Religious Syncretism IS Natural

Syncresis is the blending together of traditions. We have religious thinkers today who argue that syncretic practices are foolish reconceptions inimical to true faith and sign of weak adherence to established dogma. In short, these critics decry any form of religious syncretism as indicative of "erroneous" practice, or as a contamination of "pure" tradition. However, we must face the essential fact that Christianity has been a syncretic faith at least since it was made the official religion of the Roman State under Constantine, who ordained that it be combined with the then very popular (and pagan) cult of the sun god (Sol Invictus -- "the Unconquerable Sun"). With this inter-cultic syncretism by imperial edict the simpler form of Christianity that had been practiced when it was still a minority (and only recently legalized) religion ceased to be. Thus the Christian sabbath was moved from Saturday to Sol's holy day (Sunday), and the commemoration of Christ's birthday was shifted from the beginning of Autumn to the beginning of Winter (which was when Sol's birthday was celebrated). Also, the commemoration of the Last Supper was likened to the pagan cults of divine cannibalism of sacrificial gods that were reborn, like Mithras and Attis, through the neologistic concept of transubstantiation. Mary, the mother of Jesus, was now likened to pagan Parthenogenic Mother Goddesses like Isis, even though the actual Mary had several children by her husband Joseph, who had been a mensch and married her when she had been an unmarried pregnant girl (either by miraculous conception, or, as Jewish tradition has anciently held, by a Roman soldier named Pantherus). Of course before that, another form of syncretism has already begun in terms of the development of Christianity. The Church Fathers (and the Apostle Paul before them) had been busily incorporating various ideas from Greek philosophy with Christianity to give it "intellectual rigor" in the face of scholarly pagan critics, and one Church Father, Tertullian, even introduced the Indo-European pagan concept of triadic deity in the theology of the Trinity.

Yet syncretism goes even farther back in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The early faith of the Hebrew Patriarch and their household followers shows a strong connection to Sumerian, Akkadian, Canaanite mythic traditions and worldviews in the Book of Genesis (Bereshith). The laws and purification practices of the Pentateuch (Torah) resemble Babylonian law codes and ritual purity standards of Egyptian priesthood. The Psalms (Tehillim) resemble many hymns from Egypt and Mesopotamia in phraseology, motifs and themes. Conversely, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Testament (Tanakh), known as the Septuagint may have influenced the popular philosophical movement of the Kunikoi in Greece, who lived and taught lives of moral virtue over worldly materialism, just as had been preached and exemplified in the Books of the Prophets (Nevi'im). In its turn, the later rabbinic tradition of Judaism studied Greek moral philosophy (sometimes in Arabic translation) and integrated its principles in their development of Judaic moral principles.

Getting back to Christianity at an earlier stage, Jesus' re-prioritization of one's individual spiritual perspective and his moral upending of the whole social order resemble the principles of Buddhism, and there was a Buddhist immigrant community in the Galilean trade city of Tzippori (i.e., Sepphoris), not far from his native Nazareth, not to mention the Buddhist-influenced Hellenistic philosophical movement of the Eastern Mediterranean, known as the Therapeutae. The Apostle Paul's theology developed in his Epistles resembles the dualistic philosophy of Neoplatonism and the moral hardihood and spiritual universalism of Stoicism. The Book of Revelations has strong thematic and symbolic antecedents in the prophecies found in the Book of Daniel and the apocalyptic scrolls of the Qumram Separatist Jewish community on the predicted cosmic war between the "Lords of Light" and the "Lords of Darkness", not to mention the polarized theology of Manichaean Christianity and its predecessor, Zoroastrianism.

Today the critics are venting at syncretic practices within the Judeo-Christian family, seeing these spiritual experiments as anything from "pretentious" to an outright "betrayal" of orthodoxy. However, the tendency of the two traditions (Judaism and Christianity) to find more in common with each other (rather than to have a sense of mutual alienation) has happened recurrently through time, and has been recorded wherever and whenever puritanical religious and secular authorities were present to interfere and keep the two sister faiths "properly separate". One comes across the anxiety over syncretism repeatedly mentioned by ironfisted religious officials who perceived what they considered "the Judaizing of Christianity", which occurred often in places where Christians and Jews shared economic, social, and political aims and values, and as an outgrowth of these factors began attending each others religious services and even intermarrying with each other (the "proof is in the pudding": Jews of European heritage look more like Christians of European heritage than they do Jews whose ancestors lived in Arabic countries).

So syncretism is natural, and has been a part of the Judeo-Christian tradition from beginning to end. It is also a necessary factor in the positive growth of any faith tradition in communication with the broader world and possessing a moral sense of common cause with the whole of humankind. In a certain sense, Jesus was effectively a "Jewish Prophet unto the Gentiles", bringing the emotional heart of Judaism to a pagan world that had thus far mainly developed only an intellectual form of morality. Moral teaching could now generate a popular appeal in the Gentile world because it was religiously grounded. Thus efforts today by Christians to embrace the Jewish roots of their faith in a variety of ways is not a "betrayal" of their Christian faith, but actually a form of syncretism. Such synncretic instincts could reestablish that "purity" of the Early Church that the Protestants and the Counter-Reformation both failed ultimately achieve, because neither of the two major divisions of Christianity could shed the authoritarianism they mutually inherited from the Imperial Church of Constantine. To put the Jewish soul back into Christianity will restore its egalitarian spirit of halcyon days.

The Ultimate Challenge to Religion and Spirituality: Why is There Injustice and Tragedy in the World?

We have the famous answer in the Book of Job from the the Divine Whirlwind, which essentially states that humankind's perspective and perceptions are too limited to encompass the broad aims of the Divine Will. We have Jesus' injunction that we must recognize and grow beyond the fundamental realization that nourishing rain and killing drought affect alike the rich and the poor, the just and the unjust. Some Christian Gnostics chose to answer the niggling problem of evil and untimely mischance by positing that this was a false world and that what people worshiped as "god" was a false god (a rebel angel), and that our souls had been "tricked" by this fallen angel and his cohorts into coming here; thus the whole purpose of their form of Gnosticism was to find a way "out" of this grand deception and become reunited with the True God, who wanted only joy and happiness for us in the "real world" (i.e., the realm in which our souls had originally been made to abide and thrive). Early Christian thinkers like Augustine of Hippo and then later even the reformist thinker, John Calvin, cruelly reasoned that some have been predestined from the beginning of time to fail, know unremitting suffering and meet damnation upon their deaths, while others are fated to succeed, know joy and be welcomed by salvation when they die. Conversely, the forms of Christianity that have sustained the misfortunate have expressed the idea that suffering leads to a greater capacity for compassion and understanding; this blog can agree with such a notion under limited circumstances, but there are forms of suffering so intense or prolonged that they can destroy minds, damage psyches, disable bodies, or even make the victims cruel (though there are some incredible exceptions of perdurable nobility among those who have survived such hardships, either man-made or from natural causes). East Asian religions have determined that the suffering and loss endured by those who are living good lives derives from a form of karmic repayment for the errors of previous and forgotten incarnations of the soul. For atheists, the answer as to why good people sometimes meet with misfortune and bad people often go on prospering by their evils is that, first of all, there is no god to divinely intervene either way, and secondly, that the dynamics of nature are blind, and thirdly, that our collective biological instincts subvert the will toward pervasive and permanent social justice within our various forms of civilization. None of these is entirely satisfactory or completely unassailable in explaining the inevitable and often unnecessary suffering one encounters in this world. On the one hand, we are not in a position to fully comprehend the nature of the cosmos and the reason why many of us thirst for justice and happiness, even though we are a species that has evolved on a planet whose instability makes it so resistant to these worthy passions. On the other hand, the concepts of an eternal soul, a redemptive God and a heavenly "rest" provide some comfort and are inherently compelling to our psyches, in the face of this sometimes fickle and rough existence. Many of us believe that goodness and the good life throb too powerfully within us for these feelings and efforts to be mere hopeful delusions in an otherwise uncaring void. If we were truly beings of body only, we would accept our harsh mortal lot the way an insect might. But we do not, even when we have rejected a belief in a Supreme Being. We crave wholesome joy and express a rebellious mercy, even in the blunt face of Nature. Christ was a healer, so we must heal the world in his wake, not allow it to do its callous will. Christ honored the poor and the suffering -- he did not condemn them. Prayer is central to faith, taught by Jesus himself, and so there can be no such thing as predestination. God wants the best for us, and we must realize that we are each of us worthy of that.

An Heretical View of the Gospel of John

There is no doubt that the Gospel of John, composed in its final form some seventy years after Jesus' death, is one of the most powerfully written of the Four Canonical Gospels. Here we see the deification of Jesus completed, he is no longer even merely a human messiah, nor merely the Son of God, but One and the Same as God. The author of this gospel has also married Greek Platonism with the Christian beliefs that had evolved at the time it was written, and uses this philosophical structure to spell out how he believes Christians should conceive of God, worship God, be saved spiritually by God, and just what angers and pleases God. Jesus' vulnerable humanity, his self-doubt, the sense of being in equal dialog with humanity are nearly gone. Admittedly, the Gospel of John has its own unique moments that connect it with the humane figure of Jesus found in the earlier Synoptic Gospels. For instance, in this gospel we have Jesus' humble and spiritually poignant act of farewell embodied in his exercise of a traditional custom of Middle Eastern hospitality, wherein the host washes the feet of his guests, in this case with Jesus so honoring his disciples at the Passover Seder. And then this gospel also has the precious anecdote of Jesus' psychologically subtle but morally profound defense of a suspected adulteress from summary execution by stoning at the hands of a fanatical mob. But beyond these specific points, for many Christians, the general poetic beauty, philosophical integrity and doctrinal clarity of the Gospel of John come together to make this the most reassuring and oft cited of the gospels in terms of justifying various essential beliefs and religious tenets, that get concisely expressed in Church-approved creeds. What is problematic for heterodox Christians is that it demands abasement and abject penance for one's inevitably sinful nature, emphasizing not our natural kinship with God but the rectification of what is perceived to be our fundamental estrangement from God. Many of us today seeking spiritual strength want to discover within ourselves a note of liberation and capability offered in the path of salvation, to form a partnership with God rather than a servile relationship, in which our own divine spark is seen in microcosmic relationship with God, the Spiritual Macrocosm. Another problem that both progressive and heterodox Christians find with the Gospel of John is its unreserved castigation and condemnation of the Jewish people. Progressive Christians take these passages and remind their congregations that what John means by "Jews" are the conservative authorities, members and agents of the Sanhedrin who opposed Jesus' teachings. Unfortunately, the gospel's author does not actually so clarify what he means by "Jews". We can read the Gospel of John back into the historical period in which Jesus lived, and say that if the real Jesus spoke criticism, he would have had to have meant only those members of his culture who opposed his reformist ideas, but whoever composed the Gospel of John was living generations later, and did not qualify his condemnation of Jews. He let it stand baldly and damned them all as a faith and as a people. That Jesus was antisemitic is an absurd assumption, for Jesus was not a preacher of hate and intolerance (just the opposite), and would never have damned his own people. It would be tantamount to a man cursing his own brothers and sisters for choosing not to worship him as a god! We must face the fact that this author (or authors), who pretentiously took the name of the Apostle John, must have put this in Jesus' mouth to suit his/their own mortal and ungodly purposes. It is most troubling that such anti-Semitic passages from John are still assigned and read for religious services in the lectionary cycle of the liturgical year as laid out by various ecumenical councils of allied Christian denominations. It seems quite certain that there are more constructive passages to read aloud to the congregation in this age of continued intolerance and misunderstanding. Progressive churches need to step up to the plate and shrug off the fear-inspired policy to "retain strength in unity" with fundamentalist denominations which insist that such profane intrusions corrupting the divine inspiration of holy scripture be continued to be read across denominational lines at Sunday services.

Proselytism Versus Spiritual Sharing

Before Jesus' name was later used by some Christians as justification to murder, maim, beat up, rob, extort from and forcibly convert his own descendent people, Jews (even if they were not among his followers) knew of him as a reformist rabbi who prophesied doom for the Temple Culture if religious authorities continued to compromise values and traditions to accommodate the amoral worldly priorities of their Roman overlords. These Jews who were contemporaries with Jesus also knew him as a former disciple of John the Baptist, who in turn had belonged to a larger separatist Jewish movement, as exemplified historically by such groups as the Essenes and the Qumran sectarians, whose Aramaic writings generally emphasized moral intent, spiritual contemplation and the sacred act of forgiveness in contradistinction to hollow ritual observance, however assiduously adhered to. However, when some of Jesus' former disciples began preaching after his death that he had been the Messiah, the broader Jewish community rejected the validity of the assertion, because, for them, the True Messiah will usher in an immediate, permanent and world-spanning age of peace, justice and prosperity. In his lifetime, Jesus taught his followers the way to build greater peace and social justice, but he recognized the intrinsically imperfect state of this world. However, Jesus wanted his followers to not be passive in the face of these imperfections. If the apostles had not tried to proselytize Jesus as the Messiah, it seems likely that Jews would have placed him in their tradition of honored rabbis under his Aramaic name, "Yeshua ben Maria", telling stories of him alongside other such figures of Jewish Antiquity as Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Eleazar ben Shammua. One reason this seems possible is Jesus' honored place amidst another Semitic culture: that of the Arabs. Muslims revere Jesus as a prophet, calling him by the Arabic form of his name, "Isa". Up until European colonial powers in the Early Modern Period began using missionary Christianity alongside military force to dominate territories where Muslims dwelt, it had been an Islamic literary tradition to write down various tales from oral tradition that described Isa as an exemplary sage and healer, indeed as one of the progenitors of Sufism (as discussed in an earlier article of this blog). Imperialistic oppression by Westerners soured the popular native traditions devoted to Jesus, and their voices fell silent (or at least the scribes no longer felt inclined to record them). Though it is disputed, there is some evidence that Jesus was honored as "Isha, Best of the Sons of Men" by Tibetan and Nepalese Buddhists, who believed Jesus had come to India to study various spiritual traditions there, of which he came to prefer the teachings of Buddhism. Despite the aggressive policies of missionaries, Buddhists still honor Jesus as one of the world's great teachers of the true moral path, and Muslims still hold as orthodox the tenet that Jesus will accompany Allah in the Redemption of the World. Jews today, through the rectifications of Judeo-Christian scholarship now can see that Jesus belongs to a branch in the historical tree of the evolving Jewish faith, and if so understood, can be a figure that brings peace and understanding between Christians and Jews, rather than strife. What we must recognize is that there have always been elements that arose freely and naturally among like-minded, spiritually-oriented people for interfaith understanding and respectful sharing of scriptural traditions. It is only opportunistically divisive, politically motivated religious chauvinists who have upset and repressed a natural drift toward ecumenicalism between moral faiths. Proselytizers should always respect and not interfere with a person's chosen path: never impose, or the virtue of faith evaporates. We must remember that when Jesus helped, taught, healed and defended people, he did not ask first or even afterward that they worship him, or that the person to whom he had shown charity should become a Jew as he was, but rather, he simply said, "Sin no more."

An Apologeticum for This Blog

The purpose of this blog is not to disturb the meditative serenity of Christians of benign being, nor to indirectly undermine the spiritually-reasoned basis for humble good acts. Both traits are rooted in the beauty of simple faith. This blog honors the belief that the purest and strongest indication of God is the emanation of kindness within and among people despite the world's difficulties -- even in cases where such benevolent attitudes are not consciously registered within a belief in God. Not does this blog assume that its articles are going to change the mind of those who are its fanatical opposite in the broad continuum of Christian belief and values. What this blog does hope is that its articles will provide an alternative set of considerations for those who are only hearing the loudmouthed pronouncements of fundamentalism and the equally loudmouthed body of critics attacking the viability of Christianity as a source of uplift for humankind, both parties of whom purport to define just what Christianity is and always has been. This blog, rather, seeks to be an antidote to both anti-progressive, un-reflective, a-historical forms of Christianity and the bigoted critics of Christianity who would lump all varieties of Christian faith into its lowest common denominator. These critics and their counterparts, the self-appointed media-spokespeople of Christianity, have little concept of its historical complexity, and in fact, do not care to properly explore its humane variety of expression, nor its progressively evolving moral tenets, nor its continuity of humane traditions in defiance of a parallel tradition of authoritarian societal persecution that it learned from its former foe, the Roman Empire. For instance, it would not be fair to judge today's Christians by the polemical, dualistic arguments of Augustine of Hippo, a Pauline Church Father, whose puritanical writings effectively rejected the Golden Mean, which had been fundamental to the humanely beneficent ideals of Greek philosophy. Such a way of decrying the Christian faith would be equal to judging today's Jews by the harsh tribal rules of collective survival found in the Pentateuch, which came out of a warlike and highly competitive world marked by a marginal ecological environment for life. Such a specious approach would also be equal to judging the present inhabitants of the British Isles with Celtic ancestry on the ancient behavior of their pagan ancestors, who made offerings of human sacrifice to their native gods by burning their religious victims alive in wicker baskets. By contrast to such simple-minded approaches of criticism, this blog seeks to be one of the few fully assertive voices on historical and contemporary religious issues from a progressive Christian position, which otherwise seems mostly to adopt a policy of meek silence and unappreciated appeasement in answer to the firebrand and intolerant dicta of their hellfire-leaning brethren.

The Concept of "Dual Covenant"

The better angel of Islam has a concept known as "Peoples of the Book", in which tolerance and even acceptance was extended to its two siblings among the Abrahamic Faiths: Christianity and Judaism. In certain times and places, Muslim-controlled regions exercised secular laws inspired by the Koran that protected not only religious liberty for the Peoples of the Book, but also gave them equal employment opportunities and equal protection in judicial cases. Omayyad Spain was most famous for this enlightened approach, and created a vibrant multicultural society of advanced civilization because of it. However, even the better angel of Islam fell short in not extending this notion of the Peoples of the Book to areas where they had Hindu subjects. After all, the Hindus had their books of moral enlightenment, including most famously, The Bhagavad Gita, which contained the Incarnated God Krishna's sermon on a morally responsible life and whose moral tenets Jesus, Jeremiah and Mohammad would have wholeheartedly agreed with. In the defense of the Muslims there were occasional Islamic regimes and rulers, such as the Mughal Emperor, Akbar the Great, who did extend civil rights, religious liberty and moral recognition also toward Hindus. But what of the Christians? That is a long and miserable story indeed, especially with regard toward their treatment of the Jews, who had to live among them in both Orthodox Eastern Europe and Catholic Western Europe. For a brief moment during the Reformation, there was a glimmer of hope: Martin Luther made common cause with the German Jewish community against their mutual oppressor, the Catholic Church, but when Luther got the spiritual support and political protection he needed from the burghers and the nobles, he then issued an ultimatum to his other key allies, the Jews: you can retain your liberty from Catholic oppression but you must convert to Lutheran Protestantism. The Jews, having a fully satisfactory moral faith of their own, refused, and so Luther became just like his Catholic enemies: he reintroduced an initial (and vengeful) reign of terror upon the Jews and then instituted a permanent state of social and political repression upon the Jewish community, which did not begin to lift until the German Enlightenment of the 18th Century. Today we have an interesting concept called "the Dual Covenant". This arose out of the broader feeling of positive association between Christians and Jews that began in reaction toward Naziism, which gave us the concept of "the Judeo-Christian Tradition". Basically the idea of the Dual Covenant is similar to the Koranic idea of the Peoples of the Book, but goes much farther. Christians who hold to the concept of the Dual Covenant do not view Jews as "second class coreligionists" but as fully equal in terms of the grace of spiritual salvation and without the requirement that Jews believe that the Jewish prophet and rabbi Yeshua ben Maria (Jesus) was the Moshiach (Messiah). What can help the Christian understand how this can be actually so rather than merely adopting it as an unthinking attitude of broad tolerance is a better understanding of Judaism as it developed in Second Temple Times and thereafter. Even while Herod's Second Temple still stood, there were many Jews who were dissatisfied with Temple-centered worship and the tendency of some toward attitudes of hollow attachments to ritual over moral introspection and social justice. The Books of the Prophets in what the Christians know as the Old Testament should be indicative that this trend for social justice began long before even that. However it did continue to refine and develop among Jews along similar yet separately evolving lines to what Jesus prescribed to his own followers. Indeed, Jesus and his teachings were part and parcel of a larger movement within Judaism, which included the non-hypocritical members of the Pharisaic movement, the Essenes, the Qumram separatists, and many other smaller and semi-forgotten groups. After the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, Judaism continued under the Rabbinical Movement, which gave them the Talmud, a moral interpretation and explication of the Mosaic Laws of Judaism. From then on, the remaining Jews (without a Temple anymore in which to practice expiating animal sacrifices) became a religion of moral contemplation and devout observance of moral-legal traditions and communal behaviors in daily, seasonal and yearly life. As an example of social justice, every Jewish community at least from Late Antiquity, through the Middle Ages and up through the Modern Era had a legally-mandated community chest and form of social mobilization to help those who had fallen into various kinds of misfortune get back up on their feet. The Jewish community continued to compose new holy writings by spiritually authoritative and morally respectable figures through the centuries, just as the Christians had their Fathers of the Church and later theologians and honored mystics from Ancient, Medieval and recent times. The progressive moral understanding of Judaism was and is congruent with that of the Christian, and the evidence of that parallel development is seen today by the fact that there are now women rabbis just as there are now women ministers. Of course, what I would truly like to see is something that builds upon this concept of Dual Covenant and creates a real sense of a Covenant of Moral Plurality (i.e., a religious alliance where there is a permanent pact of peace and mutual respect between not only Christians, Jews and Muslims, but also with other faiths committed to moral kindness and social justice, such as Krishnaism, Zoroastrianism, the Baha'i, the Sikhs, Buddhists, and "Great Spirit" aboriginal faiths, etc). If there was only one way to salvation, human beings would only have developed one culture, one language and one civilization, but the planet Earth is a vast world of varied ecological and topographical environments that shaped human life in different ways. Therefore, the reaching out to understand the moral will of the Higher Power had of necessity to take different forms. Now modern communications can give us an unprecedented means to understand people of other faith traditions. Please, let us heal ourselves of morally-occluding divisiveness and misplaced proselytism and respect and love one another as we differently are.

Generalissimo Jesus and Christ the Asker of Sacrifice: Two False Faces of the Christian Messiah?

Orthodoxy unfortunately bestowed upon us Christians two distortions of our Savior, and these have led to a misuse of Christianity and misunderstanding of its message. What I call "Generalissimo Jesus" comes from the figure of Jesus presented in The Book of Revelations, written around 95 CE and a disputed text not admitted into the Christian Canon until the Council of Carthage in 397 CE (though Martin Luther in the 16th century reclassified it as a "disputed text"). Revelations presents a mythologized Jesus, re-imagined as a warrior-god of martial justice, leading the Heavenly Host in a Manichaean fantasy of elemental war between Good and Evil. This image of Jesus from Revelations is a source for the inspiration of the Crusades, in which mentally polarized Christians put thousands of Jews, Muslims, nature-worshiping pagans, and Christians of other sects to the sword. Few progressive Christians would argue with me that this version Jesus, dreamed up by a dubious seer, John of Patmos (Revelations is also known as The Apocalypse of John) has anything to do with the Jesus who taught the Jewish peasants of Galilee the hope of love amidst their suffering at the hands of Romans who onerously taxed them and continually abused them with their Legionary enforcers.

With the aspect I call "Christ the Asker of Sacrifice", I am entering into a conflict with a larger portion of the devout. Many early Christians, and later, Christians deemed heretical by either Catholic or Protestant authorities, offered up their lives to their persecutors in the name of what they believed in, because they thought they were following a light to which others were blind. These martyrs took as their model Jesus himself, who died on the cross as punishment by the Romans for his stated beliefs, which ran counter to Roman sociopolitical ideology and that of the colluding ruling native party in Palestine. The Christians who died in the arenas, torture chambers, execution blocks, burning stakes and crucifixion mounts were truly brave, forthright, and noble souls. Their courageous deaths for the cause of what they believed to be the light of truth even inspired some of the witnesses of their grisly and heartbreaking deaths to convert.

But my question is this: are such acts of self-sacrifice what Jesus the Rabbi would have wanted? Wasn't Jesus trying to teach a spiritual way of living, practicing attitudes and insights that brought about inclusive harmony with one's fellow human beings? Shouldn't Jesus' death have been the final one in the name of faith? Was his famous dictum, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is His" merely referring to the bankrupting taxes the Romans were imposing on the poor? Might Jesus have also meant: make the motions of obedience to the transitory tyrants of this ephemeral world, so long as you love each other as God loves you?

Think of what these martyrs might have accomplished in the form of uplifting their spiritual communities had they not cut short their lives in the name of their faith. In one sense, they can be said to be committed to honesty even unto the pain of death. But if they had made a hollow show of making an offering to the reigning emperor as "deity", their lives would have been spared. After all, no one can really control what a person thinks or believes inside. For the sake of the living, the martyrs could have chosen life and pretended to be sincere in the renunciation of their faith to satisfy the authorities, of whom the latter otherwise had no appreciation for the subtleties of human compassion which were the stock and trade of Christian communities. We must consider that if most Christians had not pretended to foreswear their faith and put on a show of worshiping whatever cretinous emperor was then in power, there would not have been enough Christians to survive in order to carry on the faith itself.

One has to take into account, in light of modern psychology, that perhaps there existed an unconscious reason for those Christians who did choose to interpret Christ's sacrifice on the cross as a model to follow in their own individual lives. These martyrs may have found that life in the world in which they lived had become simply unbearable. Early Christian communities were human oases for both the socially downtrodden and the better-off, the latter of whom had developed a moral conscience that could no longer exist mentally in the highly privileged graces of Rome. Under the Imperial social order, very few were extended human decency, and loyalty to wealth and power were the only de facto virtues of Roman society. For many early Christians, the agonies of the greater world about them, so committed as it was to moral turpitude, may have looked like it would go on forever.

If this was their perception (a quite forgivable one), it can be understood today why some might have chosen martyrdom, not only for the conscious reason of wanting to be true to the perceived tenets of one's faith, but also for the inward need to escape from a world that had become unbearable and seemed hopeless. Indeed their religious leaders may have encouraged them to submit to martyrdom as a microcosmic act of sacrifice to God, congruent with Jesus' death, which they understood to be a macrocosmic offering on the altar of salvation. These religious leaders and their desperate followers may have believed that through these deaths by martyrdom, God might be cajoled into bringing an end to the immoral society of their oppressors.

Which brings us back to Revelations, a book that taught Christians that the injustices in the world could only be solved by divinely intervening violence. With regard to today's suicide-bombers and the grief to the innocent they cause in the name of faith, the concept of martyrdom within any religious tradition must be seriously re-examined. Even the Christian martyrs of long ago caused collateral damage in the form of the grieving parents, spouses, children and friends they left behind by their voluntary deaths.

Giving one's life to save another is one thing, and such an act is a fundamental form of human altruism, something Jesus, no doubt, would have approved, if he believed that circumstances and the greater good necessitated such an ultimate act of kindness. However, giving up one's life as an embodied symbol of faith seems problematic in terms of the purpose of the path Jesus the Rabbi taught while he walked this Earth.

An Orthodox Belief That Demands An Heretical Response

"The Harrowing of Hell" has a masculine poetic ring to it, and is a metaphor (delving into archaic agrarian terminology) for one of the most bizarre acts ascribed to Jesus before we encounter in The Book of Revelations the prognosticated things he will supposedly do at the end of "history". But getting back to our poetic biblical metaphor, it refers to the belief that on the Saturday of his disappearance between his death on a Friday and his resurrection on a Sunday, Jesus went down to Hell and caught up the souls of the virtuous prophets and patriarchs from "Old Testament Times", and brought them to Heaven. This is all grandly mythological stuff, and you have poets centuries later like Dante for instance, elegiacally bemoaning the necessity of Jesus to leave behind the "virtuous pagans" to the rest of Eternity in the Netherworld. But for the critically-minded Christian who needs moral continuity, even the very idea should be abominable that the ancient leaders of the Hebrew faith, the mother (after all) of Christianity, were ever sent to Hell in the first place! Of course, it is all theologically explained in terms of the concept that these Jewish Elders were sent to Hell because they carried the "stain" of Original Sin passed on by everyone's forebear, Adam, and only Christ's Holy Crucifixion could remove that automatically damning stain, from which even from the godly predecessors of Jesus were not immune. This indeed is a patent insult to Judaism, and certainly Jesus himself would never have imagined Abraham or Moses writhing in Hell, biding patiently through the centuries until the Messiah came to absolve their long-suffering souls. But putting aside the implications of such a fate (however temporary) for the most revered shapers of the Jewish faith, what sense does any of this make for the human race as a whole? When the human species began to fully emerge from animal unconsciousness into sapient consciousness (and therefore moral accountability), are we really expected to believe that all of those of our kind who lived and died in the intervening tens of thousands of years were sent to Hell because they know nothing of Jesus and he had not yet died for them? A moral god (and therefore the One True God) would never have planned things this way. Christians must accept the possibility that people go to Heaven because of the lives they have led, and not because, after 100,000 years of our presence on this planet in our current cerebral form, that God finally sent his only begotten Son to die for us as a sacrificial propitiation for the heritable sin of Adam, the first human. We must remember how Adam earned his moral stain. It was by eating a piece of forbidden supernatural fruit, which, in essence, gave him the knowledge that no other animal possesses: that he and Eve had souls.

You Can Still be a Christian Even If...

Contrary to what some say, you can still be a Christian and realize that what has been written as scripture were interpretations of divine will by fallible human beings, and sometimes editors down through the centuries changed things. You can still be a Christian and accept some ideas and reject others presented in the Bible. You can still be a Christian and NOT believe that people of other moral religions are damned. You can still be a Christian and NOT believe that people who belong to other Christian sects are damned. You can still be a Christian and know that atheists and agnostics who live morally responsible lives will go to heaven without needing a specific belief in God. You can still be a Christian and believe in and appreciate the latest discoveries of natural science. You can still be a Christian and not be held accountable for the violence that false Christians have committed (and still commit) in the Name of God, so long as you reject the violence that they do or have done. You can still be a Christian and have friends who are not. You can still be a Christian and marry a person of another faith or who has no religion at all. You can still be a Christian and read secular literature, listen to or perform secular music, see secular movies, play secular games, create or enjoy secular art, write secular fiction, be devoted to secular concerns, and lead a secular professional life. You can still be a Christian and enjoy sex as a form of wholesome pleasure and affection between two consenting adults, even without having any reproductive motives. You can still be a Christian and use birth control. You can still be a Christian and treat women as moral, social, political, economic, legal and professional equals. You can still be a Christian and believe that homosexuality between two consenting adults is not a sin. You can still be a Christian and believe in the right of homosexual couples to have sanctified marriages. The reason you can still be a Christian under all these conditions is because Christianity is really about L-O-V-E.

Jesus the Enlightened Teacher vs Jesus the Superstar

If Jesus had not preached the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon on the Plain, if he had never shown kindness and mercy and human forgiveness to social outcasts, if all he had done was perform magical acts (i.e., supernatural miracles), been crucified, and risen from the dead, would he still be worthy of veneration? Many people believe that his miracles are proof of his Godhood, and are enough in and of themselves to worship him as the Son of God. However, what if his miracles were merely an emanation of his simple innate goodness of spirit? If we want to be true Christians, we cannot separate the moral teaching from the wonder of the magical power. If we only contemplate Jesus as a wonderworker, we may as well worship magic, than to make any pretense of valuing the moral attitudes Jesus taught us to develop toward our fellow human beings. What if Jesus had never walked on water, never fed the 5000 from a single basket of food, never raised Lazarus from the dead, and not resurrected himself after his crucifixion? To my mind, he would still be worth venerating (and aspiring to) as one of the greatest prophets (in the old sense of that word) to emerge from Jewish society. Today, many over-emphasize his god-like powers, and in doing so, they seem to miss the point. What if the main point is what Jesus tried to teach human beings about themselves?

Why Did the Romans Mock Jesus as "King of the Jews"?

Because the emphasis has always been laid on the idea that the joke was on the Romans: the belief or understanding from hindsight that Jesus was not merely "King of the Jews" but "King of the Universe", we often do not think about why the Romans might have felt so threatened by this working-class Jew from the backwater province of Galilee. After all, Rome was one of the most religiously tolerant civilizations ever to have existed. However, that tolerance had its limits (which later become very evident when so many Christians were martyred). Most people focus on the idea that the real sensitivity lay with the Roman commandment that "you can worship whomever and however you want, just so long as you also worship the Emperor". But in Jesus' time, the imperial throne had not completely bought into this Egyptian concept of rulership (i.e., that the the supreme ruler was somehow divine even though they had to make their daily visits to the toilet like every other humble human being on the planet). What we must consider at this stage is that Jesus was a threat to Rome in terms of his teaching. Jesus' value system was a complete inversion of the Roman value system. In fact, it was inimical to it; thus we have the sufficient reason for a Roman governor to take the extreme measure of having a pacifist rabbi crucified. Jesus was martyred for his beliefs alone, not because he led an army to overthrow Roman rule in Palestine. Rome was ruled by emperors, who were treated as though they were super-human, even though they were often inanely fallible, voraciously greedy, and sometimes astonishingly sadistic. Conversely, Rome did not even consider the majority of its population -- its slaves -- to be at all human. Rome did not value women, except for the bloodlines they biologically carried, their ability to reproduce heirs, their maintenance of household order, and the temporary form of their youthful beauty. Roman women were not appreciated for their minds, souls or ideas, nor the venerable character of beauty into which women can grow. Friendship, at least among the literate men who considered themselves the models of Roman society, was not based on a sense of personal fellowship and mutual affection, but in fickle opportunism for congruent political, social and economic advantage and ambition. Worst of all, Romans felt no guilt in physically, emotionally and sexually abusing their slaves, neglecting the health of their slaves, and some of these slaves they malnourished and literally worked to death. On the other side, you have Jesus. Jesus taught people to value equally the humanity and moral worth of of men, women and children, regardless of ethnicity, class or station in life. These were not marginal teachings of his. They were core teachings. He had female disciples, and though downplayed in the Canonical Gospels, they are evidenced in the non-canonical but spiritually authentic Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Phillip and Gospel of Thomas. Jesus was a sincere intellectual and spiritual liberator, but his teachings crashed on the sharp rocks of the aristocratic ideology of Rome. Spartacus the Slave, who died about a hundred years before Jesus did, also believed in the dignity of all human beings, and tried to break through to a world where social justice existed. The Romans sent him to the same fate as they would Jesus. If nothing else, Rome was consistent.

The Multiple Spheres of Jesus' Kingdom of God

Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God in multiple ways: "The Kingdom of God is at hand" (Mark, 1:15); "But seek ye first the Kingdom of God" (Matthew, 6:33); "The Kingdom of God is in your midst" (Luke, 17:21); "The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the Earth" (Thomas, 113); "the Kingdom of God is within you" (Luke, 17:21). There is a sense of immediacy in every aspect of the notion, and some have mistaken the preaching on this theme meant that Jesus thought that the Day of Doom was imminent. This is to disregard the contexts in which he spoke of it and the related principles he taught. Like anything so transcendent as a spiritual concept of "the Kingdom of God", one must not be surprised that it is multifaceted. For Jesus, it is a complex idea, even as it is a liberating revelation. In John, chapter 3, verse 3, Jesus says, "Verily, I say unto thee: except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God." The reality of the Kingdom of God for Jesus seems to be something that is not only of the world's future, or the afterlife, but also of the present, of something (given the faith and the knowledge) that can be perceived in this world and within one's very soul. It is all-pervading, within and without, heretofore, here now, henceforward and hereafter. It is of one's soul, of one's community, of one's ultimate destiny. That is why when Christians today think only of the afterlife, and allow others to destroy this beautiful Earth God created for our joy, well-being and stewardship, they commit the sin of omission. And when Christians ally themselves with political forces which wreck this lovely living world we have been so preciously given, they are committing the sin of commission. The Kingdom of God is our neighbors, and our neighboring species of plants and animals, the whole spiritualizing ecosystem, as well as that into which our everlasting souls will pass after death. The Kingdom of God abides within us, because in each of us is a child of God who carries a spark of God's everlasting energy and being. We therefore should respect ourselves and all things created by God. You see, we did not even need to learn from the American Indians that the Great Spirit wants us to love Mother Earth, and in so doing love each other. It has been in our Bible (as well as in one of its lost Gospels) all along. Amen.

Two Visions of Jesus: Prince of Peace or Military Messiah?

It is popular among the intelligentsia to throw out what they call the "Victorian bourgeois concept" of "the kindly Jesus". This camp identifies themselves as the "realists", and they envision an "historical" Jesus as an angry, stern and militant prophet like most messianic figures that arose in his time and place. Scholars of this "redacted" Jesus claim that Jesus really imagined an imminent doomsday for the Romans, and that Jesus was only concerned with the welfare of the Jews. They also argue that Jesus had material political ambitions. However, Syrian and Egyptian Arabic translations of an uncorrupted Oriental text of Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews provide a contemporary account by a fellow Jew of Jesus, in which the latter is pointedly not described as a pretender to military messiahship but as a praiseworthy rabbi, teacher, healer and honorable man of peace, whom Josephus felt had been wrongly executed. This account is from a Pharisee who had actually lived in the province of Galilee, Jesus' home territory. Such a description from Jesus' own time by a non-Christian Jew flies in the face of the current claim that Jesus as a figure of transcendent peace arose as a hopeful post-crucifixion concoction by his despairing disciples. Yes, Jesus could get angry, could grow impatient with moral inertia, could become vexed by hypocrisy, and he could employ the most rapier-like rhetoric with the reactionaries who challenged him. However, his one act of true wrath was specifically instigated by his righteous vehemence toward religious profiteering, was carried out alone, and did not constitute a political fracas with Roman authority, nor rally any group to acts of bodily violence against the Roman occupation. In fact, Jesus spent the bulk of his ministry teaching universal love and understanding, and he otherwise carried out acts of spiritual, mental and physical healing. Otherwise, Jesus also enjoyed sprinkling his teachings with a clever sense of humor. Getting back to the Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus would not have given such a positive report of Jesus had the latter been just like so many other radical religious leaders of the time, who claimed to be Messiah and led people to their destruction in the long odds game against the Empire of Rome. Josephus could have had no other reason than personal conviction for his brief testimony on Jesus, as the gentile audience he targeted for his book (an apologeticum of the Jews after their failed revolt) was otherwise indifferent to the then nascent Christian cult, which at the time was still largely a minor internal phenomenon of the Jewish world. The remembrances of Jesus as a peaceful teacher and healer are also too plentiful and sincerely detailed throughout the Gospels (both canonical and non-canonical) for these qualities to be posthumous fabrications or only marginal aspects of his identity when alive. Josephus' objectivity is impeccable, as he did not convert to Christianity, and he was retrospectively unsparing in his criticism of religious leaders who used Judaism for political and military purposes. It makes sense that Jesus would be one of the few religious figures to whom Josephus would give such plain and honest praise, if Jesus were just what most Christians today think of him: the Prince of Peace.

Why the Gospel of Thomas Should Be Admitted as Canonical

If some international, ecumenical body of Christian Churches decides to do a Revised Standard Version of the Bible for the 21st Century in vernacular languages, they must, as has been argued earlier in this blog, take into account the Codex Sinaiticus, our oldest surviving Bible (which indicates a feminist St. Paul as the original voice of his epistles), but it must also must accept into the biblical fold, The Gospel of Thomas, the most accessible and "orthodox" of the gospels and other writings discovered in a clay jar in the oasis of Nag Hammadi in Egypt back in the late 1940s. There are several essential justifications for doing so. Scholars have proven that it has a linguistic provenance with the earliest Christian Gospels. This relates to the fact that its phraseology and ideas are expressed in an original form and belong to the days of early Christianity. Though the form in which we now have it is in Coptic (the language of the Pharaohs that survived in Late Antiquity), scholars find that its diction and semantics easily translate back to the Aramaic original that must once have existed (Aramaic being the language of Jesus and his disciples). The basic moral, cosmological and theological teachings of Thomas are consistent with the Canonical Gospels in general. Moreover, the wisdom and mystical content is not at odds with the already established teachings of Jesus himself. There are those who will say: well, the Ecumenical Councils of the Ancient Church did not accept it, most especially the Council of Nicaea (the one under the auspices of Emperor Constantine), which crystallized the Christian Church as we know it. Well, that was then, this is now. The fact of the matter is that the New Testament already contains multiple ways of conveying central truths. Each of the Canonical Gospels takes its own viewpoint and introduces its own original ideas about Jesus, what he taught, what he claimed. This amounts to a clear precedent for the inclusion of alternate perspectives. Some say, well there is no Crucifixion in Thomas, but the rebuttal is: well, there is no Nativity in John. Psychologists today have established a basic fact of human existence: as a species, not all of us approach the world with the same form of intelligence. This is a good thing. It gives us more mental tools, collectively speaking, with which to solve the variety of problems and challenges we face as a society. As it stands, each of the Canonical Gospels addresses itself to this reality that has always existed, even before it was consciously and scientifically realized. Why isn't there just one Gospel in the first place? Why isn't there one version of Jesus' life and teachings? Christianity from the beginning was a religion embraced by a vast international community of cultures: Latin-speaking Romans, Koine-speaking Greeks, Aramaic-speaking Jews, Coptic-speaking Egyptians, and many other cultures and ethnic groups in between. The four gospels in our Bible are an artifact of this multicultural origin of Christianity, and they each emphasize different things concerning Jesus. So what does Thomas have to offer that they don't? Maybe something that would have saved us from a lot of grief in the past: the concept of personal responsibility for one's salvation. The Gospel of Thomas teaches us our role in effecting the liberation of one's own soul through a clarity of understanding of moral relationships. One of the beautiful things about Christianity that was correctly identified by Martin Luther is the fundamental power of faith itself. However, that is just the beginning. The mental articulation of that faith is the hard work of daily life. Unfortunately, too many people, once they have had that wonderful insight that God is real, Jesus is real, love is real, they surrender that inner light that revealed this to them to some aggressive authority figure. Well, not everyone is capable of teasing out the mysteries of moral existence. We are all differently gifted. The author of this article is incapable of teasing out the mysteries of the universe in terms of physics and mathematics (though the author surely appreciates that some can and delights in the discoveries they make). But whatever, form of intelligence a person has, if they are religiously persuaded, they should never wholly depend on a religious authority figure to dictate their actions and decisions. We are most of us capable of learning from experience, contemplating the results of our actions and those of others. We should never become dependent on a person claiming religious authority to tell us what to think or do, or how to judge our fellow human beings. Preachers, ministers, pastors or priests function properly in Christian moral terms when they provide compassionate guidance, and remind us that we must otherwise follow the conscience God gave us. If this balance is valued, respected and protected, Christianity will be less likely abused for political agendas, which are anything but moral or what Christ would have wanted for us. If we institute, if we canonize, if we include, finally, The Gospel of Thomas, there will at last be a corrective for this tendency in Christianity (both among Protestants and Catholics) to abdicate personal conscience in favor of some hierarchical or charismatic clerical figure. Thomas demands that we turn toward our inner light and not allow ourselves to be deceived once we have passed through that wonderful threshold into the intuitive light of faith. There is a reason that the monks in that desert monastery in Egypt did not simply burn The Gospel of Thomas when the Emperor and his Council of Bishops declared it an heretical text. Those monks knew it contained truth, and so they put it into a time capsule for us today, living in a more tolerant and enlightened age, to rediscover its merits. As a Christian, the author feels it was meant to be that is should now once again be a part of our world. So let us now accept it from the hands of the scholars who have been interpreting it for the past sixty-five years and bring it into the care of the Christian People themselves. Let us have it in our Bible, where it will find a complimentary home among the four other accepted gospels, there to perform the same function of greater wholeness in diversity that Mark, Matthew, Luke and John have been doing for nearly two millennia. Let us make it Mark, Matthew, Luke, Thomas and John -- a philosophical pentangle of ancient perfection!