Christ for the Ages

Christ for all Ages
And all People

“Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason then that of blindfolded fear.”

Thomas Jefferson in a letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

After the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls and the Naj’ Hammadi texts, Alvin Kuhn, a biblical scholar and Egyptologist pieces together, literally and figuratively, from the fragments of ancient papyri, the suppressed story of first and second century Christianity. For the first time in 1600 years, the voices and thoughts of early Christians known as Gnostics were revealed. What we have to learn from these devout followers of Christ will help us make decisions about the kind of future we want. For that is the lesson of the Gnostics, we are God’s incarnation on earth, the embodiment of the Spirit, each and every one of us. We, in the Image of God, have the creativity to manifest Heaven or Hell.
This understanding of Christ espoused by the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas spoke to my heart. We read, “Divine Light is in all people”, and also about Jesus refusing worship, instead directing seekers to the Light within. ‘Gnosis’ or ‘Knowledge’ is coming to the ‘understanding, belief, and faith’ that we each have direct connection to God, and that all humanity is linked together in the Spirit. Enlightenment is our salvation; we are separated from God only by our pride or ignorance. To try and save a ‘self’, is contra-indicated to our wholeness or salvation, because we are never ‘lost’, and our true ‘self’ is a part of God and Nature and Spirit. Trying to isolate or ‘save’ your ‘ego’ or ‘self’ from the rest of creation of which it is an integral part is futile. Jesus said ‘whoever would save his soul must lose it.’ We must die to self, that is a personal ego, and identify with all of creation as an extension of our self. To acknowledge a separation from the ‘ground of being’ that is the all in all, and the ‘I am that I Am’, one in effect experiences disconnectedness (sin), because they set up a paradoxical reality living in opposition to the heavenly matrix that fills the universe and in which we live and move and have our being.
My first mystical experience was when I was a young child of 3 or 4 one summer at my grandma’s house. This was in fact my first memory. I feel like my soul was born that day. I woke that morning to comforting smells and friendly sounds, but it was the sight in the window that inspired the epiphany. A nest of Cardinals became the Beatific Vision, I saw God in the mother feeding her brood. A blue green dreamscape combined with the sweet feelings of a summer morning in the country at a family reunion precipitated the Spirit to sweep over me and fill me with the indisputable certainty that we were all One, and that all was well in the world. I saw with God’s eyes, and it was good.
That experience defined my religion and it seemed to work pretty well in the Presbyterian Church we regularly attended. Not until I heard about the ‘second coming’ and ‘being born again’ did I question the reality I experienced in my own heart. I asked to be saved, not just a few times, got baptized twice and started worrying that all my friends and some of my family were going to hell. Worry about my own salvation continued to haunt me; was I really sincere in my heart of hearts? It was hard for me to believe that the Lamb of God was really a wolf in sheep’s clothing, coming to slay and torture the “wicked’. None of this seemed real to me. I was depressed and confused, I thought my faith was weak, because I couldn’t believe in Jesus as an avenging judge. I had a hard time believing Jonah being swallowed by a whale. Some say faith is trying to believe what you know to be impossible.
I had known God by the omnipresence of the Spirit that filled my heart, and the infinite peace that filled that eternal space. I couldn’t relate, no matter how hard I tried, to a schizophrenic god, who is both loving and vengeful, therefore sending his children to a lake of fire for the sin of being born. Was the Bible wrong, or was it simply misinterpreted? Is god really the vindictive Olympian who slaughters out of jealousy, the bloodthirsty Quetzalcoatl who demands sacrifice and rationalizes violent conquest and revenge?
Maybe Jesus came to redefine and clarify. Maybe God wasn’t really like that. Maybe the Old Testament writers didn’t speak accurately of the attributes of God. I believed in a God of Love and Compassion, therefore I couldn’t believe the Bible. Maybe the Gnostic texts have a perspective of who Jesus was and what he taught that matches my ideal. Maybe we can look at the bible with a new ‘Old’ understanding and recover the essence of Christianity and experience a revival of the eternal Christ with the assurance and trust that comes with a rational belief system.
A problem that perplexes us as a society is the predominance of a pre-Einstein worldview. The atomic bomb exploded the myth of dualism. E=mc2 proves all things are connected, energy equals mass. This is a universe not a duo-verse of spirit and matter. All things are interconnected and interdependent. We all share electrons! Deepest in the heart of matter we discover only vibration. Waves are no less than the Word of God in concert with the music of the angels mingled with our thoughts and prayers. We need a spirituality that matches our science.
Matthew Fox building on the prophecies of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin gives us that cosmology. Unity thought is often considered ‘New Age’ by fundamentalists but is in truth the ‘Perennial Philosophy, embraced by mystics and saints of all ages and religions. Fox gave voice to my soul with his book ‘Original Blessing’. Belonging is our birthright, the earth is not cursed, and neither are we. Does it speak to your heart as it did to mine that at our core we are good. We are not distanced from God by our humanity, but we are spiritual beings, lost only in our loneliness we know when the light in our heart is faint and when we feel worthless and disconnected. I could never be happy, not even in heaven, if other people were suffering. If God were a loving Father, none of this made sense. I decided to trust my conscience instead of the Bible.
If Grace were true, we are not saved by what we believe or if we are right or wrong. God’s love is unremitting, which makes sense in a seamless world. I knew peace for the first time since before I was ‘saved’. I trusted God was bigger and better than any notion I might have. I preferred a God of Mystery to a tribal god responsible for vicious atrocities.
A cursory reading of the Old Testament presents even the casual observer with panoply of vengeance, murder, and rape perpetrated in the name of Jehovah. This proves to be a dilemma for believers in scripture’s inerrancy, but is exactly what is to expected, if ‘anthropomorphisms’ is what we really have, that is ‘god created in man’s image.’
A critical study of the Bible is an exciting adventure into the ancient world. Like a detective story, secrets are uncovered when we reread familiar passages with an open mind. One of the most obvious characteristics in the Pentateuch is the use of ‘doublets’. The same stories are told twice, each story contradicts the other in some way; be it names, chronology, or geography. Examples can be found in the creation, the garden, and the flood stories. A closer look reveals that two different names for god are used in ‘doublets’. It is most likely that passages using different vocabulary and having different perspectives were written by different authors. This is the conclusion accepted by most modern scholars.
Was the Bible not written by Moses then, but compiled later from writings by competitors? This hypothesis seems to fit the history of the period that traces the rivalry of factions within early Judaism. Much like today, where churches contend for the ‘true’ form of worship, priests back then challenged one another for authority. Their holy writings were polemics justifying their cause. After all, if sacrifice was only allowed in your temple, then your priesthood prospered and was assured of at least something to eat, namely sacrifices. The tribes of Judah and Israel gave us the conflicting ‘doublets’ in the Bible in an attempt to prove that ‘God was on their side.’
Jesus taught that God did not take sides, but that God was on the inside of everyone, ‘the kingdom of heaven is within.’ God has no favorites, and Jesus broke down the barriers of race, gender, nation, and religion. This message of non-discrimination was not what the Jews wanted to hear, or what they expected from a messiah. They wanted a hero like Moses or Elijah to exalt their nation. So, he was rejected and crucified.
Stories begin to circulate about his resurrection. A god who dies and rises again is a theme not uncommon to the world of antiquity. Religions based on similar myths of risen saviors had held sway for hundreds, if not thousands, of years before the time of Jesus. Horus, Dionysus, and Mithra all fulfilled the role of resurrected gods in passion plays, which became to be known as the ‘Mysteries’. A virgin birth was not unique to Jesus. Even some of the miracles (walking on water, feeding the multitudes, healing the sick, raising the dead) attributed to Jesus find precedent in older myths. There is a common thread that runs through these myths, and that is the hope of life after death. People pinned their hopes on these representatives of the human spirit. They even went so far as to eat the flesh and drink the blood of their gods. The ‘mystery’ for the initiates was that the “Christ’ or ‘anointing’ was the Spirit in them. God raises us all from the dead in the Spirit. There was, in fact, Christianism before Jesus. The term ‘Christ’ was applied to Jesus as the legend grew. Was Jesus being mythologized as the next Christ in a long list of saviors?

“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fables of the generations of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”
Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

Speculation about Jesus resulted in a multitude of gospels claiming insight and inspiration. How and why did the texts we know as the New Testament become canonized? Investigation once again leads us to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Naj’ Hammadi texts. They were buried for fear of being burned by the sect claiming orthodoxy. What was the 3rd century church afraid for us read? One such gospel is the Essene Gospel of Peace. This book is especially important, because it is likely Jesus spent his unrecorded years among the Essenes, an ascetic community that criticized temple worship they considered corrupted. The Essenes believed in the divine nature of man, the holy spark in all humanity. This was heretical to those who wished to exercise control. How could the clergy claim to be the sole arbitrators of grace, if every believer communed with God through the Spirit? They couldn’t, so they begin to define what it meant to be a Christian to fit their agenda. When Gnostics and orthodox Christians discussed the nature of God, they were debating spiritual authority. Soon only the Roman Catholic Church could dispense the sacraments. Constantine assured orthodoxy’s triumph after a ‘vision’ of the cross with the words “In this sign Conquer.” He invested in the ecclesiastical infrastructure while at the same time destroying rival temples.
The Romans not only defeated the pagans and Gnostics but also gained dominance over the church of Jerusalem founded by Jesus’ own brother James. Paul, a man who never knew Jesus, became the main apologist and theologian, and his only authority was a ‘vision’! The historical Jesus remains shrouded in obscurity, because there are few records outside of the gospels about him, and the gospels must be read as propaganda, because that is exactly how Luke describes their objective, “this is written that you may believe.” Mark is acknowledged as the first of the canonical gospels, written sometime after 70 C.E. Its contents were not whispered in someone’s ear by God, but passed down from personal associates of Jesus to become oral traditions, later to be written down and finally copied by the author of Mark. That is 4 levels of remove from the historical Jesus. The authors of Matthew and Luke who copied Mark and added their own stories were 5 levels removed.
Mark portrays a very human Jesus. He even leaves his readers guessing about the empty tomb at the end of his story. Matthew and Luke both use Mark as a reference plus another common source known as Q(German for source). Then amplifications are added to accentuate their point of view. A parallel reading of the synoptic gospels reveals discrepancies in each telling of the same stories. Literalists who claim the Bible is inerrant are once again hard pressed to explain the differing versions. Compare the quotes of Jesus about the meanings of parables found in Mark 3:14 and Matthew 11:2-3. In Mark, Jesus is said to use parables to obfuscate. In Matthew, Jesus uses parables to illuminate. Matthew similarly touches up Mark’s story about Jesus and John the Baptist. Matthew is evidently embarrassed by the lowly status Mark infers on Jesus and changes the story to exalt Jesus above the Baptist. Matthew consistently edits Mark to suit his own purpose, which is establishing the divinity of Jesus. Matthew uses familiar miracle stories from the Old Testament and pagan sources and attributes them to Jesus to substantiate his assertions. The Gospels are clearly not historically accurate. The writers of the gospels were not concerned about those details. They were writing theology not history.
However, their influence would chart the course of history. The western world was plunged into the Dark Ages as the Church clamped down on reason and freethinking. Extensive documentation records the diabolical horrors of the Crusades, the inquisitions, and the witch burnings. Finally, the Renaissance and Enlightenment freed humanity from the slavery to the Pope. People were free to have their own thoughts without fear of reprisal from the Church. The fear of God had been inculcated into the psyche and collective unconscious for a millennium, however, and fear is not easy to overcome. The Reformation generated many new sects interpreting the scriptures according to their inclinations, but the teachings of the ancient Mysteries and Gnostic gospels had been systematically erased from common knowledge. Some of these secret teachings were preserved as ‘esoteric’, despite libraries being razed in the name of the ‘Lord’.

“I have recently been examining all known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies.”
• Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Dr. Woods

The Bible is the word of god in the sense that it comes from and speaks to the deepest instincts and aspirations of man, the abode of the Spirit. We can profit from the Bible by reading it as mythology. There are universal lessons to be learned from the “Illiad”. Though we do not take the stories literally, they are still true to human nature. Miracles were assigned to epic heroes to signify status and produce awe. God did not part the Red Sea, but that legend elevated Moses’ reputation and conjunctively codified the Law. The finger of God did not write the Ten Commandments, but they were expressions of humanity’s highest ethics. By claiming revelation, societies were able to impose order. Suggesting that the Bible is full of promises is putting a heavy burden on believers. We should not expect miracles. Rising from the dead in the Spirit requires no miracle; resurrection is inherent in the natural order.
The unearthing of the Dead Sea scrolls and Naj’ Hammadi texts can be seen as a resurrection. We are offered another chance to revive our theology according to teachings ascribed to Jesus that affirm our deepest held beliefs that we are all God’s children. We are not asked to sacrifice our reason and accept miracles. Our salvation does not depend on believing the impossible; that Jesus was born of a ‘virgin’, or that he walked on water, or even that he was raised from the dead. Our salvation is assured by our birthright, the anointing of the Spirit that is our essence. Christ is that spirit. Jesus assumed that title by living in the fullness of the Spirit and recognizing our Oneness with God.
Incarnation is perhaps the oldest religion. The Spirit in us testifies to the conclusion that God became Man. We feel that connection in our soul. We long for Heaven because that is where we are from and where we are going. Our hope for eternal life is justified precisely because the Sun is born again each spring. Easter was attached to this phenomenon, for that is the nature of the cosmos. Apollo is a type of Christ, as is Jesus, as is the Easter bunny. Would you sacrifice a rabbit to appease an angry god? Is God really angry? Does God demand a bloody sacrifice?
The history of the church could be written in blood, by martyrs yes, but mostly by innocent people who couldn’t believe in a sadistic deity with a nationalistic fervor and genocidal program that Hitler could only envy; compare Auschwitz to Hell. Burned at the stake for their unbelief, are these infidels the true saints? Have we the courage to deny the dubious authority of misconstrued myths and trust in our own hearts and minds?
Are you able to imagine the sweet ‘Lamb of God’ transforming into a ‘Lion’ bringing judgment and destruction? To me Jesus will always represent the God of Love who is ever Merciful. If we can but look on our fellow man through the eyes of the Christ, we too would be sympathetic and wars would cease. Who would Jesus bomb? We are all brothers and sisters. Treating anyone as less than a child of God is to sin against the Holy Spirit. The laws and the prophets are summed up in this one saying, ‘Love the lord thy God with all thy heart, with all the soul, and with all thy strength, and love thy neighbor as thy self.” Love thy self, because we bear God’s image, and love thy neighbor, because our neighbor is our self.
Armageddon doesn’t have to be. It will not be, if we listen to the Spirit of Love in our hearts and not to the prophets of hate and fear. Blind support for Israel as they commit crimes against humanity is not alignment with God’s people, for God’s people are the ‘anointed’ of any religion that practice mercy and loving-kindness, “Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” Which side are we on? Warfare and genocide seem to be the way of Moses and Mohammed. Non-violence and self-sacrifice is the way of Jesus the ‘Christ’.
The yearning in our heart for God, the desire for truth, the longing for redemption, the hunger for justice, the thirst for righteousness, the yen for love; these cravings are signs of the Spirit in our soul. These urges are evidence of the Cosmic Christ that pervades time and space and resides in every heart. Our conscience is our assurance of salvation. Our nostalgic ache for ‘Eden’ is a wish for unity. The kingdom of heaven will come and is now here for those who know this peace.