Saul, Paul, and how Jesus survived Christianity

How can you who are so holy suffer? All your past except its beauty is gone, and nothing is left but a blessing. I have saved all your kindnesses and every loving thought you ever had. I have purified them of the errors that hid their light, and kept them for you in their own perfect radiance. They are beyond destruction and beyond guilt. They came from the Holy Spirit within you, and we know what God creates is eternal. You can indeed depart in peace because I have loved you as I loved myself. You go with my blessing and for my blessing. Hold it and share it, that it may always be ours. I place the peace of God in your heart and in your hands, to hold and share. The heart is pure to hold it, and the hands are strong to give it. We cannot lose. My judgment is as strong as the wisdom of God, in Whose Heart and Hands we have our being. His quiet children are His blessed Sons. The Thoughts of God are with you. (ACIM:T-5.IV.8)

In Closing the Circle: Pursah's Gospel of Thomas and A Course in Miracles, I paid quite a bit of attention to the issue of the transition that takes place in the traditions about Jesus, between the teachings of Jesus, of which the Thomas gospel seems to be the most authentic record, and Chrisitianity, named after him, but never 'founded' by him in any meaningful sense of the word, but merely ascribed to him by others and given his name, after his death. Because of the profound intertwining of the Jesus tradition with the orthodoxy of Chrisitianity as it solidified in the next 300 years, for a long time it was the "canonical" books of the New Testament that appeared authoritative.
Only with the re-discovery of the Thomas Gospel, once one understands the timeline of how and why it emerged before the gospels of the New Testament collection, does it become insightful where the break occurs - with the introduction of the theological foundations of Christianity, including the exceptionalism about Jesus as God's only son, to the exclusion of the rest of the sonship as 'adopted sons,' the interpretation of the crucifixion, resurrection (bodily, as Paul assures us), the second coming (the puzzling idea of his returning to the world he claimed to have overcome), the Eucharist etc. All of these concepts were features of Pauline Christianity, and there were many other schools of would-be Christian thought which did not have them, or had entirely different notions. Among other things there were many vocal debates about the idea that the moment of the resurrection was really the moment of the Heavens opening up in the story of the baptism in the River Jordan, under John the Baptist. That particular story would be closer to what is reflected in the Course today. The fact is Pauline Christianity won, because it rendered itself palatable to Caesar, and as a result eventually what we now regard as Roman Catholicism. The fact that it was most successful in stamping out other views, and gained the upper hand politically is no recommendation.

After those original debates died down, Christianity went through a consolidation phase, and then a splintering again. With Vatican II the most obvious attempts at mind control were starting to be relinquished, allowing such an oxymoron as Catholic Bible Scholars, or in general Catholic Bible Studies to exist, just when the first serious translations of the Thomas Gospel began to gain currency, while at another place on the planet the dictation of A Course in Miracles got under way.
Since the time of the enlightenment, thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson in the US had become suspicious of the Pauline material, and smelled a rat. Jefferson likened his efforts to cull Jesus' teachings out of the Biblical materials to salvaging 'pearls' from a pile of 'manure.' Paul he called a 'dupe' and a 'fraud.' This was all very perceptive, but name calling does not solve anything. Jefferson's positive contribution, which was only published posthumously as the 'Jefferson Bible' -- he had called it The Life and Morals of Jezus of Nazareth -- however is a powerful turning point and came very close to anticipating the re-discovery of the Thomas Gospel almost 125 years later.

The interesting thing about A Course in Miracles no doubt is that in it Jesus quotes some of Paul's inspired writing on numerous occasions, while at the same time forcefully correcting the fundamental constructs of the Christian theology of which Paul was the principal architect. In other words, the Course shows also in that regard, what forgiveness means -- the mistakes and the messes are cleaned up and corrected, and only the inspired, 'loving' thoughts are remembered. To that extent then it is never useful to pursue this type of critical scholarship of the tradition, unless it also helps us to see how we all make the mistakes Paul made, and forgive him and ourselves in the same breath. Here, the text of the Course is our guide, as the opening quote shows.

Stevan Davies on Thomas Sayings in Mark, ctd. 0

Some time ago I discussed an article of Prof. Stevan Davies here, which provided some unique insight into the editorial process which turned Jesus into a Christian. Presently, I want to discuss Stevan Davies' second article in some detail. I note that, while I tend to favor using the name Jesus at the moment, I do understand and appreciate why Gary Renard was guided by his teachers to speak of J, because so many people have problematic associations with the name Jesus, and thus might pass up the teachings of A Course in Miracles for that reason. I myself referred to what I now call "Jesus" as "God's Help" which would be the etymological meaning of his name in Hebrew. For me the most helpful operating definition of Jesus is given by Kenneth Wapnick, who is the premier teacher of A Course in Miracles: "Jesus is a what, who looks like a who, because you think you're a who," in other words, in truth we are spirit, but as long as we identify with the dreamroles of who we are, as characters in this stage play (All the world's a stage), spirit may demonstrate its presence to us in the figure which we in the West call Jesus. That definition gives very practical expression to the most abstract understanding we seem capable of and still use words--and the essence of Jesus's teaching of course is that it's all in the experience, since evidently his kingdom is of spirit (that is the "what"), and not of this world, and therefore clearly beyond words, as the words and concepts are very much of this world, or, as the Course puts it, "symbols of symbols, and therefore twice removed from reality," i.e. the word is the symbol for the concept, which itself is a symbol for the reality which it refers to. I'll quote the relevant passage here in full:

Strictly speaking, words play no part at all in healing. The motivating factor is prayer, or asking. What you ask for you receive. But this refers to the prayer of the heart, not to the words you use in praying. Sometimes the words and the prayer are contradictory; sometimes they agree. It does not matter. God does not understand words, for they were made by separated minds to keep them in the illusion of separation. Words can be helpful, particularly for the beginner, in helping concentration and facilitating the exclusion, or at least the control, of extraneous thoughts. Let us not forget, however, that words are but symbols of symbols. They are thus twice removed from reality. (ACIM:M21.1)

In short, the process we witness with Jesus is that he speaks to us of a non-dualistic reality, where all is one, but because of our perception of a world in which we live, which is very much a world of duality (light/dark, black/white, war/peace, male/female, etc.), he can ONLY speak to us in parables, though we constantly persist in our bad habit of taking him literally, and thus we see from time to time in the literature how Jesus clarifies this point over and over again, as in Mark, here:

Mark 8:15-18 (New International Version)

¹⁵"Be careful," Jesus warned them. "Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod."
 ¹⁶They discussed this with one another and said, "It is because we have no bread."
 ¹⁷Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked them: "Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? ¹⁸Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? And don't you remember?

In short, we constantly do not get it that everything, but everything he says or does, comes to us in parables, and that he is leading us beyond our mortal intellect which continues to frame what he says in the context of our dualistic world, where we think we live, and we won't share in his (non-dualistic) experience of the Kingdom, unless we let go of our judgment, which otherwise prevents our ability to follow him, in terms of living what he demonstrates. The ego always wants to talk about what it sees and hears, which is a stalling technique. For that reason it becomes soon very clear in the context of learning A Course in Miracles, that all questions are of the ego, and in fact always express only one thing, namely the ego's secret mission to trip Jesus up, and to prove that he is wrong and we are right.
In terms of the historical Gospel tradition then, the process is that first we have a record of some of his sayings in no particular order, as in the Q and the Thomas traditions, and then we get the narrative Gospels, in which a process begins of the writers framing the stories according to their own best understanding, which may or may not have anything to do with what Jesus actually taught. Most importantly, by thirty years after his death, the figure of Paul comes on the scene who begins to reframe Jesus, and becomes really the originator of one particular tradition which just happens to become dominant, and evolve into what we today think is Christianity, which takes final form through such things as the Nicean Creed which dates to 325 CE, and the definition of the Canonical books of the New Testament by bishop Athanasius in 367CE, which was the first time they were defined in the order we now know. The tendency then which we all have with Jesus, and which is the basis of all distortions of his writing, is that we constantly try to frame his teachings in terms of this world, instead of listening to him, and let him teach us to understand it in the way he intended them. The end result is then a tradition about him, and explanation of him (theology), which end up taking the place of his very direct and simple teachings. The very same process we are watching currently unfold around A Course in Miracles which has given rise to an entire industry of would-be teachers and writers about the Course, who all too often add their own stuff to it, and distort what the Course clearly says.
The issues Prof. Stevan Davies discuss are so interesting, because they document such a process as it once took place with Jesus, and in the formative process from which Christianity resulted. Thus once again, his teachings are about healing our relationship with God and therefore with our Self, and they are geared to experience, not theology, or, as he puts it in the Course (and I'm quoting the whole paragraph, as it is relevant to this article):

The ego will demand many answers that this course does not give. It does not recognize as questions the mere form of a question to which an answer is impossible. The ego may ask, "How did the impossible occur?", "To what did the impossible happen?", and may ask this in many forms. Yet there is no answer; only an experience. Seek only this, and do not let theology delay you. (ACIM:C-in-4)

Accordingly also, the way Jesus' teaching comes across in the Course, it comes down in the end to a willingness ("the little willingness") to let ourselves be guided by spirit instead of our ego, and thus to let "Jesus" show us the way home. That is certainly a nice thought to contemplate in this Easter time.