Stevan Davies on Thomas Sayings in Mark, Part II, Unit 2

Stevan Davies' 2nd article on the transition from Thomas to Mark focuses on the section Mark 3:20-35, and in it he sees Logia 35, 44, and common themes with 61, 64,  and 99, and then some usage that is present in 57, 76, 96. 97, 98, 113.

To make it easy, I'm quoting the Markan passage here from the NIV:

Mark 3:20-35 (New International Version)

Jesus and Beelzebub

 ²⁰Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. ²¹When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, "He is out of his mind."

 ²²And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, "He is possessed by Beelzebub^[a]! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons."

 ²³So Jesus called them and spoke to them in parables: "How can Satan drive out Satan? ²⁴If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. ²⁵If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. ²⁶And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. ²⁷In fact, no one can enter a strong man's house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can rob his house. ²⁸I tell you the truth, all the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven them. ²⁹But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin."
 ³⁰He said this because they were saying, "He has an evil spirit."

Jesus' Mother and Brothers

 ³¹Then Jesus' mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. ³²A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, "Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you."  ³³"Who are my mother and my brothers?" he asked.
 ³⁴Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! ³⁵Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother."

Funnily enough I remember one thing about this passage in relation to Christianity, or particularly Roman Catholicism. My ex-wife got upset with me one day when I made reference to Jesus's siblings, convinced that I was making it up. I showed her this passage and other similar passages. Later we found out that someone wrote a whole book about facts from the Bible that were generally suppressed in Catholic teachings. All of which was possible of course particularly pre Vatican II, because studying the Bible generally was not "done" in that environment. A lot has changed since then, and the RC crowd has now joined the Protestants in the search for the "historical" Jesus, which the Protestants originally, in the 19th century conceived as their best defense against the catholics playing footloose and fancy free with the "facts" of the Bible.
Davies traces the opening passages (through 3:26) of the above section to the Q tradition, and sees essentially Thomas quotes after that, starting with 3:27, Logion 35 (skipped in the Pursah version); 3:28-29, Logion 44 (skipped in the Pursah version); 3:31-35, Logion 99 (Present in the Pursah version). In other words, right away we have a strong hint here that some of the sources may be dubious from Pursah's standpoint, as she skips the first quotes on which this is based. We may also notice however that here way of expressing her views on the matter is rather mild, and she never does say that none of the other sayings are even partially authentic, but in essence she's saying there are too many corruptions with them, but these 70/71 in the collection she feels she can vouch for, based on her recollection.
While we once again see how the narrative process is at work using various known elements to weave its story, this passage actually does make sense if you read it the right way. Speaking strictly from the standpoint of a Course student, the Markan passage may make sense on many levels. The first is the accusation of Jesus being possessed by the devil, which if you think about it, really finds its corollary in the notion in the Course that to the ego the guiltless are guilty, although that relates more specifically to the scene in front of Pontius Pilate, but I'll quote it here in full:

Much of the ego's strange behavior is directly attributable to its definition of guilt. To the ego, the guiltless are guilty. Those who do not attack are its "enemies" because, by not valuing its interpretation of salvation, they are in an excellent position to let it go. They have approached the darkest and deepest cornerstone in the ego's foundation, and while the ego can withstand your raising all else to question, it guards this one secret with its life, for its existence depends on keeping this secret. So it is this secret that we must look upon, for the ego cannot protect you against truth, and in its presence the ego is dispelled. (ACIM:T-13.II.4)

The whole point here is that from the Course's point of view Satan or Beelzebub are understandable projections, personifications of the ego thought itself, and it's most basic form of defense IS projection, accusing the other of what it itself does. Thus also the ego IS the house divided against itself, for at the most abstract level it is the thought that the separation of God (splitting off from God, respectively "dividing" itself from God) is possible, which then gives rise to the phenomenon of the split mind, which not only splits itself off from God, but completely identifies itself with the split off part to the point of forgetting its immortal self as the Son of God completely, except for the quiet presence of the Holy Spirit, which is always still present in part of our mind, regardless of how much we try to repress and ignore it. And of course the ego's house will not stand, for the ego thought and all that it makes up subsequently by definition live on borrowed time, they are not the creations of love of our eternal, immortal Self, they are the substitute relaties which are manifested, projected from the split mind, and nothing is permanent about them.
We should not have to wonder why Pursah would have rejected Logia 35 and 44 from her collection, as 35 is murky to say the least, and 44 is the diametrical opposite of what Jesus taught, and so certainly does not make any sense being in the collection. This is one of the hallmarks of Christianity, that it did incorporate a lot of corruptions, because it is completely reflective of the taught system of the wrong mind, and so it continues the mistakes of the Old Testament tradition, in which God is alternately loving and hateful. Jesus on the other hand represents oneness, and a thoughtsystem that is entirely consistent, because it reflects nothing else but oneness.
The final statement, reflecting Logion 99, makes complete sense, and acts here as the punch line. In Course terms, what Jesus is advocating here is the point that special relationships are of the ego, be they family/heredity, or any other, and that the Holy Relationship as the Course calls it is the way in which we are joined with our brothers, and the only way in which we can join with our brothers is in the mind, and never with the body. And of course, where two or three are together in my name, there I am in their midst (again: in the mind), or as the Course puts it:

You who are now the bringer of salvation have the function of bringing light to darkness. The darkness in you has been brought to light. Carry it back to darkness, from the holy instant to which you brought it. We are made whole in our desire to make whole. Let not time worry you, for all the fear that you and your brother experience is really past. Time has been readjusted to help us do, together, what your separate pasts would hinder. You have gone past fear, for no two minds can join in the desire for love without love's joining them.  (ACIM:T-18.III.7)

Mary Magdalene Revisited

For some reason Mary Magdalene has been on my mind, so I figured it's time to write about her for Valentine's day. Every since the re-discovery of numerous materials that were left out of the New Testament, there has been growing attention to Mary Magdalene, but even the little that was in the New Testament books was intriguing. The notion that she was the first to understand the resurrection, and thus became the one to bring the news to the other apostles, making her the Apostle to the Apostles, is intriguing, and makes it all the more surprising that she should have exited stage left. In the various other books, perhaps the most interesting description of her relationship with Jesus comes from the Gospel of Philip, as follows:

There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary, his mother, and her sister, and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion. His sister and his mother and his companion were each a Mary.
And the companion of the [Savior is] Mary Magdalene. [But Christ] loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often[]. The rest of the disciples [were offended by it and expressed disapproval.] They said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her?"

There are other cute references to the apostles being bothered by the closeness of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and many have observed the logic that not only would it have been strange if Jesus wasn't married, but also the role which Mary Magdalene played at the time of the crucifixion, including going to the grave to anoint the body would be thoroughly consistent with the role of a wife. There is nothing explicit in the literature that definitively identifies her as Jesus' wife, but it simply makes sense. It is important to note however that not only was she physically close with him, but that there is extensive evidence that the Apostle to the Apostles was indeed a teacher in her own right and in all probability understood what Jesus stood for better than anybody. So much the more amazing that she should fade away in the literature.

At least it is now clear enough that the story of her as a penitent prostitute was a fabrication probably going back to Pope Gregory I, in 591, however that particular story fits in with the efforts of the church to trivialize her, and to shore up the importance of the "official" apostles, centered really on Peter and the theological foundations provided by Paul. The relative neglect of her, and later the attempt to deliberately trivialize her, do make sense if you take into account the fact that in Paul's theological framing of who Jesus was, he is made completely different from us. In that context having Jesus be married would be very inconvenient. Even more so towards the Middle Ages, when the emphasis on celibacy grew in importance and was ultimately made church law, at least in the Roman Catholic church, it becomes all the more important to think that Jesus was above all that, and was exceptional in that regard as well.

From the standpoint of A Course in Miracles it all makes more sense, for the fundamental underlying notion of the Course is that our spiritual growth happens only in relationships, and not by trying to abandon the world in that sense. The very simple logic of the Course is that the ego's notion of separation seeks to reassert itself by relationships to others, starting with parents and siblings, and then evolving to love interests. These relationships make us special (think Valentine's day), and besides that seem to give us the sense of completion which we gave up in embracing the separation, which is the very foundation of our individuality. The Course is based on the notion that the separation can only be healed in relationships, through outgrowing the specialness, and embracing again the Holy Relationship--to thine own Self be true--and therein to transcend our specialness claims on another and learn to embrace inclusive love as the Course means it, which can flow through us and extend into the world through our relationships, as we learn forgiveness ourselves. In this context, when we invite the Holy Spirit into our lives, in lieu of chasing the ego's goals, our partners become our teachers, and our relationships become the cradle for the rebirth of the Holy Relationship, which then becomes the central reality in the way we relate to everything in the world. This way the relationships which are started by the ego to reassert itself, form the perfect vehicle in the hands of the Holy Spirit, to relearn the meaning of universal Love through those very relationships.

Logion 22 in Mark

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

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

When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and want you make male and female into a single one, so the male will not be male and the female will not be female... then you will enter the Kingdom.

In more modern wording we could say: if we heal our dualistic perception, we awaken from the dream, awaken to the reality of who we really are in truth, namely spirit.

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

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

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

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

Out of the Course Ghetto

There is a temptation among students of A Course In Miracles to seek to congregate with like minded people, and then they naively assume that this means other students of A Course In Miracles. Discovering the fallacy of that notion sometimes leads to quite a bit of consternation. The fundamental conundrum is the same as when Christianity went wrong in proselytizing, and substituting joining with Jesus - in spirit - through following him in his example of living truth, and instead of joining with him, they went about gathering people, and developing the church, which leads to another experience of separation in a different form. The whole thing replays itself when people get hung up about the Course community, as if it actually means something, or worse, they want to select a therapist based on their presumed studies of the Course, at which point I usually turn it into a joke and ask them what they're going to do for a dentist, a plumber, a cobbler, or a car mechanic?

A particularly ugly variant is when in a couple, one of the partners starts working with the Course, and becomes convinced that they should find a partner who is more interested in their spiritual endeavors, and with whom they could do the Course, which is kind of an extreme form of the misunderstanding what the Course is all about, which should really start and end with the idea that it is only about what's going on in my mind, my own spiritual hygiene. It in no way involves doing anything with anybody else on the external level; it is about forgiveness, and the observation of whether someone is doing the Course or not is merely another way of seeing differences, which in turn is just another way of not seeing that the sonship is one, and the ego has us by the short ones all over again. On a practical level, discussing the practice of the Course is usually easier and more productive simply with other fellow travelers on this path or any other path, and not particularly with people we're closely involved with. We will most likely encounter some others along the way, whose experience with the Course may be similar to our own, but since the Course is a lifelong process, and we go through many growth phases with it, the fact that someone else is studying the Course in their own estimation really means nothing. What makes a Course student? Someone who is running around with a certain blue book with gold lettering? Or someone who practices what it says, which you can't tell from the outside?

So the notion of a "Course community" is largely fallacious, because the Course is really a self study program in which the therapist/teacher is Jesus, as a presence within, who is present to all of us whenever we want to. The only real communication lies in the learning from him, by extending forgiveness, and realizing that communication only happens by getting our ego out of the way, and making room for the Holy Spirit. In the Thomas Gospel, Jesus expresses this in Logion 108 as follows: Whoever drinks from my mouth shall become like me. I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to that person. Thus is the only true joining found in entering what the Course calls the Holy Relationship, through which we can experience our oneness with all of the sonship. In Gary Renard's books this is seen as the "J Underground," symbolic of a joining in realizing that there is indeed another way, and that there is a way out of the madness of the world. That inner joining with our brothers through forgiveness is the measure of meaningful progress in the Course, and has nothing to do with anybody studying the Course or not in form. The only meaningful definition, given in the Course, is that anyone who has completed the workbook, is a teacher of God.

Letting go of the superficial notion of a community, as congregating with people, with all its tendencies to ghettoization, and focusing on the inner joining through forgiveness instead, is the first step on this path. On a practical level I've come across this phenomenon in the marketing of my own book--no it's not a Course book, at best it's a book about Jesus, which takes inspiration from A Course In Miracles, from Gary Renard, from the Thomas Gospel, etc. And again I'm encountering the problem in Holland, with the preparations for a new introduction of Gary's books into Dutch, starting with a new translation of The Disappearance of the Universe. No, it's not a Course book; to say so would limit its market. I have met too many people who have found the Course through Gary's work, and between the intriguing title, and the even more intriguing subtitle of "Straight Talk about Illusions, Past Lives, Religion, Sex, Politics, and the Miracles of Forgiveness," this has gotten many people interested in Gary's story. The text on the back also does not mention the Course, except indirectly, although some of the endorsements do. Most importantly the autobiographical dimension is the story of the book, and Gary himself does not know of the Course at the outset of the book, which is the whole point, so by positioning the book as a Course book, one would exclude the larger part of its potential market, as experience has shown. And no, do not read anything into the expression "Straight Talk," Gary voted for Obama.