can’t blame everything on cultural ideas. Just because the majority of people in my culture believed in demon possession was no excuse for them to go with the “status quo” on these illnesses. There was plenty of solid science, solid scientific research at the time. In fact, there was more interest in solid scientific research then than there would be in Europe for many years. So I have no sympathy for the attempts made by Christian theologians to excuse the cruel treatment of the mentally ill that appears in the Bible. It wasn’t acceptable then, and it isn’t acceptable now. The author of Mark tries to make that point very clear.

A: You know what’s weird? I remember that when I first looked at the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas — some years before I set out on my path of becoming a mystic — I felt very stupid because I couldn’t make hide nor hair of the wisdom that seemed to be hidden in the sayings. They felt like riddles I couldn’t solve. Just as Stevan Davies says in his notes.

J: And now?

A: Now most of the sayings make perfect sense to me — but only because I fully understand the religious and social and medical context in which they were spoken. You know, there’s actually some pretty good stuff in there if you know what to look for.

J: Thank you.

A: Hey. No worries. You can spend the next umpteen years fleshing out those sayings and explaining in more detail what you meant way-back-when.

J: I look forward to it.

* Stevan Davies, Translator. The Gospel of Thomas. Boston & London: Shambhala, 2004.

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Posted in A.N.E. Wisdom literature, Davies (Stevan), Essenes, Gospel of Thomas, historical Jesus, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, John the Baptist, religion and mental Illness and tagged Gospel of Thomas, Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

17 Feb 2011

JR11: More on John the Baptist

A: You said a few days ago [Feb. 6] that the man you knew as John the Baptist had been raised to believe he was one of the Essene’s two prophesied Messiahs. Tell me more about that.

J: In order to understand the history of John the Baptist, you have to understand the mindset he was raised in. Most normal people — by that I mean psychologically and emotionally well adjusted — can’t relate to the mindset. This is true regardless of what time period you’re looking at. By that I mean there were normal, well-adjusted people 2,000 years ago who were just as bewildered by John as normal people would be today. He was an extreme person — and his extreme nature brought out a lot of different reactions in people. Some people thought he was a hero. Others thought he was a dangerous provocateur The normal people thought he was a dangerous provocateur.

A: Yet you spent several years hanging out with him.

J: I did. I genuinely believed he had important things to teach me about God. He had a masterful grasp on the sacred writings of the Hebrew tradition. His recall was phenomenal. It was rote learning, pummelled into his brain by years and years of study. I didn’t understand for a long while that rote learning isn’t the same thing as insight.

A: You thought he had insight.

J: He was so different from other people I knew. He seemed so focussed, so pure in his devotion to his calling. He never had doubts. He seemed almost . . . almost invincible. His faith seemed as sturdy as a mountain. Unshakeable. Unmoveable. I found it fascinating. I wanted to understand how to get faith like that. Of course, it turned out he had no faith in God at all. He had faith in the teachings of his religious sect, the Essenes. Faith in sacred teachings is not the same thing as faith in God.

A: I learned that one the hard way.

J: As did I. As did I. The Essenes were a breakaway sect — one of several groups that all used the sacred Hebrew texts but in very different ways. There was no single form of Judaism then. And not just Judaism. There were too many different religions at the time to count — some Greek, some Egyptian, some Persian, some mainstream, some cult-like, some offering wisdom, some offering salvation, some offering healing. It was a giant mishmash of religious options. A giant smorgasbord. People think it’s bad today. But it was much worse 2,000 years ago. It was confusing as hell.

A: So a prophet with unshakeable conviction was very appealing.

J: People need certainty. Not in everything, of course, but in their relationship with God, they want clear answers. John seemed to have those clear answers.

A: What was John’s relationship with other religious groups? How did he view other Jews, for instance? I should probably ask something else first, though, just to be sure . . . was John a Jew?

J: Most definitely. He was a circumcised male. As far as he was concerned, the tribes of Israel were the chosen people, and he was one of their chosen leaders. He had no use for Jews who fraternized with the enemy — the enemy being a rather broad category that included almost every non-Essene on the planet.

A: How did John feel about Jewish groups such as the Pharisees? The Pharisees were interested in teaching people how to live according to the laws of the Torah. So was he more sympathetic to the Pharisees?

J: No. As far as John was concerned, the Pharisees were just another bunch of corrupt, impure, impious, unfaithful Jews. Anyone who rejected the Essene’s phenomenally rigid purity laws were inferior in John’s eyes. That’s why the Pharisees are not painted in a positive light in John’s gospel.

A: Nobody’s painted in a positive light in John’s gospel except for the Son of God.

J: And maybe John the Baptist.

A: Yes, he does “show” rather well, doesn’t he?

J: It’s John who makes the definitive identification of the Messiah.

A: So if John believed he himself was the Messiah, why did he write a whole gospel dedicated to making you into the Messiah?

J: Well, you know, that’s the tricky thing. John doesn’t really make me — the fleshly, earthly me — the Messiah. He uses my name. He uses some of my own writings. He uses some of the people and events in my life. But he doesn’t tell the story of me — the man who rejected Essene teachings and the legitimacy of the Temple. He creates a myth. He creates the man he eventually believed me to be. He creates an elaborate dream-myth of mythical overlighting to explain — largely to himself — why he himself wasn’t actually the Messiah. His gospel is his justification, his justification of himself and his actions. He created a tale of a human figure who was so divine — so impossibly elevated beyond the reality of human life and human understanding — that nobody — not even the most righteous Jew — could come close to his perfection. This got John off the hook. Because if nobody could come close to the perfection of the Son of God, then John himself couldn’t come close. Not even with his impressive pedigree.

A: What do you mean by “mythical overlighting”?

J: Ah. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier today — John’s extreme but troubled mindset. As I mentioned before, John suffered from a psychotic illness throughout adulthood. His delusions came and went. Like most people who suffer from schizophrenia, he had periods where he had difficulty separating reality from delusion. Unfortunately, this is part of the illness. John’s psychopathology made him vulnerable to delusional ideas about the nature of God and humanity. He came to believe that I had not really been a human being. Not in the normal sense of the word. He knew I’d had a physical body, but in his delusional state he decided that I’d been “overlighted” by God. “Taken over,” if you will, by the divine presence. “Bumped out” and replaced by pure divine consciousness. Sort of like being “possessed,” only instead of being possessed by a demon, it’s possession by the One God.

A: Oh. That idea is still quite popular with fantasy and horror writers.

J: And many New Age gurus.

A: Yeah, that too.

J: This is partly why John’s gospel was popular with later Gnostic Christians. Gnostic Christians had an elaborate, dualistic world cosmology where good and evil were doing battle, and sparks of the divine fell to Earth to be trapped in evil human bodies. John’s portrayal of an overlighted Messiah fit right in with that.

A: And of course there was the Docetic heresy, where people read John and decided that Jesus never had a physical body at all and was just pure divine light all along — a vision of divinity that could only be seen by certain followers.

“Jesus said: When you give rise to that which is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not give rise to it, what you do not have will kill you” (Gospel of Thomas 70). The experience of redemption comes from within when you accept your own potential to love and forgive and your own potential to be loved and forgiven. Redemption leads to so many internal emotional and spiritual changes that you feel as if you’ve been “saved.” But redemption isn’t the same thing as theological salvation. Theological salvation is something only God or the Universe can effect to remove the threat of future punishment, damnation, or karmic rebirth. When you focus on the negativity of the “salvation model” instead of the positivity of Jesus’ “redemption model,” the constant lack of love can alter the wiring of your brain to such an extent that you begin to suffer from neurological and psychiatric dysfunction (e.g. major depression, addiction disorders, dementia). Photo credit JAT 2015.

J: This is the problem with taking books that have been written by mentally ill people and labelling them “divine revelation” or “the inspiration of God.” John’s gospel isn’t balanced and isn’t truthful. It says all the wrong things about God. It’s caused no end of problems.

A: It sets the bar impossibly high for all human beings. How are we supposed to follow the example of a guy who’s the Son of God, and the living bread, and the gate, and the good shepherd, and the vine, and the light of the world, and the resurrection and the life. I mean, that’s a tall order.

J: Not if you’re God the Mother and God the Father.

A: Yeah. But John’s not talking about God. He’s talking about a man named Jesus. That’s a whole different kettle of fish.

J: It keeps people from trying too hard. If you raise the bar too high, people won’t even bother trying. That’s what John wanted, though. He wanted to raise the bar so he himself wouldn’t have to jump it.

A: That’s so selfish!

J: John was a selfish man. He and his brother James were raised to believe they were the chosen Messiahs. It was their whole life, their whole mission. They weren’t going to give it up. When circumstances forced them to give it up, they didn’t go down without a fight. John was still fighting for his birthright till the day he died. And the one thing he was determined to do was prevent anyone from following the teachings of “Jesus of Nazareth” as opposed to his divine “Jesus, Son of God.” If he couldn’t have the crown of glory, he was going to make certain I couldn’t have it, either.

A: You didn’t want it, though.

J: No. I didn’t. But John never accepted that. He was certain I was “out to get him” — that I was trying to take the crown of glory for myself. John was paranoid. And John was angry. And eventually he saw me as his enemy. It ended badly. Very, very badly.

A: What did he do to you that he would have to drag thousands — millions — of other people into his own self-serving fantasy of divine rescue?

J: He helped turn me over to the authorities. And then he stabbed me. Right in the lower gut. He thought he’d killed me, but he hadn’t.

A: Ah. That might make a person feel guilty enough to try to explain away his actions.

J: It wasn’t a very saintly thing to do.

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Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, dissociation, Essenes, Gnosticism, historical Jesus, Jesus Redux, Jesus' teachings, John the Baptist, Messiah, mysticism, occult themes, religion and mental Illness and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

09 Feb 2011

JR8: Mystical Bloodlines, Mystical Castes

J: I’d like to start out today’s discussion by emphasizing a very important point. I want to emphasize that it’s wrong to make sweeping generalizations about any particular religion or religious tradition. Just as it’s wrong to “hate” somebody on their basis of their religion, it’s just as wrong to “love” somebody on the basis of their religion. Religious beliefs form a framework for people, a place to start on the journey of faith. But in the end, the only thing that matters as far as God is concerned is what choices you make as an individual. No religion has all the answers. No religion is even asking all the right questions. So when I come out swinging against a revered figure from the past such as John the Baptist, I’m not trying to attack huge groups of people. I have specific complaints about the choices made 2,000 years ago by John the Baptist while he was incarnated as a human being. I also have specific complaints about specific choices made by a number of individuals who were close to John at the time. However . . . and this is a big however . . . the choices made by John the Baptist 2,000 years ago have nothing to do with the choices open to individual people today. There is no “loss of honour” for readers today because of choices that were made by somebody else centuries ago. No real “loss of honour,” anyway. If individuals today believe I’m undermining their own personal sense of honour by exposing the reality — the harsh and painful truth — about ancient religious teachings, then they’ve got bigger problems than they realize.

A: Yes, but a lot of people still believe very deeply in ancient ideas such as the mystical power of bloodline. For these individuals, there’s such a thing as honour in the blood. Honour carried from generation to generation through the bloodline. Power carried from generation to generation. Divine rights carried from generation to generation. It’s one of the underpinnings of their modern day lives. So they’ll take enormous offense at what you’re saying. Gargantuan offense.

J: I’m sorry to have to say this, but a conviction in the innate mystical power of bloodlines is a fantasy superstition that belongs only in novels and films. God does not favour any one clan or family group over another. It should be clear to everyone by now what happens in the wider world when particular clans, tribes, or nations give themselves the label of “Chosen by God.” Nothing good comes of it. Nothing.

A: Yet it’s a myth-dream that’s found in most cultures and most places in the world. Not to mention most major world religions. Why is this myth-dream so universal?

J: It goes again to the issue we’ve been discussing — major mental illness.

A: Ooooh. I can hear the gasps already.

J: Well, I won’t apologize for saying what needs to be said. Individuals will have to deal with it. It’s the reality. It’s time the blunt reality was brought into the open. Other forms of violence and abuse have been brought forward, brought into the open in recent decades. It’s painful and awkward at first, but it’s only when people openly discuss their suffering that change begins.

A: As you’ve said many times to me, healing follows insight. Healing follows self-honesty and public transparency.

J: Abusers will keep their secrets for as long as they can. They won’t volunteer to tell people their dark secrets. Even when they’re caught, they typically deny they did anything wrong. Other people have to step forward, point the light of truth at the abusers, collect evidence of their wrongdoing, and demonstrate their guilt through a public, transparent, non-corrupt legal system. It’s the only way to change a society’s perception of what’s moral and what’s immoral.

A: Can you give some examples?

J: Sure. Not so long ago, it was considered acceptable by many North Americans to treat women as inferior “possessions” of men. It was considered acceptable to turn a blind eye to incest and child sexual abuse and child pornography. It was considered acceptable to dump vast quantities of highly toxic pollutants into the water, air, and earth.

A: These things are still going on.

J: Yes. But these choices are no longer considered acceptable by the majority of North Americans. There’s been a cultural shift. The harmful actions of the abusers — the narcissists and psychopaths — are no longer being condoned by wider public opinion. There are legal and social implications for the abusers now. The legal and social implications didn’t use to exist. They only exist today because a lot of decent people got on board with the idea that these particular choices — the choice to abuse women, the choice to abuse children, the choice to abuse the environment — are wrong. Immoral. Not acceptable in a compassionate community.

A: It’s a work in progress.

J: Yes. It’s astounding and beautiful and amazing because it shows the truth. It shows that if you boldly and honestly expose the reality of abuse, a lot of people will recognize the wrongness of the abusers’ choices. They’ll feel it deep in their bones.

A: Deep in their souls.

J: The soul is consciousness with a conscience. The soul knows the difference between right and wrong, between moral choices and immoral choices. The soul is not stupid. Everybody has a soul, and everybody comes “prewired,” so to speak, with a “right and wrong” package in their DNA. It’s why mentally mature, emotionally mature people instinctively recoil from certain actions, certain choices. They just feel in their gut that it’s wrong.

A: Except for the people with psychopathy. The psychopaths have lost access to the “right and wrong” package. They know it exists, because they can see it operating in the world around them, but they don’t care. They don’t recoil from horror and abuse the way other people do. Brain scans confirm that certain parts of their brains are underactive, other parts are overactive.

J: As I said, it’s a major mental illness.

A: One that isn’t in the DSM-IV, the bible of psychiatry.

J: Psychopathy is a touchy, touchy topic. It should come as no surprise that a lot of “successful” people in politics, business, religion, and entertainment have little regard for the nuances of “right and wrong.”

A: That’s a polite way of saying that many successful people are psychopaths.

“Jesus said: There was a rich man who had a great deal of money. He said, ‘I shall invest my money so that I may sow, reap, plant, and fill my storehouses with produce, that I may lack nothing.’ These were the things he was thinking in his head, but that very night he died. Whoever has ears should hear” (Gospel of Thomas 63). Even psychopaths have a personal code of morality — a set of internal laws to live by — despite their lack of conscience. Competitiveness, dominance, perfectionism, obsessiveness, chosenness, and eradication of weakness are among the key markers of moral success for a psychopath. Needless to say, a psychopath has no use for traits such as love, tolerance, forgiveness, ambiguity, or individuation, despite what he or she may say out loud. Shown here is the entrance to the Chapel of John the Baptist, Westminster Abbey, England. Notice all the sharp, spiky, metal forks on the door — all the better to stab your heart as you try to open the door to relationship with God. Photo credit JAT 2023.

J: Again, no surprise. But these people have tremendous power, tremendous resources. It’s risky to piss off a psychopath. They think nothing of getting revenge. In fact, revenge is a favourite pastime. Even worse, psychopaths lose their ability to feel empathy for others, but at the same time, they show an eerily heightened grip on logic and a creepy ability to spot other people’s vulnerabilities. It’s scary how manipulative they can be in a purely cold, hard, logical way.

A: Almost as if they’re compensating for the loss of empathy and emotion by putting extra biological resources into their logic circuitry.

J: That’s exactly what psychopathy is. They’re trying to find a way to cope with life. They’re trying to find a workable system. They have no capacity for love, forgiveness, or trust. They’re so empty inside that they’re always looking for ways to fill the void. It’s a literal void, not just a metaphorical void. They can’t access certain functions of their brains. They can’t access the emotional circuitry they were born with. So they actually do feel empty, as if something’s constantly missing. They’re so narcissistic, however, that they believe everybody else on the planet feels as empty as they do. They think other people are faking it when they talk about love, redemption, forgiveness, and trust. In the world of the psychopath, love — mature, respectful love — is pure fantasy. It can’t be real. A psychopath feels nothing but contempt for the ideals of love, redemption, forgiveness, and trust.

A: A contempt that’s notably present in the orthodox doctrines of the Western Christian church.

J: True. But Christianity isn’t the only faith tradition that’s riddled with contempt for these compassionate ideals. I was dealing with the same contempt 2,000 years ago in Palestine. Lots of people were. Women, children, slaves, foreigners — all these people had to deal with the fallout of a religious tradition that had steadily erased all the empathy from the earlier spiritual traditions —

A: Like the Covenant Code in Exodus.

J: Like the all too brief Covenant Code. Bit by bit they replaced the Covenant Code’s early focus on human dignity with mystical authority for a few select men and their families. What scholars today call Second Temple Judaism bears so little resemblance to the Rabbinic Judaism practised today that I hesitate to even call the ancient religion “Judaism.” It was a bizarre caste system, really. It placed incalculable power in the hands of the High Priests and the Levites, who happily abused the “lesser tribes” of Israel — the lower Jewish castes. Meanwhile, the priests derived all their power, authority, and wealth from the “sacred books” they themselves wrote. A bit of a conflict of interest, don’t you think?

A: Yeah. I notice that after a while they decreed there could be no more prophecy. No more troublesome prophets standing up on soapboxes and speaking the truth.

J: The priests were always willing to endorse new prophetic voices off the record as long as those new voices reinforced the idea among the general population that Jews were the chosen people and Jerusalem’s priests were “the best of the best.”

A: Hence they could tolerate the Essenes, who required obedience to the caste system, but they couldn’t tolerate you, because you rejected the caste system in its entirety. And said so publicly.

J: The idea that Jews had allowed themselves to become enslaved to the priests may have entered my teachings more than once.

A: Yeah, I’ll bet.

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Posted in conscience & morality, empathy, Essenes, faith, HDM Myths, healing, intent, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, John the Baptist, occult themes, psychopathy, religion and mental Illness, slavery, Soul, status addiction and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

06 Feb 2011

JR7: John the Baptist and Jesus

Theologians and biblical researchers have tended to overlook the significance of this passage from Mark 3: 13 – 19, in which Jesus names the twelve apostles: “. . .James son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder)”. The Gospel writer Mark isn’t telling his audience that James and John were powerful preachers (as Christian writers would like to believe); Mark is telling his audience that James and John were claiming for themselves a powerful pedigree. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the charter for the Yahad is a reference to two prophesied Messiahs — a priestly Messiah and a Messiah of Israel (a royal commander for the armies) — who will serve together in the Last Days at the Messianic Banquet. Once it’s clear that the Yahad was waiting for a pair of Messiahs rather than a single Messiah, the reference in Mark to the Sons of Thunder takes on much greater significance. Mark is saying that James and John were claiming divine heritage, just like the long parade of gentile heroes who insisted they were the sons of Zeus, Jupiter, and other Thunder Gods. (And I don’t think Mark thought much of this particular claim.) Shown here is the mosaic above the entrance to the Chapel of St. John and the Grotto of the Revelation on the island of Patmos. Photo credit JAT 2001.

A: Tell me more about John. Why do you say that John the Baptist and John the Evangelist are one and the same person? Is there any proof for that in the Bible?

J: You have to know what to look for. Mark’s account of John’s beheading is much more than it seems. But Mark is like that throughout his gospel. You really have to know your sources — important early texts — to understand Mark. Mark was highly intelligent and very well read. He riffed off well known symbolism and motifs to tell his tale of intrigue. And intrigue it was.

A: The Gospel of John mentions John the Baptist’s early ministry several times, but then he sort of fades out of the picture. The Fourth Gospel doesn’t say what happened to the Baptist.

J: That’s because John the Baptist was still alive and still teaching long after I died.

A: Tell me about him as a person.

J: How much time do you have?

A: The Gospel of John is considered by many Christians to be the clearest expression, the clearest depiction, of the ministry and divinity of Jesus. Theologians love John’s “high Christology.” Many people feel that when they’re listening to the voice of John, they’re listening to divine truth. The prologue — John 1:1-18 — is poetic, elegant, mystical. It helps people feel they’re getting closer to God.

J: John was a gifted communicator, a skilled rhetorician and poet. If he hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have been drawn into his movement in the beginning. He was truly charismatic when he spoke. His writings definitely reflect that. Even his last writing — the book of Revelation. Even when he was profoundly psychotic, as he was in the later years of his life, the poetry and metre of the texts he’d read again and again in his childhood infused all his thinking. In a way you could say that the poetry and metre of those early texts — the logos — acted for him to lessen the pain, fear, and confusion that comes with psychosis. The logos was a soothing mantra. Olanzapine in word form, you might say.

A: Olanzapine being a highly effective atypical anti-psychotic medication.

J: Yes. Before the advent in recent years of tailored psychiatric medications, those who were suffering from major mental illness — including the flattened affect and hallucinations that accompany schizophrenia and related forms of psychotic illness — suffered more than most people can imagine. The suffering is internal but intense. Sometimes it feels to them as if their head is on fire. Or that ants are crawling everywhere inside them. It’s a horrible feeling. They have to find relief wherever they can. The majority turn to addictive substances — substances that trigger the dopamine circuitry in the brain, the pleasure circuitry. Others turn to religion. It’s sad to say, but extreme religiosity — rigid piety, fideism, blind faith, obsessive observance of ritual — all these careful, minutely observed rituals can bring relief to a suffering individual, depending on what parts of their brain have been ravaged by the effects of the disease process.

A: When I was working in the mental health field, I saw firsthand that one of the hallmarks of psychotic illness is paranoia. A fear that people are out to “get them.” When they’re floridly psychotic they’re often afraid of their own family members and medical caregivers. They’re sure they’re being watched, spied on. They’re afraid somebody will put poison in their medications. They think they’re perfectly sane and everybody else is sick. They have no objective understanding that they’re ill when they’re ill.

J: It’s the tragedy of the disease. They don’t believe they’re sick. If they get proper treatment, and become medically stabilized, they begin to develop insight. They begin to understand that the voices they’d been hearing in their heads weren’t normal, weren’t real. They can begin to trust their family members again. However, it’s not possible to persuade a floridly psychotic person to trust you. You can’t use logic to get through to them. As those working in the field of psychiatry know, sometimes you just have to lock the person up for a while and treat him against his will. Of course, by the time he’s that psychotic, he doesn’t really have free will — not as you and I would understand it. He has lots of thoughts, but they’re not balanced, they’re not integrated. There’s no functioning internal framework to hold his thoughts together, to help him process his thoughts and experiences, and learn from them. It’s a big jumble in his head — very frightening, very confusing.

A: So if he can find an external framework that makes sense to him . . .

J: Right. If he can find an external framework such as a strict religious code, then he can lean on that code. He no longer has to make sense of anything on his own. He’s off the hook, so to speak. The code tells him what to do and when to do it. This means he doesn’t have to decide these things for himself. For a person with schizophrenia (not really one disease, but a related cluster of illnesses) this is a huge relief. Life becomes liveable. Painful but liveable. The tradeoff is the fear. You can’t get rid of the fear. You’re constantly afraid of attack from “evil forces” such as the devil or demons or vampires or aliens. But at least you can blame the “evil forces” for your fear. You don’t have to blame your family. So from that point of view, the strict religious code makes it easier for you to stay with your family and receive the care you need.

A: Can you explain how all this relates to the man named John?

J: The man I knew as John — though his real name wasn’t John — would be diagnosed today under the category of schizophrenia. I first met him when he was about 18, and he already showed signs then of the illness.

A: As I understand it, that’s a common age for a diagnosis of schizophrenia to be made. The signs and symptoms often show up in late adolesence, early adulthood.

J: Yes, except I didn’t have a DSM-IV to refer to, and I didn’t recognize his illness at first for what it was. I thought he was an inspired prophet.

A: What was his background? Where did he come from?

J: He was an Essene. He was born Essene and raised Essene. He wasn’t a raw recruit, as some were — including myself for a short time.

A: You were an Essene?

J: I never officially joined the yahad or “Unity,” as they described themselves. In fact, I never made it past the “inquiry phase,” as you might call it. I was curious about the yahad. Many Jews were. Like many spiritual inquirers, I thought the Essenes might have the answers I was looking for. So when I heard about the new prophet named John, I went to check him out. It took me a long time to understand that John didn’t have the answers. He spoke endlessly and eloquently, but had no answers for me or anyone else. He was far too delusional to help anyone, including himself.

A: You said his real name wasn’t John. What was his real name?

J: I never knew. Not during my lifetime as Jesus. Readers today may have a hard time understanding what I’m about to say, but when I was growing up, “name magic” was a big deal. If you believed in the mystical “truth” of name magic, you didn’t lightly give out your real name.

A: Why not?

J: Your real name was said to be a source of great power. If an evil sorcerer or magician got hold of your name, he could gain power over you.

A: Interesting. That idea is still floating around. I remember reading Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea novels when I was growing up. The power of true names was central to her stories.

J: Kabbalah also embraces this idea.

A: Not a big fan of Kabbalah myself.

J: Kabbalah owes a lot to the ancient ideas of the Essenes.

A: What goes around comes around.

J: There aren’t a lot of new mystical ideas under the sun. The human brain, when diseased and dysfunctional, tends to produce certain distinctive patterns of thought, mood, and behaviour — what physicans call signs and symptoms. When patients start believing — truly believing — in occult magic, psychiatrists get worried. It’s okay to believe in things you can’t see if those things have a scientific origin — because one day the science will catch up with the theory — but there’s a line.

A: For instance, it’s okay to believe in love, even though we can’t see it. Though neuroscientists are now trying to capture it on brain scans.

J: Right. But mature love makes the world a better place, a more compassionate place, a more logical place. Occult magic doesn’t do any of these things. Belief in occult magic makes people less mature, less balanced, more grandiose, more controlling, and therefore less able to bring healing and compassion into the world around them.

A: Belief in occult magic ties in with the signs and symptoms of major mental illness.

J: Including psychopathy and severe narcissism.

A: Only a profoundly narcissistic person would believe that God gives special magical powers to small groups of bullies and tyrants who abuse others in the name of God.

J: There you go — your description of John in a nutshell. Raised to believe he was one of the Essene’s two prophesied Messiahs, hence profoundly narcissistic and dysfunctional by the time he was 18.

A: I guess he didn’t like you very much, then.

J: The Essenes were taught to hate the Sons of Darkness and raise up the Sons of Light. As far as he was concerned, I proved myself beyond dispute to be an apostate to the yahad cause and a Son of Darkness worthy of death. By the time I was arrested, John hated my guts.

A: So much for the theory that John himself was the Beloved Disciple.

J: Yeah, but I forgave him anyway, even after he tried to kill me.

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Posted in Book of Revelation, dissociation, Essenes, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Jesus Redux, John the Baptist, Messiah, occult themes, religion and mental Illness and tagged historical Jesus, religion + mental illness | 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 historical Jesus, Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

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