Lilies of the Field

This is the story of three remarkable flowers: one of these flowers is from the past, one is from the future, and one, perhaps even more remarkably, is from a dream. These blooms are made remarkable because through the powers of the human imagination they have invaded our reality, and in that sense they have been made real.

Flowers briefly bloom and fade, reminding us that beauty is a transient thing. This flower from a far future described by H.G. Wells in The Time Machine survives for millennia through Wells’ powers of description: art can outwit time, even if only in the human imagination.

First published in 1895, H.G. Wells’ classic fantasy novel The Time Machine tells of an unnamed inventor who builds a machine which can travel through time. Wells’ protagonist journeys to a far future in which humanity has evolved into two separate species. The working classes of Wells’ own time have become sinister creatures known as the Morlocks who live in underground darkness. The upper classes have evolved into effete and idle beings called the Eloi. The Eloi spend their time picking flowers, eating fruit, and living in what the Time Traveller at first presumes to be an indolent paradise. But he later discovers to his horror that any Eloi who have not taken shelter by nightfall become the prey of the predatory Morlocks.

The Time Traveller who is the protagonist of Wells’ story must battle the predatory Morlocks if he is to make it safely back to his own time. The ability to travel through time has long fascinated the human imagination. Astrophysics suggests possibilities, while many writers of  imaginative fiction have enabled us to make such journeys already.

Although this background gives the story an undercurrent of social satire, with Wells' narrative making a dry observation about the English class system, what truly drives the narrative forward are Wells’ astonishing powers of description. We see in our own imagination what the Time traveller experiences, and with him we endure the horror of the possibility of being stranded in this unknown and dangerous future when his machine is stolen by the Morlocks, and he is forced to make a hazardous journey to the subterranean world in his attempt to recover it.

During his sojourn with the Eloi the Time Traveller is befriended by a young woman whom he has rescued from drowning. The little Eloi presents him with some white flowers as a gift, and it is two of these blooms from the future which the Time Traveller discovers in his coat pocket upon his eventual return to his own time: the only tangible evidence of his fantastic adventures in the world of the far future.

Surrounded by the palace of the Khan the moonlit pleasure dome is reflected in the waters of a surrounding lake. Coleridge’s dream poem Kubla Khan is alive with such vivid imagery: Kubla existed in history, but the Khan of Coleridge’s poem is the poet’s own invention. In poetry experiences become heightened and intensified, and mere reality is left behind so that we might view that reality with fresh eyes on our return.

Wells’ precious flowers from the future find an echo in words written by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge almost exactly a century in time before Wells wrote his own story. The poet relates how he lapsed into sleep, during which he dreamed a glorious visionary poem of several hundred lines. Upon awakening he immediately began to write down the poem of his dream – only to be interrupted by an unexpected visitor. Once his visitor had departed he again set to work, but to his dismay discovered that he had by then forgotten most of what he had dreamed. The surviving fifty-two lines we know as the masterful poem Kubla Khan, with its stately pleasure dome, its gardens redolent with incense, and its Abyssinian ‘damsel with a dulcimer’: the remaining snatches which Coleridge managed to rescue of a far grander design.

Coleridge’s Abyssinian maid seated before her dulcimer. The flower on her shoulder echoes the bloom which the poet wished to possess as proof that his dream experience had indeed been real. But were this mysterious bloom actually to appear in our reality, then all of our preconceptions about what reality is would have to be revised.

In attempting to come to terms with his bitter-sweet experience, Coleridge wrote a brief sentence which to me is one of the most reality-challenging phrases in all of literature: “If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke – Aye! and what then?” What then, indeed. Were this dream flower truly to materialize in our world then the fabric of our own reality would collapse. So we now have a flower from the future and a flower from a dream. But what of the flower from the past?

Jesus asks his followers to ‘consider the lilies of the field’. This instructional lesson from Matthew’s gospel remains valid, even though these particular ‘lilies’ turn out to be as elusive as Wells’ flower from the distant future and Coleridge’s flower from his dreamed-of paradise.

It is one of the most quoted passages in scripture, and its message is so immediate that, two millennia later, we still can readily relate to it: “And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” These words attributed to Jesus come from Matthew 6:28-29. This short passage assures us that we will be provided for, but it also underscores the vainglory of worldly wealth when compared to the unsurpassable creations of the natural world. We do not even need to be particularly religious to feel the truth which is uttered here. But why should these flowers from the past be grouped together with the fantastic flowers from the future and from a dream? Are not lilies real enough?

Sternbergia growing in the wild. Known as Autumn crocuses, these flowers are thought to be the most likely candidates for what in Matthew’s gospel were described as ‘lilies’. But a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and whether the blooms were poetic lilies or prosaic crocuses the lesson of the story remains the same. 

Well, not these lilies, no – because they could not have been lilies. Lilies are not native to the Holy Land, so whatever flowers were being used for this lesson in trust and earthly humility, they must have been some other bloom. Scholarship suggests that the most likely candidate would have been Sternbergia, known as the Autumn crocus, which grows in profusion in such areas around Galilee. It seems that, once again, the magnificent prose of the King James Version opted for a [1]telling turn of phrase over accuracy.

But let’s face it: ‘Consider the Autumn crocuses of the field’ just does not have the resounding ring of the more familiar phrase which has come down to us. Poetry can reveal the greater truth, and with a greater power, than a more prosaic reality. And so we comfortably can place the lilies in Matthew alongside the fantastic botany of Wells and Coleridge without doing a disservice to any of them. The lessons – and the sense of wonder – remain the same. The essayist Jorge Luis Borges remarked that [2]“a false fact may be essentially true.” These mysterious flowers from time and from dreams bloom in spite of their unreality, and we are left to wonder at their strange and fragile beauty.

Hawkwood  

Notes:

[1] Ultra-violet tests on the original Greek manuscript of this gospel held by the British Museum have revealed that the original text reads, not ‘they neither toil nor spin’, but: ‘they neither card nor spin’. Since carding is a process of combing yarn, this makes more sense within the context of the phrase.

[2] This comment appears in Borges’ essay Note on Walt Whitman.

Sources:

H.G. Wells: The Time Machine. Pan books Ltd. 12th printing, 1975. The watercolour illustration of the Time Traveller being attacked by Morlocks is by Alan Lee, scanned from the cover of my own edition of this title.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems, selected and with an introduction by John Beer. J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd. 1974 edition.

John Livingstone Lowes: The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. Pan Books Ltd. Picador imprint, 1978.

Jorge Luis Borges: Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, translated by Ruth L.C. Simms. University of Texas Press, 1964. My post is in part inspired by the essay in this title The Flower of Coleridge, which draws the comparison between Coleridge’s statement and the flower of Wells’ story.

Robin Lane Fox: The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible. Penguin Books, 2006. Chapter 8 of this title examines the errors of translation mentioned in my text.

My pencil and wash paintings of the ‘stately pleasure dome’ and the ‘Abyssinian maid’ are from an unpublished study of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. © David Bergen Studio. To see my other paintings of the 'maid' please visit here. To see my painting of Kubla Khan please visit here. 

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 Enlightened Insight of the Woman

Adam is a pushover for the dark powers to corrupt. He is already compliant to the suggestions of the serpent. But within Adam’s innermost secret being lies a mysterious purity, a wise and essential other Self, which will prevent his further corruption. To weaken Adam further, so that he will become a willing participant in the [1]creator’s schemes, the creator knows that he must extract this pure and powerful essence from Adam, and so causes Adam to become unaware. Now with Adam in a state of unawareness his creator can, as it were, make a forced entry into Adam’s being.

And so within the deepest recesses of the Man’s inner being the creator is able to locate and remove this secret Self, this enlightened Insight from Adam. The creator places this Insight inside a female form, because this is the form which most closely mirrors the perfect Self that the creator had seen in a vision. In this way this essential part of Adam is removed from him and given its own independent existence: a form which reflects the purity that once had been an integral part of Adam’s own being, a form which embodies this precious quality of enlightened Insight.

Adam now sees this shining new form standing beside him. At this same moment his state of unawareness vanishes as enlightened Insight lifts the veil that has covered his mind. In this new being Adam recognizes his partner, his equal, his true other Self. And although they are now two separate beings, together they are a reflection of the unity that once had existed, and will do so again.

*****

When compared with the widely known version in the Bible, the above story is an unfamiliar recounting of the creation of Eve. In the [2]second chapter of the Bible’s Book of Genesis Adam literally is sent into a ‘deep sleep’, during which God physically removes one of his ribs from which he then creates the Woman. The Genesis recounting of these events is literal indeed, and has the Woman being formed from the actual flesh of the Man. In Genesis, Eve is a creation from [3]second-hand material.

But the above first version of the creation of Eve concludes by assuring us that, although the Woman was extracted from the Man, it was a process of mysterious essence, and not, as the text emphasises, involving any physical modification of Adam’s anatomy, as [4]Moses describes in Genesis. This first version actually names Moses and ‘Adam’s rib’ in its striving to correct what it clearly considers to be an erroneously literal version of the creation of Eve.

In this 16th-century woodcut by Heinrich Aldegraver of the creation of Eve, a pontifical deity physically extracts Eve from the side of a sleeping Adam. However fervently we as believers might read the scriptural text, a literal depiction of the event confronts us with an anatomical absurdity.

What we notice in the above first version is that, far from being the rather condescending literalist description of Eve’s creation which Genesis offers us, it instead honours the Woman. In this version, the form of the Woman – her very body – is itself the embodiment of this precious quality of enlightened Insight. The Woman does not just ‘have’ insight: she actually is Insight. What at first seems to be an adjustment to the literalist Genesis account is actually a radical revision – a ‘re-visioning’, and we must weigh the two alternatives: the Genesis version which treats the Woman as a sort of creative [5]afterthought, and the other which, in the manner of her creation, grants her both status and dignity.

The Biblical version of the creation of Eve from Adam’s flesh is, as we know, recounted in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis. The other less familiar version related here is told in The Secret Book of John, one of the texts now known as the Nag Hammadi scriptures, after the nearby Egyptian village where they were discovered by chance in 1945. For over sixteen centuries the literalist version of scripture is the one which has had the official Church stamp of approval. Of the other, all known copies were burned or otherwise destroyed in the 3rd-4th-century purges organized by the Church. The text of The Secret Book of John discovered at Nag Hammadi is one of only [6]two known copies which we have.

  

Both of these versions of the creation of Eve are stories, not history. But stories also can be ways of transmitting greater truths, and we must decide for ourselves which [7]stories carry the most truth and meaning for us personally. But supposing that our choice of which story to take on board carries with it a moral responsibility, and with this in mind the weighing up of such a choice can have huge, even momentous significance, with consequences for our perception of womankind that will echo down the centuries. So: of these two stories of the creation of Eve, which version, the Gnostic or the Biblically orthodox, shows womankind more respect, and gives her creation – her very existence – a greater meaning and dignity?

Hawkwood  

   

Notes:

[1] The identity of this creator will be the subject of a future post. 

[2] Although it is the familiar version in the second chapter of Genesis which is featured in this post, please see my post Lilith: Spirit of the Night for a separate and conflicting version of the Woman’s creation in the first chapter of Genesis. Please also see my posts Adam: The God who Failed and Eve's Story for other alternative versions of the Eden story.

[3] ‘Second-hand’, because in Genesis 2 God already has created the Man, and then creates the Woman from the material which already has been created. 

[4] Tradition names Moses as the author of the first five books of the Old Testament (the Jewish Torah), although this attribution is unsupported by scholarship.

[5] My use of the term ‘creative afterthought’ is justified by scripture itself, which relates that God, having created the Man, then decides that he needs a ‘help meet’ (K.J.V. Genesis 2:18). In the Revised Standard Version the term is ‘helper’. Apparently it only occurs to God to create the Woman once the Man has been created - and then not as his equal partner, but merely as his 'helper'.

[6] The other copy was discovered in a monk's tomb in the 19th-century. And while I am always cautious about floating the idea of conspiracy theories, it is possible, even plausible, that other copies of these Gnostic texts (and other such texts which the Church deemed to be heretical), which have yet to be evaluated or even viewed by impartial scholarship, were kept at the time for record and archival purposes, and to this day remain under seal either in the Vatican Library or in the Vatican Secret Archives.

[7] The current resurgence of alternative spiritual views and values did not grow out of a historical vacuum, but reflects the Church’s loss of control as the arbiter of truth in such matters. Only a little less than two centuries ago the Church still could – and did – impose the death penalty for any view which it considered heretical, with the last execution for heresy being carried out by the Inquisition as recently as 1826. The breaking of the Church as a political power altered the whole game plan – but it should never be forgotten that such countries as Iran and Saudi Arabia still provide a chilling example in our own time of what happens when religion has a political power base. Under Islamic law the death penalty for apostasy is still current. Keeping the adherents to one’s faith in line through threat and fear of the consequences has long been an option for those who wield religious power.  

Sources:

The Secret Book of John, translated from the Coptic by John D. Turner and Marvin Meyer, can be read in its entirety with all textual notations in: The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. Published by Harper One for Harper Collins, 2008. The story retold in my post is only one episode in this text, which contains both further narrative events regarding the expulsion from Eden and the Flood, and advice about the soul's journey. The entire book is in the form of a first person narration by Jesus.

No illustrated version of The Secret Book of John exists. The first, second and the last images suggesting the events from this text have been painted for this post by Hawkwood for the David Bergen Studio © All Rights Reserved.

Please see my post The Ecstasy of Eve for several other versions of the creation of Eve by different artists.

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.