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.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Saturday, April 5, 2008
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.
, 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.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
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).
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).
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Tradition and Textual Criticism
And with many such parables spake he the word unto them, as they were able to hear it. But without parable spake he not unto them: and when they were alone, he expounded all things to his disciples. (Mk 3:33-34)
One of the interesting aspects of the emergence of Pursah's Gospel of Thomas is that it makes us think again of the whole business of textual tradition and textual corruption. One of the fundamental issues with the world's misunderstanding of the teachings of Jesus lies in the problem of reporting. To begin with there is the issue of contemporaneous reporting: there is none.
However, by studying the problems of textual transmission even a little bit, we can definitely begin to intuit a lot about the problems of transmission, particularly if we take into account that before the written stage, there was a period of purely oral transmission. The way Pursah pares back the Thomas Gospel to its bare essence in her version of it is fairly instructive. The contraction of sayings 6 & 14 into one makes immediate intuitive sense if you read them in the Nag Hammadi version and then compare it to the form in Pursah's Gospel of Thomas. Realistically however, we need to understand that there is no authority to say that Pursah's version is authentic as she claims, other than your own inner guidance that could make you feel comfortable with her text. In this regard there is no external authority to validate the apparent facts. Having said that, many of her edits do seem to make immediate intuitive sense.
Another contribution of the Pursah version which makes intuitive sense, lies in the fact that she systematically strips out the "Jesus said" and therefore radically alters the nature of the presentation from story-telling mode, into one of direct address. The text speaks directly to the reader, and therefore through the text Jesus speaks directly to us, in a manner not dissimilar from A Course In Miracles
. A lot of Pursah's changes up to that point could be viewed on the basis of the commonly understood issues of oral tradition, similar to the telephone game, where people whisper a story in each others ear, and the last person tells it out loud to the group, at which point the originator shows the original written story which the first person read, and the transition tells you a lot about the changes along the way. Simple experiments like that may cure us of any notion of the reliability of oral tradition. Scriptural corruptions per se are easier to deal with because once you have multiple texts, you can compare, and you can decide which ones are older, which ones have a shorter path of transmission etc., and the more you can reconstruct this, the more you can feel comfortable that it is reasonable to attempt to filter out an original text, an authoritative text, which you can pretty much vouch for at that point. However, there is another dimension, which Pursah implicitly appeals to in her comments.This other dimension is understanding. Pursah's presentation in DU sets us up to explore that dimension with her comments in that book: that it should be intuitively obvious which of the 114 sayings should be original sayings of Jesus, and which contain evident contradictions. In Your Immortal Reality
she subsequently indulges us by actually giving us her version, and she is pretty emphatic that this is how it originally sounded, except that it would have been in Aramaic. In the process, however, she has invited us to get in touch with our own understanding of and intuition about the material. This appeal is a crucially important part of the process, and should also make us do a double take about the issues surrounding oral tradition discussed above.The very important difference is about "understanding," as alluded to in the quote from Mark with which I opened this comment. The point is that individually Jesus explained everything to his apostles. And so also did the teaching style of the apostles doubtlessly develop with their growing understanding. And they in turn taught from their own understanding, in a manner similar to Jesus, in which they might have reused images, stories and words they heard Jesus say, or they might simply make up their own story, based on the situation they were in, or their own life experience, but focused on transmitting to their interlocutor or their audience, the spirit or meaning, the content of Jesus's teaching. And thus the essential point is that the teaching was about expressing the truth Jesus taught, in a way that the audience could hear. Once we begin to fathom this dimension, it should be readily obvious to us that the whole point is about transmitting meaning, so that many corruptions in form, may not be corruptions at all if they adequately convey the meaning.
To students of the Course this should be obvious, for the miracle is really the instrument of teaching, and we realize that as we learn to choose the miracle, Jesus really is taking us by the hand, and making us understand in the circumstances of our life what his teaching of love means to us, right here, right now, in our own life. The miracle in that sense is the definition of the teaching moment in which Jesus explains "everything" to us when we are alone with him, i.e. when we drop the interpretations of the ego, and listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit instead. Through those experiences we come to understand in the context of our own specific experiences the meaning of what Jesus teaches, then, now, and always. Therefore, the validation of Pursah's proposed "Kernel" of the Thomas Gospel lies only in that inner experience of consistency which altogether speaks for itself. And so, again, the role Pursah plays serves to underscore one of the principal tenets of the Course namely that its purpose is not to become the basis for a new cult or religion, but rather to help some people find their Internal Teacher (ACIM:Preface). Pursah in effect refers us to our Internal Teacher first to validate the soundness of the kernel of the Thomas Gospel which she proposes. Besides inviting us to validate her preferred text in this fashion, she also emphasizes that in understanding it, we should not seek external authority, but learn to become our own ministers and teachers, by letting the Thomas sayings speak to us, and developing our own understanding, as we let the spirit work through us.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Entering the Mainstream...
The other day I picked up at a news stand copy of a "Collectors Edition" of US News & World Report, titled "The Secrets of Christianity." I was amazed, for finally some relatively serious information is entering the mainstream, in a format that is easily accessible, and relatively informative. It seems to be a good omen ahead of the publication of my book. After all if US News and World Report is not mainstream, nothing is.
Several years ago, when Tim Freke and Peter Gandy just had their first books out in which they pursued in their way the notion that the earthly life of Jesus is not the point but the spiritual symbolism is -remember the Course calls him a manifestation of the Holy Spirit- I had a correspondence with one of them, I believe it was Peter, and they seemed to be unacquainted with what I assumed to be their precursor literature from the school of Radikalkritik and their predecessors in turn reaching back all the way to the 18th century in France and England. Today their books are featured on websites on Radikalkritik. At its hight, Radikalkritik (the major website is www.hermann-detering.de which has multilingual information in German, Dutch and English) flourished mainly in the 2nd half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th in Germany and Holland. The twin pillars of inquiry were the lack of historical detail about Jesus, and the mythological character of the literature, and the exploration of the disconnect between Jesus and Paul, including the fact that some researchers entirely dismissed the letters of Paul as the product of Christian self-justification in the 2nd century, attributed to Paul, but historically dubious. Somewhat to my surprised, Radikalkritik is now discussed in the opening article of this publication, and at some length.
In other words, the fissure between Jesus and Christianity is now entering mainstream awareness, and this ties in very nicely with the growing interest in apocryphal literature, and exploration of the possible meaning of Jesus beyond the boundaries of the Christian churches. So it would seem that after the youthful silliness of The DaVinci Code
, which sort of exploded the latent interest in these issues from a rebellious standpoint that daddy lied to us (or in this case the Pope lied to us), without and real historical credibility to its arguments, we are as a society now entering a phase of broader inquiry into the real issues. This connects quite well with the Jesus of the Thomas Gospel and the Course, both of which clearly do not sound like the Jesus of Christian orthodoxy at all. The Course clarifies those differences mostly in the first 6 Chapters of the book, but occasionally reverts to it later, since it clearly deliberately uses the terminology to evoke for the reader an experience of cognitive dissonance, which rousts us out of our traditional understanding of Jesus, as not a figure of history, but as an inner presence which can lead us back home, out of the ego's insanity.
I feel that it is very helpful to realize that amidst the broad appearance that Christianity continued unabatedly to maintain the Pauline dogma through the ages, that in fact there have been very substantive groups of thinkers, who smelled a rat, and who perceived a dissonance between Paul and Jesus. For myself this whole picture did not come together completely until the Course, but being aware of it since growing up, the Course simply clinched it, and once we begin to understand the Thomas Gospel for what it is, it all becomes even clearer why the Jesus who speaks to us from its pages is not a proto-Christian at all.
Several years ago, when Tim Freke and Peter Gandy just had their first books out in which they pursued in their way the notion that the earthly life of Jesus is not the point but the spiritual symbolism is -remember the Course calls him a manifestation of the Holy Spirit- I had a correspondence with one of them, I believe it was Peter, and they seemed to be unacquainted with what I assumed to be their precursor literature from the school of Radikalkritik and their predecessors in turn reaching back all the way to the 18th century in France and England. Today their books are featured on websites on Radikalkritik. At its hight, Radikalkritik (the major website is www.hermann-detering.de which has multilingual information in German, Dutch and English) flourished mainly in the 2nd half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th in Germany and Holland. The twin pillars of inquiry were the lack of historical detail about Jesus, and the mythological character of the literature, and the exploration of the disconnect between Jesus and Paul, including the fact that some researchers entirely dismissed the letters of Paul as the product of Christian self-justification in the 2nd century, attributed to Paul, but historically dubious. Somewhat to my surprised, Radikalkritik is now discussed in the opening article of this publication, and at some length.
In other words, the fissure between Jesus and Christianity is now entering mainstream awareness, and this ties in very nicely with the growing interest in apocryphal literature, and exploration of the possible meaning of Jesus beyond the boundaries of the Christian churches. So it would seem that after the youthful silliness of The DaVinci Code
, which sort of exploded the latent interest in these issues from a rebellious standpoint that daddy lied to us (or in this case the Pope lied to us), without and real historical credibility to its arguments, we are as a society now entering a phase of broader inquiry into the real issues. This connects quite well with the Jesus of the Thomas Gospel and the Course, both of which clearly do not sound like the Jesus of Christian orthodoxy at all. The Course clarifies those differences mostly in the first 6 Chapters of the book, but occasionally reverts to it later, since it clearly deliberately uses the terminology to evoke for the reader an experience of cognitive dissonance, which rousts us out of our traditional understanding of Jesus, as not a figure of history, but as an inner presence which can lead us back home, out of the ego's insanity.I feel that it is very helpful to realize that amidst the broad appearance that Christianity continued unabatedly to maintain the Pauline dogma through the ages, that in fact there have been very substantive groups of thinkers, who smelled a rat, and who perceived a dissonance between Paul and Jesus. For myself this whole picture did not come together completely until the Course, but being aware of it since growing up, the Course simply clinched it, and once we begin to understand the Thomas Gospel for what it is, it all becomes even clearer why the Jesus who speaks to us from its pages is not a proto-Christian at all.
Friday, November 23, 2007
The Meaning of the Thomas Gospel
It pays to dig deeper. It always does. My own experiences with the Thomas gospel started innocently enough. My mindset from very early on was one of feeling that Jesus was a teacher who I wanted to find, but somehow he seemed buried under the archaeological rubble of stories, theories, theology and dogma about him, which had pretty much obliterated anything he might have ever said. I was pretty much raised in the notion that the churches were not the place to start looking. As a young man, and literate in Greek, I began to focus on the fact that Jesus had spoken Aramaic, and began to study the Aramaicisms in NT Greek, guided by the likes of Gustaf Dalman and Matthew Black, which led nowhere fast, other than some interesting dabbling in Aramaic, but never any meaningful mastery, for by that time I began to see how ludicrous the attempt was. Surely if Jesus really was who I thought he was, he was not dependent on my learning Aramaic, just because that was his language 2,000 years ago. In retrospect I recognize that experience as clear guidance, and that he was saying to me that he was perfectly capable of speaking my language, so there was no use in taking the long way around. So I decided the exercise was silly, and not worth pursuing further.
Thomas popped up in my teens because my parents went to a lecture by Prof. Gilles Quispel, and excitement was in the air over hearing something perhaps more original than the gospels we had. Somehow it was to be still a few decades before Thomas was to start getting the attention it deserved, because of the increasing recognition that it did in fact predate the Canonical Gospels and more importantly the Inventor of Christianity, aka. Paul of Tarsus. But the Thomas Gospel is a symbol, and its history is itself a parable, of how we buried (but literally!) the clearest record of the teachings of Jesus, which have an immediacy, that still speaks to us today, with more force of directness than almost any of the stories about him.
When in the 3rd Logion he tells us in colorful imagery not to listen to the teachers that tell you the Kingdom is elsewhere, then this is quite in the same vein as the Course's notion of a "Journey without distance to a goal that has never changed," (ACIM:T-8.VI.9:7) and the Jesus speaking to us wants to be invited into our life here and now--whenever here and now is, for we are always in the moment, unless we take another ego detour which merely validates the time-space framework of the world. The whole ego-ploy that made him into a religion, not to mention an important historical figure, in fact separates him from us and us from him, and puts him on a pedestal. "Some bitter idols have been made of him who would be only brother to the world," the Course says (ACIM:C-5.5). This presence and immediacy which is asking for our attention, places us in the borderland between learning and knowing, which is described in the Course as follows: "There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you."
So having the Kingdom is entirely possible to us, but we're our own worst enemies as long as we hold on to "something else," and the forgiveness process of the Course, as much as the core of any other spiritual path must be the gradual realization that the ego's "something else," is nothing, and giving it up is no sacrifice, once we start wondering why we are holding on for dear life to smeothing so totally valueless. A key passage in the Course describes it thus:
And again, to come back to Thomas, this Jesus who is here with us, now, in the moment if we let the book speak to us, tells us in Logion 42 to "Be passersby," to climb in the observer's seat (with Jesus naturally), for looking at the ego with him is the process which will undo the ego's spell. The ego not only sells us the Brooklyn Bridge, but the whole universe, all of time and space, and for the longest time we all think it is quite something, much like Plato's prisoners believe they are seeing reality on the wall in their cave. Yet the way out is right here, in front of our face, if we honestly look with the forgiveness of Jesus (doing it alone we may feel stupid having bought the damn bridge, let alone the rest of it), for only with his love beside us can we gently let it go. So our shortest way home always starts right here, if we choose to rely on this Internal Teacher who is as our Elder Brother, offering us his guiding hand to help us find the way home, for in Logion 5 he is quoted as saying:
Thomas popped up in my teens because my parents went to a lecture by Prof. Gilles Quispel, and excitement was in the air over hearing something perhaps more original than the gospels we had. Somehow it was to be still a few decades before Thomas was to start getting the attention it deserved, because of the increasing recognition that it did in fact predate the Canonical Gospels and more importantly the Inventor of Christianity, aka. Paul of Tarsus. But the Thomas Gospel is a symbol, and its history is itself a parable, of how we buried (but literally!) the clearest record of the teachings of Jesus, which have an immediacy, that still speaks to us today, with more force of directness than almost any of the stories about him.
When in the 3rd Logion he tells us in colorful imagery not to listen to the teachers that tell you the Kingdom is elsewhere, then this is quite in the same vein as the Course's notion of a "Journey without distance to a goal that has never changed," (ACIM:T-8.VI.9:7) and the Jesus speaking to us wants to be invited into our life here and now--whenever here and now is, for we are always in the moment, unless we take another ego detour which merely validates the time-space framework of the world. The whole ego-ploy that made him into a religion, not to mention an important historical figure, in fact separates him from us and us from him, and puts him on a pedestal. "Some bitter idols have been made of him who would be only brother to the world," the Course says (ACIM:C-5.5). This presence and immediacy which is asking for our attention, places us in the borderland between learning and knowing, which is described in the Course as follows: "There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you."
So having the Kingdom is entirely possible to us, but we're our own worst enemies as long as we hold on to "something else," and the forgiveness process of the Course, as much as the core of any other spiritual path must be the gradual realization that the ego's "something else," is nothing, and giving it up is no sacrifice, once we start wondering why we are holding on for dear life to smeothing so totally valueless. A key passage in the Course describes it thus:
No one who comes here but must still have hope, some lingering illusion, or some dream that there is something outside of himself that will bring happiness and peace to him. 2 If everything is in him this cannot be so. 3 And therefore by his coming, he denies the truth about himself, and seeks for something more than everything, as if a part of it were separated off and found where all the rest of it is not. 4 This is the purpose he bestows upon the body; that it seek for what he lacks, and give him what would make himself complete. 5 And thus he wanders aimlessly about, in search of something that he cannot find, believing that he is what he is not. (ACIM:T-29.VII.2)
And again, to come back to Thomas, this Jesus who is here with us, now, in the moment if we let the book speak to us, tells us in Logion 42 to "Be passersby," to climb in the observer's seat (with Jesus naturally), for looking at the ego with him is the process which will undo the ego's spell. The ego not only sells us the Brooklyn Bridge, but the whole universe, all of time and space, and for the longest time we all think it is quite something, much like Plato's prisoners believe they are seeing reality on the wall in their cave. Yet the way out is right here, in front of our face, if we honestly look with the forgiveness of Jesus (doing it alone we may feel stupid having bought the damn bridge, let alone the rest of it), for only with his love beside us can we gently let it go. So our shortest way home always starts right here, if we choose to rely on this Internal Teacher who is as our Elder Brother, offering us his guiding hand to help us find the way home, for in Logion 5 he is quoted as saying:
Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.
(Pursah's Gospel of Thomas, in Your Immortal Reality, P. 163)
The resurrection is ours if we will only open the book, and sit with it, and realize he's talking to us, and he'll walk right off the page, if we'd just let him in.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Thomas Yet Again
Somehow it did not sit well with me when I found the first saying (Logion 1) of the Thomas Gospel rendered as "whoever happens upon the meaning of these words," since I believe that the whole point of Jesus' teaching is for us to take responsibility for turning the wrong corner, since else we would never make it back (except to say that we inevitably will). In other words the teacher who teaches "seek and ye shall find" (use whatever version suits you best), does not want you to "happen upon" the meaning of his words. The whole point is that we need to muster the courage to turn back on our footsteps, and find our way back home with as much deliberation as we once had to run away. Within the Thomas gospel the second Logion immediately impresses upon us the determination to seek and find, reminding us not to stop seeking.
This is what has happened with me more and more as I compare a growing list of Thomas translations, and in the end I find inconsistencies everywhere, which also led to the decision in my upcoming book not to include the text of any one of the existing translations, but rather to only discuss the Nag Hammadi tradition generically.
This is what has happened with me more and more as I compare a growing list of Thomas translations, and in the end I find inconsistencies everywhere, which also led to the decision in my upcoming book not to include the text of any one of the existing translations, but rather to only discuss the Nag Hammadi tradition generically.
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