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!