Summing Up: Finding the Kingdom of God

In wrapping up this blog, I'd like to talk about the 20th century spiritual teacher I most admire, a man whose writings greatly influenced my journey toward becoming a Concinnate Christian. That man is Dr. Viktor Frankl.

Exeter Cathedral, Exeter. Photo credit JAT 1997.

Many people on a spiritual path wouldn't include Viktor Frankl among the great 20th century religious and spiritual leaders. Dr. Frankl, after all, was a psychiatrist, not a monk or a religious sage. He wrote books about Logotherapy and Existential Analysis, not lofty theological commentaries on the Bible. Yet this brilliant Austrian Jewish physician scholar, who endured the horrors of WWII Nazi concentration camps and went on to rebuild a life of integrity and compassion after the war, has more in common with the man who lived as Jesus of Nazareth than anyone else I've read.

Dr. Frankl's well-known book Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy* is only 189 pages long, including the bibliography. Yet within the pages of this slim book he manages to evoke all the deepest aspects of the human experience. He asks the hardest questions possible about human suffering, and arrives at the astonishing conclusion that even in the midst of unutterable deprivation and torment, even in the face of terrible hunger and cold and illness and fear, human beings can still choose to love and forgive. Nothing can take this choice away from them. Nothing.

Dr. Frankl describes his redemption in this way: "A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth -- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved [spouse]. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way -- an honorable way -- in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, 'The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.'" (page 48)

Further, despite his own deeply personal turmoil, Dr. Frankl retained his ability to objectively study and assess the psychological reactions of his fellow inmates in the camps:

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

"And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become a plaything of circumstances, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.

"Seen from this point of view, the mental reactions of the inmates of a concentration camp must seem more to us than the mere expression of certain physical and sociological conditions. Even through conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him -- mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp." (page 75)

Dr. Frankl's fellow inmates taught him about courage -- the courage "to say yes to life" in spite of pain, guilt, and death (page 139). He didn't deny the reality of pain, guilt, and death, didn't try to escape it (page 86). Instead he chose a different path -- the path of helping others find purpose in their lives, of helping others find a way to turn suffering and guilt into accomplishment, change, and responsible action. He became a mentor to those who were searching for meaning, to those who needed help in reclaiming their free will to choose love. He also understood that each person's journey is unique, that no two people will find meaning and insight in exactly the same way. Unlike so many others, he found faith in the true potential of God's children.

I see so much in common between the teachings and methods of Viktor Frankl and those of Jesus son of Joseph! If you really want to understand who Jesus was and what he taught, please read Man's Search for Meaning. Then read it again. And read it again. There is no clearer modern version of Jesus' "Kingdom of God" teachings than Dr. Frankl's book.

Thank you to the readers who have struggled along with me as I tried to put these thoughts on paper. Your support and encouragement have meant more to me than you realize.

I wish you many blessings on your own journey of love, healing, and redemption!

* Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. 3rd Ed. Translated by Ilse Lasch. New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1984.

The Crucifixion and Resurrection

Today is Second Advent, so this seems like a good time to talk about miracles.

You'd think that, with all my talk about science and brain chemistry, I'd be the sort of person who would reject the reality of miracles. Because practical people who believe in science are sort of obligated to reject the reality of miracles. Aren't they?

Sunset, October 2014: I captured this dazzling ray effect close to my home when my angels unexpectedly told me to pick up my camera, get in the car, and go! Photo credit JAT 2014.

Most United Church of Canada members seem to think so. They're squeamish about the idea that the soul exists as a scientific reality. Same thing with miracles. Officially, they won't talk about miracles. Off the record, some United Church members will confide they believe in unexplainable, God-given events. But when they talk about miracles, they speak awkwardly and self-consciously -- the same way people react when they're invited to sit at a formal dinner table where there are three different forks on the left and three different knives on the right, plus a whole bunch of spoons, and they don't know which utensils they're supposed to use first. So they spend most of their time trying to watch the other guests to see which fork they should use when. They're so busy paying attention to their feelings of embarrassment and discomfort that they can't enjoy themselves. The whole situation is stressful rather than enjoyable.

I'd like to be able to say that United Church members have gone on the defensive about miracles because of repeated attacks from atheistic scientists such as Richard Dawkins. But it's not that simple. United Church members are on the defensive because they've been repeatedly bullied by "progressive" Christian theologians (e.g. Rudolf Bultmann) who have loudly proclaimed that the miracles performed by Jesus in the Gospels couldn't possibly have happened.

In the view of Bultmann and others, no sensible Christian should believe in these miracles because to believe in miracles is to reject science. These theologians recommend that Christians read the miracle stories . . . symbolically. Symbolically -- my favourite word (grrrr).

These same theologians call into question the reality of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. They insist we should understand the Resurrection metaphorically rather than literally. In their view, the Resurrection couldn't possibly have happened for real. Naturally, this makes it easier to believe that Jesus himself wasn't real, either, but instead was an invented religious symbol.

I think they've got it all backwards. They've started with the assumption that miracles aren't scientifically possible (an assumption that's not scientifically valid), and on the basis of this assumption they've concluded that the miracle stories (especially those in the Gospel of Mark) must have been invented by gullible, superstitious, scientifically uneducated 1st century authors who didn't know any better. Or maybe by authors who were just following a popular ancient trend of inserting invented miracle stories into their biographical narratives. (The fact that today's Christian televangelists are still inventing new miracle stories to dupe the public should remind us not to make blanket statements about the motives of all ancient writers.)

Queen's University history professor Dr. Jaclyn Duffin, who is both a practising hematologist and a professor in the history of medicine (a modern day physician scholar, as it were), has recently published a book about the history of canonization and attested healing miracles in the Roman Catholic Church. She sums up medical miracles in this way: "The doctor is surprised."

The doctor is surprised. The doctor is surprised that, on the basis of current scientific understandings of the disease process, the patient somehow manages to fully recover despite all scientific predictions of imminent death.

I would suggest that when the doctor is surprised, it can mean one of two things: (1) the doctor was wrong from the beginning about the diagnosis or (2) the doctor isn't as smart as she thinks she is about the disease process, quantum biology, healing, and God.

Usually it's the latter.

The Resurrection as described in the Gospel of Mark is very sparse on details. (I agree with biblical scholars who suggest that the book originally ended at Mark 16:8, not at Mark 16:20). All we really know for sure is that Jesus was crucified, was declared dead, was taken down from the cross, hastily placed in a tomb, and somehow managed to disappear from said tomb. Mark's account leaves a lot of scientific wiggle room for a doctor to be surprised.

It's a powerful symbol, the cross that Jesus hung upon. (It's okay for symbols such as crosses or a stars to be symbols; it's just not okay for historical facts to be treated as symbols instead of as facts.) The story of the cross has something important to say to us, even today, because it's still a story where the doctors are surprised and we, the regular people of faith, are filled with awe.

For me, the miracle in this story is not that a man died and was raised from the dead. (I don't think that's scientifically possible.) For me, the miracle is that the man didn't die in the first place.

How did Jesus son of Joseph escape death on the cross? That is the miracle in question.

It's a much bigger question than Paul's Christ myth asks. Paul's Christ myth asks you to believe with blind faith that a human man fully died but was fully returned to life after three days because he was divine -- the chosen son of God. He furthers asks you to believe with blind faith that if you fully accept Paul's teachings about Judgment Day, then you, too, will be resurrected on that day. Sin is the enemy and death is its consequence. The great question for Paul is, "How can I escape death?"
 
The Jesus reality (as told by Mark) asks a different question. The Jesus reality asks you to ask new questions about God. The Jesus reality tells a powerful story about the relationship between God and God's children, and asks you to not rely on blind faith, but to use your own common sense, your own senses, and your heart.

The Jesus reality is a powerful story about the kinds of things that are possible in God's Creation when human beings walk side by side and hand in hand with Mother Father God.

It's a story about courage. And trust. And humbleness. It's a story about God's free will and our own. It's a story about miraculous (though still scientific) healing. And it's a story about grief.

One of the things we can be certain of when we read Mark is that Jesus is not trying to escape death. Jesus has no fear of dying. He tells his disciples he's going to die, but then he gets on with his life of service as a teacher and healer. He ignores all the Jewish purity laws around disease and death. He puts himself in harm's way by going to Jerusalem. His Last Supper is not a last supper but a first supper, where he rejects the Passover ritual of eating unleavened bread by choosing instead to drink water and to eat risen bread. He breaks all the laws designed to protect the pious from death. His message is not about escaping death. His message is about embracing courage and trust and gratitude and devotion in our relationships with each other and with God.
 
The Jesus reality is Mark's way of saying that death is part of human life, and no one -- not even a gifted physician scholar filled with learning and love -- can fight this reality. Jesus had to die because he was a creature of Earth, and all creatures of Earth will one day die. It's meant to be this way. It's part of the fabric of Creation. It's painful and emotionally overwhelming for us to lose someone we love, but it's the way it has to be. Our lives here are only temporary. When it's time for one of us to go Home to our eternal reality, God the Mother and God the Father (both of whom are brilliant scientists and brilliant healers), come and gently lift us out of our mortal body and tenderly carry us Home. There we're reunited with our loved ones, and our hearts break open to pour out all the tears and sorrows of our lonely human lives so we can be healed and restored in God's loving arms.

Yet, despite all this, we're left with a mystery. Despite the reality of Jesus' total trust in God, despite the reality of Jesus' courage in the face of death, we're left with the puzzling fact that God the Mother and God the Father in their wisdom decided that a man named Jesus of Nazareth would not die on the cross that day, but would, in fact, escape that terrible death, and live to tell the tale -- for a short while, anyway, before he, too, surrendered his human life, as all of us one day must.

What is it that God was saying?

Thanks be to God the Mother and God the Father this Advent Sunday.

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Cunning of Paul

You may recall that in an earlier post I put forward the thesis that the Gospel of Mark was written as a direct rebuttal of Paul's First Corinthians ("The Gospel of Mark as a Rebuttal of First Corinthians," August 18, 2010). Today I'd like to talk about that in more detail.

Maybe you're thinking that sounds pretty boring, and you'll go read the sports page for a little blow-by-blow excitement. Bear with me, though. This story is packed with more drama than an NHL brawl combined with a daytime Soap Opera.

“Toews2010WinterOlympics” from Wikimedia Commons – author Rosie Perera – originally posted to Flickr as G9-20100221-3457

 
On one side, we have Team Salvation (blue and white). Team Salvation comes onto the ice first with the biggest, meanest lines you'd ever want to see. Paul is the Captain. His best forward is Luke and his strongest defenceman is Matthew. These guys have stamina and brute strength in spades. They're not nimble. They're not fast. Their wrist shot sucks. Their overall strategy is to slam the other team into the boards, start fights, and keep the puck moving fast so the audience has trouble following the play. They've done this many times before, and they're the crowd favourite, so they're convinced their strategy will work.

On the other side, we have a rookie team, Team Redemption (red and black). Team Redemption is late getting on the ice. Mark is the Captain. His forwards are unknown draft picks. But they're fast and smart and they skate and stickhandle like a young Wayne Gretsky. Team Redemption has only one line, but they play with everything they've got. They put their heart and soul into the game.

Paul scores an easy first goal, as he expected, but then Mark gets the puck. Mark is not like any of the opponents Paul has played before. Paul keeps trying to check him, but Mark seems to have wings on his skates, and he dekes the goalie to score three quick goals. Paul starts a fight and slams Mark's head into the boards. Mark won't quit. So Matthew gets the puck and moves the play across the centre line. It's offside, but the refs don't call it because they're paid on the sly by Paul's team. Mark's wingers retrieve the puck, score another goal with a beautiful slap shot. Paul is furious. He tells Luke to kill the clock until Team Redemption's line drops from exhaustion. Which they do.

Just for the thrill of it, Paul pummels every red jersey who drops to the ice.

Okay. That's the gameplay for the 1st century battle between Paul's team and Mark's team. Only the stakes were much higher for Paul and Mark, and the play was much more brutal than anything you'd see in a 1980's NHL game.

And you thought the New Testament was talking about boring ol' topics like peace, love, and hope!

The biblical book known as First Corinthians is a letter that was written by a confident "team captain." You can tell by the tone of the letter that Paul believes his preaching mission is going fairly well, despite some kinks that have be worked out with the Christian groups who live in the Greek city of Corinth. He's sure of his own authority. He describes himself in glowing terms as "like a master builder [who] laid a foundation" (1 Cor. 3:10). "For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ."

In other words, Paul, the master builder, has chosen as the foundation for all his authority, all his church building, and all his theology one man whom he calls Jesus Christ. This man Jesus is already dead. So Paul figures he can use this man's name and this man's "face" with impunity.

For a while, he gets away with it. (Goal #1). But he doesn't count on a direct challenge to his fabricated claim about "the Christ." He doesn't count on copies of his letter to the Corinthians ending up in Palestine. He doesn't count on somebody -- a somebody who knows a lot about the actual Jesus in question -- reading the copied letter and objecting vehemently to the content. He doesn't count on this somebody writing a searing point-by-point rebuttal of Paul's claims. He doesn't count on the courage of a man who wants to tell the truth about the life and teachings of Jesus son of Joseph.

By the time Mark writes his rebuttal in the early to mid 60's (a few years before the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple), Paul himself can't do anything about it. (He seems to have stopped writing in the late 50's, and we don't know for certain what happened to him.) But his successors can do something to undermine the dangerous assertions made by Mark. They can take Mark's manuscript and do a hatchet job on it, cutting and pasting the various fragments into new compositions (the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Luke), new compositions that change the original meaning and intent of Mark's portrayal of Jesus. They can try to force a blue and white jersey onto a physician scholar who was clearly playing for the red and black team, and if they're lucky, the audience will be so confused by the changing scorecard that they won't contest the final score of the game.

Based on the lasting success of Paul's strategy, along with his successors' strategies in the orthodox Western Church, I'd say his plan was quite effective. Ruthless. Heartless. Cruel. Inhumane. But very, very effective.

Understanding God's Relationship With Us

My New Testament professor once said in class, "Give me 15 minutes and I can find a proof text in the Bible for anything you want to justify."

You'll have noticed by now that I treat the Bible with a great deal of caution. For me and for many others, the Bible is a lot like a pit bull with a hair-trigger temper. One minute it's wagging its tail at you, spouting happy thoughts. The next, it's trying to rip your throat out.

I'm not one of those mystics who thinks the Bible is a lap dog that will always treat you kindly -- an immortal, timeless lap dog whose eyes are always filled with serenity and bliss if you know the secret of looking at it the right way. Spiritual talk of secrets -- secret knowledge (gnosis) and secret interpretations (symbolic readings of the Bible) -- makes me very nervous. I'll tell you why. It's because spiritual leaders who say they can teach you how to unlock the secret biblical interpretations are making some powerful claims about God. They're claiming that God isn't a very loving God or a very nice God at all.

Take the example of the book called Song of Solomon (also known as Song of Songs). Here is a lyric poem about human love (eros). It's filled with erotic imagery and metaphors that nobody can miss. Scholars think the poem (or collection of poems) was probably written in the 4th or 3rd century BCE. Despite the extremely obvious fact that the Song of Solomon is part of an ancient tradition of erotic love poetry written for a pre-Viagra age, the Song of Solomon started to be interpreted symbolically by religious teachers sometime around the start of the Common Era.

For about 2,000 years, then, theologians have been teaching the faithful to read Song of Solomon symbolically -- as an account of the love between God and Israel. Pious and devout people are expected not to notice or respond to the explicit sexual content. And fourteen year old boys are not to read it late at night by candlelight.

If this is a sacred text about the relationship between God and God's people, I'll eat my hat.

I'm very unhappy that this symbolic interpretation can only be arrived at through some pretty twisted mental gymnastics. I'm also wondering why it's only through a special secret scholarly key that regular people can see the "light of truth" hidden in this poem. As many mystics would have you believe, the majority of people -- regular people who aren't privy to the secret key -- won't be able to see and understand the wonderful "truth" buried in this erotic text. Regular people are too dull to see the "truth." Their corrupt, inferior human senses make them too stupid to understand what's actually written here.

And, of course, that's the way God wants it to be! (according to Gnostic teachers). God, in God's infinite wisdom, decided that most human beings are just too darned stupid and weak and untrustworthy to be entrusted with divine truth. So God hid it. God hid the light of truth in the deepest, darkest swamps, where regular people can't find it, and then God chose a few select warriors to go out and find the light and guard it. Because God is too weak and stupid to protect it. God, Creator of all Creation, is too weak and stupid to parent trustworthy children. God is too weak and stupid to share divine truth with all children equally. God is too weak and stupid to tell the honest truth honestly. God is too weak and stupid to communicate clearly to all people without the help, aid, or benefit of that trusty band of "specially chosen warriors of light."

Maybe it's because God is too busy thinking lascivious thoughts about the luscious gazelles and wild does in the Song of Solomon.

I hope the last sentence creeped you out. I know it creeped me out. But don't yell at me. I'm not the one going around claiming that Song of Solomon has an elevated message about the sacred love God feels for a few chosen children.

We have a term we use today for parents who engage in sexual conduct with their own children: we call them child abusers, and if we catch them, and succeed in convicting them in a court of law, we put them in jail. As we should.

The God I know is nothing like this. Nothing like this at all. The God I know and talk to every day as part of my mystical practice are my divine parents. God the Mother and God the Father are wonderful people. They're kind and thoughtful and generous and funny. They're extraordinarily patient. They always explain things in a way I can understand with my very human brain. If I don't understand something, they don't call me weak or stupid, but instead they always try a new tack to help me "put it together." They love me as their child, but I know I'm not loved more than anyone else. They love all their children with as much ferocity as they love me. It's the ferocious love that all loving parents know towards their children. It's lifelong devotion, commitment, sacred trust. It's safety. It's eternity.

There are precious few passages in the Bible that convey this sense of God's relationship with us as angels-in-human-form. The passages that do exist are almost buried under the holy mountain of piety, righteousness, law, fear, and obedience.

I say "almost."

Beautiful things grown in marshes. These blue flags from the iris family grow in many wet spots in Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2014.

 

The really cool thing is that the truthful passages "somehow" survived all the cuts, revisions, and ruthless doctrinal choices made by narcissistic theologians in the past. "Somehow" the Letter of James made it into the Christian canon, although many influential theologians (including Martin Luther) were openly hostile towards this letter. "Somehow" the Gospel of Mark was preserved, despite the best efforts of the authors of Luke and Matthew to eradicate its message by "improving" on it. "Somehow" the non-elitist Psalm 116 got tucked in there among the more famous Royal and Zionist Psalms.

I just love the way these truthful messages are "hidden in plain sight" where anyone with an open heart and a lick of common sense can find them.

Even better, these passages say what they say in an open, honest way. No special training is required. No promises are made to you about the hidden truth that will one day be revealed to you if only you submit to blind faith.

Divine truth needs no embellishment. It's beautiful just the way it is. Today. Not centuries from now, but today.

Which is pretty much what you'd expect from a wonderful, loving God.

Who Is the Snake in Genesis?

I make no apologies to anyone for trying to put the Book of Genesis in its proper historical context.

The Book of Genesis is one short piece of human writing, written for a specific purpose almost 2,300 years ago, and it's not reasonable, fair, or honest to place so much authority on this book. To insist that Genesis is the inspired word of God is to show a profound lack of trust and faith in God. If you want to continue to proclaim that Genesis's truth is more important to you than all the other evidence available to your mind, senses, and common sense, then please go ahead. But don't tell me in the same breath that you believe with your whole heart in God. Because you don't.

It's not acceptable for people in the 21st century to read Genesis as if it were written yesterday by well-meaning modern theologians. It wasn't. Genesis has to be understood in an ancient context -- a context that no longer exists in the modern Western world. It wasn't written for a postmodern world that believes in Newtonian science and human rights legislation. It was written for a world that believed at its core in occult magic and slavery.

Genesis was not written for Rabbinic Judaism or Christianity. Neither Rabbinic Judaism nor Christianity existed until the second half of the 1st century BCE. By that time, Genesis had been making the religious rounds for over 300 years. It was a very old text by the time both Jewish rabbis and early Christian preachers began to radically alter the way in which people were allowed to relate to God.

What was so different about early Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity in comparison to other religions of the time?

No Temple.

Judaism had to radically re-envision itself after the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. Christians, too, were supposed to pay more attention to their spiritual commitments and less attention to imperial temples. Neither 1st century religious group would have been recognizable to the people who wrote Genesis.

I don't give a hoot that the people who wrote Genesis may have been Jewish or may have spoken Hebrew. They weren't Jewish in the way that Judaism is practised today, any more than Alexander the Great's armies were Macedonian in the way that Macedonians understand themselves today. It's ridiculous to try to put 2,300 year old writings under the umbrella of political correctness. These writings were used in their early years for the express purpose of perpetuating HDM myths. For this reason, they need to be brought into the light of critical scholarship and examined honestly for what they actually say, instead of what we want them to say.

Among biblical scholars, there seems to be an almost fanatical self-imposed blindness when it comes to talking about the snake/serpent in Chapter 3 of Genesis (the snake that beguiles Eve). Many scholars will tell you that the snake shouldn't be read as a metaphor for Satan/the Devil, and I agree with them. In place of the snake-as-devil reading, the preferred explanation these days is that the story about the snake describes the "broken relationship" between humanity and God, a brokenness which is in turn the cause for our suffering as human beings.

I'm all for the big moment of psychotherapeutic interpretation, when, after many months of quiet listening, the therapist suddenly drops a major insight onto the unsuspecting heart of the suffering patient. But, you know, I'm not getting the sense that the authors of Genesis really cared that much about your suffering.

And usually the transformative interpretation comes at the end, not at the beginning. At the beginning, nobody's listening. It's only after a patient has heard him/herself talking for a while that he/she is ready to hear what the therapist has to say. (Reality TV shows, while not always ethical or kind, have at least shown us time and again that insight follows relationship, not the other way around.)

There's a much simpler and more obvious reading for the snake/serpent in Genesis, one that relates directly to the historical context of the Alexandrian authors.

The snake is Hellenism. Pure and simple.

Based on the evidence of Genesis, it seems that the Jewish scholars who lived in Alexandria, Egypt (a Hellenistic hot spot) were furious about the corrosive influence of Hellenistic religion and philosophy on their own traditions and beliefs, so they decided to fight back. They decided to give their faith community some ammunition to strengthen them in the great cultural war that Alexander the Great had unleashed on Egypt (and on many other places). This is a perfectly understandable motive. When outsiders push aggressively at you, you push back. Sometimes you push back with iron weapons. And sometimes you push back with words.

The Laocoon Group is a famous ancient marble excavated in Rome and now displayed in the Vatican. Laocoon was a Trojan priest who, according to myth, was killed, along with his sons, by serpents sent by a Greek god. (The identity of the Greek god, along with other details, varies from version to version of the myth.) Photo credit I. Sailko. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

In the early 3rd century BCE, nobody would have needed an explanation as to the snake's identity. If I were to say to you today, "the Eagle did it," you're probably going to think "American eagle" (or maybe Roman legions, if you're a real history buff). Same thing with the snake in the ancient world. The snake meant Greek ideas -- Greek myths and Greek magic -- which had had a HUGE impact on people's thinking all around the Mediterranean, and not always for the better.

Biblical scholars profess to be puzzled about the great void in the canonical Hebrew scriptures around Alexander the Great and his conquest of Syria-Palestine. They see many accurate, verifiable references to other known historical events, historical persons, and military campaigns (e.g. the Assyrian conquest, the Babylonian conquest, and the return of Jewish exiles to Jerusalem). But there's nothing -- not a thing -- in the canon about those Hellenistic bastards in the late 4th century.

Of course, Alexander's successors created empires. And emperors never look sympathetically on explicit criticism, do they? In any dangerous religio-political climate (as Alexandria would have been in 275 BCE), writers of polemic have to tread carefully for their own protection and the protection of their communities.

So you disguise your polemic in metaphors. You never mention specific pharaohs (in this case, Ptolemaic emperors) by name. You identify your enemies through metaphor (the wily Greek snake who entraps vulnerable Jews). And you pretend to set your claims in the far distant past (the Patriarchal Age) so nobody can accuse you of current sedition.

And you conclude your story in Egypt. Not in Judah or Israel, but in Egypt. And the hero of your story -- Joseph -- is technically a slave, but he's a slave with so much power and prestige that he has the ear of the (unnamed) Pharaoh. And God favours Joseph and his family, even though they all have to travel to . . . Egypt. And the hero and his kin inherit the fruits of God's first covenant with Abraham (Gen. 15:1-21; there's also a second covenant between God and Abraham in Gen. 17:1-27). And lo and behold! the first covenant says that Abraham's descendants are promised all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates River -- not coincidentally the choicest parts of Alexander's empire!

Genesis is focussed on Egypt because it was written for Diaspora Jews who lived in Egypt.

What's the big deal about that? It makes perfect sense in its own context. Let's just accept that and move on.

The Book of Genesis

It's hard to argue with the reality that the Book of Genesis has had a profound influence on the growth of three major world religions. It's a powerful tale that evokes intense emotions. It's been retold over and over to breathless new audiences over many centuries. Its images appear in great masterworks of art. If its authors were here today, they'd be very proud.

 

Ancient myths about trees of power, knowledge, healing, hidden things, and creation pop up in cultures all over the world. Photo credit JAT 2014.

 
Of course, I'm one of the small minority of people of faith who read Genesis using the standard tools of socio-historical criticism (form criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism, social-scientific context) and end up concluding two things: (1) that Genesis is a cut-and-paste work of theological polemic and (2) that Genesis was redacted much later than most of the historical and prophetic books of the Hebrew canon.

Let me be clear: I believe the Book of Genesis is NOT the inspired word of God given to an anonymous prophet thousands of years ago. I believe it is largely an extended myth. A work of fiction with some bits of historical truth. A book that has much more in common with J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings than with other Hebrew works such as Ezra-Nehemiah or Leviticus.

When I was doing research for my Master's research essay (short thesis), I came across the most wonderful book in the university library. I was actually looking for a different book, which I couldn't seem to find, when suddenly my eyes fell upon a strange title: Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus.* Say who? (For those who are interested, the full bibliographic data is below).

Russel Gmirkin, the author of this admittedly highly academic book, uses careful research into early sources to suggest quite convincingly that the first part of Genesis (chapters 1-11) couldn't have been written before 278 BCE. He also shows why it's likely that Genesis was first written in Alexandria, Egypt -- not, as you'd expect, in the land of Judah.

Meanwhile, it's no coincidence at all that another important work known to scholars as the Septuagint was also written at almost exactly the same time (c. 275 BCE) in exactly the same place (Alexandria, Egypt). What is the Septuagint? The Septuagint is the oldest known collection of Hebrew scriptures -- an early version of the "Old Testament" (as Christians call it). But it's not written in Hebrew. It's written in Greek.

Much to the embarrassment of orthodox Jewish and Christian scholars, until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947 at Qumran (south of Jerusalem), scholars hadn't found any pre-Common-Era versions of the Jewish Bible written in Hebrew** (or any major chunks of the Jewish Bible, for that matter). The next-oldest-known copy of the Torah (the Masoretic Aleppo Codex) dates from the 10th century CE -- a mere 1,000 years ago or so!

Until the late 20th century, then, everyone -- even Jewish scholars -- had been relying on various ancient translations of the Hebrew texts as they tried to reconstruct the process of canonization of the Jewish Bible. They had to rely on ancient translations because they didn't have any actual ancient Hebrew manuscripts to study. Thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars now have much more material to work with, but it's important to note that among the hundreds of scrolls found at Qumran, almost all are individual scrolls that contain only a single "book" (such as the Book of Genesis or the Book of Exodus).

Almost all of the 24 "books" that are found today in the Hebrew Scriptures have been recovered individually at Qumran (proving their early origins). But many other kinds of texts have been found there, too -- non-canonical works that bear little resemblance to today's Rabbinic Judaism. And, despite everyone's curiosity, it seems there's no evidence in the Qumran material for the existence of a fixed canon in the 1st and 2nd centuries BCE (in Judean Qumran, at least). There's no Hebrew equivalent of the Greek Septuagint to be found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. No big honkin' "Old Testament" to lug around and quote from (though, to be realistic, and fair to the scribes of the Qumran community, there's only so much text that can fit onto a single papyrus scroll.) Scholars found many Hebrew and Aramaic scrolls at Qumran, but no relatively stable canonical list to define and shape them. Meanwhile, the Septuagint was already "a going concern" in Greek-speaking Jewish communities outside Judea. (These communities are called the Diaspora). One of the biggest of these Diaspora Jewish communities happened to be centred in . . . Alexandria, Egypt.

This is important because the evidence available to us suggests very strongly that sometime around 275 BCE (in the early Hellenistic period that followed Alexander the Great's conquest of vast territories, including Egypt), a group of scholars got together in Alexandria, Egypt, and assembled a collection of pre-existing theological writings into a "canon." They decided on a list of scrolls or "books" that belonged together as part of this canon. The Alexandrian scholars certainly didn't write all the scrolls or "books" themselves. They merely collected together some scrolls that had been written by earlier Jewish thinkers, probably several centuries prior to their collation in the Septuagint.

These earlier scrolls had something important to say about God, in the view of the Alexandrian scholars. But when these assorted teachings were put together, they made a mishmash. The collection was disjointed -- really just a bunch of prophecies and histories strung together. They didn't make much sense when read one after the other on their own. So the scholars had to do quite a bit of editing and rewriting to tie everything together (a process called redaction). Then they added their own contribution: they wrote an introduction to the collection -- a myth that would tie together all the earlier prophecies into a cohesive theological book that would make sense (well, sort of).

Enter the highly influential book of Genesis, pieced together from bits and pieces of earlier material, written at the same time in both Greek and Hebrew versions, and placed at the very beginning of the collection to serve as a theological "preface" for everything else that would follow.

To be sure, many elements of Genesis can be traced to Ancient Near East sources (elements such as the Flood narratives), but all this proves is that the authors knew their sources and wanted to draw on them. It's part and parcel of theological writing: you always try to draw on earlier sources in order to establish your own authority.

Unless, of course, you're Job or Jesus.


*Russel E. Gmirkin. Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch. Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 433 and Copenhagen International Series 15 (New York: T & T Clark, 2006).

** The books that have been included in the Septuagint for at least 2,000 years were not all accepted into the tripartite Jewish canon when rabbinic scholars in the late 1st century CE made some final decisions about which books to include in the Jewish canon. Jewish scholars, followed later by Protestant theologians, decided to exclude from the canon such Apocryphal books as "The Wisdom of Solomon" and "The Wisdom of Jesus, son of Sirach." (The latter book is usually just called "Sirach" -- the Jesus referred to in the full title is not that Jesus, but an earlier man who had the same name.) The Septuagint, though modified many times over the centuries, is still the official Old Testament of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Hole-y Bucket of Humility

"There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole." 

"Then fix it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry, then fix it, dear Henry . . . " 

"With what shall I fix it, dear Liza, dear Liza . . ." 

The hole-y bucket of religious humility. There's a big hole right in the middle (or worse, the bottom) where the good stuff gushes out. You always feel half-empty in your relationship with God, instead of full to the brim with courage, trust, gratitude, and devotion. Photo credit JAT 2014.

You probably know this song from your childhood. We used to sing it at Brownies and at summer camp. It always made us laugh when we got to the punchline of the song: the bucket that started the song because it had a hole in it was the tool that was needed by Henry and Liza to fix said bucket. Without an un-holey bucket, they couldn't fix the hole-y bucket. But they only had one bucket -- the one with the hole in it. It was a circular argument.  

The orthodox Western Church's teachings on humility are exactly like this childhood song.

Before I talk about the Church's teachings on humility, though, I want to talk about a different core virtue, one that's never discussed in the church. This is the core virtue of humbleness. Humbleness is what Jesus taught. 

By contrast, humility is what Paul taught. Humbleness is a feeling that sort of settles into the middle of your heart after you find redemption. Humbleness is the natural state of thinking, feeling, behaving, and understanding that you end up with when you accept the redemptive power of God's forgiveness in your life. Humbleness is your natural soul state. It's who you really are underneath all the bullshit layers of status addiction. It's a deep sense of trust in yourself -- not a sense of pride or hubris, but a sense of trust. It's an unshakable sense of acceptance. It's a sense that God made you to be a particular person, and that's the only person you can be. So you stop fighting your inner self. And you become free to become your inner self.  

That's what humbleness is. It's a state of absolute freedom from the tyranny of status addiction. Once you're free from the constant voice of status addiction in your head -- the constant judging of yourself, the constant comparing of yourself to others, the constant criticism of others, the perfectionism, the self-pity, the lack of common sense, the lack of peace, comfort, and safety in your life -- once you're free of all that you can begin to like yourself as a person. (Wouldn't that be a refreshing change?)  

A humble person is free to make choices based on a whole new set of criteria. A humble person isn't worried about getting more status, so a humble person is free to practise the virtues of common sense. A humble person isn't trying to be somebody he's not, so a humble person doesn't feel guilty about following his calling. A humble person thinks it's wrong to accuse of God of being too stupid or too lazy to make souls that are all different from each other yet all equally beautiful and worthy. A humble person shows her love and respect for God by trying every day to be who she really is, instead of trying to be somebody she's not. A humble person knows his limits.  

This is not what the Church means when the Church talks about humility.  

The traditional orthodox Western position is that no human being (except that Jesus dude) has ever been truly worthy of God's love and trust. The Church starts with the assumption that you are a bucket (aka "a vessel") with a big, fat hole in the bottom. 

You are a bucket that needs to be fixed. All your courage and your faith have been draining out through the hole. Obviously, the hole needs to be patched. You must use your free will and your self-discipline to patch the hole so "the vessel that is you" can contain the love of Christ. But you must also practise humility. Humility demands that you not consider yourself a bucket at all, because then you'd be able to carry your own portion of courage and faith, which you're not allowed to have, because that would be presumptuous. Only when you rejoice in the fact that you're a bucket with a humongous hole in the bottom will you be able to feel Christ's love flowing through you and out into the world through the hole. You must therefore be a hole-y bucket in order to fix the hole-y bucket that is you.  

Catch 22, anyone? 

Let's imagine instead that the hole-y bucket is your biological brain/central nervous system. This bucket admittedly has a few holes in it by the time you've grown up. But these holes are fixable. More importantly, the holes are not you. They're not the real you. They're damaged biological parts that need to be healed (same as clogged arteries or a broken arm). So you find some qualified people who can help you heal them. Slowly, one by one, the holes begin to heal. You begin to discover somewhat to your surprise that you -- you, yourself, and you -- are capable of startling feats of compassion. The more healed your bucket, the more love and courage and faith your bucket is able to hold.  

Go figure. Who would guess that a bucket without a big hole in it would actually hold more of the good stuff (like love and forgiveness) than a hole-y bucket? 

Gee whiz, Mother and Father, that's, like, totally unfair of you to make our reality as humans so logical! 

Mother and Father, you rock!