The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

Archive for the category “healing miracles”

02 Sep 2012

RS28: For Now We See in a Mirror, Brightly

A:  Okay.  To sum up so far, you rejected traditional and cultural beliefs about illness and healing, left the major urban centres, moved to a small town in Galilee — Capernaum . . .?

J:  Capernaum.

A: . . . broke countless religious rules about healing, didn’t use magic, ritual, or even prayer during your healing sessions, insisted on using observable science, insisted on building relationships of compassion with your patients, insisted on the power of faith, insisted on examining patients directly instead of using proxies, and rarely asked for anything in return.  Many patients with neurological, psychiatric, endocrine, and autoimmune disorders suddenly got better.  People thought you were a miracle worker.  You didn’t believe you were the prophesied Messiah, but many other people did.

Canadian National Parks 120

“Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but just grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’ Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, “Who touched me?”‘ He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease'” (Mark 5:25-34). Photo credit Hemera Technologies 2001 – 2003.

From today’s perspective, you don’t look like a religious teacher or wandering philosopher sage at all.  You look like a really gifted doctor.  In fact, you look to me like a really gifted psychiatrist.  And I ought to know what a psychiatrist looks like, since I was married to one for twenty years.

J:  I don’t deny what you’re saying.  A psychiatrist’s job, after all, is to help patients examine the parts of their biology that are interfering with their ability to think, feel, and choose in balanced, holistic ways.  It’s probably the most important field of medicine, though it’s usually the specialty that receives the least respect and the least funding.

A:  You were a physician.  A pioneering spirit in the as-yet unknown discipline of psychiatry.  Yet a religious movement sprang up around you.  Why?

J:  Because I was a man of deep faith.  I wasn’t afraid to trust God, to love God as they really are.  I wasn’t afraid to open my heart to the wonder of healing.  More important, I had a radically different idea of what illness and healing meant.  For me, illness didn’t mean “lack of perfection.”  And healing didn’t mean “acquisition of perfection.”  I had an entirely different understanding of our lives as human beings, an understanding based on my observation of the natural world.  For me, pain and death were not the enemy.  Death was obviously unavoidable.  Pain was a language, a language that spoke the truth about a person’s relationships with himself, with others, with the world around him, and with God.  I saw the loss of love and trust in God as a major source of pain and suffering in the people around me.  Their souls weren’t happy with the loss of relationship with God.  Their bodies mirrored this lack of happiness, this spiritual pain.

The truth is that all souls need God.  They need relationship with God.  They need to feel that connection, that bond of love and trust.  They also need to feel the same kind of love and trust in their relationships with their families and friends and community.  They need to feel safe — emotionally, physically, intellectually, and spiritually safe.

The world I grew up in didn’t teach anyone to feel safe in their relationship with God, or, for that matter, safe within their own families.  No community can be safe when it preaches the inferiority of women and the right to own slaves.  Second Temple Judaism was no different in this regard from the Hellenistic world around us.  Women had few rights.  And seriously ill or disabled women had even fewer.

My daughter was born with Down Syndrome.  She died at age 3 of respiratory failure.  It was probably pneumonia.  But she died in terrible emotional pain, terrible emotional suffering, because her own mother believed she was a curse.  A curse!

Her body got sick and died, but the pain of her physical suffering was small in comparison to her emotional and spiritual suffering.  She was horribly abused by her mother and her mother’s family.  Not because she deserved it but because Jewish magicians said she deserved it.  And I did nothing to protect her.

After she died — and there’s no doubt her mother and her mother’s mother were complicit in her death — I had to look at myself in the mirror and be honest about what I’d done — or rather, what I hadn’t done.  I had to own up to my complete and utter lack of courage.  And I had to deal with the constant memory of her face and her trusting smile.

I have no respect for the constant preaching from Christian theologians about the lofty preeminence of my suffering and death and resurrection.  Fuck that.  My contribution wasn’t my own death.  My contribution was to see meaning and life in the face of death, to see transformation and forgiveness in the face of death, and to really mean it.  My contribution was to find the courage to remember my daughter’s trusting smile and try to do something useful with the gift of her love.  Her love — the memory and the ongoing presence of her love in my heart — was a constant source of wonder and healing for me.

Apparently my guardian angels approved of this attitude because after I spent years learning how to forgive and learning how to listen to God’s voice and learning how to follow my own inborn talent as a physician, really weird shit started to happen around me.   I mean, really weird shit.  Healings that were more than placebo effect (which I had started to get used to by then).  I mean sudden, miraculous healings that only God can do.  I was as shocked as many of my patients.  But I understood in a logical, rational way what was happening.  So I wasn’t afraid.  I was just . . .  non-plussed.

A:  Why weren’t you afraid?

J:  Because I trusted God.  Because I could hear the voice of my own guardian angels.  Because I could feel the comfort and safety of these “events” deep in my gut.  Because people around me were crying in relief and gratitude.  Because good things were happening to regular people.  Because some of the people I helped heal began to believe in a loving God instead of a cruel, vengeful God.  Because God was obviously present in small huts and green fields and all the places where God wasn’t supposed to be present.  Because the only contribution we humans needed to bring to the table of healing was our kindness — our true kindness towards ourselves, towards each other, and towards God.  Not many people then or now have been willing to show kindness towards God.

A:  Did you understand the science of the miracle healings?

J:  You mean the quantum physics of it?  Hell, no.  I’m an angel on the Other Side and I still barely grasp the quantum physics of it!  But the science of it is there.  The truthful and logical reality of the healings is there.  Just because humans — and many angels! — don’t fully understand the science doesn’t mean it’s not science.  It’s just a really, really advanced science.

A:  A science which obviously circumvents the linear “cause and effect” of classical, Newtonian physics.

J:  Divine Love and forgiveness feel like emotional gifts, but at a quantum level, they’re both related to non-locality or, as some prefer to call it today, quantum entanglement.  Love and forgiveness also tie in with the soul’s sense of time and timing.

If you have no sense of time — no personal relationship with past, present, and future — it’s impossible for you, as a human being, to give and receive either Divine Love or forgiveness.

Trying to live in the moment — in other words, living in a state of denial about your own pain or somebody else’s pain — destroys the biological brain’s ability to process pain and turn it into something else, something much deeper and more proactive in the world, like, oh, say, like courage.

A:  So you’d define courage, then, as the ability to shift pain into some form of healing action or choice.  The ability to take action and help make the world a better place, even if it’s an emotional action, like choosing to love and forgive and trust, as opposed to a physical action, like joining the Peace Corps.

J:  Yes.  Courage is the choice to help God “build an ark.”

A:  There’s no doubt about the amount of pain that exists in the world.  So if pain is the raw material — the wooden planks — that can be turned into something deeper and more proactive, that’s one helluv’an ark we’re gonna be building.

 

 

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Posted in healing miracles, historical Jesus, Jesus' teachings, quantum theory, Realspiritik, relationship with God, sense of time & timing, theodicy and tagged , | Leave a Comment
01 Sep 2012

RS27: The Way, the Truth, and the Life

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New Brunswick (c) Jamie MacDonald 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A:  Come on.  That’s way too simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A:  Including the mysterious role of forgiveness.

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

A:  Like an angel Internet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted in Divine Love, Gospel of Mark, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Matthew's and Luke's intent, Realspiritik, relationship with God and tagged , | Leave a Comment
19 Aug 2012

RS25: Where Love Goes, Miracles Follow

Detail of Woodpecker tapestry designed by William Morris (1885). (from Wikimedia Commons)

Detail of Woodpecker tapestry designed by William Morris (1885). (from Wikimedia Commons)

J:  I’d like to begin today with a quote from the text you were reading the other day — the scroll fragment that deals with exorcism as it was usually handled in my time (Dead Sea Scroll 4Q560)*:

Col. 1 [. . .] the midwife, the punishment of those who bear children, any evil madness or d[emon . . .] [. . . adjure you, all who en]ter into the body: the male Wasting-demon and female Wasting-demon [. . . I adjure you by the name of the Lord, “He Who re]moves iniquity and transgressions” (Exod. 34:7), O Fever-demon and Chills-demon and Chest Pain-demon [. . . You are forbidden to disturb by night using dreams or by da]y during sleep, O male Shrine-spirit and female Shrine-spirit, O you demons who breach [walls . . . w]icked [. . .]  Col. 2 before h[im . . .] before him and [. . .]  And I, O spirit, adjure [you against . . .]  I adjure you, O spirit, [that you . . . ]  On the earth, in clouds [. . .] (Translated by Michael O. Wise)

A lot of words are missing from the fragment, but you get the picture.  Illness is ascribed to demons.  Cures are ascribed to the power of magical words, words spoken in ritualistic ways by Jewish magicians.  The magicians would have used magical amulets, too, and divining tools (though technically these were forbidden by Jewish orthodoxy).  Also drugs that were transmitted in the form of incense and smoke.  People today forget that opium and other narcotics were well known in my time.

These magicians were experts in chicanery.  They worked in teams, with one man acting as the wandering magician desperate to save people from demons, and others seeding themselves into the crowds to look for vulnerable targets.  They would listen to the talk of the people around them, scope out the stories that could be copied by the scammers themselves, then mimic the symptoms so they could be dramatically and publicly “saved” by the magician.  It’s an old scam.

A:  It was the faith healing scam of your day.

J (nodding):  People today read the prohibitions in the Jewish Scriptures against magic and divining and later prophecy and other occult practices, and they assume that Jews in the Second Temple period obediently followed these tenets of Judaism.  Archaeological finds prove they did not.  From the time of the Alexandrian conquest onward, Jews became a rather superstitious lot, just like their Hellenistic neighbours.  Regular people carried magic amulets and regularly spoke magic spells and chants.  They also believed in the power of curses.  When magicians found formulas that seemed to work, they wrote them down.  This is why archaeologists have found so many ancient magical codices and scrolls.

A:  Biblical Archaeology Review has had some interesting articles on this topic in recent years.  There’s also some evidence for Jewish necromancy in the early centuries of the common era — the use of human skulls with inscriptions written on them (though these are pretty rare).

Most practitioners of magic used bowls, it seems.  According to BAR, “the largest body of inscriptions from ancient Judaism is the collection of more than 2,000 magic bowls from Talmudic Baylonia (present-day Iraq) from the fifth-eighth centuries C.E. These bowls were inscribed in Aramaic with incantations against demons.”**

I think it just goes to show that within every religious tradition there are always pockets of people who are drawn to the most extreme ways to try to control the Law of Cause and Effect — which is what magic is all about.

J:  Not that this has changed . . . There are still plenty of pious religious folk who believe far more in magic (the Law of Cause and Effect taken to its logical, gory extremes) than in compassion or healing or forgiveness.

A:  So Paul’s followers — and the John the Baptist’s followers — wouldn’t have seen anything too radical or different in the magical claims made by Paul and John.  They would have expected to hear how they themselves could participate in this new way of controlling the Law of Cause and Effect.  It wouldn’t have surprised them to hear claims about name magic and power over demons.

J:  It would have surprised them to not hear these claims.

A:  So you surprised people, then.

J:  Once I got to the point in my life where I deeply trusted God’s love, God’s forgiveness, and God’s infinite goodness, there was only one path open to me — the path of girding my loins with science and faith instead of victory and vengeance.  It’s pretty hard to keep looking for victory and vengeance when you’re absolutely convinced God loves all people equally.  I had no religious books to guide me — not ones I trusted or respected, anyway — so I had to start from scratch.  I had to start from first principles.

A:  Can you give an example of that?

J:  It’s a process of reexamining everything you once believed in, so it’s not simple and it’s certainly not straightforward.  It’s like being handed a huge lapful of intertwined yarns and being told you have to untangle all the different threads and sort them by colour and weight before you can do anything else.  At first it looks like a gigantic job, an insoluble task.  But eventually you realize that if you’re patient and observant and careful in your actions, you can gradually sort out the mess.

A:  You mean you’re not supposed to take a hatchet to the ball of yarns and split them apart in one fell swoop?

J:  That was the Roman way.  Got a mess?  Fix it with a sword!

No, this way — the angel way — was much more tedious.  The idea was not to fix things by destroying annoying people and places.  The idea was to untangle all the threads, examine them individually, see the ways in which each was unique and relevant to healing, then weave them together into something new — into a beautiful tapestry instead of a useless, tangled mess.

A:  How very un-Roman of you.

J:  It was also un-Jewish.  And un-Greek.  And un-Egyptian.  So I got in everyone’s face with my theories.

A:  I’d like to go back to the point you raised about God’s loving all people equally.  How did you get to this place of understanding?  And how did it affect your ministry?

J:  I came to understand the meaning of God’s love through my experiences as a mystic.  I didn’t set out to become a mystic, but it turned out that way.  My heart kept opening wider and wider to the experience of compassion for others, and I started noticing how much pain regular people were in — the women, the children, the slaves, the poor, the ill, the disadvantaged.   I couldn’t not care.  I couldn’t turn away from their hearts.  I decided I had to do something.  This was the “faith” part of my journey.

Once I claimed this knowledge fully, and made it part of the very fibre of my being, part of my core essence, I had the strong foundation I needed to reexamine and reappraise all questions about healing through the lens of my trust in God.  I had to take it one question at a time, but the important thing is that I was willing to ask hard questions.  I was willing to challenge cultural assumptions.  I was willing to accept the evidence of my own senses in place of somebody else’s words.

I’ve always found it bizarre that Christianity has insisted on calling me “the Word” incarnate when I was the person least likely to  rely on words or law or philosophical “truth.”  I believed in what the world of science and nature taught me.  I had little respect for words.  Hypocrisy had a way of appearing as a magic cloak of many words.

A:  Albert Einstein once said, “It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”  (I have this saying on my fridge.)

J:  Yes.  This relates to the brain’s function.  If you tell the brain that only Cause and Effect exist, it will only look for Cause and Effect.  If you tell the brain there is Divine Love which interacts in unpredictable and heart-stopping ways with Cause and Effect, the brain will be able to see what’s actually there.  It will be able to see the quantum events that are taking place all around life on Planet Earth.  It will be able to see miracles.

A:  The brain won’t reject the evidence that’s in front of it.

J:  Miracles are invisible — literally invisible — to the brain of a person who has staked everything on the Materialist view of Creation.  This includes devout Christians who uphold the teachings of Paul.  Paul was a Materialist who didn’t believe in the mystery and immensity of Divine Love — its curious blend of order with chaos, linear with non-linear, female with male, mind with heart, logic with passion.  Paul couldn’t see love.  So he also couldn’t see miracles.  Love and miracles go together like two peas in a pod.  You can’t have one without the other.

A:  Where love goes, miracles follow.

J:  As anyone who has ever known real love will tell you.

 

* Michael Wise, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook, trans., The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation (New York: HarperCollins–HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), p. 566.

** See the Book Review by Michael D. Swartz on page 70 of the Sept./Oct. 2010 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.  Swartz is reviewing an exhibition catalogue called Angels and Demons: Jewish Magic Through the Ages, edited by Filip Vukosavovic (Jerusalem: Bible Lands Museum, 2010).

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Posted in Cause & Effect, Divine Love, healing, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Jesus' teachings, Materialism, miracles, mystic, Realspiritik and tagged | Leave a Comment
17 Aug 2012

RS24: Some Thoughts on Healing From Jesus

Lilies of the Field - colour - June 2013_0003

“. . . [Jesus] said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners'” (Mark 2:17).  About the illustration: This was one of the first posts I wanted to illustrate, but at the time I had no digital camera and few art supplies on hand. I had to make due with a sheet of oversized paper and a few coloured markers – along with my own artistic need. Sometimes God asks us to help with a healing task even though we have no formal academic training and no technical equipment. It’s amazing what we can do by following our intuition, listening to God’s wise counsel, and using the few tools we have on hand. Illustration credit JAT 2013.

A:  I’ve read some interesting theories over the years to explain the healing miracles in the Gospels.  Some of these theories fall under the “Quest for the Historical Jesus” umbrella.  There’s the theory that the miracles stories are reports of true supernatural events — proof of Jesus’ divinity and sovereignty over the powers of evil.  (This theory appeals to devout evangelical Christians.) On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the theory that the healing miracles should not be understood as fact but as pure metaphor — as literary window-dressing to enhance the credibility of the main character, you.  (This theory appeals to liberal and progressive Christians, who often don’t believe in miracles.)

And then there’s the bizarre group of theories that attempts to “explain” your healing powers through analogy to altered states of consciousness as they’re understood today by some anthropologists and psychologists.  Stevan Davies’s book Jesus the Healer: Possession, Trance, and the Origins of Christianity (New York: Continuum, 1995) is a particularly egregious example of this kind of thinking.  (At the bottom of this post I’ve pasted in a book review I wrote about Davies’s book for an Historical Jesus course, a review which explains why I’m not fond of Davies’s thesis.  This is the same Stevan Davies whose translation of the Gospel of Thomas we’ve been using in the Jesus Redux series of posts.)

So whatcha say, big guy?  Were you wandering around the Galilee as a Jewish magician with serious DSM-IV issues, a wannabe charismatic prophet suffering from a dissociative disorder, a delusional shaman who had a honkin’ big need for an olanzapine prescription?  Is this who you really were?

J (chuckling):  These guys make me sound like a creepy bad guy from the Criminal Minds series.

A:  Yeah, like that two-part episode where James Van Der Beek plays an UnSub who has a multiple personality disorder (Season Two, “The Big Game” and “Revelations.”)  One of his “personalities” (the really dangerous one) is an apocalyptic Christian prophet.

J:  That’s a good example.  A person suffering from a dissociative disorder is not a well person and needs intensive medical care from a team of trained professionals.  To suggest that it’s a good idea for a religious teacher or shaman to intentionally induce a state of altered consciousness (“spirit possession”) or a permanent state of dissociation in his/her followers is not only morally reprehensible but is also questionable from a legal point of view.

A:  So you didn’t try to teach your followers how to have spontaneous dissociative experiences of being possessed by Spirit.

J (shaking his head):  No.  I did not.  I taught my followers that the key to knowing God is to first know yourself.  This is, by definition, the very opposite of dissociative experiences.

A:  What about Paul?  Did Paul encourage these states of “spirit possession”?

J:  Absolutely.  He not only encouraged these states, but promoted them as one of the major “drawing cards” of his new religion — buy my Saviour and as an added bonus you’ll receive a free gift from Spirit!  Discover how with my easy salvation you can receive, at no additional charge, a special gift of the utterance of wisdom or the utterance of knowledge or faith or gifts of healing or working of miracles or prophecy or discernment of spirits or various kinds of tongues or the gift of interpretation of tongues (one gift per customer, choice made by Spirit at time of purchase, no substitutions, all gifts subject to laws of Divine Cause & Effect, this is a time-limited offer, so call one of our helpful customer service agents now!).

A:  It never ceases to amaze me how rarely Paul talks about healing in his letters.  Why doesn’t he talk about medical healing — the kind of roll-up-your-sleeves-and-touch-your-neighbour kind of healing you engaged in?  Why doesn’t he care?

J:  He wasn’t interested in helping people find healing.  He had different concerns — occult concerns related to power and order and perfectionism, as we’ve discussed.  As far as Paul was concerned, sick people were defective.  They’d already proven their imperfection and undesirability in the kingdom of God.  Corrupt mortal flesh — sarx in Greek — was an ongoing source of shame and judgment, so who cared?  Paul’s focus was the mind and the soul, which were infinitely superior to mere flesh, in his view.  To choose to heal flesh, as I did, by starting with the flesh — with the actual physical body instead of the pure Platonic Mind — was an incomprehensible paradigm to Paul.  In other words, he thought basic medical science made no sense and was a complete waste of time and divine energy.

A:  But that’s what you actually did.  You started with the actual physical body, not the pure mind or soul.  You helped heal people’s bodies so they could find the courage and strength to build their own relationships with God.

J:  Early on in my journey as a prastising mystic — not as a dissociated prophet, but as a mentally healthy mystic and channeller — my guardian angel (my daemon in the Greek — not to be confused with the English word “demon”) gave me an excellent analogy.  She said this:

“The flowers in the field that you admire, that stop your heart with wonder and beauty, are not like dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus in the field.  You cannot treat them in the ways you’ve been taught.  You must think of the flowers in the field as the emotions of God the Mother and God the Father — their memories, their feelings, their stories from times far more ancient than you or any other human being can remember.

The journey through this field of flowers cannot be like the Labours of Heracles if you want to feel the wonder of knowing God.  You must tread softly.  You must not trample in your haste to get to the other side.  You must listen with all your heart and all your mind and all your body and all your soul to the quiet whispers of the lilies.

Each person you meet is like a lily of the field.  The roots and the leaves of the lily bear the weight of the colourful blossom, but without the unseen roots and the hard-working leaves, there would be no chance for the lily to produce its harvest.

Treat the body of all you meet in the same way you would treat God’s lilies.  Respect all parts of the plant, including the most humble and least attractive parts.  Even the smallest root has a part to play.  Do not despise the leaves for the sake of the flower’s beauty.  The flower fades quickly, but the strongly rooted plant produces blossoms again if it is properly cared for.

Care first for the roots and the humble green plant, and, with time and gentle handling, it will reward you.”

This is why I rejected all religious models about the nature of the human body, and turned to a scientific model with the help of my guardian angels and God.  There was a lot I didn’t understand about the inner workings of the human body, but one thing seemed clear to me:

If God made these bodies for us, they must be worth looking after.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Book Review
STEVAN L. DAVIES.   JESUS THE HEALER: POSSESSION, TRANCE, AND THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY.  NEW YORK: CONTINUUM, 1995.  ISBN 0-8264-0794-3

Review by Jennifer Thomas    November 1, 2007

Breathe deeply before you begin to read Stevan Davies book Jesus the Healer.  There’s no index, no table of contents, no glossary, no illustrations or diagrams, not even an introduction to orient you in this book, so if you lose the thread of Davies’s argument, you have to retrace your steps.  This isn’t a book where you can jump in at any point and quickly grasp the author’s argument.  Davies’s thesis is quite complex, and he keeps adding to it chapter by chapter as he attempts (in his own words) to “bring closer together the two continents of Jesus research: historical scholarship and theological reflection” (p.18).  On the plus side, the book is a mere 216 pages long, including its 7-page bibliography.

One puzzling aspect of this 1995 book is the lack of biographical information about the author.  We’re told nothing about his education or background.  Is he a professional journalist or is he a member of academia?  We don’t know.  All we know is that he’s the author of three other books.  A search of my own bookshelves produced a copy of The Gospel of Thomas (2002), translated and annotated by Stevan Davies, Professor of Religious Studies at College Misericordia in Pennsylvania.  An internet search yielded the same information.  So we can rest assured that he deserves our attention.

Davies begins his book with a brief overview of research into the historical Jesus over the last hundred years.  Rejecting the prevailing view of Jesus as some form of teacher, Davies tackles the less well examined paradigm of Jesus as healer.  His approach is secular, not theological.  For him, New Testament reports of supernatural occurrences are a goldmine of anthropological and psychological data that other researchers have wrongly ignored.  He sets out to show us how we might reexamine the passages about exorcisms, healings, and the Son of God, and reinterpret them in light of 20th century theories about “spirit-possession” and “demon-possession.”

Chapter 2 summarizes the anthropological and psychological models Davies relies on to categorize possession: the state wherein a person’s normal persona is believed to be displaced by a “possessing” spirit or demon.  Davies is very clear that it’s the belief that’s important.  The belief makes it somehow “real” to the people experiencing it.  And this in turn makes it an “historical event.”  In other words, researchers of the historical Jesus can use biblical passages about exorcism without fear that they’re endorsing the paranormal.  This part of Davies’s thesis may prove to have more lasting value to the field than some of his other conclusions.

In Chapter 3, Davies briefly examines descriptions of 1st century Jewish prophets in Josephus, Philo of Alexandria, and the New Testament.  From here, he leads into the baptism of Jesus, which he asserts is the correct starting place for understanding Jesus.  Davies uses spirit-possession theory to suggest that John’s baptism triggered a spontaneous dissociative experience in Jesus that led Jesus (and others) to believe he was possessed by the spirit of God.

Building on this novel approach, Davies looks at questions about Jesus’ healings (Chapter 5); demon possession (Chapter 6); Jesus’ exorcisms (Chapter 7); and Jesus and his associates (Chapter 8).  But all of these chapters are really a prelude to Chapters 9 and 10, where Davies tells us that Jesus induced in his followers an altered state of consciousness (ASC) called the “kingdom of God.”  The paradoxical nature of some of Jesus’ parables and sayings is proof to Davies that Jesus was using a healing method akin to the hypnotherapy techniques of American psychotherapist Milton Erickson.

In the last section of the book (Chapters 11 to 13), Davies, not content with a basic model for how Jesus might have healed others, tries to expand his thesis to explain to modern readers why the Johannine-style sayings attributed to Jesus should be considered just as historically authentic as synoptic-style sayings; why we should view early Christianity as a “missionary spirit-possession cult”; and why we must conclude that both Paul and John used “inductive discourse” (that is, intentionally confusing speech) to generate a spontaneous experience of spirit-possession in potential converts.

By the time I finished reading the book, I had found several inconsistencies in his argument, two or three outright contradictions, and an instance where the statistical figures he quoted did not add up (quite literally).  Likely these were unintentional errors.  And I can look past them.  What I can’t look past is Davies’s preposterous theory that the authors of Q and the synoptics recorded only the sayings of Jesus when he was speaking in his own voice as Jesus, and that the author of John wrote down only the sayings of Jesus when he was “possessed” by the Spirit of God (Chapter 11).  And that’s two different people, so of course the sayings sound different!

My ultimate impression?  I couldn’t escape the sense that Davies had gleefully picked fruit from the tree of knowledge in anthropology and psychology, and had tried to put it in a nice, neat gift basket he could present to other New Testament scholars as a sort of sublime “theory of everything.”  Unfortunately, he didn’t know when to stop filling the basket.  He damaged his own thesis because he failed to grasp its limits.  So I would advise caution in relying on the material in this book.

Jesus the Healer is not currently in print.

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Posted in Davies (Stevan), dissociation, healing, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Paul vs Jesus, Realspiritik, religion and mental Illness and tagged , | Leave a Comment
13 Aug 2012

RS23: Spit-Wives and Dead Goats

b20annet038 01

(c) Image*After

A:  I saw an interesting story on the BBC News site this week about a young Palestinian man named Ayman Safiah who is the only classically trained male ballet dancer to emerge from the Palestinian culture.*  He grew up in the Galilee in a town where Arabs and Jews treat each other well, and where some of its artists and writers have achieved international recognition.  Despite his success, he’s meeting with intense prejudice from his own community.  He reminds me a lot of you.   Knows who he is.  Doesn’t let prejudice and hatred stop him from doing what his heart and soul tell him to do.

I like the quotes from him:  “‘My desire to study classical ballet was simply beyond the understanding of my classmates,’ he explains.  ‘They only knew that it was something women enjoyed.  It was completely alien to them.'”  He also says, “‘My parents knew that ballet was going to be a large part of my life from early on . . . Even my grandfather accepted my career choice even though he didn’t fully understand what it entailed.'”

Yup.  He reminds me so much of you.  So stubborn.  So determined to break through cultural taboos that have nothing to do with God or soul or faith.

J:  Well, yes, I was told more than once I was more stubborn than a Hebron camel.  It was a saying from my time.

A:  Ayman Safiah faces huge opposition from the Palestinian community because men aren’t “supposed” to be passionate about dance.  Even the fact that he’s worked extremely hard for many years and has graduated from the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in Richmond, England, has not earned him any respect from his Arab compatriots.  Some insist that performing ballet is against Islam.  Two thousand years ago, you faced the same kind of rejection and prejudice for daring to practise medicine in the Galilee.  Tell me more about that.

J:  It’s interesting that Safiah makes the link between ballet and women.  In my time, the same kind of link existed between healing and women.  Healing was something that women did, and only women were interested in learning more about it.  No respectable man in the Judeo-Hellenistic culture I grew up in would have stooped to the level of the local village spit-wives.  But I was passionate about healing.

A:  Spit-wives?

J:  A derogatory term for the women who carried on the ancient traditions of herbal medicine.  They used poultices and teas and medicines handmade from various plants and minerals.  From time to time they were known to use spit in their remedies.  Since bodily fluids, including spit, were considered unclean — religiously impure — in the Jewish religious tradition, these traditional remedies and their practitioners were looked upon with contempt.  Women from the lower classes of society shared healing information among themselves and did their best to help each other, since nobody else was willing to help them.

A (eyes rolling):  Oh come on, now.  What about all those religious temples where people could make their sacrifices and prayers for divine healing?  Who needs medical science when you can ask a priest to slaughter a female goat for you?

J (smiling):  A sentiment I certainly agreed with and talked about.  Often.  And loudly.

A:  Didn’t win you any popularity contests, did it?

J:  People of prejudice don’t like to have their prejudices challenged.  And prejudices about illness and healing were extreme in my time.  There’s a ridiculous idea floating around in liberal religious circles today that people should tolerate and excuse these ancient prejudices because “it’s just the way things were” and “they didn’t know any better.”  This is crap.  The Greek culture had a long tradition, dating back hundreds of years before my time as Jesus, of treating illness and healing as a field of science.  They’d written many treatises about the workings of the body.  Some of their scientific remedies were quite effective — not all of them, of course, but there was an ongoing interest in studying illness and healing from a scientific perspective.  This was a perspective I sympathized with, much to the horror of my pious Jewish relatives.

A:  Were the spit-wives trying to be scientific, too?

J:  Women who are desperate to care for their families and relieve the suffering of their children can become shrewd and careful observers of scientific principles.  They don’t have the time or skills or status to consult with learned scholars of religious scrolls, so they fly by the seat of their pants.  They pay attention to what works.  They remember what works.  They tell their friends what works.  They base their decisions on intuition and careful observation, not piety.  They catch on fast when you show them how to wash and dress a wound so it won’t go “green.”  They might have to do their healing work in secret, where the men won’t catch them engaging in apostasy, but they’ll do it if it means saving the life of a beloved child.

A:  In this model, it’s okay for individuals to take personal responsibility for the problems created by illness.  It’s okay for individuals to go ahead and try to fix it instead of wringing their hands and claiming that only God and the priests can fix it.

J:  Exactly.  It’s an integral part of the Peace Sequence we’ve been talking about on and off.  You’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of bringing Peace to the wider community if you ignore the imperatives of illness and healing.  For most human beings, illness and healing are the number one issues.  If you don’t have mentors who can teach others about the realities of illness and healing, there’s no way for individuals to move on to the subsequent step of the Peace Sequence, which is personal responsibility.  In the world human beings actually live in — as opposed to the world of false myths created by the likes of the apostle Paul — people have to accept that they themselves have a huge stake in this whole “illness and healing” thing.  They can’t hand over their power and responsibility for healing to any religious group, no matter how big or successful the group.

All people are part of God’s world of science and faith, and all people are considered equal by God, so all people are called upon to uphold the steps of the Peace Sequence.  A big part of this process, as I’ve just mentioned, is to apply the steps of education, mentorship, and personal responsibility to the questions of illness and healing.  This is what I tried to do two thousand years ago.  I tried to teach others that healing miracles are possible if you let go of prejudice and hatred and treat those who are ill with compassion not judgment.

Angels tread where fools fear to go.

 

*Please see “First Palestinian male ballet dancer battles prejudices” by Sylvia Smith, posted on BBC News on August 10, 2012, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19202612

Addendum May 4, 2017: For those who are scornful of the idea that ancient healers were able to devise useful medical remedies by engaging in objective scientific observation preceded and followed by powerful intuition, I found this article today which is a follow-up to an preliminary story that appeared two years ago. In a story posted by Erin Connelly — “Exciting potential: Medieval medical books could hold the recipe for new antibiotics” — the author talks about Bald’s eyesalve, “a medieval recipe that contained wine, garlic, an Allium species (such as leek or onion) and oxgall . . . cured in a brass vessel for nine nights before use.” It sounds terrible to modern ears, but according to the researcher, it’s a highly effective antistaphylococcal agent.

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Posted in healing, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Peace Sequence, Realspiritik and tagged , | Leave a Comment
05 Aug 2012

RS20: The Messiah Who Misbehaved

A:  Last time, you came out with a doozy.  You said — and I quote — “[Paul] would have thought of it as ‘reintegrating’ broken pieces of divine truth that had fallen out of their proper places.  Pieces such as the Logos [Jesus].  And Charis (grace), who was Paul’s God.”

Bleeding Hearts ((c) JAT)

“They said to him: ‘Tell us who you are so that we can believe in you. He replied: You analyze the appearance of the sky and the earth, but you don’t recognize what is right in front of you, and you don’t know the nature of the present time” (Gospel of Thomas 91). Photo credit JAT 2013.

That’s quite a statement.  You’re saying, in effect, that Paul believed you actually were some some sort of divine figure who was sent to Earth, but that you were somehow “defective” or “broken,” and because of your “brokenness” Paul hated and feared you and tried to “fix” your teachings.  Have I got that right?

J (nodding):  Exactly.  It’s not difficult to see the differences in theology between Paul and myself, and it’s not difficult to see that Paul was trying to found a brand new religious movement, with himself as leader and prophet.  But at the end of the day, you still have to ask yourself why he would bother including me at all.  You have to ask yourself why he would found a new religious movement, and then stick a real person — a person whose family and friends had survived him and could still tell the truth — right in the middle of it.  It was a risky thing to do.  A stupid thing to do from the viewpoint of common sense and practicality.  It would have been much simpler and more logical for him to invent a Saviour from whole cloth, as so many other religious movements had done before him.  He could have invented a new god, and nobody around him would have blinked.  The world of 1st century CE religion was full of invented gods.

A:  So why did he do it?  Why did he take the risk of putting a real person at the centre of his new religious movement?

J:  We’ve talked about some of Paul’s motives in the past.  He was a man who was deeply driven, deeply ambitious.  He was, like so many ambitious men before and after him, a man who was blind to his own issues, blind to his own extreme narcissism.  The world was a confusing and endlessly frustrating place, from his point of view.  So, like so many other narcissists, he turned to ideology to help him cope.  He turned, in this case, to the ideology of religion.  Not faith, as I’d like to emphasize, but religion.  Religion as a cultural institution with clear rules and expectations — rules that bring order and harmony into a world of pure chaos.  Rules that make sense to the head if not to the heart.  Rules that tell people their place in life.  Rules that tell people how to behave toward their neighbours and how to behave toward their “betters.”  Rules that teach people how to obey.  This sense of structure and obedience was greatly appealing to Paul.  It helped him cope with his own feelings of confusion and anger.

A:  So he just went out and started a new religion?

J:  No.  Paul’s mindset — his internal belief system — was the start of his journey, but not the end of it.  In early adulthood, Paul turned to the Jewish tradition he’d been raised in, and at first this satisfied him.  But soon his narcissism, his need for special attention and special outcomes for himself, led him further and further away from questions about compassion and healing and forgiveness.  His clever mind and his skill with rhetoric brought him to the attention of a powerful group of military and political thinkers based in Alexandria, Egypt.

A:  We’ve talked about this before.  You called this group “Seekers of the Rock.”  You said they had a plan to seize power from the emperors of the Julian dynasty in Rome.

J (nodding):  People today often scoff at the idea that such powerful groups exist.  But they do.  They’ve been a fixture of all technologically advanced civilizations on Planet Earth.   The people who found and maintain these groups always ascribe great mystical significance and merit to their work, but, in fact, they’re really just a bunch of severe narcissists who’ve got together to form a “mutual admiration society.”

A:  Misery loves company.

J:  Yes.  Narcissists feel miserable on the inside.  But they feel better if they can keep themselves busy by throwing themselves into “a worthy cause.”  And what more worthy cause could there be than joining the Sons of Light to save the universe from the dire perils of Sin and Death and Corrupt Law and their evil leader Beliar?

A:  Paul mentions Beliar in Second Corinthians (2 Cor 6:15).

J:  And the Essenes before him.  Essene beliefs about Good Versus Evil greatly influenced Paul.  But in the end, even the secret mystical teachings of the Essenes weren’t enough for him, and he embraced the offer made to him by the Seekers of the Rock.

A:  They made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

J:  One of their seers told Paul he’d been chosen before birth to carry out a great mission that could help save the world and restore order to the entire universe.  There is no more tempting bait for a pure narcissist.

A:  Paul begins his letter to the Galatians by saying God had set him apart before he was born to receive divine revelation (Gal 1:11-17).

J:  Once a narcissist is convinced of such a claim, he or she becomes unstoppable in religious fervour.  He puts on a cloak of religious fervour that is understood by others as charisma — a gift of special grace from God.   He wears it 24/7 and goes without food or sleep if he’s caught up in the self-generated ecstasy of being the No. 1 Prophet and Mouthpiece of Revelation.  But, again, there’s nothing mystical or divine about it.  It’s the self-generated high — the orgasmic high — that narcissists feel when other people tell them how “special” and “chosen” they (the prophets) are.

A:  So Paul believed his own propaganda.  He believed he was a divinely chosen messenger.

J:  Absolutely.  He couldn’t have found the strength to keep going for so long if he hadn’t believed in his own message.

A:  The source of that strength was the “high” he got from being treated by others as special and chosen.

J:  Yes.  It’s an addictive high.  Eventually it damages both body and brain and leads to other forms of addiction, such as addiction to sex or drugs, but in the short term it gives a lot of energy, a lot of stamina for big performances, big bursts of charisma.

A:  Like some pop stars today.

J:  A lot like that, yes.

A:  So how does any of this relate to you?  Why did he decide to put you in the middle of the new religion he was commissioned to create?

J:  Several reasons.  One, he needed a “face” for his new Christ Movement, a movement that was being founded to compete with the Emperor Cult in Rome.  The Emperor Cult had “refreshed” ideas about the living god, the god incarnated in human form, the man who is really the son of God, deity in human flesh, god-and-emperor-as-One, that kind of thing.  These weren’t new religious ideas at the time.  Far from it.  But the influence of the Emperor Cult — which was nothing more than a calculated political ploy designed to build acceptance for Rome’s rule — had a surprising and unintended effect on people.  People began to think more — and yearn more — for an actual living god who could help them in their suffering.  Many people were open to the idea a living god, a Saviour who would come to Earth during a time of great need and save the oppressed.  It’s an idea that still hasn’t gone away.

A:  The Romans were nothing if not oppressive.

J:  Other religious movements of the time — and there were many — focussed on ancient gods and ancient prophecies.  Meanwhile, the Emperor Cult had a “new” god, a god of living flesh.  Paul saw the effect this had on people, and decided to offer them an alternative.  It was quite brilliant, actually.

A:  But why you?  Why not a prince or a member of the Alexandrian elite?  Why not a heroic general?  Why not a famous oracle?

J:  Paul chose me because he was afraid I was actually “the real deal.”  He didn’t arrive in Galilee in time to meet me in person, but he spoke to people who had worked with me, and he read the writings Lazarus and I had left behind.  He came to two unshakeable conclusions: (1) I had been the prophesied Messiah, as shown by the miracles of my ministry, and (2) I had seriously fucked things up.

A:  You always have such a way with words.

J (laughing):  Hey, it’s the truth.  It’s what Paul thought about me.  He could see from his own investigations that I knew something new and important about God, something he didn’t.  He could see I’d been using strange, new techniques to heal people.  He could see that something damned weird had happened around the time of my crucifixion and reappearance from the tomb.  He didn’t argue with the events, with the historicity of miraculous events during my ministry.  What he objected to was how I had used this secret knowledge.  In his opinion, I hadn’t behaved at all the way a proper Messiah should have behaved.  I hadn’t seized the power and the glory. So he concluded I’d got broken somehow, that I’d got broken and needed to be fixed.

A:  Which he had the skill to do, of course.

J:  Of course.  A narcissist doesn’t believe he has limits.  I was so broken he sometimes referred to me as the “thorn in his flesh.”  Other times he referred to me as “the useful one,” the slave Onesimus, as in Paul’s letter to Philemon.  He felt I’d fallen so low during my time as a man that I’d become no better than a slave.

A:  So what was this secret knowledge you had?  What were these strange, new healing techniques you used?

J:  Ah.  That would be science.

A:  You want to explain that?

J:  It’s the simplest thing in the world to put science and faith together when you trust in God’s goodness with all your heart, all your strength, all your mind, and all your soul.  When you believe in God — in God as God actually is — there’s no need to fight the science.  There’s no need to fight the objective realities of science.  There’s no need to hide behind religious laws and religious rituals.  You just go out there and do your thing — whatever your “thing” happens to be.

A:  Which in your case was being a physician.

J:  I was a physician, then and now.  It’s who I am as a soul.  It’s my calling, you could say.  It’s my strength.  Because it’s my strength, I hear God’s voice particularly well in this area.  My instincts, my gut, my heart, my intuition hear messages from God very clearly in the area of medical science.  I can’t hear God’s voice clearly in all areas, but when it comes to questions about medical science, I can hear clear as a bell.  I combined my skill as a natural physician with my faith in God and my faith in the goodness of all souls.  God’s healing angels did the rest.  I didn’t perform the miracles myself.  But I helped create a fruitful garden of the heart where oppressed individuals could believe in their own worthiness, in their own worthiness to be loved and healed by God.  My job was to persuade my friends they could find healing by working with God instead of against God.

A:  This doesn’t sound very broken to me.  It sounds pretty healthy and normal.

J:  Apparently Messiahs who are worth their salt are expected to show a lot more razzle dazzle.  More shields, more swords, more footstools, more thrones, more trumpets.

A:  Sounds a lot to me like an American reality TV show.  “So You Think You Can Prophesy”  . . .  “American Messiah” . . . “Dancing With the Gods” . . . Hey, you know, maybe we’re already there  . . .

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Posted in healing miracles, Messiah, miracles, narcissism, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings, Realspiritik, resurrection and tagged , | Leave a Comment
10 Mar 2012

TBM26: A Practical Tip For Getting Along With Your Angels

Here’s a super-practical tip for people walking the Spiral Path: don’t ask your guardian angels to help you get more status.

Probably the single biggest mistake made by spiritual seekers anywhere (and I mean anywhere) is to assume that God and God’s angels are remotely interested in anything resembling status.

I know that countless religious tomes have told you otherwise. I know you’ve been told that God needs your worship and sacraments (i.e. status points for God). I know you’ve been told that God needs your prayers (i.e. status points for you). I know you’ve been told that angels (if they exist at all) are bound within a strict Celestial Hierarchy — escalating angelic tiers of seniority and importance and proximity to God. (Thanks for nothing, Pseudo-Dionysius). I know this is what you’ve been told again and again. But if you look at the evidence for success among pious devotees of these beliefs, you’ll find precious little in the way of consistent, positive, demonstrable outcomes such as improved health, improved standards of living, or improved family and community safety.

Which is how God measures these things.

God the Mother and God the Father know that your task here is to see what it feels like to juggle the needs of the 4D soul with the needs of the 3D body, with lots of chances to practise forgiveness thrown in (’cause it’s never too late to remember how). So God is very interested in helping you and your family achieve a state of relative good health (both physical health and mental health) until it’s your time to Go Home (colloquially known as dying).

Naturally, a God who’s interested in helping you stay healthy is going to be very worried about the painful effects of addiction in your life, since addiction is one of the major causes of suffering among human beings. Addiction issues create physical suffering, mental suffering, emotional suffering, family suffering, and community suffering. Addiction also creates financial suffering and educational suffering and job-related suffering. It gets in the way of everything that’s positive and selfless and healing.

So . . . it should take you all of about five seconds to realize that God and God’s angels are not going to be supportive of choices based on status addiction.

Even if the myth surrounding the status addiction is a religious myth.

The general assumption seems to be that God is tolerant of all religious beliefs and all religious myths because, when push comes to shove, these religious traditions have one thing in common: they confer status points on God.

Only an emotionally immature person would conclude that God actually wants status points.

Unfortunately, all too many emotionally immature individuals have gradually fallen into the trap of status addiction, where, mired in the swamps of narcissism and bullying, and looking at others through the characteristic tunnel-vision thereof, it seems perfectly logical to conclude that the correct way to approach God is to offer status points. After all, the giving and taking of status points is a normal way of existing (though not a normal way of living) for many human beings on Planet Earth.

As humans, we don’t like to hear that angels have free will, but they do. Your own guardian angels use their free will to decide when, how, and if they’ll respond to your requests for aid – even if it means you have to go through some rough patches to get where you need to go.

So don’t do it. There aren’t a lot of strict rules to follow on the Spiral Path, and even this one isn’t really a rule, since you can ignore me and do whatever you like because you have free will. But before you make that choice, you need to know there are consequences for the choice to seek status on the spiritual journey. Here is the consequence: your guardian angels will stop helping you. They’ll still love you. They’ll still forgive you. But they won’t enable you as you rejoice in the high of an addiction disorder — any addiction disorder, including status addiction.

Just as family members of a person with addiction issues know it’s wrong to enable dysfunctional behaviours, angels know it’s wrong to enable dysfunctional and harmful behaviours. It’s courageous and loving and forgiving of them to refuse to enable the choices of status addiction. And why would we want it any other way?

Angels will help you find healing once you make the choice to be honest about your addiction. They’ll guide you to people and books and learning experiences and medical treatments that will help you heal. But they’ll let you fall flat on your face over and over until you accept the truth that your status addiction isn’t pretty and isn’t divine and isn’t acceptable to anyone, including your core self.

During my theology classes, I was required to read the teachings of Christian theologians from the time of Paul the Apostle to the modern day. I read many different explanations for why human beings suffer, but never once, except in the teachings of Jesus himself, did I come across the one explanation that fits all the facts: God refuses to be an enabler of status addiction.

The communities in the world today that have the highest standards of health, the highest standards of living for the middle and lower classes, the lowest levels of crime and corruption, and the highest standards of ethical, legal, and interpersonal conduct are the communities with the least cultural emphasis on status acquisition.

Too often it’s assumed the recipe for success in these communities is the abolition of faith, a rejection of belief in God — that is, atheistic societies built on humanistic values without religious superstitions to hold people back.

Faith in God never holds a person back. But religious institutions which are deeply committed to the preservation of status addiction can and do hold people back. This is a biological reality.

Keep the idea of God. Ditch the idea of status acquisition and status addiction in all its nasty and insidious forms.

As a spiritual practice, it’s simple. It’s sane. And it works.

Because your guardian angels are thrilled to help you when you aren’t being such an ass.

Next time I’ll talk about some of the ways in which your angels can help you. I think you’ll be very surprised to learn what matters to them.

 

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Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), faith, free will, HDM Myths, healing miracles, prayer, relationship with God, spiritual practices, status addiction, The Blonde Mystic, theodicy and tagged , | Leave a Comment
24 May 2011

JR43: The Case for "Mark Versus Paul"

Study of the Gospel of Thomas, which has strong links to the Q Source and the Synoptic Gospels, makes it easier to see what Jesus was actually saying and how Jesus’ teachings differed radically from Paul’s teachings. Ceiling mosaic in the original Queen’s Park entrance of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. Photo credit JAT 2017.

 A: Today, I’m shifting back into academic mode on the question of what Jesus actually taught 2,000 years ago — as opposed to what the Church says he taught.

I’ve had an inquiry about my academic arguments on the “Mark versus Paul” question — that is, on my thesis that Mark wrote his gospel as a direct rebuttal of Paul’s First Corinthians. To present this argument in its entirety would fill at least one big fat Zondervan text (as if Zondervan’s editors would publish such a thesis!) so all I can do at this stage is present a brief list of comparisons between the two texts. I’m aware that in order to build a case for each “talking point” in a complete academic format — a format that would be acceptable to a peer-reviewed journal — would require many months of research for each point and a long research paper for each. The work would go faster, however, if others were willing to help. If you’re interested in helping with this project, please contact me.

I’m going to present some of the major contrasts I see between First Corinthians and the Gospel of Mark. I’ll assume for this purpose that the extant copies of these two books represent with a fair degree of accuracy the original texts as they were written by Paul and Mark respectively, with the exception of Mark 16:9-20 (the very ending of Mark), which is generally believed to be a later addition.

If you want to see which researchers I rely on, please refer to the post called “The Author’s Research Bibliography” (http://jesusredux.blogspot.com/2011/03/authors-bibliography.html).

I use more than one form of biblical criticism — more than one analytical tool — in this comparison. I tend to start with traditional methods — socio-historical criticism, source criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism — and then I cross-reference these arguments with recent scientific insights from quantum theory, neurophysiology, psychotherapy, archaeology, and recent historical findings. I also use my own personal mystical faculties, but I won’t apologize for this, since insights derived from mystical conversations are only a starting point, not an ending point. Other researchers get “aha” moments and call them intuition, or divine revelation, or just plain ol’ personal brilliance. Me, I’m being honest about where I get my starting point for this discussion. After that, it’s up to me to use logical human tools to make my case.

Fortunately for me, what Jesus and my angels pointed out to me leads to an extremely strong case.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no biblical scholars currently publishing on this topic. So this is original research you’re reading. You’ll probably wonder straight away how I — an obscure blogger from Canada who has no PhD and no publishing record of note — could see evidence of a book-to-book biblical feud that nobody else has seen. To this I must reply that the feud has been obvious “to those who have eyes and those who have ears” (Mark 8:18) since these two texts began to circulate simultaneously in the latter part of the 1st century CE. Christians have always been called to decide whether they choose Paul’s teachings or Jesus’ teachings (even if they haven’t been able to articulate the choice in scholarly terms). However, it’s only now that Christians are getting round to being honest about this fact.

If Mark had simply written about entirely different themes than Paul did, there would be no point in trying to show that Mark wrote his gospel as a rebuttal of Paul’s First Corinthians. But Mark didn’t write about different themes than Paul did. He wrote about exactly the same topics and inverted them. He also chose his words as carefully as Paul did. He never uses Paul’s favourite word: nomos (Greek for law, authority, unbreakable tradition). Nor does Mark use the words charis (grace) or elpis (hope). The words nomos, charis, and elpis are part of the vocabulary of apocalyptic thought. And Mark is trying to show, contrary to Paul’s claims about Jesus, that Jesus himself rejected apocalyptic thought.

Mark never uses the words nomos, charis, and elpis. But for a man who never uses these words, he talks about them a lot in his book. He talks about what it means for a person of faith to be in full relationship with God the Mother and God the Father.

Here is a point form list of some of the direct comparisons. I reserve the right to edit, modify, add to, and clarify this list whenever additional information comes to light in future. If information is suggested to me by other writers, I will so note the contribution(s).

Concerns of Form:

1. Viewpoint Character
In Paul: The viewpoint character is Paul himself.
In Mark: The viewpoint character is Jesus; the author (Mark) is not present; reference to “a certain young man” in Mark 14:51 may indicate an eyewitness to whom Mark later spoke about events surrounding Jesus’ arrest.

2. Narrator’s Voice
In Paul: The narrator speaks in first person (Paul himself).
In Mark: Third person narration.

3. Literary Genre
In Paul: Written as a letter; uses rhetoric, exhortation.
In Mark: Written as a biographical narrative interspersed with parables, sayings, and teaching actions (i.e. teaching chreia).

4: The Narrative Hook: “The Hero’s Journey”
In Paul: The hero Paul recounts highlights of his long and arduous journey to save the Gentiles; the focus is on important urban centres; the hero’s personal journey is a metaphor for the path of spiritual ascent (i.e. the vertical path that leads to salvation and eventual bodily resurrection).
In Mark: The hero Jesus takes many small trips around a small freshwater lake; the focus is on unimportant outlying communities; the hero’s journey is horizontal, not vertical; the path is not straight; bad things happen on high hills; good things happen near boats and water.

Theological and Social Concerns:

5. Relationship to the Jerusalem Temple:
In Paul: The physical Temple has been replaced by Jesus and “believers” (1 Cor 3:9-17; 6:19-20); the Temple is now purely mystical; it is more important than ever. (Note: the actual physical Herodian Temple was still standing in Jerusalem at the time Paul wrote his letter and Mark wrote his rebuttal).
In Mark: The physical Temple exists and is the centre of corruption in Palestine (Mark 11:12-24;12:35-44; 15:38).

6. Relationship to the city of Jerusalem:
In Paul: Jerusalem is still favoured as shown by the collection for the Jerusalem church (1 Cor 16:1-4).
In Mark: Jesus spends little time in Jerusalem; healing miracles all take place outside the city; Jesus’ friends live outside the city; Jerusalem is the place where genuine faith withers away (Mark 11).

7. Healing Miracles:
In Paul: No mention of healing miracles.
In Mark: Several healing miracles take place; the theme of healing is introduced early on and repeated until Jesus reaches Jerusalem.

8. People With Disabilities:
In Paul: No special mention of individuals with physical or mental illnesses or disabilities or special needs.
In Mark: Those deemed “impure” according to Jewish custom and law are healed, touched, spoken to in violation of purity laws.

9. The Kingdom of God:
In Paul: The Kingdom is a reality outside the self; it depends on power (1 Cor 4:20; 15:24-28; 15:50).
In Mark: There is no simple explanation of the Kingdom, but empathy is central to it (Mark 10:13-31; 12:28-34).

10. Relationship of Body to Soul:
In Paul: Influenced by Platonic dualism.; the flesh is corrupt (1 Cor 3:1-4; 7:8-9; 9:24-27; 15:42-49). Souls are in peril without belief in Christ.
In Mark: Holistic attitude toward the body; non-Platonic and non-Covenantal; flesh is not impure or corrupt; right relationship with God involves caring for the body. Souls live as angels in the afterlife (Mark 12:24-27)

11: Forgiveness:
In Paul: No mention of forgiveness.
In Mark: The theme of forgiveness is introduced early on (Mark 2:1-12); both God and humans can forgive (Mark 11:25).

12: The Definition of Human Virtue:
In Paul: “Foolishness” (morias) and unquestioning faith are the highest expressions of right belief (1 Cor 1:10 – 2:5); obedience, fellowship, holiness, “strong consciousness,” and the proper exercise of freedom are emphasized.
In Mark: Courage (ischys) and a questioning faith are the highest expressions of right belief (Mark 8:11-21); egalitarianism, service, forgiveness, and insight (suneseos) are emphasized.

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Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, faith, First Corinthians, Gospel of Mark, healing miracles, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, Mark vs Paul, Mother and Father God, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings and tagged | Leave a Comment
27 Apr 2011

TBM12: Finding the Words of Your Own Promise

Daisies (c) JAT 2014

Daisies (c) JAT 2014

In my last post (Four Basic Practices to Get You Started), I introduced the idea that every day you need to repeat the promise you’ve written to yourself for yourself. Today I’d like to talk more about the promise part, since it’s the promise part that’s so central to the healing of your brain.

One thing that’s very important to understand so you can get yourself solidly planted on the Spiral Path is this: you’re only being asked to write and repeat one promise. The problem today is that almost everybody has too many ideas and too many lists and too many “shoulds” in their heads. This is a big part of the reason for the brain’s overall lack of coordination and balance — there are too many sets of instructions, and the biological brain can’t make sense of it all.

As I mentioned in the last post, you need to provide your brain (or rather I should say the semi-autonomous sectors of your brain) with some sheet music so your brain as a whole knows where it’s going. Your brain would really appreciate some consistency and simplicity! This is why it’s crucial to choose only one promise for now. After about a year (yes, a year) you can think about changing your promise. But if you’re like almost everyone else walking around on Planet Earth these days, you’ll need at least a year to get your brain committed to the new path you’re choosing. It’s a form of self-discipline to stick to only one promise. It’s also a form of integrity.

The promise you make to yourself for yourself will be the cornerstone of the new foundation you’re building for yourself, and you’ll be returning to it again and again in the way that people return again and again to a favourite prayer or mantra. In fact, your promise to yourself will be a positive, uplifting form of prayer — something for you to hang onto with all your might when the going gets tough.

Your personal promise doesn’t have to be long. In fact, shorter is better.

To give you an example, this is the promise I made to myself in the year 2000, the promise I made and stuck to no matter what: “I want to learn to love unconditionally the way you do.” The “you” I refer to in my promise is my guardian angel, whose intense and perfect love I was (and am) able to feel. I was awed and inspired by his love, by his ability to forgive, by his ability to guide me patiently and devotedly even when I was being a shithead. With his help it finally dawned on me that he actually believed I, too, was capable of remembering how to love and forgive! I had no idea exactly what it would feel like to be a loving and forgiving human being, so I decided the sensible thing to do was copy my guardian angel. I made a promise to myself (not to him, but to myself) that I would keep trying every day as hard as I could to learn how to love. I tenaciously held to this promise. There were days when this promise spoken morning and evening was the only thing I did that made any sense at all. But slowly, gradually, I started to notice some positive changes in my thinking patterns. (And, oh, thank God for that!)

What I didn’t know at the time, but what made a huge difference to my journey, was the focus of my promise. Somewhat accidentally, I made a promise to myself that my own soul could “get on board with.” Although the promise I made was very short in terms of the number of words it contained, it carried a lot of punch. It carried a lot of punch for the following reasons:

  • The promise was focussed on improving my relationships — no talk of status or acquisition of “health and wealth”.
  • The promise was positive and uplifting in tone — no talk of sin, salvation, or unworthiness before God.
  • The promise was honest — I was implicitly acknowledging the honest truth that I wasn’t being as loving and forgiving as I could be, but at the same time I was being honest about my ability to change.
  • The promise was clear and specific — no beating around the bush, no cliches, no vague spiritual talk of enlightenment or raising my vibration.
  • The promise showed that I myself was taking personal responsibility for my own thoughts, feelings, and choices — no victim mentality, no passing the buck to God or God’s guardian angels.
  • The promise was focussed on something “doable” and “learnable,” something realistic and non-magical/non-mystical.
  • The promise was easy to remember — there’s no point in having a 5-page promise you can’t remember in a pinch.

At first glance it’s hard to believe so much stuff could be packed into such a short promise, but when you compare it to some other well known prayers (such as the Lord’s Prayer, which I don’t use at all), you can see the basic underlying differences. The promise I made to myself was built on a rock-solid foundation of trust in God’s love, whereas traditional Christian prayers have been built on a foundation of fear and self-entitlement. (Have you ever noticed that the Lord’s Prayer contains nary a “please” nor a “thank you”?)

The promise you make to yourself for yourself could be something along these lines:

“I want to learn to be the sort of person my children can be proud of.”

Or . . .

“I want to understand the meaning of the Serenity Prayer.”

Or . . .

“I want to understand what it means to be a person of courage, devotion, gratitude, and trust.”

Or . . .

“I want to understand what changes I must make in my own life in order to hear the voice of God in my heart.”

Or . . .

“I believe in myself the way God believes in me.”

Or . . .

“I trust that I am a child of God and that I can make a real difference each day by trying as hard as I can to be kind towards others.”

Or . . .

“I want to learn to let go of my anger and perfectionism.”

These examples are only that — examples to get you started as you try to find the right words for your own promises. However, if one of these examples feels right for you, please embrace it and make it your own. Remember always, though, that your promise is your promise. It isn’t your neighbour’s promise or your child’s promise. Each person must find the words that work best for him or her. There is no single set of sacred words anywhere on the planet that has magical properties of transformation and healing for all people. What matters for you is that you find the words that make your heart light up with hope. These are the words of your heart and soul, your truest vision of yourself in relationship with yourself.

Each of these promises has the potential to gradually change your life and your relationships for the simple reason that each of these promises provides a clear, simple, uplifting, unified set of instructions for all the sectors of your brain to work on together.* It needs to be formulated in words, and it needs to be consciously repeated by yourself for yourself at least once each day (and preferably more often — ideally once when you get up for the day and once before you go to sleep — if possible). The reason it needs to be formulated in words is because a huge portion of your brain is devoted to language and communication. When you formulate your promise clearly and optimistically to yourself in words, it allows you to harness the language and communication centres of your brain to help coordinate the inner rewiring of your brain.

I want to emphasize that this brain-healing process takes a lot of time. Many spiritually-hopeful people have been gravely harmed by so-called faith healers who promise instant healing. I do not promise anyone instant healing, even though I personally believe that healing miracles sometimes take place. However, I do guarantee that your biological brain is not “carved in stone,” and that you have the ability to overcome great psychological and emotional adversity if you receive the right help and if you believe in your own truth as a child of God.

Just take it one day at a time. Stick with the Four Basic Practices for now. Remember that it takes about 42 days to grow a new neuron. If some arrogant religious-know-it-all tries to give you a hard time and tell you you’re “not going fast enough” or “not trying hard enough,” remember that you can only go as fast as your brain can build new brain cells. That’s the scientific reality, and you don’t have to apologize for it.

Take that, you Spirit-intoxicated evangelicals, you!

*(For a more detailed discussion of what’s possible and what’s not possible inside your biological self, please see “Foxes Have Holes, Canadians Have Gloves.”

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Posted in brain-soul connection, building your intuition, healing, healing miracles, intent, meta-choice, prayer, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged , | Leave a Comment
01 Apr 2011

JR29: Eucharist: The Temple Sacrifice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J: Oh yes. Most definitely.

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

-3
Posted in "4 S's", Essenes, faith, First Corinthians, Gnosticism, healing miracles, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, Letter of James, Mark vs Paul, occult themes, Paul's teachings and tagged , | Leave a Comment
13 Feb 2011

JR9: Jesus Explains "The Kingdom"

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

J: Knock yourself out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

J: That goes to the heart of my teachings.

A: I know.

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

A: Exactly my thought.

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

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

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

A: Which was . . . ?

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

A: As an individual?

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

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

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

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

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

A: What turned the tide?

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

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

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

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

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

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

J (nodding yes): [Nods without speaking]

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

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

A: Can you give any examples of their advice?

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

A: And pewtersmiths have stopped making pewter with lead.

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

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

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

J (nodding yes): Um hum.

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

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

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

J: That would be an understatement.

-2
Posted in boundary issues, ethical mysticism, faith, healing, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, Kingdom teachings, Law (Nomos), Letter of James, slavery, Soul, status addiction, trust and tagged , | Leave a Comment
02 Jan 2011

TBM3: The Five Basic Goals of the Spiral Path

Would it help if I told you that God doesn’t expect you to be perfect?

You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. And you can’t progress on the Spiral Path unless you’re willing to make a few mistakes along the way. Mistakes are going to be part of your spiritual journey. Some of these mistakes are gonna make you laugh, and some of these mistakes are gonna make you cry your guts out. But you’re gonna make mistakes. And that’s okay with God. After all, you’re only human. Sort of.

It’s a lot more accurate to say that you’re an angel-in-temporary-human-form. A soul-temporarily-downshifted-into-3D-matter. A child of God. A temporary resident of Planet Earth. Consciousness temporarily experiencing baryonic expression for the purposes of learning. A soul who has temporarily embarked on a learning expedition on Earth with a very small suitcase of supplies (think Lost). A big soul in an itty bitty living space (think Robin Williams’s “Genie” in Aladdin). An angel who has to muddle through for awhile not realizing she has wings (think Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz). A person with a very big heart.

That’s you.

Photo credit JAT 2019

Long before you were born as a human being, you existed as a soul, as an angel, as a child of God. (I use these terms synonymously). It’s the sum total of who you really are. It’s the totality of you as a child of God.

To say that you’re a soul is the same thing as saying that you’re a person. It’s incorrect to say that you have a soul. You don’t have a soul in the way that you have a removeable, detachable, non-essential right thumb or left eye. You are a soul. Everything in you — everything that you are and everything that you know and everything that you feel and everything that you need — is you. You are a person. You are a soul. You are a child of God.

And God don’t make no junk.

Your problems as a human being are not caused by your soul. Neither are your problems caused by your human biology. Your problems are caused by the catastrophic failure of Western culture to teach you how to fully balance and integrate your soul’s identity with your human biology. You haven’t been taught how to read your own personal “owner’s manual.” Heck, you haven’t been taught that you even have an owner’s manual. So you stumble through life in a state of confusion, fear, and yearning, always wanting to understand, but never knowing where to start.

So what is the first step in beginning your spiritual journey? What is the goal of the Spiral Path?

Is the goal for you to try to transcend your humanity and detach from your human thoughts, needs, and feelings so you can feel closer to God? No. The goal is for you to understand and accept your soul’s identity so you can integrate your soul’s needs with your human biology as much as possible. This leads to the feeling of trust.

Is the goal for you to try to attain perfection of action or perfection of result? No. It’s not possible for any human being to attain either perfection of action or perfection of result. The best you can hope for is perfection of intent — the ongoing desire to be the best person you’re capable of being, despite the fact that you’ll continue to make mistakes as a human being. This leads to the feeling of forgiveness.

Is the goal for you to seek gnosis (esoteric wisdom) or secret spiritual knowledge that will raise you to a new, higher level of human consciousness and human evolution? No. The goal is for you to accept that you already have the right DNA package for your own soul. Your goal is to gradually transform all your “lemons” into “lemonade.” This leads to the feeling of courage.

Is the goal for you to receive “gifts of grace” from God by dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s of God’s Law (as dictated by your religious leaders)? No. The goal is for you to use your free will to work side by side with God and God’s angels (despite your human limitations) to create a more compassionate society. This leads to the feeling of devotion.

Is the goal for you to be saved by God? No. The goal is for you to be grateful for the gift of love that God gives to you and to all Creation. Without this love, “the person who is you” would not be possible. Neither would anything good, true, or beautiful be possible. (Sorry — couldn’t resist a dig at Plato and Paul). Not surprisingly, this practice leads to the feeling of gratitude.

You’re trying on the Spiral Path to find your own soul’s feelings of trust, forgiveness, courage, devotion, and gratitude. That’s it. You’re not seeking transcendence. You’re not seeking perfection of ritual. You’re not seeking gnosis (esoteric wisdom). You’re not seeking to earn grace through piety and blind faith. You’re not seeking salvation. What you’re really seeking is your own core self, your own core identity as a soul. You’re seeking to reclaim everything you were born with as a helpless yet incredibly loving and forgiving human child.

Strange as it may seem, it’s in seeking your own true identity as a soul that you’ll begin to recognize God as God really is.

That’s when your heart will explode with wonder. And you’ll feel the way Dr. Seuss’s Grinch feels when he finally “gets it.”

Really. I’m not kidding. This is what it feels like when you ground yourself firmly on the Spiral Path. It feels . . . good. Really, really good. Like Christmas all year round.

It’s awesome.

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Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), brain-soul connection, building your intuition, healing miracles, intent, meta-choice, Soul, The Blonde Mystic and tagged | Leave a Comment
05 Dec 2010

CC48: The Crucifixion and Resurrection

Today is Second Advent, so this seems like a good time to talk about miracles.

You’d think that, with all my talk about science and brain chemistry, I’d be the sort of person who would reject the reality of miracles. Because practical people who believe in science are sort of obligated to reject the reality of miracles. Aren’t they?

Sunset, October 2014 - I captured this dazzling ray effect close to my home when my angels unexpectedly told me to pick up my camera, get in the car, and go! (c) JAT 2014

Sunset, October 2014 – I captured this dazzling ray effect close to my home when my angels unexpectedly told me to pick up my camera, get in my car, and go! Photo credit JAT 2014.

Most United Church of Canada members seem to think so. They’re squeamish about the idea that the soul exists as a scientific reality. Same thing with miracles. Officially, they won’t talk about miracles. Off the record, some United Church members will confide they believe in unexplainable, God-given events. But when they talk about miracles, they speak awkwardly and self-consciously — the same way people react when they’re invited to sit at a formal dinner table where there are three different forks on the left and three different knives on the right, plus a whole bunch of spoons, and they don’t know which utensils they’re supposed to use first. So they spend most of their time trying to watch the other guests to see which fork they should use when. They’re so busy paying attention to their feelings of embarrassment and discomfort that they can’t enjoy themselves. The whole situation is stressful rather than enjoyable.

I’d like to be able to say that United Church members have gone on the defensive about miracles because of repeated attacks from atheistic scientists such as Richard Dawkins. But it’s not that simple. United Church members are on the defensive because they’ve been repeatedly bullied by “progressive” Christian theologians (e.g. Rudolf Bultmann) who have loudly proclaimed that the miracles performed by Jesus in the Gospels couldn’t possibly have happened.

In the view of Bultmann and others, no sensible Christian should believe in these miracles because to believe in miracles is to reject science. These theologians recommend that Christians read the miracle stories . . . symbolically. Symbolically — my favourite word (grrrr).

These same theologians call into question the reality of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. They insist we should understand the Resurrection metaphorically rather than literally. In their view, the Resurrection couldn’t possibly have happened for real. Naturally, this makes it easier to believe that Jesus himself wasn’t real, either, but instead was an invented religious symbol.

I think they’ve got it all backwards. They’ve started with the assumption that miracles aren’t scientifically possible (an assumption that’s not scientifically valid), and on the basis of this assumption they’ve concluded that the miracle stories (especially those in the Gospel of Mark) must have been invented by gullible, superstitious, scientifically uneducated 1st century authors who didn’t know any better. Or maybe by authors who were just following a popular ancient trend of inserting invented miracle stories into their biographical narratives. (The fact that today’s Christian televangelists are still inventing new miracle stories to dupe the public should remind us not to make blanket statements about the motives of all ancient writers.)

Queen’s University history professor Dr. Jaclyn Duffin, who is both a practising hematologist and a professor in the history of medicine (a modern day physician scholar, as it were), has recently published a book about the history of canonization and attested healing miracles in the Roman Catholic Church. She sums up medical miracles in this way: “The doctor is surprised.”

The doctor is surprised. The doctor is surprised that, on the basis of current scientific understandings of the disease process, the patient somehow manages to fully recover despite all scientific predictions of imminent death.

I would suggest that when the doctor is surprised, it can mean one of two things: (1) the doctor was wrong from the beginning about the diagnosis or (2) the doctor isn’t as smart as she thinks she is about the disease process, quantum biology, healing, and God.

Usually it’s the latter.

The Resurrection as described in the Gospel of Mark is very sparse on details. (I agree with biblical scholars who suggest the book originally ended at Mark 16:8, not at Mark 16:20). All we really know for sure is that Jesus was crucified, was declared dead, was taken down from the cross, hastily placed in a tomb, and somehow managed to disappear from said tomb. Mark’s account leaves a lot of scientific wiggle room for a doctor to be surprised.

It’s a powerful symbol, the cross that Jesus hung upon. (It’s okay for symbols such as crosses or a stars to be symbols; it’s just not okay for historical facts to be treated as symbols instead of as facts.) The story of the cross has something important to say to us, even today, because it’s still a story where the doctors are surprised and we, the regular people of faith, are filled with awe.

For me, the miracle in this story is not that a man died and was raised from the dead. (I don’t think that’s scientifically possible.) For me, the miracle is that the man didn’t die in the first place.

How did Jesus son of Joseph escape death on the cross? That is the miracle in question.

It’s a much bigger question than Paul’s Christ myth asks. Paul’s Christ myth asks you to believe with blind faith that a human man fully died but was fully returned to life after three days because he was divine — the chosen son of God. He furthers asks you to believe with blind faith that if you fully accept Paul’s teachings about Judgment Day, then you, too, will be resurrected on that day. Sin is the enemy and death is its consequence. The great question for Paul is, “How can I escape death?”

The Jesus reality (as told by Mark) asks a different question. The Jesus reality asks you to ask new questions about God. The Jesus reality tells a powerful story about the relationship between God and God’s children, and asks you to not rely on blind faith, but to use your own common sense, your own senses, and your heart.

The Jesus reality is a powerful story about the kinds of things that are possible in God’s Creation when human beings walk side by side and hand in hand with Mother Father God.

It’s a story about courage. And trust. And humbleness. It’s a story about God’s free will and our own. It’s a story about miraculous (though still scientific) healing. And it’s a story about grief.

One of the things we can be certain of when we read Mark is that Jesus is not trying to escape death. Jesus has no fear of dying. He tells his disciples he’s going to die, but then he gets on with his life of service as a teacher and healer. He ignores all the Jewish purity laws around disease and death. He puts himself in harm’s way by going to Jerusalem. His Last Supper is not a last supper but a first supper, where he rejects the Passover ritual of eating unleavened bread by choosing instead to drink water and to eat risen bread. He breaks all the laws designed to protect the pious from death. His message is not about escaping death. His message is about embracing courage and trust and gratitude and devotion in our relationships with each other and with God.

The Jesus reality is Mark’s way of saying that death is part of human life, and no one — not even a gifted physician scholar filled with learning and love — can fight this reality. Jesus had to die because he was a creature of Earth, and all creatures of Earth will one day die. It’s meant to be this way. It’s part of the fabric of Creation. It’s painful and emotionally overwhelming for us to lose someone we love, but it’s the way it has to be. Our lives here are only temporary. When it’s time for one of us to go Home to our eternal reality, God the Mother and God the Father (both of whom are brilliant scientists and brilliant healers), come and gently lift us out of our mortal body and tenderly carry us Home. There we’re reunited with our loved ones, and our hearts break open to pour out all the tears and sorrows of our lonely human lives so we can be healed and restored in God’s loving arms.

Yet, despite all this, we’re left with a mystery. Despite the reality of Jesus’ total trust in God, despite the reality of Jesus’ courage in the face of death, we’re left with the puzzling fact that God the Mother and God the Father in their wisdom decided that a man named Jesus of Nazareth would not die on the cross that day, but would, in fact, escape that terrible death, and live to tell the tale — for a short while, anyway, before he, too, surrendered his human life, as all of us one day must.

What is it that God was saying?

Thanks be to God the Mother and God the Father this Advent Sunday.

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Posted in "Escape", afterlife, atheism, Concinnate Christianity, Divine Love, Gospel of Mark, healing, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Jesus' teachings, life and death, miracles, Mother and Father God, resurrection and tagged | Leave a Comment
22 Sep 2010

CC35: Would You Like To Super-Size That Stampede?

In last Saturday’s Toronto Star (Sat., Sept. 18, 2010), an article on page 2 stopped me in my tracks. Entitled “Believers fine with the Rapture, but what about Fido?” (written by Lesley Ciarula Taylor), the story described a new Internet-based business called “Eternal Earth-Bound Pets.” This business, founded by a gentleman named Bart Centre, already has 225 clients who have paid $110 U.S. per pet to have their pets rescued and cared for after May 21, 2011.

Why are these clients so confident their pets will need to be rescued after May 21, 2011? Well, because the Rapture has been prophesied for that day, and as every Rapture-believing evangelical Christian knows, that’s when “true believers” will be saved — taken directly up into Heaven, body and all, in the twinkling of an eye — and all the rest of the poor slobs on Planet Earth will left to contend with the dreaded Doomsday, currently prophesied to be coming soon to a sinful city near you on October 21, 2011.

Of course, since only the chosen among human beings will be beamed up to Heaven during the Rapture, there’s the dicey question of who will look after all those soulless pets, the pets that will be abandoned by their Christian owners when the “stampede of saints” comes next spring.

This painting of an angel with an incense censer was created by the circle of Bernaert van Orley in about 1535-1540. Originally part of an altarpiece, its purpose would have been to help churchgoers imagine the glory of heaven for the chosen. On display at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2018.

Enter Eternal Earth-Bound Pets. Mr. Centre, you go for it! I wish you luck in your money-making enterprise. I have no sympathy for orthodox Western Christians who choose to believe in apocalyptic bullshit like the Rapture. If their narcissistic, status-driven beliefs make them vulnerable to niche marketing schemes, that’s okay. Maybe some of these idiots will learn the hard way not to listen to religious prophets.

Of course, these particular Christians are listening to the teachings of Paul, and Paul was himself an apocalyptic religious prophet. Paul was going around telling people that Jesus was coming back “really, really soon,” and that people who gave over their lives to complete faith in Christ would not die, but would be saved, body and soul, and taken up into Heaven. (“Beam me up, Scotty.”)

Give me a break. Paul was making absurd promises to people. He was telling people they could escape death on one condition: they had to fully accept Paul’s teachings. Notice how he left himself “an out,” though. If they happened to die before Christ’s return, it was their own fault. They must have fallen short in their belief.

Too bad for you, buddy (said Paul). Your faith wasn’t good enough (said Paul). You should have tried harder to follow my own special brand of teachings (said Paul). Repent, repent!

Paul talks a lot in First Corinthians about escaping sin and death. But he never talks in this letter about healing miracles.

Ah, you say, what about Acts 20:7-12, where Paul heals the young man who fell out of the window! That sounds like something Jesus would have done!

True, but Paul didn’t write the Acts of the Apostles. Somebody else wrote it decades later, and, if scholar Barrie Wilson is correct, “Luke” wrote this book for the express purpose of bridging the doctrinal gulf between the followers of Jesus in Jerusalem (the Ebionites) and the followers of Paul (proto-orthodox Christians in Hellenistic cities like Antioch). It’s cheating to rely on the Acts of the Apostles for confirmation that Paul cared about physical healing for low-status people. In the seven biblical letters written by Paul himself, there’s nothing to suggest he cared a whit about the healing miracles ascribed to Jesus son of Joseph.

Paul wasn’t teaching people about the kind of everyday psycho-spiritual-physical healing that Jesus carried out during his tenure as a physician-scholar in Galilee. Jesus, after all, was interested in healing the physical bodies and physical brains of marginalized people (women, lepers, the blind, the deaf, the “possessed” who suffered from neurological and psychiatric disorders). Paul, meanwhile, was only interested in mystical teachings about spiritual wisdom, ritual purity, prophecy, mystery, spiritual powers, and spiritual authority.

Paul taught apocalyptic bullshit. Jesus did not.

If Paul were alive today, he’d no doubt be preaching the Rapture, and telling his faithful flock how to piously prepare for the “stampede of saints” so they won’t be Left Behind.

I’m looking forward to May 22, 2010, when I’ll be getting up and having my morning coffee and looking out my window at the beautiful world God the Mother and God the Father have created for all their children.

Even the four-legged ones.

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Posted in "Escape", apocalyptic prophecy, Concinnate Christianity, First Corinthians, healing miracles, Paul vs Jesus, prophets, spiritual ascent, status addiction and tagged | Leave a Comment
10 Sep 2010

CC32: Forgiveness: The Divine String of Pearls

Today I’m being lazy and posting something I first typed in 2007. When I say “typed,” I mean “typed.” I wasn’t the author of this piece. The author was the person whose name appears at the end of the lesson. He did a particularly fine job of describing forgiveness, and I can’t improve on what he wrote, so I’m giving his words a second airing.

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Lesson 6

So what is forgiveness? I will explain what I learned two thousand years ago, with the help of my angels and my loving Mother and Father, but I’ll put it in modern terms to make it more relevant.

Forgiveness is not a state of grace that mysteriously descends on you. The Gospels report (not to their credit) that the Holy Dove descended on my head while I was being baptized. These passages have led many a faithful person astray because “descent of the Holy Dove” wrongly suggests that God singles out “special people,” and confers on them special gifts through grace.

Am I saying there is no grace? Of course not. I’m saying that everything in God’s good creation is grace, and to single out one event for one person is to highlight 1% of God’s ongoing grace, and ignore the other 99%.

You are here, living a life as a human being on Planet Earth, so that you might understand, in your eternal life as one of God’s angelic children, the transformative power of forgiveness. You are not here because you’re unworthy of God’s love. You are here because God trusts you as an angel, and God knows that when you die as a human being, you will take what you have experienced here and transform it into forgiveness and wisdom.

However, you do not have to wait until you die and return Home to Heaven. You have the tools available to you here and now to begin this transformative process.

Your primary tool is your will power. Forgiveness, as a divine experience, is 100% pure will power. There is no mystery. There is no magic. There is no ritual, no potion, no esoteric way to go about this except to learn to use your divine free will in the same way your divine Mother and Father use their divine free will to forgive the harmful choices you make. Though the method of forgiving involves no mystery, the result is filled with unending mystery. When you accomplish divine forgiveness, God’s true beauty shines even more brightly for you, if such a thing is even possible (though it is . . .). In other words, I find it much easier to put into words how you can get to the place of forgiveness than to put into words what it will feel like when you get there. That is the sacred part of the journey for each person.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

String of Pearls (c) JAT 2013

Forgiveness is what you end up with when you use your soul’s Courage, Trust, Gratitude, and Devotion to make a permanent choice to wrap up a harmful choice in a permanent layer of love. The harm (caused either by you or someone else) is like the grit inside an oyster’s shell. The grit hurts. But the oyster painstakingly covers the grit in smooth, nacreous layers that take your breath away with their beauty. The grit inside the pearl does not go away. But it is permanently transformed into a thing of beauty. The task of forgiving is like the efforts of the oyster. The task of forgiving is not to erase or deny the pain. The task of forgiving is to use your will power to turn the pain into a divine string of pearls.

I used the word “permanent” three times in the above paragraph. This is because I wish to highlight the difference between “forgiving” and “shrugging something off.” What makes forgiveness divine is its immutability. Once God makes the choice to forgive a particular harmful choice you have made, God will never go back on the decision to forgive you. Their forgiveness for that action is permanent. They will not say to you, “We take it back — you’re no longer forgiven.” They will not manipulate your trust by pulling the rug out from under you. They make the choice, and they stick by the choice.

Human forgiveness is meant to be exactly the same. The forgiveness in your own heart must be an unflinching, unshakeable choice that nobody can talk you out of under any circumstances. If somebody can talk you out of it, it’s not real forgiveness. Another way to describe this is to think of it as integrity. Forgiveness is an oath you make, an oath you make to your own soul. Forgiveness is an oath you make to yourself that you will put a layer of love around the harmful choice, and you will never, ever remove the layer. You would not be a person of deep integrity if you broke this sacred oath. So you choose each day to keep your oath, and you choose each day to maintain the layer of love.

Each harmful choice that is forgiven is its own pearl on your divine string of pearls. You do not have just one big pearl that keeps getting bigger and bigger. You have separate pearls for separate acts of forgiveness. Each time you experience pain that must be forgiven, you build a new pearl using your divine free will and your own innate Courage, Trust, Gratitude, and Devotion.

This is the manner in which your loving Mother and Father forgive you.

I invite you, as my beloved sisters and brothers in Christ, to step through the portal of wonder that will open for you when you choose to forgive.

Love Jesus
December 16, 2007

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Posted in Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, forgiveness, free will, healing miracles, Jesus' teachings and tagged , | Leave a Comment
15 Jul 2010

CC26: The Corruption of Free Will Through Addiction

Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, what would happen if the Church were to put crack cocaine in your communion bread every week.

From a practical standpoint, if you had a genetic or psychological vulnerability to addiction, you’d fairly soon become addicted to crack cocaine. Then what would happen? You’d begin to suffer from the desperate cravings of addiction. You’d become a prisoner of your own “selfish brain.” You’d find yourself behaving in ways you’re not proud of. You’d try to stop, and you’d try to control your brain’s cravings, but sometimes you’d give in to the need, break your promises, and end up hurting the people you love. You’d feel as if you’d lost your free will.

Addiction is like that. It makes you feel as if you don’t have free will. Addiction to alcohol, addiction to cocaine, addiction to sex. All share a common feature: a frightening sense that you’re not in control of your own brain and your own free will. Rare is the person who can free herself from addiction through will power alone. Most addicts need help on the long journey of healing. This is because their biological brains have been physically damaged by toxic, addictive substances. While the brain is slowly healing from the damage caused by addiction, it needs external supports. Appropriate supports might include Twelve Step meetings, in-patient medical treatment, out-patient treatment, or professional counselling (or a combination of these).

People who seek such help are not weak. They are injured, and they deserve to be cared for during the healing process in the same way that stroke victims deserve to be cared for. For people in recovery, part of the healing process is the gradual restoration of a sense of trust in their own free will. This part isn’t easy, because they remember the way their brains once took control of their choices, and made them frightened of themselves. But if they’re lucky enough to connect with a firm but compassionate mentor, they can reconstruct their lives and relationships a bit at a time. Some even find true redemption.

We’re deeply aware in our society of the dangers of addictive substances such as narcotics, alcohol, and so on. We read about the dangers of them in newspapers and magazines. We see reality shows on TV that feature the struggles of addicts and their families. We listen to our doctors preach about the perils of excessive alcohol. We tell our children to beware of drug dealers. We try to empower ourselves so we won’t be vulnerable to addiction.

Why do we do all these things? We do all these things because we understand that addiction is a bad thing. It’s bad for a person’s mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Addiction ruins lives. Addiction can be treated, because it’s a medical disorder, but before an addicted person can be successfully treated, she has to accept she has a problem. She has to let go of her denial. She must want to recover her own free will. Only then can she work with her treatment team as a willing participant in the healing process. If she isn’t willing, she won’t be able to heal.

Paradoxically, of course, she must have some remnant of free will remaining to her so she can make the choice to heal. Chances of this are much better if she’s dealing with only one addiction. If she has multiple addictions — such as alcohol, tobacco, and narcotics — or if she exhibits co-morbidity — a DSM-IV diagnosis of major depression, bipolar disorder, Axis II personality disorder, or other major mental illness in addition to a diagnosis of substance use disorder — then the situation is even more complex. She may not be able to form the intent to heal until she’s received intensive care in a psychiatric facility on an involuntary basis (i.e. a committal). This is the painful but necessary reality when she’s no longer able to make caring choices for herself. When she’s no longer mentally competent — no longer able to form responsible choices, as determined by a professional review board — the community must step in and make choices on her behalf until she is healed. This is much better than forcing her to live on the street.

Okay. Back to the Church. What does any of this have to do with the Church? Well, here’s the thing. It’s hard enough to recover your free will when you’ve been dealing with only one addiction. It’s a lot harder to even understand what free will means when you’re struggling with another addiction — a hidden addiction, a secret addiction, an addiction you don’t even know you’re dealing with, because our society doesn’t treat it as an addictive disorder.

This is the famous Rosetta Stone which is on display in the British Museum, London, UK. The stone, which features one decree written in three different ancient languages, has become a symbol for deep mysteries that can be untangled if you have the right translation tools. To understand your own free will, it often feels as if you need your very own Rosetta Stone. Photo credit JAT 2024.

I’m talking about an addiction to status. I’m talking about status anxiety run amok. I’m talking about an addiction disorder where dopamine is not generated in the brain by ingesting addictive substances, but instead is generated through a constant process of acquiring “status points.” These “status points” cause the brain to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter that’s definitively linked to addiction. Dopamine and other neurotransmitters in the brain can generate a brief “high,” a feeling of pleasure. It’s the feeling of pleasure that people get addicted to, but it’s a temporary pleasure, a short-term high, and it can’t replace the long-term experience of trust, safety, love, devotion, and peace that human beings are capable of when they open their hearts and minds to their full potential as children of God.

Our society doesn’t believe an addiction to status is a bad thing that undermines your mental, physical, emotional and spiritual health. Instead, our society treats this addiction as a good thing, a positive thing, a necessary thing. We deny the addiction, we minimize it, by labelling status-driven behaviour as simply “Type A” or “Boardroom Material.” We encourage our children to be competitive and aggressive, to be “the best,” “the fastest,” “the strongest,” “the smartest,” “the richest.” Our societal norms and values — including those that stem from the Church’s “most saved” department — have become so interwoven and intertwined with this particular addiction that it’s hardly visible to us now. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

The Church isn’t alone in promoting these status-soaked values. (American pop culture rivals the Church in its ability to satisfy the constant cravings of a status addict.) Neither did the Church invent these values, as a quick review of ancient civilizations will reveal. But since the time of Paul the Apostle, the orthodox Western Church has worked very hard to ensure that Christians will fall prey to this particular addiction.

Why would Church leaders do such a dreadful thing? Well, I suppose that early Church Fathers believed they were helping to forge a more solid, more obedient, more orderly society. I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time. But the cost has been enormous. The cost of this addiction over the centuries has been the loss of free will in the brains of individual Christians. The cost has been fear — the fear of the self that accompanies addiction and its inexplicable urges. The cost has been the sheer inability of regular Christians to believe they’re worthy of God’s love and forgiveness.

That’s a pretty big cost if you ask me.

Augustine’s teachings on original sin and concupiscence actually make sense when you’re struggling against the cravings of addiction, because his theories offer you a sound explanation for your behaviour! It all makes sense . . . until you learn that at least one of your addictions has been caused — not cured — by the Church’s own teachings on sin, salvation, sacraments, and separation from God.

This is why orthodox Western Christians have long felt they’re trapped in a life-long hamster wheel of pain and suffering, sin and absolution.

I don’t see how a good pious Christian could feel any other way, given the circumstances.

That’s why I follow the teachings of Jesus instead.

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Posted in "4 S's", Concinnate Christianity, Favourite Posts, free will, healing miracles, mental illness, redemption, status addiction, theodicy | Leave a Comment
23 May 2010

CC14: Why I Think Jesus Was A Physician-Scholar

Among Progressive Christians in Canada these days there’s a popular new trend in church reform. This is the “Jesus-is-obsolete” trend.

Well-known authors such as Gretta Vosper and Tom Harpur, along with less well known but influential biblical scholars such as William Arnal (plus my own New Testament professor), have concluded that even if we could figure out who the historical Jesus was with some degree of accuracy, it wouldn’t matter to the church today. According to these authors, if Jesus has any remaining importance to us in the third millennium, it’s only in a symbolic way. In other words, the symbol of Jesus is more important than the reality of Jesus. Our acceptance of this reality will help the church move forward, say these authors. Tom Harpur is so convinced of this that he no longer believes a real individual called Jesus of Nazareth even existed. For him, Jesus the Pagan Christ was an entirely fictitious character from the get-go.*

I guess you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I don’t agree with these authors or my New Testament professor.

Limestone ossuaries were used in Jewish burials in Palestine for a fairly limited period of time just before and after the start of the Common Era, so they’re a useful archeological tool for gathering information about Palestinian Jewish families from the late Second Temple period. This one, with a common motif of rosettes, was found in Jerusalem and is dated to the Herodian Period. (It’s on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2017) If you want to know more about this topic, you can read my post called “Excavating James: The James Ossuary and the Talpiot Tomb” at https://jenniferthomas.ca/?p=603

On the other hand, I wouldn’t dispute the level of confusion and disagreement among scholars of the historical Jesus. These are the researchers who use historical, archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic data to try to piece together the facts of Jesus’ life — things like his actual date of birth, his actual date of death, the identity of his family members. They’re looking for information from verifiable sources outside the Bible to try to make sense of the conflicting biblical accounts of who Jesus was. This “Quest for the Historical Jesus” has been going on since the time of the Enlightenment, so it’s not new. Albert Schweitzer was so frustrated by the whole process that he gave up on theology and went off to Africa to be a doctor. (There’s a certain irony in this, as I’ll show.)

A couple of years ago I stumbled across a really cool website called “Historical Jesus Theories,” put together by Peter Kirby (www.earlychristianwritings.com/theories.html). On the first page, you can see at a glance how much disagreement exists among scholars of the historical Jesus. You can see that scholars have studied the “facts” about Jesus, and have concluded that Jesus is best described as “Jesus the Myth: Heavenly Christ.” But wait! There are also 8 more theories! There’s the theory of Jesus the Myth: Man of the Indefinite Past — Jesus the Hellenistic Hero — Jesus the Revolutionary — Jesus the Wisdom Sage (a popular one) — Jesus the Man of the Spirit — Jesus the Prophet of Social Change — Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet (also a popular one) — and last but not least, Jesus the Saviour.

Wow. All those theories based on the facts, and not a single one that suggests Jesus was a physician-scholar. It’s my own thesis that Jesus is best understood as a physician-scholar, so I can’t suggest any books for you to read on this theory because as far as I can tell there aren’t any books (apart from the one I’m writing).

I also think Jesus was a practising mystic, but secondarily to his role as a physician-scholar. (If you think I ruffled a few feathers in my theology classes with my theory that Jesus was a physician-scholar, you should have seen my Christology professor’s eyes almost pop out of her head when I suggested in a class discussion that Jesus had been a mystic!)

I have to admit I’m somewhat puzzled about the resistance to this idea that Jesus was a physician-scholar. To be frank, this understanding of Jesus fits much better with historical and psychological realities than any of the other theories. It fits like a hand in a glove when you read the Gospel of Mark. When you read only what Mark says, and you try to completely ignore what the other gospels say, you have a story about a guy whose priorities are healing the sick, forgiving people, teaching people, spending lots of time with people (even when they make him slightly exasperated), and trusting God.

Right near the beginning of Mark, Jesus says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners” (Mark 2:17). Today’s commentators seem to want to interpret this allegorically: they say that Jesus wasn’t actually a physician, but was more like a healer of the soul for those who had sinned. So when Jesus self-identifies with the role of medical practitioner, it’s okay for Christians to ignore it. But when other people who don’t even like or trust Jesus call him “the carpenter” in Mark 6:3, that’s not allegorical — that’s factual! Jesus is a poor, illiterate carpenter! Jesus is a poor, illiterate, Jewish, Aramaic-speaking carpenter who probably couldn’t speak Greek! Jesus is a poor, illiterate, uneducated, Aramaic-speaking carpenter from the Galilee who obtained his amazing ability to engage in sophisticated debate with scribes and Pharisees because . . . well, because the Spirit had chosen him! And, to prove this fact, we can easily see that the history of Christianity has been similarly shaped only by men who imitated Jesus in his illiteracy, who were all were poor, uneducated tradespeople, fluent only in their local dialect, and unable to use the tools of rhetoric to argue their case except when the Spirit moved them! Yes! History and psychology prove that Jesus must be seen in this light! Why, all of Christianity’s thinkers fit this model!

Don’t they?

What . . . you mean you think that history and psychology prove the opposite — that the great religious thinkers who’ve been remembered for centuries (regardless of their respective religious traditions) have — to a person — been highly educated and charismatic but emotionally humble? Like, oh, like maybe Gandhi. Or Martin Luther King, Jr. Or the Dalai Lama. These men are from our own era, yet it’s pretty hard to imagine that any of them could have made a difference if they hadn’t used their personal charisma and advanced education in service to the people they love(d).

Do we have to imagine that Jesus was a carpenter and only a carpenter? (Not that I have anything personal against carpenters. My own father is a tekton in every sense of the Koine Greek word, and has always spent his spare time building and repairing things in his workshop — but my father is also one of the smartest people I know, and he earned a Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering in the 1940’s. The fact that he’s an amateur carpenter doesn’t negate his other training.)

There are many other clues in Mark that together build a portrait of Jesus as an educated physician-scholar. (I won’t go into all of them in this post, or this post would end up as long as a book chapter.)

I’ve wondered from time to time whether today’s scholars can’t “see” Jesus in this light because they’re thinking of “physicians” through their own hermeneutical lens. Let’s face it — modern Western medicine of the allopathic variety is not doing much these days to impress people with its compassionate bedside manner. This is especially true if you live in the United States, where health care decisions are increasingly being made by for-profit insurance companies. If your own personal experience has led you to equate physicians with cold-hearted, scientifically-based, profit-oriented medical care, then you’re probably not going to be looking for Jesus to be a physician. In fact, you probably wouldn’t want Jesus to be a physician, because then you wouldn’t be able to relate to him anymore.

This is where it’s important to step back and apply the criterion of “historical context” to Mark’s picture of Jesus as a physician-scholar. Jesus lived in a time when healing and religion were intertwined in a way we don’t fully relate to in this era of modern medicine. So when Jesus is quoted in Mark 2:17 as saying that sinners are in need of a physician, he means that both medically and religiously. Mark is giving readers the clue they needed in the first century CE to understand what claims he is making about Jesus’ training and background. It would have been obvious to readers then that Mark’s Jesus was a physician-scholar. It also would have shocked many pious people, because according to the “righteous” (who also make an appearance in Mark 2:17) only priests sanctioned by the Temple had the power and the right to heal the sick.

Mark’s Jesus is a rogue healer. He doesn’t follow any of the Laws when he does his healing, either Jewish laws or Greco-Roman laws. This is why I call Jesus a founding member of Doctors Without Borders. He put the suffering of the sick ahead of the Law.

Only those who’ve had a doctor fight for them or their loved ones against today’s institutional medical bureaucracy and conventional scientific wisdom will understand what courage it took for Jesus to do this.

Thanks be to God.

For a scholarly update on some of the early non-biblical sources that talk about Jesus or imply his historical existence, please the article by Dr. Lawrence Mykytiuk called “Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible” in the Jan/Feb 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

For more on Jesus’ approach to healing, please see “Spit-Wives and Dead Goats.”  For introductory exegetical commentary on healings in the Gospel of Mark, please see The Way, the Truth, and the Life.

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Posted in Concinnate Christianity, Gospel of Mark, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Law (Nomos), Paul and tagged , | Leave a Comment

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