The Heresy That Was Once Orthodox: Adoptionism

In the 1st Century CE, there were two forms of what we retrospectively can call "Christianity", but which at the time was far less formalized as a faith distinct from mainstream Judaism. Both groups would have identified themselves as "followers of Jesus". The Jacobine camp (followers of James/Yakov the Just and his successors) believed that converts should continue to follow all the purity laws and rituals of Judaism. The Pauline Camp (the followers of Paul and his successors) believed that keeping kosher was unnecessary but Jewish moral laws should still be observed. The latter camp attracted mostly Gentile converts, while the latter (obviously) attracted mostly Jewish converts. What is interesting is that both groups thought of themselves as Jewish. In fact, they thought of themselves as the Jews who knew that the True Messiah (as prophesied in Isaiah) had arrived. Another thing they held in common was the implicit belief that Jesus was a human being. Followers of both the Apostle Paul and the Apostle James both believed that Jesus had achieved such a purity of spiritual being that he was adopted by God as His son, right after his sacred immersion in the River Jordan by John the Baptist, wherein a theophanic dove, embodying God's emanation of Holy Spirit (Sophia/Shekinah), descended upon Jesus as a sign of God's recognition of Jesus' entry into Messiahship. It must be understood that these early followers of Jesus understood the concept of "messiah" (meshiha') to be the highest form of prophethood, but not as form of deity or deification.

It was not until the final form of the Gospel of John appeared in the first quarter of the 2nd Century CE that Jesus was thought by some followers of Jesus to be God incarnate, and most of these were of Gentile heritage. By this point, these were calling themselves "Christians", while those who maintained the Jewish character of religion of Jesus' first followers, began to distinguish themselves from those who thought Jesus was more than the Messiah but actually Divine, by calling themselves by such names as "Nazoreans" (Notzrim) and "Ebionites" (Ebyonim). They are collectively called by today's scholars, "Jewish Christians".

Those who persisted in holding that Jesus was a human being whose spirit had been ennobled through theophany continued to by an accepted branch by what became mainstream Christianity until the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, when the Emperor Constantine demanded that all Christians unify under one creed. Even such figures as Jerome, an early Church Father who translated the Greek New Testament into Latin, held respect for the special sacred New Testament text that Jewish Christians studied alone and held sacred apart from all others: the Gospel of the Hebrews. Thought by some to be an important source for the Gospel of Matthew, it may well have been, unlike the Gospel of Matthew, actually written by Jesus' own disciple by that name, rather than merely attributed to him as the canonical gospel of that name has been found to be. Contemporaries attested that it was written in Hebrew characters and in the Aramaic language, the daily language of Jesus and his original followers.

Later ecclesiastical authorities decided that Jewish Christians followed an heretical concept they called "Adoptionism": that Jesus was merely adopted by God as His son rather than being one and the same as God in two separate but contiguous forms: Son and Father. Consequently, though the Gospel of Hebrews had been a respected work, admiringly quoted, and considered venerable by an array of even mainstream Christian scholars, it was declared heretical for this implicit heretical teaching, and so was systematically destroyed and no longer copied in orthodox scriptoria. Now we know it only by a few fragments and from certain passages cited in other works.

However, teachings of this truly lost gospel (emphasizing forgiveness and Jesus' human nature more than the canonical gospels, which emphasized attributed supernatural powers) were preserved among Jewish Christians safely outside the control of the Christian Roman Empire, especially in Western Arabia. Here Jewish Christians (not Christianized Jews) survived into the 7th Century CE, where they communicated to Muhammad most of what that Prophet of Islam came to determine about Jesus. Yet, even after Jewish Christians gradually became absorbed into Islam, eventually to disappear, the concept of Adoptionism would arise again repeatedly in the European Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, wholly independently, even with the long disappearance of the Gospel of the Hebrews.

It was simply more reasonable (and spiritually appealing) to some Christians that Jesus was human, that Joseph was his father, that Mary was his mother by natural means, and that in adulthood he experienced a form of theophany. This seemed to some more credible than to believe in the logically problematic concept of the Holy Trinity of a Triune God. Jesus, the Son of Man, was more spiritually heroic as a human being who came to know God in a profoundly intimate way, than to merely be an all-powerful God masquerading as a mortal. And as a human being Jesus was someone that others could actually aspire to, rather than as divine figure whose acts would always therefore be without parallel. For Adoptionists, Jesus as God led to the less desirable response of spiritual abasement by all who admired his life and teaching, instead of seeing Jesus as God's Ultimate Human Exemplar, who could be imitated in terms of one's own inner light.

More fundamentally, Jesus as a human being simply made more sense to those whose concept of Monotheism was irresistibly more exacting. However, the price for declaring and justifying this belief was the Burning Stake among communities of both Catholics and then also Protestants. Nevertheless, there are Adoptionists to this day. We have no place of worship that honors our creed, but some of us quietly attend churches of orthodox profession -- or else we merely practice our faith as spiritual solitaries. Fortunately in the democratic world, it is against the law to execute "heretics", and no longer legal to exact a profession of "orthodox" faith for acceptance into civic society.

One day, hopefully, an archaeologist will find a copy of the Gospel of the Hebrews preserved, likely as a papyrus scroll. Or perhaps someone who bought the scroll on the black market for textual antiquities will kindly give it up to a museum or university where scholars can preserve and translate it for humankind. Make no mistake: it is as much holy scripture as those books which are honored in the Bibles placed in motel nightstands.

To Seek Suffering is a Symptom of the Repression of the Mystic Urge

In my life, I have attended services at three different sects wherein each included a communal prayer for God to bring on hardship to the gathered congregants, so that they might become more spiritually pure. Asceticism has always been an aspect of religious expression, just as much as communal feasting or singing. However, people should be able to decide individually to exercise constructive modes of asceticism, choosing sensibly moderated forms, degrees and durations, in the form of self-denial of certain worldly pleasures and comforts. However, asceticism should be distinguished from masochism, the latter being (in my humble opinion) a destructive form of religious practice.

Literal flagellation, starvation, self-induced pain and suffering: these are behaviors that enact or reinforce self-loathing born of a religiosity that convinces people they fundamentally consist of "filth", and therefore cannot obtain salvation short of God's abundant mercy (which the faithful are constantly reminded they do not really deserve under any circumstances). I have to ask: would God create "filth"? Should we, who are by our very eternal souls God's children, by any stretch of the imagination think of ourselves as "filth"?

When a religion is constructed to emphasize the imperfections of human beings, rather than empowering people of faith with ways to create moral and spiritual wholeness, it is typically indicative of a sect whose clergy has a vested interest in controlling and subduing their congregations. When people are denied methodologies to elevate themselves spiritually through meditation and contemplation, and even through dance and music, people are left to seek other outlets, and these are usually self-abnegating, and psychologically and physiologically unhealthy.

So we now have people who stop short of purposefully and actively creating artificial suffering through religious masochism, but they are asking God in their stead to inflict suffering upon them, for God to be the agent of "spiritualizing" hardship. The prayers for these things more than anything else have brought me up short of committing myself to any organized religious sect. I have been contemplating the implications of these prayers for suffering for many years now, and have only recently come up with a plausible theory for what former fellow congregants and ministering clerics failed to clearly explain to me, as though it were just another matter for a "leap of faith", like supporting the idea of Christ's Holy Resurrection.

In fact, it is far more plausible to me that a wholly spiritualized being or apotheosized human being could resurrect him or herself from physical death, than that God would want us to understand Him/Her primarily through suffering, and that the highest gift He/She can bestow upon us is suffering. I think the highest gift God can give us is healing, and being so healed we can spread that healing to others through our shared light in God. I have argued before in this blog that suffering can potentially be a teacher that makes us more compassionate toward others. In fact, those who have suffered very little sometimes lack a depth of capacity for sympathy and patience for the suffering of others, including those with inward woes. But some degrees of suffering can also be mentally and physically debilitating, and thus socially disempowering and psychologically crushing. Suffering of one kind or another is indeed inevitable in this world -- so why on earth pray for it?! Such an act is redundant!

What we should pray for is grace of temperament and spiritual support in the face of suffering, for healing and a keener appreciation for the gift of health, for a greater spiritual wholeness to meet with resilience the rigors of this world, and in the aftermath, a greater sympathy or even empathy for others who are currently dominated by inner or physical suffering. This would be a far more constructive mode of prayer, and more in line with worshiping a God who embodies Love.

So why are clergy more comfortable with and unquestioning of prayers issued for worship services by religious authorities in their sects, that ask their congregations to pray for suffering in order to get closer to God? Why would these same clerics not support modes of being that cultivate a mystical receptivity to God?

One answer might be that it would accord a freedom and power to the individual person of faith that is threatening to the institutional will toward subtle domination of its worshipers. Mysticism has the same goal as orthodox forms of asceticism: achieving a greater closeness to God. But mystics have an open secret: communion with God is often discovered in spiritual joy.

Why Were the Seekers Excluded and Called Heretics?

A major component of the Christian concepts of orthodoxy ("right teaching") or catholicity ("universality") as hammered out by early Church Fathers from Iranaeus to Athanasius has to do with a fundamental distrust of those who would go beyond the clerical guidance meted out to the mass undifferentiated congregations of the faith, specifically those who wanted to ask deeper questions, and find a more intimate union or communion with the divine. It is interesting that, even when such Christian seekers honored all the basic orthodox tenets, and took comfort and joy in belonging to a catholic community, that this was not enough to satsify clerical leaders, especially administrative leaders. Beginning with the legalization of Christianity by Emperor Constantine, we see a schism form between those who were interested in enforcing an authoritarian hierarchical political grounding for the Church, and those who wanted the freedom to pursue a mystical (and ascetic) quest for personal epiphany, either through an isolated community of study and collective meditative devotion (cenobitism) or through a journey of individual isolation (anchoritism). Christianity alone went against this natural aspect of the broad continuum of religious impulse. Christian political leadership ended up compromising by allowing those who wanted to lead a more wholly spiritual life to have isolationist communities, but they could only study canonical books (i.e., those which lacked any content of pursuing a mystical understanding of God, self or the universe) and had to knuckle under episcopal censure. In short, hermits and monks were reduced to leading lives of simple mechanistic routinized devotion, not being permitted to read or write inwardly-inspired texts, or intentionally teach disciplines which could result in profound mystical union or direct contact with the divine dimension of reality. In every other world faith, room was made for those who wanted to take this further step into spirituality, and the communities that pursued this deeper entry into the dimension of spirit were not regulated in the form of their meditative and visionary disciplines. Each of the other world faiths were capable of supporting a peaceful and inter-dynamic parity: Buddhism (Tantra), Hinduism (Yoga), Islam (Sufism), Taoism (Sagehood), Judaism (Kabbalah). Why did religious authorities in Christianity feel threatened by that inevitable element in their own congregations, which sought to go beyond the basic understandings of faith? There is nothing wrong with having a simple faith, but there are those who want to pursue things more deeply: the nature of their relationship to God, the universe, and to eternal soul dwelling within them. The two paths can belong to a greater whole without threatening each other. The other global religions mentioned are quite stable with having both forms coexistent. It is strange that the Christian clergy felt threatened by this alternative but wholly natural impulse. There are such a variety of people who come into any given religious faith, all having varied needs and degrees of commitment to the spiritual. It is unfortunate for Christianity that this rift happened, because the mystical can (re)enrich the mundane, just as surely as mundane spirituality can remind the mystical of how to communicate with the material world we all must inevitably negotiate. To exclude one over the other is create an imbalance. Christianity's tendencies through time to lapse into various forms of extremist (and therefore repressive) control over daily life could have been remedied by an acceptance of mysticism receptiveness to the fruits it bears for all. Mystic outlooks loosen up and deepen spiritual perspectives, keeping them from falling into petty, superficial, reflexive (and unreflective) dogmatism. A strictly "what-is-what-oriented" form of religion destroys the possible suppleness the spiritual mind can acquire, thereby creating artificial blind-spots in one's faith. Even for those who need only simple answers, grief is the result of forbidding the heartfelt question "why" that must emerge from time to time even among the general congregation, which is an element that most needs the compassion, understanding and cognitive openness of its clerical leadership. To this day, we have Protestant and Catholic thinkers and leaders who are terribly upset that the scrolls found in a buried jar at the Nag Hammadi Oasis in Egypt have reopened the case for unregulated mysticism in Christianity, works that the influential Bishop Iranaeus of Lyons and Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria almost succeeded in extirpating many centuries ago through their succession of anathematizing pronouncements. However, those copies from a Coptic Egyptian monastery escaped the book-burnings, and I think not by mere mortal accident. They are here for us today to read and potentially rescue our faith from becoming one of political, moral and ritual shallowness.

Joseph, the True Exemplar

If we look at the story of Joseph as told in the Book of Genesis/Bereshith, we encounter a story-arc of rising virtue that is paralleled in the Hebrew Testament only by the story of Ruth. Joseph begins his life as a spoiled younger son whose youthful vanity and gloating unreflective sense of parental favor arouses the bitter jealousy of his older, more world-worn brothers. This initial proclivity of immaturity propels Joseph into a course of destiny he might never have known, and ironically (or providentially) provides a future avenue of opportunity of which his family might never have been able to avail themselves.

Sold by his resentful brothers into slavery among people of another culture and language (that of Egypt) and made to seem murdered to his parents, Joseph suffers the ultimate humbling of his naive conceitedness. But at the same time, he is thrust into a situation where his native abilities are no longer sidelined by those of his many and more experienced older brothers. In his new context, however humiliating, he discovers his gift of inborn wits.

Joseph is soon faced with choosing between an inner moral code to govern his relationships with other human beings, or to surrender to desire, irrespective of the harm and dishonor it may incur; he chooses the former at every fork in the road of his remarkable destiny. Choosing the path of virtue ironically (or providentially) lands him in prison after being falsely accused by a married woman whose advances he rejects, though not cruelly but out of the conviction of his own moral reasoning. He declares that such an act would be a double act of bad faith: a betrayal of her wedded husband on her part, and a betrayal of trust between Joseph and his master (her husband), who has not only treated him well as a servant but, recognizing Joseph's intelligence, promoted him to the position of steward of his estate. So Joseph chooses not to carry over the fundamental sin his brothers committed against him.

The parallel thread running through the whole storyline of moral tests is Joseph's gifts of intelligence, which always readily emerge in whatever changing (or challenging) situation he faces, and for which he always comes to win respect, recognition and promotion. Yet never does he use his abilities or rising social position in Egyptian society to commit harm or exploitation for self-interest or to satisfy amoral or destructive desires. His talents of psychological interpretation and his sapient grasp of social and political contexts, as well as his intuitive sense of worldly trends, obtain for him exoneration and elevation to the highest position one might win without royal blood: that of vizier of Egypt, a real office corroborated by other ancient sources.

Joseph's conservational sense saves Egypt from famine in the cycling years of crop failure that follow the preceding years of bumper crops, and sets the scene for a moment as morally moving as when the newly widowed Ruth goes beyond the traditions of intertribal filial piety and chooses to cherish and remain staunchly committed to her likewise widowed mother-in-law. In Joseph's story, another act of unexpected compassion occurs. Unrecognized by his brothers, who come to Egypt to trade for surplus grain and thereby save their clan from starvation, Joseph chooses to inwardly forgive them for their betrayal (now years in the past), and then invites them to bring their father and the rest of the family and households to live in Egypt as a haven from the years of drought he senses will follow. It is only after they all return that Joseph humbly reveals his true identity, initiating an unexpected family reunion, replete with tearful forgiveness and passionate apology. Here is moral beauty writ large, and is arguably the finest example of moral growth and the redemptive power of God working through human beings in the whole Hebrew Testament.

There may have been more exalted figures (Moses), more beloved figures (David), and more glorious figures (Solomon), but there is none who faces so many tests of moral integrity and physical survival, and who always chooses not only the most intelligent course of action, but also the id-subsuming option toward greater virtue. Joseph forgoes lust in the form adultery to safeguard his moral refuge in relationships of mutual trust. He forgoes despair in prison to selflessly counsel his cellmates, he forgoes a sense of ethnic alienation to help his foreign masters and a foreign nation from disaster, and he forgoes revenge against his ruthless brothers to show them redemptive mercy and forgiveness, though he does perform a quite forgivable prank on them before revealing his true identity (which you can read about for yourself!).

Joseph's life is one of ups and downs, and a period of long separation from his family which, for all its faults, he finds that he perdurably loves, but he does not allow his de facto orphanhood, his enslavement, his imprisonment, nor his exile in a foreign nation to cause him to decline in moral character, however inwardly sorrowful, desperate and vengeful he might have no doubt felt at times, being human and not some sort of demigod. In fact, his hardships ennoble him, because he discovers in them opportunities to enact the moral beauty of the faith planted in his soul by his parents. There is not such another exemplar of the Hebrew faith, aside from the aforemention Ruth, until the story of Jesus, for even Moses lapses and commits murder (however sympathetic we may be to its special circumstances), David commits adultery and conspires the murder of the husband of his mistress, and Solomon lapses into paganism to please the women for whom he is possessed by desire.

The story of Joseph is important to the Three Abrahamic Faiths that honor it, not only for the intrinsic merits of Joseph's emergence from mocking, irreverent, egocentric adolescence to become a person who steadfastly steered a course of accumulating moral character, but also for the resulting broader impact of his choices as an individual. The story is also important to these three religions because Joseph's honor and proactive morality led to both the preservation of the discerning nation who had originally bought him as a slave, and to the physical deliverance of his kindred and their spiritual redemption through his sincere and openhearted forgiveness. To this day, Yosef (Jewish), Yusuf (Muslim), and Joseph (Christian) remain popular names as cross-cultural cognates, the parents of each faith tradition implicitly hoping for a similar course of wise and moral choices from their offspring, when they encounter the inevitable challenges to be faced in this world as young adults and mature adults.

Joseph is the mythic ancestor of the subsequent moral leaders in the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, Jesus and Muhammad included. Joseph's life set the standard of moral being the way no patriarch before him had. Joseph is a paragon in the face of adversity, winning success the honest way. Oh that those who attain positions of power and influence today would take Joseph as their model. But then, Joseph's rising was as virtuous as the mastery to which it led.

The Rubbing Point Between Jews and Christians (and Muslims)

We know from the Bible and the cuneiform records of the very ancient city of Ur, where the early Hebrew Patriarch Abram/Abraham came from, that it was a typical polytheistic community that traditionally worshiped a pantheon of deities and engaged in both animal and human sacrifice. When Abram decided to follow the path of monotheism, he removed his whole household from Ur and set out upon the risky existence of a nomad. This he did in order to escape the pagan influences of what had been his hometown. All of this is famously recounted in the Book of Genesis (Bereshith), including a pivotal event later in Abraham's life when God calls upon this patriarch to prove his new-found faith by offering up his son and heir Isaac as a human sacrifice. Reluctantly and aggrievedly, Abraham agrees and begins to follow through at the appointed day and time. But at the last minute, God calls out for him to stop. God then commends Abraham for his loyalty in being willing to part with his most precious living possession. But significantly, God explains that this is more than a mere test of fidelity. It is to demonstrate above all that the God Abraham worships is not like other gods -- indeed, not like all the other gods worshiped in that Age: God the Most High (El Elyon) does not and never will require human sacrifice, and in fact, it is an abomination to God that such things are done at all. This story demonstrates a break by the faith tradition of the Hebrews with the rest of religious world as it then existed, and is perhaps as pivotal as choosing to worship only one deity. It reveals that this "one god" has an entirely different set of expectations, and wants to establish an alternative sort of relationship with humankind.

Atheist critics like to point to this myth with a "glass half empty" perspective and say, "look! Abraham was willing to sacrifice his own son, conceived after decades of barren marriage, and all to please his crazy conception of the divine will! -- so do you see what evil religion can drive a person to do?!" However, if we think of this story as coming out of a psychological era when most of humankind felt that there were times when life could grow so difficult that it required desperate measures, and that human sacrifice was the final answer to win the support of a patron deity or mollify an offended deity, this prohibition on human sacrifice is a profound departure from superstitious presumptions. At the price of a human life, this divine power could restore balance and prosperity in the afflicted community, which usually was suffering some extreme crisis like famine, plague or losing a war. But the God of the Hebrews made it clear that there never would be any circumstances where he would require a human death as a form of religious donation for propitiation. In fact, harmony with God's will would have to be established in an entirely different way than by the mindset that conceived such an ultimate form of sacrifice. As the Books of the Prophets (Nevi'im) make repeatedly clear, that harmony could only be established through righteous community relationships -- what we today would call social justice.

The story of Abraham's difficult trip to the high place with his beloved son would have been well known to Jesus the Jew and his fellow Jewish disciples, a myth at the root of all the moral scripture in their faith tradition. And here is where the rub comes in between Jews and Christians today: some of his disciples decided after Jesus' death that his crucifixion was a sacrifice God demanded to spare humankind his divine wrath. For most Jews, to believe that his death had this sacramental consequence would have seemed like turning away from the Jewish tradition of monotheism and embracing a pagan idea: that the divine sphere requires an offering of human life to obtain its pervading good will. It is interesting that the Third Abrahamic Faith (Islam) makes the following ruling on the significance of Jesus' death in their holy book, the Koran: God is fundamentally just, and therefore, he would not have required the sacrifice of a human being for the redemption of humankind, and certainly not his noble prophet, Ise (Jesus).

A healthy view of Jesus' death that a spiritually-interested non-Christian could take would be the simple recognition that Jesus stood up for what he believed in, and, unfortunately, was put to death for it by those who felt he threatened both their sense of power and the stability of the society from which they derived that power. We must remember that thousands of others during the course of the Roman Empire met with the exact same fate as Jesus, brave people who stood up for the sovereignty of their subjugated native cultures, oppressed people who openly resisted the slave system. These were the twin fists of domination and exploitation upon which the Roman economy was built, and any attempt to stay those hands could lead the rebel to find him or herself braced against the cross.

Because Jesus was a person of such noble being who made people think in a fresh way about what is really morally important in this life, and then ironically (and tragically) met with such a terrible and dramatic (and for those times, ignominious though not uncommon) death at the hands of a foreign occupying power, his teachings, indeed his very personality, were perhaps saved from otherwise becoming forgotten. The Romans mockingly appended a plaque that read, "Iudorum Rex" (King of the Jews), marking him as a political criminal. From merely an historical standpoint, such a case makes evident that it is human beings who sacrifice their fellows for the cause of moral ignorance (the communally coerced suicide of Socrates being another important example of this recurrent and deplorable social phenomenon).

The edifice upon which Christianity has built its justification for a human sacrifice being at the center of its faith begins with Paul's invention of the concept of Original Sin, a grandiose interpretation of the Adam and Eve story, in which this apostle asks his fellow Christians to believe we are all stained by the primary sin of disobedience, a stain that could only be removed by the sacrifice of a god in human flesh. For the Jews, this is a story symbolizing humankind leaving a static state of animal ignorance and entering the dynamic state of sapience. As for the Islamic take on all this, the Koran states that each of us is responsible only for our individual sins and are not held accountable by God for the sins of ancestors, descendants, kinfolk or tribe.

Christian theologians would perhaps argue on the basis of exceptionalism that the rules of Judaic tradition on human sacrifice need not apply, because the soul within that perished human body and personality (i.e., Jesus) was divine, but there were pagan faiths conceived long before the emergence of Christianity that believed the same thing about sacrificial deities who could resurrect themselves (e.g., the Egyptian Osiris, the Phrygian Attis, the Romano-Persian Mithras, etc.) for the redemption of their believers. The interpretation here presented of the climactic Genesis story of Abraham's life gives Christians the means not merely to be humanistically tolerant of their fellow Abrahamic Faiths, but also to acquire moral understanding of why the idea that Jesus, god or not, died for our sins, is spiritually illogical to these related monotheistic faiths. These fellow religions have well conceived theologies and moral argumentation. They do not dismiss out of hand what Jesus sought to accomplish as a rabbi and prophet.

Jesus' life is in fact honored by any who care to familiarize themselves with the Gospels in the spirit of free thought, independent reading, and mutual respect. For Muslims and Jews, whether or not Jesus rose from the dead is immaterial to the case. For them, God does not require human sacrifice for humankind's collective or individuated salvation.