Friday, February 6, 2009

Logion 22 in Mark

This one gets really interesting... here we see full scale level confusion at work.

Logion 22 in the Pursah rendering (Gary Renard, Your Immortal Reality) reads as follows:

When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and want you make male and female into a single one, so the male will not be male and the female will not be female... then you will enter the Kingdom.
In more modern wording we could say: if we heal our dualistic perception, we awaken from the dream, awaken to the reality of who we really are in truth, namely spirit.

It should be noted that Pursah leaves off some material as unauthentic, which Davies goes on to analyze, particular the precursor clauses to Mark 9:43-8, about cutting off your hand if it causes you to sin etc. which is a section which in and of itself has resulted in a lot of suffering and misconceptions.

As per usual I'm following Stevan Davies' article on Mark's Use of the Thomas Gospel, Part I , but skipping the sections which Pursah deems spurious anyhow. Next is the following well known passage:
Mark 10:2-9:
Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?"
"What did Moses command you?" he replied.
They said, "Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away."
"It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law," Jesus replied.
"But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.'[a]
'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife,[b] 8and the two will become one flesh.'[c] So they are no longer two, but one.
Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."
As we can appreciate immediately this has been altered almost beyond recognition, and it is broadly reflective of the transition from Jesus to Paul and Peter, etc., namely an abstract teaching about the healing of duality in the mind, as the precondition for entering the Kingdom, here becomes applied to relationships in the world, and a moralistic teaching, directed at behavior in the world, which is not where Jesus' original teaching was focused at all. Rather, our special relationships in the world, with people, places, and things are the ego's substitute for the Holy Relationship, with our true self, the Christ in us. Jesus, rather than playing traffic cop in the world, is asking the apostles to follow him, out of this world, to his Kingdom not of this world, which is the Real World (in terminology of A Course in Miracles) which we find by living the Holy Relationship. To thine own self be true, as Shakespeare put it. That is what God has joined together, and which we cannot separate, although we do our best to lose ourselves in the world through special relationships.

Finally, an earlier part from the Nag Hammadi version which was also used again in Mark (10:13-16) is again left out by Pursah, apparently on the grounds that she cannot vouch for the authenticity of it, so it may well be another later addition, and I'll skip consideration of it here.

The bottom line is that in the later treatment of this saying we see the transition from a very abstract non-dualistic statement, which in A Course in Miracles we would consider a "level one" statement to a very definite "level two" statement which broadly acknowledges and reinforces some very plainly dualistic concepts, beginning with relationship outside of ourselves.

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