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putting it back together

The last entry's example is but one illustration of the Midrashic style of writing which is echoed time and time again throughout the old and new testaments. But luckily, since these stories were interpreted incorrectly well into Christian history, they can certainly be corrected later in Christian history without destroying the core of the story. It has taken until the twenty first century to begin to go back and pick up on the symbols of the Jewish faith—and not before time I tells ya! So we can now finally open our eyes to a whole new dimension of the gospel material.. the dimension were were meant to see!

One of the scribes who had listened to them debating, appreciated that Jesus had given a good answer and so gave a further question to him, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” Jesus replied, “This is the first: You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: You must love your neighbour as yourself”. There is no commandment greater than these.” - Mark 12:28–31

‘Midrashic’ style

So for a taste of how the Jewish writers operated, I would like to tell of their ‘Midrashic’ style (and I’m paraphrasing John Shelby Spong here). Midrash is the Jewish way of saying that everything to be venerated in the present must somehow be connected with a sacred moment in the past. It is recognition that the truth of God is not bound within the limits of time but that its eternal echoes can be and are heard anew in every generation. For example, the power of God working through Moses was seen in the parting of the waters to allow the Hebrew people to walk into God’s promised future beyond the Red Sea. But Moses died, and God’s people needed to validate God’s continuing presence in Moses’ successor, Joshua. That validation was established by retelling the parting of the waters story in the saga of Joshua. This time it was the waters of the Jordan River rather than the Red Sea, but the affirmation of the parting of the waters was equally real—God was still at work among God’s people in the time of Joshua, still calling them into God’s promised future. The Midrash tradition continued when Elijah was also said to have parted the waters of the Jordan River when he exercised his authority as the leader of God’s people. When Elijah died, the story was repeated in the cycle of stories about Elisha. The ability to part the waters told the Jewish people that Israel’s history was one continuous story.

This same Midrash tradition sought to tell the story of Jesus, who was believed by his followers to have both fulfilled and expanded the symbols of the Jewish tradition. The Gospel writers had Jesus begin his career by walking into the waters of the Jordan River and parting, not the waters, but the heavens themselves so that the spirit of God, which was linked with heaven and water in both Jewish mythology and in the Gospel tradition, could visibly descend, rest on, and validate Jesus as the new expression of God in the ongoing story of God’s people. The question to ask of this Midrash tradition is not, did it really happen? That is a Western question tied to a Western mind-set that sets up a yes-or-no answer, for it either happened or it did not; it was either real or it was not.  The proper questions are: what was the experience that led, or even compelled the compilers of sacred tradition to include this moment, this life, or this event inside the interpretative framework of their sacred past? And what was there about Jesus of Nazareth that required the meaning of his life to be interpreted through these Jewish stories of antiquity?

Our battle is not between good and evil...but between ignorance and enlightenment - Mark Ruser

specific facets

the root of antisemitism

Now the gospels were written at a time when the Romans were persecuting the Jewish people—in fact Jerusalem had just been destroyed by the Roman army! This meant that the Christians had to distance themselves from the Jewish people or they themselves would have been subject to the might of Rome. The gospels contain a combination of both oral tradition passed down through at least three generations (talk about Chinese whispers) and because of this and the above-mentioned need to separate themselves from the Jews; a large amount of propaganda crept in. So if we take this as ‘the word of God’ and place these gospels in our day and age, what will be the result? It’s followers will become anti-semitic of course—funny that!

The first Christians of course, were converted Jews, thus the Gospels were in fact written through Jewish eyes and by people who had detailed knowledge of the Old Testament and believed Jesus to be the fulfilment of these scriptures. But unfortunately, we Christians became gentiles just after the first century of this Common Era, and we began to read the scriptures as if they were gentile objective history books. We were so anti-semitic that we didn’t even raise the question of how these ex-Jews wrote their sacred stories. How can this, in essence Jewish work be understood if one ignores the Jewish context, the Jewish mind-set, the Jewish frame of reference, the Jewish vocabulary, and even the Jewish history that shaped and formed the writer? But this has been the reality of the Christian west for most of our history!

your wanting an example?? stay tuned

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.  -  Jonathan Swift

broad brushstrokes

So let's begin with the New Testament: I have problems with the accuracy of the bulk of the latter part of this collection of books, however the earlier writings such as Paul’s letters and to a lesser extent, the gospel of Mark, I believe are sincere. This is because they (Paul in particular) were writing about Jesus the person. The latter books tend to use Jesus as justification for the early church’s doings by stretching and in fact inventing many of His stories to suit their needs.

But while I'm here, to dispel the argument that Jesus was not an historical person, I tell you; if they were to create a myth, the early writers of the Gospels would not have had Jesus come from Nazareth, a place they despised—with doctrine stating ‘nothing good could ever come out of Nazareth’. And further, their message surely spells history as there is no other explanation for the writers to create a story so unheard of in their time, a story they would need to bend and twist to fit into the framework of their pre-modern ways for decades. If you were looking for something that isn’t historical, start at the stories invented later to try and rectify what didn’t sit well with early Christian prejudices—Jesus was born in Bethlehem, during a census and in a stable—now that may be a lot of things, but it’s certainly not history.

And the resurrection story—which is the crux of the Christian message. What gives it merit is not whether Jesus was crucified or raised from the dead, it is in the transformation that occurred within the disciples shortly afterwards—they had forsaken Jesus in fear and abandoned him in cowardice but suddenly became fearless, heroic people ready to die for the truth which now possessed them, becoming the most influential movement the world has ever known—no vision or hallucination I believe is sufficient to explain such a revolutionary transformation.

Perhaps they saw the love of God incarnate within him… he was betrayed, denied, persecuted, forsaken, tortured and killed yet he still loved the perpetrators. That’s why I believe God is in Christ—I don’t see it possible in any human to have this much capacity to love. I find in this Jesus a life fully lived and a love wastefully given.

These people then went on to establish the Christian religion we know of today. One which I will argue later on, has refused to renew itself since its humble beginnings in the first century. As Paul Davies observed ‘The trivial God we meet in church is no longer big enough to be able to be the God of this world anymore’. ‘After religion, try Jesus’ is now the cry as the church continues to refuse to budge on fundamental dogma. In messing with the simple and central theme of ‘There's nothing you can do and nothing you can be that would place you outside the boundaries of the love of God’, the church only succeeds in muddying the waters by adding unnecessary layers.

The church needs to realise that the Bible cannot be taken literally or assumed inerrant anymore as its words and images are limited by the age that produced them. Our 20th century vision of this God of antiquity has been culturally conditioned, socially moulded as well as linguistically restrained. We need to journey beyond these restrictions and into the experience that shaped the bible and put it into a context that we can understand in our day and age.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg––or else he would be the Devil. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.  - C. S. Lewis

the kernel of truth

So if head then head back to when each religion was in its infancy, you will find a common thread they all share, that of compassion, wisdom and being. Interestingly, if you dig deeper, you’ll also discover the same common thread in philosophy—Plato in my opinion was not all that revolutionary, he was just the first recorded person to tap into this primordial need, thereby giving an alternative to the faith based religions and arguing the same fundamental truth but through logical rationale. Anyway, this common thread I speak of, although eternal, expresses itself in the time it was written and through the mind of man; therefore every scripture must necessarily contain two elements, one temporary, perishable, belonging to the ideas of the period and country in which it was produced, with the other eternal and imperishable and applicable in all ages and countries. Each also undergoing 2000 years of humanity and easily adding 2000 years of self serving dogma to this ‘common thread’. So to find fulfilment, we now need to peel back the layers, right back to the kernel of the message and remember what kindled this belief process in the first place. My personal opinion is that a shortcut lies in the Buddhist faith which has no hierarchy and therefore no power struggles which results in fewer layers to wade through.

My emphasis here however, will be through the Christian coloured pane of that multi-coloured lantern, as it is from within this Christian tradition on which I was raised.

So with my next entry, I'll use broad brush strokes for my take on the ancient faith of Christianity which broke upon the scene in Judea in the first century and then moved on to conquer the Roman empire in the fourth century, dominate Western civilisation in the thirteenth century, endure the face-lifting reformation of the sixteenth century, follow the flag of European colonial expansion in the nineteenth century, and shrink dramatically in the twentieth century.

I consider myself a Hindu, Christian, Moslem, Jew, Buddhist, and Confucian.
- Mahatma Gandhi

that was then..

One night close to a decade later, I had a thought process which married cosmology and transcendence into a statement which was so simplistic that it may have some element of truth:

Either (via the big bang) the universe came into existence out of nothing, with matter and energy being created out of emptiness and for no reason.

or

A power we cannot yet comprehend set the big bang and the universe into motion by divine intervention and for a purpose we are not yet privy to.

Although the later is impossible to humanly comprehend, the former is simply impossible!

So as scientists can never explain what happened before the big bang, it seems rational to think that something irrational is out there and I guess all the different religions are trying to fill in that hole.

If the above were to be accepted as profound however, it would need to be opened up to academics and philosophers alike. I sent this to the most authoritative source I know - John Shelby Spong, and received this reply:

Dear Mark:
Thanks for your letter. Your argument is as good as any. It is not new. It responds to the question why is there something and not nothing.
In the last analysis whether there is God or not doesn't really matter. The real question is: does this God relate to me?
My best,
John S. Spong

The latter part of this reply alludes to what Bonhoeffer recognised, as so many religious people fail to do, that anything we say about God is subjective. We cannot capture and fully embrace God. Our words point to and our images interact with God, but our words and our images are products of our world, our cultural realities. They are not objective and they will not endure forever. So therefore we must ask ourselves ‘who is God for us today?’ and ‘how does this God relate to me personally’. The former part of his reply however adds a certain amount of validity to my statement and subsequently gives further strength to my conviction.

So even though I believe all religion to be ultimately man-made, I treat God as axiom and Jesus as simply one of the many doorways to that God—like a candle inside a multicoloured lantern, everyone looks through a particular colour, but the candle is always there. Ultimately, we must learn that in respect to the different religions out there, it is not the road we individually travel, but the destination we seek, that is crucial. To suggest otherwise is to continue to play outdated religious games.

Maybe the human mind is not capable of understanding universal truths? - Anon

the gospel according to not that Mark but this one

sooooo....... like many, in my late teens, I grappled long and hard as to the existence of God, believing it to be  the most important question you have to answer in your lifetime—since your eternity depends on the answer. I figured at the time that as medical advances continue to a point where each person may be able to be kept alive forever, the question may ultimately become a choice between immortality and God.

The more I read and pondered the likelihood of such a God, the more I was convinced of It’s presence. I had resigned myself to the fact that for those who do believe, no explanation is necessary while for those who do not, no explanation is possible. To recall Alan Watts; ‘defining God is like trying to wrap up the wind in a package and post it’. Anyhow, if I were able to give you total proof of the existence of God, would we not all be believers?

 Dietrich Bonhoeffer says “A God who let us prove his existence would be only an idol”. We therefore need a certain amount of that faith element. And besides, if there were no God, who pops up the next Kleenex?

Your God is too small. - J B Phillips