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ОглавлениеThe problem for and the function of religion in this age is to awaken the heart.
– JOSEPH CAMPBELL, Thou Art That
ONE SUNDAY in the early 1970s, I was guest preaching to an Anglican congregation at a historic downtown Toronto church. The sermon was somewhat controversial in its thrust, and as I came down from the pulpit the rector was already on his way to the chancel steps. Turning to me, he said, “You can’t leave it there, Tom.” He then proceeded to disagree with every major point I had tried to make. The people gasped. Naturally, I responded with some gusto and we began an impromptu debate that lasted nearly an hour. Nobody left. Nobody even stirred. At one point I invited any who wanted to do so to join in, and several vigorously did. I still meet people today who were there and who say they have never attended a church service quite that exciting since.
In a way, this story parallels what has happened in the wake of my 2004 book The Pagan Christ. The response has been tremendous; most letter writers have expressed gratitude, but nearly all have said in one way or another, “You can’t leave it there.” Most of them wanted to continue the journey.
Those who read that book know that it sets out considerable, detailed evidence that the entire story upon which Christianity has rested for nearly two thousand years is based upon much earlier narratives, including one of humanity’s earliest myths, that of Incarnation. In its simplest form, the doctrine of Incarnation is the understanding that deep in the centre of every person’s being is a spark of the eternal fire of the Divine. It was that belief, I maintained, that formed the foundation upon which Christianity later was constructed. Specifically, to quote the words of the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung, it was demonstrated that “the Christian era owes its name and significance to the antique mystery of the god-man, which has its roots in the archetypal Osiris–Horus myth of ancient Egypt.”1 Since some conservative critics have attempted on various grounds to deny this Egyptian connection, I have included an appendix at the conclusion of this book with further striking, contemporary scholarship on the subject.
In the course of showing Christianity’s deep dependence upon the ancient Egyptian wisdom, I concluded that there is no reliable, unambiguous historical evidence for an actual Jesus of Nazareth. This is not an easy conclusion to grasp for a Western culture deeply influenced by a literal, historicized version of the ancient myth—and for many it comes as a genuine shock. Many, on the other hand, have written to me to say that the question of historicity or non-historicity doesn’t really affect their deeper spiritual understanding. Perhaps, at one level, it doesn’t really matter that much. But it does matter—profoundly—when you look at the Church’s past and realize the horrific consequences of literalism and the focusing of Incarnation in one putatively historical person. Millions have died because of it. Wars and torture have followed in its wake. The lives of countless millions have been controlled from cradle to grave by ecclesiastical powers as a result of such a dogma. Essentially, what the historical approach has done has been to cut the individual off from realizing fully his or her own divinity within. This is of profound importance, because ultimately what matters is the subjective or inner meaning of the Jesus Story for each of us and for humanity at large.
The stance taken in what follows is that Jesus is a mythical figure. The Jesus Story certainly has of itself a long, tempestuous and incredibly complex history. But that is quite different from proving that the narratives themselves have anything historical about them. Arduous study shows that the “evidence” offered by professional apologists and many others for a Jesus of history simply doesn’t stand up under critical examination. This particular emperor has no clothes, despite the fact that many scholars who should know better continue to argue that he does. The problem is that they become simply and hopelessly vague when asked to produce their evidence. The best they can do is to offer hearsay material, and that only of the flimsiest kind.
On the question of the current so-called “Third Quest for the Historical Jesus,” Harold Bloom, the well-known American literary critic and bestselling author, comments: “Quests for the historical Jesus invariably fail, even those by the most responsible searchers. Questers, however careful, find themselves and not the elusive and evasive Yeshua, enigma of enigmas.”2 To my mind, they are like those looking for treasure down a deep well and finding only their own reflections in the water.
In his 2005 book Jesus and Yahweh—The Names Divine, Bloom says he is completely baffled, as a scholar, by the “human comedy” of this never-ending search. He describes reading the work of such prominent New Testament experts as Raymond Brown and Father J.P. Meier and wondering “why they will not admit how hopelessly little we actually know about Jesus. The New Testament has been ransacked by centuries of minute scholarship but all that labour does not result in telling us the minimal information we demand on any parallel matter.” As for Flavius Josephus, upon whose shoulders the entire shaky case for Jesus’ historicity is made to rest, Bloom bluntly, and rightly, states that he was “a wonderful writer and non-stop liar.”3
While Bloom, without giving any reasons, somewhat paradoxically is prepared to admit that Jesus was “a more or less historical person,” he believes nothing can be known for certain about him. He explains that what he means by this is that “everything truly important about him reaches me from texts I cannot trust.” Part of the reason for this is that “there is not a sentence in the entire New Testament composed by anyone who had ever met the unwilling King of the Jews.”4 Before leaving this subject, I will say that in any criticisms received in the wake of The Pagan Christ, nobody has yet produced what any truly objective scholar would call convincing or verifiable evidence for a flesh-and-blood Jesus of Nazareth.5
Accordingly, there will be some commentary from time to time throughout this study on the historicity question as it becomes relevant to our main theme. However, that is certainly not the central issue here. Rather, it is this: what, when all is said and done, does the 2,000-year-old story of Jesus called Christ mean to you and me and to the wider world? This is the burning issue that the endless scholarly wrangling utterly obscures and for the most part fails even adequately to address. To get at that kernel of wisdom, we will treat the story here as it was originally, I believe, intended to be interpreted—as a myth of the highest order. Not just any myth, indeed, but the story of the evolution on this earth plane of each individual living soul. The fundamental thesis of this book is that the Jesus Story is your story and mine told in the light of eternity and of eternal values.
In the groundbreaking, still highly relevant television series by PBS called The Power of Myth, in which, during six fascinating one-hour shows, the famous mythologist Joseph Campbell was interviewed by journalist Bill Moyers, Campbell spoke about one of his favourite themes—the Hero with a Thousand Faces. He explained how all the greatest truths about who we are and what we are meant to be begin with a story. The story, or (to use the Greek word) mythos, is almost always, he said, a fictional account of the adventure(s) of a hero, someone who does daring and dangerous things for a cause, someone who goes out to speak and act courageously and then returns bearing his reward, whether material or spiritual. In the nearly universal god-man myth, the hero meets death or is swallowed by a monster only to experience rebirth and triumph at the end.
Each of us, Campbell argued, can learn from the hero’s adventure because we are all likewise called to the going out and the coming back of the unique adventure that is our own life, from the moment of birth through maturity to death itself. The myriad myths of humanity can differ enormously from one another, and yet there are certain universal themes running through them all. The various trials and revelations experienced by the hero invariably call for a denial or “losing” of his or her own lower self, or ego, as the hero’s consciousness is expanded and transformed. In Campbell’s words, the important dimension of the story is the “interface between what is known” and the true source of all life and being. The myths, he declared, are meant to bring us eventually to a level of consciousness that is spiritual. Like dreams, they use the language of symbols and other imagery because they flow up from the depths of the unconscious and draw us ever upwards towards an ever-greater light. Greater light means fuller awareness of who we really are, and with that comes deeper appreciation of the presence of the divine light in other people around us. We become more sensitive to their hopes and longings, more compassionate to their struggles and their grief.
Given an approach like that, it is easy to see why Campbell, who died in 1987, called himself a “maverick” and why he had such difficulty with organized religions. Religion, ideally, should lift us into that greater light; it should connect us ever more solidly with the source of our very being and with one another. This is what people everywhere hunger and thirst for today. Yet history makes plain that religion has not always functioned that way. Carl Jung said that in a real sense religion has been humanity’s creation as a defence against a genuine encounter with Transcendence or the Divine. To be quite specific, excessive literalism and the historicizing of that which was meant as metaphor and myth has too often led to religion as the great inhibitor of human growth, as the great oppressor of human freedom, a prison rather than a source of healing. Thus religion, Campbell said in a now-famous aphorism, can be defined as “mythology misunderstood.”
The Pagan Christ taught that the Christian story is based upon an eternal myth of the gift of Christ consciousness, or of the divine flame, to every one of us. However, tragically, it is a myth that well over a billion people on Earth today still see as the literal story of a single individual who lived long ago in Palestine, who alone can be called the “Only Begotten Son of God,” and who alone, by his death and Resurrection, can save us from the penalties of sin and death.
While the eternal mythos of the Christ within unites and binds all humanity together, this latter, exclusivistic, literal reading, and the insistence on an extremely questionable history, continues to rupture and divide Christians from other religions, from those of no religion and very often from one another. It’s one reason why there are at least four hundred different competing Christian denominations and sects today. The return to the deeper, much more universal, mythological understanding is imperative as a condition for world harmony and peace. It is also, I deeply believe, the key to the survival of Christianity as a viable faith in the future.
I have found that the mythic approach to the Gospels, and indeed to the whole of the Bible, has enriched my faith and deepened it in ways I had scarcely imagined when I was a parish priest or a professor at the seminary. Nature is more alive to me—or I sense that I am a deeper part of it. Prayer, while much more informal and conversational—or more often deeply silent—seems more connected, more real. Trust in the mystery we call God is keener, more alive. The mythic way is the genuine path towards the goal of a renewal of faith in our time.
The question we will attempt to answer here, then, is: what do the Gospels themselves look like or “feel” like from that mythic and symbolic point of view? What happens when we drop the pretence that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are varying complementary biographies of one man called Jesus of Nazareth and see these ancient texts for the allegories, parables, word pictures and myths I believe they were originally intended and understood to be? If sheer literalism leads to “blind faith,” what kind of understanding and raising of consciousness flows once a mythical, metaphorical principle of interpretation is applied? The time has come to test this hypothesis and see.
Before I attempt to do so, however, let me be absolutely clear. This book is aimed at helping modern men and women to see the Gospels in a new light. In no way is it an attack upon Scripture or on other interpretations. In the Hellenistic world, sacred writings were widely interpreted as having an allegorical meaning. The literal sense was important in its limited way, but only as a “minor mystery” compared with the greater riches beyond. Another way of putting this is to say that sacred texts were understood to have both an exoteric and an esoteric meaning. The exoteric sense, the literal, was for beginners, those not yet ready to comprehend the real message. The true, or esoteric, meaning lay within or beyond the text itself.
There is abundant proof of this fundamental distinction in the pages of the New Testament, and in particular in Mark, the earliest of the four Gospels. In chapter 4 of Mark, after telling the very first of the parables—the parable of the sower, which is found in every Gospel—Jesus is asked about the meaning of the parables in general. The Gospel says: “When he was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables.” Jesus is then made to reply: “To you has been given the secret [in Greek, mysterion] of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables . . .” In case we miss the point, the author/editor of Mark repeats it a few verses later. Verse 33 reads as follows: “With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.” Matthew uses the same word as Mark for the secret but makes it plural—ta mysteria, the secrets or mysteries of “the kingdom of heaven.” In other words, like all the other Mystery Religions of that period, early Christianity was based upon an inner or esoteric mystery teaching(s), which held the key to all the rest. The parables, then, are meant to communicate that essential mystery, while at the same time protecting it from being too readily seized upon and profaned by those of ill will.
When I was growing up in Toronto’s east end, I attended a Bible class for youngsters of about ten to twelve years of age. There was one game we played at each session that gave me a gift that was to benefit and last me all my life; it was called Sword Drill. Each class member had a “sword,” which was in fact a bible. You held it tightly in its “sheath” (under your arm) until the teacher called out a Bible reference. Instantly there would be a furious searching and turning of pages until the first to find the passage leapt up and read it aloud. Points were awarded and the competition was very keen indeed. It now seems simple or perhaps even naive. But it taught me how to find my way around in what can be a very difficult book, or rather, collection of books. It gave me a thorough knowledge of the literal text I can never forget. However, although it’s a great place to start, one very soon longs and looks for something more. The vision that now follows has helped me as nothing else has done to find that something more.
There is one last thing I’d like to clarify before we go further: when I speak in this book of matter and spirit, or of the “spiritual” in contrast to the “material,” I am not expressing or espousing some kind of ultimate dualism. Dualism holds that there are two essential (ontological) realities of good and evil, darkness and light, physical and spiritual. Zoroastrianism, for example, seems to be an expression of this. So was Manichaeism. That would mean that the body is evil (and some Gnostics went that far, affecting Christianity in the process) and only the soul is good. Ultimately, there is but one final reality, from which all else emanates. This Monad, another name for God, permits a cleaving into two realms so that, in the tension of opposites, Creation in all its manifold wonder takes place. Spirit and matter give birth to each other, and at the end of the eon or “age” all will be one once more. Neither is superior to the other. That is why matter “matters” and is a vehicle for the Divine.
