Why I Write This Blog

When in the 16th-century the philosopher Giordano Bruno suggested that space is infinite, and that each star is a sun like our own with its own worlds circling around it, these shocking speculations were added to the charges of heresy which the Church brought against him. To obliterate these outrageous heresies from the world Bruno was [1]incarcerated by the Inquisition and periodically tortured for eight years before being burned at the stake in Rome, after which his ashes were swept up and dumped in the Tiber. But ideas endure, and heresies have a way of casting shadows of doubt across the comfortable worlds which we create for ourselves. This weblog is about those shadows.

The bronze statue of Giordano Bruno which stands close to the site of his execution in Rome. An enlightened free thinker centuries ahead of his time, Bruno’s daring ideas have long been vindicated by our own contemporary science. But as recently as 2000 the Papal office refused to sign an edict that would have pardoned Bruno, considering his ideas ‘too extreme to be forgiven by the Church’. The charges against Bruno stand to this day.

But this begs the question: what are heresies? In the 13th-century Pope Clement III branded the Christian Cathars in the south of France as ‘the enemies of Christ’, and their beliefs as ‘heretical’. But the firestorm of violence which he then unleashed against the [2]Cathars, and the mass genocides, burnings and tortures which resulted in the virtual extinction of the Cathars and their beliefs not only had nothing whatever to do with the teachings of Christ, they were the antithesis of all which those Christian teachings stood for. It was the pacifist Cathars who in their turn – and with every justification – regarded the papal forces as the agents of Satan, and the Catholic version of Christianity as an extreme heresy.

A Cathar defends his beliefs before a tribunal of Catholic Inquisitors. Instigated by the papacy and organized by the Dominican brotherhood, the Inquisition invested itself with Draconian powers which even included exhuming and putting on trial the corpses of the deceased: a legal ploy which allowed the Papal authorities to seize the property of the surviving next of kin.

The lesson of history is clear: whether you regard any given belief as ‘heretical’ or not is simply down to which side you are on. And if you have the power base and the organization to push through your opinions by force, then it is your beliefs that get to be called the ‘correct’ ones. But supposing that things in 13th-century France had been allowed to take their natural course, and the growing popular wave of Catharism outstripped the existing Catholicism? We now might well be referring to Catholicism as the great heresy, and Catholics would find themselves on the fringe as a minority belief – if they still existed at all.

This is not as fanciful as it might sound. Contemporary scholarship now considers that it is possible, even plausible, that the original form of Christianity had more in common with Gnosticism, the predecessor of Catharism, than that it resembled anything which we now have come to recognize as ‘Christian’. That the Gnostics and their beliefs, like the Cathars a millennium later, were crushed by the forces of Catholicism is the contributing reason which led eventually to the establishing of the Holy Roman Empire and the complete dominance of the version of Christianity that it represented. And it is a matter of history that this dominance was accomplished, not by the peaceable winning of hearts and minds, but by waves of persecutions, the [3]machineries of terror, and a force of arms.

A woman accused of heresy is ‘put to the question’ – an Inquisitor’s euphemism for torture – using the cauda. Enough weights attached to the feet, or even a short drop, would have dislocated both of the victim’s shoulders. Note the crucifix on the table. My own belief says that anyone, anywhere, at any time who causes suffering or even death in the name of Christ is himself crucifying Christ anew.

So what also drives this blog is a sense of injustice about what has taken place in the past which led to Christianity as we now recognize it. Christianity might have become the dominant world religion, but which Christianity is the correct one? It is a religion which has become deeply divided against itself into some 38,000 different and distinct versions which we call denominations. There are differences of opinion about points of doctrine (the exact nature of the Holy Trinity and the form of Holy Communion, to name but two) which run so deep that the members of one denomination probably would not even worship in the church of another denomination. Could this very un-Christian divisiveness be itself a sign that the version which became the dominant one was not actually the correct one to begin with? For if it was the correct version of Christianity, why has it caused such deep rifts of faith? Would not all Christians simply now be Catholic?

In open defiance of Papal authority, Martin Luther famously nails his 95 theses to the door of the church in [4]Wittenburg, so beginning the Protestant Reformation. What is less well-known but equally a part of recorded history is that the founder of Protestantism was himself radically anti-Semitic, urging the forced expulsion of all Jews from Germany, and additionally advocating the genocide of the working classes. The ruling class took him at his word and 100,000 of his fellow-countrymen were slain.

Just about any post on this blog would have seen me marched to the stake (and also first incarcerated and tortured) even as recently as the 18th-century. But this blog exists, and that in itself is demonstration enough of the way in which the tide of history has turned. Political and civic power has slipped from the Church’s grasp. Contemporary scholarship and opinions are now freely accessible, both on the Internet and through any number of publications – including the complete translations in English of the Gnostic texts, suppressed by the Church for sixteen long centuries until their independent discovery at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. We at last can listen to the Gnostics in their own authentic voices. Those voices are now once more abroad in the world, and this particular genie is not going back in the bottle.

The first two pages of the Gospel of Thomas: one of only two copies known. All other copies were believed to have been destroyed in the purges ordered by Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria. The text is a series of sayings by Jesus in the form of ‘wisdom teachings’. Thomas is not a name, but a term meaning ‘The Twin’, which could imply that this author sought to be the perfect mirror or reflection of these teachings.

When these subjects have come up in conversation, it has frequently taken me aback just how little Christians seem to know about the background of their own faith. This is a belief and a code of ethics which for many governs their very lives, and yet how many actually know the nuts and bolts of how the Bible came into being historically, and the different processes and individuals who were involved in its at-times alarmingly arbitrary shaping? There seems to be a general acceptance that ‘things are as they are’, and that the early Church Fathers who did the shaping ‘must have known best’.

Whether Irenaeus, Athanasius, Tertullian, Augustine and others who shaped the Bible and Christian doctrine to its present form really did ‘know best’ is a question for debate. The point is to know about what they actually did, and what their motives and personal agendas were for making the choices which they made. And not just the [5]tidy versions which can be read on any number of Christian websites, but the hands-on history of the way things happened.

‘Saint’ Irenaeus. The self-styled arbiter of ‘The Truth’, his writings contain tirades of toxic invective against all things which he personally considered to be heretical. But his methods for deciding what should or should not become scripture were startlingly vague.

Thus, of all the many gospels then in circulation, Irenaeus in the 2nd-century kept only four of his own personal choosing to [6]include in scripture. Why four? Because, as he informs us himself, there are "four zones in the world and four principal winds.” Yes, that really was this man’s sketchy logic behind his decision: a decision that would affect the whole subsequent development of Christianity. Who decided that he had the necessary authority to take such far-reaching action? He did.

But heresies come in different forms, of which religious heresies are but one. There also are social heresies, such as the fact that in the tough-guy society of Ancient Sparta homosexuality was not merely encouraged: it was [7]mandatory. And there also are scientific heresies. These can go either way. It flies in the face of both science and common sense to believe that Tyrannosaurus rex, the most awesome carnivore known, was on board Noah’s Ark and ate coconuts. And yet this is an on-the-record statement by the Creationist CEO of the [8]Creation Museum in Kentucky. But other forms of scientific heresies are more challenging. Science might deny the existence of [9]ley lines, even though they can be plotted on any good map with an ordinary pencil and rule. And conventional archaeology will insist that the [10]Great Pyramid of Egypt was built as a pharaoh’s tomb, even though no evidence whatever has been found to confirm this. So these heresies as well have their place on this blog.

Two principal European ley lines intersect at Avebury: a major Megalithic sacred site which existed long before any church was built, and which still exists today. Numerous other sites not shown here are also found along these leys. It was a common practice to build churches upon the foundations of the pagan sites which the new faith destroyed. The Christianization of Europe was not a peaceable process, but cost hundreds of thousands of the lives of pagans who, like the Cathars and the Gnostics, refused forced conversion and died as martyrs for their faith.

It is a big deal for me that others can rely on the accuracy of the material which I present here. I take time to get things right, which also is why I list my sources for each post where that is appropriate: the option is there for readers independently to check things for themselves should they wish to. And when discussing actual passages of scripture I will cite chapter and verse for the same reason. To be frank, the Bible does at times say some very weird, contradictory and shocking things. If I myself find it hard to believe that those things are actually there in scripture (and they are), then I assume that others might want to check for themselves for that very reason.

This timeline graphic created for my post about [11]Jesus in India seemed to be the most effective way of underscoring in visual form just how little we know about the life of Jesus. The period from his early teens until the last two years of his life is a complete unknown. This certainly invites speculation, and what I discovered is that to make a journey along the Silk Road from Galilee to the mountains of the Hindu Kush was for him not just possible, but entirely plausible.

As readers will have noticed, I also create a lot of the artwork, maps and other graphics for my posts. It all takes time, and if at times my posts do not appear as regularly as I would wish, it is simply due to the pressures of other work which needs my attention.

So the Shadows in Eden blog sets out to be a serious investigation into why we believe what we believe, who gets to decide what is ‘correct’ for us to believe, and ultimately, what ‘faith’ actually is. It is a journey which I myself am on in the hope of discovering some answers to what for me are some very fundamental questions, and I am delighted and gratified that so many are coming on that journey with me. Many, many thanks to you, my reader, whatever faith or non-belief, spirituality or interest in these subjects you might hold. 

Hawkwood

A NOTE ABOUT COMMENTS: I review every comment before I publish it, and not all comments see the light of day. One common reason for this is that the comment in question simply has nothing specifically to do with the topic of the post on which it has been left. Sometimes such general comments can be useful, but not always. And while I am prepared to make exceptions, a comment which is simply a [12]link to someone else’s blog or website will probably not be published either. Nevertheless, comments are welcome, particularly those comments which are a constructive response to what any given post is about. And anyone is certainly free to disagree with what I have said, because that can create a meaningful exchange of different points of view.

Notes:

[1] Please see my post Giordano Bruno's Infinite Space.

[2] Please see my post A Dark Crusade.

[3] Run by the Dominican brotherhood, the Inquisition was initially established as a temporary Church institution to eliminate the last of the Cathars once the military campaigns against them had ended. Instead, it lasted in various forms into the 18th-century, encouraging a social climate of paranoia through informing, even against members of one’s own family, incarceration and torture of both men, women and children, and death by being burned alive. Once sentence was passed, the condemned were handed over to the civic authorities for execution to ensure that Church records remained untainted by the blood of its victims.

[4] Please see my post Martin Luther's Final Solution.

[5] To name but one example, the online Catholic Encyclopedia manages to write an entire entry extolling the virtues of 'Saint' Helena (right, by Francesco Morandini), the mother of Emperor Constantine, without once mentioning the fact that she instigated the brutal murder of her daughter-in-law Fausta so that she could take Fausta's place at her son's side and become his consort in all but name. These dark Freudian deeds the Encyclopedia apparently saw fit to quietly brush under the carpet. Please see my post Helena and the True Cross, which also covers the bizarre Middle Ages trade in 'holy relics', which appears to have been prompted by Helena's recovery in Jerusalem of the 'True Cross'.

[6] Please see my post The Gospel According to Somebody.

[7] Please see my post Coming of Age in Sparta.

[8] Please see my post How do Creationists know what Dinosaurs looked like?.

[9] Please see my post Ley Lines: Patterns of the Ancient Earth.

[10] Please see my post A Night Inside the Great Pyramid.

[11] Please see my post Jesus in India.

[12] Although the link will still be published in a copy/paste form, Blogger does not in any case allow live links in post comments.


Sources:
The sources referenced to write this post can be found in the listed sources on the above posts, with some additional material being drawn from the sources listed on other posts on this blog. The painting of the Cathar before the tribunal is by Jean-Paul Laurens, the painting of the use of the cauda is by Nicolay Bessonov, and the painting of Martin Luther in Wittenburg is by Ferdinand Pauwels.  

The Word of God

What is the bottom line of your faith? If you are Christian, is it accepting the divinity of Jesus? Perhaps it is in the acknowledgment of his sacrifice to take your sins upon his own shoulders, or in tracing his perfect [1]lineage back to the prophets of old. But none of these things, however vital they might be to your faith, are necessarily at the foundation of what makes your faith workable. The keystone upon which all these other things rests is the simple acceptance that scripture is the revealed Word of God: that the texts of the [2]Bible, and every word which appears in them, are the product of Divine Revelation. Because without accepting this premise scripture becomes like any other secular text, and its supernatural elements – all of them – are reduced to an interesting but questionable fiction.

Ascribing authorship to the four gospels and other such texts is a considerably less certain exercise than the editors of my own [3]King James Version admit to. In fact, it’s not certain at all. Centuries before copyright laws existed, it would not have been considered a subterfuge to attach the name of some respected prophet or apostle to a text with the wish to imbue that text with an aura of authority.

That in almost every case we simply do not know who wrote these texts (regardless of the various names to whom these texts are nominally attributed) need not in itself be a reason to preclude them from being divinely inspired, any more than some of the greatest [4]literary works which we have are diminished in their greatness simply because their authors are unknown to us. So we must use other criteria to determine these texts’ divine source. But what are these criteria? By what standards can we possibly determine beyond doubt whether, when we open our Bible, the words that we read are truly those of God speaking through his chosen ones? 

While I was reading through some of the many annotations and footnotes in my copy of the [5]Gnostic Scriptures, a singular thought occurred to me. Here was a volume of texts presented with scrupulous scholarship. Its various translators of the original [6]Coptic and [7]Greek languages into English were happy enough, where appropriate, to provide possible alternative phrases and meanings where the original language had no exact English equivalent or was ambiguous. Little or no attempt had been made to polish the language of the originals for the sake of introducing a poetic turn of phrase. What richness of language there was emerged from the original texts, and not from any over-enthusiastic translation, however well-intentioned.

A portion of the poorly-preserved Gospel of Judas, written in Coptic. Such fragments dramatically illustrate the herculean task faced by scholars to recreate such texts, with reasonable assumptions made upon the basis of the context of the words around them being used to suggest what the words in the missing lacunas might have been.

But that was not all. Any ambiguities were further referenced to the works and examples of other translators beyond this particular edition, making any amount of cross-checking possible. And any lacunas (gaps in the text, usually caused through damage) were acknowledged as missing from the originals. If a word or a phrase used by the translator to fill such a gap was a speculative guess, then it was called just that. Scholastically, it was all impressively honest stuff.

My singular thought was: is there anywhere an equivalent volume published which deals with canonical texts in the same way? I know of individual books which do this for [8]specific texts in scripture, and there are of course individual studies and papers dealing with specific books or parts of books, but not a volume (or a series of volumes) which covers the whole of the Bible. On the face of it, there is no reason why there should not be a canonical (yet scholarly impartial) equivalent of my edition of the Gnostic scriptures. All of these texts, whether canonical or outside the canon, are ancient texts in ancient languages, written on scrolls or in [9]codices in various states of preservation. They are not even the original texts (no, none of them), but were written down by scribes and copyists, sometimes by blindly copying the characters of a [10]language unfamiliar to them, and with the inevitable scribal errors which this involves.

Part of the Dead Sea scroll in Ancient Hebrew known as the Great Isaiah Scroll. Where more than one copy of a text is available we can use these copies to create the complete text. But what if (as has happened) two copies contradict each other? How can we choose which version is the correct one? Perhaps only one copy is more true to the original – or perhaps even neither.

When reading, say, the King James Version, it is the easiest thing in the world to imagine that, yes, this must be the definitive complete version of scripture, simply because that is what it sounds like, and forget that the 17th-century KJV has been superseded in its accuracy both by contemporary scholarship and by new discoveries made since, particularly the Dead Sea scrolls, discovered just two years after the unearthing of the Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945.There is no ‘definitive’ version of scripture, simply because we do not have one. Neither can there ever be one, for who knows what texts still lie somewhere undiscovered that would yet demand revisions to what we now have? 

Just as with the Gnostic texts, what we instead have are variant readings with scribal errors, and the grappling with the exact meanings of words which [11]translation inevitably involves. Often-enough, a slight mistranslation can lead to a major error, such as the KJV having the Israelites cross the Red Sea, when the texts specify that they actually crossed the Reed Sea (Yam Suph: Hebrew: יַם-סוּף) – then an area of marshland east of the Nile Delta (at the time of these texts the Red Sea was actually known as the Erythraean Sea), or specifying the resting place of Noah’s ark as Mount Ararat, when the texts say, not ‘Ararat’, but the word ‘RRT’: the vowel-less rendition of the considerably less specific area of the kingdom of Urartu.

The Lord’s Prayer translated into the language of the Native American Choctaw Nation. Such powerfully-expressed sentiments as are found in this prayer perhaps lend themselves more readily to translation than complex episodes which took place within the cultural context of the Middle East of the Late Bronze Age, and which were written down in the Early Iron Age by minds already distant from the original settings of the events which they describe.

If I choose examples which already have been covered on this blog, then events taken as ‘Gospel’ truth shift under scrutiny from being actual historical events (the [12]Exodus, or the bloody Israelite [13]conquest of Canaan under the sword of Joshua) into being revealed either as metaphor or as concocted fiction. This hardly need surprise us, as the narratives relating these and other such Biblical events were only written down centuries (in the case of Joshua, almost a full thousand years) after the events which they describe. In our terms, the Book of Joshua is a historical novel.

How, then, can we reconcile these ancient texts, so full of errors, [14]contradictions and mistranslations, with being the immaculate revealed Word of God? Even Noah and his [15]ark turns out to be a story imported from the Babylonia of Israelite exile. David and Solomon might have existed, but their historical reality in all probability made them mere local warlords, rather than being the mighty father-and-son kings whose deeds resound in the pages of the Old Testament. If our belief accepts scripture as being divinely inspired en bloc, with all its omissions, mistranslations, bloody slaughters in God’s name, and shamelessly invented pedigrees of conquest, how do we reconcile these less-than-perfect (and certainly in places, morally odious) texts with divine perfection? In short: what is, or is not, divinely inspired, and how do we separate the two?

Two pages from a letter written in 1943 by Etty Hillesum in the holding camp of Westerbork in occupied Netherlands, prior to her deportation to Auschwitz. If this remarkable young woman could both find and recover a state of grace in a place that was a waking nightmare of inhumanity, why should we not consider that the Spirit acted through her at least as much as through the words that are written in scripture? How can we know where such a line exists?

The letters and diaries of Etty Hillesum reveal an ongoing dialogue with God through which she was able, even when facing the ultimate horrors of the Nazi death camp in which she died, to draw upon deep wellsprings of solace within herself, and even find compassion for her captors who took her life. Contrastingly, in the second book of [16]Kings we are told that forty-two little children are torn to pieces by bears, apparently for doing what little children do everywhere: for making fun of a bald man. In this case, the bald man in question being the prophet Elisha, the wrath of the Lord seems to have descended upon the children with ruthless [17]finality. Which of these two sources are we to consider more worthy of being divinely inspired: the horrific killing of little children for a triviality, or the profoundly spiritual yet deeply human words of a Holocaust victim?

You might criticize me for choosing such a grotesquely bizarre episode of scripture as my example, but that’s the whole point about scripture: it’s all in, or all out. If you want Psalm 23 and the Sermon on the Mount, then you also get the cruel deaths of those forty-two children and many other such shockingly inhuman episodes along with them. But what about those worthy ancient texts which are nowhere to be found between the covers of the Bible? Where is the magnificent passage from the Book of Enoch describing his ascent through the spheres of heaven, at least as stirring as anything in Ezekiel? Where are the profound spiritual insights offered by the Gospel of Thomas?

The prophet Enoch, who was claimed to be the seventh generation from Adam, and the great-grandfather of Noah. The book which bears his name might not have been written by him, but it does provide us with many of the details which otherwise are frustratingly missing from Genesis, from the nature of the fruit in Eden to the true reason for the Flood, as well as a stirring description to rival that of Ezekiel of Enoch’s ascent through the celestial spheres. We are left to wonder why this remarkable text never actually made it into scripture, but I for one consider scripture to be the poorer for its omission.

And that is what seems to be the problem with scripture as it has come down to us: the gaping flaw in our logic of perceiving it as being the result of Divine Revelation. However divinely inspired it might or might not be, whether a text – any text – is or is not the Word of God is something which is decided by imperfect and very fallible us.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Luke 3: 23-38 meticulously traces the lineage of Jesus from God, then Adam, all through the generations to the carpenter Joseph: a logic which passes me by when doctrine declares that his conception was of divine origin, and so making the tracing of such an earthly lineage redundant.

[2] Clearly this also applies to any texts which other religions deem to be the result of Divine Revelation. However much respect (or the lack of it) we might give the texts of another belief, one religion does not regard the text of another religion as falling within this category, otherwise the world would be of one faith. I have various editions of the Bible in my collection, including three editions in Dutch (right: the Dutch edition of the Bible illustrated with Rembrandt's etchings of Biblical subjects), as well as an authorized English translation of the Quran. Irrespective of my own beliefs, I treat them all with due consideration and respect. 

[3] King James Study Bible. Zondervan, 2002.

[4] The epics of Gilgamesh and Beowulf, and the 14th-century romance of chivalry Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are three examples which fall into this category.

[5] The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. Published by Harper One for Harper Collins, 2008.

[6] Coptic is an adaptation of written Egyptian using the Greek language.

[7] Such texts were written in Koine Greek: the common form of the Greek language in the Hellenist Middle East (that is: the areas which were subject to Greek influence following the conquests of Alexander the Great, which would have included Galilee and what is now Syria).

[8] Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters (Trinity Press International, 1975) and Hans-Josef Klauck’s Ancient Letters and the New Testament: A Guide to Context and Exegesis (Baylor University Press, 2006) both provide exhaustive analysis of the letters of Paul.

[9] Codices are manuscripts bound in book form.

[10] From Ancient Hebrew into Greek for the Septuagint, or from Greek into Coptic. It is only to be expected that the more remote from the source, the less certain is the accuracy of the translation. The list, of course, goes on: from Aramaic into Greek, from Greek into Latin, from Latin into Middle English, from Middle English (and German) into the poetically archaic English of the King James Version, and so into all the languages of today. Translation, as anyone knows who has tried it, is not just a matter of transposing words. So many, many words simply have no equivalent in another language. Inflexions of meaning and differences in syntax and idiom can all conspire to force drastic compromise upon the translator, and subtle metaphors can become lost in a plodding literalism to take on new meanings which the original writers never intended. On this title page (left) of the Bible, translated from the Greek and Hebrew into German by Martin Luther in 1524, the artist Lucas Cranach depicts Joshua as an armoured knight very much belonging to his own time. 

[11] Please see my post A Simple Misunderstanding.

[12] Please see my post Odyssey and Exodus: the Long Journey Home.

[13] Please see my post The Butcher of Canaan.

[14] Please see my post The Words of Jesus.

[15] Please see my post The Lost Ark of Noah.

[16] 2 Kings 2: 23-24. I personally view these two short verses as two of the most callous and brutal which I have come across in all of scripture. This is not to say that I believe this shocking incident actually happened. It is what it says about it being included in scripture, and about what those who wrote it imagined to be God’s suitable justice. The two verses are short enough to include in full here: “23: And he (Elisha) went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. 24: And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.” If you think such bloody brutality would make even a Christian Apologist bend a knee, I refer you to this Christian website. Just scroll down to the picture of the bears and read how the ‘little children’ of scripture have mysteriously morphed in this commentary to become ‘young men’ who (according to this writer) get their well-deserved come-uppance. Seriously?

[17] While there appears to be much focus on the incident of the bears tearing the children to pieces as the result of Elisha’s cursing them, the following episode of Elisha raising a child from the dead (2 Kings 4: 8-37) seems to be glossed over in terms of placing it alongside the first incident to create a savage irony (which is why I do so here). Scripture tells us that Elisha had the power of life over death. Why then did he not compassionately use that power earlier – or more to the point: why did Elisha behave so despicably in the first place?

Sources:

Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life: The Diaries 1941-43, and Letters from Westerbork. Henry Holt and Company Inc. 1996. Other sourced titles are included in the notes above.

Gospel of Judas from National Geographic. Great Isaiah Scroll from Wikimedia Commons. Choctaw translation of the Lord’s Prayer provided by John C. Sacoolidge. Choctaw beaded sash from the 1830’s from the Oklahoma Historical Society. The imagined portrait of the prophet Enoch is painted by Hawkwood for the © David Bergen Studio, with a section of the Greek text of the Book of Enoch as a background.

The Words of Jesus

What are the actual words spoken by Jesus? This question was prompted by my writing a previous [1]post in the first person as Jesus. This was not a conscious decision I made beforehand. It was something which simply happened when I began to write. I rather think now that had I pre-planned such a form for my post then I would have been too overawed to write a word. But the thought was also prompted by my noting that in my [2]King James Study Bible the editors had made the decision to print the entire text in black – except for all the spoken words of Jesus in the New Testament, which are printed in a confident red.

This textual colour choice might give Jesus’ words a certain authoritative conviction, but it also ironically invites the question: just how truly reliable are these as the actual spoken words of Jesus? To make one point clear: I am not one who subscribes to the theory that Jesus as a historical person did not actually exist. It might be an uncomfortable truth for some that we have no [3]independent verification outside of the gospels for his historicity, but that to me is not a reason in itself to call his existence into question, even if his actual nature might remain in the province of personal belief.

In the Gospel of Matthew, 8:4, having miraculously cured a leper, Jesus admonishes the man to tell no one what he has done. So how do we know about this incident, and what Jesus said to this man? Did the cured leper ignore Jesus’ wish and spread the news of what had transpired, and who had cured him? If there were other witnesses present who overheard Jesus’ words (and therefore were in a position to record and preserve them) then the words themselves were already public, making Jesus’ statement redundant. Either option demonstrates the uncertainty of the exchange, even its very unreliability.

"And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. And Jesus saith unto him, See thou tell no man; but go thy way.." But how do we know this?

There are, of course, other such examples, not the least of which is the detailed exchange that took place between Jesus and Satan in the [4]wilderness. Clearly no one else was present to witness and record the incident, so how can we possibly know the actual words that were spoken – including those spoken by a supernatural being? And what actually were the last words spoken by Jesus on the cross? You can pick and choose, because three of the four gospels will tell you something different.

Both Matthew and Mark agree on what these last words were, having Jesus cry out in despair: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” [5](Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34). Luke’s phrase is one of simple acceptance: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” (Luke 23:46). John has Jesus utter the phrase of brief resignation: “It is finished.” (John 19:30). Not one of these three ‘last words’ phrases even remotely resembles the others. Clearly, while they might all be wrong, they certainly cannot all be right. Few examples of scripture contradicting itself focus our uncertainty more than these conflicting phrases. What they purport to be is not some mere conversational aside, but the actual last words uttered by Jesus in his earthly existence – words of no small moment for Christians everywhere.

Jesus’ actual appearance is a total unknown, and yet throughout history artists have portrayed him as he appears here. This portrayal of him has now become an entrenched aspect of Christian tradition: a tradition for which we nevertheless have no verification.

We are in a situation in which we are being forced to choose which contradictory Gospel account might be the more accurate version. Scholastically the problem does not present itself, as it simply demonstrates that the unknown writers of these gospels evidently were using different sources for their material. It only becomes a problem when scriptural authority is accepted as religious belief. Some light can be shed on the situation once we recognize that the four gospels were something of an experiment in literary form. The idea of weaving stories and apparent conversations together in a narrative to give them the ring of actual events was something of a novelty for its time. This contrasts with such a text as the ex-canonical Gospel of [6]Thomas, which makes no attempt at narrative, but rather presents an apparent conversation with Jesus in [7]instructional form. It has no ‘setting’ as such.

The first two pages of the surviving Gospel of Thomas, written in Coptic. It was buried along with other such texts in the Egyptian sands for sixteen long centuries before being discovered in 1945. Many such texts were destroyed in the purges ordered by Athanasius, the influential bishop of Alexandria, and deliberately burying them became a desperate way for those who valued them to ensure the texts' survival. Against all the odds, it worked.

This non-narrative form of the Gospel of Thomas is of particular interest because it appears to predate those [8]canonical gospels which derive certain common passages from it. This in turn strongly suggests that the original gospel writings were actually such non-narrative collections of ‘wise sayings’ (in this case, those of Jesus), which in turn implies that the narrative elements of the canonical gospels (the story lines, settings, miracles, etc.) were later additions which expanded upon these original collections of sayings.

Most of these collections have now been lost, but one source known simply as Q (from the German quelle, meaning ‘source’) is hypothesized from elements common to Matthew and Luke. It is possible that the authors of Q and Thomas were actually the [9]same person who therefore greatly influenced later gospel writers. This is because reconstructing Q from Matthew and Luke leaves only the sayings and teachings of Jesus, with no narrative elements: the same form as the Gospel of Thomas.

The lost text known as Q can be extrapolated from the contents common to the gospels of Matthew and Luke. While Q has never been found, its one-time existence is entirely plausible, and is a reminder that all such texts which we now have, both scriptural and ex-canonical, are simply those which have survived both the willful destructiveness of orthodox purges and the rigors of time. 

All of these gospel texts, whether they happen to be canonical or whether they are from other sources, and whether those sources are approved by orthodoxy or not, contain detailed and sometimes extended passages purported to be the actual words spoken by Jesus. On the face of things, it would seem to be stretching all credulity to presume that a scribe happened to be on hand on each and every occasion to record exactly what was being said, and any texts that might have been written at the time have been lost to history. What we have instead are only near-contemporary texts dating in some cases from [10]decades after the events which they describe.

So how can we so confidently take for granted that these words of Jesus are indeed what is claimed for them? It is, as with all such situations, a matter of faith. And perhaps it is so that, as I imply in my own previous post The Mystic Marriage, the words of Jesus need not be a matter of any historical record, but are any words, said by anyone, anywhere, at any time, which are truly spoken from the heart.

Hawkwood 

“As we say down here when we preach, it is written in red letter. It is in my King James Bible, and that is what I go by, the King James Bible.” ~ Serpent handler [11]Pastor Andrew Hamblin, Tabernacle Church of God, LaFollette, Tennessee.

  

Notes:

[1] Please see my post The Mystic Marriage.

[2] The King James Study Bible, pub. Zondervan.  Printing the spoken words of Jesus in red is commonly encountered in Bibles, although such a two-colour print run adds to the expense of production. 

[3] The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (right), who switched his allegiance to the Romans, is often cited as an independent source which confirms Jesus' historicity, although the passages in his text which appear to refer to Jesus are thought to be later additions by an unknown hand, evidently with an agenda to provide such backdated independent confirmation of Jesus’ existence. The actual historicity of Jesus is naturally a very gnarly question to answer. The occupying Roman forces, normally such scrupulous bureaucrats, leave no record. This is mysterious in itself, considering the potential threat that such a person would have been to the stability of Roman occupation. Jesus was, after all, tried for sedition against the state. There is one possible reference by the Roman historian Tacitus to an unnamed messiah, but historical certainty is something else. 

[4] Please see my post The Good Satanist.

[5] Both Matthew (which copies from Mark) and Mark agree that after uttering these words Jesus ‘cried with a loud voice’ (Matthew 27:50, Mark 15:37) before dying. This statement has been used as something of a let-out clause by those striving to give the four gospels an internal coherence (as do the editors of my King James Study Bible, which is the Apologist approach to scriptural scholarship), and who for this reason claim that this ‘loud cry’ actually was the short phrase referred to in John. Such a claim is clearly unverifiable and speculative, and still leaves the discrepancy with Luke’s version (in which Jesus does not cry out) unexplained. My own instincts tell me that the phrase in John, "It is finished", if it was said at all. would have been uttered in a last gasp: one of almost whispered resignation. Can you really imagine these modest words being yelled out at max volume? 

[6] ‘Thomas’ is not a name, but a term meaning ‘twin’. This might mean that he was a true reflection – a ‘mirror’ – of the teachings of Jesus, or rather more mysteriously, that Jesus indeed had a twin, a second Self: a can of mystic worms which I might open in a future post. This to me is explanation enough of why this particular gospel never made it into the canon: if there is one thing that orthodoxy apparently abhors, it is mysticism, and the Gospel of Thomas is replete with statements which read more like Zen koans. It will by turns delight, intrigue and shock, and we need to put in some spadework to unearth the deep wisdom that is contained there.

[7] In this sense, the Gospel of Thomas is in the form of a catechism: instructions on faith or doctrine written in a question-and-answer format, as if the reader is in conversation with the writer.

[8] The famed ‘Doubting Thomas’ episode in John 20:24-29 suggests a calculated ridiculing of Thomas, and other passages in John imply a deliberate refutation of the ideas which the Gospel of Thomas expresses. Since this key incident in John's Gospel of Thomas’s skeptical encounter with the risen Christ is virtually ignored by the other three gospels, it is reasonable to conclude that this is a fictive incident which was written into the narrative to serve John’s anti-Thomas agenda, with John portraying Thomas as the ultimate agnostic.

[9] Since the Gospel of Thomas is considered to be a Gnostic text, and since the Q source must have been similar to Thomas - even perhaps by the same person - it logically follows that the amount of Q shown in my above 'pie-slice' diagram is a telling indication of just how much Gnostic influence still remains in the canonical gospels. The responses of Jesus in Matthew 8:20-22 are wholly Gnostic in their nature. "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head." (Matthew 8: 20, R.S.V.) "Foxes have their dens and birds have their nests, but the son of man has no place to lie down and rest." (Thomas 86).

[10] The scriptural texts most nearly contemporary with the events of the crucifixion are specific letters of Paul. Intriguingly, although he lived within the same generation, Paul himself shows little interest in the historical Jesus. Rather, he is impassioned about establishing the new beliefs on an Apostolic Gentile basis, and steering them away from a direction which tied them to a tradition of Jewish customs and prophets which was the focus of James. The four canonical gospels were believed to have been written within the first century, which nevertheless makes their authorship a retrospective one relating events which were not witnessed first-hand by their unknown writers. The oldest gospel is not Matthew, but Mark, which, like Q, has elements common to both Matthew and Luke, and from which the writers of these two gospels also evidently drew for source material.

[11] Quoted in: Snake Salvation: One Way to Pray in Appalachia, by Elizabeth Dias, Time, September 9, 2013. Please see my post They Shall Take Up Serpents.

Sources:

Elaine Pagels: Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. Random House, 2003. Professor Pagels’ title contains the complete text of the Gospel of Thomas, as well as a comprehensive examination of both its content and the historical setting and aftermath, including emerging doctrinal conflicts of the early Church which were contested by a number of individuals who sought to shape Christian doctrine to their will. Not the least of these was Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, who decided that only four of the many gospels then in circulation should be included in scripture – and then only the four of his personal choosing. Yes, it really was a single individual who decided for himself that he had the right to make such a momentous decision – and then made it.

The top image is a detail from the painting Christ and the Sinner, by Henrik Siemiradki. The third image is a detail from the painting Christ Crucified, by Harry Anderson. In the notes: Crucifixion, by Thomas Eakins. The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, by Caravaggio. Saint Paul in Prison, by Rembrandt. Other graphics created for this post by Hawkwood for the © David Bergen Studio.

Sin and Other Illusions

You are sitting at your computer innocently doing what you do, when suddenly a formal-looking warning pops up in an on-screen window. It earnestly advises you that your comp has been infected with a virus, and that you absolutely and beyond question need to let it do a system scan to help you rid your hard drive of the offending corruption before things go into digital meltdown. Before you have a chance to decide, it begins a rapid scan, and on completion delivers an alarmingly specific list of the assorted bugs which it has detected that are even now busily chomping their way through your files. All you need to do (it suggests) is make over a payment to the scan company and your embattled hard drive will be restored to its former pristine condition.

Those who have had the above bad experience (and those who suss it anyway) will know that it is the helpful scan (in reality a mere animation) that is attempting to use fear to con you into parting with your cash. And that convincing list of threatening bugs is a fake: not one of them actually exists. In fact, there was nothing wrong with your system in the first place. Well.. not until the fake scan began, anyway.

Supposing it has been suggested to you that you have a 'virus' in your system – in yourself. Through constant reiteration of this idea to you, you no longer even question its veracity - to the point where you accept your virus-ridden condition as the only reality. It seems like a gloomy prognosis. Mind you, there is no actual straight evidence for the existence of this virus, and (if you're honest with yourself) neither do you notice any direct ill-effects from the damage being done to you internally. You simply accept that you are the unconsenting host to this bug, and that’s the way things are.

But wait! You are told that there is hope. There is a way to get rid of your virus. There is a way that you can be 'debugged', and it is so very, very easy. Remembering that you are long past the point where you question the reality of having such a virus inside you, you'd grab at the chance, right? And one factor that would make you reach out for what's on offer is simple fear: fear at the thought of what might happen if you don't, as it were, make over the cash. Now for ‘virus’ read ‘original sin’, and for ‘debugged’ read ‘redeemed’, and my metaphor is complete. Voila!

This is the mental (and emotional) sleight-of-hand that is part and parcel of faith. You have been convinced of the reality of the sin inside you, and that you absolutely and beyond question need the ‘cure’ of redemption. But since this blog is partly about questioning the unquestioned... what if there is no ‘sin’? What if there actually is nothing wrong with you in the first place? Religions and beliefs by no means universally recognize the concept, and it goes without saying that for unbelievers it’s a non-starter. Sin is a product of the human mind: an idea which, I know from personal experience, can be shocking to those for whom it is a tenet of faith.

And if you already have accepted Jesus, then you must buy into sin as well, because without sin to redeem, Jesus’ ministry would have no purpose. It’s a closed loop, and once you’re in it, you will probably have a fight on your hands to break out of it, even when you perceive the mechanisms which keep the wheels of faith turning. It’s a fight, because of the various pressures which can be brought to bear upon you; from family, from friends, from social and community situations in which you might have involved yourself over a period of years. You might have so much invested in the situation which comes with your faith, emotionally and socially, that you will deny your own doubts to yourself, even when confronted with those doubts. I’ve seen it happen often enough.

But few words are more true or more wise than those attributed to Jesus in the heretical 2nd-century Gospel of Thomas: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.’ These are the words of a very different Jesus from the Jesus propounded by Bible-thumping cable network evangelists. This is an altogether more intriguing Jesus, a quietly-spoken Jesus whose voice has been silenced by orthodoxy, a Jesus the Zen master, a Jesus the shaman, a Jesus the mystic who, cut loose from all doctrines and dogmas, invites us to coax out any truth which is there for ourselves. And such an intimate and personally experienced truth has no need to invoke any scary soul-chomping bugs.

Hawkwood

Original bug graphics created with Mehdi and Chaoscope software (scroll upscreen to see the bugs 'walk'!).