The Book of Andrew and docetism 21st century style.

An interesting new addition to the modern Jesus literature, connected to A Course in Miracles, has arrived on the scene. The full title is The Book of Andrew: A Past-Life Memoir, by Charles Cale Lehman, edited for print by Bruce Gregory. The interesting details include that Charles Lehman was at one time the partner of Bill Thetford, who with Helen Schucman was responsible for the recording of the Course. Later Bill Thetford and he remained life-long friends. As a child Charles sometimes said his name was Andrew, and when Ken Wapnick met him in the seventies, he had a visionary experience--uncommon for him--of seeing the name "Andrew" on his forehead. Bruce Gregory is a regression therapist, who was recommended to Lehman by Bill Thetford, and who was instrumental in guiding the regressions that ultimately led to the material for this book.

The book is a joy to read, and it is very consistent in content with A Course in Miracles, and in as much as it pertains to Lehman's past life memories of his lifetime as Andrew, a disciple of Jesus, at the same time it reminds me of the docetic paradox in writings such as the Acts of John, which have traditionally befuddled the Christian Church because it thought Jesus was the character in Palestine whose story was reported by Peter and Paul, to the notable exclusion of many of the other apostles. There are interesting discrepancies in the form of the story, which make it clear once again that individual people experience Jesus differently.

Jesus is a what that looks like a who, as long as you think you're a who
That is one of my favorite sayings of Ken Wapnick. It makes the point that we experience Jesus as a person, and we tend to think of him as someone we would recognize. Helen had a dream at one point in which Jesus figured, and she later asked Jesus how come he looked like Bill, and Jesus answered her: "Who else would I look like?" Clearly, Helen's mind was learning to see the face of Christ in all her brothers. Another similar experience was her subway experience. In the acts of John we have the accounts of different apostles all comparing notes and realizing they experience Jesus (post resurrection) in totally different ways. And now, in the form of the Book of Andrew, we have a modern memoir, a past-life recollection of Jesus, and some of the other apostles, which clearly differs from another account that still stands within the Course tradition, namely Gary Renard's Disappearance of the Universe trilogy. Gary's Judas is a drunk, and a very different character from what is described in the Book of Andrew, although Jesus reaffirms in both that Judas is a brother and a Son of God, and thus Jesus stays remarkably true to his Course, as Gary might quip. Mary Magdalen is not in evidence in the account in the Book of Andrew, and the apostle John shows up in a more traditional role as the favorite disciple. In other areas the two books confirm each other. In short, Charles Lehman and Gary Renard differ on the details, though both accounts are consistent in content with the teachings of Jesus as we learn them in the Course.

An interesting twist in the Book of Andrew is that Jesus tells Andrew he would have to write things down later, because Peter and Paul would distort his teachings, which is of course exactly what happened. It is called Christianity. Much like the Buddha was a Hindu, Jesus was a Jew, and neither one ever intended to instigate yet another religion, because they very much recognized that the truth is one. But for the ego, that's too simple, and it always wants to see truth as exclusive not inclusive. Yet Jesus, Buddha, and Krishna were all evidently teachers of a non-dualistic reality that transcends all worldly specifics, for the simple reason that only truth is true and everything else is of necessity a lie, so that any teachings that would proceed from separation and differences would necessarily be untrue. The problem always is that we have to grow up to embrace truth, we have to climb the mountain to get to the level of Jesus, Buddha or Krishna, instead of dragging them into this world to fix our self-created problems for us. If they were to do so, they would merely attest to the reality of problems designed to prove the ego right and them wrong. But Jesus taught his disciples to leave their familiar patterns behind and follow him where he was going.

Familiarity and remembrance
Reading a book like The Book of Andrew, or Gary Renard's Disappearance of the Universe trilogy is not about them learning to hear the voice of Jesus, but about us doing so. The only reason we recognize the voice of Jesus, when we do, without any hesitation is because it is totally authentic, namely because it is the voice of who and what we really are in truth. The more we recognize that, the easier we will let go of our ego, because that scratchy voice is completely false, fake, and not at all who we are. As long as we are identified with our ego, we will feel like we are here, and yet at the same time we will feel shut out, alone and like a stranger, the authenticity of the voice of our inner teacher draws us towards the truth and the love which is what we really are in truth, and in realizing that the world will lose all grip on us and fade away, even while we may still appear to be here for a while.

Historical Opinions as a Key to Thomas Translations

Below I would point out some of the key historical positions, and what they imply as to the views on Thomas of various commentators.

1) The position we embrace here, that Thomas came first, is of roughly the same age as Q, the tradition which Gary Renard refers to as The Words of the Master, and therefore it was a source for the other writers. John does not quote him directly, although he seems to go to some lenghts to discredit and refute him, which would likewise argue for pre-existence. This position is in my view the most common-sense view to take today, and it was mine already for some time, long before Pursah explained the story to Gary in Your Immortal Reality. I have covered this position in the first post on this blog, so I merely mention it here for the sake of completeness. The main points for this position are that the Thomas Gospel as a form predates the narrative gospels, the internal evidence that shows an absence of all the theological notions of later Christianity, eucharist, crucifixion, etc., and the likelihood that many Thomas sayings are quoted by later evangelists, as they do appear to represent early forms of many sayings. This position simply leaves it open that Gnostic sects could later have adopted Thomas, explaining the find at Nag Hammadi, without necessarily making Thomas a Gnostic document per se. Stevan Davies and the Jesus Seminar are mostly in this camp. There is a budding awareness in this group that Thomas shows us a very different Jesus from the notions which crystallize as "Chrstianity" later on, and very likely a more original one. This logic leads to a separation between the teachings of Jesus and Christianity, as being perhaps mostly unrelated, by dint of the fact that Paul and Peter c.s. in effect put their interpretations in Jesus' mouth.

2a) The good, or benign, or perhaps merely interesting Gnostic position. Here the Gnostic associations in Thomas are reinforced but seen as a positive. Deriving among other things from the fact that the Nag Hammadi library has a gnostic character, but also from the fact that self-knowledge and introspection are  inherent to the Thomas material, and thus of a gnostic character in the wider sense. This position tends to keep open a later dating of the book since the Gnostic development within Christianity does not happen in full force until the 2nd century AD. Jean-Yves Leloup is in this camp, so was Gilles Quispel, and Elaine Pagels is as well. There is an overall tendency among this group to pull Thomas into the history of Christianity. One can not very well argue that the Thomas Gospel was not together by 140 AD (the oldest Greek fragments), but anything more recent than c.a. 60 is safe, for it preserves a picture of the Jesus of Thomas in a sort of proto-Christian landscape, because with any timing later than 60 AD, the break represented by Paul is obfuscated. Some of these authors get fascinated by Thomas and other books of Nag Hammadi, and there is a certain polite curiosity about other modes of experiencing Jesus, but the tendency remains for the Christian mold not to be seriously questioned.

2b) The Bad Gnostic position. This position is argued mainly by writers who are beholden to the Christian tradition and the churches, and in order to save its relevance, they dismiss Thomas as a later book, of the late 1st or even the 2nd century, which was the date of the Oxyrrhynchus papyri (ca. 140 AD), and by taking this position Paul's position as the de facto founder of Christianity is protected because the issue of his evident corruption of Jesus' teachings never arises. This is the position of e.g. Bart D. Ehrman, and to such writers Thomas is at best an interesting curiosity, at worst a blasphemy or a fraud, really not unlike the line of bishop Irenaeus' writings against the heretics, though often with a more sophisticated and seemingly objective modern historical appearance.

There may be some further sub-categorizations here, but the above should be helpful in determining the slant of a translation. Other issues which unfortunately taint translations are attempts to make the book sound more "modern," and God-forbid, but yes, even a tendency political correctness exerts a corrupting influence on the faithfulness of some translations.