Michael Prescott's Blog

My pleroma

In our last adventure, we looked at the Gnostic myth of creation as presented in The Secret Book of John, one of the ancient documents found at Nag Hammadi. As a story of God's origins and the subsequent creation of the material world, the myth is interesting but perhaps not particularly persuasive.

There is, however, another way of looking at it, which may have more relevance to most of us than the cosmological interpretation. We can view the story from a psychological angle, or perhaps more accurately, from the angle of one's personal spiritual growth.

If we were to retell the story that way, it would go something like this:

in the beginning there is pure awareness, our state of mind as a newborn infant. There is as yet no self-awareness, no separate sense of self.

At a certain point, self-awareness develops. The young child is able to distinguish between himself and the world around him – between the experiencer and what he perceives.

Along with self-awareness, a host of mental faculties gradually comes into existence, creating new mental constructs and categories in the child's mind and holding the promise of potentially unlimited development.

At this point, however, self-awareness takes a detour, evolving into the ego. The ego can be seen as a misshapen and incomplete form of self-awareness, cut off from much of the higher wisdom of the mind, isolated and arrogant.

The ego comes to see itself as the ruling power – in fact, as the most important thing there is. In effect, the ego becomes a kind of tin god, requiring subservience and banishing any thoughts or feelings that jeopardize its preeminence.

While the ego holds sway, the person's outlook is narrow, crabbed, often envious and spiteful, or greedy and acquisitive, or vengeful and malicious. The ego creates a kind of personal hell for the person in its thrall.

To escape the tyranny of the ego, what's required is the knowledge of higher spiritual realities. In other words, gnosis.

Gnosis allows the person to cast off the ego and ascend to a higher plane of psychological development and spiritual understanding. This ascent entails a reawakening of the forgotten mental faculties eclipsed by the ego. When the full range of these faculties has been restored, the person has achieved his full potential and has been, so to speak, united with the mind of God.

The parallels are pretty clear, but are even clearer if we place them side-by-side in this handy chart (click for a clearer, uncropped version) :

This way of looking at the story may make it more meaningful to some of us. How the Gnostics thought of it is an open question. Perhaps some of them saw it purely as cosmology and took it literally; they were probably the ones who felt the need for exhaustive lists of demons who could be called out in exorcisms. Perhaps others saw it both ways, as a cosmology and as a guide to one's personal life. And perhaps a few saw it exclusively as a psychological-spiritual guide, with the cosmological elements presented purely as camouflage to disguise the deeper truth from those who were not fully initiated.

Jesus is made to say (in Matthew 13:10-13) some words that may reflect a Gnostic influence, or at least the influence of esoteric doctrines in general, which conceal their highest truths from most seekers:

To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.

Pleroma is where the heart is

Over the years, I've tried reading various examples of the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi, but usually without much success. The problem is that these fifteen-hundred-year-old codices, which were found buried in a large clay jar, are in poor condition, with many illegible or missing words. A typical translation might go something like this:

Then So[fia] came [down] from the Pleroma ((and)) enter[ed] ... (words missing) ... Upon which, ((she)) ascended, taking [with her] the ((divine?)) light [that] ... (two lines missing) ... from above. 

I made that up, but it gives you the idea. I've sometimes wondered why somebody doesn't try to produce a more reader-friendly translation accompanied by actually helpful notes.

Well, somebody did. The Secret Book of John: The Gnostic Gospel, translated and annotated by Stevan Davies, is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in reading these texts without undue mental strain. I'm not saying it's an easy read, but it is far more lucid than other translations of Gnostic documents I've seen, and the accompanying notes are enormously helpful.

The Secret Book of John, known technically as the Apocryphon of John, lays out many of the basic motifs of Gnosticism's complex mythology. The text, like many Gnostic works, is overcomplicated and frequently confusing. It has clearly been revised and amended many times, with marginal and interlinear notes incorporated in inconsistent ways. More than one tradition is preserved in the document, and these traditions sometimes contradict one another. The Gnostics had a tendency to indulge in elaborate cosmologies, which can confuse rather than elucidate their main points. Finally, part of the purpose of the text was to assist exorcists and healers in expelling demons from the body; accordingly, it provides long lists of the demons responsible for each individual body part, which make for extremely tedious reading.

Before proceeding, we may want to pause to consider the implications of that last detail. We like to think of the Gnostics as sophisticated thinkers, and in many respects they were. Still, it's worth remembering that these people (or at least some of them) believed that all human ills were attributable to demons, and that any given ailment could be cured by naming the appropriate demon. If a patient reported pain in the big toe of his left foot, it was critically important for the healer to call out the demon Phikna, who was responsible for the toes of the left foot, and not Miamai, who lorded over the toenails, or Boabel, whose jurisdiction covered the toes of the right foot. Naming the wrong demon was tantamount to medical malpractice.  

It was, in short, a very different world from our own, and we ought to be wary of accepting any of this ancient knowledge just because it is very old. Lots of ideas are very old, and also very wrong, and even outright silly.

Anyway, if we want to know just what the Gnostics believed about God and humanity, we can find it in The Secret Book of John, which seems to have taken pride of place among the Nag Hammadi books, being reproduced three times in three separate codices, each time as the first chapter. But to make it as clear as possible (admittedly, its inherent ambiguities mean that it can never be entirely clear), we need to strip away the complications to produce a more streamlined and accessible narrative.

My attempt to do so goes something like this:

In the beginning there was God, who was pure awareness. At some point God developed the capacity of self-awareness, which means that he (the masculine pronoun is used for convenience) was able to view himself as an object. In effect, he had split himself in two – God and the image of God. Each new mental faculty innovated by God created an additional split. Eventually a full range of mental faculties developed, each of which could be conceptualized as a separate being in its own right – not a material being, since we are dealing purely with the realm of thought and (arguably) thought-forms – but a mental operation that could be carried on with or without the cooperation of the rest of God's mind.

This complete range of God's mental capabilities is known as the pleroma, which means something like "the fullness of God's mind" or "God's mind in full." The pleroma is peopled (one might say) by a cast of characters corresponding to the various mental processes and functions of God's mind.

All was well until one of the mental faculties, Wisdom, decided to attain self-awareness for herself. (In Greek, the word for wisdom is Sophia, and so Wisdom is construed as feminine.) This was a mistake. Operating independently, without the rest of the pleroma to assist her, Wisdom was unable to create true self-awareness. Instead she gave birth to a misshapen, incomplete mental faculty, a kind of miscarriage. This abysmal creation was dubbed Yaldabaoth.

Ashamed of her error, Wisdom removed her unwanted child from the pleroma altogether, placing him in a lower sphere, cut off from God. Totally isolated, Yaldabaoth not unnaturally acquired the idea that he was the one and only God. He created a host of demons to serve him – such demons (archons) being immaterial thought-forms or objectified aspects of his own mentality – and arrogantly declared, "I am a jealous God and there is no God but me!" (As Davies points out, this is the Gnostics' subversive reworking of Exodus 20:3-5.)

Wisdom, repenting of her actions, confessed all to God. The pleroma, now acting together, took steps to undo the damage. God's mind-in-full generated a perfect thought-form of the first human being and displayed it to Yaldabaoth and his minions. Dazzled by this vision, Yaldabaoth was moved to re-create the human thought-form in his own sphere. But he could bring it to life only by breathing some (or all?) of his divine power (inherited from his mother Wisdom, who inherited it from God) into the human form he had made. Next, the pleroma bestowed insight on this newly animated human thought-form (by now named Adam), reminding him of his divine origins and encouraging him to ascend to the pleroma where he belonged. By ascending, Adam would take God's divine spark of power with him, leaving Yaldabaoth and his demons powerless, which was the pleroma's plan all along.

The plan, however, hit a snag. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Yaldabaoth began to fear that his own creation, potentially more powerful than himself, would turn against him and destroy him. He realized that if Adam abandoned him, the divine light would be gone and Yaldabaoth's sphere would be left in darkness.

To keep Adam from escaping, Yaldabaoth saw to it that he forgot his divine origins altogether. Moreover, Yaldabaoth and his demons encased the human thought-form in matter, concealing the divine spark under layers of physicality.

This is the first appearance of matter in our story. Throughout all the previous action, we have been dealing only with mental faculties and thought-forms. Now, at last, there is a material being occupying a material world.

The purpose of matter, then, is to imprison the divine spark and prevent it from rising out of the lower realm ruled by Yaldabaoth and into the pleroma, where it can attain its proper destiny as part of God's mind-in-full. Humans dimly sense their divine origin and destiny, but have forgotten it and cannot find the spark of God buried in the "tomb" of the material body.

What has happened since that day is essentially a struggle between Yaldabaoth and his demons on the one hand, seeking to keep human beings forgetful and trapped, and the pleroma of God seeking to awaken us to the true knowledge – gnosis – of our origins and set the stage for our ascent to divine status.

As I said, the full document is more complicated. Among other things, it retells various stories in Genesis, such as the temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the garden of Eden, putting a very different spin on them. For instance, the Tree of Life in the garden is, in the Gnostic version, more like a tree of death intended to keep humanity tethered to the earth. Davies translates this poetic description of the tree:

Its root is bitter
Its branches are dead.
  Its shadow is hatred
  Its leaves are deception
The nectar of wickedness is in its blossoms.
  Its fruit is death
  Its seed is desire
It flowers in the darkness
  Those who eat from it are denizens of Hades
  Darkness is their resting place.

As we've seen, the God worshiped throughout the Hebrew Bible is recast by Gnostics as the villain of the piece, a false god, an ignorant and malicious god, who wants to keep humanity in subjection, while the true God occupies an altogether different and infinitely more exalted sphere.

Whatever else we can say about it, the Gnostic vision offers a creative solution to the problem of evil in the world. Instead of the convoluted arguments offered by orthodox theologians to explain how an omnipotent and beneficent God can permit so much wickedness and suffering, the Gnostics simply declare that we've been worshiping the wrong god all along, and that the wickedness and suffering are features of this false god's ignorance and viciousness. Naturally, this point of view did not endear them to the early Christian "heresy-hunters," who attacked them with relish and who, after attaining political power, largely exterminated them.

Lost in the bardo

Let’s consider a series of items, and then look at where they may take us. 

 

Item: During a near-death experience, a man found himself being tormented by demons. Terrified, he reached back into his childhood to the only faith he had ever been taught and prayed to Jesus for salvation. Instantly he found himself lifted out of the experience into a higher plane.

 

Item: A deeply religious Christian, undergoing a near-death experience, found himself in a stereotypical Christian heaven, complete with "pearlescent gates," streets of gold, and choirs of angels. He came back convinced that he had been to heaven, though he remained skeptical of other NDEs that encompassed different, nonbiblical experiences. 

 

Item: A survey of Hindus in India who underwent NDEs found that many of them reported being taken to the afterlife by angelic messengers known as yamdoots, whose role is to escort the deceased to the next life. In many Hindu NDEs, the experiencer's death was attributable to a bureaucratic error, which was promptly corrected by returning them to life.

 

Item: Spiritualist literature abounds in descriptions of Summerland, a paradisal environment enjoyed by most people after death, which bears a striking resemblance to earthly life. Gardens, cottages, and other homely delights are recounted in detail. People are sometimes said to engage in sex, create artworks, plant flowers, or hold regular jobs.

 

Item: Accounts of postmortem existence often feature puzzling omissions and elements of vagueness that cannot be resolved even after repeated follow-up questions. Exactly how the spirits spend their time, whether there are alterations of day and night, whether people need to sleep, and other details either vary unpredictably or are never satisfactorily addressed.

 

Item: Oliver Lodge's book Raymond recounts purportedly postmortem communications with his son. Among other details, Raymond says that some people in the afterlife smoke cigars and drink liquor. Lodge was ridiculed for believing such far-fetched claims. And yet his book contains much veridical material produced by mediums – statements they had no way of knowing, which were later verified, and at least one startlingly accurate prediction.

 

Item: In some channeled literature and séances, communicators claim that Shakespeare and other great poets are continuing to write. Yet no convincing snippet of original Shakespearean poetry ever comes through. On the rare occasions when original poetry is proffered, it is no better than doggerel.

 

Item: Communicators disagree with each other on such fundamental questions as whether or not reincarnation is real, and whether or not there is a God. 

 

Item: In The Road to Immortality and Beyond Human Personality, the alleged spirit of F.W.H. Myers, as transcribed by Geraldine Cummins, warns that Summerland is a plane of illusion which he compares to the land of the Lotus Eaters in Greek mythology. The Lotus Eaters kept themselves perpetually intoxicated and existed in a hallucinatory state. Myers insists that however attractive Summerland may be to its inhabitants, it is not ultimately real, and when an individual spirit recognizes this fact, he will immediately be elevated to a higher plane.

 

Item: Longtime OBE researcher Robert Monroe reported bizarre experiences on other planes of existence that often had an illogical dreamlike or nightmarish quality.Still, his experiences are hard to dismiss as nothing more than dreams, because of their occasional veridical content. 

 

Item: So-called alien abductions have much in common with out-of-body experiences. In both cases, the experiencer typically reports being drowsy or asleep, then feeling his body start to vibrate before he rises horizontally from bed and floats through the air, often passing through a wall or window. Other than the science-fiction aspects (little green men, flying saucers, lab experiments), the only significant difference between abductions and OBEs is that the OBEs are understood to be nonphysical; the person looks down and sees his physical body lying prostrate and temporarily abandoned. By contrast, abduction experiences are assumed to be physical, probably because the person is simply unfamiliar with being out of the body.

 

Item: Hypnotic regression to an alleged between-lives experience, in which the patient remembers an intermediate experience after one earthly incarnation and prior to the next, typically discloses an afterlife environment markedly different from that described in NDEs and mediumship. In between-lives accounts, the spirits typically do not take human form but exist as blobs of light in an abstract landscape. Unlike the residents of Summerland, they remember all their past lives and the other members of their soul group. And they participate in planning their next incarnation, during which they will necessarily sublimate their higher consciousness and all knowledge of their life-plan.

 

Item: Sometime between the 8th and 14th centuries, Tibetan monks authored a document known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It delineates various stages of postmortem existence, stages known as bardos. As is often the case with religious writings, the book is highly formalized, with successive stages neatly ordered in groups of seven and said to last for a specific number of days. Leaving aside these elaborations, the essence of the narrative is that dying persons experience “luminosity" or "the clear light of being." If they recognize this light as their own higher self, they will merge with it and avoid subsequent incarnations. Most people, insufficiently spiritually advanced to do this, proceed to a series of visions, both positive and negative, which are generated by their own minds but perceived as objectively real. They find themselves fully immersed in these thought-forms, which reflect their deepest expectations, fears, and hopes, all the while cut off from the higher self. If plagued by frightening images, they are advised to appeal to a personal deity in order to rid themselves of troubling thoughts. At a late stage in the process, they are brought before the Lord of Death and subjected to judgment by looking into the mirror of karma. As before, they are advised to realize that the scene is nothing more than a mental projection; most people, however, cannot manage it. Eventually they are shuttled back to earth in a new incarnation, still caught in the wheel of rebirth. 

 

Okay. Now let's assume, for the sake of argument, that all of the above items are factually correct as far as they go. Can they be reconciled? I think so ... and it's not really even that hard.

 

Upon death, a person sees "the clear light,” which near-death experiencers know as "the being of light," sometimes perceived as literally the light at the end of a tunnel. As some near-death researchers, notably Kenneth Ring, have speculated, this being of light is, in reality, one's higher self. Most people, however, will misinterpret it as God, i.e. something outside of and distinct from themselves, a basic error which prevents them from uniting with the light. Then, just as the Tibetan Book of the Dead suggests, they move into a realm of illusions produced by their subconscious minds. People with a background in Christianity or Hinduism will see environments consistent with Christian or Hindu imagery. People who are subconsciously troubled may find themselves in a hellish environment, which they can escape by focusing on a personal deity - just as one NDEr escaped from the "demons" tormenting him by appealing to Jesus. 

 

Most people in our secular age find themselves immersed in a virtual-reality environment similar to the earthly world they have left – an environment conjured up by the collective unconscious of many like-minded souls. This is what spiritualists call Summerland, the Lotus Flower paradise discussed by Myers. As a plane of illusion, Summerland can incorporate any ideas in the inventory of the subconscious, including cigars, whiskey, sex, gardening, meeting William Shakespeare, and whatever else may seem pleasurable or interesting. But since Summerland residents are not actually meeting William Shakespeare, they are unable to produce any satisfactory examples of his new work. And because they are Lotus Eaters, they will be hard-pressed to explain exactly how they spend their time or even what time is. They are in a hallucinatory state which they mistake for a higher reality.

 

The "life review" common to many NDEs and some channeled accounts, and described in Buddist terms as peering into the mirror of karma, is another illusory, self-generated experience - which may account for the fact that a person typically sees what he needs to see and feels that he is being judged only by himself. 

 

At this stage of consciousness, the individual is not aware of his higher self, his soulmates, or his previous and upcoming incarnations. He may or may not believe in reincarnation or in God. His knowledge is partial and conjectural. He still sees as through a glass darkly. The higher self, temporarily cut off from the ego-persona, enjoys a different experience, as remembered by hypnotically regressed patients who report between-lives memories.

 

Even without having a near-death experience, people can encounter other planes of existence generated by their own thoughts and possessing a kind of quasi-reality. This is the case with many out-of-body experiences, and it accounts for their dreamlike qualities. It is also the case with so-called alien abductions - nonphysical experiences generated (presumably) by imagery gleaned from popular science fiction. In previous eras, the same types of "abductions" were interpreted as the work of demons, angels, faerie folk;- the popular mythology of the time.

 

Skeptics of near-death experiences, mediumship, and channeled literature are right to point out the discrepancies, illogicalities, lacunae, and cultural biases that crop up in these cases. But they are wrong in assuming that the cases can thereby be explained away in materialistic terms. The best accounts contain too much veridical material. The actual explanation is that the experiences are real but hallucinatory - actual adventures in nonphysical realms, but adventures realized in terms of thought-forms and cultural constructs dictated by the experiencer's own mind. 

 

These sojourns in what the Tibetans call the chonyid bardo and sidpa bardo take place below the evolutionary level of the higher self, on a lower plane where postmortem existence is largely dictated by the biases, assumptions, and limitations of the subconscious mind. Such existence is a virtual-reality simulation, real enough to be fully immersive and widely shared, but not real enough to withstand the direct apprehension that yields liberation. Most NDErs who report visiting the afterlife remember this kind of experience. Most mediumistic communicators exist at this level also. Communications from higher-level entities are rarer and more difficult to evaluate or verify, since they typically lack evidential content.

 

This way of looking at things may help bring some order to the disparate collection of case histories reported as NDEs, mediumship, OBES, hypnotic regressions, and transcendental experiences, which have many commonalities but also many discrepancies. 

Cutting remarks

As a follow-up to my last post, I thought I'd take a look at one of the authentic letters of Paul, the one he sent to the Galatians. Unlike the Gospels and Acts, which were written decades after the events described, Paul's letters were written in the heat of the moment and give a more realistic sense of what was happening "on the ground."

What's clear, above all, from this and other letters is that Paul's missionary activities proceeded in an atmosphere of intense personal controversy, and that his opponents were emissaries of the Jerusalem church – representatives of the core group of apostles who actually knew Jesus in the flesh and had a very different idea of Jesus' teaching than did Paul. Since their authority could hardly be questioned, Paul was naturally put on the defensive and had to fight a constant rearguard battle to prevent his own converts from being swayed to the "Jewish Christian" version of the faith.

In Galatians, after a few boilerplate introductory remarks, he immediately jumps into the fray. (All quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. My analysis is largely dependent on S.G.F. Brandon's The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church., pp 136—139.)

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel – not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed! (1:6,7)

Pretty strong stuff right out of the gate. He is saying that his opponents – who, as it will become clear, represent the Jerusalem apostles – should be placed under a curse. Clearly he has learned that his converts in Galatia, who previously were faithful to his own idiosyncratic interpretation of Christianity, are now changing their minds and aligning themselves with the Jerusalem party. Since he is not in Galatia, he can defend himself only with a strongly worded letter. Very strongly worded, as we'll see.

Knowing that his standing as an apostle is inherently insecure, since he never actually knew Jesus, he takes the bull by the horns and boldly proclaims that what appears to be a defect in his position is actually an asset.

The gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ ... But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me [or "in me"], so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus. (1:11 – 17)

In other words, he had no need of human contact with Jesus or those who'd known him, because he had direct supernatural contact with the risen Christ. In this way he tries to put himself on an at least equal (if not superior) footing with his opponents.

He goes on to say that after three years he finally went to Jerusalem to visit Peter for just two weeks but saw no one else except James — that is, Jesus' brother, who had assumed control of the movement after Jesus' death. (As Brandon points out, the fact that leadership of the early Jewish Christian movement was handled in dynastic fashion is yet another indication that Jesus was regarded as king in a political sense. After James was martyred, leadership passed to yet another relative, a cousin named Simon.)

Fourteen years later, Paul says, he went to Jerusalem again, apparently summoned there to answer for his unorthodox teachings. Though he does his best to whitewash his account and put the outcome in a favorable light, it is clear that the encounter was acrimonious in the extreme. His defensiveness and excitement are raised to a fever pitch, to the point that he becomes incoherent, leaving his thoughts unfinished and fragmented.

But because of false believers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might enslave us – we did not submit to them even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might always remain with you. And from those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders (what they actually were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality) – those leaders contributed nothing to me. (2:4-6)

Note also his defensiveness in downplaying the status of the leaders of the Jerusalem church, insisting that their leadership position was a matter of indifference to him and to God. Clearly, however, this was not the case; after all, he had meekly consented to travel to Jerusalem and defend himself before James and the others, thus implicitly acknowledging their authority.

In any event, he claims that they worked out an amicable agreement, but this dubious assertion is immediately undercut by the next event in his timeline:

But when Cephas [= Peter] it came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. (2:11 – 12)

If we unpack this, we can see that whatever arrangement Paul arrived at with the Jerusalem church didn't last long. Paul and Peter were immediately at odds; James had sent word that Paul's policy of open admission of Gentiles was unacceptable; and even Barnabas – Paul's faithful companion in missionary work – ended up siding with "the circumcision faction," as Paul calls it. Of course, the issues involved ranged beyond circumcision. The disagreement was over whether or not one had to be an observant Jew in order to follow Jesus. Paul insisted that simple faith in Jesus was enough, and there was no need to be circumcised or to obey Jewish rituals, observe Jewish holidays, and follow the Law as laid down in Deuteronomy. The Jerusalem church, on the other hand, saw their movement as a subset of Judaism and, as such, required full commitment to Jewish practices, including circumcision, observance of rituals and holidays, and obedience to the Mosaic Law.

After some paragraphs arguing in favor of justification by faith, as opposed to following the Law, Paul returns to the sense of personal betrayal he feels from his own converts.

You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? ... Are you so foolish? Having started with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? Do you experience so much for nothing? ... For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse. (3:1-10)

Since Jews "rely on the works of the law," evidently they are "under a curse." Remember that he is talking, ultimately, about James and Peter and the other Jerusalem apostles.

Paul resumes making various not entirely lucid arguments against the Law, but quickly comes back to his converts' backsliding: 

Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods. Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits? How can you want to be enslaved to them again? You are observing special days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid that my work for you may have been wasted. (4:8 – 11)

Evidently Paul believes that pagans are enslaved by "beggarly elemental spirits," presumably demonic beings masquerading as the pantheon of polytheistic deities. There may also be an element of Gnosticism here, since the Gnostics held that the world was in the grip of low-level supernatural forces called the archons (a term Paul himself uses elsewhere, though in an ambiguous sense). Rather shockingly, he equates pagan belief to Jewish belief, saying that if the converts follow Jewish practices by "observing special days" and obeying the Law, they will again be enslaved by demons. No wonder he says that the emissaries from the Jerusalem church should be cursed – in his view, they are tempting the souls he has saved into an unholy communion with devils. The depth and intensity of the conflict splitting the early Christian movement is obvious.

Nor does he grant the Jewish Christian apostles even the dignity of a benevolent motive. He claims they are driven by petty self-interest:

They make much of you, but for no good purpose; they want to exclude you, so that you may make much of them. (4:16)

And he suggests that they are cowards fearful of persecution:

It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh to try to compel you to be circumcised – only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. (6:12)

The idea here is that the Jerusalem faction wishes to avoid conflict with other Jews by downplaying the crucifixion (which was a "stumbling block" to Jewish acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah) and by requiring all converts to be circumcised, thus negating any criticism that they are selling out to the Gentiles.

Paul's opinion, in short, is that the emissaries of the Jerusalem church – and no doubt the apostles in Jerusalem themselves – are seeking only to build themselves up, protect themselves from the criticism of their fellow Jews, and play it safe. They are phonies and cowards, he thinks. Worse still, they are demonic tempters who are accursed, and who compromise the souls that Paul has saved, leading them to perdition. 

These are the people who actually walked and talked with Jesus, including Jesus' own brother. The fact that Paul could dismiss them in such harshly derogatory terms shows how fully he had divorced himself from the roots of the Christian movement in Judea. But we aren't done yet. 

After still more angry arguments against the Law, Paul reaches the climax of his sputtering rage.

Listen! I, Paul, am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you. Once again I testify to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obliged to obey the entire law. You who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from Christ; you have fallen away from grace ... Whoever it is that is confusing you will pay the penalty.… I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves! (5:2 – 12)

Yes, you read that right. Paul, who would later be canonized as a saint, actually suggests that the emissaries from Jerusalem ought to "castrate themselves." The sense of his remark is something like this: if those damned Jews are so enamored of circumcision, why don't they just chop off their penises entirely?

If this is what he wrote in a letter, we can only imagine how he must have carried on in face-to-face encounters with his enemies. I wonder how many Sunday school teachers have informed their students that St. Paul once told Peter and James to cut off their genitals.

In a last rhetorical flourish, Paul equates the Jerusalem faction to those who would scorn God himself:

Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. (6:7)

Other authentic letters of Paul recapitulate the attitudes seen here.  In 2 Corinthians 11:13 – 15, he fulminates against those he has identified sarcastically as "super-apostles," saying,

For such boasters are false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder! Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is not strange if his ministers also disguise themselves as ministers of righteousness. Their end will match their deeds.

In other words, his enemies, the Jerusalem party of Peter and James, are Satan's minions.

There can be no doubt that the early history of the Christian church was marked by savage infighting and vicious schisms, as is true of many religious movements. The version of Christianity that has come down to us was written by the winners in these battles – and the winners were decidedly not "the circumcision faction," as evidenced by the fact that circumcision (along with other distinctively Jewish practices) is not required of Christians today.

Jesus as man and myth

Lately I’ve been reading books of New Testament scholarship, something I haven’t done in quite a while. I plowed through two books by renegade scholar Hyam Maccoby, Jesus the Pharisee and The Mythmaker. I also read S.G.F. Brandon’s Jesus and the Zealots and am halfway through his Fall of Jerusalem. Since both of these writers are out of the mainstream, I tried to obtain some balance by reading Jesus the Jew, by Geza Vermes.

I find this whole subject very interesting, and I’ve come to certain tentative conclusions about it. But before I go on, I should point out that Jesus, as a historical figure, is someone who can be interpreted in almost any imaginable way. People tend to see in Jesus what they want to see. Marxists see him as a proto-Marxist, ecologists see him as a proto-ecologist, feminists see him as a proto-feminist, and college professors see him as a hip dude who enjoyed rapping with his disciples in the best tradition of student-friendly academics. It’s unlikely that any of these interpretations is correct.

To get closer to the historical reality, we need to look at the context in which Jesus operated. Judea in his day was under enemy occupation. Haunted by memories of past greatness as an independent theocratic kingdom, Judea had been crushed under the Roman boot. The Romans appointed the high priests who carried out the Temple sacrifices in Jerusalem, the central cultic practice of Judaism at the time. The Romans imposed high taxes collected by the hated “publicans,” who were free to use any form of extortion and violence to wring as much money as possible from their victims. The fact that Rome was a pagan state with a deified emperor only heightened Jewish resentment. The Jews had always regarded themselves as the special people of the one and only God, Yahweh; to be subordinated to a ruthless imperial power that celebrated a mere mortal as a deity and required taxes in tribute to him was intolerable.

As a result, revolutionary movements thrived throughout the first century A.D., leading up to the disastrous revolt of AD 66 – 70, when the population of Judea tried to overthrow their Roman masters, only to be decisively defeated. In the aftermath, the Jerusalem Temple was profaned and destroyed, thousands of Jews were crucified, and many more were forcibly deported, scattered throughout the Empire so that they could no longer band together and cause trouble. Now that Temple sacrifice was no longer possible, the religion itself had to be reinvented; it became a movement based on intensive study of the Torah under the guidance of learned rabbis, in which animal sacrifice no longer played a role.

Prior to all this, numerous would-be messiahs sprang up in Judea, promising deliverance from the hated Romans. The word “messiah” is Hebrew for “anointed,” and because the anointment was the key feature of the coronation of Jewish kings, the term became synonymous with “king.” Naturally, anyone who declared himself the Messiah – i.e., the King of the Jews – was setting himself in direct opposition to Caesar, and was therefore seen by the Romans as guilty of sedition. Some of these self-proclaimed messiahs tried to organize military action against the Romans, while others depended on a divine miracle that they expected momentarily. Whatever the specifics of their program, they were invariably hunted down by Roman authorities, to be killed or (rarely) driven into exile.

Besides declaring himself the rightful King of the Jewish people, a Messiah might also demonstrate his bona fides through prophecy and miracles. Though the Messiah was understood to be a mortal man, he was seen as having been specially appointed by God with a divine mission, so it was not surprising that he might possess unusual powers of healing, exorcism, and prophecy. The Jewish historian Josephus, a turncoat who ended up as a client of the Roman emperor Vespasian, despised these rebels as “wonder-workers” – charlatans, magicians – who got ordinary people all worked up over nothing and helped bring about Judea’s humiliating defeat in A.D. 70.

These would-be messiahs did not operate in a vacuum, of course. Rumblings of discontent were increasingly widespread throughout Judea, especially – it would seem – in Galilee, where they took the form of clandestine popular resistance. The Zealots, whom Josephus denigrated as “bandits,” were the best known revolutionary party. Fiercely nationalistic, the Zealots recruited followers who aimed at the overthrow of Rome, while harassing and murdering Jews who were seen as collaborationists with the regime. In some cases, Zealots committed public assassinations at crowded festivals, using small daggers concealed in their clothing. For this reason, the Romans came to know them as sicarii, or “dagger-men.”

In short, the situation in Judea was a hotbed of unrest that periodically flared up into open rebellion, only to be ruthlessly stamped out by Roman troops.

Where does Jesus fit into this picture? Both Maccoby and Brandon argue that he probably matched the general pattern of other messianic pretenders of the period. Most likely, he gained popularity by assuring people that the end of Roman rule was at hand, that a new day was soon to dawn, and that Israel would be restored to its former glory, with the hereditary Throne of David once again occupied by one of God’s chosen kings. His immediate inspiration appears to have been John the Baptizer, who preached the message that the Kingdom of God was at hand and that the Jewish people should repent – that is, should purify themselves so as to be worthy of God’s favor. Though the expression “Kingdom of God” has been much debated, it probably referred to an earthly kingdom, a theocracy along the lines of the semi-legendary kingdom of David and Solomon. The concern of John – and almost certainly of Jesus also – was not individual salvation in an afterlife, but the salvation of the holy Davidic kingdom on earth. John apparently did not claim to be the Messiah himself, but only the prophet announcing the imminent appearance of the Messiah. It is possible that Jesus’ ministry began the same way, but that at some later point he became convinced that he actually was the Messiah. Or perhaps he never did believe this, and the role of Messiah was assigned to him only by his more ardent followers. (A certain reluctance on the part of Jesus to accept Messiah-hood is indicated by a story of how the people wished to crown him King but he refused, and also by his repeated requests for secrecy on the part of his inner circle.)

After some time preaching in Galilee (a center of revolutionary activity, where anti-Roman agitators could count on local support), Jesus and his core disciples risked entering the more dangerous territory of Jerusalem, where the Romans, in conjunction with their collaborators among the Jewish priesthood, maintained much firmer control. Maccoby believes they arrived in the autumn for the Feast of Tabernacles, while Brandon is content to accept the biblical version that they arrived in the spring, just prior to the Passover. In any event, Jerusalem was apparently meant to be the scene of Jesus’ ultimate triumph. Here, in the heart of Judea, where stood the Temple itself, Jesus hoped to help bring about the miraculous overthrow of the Romans and the restoration of the Davidic kingdom.

His attack on the money-changers in the Temple courtyard appears to have been a key step in his campaign to purify the Temple and set the stage for divine intervention. Brandon argues convincingly that Jesus did far more than simply overturn a few tables, an action that would have been quickly stopped by the Temple police; instead, Jesus probably entered the Temple with a large group of followers and incited a melee that the police were unable to control. He may have intended to actually seize control of the Temple and use it as his base of operations. Seizure of the Temple would have greatly magnified his status and electrified the population of Jerusalem, who would remember that the successful revolt of the Maccabees against the Seleucid Empire climaxed with the rededication of the Temple. In any event, the dramatic effort apparently failed, and Jesus and his supporters were driven out of the Temple and into the hills, where they hid from the authorities. By this point, both the Temple priesthood and the Roman governor would have been committed to the arrest and execution of Jesus and his inner circle.

Maccoby and Brandon differ on exactly what happened next. Maccoby believes that Jesus intended to bring about divine intervention in a night of intensive prayer on the Mount of Olives outside Jerusalem, in fulfillment of biblical prophecy. This is Maccoby’s interpretation of the famous Agony of Gethsemane account in the Gospels, where Jesus is pictured as praying so intensely that sweat drips from his forehead like blood. Brandon thinks that Jesus and his followers were simply hiding and trying to regroup, perhaps in preparation for leaving the area altogether and retreating into the desert. In any case, they were discovered by Roman troops. The Gospel accounts indicate, in a muted fashion, that the apostles attempted to put up resistance. How much of a struggle ensued is impossible to say, but, in the end, Jesus was arrested, while apparently most or all of his close followers managed to escape.

Neither Maccoby nor Brandon gives any credence to the famous story of Jesus’ trial before Pilate. It was certainly not the custom of Roman governors to conduct public trials; such a practice would have only invited mob violence. Nor was it their practice to give the crowd an opportunity to vote on the release of a particular prisoner during a religious festival. Nor is there any reason to believe that Pilate ever had the least interest in Jesus’ psychology, theology, or even his basic guilt or innocence. By all other accounts, Pilate was an extremely ruthless procurator with little or no regard for the lives of his Jewish subjects. Most likely, he condemned Jesus to death without so much as a hearing. Jesus was just one more nuisance the governor had to deal with in his busy schedule, and the execution of yet another rebellious Jew would not have cost him a moment’s thought.

One detail of the Pilate story that may well be correct, however, is that the titulus (inscription) on Jesus’ cross read “King of the Jews.” This was almost certainly the crime of which he was convicted and for which he was executed. Again, styling oneself as king was tantamount to declaring direct opposition to Caesar, and was therefore a capital offense.

What we get from all this is a rather different picture of Jesus than the one promoted in the Gospels, which were written decades after the events and were aimed at a predominantly Gentile (non-Jewish) audience. The Gospels take great pains to downplay any political activity on Jesus’ part and to exculpate the Romans as much as possible for his execution, even making Pilate a conflicted and sympathetic figure. Instead they lay all the blame on the Jews, going so far as to have the Jewish crowd improbably assembled for Jesus’ public trial declare that they willingly take his blood on themselves and their children – a passage that has been used ever since to justify anti-Semitic pogroms. The polemical approach taken by the Gospels reflects their Sitz im Leben (situation in life), i.e., their historical context. By the time they were written, the Christian church had broken with the Jewish community, and relations between Christians and Jews were extremely hostile. Christianity had become an almost exclusively Gentile movement, and it would have been impolitic to lay any emphasis on the role of Rome in crucifying the Savior of mankind. It would have been equally impolitic to present Jesus as a Jewish revolutionary seeking to overthrow the Roman empire, when the Christians were eager to discourage the political persecution of their movement.

The question naturally arises, though, that if Jesus’ historical career was that of a would-be Messiah with mixed political and religious motives, who came up against the Roman state and was executed for sedition, then how did he come to be seen as the hero of a predominantly Gentile movement, celebrated as an apolitical pacifist whose purposes were far larger than the restoration of the kingdom of David?

Both Maccoby and Brandon agree that two key historical developments were responsible. First, there was the destruction of the Temple and the humiliating defeat of the Jewish people in A.D. 70, which seems to put an end to the Jerusalem church and what might be called the “Jewish Christian wing” of the movement. Second, there was the teaching of St. Paul.

Paul apparently began as a devout Jew, raised in a Hellenistic environment (reportedly the city of Tarsus), but while near Damascus, he experienced a mystical revelation in which the figure of Jesus appeared to him. This revelation changed his life and ultimately changed the entire direction of Christianity. Paul became convinced that he had been appointed to carry the message of Jesus – as he understood it through direct revelation – to the Gentiles. In his letters, which were written decades before the Gospels and represent the earliest extant Christian documents, he boasts that his knowledge did not come from knowing Jesus in the flesh or from talking with people who had known him, but rather from mystical communion with the resurrected Christ. Although Paul made efforts to tailor his brand of Christianity to Jewish Christian traditions when possible, his overall approach represented a radical departure. In his mind, Jesus was not the Messiah in the traditional Jewish sense – a mortal man appointed to restore the Israelite kingdom – but the incarnation of God himself, an aspect of God that preexisted his earthly life and may have preexisted the universe as such. The purpose of this God-man was to ensure the salvation of individual souls, much in the way that the Hellenistic mystery religions apparently promised personal immortality to those who underwent their initiation ceremony. (I say “apparently” because the details of the mystery religions’ ceremonies were kept secret and can only be inferred. But it seems likely from occasional remarks that have been preserved, for instance in the writings of Plutarch and Apuleius, that personal immortality was the focus of these rites.)

Paul, with his combined background of Jewish and Hellenistic influences and his unique personal genius, created a new and powerful religious synthesis. His work did not go unnoticed by the Jerusalem church. Though the Book of Acts, written decades later, does its best to whitewash any conflict between Paul and the core group of apostles in Jerusalem, who were led by Jesus’ own brother James, the letters written by Paul at the time make it clear that the two sides were often at odds. Paul was called to Jerusalem more than once to justify his unorthodox teaching; he often found rival apostles – presumably of the Jewish Christian type – preaching against his ideas and trying to win over his converts; and he was ultimately arrested and sent to Rome, where he may have met his death, as a result of a Jewish Christian plot hatched in Jerusalem. It seems clear, then, that Paul’s brand of Christianity met with intense resistance from the people who had actually known Jesus in real life and who were not impressed by Paul’s claims to have communed with Jesus beyond the grave. In one of his letters, Paul goes out of his way to say that he is not insane, presumably to counter an accusation being made by his enemies in the Jewish Christian movement. In another letter, he famously says he is “not ashamed of the gospel,” an odd circumlocution suggesting that his version of the gospel had a certain notoriety that he was seeking to overcome.

Furthermore, it appears that the efforts of the Jerusalem church were pretty successful in the short run. Brandon argues that the desultory condition of Paul’s letters, some of which exist only in pieced-together form, indicates that Paul fell out of favor for some considerable period of time. Ultimately, of course, his teachings did win out. The explanation, according to both Brandon and Maccoby, was that the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and the consequent destruction of the Jerusalem church left the field open for the Pauline sect to proselytize with minimal opposition. And since Pauline theology was far more congenial to Gentiles than the original Jewish Christian story, it gradually won out. When the Gospels and Acts came to be written (by Pauline Christians), the Jewish Christian origins of the movement were, to a large extent, suppressed.

In other words, what we have today is Pauline Christianity, which bears little resemblance to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean apocalyptic preacher and revolutionary whose interests lay in the restoration of the Throne of David.

This leaves us with one other obvious question – namely, does this historical interpretation, if it is correct, invalidate Christianity as a religion?

If the historical Jesus did not teach the things that we are told he taught, if he did not see himself as the incarnation of God or the Savior of mankind, if he was not interested in reaching out to the Gentiles (as even some of the Gospel stories indicate), if he was in fact just one of many failed messianic candidates in a period of political unrest in ancient Judea … if he was, in short, not very much different from such dimly remembered figures as Theudas or Bar-Kochba (two other self-appointed messiahs who came to a bad end) … then is there any reason to regard the religion centered on him as meaningful or important?

I think there probably is. In fact, I think there may be more reason to take Christianity seriously when viewed in this light. Though Paul may have been libeled as insane by his rivals, he seems to have had an experience best described by the term “cosmic consciousness.” In one or more episodes of mystical transport, he seems to gotten in touch with some kind of higher power – whether we think of it as his own higher self, or God, or discarnate spirits, or the specific discarnate spirit of Jesus himself, or some other supranormal reality. And in this mode of transcendent insight, Paul experienced a kind of instantaneous and dizzying “data dump” that crowded his brain and haunted his thoughts for the rest of his life. His letters, read in this light, show us – not the careful logical reasoning of a trained rabbinical scholar – but the excited thought processes of someone whose understanding outstrips his language, someone who jumps from one big idea to another without filling in the necessary gaps, someone who thinks in terms of vast patterns and cosmic imagery rather than legalistic or casuistic details. In other words, we see the writings of someone whose entire life was reshaped and targeted in a new direction as the result of an overwhelming mystical revelation. Though he did his best to graft this revelatory material onto Judaism and the teachings of the Jerusalem church, he was only incidentally indebted to those sources. He was presenting something new, something that exploded the existing paradigm and offered an exciting new fusion of Judaism, Hellenism, Gnosticism, and personal mystical insight.

Seen in this way, Pauline Christianity becomes an exciting window into the higher reaches of transcendental revelation, and is arguably more interesting and more relevant to the modern world than the religious-political efforts of the historical Jesus. Paul himself seems to have felt this way, inasmuch as he showed little interest in the actual life of Jesus on earth, making few references to it in his letters. The historical Jesus did not interest him. His interest lay in the direct revelation(s) he had received.

It’s ironic to consider that what Albert Schweitzer called “the quest of the historical Jesus” – the massive, longtime, ongoing effort of New Testament scholars to determine the actual facts of Jesus of Nazareth’s life – may end in the realization that the historical Jesus is of no great importance, and that what really matters is the eternal spiritual reality accessed by a man who never knew Jesus in the flesh.

The French objection

Conservative writer David French recently penned an article for the National Review website called “Post-Christian America: Gullible, Intolerant, and Superstitious.” I thought it was worth commenting on.

French begins by criticizing the view held by many secular humanists that if Christianity is defeated, society will become more rational. He writes:

Many of the best-educated and least-religious people I knew weren’t all that reasonable. They held to downright irrational views about reality. I remember an elite-educated secular friend in Philadelphia who scoffed at my wife’s Christian faith; this friend was also convinced that her child had an “indigo aura” that imbued him with special gifts. I recall conversations with Harvard Law School classmates who laughed at the New Testament but thought reincarnation was “cool.” And how can I forget the strange sight of Harvard students walking in and out of the neighborhood witchcraft store?

He goes on to cite a New York Times story reporting that “America’s less religious citizens are far more likely to believe in things such as ghosts and UFOs than people who attend church.” The Times writer locates the motive for such beliefs in “the pursuit of meaning. The less religious participants [in a series of studies] were, we found, the less they perceived their lives as meaningful. This lack of meaning was associated with a desire to find meaning, which in turn was associated with belief in U.F.O.s and alien visitors.”

French ads that “post-Christian Europeans have their own tendencies to believe in elves, trolls, and mental telepathy.”

After some musings on the deleterious consequences for national politics and civil discourse, French concludes:

Human beings are hard-wired to search for meaning and purpose. As we conduct that search, will our nation and culture continue to value and respect the faith that grants hope of redemption, patience through present suffering, and a means to discern between good and evil? Or will it continue to shun the way, the truth, and the life in favor of a grab-bag of ghosts, UFOs, and wishful thoughts? The choice isn’t between reason and religion. It’s all too often between religion and superstition. Post-Christian America will be a less rational place.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

First, French is not wrong to say that people – or at least very many people – have an innate need to find meaning in life. While there do seem to be individuals who never give a thought about any higher purpose and just go through life from day to day, they are probably an exception to the general rule.

Second, it seems pretty clear (as French suggests) that some people have merely taken the Christian hope of a Savior descending from on high to redeem our beleaguered planet, and have reimagined it as benevolent ETs descending in spaceships, like Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still, to rescue us from ourselves. 

Third, it’s true that Christianity has developed a complex and erudite theology that can serve as a comprehensive explanation of good and evil, happiness and suffering, and the ultimate purpose of human life. Meanwhile, popular alternatives do not offer anything nearly as intellectually nourishing or sophisticated.

That said, some of French’s other views stand on less solid ground.

For one thing, he seems to assume that people could find what they want and need in Christianity, but that they perversely turn away from it and seek less satisfying alternatives. What’s more likely is that they have tried Christianity, or at least looked into it, and found that it simply does not satisfy them. It’s not that they’re searching for meaning because they’ve given up Christianity; it’s that they gave up Christianity because it didn’t answer their quest.

Undoubtedly, people who open themselves up to non-mainstream spiritual options are at risk of accepting dubious or outright silly ideas. But this is simply the price paid for exploring unfamiliar terrain.

More important, it’s an error – in fact, a logical fallacy – to lump together all unorthodox beliefs as equally baseless. “Elves” and “mental telepathy” do not occupy the same position on the spectrum of empirical evidence and scientific research. As far as I know, there's no evidence or research regarding elves, while there is more than a century of evidence of and research into mental telepathy, including such robust and massive studies as the ganzfeld and autoganzfeld experiments. Even such an outspoken Skeptic as Richard Wiseman has stated:

I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but [this] begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do.

Wiseman later clarified that he didn’t mean to single out remote viewing but was speaking about psi in general: “It is a slight misquote, because I was using the term in the more general sense of ESP – that is, I was not talking about remote viewing per se, but rather Ganzfeld, etc as well. I think that they do meet the usual standards for a normal claim, but are not convincing enough for an extraordinary claim.”

Nobody could say that by the standards of any other area of science, the existence of elves has been proven.

Or take French’s conjunction of indigo children and reincarnation. The notion of indigo children is trendy in certain New Age circles, but I don’t think it’s supported by any hard evidence. On the other hand, reincarnation is supported by surprisingly powerful evidence, mainly in the form of the spontaneous recollections of past lives by young children. Thousands of such cases have been identified and documented worldwide, some of them extremely striking.

While the current spirituality movement undeniably lacks the intellectual heft of Christianity, with its legacy of world-class thinkers like St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, it is still in its early days. It’s arguable that we’re experiencing a paradigm shift from traditional religion to a new, more empirically grounded spiritual outlook that will require new philosophical insights and explications. Transition periods are always uncomfortable and messy, but in the long run, they can result in progress.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that, for all the admirable theological complexities of Christianity, the religion is ultimately founded on stories like this:

After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma temple tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the temple tax?”

“Yes, he does,” he replied.

When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak. “What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own children or from others?”

“From others,” Peter answered.

“Then the children are exempt,” Jesus said to him. “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.”

(Matthew 17:24—27)

French tells us that the choice is “between religion and superstition.” It may be more correct to say the choice is between age-old superstitions codified as respectable theologies on the one hand, and, on the other, challenging new approaches based on present-day observation, experience, and research. 

The mark of Zoroastrianism

First, I want to thank the many readers who contributed ideas on my last post about the future direction of this blog. Right now my inclination is to follow Bruce Siegel's suggestion and post less often, while still keeping the focus on the paranormal. I also think Roger Knights had a good idea about reposting older material, though I don't plan to do so on a regular basis. Julie Baxter had good thoughts about Leslie Flint and other psi phenomena that have not been treated thoroughly, or at all, in this forum. I think Eric Newhill is right in saying that political discussions become too contentious; and there are plenty of political sites already.

I'm no doubt overlooking a lot of other people who made valuable contributions. The bottom line is that I appreciate all your input.

And yes, I am open to guest posts. This has been my policy for a while, so please don't be shy about taking me up on it.

This new post is on a subject that I admittedly know little about. Until recently the only thing I'd read about Zoroastrianism was Gore Vidal's historical novel Creation, which takes place during the so-called Axial Age and features Zoroaster's (fictional) grandson as the narrator. It's a good book, but I read it years ago and don't remember it very well. Recently, however, I did some online research into Zoroaster, also known as Zarathustra, and the religion he founded, which predates Christianity by at least 500 years and which was a major belief system in the ancient world. Zoroastrians practice their faith to this day, though in greatly reduced numbers.

Two things in particular interest me about Zoroastrianism. The first are certain obvious similarities to Christianity, and the second are parallels with modern spiritualism, including some of the speculations that I've offered right here.

 

The mark of Zoro ... aster?

I'll start with the Christian parallels. I should point out that I'm deriving most of this information from the Wikipedia entry on Zoroastrianism, which seems to be well-sourced. As always when dealing with Wikipedia, some skepticism may be advisable, since the quality of the entries varies tremendously, and the content is constantly changing.

According to Wikipedia, Zoroaster was drawing water from a river for use in a ritual when a spiritual being appeared to him and allowed him to see God. In Matthew 3:16, Jesus was undergoing baptism in a river when the spirit of God descended on him like a dove.

Afterward, Zoroaster encountered six other spiritual beings who taught him the rest of what he needed to know; only after this did he begin his ministry. After his baptism, Jesus is said to have gone off into the desert for an extended period, during which he saw visions and overcame temptations, before commencing his ministry.

Zoroaster acquired only one follower in his homeland and found success only after traveling abroad. Jesus acquired no followers in his home village and reportedly said (Mark 6:4) that a prophet is without honor in his own town.

Zoroaster taught that there is only one God, that God is entirely good, that the various pagan gods are inferior heavenly beings (many of them demons), and that man's free will is (at least partly) responsible for his pain and suffering in what would otherwise be a paradise on earth. All these views are consistent with Christianity and also with Judaism, which was developing into its modern form during the Axial Age.

Zoroaster taught that the forces of chaos and order were perpetually in conflict, and that our free will allows us to choose which side to take. It is the individual's responsibility to choose rightly. The darker forces will eventually mount a final assault at the end of days, but will be decisively defeated by a savior-figure who will be born of a virgin. After their defeat, the dead will be raised and restored to earthly life, this time with immortality. Needless to say, all of this is strongly reminiscent of Christianity.

The parallels I've selected may make it seem as if the two belief systems are virtually identical, but that's only because I have cherry-picked the most interesting similarities. I could have selected other details highlighting notable differences between the two faiths. For instance, Zoroastrianism emphatically rejects asceticism and monasticism, insisting that the purpose of life on earth is to participate in life and gather experiences, not to shut oneself off in a monastic cell or to deprive oneself of any experience, including physical pleasure. Zoroastrianism also rejects spirit-body dualism, conceiving of both earth and heaven in similar terms. In these respects, Zoroastrianism is arguably similar to Gnostic Christianity, but not to Christianity as generally practiced today.

Still, it would be hard to argue that even orthodox Christianity was not, at the very least, influenced by Zoroastrianism in its formative centuries.

What about modern spiritualism? Zoroastrianism holds that the individual soul preexists earthly incarnation. During this pre-birth phase, the soul is joined with its guardian spirit. While incarnated on earth, the soul is separated from its guardian, which watches over it and attempts to protect and guide it when possible. After death, the soul is reunited with its guardian spirit, achieving wholeness again.

This is pretty similar to the spiritualist idea that the individual soul is an extension of a higher self or oversoul, from which it detaches during its period of earthly incarnation and to which it returns after the incarnation is complete.

After death, Zoroastrianism tells us that souls are judged according to their thoughts, words, and actions while on earth. Souls that pass the test will enjoy paradise, but with the caveat that continuing spiritual struggles can be expected even in postmortem existence. The ongoing battle between order and chaos is apparently not limited to this physical plane.

Souls that fail the test of judgement are relegated to a hellish sphere of existence – but not for purposes of punishment and not for all eternity. Instead, the sojourn in hell is temporary, and the purpose is to reform the soul. Ultimately this process must prove successful; it is the destiny of every soul to be reunited with its guardian spirit (= higher self) and with God.

The Zoroastrian concept of God transcends gender. God is called Ahura Mazda, a name that connotes both male (Ahura = Lord, masculine) and female (Mazda = Wisdom, feminine). It can be translated as Wise Lord. Yet God, for all his/her power, is not omnipotent. This idea of a less-than-omnipotent God has led some commenters to classify Zoroastrianism as a form of pantheism in which God/consciousness emerges from a self-creating universe, although this seems to be a later interpretation and probably not the original idea.

I find it interesting that as we go back in time to a comparatively early stage of religious development, we find a number of ideas that match up quite well with spiritualist teachings today: a pre-incarnational existence for the soul; separation from and reunion with a higher self; a division of the spiritual world into heavenly and hellish spheres, with the hellish spheres intended as temporary way stations for the moral improvement of the soul; a God that is neither male nor female, is not omnipotent, and may be immanent, not transcendent; a universe that is still a work in progress, with the balance between systemic order and chaos determined by the choices of individual incarnated beings.

Again, I don't want to exaggerate the parallels. There are certainly differences. For example, many people in the spiritualist community embrace reincarnation, but Zoroastrianism rejects reincarnation except in the limited sense of the resurrection of the dead after the final judgment.

Even so, the similarities are at least worth looking at.

Oh, and for the dog lovers out there: the dog is sacred in Zoroastrianism. This in itself strikes me as a pretty good recommendation of the religion.

The same, but different

I wrote this post as a reply to a Facebook friend who was (correctly) criticizing the fashionable notion that all religions say the same thing. It seemed worth sharing here, if only because it saves me the trouble of writing something new. 

~~~

I think all religions are the same in one sense. They all seem to involve getting in touch with one's higher self. This higher self may be identified as God, Jesus, one's Buddha nature, the Ground of Being, or whatever. Also, all religions seem to have been founded by someone who actually did get in touch with his higher self and then tried to pass on what he had learned. He may have had an NDE or a series of OBEs, or he may have been an expert meditator, or he may have experimented with psychogenic drugs, or he may have had some neurological quirk that opened up his consciousness. One way or another, he experienced "cosmic consciousness," at least fleetingly, and was able to retain and communicate some of what he had learned.

The differences among religions, which are substantial, come about because a) it's difficult even for an adept to distinguish between the wisdom of the higher self and the fears and biases of the ego, b) the acolytes are not nearly as advanced as the founder and tend to misunderstand his teachings, and c) as the movement grows, it becomes more ossified, ritualized, bureaucratic, political, and worldly.

~~~

I'd add to the above that one possible explanation of the divine figures seen by NDErs is that they are symbolic representations of the experiencer's own higher self. So there may be a consistent tendency, whether one is incarnate or discarnate, to objectify and misinterpret the higher self as an outside entity. 

Book review: Did Jesus Exist?

There aren't too many areas where some New Agers and some dedicated atheists find common ground, but one of them is the question of the historical reality – or unreality – of Jesus Christ. If you Google Jesus + myth, you'll come up with thousands of websites arguing that Jesus never lived – that he was invented by his earliest followers, who were influenced by astrology, numerology, pagan myths, and even Hinduism.*

Enter Bart D. Ehrman. Ehrman is a professor of New Testament studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He is not a Christian; he describes himself as an agnostic inclined toward atheism. So we’re not dealing here with a conservative or fundamentalist Christian committed at the outset to the accuracy of biblical accounts. Quite the contrary; Ehrman is very skeptical of much of the material reported about Jesus in the Gospels, and believes that what we can know about him with any high degree of certainty is limited to only a few core statements.

Nevertheless, he is convinced that Jesus was a real historical figure. And in this he is far from alone. As Ehrman takes pains to point out in Did Jesus Exist?, virtually all of his colleagues in academia agree with this basic proposition. He writes:

I should say at the outset that none of this [Jesus-as-myth] literature is written by scholars trained in New Testament or early Christian studies teaching at the major, or even the minor, accredited theological seminaries, divinity schools, universities, or colleges of North America or Europe (or anywhere else in the world)….

But a couple of bona fide scholars – not professors teaching religious studies in universities but scholars nonetheless, and at least one of them with a Ph.D. in the field of New Testament – have taken this position and written about it. Their books may not be known to most of the general public interested in questions relating to Jesus, the Gospels, or the early Christian church, but they do occupy a noteworthy niche as a (very) small but (often) loud minority voice….

The authors of this skeptical literature understand themselves to be "mythicists" – that is, those who believe that Jesus is a myth…. His life and teachings were invented by early storytellers. He never really lived….

The reality is that whatever else you may think about Jesus, he certainly did exist.

Much of the book is devoted to backing up this claim with an extensive and highly interesting discussion of ancient literary sources. I won't attempt to summarize this presentation, which is both readable and concise (though sometimes a bit repetitive). I think any open-minded person – anyone not already committed to the mythicist perspective – would find it convincing.

Having established with a very high degree of probability that there was a real person named Jesus operating in first century Palestine as a prophet and wonderworker, and that he was crucified by the Romans around the year 30 A.D., Ehrman goes on to critique the more serious proponents of the Christ-myth hypothesis. But early on, before he deals with the scholars who need to be taken seriously, he has a little fun with the non-scholars who've tackled this subject in popular books and on innumerable websites.

Since these are the authors who seem to have the most influence in both New Age and materialist circles, it's worth quoting some of what Ehrman has to say. In what is quoted below, the material in square brackets is Ehrman's, not mine. 

In 1999, under the nom de plume Acharya S, D. M. Murdock published the breathless conspirator's dream: The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold….

The book is filled with so many factual errors and outlandish assertions that it is hard to believe that the author is serious. If she is serious, it is hard to believe that she has ever encountered anything resembling historical scholarship. Her "research" appears to have involved reading a number of nonscholarly books that say the same thing she is about to say and then quoting them. One looks in vain for the citation of a primary ancient source, and quotations from real experts (Elaine Pagels, chiefly) are ripped from their context and misconstrued....

The basic argument of the book is that Jesus is the son-god: “Thus the son of God is the sun of God."...

Just to give a sense of the level of scholarship in this sensationalist tome, I list a few of the howlers one encounters en route, in the order in which I found them....

The "true meaning of the word gospel is 'God's Spell,' as in magic hypnosis and delusion" (45). [No, the word gospel comes to us from the old English term god spel, which means "good news" – a fairly precise translation of the Greek word euaggelion. It has nothing to do with magic.]....

The church father “Irenaeus was a Gnostic" (60). [In fact, he was one of the most virulent opponents of Gnostics in the early church.]

Augustine was "originally a Mandaean, i.e., a Gnostic, until after the Council of Nicaea" (60). [Augustine was not even born until 19 years after the Council of Nicaea, and he certainly was no Gnostic.]

Ehrman has even more to say about the hapless Acharya, with whom I had a brief contretemps online way back in 2007 (see the comments thread of this post). Even in that discussion, Acharya managed to produce another "howler," when she misidentified the author of Revelation as James (it was someone named John; he identifies himself in the text.) 

My impression, however, is that the sun-god theory takes a backseat in popularity to the evergreen notion that Jesus was just another instance of a dying-and-rising pagan god, a view that enjoyed considerable popularity in the early 20th century after the publication of James Frazer’s famous work The Golden Bough. The trouble is that Frazer's understanding of pagan mythology was deeply flawed, and the gods he described as being resurrected were not actually seen that way in the ancient world.

As one example, it is sometimes said that the Egyptian god Osiris was resurrected after his dismembered body was reassembled by his sister Isis. This is incorrect. Osiris did not come back to earthly life. The ancient Egyptians believed that the body had to be intact in order for the soul to survive, which is why they placed so much emphasis on mummification and preservation of the corpse. The point of reassembling Osiris’s violated corpse was to allow his soul to journey to the afterlife, which (we are told) it did.

As Ehrman notes, today's main popularizers of the dying-and-rising God theory as applied to Jesus are Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, authors of the 1999 book The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God? Ehrman writes:

In [Freke and Gandy’s] view, … Jesus was not a sun-god. He was a creation based on the widespread mythologies of dying and rising gods known throughout the pagan world....

This divine figure was called by various names in the pagan mysteries: Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, Bacchus, Mithras. But "fundamentally all these God men are the same mythical being" (4). The reason that Freke and Gandy think so is that supposedly all these figures share the same mythology: their father was God; their mother was a mortal virgin; each was born in a cave on December 25 before three shepherds and wise men; among their miracles they turned water to wine; they all rode into town on a donkey; they all were crucified at Eastertime as a sacrifice for the sins of the world; they descended to hell; and on the third day they rose again....

What, for example is the proof that Osiris was born on December 25 before three shepherds? Or that he was crucified? And that his death brought atonement for sin? Or that he returned to life on earth by being raised from the dead? In fact, no ancient source says any such thing about Osiris (or about the other gods).

As he did with Acharya, Ehrman lists a series of blunders committed by Freke and Gandy in their magnum opus. Again, words in brackets are Ehrman's.

A sampling:

Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Empire (11). [No, he did not. He made it a legal religion. It was not made the state religion until the end of the fourth century under Theodosius.]

Eleusinian mysteries focused on the godman Dionysus (18, 22). [Not true. These mysteries were not about Dionysus but about the goddess Demeter.]

"Descriptions by Christian authorities of Christian baptism are indistinguishable from pagan descriptions of Mystery baptism" (36). [How could we possibly know this? We don't have a single description in any source of any kind of baptism in the mystery religions.]

The Romans "completely destroyed the state of Judaica in 112 CE" (178). [This is a bizarre claim. There was not even a war between Rome and Judea in 112 CE; there were wars in 66–70 and in 132–35 CE.]

After having disposed of both the popular and the more scholarly mythicists, Ehrman devotes the last portion of his book to a discussion of what we can really know about the historical Jesus besides the mere fact of his existence. This is basically a recapitulation of his earlier book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, arguing that Jesus foretold the imminent end of the world and sought to bring it about by his own self-sacrifice.

Here I'm not so sure I agree with Ehrman; I'm more inclined to the view proposed by N.T. Wright in Jesus and the Victory of God. In brief, Wright believes that Jesus was not prophesying the end of the world but the destruction of Jerusalem – a prophecy that came true in 70 A.D. when the Romans crushed a Jewish uprising and destroyed the Temple, which was the focal point of Jewish religious observance at the time. Though Jesus is reported as using eschatological language – the sun and moon will go dark, etc. – Wright shows clearly that this type of language was used by Hebrew prophets throughout history in a poetical and metaphorical way to highlight predictions of political and military catastrophe.

If this is true, where did we get the idea of the Second Coming, which is so central to later Christian thought? One possibility is that reports of Jesus' resurrection led to the conviction that the end of the world was nigh, inasmuch as some first century Jews believed that the End Times would be accompanied by a general resurrection. Jesus, then, was seen as the "first fruits" (Paul's phrase) of the coming resurrection of all humanity. This could be why Paul and other early Christians expected the end to come soon, even if Jesus himself had not made any such prediction, at least during his earthly ministry.

I find Wright's thesis pretty convincing, though Ehrman's viewpoint is more in line with the scholarly consensus today.

In any case, regardless of what Jesus may have taught about the end of the world, he certainly did exist; he was not invented out of whole cloth as a sun-god, a dying-and-rising god, or any other mythic pagan archetype. This is the main point of Ehrman’s book. For those who may have been tempted to think otherwise by the trendiness of the mythicist position, Did Jesus Exist? is most highly recommended.

~~~~~

*… and even Hinduism. Ehrman tells us of a 1791 essay by Francois Volney, who claimed that the early Christians “derived Jesus's most common epithet, ‘Christ’ from the similar sounding name of the Indian God Krishna." This, of course, is ridiculous; the word Christ, or Christos in ancient Greek, means “the anointed,” and as such is a straightforward translation of the Hebrew word messiah, which also means "the anointed." Needless to say, it is exceedingly unlikely that any first century Palestinian Jews had the slightest knowledge of the Hindu pantheon. And Christos doesn't sound all that much like Krishna anyway.

A lot of malarkey?

Though I'd never heard of it, a book called The Boy who Came Back from Heaven has apparently been a popular title in Christian circles since 2010. It recounts the near-death experience of Alex Malarkey, who suffered a crippling accident when he was six years old. Here's part of the book description found on the Amazon sales page:

Two months later, Alex awoke from a coma with an incredible story to share. Of events at the accident scene and in the hospital while he was unconscious. Of the angels who took him through the gates of heaven itself. Of the unearthly music that sounded just terrible to a six-year-old. And most amazing of all . . . of meeting and talking to Jesus.

Now Alex has publicly disowned the book, stating that it was based on lies he told to get attention, and his publisher has announced that the book will be discontinued. 

The incident naturally raises questions about other NDE accounts. Given the popularity of books about NDEs and the widespread dissemination of NDE "memes" throughout our culture, it is certainly possible - in fact, likely - that some other NDEs are also made up or greatly exaggerated, either for the purpose of making a buck or just for a chance at the spotlight. 

That said, we shouldn't let skepticism run away with itself. NDEs have been reported for centuries, and there are dozens - possibly hundreds - of cases predating the 1975 publication of Raymond Moody's Life after Life, which coined the term "near-death experience" and first popularized the idea. And it took a while for NDEs to catch on; many of the patients studied by Michael Sabom in his groundbreaking 1981 study Recollections of Death said they had never heard of an NDE. Since Sabom began his investigation only a short time after Moody's bestseller was published, and since he was working in a rural area with a low-income, low-education population, his patients' lack of awareness seems quite understandable.

In the present case, there's another factor - Alex Malarkey, like his parents, is a deeply religious Christian. It appears that his mother has been opposed to the book for years and recently "communicated to [a prominent retailer] that her son Alex was against the book that purported to be his story." It's likely that Alex - today a badly disabled 16-year-old - has come under pressure from those closest to him to recant the book.

Consider the public statement he released. Here it is in its entirety:

Please forgive the brevity, but because of my limitations I have to keep this short.

I did not die. I did not go to Heaven.

I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible.

It is only through repentance of your sins and a belief in Jesus as the Son of God, who died for your sins (even though he committed none of his own) so that you can be forgiven may you learn of Heaven outside of what is written in the Bible…not by reading a work of man. I want the whole world to know that the Bible is sufficient. Those who market these materials must be called to repent and hold the Bible as enough.

In Christ,

Alex Malarkey

It seems pretty clear that Alex's motive, at least in part, is to advocate for "repentance" - repentance on the part of those who publish books like his, and also those who read them. The Christian blog Pulpit and Pen, from which I pulled Alex's statement, enthusiastically concurs, writing: 

The Bible is enough.

The Bible is sufficient.

Christ is enough.

Christ is sufficient.

We don’t need Christian bookstores to sell us books and resources  that tell us otherwise. We pray that Thom Rainer, Ed Stetzer, other Lifeway executives and all Christian book retailers will take notice of this courageous and Gospel-centered 16 year-old young man, and that everyone reading this will lift him up to the Lord.

Pulpit and Pen also tells us: 

We are publishing this story because Christian publishers and retailers should have known better. They should have had the spiritual discernment, wisdom, compassion, and intestinal fortitude to not sell a book which contains, along with all books like it, deep theological problems. It also doesn’t help that in what is purported to be a “TRUE STORY”  that there are vivid descriptions ... which test the limits of how far we are willing to go outside the realm of scripture and accept as having been from God.

In fact, the bloggers appear to be on a mission against all "heavenly tourism" books, complaining about a retailer that still sells them despite their own objections, and boasting that they have successfully gotten three other titles pulled from the shelves. It's not clear if the other three titles were about heaven, but they evidently contained material the blog disapproves of. ("Due to the pressure and pleas from the Pulpit and Pen and others, ... three of the books that we have taken aim at and labelled “the worst books Lifeway sells” have been pulled from their online store. We’re going for a fourth ...") In an update, the blog proudly announces that The Boy who Came Back from Heaven has now been pulled by Lifeway, as well. 

I have no idea what really happened to Alex. It's possible he had an NDE and was later pressured into recanting, just as many people who've had mystical visions have been pressured by mainstream religious authorities. It's also possible that he had a less dramatic NDE and exaggerated it for "attention" and to win the plaudits of his Christian family. Or maybe he had no NDE at all, and made up the whole thing, as he now says. Or possibly his father, who coauthored the book, was responsible for the project from its inception, and simply used Alex as a pawn. This last is the apparent implication of a statement left by Alex's mother on her own blog, as reported by the Washington Post:

She goes on to say that the book is not “Biblically sound” and that her son’s objections to it were ignored and repressed. She also notes that Alex “has not received monies from the book nor have a majority of his needs been funded by it.”

She ends in obvious frustration, writing: “Alex’s name and identity are being used against his wishes …"

Whatever the truth, it seems clear that Alex and his book have gotten caught up in a religious skirmish, and that the people agitating against the book are motivated mainly by their interpretation of Christian doctrine. Their principal objection to the book is that it says things that fall outside of scripture and are therefore suspect, since only scripture is a guide to truth. This is the same objection that other religious persons lodge against mediumship, past-life recall, spontaneous after-death communications, apparitions and hauntings, etc. For such people, the Bible tells us all we can know or ought to know, and any attempt to go beyond it constitutes meddling with things we should leave alone. 

If Alex did invent the story, or much of it, then he should recant, of course. If some adult(s) manipulated him into putting his name on it in order to make money, it's an outrage. But if Alex's experience was not made up and he's recanted only because of outside pressure, then he's been cheated of a great gift. 

Any way you look at it, this is a sad story.