“Life is filled with secrets. You can't learn them all at once.”
Dan Brown
It has often been said that there are no two characters in history more alike than Socrates and Jesus. Except perhaps that Socrates never claimed to be the ‘son of God’...unless, that is, we all are. However, if recently discovered documents (apparently hidden to prevent their destruction in the years following the death of Jesus) tell the true story, then it appears that Jesus shared this egalitarian view. For * I’ll leave that for you to decide, as this book does not intend to replace the ancient texts, but rather to encourage you to read them for yourselves.
Perhaps another difference between Jesus and Socrates is that, while the former taught us that we should love, the latter taught us how to. For this, the case can be made that what we call the Socratic method is simply the way we should talk to those we love. For love is not mere how we feel about others, but how we treat them, and words are indeed actions.
Socrates ultimately summarized his teachings, before being executed for such radical views, saying that “love is the only thing I ever claimed to know anything about.”[1] This is a curious claim, coming from one who was known for claiming to know nothing. But knowing, at least, how little he actually knew, one of the things Socrates understood and taught best is the importance of the art of dialogue toward mutual understanding and self-improvement – essential elements of love.
So to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” as Jesus taught us, is no either/or proposition. To be other-interested is not opposed to being self-interested, it is the ultimate self-interest – enlightened self-interest. And in this sense, egoism does not oppose altruism, but presupposes it. And so it naturally follows that one should “love thy enemies as thyself.”
Jesus tried to bring these lessons about love and the law of compassion to the fundamentalists of his day, who called themselves Pharisees. But like so many today, they were too sure they had nothing to learn from this idealist who would have them humble themselves. That they alone were the proper judges of other people’s goodness was the foundation of the law of piety they preferred to that of compassion. This holiness code, passed down from Mosaic Law, allowed the Pharisees to dictate other people’s behavior, power and privilege they apparently valued more than uplifting their souls. This right they assumed that gave them so much earthly power, that of drawing distinct lines between those they considered “clean and unclean, pure and defiled, sacred and profane, Jew and Gentile, righteous and the sinner,”(Smith, p.209) was not loving, and Jesus took exception to it. He did not object to their fundamental beliefs in the power of the God they revered in common, but to their attempts to use that divine power to control the beliefs and behavior of others.
Jesus “saw social barriers as an affront to Yahweh’s compassion, and he disregarded them.”(Smith, p.209) Instead, he taught all who would hear to love, not merely those were like them or lived by the same religious dictates, but rather, to love all people. But his attempts to teach us to “Love our enemies” have fallen largely on deaf ears, if the arrogance of so many fundamentalists today is any indication. And arguably, this is why Jesus gave his life, as did Socrates and so many other of the sages of the ages – not for religion itself – but for religious freedom.[2]
Jesus’ agreement with the Mosaic view that there is only one god has been used throughout the ages as a battle cry to denounce all other views of god. But it was originally understood by those who knew him best, if we are to take recent discovery of ancient texts seriously, in a sense that the ancient Hindus had put forth – One God, yes, but one which we nonetheless all see differently – as conceive through different cultural windows, languages, and mythologies. The so-called Gnostic Gospels give us a more dialectic view of the ancient Jesus and the lessons he taught. And they sound more uniting than dividing, more healing than we have heard them in the past.
As others of the great teachers would have us understand, "Many illnesses can be cured by the one medicine of love and compassion,” as the Dalai Lama teaches. “These qualities are the ultimate source of human happiness, and the need for them lies at the very core of our being."[3]
For this and other reasons, we can see why the ancients understood that true love is not about how we feel about others – though such emotions may often be the serendipitous side effects of loving well. Indeed, in its truest sense, love may well be its own reward, such that even in the most difficult of trials, that deep feeling abides.[4] But more than mere words that we use or emotions that we feel, friendship and love, in their truest senses, have more to do with how we treat one another than how we feel about each other. In fact, true love, like true friendship, is an activity -- one that involves the golden rule of communication, which is listening the way we would like to be heard.
Which is why one must, as Socrates and Confucius taught, “Recognize that you know what you know, and that you are ignorant of what you do not know. Hear much, leave to one side that which is doubtful, and speak with due caution concerning the remainder.” [5] Such humility, empathy, and curiosity is the essence of treating others as ends in themselves, for their good, just as we ourselves would wish to be treated. For “a friend,” Aristotle says, “is another self.”[6]
Hence, the need to recover an understanding of the lost art of dialogue, because wisdom turns out to be, “the ability to see the connections between things.”(Republic, 7.537) It is by this dialectic process of gathering and weighing perspectives – “like lines converging on a common center,” as Plato says, by which the human mind grows. For this reason, two heads are better than one, and three better yet, and so we approach the whole truth by incremental growth. Considering that we are all born in different places, face idiosyncratic life challenges, with specialized skills and talents, and follow ultimately unique paths, we all see the same world from very different points of view. This does not entail that it is a different world, or that our diverse eclectic perspectives are somehow irreconcilable – as some pure relativists might conclude. Indeed, if one could only 'know' what one learns from one's own window on the world, one would be unnecessarily limited to a very narrow slice of reality. Happily, we can learn from the experience and insights of others, and indeed, "A great deal of our knowledge comes from other people in this way. Because we can communicate what we experience, human beings can merge their separate windows into one giant window."(Kelly: The Art of Reasoning, p.88) Indeed, it’s been said that the perfect person would be all people put together. On the other hand, there being no such thing as perfection, once and for all, our best is pretty good – and gets better by way of learning from one another.
Which brings us back to the power, and danger, of words -- as we shall see, written words most especially. Words can, and indeed must, also be the source of resolution for our misunderstandings and miscommunications, but without sensitivity to the different senses in which we use them, all our efforts to talk things out can go awry, if and when the words themselves get in the way.
As physicist David Bohm aptly put it, “Whatever we say is words,” but “what we want to talk about is generally not words.”[7] So we would be wise to look more deeply, from more perspectives than just our own. Still, we should put no faith in anyone else’s words, as Socrates warns, because you won’t really understand something “until you hear your own voice say it.”[8] “Words can be communicative,” says Alan Watts, “only between those who share similar experiences.”[9] As we quoting Zen masters earlier: “A finger is used to point at the moon, but let us not confuse the finger with the moon.” Words are pointing tools, but what they point at is an inner experience that cannot be seen by the uninitiated.
So “Be lamps unto yourselves,”(p.68)[10] as Buddha said, and thus see for yourself whether or not advice offered by our ancient betters proves better for you, and makes you more truly happy than your past habits have.
The reason they call 'gnosis' the 'secret knowledge' -- because it is reserved for those who learn it 'the hard way', so to speak. It cannot be learned simply by word of mouth, as Socrates says, as if drained by a wick from one person to another. The only people who ever really understand are those who have had the experience that brings it home, and who, in learning, persevere in earnest to the end with the experiment necessary to continued learning.
In this way, you might come to see what, for most of us living in the dark of Plato’s cave, is obscured from sight at a very young age. And this is why such wisdom is available only to the worthy – because the unworthy are not yet awake to seeing what is visible only to the good heart that gives rise to the good will – still and always available to us all, but only for the earning.
The so-called Gnostic Gospels were found outside Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. We knew these had once existed, b/c ‘heresiologists’ of the 3rd and 4th century wrote incessantly about them, and subsequent centuries made it their goal to destroy every last bit of such ancient literature. And so while we knew of them, until the actual books of the Gnostic Gospel Library were found, everything we knew about the so-called 'gnostics' was received "almost exclusively through the myopic view of heresy hunters, who often quote only to refute or ridicule."(Nag Hammadi Library, Robinson, p.6)
Think about that. As one of you aptly asked, who defines what is heresy? Who has that right to tell all what they can and cannot think? The answer depends on who has the power to do so…even the mainstream way of thinking might be called heretical if and when an extreme faction comes into power. Which is why we know now to avoid integration of church and state -- b/c state imbues church with the power to punish. And indeed, when the Roman Empire usurped Christian faith and it became the Roman Catholic church (which means, disingenuously, universal), the first thing it did was set about to ‘expel’ and ‘eradicate’ and ‘assassinate’ all opponents.(p.5) (If you want a fine example of the murderous handiwork of these so-called Christians, Google the destruction of the library at Alexandria and the death of it’s leading teacher, Hypatia, whose skin was filleted from her bones before she was burned alive…).
In the face of this persecution, classical, late classical, and early Christian scholars gathered together as many of the ancient wisdom traditions that influenced them. Scholars takes books very seriously, but books can be destroyed…and when the Roman Christians were threatened by these free thinking Gnostics, that is just what they set out to do. But persecuted ways of thinking do not die, they just go underground, pass on their history through clandestine means. They pass secrets through time for those to come who will once again seek the truth…as Jesus says to James and Peter when, frustrated that they didn’t get it, he nonetheless knew that someday, somewhere, someone would.
And so they gathered together and buried what we finally found all these many centuries later….perhaps just when we need it most.
What was actually found in Egypt included twelve leather bound books (i.e codices with covers and leaves of pages) plus 8 leaves tucked inside (that together made for a thirteenth book), “each a collection of relatively brief works.”(p.10) …in all, 52 tractates…12 of which we had earlier found parts of…40 of them absolutely new to us…30 of them fairly complete…each distinguished by its handwriting, indicating several, maybe many scribes…and some repetition, indicating their production was not a uniform effort, but rather an after the fact collecting together of texts…translated into Coptic (Egyptian language in Greek alphabet) probably over the course of a full century…had clearly been well cared for as only ‘holy texts’ would be (p.17)…but had badly deteriorated, starting even before they were buried in jars the dry desert to preserve them…able to date them because the papyrus of these books was recycled from business documents of the time (p.16)…showed ”a fiber pattern as distinctive as a fingerprint” (p.11)…so place them in time (about 400 C.E.)…indeed, they were reassembled by matching the ends of fibers forensically…
We can see now from these original texts that Gnostic thought was “not an aggressive movement,” as the Romans had characterized it, “but rather a withdrawl from involvement in the contamination that destroys clarity of vision.”(p.1) Transcendence -- rising above what is to what could be…“For some, concentrated inwardness undistracted by external factors came to be the only way to attain the repose, the overview, the merger into the All which is the destiny of one’s spark of the divine.”(p.4)
“Thus, the Nag Hammadi library involves the collection of what was originally a Greek literary productivity by largely unrelated and anonymous authors spread through the eastern half of the ancient world and covering a period of almost half a millennia (or more, if one takes into consideration a brief section of Plato’s Republic, VI.5).(p.13)
It was therefore, “not inner-Christian”, but much “broader than…hence independent of, and perhaps even prior to Christianity.”(p.6) These texts are therefore, “important contribution to [the] history of religion, but also to the history of philosophy.”(p.9) “The history of Gnosticism as documented by the Nag Hammadi library, takes up about where the Dead Sea Scrolls break off.”(p.7) Thus Gnosticism seems not to have been in its essence just an alternate form of Christianity. Rather it was a radical trend of release from the dominion of evil or of inner transcendence that swept through late antiquity and emerged within Christianity, Judaism, Neoplatonism, Hermetism, and the like. As a new religion it was syncretistic, drawing upon various religious heritages. But it was held together by a very decided stance, which is where the unity amid the wide diversity is to be sought."(P.10)
What characterizes Gnostic thought is “an affinity to an ideal order that completely transcends life as we know it.”…one that tends toward “a life-style [that] involved giving up all the goods that people usually desire, and longing for an ultimate liberation.”(p.1) Sound familiar?
Elaine Pagels notes that, “Some scholars have suggested that if the names were changed, the ‘living Buddha’ appropriately could say what the Gospel of Thomas attributes to the living Jesus. Could Hindu or Buddhist traditions have influenced Gnosticism?”she asks.
It becomes clear in all this that the "long-standing debate among historians of religion as to whether Gnosticism is to be understood as only an inner-Christian development or as a movement broader than, and hence independent of, and perhaps even prior to Christianity,"(p.6) is resolved "in favor of understanding Gnosticism as a much broader phenomenon than the Christian Gnosticism documented by the heresiologists."(p.6) “Gnostic schools began to emerge within (both) Christianity and Neoplatonism until both agreed in excluding them as the heresy of Gnosticism.”(p.*) Which tells us a lot about how far Platonists had fallen from the Socratic tree!
”The world of thought from which Jesus and his first followers had come was the popular piety of the Jewish synagogue, focused in terms of John the Baptist’s rite of transition from the old regime to the new ideal world whose dramatic arrival was forthcoming. In this way of thinking, the evil system that prevails is not the way things inherently are. In principle, though not in practice, the world is good. The evil that pervades history is a blight, ultimately alien to the world as such…Their plight is that they have been duped and lured into the trap of trying to be content in the impossible world, alienated from their true home.(p.3) “Jesus called for a full reversal of values, advocating the end of the world as we have known it (which is NOT the end of the world itself!) and its replacement by a quite new, utopian kind of life in which the ideal would be real.”(p.3)
The Gnostics were a dialogic community made up of thinking people from many wisdom traditions who all had an understanding of gnosis at heart. In an ideal order, no one voice speaks for everyone…life on earth of diverse voices is a dialogue…and what I hoped you would take from our readings is that insight…for it makes us better listeners…better learners…b/c all voices bring something true to the dialogue, and all have something to learn, and it’s up to us to figure out what that is, and to then bring that perspective to bare on your deliberations (inner dialogues, in this sense) as you ask yourself what you think?
Seekers of truth and scholars of history must follow the evidence where it actually leads, not just cling to old beliefs and stories out of wishful thinking for them to be true. It is natural for us to want to prefer stories that we are ‘chosen’ or ‘superior’ or somehow God’s favorites, but by definition, not everyone can be, and so by that very stance we are insisting that others accept inferior ‘left behind’ status…an offensive attitude if ever there was one. Would a good creator God offend so many of his creation in this way?
Unfortunately, “History is written by the winners…”, and there’s lots of incentive for them to tell it like they want it to appear, rather than as it really was…but time reveals the truth about the past, only gradually, slowly as primary sources come to light that outshine the secondary sources we have had to depend on…we see it is a question of whose word we take for what is true…who do we believe?
I want to remind you at this juncture that philosophy is using our inner reason to figure out what is logically as well as empirically true, so that we don’t have to just believe, just take other’s word for such things, especially when it comes to the truth of what happened in history…and thus the truth about our own spiritual potential…being deceived about this is arguably, of all things, the greatest evil. So we must follow the evidence that reveals itself about history as time moves forward…and where the evidence leads is toward a better understanding of the fact that the truth stays true, and persistent inquiry will find it, and deny or ignore that evidence all you like, but that does not change that the truth stays true, and will be found by those who are not distracted by false gods…so what good does it for us to deny what we don’t want to see?
So these texts are going to present a problem for anyone who wants to take the scriptures too literally. The first problem (as you’ll see from Erhman’s piece posted in Content) is 1. Translation error. The second is 2. Deliberate manipulation of the texts, and the third is 3. the fact that there are no original texts to draw on. The ”hazard [being] in the transmission of the texts by a series of scribes who copied them.” Some didn’t know what they were doing, so errors occur, and worse, some knew exactly what they were doing, and over the centuries many made deliberate changes in the texts to suit their own particular, often self-aggrandizing view of history. And this was increasingly easy to do b/c, as it turns out, there are no original texts to check later versions against… Such a thing as a clean control copy does not exist.”(p.2)
Thus, many stories and traits attributed to Christians are shown in the Nag Hammadi texts to have non-Christian origins…many books (the Sethian, largely Greek texts “contain no Christian elements at all.”(p.8)…although some have a Christian veneer, as if Christian elements were added later by Christian scribes and editors…many clearly run foreign to the message of the texts. These more ancient stories were lifted from the actual originals, and when the original texts were destroyed, they were misappropriated to a different, sometimes ‘biblical’ source. I know that is hard for some of us to swallow, and it doesn’t change the value of the teachings. But it does throw into question the source of these lessons, and whether they can be trusted on other grounds.
Here is where the gnostics might want to remind us of something important that the ancients understood better than we apparently do. And that is, that there are actually two gods at work in the world of human religion. One is the god of life, light, health, and goodness, what they think of as the true god. The other is the pretense of god -- the god of death, darkness, and disease. Both gods are 'creators' -- but the difference is that one's creativity is constructive, while the others is destructive. And sadly, this latter god is even better at getting people to follow it than the good god b/c it is so willing to deceive them, tell them what they want to hear, make them feel good by teaching them that others are bad, and feeds their lesser inclinations toward the will to power, to superiority -- it feeds their egos, so to speak. It moves them away from love, toward hate. Away from justice, toward self-interest, as if might makes right. The good god, on the other hand, makes us more loving, more just, not less, whereas the evil god tells us there is no justice, not in us, and not in this world. Indeed, the reason religion is so wrought with darkness, among the light, is b/c 'evil' has every incentive to try to appear 'good' -- and so it wears religion like sheep's clothing, making it very hard for the average person to discern a person of true faith from one who is only out to recruit us for their own purposes.
Now, holding the actual texts in our hands we can see what the church (or was it the empire?) was so afraid of…people thinking for themselves...reaching for justice on earth…trying to make the real world live up to its just ideal…In other words, people standing up to unjust rulers. The empire’s challenge was how to quiet and pacify those who dream of justice in this world and oppose unjust rulers en masse? Answer: focus their attention on the afterlife…convince them that humans are incapable by nature of living up to their better selves in this life, that they are by way of some historical mistake, ‘fallen’, unable to be saved in this life, and only capable of happiness in the next life, if at all -- message that contradicts the heart of true gnosis.
Putting this in a historical context, you can see the incentive that the Roman Empire had to distort Jesus' message -- not only to get Christians to fight their wars, but b/c if you can focus people on their after life, and in fact keep them in fear of it, then they become very easy to control in this life. They will stop asking for justice from their leaders, stop questioning the authority of the empire -- especially if they became subject to punishment by the newly-religious empire if they did not accept its injustice. And so the empire become complicit in the evil god's work -- indeed, they become the devil's hands.
So beware of putting trust in voices that make us feel good, not realizing that this is exactly what evil is good at -- what Socrates calls flattery -- telling us what we want to hear...making us feel good about ourselves, even if only by teaching us to look down on others.
So the question for all of us is, does our religion make us more or less compassionate? More or less loving?
--During most of their history, “the Jews were either oppressed or displaced. They were underdogs, and underdogs have only one direction to look; up. This upward tilt of Jewish hopes and imaginings impregnated the Western mind. A better tomorrow is possible, if not assured… [and] the Jews personified their hope in the figure of a coming Messiah, or Chosen One.”(Smith, 195) “Some expected an actual Messiah, while others foresaw God dispensing with a human agent and intervening directly to institute an age of universal harmony.”(Smith, 195)
--“Thy kingdom come, on earth, as it is in heaven.”
-- Jesus was born in Palestine around 4 B.C., and grew up in Nazareth. was baptized by his predecessor, John the Baptist, “he was electrifying the region with his proclamation of God’s coming judgment.” This is said to have “opened his spiritual eye.” The Jewish spiritual tradition centered on Yahweh, and included angels and other invisible beings who, at least in imagery, resided above the earth, though it was understood that “the two were not spatially separate” but were instead “in continuous interaction.”(Smith, 206) It was thought that “Spirit could be known,” and humans could initiate that contact by fasting and solitude, during which they “immersed themselves in Spirit.”(Smith, 206) This drove Jesus into the wilderness for forty day of prayer and fasting, which empowered him. He is said to have begun his ministry by quoting Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. Today this scripture has been fulfilled.”(Smith, 206) “In his early thirties he had a teaching-healing career that lasted between one and three years.”(Smith, 206) The Gospels attribute to Jesus the powers to heal, cast out demons, quell storms, part waters, and return the dead to life.(Smith, 206-207) “Jesus as a charismatic wonder-worker who stood in a tradition that stretched back to the beginnings of Hebrew history.”(Smith, 206) He aimed “to alleviate suffering and seek a new social order.”(Smith, 206)
--Given the Roman occupation, high taxes and loss of freedom, the Jewish people found themselves in a desperate political situation. There were four existing responses, included the Sadducees, Essense, Zealots, Pharisees, but Jesus rejected all these options. Jesus opted for another response, one that involved change, rather than the status quo (as the Sadducees, who “favored making the best of a bad situation and accommodated themselves to …Roman rule”), he did not want to remove himself from society (like the Essenes who “considered the world too corrupt…so they withdrew into property sharing communities”), but Jesus was a peacemaker, so neither did he want armed revolt (like the Zealots, “who thought that change could only come through armed rebellion”). He might have agreed with the Pharisees, but found their fundamentalism less compassionate than he though God would want. Rather, Jesus followed the law of compassion “and urged that even enemies be loved.”(Smith, 207). He didn’t disagree with the holiness code delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai, but he did take issue with the social system that the Pharisee’s code of piety promoted, which was not compassionate, for it drew distinctions between clean and unclean acts and things, and then went on to “categorize people according to whether they respected those distinctions” or not.(Smith, 209) “The result as a social structure that divided people who were clean and unclean, pure and defiled, sacred and profane, Jew and Gentile, righteous and sinner. Jesus saw social barriers as an affront to Yahweh’s compassion, and he disregarded them…advocating an alternative vision of the human community.”(Smith, 209) And his protests attracted enough attention to “alarm the Roman authorities, which led to Jesus’ arrest and execution on charges of treason.”(Smith, 209) With this, “Christianity reshaped [the Jewish hope for a Messiah] into the Second Coming of Christ.”(Smith, 195)
--“The most impressive thing about the teachings of Jesus is not that he taught them but that he appears to have lived them…his entire life was one of humility, self-giving, and love that sought not its own.”(Smith, 213)
--Jesus’ love “embraced sinners and outcasts, Samaritans and enemies. It gave, not prudentially in order to receive, but because giving was its nature.”(Smith, 216) --“He loved people and they loved him in turn – intensely and in great numbers…he ignored the barriers that mores erected between people. He loved children. He hated injustice, and perhaps hated hypocrisy even more because it had people from themselves and precluded the authenticity he sought to build into relationships.…here was a man in whom the human ego had disappeared…they felt that as they looked at Jesus they were looking at something resembling God in human form.”(Smith, 213) Indeed, “a God who loves human beings absolutely, without pausing to calculate their worth or due.”(Smith, 213)
--Jesus also spoke as few ever had, “’hard sayings,’” revealing “a scheme of values that is at radical odds with the usual.”(Smith, 212) “We are told that we are not to resist evil but to turn the other cheek. The world assumes that evil must be resisted by every means available. We are told to love our enemies and bless those who curse us. The world assumes that friends are to be loved and enemies hated. We are told that the sun rises on the just and the unjust alike. … We are told that it is more difficult for the rich to enter the Kingdom than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye. The world admires wealth. We are told that the happy people are those who are meek, who weep, who are merciful and pure in heart. The world assumes that it is the rich, the well-positioned, and the powerful who are happy.”(Smith, 212-213) Jesus was clear about “people whose outer lives are stately mausoleums while their inner lives stink of decaying corpses.”(Smith, 212)
--And with this, “human beings find their latent love triggered by the love of others for them…the love that builds in them is the love that comes to them, assimilated and then reflected back into the world….” Until it ultimately becomes “a love of infinite proportions.” (Smith, 216) something so far beyond human love can only be explained as “God’s love,” powerful enough to “reduce all fear, guilt, and self-obsession to zero.”(Smith, 216) (connect understanding breeds love…*) This love lifted the “intolerable burdens” of fear, including the fear of death…guilt…and the cramping confines of self-centeredness,”(Smith, 216) a release that “could bring new life.”(Smith, 216) And so early Christians experienced “lives that had been transformed – men and women who had changed overnight by finding, so it seemed, the secret of living.”(Smith 215) It included two qualities especially; “The first of these was mutual regard…and a total absence of social distance.”(Smith, 215) They “not only said that everyone was equal…but [they] lived as though they meant it.”(Smith, 216) “The second quality they exhibited was joy…they had found an inner peace that surfaced in happiness.”(Smith, 216)
--“the deepest impulse in the human self is to be lovingly related to people. The impulse must be activated, however; typically through the mother’s initiating love for her infant.”(Smith, 216) “A loving human being is not produced by exhortations, rules, and threats. Love only emerges in children when it is poured into them, normally by nurturing parents.”(Smith, 216)
“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”(1 Corinthians 13:4-8)
-- What Jesus’ life actually was, and how it appeared to his disciples, these may have been very different things. Jesus did perform what some would call miracles, but so have many shamans and healers throughout history. And importantly, “Jesus did not himself emphasize them; almost all of them were performed quietly, apart from the crowd, and as demonstrations of the power of faith.”(Smith, 210) In the words of Simon Peter, when asked to epitomize Jesus’ life, he put it simply: “He went about doing good.”(Smith, 210) And he did this so effectively “that those who were with him constantly found their estimate of him modulating to a new key. They found themselves thinking that if divine goodness were to manifest itself in human form, this is how it would behave.”(Smith, 210) This is “what finally edged his disciples toward the conclusion that he was divine.”(Smith, 213) Importantly, though, “They did not reach that conclusion before Jesus’ death…”(Smith, 210)
--Of what happened after his death, “We are given too few details to know exactly what happened after the crucifixion. Jesus’ close associates reported that he appeared to them in a new way, but it is not possible to determine exactly what that way was.”(Smith, 214) The resurrection reversed the cosmic position in which the cross had placed Jesus’ goodness. Instead of being fragile, the love the disciples had encountered in him was victorious over everything, including death.”(Smith, 214)
--there were only “a dozen or so disconsolate followers of [the] slain and discredited leader,”(Smith, 215) but together they fanned the flames of what was said to be “tongues of fire [that] descended upon them.”(Smith, 215) From “an upper room in Jerusalem, they spread their message with such fervor that in their own generation it took root in every major city of the region.”(Smith, 215) “They exploded across the Greco-Roman world” as “People who were not speakers became eloquent,”(Smith, 215) “preaching what has come to be called the Gospel but is literally the Good News.”(Smith, 215) With the outline of a fish, they scratched on walls and in the dirt a symbol that pointed the way “to the place where their persecuted sect held it’s underground meetings. (“the Greek letters for fish are also the first letters of the Greek words for ‘Jesus Christ, son of God, Savior’…the essence of the Good News the Christians were on fire with.”(Smith, 215)
--Christianity ultimately divided into three major branches, including Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism.(Smith, 206)
[1] (Plato’s Symposium)
[2] Dan Brown makes this case in his novel, The Lost Symbol. To the seemingly widespread belief that our American forefathers were not only religious, but bent on laying the foundation for a Christian nation, Brown says this (by way of his arch-typical scholar, Peter Solomon: “Our forefathers were deeply religious men, but they were Deists -- men who believed in God, but in a universal and open-minded way. The only religious ideal they put forth was religious freedom… America’s forefathers had a vision of a spiritually enlightened utopia, in which the freedom of thought, education of the masses, and scientific advancement would replace the darkness of outdated religious superstition.”(Brown, p.407) (Brown, The Lost Symbol 2009)
[3] (The Medicine of Altruism, Speech by the Dalai Lama, http://www.dalailama.com/messages/world-peace/the-medicine-of-altruism )
[4] The bhakta yogi (“for whom feelings are more important than thoughts”(Smith, 29) we are told, understands the connection between true love and true happiness, and expresses this in his love of God, which is said to be, “for no ulterior reason (not even to be loved in return) but for love’s sake alone. Insofar as [the yogi] succeed(s) in this project [he] know(s) joy,” we are told, “for no experience can compare with that of being fully and authentically in love.”(Smith, 29)
[5] (Smith, p.116)
[6] (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Book 8: Section 3 1156b10)
[7] Science, Order and Creativity, David Bohm and F. David Peat (p.8)
[8] (Plato, Alcibiades n.d.)
[9] (Watts 1957, 4)
[10] (Smith 1958)
Dan Brown
It has often been said that there are no two characters in history more alike than Socrates and Jesus. Except perhaps that Socrates never claimed to be the ‘son of God’...unless, that is, we all are. However, if recently discovered documents (apparently hidden to prevent their destruction in the years following the death of Jesus) tell the true story, then it appears that Jesus shared this egalitarian view. For * I’ll leave that for you to decide, as this book does not intend to replace the ancient texts, but rather to encourage you to read them for yourselves.
Perhaps another difference between Jesus and Socrates is that, while the former taught us that we should love, the latter taught us how to. For this, the case can be made that what we call the Socratic method is simply the way we should talk to those we love. For love is not mere how we feel about others, but how we treat them, and words are indeed actions.
Socrates ultimately summarized his teachings, before being executed for such radical views, saying that “love is the only thing I ever claimed to know anything about.”[1] This is a curious claim, coming from one who was known for claiming to know nothing. But knowing, at least, how little he actually knew, one of the things Socrates understood and taught best is the importance of the art of dialogue toward mutual understanding and self-improvement – essential elements of love.
So to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” as Jesus taught us, is no either/or proposition. To be other-interested is not opposed to being self-interested, it is the ultimate self-interest – enlightened self-interest. And in this sense, egoism does not oppose altruism, but presupposes it. And so it naturally follows that one should “love thy enemies as thyself.”
Jesus tried to bring these lessons about love and the law of compassion to the fundamentalists of his day, who called themselves Pharisees. But like so many today, they were too sure they had nothing to learn from this idealist who would have them humble themselves. That they alone were the proper judges of other people’s goodness was the foundation of the law of piety they preferred to that of compassion. This holiness code, passed down from Mosaic Law, allowed the Pharisees to dictate other people’s behavior, power and privilege they apparently valued more than uplifting their souls. This right they assumed that gave them so much earthly power, that of drawing distinct lines between those they considered “clean and unclean, pure and defiled, sacred and profane, Jew and Gentile, righteous and the sinner,”(Smith, p.209) was not loving, and Jesus took exception to it. He did not object to their fundamental beliefs in the power of the God they revered in common, but to their attempts to use that divine power to control the beliefs and behavior of others.
Jesus “saw social barriers as an affront to Yahweh’s compassion, and he disregarded them.”(Smith, p.209) Instead, he taught all who would hear to love, not merely those were like them or lived by the same religious dictates, but rather, to love all people. But his attempts to teach us to “Love our enemies” have fallen largely on deaf ears, if the arrogance of so many fundamentalists today is any indication. And arguably, this is why Jesus gave his life, as did Socrates and so many other of the sages of the ages – not for religion itself – but for religious freedom.[2]
Jesus’ agreement with the Mosaic view that there is only one god has been used throughout the ages as a battle cry to denounce all other views of god. But it was originally understood by those who knew him best, if we are to take recent discovery of ancient texts seriously, in a sense that the ancient Hindus had put forth – One God, yes, but one which we nonetheless all see differently – as conceive through different cultural windows, languages, and mythologies. The so-called Gnostic Gospels give us a more dialectic view of the ancient Jesus and the lessons he taught. And they sound more uniting than dividing, more healing than we have heard them in the past.
As others of the great teachers would have us understand, "Many illnesses can be cured by the one medicine of love and compassion,” as the Dalai Lama teaches. “These qualities are the ultimate source of human happiness, and the need for them lies at the very core of our being."[3]
For this and other reasons, we can see why the ancients understood that true love is not about how we feel about others – though such emotions may often be the serendipitous side effects of loving well. Indeed, in its truest sense, love may well be its own reward, such that even in the most difficult of trials, that deep feeling abides.[4] But more than mere words that we use or emotions that we feel, friendship and love, in their truest senses, have more to do with how we treat one another than how we feel about each other. In fact, true love, like true friendship, is an activity -- one that involves the golden rule of communication, which is listening the way we would like to be heard.
Which is why one must, as Socrates and Confucius taught, “Recognize that you know what you know, and that you are ignorant of what you do not know. Hear much, leave to one side that which is doubtful, and speak with due caution concerning the remainder.” [5] Such humility, empathy, and curiosity is the essence of treating others as ends in themselves, for their good, just as we ourselves would wish to be treated. For “a friend,” Aristotle says, “is another self.”[6]
Hence, the need to recover an understanding of the lost art of dialogue, because wisdom turns out to be, “the ability to see the connections between things.”(Republic, 7.537) It is by this dialectic process of gathering and weighing perspectives – “like lines converging on a common center,” as Plato says, by which the human mind grows. For this reason, two heads are better than one, and three better yet, and so we approach the whole truth by incremental growth. Considering that we are all born in different places, face idiosyncratic life challenges, with specialized skills and talents, and follow ultimately unique paths, we all see the same world from very different points of view. This does not entail that it is a different world, or that our diverse eclectic perspectives are somehow irreconcilable – as some pure relativists might conclude. Indeed, if one could only 'know' what one learns from one's own window on the world, one would be unnecessarily limited to a very narrow slice of reality. Happily, we can learn from the experience and insights of others, and indeed, "A great deal of our knowledge comes from other people in this way. Because we can communicate what we experience, human beings can merge their separate windows into one giant window."(Kelly: The Art of Reasoning, p.88) Indeed, it’s been said that the perfect person would be all people put together. On the other hand, there being no such thing as perfection, once and for all, our best is pretty good – and gets better by way of learning from one another.
Which brings us back to the power, and danger, of words -- as we shall see, written words most especially. Words can, and indeed must, also be the source of resolution for our misunderstandings and miscommunications, but without sensitivity to the different senses in which we use them, all our efforts to talk things out can go awry, if and when the words themselves get in the way.
As physicist David Bohm aptly put it, “Whatever we say is words,” but “what we want to talk about is generally not words.”[7] So we would be wise to look more deeply, from more perspectives than just our own. Still, we should put no faith in anyone else’s words, as Socrates warns, because you won’t really understand something “until you hear your own voice say it.”[8] “Words can be communicative,” says Alan Watts, “only between those who share similar experiences.”[9] As we quoting Zen masters earlier: “A finger is used to point at the moon, but let us not confuse the finger with the moon.” Words are pointing tools, but what they point at is an inner experience that cannot be seen by the uninitiated.
So “Be lamps unto yourselves,”(p.68)[10] as Buddha said, and thus see for yourself whether or not advice offered by our ancient betters proves better for you, and makes you more truly happy than your past habits have.
The reason they call 'gnosis' the 'secret knowledge' -- because it is reserved for those who learn it 'the hard way', so to speak. It cannot be learned simply by word of mouth, as Socrates says, as if drained by a wick from one person to another. The only people who ever really understand are those who have had the experience that brings it home, and who, in learning, persevere in earnest to the end with the experiment necessary to continued learning.
In this way, you might come to see what, for most of us living in the dark of Plato’s cave, is obscured from sight at a very young age. And this is why such wisdom is available only to the worthy – because the unworthy are not yet awake to seeing what is visible only to the good heart that gives rise to the good will – still and always available to us all, but only for the earning.
The so-called Gnostic Gospels were found outside Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. We knew these had once existed, b/c ‘heresiologists’ of the 3rd and 4th century wrote incessantly about them, and subsequent centuries made it their goal to destroy every last bit of such ancient literature. And so while we knew of them, until the actual books of the Gnostic Gospel Library were found, everything we knew about the so-called 'gnostics' was received "almost exclusively through the myopic view of heresy hunters, who often quote only to refute or ridicule."(Nag Hammadi Library, Robinson, p.6)
Think about that. As one of you aptly asked, who defines what is heresy? Who has that right to tell all what they can and cannot think? The answer depends on who has the power to do so…even the mainstream way of thinking might be called heretical if and when an extreme faction comes into power. Which is why we know now to avoid integration of church and state -- b/c state imbues church with the power to punish. And indeed, when the Roman Empire usurped Christian faith and it became the Roman Catholic church (which means, disingenuously, universal), the first thing it did was set about to ‘expel’ and ‘eradicate’ and ‘assassinate’ all opponents.(p.5) (If you want a fine example of the murderous handiwork of these so-called Christians, Google the destruction of the library at Alexandria and the death of it’s leading teacher, Hypatia, whose skin was filleted from her bones before she was burned alive…).
In the face of this persecution, classical, late classical, and early Christian scholars gathered together as many of the ancient wisdom traditions that influenced them. Scholars takes books very seriously, but books can be destroyed…and when the Roman Christians were threatened by these free thinking Gnostics, that is just what they set out to do. But persecuted ways of thinking do not die, they just go underground, pass on their history through clandestine means. They pass secrets through time for those to come who will once again seek the truth…as Jesus says to James and Peter when, frustrated that they didn’t get it, he nonetheless knew that someday, somewhere, someone would.
And so they gathered together and buried what we finally found all these many centuries later….perhaps just when we need it most.
What was actually found in Egypt included twelve leather bound books (i.e codices with covers and leaves of pages) plus 8 leaves tucked inside (that together made for a thirteenth book), “each a collection of relatively brief works.”(p.10) …in all, 52 tractates…12 of which we had earlier found parts of…40 of them absolutely new to us…30 of them fairly complete…each distinguished by its handwriting, indicating several, maybe many scribes…and some repetition, indicating their production was not a uniform effort, but rather an after the fact collecting together of texts…translated into Coptic (Egyptian language in Greek alphabet) probably over the course of a full century…had clearly been well cared for as only ‘holy texts’ would be (p.17)…but had badly deteriorated, starting even before they were buried in jars the dry desert to preserve them…able to date them because the papyrus of these books was recycled from business documents of the time (p.16)…showed ”a fiber pattern as distinctive as a fingerprint” (p.11)…so place them in time (about 400 C.E.)…indeed, they were reassembled by matching the ends of fibers forensically…
We can see now from these original texts that Gnostic thought was “not an aggressive movement,” as the Romans had characterized it, “but rather a withdrawl from involvement in the contamination that destroys clarity of vision.”(p.1) Transcendence -- rising above what is to what could be…“For some, concentrated inwardness undistracted by external factors came to be the only way to attain the repose, the overview, the merger into the All which is the destiny of one’s spark of the divine.”(p.4)
“Thus, the Nag Hammadi library involves the collection of what was originally a Greek literary productivity by largely unrelated and anonymous authors spread through the eastern half of the ancient world and covering a period of almost half a millennia (or more, if one takes into consideration a brief section of Plato’s Republic, VI.5).(p.13)
It was therefore, “not inner-Christian”, but much “broader than…hence independent of, and perhaps even prior to Christianity.”(p.6) These texts are therefore, “important contribution to [the] history of religion, but also to the history of philosophy.”(p.9) “The history of Gnosticism as documented by the Nag Hammadi library, takes up about where the Dead Sea Scrolls break off.”(p.7) Thus Gnosticism seems not to have been in its essence just an alternate form of Christianity. Rather it was a radical trend of release from the dominion of evil or of inner transcendence that swept through late antiquity and emerged within Christianity, Judaism, Neoplatonism, Hermetism, and the like. As a new religion it was syncretistic, drawing upon various religious heritages. But it was held together by a very decided stance, which is where the unity amid the wide diversity is to be sought."(P.10)
What characterizes Gnostic thought is “an affinity to an ideal order that completely transcends life as we know it.”…one that tends toward “a life-style [that] involved giving up all the goods that people usually desire, and longing for an ultimate liberation.”(p.1) Sound familiar?
Elaine Pagels notes that, “Some scholars have suggested that if the names were changed, the ‘living Buddha’ appropriately could say what the Gospel of Thomas attributes to the living Jesus. Could Hindu or Buddhist traditions have influenced Gnosticism?”she asks.
It becomes clear in all this that the "long-standing debate among historians of religion as to whether Gnosticism is to be understood as only an inner-Christian development or as a movement broader than, and hence independent of, and perhaps even prior to Christianity,"(p.6) is resolved "in favor of understanding Gnosticism as a much broader phenomenon than the Christian Gnosticism documented by the heresiologists."(p.6) “Gnostic schools began to emerge within (both) Christianity and Neoplatonism until both agreed in excluding them as the heresy of Gnosticism.”(p.*) Which tells us a lot about how far Platonists had fallen from the Socratic tree!
”The world of thought from which Jesus and his first followers had come was the popular piety of the Jewish synagogue, focused in terms of John the Baptist’s rite of transition from the old regime to the new ideal world whose dramatic arrival was forthcoming. In this way of thinking, the evil system that prevails is not the way things inherently are. In principle, though not in practice, the world is good. The evil that pervades history is a blight, ultimately alien to the world as such…Their plight is that they have been duped and lured into the trap of trying to be content in the impossible world, alienated from their true home.(p.3) “Jesus called for a full reversal of values, advocating the end of the world as we have known it (which is NOT the end of the world itself!) and its replacement by a quite new, utopian kind of life in which the ideal would be real.”(p.3)
The Gnostics were a dialogic community made up of thinking people from many wisdom traditions who all had an understanding of gnosis at heart. In an ideal order, no one voice speaks for everyone…life on earth of diverse voices is a dialogue…and what I hoped you would take from our readings is that insight…for it makes us better listeners…better learners…b/c all voices bring something true to the dialogue, and all have something to learn, and it’s up to us to figure out what that is, and to then bring that perspective to bare on your deliberations (inner dialogues, in this sense) as you ask yourself what you think?
Seekers of truth and scholars of history must follow the evidence where it actually leads, not just cling to old beliefs and stories out of wishful thinking for them to be true. It is natural for us to want to prefer stories that we are ‘chosen’ or ‘superior’ or somehow God’s favorites, but by definition, not everyone can be, and so by that very stance we are insisting that others accept inferior ‘left behind’ status…an offensive attitude if ever there was one. Would a good creator God offend so many of his creation in this way?
Unfortunately, “History is written by the winners…”, and there’s lots of incentive for them to tell it like they want it to appear, rather than as it really was…but time reveals the truth about the past, only gradually, slowly as primary sources come to light that outshine the secondary sources we have had to depend on…we see it is a question of whose word we take for what is true…who do we believe?
I want to remind you at this juncture that philosophy is using our inner reason to figure out what is logically as well as empirically true, so that we don’t have to just believe, just take other’s word for such things, especially when it comes to the truth of what happened in history…and thus the truth about our own spiritual potential…being deceived about this is arguably, of all things, the greatest evil. So we must follow the evidence that reveals itself about history as time moves forward…and where the evidence leads is toward a better understanding of the fact that the truth stays true, and persistent inquiry will find it, and deny or ignore that evidence all you like, but that does not change that the truth stays true, and will be found by those who are not distracted by false gods…so what good does it for us to deny what we don’t want to see?
So these texts are going to present a problem for anyone who wants to take the scriptures too literally. The first problem (as you’ll see from Erhman’s piece posted in Content) is 1. Translation error. The second is 2. Deliberate manipulation of the texts, and the third is 3. the fact that there are no original texts to draw on. The ”hazard [being] in the transmission of the texts by a series of scribes who copied them.” Some didn’t know what they were doing, so errors occur, and worse, some knew exactly what they were doing, and over the centuries many made deliberate changes in the texts to suit their own particular, often self-aggrandizing view of history. And this was increasingly easy to do b/c, as it turns out, there are no original texts to check later versions against… Such a thing as a clean control copy does not exist.”(p.2)
Thus, many stories and traits attributed to Christians are shown in the Nag Hammadi texts to have non-Christian origins…many books (the Sethian, largely Greek texts “contain no Christian elements at all.”(p.8)…although some have a Christian veneer, as if Christian elements were added later by Christian scribes and editors…many clearly run foreign to the message of the texts. These more ancient stories were lifted from the actual originals, and when the original texts were destroyed, they were misappropriated to a different, sometimes ‘biblical’ source. I know that is hard for some of us to swallow, and it doesn’t change the value of the teachings. But it does throw into question the source of these lessons, and whether they can be trusted on other grounds.
Here is where the gnostics might want to remind us of something important that the ancients understood better than we apparently do. And that is, that there are actually two gods at work in the world of human religion. One is the god of life, light, health, and goodness, what they think of as the true god. The other is the pretense of god -- the god of death, darkness, and disease. Both gods are 'creators' -- but the difference is that one's creativity is constructive, while the others is destructive. And sadly, this latter god is even better at getting people to follow it than the good god b/c it is so willing to deceive them, tell them what they want to hear, make them feel good by teaching them that others are bad, and feeds their lesser inclinations toward the will to power, to superiority -- it feeds their egos, so to speak. It moves them away from love, toward hate. Away from justice, toward self-interest, as if might makes right. The good god, on the other hand, makes us more loving, more just, not less, whereas the evil god tells us there is no justice, not in us, and not in this world. Indeed, the reason religion is so wrought with darkness, among the light, is b/c 'evil' has every incentive to try to appear 'good' -- and so it wears religion like sheep's clothing, making it very hard for the average person to discern a person of true faith from one who is only out to recruit us for their own purposes.
Now, holding the actual texts in our hands we can see what the church (or was it the empire?) was so afraid of…people thinking for themselves...reaching for justice on earth…trying to make the real world live up to its just ideal…In other words, people standing up to unjust rulers. The empire’s challenge was how to quiet and pacify those who dream of justice in this world and oppose unjust rulers en masse? Answer: focus their attention on the afterlife…convince them that humans are incapable by nature of living up to their better selves in this life, that they are by way of some historical mistake, ‘fallen’, unable to be saved in this life, and only capable of happiness in the next life, if at all -- message that contradicts the heart of true gnosis.
Putting this in a historical context, you can see the incentive that the Roman Empire had to distort Jesus' message -- not only to get Christians to fight their wars, but b/c if you can focus people on their after life, and in fact keep them in fear of it, then they become very easy to control in this life. They will stop asking for justice from their leaders, stop questioning the authority of the empire -- especially if they became subject to punishment by the newly-religious empire if they did not accept its injustice. And so the empire become complicit in the evil god's work -- indeed, they become the devil's hands.
So beware of putting trust in voices that make us feel good, not realizing that this is exactly what evil is good at -- what Socrates calls flattery -- telling us what we want to hear...making us feel good about ourselves, even if only by teaching us to look down on others.
So the question for all of us is, does our religion make us more or less compassionate? More or less loving?
--During most of their history, “the Jews were either oppressed or displaced. They were underdogs, and underdogs have only one direction to look; up. This upward tilt of Jewish hopes and imaginings impregnated the Western mind. A better tomorrow is possible, if not assured… [and] the Jews personified their hope in the figure of a coming Messiah, or Chosen One.”(Smith, 195) “Some expected an actual Messiah, while others foresaw God dispensing with a human agent and intervening directly to institute an age of universal harmony.”(Smith, 195)
--“Thy kingdom come, on earth, as it is in heaven.”
-- Jesus was born in Palestine around 4 B.C., and grew up in Nazareth. was baptized by his predecessor, John the Baptist, “he was electrifying the region with his proclamation of God’s coming judgment.” This is said to have “opened his spiritual eye.” The Jewish spiritual tradition centered on Yahweh, and included angels and other invisible beings who, at least in imagery, resided above the earth, though it was understood that “the two were not spatially separate” but were instead “in continuous interaction.”(Smith, 206) It was thought that “Spirit could be known,” and humans could initiate that contact by fasting and solitude, during which they “immersed themselves in Spirit.”(Smith, 206) This drove Jesus into the wilderness for forty day of prayer and fasting, which empowered him. He is said to have begun his ministry by quoting Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. Today this scripture has been fulfilled.”(Smith, 206) “In his early thirties he had a teaching-healing career that lasted between one and three years.”(Smith, 206) The Gospels attribute to Jesus the powers to heal, cast out demons, quell storms, part waters, and return the dead to life.(Smith, 206-207) “Jesus as a charismatic wonder-worker who stood in a tradition that stretched back to the beginnings of Hebrew history.”(Smith, 206) He aimed “to alleviate suffering and seek a new social order.”(Smith, 206)
--Given the Roman occupation, high taxes and loss of freedom, the Jewish people found themselves in a desperate political situation. There were four existing responses, included the Sadducees, Essense, Zealots, Pharisees, but Jesus rejected all these options. Jesus opted for another response, one that involved change, rather than the status quo (as the Sadducees, who “favored making the best of a bad situation and accommodated themselves to …Roman rule”), he did not want to remove himself from society (like the Essenes who “considered the world too corrupt…so they withdrew into property sharing communities”), but Jesus was a peacemaker, so neither did he want armed revolt (like the Zealots, “who thought that change could only come through armed rebellion”). He might have agreed with the Pharisees, but found their fundamentalism less compassionate than he though God would want. Rather, Jesus followed the law of compassion “and urged that even enemies be loved.”(Smith, 207). He didn’t disagree with the holiness code delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai, but he did take issue with the social system that the Pharisee’s code of piety promoted, which was not compassionate, for it drew distinctions between clean and unclean acts and things, and then went on to “categorize people according to whether they respected those distinctions” or not.(Smith, 209) “The result as a social structure that divided people who were clean and unclean, pure and defiled, sacred and profane, Jew and Gentile, righteous and sinner. Jesus saw social barriers as an affront to Yahweh’s compassion, and he disregarded them…advocating an alternative vision of the human community.”(Smith, 209) And his protests attracted enough attention to “alarm the Roman authorities, which led to Jesus’ arrest and execution on charges of treason.”(Smith, 209) With this, “Christianity reshaped [the Jewish hope for a Messiah] into the Second Coming of Christ.”(Smith, 195)
--“The most impressive thing about the teachings of Jesus is not that he taught them but that he appears to have lived them…his entire life was one of humility, self-giving, and love that sought not its own.”(Smith, 213)
--Jesus’ love “embraced sinners and outcasts, Samaritans and enemies. It gave, not prudentially in order to receive, but because giving was its nature.”(Smith, 216) --“He loved people and they loved him in turn – intensely and in great numbers…he ignored the barriers that mores erected between people. He loved children. He hated injustice, and perhaps hated hypocrisy even more because it had people from themselves and precluded the authenticity he sought to build into relationships.…here was a man in whom the human ego had disappeared…they felt that as they looked at Jesus they were looking at something resembling God in human form.”(Smith, 213) Indeed, “a God who loves human beings absolutely, without pausing to calculate their worth or due.”(Smith, 213)
--Jesus also spoke as few ever had, “’hard sayings,’” revealing “a scheme of values that is at radical odds with the usual.”(Smith, 212) “We are told that we are not to resist evil but to turn the other cheek. The world assumes that evil must be resisted by every means available. We are told to love our enemies and bless those who curse us. The world assumes that friends are to be loved and enemies hated. We are told that the sun rises on the just and the unjust alike. … We are told that it is more difficult for the rich to enter the Kingdom than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye. The world admires wealth. We are told that the happy people are those who are meek, who weep, who are merciful and pure in heart. The world assumes that it is the rich, the well-positioned, and the powerful who are happy.”(Smith, 212-213) Jesus was clear about “people whose outer lives are stately mausoleums while their inner lives stink of decaying corpses.”(Smith, 212)
--And with this, “human beings find their latent love triggered by the love of others for them…the love that builds in them is the love that comes to them, assimilated and then reflected back into the world….” Until it ultimately becomes “a love of infinite proportions.” (Smith, 216) something so far beyond human love can only be explained as “God’s love,” powerful enough to “reduce all fear, guilt, and self-obsession to zero.”(Smith, 216) (connect understanding breeds love…*) This love lifted the “intolerable burdens” of fear, including the fear of death…guilt…and the cramping confines of self-centeredness,”(Smith, 216) a release that “could bring new life.”(Smith, 216) And so early Christians experienced “lives that had been transformed – men and women who had changed overnight by finding, so it seemed, the secret of living.”(Smith 215) It included two qualities especially; “The first of these was mutual regard…and a total absence of social distance.”(Smith, 215) They “not only said that everyone was equal…but [they] lived as though they meant it.”(Smith, 216) “The second quality they exhibited was joy…they had found an inner peace that surfaced in happiness.”(Smith, 216)
--“the deepest impulse in the human self is to be lovingly related to people. The impulse must be activated, however; typically through the mother’s initiating love for her infant.”(Smith, 216) “A loving human being is not produced by exhortations, rules, and threats. Love only emerges in children when it is poured into them, normally by nurturing parents.”(Smith, 216)
“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”(1 Corinthians 13:4-8)
-- What Jesus’ life actually was, and how it appeared to his disciples, these may have been very different things. Jesus did perform what some would call miracles, but so have many shamans and healers throughout history. And importantly, “Jesus did not himself emphasize them; almost all of them were performed quietly, apart from the crowd, and as demonstrations of the power of faith.”(Smith, 210) In the words of Simon Peter, when asked to epitomize Jesus’ life, he put it simply: “He went about doing good.”(Smith, 210) And he did this so effectively “that those who were with him constantly found their estimate of him modulating to a new key. They found themselves thinking that if divine goodness were to manifest itself in human form, this is how it would behave.”(Smith, 210) This is “what finally edged his disciples toward the conclusion that he was divine.”(Smith, 213) Importantly, though, “They did not reach that conclusion before Jesus’ death…”(Smith, 210)
--Of what happened after his death, “We are given too few details to know exactly what happened after the crucifixion. Jesus’ close associates reported that he appeared to them in a new way, but it is not possible to determine exactly what that way was.”(Smith, 214) The resurrection reversed the cosmic position in which the cross had placed Jesus’ goodness. Instead of being fragile, the love the disciples had encountered in him was victorious over everything, including death.”(Smith, 214)
--there were only “a dozen or so disconsolate followers of [the] slain and discredited leader,”(Smith, 215) but together they fanned the flames of what was said to be “tongues of fire [that] descended upon them.”(Smith, 215) From “an upper room in Jerusalem, they spread their message with such fervor that in their own generation it took root in every major city of the region.”(Smith, 215) “They exploded across the Greco-Roman world” as “People who were not speakers became eloquent,”(Smith, 215) “preaching what has come to be called the Gospel but is literally the Good News.”(Smith, 215) With the outline of a fish, they scratched on walls and in the dirt a symbol that pointed the way “to the place where their persecuted sect held it’s underground meetings. (“the Greek letters for fish are also the first letters of the Greek words for ‘Jesus Christ, son of God, Savior’…the essence of the Good News the Christians were on fire with.”(Smith, 215)
--Christianity ultimately divided into three major branches, including Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism.(Smith, 206)
[1] (Plato’s Symposium)
[2] Dan Brown makes this case in his novel, The Lost Symbol. To the seemingly widespread belief that our American forefathers were not only religious, but bent on laying the foundation for a Christian nation, Brown says this (by way of his arch-typical scholar, Peter Solomon: “Our forefathers were deeply religious men, but they were Deists -- men who believed in God, but in a universal and open-minded way. The only religious ideal they put forth was religious freedom… America’s forefathers had a vision of a spiritually enlightened utopia, in which the freedom of thought, education of the masses, and scientific advancement would replace the darkness of outdated religious superstition.”(Brown, p.407) (Brown, The Lost Symbol 2009)
[3] (The Medicine of Altruism, Speech by the Dalai Lama, http://www.dalailama.com/messages/world-peace/the-medicine-of-altruism )
[4] The bhakta yogi (“for whom feelings are more important than thoughts”(Smith, 29) we are told, understands the connection between true love and true happiness, and expresses this in his love of God, which is said to be, “for no ulterior reason (not even to be loved in return) but for love’s sake alone. Insofar as [the yogi] succeed(s) in this project [he] know(s) joy,” we are told, “for no experience can compare with that of being fully and authentically in love.”(Smith, 29)
[5] (Smith, p.116)
[6] (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Book 8: Section 3 1156b10)
[7] Science, Order and Creativity, David Bohm and F. David Peat (p.8)
[8] (Plato, Alcibiades n.d.)
[9] (Watts 1957, 4)
[10] (Smith 1958)