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.

The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity

It seems this book is sold out in the moment, but one of the things I'm trying to do on this site is to offer mini reviews of the books I've consulted in writing Closing the Circle. The most recent printing of this one was at Barnes & Noble, in their reprint series.

I think this is a very important book, because it provides a unique and different look at an old problem. There are a lot of ways to approach the evident differences between the teachings of Yeshua, and the words that the Pauline world of the New Testament puts in Jesus's mouth, all the while framing the stories in a way that underscores Christian theology. Hyam Jaccoby, is a Talmudic scholar, and he approaches it from that angle, and his investigation is pretty convincing. If there is a weakness it is that Jesus is left as a Jewish rabbi, really as the sort of Yeshua that his brother James and the Jerusalem community would have wished he were. He Jewish rabbi, with some unique ideas perhaps, but nevertheless a Jewish rabbi. That was their view. While Paul's view was the one to mythologize Jesus in ways that laid the groundwork for the Christian teachings about him.

Hyam Jaccoby takes Paul to task by pointing out that ideas like Jesus's divinity and the meaning of the Eucharist, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Second Coming all go back to Paul and not to Jesus. In short everything that makes Christianity what it is, originates with Paul, not Jesus. The book is truly very informative, the more so while it does this through analyzing Paul's writing and influence. But the conclusion lines up perfectly with what we now know about the Yeshua of the Thomas gospel, who also dates from before he was made to sound like a Christian.

With the Thomas gospel in hand it seems to me we would differ with Maccoby, in that Jesus did transcend the Jewish mold as well. In short I agree with Maccoby that he was not the proto-Christian Paul makes him out to be, but that does not automatically make him out to be the Jewish rabbi which Maccoby makes out of him, again, really following the mold of how the Jerusalem community under James looked at him.
So this is complimentary reading for someone who is so inclined. I found it tremendously engaging reading, and intuitively quite convincing.

The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity

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.

Anything Rather Than The Love Of God

They said to him, "Tell us who you are so that we may believe in you."

He said to them, "You examine the face of Heaven and earth, but you have not come to know the one who is in your presence, and you do not know how to examine the present moment."
(PGoTh, Logion 91)

In Lesson 196 we find the following: The thing you dread the most is your salvation. (ACIM:W-196.9:4) The central theme here is that Jesus teaches us in this saying as well as throughout the Course that our problem is that we are slamming the door in his face, or to put it more formally, we keep choosing the separation now.

To paraphrase it in a different way, he is present to us, always, but we prevent ourselves from seeing him while we keep seeking in the world outside, and in the past, for the explanation of who he is, instead of accepting his presence. Thus the ego's motto in slightly different words is: "Anything rather than the Love of God." The Course may not use quite those words anywhere, but the theme plays throughout, as in here:

It is reasonable to ask how the mind could ever have made the ego. In fact, it is the best question you could ask. There is, however, no point in giving an answer in terms of the past because the past does not matter, and history would not exist if the same errors were not being repeated in the present. (ACIM:T-4.II.1:1-3)

And again this is also the essence of what has been misinterpreted in Christianity as the Eucharist--he is sharing his mind with us, and is present to us whenever we remember him, that is the power of the resurrection. The power of the Course as a path lies in the fact that all of this points towards our responsibility for a behavior in the mind which we can stop. Jesus is outside the door, and it is up to us to stop slamming the door in his face, as he will be glad to come into our mind at our invitation. The ego's problem is we keep looking for him as a body, i.e. outside, and that sets us up for defeat, which played itself out in early Christian history as the constant adjustments about the prediction of the Second Coming, which then became enshrined in various apocalyptic theologies over time. Meanwhile, we safely keep him outside the door, by denying his reality, and through our addiction to conflict we keep him far away from us.

Thus, we indeed do not know how to examine the present, for we are sound asleep in the ego's dreams, unable to be awake to his presence--think also of the apostles asleep in the garden. And here is where the Course is so practical and helpful, for it helps us to learn to see the silliness of our resistance, and how we're causing our own pain. And the practice of forgiveness helps us to let go of the defenses that are designed to keep us in misery.