Jefferson Revisited I

You would maintain, and think it true, that you do not believe these senseless laws, nor act upon them. And when you look at what they say, they cannot be believed. Brother, you do believe them. For how else could you perceive the form they take, with content such as this? Can any form of this be tenable? Yet you believe them for the form they take, and do not recognize the content. It never changes. Can you paint rosy lips upon a skeleton, dress it in loveliness, pet it and pamper it, and make it live? And can you be content with an illusion that you are living? (ACIM:T-23.II.18)

I've written elsewhere about the function of cognitive dissonance in the Course, focusing on the notion that the whole Course process is about making us aware of all that doesn't work in the ego's world, and gradually to wear off our rationalizations and justifications of it. It is through that process that we remove the blocks to love's presence, as the introduction to the Course declares to be its goal. This is the specific process of the Course, but it behooves us to understand that this is the process of how Jesus or the Holy Spirit teaches us, regardless if we're a Course student or not. In that sense the Course merely serves as an acceleration of the process, and that is why the only real claim for the benefit of the Course which Jesus ever makes is that it will speed us along faster, but otherwise it claims no specialness, being only one of thousands of paths. Since the underlying psychological process regardless of whether we undertake it consciously with the Course or not, is always the same, and is inevitable, it pays to look closer. The ego system is always a lie, never mind how hard we try to justify it. Only truth is true, and everything else is a lie. The disparity creeps in whenever our justifications wear out, and the truth peeks its ugly head through the thin veils of the ego's obfuscations.

Presently I'm reading Annette Gordon-Reed's book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, and it is bringing all these things to life for me. I guess I am fascinated by Jefferson, and in particulare by his profound intuition that about Jesus that is evident in his work that is now known as The Jefferson Bible. At some level it could be no mere coincidence that his first name was Thomas. And then there is his life... besides the schoolbook stuff, and the obvious historical importance, so much has come out in recent years, a hundred and fifty years after the fact, that has shifted the whole perception, that it pays to look beneath the public drama and into the heart of  what went on. The present book is a bit bulky, and not a casual read. It seems repetitive at times, which clearly has annoyed some reviewers, but I don't think it is bothersome, to me it is as if we're with the author, reading over her shoulder, trying to decipher from the fog of history what she is trying to ascertain about the nature of the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings. She repeatedly has to polish her glasses, and resort the papers, and check her own feelings to see if she is still on the right track. My gut sense is she is. Her most "controversial" tenet which this book develops is that there was a basis of genuine affection, and emotional bond in this relationship, a notion which not everyone finds acceptable. In the process of her discovery about this we travel with Jefferson to Paris, where he begins to fully develop his notions of the rights of man, etc., in the run-up to the French Revolution, all of which is materially important for his later work in America. But there he is, publicly speaking out against slavery, and privately having two undeclared people in his entourage, Sally and her brother James, who are free under French law, and slaves under Virginia law, and he'd rather not have anybody find out. Evidently there was a negotiation in the formative period of his relationship with Sally, in which the notion of her freedom under French law enters the consideration, before she decides to return to the States with him on his apparent promise of the manumission of her children by him.

We all know these situations in our lives where the appearances do not line up with the facts, and we tend to ignore these things, but eventually those kinds of disparities may force a shift. A book like this is a powerful reminder of how this life learning process works, and how we inflict suffering upon ourselves by resisting where the process is taking us. For Jefferson the process ended up being a slow movement towards the manumission of his former slaves, some only posthumously through his will, but the seeds of it were evident when he lived in Paris, and there was total cognitive dissonance between what he was trying to maintain in his Virginia (slave-owner, among other things) persona, his public life in Paris, and his private life at home, with a chef who was a black slave from Virginia, and his younger sister who became his mistress. What seems so helpful to me about this type of a process is the realization that this is universal. The ego system never works, or in the words of the Course, it may be foolproof, but it is not God-proof, as the following passage says, speaking about the need for us to transcend the ego's judgments, and appeal our case, whatever it may be, to the " Higher Court," of the Holy Spirit:

You need not fear the Higher Court will condemn you. It will merely dismiss the case against you. There can be no case against a child of God, and every witness to guilt in God's creations is bearing false witness to God Himself. Appeal everything you believe gladly to God's Own Higher Court, because it speaks for Him and therefore speaks truly. It will dismiss the case against you, however carefully you have built it up. The case may be fool-proof, but it is not God-proof. The Holy Spirit will not hear it, because He can only witness truly. His verdict will always be "thine is the Kingdom," because He was given to you to remind you of what you are. (ACIM:T-5.VI.10)

In short since freedom is our natural condition, we ultimately cannot fail but relearn it, though it may take us a long time to experientially disprove the opposite to freedom, releasing the shackles of the ego system. But that it will happen in the end is certain, because it is part of truth, however long it takes us to get there. The painful parts are trying to hang on to our justifications for what we know not to be the truth, just like Thomas Jefferson in his writings on the State of Virginia publicly reaffirmed the seeming justifications for racial discrimination and slavery, while his private life was inexorably moving in a different direction. These are the scenes which Shakespeare modeled in the phrase " Me thinks the lady doth protest too much." In such cases our heart already knows a truth that seems inconvenient, but our mind is still attempting to hold on to what it thinks it knows from the past, and so the rationalizations and protests express not the truth, but our fervent resistance to it, by which we only prolong our own suffering. And often times it can be helpful to watch this process in another, and through empathy that can in turn allow us to recognize similar processes in our own lives, and perhaps help us to choose " another way"  a bit sooner, and lessen our discomfort along the way.  The process invariably entails that the fissures of inner contradiction in any arrangements our ego makes start to show up and become more undeniable and uncomfortable, until the gap of cognitive dissonance forces us into a change process. Those are the times when life itself erupts through the cracks of our seemingly comfortable living arrangements.

The path the Course teaches in effect is to learn to see those discrepancies better and better, by stopping our rationalizations and justifications, and asking the help of Jesus or the Holy Spirit to look at them without judgment, but just noticing: "Oh well, my ego's still alive and well." It is by stopping to take these things overly seriously, that we gradually let the air out of the ego's defenses, until we can blatantly see that it is nothing, and then we know it is no sacrifice to give up nothing. Hence Jesus says also in the Course that he asks for teachers (of the valuelessness of the ego-system), not martyrs, as in the following passage:

    As you read the teachings of the Apostles, remember that I told them myself that there was much they would understand later, because they were not wholly ready to follow me at the time. I do not want you to allow any fear to enter into the thought system toward which I am guiding you. I do not call for martyrs but for teachers. No one is punished for sins, and the Sons of God are not sinners. Any concept of punishment involves the projection of blame, and reinforces the idea that blame is justified. The result is a lesson in blame, for all behavior teaches the beliefs that motivate it. The crucifixion was the result of clearly opposed thought systems; the perfect symbol of the "conflict" between the ego and the Son of God. This conflict seems just as real now, and its lessons must be learned now as well as then. (ACIM:T-6.I.16)

That we will find truth is inevitable, as the Course repeatedly reassures us, because simply put truth is true, and everything else is a lie, so the rest is only a matter of time. It is our choice how long we want to suffer still. The reason the cracks will always be there, is because the split mind is not capable of anything else, by reason of the very nature of what it is. Therein exactly lies the root of fool proof, not God proof, and so there is always hope, because part of our mind of necessity has an allegiance to truth, and that is what the Course calls the right mind, where we do hear the Voice for God, or the Holy Spirit, who is calling us to leave the insane asylum behind, and seek and find our way Home.

A Talk Given by Ken Wapnick

Continuing on the commitment to discuss on this site all of the books which I mention in Closing the Circle, it is high time to talk about A Talk Given On A Course In Miracles, An Introduction, by Kenneth Wapnick. This book is ideal as someone's first introduction to the Course, though for many people today The Disappearance of the Universe fulfills that function. But even so, one of the things you are bound to discover is that Gary Renard also mentions Ken Wapnick as the premier teacher of A Course in Miracles.

I think this little book is indispensable in every sense of the word, for being as small as it is (just 127 pages in a 4-3/4''x7'' format), it provides a truly comprehensive introduction to the Course, and even if you are already a student of the Course this little book can be extremely helpful to you to see the forest, without getting distracted by the trees. By far the most distortions of the Course, which are all too common, happen exactly because of that issue, that people focus on trees and not the forest, and then it becomes very easy to ignore the true context of the Course, and distort parts of it and turn them into something they are not. Gary's second book, Your Immortal Reality, pretty extensively dispenses with many of those issues in a very incisive and to the point fashion.

The book starts with a brief summary of how the Course came into being, which is extremely helpful for anyone to understand. Next it lays out the Course's notions of Heaven, or One Mindedness (i.e. what came before and comes after the notion of separation, and the world of egoic illusion), that's a very short chapter, and rightly so, for we don't understand it anyway. The only connection that we retain to that in the seeming separation is the Holy Spirit as the memory of Heaven, but our relationship with Him tends to be uncertain as well, because our commitment is not wholehearted at first. By far the largest portion of the book is taken up by the discussion of the ego's thought system and its exploits, Sin, Guilt and Fear, Denial and Projection, the Attack-Defense Cycle, and Special Relationships. That this should be the largest section is evident by the simple logic that the purpose of the Course is very much for us to become aware of our ego, and to stop denying it. The long and the short of it is that until we know we are in trouble we are not motivated to get help, and we're not ready to ask the Holy Spirit until we begin to fathom the circular logic of the ego, and realize that we cannot pull ourselves up out of the ego's marsh by our own hair like Baron von Münchhausen. Only when we get that, and we begin to see that the Holy Spirit is not part of the insanity are we possibly interested in asking for His Help.

Equally logically the next section of the book is about the meaning of the Holy Spirit, the meaning of Forgiveness, and the meaning of Miracles. And then finally Chapter 5 is about Jesus and the purpose of his life. This is a powerful finale to this very concise introduction. The point here is that when we start on the Course, the vast majority of us have issues with Jesus. Stereotypes galore. Here, in just 10 pages, we get a quick introduction to the Jesus of the Course, who presents himself to us as our loving brother, who can simply help us because he has already found the way home, and we are just starting to look and have no idea which way to turn. Perhaps one of the key lines in this part of the book is this: "What Jesus did was to live in this world--the world of suffering, sin, and death--and show that it had no effect on him." And that is the gist of the Course's notion that the message of the crucifixion is to "Teach only love," which is a different way of saying that the point is learning to follow in Jesus's footsteps in the sense of these words from the Course, which Ken also quotes "Teach not that I died in vain. Teach rather that I did not die by demonstrating that I live in you." (ACIM:T-11.VI.7:3-4).

Finally Ken also explains in detail that while it is not necessary to believe in Jesus, it is necessary to believe in the resurrection, as the awakening from the dream, i.e. the awakening to the knowledge that there is no death except seemingly in this world of appearances. I am quoting his entire paragraph on this point:

Once again, to benefit from A Course in Miracles, it is not necessary to believe in Jesus as our personal savior, Lord, or whatever other words we choose to use. But on some level we must accept the fact that the resurrection is something that could have happened, even though we may not believe in Jesus. Ultimately, we cannot accept the Course, unless we also accept the fact that death is an illusion. We need not do this right away, and we do not have to fully integrate this into our lives, because the moment that we integrate it, we will not be here anymore. This is the goal. But as an intellectual idea, we have to recognize it as an essential part of the entire system. (p.122)

In the end then, Jesus is our model for learning in the sense of demonstrating that our Inner Peace is not dependent on anything "outside," including our body, "outside" here meaning part of the phenomenal world as opposed to being of spirit. And Jesus is present in the Course as an elder brother, who can show us the way home, if we ask, and as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit (the memory of Heaven), and as such one of the most concise descrtiptions of him comes also from Ken, though it is not in this book: "Jesus is a 'What,' that looks like a who, as long as you think you're a who." In other words, as long as we identify with our bodily identity, we will think of Jesus as a person, but when we remember what we are as spirit, we will realize that that is what Jesus was demonstrating to us all along, and at that point we and he are entirely the same as spirit.
 

Henry J. van Dyke and the Other Wise Man

It's just that time of year, and I like to think about Henry J. van Dyke, and make sure he's not forgotten. The book has been variously published as The Story of the Other Wise Man or the Fourth Wise Man. You can find an on-line version here: http://www.classicreader.com/book/593/1/ , or as a download here: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10679, but this book is definitely worth owning in book form. Idea for a Christmas present?

The reason I'm discussing this little gem of a book on this blog is simply this: as much as I am interested in the story of the discovery of the Thomas gospel and all that goes with it in terms of clarifying what he was saying before later editors turned him into a proto-Christian, it is always important to remember that Jesus speaks the language of the heart, and people have found their way to him at any time, and regardless of theological limitations. I personally find little appeal in the Christian theology which Henry J. van Dyke obviously embraced, but when I read this story, I know in my heart that this man had a very clear understanding of Jesus, to be able to express it in this deeply moving story.

The Story of the Other Wise Man is all about giving up all of our notions of what it will take to come to Jesus, for in the story it is blatantly clear that the fourth wise man does not find him until after he has given up even the last bit of what he thought it would take to come to him, and only when he does, he finds that in what he thinks is abject failure, he meets him, stronger yet, in that instant he is face to face with him.

This theme is worked out in A Course in Miracles in a different way, for there Jesus makes it clear that essentially we need to forgive him, for NOT being the idol that we made of him, which is essentially the same point that Henry van Dyke makes in this wonderful story: what will keep us away from him are only our own concepts about him, for as long as we are busy telling him who he is and what to say, we are evidently listening to ourselves and not him. It's that easy. Once you catch on, it is easy to spot the problem, and once you spot the problem perhaps some day you can let it go...

    
I have great need for lilies, for the Son of God has not forgiven me. And can I offer him forgiveness when he offers thorns to me? For he who offers thorns to anyone is against me still, and who is whole without him? Be you his friend for me, that I may be forgiven and you may look upon the Son of God as whole. But look you first upon the altar in your chosen home, and see what you have laid upon it to offer me. If it be thorns whose points gleam sharply in a blood-red light, the body is your chosen home and it is separation that you offer me. And yet the thorns are gone. Look you still closer at them now, and you will see your altar is no longer what it was.  (ACIM:T-20.II.4)

In short as long as what we offer him is framed in our own concepts that the ego and the separation are real, that is tantamount to slamming the door in his face. It is only by letting all that go, that we can let him in, and in fact the minute we do let that go, we will be face to face with him. This is why the Course speaks of "removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence." (Introduction) That is the fundamental lesson of forgiveness. In the Thomas gospel, this same notion that we let stereotypes and past expectations blind us to the living reality of him, is expressed beautifully in Logion 52:

The disciples said to him, " Twenty-four prophets have spoken in Israel, and they all spoke of you."  He said to them, " You have disregarded the living one who is in your presence, and have spoken of the dead."

Introductions

If there is anyone who put me on the track to consciously seek out a path to the teachings of Yeshua prior to him becoming Christianized as Jesus, it was the Dutch author Johan Willem Kaiser (JWK), whose main body of work dates from 1946 to 1960. By the mid sixties I was beginning to very seriously explore ways to seek out what I sensed was Jesus's original meaning, which I was pretty clear was not at all what Christianity said he said. Since I was learning classical Greek in school, reading the Bible in Greek was a logical first step. The work of Kaiser became an important guide to me since about age fifteen, both in the form of his book Beleving van het Evangelie, (Experiencing the Gospel, not available in English), which was a thoroughly new translation and commentary of the Gospel according to Mark, as well as in the awareness that is ingrained in all his work that a relationship with Jesus is the essence of what he meant by "following him," i.e. learning to follow his guidance rather than relying on our own council, in the understanding that the "Kingdom" he spoke of was not of this earth, but of spirit and in spirit. Hence he would not be a teacher of morals, but a teacher of spirituality and spiritual development.

One central concept that is pervasive in Kaiser's work is that "to follow Jesus" is about inner experience, while the evolution of Christianity was all about morality and behavior, and confessions of conscious beliefs, in other words, it became primarily all in the head, and external, which is not what Jesus was talking about, but it evolved that way under those who came after him, starting with Paul. The latter becomes very true if you begin to study Paul's struggle with concepts in his writings, and how he resolves his own inner contradictions in his evolving mythologizing of Jesus, founded on his famous conversion experience on the road to Damascus, which I still sense was a completely legitimate experience, the problem being that our ego has a fair way of co-opting absolutely everything, and reinterpreting it to suit its purposes.

Before I found my way to Kaiser's work, I had been familiar since early childhood, at least age 4, with Ms. Margaretha "Greet" Hofmans, aka. "Tante Greet" (Auntie Greet). She was a student of his during the Second World War, and she had a channeling-type experience of what I would today call Jesus. Her preferred way of referencing him with me was as "the Help," or "God's Help," (the etymological meaning of his name in Hebrew), explaining to me from time to time how this Help was available to me whenever I wished, except on the condition that I should understand that this Help was not like Santa Claus, fulfilling wishes, and giving you what YOU thought you wanted, but rather, it meant that you should be willing to let go of your definition of the problem, deferred (ego-) judgment was the key. Only when I was in my forties and fifties and studying A Course In Miracles did I truly realize how utterly profound this explanation was, and how wonderful as a way to explain the situation to a child. This theme is pervasive in the Course, that we have to go up to the Answer (the presence of the Holy Spirit in our minds), instead of dragging the answer down into the world by making the world, "the problem" good and real. In short his Kingdom indeed is not of this world, he did not say that by accident. Kaiser had an inspired work partnership with Ms. Hofmans, in which he did write books, and give public presentations, and she worked one on one with people, to help make them aware of their own inner access to the Help, as well as channeling answers to questions for them. So it was only natural that my acquaintance with her should lead to finding my way to Kaiser's work later on.

Since then things have for me come full circle on a number of different levels, some of which I am no doubt not even aware of yet, as I write this, but some of them are very clear. Number one, as much as Ms. Hofmans and Kaiser put me on a track to at least some awareness of the inner access to this living Presence of another knowing, that is somehow present to us all  if only we stop denying it long enough, they taught me to see the distinction between that direct inner awareness and inspiration, and the rationalizations of the dialectic mind (what the Buddhists call "monkey mind"), which in the Christian tradition are symbolized in terms of the Pauline reconstruction of Jesus' teachings into Christianity, and later the Nicene Creed, which really reduces things to conscious beliefs and rationalizations only. Parallel phenomena occurred in Vedanta and Buddhism, e.g. "what's known as the teachings of the Buddha are not the teachings of the Buddha," while a pure non-dualistic teaching in Advaita deteriorated into a very dualistic Hinduism, though from time to time some inspired teachers emerged who returned to the source, similar to the Christian experience. Inspired living begins only when we stop taking the ego's rationalizations, and our concomitant perceptions totally seriously, and make some room for spirit, and the first step therefore must be to learn this inner discernment, since we cannot prevent the ego from literally running us into the ground, lest we begin to learn another way of living, by making a deliberate choice.

A Course in Miracles was born from Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford's realization that "There must be another way," (for the full story of the scribing of the Course, see Ken Wapnick's biography of Helen Schucman, Absence from Felicity). The Course is totally geared to an emphasis to the experiential "following" of Jesus, by letting him take us by the hand and teaching us another way of looking at the world, and thus engaging on a path that will loosen our abject slavery to the ego until we learn to live in inner freedom again. I became aware of the Thomas gospel in the early sixties, and was always intrigued with it, and I followed the evolution of the scholarship which gradually led to date it earlier than Paul and the Canonical Gospels. However, it was not until Gary Renard's books came along, that I fully realized that the Thomas gospel was indeed the voice of the pre-Pauline Jesus, who had not yet been redacted into a proto-Chrsitian, but the more I realized that connection, the more it grew in importance in my mind, and thus the idea for Closing the Circle was born.

There were more circles than one being closed however, and here's a collection:

• In the Course, Jesus frequently offers corrections to the Bible, or our understanding of it, and states that he meant something else than what has been "made of him."
• In the Thomas gospel the Jesus who speaks is free from the editorial influences that "made him" into the "bitter idol" of Christianity, who died a sacrificial death on the cross. (cf. ACIM:T-C-5.5:7)
• With roots in the enlightenment, the German school of Radikalkritik explored the disparity between Jesus and Paul extensively since the mid nineteenth century.
• Johan Willem Kaiser voices it as follows in a vocabulary entry in his book De mysteriën van Jezus in ons leven, (Eng. The Mysteries of Jesus in our Lives, not available in translation), voices it as follows "Presently the newly awakened psychology will gradually accomplish what pure religious devotion might have done: throw out Paul, and let Jesus in!" (as quoted on p. 115 in The Gospel as a Spiritual Path)
• Thomas Jefferson in his editing of The Jefferson Bible, which he titled, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth followed the same logic of taking the Pauline/Christian wrappers off of Jesus.
• During the writing of the book then showed up the brilliant book of Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Vieira, Take Me To Truth, which offers an interesting insight in the ego's tendency of skipping steps in the process the Course refers to as the Development of Trust, and which provides a very interesting way of looking at Paul's development. (See their comments on "Bypass" on page 162 of their book.)

And all of the above are merely different ways of learning to tell apart the "raucus shrieking" of the ego (ACIM), from the still, small voice inside, which does offer us inspiration and guidance, the more we get the ego out of the way. Included in this process, is learning to tell the ways in which we can fool ourselves completely about just how spiritual we are. It is to the eternal merit of the Course that it finally puts us in touch with our own inner resistance, and gives us an understanding of why we don't want Jesus around, even though part of us knows that the only way we can be truly happy is in our relationship with him. The Course stresses our need to forgive Jesus for not being who we would like him to be, because that is our path to dropping our resistance to him. But until we know we have that resistance, there is no hope of overcoming it, while through forgiveness we can take the sting out of it, and ultimately let it go.

And so, if Ms. Hofmans introduced me first to "the Help" and then to Kaiser, and he gave me the "formal" introduction to the original teachings of Jesus, I subsequently followed that path and kept seeking until I found his voice in A Course in Miracles, and I ended up in turn being re-introduced by Gary Renard to that original voice, as it speaks to us from both ACIM and the Thomas gospel, but that time in the vernacular, leading me to write Closing the Circle. My earlier book about Kaiser's work, The Gospel as a Spiritual Path, really returns the favor, by affording the modern reader a glimpse into the work of and an introduction to this important teacher, who knew so well (as all real teachers do) his own unimportance, because truth can come through us, but it is not authored by us. Meanwhile he is one of the most important spiritual authors of the twentieth century in my book, on a par with (at least), Blavatsky, Gurdieff, Rudolf Steiner, Alice Bailey, et al. Unfortunately he has been nearly forgotten, even in his native Holland, a situation which I hope can yet be changed.

Gary Renard on New Realities TV

Just in case you had missed it, here is the link for Gary's interview on New Realities TV, on July 14, 2008.

On YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSO3SysWQus

Do note there are actually multiple segments. This was a great interview, enjoy! There are several other helpful clips there as well.

The Christ Myth

Arthur Drews has become mostly forgotten, but this particular book from 1910 continues to be reprinted steadily. And the importance of his work continues to be recognized in the school of Radikalkritik, which is primarily a German/Dutch phenomenon, though it has some offshoots in the USA also. See here: www.radikalkritik.de

While I don't find myself agreeing with Drews too much in detail, I find his overall thesis a helpful anti-dote to the never ending stream of literature about the so-called historical Jesus. His is one of several traditions in European letters which have looked at Jesus as symbol more than a historical person, which I find actually more helpful than thinking about the supposedly historical accounts, which only draw us into the play, rather than watching it, and watching what it's telling us. In eighteenth century France the idea of Jesus as a solar hero had already been seriously explored, something which would be expanded upon by the theologian of the Christian Community, by the nineteenth century theologian Dr. Hermann Beckh, and then developed further in Holland by Johan Willem Kaiser in the 20th. In entertaining this possibility the mind looks much more at the meaning of Jesus's life than at the factual circumstances, which can only  be helpful.

The book is also helpful in exploring the three phases of Jesus, the pre-Chrsitian, the Pauline and the Jesus of the Gospels, for it is really by pulling those traditions apart and becoming aware of them that we begin to see the way that interpretation shaped the traditions about Jesus, and here Drews' observations make us just all the more conscious of the evolutionary aspect of how the world has looked at Jesus, and how our perceptions of him have been molded by the tellers of the story. In the context of the Thomas gospel I find this particularly helpful because it really has that "Just the facts ma'am" quality, which leaves out any editorial, explanation, or interpretation. In other words, in the Thomas Gospel the mythmaking really has not yet begun.

For the rest you can reflect on this book on any number of levels, including the realization that in a profound sense it is true, entirely in the sense of the notions in the Course that all of duality of necessity is metaphor, metaphor for aspects of an experience which can only exist after we entertain the possibility of being seprate from God, the separation myth, which usually takes the form of a creation story, in which we are absolved from the blame for the mess we're in. For the rest then there are only two sorts of metaphors, those that have us wandering away further from home, and those that help us find the way home. The Jesus myth of course is of the latter variety. Interestingly enough the way this book is written allows for the possibility that the notion of the mythical character of the Jesus tradition is not automatically tantamount to debunking him, but rather understanding him on a different, more spiritual level.

What to me is most important about this book and others like it, is that they provide counterbalance to the overwhelming interest in the historical Jesus and his physical circumstances, which has dominated the literature since the middle of the 19th century. I guess it would not make for light reading in the eyes of most, but it's very instructive if you have this kind of mindset.

The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity

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

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

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

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

The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity