Back to Basics

The other day I posted about the exact issues of how to mentally disentangle the Christian construct of Jesus from the Jesus of the Thomas gospel. This theme is very much in line with my recent discussion of the materials of Stevan Davies, who is a Biblical scholar who has done an incredible job in identifying how the story changed between the Thomas gospel, which dates from the year 50CE, and the later Canonical Gospels, which are dated from ca. 65CE (Mark) onwards. The most significant difference is that in the period 60-65CE, Paul's writings appear on the scene and the influence of his thinking very much sets the tone for the whole New Testament, and so, if you were to put the NT in proper chronological order, the letters of Paul should come first, then Mark, then Matthew and Luke, and then John and Revelation.

If you reordered the books that way, you'd instantly understand why it's such a big difference that the Thomas Gospel was 15 years or so earlier than that: Paul is in between. A simple way of looking at it is that the New Testament reflects the way that Paul said we should look at Jesus. That is a very different thing than the teachings of Jesus proper. The Thomas Gospel has only statements directly attributed to Jesus, and NONE of the interpretations which Paul developed, and which became the basis of Christian theology. Another way of putting it is that Christianity--leaving aside for a moment that there are some 25,000 flavors of it--is merely one interpretation of Jesus, so perhaps more correctly we should speak of one set of interpretations, of him. One way or another Paul looms large in the inception of it, and I think the fair way of interpreting those events is to say that Jesus was a spiritual teacher, and Paul posthumously made a religion out of him. No doubt he had the best intentions, but that does not mean he said the same thing, he interpreted, explained, elaborated, and added on his own concepts.

In order to expand a bit more on some of this basic information, I'm going to do several posts here to discuss some very fundamental stuff that provides the foundation for my book, Closing the Circle--the topic of this blog.

Here is how it all fits together. As I like to point out to people by way of a joke, the first thing to know is, it's not my fault, and the second thing to know is, it's all Gary Renard's fault. So blame him. Complaints in triplicate, press hard, three copies. Without Gary, I would not be in this mess, and I would not have had to write this book. Jokes aside, this is the right sequence of events, but today I want to explain some more details of the chronology.

Whether we are Christians or not, if we grew up in the West, we grew up in a culture dominated by Christianity, and we're all more or less familiar with the chronology, although some of the fine distinctions I'm making about the first 75 years are not generally known, they reflect an insight that has been evolving particularly since the rediscovery of the now famous book collection at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945, which dated back to the time (ca. 365 CE) when the young Church was just making decisions as to what books would make up the New Testament, and some monk had the foresight to bury a collection of books the Church did not like. What we found we owe to the foresight of this monk, and the Thomas gospel was probably the most important part of that find.

Now to explain my own relationship to all of this for a moment, let me say first that I was never a Christian, but for some reason I was interested in the teachings of Jesus. Thanks to a Dutch author, Johan Willem Kaiser, who among other things produced an incredibly insightful translation and commentary of the Gospel of Mark, I had an understanding early on that Jesus and Christianity were two different things, and since thankfully I learned to read Greek, I could at least study some of the original material, and filter out some of the theological coloration which has characterized later translations of the Bible, and via that route I tried to come back to an understanding of the original teaching of Jesus. For me the central issue always seemed to be that he was about spiritual experience, not about theology or morality. In short, Jesus was not a Christian.

The Thomas gospel began to appear in translation in the 1950's and slowly the biblical research came in motion which ultimately led to the almost inevitable conclusion I presented above. It predated the other gospels. Personally I saw Jesus as a spiritual teacher, not too different from Buddha, Krishna, Socrates, Lao Tsu, Sri Ramakrishna and Krishnamurti. Their focus was always on learning truth through personal spiritual experience, including the notion that the truth is within and knowable, if we just learn the mental hygiene not to confuse ourselves all the time with other values and thoughts that have nothing to do with the price of beans. For me the Thomas gospel was never an easy read, much of the research and interpretation I found cumbersome and less than helpful, so for a long time I regarded it as merely an interesting curiosity.

For me something changed when I discovered A Course in Miracles in 1991. First of all this book (usually abbreviated ACIM), which was channeled in the late 60's by a Dr. Helen Schucman, who was a Professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in NY, and published in 1975, is attributed to Jesus. And the way he comes across in its pages is exactly that, as a spiritual teacher, with a focus on the experience of truth, not on theology. The book is very profound, highly integrated, and incorporates really a unique amalgam of Western and Eastern thought, including everything from Plato, the Bible, Shakespeare, and some of the premises of Freudian psychoanalysis not to mention some of the therapeutic orientation of Carl Rogers. That list could easily be expanded further. The bottom line is, for me it was intuitively clear that the intelligence speaking to me through the pages of ACIM was Jesus as I sensed he taught originally and for all time. The teacher of Truth. Not a teacher of Christian theology. Just Truth with a capital T. I had studied the Course for 12 years before Gary Renard appeared on the scene, but then the magic started...

In 2003, three books appeared, with the same publication date, Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, Elaine Pagels' Beyond Belief, and Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe. In short, indirectly the Thomas Gospel was in the air, for all three touch on it. The first two were more in the main stream, and they awakened an interest in the Thomas gospel and related materials, Gary's book however was a surprise hit in its own right. He had never been published before, and he was with a very small publisher, and yet before you knew it, he sold 100,000 copies, and the book was acquired by Hay House. It was in Gary's book that the connection was made between the original teachings of Jesus in the Thomas Gospel, and ACIM, and it was in his second book, Your Immortal Reality, (2006), that one of his teachers, Pursah presented her kernel of the Thomas Gospel of just 70 sayings of Jesus (compared to the 114 of the Nag Hammadi text), which she says really sounded like Jesus. Her selection makes a lot of sense, so for me at the moment, I'm totally focused on that collection of 70 sayings from Thomas as being the least suspect kernel of his original teachings, but they are still fragmentary. Thus the greater context for me is provided by A Course in Miracles.

In my next few posts I will talk a bit more about the characters involved, to make the foundation of my work on the Thomas Gospel even clearer.