The "Historical Jesus" Fallacy Revisited

Recently, I blogged some pieces about the issues to do with the historical Jesus, pointing out why in essence the whole concept is a distraction.

The topic keeps coming back up, because with my interest in the Thomas Gospel, the whole question of why Jesus sounds so different in Thomas than in the later gospels keeps coming up, and the historical time line of how things happened at the time is the most practical way of explaining that, and sorting out Jesus's teachings from the theologies that were later promulgated in his name.

However, the real way of understanding it all is only internal, never mind how difficult that may seem at times. This is one reason why A Course In Miracles is so helpful, because it puts us in touch with the resistance we all have against Jesus.

For the careful reader it is very evident how "fresh" the sayings from the Thomas gospel sound, it is really like it was recorded by someone live, and then collected into a bundle, so it is almost as if you can hear the spoken word vicariously through the scribe, listening through him. This experience is similar to what people experience with A Course In Miracles, and even with some of the sayings in the New Testament tradition, the inner recognition results from having an experience that results from a sincere attempt to follow him, by practicing what it is we hear him say. Only in that attempt do we come to grips with the meaning of the words, and does the meaning of the teaching reveal itself. References to that are to be found throughout the literature. His teachings are thoroughly practical, and not at all meant as a topic for a thesis in theology, but for daily practice.

Once we begin to fathom the holographic nature of this perceptual universe of time and space, "the world," it is evident that Jesus is speaking to us from outside that world of separation, from a reality of wholeness, where truth is one, and one is truth, and no separation or differences exist. He is thus the personification of our own deep understanding that the Kingdom is actually our reality, and, as Jesus says repeatedly in the Thomas logia, the Kingdom is all around us, we just don't see it. Ultimately, the reason we don't see the Oneness, is because we have chosen at the level of the mind to take seriously the notion of a separate identity, and on the abstract level, it is that choice of the mind, where we place ourselves outside the all of spirit, which we are a part of, that we then reciprocally no longer perceive that all as oneness, but as a multitude of individuals and individual entities. One is a logical consequence of the other.

Therefore when we follow the accounts of Jesus, there is a temptation of trying to identify him as what he looked like and what he said or did, and which individual he was, so we can point him out, as Judas did, and we do not even fathom that this in itself is the betrayal, not of Jesus, but of ourselves. The Judas principle denies the living, spiritual reality of Jesus, and hands him over to "the authorities of the world," so that he ends up being crucified. Like Judas we do not comprehend that we are simply so drunk with the perceived "reality" of time and space, that we don't realize the consequences of our action, but we won't learn until we finally are able to stop choosing form over content, and let the spirit direct the form, instead of trying to force it into a mold which kills it. By setting him up as a person of history, we now relegate Jesus to being one person in particular, who we can then crucify, or idolize, or both, but at the very least we have then successfully killed off his living reality as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit (as A Course In Miracles calls him). At that point we have seemingly managed to pull him down to our level, instead of following his call to rise up to his level and follow him to the Kingdom, which is the reality of our oneness, which we cannot see as long as we look from the vantage point of individuality, with our physical eyes. The idea of his teaching is instead to come up to his level, and see the world with the spiritual vision of oneness, so that we see it like him. However, as long as we limit him to a historical person, we have then established him to be like us, as a specific individual, whom we call Jesus, and to make it really safe, he lived 2,000 years ago. And again, psychologically to put him in the past symbolizes nothing but repression. We have thus distanced ourselves from him, by imagining we live in a world in which he lived, and died, that long ago.

So the way to recognize him for what he is, including understanding the true and the false of the historical traditions about him, lies in practicing his teachings in our own lives, at which point we find ourselves moments of sudden understanding of some of his sayings, which might otherwise remain obscure. We see this in contemporary writers such as Eckhart Tolle and Jeff Foster, and we've seen it from many spiritual people (regardless of if they were sainted or not), who suddenly along their path experience a deepening of understanding his words, when experientially they come in touch with the same issues of spiritual development as Jesus spoke about. That level of understanding, which is a dynamic growth process of its own, is altogether different, and more solid than the form-based argumentations of philology, hermeneutics, and theology, which will invariably shut us off from that living reality of experiencing Jesus in the present.

Another tip-off about the problem is to realize just how many historical Jesuses there are. As many as there are students of him, for we all have different images and understandings of the past, which after all is not a reality per se, but just a way of speaking about our experience, and our own belief system of who and what we are. There is no better way than that to realize that none of them are true. The only thing about him that is true, is the essence, is what he represents. Historically it is the Acts of John which is the tipoff, for there we find the apostles discussing how differently they each experience Jesus.

The above is why I found myself recently saying to someone that the whole historical Jesus "thing" is some sort of a hoax. Jesus told us he would be with us whenever we call on him, but by limiting him to a personage of history, we safely shut the awareness of him out of our present awareness.

Amazing Talk about Spirituality, Ken Wilber and Fr. Thomas Keating

This is a very interesting segment, from what was obviously a larger dialog...

Between Scylla and Charybdis

A rose by any other name is still a rose... ?

Which will it be: Jesus, Jesus, or Jesus? Evidently, whoever Jesus is, he is not dependent on how we think of him, but nonetheless, confusion is rampant. People's associations with the name can be very powerful at times, and yet, he is unaffected by any of it. Having said that, it remains a helpful thing at times to realize the many ways people have looked at him, and all of which he is not. No different than the famous Buddhist saying that "What is known as the teachings of the Buddha, are not the teachings of the Buddha." Ultimately whether you follow Buddha, Krishna, or Jesus, the only thing that could possibly matter is your own relationship to them, and more precisely, the more you can let them teach you the meaning of their being and their teachings, rather than the interpretations of others. It really gets to be absurd to substitute these teachers with the interpretations of them by others, yet that is what "religions" have always done and are still doing.

Some bitter idols have been made of him who would be only brother to the world. Forgive him your illusions, and behold how dear a brother he would be to you. For he will set your mind at rest at last and carry it with you unto your God. (ACIM:C-5.5)

With early Christianity there were major differences from the start, most notably the "Jerusalem" church under Jesus's brother James, a.k.a. the Ebionites, which maintained a Jewish focus, and felt that Paul c.s. Romanized Jesus, and they were certainly right about that, but does that mean that they got Jesus right? Paul, and Peter c.s. made the most noise, and ended up establishing the very Roman tradition which for a while was the Church pure and simple, but then quickly split again in East and West, Greek and Roman, and that process has been repeated many times over until today. Pursah, the ascended master who appeared to Gary Renard, and who was the apostle Thomas in another life, represents yet another school, that of Thomas and Thaddeus, which ended up via Syria in India in the years after Jesus' death, and their central text was the Thomas Gospel. And of course there were numerous other schools, we can't even keep track of them, but very soon it was in the hundreds and even thousands.

All in all the Thomas group, and of course Mary Magdalen, left precious few historical traces, and seemed to have sailed between the Scylla and Charybdis of these dominant groups who were the major power blocks of early Christianity. So as always, it is the victors who write history, and this is why our perception of Christianity in the West is so biased towards the Pauline tradition. In Gary Renard's book Your Immortal Reality, Pursah points out that in order to understand the source of the movement, you would want to go back to a time before it splits into many different traditions. By that logic the Thomas Gospel is our best source, because it is the oldest, and least corrupted record of actual teachings of Jesus, along with that other sayings tradition, the Q document, of which we don't own a copy, but which has been reconstructed from quotes that are common to the texts we do have. Clearly Jesus was not a Christian, not only historically, because it was invented long after his time, in the modern sense that we attach to the term today, but also, his teachings are clearly very different than the religion(s) founded in his name. In fact everything points to the fact that he had no intention of founding any new religion. As I recently blogged here, under the title Being There, just one little theme alone shows the completely different thought of the original teachings versus Christianity, namely the very clear emphasis on the Kingdom as not something in the future, but something here and now, that is within us and around us, but which we do not see, unless we get an attitude adjustment - and for that Jesus offers some ideas. Therefore he is also not pro or con any religion, and not concerned with founding a new one, but merely a teacher of truth, a truth which finds its only validation in inner experience.

Thus the answer is not in making him out to be a Jew, although he was a Jew, that fact was not important to his teachings. Thus James and the Jerusalem school, although they are very reflective of the culture from which Jesus sprang, and were certainly very justified in their skepsis of Paul, but they do not do Jesus a service by restricting him to being a Jew. Still we can learn a lot of useful stuff from scholars like Robert Eisenman (James the Brother of Jesus), Hyam Maccoby (Mythmaker, Paul and the Invention of Christianity), and Barrie Wilson (How Jesus became a Christian). The mass of Pauline writings which became so dominant and constituted the New Testament, has filled entire libraries, but it's good to realize that essentially any book that does not reflect and appreciate the complete difference between the teaching of Jesus and Paul, is inevitably from the Pauline tradition, and beholden to justifying his views, a practice which started with the Gospel of Luke, and the book of Acts, whose purpose really was to prove Paul right and James wrong. So it is that for our own understanding of him, we need to navigate between all of these systems which claim to represent him, and seek our own relationship with him. The preface of A Course in Miracles expresses that very clearly, here:

The names of the collaborators in the recording of the Course do not appear on the cover because the Course can and should stand on its own. It is not intended to become the basis for another cult. Its only purpose is to provide a way in which some people will be able to find their own Internal Teacher. (ACIM, preface)

And this makes it very clear what needs to be done. Not a degree in theology, but starting a relationship with your own Internal Teacher, to which the Course may be a help, but it is not a substitute, nor is any particular writing. A book is not the truth, at best only a reflection of it, and some books may be more helpful finding it than others. The key thing is to let the teacher teach us, rather than us telling him what to say.

Reciprocity of Teaching and Learning

Parents often find out to their annoyance that kids do what you do, not what you say. They turn out to be a lot smarter than parents give them credit for, except most parents don't get it, for they think they are raising their kids, when it's really the other way around, and the kids are raising them, except it often results in learning failure if the parents think they already know everything. Or, properly seen, it's a two way process. It's one of the lies of our culture that we're grown-up at age so and so (varies by culture and time), and that we are ready to be parents just because we have kids. Perhaps we should consider that having kids is an accelerated learning opportunity, which most of us at best only realize long after families fall apart, kids hate their parents, and so on.

The same goes in teaching. Kids learn more from watching you learn than from watching you teach, and thus teaching by example remains the most powerful form of teaching, and of course in a classroom setting that example can be one of the students who isn't getting it, and who is asking all the stupid questions that everybody else also has, but does not dare to ask.

A Course in Miracles is all about teaching by learning. Throughout the book it becomes clear that the wealth of teaching that is there is designed to be practiced, not be the subject of speculation, and theological reflection. It is indeed a very practical course. The intellectual presentation merely serves to reassure us, and give us some hand holding, as we learn to let go of the thought system of the ego, and learn the thought system of the Holy Spirit. This structure of teaching= learning and vice versa is also found in the structure of the book, as almost a college curriculum, with a text, a workbook for students and a manual for teachers. The trick is we are both the student and the teacher, and our best teaching is when we are good students. Teaching classes on the Course has nothing to do with it, and if anyone calls themselves a teacher of the Course, my suggestion would be you run for the hills, or go play some billiards down the street instead.

In the Thomas material, this reciprocity of teacher and student, is the subject of Logion 108, where this reciprocal relationship with Jesus finds very graphical symbolic expression, showing us that by learning from him, we do become like him as a teacher, because in this learning by example we will experience that Jesus's experience becomes our own, which has nothing to do with copying him in form, as Christianity has too often taught. It is about learning from him in content. Also in the Course we find the same notion expressed when Jesus tells us that the only difference between him and us is in time, not in reality.

    "No man cometh unto the Father but by me" does not mean that I am in any way separate or different from you except in time, and time does not really exist. The statement is more meaningful in terms of a vertical rather than a horizontal axis. You stand below me and I stand below God. In the process of "rising up," I am higher because without me the distance between God and man would be too great for you to encompass. I bridge the distance as an elder brother to you on the one hand, and as a Son of God on the other. My devotion to my brothers has placed me in charge of the Sonship, which I render complete because I share it. This may appear to contradict the statement "I and my Father are one," but there are two parts to the statement in recognition that the Father is greater. (ACIM:T-1.II.4)

It Blows My Mind

Funnily enough, there are urban myths around, such as that we only use a small percentage of our brain, etc., which are really an interesting symbolic reminder of a reality we seem to have lost. What if we could use it all. We never stop to think how absurd it is to assume that meat could think. It's almost as absurd as thinking that computers could ever think. Absurd because both assumptions ignore the thinker who teaches dead matter to perform a certain way.

The image that is evoked by Logion 96, of the leaven that makes large loaves of bread, is really about the fact that the Kingdom represents something that exceeds our wildest imagination. In the Course we find this discussed in other ways, such as the difference between grandeur (of spirit, and our true nature), and grandiosity (of the ego - which is really the superiority complex covering over an inferiority complex). Our reality as immortal spirit is completely beyond what we can grasp within the ego mind, and hence there is always the emphasis in the Course on our relationship with our Internal Teacher, just like we find emphasis in the early Jesus literature on "following" him.

The life of the ego, is an existence of littleness, of scarcity, and of limitation. And the teachings of Jesus are nothing but an invitation to wake up from that dream of limitation, to our true reality as spirit, which is beyond our wildest imagination, and he invites us to invite him to lead us up to the level where he is.

In you is all of Heaven. Every leaf that falls is given life in you. Each bird that ever sang will sing again in you. And every flower that ever bloomed has saved its perfume and its loveliness for you. What aim can supersede the Will of God and of His Son, that Heaven be restored to him for whom it was created as his only home? Nothing before and nothing after it. No other place; no other state nor time. Nothing beyond nor nearer. Nothing else. In any form. This can you bring to all the world, and all the thoughts that entered it and were mistaken for a little while. How better could your own mistakes be brought to truth than by your willingness to bring the light of Heaven with you, as you walk beyond the world of darkness into light? (ACIM:T25.IV.5)

Making a Clean Break

That is the underlying theme of Logion 47, yet another "prequel" to the New Testament. The change of mind which Jesus advocates is a complete break with the past. The thought systems of the ego is utterly incompatible with the thought system of the Holy Spirit, which Jesus represents. The break has to be complete, for as long as you hang on to the ego even a little bit, you are hanging on to contradiction and to pain, and keeping conflict in your life.

This saying is just one of the many many ways in which the Jesus material that has been handed down to us is letting us know that his teaching is really, really different. His Kingdom is not of this world, give to God what is God's and to Caesar what is Caesar's, etc., and throughout the material of A Course in Miracles we find this principle clarified to us in great detail.

Here is where the metaphysics of the Course truly help in understanding our mistake, and understanding why it is impossible for us to exit from the mental knot which is the ego system, without appealing to something or someone who is not part of that system. These concepts become clearer every time you look at them, and appeal to us intuitively at a very deep level.

• One comes first. (Duh!) Here there is nothing but the consciousness of Heaven.
• We toy with the idea of being anything other than one, and stupidly we take this thought seriously, without realizing that oneness is ever so much still one, never mind if we take the idea very seriously, it remains nothing but a "tiny, mad idea." But if you take it seriously, it would be the first step of the separation. And we do take it very seriously...
• We get all impressed with our new found sense of self-importance, and forget to laugh about the whole thing, though we are nagged by the memory of Heaven (a.k.a. the Holy Spirit), which we cannot truly forget. So give him his own room, and tell him to stay there, so as not to spoil our game. This is the separation of the mind into Right mind and wrong mind.
• Now that we are feel free from that spoil-sport, we can totally run off with the ego, but we find ourselves feeling guilty, sensing vaguely that we did something wrong (sinned in the past), and are afraid of tomorrow, for we suspect God wants to get us back for running away from home (fear for the future). So now we cannot experience the present, but we use it to scheme to protect ourselves from that fearsome future, by defending ourselves from all the evils that are lurking in the world. This futile battle for self-preservation is what we think is our life, and we never admit the utter futility to ourselves, for try as we might it ends in death - the only certainty of the ego thought system. We're on borrowed time, until the Grim Reaper comes to collect the overdues.
• We now happily compound our error by extending the ego's run, and let ourselves once more be guided by its insane thought system, which inevitably recommends more of the same, namely to run away from the problem. At this stage it comes up with the idea that in this world of time and space we can have discrete individual bodies, where we will really be safe, ignoring the fact that it all reflects the same stinking thinking. This is the metaphysical equivalent of the Big Bang.

We find ourselves living a life in this world, and somehow smelling a rat. Somehow, the contradiction of Logion 47 makes sense, and we know something does not add up. With the growing discomfort we start looking for "another way," and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are just symbols of the part of our mind which still recalls all the way back to the Oneness of Heaven, and shows up in our lives as a Helper or Inner Teacher to fill in what the ego forgot, and so begins the way back home, on which we learn but to give up all the ways in which we've rationalized the ego's thought system. As we learn to navigate, and through forgivess touch on the miracle of Inner Peace, we also begin to notice more sharply how much the ego system is one of conflict, and how painful it is whenever we fall back on it. We need to learn this incompatibility fully, in order to be motivated to keep on making the other choice, until it finally becomes the default choice, in what A Course In Miracles calls "accepting the Atonement for ourselves," which is our only real job if we follow Jesus:

    Healing and Atonement are not related; they are identical. There is no order of difficulty in miracles because there are no degrees of Atonement. It is the one complete concept possible in this world, because it is the source of a wholly unified perception. Partial Atonement is a meaningless idea, just as special areas of hell in Heaven are inconceivable. Accept Atonement and you are healed. Atonement is the Word of God. Accept His Word and what remains to make sickness possible? Accept His Word and every miracle has been accomplished. To forgive is to heal. The teacher of God has taken accepting the Atonement for himself as his only function. What is there, then, he cannot heal? What miracle can be withheld from him? (ACIM:M-22.1)

Is that all there is?

I love that wonderful song, and most dearly in the rendering by Joan Morris and William Bolcom, from their Leiber & Stoller album (Other Songs by Leiber & Stoller, Nonesuch H-71346). I could not find this particular song, but you can just about imagine how they would perform it from this wonderful YouTube video.




There is always that haunting feeling that something is missing, and you can stash it for a while, but it won't go away. After many years of spiritual seeking, it all really only came together for me, in the way A Course in Miracles in explains it to me, namely that the choice for the separation, for individual awareness, on a spiritual level is the equivalent of giving up everything for nothing. We gave up the all, for nothing at all, and then spend the rest of our lives wondering what's missing. Well, duh! Only everything is missing. For the choice for individuality means the choice for a limited life, living on borrowed time, for a while, until we die. The Course variously describes the choice for the ego as the choice for death, for murder, for the crucifixion. Logion 11 sums it all up beautifully.

The dead are not alive. We who chose individual existence over the peace of heaven, find ourselves on a treadmill of constantly having to justify our individuality, and making it real by sleight of hand, even though any fool could see in advance that no matter what you do, it ends in death. To keep up the system implies a constant re-affirmation of death and crucifixion, which is beautifully captured in Wilhelm Reich's little book The Murder of Christ. Without going along with Reich's overall thesis, I still find this description remarkably powerful, because it lays bare the mechanism of constant justification which is needed to keep this individual awareness going, and it demands a constant validation of our choice against the awareness of the whole which we have denied in the process and which is our real life in the end, transcending all specific forms, and returning to our natural inheritance.

The living will not die. The other choice, is waking up from the dream, and returning to our real life, which as the Course puts it is only in Heaven. Thus only when we wake up from the dream will we know what our life is, namely the life of the spirit, and we will simply know our immortal reality. The misunderstanding is always that these bodies will become immortal. No what we are, spirit, is always immortal, and we just played a temporary role in these bodies, but they don't matter.