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2 THE MYTH AND YOU

Finding the deeper meaning [of the Bible texts] is thus the process by which God gradually, by means of parable and metaphor, leads those to whom God would reveal himself from the sensible to the intelligible world.

– CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA¹

Origin of the Gospels

SINCE THE PUBLICATION of The Pagan Christ, one question that has intrigued and puzzled readers is just what the source of the Gospels and the Gospels’ Jesus actually was. Reading as widely as possible has made me aware that there is nobody today—no scholar or expert—who can give a definitive answer to this question. The fact that we now know there were “many Christianities” or Yeshua (Jesus) movements in, and in some cases before, the first century has added greatly to the confusion and uncertainty.² One theory, though, currently being discussed in some popular writings, merits a great deal more research by Biblical scholars.

Philo Judaeus, who lived from about 20 BCE to 40 CE, was a brilliant Jew by religion and a Greek philosopher by education who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. He understood the books of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) and other Hebrew scriptures allegorically, and laboured diligently to harmonize them all with Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. (It should be added that he and all the thousands of Egyptian Jews in Alexandria read the “Old Testament” in a Greek translation called the Septuagint, created roughly two hundred years earlier, in Alexandria.) His writing about the divine Logos, or Word of God, and about the “son” of God, for example, is thought by many scholars to have strongly influenced the author of the prologue to John’s Gospel.

Be that as it may, it is the case that he writes also about a large group of devout Egyptian Jewish ascetics called Therapeutae, or healers, who lived near Lake Mareotis close to Alexandria. They were already well established long before Philo’s time and had similar communities scattered around the Mediterranean basin in key centres. In his De Vita Contemplativa, Philo says they were also enthusiastic allegorizers of the Hebrew scriptures and, in addition, had arcane or esoteric writings of their own. Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in the fourth century, knew little or nothing of their origins but was struck by the similarities of their way of life to that of Christian monks.³ He even speculates that the “writings of the ancient men who were the founders of the sect,” referred to by Philo, “may well have been our Gospels and Epistles.” This is an intriguing possibility. Epiphanius (c. 315–403) was a bishop and church historian who also linked the Therapeutae with the early Christians. He notes that the name Jesus (Yeshua, or “God saves”) is similar to the Greek word therapeutae, a “healer” or “saviour.” Godfrey Higgins in Anacalypsis says that the Therapeutae were physicians of the soul and had churches, bishops, priests and deacons all but identical with the Christians. He says they had missionary stations or colonies of their community in Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae and Thessalonica, just as in the Pauline churches.⁴

In The Pagan Christ, I have documented the parallels between Osiris/Horus of Egypt and Yeshua-Joshua-Jesus in the New Testament. It is easy to see how allegorizing Jews, living in Egypt, could have made the shift. The Therapeutae could conceivably have been the original Christ communities and have first been called Christians at Antioch. What is certain is that there was widespread expectation in Jewish communities in the very early first century that Joshua or Yeshua the Deliverer might suddenly return to usher in a Messianic Age. Yeshua the Anointed One becomes Iesous Christos, or Jesus Christ, in Greek. His elevation to a central, mythical figure in Hellenized Jewish mysteries would have been a seamless transition.

But, it must be stressed again, nobody knows for sure how it all began.⁵ However it happened, it is the “old, old story,” this time in Jewish dress. To those who perhaps find it difficult to abandon a long-held opinion that every major religion must of necessity have its foundation upon a historical person, I commend the chapter “Can a Vibrant Religion Exist Without an Actual Founder?” in Living Waters.⁶

Before going any further, I would like to give here a very simple introduction to the Gospels, because I’m well aware that terms and ideas familiar to some readers are not necessarily shared by all. If you find it too simple or familiar, you can turn a few pages and get right into the book.

The Synoptic Gospels:

Mark, Matthew and Luke

None of the Gospels have come down to us carrying the names of their “authors” or editors, and nobody really knows for certain who their final editors or “redactors” were, but I will use the traditional titles for the sake of simplicity.

It is important to know that Mark, Matthew, Luke and John and the rest of the New Testament documents were all written in Hellenistic Greek. Greek was the lingua franca, the universal language of the educated class, in the ancient Mediterranean world, ever since the conquests of Alexander the Great, who died in 323 BCE. Two things stand out when this fact is recognized:

1) It is agreed among scholars that the language in which any historical Jesus would have thought, spoken and taught was Aramaic. None of his teachings, however, have come down to us in Aramaic. Together with others, most notably the American critic Harold Bloom, I am amazed that more New Testament scholars are not wholly perplexed by this fact. Nothing, other than possibly five or six words, has been preserved in the language actually spoken by a personage of such extraordinary standing in human history!

2) The Gospel of Mark makes no secret of the fact that the first disciples were uneducated fishermen. He even paints a picture of them as slow-witted at times. The idea that any one of them helped create and write a new literary form, a Gospel, needs to be put aside. None of the Gospels was written by an eyewitness. Paul, the earliest New Testament writer, never met a historical Jesus, only the mythic Christ.

So, nobody knows for certain when or by whom the Gospels were created. It must be remembered that they were never “written” in the way a modern author writes a book. They are highly edited works showing the evidence of having been compiled from earlier collections of sayings and, I believe, ancient myths and “miracle” plays depicted in the Mystery Religions.⁷ Mark’s Gospel was by general scholarly agreement the first, written most probably sometime between 70 and 90 CE. Matthew was probably written around 90 CE, Luke shortly thereafter. Because Matthew and Luke contain nearly all of Mark and they can thus all be viewed together, they are called the Synoptic (from two Greek words meaning “to see together”) Gospels.

Since the finding of the Gnostic gospels at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945, it is recognized that there were at least twenty gospels circulating in the early centuries. Most were named after prominent Gospel figures to guarantee a feeling of authority and authenticity—that is, to ensure a readership. The Gospel of Thomas is the best known of these.⁸ The four canonical (officially approved) Gospels were declared to be so by the Church during a lengthy process, and all others were hunted down and destroyed. The likely reason the books found at Nag Hammadi had been buried there was to escape the vigorous attempts after the Council of Nicaea, in 325 CE, to silence all but the official line.

Scholarly study long ago led to the conclusion that whoever “wrote” or were the final redactors/editors of Matthew and Luke had Mark in front of them when they wrote their Gospels because, between them, they reproduced the bulk of it verbatim. It should be noted, however, that they certainly don’t treat Mark as the untouchable and inerrant Word of God, because at times they make specific corrections or depart from his account altogether. Mark includes no birth narrative (“his” Jesus is an adult from the very beginning), only a very few parables, and little other specific teaching of Jesus. There is no Sermon on the Mount. (Incidentally, the Sermon on the Mount becomes the Sermon on the Plain in Luke.) Also, Mark records certain (perhaps embarrassing) details—such as the cry of dereliction and forsakenness from the Cross—that Matthew or Luke either soften or, as I have said, leave out entirely. Mark frequently underlines as well the disciples’ well-nigh total inability to understand what was happening.

In addition to Mark, Matthew and Luke seem to have another common source of material not found in Mark. The traditional hypothesis here is that this source, called Q (from the German word Quelle, “source”), was a “sayings” gospel with no story of the Cross and Resurrection, much like the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Over the years, this hypothesis (no document has ever been found) has spawned many books and a plethora of Ph.D. theses, and it is still widely believed in by critical scholars. However, a formidable challenge to the theory has recently been issued by the scholar Michael Goulder of Birmingham, England, in an article in a prestigious scholarly journal titled “Is Q a Juggernaut?” In this article Goulder says that there is scarcely a Biblical scholar in Oxford today who would vouch for the authenticity of a Q document. He believes that the simpler explanation for the common non-Markan material is that Luke had Matthew as well as Mark in front of him when he wrote.⁹

The final element in both Matthew and Luke is material peculiar to each alone. This is generally referred to as L for Luke’s and M for Matthew’s. We must remember that the Gospel authors often were acting as redactors or editors, collating material from a range of sources, not all of them known to us today and many of them much more ancient than scholars from traditional backgrounds would care to admit. For example, there was a vast store of oral, as well as written, “wisdom” sayings that circulated widely in the ancient Near East, particularly in the Mystery Religions. The Mystery Religions were movements that restricted full admission to those who had gone through certain secret initiation rites, or mysteries. The most famous were those of Demeter in Eleusis in Greece, as well as those of Dionysus, Mithras, Serapis and Isis. The “parts” acted out and spoken by the sun god or central speaker in the many Mystery Religion dramas formed a part of this collection of “sayings,” or Logia.

Why were four Gospels selected, and not three or six or eight? Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons around 190 CE, said there had to be four because there were four winds and four directions. This usually draws an indulgent smile from scholars, but there was a solid, though esoteric, reason behind the choice. For the ancients the number four was fundamental to the entire structure of life and the universe. The square, with its four sides, was the basis for any further elaboration in all forms of building, even the Pyramids. There were four major stages in evolution: the mineral, the vegetative, the animal and the human. Also, there were the four basic elements of water, earth, air and fire. This is the esoteric reason why the Egyptian sun god Horus had four sons. It is also behind the account of Jesus’ choice of four fishermen as his chief disciples: Peter, Andrew, James and John. It was perfectly natural, even necessary, then, that this fourfold order of nature be followed in structuring the Scriptures for the new movement, Christianity.

John’s Gospel

The last of the four Gospels, John, was probably composed around 95–100 CE, and is in a classification by itself. The vast differences between the Gospel According to St. John and the first three Synoptics have been commented upon by Christian scholars all the way back to the latter half of the second century. John may have followed some of Mark’s outline, especially the Passion narrative, but his Gospel is so different that we are in an almost completely other world. From the very outset, John’s Jesus is the Son of God in all his glory.

The differences between John and the Synoptics simply cannot be reconciled, much as some conservative scholars have tried. There are no parables in John. The account of the institution of Holy Communion, or the Mass, is missing completely, replaced by the washing of the disciples’ feet on Maundy Thursday, as it has come to be called. Like Mark, there is no nativity story and no virgin birth. Instead of a birth narrative, we are told Jesus was the divine Logos with God, and part of God’s being from eternity. The cleansing of the temple comes right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in John, and not at the end, where the others all have it. The amazing story of Lazarus is unique to John. In general, John’s Gospel has been called “the spiritual Gospel” because of the various extensive and unique dialogues where the deep things of the Spirit are discussed.

At the same time, the Gospel of John is undoubtedly the most quoted of the four Gospels. It contains the famous text, John 3:16, which is so often held up on a card by that person who always manages to get a seat in the ball park right behind the catcher or in the part of the arena where the TV cameras zoom in most frequently. The same text is found on signs of every size all along the roads and highways of North America. It begins with the familiar words “For God so loved the world . . .” It’s the same chapter that tells the story so loved and quoted by the more conservative wing of contemporary Christianity, about the need to be “born again.” They misunderstand it completely in my view, but they certainly use it a lot.

In discussing what is meant by being born again (or better, in view of the Greek, “born from above”), in chapter 3 John makes it abundantly clear that what is being talked about is the fact that all humans are to have two births—the natural birth from “water,” as a human baby, and a second birth, which is spiritual. The “born again” experience is that of recognizing one’s true nature as a spark of the Divine—the light that gives light to everyone coming into the world. It has nothing whatever to do with what evangelicals describe as recognizing one’s status as a sinner and “accepting Christ as Saviour.” There is nowhere in the Gospels where this condition for “becoming a Christian” is ever laid out in the manner, for example, in which the famous Evangelist Billy Graham presents it. The traditional church teaching that we all, by our very nature as part of the human family, are contaminated by “original sin,” that is, by the sin of our mythical forefather Adam—Paul says that “in Adam all died” (because of his sin)—and that we add to this by our own sinful acts, has been the basis for clerical control all down the ages.

It’s important to remember that the idea of having a second birth is by no means unique to the New Testament. It was widespread in the cults and competing philosophies flourishing in the Greco-Roman world of that day. It even had its own term, palingenesia. In the Hermetic Literature (Corpus Hermeticum—recorded in the second and third centuries, but based upon Egyptian wisdom going back many centuries before that) the subtitle of chapter 13 is “On Being Born Again” and includes the “Hymn of Rebirth.”¹⁰

Significantly, John’s portrayal of Jesus and the whole story is, in fact, so different from the others that there were parts of the emerging ecclesiastical organization in Rome and elsewhere that wanted it rejected from the official canon of sacred scripture. One vivid way of describing this situation is to say that John’s Jesus “walks about four feet above the ground.” In other words, while this Jesus never categorically claims to be God (incidentally, this claim is not explicitly made anywhere in the New Testament), his status is one of great personal exaltation from the very outset. There is no Markan “Messianic Secret” here: there is no command not to tell anyone who he is. The Christology—the view of who Jesus is—is far “higher” in John than it is in Matthew, Luke and Mark. John’s Jesus moves and speaks with the total authority of the central figure of the ancient mythos or mystery play, with no attempt to cloak or veil the fully allegorical nature of the drama. (For more on the differences between John and the Synoptics, see Appendix A.)

What are we to say to all of the above? The implications, it seems to me, are quite clear. While each of the Gospels is a mythical rendition of the Jesus Story, the Fourth Gospel is to my mind the most conspicuously so. Read literally, it is, with some brilliant exceptions, a laborious and quite unbelievable task. Taken fully in its deeper, spiritual sense as the drama of the soul in matter, it is a virtuoso piece of illumination and inspiration full of joy and glory and hope for all. I suggest that with all of this in mind, readers might want to get a good, modern translation—I prefer the New Revised Standard Version myself—and set aside the time to read John through. Don’t do it in bits and pieces as if you were in Sunday school or church, but as a whole. Read it as you would any other book, remembering that the chapters and verses are artificial divisions introduced many centuries after the book first appeared. Read it allegorically as a parable about your own life’s journey, and feel it come alive as never before. The message of this book is that Christ’s journey is a metaphor for our own spiritual journey through life. Read as myth and allegory, the Gospels speak powerfully to that theme.

St. Paul

This book is concerned with the mythic meaning of the Gospels, but it must be kept in mind that the earliest writings of the New Testament are those of St. Paul, who was the major force in the establishment of Christianity as a universal faith. He wrote his epistles around 50–65 CE, about twenty years before the earliest Gospel. He knew only a mystical Jesus, and his approach is wholly mythical—that of the Christ within. Paul’s knowledge of Jesus comes from visions and revelations; from the Old Testament (Paul viewed the whole of it as prophetic and as elucidating facts about Jesus); and from what was being said about the Christos in the Christian communities already in existence.¹¹

The silence of Paul over the putative historical Jesus is virtually ear-shattering. But, because he does speak of Jesus Christ some two hundred times, the true nature of the problem escapes the average reader. He calls Jesus Lord and Son of God, but such titles already existed within both Judaism and the surrounding Pagan religions, and of themselves prove nothing. Paul presupposes that Jesus existed as a supernatural being before “God sent him into the world to redeem it.” Such pre-existence on the part of the Logos and Sophia, or Wisdom, was part of Judaic thought at the time. It was also part of Gnostic thinking, and there is considerable evidence to support the view that Paul was a Gnostic. According to Paul, Jesus assumed flesh (mythically) sometime after the reign of David, from whom Paul says, following what the Old Testament prophesied, that Jesus, as a man, was supposed to have been descended.¹² In the myth, he was “made of the seed of David according to the flesh.” This, of course, was part of the traditional view of what or who the Messiah had to be. In Romans too he terms him a Jew “according to the flesh” and, later, the scion of Jesse to govern the Gentiles.¹³ As Professor G.A. Wells points out in Did Jesus Exist?, however, there were many centuries intervening between David and Paul, and the latter gives absolutely no indication in which of them Jesus’ earthly life supposedly fell. It is all supremely vague and mystical. We remember that Osiris too in the myth had an earthly life but was wholly mythical himself. As the scholar G. Bornkamm has observed, it is “an astonishing fact” that Paul nowhere mentions Jesus of or from Nazareth, who was a prophet and miracle worker who ate with tax collectors and sinners. He never once calls him “Jesus of Nazareth.”

Among other things, Paul is silent about:

• The Sermon on the Mount, and all the rest of Jesus’ ethical teachings. He discusses ethical issues, even some doctrines familiar to us, such as “bless those who persecute you,” but he gives them on his own authority, with no sign that Jesus taught the very same truths.¹⁴ He appeals instead to passages from the Old Testament to support his teachings. The Gospel itself was already written in the pages of the Old Testament, according to Romans 1:2. He says there that the Gospel was “promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures.”

• The virgin birth. Paul simply says Jesus was “born of a woman,” but so too were the Pagan deities, for example Horus and his mother Isis. He never mentions the virgin birth.

• The Lord’s Prayer. This omission is all the more remarkable in that Paul discusses prayer at length in chapter 8 of Romans and says plainly that Christians don’t know exactly what to pray for and have to depend on the Spirit’s praying within us with “groanings that cannot be uttered.”¹⁵

• The temple cleansing—which is cited by all four Gospels.

• All the miracles that abound in the Gospels. In fact, he seems to deny that Jesus worked miracles, since he puts down that whole approach: “Jews demand signs [miracles] and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified . . .”¹⁶

• He knows nothing of Jesus’ command to go and baptize everyone, since he explicitly says: “Christ did not send me to baptize.”¹⁷

• He fails to support his lengthy plea for celibacy by any reference to Jesus’ reported praise for those who renounce marriage for the sake of the kingdom.¹⁸

• Even when writing about Jesus’ death, he never mentions any of the trials, Pontius Pilate, Herod or Jerusalem. In 1 Corinthians, 2:6–8, Paul writes about the crucifixion of Christ by “the rulers of this age,” but this is not a reference to any earthly powers. Rather, he is referring to the widespread view in the Judaism of his day that the world was in the grip of evil angels and other malignant forces.¹⁹ Kittel, in his Theological Wordbook of the New Testament, says that by “rulers” Paul is not here referring to any earthly governors but to heavenly or spiritual ones.

Critical scholars agree that Paul gives Jesus’ Crucifixion “no historical context” whatever, so that nothing is known from him as to where Jesus had lived, where he was killed, where he was buried or the story of his Resurrection. E. Kasemann, the distinguished New Testament scholar, has found that “the scantiness of Paul’s Jesus tradition overall is surprising,” to say the least, but adds that his silence over the circumstances of the Crucifixion, which is so central to his theology, is “positively shocking.” G.A. Wells in Did Jesus Exist? notes that scholar W. Schmithals is on record as saying that Paul’s silence about the entire substance of the Gospels is a “problem to which no satisfactory solution has been given during two hundred years of historical and critical research, and to the solution of which great theologians have sometimes not even attempted to contribute.” They simply refuse to tackle the issue at all.

In addition to the above, the following facts need to be known more widely:

Paul’s mention of James, the Lord’s brother, does not necessarily mean a blood brother of Jesus.²⁰ The Jerusalem group of believers were called by Paul “the brethren of the Lord.” Paul frequently uses the term “brother” for a fellow believer. Jesus, in this tradition, spoke of his close followers as his brothers, just as certain religious groups still do today, for example the Brethren churches. I even get letters from people wholly unknown to me that begin: “Brother Tom.”

It is argued that 1 Thessalonians 1:6 says Christians received the Word in much “affliction” and so are imitators of Christ. This might seem to imply that Christ was known to have suffered, that is, on earth. But other gods had similarly been regarded as suffering—Osiris, Orpheus, Adonis, etc.

Paul speaks of the faithful as having “received Christ Jesus,” in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Wells notes this is “the purest mysticism” and that the knowledge of Christ comes from communion “with hidden powers or spirits.”²¹ In 1 Corinthians 4:1, Paul designates himself and his fellows as the “stewards of God’s mysteries,” which was exactly the technical name for the stewards at the temples of the popular Egypto-Greek deity Serapis.²²

Finally, Paul uses the language of mysticism and of Mystery Religions over and over again. He speaks of being in Christ, through Christ, with Christ, unto Christ, as suggesting some indescribable relationship between himself (or the believer) and Christ. It’s a relationship, according to Wells, for example, that the context wholly fails to explain. The real explanation is that Paul knew only the mystical Christ, the “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”²³

Finding Personal Meaning in the Myth

Know what is in front of your face and what is hidden from you will be disclosed.

– THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS, Saying #5

When I was in my teens I led a youth Bible class at St. Peter’s Anglican Church in the heart of downtown Toronto. One of the favourite old-time hymns the young people used to ask for began with the words: “Who is on the Lord’s side? Who for him will go?” The answer came ringing back in a later verse: “We are on the Lord’s side; Saviour we are thine.” It was a fine evangelical call to service for Jesus.

Later, however, in my first year at University College, at the University of Toronto, I happened upon the chapter in the book of Exodus from which the key words of the hymn were taken. It was chapter 32, where the mythical story is told of Moses’ descent from the mountain bearing the two tablets of stone upon which God’s “finger” had written the Ten Commandments. Moses discovers that in his long absence on the mountain the people have strayed and made for themselves the image of a golden calf. Moses throws a major temper tantrum, smashes the two tablets on the ground, seizes the calf and, after reducing it to powder in a fire, scatters the ashes upon water and forces the Israelites to drink it.

The true significance of all of this no doubt revolves around the author’s awareness of the ending of the zodiacal Age of Taurus the bull and the beginning of the Age of Aries the ram. (Notice that in Genesis, when Abraham was about to slay his son Isaac, he was told to offer up a ram caught in a nearby thicket instead.) But it’s what happened next that arrested my full attention. Here is the text itself:

When Moses saw that the people were running wild (for Aaron had let them run wild, to the derision of their enemies), then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, “Who is on the Lord’s side? Come to me!” And all the sons of Levi gathered around him. He said to them, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side, each of you! Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbour.’” The sons of Levi did as Moses commanded, and about three thousand of the people fell on that day. Moses said, “Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of a son or a brother, and so have brought a blessing on yourselves this day.” (Exodus 32:25–29)

I have never heard this part of the story read in church. The hymn, of course, like the Church in general, wholly slides over this horror—the total antithesis of common humanistic morality, never mind of the complete ethical teachings of the New Testament. Notice also another major but usually overlooked phenomenon: The “Lord” in the story is Yahweh, later to become God the Father. The hymn, however, as almost always happens in unthinking, popular Christian theology, transfers the title “Lord” to the “Saviour,” that is, to Jesus. In other words, the entire passage is twisted to suit the cause of “the Gospel.”

Anyone familiar with the rest of Exodus and indeed the whole of the Old Testament will be fully aware that this passage about killing sons, brothers and neighbours, and being blessed in the process, is far from atypical. There are many scenes of greater gore and outright cruelty—even genocide—in these “holy” texts than the verses quoted here. It would be “flogging a dead horse” to begin to list the most heinous.

What is important to stress, however, is that none of this was actual history. The recording of real events was not, as cannot be underlined too heavily, the purpose or intent of the authors in every case. Archaeology supports what knowledge of ancient theological and philosophical practices has made abundantly clear: the many battles and the carnage depicted in the Bible, especially in the supposed conquest of the Promised Land—Canaan—never happened as actual fact. They were all part of the mythical surroundings given to the Israelites to glorify their past and to underscore the zealous, exclusivist nature of the tribal god they served. If even a fraction of the battles and slaughters described in the early books of the Bible had actually taken place, the “Holy Land” would today be ankle deep in ancient weapons and other signs of furious wars. It is not. Indeed, very far from it. Mythmaking, you see, didn’t just suddenly start and stop with the stories of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It runs throughout the entire Bible, all sixty-six books, including all of the New Testament and thus throughout the Jesus Story as well.

But how, one asks, can ancient myth, even though understood as defined by Joseph Campbell as “what never was, but always is,” speak to you or me in the technological era of the twenty-first century? In the coming chapters we will examine the familiar New Testament Jesus stories and try to see where they came from and what they mean for our lives. As we do so, we will see the full nature of the spiritual encouragement and the solid grounds for conquering our fears that ring through them.

This encouragement, oddly enough, has most relevance where religion itself is concerned. Anyone who has thought about it knows there is a tremendous amount of fear involved wherever religion or spirituality are even mooted for discussion. I know many hundreds of people through letters as well as direct contact over the years whose entire experience of what is sometimes euphemistically called their “spiritual life” (but more accurately too often is their catalogue of neuroses) is ringed about with fear. There is fear of God’s disapproval, fear of offending parents, relatives, friends, clergy and others. There is also deep-rooted fear of change of any kind.

This latter aspect deserves much more attention than it gets. There are millions walking about out there today whose inner spiritual growth has far surpassed anything they once knew, but who move in mortal terror of anyone else finding out. One woman reader of my newspaper columns wrote to say that she lives in dread some Sundays until the clock moves past 11 a.m. Only then can she relax, since it’s now too late to make it to her local church. Most Sundays, however, old fears win out and she ends up seated in a pew well before the sacred hour. Such was her background that church attendance became so loaded with negative power that she is almost paralyzed by the idea of being free to choose to go or not go as an autonomous agent. She wrote that she resents the way the preacher “talks as though we all are five-year-olds” and then she feels guilty about being critical in the church and of the Church.

Not that failure to attend church necessarily means spiritual growth; it could mean the opposite. We all need to examine our religious beliefs and practices from time to time to see to what degree they are governed not by insight and spiritual freedom but by childhood habits and adolescent, ingrained taboos. For far too many even today, religion equals guilt—lots of guilt. Perhaps if more people like my friend could summon the courage to voice their feelings to the clergy, the quality of the preaching might improve. Certainly, not speaking up or just staying away does nothing to challenge the current infantilization of the laity.

It’s painful to say, but the amount of superstition and fear of moving on that pervades much of the public mind when it comes to matters of faith and of spirit is profound. Yet, at the same time, there is an enormous fascination with spirituality. The towering success of The Da Vinci Code is a current testimony to this. The lesson learned by Peter is one for us all just now: “Fear not.” Dare to leave the “boat,” as we shall see he was once challenged in the myth to do, and move ahead! My hope is that this book will become the catalyst for just such a personal breakthrough for you.