It seems that in this blog sofar, I have effectively discussed all the books I've referred to in Closing the Circle except this one. So it's time to correct this oversight. I think it is healthy to begin to realize the shift in perception that the discoveries at Nag Hammadi are bringing about, even though they are still very slow to become generally felt. Evidently the Christian construction of Jesus has staying power, because it has become so culturally dominant, but perhaps more importantly because the Christian concept of Jesus as the vicarious savior lets us off the hook - we can have our cake and eat it too - while the original teachings of Jesus ask us very pointedly to take responsibility for our lives (take up our cross), and follow him. Evidently the Christian model has much greater appeal.
The trap presented by the whole thing is that from the Christian fantasies of Jesus, we are then liable to move into a "better informed" position on "the real historical Jesus." We will then have accomplished nothing, merely shifted from one picture of Jesus to another picture of Jesus, which equally serves as a substitute for the experience of him. A careful reading of the Thomas Gospel, and even the canonical gospels, and most certainly A Course in Miracles, makes it clear that Jesus is not about theology, but about practicing his teachings and applying them to our lives.
Seen from that point of view, the value of the Nag Hammadi discoveries lies in the mere fact that they upset the applecart, and the symbolism of that is absolutely precious. The books were buried by some priest in an out of the way monastery right at the time that the Canon of the New Testament was decided on, which was a highly partisan selection process of what literature was considered "proper" for Christians, and much else was prosecuted, banned, and often destroyed. And then 1600 years later, after a major world conflagration, and about 20 years prior to Vatican II, where Catholics were set free in the area of Bible studies, voilà this treasure trove turns up again.
Meyer gives a very readable and in depth account of the history of the discovery and the impact of the books. For anyone who wants to understand the context, this is a very helpful introduction, and Marvin Meyer is not too biased in the traditional Christian mold, though I would suggest he has a little too much of a gnostic bias to my taste. Jesus was not a gnostic, even though he did say numerous things which were later expanded upon in the gnostic tradition, and to that extent, he often sounds more gnostic than Christian, but that does not make him a gnostic per se, just as much as he was not a Christian.
Showing posts with label Christian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christian. Show all posts
Friday, February 26, 2010
Monday, February 23, 2009
Lemme 'splain
Today I was in a social situation, where my book came up, as part of introductions, and I got to practice (again) just how to explain simply where it fits. I had to be exact, for there was an evangelical theologian in the company. I'm finding that it is becoming easier and easier to do as I go along, and the notion is simple, Jesus was not a Christian, since that faith was invented after his time.
Jesus and the Buddha were spiritual teachers in their day and age, just like Krishnamurti was one in our day, and they were not founders of religions. Krishnamurti was very specific about that. Those religions were founded afterwards, by followers - Krishnamurti has been spared that fate sofar.
The fact that those followers did not necessarily teach the same thing as the people in whose name they built these religious systems has become blatantly clear from the Thomas gospel because it is the oldest of the Gospels, predating St. Paul by some 20 years, and it contains nothing at all of the theological ideas that made Christianity what it is. Moreover the dating of the Thomas gospel prior to the canonical Gospels, which reflect the editorial influence of Paul, is clear. Besides the absence of key (Christian) theological ideas, there is the fact that in the case of many sayings which later do appear in the Canonical Gospels, the form of those sayings is invariably more primitive in Thomas, leading to the inevitable conclusion that Thomas had to come first.
So the rest is a matter of personal preference. If Christianity works for you, fine. If you're interested in the teachings of Jesus in their own right, the Thomas gospel should be one of your primary sources, and you should clear your head of the cobwebs of Christianity. That's all there is to it. The biggest reason that people have had problems understanding the Thomas gospel, is because they cannot mentally sort out that the Jesus who speaks in Thomas is not a Christian. It is absolutely necessary that you're clear about that, otherwise you're bound to keep on misreading him.
Jesus and the Buddha were spiritual teachers in their day and age, just like Krishnamurti was one in our day, and they were not founders of religions. Krishnamurti was very specific about that. Those religions were founded afterwards, by followers - Krishnamurti has been spared that fate sofar.
The fact that those followers did not necessarily teach the same thing as the people in whose name they built these religious systems has become blatantly clear from the Thomas gospel because it is the oldest of the Gospels, predating St. Paul by some 20 years, and it contains nothing at all of the theological ideas that made Christianity what it is. Moreover the dating of the Thomas gospel prior to the canonical Gospels, which reflect the editorial influence of Paul, is clear. Besides the absence of key (Christian) theological ideas, there is the fact that in the case of many sayings which later do appear in the Canonical Gospels, the form of those sayings is invariably more primitive in Thomas, leading to the inevitable conclusion that Thomas had to come first.
So the rest is a matter of personal preference. If Christianity works for you, fine. If you're interested in the teachings of Jesus in their own right, the Thomas gospel should be one of your primary sources, and you should clear your head of the cobwebs of Christianity. That's all there is to it. The biggest reason that people have had problems understanding the Thomas gospel, is because they cannot mentally sort out that the Jesus who speaks in Thomas is not a Christian. It is absolutely necessary that you're clear about that, otherwise you're bound to keep on misreading him.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Thought Experiment with Thomas
While on the one hand the Thomas gospel is simply an odd collection of sayings of Jesus, and hardly a complete presentation of his teachings, it is important to realize that it is truly the most complete document we have before Jesus was posthumously remolded into a Christian by the diligent efforts of Paul, Peter and the gang. It just turns out that our whole understanding of the situation is so molded by the mythologizing of Christianity that has indoctrinated us all with its version of the facts. In Gary Renard's books his teachers, Arten & Pursah, also point out that the Thomas gospel was not a very complete document, mainly, as Pursah explains, because in her incarnation as Thomas she was ultimately decapitated, and never had the opportunity to add certain thing she might have wanted to add, leaving the book somewhat unfinished.
However because the Thomas sayings predate the canonical gospels, and most particularly Paul whose theological veneer has been applied to all of the New Testament, there is reason to try and focus on the Thomas sayings in isolation, and if you're comfortable with the selection of 70/71 sayings which Pursah presents, as I am, then I would suggest you stick to that, because this selection eliminates numerous ambiguities which otherwise spoil the soup. You have now just eliminated all of the theology of Christianity, and so as a pure thought experiment it is now worthwhile to try to understand what Jesus is saying within just the context of those 70 sayings, for in doing so, you will come as close as you could to hearing him without any addition of extraneous stuff that came later.
As a young man I thought I would get to this point by learning Aramaic, Coptic, etc., until I suddenly knew intuitively that if Jesus was indeed who I deep down knew he was, then also he could bloody well speak to me in my own language, and I should not have to learn some abstruse language to be able to understand him better. The way I look at it today, that was truly the Voice of the Holy Spirit, or Jesus if you will, speaking to me--it was an inspired thought. Since then--having once and for all seen the fallacy--I gave up my efforts at that kind of scholarship, although I'm still happy that I can at least read my New Testament in Greek.
What I would like to suggest here then, as an ongoing thought experiment, is to read the Thomas sayings purely in the context of that collection itself, and stopping yourself as much as possible from pulling in the later Christian theology, and try to add essentially nothing to them. Just let them speak for themselves. By the end of this exercise it will be thoroughly clear to you that Jesus was not a Christian, because very simply Christianity had not been invented yet. So he never had a chance to go to catechism class either, for those had not been invented yet either. This, in my view, is the sort of hidden invitation which the Thomas gospel extends to you, its reader. Try it, you might like it!
However because the Thomas sayings predate the canonical gospels, and most particularly Paul whose theological veneer has been applied to all of the New Testament, there is reason to try and focus on the Thomas sayings in isolation, and if you're comfortable with the selection of 70/71 sayings which Pursah presents, as I am, then I would suggest you stick to that, because this selection eliminates numerous ambiguities which otherwise spoil the soup. You have now just eliminated all of the theology of Christianity, and so as a pure thought experiment it is now worthwhile to try to understand what Jesus is saying within just the context of those 70 sayings, for in doing so, you will come as close as you could to hearing him without any addition of extraneous stuff that came later.
As a young man I thought I would get to this point by learning Aramaic, Coptic, etc., until I suddenly knew intuitively that if Jesus was indeed who I deep down knew he was, then also he could bloody well speak to me in my own language, and I should not have to learn some abstruse language to be able to understand him better. The way I look at it today, that was truly the Voice of the Holy Spirit, or Jesus if you will, speaking to me--it was an inspired thought. Since then--having once and for all seen the fallacy--I gave up my efforts at that kind of scholarship, although I'm still happy that I can at least read my New Testament in Greek.
What I would like to suggest here then, as an ongoing thought experiment, is to read the Thomas sayings purely in the context of that collection itself, and stopping yourself as much as possible from pulling in the later Christian theology, and try to add essentially nothing to them. Just let them speak for themselves. By the end of this exercise it will be thoroughly clear to you that Jesus was not a Christian, because very simply Christianity had not been invented yet. So he never had a chance to go to catechism class either, for those had not been invented yet either. This, in my view, is the sort of hidden invitation which the Thomas gospel extends to you, its reader. Try it, you might like it!
Friday, October 31, 2008
Apostolic Succession Revisited
The following is adapted from a post, dated 10/31/2008, which I made to a forum on the Gospel of Thomas on Yahoo.
The notion of the Apostolic Succession is a foundational concept of the Christian religion, particular in the RC church, presumably establishing a lineage of spiritual truth all the way back to the twelve apostles. The concept however in effect is a bit of a contradiction in terms, since spiritual truth is known within, and only needs to be remembered, and it is not discrete knowledge, like an art or craft or some such, which is passed down from father to son. In the following I explore the fundamental level confusion between the spiritual and worldly domains on which the concept is based.
"Religion" is the ego's reaction formation against spirituality, for the simple reason that spirituality threatens the ego. Once the mind empowers the idea of separation and therefore duality, it now conceives of mind as an epifunction of the body, since the original oneness of spirit is a threat to the dream of a separate identity (body). I use the term body here more or less in the theosophical sense of everything to do with a separate identity, i.e. astral, etheric, mental, causal, and phsycial.
This conflict was raging in the early years after Jesus's ministry, and the fundamental difference was about the question: Is the knowledge within everyone of us, or is the knowledge imparted from outside? Jesus knows we are spirit, and that's all he taught, and he knows the thruth is our natural state, and all the rest is made up, or as he puts it in Logion 3, the Kingdom or God's Rule, as it is called in the Pursah version, is within. Paul turns the whole thing on its ear, and puts the body central, which is why he ultimately comes down on saying that, the resurrection is of the flesh. So Paul is emblematic of the dualistic re-interpretation of the teaching of the oneness of spirit, and subverting it to a teaching of separate individuals in the realm of time and space. Since this is fundamentally a lie, it now has the psychological need to seek reassurance, and having made the separate identity the basis of everything, as opposed to the oneness of spirit, it then must turn around and convince others of its position, that is the fundamental feature of the ego (separated) mind, and its fundamental need to proselytize. Since it conceives of itself as separated, it then needs witnesses to attest to its substitute reality, and within the dream it now goes out and seeks reassurance of its position by convincing others, really to convince itself. Note that in the end the outcome in this world is always that some will agree with it, and some won't, and that this does not matter, for it is the dualistic battle about its position which reinforces the notion that separated existence is the basis of reality.
Within this context, Jesus, teaching in parables, tells Simon that instead of doubting, which is the ego's condition (duality), he is to put his trust in spirit, which is the foundation of Jesus' church, namely the oneness of the sonship. In other words the experience of the sonship is only available to us if we newly entrust ourselves to spirit as our reality and our foundation, in that realization lies the oneness of spirit. Paul, c.s. misunderstood this and interpreted Jesus dualistically, re-framing the entire thing around the reality of separate bodies, and instead of understanding Jesus's reference to uniting with him in spirit, they turned it into a game of collecting bodies in a building. So what they heard Jesus say was that they were put into the real estate business, and given a license to market their interpretation his words, and they should go and convince other people of the same thing. In this model, wisdom, gnosis, etc. is also of necessity reinterpreted as something I have, i.e. my body has a brain, and my mind is an epifunction of my brain, and it is capable of acquiring wisdom. Since in their model the teacher dies (on the cross), and he's late coming back (Second Coming gets postponed, because they see it as something of the body, which it isn't), these followers now empower themselves as substitute teachers, in the business of preserving (their version) of the teachings until the real teacher comes back. The real beauty of this business model is that its basic premise can never be fulfilled, so within the illusion of this world of separate existence, it is the closest thing you can get to a license in perpituity, and the defining property is that they declare the truth to be something they have and nobody else does, so unless you join them you're out of luck. Knowledge and salvation are now special.
To Jesus the truth, and gnosis (if you will) is within, and merely needs to be manifested in our experience by living it, which is done through following him to the Kingdom, which again is the oneness of spirit. His teaching then is that since what we fundamentally are is spirit, we may deny it temporarily, but that doesn't change it. And so the split occurs between Jesus teaching the oneness of spirit, in which truth is one, and absolutely universal, since it is what we are. Contrary to that, the emergent religions subvert this teaching into various flavors in which the truth is not one, rather the truth is something separate, which they own, and which they will teach you if you join them. So now a scarcity model is created and a dependent relationship formed, in which you no longer are a child of God, but at best an adopted child as Paul puts it. The fundamental split is then between on the one hand, knowing that gnosis is within each and everyone of us, because it is the reality of what we are and where we come from. We want to return to it to live in the mold Jesus shows us, and what we need to do is join with him in spirit and live his reality, as he demonstrated it to us by his own life. Or, on the other hand to buy the interpretations of Peter, Paul and others, in which truth is a good, which they own and control, and I can only have it by joining them and relying on their imparting that truth to me. So now a codependent relationship is born, in which a "vicar of Christ," i.e. a placeholder for Christ, is the authority to which I must turn, to have the truth, which by myself I do not have.
In this latter model, there is now a need to establish that the "Vicar of Christ" is in fact the rightful owner of the truth, and since the model implies that the truth is a something, a good, which was imparted to a certain group of people by some mythical true teacher (Paul's Jesus myth), the need arises to establish a chain of custody, that shows the world this group are the rightful owners, et voilà there you have the need for the theology of apostolic succession, which you only ever need if you believe as does the emergent religion that the truth is not one, and that you own it, and once everyone accepts that you own it and they don't, you now are on the winning team, and you get to set the rules.
Fundamentally gnosis is the expression of inner knowing, in which we relate to God from the total certainty of spirit (this is the rock Jesus was talking about to Simon Peter), and can merely help each other as brothers to learn to live in that reality more and more. To treat gnosis in the mold of the nascent religious model of Paul c.s., as a good that is to be imparted by specific teachers to specific students is a profound confusion of what gnosis is in the first place, and it is born only from a need to mimic the other guys. The very point is that since the truth is true, and utterly inevitable, the Kingdom is our only reality whether we believe it or not. Thus the only mission is to wake up from the dream in which the separated existence appears to be our reality.
Maddeningly therefore it is only because of the reality of Jesus' teaching that the discontinuity happens that people "get it" outside of a structured tradition, since it is not a linear good, but a truth about the nature of reality in a holographic universe. The reality of spirit is our reality. It is accessible at any time when anybody places their faith on that "rock," independent of specific teachers or teachings, and this is why the church's monopoly on truth never works. They solved this dilemma historically by the system of sainting some people who seemed to speak that truth, usually this meant coopting them if they failed in suppressing them, but again since their very premise is wrong they inevitably make mistakes and saint some idiots and reject some others who were true saints, but were declared heretics by the church, and during much of history were either excommunicated or murdered. The only reason it does not work in the end is because truth is simply true, and is not made by anyone, or any particular institution. This is the same phenomenon which Victor Fraenkel, and the sisters ten Boom observed in the concentration camps, that ultimately spirit cannot be killed or stamped out.
The problem lies that from the notion of gnosis as a direct inner understanding of God, truth, and the reality of Heaven, in reaction to the other groups, religious communities are formed, which end up speaking of gnosis as a something, which it isn't by definition. And again, since there is this seeming discontinuity in our experience in time, it can then occur that Valentinus in the 2nd century perhaps understood Jesus better than many seeming teachers in between, when he spoke of Jesus laughing under the tree while his body was being crucified. So Valentinus understood what the church didn't, namely that Jesus was teaching the reality of spirit, and the resurrection, whereas the creed of the church was based on the reality of the body (separation and duality), and the crucifixion. Thus the early church was--despite the crocodile tears--not disappointed when Jesus missed his appointment (Second Coming), but they were extatic, for that was the premise that kept them in business, and again the business model crucially depends on maintaning the belief that there will be a Second Coming at a future time, for that is their emotional hold on the community they create. It also makes a lie of everything Jesus taught, namely that the Kingdom is right in front of your nose, you just don't see it, because you're looking with the wrong pair of glasses. And the deal that he offers is, is to learn to look with his glasses, and see reality (spirit).
In short, the very notion of gnosis as an incontrovertible inner knowing of reality, that is accessible to us any time because our reality is that we are the son of God, in whom he is well pleased, make it into an contradiction in terms to think that gnosis is something that is to be handed down in some form of apostolic succession. It can't not be handed down, because it is the truth.
The notion of the Apostolic Succession is a foundational concept of the Christian religion, particular in the RC church, presumably establishing a lineage of spiritual truth all the way back to the twelve apostles. The concept however in effect is a bit of a contradiction in terms, since spiritual truth is known within, and only needs to be remembered, and it is not discrete knowledge, like an art or craft or some such, which is passed down from father to son. In the following I explore the fundamental level confusion between the spiritual and worldly domains on which the concept is based.
"Religion" is the ego's reaction formation against spirituality, for the simple reason that spirituality threatens the ego. Once the mind empowers the idea of separation and therefore duality, it now conceives of mind as an epifunction of the body, since the original oneness of spirit is a threat to the dream of a separate identity (body). I use the term body here more or less in the theosophical sense of everything to do with a separate identity, i.e. astral, etheric, mental, causal, and phsycial.
This conflict was raging in the early years after Jesus's ministry, and the fundamental difference was about the question: Is the knowledge within everyone of us, or is the knowledge imparted from outside? Jesus knows we are spirit, and that's all he taught, and he knows the thruth is our natural state, and all the rest is made up, or as he puts it in Logion 3, the Kingdom or God's Rule, as it is called in the Pursah version, is within. Paul turns the whole thing on its ear, and puts the body central, which is why he ultimately comes down on saying that, the resurrection is of the flesh. So Paul is emblematic of the dualistic re-interpretation of the teaching of the oneness of spirit, and subverting it to a teaching of separate individuals in the realm of time and space. Since this is fundamentally a lie, it now has the psychological need to seek reassurance, and having made the separate identity the basis of everything, as opposed to the oneness of spirit, it then must turn around and convince others of its position, that is the fundamental feature of the ego (separated) mind, and its fundamental need to proselytize. Since it conceives of itself as separated, it then needs witnesses to attest to its substitute reality, and within the dream it now goes out and seeks reassurance of its position by convincing others, really to convince itself. Note that in the end the outcome in this world is always that some will agree with it, and some won't, and that this does not matter, for it is the dualistic battle about its position which reinforces the notion that separated existence is the basis of reality.
Within this context, Jesus, teaching in parables, tells Simon that instead of doubting, which is the ego's condition (duality), he is to put his trust in spirit, which is the foundation of Jesus' church, namely the oneness of the sonship. In other words the experience of the sonship is only available to us if we newly entrust ourselves to spirit as our reality and our foundation, in that realization lies the oneness of spirit. Paul, c.s. misunderstood this and interpreted Jesus dualistically, re-framing the entire thing around the reality of separate bodies, and instead of understanding Jesus's reference to uniting with him in spirit, they turned it into a game of collecting bodies in a building. So what they heard Jesus say was that they were put into the real estate business, and given a license to market their interpretation his words, and they should go and convince other people of the same thing. In this model, wisdom, gnosis, etc. is also of necessity reinterpreted as something I have, i.e. my body has a brain, and my mind is an epifunction of my brain, and it is capable of acquiring wisdom. Since in their model the teacher dies (on the cross), and he's late coming back (Second Coming gets postponed, because they see it as something of the body, which it isn't), these followers now empower themselves as substitute teachers, in the business of preserving (their version) of the teachings until the real teacher comes back. The real beauty of this business model is that its basic premise can never be fulfilled, so within the illusion of this world of separate existence, it is the closest thing you can get to a license in perpituity, and the defining property is that they declare the truth to be something they have and nobody else does, so unless you join them you're out of luck. Knowledge and salvation are now special.
To Jesus the truth, and gnosis (if you will) is within, and merely needs to be manifested in our experience by living it, which is done through following him to the Kingdom, which again is the oneness of spirit. His teaching then is that since what we fundamentally are is spirit, we may deny it temporarily, but that doesn't change it. And so the split occurs between Jesus teaching the oneness of spirit, in which truth is one, and absolutely universal, since it is what we are. Contrary to that, the emergent religions subvert this teaching into various flavors in which the truth is not one, rather the truth is something separate, which they own, and which they will teach you if you join them. So now a scarcity model is created and a dependent relationship formed, in which you no longer are a child of God, but at best an adopted child as Paul puts it. The fundamental split is then between on the one hand, knowing that gnosis is within each and everyone of us, because it is the reality of what we are and where we come from. We want to return to it to live in the mold Jesus shows us, and what we need to do is join with him in spirit and live his reality, as he demonstrated it to us by his own life. Or, on the other hand to buy the interpretations of Peter, Paul and others, in which truth is a good, which they own and control, and I can only have it by joining them and relying on their imparting that truth to me. So now a codependent relationship is born, in which a "vicar of Christ," i.e. a placeholder for Christ, is the authority to which I must turn, to have the truth, which by myself I do not have.
In this latter model, there is now a need to establish that the "Vicar of Christ" is in fact the rightful owner of the truth, and since the model implies that the truth is a something, a good, which was imparted to a certain group of people by some mythical true teacher (Paul's Jesus myth), the need arises to establish a chain of custody, that shows the world this group are the rightful owners, et voilà there you have the need for the theology of apostolic succession, which you only ever need if you believe as does the emergent religion that the truth is not one, and that you own it, and once everyone accepts that you own it and they don't, you now are on the winning team, and you get to set the rules.
Fundamentally gnosis is the expression of inner knowing, in which we relate to God from the total certainty of spirit (this is the rock Jesus was talking about to Simon Peter), and can merely help each other as brothers to learn to live in that reality more and more. To treat gnosis in the mold of the nascent religious model of Paul c.s., as a good that is to be imparted by specific teachers to specific students is a profound confusion of what gnosis is in the first place, and it is born only from a need to mimic the other guys. The very point is that since the truth is true, and utterly inevitable, the Kingdom is our only reality whether we believe it or not. Thus the only mission is to wake up from the dream in which the separated existence appears to be our reality.
Maddeningly therefore it is only because of the reality of Jesus' teaching that the discontinuity happens that people "get it" outside of a structured tradition, since it is not a linear good, but a truth about the nature of reality in a holographic universe. The reality of spirit is our reality. It is accessible at any time when anybody places their faith on that "rock," independent of specific teachers or teachings, and this is why the church's monopoly on truth never works. They solved this dilemma historically by the system of sainting some people who seemed to speak that truth, usually this meant coopting them if they failed in suppressing them, but again since their very premise is wrong they inevitably make mistakes and saint some idiots and reject some others who were true saints, but were declared heretics by the church, and during much of history were either excommunicated or murdered. The only reason it does not work in the end is because truth is simply true, and is not made by anyone, or any particular institution. This is the same phenomenon which Victor Fraenkel, and the sisters ten Boom observed in the concentration camps, that ultimately spirit cannot be killed or stamped out.
The problem lies that from the notion of gnosis as a direct inner understanding of God, truth, and the reality of Heaven, in reaction to the other groups, religious communities are formed, which end up speaking of gnosis as a something, which it isn't by definition. And again, since there is this seeming discontinuity in our experience in time, it can then occur that Valentinus in the 2nd century perhaps understood Jesus better than many seeming teachers in between, when he spoke of Jesus laughing under the tree while his body was being crucified. So Valentinus understood what the church didn't, namely that Jesus was teaching the reality of spirit, and the resurrection, whereas the creed of the church was based on the reality of the body (separation and duality), and the crucifixion. Thus the early church was--despite the crocodile tears--not disappointed when Jesus missed his appointment (Second Coming), but they were extatic, for that was the premise that kept them in business, and again the business model crucially depends on maintaning the belief that there will be a Second Coming at a future time, for that is their emotional hold on the community they create. It also makes a lie of everything Jesus taught, namely that the Kingdom is right in front of your nose, you just don't see it, because you're looking with the wrong pair of glasses. And the deal that he offers is, is to learn to look with his glasses, and see reality (spirit).
In short, the very notion of gnosis as an incontrovertible inner knowing of reality, that is accessible to us any time because our reality is that we are the son of God, in whom he is well pleased, make it into an contradiction in terms to think that gnosis is something that is to be handed down in some form of apostolic succession. It can't not be handed down, because it is the truth.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Category Busting
The experience of this book launch is teaching me some interesting lessons, and we're only just getting started. One of the biggest challenges involves the labeling of the book, which impacts on where it gets seen, reviewed, filed in bookstores, displayed, etc. Some thoughts.
- It's a Course/ACIM book, maybe, but it's really a Gospel of Thomas book, with introductions that provide the connections to the Course, the Christian tradition, and Gary Renard's work, so as soon as you limit it to the Course, it's stuck in a rut already. I now am starting to see readers who had NO previous background in either the Course or the Thomas Gospel.
- It's a Jesus book, undoubtedly, but the term is apt to be misunderstood, for reasons that should be obvious. They are the same reasons why Pursah in Gary Renard's books uses the term "J" instead of Jesus, namely avoiding the religious stereotypes associated with him, both positive and negative, so he can be appreciated in a new light.
- It's a religious book. Of course not, it has nothing to do with religion as the world commonly understands that term, as little as Jesus did. He was only framed for founding a religion by Paul and others who came after him, he had no such interest or intention.
- It's a truth book. Perhaps, but that's not a category anybody knows what to do with never mind how you slice it.
- It's a spiritual book. Well, that's a possibility. Spiritual, not religious as the fashionable phrase goes nowadays. Fine. The way I tend to explain the term is that spiritual for me connotes something that is about my relationship to the Divine, and not about anybody else's rules or concepts, let alonge anything moral or behavioral.
- It is a book that invites a new way of looking at Jesus, resting on the twin traditions of the Thomas Gospel and A Course In Miracles. It has a great picture of Jesus on the cover, which by the way is called "Teach Only Love," and was painted by Sam Augustin -- Personally I like this the best. For the picture, which has a total absence of Christian paraphernalia, and represents Jesus only as a presence of love and light, seems to be inviting people in regardless of any familiarity with either Thomas, or ACIM, or anything else along those lines. It seems to make the book jump in people's arms. Although undoubtedly some are also put off by it, if they have issues with Jesus. Tough luck on them.
- It's a book on non-dualism. A bit of a stretch really, for that is not the topic in any overt way, except that the teachings of the Course, and ultimately of Jesus, clearly are completely non-dualistic.
- It's a contemplative book. For sure. I think that is the whole purpose of the Thomas Gospel, to enter a dialog with Jesus and the thought system he represents, and to invite the reader in to contemplate these ideas for themselves, not to mention to turn around and apply them in their lives.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Some Scholarly Stuff about Thomas
Occasionally it makes me bristle when Gary or anyone states that my work would be 'scholarly,' in my view it is not, strictly speaking. I find that epithet a bit off-putting in the sense that I neither produce college textbooks or original research, even if I am--at times at least--a keen watcher of what is developing in some of the literature surrounding Thomas. And some good stuff has been percolating for years now in the community that studies Thomas with an open mind. A very interesting discussion about Thomas in relationship to Mark (my favorite of the canonical gospels), can be found here: http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/tomark1.htm and here http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/tomark2.htm
The above material in essence documents in a formal, scholarly fashion, having recourse strictly to the form of the material, and the sequence and circumstance of its borrowing, the transformation of Jesus teachings in their raw, relatively unedited form in the Thomas gospel, towards the Pauline/Christian rendering of him, of which Mark is the first example. Clearly the dominant influence behind all this is Paul and his interpretation of Jesus, which progressively pulls him into this world, and puts all kinds of theological make-up on him, ultimately insisting that the resurrection and second coming are of the body, thus accomplishing what the ego always wants to do, namely to pull Jesus down into the muck of this world with us, and solve our problems here, instead of us learning to follow him to a Kingdom not of this world, of which he speaks to us always. But which we do not want to hear about in the worst way. This last issue is of course the crux, and it is the reason why the Course spends so much time putting us in touch with our resistance to what Jesus teaches.
So, the simple thing to take away from it all is that the reason Jesus in Thomas does not sound like a Christian, is because Christianity is an ego-dominated, dualistic, distortion of his teachings, which fully makes the world real, and as such ensures that we do not hear what Jesus teaches in reality. And as Course students we may then always recognize that this is merely a very useful mirror of our own tendency to want to do all of these things with Jesus, thus compromising the Course. Our ways of doing so are often very subtle, but as we progress with our work they will become more and more clear and easy to recognize, and for many who are 'recovering Christians' forgiving Paul will be one way this process can take form, for different from what Dan Brown et al. believe, we were not duped into believing certain things while an evil church withheld the truth. The ego's conspiracy is always to set it up so that someone else can be blamed for our betrayal of our true Self, which in this Judaeo-Christian imagery is symbolized as the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus, and we simply do not hear, and do not want to hear his message of forgiveness, the meaninglessness of the body and the fact that he does not believe in betrayal (ACIM:T-6.I.15:5) for those reasons, knowing us, as he does, as spirit. He is asking us to follow him and do the same, and we simply reinterpret him to make sure we don't, so that the ego stays firmly in charge. We simply resist, because we realize that if we are spirit, we didn't happen, and so we have to keep on killing Christ, as Wilhelm Reich fathomed in his own funny way (see his The Murder of Christ
).
The above material in essence documents in a formal, scholarly fashion, having recourse strictly to the form of the material, and the sequence and circumstance of its borrowing, the transformation of Jesus teachings in their raw, relatively unedited form in the Thomas gospel, towards the Pauline/Christian rendering of him, of which Mark is the first example. Clearly the dominant influence behind all this is Paul and his interpretation of Jesus, which progressively pulls him into this world, and puts all kinds of theological make-up on him, ultimately insisting that the resurrection and second coming are of the body, thus accomplishing what the ego always wants to do, namely to pull Jesus down into the muck of this world with us, and solve our problems here, instead of us learning to follow him to a Kingdom not of this world, of which he speaks to us always. But which we do not want to hear about in the worst way. This last issue is of course the crux, and it is the reason why the Course spends so much time putting us in touch with our resistance to what Jesus teaches.
So, the simple thing to take away from it all is that the reason Jesus in Thomas does not sound like a Christian, is because Christianity is an ego-dominated, dualistic, distortion of his teachings, which fully makes the world real, and as such ensures that we do not hear what Jesus teaches in reality. And as Course students we may then always recognize that this is merely a very useful mirror of our own tendency to want to do all of these things with Jesus, thus compromising the Course. Our ways of doing so are often very subtle, but as we progress with our work they will become more and more clear and easy to recognize, and for many who are 'recovering Christians' forgiving Paul will be one way this process can take form, for different from what Dan Brown et al. believe, we were not duped into believing certain things while an evil church withheld the truth. The ego's conspiracy is always to set it up so that someone else can be blamed for our betrayal of our true Self, which in this Judaeo-Christian imagery is symbolized as the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus, and we simply do not hear, and do not want to hear his message of forgiveness, the meaninglessness of the body and the fact that he does not believe in betrayal (ACIM:T-6.I.15:5) for those reasons, knowing us, as he does, as spirit. He is asking us to follow him and do the same, and we simply reinterpret him to make sure we don't, so that the ego stays firmly in charge. We simply resist, because we realize that if we are spirit, we didn't happen, and so we have to keep on killing Christ, as Wilhelm Reich fathomed in his own funny way (see his The Murder of Christ
).
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Can You Please Choose Somebody Else For A Change?
That is the old joke. Abe Moskowitz comes to heaven and meets God, and he asks Him: "Is it true that the Jews are the chosen people?" And the voice of God booms: "Yes, Mr. Moskowitz, it is true, you are the chosen people!" And Moskowitz says: "Then could you please choose somebody else for a change?"
That, in a word, is the problem of theodicy, and Bart D. Ehrman has just added his proverbial two cents to a long list of explorations of this issue. To phrase it more formally, as Ehrman does in even more detail: If God is the Creator and is Almighty and just, then why would He allow suffering? And Ehrman heaps on the evidence. He could also have referred the reader to the year 2000 special edition of The Economist, where the editorial reminded us that the twentieth century had been the bloodiest on record. Progress anyone?
If you read it with any kind of background in A Course In Miracles
, this book has to strike you as a dramatic recap of just why you must slam right into the wall of this question, as long as you think God created the world. The Course's clarification of this point is that God created us as spirit and absolutely one with Him, and that the rest of it is just a nightmare, a delusion, a projection, a mis-creation that emanates from the separation thought, and not at all His Creation. The sole basis of the seeming reality of the world lies in the one impossible speculation: What if I were separate? What if, indeed.
The results are quite absurd, as Ehrman duly points out by making the world good and real and treating us to endless descriptions of suffering from the Bible and from history, as well as his own personal experience. However, under the Course's approach, that experience of suffering is just our frenzied imagination run amok with our impossible thoughts, the reality of which has no firm foundation except in our stubborn belief that would make it so. A mind is a powerful thing, and that is why in the end there is hope, for if we can make a mistake, we can also fix it, by getting the right guidance and learning that we are not a helpless victim at all. But as with Ehrman, the defense--let's blame somebody else--makes sense from a psychological standpoint. At the beginning of the story when the idea is fresh, we only have God to blame. Later, when we carry it to logical extremes and have the choice of an unlimited number of hapless individuals mirroring the same thought ad infinitum, we can and we do blame everybody and their neighbor.
Meanwhile, as to studying the Bible, Ehrman's story is fascinating. For he lost his fundamentalism a long time ago, as he became a serious Bible scholar, and the wonderful thing is that he has shared his voyage of discovery with us, starting with his evolution from fundamentalism towards a more critical attitude. But his current book describes his grappling with the very dualistic biblical God, Whom again, as Course students, we would look upon for the most part as an expression of the ego - He has His good days and His bad days, and beware of the bad days! Hence, while the author has moved from his earlier fundamentalist literalism about the language, the form of the Bible, towards greater freedom, to appreciate that neither the form of it nor the beliefs it reflects are any kind of a coherent whole, he is still stuck in literalism about the content of the book on another level, and hence he has now slammed solidly into the wall that is known as theodicy, and he has sent us his accident report. I for one enjoy his willingness to do an honest self-examination, and to evolve his position, not to mention the liberal sharing of his personal development with his readers. It is a wakeup call.
What is curious is that Ehrman, who does such a marvelous job in his book Lost Christianities, by documenting how early Christianity was not at all the coherent whole that people would like to believe it was, here sticks to a fairly rigid regimen of reading of the Bible and never once even suspects that it can also be read on another level. Evidently, he is familiar with some gnostic literature, but it does not seem to occur to him that some of the gnostic speculation that the God of Genesis, who created the world, must be an inferior sort of a God and not the true God, should perhaps be entertained seriously. Given how he is evidently bothered by the Bible, one might hope he would at least entertain such a possibility ever so briefly, after all he describes brilliantly how apocalypticism was an ancient attempt to deal with theodicy. The only reason the gnostics ever came up with that idea in the first place, is that, from Jesus, they did understand God to be a loving God, not to mention that His Kingdom was not of this earth, so why would He create one in the first place? It did a lot for them in looking at the problems of evil and suffering differently.
Having said that, if one were to read Ehrman's exploration with a different mindset, as the Course might suggest to us, we might understand that, while some themes in the Bible may contain profound spiritual truths, other parts reflect the ego's dualistic experience of God, which sometimes shows up as good God, vs. angry God, and other times as God vs. the Devil. And thus it becomes very clear and instructive just how large parts of the Bible portray the ego's pathological killer God and not at all the loving Father Whom Jesus represents in the New Testament. And yet we do feel spoken to, for some part of us knows, that we who are reading this are the chosen people, but we do not realize how and why the dualism and the hell and damnation--not to mention the need to "fear God"--are the projection of our own choice of the separation. After all, in a symbolic sense, Israel is nothing else but the Sonship in the separation, lost in exile in a world which is not our home, and in terror of a vengeful God who is merely the projection of our attack on Heaven and a completely logical outflow of preferring the separation.
Similarly, the frequent theme of the "adulterous generation" really does ring true because deep down we know our own faithlessness to who and what we really are. And unless we turn to the Internal Teacher of the Course, who represents to us our Loving Father and the personification of our Sonship to us (no one comes to the Father except through him!), and who thus truly is the truth, the way, and the life. In the biblical representation there rarely is relief from the fear, except in the examples of forgiveness and various assertions in the teaching of Jesus. Paul in the New Testament quickly corrects that and reverts back to fire and brimstone whenever he can. So also the stories of Baal worship in the Old Testament merely symbolize how the ego leads us into the dominion of oppressive gods, but the vengeance of the one God is, again, only our projection, of our guilt over our own preference.
There are many other elements which should make us think that the material is symbolic, not literal. There is the issue of the 12 tribes and the 12 apostles, and the twelve in terms of the Zodiac simply represent "all of us," in the sense that it represents all the possibilities. What could be more clearly symbolic! There are many more connections where that came from. There is also the symbolism of many names, which equally should tip us off that: 1) these are not histories--about someone else in some other time--these are myths that want to represent a truth to us now, in the sense of the typical fairy tale opening, "Once up on a time," and 2) the value of the stories lies in the themes they represent, not in the specifics of the story. The ego always obfuscates matters by confusing the staging for the plot. Again, from the Course's standpoint, once we understand how it is an ego-ploy to "accuse" God of creating the world, let alone humans, Ehrman's cry, "In the Bible, aren't humans made in the image of God?" (page 189) would be solved.
Ehrman in his book remains stuck in the literalist view and does not entertain the symbolic view, which opens up if we get above the battlefield and look at our perceptions with Jesus and begin to understand the dynamics of projection and the fact that, in the world (where we think we are), it all comes to us in parables. One wonders why generations of people stay stuck in this view of the Bible, even though Jesus is repeatedly quoted as saying, that if we do not look at it with him, it all comes to us in parables, but if we join with him, he will explain it all to us. (c.f. Mk. 4:34). Once we do move in this direction though, even the most fearful parts of the Bible could make good reading as a way of appreciating the insanity of the ego.
In the discussion of apocalyptic thought some of the psychological understanding which the Course offers could again clarify a lot. It was not just some arbitrary literary "invention" to entertain speculative thinking about the end of times, rather, it is a fundamental aspect of the ego's "dynamics" which seeks to rob us of the present with guilt over the past and fear of the future, so that, to paraphrase the Course, at no point is individuality actually real at all (c.f. ACIM:T-2.I.2:1-2, T-6.V.A.2, T-18.VII.3:1). On the whole the discussion of apocalyptic thinking makes clear also what the results are of the level confusion, which reduces the coming of the Kingdom to an event in linear time, which again is only a projection of the ego's fears, and an anthropomorphic distortion of what Jesus said, as would also be clear by a juxtaposition of some of the Thomas sayings, where Jesus makes it very clear that the Kingdom is here now, except we don't see it yet, which again chimes in beautifully with the Course's notion of "a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed" (ACIM:T-8.VI.9:7). In the course of all this we can only come to appreciate more deeply what a powerful job Christianity did in completely obliterating abstract thinking, which has been so powerfully present in other traditions such as Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta) and Buddhism, and when some gnostics took a stab at it, it was run out of town as heresy. Curiously, even in the presence of the world view of quantum mechanics, and modern psychology, quite aside from the Course, this book stops at observing the patent impossibility of looking at God and the Bible in the Christian way.
On another level, however, the larger picture of the Bible does make sense, if we appreciate it on a more symbolic level, i.e. as parables. As Adam, we do choose duality and fall asleep--and, as the Course says, "nowhere does it refer to him waking up..." (ACIM:T-2.I.3:6). The waking-up part only comes with Jesus who asks us to follow him to His Kingdom not of this (dream!)- world. But, for the most part, he was badly misunderstood, and Paul quickly dragged him back down to "reality," making it seem as though he was to come to us, as in Paul's understanding of the Second Coming, instead of us going to him, which is what he asked. Paul in effect left him nailed to the cross, and later abandoning us by going to Heaven by himself. And emergent Christianity sold us on the idea that he was late coming back, so that, as adopted sons, for us there is in the meantime little else to do but to feel guilty, try to be good little Christians, and hope for the best, unless, that is, there might be another way of looking at this picture.
On the whole this aspect of the book shows clearly how Ehrman still thinks like a Christian, even as he protests that he longer can be a Christian, for again and again he quotes the contradictions in the Bible, which might go away, if one seriously allowed a critical thinking of the Bible, in which it turns out to be a seriously flawed patchwork of thought, stories and ideas about man's relationship with God, which coalesced together as a book through a highly capricious set of historical circumstances, so why stick to reading it as if it was a consistent whole? In particular the increasing dualism in "quotations" (or should we just say "attributions") of Jesus, might be resolved once we understand how the Jesus of Thomas was a non-dualist, and the Jesus of the Pauline world of Christianity was a dualist and a literalist--or is that really Paul we are talking about? And along those same lines it makes sense that Ehrman spends a lot of time on Paul's reasoning as to why the resurrection was a bodily, and not a spiritual event. This is the same Ehrman, who unlike many others, dismisses the Thomas gospel, where Jesus sounds so very different from his Pauline incarnation in the canonical gospels, as a fraud instead of letting it open his eyes as to why Jesus really did teach something very different before being edited by Paul. In other words, as long as we dogmatically assume the Pauline redaction of Jesus as a given, we never will be open to what Jesus said before Paul came along, even though it makes historical sense to do so, since "Paul" only came along after Jesus had already died, and said all that we have been told about him saying, and the question of who is saying it deserves more attention.
One final example of Ehrman's being stuck in Christianity, albeit a non-Christian Christianity, is his treatment of Revelation, in which he points out that the author of the book clearly was concerned not with prognosticating our future, but with his own imminent expectation of doom. If the book were thus read psychologically, it is a graphic example of the perennial ego-principle of the expectation of doom as the necessary corollary to the assumption of individual existence, namely that death eventually proves the seeming reality of such unreal existence. So psychologically death is the ego's trump card, and that is the underlying appeal of Revelation for all ages. It portrays the ego's apocalyptic expectations. So that, when, on the basis of his literalistic (dare I say "Christian"?) reading he says, "Moreover, the fervent expectation that we must be living at the end of time has proved time after time--every time--to be wrong," in fact when this apocalyptic dynamic is properly understood as a projection that results from the basic ego-dynamic, it should be evident that it is a perfect expression of the underlying ego fear, that its game is up, it is living on borrowed time--because it is!
On the whole, then, besides the fact that I've enjoyed Ehrman's recounting of his journey thus far, I can only hope for his sake that he does not stay in sack and ashcloth at the wailing wall, which is this book. Just as with Job's friends, the ego's witnesses only reflect back to us the reality of our suffering and the injustice that is being done to us, not to mention their judgment of us, and unless and until we get tired of the ego's dirge (ACIM:P-2.VI.1:5), our "friends" won't quit talking to us (for that's what we have them for). And not until they finally fall silent will we even begin to hear the Voice for God, symbolized in the book of Job by " Elihu" (Job's fourth friend, whose name meant "This one is my God"), and who shows up at the end of the story, at which point Job begins to hear the Voice of God. But we won't get tired of the ego's dirge (ACIM:P-2.VI.1:5) until we look at it with Jesus, for only his love and forgiveness takes the sting out of it, and in the end drains the air out of the ego's balloon, so that it can "...fade into the nothingness from which it came..." (ACIM:M-13.1:2).
Some aspects of the book are quite funny and illustrative of what the Course teaches us about denial, e.g. when the author describes his experiences in social situations, when he tells people he's writing a book about suffering and they fall silent. His description of the reactions is priceless, and... no surprise! Clear proof that the ego does not want us to look at it honestly! In the end, though, his conclusion is that the best we can do is to make the world a better place, so welcome to the New Age. Self-examination, unpopular ever since Socrates was put to death for promoting it, has been unpopular in Western tradition. For those who are otherwise inclined, there is the Course, and the Work (by Byron Katie), pointing in the other direction, towards taking responsibility for our projections, and changing ourselves, which, while it is not a trivial task, is infinitely easier than changing everyone else, let alone the whole world. Jesus had a cute saying that we could not hope to help our brother get the splinter out of his eye, lest we remove the moat out of our own eye first...
One interesting little detail of this book is that Ehrman seems to subscribe to a chronology in which Mark was composed after Paul started to write, which I tend not to believe, but having said that, there unquestioningly are some very Pauline lines in Mark, though to me it seems they are not as much an integral part of the story as Ehrman suggests. Depending on how you read those passages, it seems to me that those Pauline interpretations, which theologize the events, could easily be lifted out without compromising the story.
Postscript: Since I posted this note, I went to hear Bart Ehrman speak at St. Bart's in Manhattan, at their Center for Religious Inquiry. He signed my copy of the book. In a brief conversation I suggested to him that he had joined the club of Thomas Jefferson, and that the "Jefferson Bible" really was his Bible at this point, considering that Jefferson considered himself a materialist, but had high regard for Jesus as a teacher of morality. Clearly he had not thought of that, but upon a brief moment of reflection he could not help but agree. Not a bad club to belong to, I guess.
(Note the discussion of the biblical Job in this light is based on the article " Beproeving," [Eng. " Temptation"], by J. W. Kaiser, in the bundle Mysterien van Jezus in ons Leven, Synthese, The Hague, Holland).
That, in a word, is the problem of theodicy, and Bart D. Ehrman has just added his proverbial two cents to a long list of explorations of this issue. To phrase it more formally, as Ehrman does in even more detail: If God is the Creator and is Almighty and just, then why would He allow suffering? And Ehrman heaps on the evidence. He could also have referred the reader to the year 2000 special edition of The Economist, where the editorial reminded us that the twentieth century had been the bloodiest on record. Progress anyone?
If you read it with any kind of background in A Course In Miracles
, this book has to strike you as a dramatic recap of just why you must slam right into the wall of this question, as long as you think God created the world. The Course's clarification of this point is that God created us as spirit and absolutely one with Him, and that the rest of it is just a nightmare, a delusion, a projection, a mis-creation that emanates from the separation thought, and not at all His Creation. The sole basis of the seeming reality of the world lies in the one impossible speculation: What if I were separate? What if, indeed. The results are quite absurd, as Ehrman duly points out by making the world good and real and treating us to endless descriptions of suffering from the Bible and from history, as well as his own personal experience. However, under the Course's approach, that experience of suffering is just our frenzied imagination run amok with our impossible thoughts, the reality of which has no firm foundation except in our stubborn belief that would make it so. A mind is a powerful thing, and that is why in the end there is hope, for if we can make a mistake, we can also fix it, by getting the right guidance and learning that we are not a helpless victim at all. But as with Ehrman, the defense--let's blame somebody else--makes sense from a psychological standpoint. At the beginning of the story when the idea is fresh, we only have God to blame. Later, when we carry it to logical extremes and have the choice of an unlimited number of hapless individuals mirroring the same thought ad infinitum, we can and we do blame everybody and their neighbor.
Meanwhile, as to studying the Bible, Ehrman's story is fascinating. For he lost his fundamentalism a long time ago, as he became a serious Bible scholar, and the wonderful thing is that he has shared his voyage of discovery with us, starting with his evolution from fundamentalism towards a more critical attitude. But his current book describes his grappling with the very dualistic biblical God, Whom again, as Course students, we would look upon for the most part as an expression of the ego - He has His good days and His bad days, and beware of the bad days! Hence, while the author has moved from his earlier fundamentalist literalism about the language, the form of the Bible, towards greater freedom, to appreciate that neither the form of it nor the beliefs it reflects are any kind of a coherent whole, he is still stuck in literalism about the content of the book on another level, and hence he has now slammed solidly into the wall that is known as theodicy, and he has sent us his accident report. I for one enjoy his willingness to do an honest self-examination, and to evolve his position, not to mention the liberal sharing of his personal development with his readers. It is a wakeup call.
What is curious is that Ehrman, who does such a marvelous job in his book Lost Christianities, by documenting how early Christianity was not at all the coherent whole that people would like to believe it was, here sticks to a fairly rigid regimen of reading of the Bible and never once even suspects that it can also be read on another level. Evidently, he is familiar with some gnostic literature, but it does not seem to occur to him that some of the gnostic speculation that the God of Genesis, who created the world, must be an inferior sort of a God and not the true God, should perhaps be entertained seriously. Given how he is evidently bothered by the Bible, one might hope he would at least entertain such a possibility ever so briefly, after all he describes brilliantly how apocalypticism was an ancient attempt to deal with theodicy. The only reason the gnostics ever came up with that idea in the first place, is that, from Jesus, they did understand God to be a loving God, not to mention that His Kingdom was not of this earth, so why would He create one in the first place? It did a lot for them in looking at the problems of evil and suffering differently.
Having said that, if one were to read Ehrman's exploration with a different mindset, as the Course might suggest to us, we might understand that, while some themes in the Bible may contain profound spiritual truths, other parts reflect the ego's dualistic experience of God, which sometimes shows up as good God, vs. angry God, and other times as God vs. the Devil. And thus it becomes very clear and instructive just how large parts of the Bible portray the ego's pathological killer God and not at all the loving Father Whom Jesus represents in the New Testament. And yet we do feel spoken to, for some part of us knows, that we who are reading this are the chosen people, but we do not realize how and why the dualism and the hell and damnation--not to mention the need to "fear God"--are the projection of our own choice of the separation. After all, in a symbolic sense, Israel is nothing else but the Sonship in the separation, lost in exile in a world which is not our home, and in terror of a vengeful God who is merely the projection of our attack on Heaven and a completely logical outflow of preferring the separation.
Similarly, the frequent theme of the "adulterous generation" really does ring true because deep down we know our own faithlessness to who and what we really are. And unless we turn to the Internal Teacher of the Course, who represents to us our Loving Father and the personification of our Sonship to us (no one comes to the Father except through him!), and who thus truly is the truth, the way, and the life. In the biblical representation there rarely is relief from the fear, except in the examples of forgiveness and various assertions in the teaching of Jesus. Paul in the New Testament quickly corrects that and reverts back to fire and brimstone whenever he can. So also the stories of Baal worship in the Old Testament merely symbolize how the ego leads us into the dominion of oppressive gods, but the vengeance of the one God is, again, only our projection, of our guilt over our own preference.
There are many other elements which should make us think that the material is symbolic, not literal. There is the issue of the 12 tribes and the 12 apostles, and the twelve in terms of the Zodiac simply represent "all of us," in the sense that it represents all the possibilities. What could be more clearly symbolic! There are many more connections where that came from. There is also the symbolism of many names, which equally should tip us off that: 1) these are not histories--about someone else in some other time--these are myths that want to represent a truth to us now, in the sense of the typical fairy tale opening, "Once up on a time," and 2) the value of the stories lies in the themes they represent, not in the specifics of the story. The ego always obfuscates matters by confusing the staging for the plot. Again, from the Course's standpoint, once we understand how it is an ego-ploy to "accuse" God of creating the world, let alone humans, Ehrman's cry, "In the Bible, aren't humans made in the image of God?" (page 189) would be solved.
Ehrman in his book remains stuck in the literalist view and does not entertain the symbolic view, which opens up if we get above the battlefield and look at our perceptions with Jesus and begin to understand the dynamics of projection and the fact that, in the world (where we think we are), it all comes to us in parables. One wonders why generations of people stay stuck in this view of the Bible, even though Jesus is repeatedly quoted as saying, that if we do not look at it with him, it all comes to us in parables, but if we join with him, he will explain it all to us. (c.f. Mk. 4:34). Once we do move in this direction though, even the most fearful parts of the Bible could make good reading as a way of appreciating the insanity of the ego.
In the discussion of apocalyptic thought some of the psychological understanding which the Course offers could again clarify a lot. It was not just some arbitrary literary "invention" to entertain speculative thinking about the end of times, rather, it is a fundamental aspect of the ego's "dynamics" which seeks to rob us of the present with guilt over the past and fear of the future, so that, to paraphrase the Course, at no point is individuality actually real at all (c.f. ACIM:T-2.I.2:1-2, T-6.V.A.2, T-18.VII.3:1). On the whole the discussion of apocalyptic thinking makes clear also what the results are of the level confusion, which reduces the coming of the Kingdom to an event in linear time, which again is only a projection of the ego's fears, and an anthropomorphic distortion of what Jesus said, as would also be clear by a juxtaposition of some of the Thomas sayings, where Jesus makes it very clear that the Kingdom is here now, except we don't see it yet, which again chimes in beautifully with the Course's notion of "a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed" (ACIM:T-8.VI.9:7). In the course of all this we can only come to appreciate more deeply what a powerful job Christianity did in completely obliterating abstract thinking, which has been so powerfully present in other traditions such as Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta) and Buddhism, and when some gnostics took a stab at it, it was run out of town as heresy. Curiously, even in the presence of the world view of quantum mechanics, and modern psychology, quite aside from the Course, this book stops at observing the patent impossibility of looking at God and the Bible in the Christian way.
On another level, however, the larger picture of the Bible does make sense, if we appreciate it on a more symbolic level, i.e. as parables. As Adam, we do choose duality and fall asleep--and, as the Course says, "nowhere does it refer to him waking up..." (ACIM:T-2.I.3:6). The waking-up part only comes with Jesus who asks us to follow him to His Kingdom not of this (dream!)- world. But, for the most part, he was badly misunderstood, and Paul quickly dragged him back down to "reality," making it seem as though he was to come to us, as in Paul's understanding of the Second Coming, instead of us going to him, which is what he asked. Paul in effect left him nailed to the cross, and later abandoning us by going to Heaven by himself. And emergent Christianity sold us on the idea that he was late coming back, so that, as adopted sons, for us there is in the meantime little else to do but to feel guilty, try to be good little Christians, and hope for the best, unless, that is, there might be another way of looking at this picture.
On the whole this aspect of the book shows clearly how Ehrman still thinks like a Christian, even as he protests that he longer can be a Christian, for again and again he quotes the contradictions in the Bible, which might go away, if one seriously allowed a critical thinking of the Bible, in which it turns out to be a seriously flawed patchwork of thought, stories and ideas about man's relationship with God, which coalesced together as a book through a highly capricious set of historical circumstances, so why stick to reading it as if it was a consistent whole? In particular the increasing dualism in "quotations" (or should we just say "attributions") of Jesus, might be resolved once we understand how the Jesus of Thomas was a non-dualist, and the Jesus of the Pauline world of Christianity was a dualist and a literalist--or is that really Paul we are talking about? And along those same lines it makes sense that Ehrman spends a lot of time on Paul's reasoning as to why the resurrection was a bodily, and not a spiritual event. This is the same Ehrman, who unlike many others, dismisses the Thomas gospel, where Jesus sounds so very different from his Pauline incarnation in the canonical gospels, as a fraud instead of letting it open his eyes as to why Jesus really did teach something very different before being edited by Paul. In other words, as long as we dogmatically assume the Pauline redaction of Jesus as a given, we never will be open to what Jesus said before Paul came along, even though it makes historical sense to do so, since "Paul" only came along after Jesus had already died, and said all that we have been told about him saying, and the question of who is saying it deserves more attention.
One final example of Ehrman's being stuck in Christianity, albeit a non-Christian Christianity, is his treatment of Revelation, in which he points out that the author of the book clearly was concerned not with prognosticating our future, but with his own imminent expectation of doom. If the book were thus read psychologically, it is a graphic example of the perennial ego-principle of the expectation of doom as the necessary corollary to the assumption of individual existence, namely that death eventually proves the seeming reality of such unreal existence. So psychologically death is the ego's trump card, and that is the underlying appeal of Revelation for all ages. It portrays the ego's apocalyptic expectations. So that, when, on the basis of his literalistic (dare I say "Christian"?) reading he says, "Moreover, the fervent expectation that we must be living at the end of time has proved time after time--every time--to be wrong," in fact when this apocalyptic dynamic is properly understood as a projection that results from the basic ego-dynamic, it should be evident that it is a perfect expression of the underlying ego fear, that its game is up, it is living on borrowed time--because it is!
On the whole, then, besides the fact that I've enjoyed Ehrman's recounting of his journey thus far, I can only hope for his sake that he does not stay in sack and ashcloth at the wailing wall, which is this book. Just as with Job's friends, the ego's witnesses only reflect back to us the reality of our suffering and the injustice that is being done to us, not to mention their judgment of us, and unless and until we get tired of the ego's dirge (ACIM:P-2.VI.1:5), our "friends" won't quit talking to us (for that's what we have them for). And not until they finally fall silent will we even begin to hear the Voice for God, symbolized in the book of Job by " Elihu" (Job's fourth friend, whose name meant "This one is my God"), and who shows up at the end of the story, at which point Job begins to hear the Voice of God. But we won't get tired of the ego's dirge (ACIM:P-2.VI.1:5) until we look at it with Jesus, for only his love and forgiveness takes the sting out of it, and in the end drains the air out of the ego's balloon, so that it can "...fade into the nothingness from which it came..." (ACIM:M-13.1:2).
Some aspects of the book are quite funny and illustrative of what the Course teaches us about denial, e.g. when the author describes his experiences in social situations, when he tells people he's writing a book about suffering and they fall silent. His description of the reactions is priceless, and... no surprise! Clear proof that the ego does not want us to look at it honestly! In the end, though, his conclusion is that the best we can do is to make the world a better place, so welcome to the New Age. Self-examination, unpopular ever since Socrates was put to death for promoting it, has been unpopular in Western tradition. For those who are otherwise inclined, there is the Course, and the Work (by Byron Katie), pointing in the other direction, towards taking responsibility for our projections, and changing ourselves, which, while it is not a trivial task, is infinitely easier than changing everyone else, let alone the whole world. Jesus had a cute saying that we could not hope to help our brother get the splinter out of his eye, lest we remove the moat out of our own eye first...
One interesting little detail of this book is that Ehrman seems to subscribe to a chronology in which Mark was composed after Paul started to write, which I tend not to believe, but having said that, there unquestioningly are some very Pauline lines in Mark, though to me it seems they are not as much an integral part of the story as Ehrman suggests. Depending on how you read those passages, it seems to me that those Pauline interpretations, which theologize the events, could easily be lifted out without compromising the story.
Postscript: Since I posted this note, I went to hear Bart Ehrman speak at St. Bart's in Manhattan, at their Center for Religious Inquiry. He signed my copy of the book. In a brief conversation I suggested to him that he had joined the club of Thomas Jefferson, and that the "Jefferson Bible" really was his Bible at this point, considering that Jefferson considered himself a materialist, but had high regard for Jesus as a teacher of morality. Clearly he had not thought of that, but upon a brief moment of reflection he could not help but agree. Not a bad club to belong to, I guess.
(Note the discussion of the biblical Job in this light is based on the article " Beproeving," [Eng. " Temptation"], by J. W. Kaiser, in the bundle Mysterien van Jezus in ons Leven, Synthese, The Hague, Holland).
Friday, August 3, 2007
Spoken Miracles
Visitors to the Yahoo! group on The Disappearance of the Universe will recognize the name of Martha Lucía Espinosa immediately, and know that there was a discussion on the forum about her plans for this upcoming book, which is based on a hint that was contained in DU, namely that the 365 Course quotes contained in that book provide a complete summary of the Course's teachings, which one could use for daily meditations etc. Because of her editorial choice to present these "quotes" as a "sayings collection," I felt a discussion of the book was in order here.Those of us who have really worked with Gary's books are in no doubt that they are inspired material, for they speak to us on so many levels all at once, and they clearly represent yet another dimension to facilitate our learning of the Course, by re-casting it in the framework of Gary's conversations with his friends, the ascended masters Arten and Pursah. Gary's experiences with Arten and Pursah, and with learning the Course, on one level are nothing but a dramatization of our own learning opportunities with the Course, inviting us to empathize, and identify with Gary as Course student par excellence, as he goes through his own slapstick routines of Course learning. Clearly, in preparing this little book Lucía has discovered yet another dimension in which this material operates, which she reflects in her choice of title. Not only was the Course spoken to Helen Schucman, the 365 quotes from the Course were again spoken through Gary's books during his conversations with Arten & Pursah. And Lucía heard the spoken quality in those quotes, in particular also because of the context of the Thomas Gospel which permeates Gary's work, in as much as his own discovery of having been Thomas in a prior life, as well as Pursah representing the recollection of that lifetime, which is obviously central to the book. Throughout Gary's books the focus is on what "J" really did say, 2000 years ago as recorded by Thomas, and today in the form of ACIM, and to clear away the clutter of subsequent interpretation and distortion, and to get back to what the words were meant to say as they were spoken by the speaker. The Thomas Gospel is fast becoming the symbol of hearing the authentic teaching of Jesus, before the distortions of it began to accumulate in the narrative Gospel tradition which came later, and which was never again to get out from under the heavy editorial influence of Paul, whose first letters are contemporaneous with the Gospel according to Mark, which in and of itself has perhaps the least amount of Pauline influence, but nevertheless already shows some of the influences that were to distort the teachings of the living Jesus into the dead body of Christian dogma (eucharist etc.). Pursah's kernel of the 70 authentic sayings in the Thomas Gospel help us find the "historical" Jesus in pure form, free of the materials that were added on later. In Spoken Miracles, Lucía hears a kernel of the Course, almost as a sayings tradition, which can speak to us in a very direct way as a refresher of the Course - though it could also be an introduction to the Course. The book represents Pursah's Cliff-notes for A Course In Miracles , and as such it is a wonderful way to straighten us out, if we get wrapped around the axle with the ego's complications again.Lucía's own introduction is fascinating, and may serve to make the material accessible to many seekers. No doubt few might have wandered as widely and at such a young age as Lucía has, starting with studying a form of Gnosticism at age 13, but as she meandered through various spiritual and religious traditions, she touches seemingly on anything that is around in the contemporary landscape, including a brush with the dogmatic certainty of fundamentalist judgment and the Leave Behind series, to which Gary also offers some choice comments in the course of his books. The Course itself emphasizes in the first entry of the Manual for Teachers, that God's Teachers come from anywhere and everywhere, from any religion or no religion, and in that spirit Lucía's wide ranging explorations will offer many readers the opportunity to recognize themselves in her, and thus to hear again the still small voice inside, which leads us to truth in the end. Reading the book is a mind-blowing experience, for even if we already realized the rich crystalline structure of the Course, until Gary came along, most of us would have thought a popular introduction to the Course was an impossibility, and a meaningful summarization equally an impossible task, except that it turns out that DU, like a Russian doll, contained this supposedly impossible summarization. It just took Lucía's faithful scribal work to free it up from its rough shape and to polish the diamond. This resulting little gem of a book truly astound us with the brilliance of the Course on yet another level, as impossible as that seems. I've studied the Course for too long to venture a guess how this book would strike someone who came to it without a knowledge from the Course, it seems to me that very much like the sayings of Thomas it would evoke a hunger to know and understand more of the thought system that was being implied more than explained in them, in which case it could lead people to the Course. As a refresher for long standing Course students, it is definitely... well... if I may say so: refreshing! It could be used as the thoughts for the day for a year long refresher program, or also simply read, or you could dabble in it. Last, not least, this book is also a great buy at $9.95, and in a way it provides a more portable Course than the portable Course - the small format edition of the Course from the original publishers, which is still more luggable than portable. So for a weekend trip take this one along if you are traveling light! And I supect that just like The Disappearance of the Universe itself serves as an introduction to the Course for many people, this little book too may become a first invitation to the Course for a great many people - kind of a no risk trial. |
Sunday, July 22, 2007
The Gospels Revisited - The Jesus Seminar
I meet Course students who don't have the familiarity with the Christian tradition to appreciate some of the comments in A Course In Miracles
, and the evident allusions to New Testament stories, and some of them would like to find a decent source. At the present time this edition, The Complete Gospels, is arguably the finest resource one could consult, in particular also because it simply presents all the different gospel traditions side by side, without overly emphasizing those that Christianity declared to be the canon of the NT. It is the most neutral and unbiased way to be introduced to this important cultural good. For people who have been exposed to a lot of this material in their upbringing, but who want to take a new look at it, this edition naturally is the best source.
The Jesus Seminar is doing an incredible job in making many materials accessible. For my upcoming book Closing the Circle: Pursah's Gospel of Thomas and A Course In Miracles
, I have extensively consulted The Five Gospels
, and I'm discussing that book's conclusions about the authenticity of Thomas sayings in an appendix to the book. While I'm not really using this edition for my book and this blog is really focused on materials for the book, I still want to post this note here, if nothing else because I mentioned in my discussion of The Five Gospels that there is a need for this kind of an edition. I may also remind the reader that Gary Renard has shared with us that Pursah favors The Gospels of Thomas, Mary, and Phillip.
This book is brilliant, and very helpful. It provides modern, clean very non-denominational translations of the Gospel materials, and the only deference it shows to the canonical gospels of Christianity is by putting the synoptics first, though in chronological order (Mark first), not in orthodox theological order (Matthew first), and prefacing John with the putative "Signs" gospel that may have preceded it. Then follow the sayings gospels, specifically the reconstruction of Q as well as Thomas. Chronologically these actually are deemed to precede Mark at least as a general literary form, so this is the one compromise to the Christian orthodoxy that this book makes. The time line which the JS believes in is in sync with Pursah's position in Your Immortal Reality
, to wit, the kernel of Thomas may have been together by ca. 50 CE. (When we're in the presence of the Jesus Seminar it is politically correct to use 'CE' in lieu of 'AD.') The bulk of it would seem to have congealed ca 70-100 CE, but the JS pointedly observe that Thomas must have been 'together' before the synoptic Gospels, based on the internal evidence of the sequence of ideas as much as literary form between the sayings traditions and the synoptics. Helpfully the book also presents the Greek Thomas fragments from Papyrus Oxyrrhynchus, which are of some interest because of the variations they show.
Reading between the lines, I suspect that one of the reasons they feel Thomas congealed as a document only at the same time as the narrative gospels would be because they feel they have to account for the gnostic influences, and gnosticism doesn't take off till later. We may look at that question differently with Pursah and the Course, and understand that some of what Jesus taught originally definitely was grist for the mill of gnosticism, and Jesus did not start out as an orthodox Christian but some of his words sounded 'gnostic' and so the material became tainted with gnosticism later. On the contrary Jesus' original teaching contained some elements, including that of an inner knowing, or 'gnosis' of truth, which naturally lent themselves to be expanded upon by later gnosticism (and often distorted in the process), while the emergent orthodoxy edited that tendency out of his teachings with Paul leading the charge.
Next follow the Infancy Gospels which are rather late myths, then Fragmentary Gospels, some of which are still highly interesting, followed by the Jewish-Christian Gospels and then Orphan Sayings and Stories. The whole makes for a very complete and balanced edition, and very worth perusing. It should also be remembered that many Jesus stories apocryphal and otherwise were not gone when the church forbade them or destroyed the manuscripts. One example is the beautiful legend of St. Christopher. Never mind the church abolished him from the register of saints, for being fictional, the influence his story has had on the western mind can hardly be underestimated, witness the many images of St. Christopher in medieval art. The same applies for much of the apocryphal material - the church may have successfully destroyed the books, but the traditions frequently lived on.
If there are shortcomings they are easily offset by the many merits of this publication. I note in the introduction that the emphasis still is on wanting to understand the history of Christianity, which is not interesting to me. What interests me is the tradition of the teachings of Jesus, and this collection can shed light on that. Some word choices in the translation are a definite improvement such as "change of heart" for the Greek "metanoia," which is much better than the God-awful "repentance" of traditional Christian (read Pauline) translations, and a beautiful parallel to the Course's "change of mind," which would arguably be more accurate since Greek "noia" comes from "nous," which definitely does mean mind, but "change of heart" certainly conveys that meaning if in a less technical and more poetic sense.
Sometimes the preference for a what is supposedly contemporary language pours too much water in the wine of good translation and compromises the meaning. An example is a key phrase in Mk 4:34, which I'm quoting here in both the SV and KJV versions:
Yet he would not say anything except by way of parable, but would spell everything out to his own disciples. (Mk. 4:34 SV)
But without parable spake he not unto them: and when they were alone, he expounded all things to his disciples. (Mk. 4:34 KJV)
The original Greek, however "kat idian" connotes "privately," or "individually" and clearly that is the whole point of the statement, which is irretrievably lost in the smooth language of the SV. This is where it is clear that linguistics is not the only qualification to translating, understanding the subject matter is equally relevant, and that comes only through the experience of actually practicing what Jesus teaches.
There are other places where the effort to bring a fresh and modern translation occasionally goes overboard in my view. Greek 'basileia' does mean kingdom, and the choice to use instead 'God's Imperial Rule' is at least equally debatable, and I find that Pursah's choice of 'God's Divine Rule' would be far preferable and less ambiguous as a translation, particularly in view of how Jesus speaks of giving to the Emperor what is the Emperor's - clearly ' Imperial' would be primarily associated with the empires of the world. But again those are minor points in the overall scheme of things - readability and relative freedom of the homogenizing influence of Christian theology on most translations are important steps in the right direction.
, and the evident allusions to New Testament stories, and some of them would like to find a decent source. At the present time this edition, The Complete Gospels, is arguably the finest resource one could consult, in particular also because it simply presents all the different gospel traditions side by side, without overly emphasizing those that Christianity declared to be the canon of the NT. It is the most neutral and unbiased way to be introduced to this important cultural good. For people who have been exposed to a lot of this material in their upbringing, but who want to take a new look at it, this edition naturally is the best source.The Jesus Seminar is doing an incredible job in making many materials accessible. For my upcoming book Closing the Circle: Pursah's Gospel of Thomas and A Course In Miracles
, I have extensively consulted The Five Gospels, and I'm discussing that book's conclusions about the authenticity of Thomas sayings in an appendix to the book. While I'm not really using this edition for my book and this blog is really focused on materials for the book, I still want to post this note here, if nothing else because I mentioned in my discussion of The Five Gospels that there is a need for this kind of an edition. I may also remind the reader that Gary Renard has shared with us that Pursah favors The Gospels of Thomas, Mary, and Phillip.This book is brilliant, and very helpful. It provides modern, clean very non-denominational translations of the Gospel materials, and the only deference it shows to the canonical gospels of Christianity is by putting the synoptics first, though in chronological order (Mark first), not in orthodox theological order (Matthew first), and prefacing John with the putative "Signs" gospel that may have preceded it. Then follow the sayings gospels, specifically the reconstruction of Q as well as Thomas. Chronologically these actually are deemed to precede Mark at least as a general literary form, so this is the one compromise to the Christian orthodoxy that this book makes. The time line which the JS believes in is in sync with Pursah's position in Your Immortal Reality
, to wit, the kernel of Thomas may have been together by ca. 50 CE. (When we're in the presence of the Jesus Seminar it is politically correct to use 'CE' in lieu of 'AD.') The bulk of it would seem to have congealed ca 70-100 CE, but the JS pointedly observe that Thomas must have been 'together' before the synoptic Gospels, based on the internal evidence of the sequence of ideas as much as literary form between the sayings traditions and the synoptics. Helpfully the book also presents the Greek Thomas fragments from Papyrus Oxyrrhynchus, which are of some interest because of the variations they show.Reading between the lines, I suspect that one of the reasons they feel Thomas congealed as a document only at the same time as the narrative gospels would be because they feel they have to account for the gnostic influences, and gnosticism doesn't take off till later. We may look at that question differently with Pursah and the Course, and understand that some of what Jesus taught originally definitely was grist for the mill of gnosticism, and Jesus did not start out as an orthodox Christian but some of his words sounded 'gnostic' and so the material became tainted with gnosticism later. On the contrary Jesus' original teaching contained some elements, including that of an inner knowing, or 'gnosis' of truth, which naturally lent themselves to be expanded upon by later gnosticism (and often distorted in the process), while the emergent orthodoxy edited that tendency out of his teachings with Paul leading the charge.
Next follow the Infancy Gospels which are rather late myths, then Fragmentary Gospels, some of which are still highly interesting, followed by the Jewish-Christian Gospels and then Orphan Sayings and Stories. The whole makes for a very complete and balanced edition, and very worth perusing. It should also be remembered that many Jesus stories apocryphal and otherwise were not gone when the church forbade them or destroyed the manuscripts. One example is the beautiful legend of St. Christopher. Never mind the church abolished him from the register of saints, for being fictional, the influence his story has had on the western mind can hardly be underestimated, witness the many images of St. Christopher in medieval art. The same applies for much of the apocryphal material - the church may have successfully destroyed the books, but the traditions frequently lived on.
If there are shortcomings they are easily offset by the many merits of this publication. I note in the introduction that the emphasis still is on wanting to understand the history of Christianity, which is not interesting to me. What interests me is the tradition of the teachings of Jesus, and this collection can shed light on that. Some word choices in the translation are a definite improvement such as "change of heart" for the Greek "metanoia," which is much better than the God-awful "repentance" of traditional Christian (read Pauline) translations, and a beautiful parallel to the Course's "change of mind," which would arguably be more accurate since Greek "noia" comes from "nous," which definitely does mean mind, but "change of heart" certainly conveys that meaning if in a less technical and more poetic sense.
Sometimes the preference for a what is supposedly contemporary language pours too much water in the wine of good translation and compromises the meaning. An example is a key phrase in Mk 4:34, which I'm quoting here in both the SV and KJV versions:
Yet he would not say anything except by way of parable, but would spell everything out to his own disciples. (Mk. 4:34 SV)
But without parable spake he not unto them: and when they were alone, he expounded all things to his disciples. (Mk. 4:34 KJV)
The original Greek, however "kat idian" connotes "privately," or "individually" and clearly that is the whole point of the statement, which is irretrievably lost in the smooth language of the SV. This is where it is clear that linguistics is not the only qualification to translating, understanding the subject matter is equally relevant, and that comes only through the experience of actually practicing what Jesus teaches.
There are other places where the effort to bring a fresh and modern translation occasionally goes overboard in my view. Greek 'basileia' does mean kingdom, and the choice to use instead 'God's Imperial Rule' is at least equally debatable, and I find that Pursah's choice of 'God's Divine Rule' would be far preferable and less ambiguous as a translation, particularly in view of how Jesus speaks of giving to the Emperor what is the Emperor's - clearly ' Imperial' would be primarily associated with the empires of the world. But again those are minor points in the overall scheme of things - readability and relative freedom of the homogenizing influence of Christian theology on most translations are important steps in the right direction.
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