Guru Repository Latest Articles

Getting a Grip on Unconditional

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Getting a Grip on Unconditional

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Written By: Wendell Krossa

It is the most profound insight ever discovered by conscious humanity, and is the most liberating idea ever conceived of by human minds. It is the very core nature of the Ultimate Reality that creates and sustains all other dependent reality. That makes this truth itself the ultimate truth and reality. There is nothing in the universe more important to know than this. Its importance outweighs all other knowledge and insight in the universe. Am I just engaging in excessive exaggeration? No. It is impossible to exaggerate the value of this insight or discovery. The Palestinian sage, Jesus, argued similarly for its supreme value and importance. He told stories of people who sold everything they had just to purchase this treasure. I refer to that element in his teaching of unconditional forgiveness, unconditional acceptance, and unconditional generosity, or to use a summarizing term- unconditional love.

Humanity has not yet begun to explore the infinity of potential in this feature of unconditional love. It holds the potential to liberate human minds and spirits from all the darkness and fear that has accumulated in consciousness over the millennia. It holds the potential to liberate humanity to create an unlimited future, an infinitely better future free of all darkness and violence, especially the darkness and violence that stems from our animal inheritance with its retaliation, domination, exclusion, vengeance, and destruction. It holds the potential to unleash a quantum leap forward in consciousness.

Among all the research coming out on the Historical Jesus I would argue that this one element in his message deserves special highlighted attention due to its strikingly unique character and potential. Don’t let over-familiarity with the term breed disinterest or a sense of having already fully understood it. It is widely used in religious circles as if self-evident in religious belief systems. But the religious context has seriously distorted the meaning of unconditional and diminished its profundity with traditional categories of payback justice, thereby rendering nonsense the basic meaning of unconditional. Nothing is more powerful or liberating than this concept. And this liberating potential is a prime reason for repeatedly revisiting and exploring unconditional, because too much payback darkness still remains in human consciousness and this is holding humanity back from the full freedom that is our rightful heritage.

Jesus, with his unique emphasis on this feature or element of unconditional, introduced something quite new and startling into the long history of human insight and perception. In fact, his particular teaching on unconditional love was so opposite to all previous conventional understanding (of deity, human ethics, etc.) that it appeared not just outrageously scandalous to many people but entirely insane. Even his own family concluded this much about him and his message, and said so. It simply did not fit any conventional paradigm of normality, justice, sanity, or common sense. Most previous human thought had been developed around ideas of payback justice with its elements of wrong behaviour, offended parties, deserved revenge, and just punishment. This form of justice had long been based on myths of displeased and retaliatory gods, demands for sacrifice or payment as the prerequisite for forgiveness, exclusion- in that only the so-called good or righteous were accepted (those obeying the laws and fulfilling the rituals of a society), while all others- the unrighteous or bad people- were excluded and punished. This was known as strict payback justice. Good was rewarded and bad was punished. It all seemed so common sense, so right, and just. It was a cause/effect or action/consequence approach that was assumed to be the natural and universal order of all reality.

But payback justice is nothing more than primitive retaliation and revenge dressed up in the robes of divinity and high-sounding legal terminology. It is not what we are to be as human. We are something much better. The ideas and practices of payback have brought a debilitating darkness to human consciousness and human societies, and have created endless unnecessary fear- whether fear of an angry deity, fear of rejection and loss (if you think parental rejection is devastating to children, imagine eternal rejection by your Creator Father), and fear of temporal and ultimate punishment. People have projected the worst concepts of retaliation and punishment onto divinity and in so doing made those concepts more intense and more threatening and almost impossible to re-evaluate and reject.

When you protect something under the canopy of the sacred (it’s from God) that thing then takes on an unchallengeable authority. The Palestinian sage Jesus, a common Jewish peasant, blew all this fear, anxiety and darkness away. He claimed that no sacrifice or payment was necessary to obtain forgiveness. Forgiveness was free and not mediated by the religion of the day or by any religious elites. By his words and actions, Jesus showed that all people were fully forgiven, all were accepted equally, and all were recipients of all good things (rain and sun sent on all alike, both ‘good’ and ‘evil’). He liberated human spirits from the darkness of payback and cleansed consciousness with a uniquely new light and love. A special effort was made to emphasize that forgiveness was offered to the lawbreakers, to those who refused to kowtow to the rules and rituals of the dominant groups of a society. The free spirits, atheists, tax collectors, bandits, prostitutes, poor, social outcasts, and any others on the lists of shame- these people were fully and equally the recipients of unconditional forgiveness, acceptance, generosity, and love. This made religion with all its mediating hocus-pocus entirely unnecessary.

Through sayings and stories, Jesus set forth an amazing new type of love without condition of any kind. It was expressed in such things as his telling people to lend to others and not expect repayment. He urged people to forgive endlessly and not keep a record of other’s wrongs, to not judge others faults. He urged them to not retaliate against wrong done or respond to violence with violence. All such teaching was summarized in his statement that urged people to not hate their enemies but to love them. If people did this then they would be like God (in the image of God). This was what God was like. God did not discriminate between good and bad people but welcomed all and treated all the same, with an open embrace of unconditional generosity. God did not look for payback or payment for wrongs done. God just forgave endlessly. God, as love, did not keep a record of wrongs (e.g. 1Cor.13- love does not keep a record of wrongs). God loved all- the best and the worst- just the same. Unconditional defines what it really means to be human and therefore to be like God.

But this new message of unconditional love offended good, moral people who were oriented to payback justice. It outraged their sense of justice as reward for good and punishment for bad. Payback has always discriminated between good and bad people and responded accordingly. Now Jesus was saying, “No- all people will receive the same generosity”. And if any of us are offended by this unconditional love then we have not yet fully grasped the scandalous nature of this love. We have missed the offensive point that Jesus made. It is a direct challenge to any and all payback thinking. It is a dangerous challenge to the conventional order of all things.

People who have worked hard, lived according to the rules, lived rightly as their group tells them to, have always expected that in the end justice will prevail and they will be honoured and others who have not done as they have done will be punished and even rejected. They believe this is what a righteous God is all about. Making all things right in the end as they have dreamed and longed for. In fact, good moral people have always dreamed of the ultimate payback scenario to make right all the unresolved good and evil that has been done on earth. That ultimate payback scenario is expressed in the religious vision of heaven and hell.

Jesus’ message frustrates such expectations and angers such people. He even evokes a murderous reaction from some otherwise good, moral people. They become incensed at this scandalous generosity. Much like Jonah who became angry and depressed when God would not punish his enemies but instead showed compassion and mercy to them. Many good, moral people respond just as Jonah does, with anger at this scandalous generosity shown to so-called evil or bad people (I only use these terms in acknowledgement of conventional categorization of those who break rules, and refuse to follow the customs and conventions of reigning cultural authorities or religious groups).

Now in Jesus’ stories the response of the audience to these expressions of unconditional forgiveness and generosity is central to grasping the offensiveness of such unconditional love. Jesus offered repeated examples of good people becoming notably offended or outraged and this clearly makes the point of just how scandalous unconditional love is to most good people.

Jesus’ own followers also took offense at his teaching on unconditional love and following his death they reverted to explaining him in terms of conventional payback justice. They buried his message in traditional mythology of an offended deity that would forgive only after a proper payment or sacrifice had been made for sin. His followers could not grasp what he was teaching and so they reverted back to conventional payback mythology to explain him. In doing this, they completely distorted and buried his message in Christian conditionality. This is all over the New Testament, in the dense and dark payback theology of Paul, Peter, John, and others (and in saying this I do not discount the other valuable insights also made by these people).

How do we know for sure that the theology of Paul and others is a direct contradiction and distortion of the message of Jesus? Let me respond with the good logic of the Jesus Seminar. They note, for instance, the statements attributed to Jesus in Matthew 11, where he apparently curses Capernaum. These statements, say the Seminar scholars, are not from the historical Jesus but are later additions put in his mouth by others advocating payback and trying to present his message in such terms. To quote the Seminar scholars, “Jesus would not have condemned the towns that did not accept him. He would not have told Capernaum to go to Hell after instructing his disciples to love their enemies...the reference to the destruction of Sodom is inimical to someone who taught his disciples to love their enemies” (The Five Gospels, p.320). If anything contradicts that core message of Jesus to show unconditional love to all, then it is simply wrong and should be rejected as not authentic to the core message of Jesus. That’s a great little rule of thumb when sorting out what is authentic to the historical Jesus and what is not.

So too, with anything else that tries to lessen or redefine the plain meaning of unconditional or to remove the offense from this powerful concept. Unconditional simply means no conditions at all. Nothing. No prerequisites; no post-requisites; no demands at all are to be met; no payments at all are to be made. Absolutely nothing is required to receive the fullest forgiveness, acceptance, generosity, and love from God. All persons are fully accepted and loved simply for being human persons. Every person is an imperfect human person, but each is a loved favourite of God no matter how failed a life was lived by that person.

The outrage and offense at the unconditional love taught by Jesus continues today, including among Christians who claim to be the legitimate followers and rightful guardians of his heritage. But in taking offense at the core message of Jesus on a radical unconditional treatment of others, Christians should beware of standing shoulder to shoulder with such shamed characters as the older brother to the Prodigal son, who took offense at the generosity of the father to his wayward son. They should be careful of standing against Jesus and with the hardworking labourers in the vineyard who were incensed at the generosity of the owner toward the latecomers, giving them the same reward as the regular hardworking labourers, despite their minimal output. Offended people stand with the men rebuked for seeking harsh payback justice for a woman caught in adultery. Believers in payback response stand with those men who were offended by Jesus’ acceptance of a ‘sinful woman’ that washed his feet with her hair. They were all offended and scandalized by this unconditional forgiveness, acceptance, generosity, and love shown to ‘unworthy’ and ‘evil’ people. It violated their sense of conventional justice. They believed that human failure should be punished as this was only right and just.

For millennia now we have had payback justice beaten into our consciousness as the natural and right order of things. This makes it very difficult for us to even begin to grasp this new unconditional response of Jesus toward all people, good or bad.

Let me take this element of unconditional to where it is really pointing and see how many good people I can offend in the process. It points to something entirely new to human consciousness- a radical new view of Ultimate Reality or Deity. It declares that the great and long-feared Source of all, is not threatening, avenging, or punishing. There is nothing to fear in God, but rather, God is indeed love. And now it has been revealed that God is not just love, but is of the nature of a scandalously unconditional love that overturns all previous associations of deity with any form of retaliation, vengeance, or punishment. This is indeed an entirely new God. An offensive and scandalous God. But an entirely humane God.

This view of God is presented right there in the Bible itself in various places, despite having been long buried in much surrounding payback mythology. Even in the Old Testament we were told of a God that did not want sacrifice, but mercy. We should have long ago known better that God was not interested in payment for sin but rather looked for mercy, forgiveness, and love. Note also all those New Testament writings that urge people to forgive and love enemies and to not keep any record of the wrongs of others. They are told to treat others generously without expecting payment. Now if people are expected to behave like this, why should we think that God is held to a lesser standard and allowed to demand payment before forgiving, or to keep a record of wrongs and demand payment for those wrongs? Surely God holds Godself to an even higher standard than what is demanded of us. We only work at trying to love. God is Love in its purest form.

Think of it- any high and humane response urged upon us imperfect people, well, we can be sure that it is a response that God also holds to, only in infinitely higher fashion. If God tells us to not retaliate against enemies but forgive and love them, then we can be certain that God does not retaliate against his enemies but forgives, no matter what they have done. Look at what Bob Brinsmead calls the greatest saying of Jesus, uttered while he was being crucified, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”. This, says Brinsmead, shows that in his heart Jesus had already forgiven those who were in the act of killing him. We all recognize that is a God-like response. Then how can we revert to a belief system that demands a blood sacrifice before forgiveness can be offered? Or that demands eternal punishment for human wrongs?

This new insight of Jesus points to something so incomprehensibly wonderful that it is even today hard to fully grasp. That all people, none excluded, are fully forgiven. All are fully accepted; all are loved equally. There is no special insider status for some, for the so-called obedient and righteous; the good people. There is no special treatment or reward for the faithfully religious. The failed addict on the street, or the criminal, is as valued and loved as any so-called lifelong moral or good person. In fact, according to Jesus, those who view themselves as the good people may actually be farthest from this kingdom of God- this kingdom of unconditional- and may be the last to grasp this amazing generosity and love. They show this by taking offense at unconditional love and even rejecting it as too shameful and scandalous, just as many did in the time of Jesus. Some were so angered by it that they fought it outright and planned to kill its leading advocate. It was that offensive and enraging.

Even today we find ongoing effort to explain this scandalous love away. While many religious people will acknowledge the term unconditional love as part of their belief system, they subsequently set about explaining it in terms of their traditional religious positions which demand all sorts of conditions and prerequisites. Yes, unconditional love they affirm, but first it depends on Jesus making a blood sacrifice or payment to satisfy the offended holiness of God. Then God can show unconditional forgiveness to those who repent and ask for it, and then change their ways by joining a good church and doing God’s will as taught by that church, and....and on and on it goes. You see what happens. Unconditional as taught by Jesus suddenly becomes something entirely different that is highly conditioned on full payment made before forgiveness can be offered and many other conditions. We are then right back to the old payback justice of all moral and religious systems. Unconditional has once again become conditional and the scandal is removed and the conventional sense of justice is once again satisfied. The brilliance of this new insight is then dimmed and its liberating power rendered impotent. People are once again enslaved to fear and anxiety over their standing.

And the core message of Jesus is eviscerated and made nonsensical. Conditions of any kind have nothing to do with authentic unconditional. If you cannot embrace unconditional with its basic meaning of no conditions, then use another term that denotes the conditions you are advocating. Call it highly conditional love, if such can even be called love.

And what about the common complaint from concerned people that such a teaching on unconditional love will produce carelessness about one’s behaviour? Not true. When people fully grasp something of the wonder of unconditional love, they feel the impulse to be and do the same. You see this in the accounts of people having Near-Death Experiences. They taste something of a wondrous unconditional love and then come back with a stronger desire than ever to live the same love in their lives. They want to be better persons, more loving, and to treat others better. They have come to realize how important love is, and especially unconditional love. Many of them do not see this same message taught in their religions and so become less religious, though more spiritual. They also often adopt a universal approach to belief systems and religions. They realize that God does not care at all about religion and belief systems but accepts all the same. They are beginning to grasp something of the real meaning of unconditional. It does not require adhering to some particular belief system or joining any religion. I would also add that you don’t need an NDE to understand this message of Jesus, and even some NDErs seem to miss the full scandal of such love.

What could this truth do if unleashed in human consciousness and societies? Well, think of the social costs of operating societies on the principles of payback justice. Payback is really just primitive retaliation and revenge dressed up in the robes of divinity and human justice. This payback thinking is at the root of so much interpersonal misery (getting even) and wider social misery and violence (again, getting even, punishing offenders, re-enforcing cycles of violent reprisal). Nothing is more practical than unconditional forgiveness and unconditional acceptance for resolving conflict in human relationships and wider relationships between societies. Nothing is more practical for bringing peace on earth and ending violence and war. Nothing is more effective for solving human pathologies that are re-enforced by payback. And nothing is more effective for meeting the deepest of human needs for acceptance and love. This unconditional insight is the key to the beginning of the infinity of progress toward something better. It will turn the current order or things upside down and this will anger many people. It will undermine power and status and spell the end religion. It is a dangerously upsetting idea.

So how to express the real nature of this scandalous unconditional element in Jesus’ teaching and life? Let me summarize it as plainly and bluntly and offensively as possible and do so by responding to the conventional myths and beliefs of payback systems: There is no threat behind reality. There is no angry god, seeking retaliation against bad behaviour and threatening punishment or demanding a payment before forgiving. As Bob Brinsmead has said, if any payment has to be made then forgiveness is not required. A God who demands payment in full, knows nothing of real forgiveness.

I continue- there is no hell for bad people or exclusive heaven for only good people. Illness, misfortune, suffering, and death are not punishment for sin. No one will be rejected by God. God is not angry with anyone. Lets rid our consciousness once and for all of such dark and depressing ideas of payback and conditions. There is nothing surrounding you but incomprehensible love focused on you despite whatever you have believed, thought, or done.

Every person- both so-called good and bad- is equally located in the very center of unconditional love, unconditional acceptance, and unconditional forgiveness at all times. Every person is the recipient of a scandalous generosity. Everyone has received the gift of consciousness or conscious existence as a unique person, a person created out of love, held in existence every moment by love, and who will be received back into that love in the end. Everyone is equally gifted with all the beauty of the world and the universe, and with all the resources of our physical reality. No one is of lesser or greater status in this kingdom of unconditional love. No one is on the periphery. All exist in the very center, fully accepted and loved by God.

Let me repeat for emphasis- every person, with all the differing degrees of imperfection and failure that are inherent to being human, is fully forgiven, and fully accepted, and a recipient of the scandalous unconditional love of God. None are excluded, not even the worst. Does that make you feel uncomfortable? Well, if we start to set boundaries and exclude others then where do we draw the line? We should remember that we have long tended to evaluate according to our own dark and vengeful nature and our impulse to wish others harm. Do we really think God is like us in the expression of our worst impulses? Then that would be a frightening God and none of us would be safe. No. God is unconditional love.

Try to grasp it in a personal manner- how would each one of us like to be treated? We would all prefer unconditional forgiveness, unconditional acceptance, and unconditional generosity. Well, then we ought to extend the same to all others, without limits or boundaries. We ought to treat others just as we would like to be treated.

No matter how we try to get a hold of it and express it, this unconditional love is still something incomprehensibly better than the best we can probe or imagine. Language superlatives cannot express it. It is something that liberates utterly from fear, worry, and anxiety and allows us to fully embrace ourselves and all life. It liberates people at the very core of their being- in their subconscious minds and the depths of their spirits. It inspires us to make life something better for everyone, for all life. Tasting something of unconditional love sparks a desire to bring this wonder to all life. It inspires all of us to create a better future, and to explore the infinity of human progress.

The historical Jesus points to something so amazing that it is worth more than anything else in the world. As noted before, he spoke of people discovering a pearl or treasure and selling everything to possess this treasure. He was referring to the kingdom of God that is unconditional love. This was the kingdom that he valued and taught others to seek. It ought to be valued above everything else in life. It was something so infinitely better than the best that could be imagined or expressed that it redefined the concept of transcendent. Whatever you can imagine about how good divine forgiveness, acceptance, generosity, or love might be, be certain that it is infinitely better than that imagination that tries to stretch into the infinite. This is what “God is love” really means. It makes everyone feel safe in the most ultimate manner.

But because of its potent overturning of conventional worldviews and power to disturb the peace of payback societies, such love has also became the ultimate offense and scandal to good moral people who have lived their lives oriented to a strict code of payback justice. If we do not offend one another with our description of unconditional love then we have not explained it properly or fully. Unconditional love is an offense to the common sense of justice as rewarding good and punishing bad. Look how such love offends good, righteous, hard-working people in the stories of Jesus. The point of including those people in the stories is to show the actual nature of unconditional response, that it offends and outrages good people. If it does not offend, then you are likely not getting close to what it really means.

This core teaching of Jesus has been long distorted and buried by the context of the Christian belief system and by the Christian theology of payment and justice. This is a great tragedy. It is time to liberate human consciousness fully and take it to new levels of advance. It is time to cleanse consciousness of the darkening beliefs of vengeful payback justice.

We need to be very careful of any qualifying explanation that weakens the scandal and offensiveness of the element of unconditional in Jesus’ message. It is something that should make everyone feel uncomfortable and dangerously in the realm of the outlaw. Don’t try to lessen the offensiveness. Don’t diminish the scandal by attaching any sort of condition. Don’t dim the brilliance; and don’t hinder the power of this unconditional to liberate the human mind and spirit by qualifying it in terms of conventional justice. Don’t try to save this generous God from himself, feeling that he has gone too far and will bring ridicule and charges of extremism and impracticality or loss of common sense.

Let unconditional bite fully. Then watch it transform human consciousness and unleash human creativity toward the infinity of progress into a better future.

Postscript: I have been hesitant to add the usual qualifiers to counter the complaint of some that advocating unconditional treatment of others appears to be advocating foolish things like letting dangerous criminals go free (e.g. psychopaths). Let me just say that unconditional love does not interfere with the obvious, which is responsibility to protect people from harm. But these rare exceptions do not void the basic thrust of unconditional treatment of others (including challenge to the barbaric prison systems we continue to employ). Such rare exceptions should not be employed as excuses for our responsibility to fully engage unconditional in all its offensiveness and scandal.

Religious trends in the West

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Religious trends in the West:

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

United States: At about the year 1990, Christianity started to lose market share in the U.S. The percentage of American adults who identify themselves as Christians dropped from 87% in 1990 to 77% in 2001 -- about 1 percentage point per year. The rate of decline then slowed; identification as Christian dropped to 76% in 2008. Sometime during the first decade of the 21st century, Protestant Christians became a minority in the U.S.

The percentage of adults who say that they attend church on most weeks is close to 40%. But, half are lying; a counting of noses reveales that the true value was about half of this amount.

Adults who identify themselves as having no religious affiliation are largely taking up the slack. According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey ₁ in mid 2007, 16.1% of the adult population reported being unaffiliated with any faith group. They consist of "Nothing in particular," Agnostics, Atheists, Secular unaffiiliated, and religiously unaffiliated persons.

Some small religions are growing rapidly. One example is Wicca, an Earth-based Neopagan religion. It is doubling about every 30 months.

If current trends hold, then sometime during the early 2030's, Christianity will become a minority religion in the U.S.

North America is rapidly becoming more religiously diverse. The Northeast is largely mainline Christian, liberal Christian, and secular. The South is largely conservative Christian. The West coast has many followers of eclectic and mystical religions. There may not be a strong enough foundation of religious tolerance in the U.S. and Canada to support this growing future diversity without significant conflict.

A major problem within many Christian churches is the disenchantment by many older teenagers and young adults. That does not bode well for the future of Christianity in the U.S.
Canada: Christianity has partly faded in Canada, where only 20% of adults say that they attend church regularly, and only about 10% actually do.
United Kingdom: Christianity has been largely abandoned in the UK. The decline started in the 1950's. By 1980, only about 12% reported that they attendeded church weekly. This is expected to drop to about 5% by 2015. Meanwhile, the average age of an attendee rose from 40 years in 1985 to 50 in 2010 and is expected to reach 66 by 2020.

As of early 2007, one survey showed that although 58% of UK adults still identify themselves as Christian, only about 15% of adults say that they attend any type of religious service once a month.

Atheists and Agnostics have grown to about 33% of the population. The religion/philosophy claimed by the Jedi Knights of Star Wars fame is now the fourth largest religion in the UK! ₂
Elsewhere in Europe: One 2007 survey showed that five countries that are predominately Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox have high church attendance: 76% in Poland, 67% in Ireland, 55% in Greece, 47% in Portugal, 44% in Italy. The lowest rates of churchgoing is found in Denmark, 9%; France: 14%; Hungary: 18%; Belgiium: 19%; Germany: 20%; Netherlands: 21%. ₂

It may be significant that Denmark was found to be the happiest place on Earth; the U.S. was rated the 23rd happiest country.

Borrowing from Ancient Mysteries?

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Borrowing from Ancient Mysteries?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Wendell Krossa

Here is a response from an Evangelical to the argument that Christianity borrowed from surrounding mythology.

“Even secular scholars have rejected the idea of Christianity borrowing from the ancient mysteries. The well-respected Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard writes in Theories of Primitive Religion that The evidence for this theory… is negligible.

“The first real parallel of a dying and rising god does not appear until A.D. 150, more than a hundred years after the origin of Christianity. So if there was any influence of one on the other, it was the influence of the historical event of the New Testament (resurrection) on mythology, not the reverse. The only known account of a god surviving death that predates Christianity is the Egyptian cult god Osiris.

“In this myth, Osiris is cut into fourteen pieces, scattered around Egypt, then reassembled and brought back to life by the goddess Isis. However, Osiris does not actually come back to physical life but becomes a member of a shadowy underworld… This is far different than Jesus’ resurrection account where he was the gloriously risen Prince of life who was seen by others on earth before his ascension into heaven. –Dr. Norman Geisler.”

Bob Brinsmead

As for the Dying and Rising gods: This is a bit like the Documentary Hypothesis - in more conservative circles one heard it said quite often that the DH is now dead - but as Friedman says and has quite well demonstrated, it is not dead at all, but with time it has been refined and strengthened. It is the same with the debate over dying and rising gods. A scholar by the name of Mark S. Smith is credited with demolishing this theme in an essay in 1998, which is often cited for the fact. It seems that his argument is based on dissimilarity of these old myths and the Christian myth. Of course there is dissimilarity, as the old myth of Osiris was reset in culture, after culture, and consequently underwent re-shaping. Anyhow, the whole question is revisited by Tryggve N.D. Mettinger's, The Riddle of Resurrection: 'Dying and Rising Gods' in the Ancient Near East. This published book puts the whole debate beyond question in my mind - he demonstrates that the idea of dying and rising gods saturated that culture and permeated its religious thought.

The proposal that Christians did not borrow from pagan myths is periled - a very good book on the subject is by a Canadian Episcopalian, Tom Harpur. He not only acknowledges the pagan borrowings but takes the interesting view that these pagan mysteries were expressing universal truths, or at least one’s struggling for expression. He does not use the evidence of the borrowings as a big stick to beat up on the Christian faith, but shows there has been a progressive development of basic themes since ancient times down to the time of Christ. This is a thoughtful book - almost an apologia for the incorporation of ancient myths into Christian religion and ritual.

The History of Historical Jesus Research

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

The History of Historical Jesus Research

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Written by: Luke Muehlhauser on November 30, 2008 in Historical Jesus

Jesus of Nazareth may be the most important person in the history of Western Civilization, but we know little about him. As with most ancient persons, our sources for the life of Jesus are few, contradictory, and mixed up with myth and legend. It’s not surprising that scholars and religious groups assert radically different ideas about who Jesus was.

Another problem is that for most of history, scholars didn’t even try to use objective scientific/historical methods to find out who Jesus was. Historical Jesus research is a young, exciting field of study, with important new works being published each year.

Scholars think of historical Jesus research as having four stages:

No Quest: 26-1738
Old Quest: 1738-1940s
New Quest: 1950s-1970s
Third Quest: 1980s-today

No Quest: 26-1738

For most of history, Jesus was simply worshiped as the Christ. The historicity of the gospels was assumed, even though the contradicted each other. The historical Jesus was the Jesus of faith; Jesus was whoever your flavor of Christianity told you he was.

Old Quest: 1738-1906

Seventeen centuries passed before scholars tried to reconstruct the historical Jesus from the evidence.

Thomas Chubb (1679-1747) questioned religious morality and demanded that dogma be subject to reason. He defended Christianity and argued that Jesus’ core message was the imminent Kingdom of God and good news for the poor.

H.S. Reimarus (1694-1768) denied miracles and listed contradictions in the Old and New Testaments. For Reimarus, Jesus didn’t want to supersede Judaism with his teachings. The disciples, dismayed that Jesus’ predictions didn’t come true, stole his body and then invented stories about him to support their individual theologies.

David Strauss (1808-1874) analyzed the gospels’ miracle stories as myths. His book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined was called “the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell.”

Ernest Renan (1823-1892) urged that Jesus’ life should be studied critically like that of every other man, an idea which enraged the Church. He read French Romanticism into the life of Jesus, for example suggesting that Jesus wept at Gethsemane because he imagined “the young maidens who, perhaps, would have consented to love him.”

Martin Kahler (1835-1912) drew a distinction between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of faith, and said we should let the Christ of faith replace the historical Jesus.

Emil Schurer (1844-1910) helped launch the study of ancient Judaism, though it was seen as merely the “background” for the New Testament.

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) shook things up in 1906 with The Quest of the Historical Jesus. He showed that these scholars and more had only “discovered” a Jesus they wanted to see, and did not employ rigorous and disinterested research. Schweitzer’s own theory was that Jesus was most concerned with the coming end of the world.

Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) launched Form Criticism, the study of the literary forms in the gospels. He defended the idea that Matthew and Luke are dependent on Mark and a lost book called Q, now the dominant scholarly opinion. He attempted to “demythologize” the gospels, hoping to ignore superstitious claims about the virgin birth of a god-man while focusing on the symbolic truths of the gospels.

The Old Quest was heavily driven by theology, and paid little attention to archaeology or historical method. Still, it was the first attempt to understand Jesus apart from church dogma.

New Quest: 1950s-1970s

In 1953, Ernst Kasemann argued that we can discover more about Jesus than his teacher Rudolf Butlmann thought, and that the historical Jesus is crucial for authentic Christian faith.

The creation of Israel in 1948 brought renewed interest to the study of Judaism in Jesus’ time, and the discoveries of the Nag Hammadi library (1945) and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1947) brought archaeology and textual scholars into the field of Jesus research.

Other New Quest writers include Gunther Bornkamm, W.D. Davies, John A.T. Robinson, and Edward Schillebeeckx.

Third Quest: 1980s-today

By the 1980s, something new was happening. Theological concerns diminished, and scholars used scientific historical methods to discover the Jesus who actually lived in history. New Testament scholars joined with experts in ancient Judaism, textual critics, sociologists and archaeologists.

Because Jesus research had now submitted to agreed-upon scientific and historical methods, a wider variety of scholars participated. As James Charlesworth puts it, today “it is often not asked – or even obvious – if an author is a Roman Catholic priest… a liberal Christian, a conservative Christian, a Jew, an agnostic, or an atheist.”

Major scholars of the Third Quest include David Flusser, Geza Vermes, E.P. Sanders, Marcus Borg, James Dunn, N.T. Wright, J.P. Meier, John Dominic Crossan, Gerd Theissen, Paula Fredricksen, Gerd Ludemann, Bruce Chilton, Gary Habermas, and L.T. Johnson.

In 1985, Robert Funk founded the Jesus Seminar, a group of about 150 scholars in biblical studies and related fields. They discuss the historical Jesus and then vote on what they think is historical or not historical. Also, the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion launched The Jesus Project this month, another gathering of scholars to investigate the historical Jesus.

Due to inevitable prejudice and the scarcity of good evidence from Jesus’ time, modern scholars have a wide range of opinions on who the Historical Jesus was: Jesus the Myth, Jesus the Wisdom Sage, Jesus the Social Prophet, Jesus the Savior, Jesus the Hellenistic Hero, Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet, and more.

New discoveries and perspectives are also being drawn from existing evidence. Dennis MacDonald recently found that some gospel stories emulate the Homeric epics in great detail. Next year I look forward to new books on the historical Jesus from Richard Carrier and Robert Price.

Though the scientific study of the historical Jesus has just begun,¹ we should be grateful for the current state of Jesus research. By comparison, the Quest for the Historical Muhammad has only just begun, and similar quests for a historical Buddha, Abraham, Lao Tzu, or Socrates may always be impossible.

The fallout of the Nobel scam of 1946

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Lawrence Solomon: The fallout of the Nobel scam of 1946

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lawrence Solomon Feb 10, 2012 – 8:27 PM ET

Scientist’s radiation cover-up might have cost thousands of lives

Why do most people today, scientists included, believe that small doses of radiation are harmful to human health when no proof for this theory exists, and when mountains of evidence show the opposite — that small amounts of radiation actually promote health? After years of sleuthing into historical records, a scientist at the University of Massachusetts has found a smoking gun, involving a scientific scam in 1946 at the very highest echelons — the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm.

In an august Nobel hall one year after the end of the Second World War, the scientific world was knowingly misled by Hermann J. Muller, winner that year of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. This is the verdict from a forensic review entitled Muller’s Nobel Prize Lecture: When Ideology Prevailed Over Science, just published by the Society of Toxicology in the Oxford University Press’s Toxicological Sciences. Had Muller spoken the truth and revealed the existence of contradictory research in the world’s most prominent scientific gathering, we might today have an entirely different view of radiation and its effects, preventing immense human suffering and the loss of countless lives.

Prior to the Second World War, the world of medicine saw radiation as a life-giving therapy as well as a diagnostic tool: Ordinary X-ray machines were widely used to zap more than two dozen different types of infections, gangrene among them, miraculously eliminating the need to amputate limbs. But science didn’t understand how exactly radiation worked its wonders, leading to conjecture that radiation, a known killer at very high doses, might do harm as well as good. One theory that arose held that radiation also killed at low doses, only in smaller proportions. This theory — that there is no safe dose for radiation — became the focus of a hot dispute, with one medical camp accepting it, the other rejecting it, and both investigating it.

Muller was in the ascendant “no safe dose” camp that claimed that there is no threshold below which radiation stops being harmful. As he told the distinguished attendees in Stockholm in accepting his Nobel Prize, the evidence now leaves “no escape from the conclusion that there is no threshold dose” of radiation. It was a convincing performance in the world’s most prestigious scientific gathering, except Muller himself knew that statement to be unsupportable. The historical evidence, as uncovered by Edward Calabrese, the author of the forensic review, leaves no escape from the conclusion that Muller was engaged in duplicity.

Five weeks before Muller delivered his Nobel acceptance speech, he had received a manuscript from Prof. Curt Stern, a prominent radiation geneticist who had headed a project for the Manhattan Project that had also employed Muller as a consultant. The manuscript confirmed an earlier study that demonstrated a safe dose. Muller responded to Stern in a private letter, saying he had no dispute with the study but felt that its findings were so significant to the debate that the new study needed to be replicated as soon as possible, a major undertaking that would take a year.

Muller then went to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize as if the manuscript had never existed. Another several weeks and Muller again wrote Stern, to again impress on him the importance of replicating the manuscript’s findings. As Calabrese’s expose reveals, Muller not only convinced the Nobel Prize assemblage that the science was settled on the danger of low levels of radiation, he also succeeded in marginalizing the Stern manuscript, effectively thwarting important lines of inquiry. Score one giant victory for scientific deception, one giant loss for truth in science.

What harm was done by Muller’s false assertion in Stockholm? Although the scientific world has recently rediscovered the benefits of low levels of radiation in a growing discipline called radiation hormesis — universities now offer courses in hormesis and scientific journals publish an increasing number of hormesis studies — Muller’s role in derailing research over many decades is undeniable. The costs have been incalculable. As good as antibiotics have been, for example, they continue to underperform the pre-Second World War success rate of X-ray therapy in preventing amputations and deaths from gangrene. Studies also show that routine exposure to low levels of radiation act as a tonic, dramatically preventing numerous diseases, including major killers such as heart disease and cancer.

Muller is now dead and buried, along with perhaps thousands, perhaps millions who met an untimely death in part because of him.

Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers.

To read the expose of Hermann Muller, click here.

Who's Your Daddy - A Familiar Story

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Who's Your Daddy - A Familiar Story

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A seminary professor was vacationing with his wife in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

One morning, they were eating breakfast at a little restaurant, hoping to enjoy a quiet, family meal. While they were waiting for their food, they noticed a distinguished looking, white-haired man moving from table to table, visiting with the guests. The professor leaned over and whispered to his wife, 'I hope he doesn't come over here.' But sure enough, the man did come over to their table.

'Where are you folks from?' he asked in a friendly voice.

'Oklahoma,' they said.

'Great to have you here in Tennessee,' the stranger said... 'What do you do for a living?'

'I teach at a seminary,' he said.

'Oh, so you teach preachers how to preach, do you? Well, I've got a really great story for you.' And with that, the gentleman pulled up a chair and sat down at the table with the couple.

The professor groaned and thought to himself, 'Great.. Just what I need.... Another preacher story.

The man started, 'See that mountain over there? (Pointing out the restaurant window). Not far from the base of that mountain, there was a boy born to an unwed mother. He had a hard time growing up, because every place he went, he was always asked the same question, 'Hey boy, who's your daddy?' Whether he was at school, in the grocery store or drug store, people would ask the same question, 'Who's your daddy?'

He would hide at recess and lunch time from other students. He would avoid going in to stores because that question hurt him so badly. 'When he was about

12 years old, a new preacher came to his church. The boy would always go in late and slip out early to avoid hearing the question, 'Who's your daddy?'

But one day, the new preacher said the benediction so fast that the boy got caught and had to walk out with the crowd. Just about the time he got to the back door, the new preacher, not knowing anything about him, put his hand on his shoulder and asked him, 'Son, who's your daddy?'

The whole church got deathly quiet. He could feel every eye in the church looking at him. Now everyone would finally know the answer to the question, 'Who's your daddy?'

This new preacher, though, sensed the situation around him, and using discernment, said the following to that scared little boy.. 'Wait a minute! I know who you are! I see the family

resemblance now, You are a child of our Father, God.'

With that he patted the boy on his shoulder and said, 'Boy, you've got a

great inheritance.. Go and claim it.'

'With that, the boy smiled for the first time in a long time and walked out the door a changed person. He was never the same again. Whenever anybody

asked him, 'Who's your Daddy?' he'd just say, 'I'm a Child of our Father, God.''

The distinguished gentleman got up from the table and said, 'Isn't that a great story?'

The professor said that it really was a great story!

As the man turned to leave, he said, 'You know, if that new preacher hadn't told me that I was one of our Father's children, I probably never would have amounted to anything!' And he walked away.

The seminary professor and his wife were stunned. He called the waitress over and said, 'Do you know who that man was -- the one who just left who was sitting at our table?'

The waitress grinned and said, 'Of course. Everybody here knows him.

That's Ben Hooper. He's the governor of Tennessee!'

About NDE Experiences

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Exchanges Between Friends – NDE Experiences

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Wendell Krossa

Cherie Sutherland is a near-death researcher with a number of books out on this experience. She is always a worthwhile read. Her book on children’s NDEs is similarly worth reading (Children of the Light). Lots of fascinating insights from these accounts.

She quotes this excerpt from William Wordsworth at the front of this book:

“Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come,

From God, who is our home”

Reminds me of the Catholic theologian who said, “We come from love, we exist in love, and we return to love in the end”. Our true home.

William Ferguson

The Scottish boy who lived before, quite amazing...

http://youtu.be/WoSrzpLoODo

There 5 parts, about 10 min each. Appears to be a British TV program.I don't think Heaven/Nirvana is a final destination. I think it’s a rest stop and R&R! More fuel for the planet diver theory....it’s about adventure!

Herb Sorensen

I was a kid when the Bridey Murphy story first broke, and became a fabulous hit, with the book, and later movie. It is directly germane to all this NDE discussion, and you should review it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridey_Murphy

It also closely, after the fact, follows the Helen Keller/Frost King story. Briefly, Helen Keller wrote a story as her own, which is remarkably similar to another story that she had heard, possibly as a young child. Serious charges of plagiarism were made, with a vigorous battle thereon, later characterized by Mark Twain as "owlishly idiotic and grotesque."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frost_King

Both of these incidents point up the SERIOUS flaw of relying on subjective personal accounts of perceptions which are being described as "near death experiences." When I was still in college in the early 60's, there was a fellow student much interested in such phenomena, and my memory is vague, but as I recall, he attributed some of this to birth experiences where one emerges into the light - presumably an experience common to nearly everyone who was born in a dark room.

As an agnostic, I can entertain interpretations where actual objective facts are in scant supply. But in all the discussion and attribution going on here, it occurred to me that at least some one here has considered a lot more than what I am calling attention to. I'm curious, as usual.

Wendell Krossa

Herb, the rip roaring debate goes on, as does all sorts of research. Note for instance Sam Parnia’s group and world-wide project. And of course, we have noted repeatedly Van Lommel’s summary of research and sceptical counter arguments.

As you look at the research, the explanations, the many varied accounts themselves, you come up with some personal guidelines as to what elements appear truthful and what comes down to subjective personal interpretation (though still based on some reality), and what is shaped by memory and culture and belief, and on and on.

For myself, I have found an endless source of good insight, much of if affirming personal belief from my own study and reflection on varied issues. What the NDEs do is offer some more personal detail (filling out things we have thought of) and for that we can be thankful.

Most important to paying attention to this still emerging phenomenon, is laying a death blow to humanity’s long held fear of dying and death. This is liberating, and it is liberating many to live more fully now. This may presage some significant shift or advance in public human consciousness… Who knows.

Even more important than the above, is that this NDE thing is once again reviving a focus on unconditional love, something long ago advocated by that Palestinian sage, a profound insight and message that was buried by subsequent Christianity.

As to the varied personal features in NDEs that seem strange at times, even corny and excessively religious, well, there are some good explanations found throughout varied books on the subject. Howard Storm offers this (My Descent Into Death), “(on people taken from this world and introduced to the wonder and power of God)...there are as many entry points into heaven as there are individuals. Each person is escorted toward heaven according to his or her life, culture, and spiritual level. One person may be in a beautiful field, another may be in a magnificent castle, another in a setting in their grandparent’s home. God and the angels, for the specific comfort and beginning edification of that person, individually create each setting. It is difficult for us to understand and believe how much God cares about and respects our individuality...we will grow and be transformed”. And this after sections on love and that God does not control or coerce.

That suits well my understanding of the nature of true love. And so even if I cringe at some of the things I read in these accounts, I am willing to grant that it may be what someone else needs for where they are.

This does not mean we accept it all as ‘truth’. No. A lot of this stuff has to be challenged and exposed for what it is. And some are using their accounts to push the same old, same old. Brutal mythology that only perpetuated darkness here and should not be allowed to continue unchallenged. Some of it has nothing in common with unconditional love and the brilliance of this light. So as in all things, we use our powers of discernment. According to where we are in our own journeys.

And go easy on those who differ.

Love Encompasses Freedom

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Love Encompasses Freedom

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Written By: Bob Brinsmead

The greatest word at the heart of OT, especially the Prophets is sadaq - justice - nothing syrupy about it. But the meaning is equivalent to the greatest word at the heart of the NT - agape (love)

Walter Kaufman wrote a book called "The Faith of a Heretic." He claimed that the ethic of the OT prophets was superior to the ethics of the NT. Of course, he could have been expressing his suspected Jewish bias here, but he makes a good case for his contention.

As I have argued, Jesus conflated the two great commandments - love of God and love of neighbour - into one commandment and thereby put the axe at the root of all religiously inspired violence. But on the negative side, it has to be said that NT love ends up by going down the road of "love of the brotherhood" or love of fellow Christians viz a viz the world. The NT does not preach love of heretic nor love of the Jews who failed to become Nazareens. There are legititimate question marks to put on the typical Missionary Love. Paul had this kind of love for the Jews, but when they failed to respond, he became quite vitriolic toward them a la his Thessalonian letters. Luther did the same. The young Luther argued that the Jews had failed to respond to the Christian message because of the way the Christian world had treated them. If they were subjected to a more Christian (loving) approach, Luther argued that they would respond. The older Luther, finding that the Jews would not respond to the Christian gospel, no matter how it was dressed up, poured out the most passionate vitriol against the Jews.

In this vein, the Gospel of John is somewhat of an embarrassment to those whose ecumenism embraces the Jews. It contains the potent anti-Judaism of the NT.

But to get back to Koffman's point. NT love for the most part is love for the brother or insider, not love for the opponent of your faith or the outsider. The very worst expression of this intra-sectarian love is the Book of Revelation. Religion in the sense of law/dogma, generally enforced by rewards and punishments, motivated by the fear of death and guilt, is Egypt. It has a certain appeal as the Israelites found when they ran into hardships and uncertainties, but Egypt is the land of bondage.

Even St. Paul would agree the law/religion was for minors, a pedagogue and a jailer until coming of age. See Galatians 3. I think Paul screwed some things up, but his really big insight was in this area of human freedom. "If you are led by the Spirit you are not under the law."

When a kid is learning to play the piano he must practise the scales and follow the precise rules of music as taught by the teacher. But the more mature piano player, especially if he is a genius, transcends or ignores a lot of the rules he learned as a kid.

Here's the quote:

'Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.'

That's includes religious dogma - a lot of it formed by goat herdsmen in a primitive, superstitious and pre-scientific age. Like the myth of the devil!

With the promise of eternal blessedness if you believe thus and thus, and damnation if you don't. This is mind control through the manipulation of fear of death and fear of guilt. . Some Christian missionaries have taught that they are rescuing people from eternal hell fire. It's message is about believing this dogma, accept the love of God in this package, or he will beat the crap out of you. I won't demean what it means to be human by using this sort of thing as a servant, an instrument - for that is using dogma to turn people into victims for your advantage. I have no use for the whips and chains of Egypt.

Mark's portrait is not very human, in some respects he’s a brooding, ill-tempered man. A scholar recently has done a fine job of showing parallels between Homer’s writings (Illiad and Odyssey) and Mark. The correlations are quite amazing. Everyone in that day learning Greek used Homer as the basic Reader from which to learn, and the miracles of Homer were quite well known - Mark did a re-run of Homer - some of the miracles are astonishingly the same in both Homer and Mark. Or was it as Justin Martyr said, the devil foreseeing the deeds and miracles of the Christ, sought to parody them in pagan writings. Really now! Did Homer mimic Mark or did Mark mimic Homer. Anyway, this recent scholarly thesis is one of the most astonishing things I have read on the literary borrowings of the NT.

'Things That Matter': Historical Jesus Studies in the New Millennium

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

'Things That Matter': Historical Jesus Studies in the New Millennium

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

From: http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?articleId=333

The flurry and the furor of historical Jesus studies that marked the 1990s is over. The Jesus Seminar has gone on to study Paul and creeds. N. T. Wright is now Bishop of Durham and producing a series of devotional commentaries. His fellow bishop John Shelby Spong has turned his attention to advocating gay marriage and denouncing theism. Raymond Brown is gone (and missed). Somewhere in the bowels of Notre Dame's libraries John Meier must be tediously working on Volume Four of his magnum opus, and we will all read it when it arrives, but there is not quite the breathless anticipation that awaited Volume Two.

Serious scholars are still doing serious scholarship but, at a popular level, fans of the historical Jesus may long for those days when the discipline was more lively. Remember when Time and Newsweek devoted at least one cover each year to Jesus studies? Now they've had to turn to The Da Vinci Code, Mel's passion movie, the Left Behind series, and (God help us) Christian rock to sell those requisitely religious mid-December and holy week issues.

On cable television the VH1 network (that's the pop-music video channel for you ivory-tower types) is currently enjoying a hit with their nostalgia series I Love the Nineties. The show explores images and fads from a decade gone by: it was the time of Ally McBeel, Tanya Harding and Tickle-Me-Elmo.

And it was a time when Bible scholars could blackball Jesus by dropping little marbles into bowls; when headlines could scream, "Scholars Decide: Jesus Did Not Teach the Lord's Prayer"; when John Dominic Crossan could announce that the post-crucifixion body of Jesus was devoured by wild dogs. Jane Schaberg called Jesus a (literal) bastard; Meier called him "a marginal Jew"; Leif Vaage said he was "a party animal"; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza characterized him as a feminist prophet of the goddess Sophia; Crossan described him as "a Galilean hippie in a world of Augustan yuppies." At one meeting I attended, a journalist named Russell Shorto—who was covering the event for (get this!) GQ magazine-turned to me and said, "You can't make this stuff up!"

So where are we now? What are the earmarks of Jesus scholarship in the mid-2000s? I'll name five features that distinguish the discipline in just what might turn out to be its doldrums decade—and you can decide for yourself how to evaluate what seems to be transpiring.

First, I notice a decrease in biographies of Jesus and an increase in dissertations concerning him. That translates into more focus on detail. There is a new generation of scholars who seem to have little interest in telling us everything about Jesus but who possess a passion for persuading us of some one thing that they are sure is true.

Second, I notice less reliance on the apocryphal gospels than was in vogue a few years ago. No one can ignore those writings completely, but they seem to have worn out their welcome among many scholars who think that their significance for historical reconstruction was exaggerated. With the possible exception of the Gospel of Thomas, the apocryphal works are almost unanimously viewed as late and all but void of historically reliable material independent of what can be found in canonical writings.

Third, I think I notice an increased interest in the historical Jesus on the part of women scholars, though the field remains overpopulated with men. Kathleen Corley, Amy-Jill Levine, and Paula Fredriksen have joined Schussler Fiorenza and Schaberg as high-profile examples of scholars who have gone where few women have gone before, and the "Call for Papers" that goes out for each annual meeting of the SBL inevitably draws responses from female doctoral candidates around the globe. The nature of Jesus' stance toward women has been a topic of special interest to these and other scholars, as has the related question of what can be affirmed historically of his female associates (especially his mother and Mary Magdalene).

A fourth trend is more difficult to name and will take some time to substantiate. I discern what I can only describe as a resurgence of orthodoxy. Conservatives, traditionalists, evangelicals—call them what you will—have entered the field in droves and, in many cases, have seized the offensive. In the 1990s, Jesus studies was stereotyped as a left-wing haunt for radicals and disaffected apostates; the cautious and the conventional (Meier; Wright) were viewed as "hold-outs" from a previous era. Evangelical scholarship was almost always defensive and reproachful, as might be inferred from the literally inflammatory title of the popular book Jesus Under Fire (ed. by Michael Wilkins and James Moreland). Luke Timothy Johnson also devoted an entire book to kicking against the goads and won himself a place in evangelical hearts he had not inhabited previously (see The Real Jesus; for the goads reference, cf. Acts 9:5; I avoid using the KJV translation, though some might have thought it applied).

Times have changed and those who maintain that the Gospel portraits of Jesus are largely inauthentic, now find themselves on the defensive. The single greatest factor in this turnabout has probably been the dethroning of dissimilarity as the favoured criterion for historical research. For decades, scholars deemed material inauthentic if it seemed overly compatible with the interests and ideologies of developing Christian religion. There is logic to this that ought not be dismissed, but scholars with a more optimistic appraisal of tradition have complained that such a criterion guarantees a Jesus who has little in common with those who were willing to die for devotion to his cause.

The conservatives (or whatever one wants to call them) often claim to have Occam's razor on their side. Let's take two examples:

1. Jesus fulfills what were thought to be messianic prophecies. The dominant paradigm for decades held that those instances in which the Gospels portray Jesus doing things that the scriptures were thought to predict the Messiah would do, must be regarded as apologetic fabrications of the early church. A new wave of scholars has asked which of two scenarios seems more likely: a) Jesus never claimed to be the messiah, but his followers decided that he was the messiah nonetheless; these otherwise honest persons then scoured the scriptures for passages that spoke of the messiah and proceeded to make up stories about Jesus that presented him as doing the things that they now thought he should have done; or b) like several other persons known to us, Jesus became convinced that he was the messiah; he read or heard about things that the scriptures supposedly said the messiah would do and tried to shape his life accordingly.

The latter scenario does not explain everything, but it might allow authentication of much that those who rely on the criterion of dissimilarity would dismiss. Of course Jesus could not have orchestrated his own birth in Bethlehem (the authenticity of which is often contested), but why would he not have chosen to ride a donkey into Jerusalem in emulation of Zechariah 9:9? Over thirty years ago, Rudolf Bultmann presented the latter story as his definitive example of an apologetic legend; it must be regarded as non-historical, since we would otherwise have to assume that "Jesus intended to fulfill the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9 . . . [which] is absurd." [1] No scholar today would be able to treat the absurdity of such a construction as a matter so self-evidently obvious that it does not even require argumentation. This fact alone attests to a shift in predispositions of the guild.

2. Jesus proclaimed an eschatological/apocalyptic message of a coming kingdom. Perhaps the most distinctive hallmark of Jesus scholarship in the 1990s was a repudiation of the notion that Jesus expected and announced an imminent end of the world. Indeed, that repudiation was what prompted coinage of the term "third quest," to distinguish the work of scholars like Borg, Crossan, and Robert Funk (all associated with the Jesus Seminar) from that of persons associated with what had been popularly called "the new quest of the historical Jesus" (e.g., Günther Bornkamm, Norman Perrin, and Gerd Theissen, all of whom did attribute an imminent eschatological perspective to the Jesus of history). The emerging, third-quest paradigm favoured a Jesus who did not speak about the end of the world but of a new way of being. The eschatological and apocalyptic sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were dismissed as enthusiastic attributions of a church in crisis, exemplary of the kind of rhetoric spouted by sects experiencing violent persecution and/or social ostracism.

Again, the so-called conservatives have raised the question of whether the scenario that rejection of this material requires is really more plausible than that which ensues if the material is accepted as authentic. They start by noting that almost all scholars grant that 1) John the Baptist spoke of an imminent end; and, 2) Paul also thought the end was at hand. Is it reasonable to assume that Jesus broke with his mentor on this apparently essential point only to have his own view subsequently rejected by his most prominent and earliest interpreter? That could have happened, but isn't it more reasonable, this argument suggests, to regard Jesus as the midpoint on a trajectory, as the connecting dot on a line from the Baptist to the Apostle? Is it not simpler (Occam's razor again) to assume a progressive development of ideas than to adopt a scenario that requires at least two 180 degree turnabouts?

My point here is not to argue for the traditionalist view—it can be challenged. What I think must be granted, however, is that the vision of a non-eschatological Jesus that was presented so forcefully in the '90s has fallen on hard times. When Borg published his Jesus in Contemporary Society in 1994, he dealt extensively with the work of E. P. Sanders, whom he regarded as the principal remaining exponent of "the previous eschatological consensus." [2] But subsequent works by Meier and Wright would make clear that Sanders was not alone, and in recent years, studies on Jesus by Dale Allison, Darrell Bock, James D. G. Dunn, Bart Ehrman, Craig Evans, Joachim Gnilka, Leander Keck, Scot McKnight, and Graham Twelftree, have all either argued for an eschatologically focused Jesus or treated that vision as a near-consensus that can almost be taken for granted. The debate does continue [3] but I think that those who grant general authenticity to the eschatological material are now once again regarded as representative of the mainstream.

Pendulums do swing, and I have no predictions as to where the guild may end up on such questions as Jesus' own messianic consciousness or apocalyptic inclinations. I also plead a degree of personal agnosticism on these matters. I am not suggesting that the conservatives are right on such matters, only that they are (currently) winning. The growing respect for Gospel tradition that we see among historical Jesus scholars today is a far cry from the skepticism that marked the guild a decade ago. Perhaps that is one reason we are no longer as interesting to journalists.

A fifth and final trend that marks current Jesus studies is a strong effort by scholars to integrate their work into some sort of larger task. Today's historical Jesus scholars want to emphasize the significance that reconstructing a historically credible Jesus has for systematic theology, pastoral preparation, spiritual formation, ecumenical discourse, and a variety of other agendas.

Those who have made their way through N. T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God will have no doubt noticed the breadth of its concern. Historical questions are raised, but the book also wants to deal with theology; it wants to explicate what resurrection faith has meant, does mean, and ought to mean for those who commit themselves to it. Likewise, James Dunn's massive Jesus Remembered is explicitly marketed as volume one in a "Christianity in the Making" series and is less concerned with establishing what Jesus said and did than with analyzing how Jesus was remembered and why.

Donald Capps is interested in understanding the historical Jesus from a psychological point of view, apparently because such an understanding will be significant for his work in counseling and pastoral care. Other Jesus scholars—including Borg, McKnight and the present author—have recently authored books on spirituality in which their prior convictions regarding the Jesus of history remain relevant.

This all seems to illustrate something that I heard myself saying back in the '90s when Robert Funk was invited to speak at a meeting of the Ohio Academy of Religion. The controversial founder of the Jesus Seminar was slated to give a very academic and fairly non-controversial address on some topic of historical interest, but his mere presence in the mid-west was noticed by the general populace and the building where he was to lecture was surrounded by protestors with picket signs. Indeed, threats were called in, necessitating police protection and armed bodyguards—a first for any plenary session of the OAR. I was asked to introduce Funk that night and, appraising the situation, I chose to do so with the following line: "Robert Funk is a man who gets people riled up over things that matter."

And so it is with the current state of historical Jesus studies. People are less riled up than they used to be—I don't know whether that's entirely good or only partly so. But both historical Jesus scholars and their detractors would still agree that these are things that matter. We are studying subjects of fundamental importance to religion and society, topics with profound implications for theology and piety, as well as for politics, philosophy, and the very self-image of western civilization.

Mark Allan Powell is Robert and Phyllis Leatherman Professor of New Testament Studies at Trinity Lutheran Seminary and Chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Notes

[1] Rudolph Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Problem, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 261-62.
[2] Marcus J. Borg. Jesus in Contemporary Society (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994), p. 74.
[3] An up-to-date resource for assessing this discussion is Robert J. Miller, ed., The Apocalyptic Jesus: A Debate (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2004).

Citation: Mark Allan Powell, " 'Things That Matter': Historical Jesus Studies in the New Millennium," SBL Forum , n.p. [cited Nov 2004]. Online:http://sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=333

The Ancient Record of Religion Among Archaic Hominidsew Article

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

The Ancient Record of Religion Among Archaic Hominids

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Written By: G. R. Morton

http://home.entouch.net/dmd/religion.htm

There are two viewpoints I am arguing against here. They are Dick Fischer's late Adam hypothesis and Hugh Ross's Adam within the past 60,000 years assertion. Both views hold that altars only go back no more than 24,000 years or so. Dick distinguishes between animal sacrifice and other religions. Dick thinks animal sacrifice didn't exist further back in time than the Adamic covenant, which he places in the Sumerian period. Dick Fischer writes:

Presumably, any outsiders living at the time of Adam would have been outside the old covenant, and unable to enjoy this unique status, which included the hope of being claimed by God through (1) the Adamic bloodline, (2) the discipline of self righteousness, and (3) the ritual of animal sacrifice.

The beginnings of God-awareness or seeking after God can be substantiated in history by the evidence of religious relics and altars dating as far back as 24,000 years ago, but there is no evidence that the Creator manifested Himself to any of these forerunners as He did to Adam.

Catal Huyuk in south-central Turkey was excavated in the 1960s. This city was settled as far back as possibly 8300 B. C., but by about 5600 BC it was abandoned. From analysis of the skeletal remains found there, a French expert concluded that two distinct racial types were represented, on European, the other Asian. Although many shrines were unearthed at Catal Huyuk, there were no signs of animal sacrifice.

....animal sacrifice apparently was not practiced inside the shrines, as there is no evidence of a slaughtering block or a catchment for the runoff of blood.

If animal sacrifice was a covering for sin began with Adam and his descendants after the Fall, then apparently Catal Huyuk was not populated by Adamic or Semitic populations. Also, 5600 BC is far too soon for any Semites and a little too soon for Adamites." (Fischer, 1996, p. 194)

Dick seems to place lots of weight on the animal sacrifice issue. He seems to (erroneously) think that animal sacrifice didn't occur until Adam, living sometime around 4500 BC. (Fischer, 1996, p. 196)

The problem I see is that this creates two classes of people - the Semites (Jews and Arabs) who are descended from Adam with the image of God and others who don't have it. This creates weird situations like my family in which my wife and children would be descendents of Adam and have the image of God, and I wouldn't. (My wife occasionally thinks this may be true when she sees some of the stuff I do) But at root, such a view in my mind could encourage racism. In fairness to Dick, whom I like, he would deny this and he certainly holds no racist views. . But given what humans do with racial differences, I think it is a valid worry.

Hugh Ross says some equally silly things.

Bipedal, tool-using, large-brained primates (called hominids by anthropologists) may have roamed the earth as long ago as one million years, but religious relics and altars date back only 8,000 to 24,000 years. Thus, the secular archaeological date for the first spirit creatures is in complete agreement with the biblical date.

Some differences, however, between the Bible and secular anthropology remain. By the biblical definition, these hominids may have been intelligent mammals, but they were not humans. Nor did Adam and Eve physically descend from them. (According to Genesis 1:26-28 the human species was created complete and brand-new by God through His own personal miraculous intervention.) Even here, though, support from anthropology is emerging. New evidence indicates that the various hominid species may have gone extinct before, or as a result of, the appearance of modern humans. At the very least, 'abrupt transitions between [hominid]species' is widely acknowledged. (Ross, 1993, p. 141)

Now to the archaeological issues. Animal sacrifice has gone way back much farther back than Dick acknowledges, and that, in my mind falsifies his views. And altars go way back beyond the 24,000 years Ross claims. Indeed, altars go further back than the 60,000 year limit Ross claims the Bible teaches for Adam's existence. He says that the Bible is false if Adam is older than 60,000 years. While I don't see any Biblical support for such a view, it is his view. As you read below, notice the sacrifice of bears, deer, and even humans seen in the distant past, long before Dick thinks they exist. Also notice the existence of monuments built for the purpose of the sacrifice and religion which exist long before Ross claims..

Recent discoveries have revived the debate about how old religion is. I will follow several evidences of religion back into anthropological history. El Juyo is around 13,000 years ago. Freeman and Echegaray describe it:

Presiding over all these associated features from a position directly overlooking the small structure (in the middle of its southeast side), was a good-sized vertical stone, one of whose surfaces, that facing the structure and the old cave entrance, had been deliberately transformed into a semi-human face. The stone measures thirty-five by thirty-two centimetres and is twenty-one centimetres thick. (Freeman and Echegaray, 1981, p. 10.)

From the description given above and an examination of the photograph and drawing, the reader will realize that the stone face represents a being whose nature is dual, although the two sides of its character have been harmoniously integrated into one single face. The proper right side of the face is that of an adult male human, with moustache and beard. The proper left side is a large carnivore, with oblique eye, large lachrymal, and a moderately long nose, ending in a good depiction of a naked rhinarium. The chin is triangular, and a sharply pointed tooth projects above the mouth. On the muzzle there are three sub-parallel lines of black spots suggesting the bases of whiskers or vibrissae, a characteristic feature of felids. Taken as a whole, these features represent a large cat, probably a lion or leopard (both existed near El Juyo in Magdalenian times). (Freeman and Echegaray, 1981, p. 15-16.)

The form of the structures and the peculiar way in which they were built also call for an explanation from beyond the realm of ordinary domestic activities. As examples, we may cite the careful disposition of the regular lots of earth which go to form the bulk of the mounds, either in rosettes or in double lines; the fact that the several rosettes were plastered over with clay of vividly different colors; the sprinkling of red ochre over the whole at several different stages of construction; the channel uniting the two mounds, by which something organic and greasy was evidently poured from the small structure into the large one; the vertical antler tine found in the middle of an ochre layer in the bottom of the larger trench; the positioning of the two large slabs, one horizontally over the large structure, the other on edge nearby. The symmetry of spatial relationships, with pits between and at either end of the two mounds, other pits on either side of the large horizontal slab and the vertical slab oriented parallel to the small mound and both perpendicular to the large one. Finally, the very presence of these enigmatic mound-trench complexes, which have no apparent economic explanation. The behaviour involved in the construction of this structural aggregate is obviously symbolic and its meaning obscure. (Freeman and Echegaray, 1981, p. 15.)

Clearly, this religious monument goes much further back in time than Ross and Fischer believes. There was apparently an altar in Chauvet Cave (dated 31,000 years ago [Balter, 1996, p. 449]). A bear skull was precariously placed on a flat topped stone and fire was burned just behind the skull. Chauvet et al, write:

A little further on we were deeply impressed by what we discovered. In the middle of the chamber, on a block of grey stone of regular shape that had fallen from the ceiling, the skull of a bear was placed as if on an altar. The animal's fangs projected beyond it into the air. On top of the stone there were still pieces of charcoal, the remains of a fireplace. All around, on the floor, there were more than thirty bear skulls; now covered in a frosting of amber-coloured calcite, they were purposely set out on the earth. There were no traces of skeletons. This intentional arrangement troubled us because of its solemn peculiarity." (Chauvet et al, 1996, p. 50)

The lack of bear skeletal parts proves that these were not stray bears that got trapped and died in the cave. Their heads were removed elsewhere and brought into the cave. There were no postcranial elements.

The fact that 30,000 years ago man was apparently worshiping the bear, lends credence to the next oldest probable religious site. Except this one was built by Neanderthal. At Bruniquel, France. Archeologists have excavated a square stone structure dating to more than 47,000 years ago (prior to the advent of modern man in Europe) in which the Neanderthals burned a bear. Bednarik (1996, p. 104) writes:

The cave of Bruniquel in southern France has just produced fascinating new evidence. Several hundred metres in from the cave entrance, a stone structure has been discovered. It is quadralineal, measures four by five metres and has been constructed from pieces of stalagmite and stalactite. A burnt fragment of a bear bone found in it was radiocarbon analysed, yielding a 'date' of greater than 47 600 years BP. This suggests that the structure is the work of Neanderthals. It is located in complete darkness, which proves that the people who ventured so deep into the large cave system had reliable lighting and had the confidence to explore such depths. Bruniquel is one of several French caves that became closed subsequent to their Pleistocene use, but were artificially opened this century.

This appears to have been the ritual sacrifice of a bear. It is also the first proof that man went deep into caves long before they painted the walls. (Balter, 1996, p. 449)

Neanderthals at Nahr Ibrahim, Lebanon, appear to have ritually sacrificed a deer. Marshack writes:

In the Mousterian cave shelter of Nahr Ibrahim in Lebanon the bones of a fallow deer (Dama mesopotamia) were gathered in a pile and topped by the skull cap. Many of the bones were unbroken and still articulated. Around the animal were bits of red ochre. While red ochre was common in the area and so may have been introduced inadvertently, the arrangement of the largely unbroken bones suggests a ritual use of parts of the animal. (Marschack 1990, p. 481)

The ochre was proven to have been brought in from elsewhere by the discoverer (Solecki, 1982). This site is greater than 40,000 years old. This is animal sacrifice long before Dick says it exists. Perhaps these ancient peoples should have read The Origins Solution so that they wouldn't do these things.

The 80,000 year old site of Drachenloch, Switzerland, also appears to have been a religious site, once again a Neanderthal site. Bachler found what appeared to be ritually arranged cave bear bones and ashes on what he called a sacrificial altar. (Lissner, 1961, 187-188). Campbell and Loy write:

The most famous example of what has been claimed to be Neanderthal hunting magic is the so-called bear cult. It came to light when a German archaeologist, Emil Bachler, excavated the cave of Drachenloch between 1917 and 1923. Located 8,000 ft (2,400 m) up in the Swiss Alps, this 'lair of the dragons' tunnels deep into a mountainside. The front part of the cave, Bachler's work made clear, served as an occasional dwelling place for Neandertals. Farther back, Bachler found a cubical chest made of stones and measuring approximately 3.25 ft (1 m) on a side. The top of the chest was covered by a massive slab of stone. Inside were seven bear skulls, all apparently arranged with their muzzles facing the cave entrance. Still deeper in the cave were six bear skulls, seemingly set in niches along the walls. The Drachenloch find is not unique. At Regourdou in southern France, a rectangular pit, covered by a flat stone weighing nearly a ton, held the bones of more than 20 bears. (Campbell and Loy, 1996, p. 441)

Honesty demands that one note that Drachenloch (not Regourdou) is controversial so for an alternative view, see Kurten (1976, p. 84-86) For a discussion of why I don't think Kurten's critique is correct see Morton (1997, p.73-75)

There is an even earlier altar, which is not controversial, found at Bilzingsleben, Germany. The excavators, Dietrich and Ursula Mania have found a 27-foot-diameter paved area that they say was used for "special cultural activities" (Mania et al,1994, p. 124; See also Mania and Mania, 1988, p. 92). Gore writes:

But Mania's most intriguing find lies under a protective shed. As he opens the door sunlight illuminates a cluster of smooth stones and pieces of bone that he believes were arranged by humans to pave a 27-foot-wide circle. 'They intentionally paved this area for cultural activities,' says Mania. 'We found here a large anvil of quartzite set between the horns of a huge bison, near it were fractured human skulls.' (1997,p. 110)

I would contend that the symbolism here, if found in a modern village, would be enough to cause one to turn and flee for his life. Such an arrangement of objects would immediately be interpreted as evidence of religion, and a hostile religion at that. Bilzingsleben dates to around 425,000 years, not the mere 24,000 years that Ross prefers for the oldest evidence of religion. If Ross wishes to claim that religion doesn't go back further than 24,000 years, he should explain why the above five examples don't qualify as examples of religion? It is clear that evidence of religion in the anthropological record prior to 24,000 years is not rare. Ross can't prove his case by ignoring these sites and this data.

Then, there is the de-fleshing of human bones which has occurred at Bodo Ethiopia, 600,000 years ago. The skull has the same kind of cut marks one got when a body is de-fleshed for burial. Medieval and early Christians engaged in this practice. The bones of the saints were cleaned (using knives) and then the bones were put in niches in the wall. We see these kinds of cuts that long ago.

One can only conclude from the above that both Fischer and Ross are ignoring the archaeological data in order to maintain their belief system. This twisting of the observational data for apologetic purposes, is a time honoured tradition among apologists. It is something that must stop if Christianity is to ever develop a successful apologetic.

Religion among the Archaic Hominids
How Could Mankind be 5.5 MYR Old without Fossil Evidence for Him That Long Ago?
Review of Fairweather Eden by Michael Pitts and Mark Roberts
Planning Ahead-article from PSCF
The Homo erectus Genes in Us
The Neandertal Hybrid--evidence of human/Neandertal mating--implications
The Shaman's Cape-Evidence of Religion Among the Neanderthals
Sweat as Part of the Curse--The Curse of a Big Head
The Earliest Evidence of Human Compassion
How Old is Man and When Was He Human?
History of HumanTechnology

Music Among the Neandertals and Other Ancient Men
The Earliest Subterranean Mining
Evidence for Neanderthal Ancestry--Implications for Christianity
Neanderthal mtDNA Controversy--Implications for Christianity
Neanderthal and Tasmanian Technology Compared--Can Technology Determine Humanity?
The Evolution of Human Birth
Book: Adam,Apes and Anthropology
About theAuthor
Ordering Information
Theology articles
Geology Articles