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The Fate of the Mustard Seed

In what is probably the earliest gospel, Mark, we find a parable that has provided the focus of much scholarly scrutiny for some nineteen centuries. It is the parable of the Mustard Seed. Here it is: "And he said, ‘How may we liken the kingdom of God? Or in what parable may we place it? As a grain of mustard which, when one sows it on the ground, is smaller than all the seeds on the earth, but, once it germinates, comes up and becomes greater than all the herbs and makes great branches so that the birds of the sky are able to find lodging in its shadow’" (Mark 4:30-32). One of the most influential interpretations of the parable is that it was meant to provide encouragement and comfort in the face of disappointed expectations. It presupposes that Jesus has been proclaiming, predicting, the impending end of the world as we know it, the dawn of a new world of salvation. And many have flocked to his banner, eager to leave the clinging bands of the old order behind: debts, aches and pains, political domination, etc. But it has been a while and the sky has not rolled up like a window shade. The angels have not carried the judgment throne of the Almighty to earth to convene court. Satan has not been bound and cast into the bottomless shaft. In short, despite some admittedly exciting faith healings, things continue to go on, in the same old circles as before. Disciples are beginning to wonder. Are they the avant garde of a new age, or merely one more eccentric sect? If this is the presupposed scenario, the point of the parable would seem to be to urge Jesus’ followers not to give up hope. The impressive growth of the mustard plant will not occur without a preliminary period of planting the seed and waiting for it to sprout. And during that time, it seems a watched pot that will never boil. But Jesus assures his hearers that it will. The world that his sectarian followers cherish in the kingdom of their minds will break forth, inescapably, unambiguously, in due time. Rome was not built in a day, and it will take more than a day for it to fall.

The point of the parable is much like that of Nietzsche’s parable of the Mad Man in The Gay Science. He enters the village breathlessly, announcing to a crowd of idlers and hecklers that “God is dead!” His news does not register, whereupon he concludes, “I come too soon!” Even the nova of the farthest star takes measured minutes, perhaps years, to reach the earth at the speed of light. And so even the death knell of the deity is not yet heard. The world ended this morning, yet all goes on as business as usual. The only difference is the easily-missed addition of a small flock of fanatics on the far edge of perception.

Ever since, years ago, I stumbled upon Edgar J. Goodspeed’s fascinating book, Strange New Gospels (also called Famous Biblical Hoaxes), I have been intrigued with modern contributions to the gospel genre, many of them claiming to be newly discovered ancient texts deserving a place in the scriptural canon, others admitting their recent minting and billing themselves as new revelations for a new age and a new world. One wonders if their authors expected their gospels to catch fire and catalyze a new era. If so, they soon faced the same disappointment that led to the parable of the Mustard Seed. Some of these prophets might have been lucky enough to found a short-lived sect to play-act the coming of the new world in their midst, the mirror-image of those who like to invoke the past in their own circle, playing at Civil War reenactment or medieval jousting in a theme-restaurant. More likely, their books managed to sell some copies in New Age book stores, finding shelf space in the store or in the customers’ homes alongside many other equivalent, cheaply-bound revelations. As a voice in a chorus, the prophet’s, the evangelist’s voice would be muddied and drowned, finally becoming one more disk in a spiritual record collection. As near as I can tell, this was the fate of The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (1908) by Levi Dowling. It did manage to generate a sect, the Aquarian Christine Church, but many more have read (or at least bought) the book, with its interesting tales of Jesus traveling through Asia.

Levi’s Truth

Leo Dowling (1844-1911) was a teen-age preacher, then a Disciples of Christ pastor, army chaplain and medical man. He “channeled” this gospel daily between 2 and 6 am, drawing, as he believed, upon the Akashic Records, an etheric deposit preserving all past events. He believed that the Father-Mother God had sent the third person of their trinity, the Son or Christ, the Manifestation of Love, to every inhabited planet at the commencement of every age. Jesus was the Christ-Manifestation for the dawn of the Piscean Age, and (he implies) Leo Dowling himself is the Christ for the Aquarian Age (7:26), bearing a new gospel fitting the more advanced spiritual sensibilities of that Age. Each individual Christ is a righteous individual prepared to serve as host to the Christ-Spirit through many reincarnations of spiritual perfecting. The result appears to approximate Nestorian “two-person” Christology.

Dowling’s pseudonym, “Levi,” may denote his mediatorial function, the bringer of the new gospel to the world, thus a priestly task. Specifically, his visionary journeys make the name appropriate, in light of the ancient pseudepigraphon The Testament of Levi in which Levi, the priestly progenitor and son of Jacob, travels to heaven and receives revelations.

Did the Age of Aquarius, once so highly touted during the Sixties, ever come? Was anyone even sure when it was supposed to come? We are already, in these questions, mired in an ambiguity ill-befitting the breathless revelations of Levi Dowling and his evangel. The world is not transformed, nor is it clear that universal acceptance of Dowling’s gospel would have or could have transformed it. But it is a fascinating work in many ways. I doubt that The Aquarian Gospel ever received quite the vogue enjoyed in the 1990s by another new Jesus revelation, Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles. And the disparity is astonishing given the contrast between the two books as literary objects. Schucman’s alleged channelings from the ascended Son of God constitute a seemingly endless desert of turgid, numbing prose. By contrast, Dowling’s Aquarian Gospel is an impressive work, composed in alternating iambic pentameter and hexameter, like Shakespeare. (I am presenting the longer excerpts here with appropriate line breaks.) Though this technique inevitably embellishes the wording, the Aquarian Gospel still manages to keep to a spare, quasi-scriptural style.

What sort of religion does the Aquarian Evangel promote as the Christian faith for the new era? The religion recommended here is that of pragmatic, rational moralism, coupled with basic New Thought. It spreads its net to include reincarnation (95:38) because of that doctrine’s rationalistic calculus of debt and repayment: it is a rationalistic theodicy. According to its almost too-neat system, there is no innocent suffering, since even the infant born with AIDS may still be judged, as John Calvin did, a “little serpent in the crib,” bearing the burden of sins committed in unremembered previous lives. One need not recall them or the sins committed in them, any more than the Freudian patient need remember his supposedly deep-buried hatred for his father. It is a postulate of the system. As I say, a bit too neat. But that counts for a great deal when one places a high premium on “pure reason” in religion.

The Aquarian Evangel, in all its populist common sense, hates liturgical pomp and finery: “When men array themselves in showy garbs to indicate that they are servants of the gods, and strut about like gaudy birds to be admired by men, because of piety or any other thing, the Holy One must surely turn away in sheer disgust” (35:9). This is a match for Fellini’s hilarious “ecclesiastical fashion show” in his film Roma. Naturally, this antipathy is not alien to the more familiar gospels. Matthew has Jesus lambaste the Pharisees in such terms: “They widen the phylacteries across their foreheads, and they lengthen the fringes of their prayer shawls” (Matthew 23:5). Is such finery mere ostentation? Those who cultivate it see it as “the beauty of holiness.” Those who do not are perhaps lower-class, anti-aristocratic, anti-artistic sectarians. And Dowling’s Jesus seems to be balancing the same chip on his mighty shoulder.

We can also detect a significant interest in non-Christian faiths and a sense of being accountable for what to make of them, an anxiety not unlike that of Schleiermacher¹ and other Liberal Protestant theologians who, in their own way, were occupied with the same challenge Levi Dowling struggled with. Like Schleiermacher, Dowling can no longer simply take Christian distinctiveness for granted; he must give the other faiths a fair shake with an open mind and heart. The clearest signal that Dowling thinks we must learn from other faiths is that he depicts his Jesus learning from them. But Dowling, unlike most of his readers in our day, was no New Age syncretist. He does come quite close to identifying Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha as co-avatars, but Dowling’s Jesus remains, as for Schleiermacher and for Paul Tillich² , the final rule of judgment for all religions as well as Christianity. At the same time, as I read him, Dowling is motivated in this consideration by something older than the theologies of Schleiermacher and the Neo-Orthodox Tillich. Dowling is, once again, a religious rationalist of the old school, and the gospel he has his Jesus expound is the universally valid religion of the Enlightenment, a generally Kantian “religion within the limits of reason alone.” Natural religionists³ of the eighteenth century, like the Deists, held that God had created the human brain in all places and times with insight sufficient to discern right and wrong, and that only the gratuitous embellishments of self-worshipping priestcraft had obscured that moral clarity, and largely by elevating competing and ill-founded dogmas as more important than the morality all agreed on. From that poison seed spouted sectarian strife and religious warfare. Fully in accord with this commonsense stripping-down, Dowling’s Jesus torpedoes establishment Christianity, subverting its doctrines, but also condemns similar sins when committed by Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, and others whom he encounters on his Asian tour. Pointedly unlike Notovitch’s wandering Jesus, the Jesus of the Aquarian Gospel sought less to drink from the fountain of the Asian faiths than to purify their tainted springs. His mission was more to teach than to learn.

Giving the Aquarian Gospel Its Due

My goal is to highlight the intricate use of gospel and other biblical materials by Levi Dowling, employing the methods of the classical Higher Criticism, specifically form and redaction criticism. These tools are appropriate because, as we shall have abundant occasion to see, the evangelist Levi has very, very often rewritten the Bible. After all, it is a new version of the Jesus story he means to tell, not that of some new savior altogether, so there is going to be a great deal of overlap. At the same time, however, Dowling’s book is supposed to be a new revelation in its own right; thus it has to have something to say. And the surest way to accomplish this goal, the telling of new truth through an old story, is to rewrite that old story to make it into a new one. And the present volume is a modest attempt to think Levi Dowling’s thoughts after him, to trace his editorial, theological hand as he composes, alters, and reinscribes. This is just the way we study, say, the Gospel of Matthew, detecting through careful comparisons how and why he changed his base document, the Gospel of Mark. Having the source before us, it is not too difficult to ferret out the reasons for the changes. That is true of The Aquarian Gospel and its major sources, which are the four canonical gospels plus Nicholas Notovitch’s fiction (offered to the public as fact), The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ in which the savior traveled the length and breadth of Asia before embarking on his Galilean and Jerusalem ministries.

I feel sure that by now it will be apparent to every reader that in no way do I propose to write an expose of Levi Dowling’s latter-day gospel. No, not for a moment. While I accord the text no particular authority beyond being fascinating and offering some gems worth pondering, I respect it and seek here to expound it with the methods scholars have used to illuminate the fine print of the Bible. I can think of no higher respect to pay to the text.