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01 Sep 2012

RS27: The Way, the Truth, and the Life

New Brunswick (c) Jamie MacDonald 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A: Come on. That’s way too simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A: Including the mysterious role of forgiveness.

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

A: Like an angel Internet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted in Divine Love, Gospel of Mark, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Matthew's and Luke's intent, Realspiritik, relationship with God and tagged brain-soul connection, ethical mysticism | Leave a Comment

02 Aug 2011

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

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

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

A: Which you were not.

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

A: Paul talks about punishments.

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

A: Because they have no conscience.

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

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

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

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

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

A: It’s real life, that’s for sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A: What was that alternate version?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A: Actions speak more loudly than words.

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

A: Tell me about the Idol Bread.

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

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

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

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

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

04 May 2011

JR36: Saying 56 in the Gospel of Thomas

A: When we wrote last time (“Father of Lights, Mother of Breath”), I ran out of time, and we didn’t get a chance to return to the question of Saying 56 in the Gospel of Thomas. I was hoping we could continue that discussion. (For the record, Stevan Davies translates Saying 56 as “Jesus said: Whoever has known the world has found a corpse; whoever has found that corpse, the world is not worthy of him.)

J: I can’t help noticing the irony of a person who’s “alive” having a discussion with a person who’s “dead” about the question of “alive versus dead.”

A (rolling eyes): Very funny. I prefer to call you “molecularly challenged.”

J: Hey — I left some bones behind when I died. Traces of them are sitting in a stone ossuary in a warehouse owned by the Israel Antiquities Authority. Kinda reminds me of the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

A: The IAA can have them. I somehow doubt you’re going to be needing them again.

J: Well, you know, there are still people on the planet today who believe in the concept of bodily resurrection on the Day of Judgment. According to that way of thinking, I might actually need to retrieve my bones so I’ll be complete on the final day of judgment.

A: Hey! You’re not supposed to have any bones. According to Luke, you ascended bodily into heaven — at least once, maybe twice! (Luke 24:51 and Acts 1:1-11). Prophets who are “beamed up” aren’t supposed to leave body parts behind. That’s the whole idea.

J: Nobody gets out of a human life “alive.” At some point, the biological body reaches its built-in limits, and the soul returns to God in soul form. There’s no ascension. Never has been, never will be. Luke is lying.

A: Maybe Luke just didn’t understand the science of death. Maybe he was doing his best to explain something he didn’t understand.

J (shaking his head): Luke was lying. On purpose. If Luke had been sincere and well-meaning — if misguided — he would have to stuck to one story about my ascension. But one man — the man we’re calling Luke — wrote two scrolls together to tell one continuous story. He wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles as a two-part story. The Gospel finishes in Bethany, the hometown of Lazarus (who was the subject of a miraculous healing), and the last thing we hear is about is the disciples. Apparently, they obediently returned to Jerusalem to continually pray.

A: Yeah, like that was gonna happen.

A major problem for the spread of Pauline Christianity among Jews and Gentiles was the Eucharistic ritual instituted by Paul. A lot of people didn’t like the idea of ritualistically eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a divine being. So one of Luke’s jobs, when he wrote the two-part Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles, was to soften the impact of it for newcomers, while preserving Paul’s occult meaning for those who were “in the know.” What you see at the end of Luke’s Gospel and the beginning of Acts is a slyly written (and entirely fictitious) account of twelve men who are “chosen” for the special privilege of receiving the Cloak of Glory from the Holy Spirit after they’ve properly prepared themselves for 40 days in the presence of the mystical body of Christ. They eat from the mystical body in order to purify themselves for the coming baptism of fire on Pentecost. Then, on the appointed day, the twelve (well, thirteen, if you count Paul’s later baptism of fire) suddenly receive the intense fire of Glory that Luke says was promised to the twelve by God through Jesus. After that, nobody is allowed to challenge the authority of the apostles. Please note that if you’re having trouble following this narrative in its established biblical form, there’s a good reason for that: the secret knowledge wasn’t meant to be easily understood by everyone. Interestingly, though, the themes of this secret knowledge have been found in other religious traditions, too. For instance, in this photo of the Tantric Buddhist deity Acala, “the Immovable One,” he is braced by the fiery tongues of phoenix flame — much like the fire delivered to the apostles at Pentecost. Who doesn’t like a really good bonfire when Divine Power is the prize? This wooden sculpture is on display at the British Museum. Photo credit JAT 2023.

J: Meanwhile, when you open up the book of Acts, which picks up where Luke left off, you get a completely different story from the same author. In Acts, he claims that after my suffering I spent 40 days with my chosen apostles in Jerusalem, and then was lifted up by a cloud from the Mount of Olives (which is just to the east of Jerusalem’s city walls). The Mount of Olives is closer to Jerusalem than Bethany, the “authentic” site of my so-called Easter ascension in the Gospel. Luke also adds two mysterious men in white robes to the Acts version of the story. These two sound suspiciously like the two men in dazzling clothes who appear in Luke’s account of the tomb scene (Luke 24:4). Luke is playing fast and loose with the details — an easy mistake for fiction writers to make.

A: Well, as you and I have discussed, Luke was trying very hard to sew together the Gospel of Mark and the letters of Paul. Mark puts a lot of focus on the Mount of Olives — a place that was most definitely not Mount Zion, not the site of the sacred Temple. Luke probably needed a way to explain away Mark’s focus on the non-sacred, non-pure, non-holy Mount of Olives.

J: You wanna bet the Mount of Olives was non-pure! It was littered with tombs. Religious law dictated that no one could be buried within a residence or within the city walls, so it was the custom to bury people in the hills outside the city walls. To get from the city gates of Jerusalem to the top of the Mount of Olives, you had to pass by a number of tombs and mausoleums. If you got too close to death, though, you were considered ritually impure, and you had to go through a cleansing and purification process once you got back to the city — especially during a big religious festival. Mark’s Jewish audience would have understood this. They would have wondered, when they read Mark, why there was no concern about contamination. They would have wondered why the Mount of Olives became the site of important events when the purified Temple precincts were so close by. It would have defied their expectations about death and purity and piety.

A: This was easier to understand when the Temple was still standing.

J: Yes. It would have made a lot of sense in the context of Herod’s humongous Temple complex. It started to make less sense, though, after the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 CE.

A: A fact that Luke took advantage of.

J: Yes.

A: Mark doesn’t include the saying from the Gospel of Thomas about corpses (saying 56), but Mark’s portrayal of you shows a man whose least important concern is ritual purity — not what you’d expect at all from a pious Jew, in contrast to Matthew’s claim about you (Matthew 5:17: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”)

J: Matthew says this, but Mark says the opposite.

A: Not in so many words, but by showing your ongoing choices and actions.

J: Later Christian interpreters wanted to believe that God had given me special powers over demons and sin and death, and this is how they understood Mark’s account of my ministry. But this isn’t what I taught. I didn’t have the same assumptions about life and death that most of my peers had. It’s not that I had special powers over life and death — it’s simply that I wasn’t afraid of life or death. I wasn’t afraid to “live” and I wasn’t afraid to “die.” I wasn’t afraid to embrace difficult emotions. I wasn’t afraid to trust God. Maybe to some of the people around me it seemed that I had special powers, but I didn’t. All I had was maturity — the courage to accept the things I couldn’t change, the courage to accept the things I could change, and the wisdom to know the difference.

A: The Serenity Prayer.

J: Yes. It seemed to me that Creation is much more like a rainbow than like night-versus-day. It seemed to me that the world I lived in was not “evil” and “corrupt,” as many occult philosophers had said. (Including the Jewish sect of Essenes.) Yes, there were corpses, it’s true. People died. Other creatures died. Beautiful flowers died. But obviously death led to new life, and wasn’t to be feared. Death wasn’t the enemy. Fear of the self was the enemy. Fear of trusting God, fear of trusting emotions such as love and grief, were the obstacles between individuals and God.

To get over those fears, you have to face your initial fears about death — about “corpses.” You have to begin to see the world — Creation — in a new, more positive way, and accept — even love in a sad sort of way — the corpses. You have to stop spending so much time worrying about your death, because it’s gonna happen whether you like it or not, and no religious ritual can stop it. Accept that it’s going to happen, then focus on what you’re doing today. Focus on the Kingdom of today. Build the love, build the relationships, build the trust. Physical bodies come and go, but love really does live on.

“My friends, 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” (James 1:2-4). Photo credit JAT 2017.

A: Some people might take that as an endorsement of hedonistic behaviours or suicidal behaviours, since, in your words, death isn’t to be feared.

J: There’s a big difference between saying “death isn’t to be feared” and saying “death is to be avidly pursued.” If you avidly pursue death, it means you’ve chosen to avidly reject life — the living of life to its fullest potential. Trusting in God means that you trust you’re here on Earth for a reason, and you trust that when it’s your time God will take you Home. What you do with the time in between depends on how you choose to view Creation. Is God’s Creation a good creation, a place of rainbows where people can help each other heal? Or is God’s Creation an evil “night” that prevents you from ever knowing the pure light of “day”?

A: What about those who’ve chosen to view Creation as an evil place of suffering, and are now so full of pain and depression that they can’t take it anymore? What happens to those who commit suicide?

J: God the Mother and God the Father take them Home and heal them as they do all their children. There is no such thing as purgatory or hell for a person who commits suicide. On the other hand, our divine parents weep deeply when families, friends, and communities create the kind of pain and suffering that makes people want to kill themselves. There would be fewer tears for everyone if more human beings would take responsibility for the harmful choices they themselves make.

A: And learn from those mistakes.

J: Absolutely. It’s not good enough to simply confess the mistake. It’s important to confess the mistakes, but people also have to try to learn from their mistakes. They have to be willing to try to change. They have to let go of their stubbornness and their refusal to admit they’re capable of change.

A: Easier said than done.

-3

Posted in Essenes, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Thomas, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Law (Nomos), life and death, Mark vs Paul, Matthew's and Luke's intent, Paul vs Jesus, relationship with God, Talpiot Tomb and tagged Jesus vs Paul, Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

09 Mar 2011

JR19: The Beatitudes of Luke

A: People are often confused about the meaning of your statements on wealth and poverty. There’s a long history of Christians deciding to “imitate you” by giving up all their possessions and taking vows of poverty (among other vows). How do you respond to this interpretation of your teachings?

J: It’s an incorrect interpretation.

A: In what way?

J: Psychologically and spiritually, it’s an incorrect interpretation. There’s no truth to the widespread belief that asceticism is the correct path to knowing God. Asceticism, including the modified form of asceticism preached by the monastic founder Benedict, is an ancient spiritual practice, to be sure, but it’s a dangerous one. It’s dangerous to the human body and the human brain. Therefore it gets in the way of connection with God. I don’t recommend ascetism today. I didn’t recommend asceticism 2,000 years ago.

Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in the Kingdom within; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.” (Luke 6:22-26, translation from The New Oxford Annotated NRSV, 3rd Ed.) Photo credit Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

A: The Beatitudes and Woes in Luke [Luke 6:20-26] seem to suggest otherwise. The footnotes in the New Oxford Annotated NRSV state that “the focus [in the beatitudes] is on economic and social conditions, not spiritual states” (p. 107 NT).

J: Commentators interpret the Lukan beatitudes this way because the commentators themselves have a dualistic understanding of humanity. There’s a common belief that economic and social conditions can be separated from spiritual states. But they can’t. They’ve always been intertwined. There’s no such thing as a spiritual state that’s separate and distinct from economic and social realities. It’s one of the great myths of religion — the idea that people can dissociate themselves from their own thoughts, needs, feelings, and relationships in order to get closer to God. It’s pure crap. Abusive, damaging crap.

A: Explain.

J: The only path to connecting with God while living as a human being is to become a Whole Brain Thinker. A Whole Brain Thinker is a person who makes balanced choices, holistic choices each day. A Whole Brain Thinker engages all parts of the brain God gave him. He uses his emotions in a balanced, compassionate way. He uses his logic and memory to balance his heart. He honours and respects the needs of his physical body, neither denying himself food nor overindulging at the expense of his physical health. He incorporates his spiritual life into his regular daily life, rather than setting aside just one or two hours per week to attend religious services. He struggles each day to find the balance among all these competing aspects of his true self, but he tries his best because that’s the only path open to a self-realized person. To a person who has found the Kingdom.

A: Are there any measurable benefits to such a path? Any positive outcomes? Any sources of spiritual hope?

J: There are many measurable benefits. Too many to count, in fact. I can’t give a precise list, because each person is different, each soul is different, so there’s variation from person to person. But there are some overall patterns that can be described. There are overall improvements to physical health, mental health, family relationships, and community relationships that develop automatically when individuals start to take control of their own choices, their own thoughts and feelings. Thousands of researchers in hundreds of different fields would back me up on this one.

A: I love it when scientific research backs up the Divine Truth!

J: One area that gets very little research attention is the role of brain health in facilitating the experience of trust. One of the first emotions to get “blocked” in the angry brain, in the addicted brain, is trust. Trust is a complex soul emotion. It’s interwoven with relationships in the soul and in the childhood brain. It’s also interwoven with the physical body through ongoing touch — respectful touch, appropriate touch, sentimental touch. There’s a reason that folk wisdom recommends daily hugs. Hugs are important. Respectful hugs — by that I mean non-sexualized hugs — are hugely important to people’s health. On the other hand, abusive contact, abusive touch has the opposite effect on people’s biology. It damages brain cells. Stress hormones released in the body damage the brain cells of both the abuser and the abusee. A survivor of childhood abuse is likely to grow up unable to trust. Without the emotion of trust, there’s no basis for mature relationship. There’s no basis for mature relationship with yourself or with anybody else. It means you have no foundation for a relationship with God.

A: Because you need to feel trust in order to feel faith. Genuine faith.

J (nodding): Genuine faith is founded on a person’s ability to trust that God actually knows what they’re doing! If you aren’t able to trust God, then you’re always going to be second-guessing God, getting angry with God. You’re always going to be judging God. People don’t like to admit that they’re judging God, but many Christians do it. Every single day they draw up lists of God’s “crimes” of omission and commission. You wouldn’t believe the number of angry prayers God gets every day.

A: So how does all this relate to the message of the Lukan beatitudes?

J: The issue here is the interconnection between trust and faith on the one hand, and anger and addiction on the other hand. The brain isn’t wired — nor should it be — to allow human beings to live a life of trust and faith AND anger and addiction. People have to make a choice. They have to make a choice between living a life of trust and faith — a life where they feel alive every day instead of dead inside, empty inside — OR living a life of anger and addiction. It’s an unfortunate fact that once people become addicted to status, physiologically addicted to the dopamine release of “status hits,” they tend to want to stick with their “drug of choice.” They won’t give it up until they decide their addiction is causing harm. They have to stop denying the harm created by the addiction. So let me ask you . . . how many people do you know who’ve voluntarily given up their status for the sake of inner life, inner freedom, inner joy?

A: I know several people who’ve lost their status involuntarily — not through choice, but through circumstance. Stock market losses. Divorce. Illness. Long-term disability. That sort of thing.

J: You know a number of people with money, status, privilege, possessions. How would you say they’re doing on the “inner joy” scale?

A: Many aren’t doing well. They’re getting clinically depressed. They’re developing chronic health problems — a lot of autoimmune stuff. Sleep disorders. Chronic pain. Unrelenting stress.

J: Right. These responses to stress and status addiction aren’t new. They’ve been around for as long as homo sapiens sapiens has been biologically suspectible to status addiction.

A: The Lukan Woes — Luke 6:24-26 — look different when read in the context you’ve just described. The “consolation” and the “hunger” and the “mourning and weeping” sound a lot like clinical depression.

J: Clinical depression has a genetic component, but it’s also intertwined with internal stresses and external stresses. Sometimes you can’t do anything about the external stresses — things like the Dow Jones average. But the internal stresses have an effect on clinical depression, too. People can really stress themselves out by making choices that harm themselves and harm others. There’s a reason that people with clinical depression respond best to a treatment course that involves both appropriate antidepressant medication AND certain kinds of effective psychotherapy. The medication helps your brain build new “wiring,” which is necessary to the healing process, while the psychotherapy can help you recognize your harmful choices and learn to make more loving choices.

A: Nothing new there as far as an empathetic psychiatrist is concerned.

J: Exactly. And Christianity should jump onto the same page with the empathetic psychiatrists. It’s not money that’s the root of all evil. Money builds schools, hospitals, roads, etc., etc., etc.

A: Whereas status addiction builds huge monuments, huge reputations, huge armies, and professional sports teams.

J: Jared Diamond thinks that civilizations collapse when they harm their own environment and starve themselves to death. But people who are using their brains in holistic, balanced ways have too much common sense to destroy their own environment. Only serious status addicts are stupid enough to destroy their own sustenance for the sake of building a bigger, better Temple.

A: The history of collapse in a nutshell.

J: God won’t back up status-addicted choices. God would rather bring people Home to heal them and release them from the pain of status addiction than leave them in a morass of profound abuse. And make no mistake — religion based on status addiction is profoundly abusive.

A: Including Pauline Christianity. Its doctrines, its teachings.

J: If the shoe fits . . .

-3

Posted in dualism, faith, healing, Jesus Redux, Kingdom teachings, makarism, Matthew's and Luke's intent, religion and mental Illness, Son of Man, spiritual practices, status addiction, trust, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

14 Feb 2011

JR10: Son of David or House of David?

A: You’ve said more than once that you were the son of a wealthy, aristocratic family, a descendant of priests. Were you a descendant of King David? Was your father “of the house of David,” as Luke says in Luke 1:27?

J: This is the great thing about modern socio-historical criticism of ancient religious texts. Today’s research gives so many terrific, irrefutable facts that contradict the Church’s teachings. It’s like a game of Battleship, blowing up beloved traditions and sacred doctrines one piece at a time.

A: So I’m thinking the answer to my question is “No”?

J: With a capital “N.” There is no way — no possible way — that the Jewish hierarchy or the Roman hierarchy would have allowed a male with a proveable link to the lineage of David to survive, let alone go around preaching a radical doctrine about God. That lineage was dead. Long gone. Jesus scholars trace the last reference to a verifiable descendant of David in Hebrew scripture to the 5th century BCE Book of Ezra-Nehemiah. After that, the Jewish texts are silent on David’s genealogy.

A: This appeared to be no obstacle to the writers of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. Matthew and Luke both insist you’re an actual descendant of David, and give you a genealogy to prove it.

J: Yes, but they don’t give the same genealogy, which has to make you wonder . . . could it be possible these men made it up? [Voice dripping with facetious humour.]

A: You mean, invented the genealogy. Lied about it.

J: Well, there’s certainly no truth to either of their genealogies.

A: If a written record of David’s line of descent had actually existed in the first century, where would it have been kept?

J: In Jerusalem. In the Temple. The records of bloodlines for the high priests and the other priests were highly valuable documents. They were carefully preserved. Any record of Judah’s or Israel’s ancient kings would also have been preserved. During the Second Temple period, the safest storehouse for valuables was the Temple and its precincts. The originals were kept there.

“His disciples said to him, ‘Who are you to say these things to us?’ [Jesus replied]: ‘You do not know who I am from what I say to you. Rather, you have become like the Jewish people who love the tree but hate its fruit, or they love the fruit but hate the tree'” (Gospel of Thomas 43). In this saying, Jesus is referring to the struggle within 1st century Judaism to reconcile opposing claims about authority. Some taught that bloodline was the key. Others taught that rigorous knowledge and obedience to the Law was the key. Jesus himself rejected both these arguments, even though he came from a priestly family and was highly educated. He taught a holistic approach wherein the ability to love God and to love other people took precedence over both bloodline and advanced study of scripture. Photo credit Hemera Technologies 2001-2003.

A: But in 70 CE, the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple. Any scrolls that were saved were probably taken into hiding. Making them hard to check, hard to verify — at least until the political situation had settled down.

J: A fact that “Matthew” and “Luke” both took advantage of. Both of them wrote after the Temple was destroyed. “Mark” wrote just beforehand. Mark was very careful not to make any claims about my background that could easily be disproved.

A: Yet in the Gospel of Mark, there’s reference to you as “the son of David.” How do you explain that?

J: That’s an easy one. Mark never says that I’m from the “House of David.” Mark says that a blind beggar named Bartimaeus called out to me as the “son of David.” The short and simple answer — plain as can be — is that “House of David” and “son of David” mean two completely different things.

A: Explain.

J: To claim to be of the “House of David” is to make a genealogical claim — a claim to be a direct blood descendant of a former king. It’s like saying, “I’m descended from King Henry VIII” or “I’m descended from Queen Elizabeth I.”

A: Except that everybody knows Queen Elizabeth I died without children, without direct heirs. So anybody making that claim would have a hell of a time proving it to historians and archivists.

J: Same thing with King David. If descendants of King David were still known, still living, where were they when the Hasmoneans — the so-called Maccabeans — claimed both the High Priesthood and the de facto Kingship of Judea in the 2nd century BCE? Why didn’t the Davidic family step forward then to reassert their “claim” to the throne? Or when Pompey invaded in 63 BCE and made Judea a Roman protectorate? Or when Augustine officially turned the Roman Republic into an Empire with the Emperor as divinely appointed ruler and keeper of the Pax Romana in Judea, (as well as everywhere else)? It’s just not historically realistic to believe there really was a “House of David” by the first century of the common era.

A: So when “Matthew” and “Luke” made their claims about your ancestry, we should understand these as fictional claims — about as meaningful and factual as it would seem to us today if Stephen Harper were to say he’s a direct descendant of King Arthur of the Round Table. Pure hype.

J: You bet. On the other hand, if Stephen Harper were to liken himself symbolically or metaphorically to King Arthur — if he were to say he’s following the inspiration of his hero King Arthur — then people would respond differently.

A: It never hurts for a politician to model himself after a popular hero.

J: And in the 1st century CE, David was a popular folk hero. Not David the King, but David the humble shepherd lad who brought down the oppressor Goliath with one well-aimed blow of a stone.

A: Plus a swift sword to the neck.

J: People often forget that just as there are two different versions of the Creation story in Genesis, there are two different versions of the early David story in First Samuel, and there are two strikingly different “images” of David in the Bible — one humble, one royal. Which version is going to appeal more to regular folk oppressed by their leaders, both domestic and foreign?

A: The version where David is the little guy up against the big, mean, nasty Goliath.

J: Or the big, mean, nasty Herodian Temple, in my case.

A: It was a metaphor, then. A reference to the heroic folk tale of David. A reminder that God doesn’t always choose “the big guy” or “the firstborn son.”

J: Regular people didn’t love David because he was a king. Regular people loved David — the young David, the innocent David — because they could relate to him. David was a popular symbol amongst the slaves and the hard-working lower classes who longed to be freed from the cruelty of unjust leaders.

A: Huh. Well, as the Staples commercial says, “That was easy.”

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Posted in Bible, Book of Genesis, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, Matthew's and Luke's intent and tagged historical Jesus | 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

03 Dec 2010

CC47: Hidden in Plain Sight: The Cunning of Paul

“Toews2010WinterOlympics” from Wikimedia Commons – author Rosie Perera – originally posted to Flickr as G9-20100221-3457

You may recall that in an earlier post I put forward the thesis that the Gospel of Mark was written as a direct rebuttal of Paul’s First Corinthians (“The Gospel of Mark as a Rebuttal of First Corinthians,” August 18, 2010). Today I’d like to talk about that in more detail.*

Maybe you’re thinking that sounds pretty boring, so you’ll go read the sports page for a little blow-by-blow excitement. Bear with me, though. This story is packed with more drama than an NHL brawl combined with a daytime Soap Opera.

On one side, we have Team Salvation (blue and white). Team Salvation comes onto the ice first with the biggest, meanest lines you’d ever want to see. Paul is the Captain. His best forward is Luke and his strongest defenceman is Matthew. These guys have stamina and brute strength in spades. They’re not nimble. They’re not fast. Their wrist shot sucks. Their overall strategy is to slam the other team into the boards, start fights, and keep the puck moving fast so the audience has trouble following the play. They’ve done this many times before, and they’re the crowd favourite, so they’re convinced their strategy will work.

On the other side, we have a rookie team, Team Redemption (red and black). Team Redemption is late getting on the ice. Mark is the Captain. His forwards are unknown draft picks. But they’re fast and smart and they skate and stickhandle like a young Wayne Gretsky. Team Redemption has only one line, but they play with everything they’ve got. They put their heart and soul into the game.

Paul scores an easy first goal, as he expected, but then Mark gets the puck. Mark is not like any of the opponents Paul has played before. Paul keeps trying to check him, but Mark seems to have wings on his skates, and he dekes the goalie to score three quick goals. Paul starts a fight and slams Mark’s head into the boards. Mark won’t quit. So Matthew gets the puck and moves the play across the centre line. It’s offside, but the refs don’t call it because they’re paid on the sly by Paul’s team. Mark’s wingers retrieve the puck, score another goal with a beautiful slap shot. Paul is furious. He tells Luke to kill the clock until Team Redemption’s line drops from exhaustion. Which they do.

Just for the thrill of it, Paul pummels every red jersey who drops to the ice.

Okay. That’s the gameplay for the 1st century battle between Paul’s team and Mark’s team. Only the stakes were much higher for Paul and Mark, and the play was much more brutal than anything you’d see in a 1980’s NHL game.

And you thought the New Testament was talking about boring ol’ topics like peace, love, and hope!

The biblical book known as First Corinthians is a letter that was written by a confident “team captain.” You can tell by the tone of the letter that Paul believes his preaching mission is going fairly well, despite some kinks that have be worked out with the Christian groups who live in the Greek city of Corinth. He’s sure of his own authority. He describes himself in glowing terms as “like a master builder [who] laid a foundation” (1 Cor. 3:10). “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.”

In other words, Paul, the master builder, has chosen as the foundation for all his authority, all his church building, and all his theology one man whom he calls Jesus Christ. This man Jesus is already dead. So Paul figures he can use this man’s name and this man’s “face” with impunity.

For a while, he gets away with it. (Goal #1). But he doesn’t count on a direct challenge to his fabricated claim about “the Christ.” He doesn’t count on copies of his letter to the Corinthians ending up in Palestine. He doesn’t count on somebody — a somebody who knows a lot about the actual Jesus in question — reading the copied letter and objecting vehemently to the content. He doesn’t count on this somebody writing a searing point-by-point rebuttal of Paul’s claims. He doesn’t count on the courage of a man who wants to tell the truth about the life and teachings of Jesus son of Joseph.

By the time Mark writes his rebuttal in the early to mid 60’s (a few years before the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple), Paul himself can’t do anything about it. (He seems to have stopped writing in the late 50’s, and we don’t know for certain what happened to him.) But his successors can do something to undermine the dangerous assertions made by Mark. They can take Mark’s manuscript and do a hatchet job on it, cutting and pasting the various fragments into new compositions (the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Luke), new compositions that change the original meaning and intent of Mark’s portrayal of Jesus. They can try to force a blue and white jersey onto a physician scholar who was clearly playing for the red and black team, and if they’re lucky, the audience will be so confused by the changing scorecard that they won’t contest the final score of the game.

Based on the lasting success of Paul’s strategy, along with his successors’ strategies in the orthodox Western Church, I’d say his plan was quite effective. Ruthless. Heartless. Cruel. Inhumane. But very, very effective.

* For more on this topic, please see “Materialism, Pauline Thought, and the Kingdom,” as well as “Seventh & Final Step: Remove the Thorn in Jesus’ Flesh (That Would Be Paul)”

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Posted in Concinnate Christianity, First Corinthians, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Mark vs Paul, Matthew's and Luke's intent, Paul, Paul vs Jesus, redemption and tagged Jesus vs Paul, Mark vs Paul | Leave a Comment

30 Nov 2010

CC46: Understanding God’s Relationship With Us

My New Testament professor once said in class, “Give me 15 minutes and I can find a proof text in the Bible for anything you want to justify.”

You’ll have noticed by now that I treat the Bible with a great deal of caution. For me and for many others, the Bible is a lot like a pit bull with a hair-trigger temper. One minute it’s wagging its tail at you, spouting happy thoughts. The next, it’s trying to rip your throat out.

I’m not one of those mystics who thinks the Bible is a lap dog that will always treat you kindly — an immortal, timeless lap dog whose eyes are always filled with serenity and bliss if you know the secret of looking at it the right way. Spiritual talk of secrets — secret knowledge (gnosis) and secret interpretations (symbolic readings of the Bible) — makes me very nervous. I’ll tell you why. It’s because spiritual leaders who say they can teach you how to unlock the secret biblical interpretations are making some powerful claims about God. They’re claiming that God isn’t a very loving God or a very nice God at all.

Take the example of the book called Song of Solomon (also known as Song of Songs). Here is a lyric poem about human love (eros). It’s filled with erotic imagery and metaphors that nobody can miss. Scholars think the poem (or collection of poems) was probably written in the 4th or 3rd century BCE. Despite the extremely obvious fact that the Song of Solomon is part of an ancient tradition of erotic love poetry written for a pre-Viagra age, the Song of Solomon started to be interpreted symbolically by religious teachers sometime around the start of the Common Era.

For about 2,000 years, then, theologians have been teaching the faithful to read Song of Solomon symbolically — as an account of the love between God and Israel. Pious and devout people are expected not to notice or respond to the explicit sexual content. And fourteen year old boys are not to read it late at night by candlelight.

If this is a sacred text about the relationship between God and God’s people, I’ll eat my hat.

I’m very unhappy that this symbolic interpretation can only be arrived at through some pretty twisted mental gymnastics. I’m also wondering why it’s only through a special secret scholarly key that regular people can see the “light of truth” hidden in this poem. As many mystics would have you believe, the majority of people — regular people who aren’t privy to the secret key — won’t be able to see and understand the wonderful “truth” buried in this erotic text. Regular people are too dull to see the “truth.” Their corrupt, inferior human senses make them too stupid to understand what’s actually written here.

And, of course, that’s the way God wants it to be! (according to Gnostic teachers). God, in God’s infinite wisdom, decided that most human beings are just too darned stupid and weak and untrustworthy to be entrusted with divine truth. So God hid it. God hid the light of truth in the deepest, darkest swamps, where regular people can’t find it, and then God chose a few select warriors to go out and find the light and guard it. Because God is too weak and stupid to protect it. God, Creator of all Creation, is too weak and stupid to parent trustworthy children. God is too weak and stupid to share divine truth with all children equally. God is too weak and stupid to tell the honest truth honestly. God is too weak and stupid to communicate clearly to all people without the help, aid, or benefit of that trusty band of “specially chosen warriors of light.”

Maybe it’s because God is too busy thinking lascivious thoughts about the luscious gazelles and wild does in the Song of Solomon.

I hope the last sentence creeped you out. I know it creeped me out. But don’t yell at me. I’m not the one going around claiming that Song of Solomon has an elevated message about the sacred love God feels for a few chosen children.

We have a term we use today for parents who engage in sexual conduct with their own children: we call them child abusers, and if we catch them, and succeed in convicting them in a court of law, we put them in jail. As we should.

The God I know is nothing like this. Nothing like this at all. The God I know and talk to every day as part of my mystical practice are my divine parents. God the Mother and God the Father are wonderful people. They’re kind and thoughtful and generous and funny. They’re extraordinarily patient. They always explain things in a way I can understand with my very human brain. If I don’t understand something, they don’t call me weak or stupid, but instead they always try a new tack to help me “put it together.” They love me as their child, but I know I’m not loved more than anyone else. They love all their children with as much ferocity as they love me. It’s the ferocious love that all loving parents know towards their children. It’s lifelong devotion, commitment, sacred trust. It’s safety. It’s eternity.

There are precious few passages in the Bible that convey this sense of God’s relationship with us as angels-in-human-form. The passages that do exist are almost buried under the holy mountain of piety, righteousness, law, fear, and obedience.

I say “almost.”

Beautiful things grown in marshes. These blue flags from the iris family grow in many wet spots in Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2014.

The really cool thing is that the truthful passages “somehow” survived all the cuts, revisions, and ruthless doctrinal choices made by narcissistic theologians in the past. “Somehow” the Letter of James made it into the Christian canon, although many influential theologians (including Martin Luther) were openly hostile towards this letter. “Somehow” the Gospel of Mark was preserved, despite the best efforts of the authors of Luke and Matthew to eradicate its message by “improving” on it. “Somehow” the non-elitist Psalm 116 got tucked in there among the more famous Royal and Zionist Psalms.

I just love the way these truthful messages are “hidden in plain sight” where anyone with an open heart and a lick of common sense can find them.

Even better, these passages say what they say in an open, honest way. No special training is required. No promises are made to you about the hidden truth that will one day be revealed to you if only you submit to blind faith.

Divine truth needs no embellishment. It’s beautiful just the way it is. Today. Not centuries from now, but today.

Which is pretty much what you’d expect from a wonderful, loving God.

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Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, Bible, Concinnate Christianity, Divine Love, Gnosticism, Gospel of Mark, Letter of James, Matthew's and Luke's intent, Mother and Father God, mysticism, relationship with God and tagged Divine Heart | Leave a Comment

08 Aug 2010

CC28: Realspiritik

Last Christmas, when everyone was putting out their favourite Christmas decorations, I chanced to see an interesting item in a store. It was a Nativity scene. All the traditional details of the Nativity narrative that Christians love and cherish were carefully rendered in this modern-day creche, from the timbers of the stable to the angel on the roof. The nativity scene could be set on a tabletop, and enjoyed in this way as a reminder of the Christmas story. But for true fans of the story, there was more. The creche was fitted with a high-tech digital sound and lights device. At the touch of a button, the soothing, mellow voice of a male narrator suddenly filled the space around the creche with a reverent retelling of the Christmas story, as tiny moving “spotlights” highlighted each character in sequence. It was quite well done, and I’m sure whoever bought it will get a lot of pleasure out of it.

It’s a touching story, this Nativity tale, and it’s one that many people find great comfort in. They can’t imagine Christmas without it. It’s such a great story, with all the bells and whistles of a good Saviour myth: divinely chosen human parents, a virgin mother, mystical signs and portents leading up to the time of birth, a long-prophesied male child from a sacred bloodline who must be whisked away and hidden from evil kings until he comes of age. Why, it’s a story worthy of Harry Potter! Or King Arthur! Or Aragorn son of Arathorn! Or Luke Skywalker! It’s such a terrific, timeless story that it’s no wonder there are two completely different versions of it in the New Testament — one in Matthew, one in Luke. Why stop at one invented Nativity story when you can have two? That way, people can pick and choose what they like, and they can paste the details together in new and creative ways called “blended truth,” and there’s something for everyone, so all people can relate to the story — even the lowly shepherd folk!*

Being told from early childhood that you’re very, very special is a double-edged sword. Photo of 17th century Mughal ceremonial court dagger set with jewels from Royal Ontario Museum special exhibit. Photo credit JAT 2019.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love a good tale of intrigue, adventure, and heroism. Plus I think we really need good storytelling. Good stories teach us timeless truths, and help us understand our own lives and our own painful experiences. Stories told through books, visual art, music, plays, film, dance, and performance art are deeply important to the human experience. But stories are stories, and facts are facts, and a lot of damage is caused when the two become interchanged, when story is treated as fact, and fact is treated as story.

We can sometimes recognize situations where story is being treated as fact: we call it propaganda, spin, political manoeuvring, brainwashing, or manipulation. Our history books (and our newspapers) are filled with examples of leaders who’ve used “the big spin” to control political, religious, and economic events.

However, we’re less familiar with examples of fact being treated as story. By this I mean we’re less familiar with examples of individuals who spoke an honest truth and were ignored by their contemporaries until later commentators “took up the cause” and “improved” it to make it more appealing to a wider audience. This process of “improvement” involves the addition of a thick layer of myth to a foundation of fact. An excellent example of this is the way in which Lenin and Trotsky “improved” upon the writings of Marx and Engels to create Russian Communism.

The reality of Jesus’ life and teachings — the actual events, and the actual people — is another instance of fact being turned into story. So many layers of myth, allegory, and invention have been added to a basic foundation of fact that orthodox Western Christianity now resembles a nutritious, single-layered, carrot cake that’s been piled high with three feet of gooey, calorie-laden icing. There’s so much icing, we don’t realize there’s still a cake inside there somewhere. All we can see is the icing. We eat piece after piece of icing, and always feel sick to our stomachs. But if we could get down to the carrot cake, made with wholesome ingredients such as eggs, oil, carrots, unbleached flour, spices, and a little sugar, we’d probably find our spiritual food nourishing instead of nauseating!

Let me ask you a question. A practical question based on realistic observations about realistic human behaviour. Okay . . . you’ve read the tabloid headlines (even when you don’t want to admit it), and you’ve seen the TV interview shows, and you’ve been on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube. Over and over again you’ve seen the reports about famous child stars and their tragic lives as adults. Right? You’ve heard again and again about famous child stars who had everything, but ended up crashing and burning in early adulthood. Famous child stars who’ve been battling addiction disorders since their early teens. Famous child stars who can’t sustain monogamous romantic relationships. Famous child stars who’ve become abusive towards others and are brought before the courts to answer for their abuse. Famous child stars who become narcissistically self-indulgent, no longer capable of understanding what empathy is.

What turns these talented young actors into narcissistic monsters (because they sure as heck weren’t born this way)? The answer is status addiction.

These young people, who started out as normal boys and girls, have been told countless times over many years that they’re special, that they’re different, that they’re deserving of fame. They fall prey to status addiction at an early age. Once they’re biologically addicted to status, they’re much more vulnerable — both psychologically and physiologically — to other addictions, such as alcohol and street drugs. It’s no surprise at all that they can’t control their emotions or their choices by the time they’re young adults.

So here’s my question . . . just exactly how do you think a young boy raised from infancy to believe he’s the long-awaited Messiah would escape the fate of these young Hollywood stars? How do you think such a boy would be any different?

Do you think his biology would be different? Do you think his physiology would be different? Do you think his DNA would be different? Do you think he’d be immune to the realities of status addiction? Do you think he’d be invulnerable to the slings and arrows of status addiction, like some sort of Jewish Achilles, dipped by his semi-divine mother into a baptismal pool of magic river water so he’ll be divinely protected from almost everything real? Do you think he could spend years in a household where he’s treated differently from his brothers and sisters, where he’s trained from birth to fulfill “a special purpose” as Israel’s Messiah, yet somehow not end up becoming a self-entitled, narcissistic, addiction-addled brat? (And, by way of comparison, isn’t it interesting that Homer’s Achilles grows up to become a self-entitled, narcissistic, addiction-addled brat?)

I can think of only one modern example of a person who was raised in such an elitist spiritual environment without losing all his humbleness and courage, and that person is the current Dalai Lama. My hat’s off to him and his teachers because he’s managed to preserve the sanity and compassion he was born with. I can’t in all honesty say that orthodox Western Christian doctrines would be of any use to a boy or girl who genuinely wanted to be close to God.

The reality is that if Jesus had been raised to believe he was the Messiah, he would have been a pretty useless Messiah. He would have ended up “broken,” broken in the way so many other men and women have become broken because they were raised to believe that God had chosen them before birth to become special prophets and leaders. If Jesus’ family had raised him in this way, they would have turned him (without meaning to) into a garden-variety spiritual narcissist with serious addiction problems.

This is not the Jesus we see in the Gospel of Mark. Nor is it the family of Jesus we see in the Gospel of Mark.

In the Gospel of Mark, there is no Nativity story at all. In fact, Mark gives only hints to his readers about Jesus’ family of origin, and these hints aren’t very flattering.

Isn’t it interesting that Mark thinks the historical facts about Jesus’ mission speak more loudly to his audience than any myth could?

Ya gotta wonder what Mark knew that Paul didn’t want you to know.

* Although most readers today assume that Luke is referring to sheep herders in Luke 2, there’s good reason to suspect that Luke is alluding to Egyptian rulers — shepherds caring for their people — whose ancient symbols had long been the crook and the flail. If this is true, it means that Luke is showing Egyptian rulers (wise kings) travelling to Bethlehem to offer obeisance to the Christ child, just as Matthew shows the Persian Magi (wise kings) doing the same in Matthew 2.

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Posted in Concinnate Christianity, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Mark vs Paul, Matthew's and Luke's intent, Messiah, narcissism, status addiction and tagged Jesus vs Paul, Mark vs Paul | Leave a Comment

25 Jul 2010

CC27: Jesus: The Anti-Status Teacher

There is currently no major world religion that bases its doctrines and spiritual practices on the teachings of the man who once lived as Jesus.

There are several world religions that owe a significant doctrinal debt to ancient Egyptian mystery cults. There are several world religions that would not be recognizable in their current form without the legacy of ancient apocalyptic groups. There are several world religions that have incorporated the teachings of ancient Wisdom literature into their texts. But there are no major world religions that approach the deep questions of spirituality and relationship with God in the way that Jesus approached these concerns.

This isn’t new. At the time Jesus was teaching and healing, many different religions and philosophies were competing with each other to attract devoted followers. Many of these “pagan” religions were quite successful, far more successful than the modest house churches that sprang up in response to Jesus’ message. So successful were these “pagan” religions, in fact, that in the end they won out over the teachings of Jesus.

Most Christians believe it’s the other way around, that Christianity’s “truth” won out over paganism’s “heresy.” But orthodox Western Christianity isn’t based on the teachings of Jesus. It’s based on the teachings of Paul and his vigilant successors — men such as the author of Matthew and the author of Luke-Acts (whose writings were decreed canonical), and men such as Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Cyprian of Carthage (whose writings helped shape orthodox thought). These men took the ancient teachings of the mystery cults, the apocalyptic groups, and the Wisdom sages, and repackaged them, rebranded them, into a “new and improved” religion called Christianity.

So while early orthodox Christianity had everything to do with Christ — an ancient saviour figure who was central to Egyptian, Persian, and Greek mystery cults — early orthodox Christianity had nothing to do with the teachings of the physician-scholar named Jesus son of Joseph. In fact, the doctrines promoted by Paul and the men of the “apostolic succession” are the antithesis of Jesus’ teachings about God.

Paul wanted desperately to preserve the ancient teachings of the mystery cults, the apocalyptic groups, and the Wisdom sages because these three approaches to religion, though very different from each other on the surface, all share one fundamental feature: they encourage people to become addicted to status.

Paul offered people a new religion that gave them “bonus points” in their drive for status. Paul promised people more status, extra status, new and improved status, special status, irrevocable status. It’s a status-addict’s dream!

Jesus, meanwhile — as evidenced in the Gospel of Mark, the reconstructed Q source, and parts of the Letter of James — desperately wanted to get rid of the ancient teachings of the mystery cults, the apocalyptic groups, and the Wisdom sages. Why? Because he understood that the widespread addiction to status was the single greatest impediment to people’s understanding of God.

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Photo credit Free Israel Photos

You’ve probably heard the biblical saying that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God (Mark 10:25). This is usually interpreted as a condemnation of money and wealth, the idea being that if you give away all your money and wealth, you’ll be closer to the kingdom of God.

This is too simplistic. “Rich” people can give away all their money and wealth, and still not feel God’s presence because all they’ve done is exchange one form of status anxiety (wealth acquisition) for another form (asceticism, a.k.a. purity acquisition). Money per se isn’t the problem. Money can be used for hospitals, schools, meal programs, and so on. It’s not money that’s the root of all evil — it’s status addiction.

The only way for people to feel God’s ongoing presence in their lives is for them to acknowledge their addiction to status, and to make a commitment to heal this addiction.

It goes without saying that status addiction is rampant in our society. It’s not an easy thing to heal (about as easy as that camel going through that narrow gate). But it can be done. To be free of status addiction is to be kind and loving towards others in the guileless manner of a young child.

For this reason, Jesus compares those who want to enter the kingdom of God to little children (Mark 10:13-16). Young children haven’t yet been taught to hate others on the basis of class, race, or gender. They haven’t yet been taught that they’re “better” than others, that they’re more loved by God than others, that God will save them and their families but not others. They haven’t yet absorbed the cultural norms of competition, superiority, perfectionism (all forms of status addiction). Young children are still free. They still have free will. They still have the ability to love. They still have the ability to forgive. They still have the courage to look at other people, and see them as people, not as slaves, property, or lesser beings.

A young child knows nothing of Law or Covenant (both of which are hopelessly interwoven with status). Nor does a child care about “whole burnt offerings and sacrifices” (Mark 12:33). What a young child cares about is love — love that’s infused with respect, and dignity, and egalitarianism, and empathy, and mature relationship, and simple kindness. Love that doesn’t boast (since boasting is food for status addiction). Love that doesn’t presume to prophesy (since prophesying is food for status addiction). Love that doesn’t claim to be centred in the Mind (since pure logic is food for status addiction). Love that doesn’t punish the body through ascetic practices (since asceticism is food for status addiction). Love that never seeks revenge (since revenge is to status addiction what crack cocaine is to substance abuse). Love that can’t be taken away or withheld as a form of punishment. Love that isn’t co-dependent. Love that isn’t a synonym for “obedience.” What a young child wants is love that forgives. Love that’s . . . well . . . divine.

What children need, and what they in turn give to others, is divine love — the kind of love our God (God the Mother and God the Father) feel for all their children. The kind of love that Jesus wrote about in a text that Paul subsequently “borrowed” for his letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 13:1-8a).* The kind of love the orthodox Western Church doesn’t teach you about.

This is a love based on the power of the soul, the power of free will, the power of forgiveness, and the power of redemption. It has nothing to do with sin, separation, sacraments, and salvation. It’s a love that can be difficult for human beings to understand. It’s a love that can be difficult for adults to master (the whole “camel squeezing through the narrow gate” thing). But once it’s yours, nobody — not even an angry Church cleric or an angry Temple priest — can take it away from you, because it’s a sacred trust that exists between you and God.

It’s a sacred trust that fills you with wonder, and devotion, and gratitude, and humbleness. It’s a sacred trust worth dying for, as the man named Jesus once knew. It’s a sacred trust that opens the door to the kingdom of God while you’re living here as a somewhat confused but unquenchably hopeful human being on Planet Earth.

The keys to the kingdom are not found in the person of Jesus. The keys to the kingdom are found in the teachings that Jesus introduced to anyone who wanted to listen to his annoying and exasperating attacks on the status quo.

If you’re a Christian, and you want to start to work on the problems of status addiction in your own life, you’re going to have to let go of the doctrine that Jesus is your Saviour. This doctrine is food for your status addiction. There is no Saviour. You don’t need to be saved, because God don’t make no junk. There’s nothing wrong with your soul. Your soul is just fine, thank you very much.

It’s okay to think of Jesus as a teacher and mentor in the same way you think of Mahatma Gandhi or the Dalai Lama or Martin Luther King, Jr., as inspiring teachers and mentors. But please don’t put Jesus on a pedestal. That’s the last thing he’d want anybody to do.

Jesus wasn’t trying to teach his followers about himself. That would have been the height — the very pinnacle — of status addiction. He was trying to teach his followers about God the Mother and God the Father. He was trying to take out the “middle men” — the prophets, priests, and philosophers — whose grandiose, narcissistic musings about the One God had made it all but impossible for anyone to have a loving, trusting, forgiving relationship with the God who is Two.

If the church of the third millennium wants to follow the teachings of Jesus, it must let go of its apocalyptic, mystery-ridden, wisdom-elevated “Saviour,” and shift its focus to God.

Now there’s a radical idea.

* It’s fashionable these days for theologians and biblical scholars to express their profound regret that Jesus wrote nothing down because he was an illiterate Galilean carpenter who spoke only Aramaic. This is nonsense. No lasting Indo-European movement has ever got off the ground without an articulate, knowledgeable leader and a written record of the movement’s main tenets. To those scholars who insist that Jesus couldn’t write down his own original and penetrating observations about God, healing, and psychodynamics, I want to say, “Get a life , , , and a history book!”

Posted in "4 S's", Concinnate Christianity, Divine Love, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, Letter of James, Matthew's and Luke's intent, Paul, status addiction and tagged Divine Heart, Jesus vs Paul | Leave a Comment

25 Jun 2010

CC21: The Law of Attraction in the Gospel of Matthew: God as the Great Gumball Machine in the Sky

Ya gotta love those Kevin Trudeau infomercials. The guy’s a regular pitbull when he’s trying to market his latest “no-fail” product. A while back, he was aggressively promoting his “Natural Cure.” These days, he’s hawking “the Law of Attraction” in a new and improved form that can be yours in a 10 CD package for a mere $297. He calls his latest course “Your Wish Is Your Command.”

Not long ago, Rhonda Byrne was selling essentially the same product through her book and video called The Secret. Before that, Joseph Murray was touting the “newly discovered” Law of Attraction in books such as The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. And before that, Ernest Holmes was proclaiming the wonders of “the Law” in his “landmark” book The Science of Mind.

What has this got to do with Christianity?

Everything.

The Law of Attraction, as recent writers have labelled it, is not a new idea. It’s an ancient idea. It’s an idea that serves as the foundation for a lot of ancient religious writings that are loosely lumped together by scholars under the heading of “Wisdom Literature.” Wisdom teachings purport to teach people how to recognize the inviolable laws of creation that, if properly observed, can lead to wealth, prosperity, good health, family status, and happiness.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, three books are generally considered to represent the Wisdom tradition: Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. Elements of Wisdom teachings are also sprinkled here and there throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, as in Genesis 2-3. Some of the Psalms have overtones of Wisdom.

Not to be outdone, the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament states in unambiguous terms that if you follow the laws and the prophets in righteousness, “all things will be given to you” (Matthew 6:33). In his wrap-up to the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew has Jesus say, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:7-11).

There you have it in a nutshell. All you have to do is ask in the right way, and God will give it to you. Not only does God want to give it to you, but God has to give it to you, because the contract law says so. The contract law between God and God’s people is binding on God. So if you righteously obey all the divine contract provisions (as they are stated by your religion’s prophets), well, naturally, God is required to hold up his end of the bargain, and give you everything you ask for — wealth, health, and happiness.

There’s a special kind of law that governs all Creation, you see. As several religious traditions will tell you, including Western Christian orthodoxy, these laws are both highly secret and highly powerful. If you can uncover the hidden secrets of these laws, you can tap into their unlimited power. In this spiritual understanding (which, I’d like to emphasize, is not limited to any one religion) God’s divine creativity is considered to be a tap. It’s hard to find this sacred tap, and it’s even harder to figure out how to turn it on. But once you have the secret knowledge (gnosis) of how to turn on the tap, you can get whatever you want.

Mystics of all religious traditions frequently fall into the narcissistic mire of believing that (1) there is such a tap and (2) they alone know how to find and control said tap. These same mystics are usually delighted to share the information with their disciples for a price. Sometimes, as with people such as Kevin Trudeau, the price is mere money. More often, the mystic seeks to gather for him/herself a treasure considered even more valuable to a narcissist than wealth. That treasure is status.

The religious leaders of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) thought they had the Law of Attraction all figured out. It didn’t turn out too well for them. Photo credit 675px-Moái_de_Rano_Raraku,_en_Isla_de_Pascua, Wikimedia Commons.

A dysfunctional mystic can live quite comfortably as an ascetic, disdaining wealth, comfort, and personal possessions, as long as he or she receives a steady diet of status to feed an ongoing psychological state of status addiction — an addiction to status, as opposed to an addiction to psychotropic substances. The addiction to status operates in a person’s central nervous system like any other addiction. There are constant cravings. Getting a “hit” of status causes the brain to release dopamine in the same way that getting a “hit” of cocaine causes the brain to release dopamine.

The only way for an ascetic mystic to get an ongoing supply of status is to indulge in spiritual practices that “affirm” to the mystic that he or she is higher on the ladder of spiritual ascent than you are.

To be higher on the ladder is to have more status. It’s as simple as that. It’s as scary as that.

To be “in the know” about the “Law of Attraction” is to have more status. This ancient spiritual practice attracts psychologically dysfunctional people who are already addicted to the dopamine high of status. That’s why it feels so good to them when they try to follow these “righteous” teachings — they’re getting a hit of dopamine each time they tell themselves they’re cleverly invoking the “contract laws” of the universe (i.e. invoking the Covenant).

Be careful what you wish for — you might get it, and it probably won’t be what you thought it would be.

That’s because God the Mother and God the Father never give you what you ask for. They only give you what you need.

And you need an addiction to status like you need a hole in the head.

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Posted in A.N.E. Wisdom literature, Bible, Book of Genesis, Cause & Effect, Concinnate Christianity, Law (Nomos), Materialism, Matthew's and Luke's intent, mysticism, spiritual ascent, status addiction and tagged Wisdom literature | Leave a Comment

21 May 2010

CC13: Choosing Between Paul and Jesus

Orthodox Western Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant) would like to have its Paul and keep its Jesus, too. But as the old maxim about keeping cakes and eating them reminds us, we have to make a decision. The church of the third millennium is going to have to throw in its lot with either Paul or Jesus. It can’t have both.

The United Church of Canada is valiantly struggling to cobble together Paul’s theology with Jesus’ praxis. This would allow them to keep their Articles of Faith (which ultimately originate in Paul’s Christ teachings) while “freshening things up” on the social justice front (thus allowing them to claim unity with Jesus’ teachings).

You can’t blame them for trying. But a continuing pattern of downward membership in the UCC speaks quite eloquently to the “success” of their patchwork solution.

The Mission and Service initiatives of the United Church are important, and I’m not trying to undermine them (well, not the service part, anyway). This is the best part of the UCC experience, as far as I’m concerned. But the theology . . . I can’t abide the theology. The blunt truth is that the theology is driving me away from the church. I love the sense of community in my church, I love the people there, I love the commitment to volunteering, and I especially love the way in which children are uplifted. But I have to sit there and listen to readings from Paul, and I’m not happy about this.

This delicate Hellenistic gold wreath, dated to the 3rd century BCE, is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. According to the ROM, such wreaths, often representing laurel, olive, or oak leaves, were placed in Greek burials as expressions of reverence for the dead. Photo credit JAT 2017.

Rather, I should say I’m not happy about the way the church tries to insist that Paul and Jesus were simpatico. Paul and Jesus were anything but.

These two men had dramatically different things to say about God. They had dramatically different goals in mind when they tried to spread their respective teachings. They had almost nothing in common except a childhood strongly influenced by Jewish teachings.

Paul doesn’t write much in his letters about his own life. (Acts of the Apostles is a secondary source, probably written three decades or so after Paul’s last known letter, Romans. Acts, which gives us far more information about Paul’s life than Paul himself gives us, was written by the same man who wrote the Gospel of Luke.) Paul himself doesn’t actually describe the famous conversion experience on the road to Damascus. (The famous story of Saul struck blind by a light from heaven is only found in Acts 9:1-9; 22:6-11; 26:12-18.)

For Paul, a mere conversion experience as an adult wasn’t good enough. Rather than saying he was brought to Christ through a vision from Jesus, Paul actually makes a much more radical claim for himself: Paul was so special in the grand scheme of things that God “set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace . . . so that I might proclaim [his Son] among the Gentiles” (Galatians 1:15-17). Paul says he was chosen by God while he was still in the womb, just as prophets of old in the Jewish scriptures had been chosen.

Note: Paul has placed himself at the top of a very small and very select group of people: the prophets. Nobody who truly believes that God treats all people equally would make such a presumptuous claim about himself or God. Paul, according to his own testimony, has provided himself with an impressive pedigree. Yet most biblical commentators fail to note that in the first century CE, as in the third millennium, an impressive pedigree means nothing to people who aren’t driven by the needs of status addiction. Pedigree means nothing to people who truly believe that all creatures are equal in God’s eyes. Paul says that all people are one in Christ, but Paul means that some people are more important to God than others — starting with himself.

Christian authors such as John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed have bent over backwards to try to prove to modern audiences that Paul really was “a saint not only for then, but for now and always” (page 413 of In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom, A New Vision of Paul’s Words and World (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004)). In their book, Crossan and Reed try to minimize the brutality of the Letter to the Romans (which, of the letters we still have from Paul, is probably the letter that was written last). And they insist that Paul’s Saviour is identical to the man who taught and healed as Jesus of Nazareth.

Whoever wrote the Gospel of Mark a few years after Paul’s last known letter was clearly trying to refute what Paul had been writing about the man named Jesus. There’s no other way to explain the vast differences in their respective portraits of Jesus. I think it’s naive to suggest that the author of Mark didn’t know about Paul’s teachings, which predated Mark’s in both time and influence. Paul admits he visited Jerusalem and met with Jesus’ brother James (Galatians 1:18-19), and Paul claims he travelled widely in the Eastern Mediterranean. Can we really imagine that Mark, who knew so much about the details of Jesus’ actual life, knew nothing at all about Paul’s strategy to co-opt Jesus as the new face of the anti-emperor Saviour?

Barrie Wilson covers many of these points in the book I mentioned on March 6/10, How Jesus Became Christian. If you want to know more about the background historical elements of this complicated first century CE saga, I recommend Wilson’s book (although, for the record, I don’t agree with Wilson’s comments on the Gospel of Matthew).

Paul had a plan and Paul had a mission. But it was not a plan to spread Jesus’ dangerous teachings. It was a plan to minimize and control the subversive effects of Jesus’ dangerous teachings.

It was a plan to eradicate the rapidly spreading story about a man from an aristocratic family who voluntarily gave up his status, his wealth, and his family connections in order to serve the poor in small towns because he was an educated God-loving scholar-physician. (cf. Doctors Without Borders)

Can’t have the nobility slumming it, you know. It might just catch on.

God forbid that regular people might start to believe that real, live, flesh and blood, aristocratic males could WANT to give up all that power and status, and live a life of humble service to God!

How to fix the problem? Great idea — put the man back on a pedestal, only this time make the pedestal so tall that nobody else can reach it, or even want to reach it.

That’ll keep them in their place . . . .

For me, this subtext is audible every time I hear a reading from one of Paul’s epistles. It makes me want to gnash my teeth, shake my head, and bellow out loud, “Come on — Paul is lying to us.”

But, since none of these reactions would be considered popular at church during worship time, my solution is to stop attending worship. I’ve decided to hang out with God in Nature, in song, in kind words, and in the people I love until such a time as the church decides to follow the teachings of Jesus instead of the teachings of Paul.

I sure do miss UCC Coffee Time, though!

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Posted in Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Mark vs Paul, Matthew's and Luke's intent, Paul, Paul vs Jesus, prophets and tagged Jesus vs Paul | Leave a Comment

04 Apr 2010

CC7: Radical Jesus in the Gospel of Mark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(These two points are my own thesis.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark’s Jesus is a radical dude.

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

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

Happy Easter Sunday to you!

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

The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

Archive for the category “Matthew’s and Luke’s intent”

RS27: The Way, the Truth, and the Life

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

JR55: Healing: The Easy Way and the Hard Way

JR36: Saying 56 in the Gospel of Thomas

JR19: The Beatitudes of Luke

JR10: Son of David or House of David?

JR6: John and the Gospel of Thomas

CC47: Hidden in Plain Sight: The Cunning of Paul

CC46: Understanding God’s Relationship With Us

CC28: Realspiritik

CC27: Jesus: The Anti-Status Teacher

CC21: The Law of Attraction in the Gospel of Matthew: God as the Great Gumball Machine in the Sky

CC13: Choosing Between Paul and Jesus

CC7: Radical Jesus in the Gospel of Mark

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JAT Publications: The Spiral Path

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