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13 Jun 2012

RS17: Excavating James: The James Ossuary and the Talpiot Tomb

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The James Ossuary. Photo by Paradiso (English Wikipedia, via Wikipedia Commons). The James ossuary was on display at the Royal Ontario Museum from Nov. 15, 2002 to Jan. 5, 2003.

In honour of today’s press release today from the Biblical Archaeology Review, with its hot-off-the-press link to Hershel Shanks’ article about the James Ossuary — “‘Brother of Jesus’ Inscription is Authentic!” (note: the Biblical Archaeology Society subsequently removed this article from its website) — I’m posting a term paper I wrote for an Historical Jesus course as a graduate student in theological studies.

I call the essay “Excavating James.” I’ve posted it here as I wrote it in December 2007, several years before an Israeli court found antiquities collector Oded Golan and antiquities dealer Robert Deutsch not guilty of forgery charges after a five year trial.* In my view, the defendants in this forgery trial ably demonstrated how scientific research can be used with dignity, appropriateness, and courage to push back against the vested interests of entrenched dogmatic beliefs.

I should also note that my Masters degree in Art Conservation (Artifact stream) offered me insights into the chemistry raised in this paper.

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EXCAVATING JAMES:
BREAKING THROUGH OLD ASSUMPTIONS

by Jennifer Thomas
December 14, 2007

In October 2002, an unprovenanced chalk ossuary with probable origins in first century Jerusalem made international headlines when a press conference highlighted the possible significance of the box’s Aramaic inscription: “Ya’aquov bar Yosef akhui diYeshua,” translated as “Jacob, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” (Shanks and Witherington 22). The ossuary, commonly known as the James Ossuary, ignited a firestorm of controversy which has not yet subsided. The scholarly debate over the inscription’s authenticity has been complicated by several factors, including its acquisition by Tel Aviv collector Oded Golan; the puzzling evidence of its having been cleaned more than once (Krumbein, “Findings: Ossuary” par. 2); its history of repair by Royal Ontario Museum conservators after it sustained damage during shipping (Shanks and Witherington 36-40); its focus in the forgery charges brought by Israeli police against Golan; its examination by Israeli police and by independent geomicrobiologist Wolfgang Krumbein, hired by Golan’s defence attorney; and its recent inclusion by filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici and paleobiologist Charles Pellegrino among the Talpiot Tomb ossuaries in their 2007 book, The Jesus Family Tomb. Some of the data presented by Jacobovici and Pellegrino is intriguing and worthy of more study. If further research can confirm the tentative scientifically established link between the James Ossuary and the Talpiot Tomb, then biblical scholars may be forced to reexamine some of their assumptions about the historical Jesus. In particular, the frequently ignored Epistle of James, when read against the background of the Talpiot Tomb and its ossuaries, in the manner of Crossan and Reed, may prove to have greater value as an exegetical tool for understanding Jesus than has previously been envisioned.

When John Crossan and Jonathan Reed revised their book Excavating Jesus to place the James Ossuary in the number one spot of their top ten archaeological discoveries related to Jesus, they probably never imagined that less than five years later a Toronto filmmaker would start knocking on doors in a Jerusalem suburb and asking residents if they had a tomb in their basement. The tomb in question was the Tomb of Ten Ossuaries, found accidentally in East Talpiot in 1980 while contractors were levelling ground for new construction. The Department of Antiquities (later called the Israel Antiquities Authority, or IAA) was contacted, and IAA archaeologists were dispatched to perform salvage archeology. The team physically entered the tomb, mapped the antechamber and the lower chamber with its six niches or kokhim, noted that almost a metre of terra rossa covered the floor of the lower chamber, and removed all the contents, including the red soil. The tomb’s ossuaries – at least, the nine that were later fully catalogued of the ten that were documented on-site – were taken to an IAA warehouse. The tomb itself was generally believed to have been filled with concrete in 1980 during construction of a condominium complex. Certainly this is Crossan and Reed’s stated belief (19). As we shall, however, rumours of the tomb’s demise were greatly exaggerated.

Amos Kloner, of the original IAA team, did not publish the group’s findings until 1996. Apparently, few scholars knew before then that six of the nine Talpiot ossuaries in the IAA’s possession were inscribed with names familiar to readers of the Gospels (an unusually high inscription rate, when compared to other ossuaries catalogued by the IAA (Shanks and Witherington 12)). In 1996, a BBC film crew came across the cluster of inscribed ossuaries, and created a brief media stir with their story (Jacobovici and Pellegrino 23). It is important, however, to separate media sensation from the fact of the tomb’s authenticity. Crossan and Reed quote from a 1996 article in which Joe Zias, then curator of the IAA, said, “[the list of names from the ossuaries] came from a very good, undisturbed, archaeological context. It was found by archaeologists, read by them, interpreted by them . . . a very, very good text” (19). The descriptions of the ten Talpiot Tomb ossuaries (nine in the possession of the IAA and one missing) are shown in Table 1.

Summary of Talpiot Tomb ossuary inscriptions (c) JAT 2007:

What are we to do with this list of family names that includes a Mary, a Jude (son of Jesus), a Matthew, a Jesus (son of Joseph), a Joseph, and a second Mary? Researchers tells us that Mary was a common name for daughters in the Second Temple period (Pfann 8). Shanks and Witherington, citing Rachel Hachlili, report that from the 1st century BCE to the 1st century CE, Joseph was second in popularity only to Simon, Judah was third, Jesus was sixth, Matthew was eighth, and Jacob/James was thirteenth among 18 Jewish male names that appear frequently in the archaeological record (56). In themselves, the inscriptions on the Talpiot ossuaries are not remarkable if they are viewed independently of each other. But they are not independent. They are a group, and must be examined as a group. They were found together. They were found in a South Jerusalem family tomb that, because of its size, location, and quality of workmanship, could only have been built by someone of means.

Pellegrino says in his book that Jacobovici took the list of six names to Andrey Feuerverger, a University of Toronto statistician (111-114). Feuerverger calculated a conservative “P factor” (probability factor) “of 600 to one in favor of the tomb belonging to the family of Jesus of Nazareth” (114). Another way to put this is to say “one in 600 families (on the conservative side) would have that particular combination of names purely by chance, based on the distribution of individual names in the population” (Mims, “Special Report” 1, quoting TABLE 1: SUMMARY OF INSCRIPTION DATA FROM TEN OSSUARIES FOUND IN TALPIOT TOMB).

In an interview with Christopher Mims published by Scientific American in March 2007, Feuerverger says, “I did permit the number one in 600 to be used in the film. I’m prepared to stand behind that but on the understanding that these numbers were calculated based on the assumptions that I was asked to use . . . I’m not a biblical scholar” (“Q&A” 2). One of the assumptions is that the family could afford an ossuarial burial.

The P factor would rise if it could be established, as Jacobovici and Pellegrino assert, that the James Ossuary is the missing tenth ossuary from the Talpiot Tomb. This may not be as far-fetched as it seems. Pellegrino worked with Bob Genna, director of the Suffolk County Crime Lab in New York, to investigate the possibility of using “patina fingerprinting” to scientifically establish provenance. Pellegrino says this:

My idea about patina fingerprinting rests on the fact that each soil type and rock matrix possesses its own private spectrum of magnesium, titanium, and other trace elements.

In theory, the patina inside a tomb or on the surfaces of its artifacts should develop its own chemically distinct signature, depending on a constellation of variable conditions, including the minerals and bacterial populations present at any specific location and the quantities of water moving through that specific “constellation.”

If such a chemical “fingerprint” existed, scanning patina samples on a quantum level with an electron microprobe would reveal a chemical spectrum that could be matched to a specific tomb and to any objects that come from it. (176)

His proposal is gutsy but by no means ludicrous or impossible from the perspective of analytical chemistry and related fields. At the least, it deserves further consideration. Publication in a peer-reviewed journal would assist others in assessing its feasibility. At the moment, though, we have Pellegrino’s anecdotal findings, some of which are published in the form of four spectra in the colour plate section of the book. He and Genna took patina samples from the following sources: the Jesus, Mariamne, and Matthew ossuaries from the Talpiot tomb, the tomb itself, the James ossuary, and a number of provenanced ossuaries from tombs known to have similar conditions to the Talpiot tomb. His proposed method relied entirely on the availability of patina samples from the walls of the Tomb of Ten Ossuaries. Had the tomb been filled with concrete, as some had been led to believe, it would have been impossible to retrieve an uncontaminated sample. Fortunately – and for this we must thank renegade explorer Jacobovici and his associates, who wouldn’t take no for an answer – the tomb was “rediscovered” in 2005. It lay beneath a concrete and steel slab on a terrace between two condominium buildings. A tenant who had lived in one of the buildings since the beginning told Jacobovici’s team that archaeologists had left the tomb open, but tenants had built the slab on top to keep children out (150). In addition, religious authorities had turned the tomb into a genizah, or burial chamber for damaged holy texts, before it was sealed (153). The tomb was now carpeted with fragments of holy books. There was concern that the presence of the decomposing texts might have significantly altered the chemical composition of the tomb’s patina over the previous 25 years; however, this was not borne out by the microprobe studies (180).

When Pellegrino and Genna used an electron microscope to examine a patina sample from the James ossuary, provided by the Israel Geological Study, they saw “hundreds of tiny fiber fragments” on the sample (184). They concluded that “someone in modern times had given the James ossuary a hard scrubbing with a piece of cloth . . . .(184)” They directed the electron microprobe to the fibres themselves, and got large chlorine and phosphorus peaks. “This was consistent with the phosphate-spiked detergents that were in common use during the 1970s and early 1980s” (184). Someone had apparently cleaned the James ossuary with a cloth soaked in a chlorine- and phosphate- based detergent.

Probes of the James ossuary patina clearly revealed the same detergent contaminants. When these modern contaminants were factored out, the remaining spectrum was identical to those obtained from the Talpiot tomb walls and from the Jesus, Mariamne, and Matthew ossuaries (185). Further, five probes taken of a James patina sample provided by the Royal Ontario Museum were also identical, “right down to contamination by cloth fibers and phosphate-based detergent” (185).

Meanwhile, the electron microprobe studies of samples taken from unrelated Israeli ossuaries yielded spectra that were significantly different from each other and from the Talpiot cluster, even when patina samples were visually indistinguishable from the Talpiot patina under light microscopy. Pellegrino says, “In conclusion, it seemed that, compared to other patina samples from ossuaries found in the Jerusalem environment, the Talpiot tomb ossuaries exhibited a patina fingerprint or profile that matched the James ossuary and no other” (188).

If we were to rely solely on Pellegrino’s admittedly novel technique to “rehabilitate” the James ossuary’s historical significance, we would not have much. However, because the box and samples from the box have been studied so many times since 2002 by specialists from different disciplines, including epigraphers, geochemists, archaeologists, art conservators, and even a geomicrobiologist, we have considerable scientific data at our disposal.

In June 2003, the IAA issued a public statement declaring the inscription on the James ossuary a modern-day forgery. Two of the 14 Israeli scholars who were invited to prepare an authenticity report were Avner Ayalon of the Geological Survey of Israel and Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Archaeology (Fitzmyer 3). These two, together with Miryam Bar-Matthews, also of the Geological Survey, examined the James ossuary, and published their findings in the Journal of Archaeological Science (Ayalon et al). They, too, chose a method never before used to assess the authenticity of archaeological artifacts. They took patina samples from various parts of the inscription, from other surface areas of the James ossuary, and from the surface patina and letters patina of unrelated Jerusalem ossuaries; ground the samples; used a mass spectrometer to analyse the oxygen isotopic composition (δ18O values) of each sample; then compared the results to well-dated secondary calcite (speleotherms) deposited in Jerusalem area caves during the last 3,000 years. Since only one James letter sample (of seven) fell within the same range as the other types of samples, Ayalon et al concluded the patina of the inscription could not have been formed “in the natural conditions that prevailed in the Judean Mountains during the last 3000 years, [indicating] that the patina covering the letters was artificially prepared, most probably with hot water, and deposited onto the underlying letters” (1188).

There are several problems with this paper, two of which are noted here. First, although Ayalon et al acknowledge that the inscription had been observed in a previous study to be freshly cleaned, they do not discuss how the residue of earlier cleaning might affect δ18O values. This is a significant lapse. Second, they apparently base the suitability of their δ18O method on the assumption that the patina on the rest of the James ossuary was pure calcite formed in a typical Judean cave environment, that is, in an enclosed or semi-enclosed atmosphere absent of soil. Krumbein’s report, however, conclusively demonstrates that the patina is not pure calcite, and that the presence of apatite, whewellite, weddelite, and quartz in the patina, along with biopitting and plant traces, suggests that “the cave in which the James ossuary was placed, either collapsed centuries earlier, or alluvial deposits penetrated the chamber together with water and buried the ossuary, either completely or partially . . .[rendering] δ18O isotopic tests irrelevant” (under “Findings: Ossuary”; italics added).

When Krumbein examined the ossuary, along with two other disputed artifacts, in Jerusalem in 2005, the Talpiot tomb, with its verified accumulation of terra rossa, had not yet entered the picture as the possible original resting place for the unprovenanced James ossuary. Nonetheless, his thorough examination and reported findings are fully in agreement with the documented conditions in which ten ossuaries were originally found in 1980.

It is by no means certain, based on the scientific evidence, that the inscription on the James ossuary is a modern forgery (for a current example of the ongoing debate, see the BAR 33.6 article). The box itself, however, seems genuine (Ayalon et al 1185). Are there other explanations for the “Jacob, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” inscription? Of course. It is possible the inscription is a well-meaning ancient addition to a plain box. It is also possible the latter part of the inscription (“brother of Jesus”) was added recently to an authentic “James, son of Joseph” inscription, as some have argued (for example, Chadwick as cited by Shanks and Witherington 42). The inscription might even be an ancient forgery. On the other hand, the entire inscription could be authentic. The question for historical Jesus researchers is this: If the ossuary and its inscription are authentic, what does it say about Jesus? Can we stretch the question further to ask what it might mean if the James ossuary is the missing tenth Talpiot bone box? Crossan and Reed have said, with regard to the James ossuary, that “like [the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Codices], the ossuary is now here and its presence demands discussion. . . . It is one single artifact that brings together archaeology and exegesis. It is also one single artifact that emphasizes how such objects are of value only when embedded among all those other discoveries that give it full context and final meaning” (28). I would argue that the Talpiot tomb findings create important archeological, scientific, and exegetical context, and that the James ossuary should be examined further in light of that context.

We can say with some measure of confidence that in the period during which ossuarial burial was practised in Jerusalem (usually given as 20 BCE to 70 CE (Shanks and Witherington 69)) a family who counted among their members a Mary, a Jude, a Matthew, a Jesus, a Joseph, another Mary, and possibly a James, had enough wealth and prestige to build a spacious tomb in the bedrock of a hill just south of the old city. Different languages were used on the ossuary inscriptions: Hebrew and Aramaic, but also Greek, with one name (Maria) a Latin version of its Aramaic counterpart. From this evidence, it could be argued the family was familiar with and possibly part of the wider Greco-Roman culture of 1st century Palestine. The family also had a penchant for widely popular names, and possibly followed a custom of naming children after close relatives.

We know from exegetical evidence that Jesus of Nazareth had a brother named Jacob or James. The Gospels of Matthew and Mark both name Jesus as the son of Mary and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon (Mt 13:55; Mk 6:3), though Jesus’ two sisters are not named in these passages. Matthew and Mark also refer to a Mary who is mother of James and Joseph (Mt 27:56; Mk 15:40). Although it is not clear which Mary is being referred to in these latter verses, she could be Mary the mother of Jesus, in which case James and Joseph would again be named brothers of Jesus. So we have two independent Synoptic sources, Matthew and Mark, that specifically name James. The Gospel of Thomas, which is considered an independent source by some (Crossan and Reed 9), refers to James the Just in Saying 12. Further, James appears a number of times in Acts and the writings of Paul. Paul lists James among those who have seen the risen Christ (1 Cor 15:7), and when Paul is writing his letter to Galatians, he describes James as one of the “pillars” of the Jerusalem church (Gal 2:9). The much-overlooked Epistle of James purports to be written by “James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ” (Jas 1:1). We also have extra-canonical sources that name James, two of which report on his death in Jerusalem a few years before the destruction of the city in 70 CE (Gillman 621). Josephus reports that James was stoned in 62 CE on the orders of high priest Ananus (Ant 20:200). Hegesippus, writing ca. 180 and quoted by Eusebius in the 4th century, gives a dramatic account of James’s martyrdom in 67 CE (?) at the hands of the scribes and Pharisees. Also from Hegesippus through Eusebius, we learn that “James became the first bishop of Jerusalem in part because he was the brother of Jesus” (Shanks and Witherington 96).

One begins to wonder why a man from the small peasant town of Nazareth in rural Galilee, where families “had an interest in keeping the head count low” (Hanson and Oakman 58) and the total population was probably less than 400 people (Reed 131), had such a large number of presumably adult siblings when childhood death rates were so high, and why one sibling – James – had such a position of honour and authority in Jerusalem. Archaeological excavations in Nazareth have brought to light no public structures and no public inscriptions from the Early Roman Period, which attests to “the level of illiteracy and lack of elite sponsors” there (Reed 131). Juxtaposed against this archaeological evidence, we have not one but two men from the same generation of the same family who rose, in the midst of an honour-shame culture, from the humblest of origins to positions of great moral authority. Both men knew Jerusalem and died there. Both had friends there. Both surely possessed impressive oratorical skills, otherwise they would have been ignored. Surely these two men started out with more than the knowledge of how to press Nazareth’s grapes into wine (see evidence for a vineyard and wine pressing vat: Reed 132). Something does not fit with a popular understanding of the historical Jesus as an illiterate Galilean peasant carpenter wisdom sage (for example Crossan and Reed; Mack). We might understand Jesus by himself in this way. But by all accounts, Jesus had a family. We must try to place Jesus more solidly within his large family, and within a culture that lived and breathed for status.

In 2 Corinthians, Paul engages in a lengthy appeal for monetary contributions to the Jerusalem church (“the collection”) (2 Cor 8:1 – 9:15). In the course of his letter, he says, “For you know the generous act [or the grace] of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). In the Greek, Paul uses ἐπτώχευσεν πλούσιος, “the well-to-do man became poor.” This verse is usually interpreted as being metaphorical, more akin to the christological construction in Philippians 2:6-8 (footnotes in Coogan NT 302). But maybe Paul isn’t being metaphorical at all. Maybe he means exactly what he says: that Jesus intentionally gave up his wealth to do God’s work. Paul, by his own admission, visited Jerusalem and saw James the Lord’s brother (Gal 1:18-19). If Paul had not known anything about Jesus’ family before this visit, he certainly did afterwards. Did Paul learn that Jesus had come from a privileged family with strong ties to Jerusalem? How would such knowledge have affected Paul’s understanding of his own divinely appointed mission, the mission he describes in Galatians 1:15-17? Would it have been to Paul’s advantage or disadvantage that the man who spoke so clearly to the non-elite about the spiritual woes of being rich (eg. Lk 6:24) might himself have originated in a family of wealth and status?

A modern analogy might be of help in understanding the historical Jesus not as a man who came from the bottom up, but as man who had the courage to intentionally step off the upper part of the pyramid, and live as a person among persons. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that one of the many descendants of American oligarch Joseph Kennedy suddenly had a profound religious experience, and saw for the first time how much suffering had been caused by his family’s commitment to certain values. What if this descendent renounced his family’s elitist way of life, moved to Canada, got a regular job, and used his spare time to study scripture? His family probably wouldn’t like him very much. They might even lie to their friends about where he had gone, rather than face the embarrassment of being “disowned” by him on spiritual grounds. Of course, such lies would become harder to maintain if he became known in his own right as a brilliant spiritual teacher up there in the boonies, a teacher of social and gender equality and . . . what’s that? . . . miraculous healings from God? For this we gave him an education? The shame, the shame.

Eventually, of course, word would get up to Canada that the guy working over there on that construction site is a Kennedy – one of those Kennedys. And suddenly the people who had ignored him the day before would invite him over to dinner to talk about his favourite subject, God. Even the local bishop might not be immune to the cachet of this gentleman’s esteemed lineage. Doors have a way of opening for those who come from “the right sort of people.”

Two thousand years ago, Jesus went through a lot of different doors. Many of those doors were owned by priests, Pharisees, scribes, and other elites who wouldn’t have been caught dead talking to a Galilean peasant on the street, let alone seek him out for questioning in public places (Mt 22:15-46; Mk 11:27-33; Lk 20:1-8) or invite him to dinner (Lk 14:1-24). However, it is quite believable that they would talk to a man who had “ascribed honour” on the basis of his descent (Hanson and Oakman 26-31), even if they didn’t agree with his theology. Much has been made of the evidence that Jesus ate with “sinners” and “tax collectors” and other outcasts. But it is just important that Jesus was known to dine with the elite. One could say that, in his ministry, Jesus swung both ways. This may be what made Jesus unique and loved by so many.

Whatever else can be said of Jesus, no one can dispute his commitment to God. He was a man of deep faith. He strove to communicate to the people around him the depth of God’s love for them. To this end, it was probably important to Jesus that he have the chance to speak in person to as many people as possible. He was not one to retire to life in an ascetic religious community like the one at Qumran. He was walking and talking (and dining) right up until his arrest. So, from a purely practical point of view, it would have been shrewd of Jesus to avoid talking about his family lineage, whatever its exact nature. The last time a devout Jewish family claiming priestly legitimacy had gathered political support from the Jewish rank and file, a rebellion had erupted that swept the Seleucid rulers from the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel. The Maccabean revolt, which proved the power of priestly Jewish bloodlines, would not have been forgotten by Palestine’s new Roman rulers. Here was a clear case of discretion being the better part of valour.

Many who would argue with the thesis presented here might wonder why an educated man from a privileged family would not have written down some of his own teachings. Surely such a man would be literate! Where are the letters of Jesus? Why did he not put something down on papyrus, and hand it to a trusted friend or family member?

Well, maybe he did. Maybe his words have been staring at us all along, hidden in plain sight in the canon as part of the Epistle of James.

The Epistle of James has to be one of the least examined sources in the New Testament. Open up the back of books written by historical Jesus researchers and examine the “Ancient Sources Index.” Under James, you will frequently find nothing. Nothing at all – this despite the fact that some of the most sophisticated theology of the New Testament is found in James, and despite the fact that it has obvious links to the Q source (Hartin; Johnson; Wachob). Some might lay the blame at the foot of Luther, who famously decried James as “an epistle of straw” (Laws 622). It seems generally to be avoided in research because its Greek is deemed too elegant for the family of a Galilean artisan (but what of a highly ranked family?); there are only two brief references to Jesus (would Jesus himself brag?); and its discussion of faith and works does not refer specifically to “works of the law” (Law 622) (is that the real message of this epistle?). On the basis of these arguments, some declare it pseudonymous. In terms of date, it has been placed in the second generation, or even in the 2nd century. However, there is much evidence to support an earlier, first generation date for the epistle of James.

Luke Timothy Johnson has done considerable research in this regard. In his book Brother of Jesus, Friend of God, he says:

With the exception of the evidence in Paul, Acts, and Josephus, the letter is the historically most certain evidence we have concerning James. Even if it is supposed that a composition by James of Jerusalem was later redacted by someone else, the present letter is almost certainly appropriated by early-second-century Christian writings [1 Clement and Shepherd of Hermas]. In fact, there are strong reasons for arguing that the extant letter was composed by James of Jerusalem, whom Paul designates as “brother of the Lord.” What is more, the evidence provided by the letter fits comfortably within that provided by our other earliest and best sources (Paul, Acts, Josephus), whereas it fits only awkwardly if at all within the framework of the later and legendary sources that are used for most reconstructions [here Johnson refers to Witherington in Brother of Jesus]. (2-3)

If Johnson is correct in his conclusions, then the Epistle of James, or parts of that epistle, could well be another independent source for understanding the historical Jesus (though Johnson himself would no doubt be chagrined at seeing his work used to support a theory he does not subscribe to (Kirby 10)).

The letter of James, far from being an epistle of straw, concerns itself with teaching the difference between earthly wisdom that does not come from above versus the wisdom that does come from above, and is “first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy” (3:17). This is an extraordinary vision of God, one that is in stark contrast to the God who clearly plays favourites in various Old Testament and apocryphal texts. Another breathtaking vision of God is given in Chapter 1, where the author says, “No one, when tempted, should say, ‘I am being tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one. But one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it” (1:13-14). He then goes on to say that “every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (1:17). Note the complete absence of eschatological promises or apocalyptic warnings. The author of these sections, whom I believe was Jesus, is telling readers to take responsibility for their own actions and not blame their bad choices on a God who has “tempted them.” He is also saying they should not fear change, because God’s love never changes even when other things do.

When we place this understanding against the epistle’s opening statements – “My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing” (1:2-4) – we can perhaps understand why its message has been so long ignored: this is not a message about justification by works alone, nor is it a message about justification by faith alone. It is an altogether radically new message about asking for God’s help in the here and now in the difficult spiritual task of transforming pain and suffering into maturity, wisdom, and love for one’s neighbour and one’s God, not to earn salvation, but simply because it’s the right thing to do.

No wonder they crucified the guy.

In conclusion, it is possible to apply Crossan’s and Reed’s “Excavating Jesus” method (balancing archeology with exegesis) to the task of “excavating James.” The excavated James can, in turn, shed greater light on the historical Jesus. Recent findings from the Talpiot tomb, the James ossuary, and the Epistle of James cannot be ignored. As a group, they demand discussion. As a group, they have a story to tell us about Jesus. And perhaps Jesus himself still has something to say.

* September 2, 2015: I have two updates to report which are relevant to the material posted on this page:

(1) I’m posting a link to a 2015 documentary that premiered on March 16, 2015 on VisionTV. The documentary, produced by Simcha Jacobovici, and Felix Golubev is called Biblical Conspiracies 6: The James Revelation. In this documentary, Simcha adds to his previous work on possible links between the James ossuary and the Talpiot Tomb ossuaries. He now states that the James ossuary may be a missing eleventh ossuary from the Talpiot Tomb. (His original position was that the James ossuary was the missing tenth ossuary, which mysteriously disappeared in 1980 after the Department of Antiquities (now the IAA) excavated and catalogued the contents of the tomb.) His new position no doubt derives from evidence presented during Oded Golan’s forgery trial which proved that he (Golan) was already in possession of the James ossuary a few years before the Talpiot Tomb was discovered. It’s still possible, however, that the James ossuary was looted at an earlier time from the Talpiot Tomb, as IAA archaeologist Shimon Gibson believes the tomb may have been broken into more than once before its official discovery (Biblical Conspiracies 6, 31 minutes).

In addition, Simcha uses the 2015 documentary to revisit the previous analytical analysis of the chemical fingerprint of the James ossuary inscription patina in comparison to that of the Talpiot Tomb ossuary patinas. This work was originally led by Dr. Charles Pellegrino (paleo-biologist and forensic archaeologist). In the documentary, Simcha consults with geo-archeologist Dr. Aryeh Shimron, who takes samples not from the inscription patina of the James ossuary but from the underside and inside of the box itself (from beneath the surface patina), then compares these with samples taken from the nine remaining Talpiot Tomb ossuaries as well as samples from random chalk ossuaries. Analysis of the chemical signatures shows strong similarities between the James ossuary and the Talpiot Tomb ossuaries, though, as Oded Golan rightly points out in an April 4, 2015 New York Times interview with Isabel Kershner, this isn’t conclusive proof that the James ossuary originally came from the Talpiot Tomb; the James bone box could have come from another burial cave in the same area and still show a similar chemical fingerprint. Samples would have to be taken from a large number of caves in East Talpiot to further refine the data.

It should be noted that Simcha’s new theory and new analytical data have no bearing on the actual authenticity of the James ossuary and its inscription. Whether or not Simcha is right, the James ossuary remains an important and authentic piece of archaeological evidence that can be legitimately combined with other pieces of evidence in the search for the historical Jesus, as stated above.

(2) I’m posting a link to an article by Hershel Shanks which appears in the Sept./Oct. 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review. The article, called “Predilections: Is the ‘Brother of Jesus’ Inscription a Forgery?” reviews some of the recent debates surrounding the authenticity of the James Ossuary inscription and the forgery trial of Oded Golan. Mr. Shanks emphasizes that Mr. Golan did, indeed, own the James Ossuary before the Talpiot Tomb was found and excavated in a 1980 salvage operation. Mr. Shanks also comments on the recent analysis by Dr. Pieter van der Horst of the IAA committee’s own original report on the James ossuary. Says Shanks, “Van der Horst notes that the IAA ‘appointed almost exclusively committee members who had already expressed outspoken opinions to the effect that the inscription was a forgery.'”

BIBLIOGRAPHY (as it originally appeared in the 2007 research paper)

Ayalon, Avner and Miryam Bar-Matthews and Yuval Goren. “Authenticity Examination of the
Inscription on the Ossuary Attributed to James, Brother of Jesus.” Journal of Archaeological Science 31 (2004): 1185-1189.

Coogan. Michael D., Ed. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with
the Apocrypha, College Edition. 3rd Ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.

Crossan, John Dominic and Jonathan L. Reed. Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind
the Texts. Rev. and Updated Ed. New York: HarperCollins and HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

“Demythologizing the Talpiot Tomb: family unit, group No. 1.” Filed under “Lost Tomb of
Jesus.” The View from Jerusalem. May 17, 2007. University of the Holy Land. 04 Dec. 2007 <http://www.uhl.ac/blog//?p=110>.

Fitzmyer, Joseph A. “Update–Finds or Fakes? The James Ossuary and Its Implications.”
Excerpted from Theology Digest 52:4 (2005). Biblical Archaeology Society. Undated. 04 Dec. 2007 <http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/bswbOOossuary_fitzmyer.asp>.

Gillman, Florence Morgan. “James, Brother of Jesus.” The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Vol. 3.
Ed. David Noel Freedman. New York: Doubleday, 1992. 620-621.

Goren, Yuval. “The Jerusalem Syndrome in Archaeology: Jehoash to James.”
The Bible and Interpretation. Jan. 2004. 04 Dec. 2007 <http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/Goren_Jerusalem_Syndrome.htm>.

Hanson, K.C. and Douglas E. Oakman. Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and
Social Conflicts. Incl. CD-ROM. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998.

Hartin, Patrick J. James and the Q Sayings of Jesus. Journal for the Study of the New
Testament Supplement Series 47. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991.

Jacobovici, Simcha and Charles Pellegrino. The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery,
the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History. New York: HarperCollins and HarperSanFrancisco, 2007.

Johnson, Luke Timothy. Brother of Jesus, Friend of God: Studies in the Letter of James.
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004.

Kirby, Peter. “Historical Jesus Theories.” Early Christian Writings. 2001-2003. 13 Oct. 2007
<http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/theories.html>.

Krumbein, Wolfgang E. “External Expert Opinion on Three Stone Items.”
Biblical Archaeology Society. Sept. 2005. 04 Dec. 2007 <http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/bswbOOossuary_Krumbeinreport.pdf>.

Laws, Sophie. “James, Epistle of.” The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Vol. 3. Ed. David Noel
Freedman. New York: Doubleday, 1992. 621-628.

“Leading Scholar Lambastes IAA Committee.” Biblical Archaeology Review 33.6 (2007): 16.

Mack, Burton L. “Q and a Cynic-Like Jesus.” Whose Historical Jesus? Ed. William E. Arnal
and Michel Desjardins. Studies in Christianity and Judaism 7. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1997.

Mims, Christopher. “Q&A With the Statistician Who Calculated the Odds That This Tomb
Belonged to Jesus.” Scientific American. March 2, 2007. 12 Dec. 2007 <http://sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=13C42878-E7F2-99DF-3B6D16A9656A12FF>.

Mims, Christopher. “Special Report: Has James Cameron Found Jesus’s Tomb or Is It Just
a Statistical Error?” Scientific American. March 2, 2007. 12 Dec. 2007 <http://sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=14A3C2E6-E7F2-99DF-37A9AEC98FB0702A>.

Pfann, Stephen. “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” UHL Articles on “The Lost
Tomb of Jesus” Documentary. University of the Holy Land. 2007(?). 11 Dec. 2007 <http://www.uhl.ac/Lost_Tomb/HowDoYouSolveMaria/>.

Reed, Jonathan L. Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus: A Re-examination of the Evidence.
Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 2000.

Shanks, Hershel and Ben Witherington III. The Brother of Jesus: The Dramatic Story &
Meaning of the First Archaeological Link to Jesus & His Family. New York: HarperCollins and HarperSanFrancisco, 2003.

Wachob, Wesley Hiram. The Voice of Jesus in the Social Rhetoric of James. Society for
New Testament Studies Monograph Series 106. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2000.

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Posted in Bible, Favourite Posts, historical Jesus, James Ossuary, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus' family of origin, Jesus' original writings, Letter of James, Paul vs Jesus, Realspiritik, Talpiot Tomb and tagged James Ossuary, Talpiot Tomb | Leave a Comment

18 Sep 2011

RS8: Timeless Courage and Kindness

A: Last Thursday (Sept. 15, 2011) my 87 year old dad had surgery at a publicly funded hospital in the Greater Toronto Area. It was a planned surgery — a knee replacement — but it was still a big deal for us. You worry when an 87 year old is having major surgery! Anyway, my mom and I got to sit for several hours in the surgical waiting room and watch all the people going about their day at this major teaching hospital.

As you’d expect there were people of all ages and all ethnicities. Different faces, different voices. But all focused on a common issue — the care and healing of sick people. I think my favourite moment came when a group of new student nurses went past with a supervisor. Ten or twelve young women, all different ethnicities, but all sporting long, shiny hair tied back in a ponytail. Black hair, blond hair, brown hair. United by fashion, I guess you could say.

Anyway, it was a positive environment. A real environment. Very grounded in our lives as human beings, human beings who need each other’s help. Coming so soon after the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it seemed like the right sort of answer to the question of why we suffer as human beings here on Planet Earth. We can’t stop change. But we can bring healing to those who are in pain in the aftermath of change.

J: Most days there’s more healing in the pinkie finger of a publicly funded hospital than in the entire body of orthodox Western Christianity.

A: The staff we met at the hospital were upbeat and positive about my dad’s procedure. They were starting with the assumption that if they did a good job on the surgery and he did a good job on the physio and follow up care, his quality of life would probably improve. I liked the fact that self-pity wasn’t encouraged or condoned. They expected my dad to be a full participant in the process of healing.

J: It’s an interesting scientific fact that people’s attitude toward their health and recovery plays a major role in the trajectory of their healing. In particular, anger and self-pity interfere with the healing process because these choices prompt the body to sustain high levels of stress hormones. Stress hormones such as cortisol can damage crucial areas of the brain. In other words, if you choose to hang onto your anger and self-pity, you can damage your own brain.

A: Canadian physician Gabor Mate has written a very readable book on the connection between stress and health — especially how too much stress is linked to illness. (Gabor Mate, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress (Toronto: Vintage Canada-Random House, 2003)).

J: Though fans of Richard Dawkin’s “selfish gene” won’t like what I’m about to say here, there is intentionality on God’s part in the design of DNA on Planet Earth.* All human beings share the same basic DNA, so all human beings are affected by the problem of brain damage caused by stress hormones and other neurophysiological imbalances. As researchers are grudgingly beginning to recognize, the human brain — and thus the wider human community — works a lot better when people make the choice to love and heal and forgive and learn from past mistakes. The human brain also works better when men and women, boys and girls, pool their respective talents as part of a team of different-but-equal individuals. No person is an island.

No matter what pond you happen to be living in, we all look to the same God for love, forgiveness, healing, and guidance. Photo credit JAT 2017

A: Especially not religious leaders.

J: God doesn’t single out certain individuals to be “chosen” priests or ministers or religious leaders. Those who claim to be chosen by God must answer to their communities for the choices they make. They must answer for their claims that God would want to blow up certain buildings or that God would want to take revenge on certain people. Why would God, who love all their children equally, be in the business of choosing one group over another? The inner heart knows God doesn’t play favourites. It cannot be any other way.

A: In the summer I stumbled across a wonderful article in the Toronto Star about a village in Pakistan where, for decades, hatred and violence between Muslims and Hindus had become the norm. (Rick Westhead, “A life-saving gift: How a Pakistani village plagued by sectarian attacks was transformed by one Hindu man’s blood donation to a dying Muslim woman,” Toronto Star, Saturday, July 30, 2011, p. A3). As reporter Rick Westhead describes, a difficult life in a desert environment was filled with fear because certain people had decided it was okay to beat and rape and even kill their neighbours on the other side of the religious divide. This all changed “in a moment” when a young Muslim mother desperately needed a blood transfusion and the only willing donor was a Hindu man. As word spread of the man’s offer, a group of Muslim men, incensed that medical staff refused to provide separate facilities for Muslims and Hindus, led a charge on the medical clinic to try to kill the blood donor. The doctor intervened. He told the attackers the Muslim woman would die without the transfusion. The leader of the Muslim attackers suddenly had an epiphany. He saw how generous the Hindu donor was. He suddenly felt remorse for his own hatred, and the next day he apologized to the donor: “‘I don’t know what came over me,’ Latif says. ‘I remember thinking that here we were refusing to even shake hands with the Hindus and he was willing to give us his blood. It was a marvelous thing he did. It was the turning point of my life.'”

Today the village is a place transformed by kindness and empathy and mutual assistance — all because of the bravery and compassion of one Hindu man and one Muslim man who were willing to let go of a longstanding “tradition” of hatred. Plus the doctor who stepped in the middle and said what needed to be said.

This reminds me a lot of you when you were healing the poor and the excluded in the towns of Galilee.

J: This is the great truth about God’s children. No matter who you are or what your religion or what the colour of your skin, you’re a child of God. You’re capable of astonishing feats of compassion and courage. It’s who you really are. When you look at your neighbour, whether Muslim or Christian or Jewish or another religion, you need to look at them through God’s eyes. You need to see them as your brothers and sisters, as your family-of-the-soul. Because this is the way God looks at all people — as individuals who are equal but different.

A: I’d like to remind readers of the My Fellow American interfaith initiative that can be visited at http://myfellowamerican.us. When I was watching the 2-minute video yesterday, with its clips of ordinary Americans who happen to be Muslim, I kept thinking of the waiting room at the hospital. I kept thinking of all the people who were there because they share the same human capacity to care. We’re all the same when we’re trying to heal and trying to help others.

J: Two thousand years ago I wrote the parable of the Good Samaritan to talk about this timeless issue. I was once the man who was beaten up by the side of the road (quite literally), and through the kindness of strangers I discovered to my shock that people can actually choose to be the loving and forgiving children God knows us to be. I would never have found my faith and my trust in God without the help of these kind, humble strangers. The people who helped me weren’t famous. They had no status. They had no wealth of the earthly kind. But they had that most mysterious of treasures — the heavenly heart.

A: It’s extraordinary how one act of great kindness and courage can change the world, isn’t it?

* This statement isn’t meant to lend support to Creationists or the Book of Genesis. Far from it. Scientific evidence about the age of the universe and the age of Planet Earth must take precedence over “revealed” teachings from sacred texts.

For more thoughts on the My Fellow American project, please see http://jesusredux.blogspot.com/2011/07/my-fellow-american-interfaith.html

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Posted in Divine Love, healing, Jesus' original writings, Jesus' teachings, Mother and Father God, parables, Realspiritik, Soul, theodicy and tagged Kingdom teachings, science & faith | Leave a Comment

19 Jul 2011

JR59: News of the World: "New Lamps For Old"

A: I see a lot of similarity between the current phone hacking scandal in the U.K. and the behaviour of the apostle Paul and his cronies in the first century CE. In both situations, a very powerful man does whatever he wants regardless of how unethical, corrupt, manipulative, and cruel it is. The only difference between then and now is that Rupert Murdoch’s employees have received a public shaming. Without the huge public outcry that accompanied the recent re-revelation about phone hacking at the News of the World, the authorities wouldn’t have reopened the investigation or arrested more people. The authorities — or rather I should say certain individuals in senior positions of authority in the police and government — knew about the accusations of unethical conduct and did nothing much about them until regular people started yelling and putting their foot down.

“But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at their image and, on going away, immediately forget what they look like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act — they will be blessed in their doing” (James 1:22-25). Replicas of Ancient Greek vessels. Photo credit JAT 2014.

J: The parallels are uncanny. If people today are having trouble imagining what it felt like for my followers soon after my death, they can read about the phone hacking scandal and put themselves in the shoes of the families of the murder victims who were psychologically assaulted by the News of the World reporters, editors, and decision makers.

A: I think most people would be shocked to learn how unethical Paul really was. How cold and calculating he really was.

J: He was a business man. Very practical, very logical. He was like the editor at the News of the World who approved the phone hacking strategies. Anything was okay as long as it got the job done. “The end justifies the means” and all that crap. Success at any price. Just the way his bosses in Alexandria wanted it.

A: Yet you’ve said in previous discussions that Paul truly believed in what he was doing.

J: Sure. A successful psychopath is an ideologue. It’s what separates the successful psychopaths — “snakes in suits,” as researcher Robert Hare calls them — from the garden variety criminals who get caught and thrown in jail for reckless, impulsive crimes. An ideologue — and Paul was a religio-political ideologue — uses “The Big Idea” as a crutch to hold up his dysfunctional brain. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s an external framework of ideas that the psychopath clings to because he’s lost his own internal compass. He can’t hear the voice of his own soul telling him what’s right and wrong. But he’s still very logical, very goal-oriented, and he’s addicted to status. So if he can “attach” himself to an external Big Idea, and apply his logic and ambition to it, he can acquire status and not end up in prison.

A: Why won’t he end up in prison? Aren’t psychopaths inherently impulsive? Prone to risk-taking behaviours and uninterested in consequences? Doesn’t this make him more likely to do something criminal?

J: Yes. It’s part of the package for psychopaths. But if you put a psychopath in a structured organization where there are very strict rules, very clear punishments, and rigid ladders of governance, he’ll be so busy trying to claw his way up “the ladder of success” he won’t bother going out to rob banks or gas stations. The buzz he gets from plotting his long-term strategy for “success” is much better than the temporary high of terrorizing a gas station attendant.

This is not to say the snakes-in-suits are “nicer” psychopaths. They’re not nice people at all. But no one can question their ability to promote “The Big Idea” (whatever their Big Idea happens to be) with charismatic passion. Regular people are easily sucked in by this passion.

A: So Paul was a snake-in-a-suit. I kinda like the way this ties in with the conversations we’ve had about the Book of Genesis.

J: Paul was promoting the Big Idea of salvation. Escape from a life without status. Escape from a death without status. He and his followers built a humongous empire on the “4 S’s” — sin, separation, sacraments, and salvation. But Paul’s Big Idea was just that — an idea. A belief system. A theory without proof. A theory that’s never had proof. Its very lack of provableness is what makes it so attractive to psychopaths. Why? Because there’s nothing in the Big Idea that can act as a mirror for the psychopath’s true intent. There’s nothing to make him look at himself honestly. There’s nothing to challenge him to be his best self. The Big Idea gives him 1,001 excuses to brush his abusive behaviour under the carpet. Unfortunately, until the psychopath sees himself as he really is, he has no incentive to change.

A: I think we’ve just spiralled back to your analogy between a psychopath and the Greek monster Medusa. Medusa’s hideous face turned everyone into stone until Perseus held up a mirror-like shield and forced her to look at herself.

J: Part of the problem here is that regular people don’t understand what makes a psychopath tick. Regular people look at a “successful psychopath” — the guy who has the drive and ambition to work 16 hour days — and they think he must really know who he is and what he wants. They think they should try to be like him. They think they themselves are failures if they want to go home to their families after working an 8 hour day. But the honest truth is the successful psychopath has no idea who he really is. All he has inside himself is a score card. A score card instead of a heart. His soul is all heart, of course, but he long ago stopped listening to this core part of himself. This is why he has no conscience and no empathy. His soul isn’t defective, but his biological brain is seriously out of balance. He’s so used to living this way that it’s normal for him. Even worse, he likes living this way. He likes hurting other people. He likes making regular people feel small and useless. And he’s not going to change until he recognizes the honest truth that he’s not a nice person.

A: It took me years to understand this lesson. I misunderstood what compassion was. I thought compassion meant you should never intentionally make another person feel bad about themselves. That’s before I learned (the hard way) that a lot of people out there want to hurt other people and consciously choose to hurt other people and get a high out of psychologically abusing other people and won’t decide to stop this behaviour until they’re forced to look in the mirror. I also learned the hard way that the more dysfunctional a person is, the more insulted and offended she’ll be when you tell her she isn’t being a nice person.

J: You’re thinking of someone in particular when you say that.

A: Yes. I’m thinking of Grace, the modern day “spiritual leader” (a.k.a. apocalyptic prophet) I hung out with for several years before I came to my senses.

J: These are the people who are quickest to say, “You have no right to say such things about me.”

A: Hey, don’t forget the other favourite response of the psychopath who insists she’s a nice person: “Oh, my dear, tut tut, how can you say such things about me? Why, everyone knows what a good person I am and how hard I work on behalf of the community. I’m so concerned for you, you poor thing. You really need to get some help.”

J: A psychopath has extremely strong defences against hearing the truth about his or her own behaviour. It’s scary how strong these defences are. The doctrines of orthodox Western Christianity have served as excellent body armour for its successful psychopaths. Pauline Christians are not called upon to look honestly at themselves and make changes to live up to their true potential. Instead they’re encouraged to stoop to the level of a psychopath’s dysfunctional mind so the psychopath doesn’t have to feel bad about himself.

A: You said pretty much the same thing in James 1:22-25.

J: I’m a consistent fellow. But it’s not hard to be consistent when you’re trying to speak the truth. Truth has an annoying habit of being consistent and provable and open to new and unfolding sources of knowledge. Even if it takes a couple of thousand years for the truth to be recognized, for the facts to be identified, remembered, understood, and acted upon.

A: I’m glad there’s finally a solid and widespread foundation of research in place so the truth about Paul’s “News of the World” can finally come out.

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Posted in "4 S's", "Escape", conscience & morality, empathy, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, Letter of James, Paul's teachings, psychopathy, psychopathy (niceness), theodicy and tagged Paul vs Jesus | Leave a Comment

05 Jul 2011

JR55: Healing: The Easy Way and the Hard Way

A: Apart from the Kingdom sayings and the puzzling Son of Man sayings, you also left behind some curious sayings about protecting the master’s house and making it strong against thievery or attack — especially attack from within. Thomas 21b and Luke 12:37-48 and Mark 3:20-27 all use this theme. The passage in Luke is especially confusing. Luke 12:37-38 is a makarism: “Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves.”

Now, I know you had nothing nice to say about the custom of slave-owning. So the passage in Luke (12:37-48) must be a parable, an analogy for something else, even though the Oxford NRSV calls these verses a collection of “sayings on watchfulness and faithfulness” rather than a parable.

“Therefore I say: If a householder knows a thief is coming, he will keep watch and not let him break into his house (of his kingdom) and steal his goods. You must keep watch against the world, preparing yourselves with power so that thieves will not find any way to come upon you” (Gospel of Thomas 21b and 21c, translated by Stevan Davies). Photo credit JAT 2013.

J (grinning): Oh, yes. It’s a parable. One I wrote myself.

A: Ah. And I see that this parable references “the Son of Man” in verse 40: “You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” Many commentators have assumed this verse is a reference to an apocalyptic prophecy you made. They assume “the Son of Man” is an actual person — you — who will be coming back on a future day to bring about the prophesied day of judgment. Is this what you meant? Because Matthew 24:36-51 certainly makes it sound as if this is what you meant.

J: Matthew, as we’ve discussed earlier, was no friend of mine and no friend to my teachings. Matthew was like a gardener who sees another’s man field and hates the way the plants are arranged. So he sneaks in with a shovel at night and digs up the other man’s plants and takes them to a new field and replants them in an entirely new garden composition and adds some new plants of his own, then steps back and loudly proclaims he’s done great honour to the other man. Meanwhile, the other man’s garden is a potholed ruin.

A: Always with the parables. You just don’t quit!

J: It’s who I am.

A: Okay. So what were you getting at? Why were you so fond of the image of the master’s house that needs to be protected? Who was “the master”? Was it God?

J: Nope. The master in the parable of the responsible slave (Luke 12:37-48) is the soul of any human being who’s walking around on Planet Earth. Any human being at all.

A: Say what?

J: Although today’s commentators assume I was an idiot who spouted apocalyptic prophecy and hadn’t a drop of common sense in me, I actually had a “method to my madness.” The sayings I left behind all speak to a few internally consistent, common sense teachings about the soul. I said a small number of things a great many times. The things I said all relate to each other in a logical, coherent, heart-based way. If I spoke again and again about the psychological reality of the Kingdom (wholeness and maturity of the self), and the importance of respecting “boundaries of the self” and “boundaries of the other,” and the potential of human beings — all human beings — to seek healing and redemption through the power of forgiveness, then there’s only one person this “master” can be. The master is the self. The master is the core self, the soul that each person is. The true self. This parable is a metaphor about the human brain. It’s an attempt to explain in layman’s terms what’s going on inside a person’s head, and why there’s no such thing as demon possession. It’s an attempt to explain why the path of redemption seems so harsh at times.

A: “Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay down his head and rest.” (Thomas 86)

J: Yes. Foxes know who they are and where their “home” is. Birds know who they are and how to build a home for themselves and their children. Human beings, of all God’s creatures on Planet Earth, are the least likely to know who they are and how to build a “home” for their highest potential. For a human being, this home is their brain — their biological brain and central nervous system. This home has to be painstakingly built over many years. Nothing so simple as building a bird’s nest, no sir! The “insides” of a person have to be carefully built to match the “outsides.” This is the holistic path to maturity for all human beings.

A: This goes back to what you were saying a few days ago about Saying 22 in the Gospel of Thomas (Saying 22 in the Gospel of Thomas). One thing I love about your teachings on wholeness — on Whole Brain Thinking — is the fairness of it. These teachings apply to all people in all places in all cultures. It’s radically egalitarian. Everyone gets the same basic toolkit for building a garden of peace. But each person’s garden will look different because each soul is different. I just love that part!

J: Yes, but before they can get to the point of being able to admire each other’s gardens — instead of envying and destroying each other’s gardens — they have to get through the healing stage. This is the stage where most people quit, where they run away from the difficulties and challenges of building an inner “home” — a field full of good soil — inside their own heads. This is the stage most people don’t even know IS a stage.

A: The Church has done precious little to help us understand this — even today, when we have so much knowledge about the human brain and its hard-wiring for empathy and change.

J: Two thousand years ago, I certainly had no knowledge of neuroanatomy or neurophysiology or neurotransmitters or the like. But I was a keen observer of human nature, and I was scientifically minded. More to the point, I was a mystic. I had unflinching faith in God’s goodness because of my mystical practice, and I knew there had to be something better than “demon possession” to account for frightening behaviour. So I looked to a scientific model. It wasn’t that hard, really. You work through empirical observation and rudimentary statistical analysis. That’s how all science advanced for thousands of years until recently. You take careful notes, you try to stay objective, you look for patterns, you try to prove you didn’t simply invent the patterns because you wanted to see them. Objectivity is crucial, of course. If you’re determined to find an imaginary Cause X, you’ll find it because you want to. However, this isn’t science. This is narcissism.

A: So your lack of narcissism — or I suppose I should say your eventual lack of narcissism — made you more open to honest fact-finding about the human condition.

J: I was open to the idea that there could be scars on the inside of a person’s body as well as on the outside.

A: In James 1:8, you use the unusual Greek word “dipsychos,” which is usually translated in English as “double-minded.” What were you getting at here?

J: If you read the parts of the Letter of James that I wrote — James 1:2-27; 2:1-8a; and 3:1-18 — you can see me struggling to put into words the problem of understanding the human brain and all its competing “intents.” I used several different metaphors there to try to explain what a lack of inner wholeness results in. Which is tragedy. Pain, suffering, and tragedy.

A: You also express the idea in James 1:8 that “the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord.” This is a pretty tough statement, don’t you think?

J: Many will think so. They’ll assume I’m talking about divine judgment and divine retribution. But I’m not. I’m talking about the scientific reality of the soul-body nexus. I’m talking about the built-in set of checks and balances that exists within the human self to promote mature, loving choices.

I’m going to come at your question from a different direction. If there really is a God, and there really are good souls, and there really are souls who choose to incarnate in a temporary 3D body where they have to struggle to balance the needs of their souls and the needs of their biological bodies . . . would it make sense to you in this context that God would refuse to provide built-in roadmaps and compasses and warning signals and obvious feedback so you could safely navigate all the confusion? Does that make sense to you?

A: No.

J: It didn’t make sense to me, either. So in the parable of the responsible slave, the “house” of the master is — to use you as an example (sorry, hope you don’t mind) — is your entire head, including your skull. The “master” is your soul, and in particular the non-plastic parts of your brain that are controlled by the thoughts and feelings and actions of your soul. The “slaves” are the semi-autonomous regions of your brain that are supposed to be in charge of your physiological needs, but which all too often end up running the show — and doing a very poor job of it, I might add. If you were to let the “slaves” manage your choices, abuses would occur. Abuses of your self and abuses of others. Naturally, your core self — your soul — wouldn’t like this very much, and your core self would have something to say about it. This isn’t punishment “from above.” This is you standing up for your own core integrity! This is you trying to get yourself back in balance!

A: By first recognizing that there’s a problem. With your own choices.

J: Healing begins with insight. Before you can heal, you have to admit there’s a problem. Unfortunately, people can get their heads caught up in some pretty unhealthy thinking patterns. They can become so dysfunctional that they confuse the “slaves” with the “master.” They can’t hear their own inner voice, even though the inner voice never stops talking.

There’s always the easy way and the hard way. You can listen to your own inner voice, and begin to heal, in which case the journey won’t be as difficult.

A: You’ll get a “light beating” (Luke 12:48).

J: The majority of human beings, then and now, however, end up by default on the hard way.

A: So their bodies get a “severe beating” (Luke 12:47) from their own souls.

J: Well, it looks that way from the outside in the beginning.

A: People will say you’re blaming the victims of illness.

J: It’s not that simple. People get ill for a variety of reasons. But ONE of the reasons people get sick is because they opt to make certain very poor choices. This is simply a statement of fact. It’s not a judgment to say that a person who chooses to eat 5,000 calories per day and is morbidly obese (with all the attendant health problems of extreme obesity) bears SOME of the responsibility for his or her state of health.

A: When you put it that way, it seems pretty fair and reasonable. There are lots of intentional human choices that can lead to serious illness and disability. We often don’t want to change the choices we make until we really, really understand the consequences that are involved.

J: Observable consequences are part of each person’s built-in roadmap for living a life of wholeness in accordance with the wishes and needs of the soul. If your biological body is way out of balance, you need to listen to what your soul is saying. It’s only common sense.

Posted in boundary issues, brain-soul connection, Gospel of Thomas, healing, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, Kingdom teachings, Letter of James, makarism, Matthew's and Luke's intent, parables, Son of Man, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

29 May 2011

JR44: Mark’s Themes of Understanding and Strength

This is a research paper I wrote in 2009 for a course on New Testament exegesis. It explains in detail some of the major themes found in the Gospel of Mark. I used Wordperfect’s Greek language symbols to type key words that were relevant to the argument. A few of these Greek letters didn’t survive the “cut and paste process,” so I’ll have to substitute English typeface where necessary (mostly for the vowels “eta,” “iota,” “upsilon,” and “omega”). Sorry about that.

P.S. The paper pasted here is as I wrote it, including the endnotes, where I confess I don’t yet understand how the word “artos” (leavened bread, loaf) is being used by Mark. Since then (with Jesus’ help), I’ve figured it out.

“Now the disciples had forgotten to bring any bread; and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. And he cautioned them, saying, ‘Watch out — beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod.’ They said to one another, ‘It is because we have no bread.’ And becoming aware of it, Jesus said to them, ‘Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear? And do you not remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?’ They said to him, ‘Twelve.’ And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?’ And they said to him, ‘Seven.’ Then he said to them, ‘Do you not yet understand?'” (Mark 8:14-21). Photo credit Hemera Technologies 2001-2003.

RADICAL MESSIAH AND THE SHEMA: MARK’S THEMES OF
UNDERSTANDING AND STRENGTH

Graham Stanton, in his discussion about the Gospel of Mark, refers to “Mark’s genius as a story-teller” (41), and says, “perhaps Mark should be seen not so much as a block of toffee (form criticism) or as a string of pearls (redaction criticism), but as a piece of rope with interwoven strands” (41). Later in the chapter, he asks these questions: “Why was this gospel written? Many scholars have proposed quite specific historical or theological settings. But they are usually able to make reasonable sense of only one or two of the many interrelated strands which the evangelist develops” (57-58). One strand which I feel has been overlooked is Mark’s overt addition to the Shema (Deut. 6:4-9) in Chapter12:29 of the Gospel. So obvious would this change have been to a Jewish Christian audience in the early to mid-60’s CE that the question of Mark’s purpose must be raised. What was he signalling to his audience with this change? Why did he dare add to a well-known prayer that, according to the Jewish Study Bible, was being formally recited late in the Second Temple period (379)? It is the thesis of this paper that Mark did not accidentally alter the Shema through lack of knowledge, and that he did not accidentally link the Shema to the commandment in Leviticus 19:18 to love one’s neighbour as oneself (12:31). There was a purpose to his addition of the phrase “and with all your mind (διανοίας)” to the existing formulation of “you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart (καρδίας) and with all your soul (ψυχnς) and with all your might (iσχύος).” This supposition is supported by Mark’s repetition of the Shema in 12:32-33, altered yet again, this time without genitive cases, and with a changed emphasis to understanding (συνέσεως). Here the sympathetic – and sensible (νουνεχwς) – scribe is allowed by Mark to voice the two most important commandments: “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ – this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” The penny then drops for readers as Jesus says to the scribe, “You are not far from the kingdom of God” (present tense verb, 12:34). Mark has just presented a major clue to unravelling some of the strands of his gospel.

The altered Shema is part of a teaching chreia (12:28-34) that can be seen, it is argued here, as an early creedal statement, the climax and summary of Jesus’ teachings about what it means to be “not far from the kingdom of God” (12:34). It is difficult to understand Jesus’ teachings about the kingdom of God, says Mark in different ways throughout the Gospel. Even Jesus’ closest friends, the disciples, do not understand (4:10-13). The whole thing can be boiled down to two commandments (12:28-31), which sound easy at first, but are much more difficult to practice than the old system of “burnt offerings and sacrifices,” a system which requires Jews to show unswerving loyalty. (Loyalty, not private emotion, is the meaning of the verb aheb, “love,” as it applies to the Shema, according to the Jewish Study Bible (380) and Sakenfeld (376)). A big part of Jesus’ version of faith, according to Mark, is the requirement that disciples use their minds. Fideism is not acceptable. God’s faithful must question the specific ways in which religious teachings are being misused (e.g. 2:23-28; 3:1-6; 7:1-23; 12:38-40; 12:41-44), just as in the past Jews once questioned harmful religious and societal conventions (e.g. Exod. 20:2-6; 21:1 – 22:16; 22:20-12). (Mark thus shows Jesus to be following the “wilderness spirit” of the Sinai Covenant in the Torah (cf. Mark 1:3,4,12), as opposed to the Temple and hierarchy-based Zion Covenant presented in the Psalms and the Deuteronomistic History.[1]) God’s faithful must be willing to not only open their hearts and souls to God’s kingdom, but also their minds (διάνοια) – their innate capacity to think and understand in moral ways (Harder 125). Moral thinking and moral decision-making is a higher form of loving God than being obedient and loyal to the laws of the Zion Covenant.

This kind of “thinking faith,” directed towards loving God (e.g. 1:35-39; 15:25-32), loving others (eg. 9:33-37; 10:41-45), and loving themselves (e.g. 12:31)[2], will put them in opposition to others – family (e.g. 3:21; 3:31-35; 10:28-31), friends (e.g. 6:1-3; 14:66-72), Pharisees (e.g. 3:6, 12:13-17), scribes and chief priests (e.g. 2:6-9, 3:16-17; 11:18), and Gentiles (e.g. 5:14-17; 15:16-20) – who choose to follow honour-oriented traditions. Understanding is not an instantaneous gift from God, however (clearly evidenced in 8:14-21)[3]. Nor is understanding a gift conferred only on the disciples closest to Jesus (e.g. 5:33-34; 9:33-37; 10:17-22; 12:34; 14:6-9). Understanding is a long, difficult process which disciples must willingly participate in (e.g. 4:13; 4:33-34; 10:23-27; 13:9-13). It requires strength, a theme which Mark repeatedly intertwines with the requirement for understanding, as shall be shown. God’s faithful must commit their strength (iσχύς) to a process spread out over time and geography (hence Jesus’ travels back and forth across Galilee and adjacent territories) and also over boundaries of class and honour (hence Jesus’ willingness to heal and teach people from disadvantaged groups). It is a process open to all people, regardless of race, religion, gender, state of mental and/or physical health, wealth, or status. But it is a difficult process.

Mark – for all that he is trying to describe a “thinking faith” – seems very wary of directly invoking Hellenistic or Judeo-Hellenistic notions of philosophy, rational thought, or “wisdom” (σοφία). Σοφία is used 51 times in the New Testament, but only once in Mark (on the lips of the surprised synagogue attendees in 6:2). The adjective σοφός appears 22 times in the New Testament, but not once in Mark. Whatever claim Mark is making, it is not a claim for σοφία (wisdom, insight, intelligence, knowledge, divine knowledge). He prefers the cognates of the more “practical” verbs συνίημι (understand, comprehend, perceive, have insight into) and διαλογίζομαι (discuss, argue, consider, reason, wonder about, question). It is notable that, although he uses the adverb νουνεχwς once, and the verb νοέω a few times, he does not use the Greek word νοuς, a noun meaning perception, understanding, thoughts, or reason. Νοuς is attested since Linear B; it was used by Plato to mean “the highest of the three parts of the soul” (Harder 122), and still later used in the post-canonical, apocryphal era of Jewish literature in a sense associated with the will or deliberation (Harder 125). It is difficult to tell whether Mark avoids using νοuς because in Hebrew there is no direct equivalent for it, and the Septuagint rarely uses it (Harder 124) (compare to Paul, who uses it in Romans and 1 Corinthians); or whether Mark avoids using it because he has a general tendency to not include abstract “wisdom words” such as “peace,” “hope,” and “righteousness” words in his writing[4].

It is interesting to ponder Mark’s non-use of the “wisdom words” frequently attested in books of the Old Testament, as well as in the other Gospels, Acts, and the accepted letters of Paul. Certainly it can be argued that these words are malleable enough to serve any purpose (“Peace in our time!”). Perhaps, by not making abundant use of “wisdom words,” Mark hopes to make his readers think, to apply their minds in new ways to the difficult question of what it means to be close to the kingdom of God. (Mark himself lends this impression in 13:14, where he suddenly interjects with “let the reader understand (νοείτω).”) “Out with the poetry, in with the praxis,” seems to be his approach. He therefore intentionally avoids “telling us” at length what Jesus said, and insists on “showing us” what Jesus did – what Jesus’ actions and choices were, where he went, who he talked to, who he aided, and what he did despite his friends’ lack of courage, faith, and love. Mark’s Radical Messiah is a man of relatively few words who teaches by example, and is not interested in raising his own status. (Even the scribe in 12:28-34 is accorded great dignity by Jesus – and also by Mark.) Therefore, for Mark, the examples are what matter most. (By contrast, Matthew’s Jesus seems very fond of the sound of his own voice, and John’s Jesus has a case of the “I ams.”)

It is clear from a review of word usage articles that, by the first century CE, there was a blurring between Jewish and Hellenistic concepts of heart, mind, and soul, and this may explain why Mark felt he needed to add to the traditional phrasing of the Shema. In the Septuagint translation of the Shema, for instance, leb is rendered as καρδία; yet Holloday’s Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon shows 11 different meanings for leb: the physical heart organ; the seat of vitality; the seat of one’s feelings and impulses; mind, character, disposition, inclination, loyalty, concern; determination, courage, high morale; intention, purpose; mind, attention, consideration, understanding; the self; conscience; metaphorically the “interior” or “middle”; and finally the organizing power of living beings (nefesh – the word which is translated as ψυχή in the Septuagint’s version of the Shema ) (171-172). Harder points out that Septuagint translators rendered the Hebrew leb or lebab as νοuς only six times, as διάνοια 38 times, and as καρδία in most other instances (124). Sorg reports that the Septuagint occasionally translates leb as ψυχή (181). Meanwhile, ψυχή itself (used 101 times in the New Testament) encompasses a broad range of meanings: the whole person or creature; a person’s actual, physical life; the seat of the emotions; the inner life or personality of a person; the part of the person that lives on after death (Harder 682-686; Carrigan). Καρδία can be used literally to mean the physical heart, or it can be used metaphorically. In the New Testament, it is used in 148 passages with a variety of meanings: the seat of intellectual and spiritual life; the inner person or personality/ego; the seat of doubt and hardness; the mind or reason; will, desire, intention (Sorg 182-183). To state, as Cameron does, that “since Hebrew psychology lacked precise terminology, there is some overlapping in the use of nepesh, leb/lebab, and ruah” is something of an understatement. Perhaps Mark, aware of the confusion amongst Jews and Jewish Christians about the meanings of leb and καρδία, nefesh and ψυχή, decides to make certain that no one can dispute the necessity of “mind” and “understanding” (as distinct from Hellenistic wisdom!) by his explicitly including both διανοίας and συνέσεως in the crucial teaching chreia of 12:28-34.

Mark wants to talk about the Radical Messiah’s “thinking faith,” but at the same time he demonstrates a prudent fear of both Jewish and Roman authorities. He does not wish to be arrested for apostasy or political treason (he is writing during a time of heightened political-religious conflict, both within Judaism itself, and between Judaism and the Roman Empire). Therefore, while he shies away from “wisdom words,” he makes ample use of allegory. It is difficult, for instance, to see Mark’s repeated use of boat crossings on the “Sea” of Galilee as anything but a metaphor. It is a lake, after all, and not a very big one, at that – a fact that early Jewish Christian readers in the region would have known. Pheme Perkins points out that the Q Source has no sayings about fishing or grapes, and no stories about storms on the Sea of Galilee (94-95). Mark, however, introduces the Sea of Galilee, fishermen, and boats in his first chapter (1:16, 1:16-20, and 1:19-20 respectively). He is hinting at something. What does a boat do? we then must ask. A boat helps us cross the waters. What have bodies of water traditionally represented in Jewish thought? The forces of chaos that are overcome by the sovereign powers of God (Gen. 1:2 – 2:3). And how does one overcome the forces of chaos? In part, by using one’s strength – at which point it is very hard to overlook the similarity in sound between the word for “fish” (iχθύς) and the word for “strength” (iσχύς). (We know that Paul uses plays on words, so it is not unreasonable to conclude that Mark does the same.) Once this is observed, the two miraculous feedings of the crowd with bread and fish (6:34-44 and 8:1-9) become emblematic of the “strength” with which Jesus feeds the people [5,6] – the same strength that is spoken of in a positive light twice in 12:28-34, in a negative light in 14:37, in a perplexing light in 3:27 and 5:4, and in a contextual way in 15:46, where Joseph of Arimathea has the strength to roll a “very large rock” across the tomb by himself.

In the important verses of 8:14-21, Mark draws an overt link between the allegorical feedings – with their relationship to the theme of strength – and the issue of understanding. Here, while Jesus and the disciples are sitting yet again in their boat (8:14 – the final reference to boats in the Gospel of Mark), Jesus castigates the disciples harshly, in several different ways, because they do not yet understand (νοεiτε) or realize (συνίετε). This pericope is filled with Greek verbs related to the thinking faculties of people (thinking faculties which include input from the senses): the disciples “forgot” the bread (8:14); Jesus cautions them to “see” the yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod (8:15); the disciples “reasoned” among themselves (8:16); Jesus “knows” their attempt at reasoning and asks them why they are still “reasoning” that way instead of “understanding” and “realizing” (8:17); have their “hearts” been hardened? Jesus asks (8:17); do they have “eyes” that don’t see, and “ears” that don’t hear? (8:18); do they not “remember”? (8:18); do they not yet understand? (8:21). Verses 14-21 of Chapter 8 can be seen to conclude and epitomize the first half of Mark’s Gospel, as some scholars have suggested (Perkins 131); however, reading the Gospel in this way does, as Perkins points out, present “as much of a challenge to the audience as the ending of the Gospel does” (131) because of its critical depiction of the disciples. The disciples, both male and female, lack understanding and strength. They have not applied “all their mind” and “all their strength” to loving God or their teacher, Jesus, and therefore – unlike the scribe of 12:28-34 and perhaps unlike Joseph of Arimathea – they have not been able to draw near to the kingdom of God. It is not enough to be loyal, according to Mark. It is not enough to be close to the Rabbi. The disciples will not be able to understand what the kingdom of God is like until they give themselves heart, soul, mind, and strength to the praxis of loving God and loving other people, the sort of praxis which Jesus models on every page of this complex gospel.

ENDNOTES

1. The two covenant thesis in the Jewish Bible is convincingly argued by W.M.

2. Not all scholars agree that 12:29 commands people to love themselves (Klassen 389).

3. Mark does not tell us how Jesus acquired his understanding. We know only that God has adopted Jesus as his son (1:11 and 9:7), and is well pleased with him.

4. In marked contrast to other New Testament authors such as Matthew, Luke in Luke/Acts, and Paul, Mark uses the words “peace” (only 3 times), “hope” (zero times), “love” (X 4), “joy” (X 1), “freedom” (X 0), “glory” (X 3), “just/righteous” (X 3) or “holy” (X 7). (Nelson’s Concordance)

5. I have not yet figured out how “artos” is being used in these passages.

6. In this context, the numerological references in the two miraculous feedings (e.g. 5,000 people, 12 baskets of leftovers, 7 loaves) can be read as being indicators to treat these passages allegorically (unlike the healing miracles, which Mark treats in a factual way).

WORKS CONSULTED

Berlin, Adele and Marc Zvi Brettler, Eds. The Jewish Study Bible: Jewish Publication Society TANAKH Translation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.

Cameron, W.J. “Soul.” New Bible Dictionary. 2nd Ed. Ed. J.D. Douglas. Leicester and Wheaton IL: Inter-varsity and Tyndale House, 1982. 1135.

Carrigan, Henry L. “Soul.” Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible. Ed. David Noel Freedman. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000. 1245.

Coogan. Michael D., Ed. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, College Edition. 3rd Ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.

Ellison, John W., Ed. Nelson’s Complete Concordance of the Revised Standard Version Bible. New York: Nelson & Sons, 1957.

Harder, Georg. “νοuς.” The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Vol. 3. Rev. Ed. Ed. Colin Brown. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986. 122-130.

Harder, Georg. “ψυχή.” The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Vol. 3. Rev. Ed. Ed. Colin Brown. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986. 676-689.

Goetzmann, Jurgen. “σύνεσις.” The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Vol. 3. Rev. Ed. Ed. Colin Brown. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986. 130-134.

Holloday, William L., Ed. A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988.

Klassen, William. “Love in the New Testament and Early Jewish Literature.” The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Vol. 4. Ed. David Noel Freedman. New York: Doubleday, 1992. 381-396.

Morrison, Clinton. An Analytical Concordance to the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1979.

Perkins, Pheme. Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007.

Sakenfeld, Katharine Door Sakenfeld. “Love in the Old Testament.” The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Vol. 4. Ed. David Noel Freedman. New York: Doubleday, 1992. 375-381.

Schattenmann, Hans-Georg. “Iσχύς.” The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Vol. 3. Rev. Ed. Ed. Colin Brown. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986. 712-716.

Sorg, Theo. “καρδία.” The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Vol. 2. Ed. Colin Brown. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986. 180-184.

Stanton, Graham N. The Gospels and Jesus. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

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Posted in Bible, courage, Divine Love, faith, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, insight, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, Kingdom teachings, Mark vs Paul, miracles, parables, Soul and tagged Kingdom teachings, Mark vs Paul | Leave a Comment

10 Apr 2011

JR31: Jesus, the Man Who Was a Mystic

Life as a Mystic (c) JAT 2015: always drawn to the path less travelled

Life as a Mystic: always drawn to the path less travelled. Photo credit JAT 2015.

A: Sayings 18a and 18b in the Gospel of Thomas have some interesting things to say about our relationship to time — to beginnings and endings. Stevan Davies’s translation says this: “The disciples asked Jesus: Tell us about our end. What will it be? Jesus replied: Have you found the Beginning so that you now seek the end? The place of the Beginning will be the place of the end [18a]. Blessed is anyone who will stand up in the Beginning and thereby know the end and never die [18b].” Your makarisms — your beatitudes — don’t sound much like the makarisms from the Jewish Wisdom thinkers who wrote books like Proverbs and Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon. Why is that?

J (shrugging): I was a mystic, not a Wisdom teacher. I believed in logic, but I believed more in Divine Love. My understanding of happiness was founded in my personal mystical experience. When people asked me how I could be so happy despite all the personal suffering I’d experienced in my life, I told them. They didn’t believe me, but I kept telling them anyway.

A: People today don’t think of you as a mystic. They may think of you as a rabbi or as a wandering Cynic philosopher or as a political revolutionary or even as a shaman-like fellow wandering around Palestine in a severe dissociative state.* But none of the well-respected biblical scholars I’ve read have described you as a mystic. Why not?

J: There’s nothing so poorly understood in the history of religion as mysticism. Having said that, the form of mysticism I practised has been rare in the annals of religious mysticism. I was neither an apophatic mystic nor an anagogic mystic. I was an endogenous mystic.

A: You’re going to have to explain that.

J: Mystical experiences from different cultures can be categorized. And should be categorized. Unfortunately, they’re usually lumped together in one big pot. They’re assumed to be roughly equivalent to each other. But they’re not. For instance, mystics who claim to have had an experience of timeless, transcendent oneness or union with the Divine come away from the experience with the belief that “less is more.” These are the apophatic mystics, from the Greek word meaning “negative speaking” or “unspeaking.” Apophatic mystics believe you can only experience union with God through the constant practise of mystical contemplation. This practice allows you to first “unknow” or “unspeak” yourself, to escape your frail human senses so you can become a proper empty vessel. If you do it correctly, goes the theory, you find yourself in a transcendent state where you no longer think of yourself as “you.” In other words, the path to knowing God is eradication of the self.

A: The opposite of what you taught.

J: Yes. Another thing I taught was the futility of the anagogic path — the vertical or upward path of spiritual ascent that’s been taught so many times by so many different teachers over the centuries. Anagogic mystics may or may not also be apophatic mystics, just to make things more confusing. Basically an anagogic mystic is somebody who believes that the only way to know God is to achieve perfection by following a rigorous step-by-step set of instructions or laws in the correct order. This takes you one step at a time up the spiritual ladder. The ladder of perfection takes you closer to God and farther away from your sinful neighbours. It sets you above and apart from your neighbours. Benedict, the founder of the Christian monasteries and the monastic Rule that bear his name, was teaching his monks a form of anagogic mysticism.

A: Again, not what you taught. So explain what you mean by endogenous mysticism.

J: It’s a term I’ve coined to suggest an experience of intense mysticism that’s hardwired into a person’s DNA rather than being imposed from the outside on an unwilling religious acolyte. True mystics are born, not made. Just as true engineers or true musicians are born, not made. An endogenous mystic is somebody who was born with a particular set of talents and communication skills aimed in the directions of philosophy, language, music, mediation (that’s mediation, not meditation), and what I’m going to call for lack of a better term “the geek factor.” True mystics are more interested than most people in offbeat stories and unusual phenomena. They show a life-long interest in stories and experiences that are somewhat unconventional. Not too weird, but a bit weird. You wouldn’t find a mystic teaching an M.B.A. course. But you might find a mystic teaching a Creative Writing course. Most true mystics don’t even know they’re true mystics. Most often they end up as writers. Writers need more solitary time than most people, as mystics do. They need the solitary time so they can pull up from somewhere inside themselves the emotions and the insights they long to express. They’re not being unfriendly or rude or hostile. They just need the quiet time so they can hear themselves think. This is true for both writers and mystics.

A: Well, you can count me in on all scores there. I spent a lot of time indoors reading as a child. And drawing. And watching TV shows that had a science fiction or fantasy element. I loved the first Star Trek series when it first came out. Come to think of it, I still like it.

J: I was like that, too. I was fascinated by the Greek myths. As soon as I learned to read, I read the Iliad. Then the Odyssey. My strict Jewish mother wasn’t pleased. But what could she do? She was a widow with a big family to look after. As long as I stayed on the family property, where I couldn’t get in too much trouble, she put up with my unusual interest in books, books, and more books. I read everything I could get my hands on. I learned to write by studying the authors I most admired.

A: I’m thinkin’ that Plato probably wasn’t one of your favourite authors.

J: I liked plays, actually. I learned a lot by studying Greek poets and playwrights. I liked the comedies of the Greek playwright Menander. Much healthier than the doleful rantings of the Jewish prophets.

A: These aren’t the literary influences one would expect you to describe.

J: No. I had to learn to read and write from the sacred Jewish texts because my mother and my maternal grandfather insisted we be literate in our religious heritage. So I knew my Torah and my Proverbs. But I was a born mystic, and, like all mystics and mystics-in-writer’s-clothing, I was interested in — utterly fascinated by — the fine nuances of character and environment and insight. I wanted to know what made people tick. I wanted to hear how they spoke, how they phrased things, how they interacted with each other. I wanted to know why people fall in love, what they say, what they do. I wanted to absorb all the joys, all the nuances, of life and living.

A: As writers do.

J: Writers can’t help it. It’s what they do. They’re so attuned to the rhythms and patterns of language and dialogue and everyday speech and sensory input and colours and textures and movement and nature and choices and especially change. Mystics are like this, too. Deeply attuned to patterns of communication that other people don’t pay attention to at a conscious level. A mystic is somebody who’s hardwired to pay conscious attention to subtle, nuanced communications from the deepest levels of Creation. Sometimes these communications come from God. Sometimes they come from one’s own soul. Sometimes they come from somebody else’s soul. But basically it’s about conscious observation and understanding of specific kinds of communications. Mystics are tuned to certain bands on the divine radio, if you will. They can pick up stations that most other people aren’t interested in trying to pick up. These “mystical” stations aren’t better than other stations. They’re just . . . well, they’re just different. All the stations on the divine radio are good, because different styles of music are all inherently equal. They’re all inherently equal, but they don’t all sound the same. Because they’re not the same. They’re different but equal.

A: As souls are all different but equal.

J: Yes. A lot of people imagine it would be wonderful and exciting to give over their lives to mysticism. But being a mystic is only wonderful and exciting if you’re hardwired to be a mystic. If you’re like most people — born with intuition, but not born to be either a mystic or a writer — you would find it very isolating, frustrating, even depressing to live as a mystic — as many Christian nuns, monks, clerics, and mystics have discovered to their misfortune. The “Dark Night of the Soul” is not and should not be part of the journey to knowing God. At no time in my life as Jesus did I experience a Dark Night of the Soul. On the contrary, my experience as a mystic gave me only an ever deepening sense that I was in the right place doing the right thing with the right people for the right reasons. I trusted my “beginning.” As a result, I stopped worrying about my “ending.” I lived each day in a state of comfort, peace, trust, and love.

A: The journey was not about the end goal, but about finding your own beginning — knowing yourself as you really are, then going from there.

J: This is the only way to find the freedom that comes from knowing and loving your Divine Parents — to whom I would like to say, once again for the record, you both rock!

* In 1995, Stevan Davies, the same author who published the translation of the Gospel of Thomas I refer to, wrote a very puzzling book called Jesus the Healer (New York: Continuum, 1995) in which he claims that Jesus carried out healings during a trance state that can be called “holy spirit-possession.” He concludes, therefore, that Jesus was a “medium.” If you’ve read my comments on The Blonde Mystic blog about psychic powers and psychic mediums, you’ll be able to guess what I think of Davies’s spirit-possession thesis.

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, apophatic mysticism, Davies (Stevan), ethical mysticism, Gospel of Thomas, historical Jesus, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, Jesus' original writings, makarism, Soul, soul purpose and tagged Christ Archetype, historical Jesus | Leave a Comment

01 Apr 2011

JR29: Eucharist: The Temple Sacrifice

A: One thing I’ve noticed over and over in my studies is the idyllic portrait that’s been painted of the apostle Paul. “Paul was such a good man.” “Paul was such a brave missionary.” “Paul teaches us how to be imitators of Christ.” “Paul was a selfless servant of God.” “Paul was a man I can relate to.” “Jesus is my saviour, but Paul is my hero. I want to be like Paul when I grow up.” I wonder sometimes if the Christians who are saying these things have ever read what Paul’s letters actually say. Paul’s own letters — Romans, First & Second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, First Thessalonians, Philemon, and probably Colossians — reveal clearly that Paul was every bit as interested in “pagan” occult magic and mysticism as the “pagans” were at this time. This wasn’t a “modern” or “progressive” religious movement at all.

“His disciples said to him: Show us the place you are, for it is essential for us to seek it. He responded: He who has ears, let him hear. There is light within a man of light, and it lights up all the world. If it does not shine, it is dark” (Gospel of Thomas 24). This saying can be understood as a central thesis statement in guiding your understanding of Jesus’ original teachings. Among those who believe in dualistic traditions about light versus dark that include good versus evil, purity versus sin, and mind versus body, a quick glance at Thomas 24 suggests that Jesus is talking about the light of divine knowledge and salvation. But only those who haven’t been paying attention to Jesus’ teachings on love, forgiveness, and healing could conclude that, for Jesus, the inner light sought by the disciples is the light of gnosis (occult understanding, illumination, pure wisdom). For Jesus, the highest state of human experience revolved around Divine Love — how to feel it, how to share it, how to be healed by it. You can choose to accept a life of relationship with God, in which case you’ll begin to live a life of wholeness, expansiveness, empathy, and healing (i.e. entering the Kingdom that can’t be “seen” but can be “heard,” or, more properly, emotionally sensed). Or you can choose to block God’s love and forgiveness in your life by allowing ancient occult rituals and beliefs to get in the way of your daily relationship with God (i.e. choosing Paul’s moveable Temple with its occult feast of body and blood). The photo shows a marble head and torso of Dionysos, God of Wine, Roman copy after a Praxitelean work of the 4th century BCE, on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2017.

J: In the first century of the Roman Empire, the idea of gods and goddesses and cult rituals and visions and prophecies and sacrifices and divine fools and chosen oracles and sacred pools and sacred temples and sacred stones and sacred forests was — by far — the dominant understanding of humanity’s relationship with the divine. This way of thinking has become foreign to the modern mind. But it was the context in which I was teaching. It was also the context in which Paul was teaching. In my time as a teacher and healer, I was not only trying to undermine the authority of the Jerusalem Temple — I was also trying to lessen the authority of occult magic in people’s minds. I was trying to say that visions and prophecies and sacrifices get in the way of people’s relationship with God. I wanted to make the experience of faith consistent with the experience of the human senses and the natural world. Some would call it a form of natural theology.

A: If this is what you were trying to do, it doesn’t come across well in the New Testament.

J: No. It can only be seen clearly in the Gospel of Mark. There’s also an indication of it in the Gospel of Thomas and in the parts of the Letter of James I myself wrote. The Kingdom parables that Matthew and Luke cut and pasted from earlier written sources also give an indication of my lack of support for ritual, magic, prophecy, and the like. The images I used in my teaching parables were all very practical, very normal. You won’t find any mystical flying chariots in my teachings.

A: Or any trips to the third heaven (2 Corinthians 12:2). On the other hand, there are lots of references to healing miracles in Mark, and many people today would want to lump healing stories into the same category as other first century superstitions.

J: Well, the honest truth is that healing miracles do take place, and always have, because healing miracles aren’t a form of magic. They’re a form of science. Healing miracles, when they take place, are the result of conscious choices made by God or by God’s healing angels. At a scientific level, God is collapsing probability wave functions and shifting quantum energies by means of non-locality (quantum entanglement) to effect changes at the macroscopic level. In other words, if God decides to give you a “miracle healing” — and only God is in charge of this decision — then God uses perfectly acceptable scientific tools to bring about the healing. This is just a more sophisticated form of what today’s medical researchers are doing with targeted therapies and surgeries performed with computer-aided magnification. Really, it’s just goofy to claim that healing miracles aren’t scientifically possible. Just because the human mind can’t grasp the scientific principles God uses doesn’t mean those principles don’t exist. Modern science gives people more grounds for believing in healing miracles, not fewer.

A: What does a human being have to “do” in order to receive one of these healing miracles? What sort of religious observance will lead to a healing miracle?

J: What I was trying to get at 2,000 years ago was the idea that occult magic gets in the way of the relationship between each person and God. It’s the relationship that’s central to the healing process. It’s the choices that people make around their relationships — all their relationships, not just their relationship with God — that affect the functioning of the body’s built-in healing abilities. Human DNA comes with some pretty amazing built-in “healing subroutines.” If those subroutines are functioning properly, the body can bounce back quite quickly from all sorts of injuries and illnesses. I’m not saying there won’t be scars, and I’m not saying there won’t be psychological and emotional adjustments. Human beings can’t escape occasional illness or eventual death. (Though to listen to Paul, you might think you can.) On the other hand, you can make the most of your DNA package. You can make the most of your human biology. You can work with God rather than against God towards a state of healing.

A: I continue to be amazed that Paul’s silence on the question of healing and healing miracles doesn’t bother today’s orthodox Christians.

J: The author of Luke-Acts did a brilliant job of making it seem that Paul’s spiritual concerns were the same as my spiritual concerns. Acts makes it seem that Paul cared about healing the disadvantaged in society. Paul’s own words say otherwise.

A: In 1 Corinthians 11:23-30, we see Paul instituting the Eucharist. In his own words, Paul says he received a revelation from the Lord in which you supposedly commanded your faithful followers to eat bread in remembrance of you and to drink the cup which is “the new covenant in [his] blood.” How do your respond to that?

J: The same way I respond to all Temple sacrifices: they gotta go.

A: You’re implying that Paul’s Eucharist is a Temple sacrifice?

J: I’m saying it right out loud. I’m saying that Rabbiniic Judaism freed itself from the horror of Temple sacrifices more than 1,900 years ago, and now it’s time for Christianity to follow suit. Paul’s mystical Eucharist is nothing more than an extension of Paul’s Temple theology. First he tells people that if they have blind faith in Christ, the Temple will come to them. Then he institutes a classic Temple sacrifice — in this case the sacred Messianic bread and wine of the Essenes (1QS 6 and 1QSa). This would have made perfect sense to a first century audience steeped in occult magic — you go to a Temple to offer a sacrifice. Logically, however, you can’t take an external sacrifice to the Temple of the Spirit if the Temple is already inside you. So to keep the Temple clean and make it habitable for the Spirit (so that the Spirit can come in and bring you lots of special spiritual goodies) you have to ingest the sacrifice. You have to drink holy blood and eat holy flesh because nothing else in the corrupt material world is powerful enough to purify your inner Temple.

A: But this inner Temple isn’t really “you.” It’s something that originated outside of you — something that God gives and God can take away. It’s like a surgical implant, a pacemaker or a stent or a pin in a broken hip. Right?

J: Exactly. It’s a Gnostic idea. An occult idea. Paul’s Eucharist is a pagan ritual. A cult ritual. A vampiric ritual. It has nothing to with “remembrance” and everything to do with occult power over evil forces. The very idea of drinking blood would have offended and horrified mainstream Jews, including me and my followers. Even John the Baptist doesn’t speak of the Eucharist in his gospel. Paul’s Eucharist crossed a big line.

A: And I suppose Mark confronted this very issue in his gospel?

J: Oh yes. Most definitely.

A: Good. Then I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts on that topic.

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Posted in "4 S's", Essenes, faith, First Corinthians, Gnosticism, healing miracles, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, Letter of James, Mark vs Paul, occult themes, Paul's teachings and tagged Kingdom teachings, Mark vs Paul | 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

13 Feb 2011

JR9: Jesus Explains "The Kingdom"

A: You told me several years ago that you wrote parts of the Letter of James yourself — specifically James 1:2-27, James 2:1-8, and James 3:1-18 — and that after your death your older brother James added the remaining verses to blunt the effect of your writings and make them more “pious.” Yesterday I was checking something in the Letter of James, and I couldn’t help smiling. What you wrote 2,000 years ago sounds an awful lot like what you said for the record last Wednesday. Do you mind if I put in a quote from James?

J: Knock yourself out.

A: Okay. Here’s the NRSV translation of James 2:1-8a, with a couple of changes in emphasis. Here goes:

“My brothers, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in God? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, ‘Have a seat here, please,’ while to the one who is poor you say, ‘Stand there,’ or ‘Sit at my feet,’ have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and becomes judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you? You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'”

J: You give them one little inviolable spiritual law to follow, and they argue with you until you’re blue in the face and dead in the ground. It’s 2,000 years since I said that, and a huge number of Christians still don’t get it — you can’t love your neighbour and keep your status addiction, too. You have to make a choice.

A: There are almost no Christians who believe you wrote these verses yourself. Few theologians pay attention to the Letter of James. It doesn’t have any real “Christology” in it. To them, it’s little more than a typical 1st century wisdom sermon. Martin Luther hated this letter because it seems to deny Paul’s doctrine of “justification by faith.” Luther called it “an epistle of straw,” and would have had it removed from the Protestant canon if he could have.

J: There you go. More proof for the theory that Paul and I had very different things to say about God.

A: Tell me what you meant when you described the poor as “heirs of the kingdom.”

J: That goes to the heart of my teachings.

A: I know.

J (grinning): No point beating around the bush, eh?

A: Exactly my thought.

J: Well, I guess you could say that I was trying to be a good teacher. By that I mean I was doing my best to explain complex ideas in a useful, useable way. Good teaching often involves finding the right image, the right metaphor for the group you’re teaching. The right metaphor can open up doors in a student’s mind, help her find the connection between what she already knows and what she’s learning. You can try to invent new terms, new words for a complex idea. Scholars often do this. Or you can try to work with existing vocabulary and use it in new ways. I opted for the latter.

A: So you chose the word “kingdom” because of the symbolism attached to it at the time.

J: Well, here’s where it gets confusing. The word “kingdom” by itself was not the exact image I chose — not that word by itself, anyway. But, like all people, I was sometimes guilty of shortening things for the sake of convenience. The actual phrase I chose was “basileia ton ouranon” — Koine Greek for “kingdom of the heavens.” Eventually, when I was speaking or writing for my own community, I called it “the kingdom” for short. But by then it was understood what I meant.

A: Which was . . . ?

J: I was trying to express the idea that each individual person should think of themselves as a whole and complete entity, lacking nothing as far as God was concerned. A tiny kingdom of “selfhood” unto themselves. An inviolable kingdom. A worthy kingdom. A very small kingdom, to be sure, but one they had full rights over as its “sovereign.” It’s about boundary issues, really. Today’s teachers and psychologists use the phrase “boundary issues.” I used the phrase “kingdom of the heavens.” But it’s the same idea exactly. It’s the idea that your body and your mind and your heart belong to nobody but you. Therefore, it’s wrong to transgress those boundaries. It’s wrong for you to invade somebody else’s body, mind, and heart, just as it’s wrong for them to invade yours. It’s about human dignity, human worth. It’s about seeing each individual as, well, as . . .

A: As an individual?

J: Yes. It’s about seeing each individual as an individual, instead of seeing them as property or as a means to an end.

A: Status addicts. Psychopaths. Narcissists. People suffering from these disorders can’t see other people as they really are — as other people. They tend to see them as objects to be used.

J: That ideal — if you can call it that — was ingrained in the culture of my time. People were so used to hearing about “the chosen” and “the judged” in society that they weren’t questioning the wrongness of it. They had little mental framework, little understanding of the idea that slavery was a violation of the soul. Most of the people I worked with in my ministry felt like the proverbial dog who’s been kicked. The dog is at the bottom of a long list of people kicking each other according to rank. The dog has the least rank, so he gets kicked the hardest. That’s the mentality I was facing in Galilee.

A: You were facing an uphill battle trying to persuade your students that they were worthy of God’s love and forgiveness — just as worthy as the priests in Jerusalem.

J: It’s not easy to overcome the conditioning of a lifetime. They weren’t inclined to believe me. These were people of faith. They didn’t want to anger God. They wanted to show God their obedience and faith. They were suspicious of me for a long time.

A: What turned the tide?

J: In the end, it was about trust and compassion, I guess you could say. I stuck to my guns. I did what I said I would do. I wasn’t a hypocrite — that alone earned me a lot of trust. I treated people fairly and respectfully the way I thought God wanted me to. Stuff happened.

A: Stuff happened? Like what stuff? What happened?

J: Oh, you know. Healings. Changes. Stuff like that.

A: You mean like healing miracles? That kind of stuff?

J: Well, yes, if you want to get right down to it, I suppose you could describe it that way.

A: Healing miracles began to take place, and the people around you — the poor and disadvantaged of Galilee — began to notice.

J (nodding yes): [Nods without speaking]

A: Were you the source of the healing miracles? Did you yourself heal them?

J: No. Never. No human being has that kind of power, that kind of ability. Healing miracles, when they take place, come from God. Only from God and God’s healing angels. I was only a facilitator, if you will. A human being people could see and touch with their own senses. My job was to reassure them, comfort them, encourage them to trust. The actual healing was God’s work. And I said so. Loudly. As often as I could. I never claimed to be a chosen prophet, and I yelled at anybody who tried to call me the Messiah. I clearly understood that my role — my task as a human being who’d been given many advantages during my youth — was to help people feel okay about receiving God’s love and comfort and healing. If I was helpful in my role as a physician — suggesting teas and salves and other sorts of medical treatments — it was only because God was guiding me in my work. I listened carefully to what God’s healing angels were saying (that’s where it’s handy to be a practising mystic), and I did what they suggested to me. I wasn’t being “forced” to listen to my angels. I wanted to listen to my angels, and I wanted to trust their advice. That was my choice — my own free will. They’re damned smart, and they had some wonderful healing suggestions.

A: Can you give any examples of their advice?

J: Gosh. They had tons of medical insights. Things like, “Tell that woman she has to eat orange vegetables.” Of course, they knew — although I didn’t — that orange vegetables contain Vitamin A, important for normal vision. Two thousand years ago, that was a miracle. They warned me, as well, about the dangers of lead. Lead was used in those days in many practical ways because of its low melting point and malleability. “Stay away from food vessels or utensils made of lead or pewter,” they said. Good advice, that.

A: And pewtersmiths have stopped making pewter with lead.

“A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.’ But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed in the country; and people came to him from every quarter” (Mark 1: 40 – 45). Photo credit JAT 2016.

J: The most important thing my angels taught me, however, was to ignore the standard Temple teachings about illness and healing. To be honest, my angels had nothing nice to say about traditional purity laws. They told me it was okay — by that I mean medically safe — to ignore the “do not touch” laws about skin diseases, bodily fluids, and dietary restrictions. My angels said to me, “Touch, touch!” So I touched. I looked in people’s eyes when they were sick. I held their hands. I told them their angels were with them. I told them God was with them. Any physician worth his or her salt will know what this means to a frightened patient. The relationship between physician and patient is integral to the healing process.

A: So you took the healing process away from the designated Jerusalem priests and put it into the hands of God. You made the healing process both more scientific and more compassionate. Which somehow led to more miracles.

J (nodding yes): Um hum.

A: I can just imagine how furious the priests would have been that people were getting better from eating carrots instead of from giving sacrifices at the Temple.

J: The fact that I was descended from priests on my mother’s side didn’t help the situation any.

A: They must have been very upset when they started to hear rumours about your healing ministry — a son of priests performing unsanctioned healings outside the Temple precincts.

J: That would be an understatement.

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Posted in boundary issues, ethical mysticism, faith, healing, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, Kingdom teachings, Law (Nomos), Letter of James, slavery, Soul, status addiction, trust and tagged historical Jesus, Kingdom teachings | 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

The Spiral Path

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JR59: News of the World: "New Lamps For Old"

JR55: Healing: The Easy Way and the Hard Way

JR44: Mark’s Themes of Understanding and Strength

JR31: Jesus, the Man Who Was a Mystic

JR29: Eucharist: The Temple Sacrifice

JR17: Interpreting Jesus’ Parables: Some Guidelines

JR16: Riddles in the Gospel of Thomas

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JR6: John and the Gospel of Thomas

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