Empty Space

...as unsubstantial as the empty place between the ripples that a ship has made in passing by. And covered just as fast, as water rushes in to close the gap, and as the waves in joining cover it. Where is the gap between the waves when they have joined, and covered up the space which seemed to keep them separate for a little while? (ACIM:T-28.III.5:2-4)

One of the reasons for picking the title Closing the Circle for my book is contained in the above paragraph. For once you really tune in to the consistency of the Jesus of the Thomas gospel and the Jesus of  ACIM, the whole magnificent theology in between evaporates into nothing, for Jesus said the same thing before and after, as if nothing ever happened. To look at it from this point of view, you begin to realize how and why the ego must always push Jesus, Yeshua, J, out of the way, and yet it can never succeed, for in the end only truth is true, and all else is a lie. As I have argued elsewhere, the emergence of Christianity as a solid, coherent religion, was a victory for the Church, and a brainchild of Paul, but it is the choice for the murder of Jesus, and perpetuates the psychological mechanisms for keeping him out of the way, i.e. the expectation of the Second Coming as some sort of future event in the time/space framework is an expectation, which detours the mind around the presence of Jesus in the now, keeps us blind to him, and now dependent on the emerging Church as our only hope to ever bring him back.

In the meantime, never mind how badly distorted Jesus's teachings were in the course of Christianity, undoubtedly some always found their way to him. For even with only the Biblical account to go by, we are free to lift Jesus out from the editorials around his words, as in fact Thomas Jefferson attempted quite amazingly. But many saints and mystics, many of whom were never known, have found the way.

The image that emerges then is of how the teachings of Jesus in the form he taught in Palestine 2000 years ago, began to fade into the background almost immediately, with the Thomas gospel and perhaps the Q tradition as the purest traditions, which are fading into the background almost immediately, and the narrative gospels taking their place. The ego always uses cooptation as one of it's most powerful strategies, which is also referenced in the Course as follows:

The ego speaks in judgment, and the Holy Spirit reverses its decision, much as a higher court has the power to reverse a lower court's decisions in this world. The ego's decisions are always wrong, because they are based on the error they were made to uphold. Nothing the ego perceives is interpreted correctly. Not only does the ego cite Scripture for its purpose, but it even interprets Scripture as a witness for itself. The Bible is a fearful thing in the ego's judgment. Perceiving it as frightening, it interprets it fearfully. Being afraid, you do not appeal to the Higher Court because you believe its judgment would also be against you. (ACIM:T-5.VI.4)

Ultimately it is because of this development  that the Thomas gospel, and the things Jesus says there, to not sound like Christianity at all. This is what came as such a shock when they were first rediscovered. Not only that it has taken fifty years since that discovery before we are beginning to notice what he really might be talking about, and that it is not the Pauline theology that was invented twenty years after his death and on. This meeting really is the central point of Gary Renard's work. The experiences he had, break through the veil of obfuscations of these teachings, and free us up to hear them anew with their original freshness. Therefore that particular circle began to be closed with the re-discovery of the Thomas gospel, and is now emerging into public consciousness, among other things because of Gary's work describing his own experiences in the vernacular.

Meanwhile the dynamic of the ego as being the choice for the murder of Christ is powerfully spoken of in the Course, and makes complete psychological sense, but there is a curious book I want to mention here, by Wilhelm Reich, titled The Murder of Christ, which explains the whole process in a very curious way. Reich was the disciple who Freud chose over Jung in the end, as a defense against Jung's interest in spirituality. Freud literally said to Reich, that they must protect the world against the "rising tide of occultism," which was exactly where Jung's interest led him, and which upset Freud no end. To Reich, like to Freud the body was the foundation of our reality in this world. Reich was faithful to Freud to the extent that for him all issues were centered in the body, and seen most clearly in our difficulties with healthy sexuality. But you can read that as a parable, that just happens to be Reich's way of expressing the issues, once you see through that, he identifies perfectly how and why, as long as we deny who we are in truth, we are absolutely committed to the continuing murder of Christ. To see through the whole thing, all you have to do is to grasp that the point is not re-becoming sexually liberated bodies, which was Reich's way of understanding our true creativity, but to re-become spirit, which really is the only place of our creative identity, when we re-identify with what we truly are as the Son of God. All the power in Heaven and earth was indeed given to us, for we have the option to choose against the ego.

On the stage of history the re-discovery of the Thomas gospel, and the ensuing renewed focus on the deeper meaning of Jesus's teachings, is certainly one way of closing the gap over 2,000 years of obfuscation of his teachings, which in a way was only empty space, once you see how silly it really was.

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.

I know, I was there!

That was the phrase Gen. George S. Patton frequently wrote in the margins of his books, when he had a comment about a historical battle, of which he had particularly vivid past-life recall. (see Carlo d'Este, Patton, a Genius for War)  Increasingly it feels to me as if the Thomas gospel may be evocative of those kinds of memories for lots of people. Somehow these little sayings, particularly in the form of the compact kernel Pursah has given us through Gary Renard's work, have an effect that reminds me of the passage "The Forgotten Song," in the Course.

Listen,–perhaps you catch a hint of an ancient state not quite forgotten; dim, perhaps, and yet not altogether unfamiliar, like a song whose name is long forgotten, and the circumstances in which you heard completely unremembered. Not the whole song has stayed with you, but just a little wisp of melody, attached not to a person or a place or anything particular. But you remember, from just this little part, how lovely was the song, how wonderful the setting where you heard it, and how you loved those who were there and listened with you.
(ACIM:T-21.I.6)

It appears to me that while there can be some initial getting used to process, because some of the imagery is evocative of Palestine 2000 years ago, in the end it appears that the very sparseness of detail evokes a recognition of what Jesus might have sounded like, which by far transcends the particulars of the time and place. To the extent that we can just learn to listen to these statements, Pursah's words  in The Disappearance of the Universe may gain some poignancy, for in her introduction of this material, she lays much emphasis on that her rendering of these statements are what Jesus really sounded like, except that he would have said them in Aramaic.

I have already reflected in an earlier note here on a growth process with this material which I have begun to observe in my workshop and with people who collaborated on the book with me. There comes a time when the strangeness wears off, and the familiarity comes back, and with it the possibility of our holographic reality may seem more present also, for the deep recognition that seems to reach across the ages in reality has naught to do with history or a historical Jesus, but with a letting go of fear, when we can let something come close to us which once seemed distant and far away. Allowing ourselves to bring far away times and places close to us in a somewhat meditative state can be very helpful, and puts us in a position to begin to appreciate the whole story of Jesus on a more personal level. Particularly also, we can see a reflection of our own struggles with the teachings of the Course, by seeing the apostles as our brothers, and recognizing in their stumbling and fumbling, and continued failures in faith and trust and their misunderstandings of Jesus. One of the central points of the Course is that we need to come up to Jesus's level, we need to bring our problems to the answer, not to compromise the answer by making our problems good and real, this is what he means with following him, this is what he means with the idea that the Kingdom is not of this earth.

And so, letting Jesus's voice ring out across the ages from the sayings in the Thomas gospel, and allowing our mind to travel to Palestine, 2000 years ago essentially involves a letting go of fear, in which the initial seeming strangeness of his expressions can flow into an awareness of living presence, and letting ourselves be with him there and then, becomes the same as letting his presence be with us here and now, as our memory of him newly comes to life. Surely that is the real meaning of the story of the Last Supper-"Do this in the remembrance of me." In the Course he says it thusly:

(7) The injunction "Be of one mind" is the statement for revelation-readiness. My request "Do this in remembrance of me" is the appeal for cooperation from miracle workers.  The two statements are not in the same order of reality. Only the latter involves an awareness of time, since to remember is to recall the past in the present. Time is under my direction, but timelessness belongs to God. In time we exist for and with each other. In timelessness we coexist with God. (ACIM: T-2.V.A.17)

Closing the Circle, Squared

At least. And there may be more than two... circles that are being closed, I mean.

When picking a name for this book, I quickly noticed that the name that suggested itself to me was not all that original, and that the subtitle would have to clarify exactly what circles were being closed here. Nevertheless the name seemed appropriate, and the publisher agreed, so closing the circle it was.

The main circle that was being closed, and the overt point of the book, was for me the living connection between the Jesus of the Thomas gospel and the protagonist of A Course In Miracles.

Another circle that is being closed by means of this book, starts with my connection with the work of Johan Willem Kaiser, whose work early in life set me on a track of understanding that the issue was not a moral conversion as in the Pauline traditions of Christianity, but the actual following of Jesus as a living reality, i.e. experience. Therefore the issue was not theology to clarify in terms the world can accept what the meaning of Jesus might be, which after all boils down to us telling Jesus what it is he said, but rather, it was to make oneself available to learning what Jesus might have to tell us, which means to accept him as a teacher, and shut up ourselves, until we begin to hear what he has to say. In the end, this historical issue turns out to be merely a special case of the ego's resistance to salvation, and it has nothing to do with the fact that Paul from time to time also wrote some brilliant, as well as beautiful things that seem undoubtedly inspired and inspiring.

The choice however is between the crucified Jesus of Christianity, and the resurrected Jesus of the living spiritual tradition of which for me personally J.W. Kaiser was an exponent and A Course In Miracles is another, for either, the point would be to help us live in a living relationship with Jesus, which they might help facilitate, but hardly define or limit. Not for nothing does the Course say of itself (ACIM:W-189.7:5), "Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God." In short it wants to be a conduit to the living experience, and with that its function is over. Kaiser takes a similar position when he says in the dedication of one of his books: "If it [the book] could here or there accompany a lonely Traveler through the desert in his hour of difficulty, then this work of one who had to bend over backwards towards the light, has already fulfilled its function." (In  "De mysteriën van Jezus in ons leven," not yet available in English). In other words again, he can only point us in a direction, and the last thing he would want is for his words to become important and be given meaning in lieu of experience, as opposed to leading us to experience.

To intellectualize spirituality is to pretend spirituality with the ego as our guide, and it is another last-ditch attempt by the ego to prevent us from leading a spiritual life in practice, which is all Jesus ever meant with "following him," i.e. take the risk of living in his spirit in our own lives. Paul is perhaps the prototype of this symptomology, but we see it every day, everywhere, and if we dedicate ourselves to spirituality in our own lives we will see how we ourselves are tempted to remain stuck in such intellectualizations, which prevent us from actually living the reality of spirit, and keep us sound asleep in the dream. The ego values intellectual accomplishments very highly, and the world likewise rewards the study of itself, including its spiritual dimensions, for confining it to an intellectual understanding, as opposed to a living realization, means that it has been reduced to a theory of life, instead of a life. To spirit therefore this is all dead matter, but it sells well, so you can make a career out of it. The effect however is to put the ego in charge of our spiritual development, which may produce an effective stage prop, never any spiritual accomplishment. This is why the Course is so clear that the choice is completely either/or, the Holy Spirit(Jesus), or the ego. There is no other choice to be made.

J. W. Kaiser made me very aware early on about the unbridgeable gap between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Paul (ostensibly about Jesus), the latter of which became Christianity. He was also familiar with much of the debate about Jesus and Paul that had raged in theological circles in the 19th century (Radikalkritik, et. al.), about which he observes that Paul always won out in those circles. He furthermore was very clear that the relationship with Jesus was about inner experience (change of mind), while Paul shifted the action towards morality, confession, and conversion (repentance). Thus Paul represents a typical example of skipping steps in our spiritual development, and underestimating the radical nature of the fundamental change of mind Jesus is talking about. In this way intellectual accomplishment, theology is the meat and substance of this stage prop ("All the world's a stage," after all), and repentance, and contrition in our condition as miserable sinners, ensure that we safely exclude ourselves from the possibility of spiritual achievement.

In Kaiser's time the Gospel of Thomas was just being discovered--the first translations appeared in the 1950s, and he died in 1960--but for the time being its historical significance was not well understood, particularly not that--as is now fairly generally understood--the fact that it must be dated before Paul, which nicely explains why none of the elements of Christian theology even make an appearance in the sayings of Jesus which are in this Gospel. For me, this is definitely the closing of another circle, meaning that it substantially solidifies the record of the pre-Pauline Jesus of Thomas, free of Christian theology, as the teacher I was looking for all along, and who I have found speaking to me in a very authentic way, albeit in a very modern form in the pages of A Course In Miracles. Kaiser in his day suggested in one of his books that the time might come that psychology might enable a movement to abandoning Paul, and returning to the teachings of Jesus. Little did he know that within ten years after his death Dr. Helen Schucman, a psychologist, was to have this channeling experience, the fruits of which we now know as A Course In Miracles. Therefore the early dating of the Thomas Gospel is compelling not only as a matter of literary form, in that sayings Gospels predated narrative Gospels, but it is also compelling because Jesus speaks only directly of spiritual experience in the form of quotations that express his teachings in the parabolic koan style, with which we have now begun to become somewhat familiar, and which are clearly geared to living experience and not to theological ruminations. This is evidently the reason why this little book has caused some mild indigestion at times in Christian circles. It would seem better to deal with it forthright. The fact that the Pauline tradition became historically dominant is hardly proof of its authenticity. The two are simply different and hence totally incompatible.

We might see this in yet a different light by observing that the theological development always follows, and never precedes the spiritual development, and that alone should make us sceptical of the value of intellectualizations as a facilitator of spiritual experience. Within the context of the Course, it is very clear that intellectualizing the work can short-circuit the experience, and thus delays us on the trip. Understanding is helpful only to the extent that it leads to experience, but it becomes harmful if it prevents the experience, and in the Course context this problem is known as skipping steps, i.e. where we act as if we are further along in the process than we are, and thus prevent ourselves from having the experiences we need, and which our ego is always desperate to prevent us from having, such as to "question every value that we hold," which the Course posits as absolutely crucial to our process (c.f. ACIM:T-24.In.2:1). Skipping steps is a nifty way of safeguarding some of our dearest sacred cows and assumptions, meanwhile pretending to accomplishment we don't have. It is at that juncture that often times cults and religions are formed, which pretend to be something different, but always end up being yet another rehash of the ego's thought system, which we do not want to let go in the worst way. A Course In Miracles at least helps us understand the basis of our resistance.

In conclusion, I feel that this second circle that this book closes has to do with Kaiser's comment about why in theological circles Paul always ends up being reasserted, he has to be, because of the inner consistency of the theology of Christianity, which started with Paul, not Jesus. Hence it should surprise no-one that among Paul's disciples, Paul's intellectualizations of the meaning of Jesus will always take precedence over the actual teachings of Jesus themselves. It is merely a cultural stereotype that substitutes intellectualization for living experience.

The Thomas Effect

It has been clear to me that one of the roles my book may play is simply to help people familiarize themselves more with the Thomas sayings, and even during the preparation of the book for its release this summer/fall, it is now becoming clear to me that this is already happening. In spite of the many editions on the market it is not as yet well known.
Somehow the imagery of the Thomas gospel does not come natural to today's readers for a variety of reasons. Many of us are not familiar with the popular culture of Palestine 2,000 years ago, and today we don't see people store flour in earthenware jars, let alone run down the street with them, as is the case in one of the Logia. So it takes us a bit of time to familiarize ourselves with these images. Undoubtedly this is also why Pursah is quite specific that the 22 sayings that are quoted in DU, are in effect a selection that is easy on the ear of the modern audience.

Having said that, I'm noticing now that repeat exposure is in and of itself opening peoples ears for these sayings, and I have gotten some interesting reactions from my proofreaders for the book. One of them feels the urge to send me quotes from the book, and the other waxes lyrical, and is hearing symphonies, but both of them seem to feel like the Thomas sayings are opening up to them purely by virtue of the repeat exposure. This is a very interesting development and it really makes me feel hopeful that Closing the Circle could help people close the circle of understanding the continuity and oneness of Jesus across time and space.

In short, for many people this version may become the first version of the Thomas Gospel they knew, which is not a bad thing, for the inner contradictions within the collection with the sayings Pursah has left out is much harder to appreciate, exactly because of that lack of agreement. In the process of preparing the book I've found myself losing mostly all interest in those sayings which Pursah leaves out.

Back to the Gospel according to Mark

Some years ago, in the aftermath of a post of mine about Thomas on the DU group on Yahoo!, which Gary later used in Your Immortal Reality, someone made a comment that I should write a book about Thomas. I figured Gary's work was enough, besides I was working on a translation of the Gospel according to Mark, and advised the party of such. To which I got a reply that nobody would read my book about Mark anyway, but everyone would read a book about Thomas. I felt hurt and insulted for about a week, but then I turned around and realized that perhaps I should listen to this suggestion. Shortly we will start finding out, as the book is due out in late summer, and in fact I received the very first advance order the other day.
Meanwhile, I have come to realize during the work on the book about the Thomas gospel, that in reality it was an invaluable preparation for the book on Mark, exactly because it forced me to really sort out my notions of what happened in those early years, and how Thomas clearly comes before the influence of Paul, whereas the canonical gospels all come either contemporaneously (Mark) or clearly after Paul.

Meanwhile, working on the problems of the tradition in the context of the Thomas story, has brought it much more clearly into focus for me just how many levels of distortion are really at play. Evidently, in the earliest, living teaching, if there is any real connection to the teacher at all, and a living awareness of the content (meaning) of the teaching as opposed to the form, being true to the spirit, would allow the apostles to use any kind of example (parable) at all to make a point, as long as they were in the living awareness of serving the same truth Jesus did, and thus were saying the same thing in spirit, even if the form might have been different. Yet, even at that level distortions would creep in almost immediately, for, just as much as we do not understand the non-dualistic teaching of A Course In Miracles for a long, long time, until we begin to fathom it experientially, similarly the apostles, still rooted in their roles in the world, were only rank beginners in understanding Jesus. Hence we end up looking at the accounts, canonical or otherwise, not as consummate expressions of realized truths, but as the first tentative accounts of truths which the writers of these accounts barely had begun to fathom, except they knew it was important enough to write down.

And, in the event, there also are some circumstances which now make it easier for me to work on the Gospel according to Mark, and share some of that work with the readers. As of recently, I have set up an account at www.GreekBibleStudy.org and linked it to my Facebook account. The best way to hook up to this is actually to find me on Facebook, and to click on the "B" symbol on the left hand side under "applications" and then to join the Greek Bible study site from there, the point being that within Facebook you can actually read my notes, along with the English text, while on the Bible Study site, you get more columns of text, including the Greek text, but you cannot (yet) get access to my notes. Therefore at this moment the only way to access my notes is through Facebook. Once you know, it's easy. (Note: As of 12/19/09 this has not been working for a while, but I will reflect it here whenever the site completes their upgrade, so it can work with Facebook again.)

The focus of my notes on Mark will be on seeing that whole book from a right-minded perspective. The foundations for the notes I will develop there will be based mostly on Jan Willem Kaiser's book Beleving van het Evangelie (Experiencing the Gospel), on the Course, and of course the Thomas Gospel. I now realize why I had to write Closing the Circle before going on with the Mark project. All going well the Mark project will result in two books: my own fresh translation of Mark with some added materials from J.W. Kaiser, most notably his Introduction to the Study and Interpretation of Drama.

The major shift is to completely appreciate that then as now the teachings came in a dualistic form, representing a non-dualistic teaching, or as Kaiser would put it, a message of Eternity clad in the images of Time. The imagery was simply different then, than what we now have in the Course, but the range of misunderstanding is the same, starting out with taking things literally. So come and visit me on Facebook if the idea of taking a different look at one of the Gospels is appealing to you. My own foundation in this regard comes from J.W. Kaiser, but nowadays Eckhart Tolle also has some interesting observations about the real meaning of Jesus in the quotes we know of him, and his observations closely parallel the work of Kaiser.

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).