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CHAPTER 1
Who is the Man with a Jar of Water?
The Vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my Vision's Greatest Enemy:
Thine has a great hook nose like thine,
Mine has a snub nose like to mine:
Thine is the friend of All Mankind Mine speaks in parables to the Blind:
Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
Thy Heaven doors are my Hell gates.
Socrates taught what Meletus Loath'd as a Nation's bitterest Curse,
And Caiaphas was in his own Mind A benefactor to Mankind:
Both read the Bible day and night But thou read'st black where I read white.
(William Blake, The Everlasting Gospel)
Of all the controversies with which the Fathers of the early church entertained themselves, few seem as irrelevant to the contemporary mind as that which concerned the duration of Jesus' ministry. For about eighteen centuries the common assumption throughout Christendom has been that, between Jesus' baptism by John and his crucifixion by Pilate, three years elapsed. This is based on a legitimate inference from the number of Passover festivals mentioned in the Gospel of John, and it is difficult to see how anyone could, or would even want to, challenge it. And yet it was a dispute over which a considerable amount of ink was expended towards the end of the second Christian century. Irenaeus, orthodoxy's first systematic apologist (writing about 185 CE), goes to great lengths to prove that Jesus exercised his ministry over many years in order to counter the contention of various Gnostic groups (principally the followers of Valentinus) that Jesus taught for one year only and, further, that 'he suffered in the twelfth month' (Irenaeus, page 200).
An idle piece of pedantic squabbling, we might be tempted to conclude. But we would be wrong to conclude this. The controversy was not just over any arbitrary twelve-month period. It concerned the solar year, which begins at the spring equinox, and Valentinus' claim is absolutely startling: the career of Jesus is connected with the sun's annual journey through the heavens, and he implies that the various stages of it correspond with the signs of the zodiac.
For Valentinus and his followers, the Gospel story is not a rudimentary biography of a single individual, pieced together from reminiscences of eyewitnesses or those who had known eyewitnesses, but an allegory, in which the sun's cycle, from its 'birth' in Aries when spring begins, to its 'death' in Pisces twelve months later, symbolically reflects the spiritual cycle of the Gnostic initiate on his journey towards spiritual liberation or enlightenment. This is why Valentinus's claim that Jesus died in the twelfth month (March, the month of Pisces) was so crucial to his case, and why Irenaeus was at such pains to refute it.
There is no reason to suppose that this and other Gnostic 'heresies', which Irenaeus condemns so roundly and, at times, parodies so shamefully in his five-volume work, were new ideas which had parasitically attached themselves to a history-based Christianity. Gnosticism was certainly not new in Irenaeus's time. Although it flourished in the second Christian century, its roots go back much further, some scholars tracing its ancestry back to the religion of ancient Iran, others favouring an origin in Judaism. Whatever its precise origins, it was never a unified religious movement but an approach to spiritual matters which transcended conventional boundaries. It was dualistic, and generally associated the world of matter and flesh with evil. The task of the aspirant was to attain spiritual freedom by overcoming bondage to the flesh. Despite the variety of ways in which it manifested, Gnosticism was concerned with the interior life of the spirit, with 'illumination' which could be attained through prayer, meditation and the performance of specific rituals. God was to be experienced within the depths of the individual, rather than demonstrated rationally or objectified historically. 'Gnosis', which comes from the Greek word for knowledge, is not primarily rational knowledge, but 'insight'. 'Gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself. And to know oneself ... is to know human nature and human destiny ... Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously, to know God' (Pagels, page xix).
Manuscripts which have surfaced relatively recently, particularly the Nag Hammadi documents, discovered in 1945, are demonstrating that the conventionally held view that Gnostic works are invariably later than the canonical Gospels and of inferior literary quality can no longer be sustained. What is emerging is a picture of early Christianity which is, in Elaine Pagels' words, 'far more diverse than orthodox sources choose to indicate' (Pagels, page xxxiii). Out of this diversity sprang a variety of writings which were attacked (by people like Irenaeus) and, eventually, suppressed by the emerging Catholic Church. In one of them, the Gospel of Thomas, the central figure is 'the living Jesus' who has a different relationship with his followers than does the traditional Jesus of Christendom. The latter is a uniquely divine figure whose sacrifice ensures the salvation of those who believe in him. The Jesus of Thomas's Gospel, however, 'comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding. But when the disciple attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal – even identical' (Pagels, page xx).
Such thinking has always been anathema to orthodoxy. What is interesting about it, from the point of view of the present study, is its antiquity. If, as Professor Helmut Koester of Harvard maintains, the Gospel of Thomas contains some traditions which belong to the 'second half of the first century' (Pagels, page xvi), then such ideas were not later perversions of the orthodox, history-based scheme, so beloved of people like Irenaeus: they were contemporary with it. Perhaps they even preceded it.
Indeed, it is no longer unthinkable for us to invert the customary view of the relationship between 'historic' and 'esoteric' Christianities. It seems increasingly likely that the former was a perversion of the latter, that the attempt to establish historical credentials for the Jesus story came some time after the story itself originated in the fertile imagination of some esoteric group, whose poetic account of the spiritual journey was transformed into history by people who had either misunderstood the story, or who were motivated by more cynically pragmatic political or ecclesiastical considerations.
The gradual 'historicization' of imaginative religious stories is by no means restricted to Christianity. In The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley points out that the same process has occurred in Buddhism, in which 'the Mahayana expresses the universal, whereas the Hinayana cannot set itself free from historical fact' (Huxley, page 62). He goes on to quote the orientalist, Ananda K. Coomaraswary: 'The Mahayanist believer is warned – precisely as the worshipper of Krishna is warned in the Vaishnaivite scriptures that the Krishna Lila is not history, but a process for ever unfolded in the heart of man – that matters of historical fact are without religious significance.'
Huxley laments the fact that, despite the efforts of Christian mystics – Eckhart, Tauler, Ruysbrock, Boehme and the Quakers – who are themselves inheritors of the esoteric tradition, Christianity has never been 'liberated from its servitude to historical fact' and has 'remained a religion in which the pure Perennial Philosophy has been overlaid, now more, now less, by an idolatrous preoccupation with events and things in time – events and things regarded not merely as useful means, but as ends intrinsically sacred and indeed divine'.
The suggestion that the Gospel story is not history but 'a process for ever unfolded in the heart of man' no doubt seems pretty absurd to those of us who have been raised on a flesh and blood Jesus readily locatable in time and space. But, in fact, it is no more outrageous than the historical schema proposed to us by orthodoxy. Indeed, it is much less problematic, since it frees us from having to defend the historicity of incidents which are, to say the least, unlikely. Only familiarity with such incidents and, perhaps, a sentimental attachment to them, prevent us from declaring them fanciful. Virgins do not give birth; people do not walk on water; storms cannot be calmed with a word; a few loaves and a couple of fish cannot feed thousands of people; and people, once dead, do not come back to life again. Fundamentalist Christians, disregarding David Hume's assertion that we should doubt our senses before we doubt the consistency of nature's laws, cling desperately to the miraculous element within the Gospels, forlornly echoing Tertullian's cry: credo quia absurdum, 'I believe because it is absurd'. And even scholars of a more liberal hue, who readily question Jesus' birth from a virgin and are prepared to interpret the other miracles symbolically or as exaggerations of natural incidents, still insist on a literal resurrection as the absolute minimum required belief for a Christian. Those for whom the historical details are of little or no consequence, who view the Jesus stories in their entirety as dramatizations of internal processes, are no more welcome within orthodoxy than were their forebears who received the rough edge of Irenaeus's quill over eighteen centuries ago.
Gospel Discrepancies
To see the Jesus story as a collection of spiritual parables frees us from the mental gymnastics involved in trying to explain factual discrepancies within the Gospels, and strange anomalies within the New Testament as a whole. For example:
• Was Jesus born in the reign of Herod the Great, as Matthew has it, or when Quirinius, the governor of Syria, ordered a census, as Luke asserts? (Herod died in 4 BCE; Quirinius's census occurred in 6 CE, some ten years later).
• Did Jesus cleanse the Temple at the beginning of his ministry (John), or at the end (Matthew, Mark and Luke)?
• Did he heal two demon-possessed men in the country of the Gerasenes (Matthew), or just one (Mark)?
• Did the crucifixion occur on the day of the Passover (Matthew, Mark and Luke), or the day before the Passover (John)?
• Did the crucifixion begin at nine o'clock in the morning (Mark) or at midday (John)?
• Is it really possible that the normally prudent Romans would risk provoking a riot by executing a popular Jewish preacher at the time of the Passover when Jerusalem would be bursting with pilgrims from around the known world?
• Is it really possible that, during the busiest liturgical season of the year, the high priests would occupy themselves plotting the execution of Jesus?
• Why is it that the apostle Paul, with the single exception of his account of the Last Supper in 1 Corinthians 11, never refers to an incident in the life of Jesus even when it would have helped his case immeasurably to do so? For example, in his account of his dispute with Peter over Gentile Christians (Galatians 2 and 3), why does he not mention Jesus' cure of the centurion's servant (Matthew 8:5-13), or the instruction at the end of Matthew's Gospel to 'go and make disciples of all nations ... teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you' (Matthew 28:19-20)? Did he not know of these traditions? Could it be that the Gospels come from a source of which Paul was entirely unaware?
The Historical Jesus
But the most valuable benefit to be gained from viewing the gospel stories as spiritual parables is that it frees us from the interminable and apparently fruitless search for the historical Jesus, which has exercised the ingenuity of scholars for at least two centuries. Albert Schweitzer's reluctant conclusion, that the historical Jesus is lost to us, must be upheld by all but the most ardent apologist for orthodoxy. The Gospels themselves furnish us with precious little biographical information, and questions concerning Jesus' physical appearance, his early life, his marital status, his personal predilections and his general character have been answered more by imaginative conjecture or doctrinal expediency than by legitimate inferences from the actual text. Even his age at the time of his crucifixion, which today seems securely fixed at 33, has been a matter of some dispute. Irenaeus concludes, quite reasonably, from the passage in John's Gospel where the Jews say to Jesus: 'You are not yet fifty years old and yet you claim to have seen Abraham' (John 8:57), that such language is only fittingly applied to someone who has passed the age of forty. Further, he claims that, since Jesus came to save all people, he must have experienced every stage of life including old age. Irenaeus confidently asserts that he learned this from 'those who were conversant in Asia with John the disciple of the Lord, affirming that John conveyed to them that information' (Irenaeus, page 201). In our collective sentimental need for a relatively youthful Jesus we have conveniently dispensed with this item of tradition.
The extra-biblical evidence for the existence of Jesus, which has been so boldly trumpeted by generations of apologists, turns out to be pretty thin when examined closely and dispassionately. The Roman authors, Pliny and Suetonius, both writing early in the second century, tell us very little more than that people calling themselves Christians – 'followers of a depraved and excessive superstition', according to Pliny (Pliny, page 405) – were proving troublesome in certain parts of the Empire. Tacitus, who was governor of Asia around 112 CE, refers in his Annals (Book 15, chapter 44) to the 'notoriously depraved Christians ... whose originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius's reign by the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate', but such a statement, made nearly eighty years after the supposed event, demonstrates only that some people were making the claim; it certainly does not substantiate it.
Nor can we glean anything of substance from Jewish sources. Philo of Alexandria, who died around 50 CE, tells us nothing of Jesus in his voluminous writings, although he does explain that the name Joshua – which is the Hebrew version of the Greek name Jesus – means 'the salvation of the Lord', and that it is 'the name of the most excellent possible character' (Philo, page 351). Here is a possible reason why the central character in the Gospel story should be given such a name.
The celebrated passage in the works of the Jewish historian Josephus, which claims that 'about this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if one might call him a man', and which goes on to tell of his miracles, his condemnation to the cross and his restoration to life on the third day (Josephus, page 576), has been identified as a much later Christian interpolation. Few, if any, scholars now accept this passage as genuine; its presence in the text is testimony to the fact that the historicizing tendency within early Christianity was so desperate to furnish evidence for a historical Jesus that it had to invent some.
It has long been a fundamental contention of orthodox apologetics that the growth of Christianity is only explicable if its historical claims are substantially true. After all, it is maintained, people are not prepared to die for a fiction. But this argument is based on the assumption that religious ideas are subjected to rational scrutiny before taking root in the hearts and minds of devotees, and this is plainly not the case, as the events at Jonestown and Waco demonstrate. Faith precedes justification. Indeed, we might say with the ancients, fides quaerens intellectum: faith seeks understanding, and attempts to furnish historical or rational evidence always follow the initial faith impetus. Mithraism – which is much older than Christianity – required no historical founder in order to flourish. It was, in fact, based on mythology and stellar symbolism, but this in no way impeded its growth or prevented it from vying with Christianity for supremacy in the early centuries of the Common Era. Christianity spread for a variety of sociological reasons, principal among these being its appeal to the lower strata of society, and it eventually triumphed because it was adopted as a political expedient by the Emperor Constantine. There is no need to invoke either divine intervention or historical credibility to account for its appeal or its endurance.
Mormonism furnishes a relatively contemporary example of the same phenomenon. Despite the extraordinarily implausible nature of its historical claims – angelic visitations, golden plates, ancient civilizations – it has, in less than two hundred years, become a world-wide religious movement with its own holy books, miracles, martyrs, and persecutions. It has also created its own philosophical, theological, scientific and historical rationale; and the whole system is ably defended by scholars of no mean ability. It is probably the fastest-growing (Christian) religion on earth, with over twelve million adherents currently, but its success owes more to its aggressive proselytizing, its simple certainties, and its comforting metaphysics than it does to the credibility of the supposedly miraculous events surrounding its inception. Successive attempts to discredit Joseph Smith's character and to demonstrate the fanciful, or even mendacious, nature of his story seem to have had little impact on the spread of Mormonism, even though information and evidence are much more accessible to contemporary investigators than ever they were in the early days of Christianity. For obvious reasons, orthodox Christian apologists are unable to accept the historical claims made by the Mormons, and are perfectly willing to explain the success of Mormonism – and other religious movements – in sociological, political, or cultural terms; however, they often seem reluctant to accept that the same factors adequately account for the growth of their own system.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Gospel & the Zodiac"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Bill Darlison.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
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