TO GET TO WHERE YOU WANT TO GO, LOVE THE JOURNEY!

Genius Realized:

Getting First Published at Age 96

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 30, 2015

“Genius is only the power of making continuous effort. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it, so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it. How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success. As the tide goes clear out, so it comes clear in.  In business, sometimes prospects may seem darkest when really they are on the turn. A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success. There is no defeat except from within; there is no failure except in no longer trying, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), American pragmatic philosopher

Harry Louis Bernstein (May 30, 1910 – June 3, 2011) was a British-born American writer whose first published book, The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers (2007), dealt with his long suffering mother Ada's struggles to feed her six children; an abusive, alcoholic father, Yankel; the anti-Semitism Bernstein and his Jewish neighbors encountered growing up in a Cheshire mill town (Stockport, now part of Greater Manchester) in northwest England; the loss of Jews and Christians from the community in World War I; and the Romeo and Juliet-like romance experienced by his sister Lily and her Christian boyfriend.

The book was started when Bernstein was 93 and published in 2007, when he was 96. The loneliness he encountered following the death of his wife, Ruby, 91, in 2002, after 67 years of marriage, was the catalyst for Bernstein to begin work on his book.

His second book, The Dream, published in 2008, centered on his family’s move to the West Side of Chicago in 1922 when he was twelve.

In 2009, Bernstein published his third book, The Golden Willow, which chronicled his married life and later years. A fourth book, What Happened to Rose, was published posthumously in 2012.  He died four days past his 101^st birthday.

Before his retirement at age 62, Bernstein worked for various movie production companies, reading scripts and working as a magazine editor for trade magazines. He also wrote freelance articles for such publications as Popular Mechanics, Family Circle and Newsweek.

Bernstein lived in Brick Township, New Jersey.  He died at the age of 101, on June 3, 2011.

The Invisible Wall tells the story of his older sister doing the unthinkable.  She falls in love with a Christian boy.  But they are separated culturally by an “invisible wall” that divides the Jewish families on one side of the cobble stone street from the Christian families on the other. 

When the young Harry Bernstein discovers the secret affair quite by accident, he has to choose between the strict morals that he has been taught all his life, his loyalty to his religious and selfless mother, and what he knows is right in his own head.

THE PATIENCE OF GENIUS

From Harry’s earliest recollections, as early as when he was four-years-old and started to read words on a page, he felt an urge to write.  Through grammar school and high school composition was his favorite subject.

As a young man out of high school, he attempted to publish, but received only rejection slips, but he persisted, finding work where he could but always wanting to be an author.  

He met his wife, Ruby, at a dance, and it was love at first sight.  He loved her to pieces and took a job reading movie scripts of authors’ books, but changed his focus from his writing obsession to enjoying her completely. 

They had two children, and a happy home, but he was put into a total funk when she died, and found the only way to fill his loneliness was writing, which he had always done throughout his life, publishing an article here and there, but never able to capture enough attention to make a living at it.

The Invisible Wall at first experienced a fate of which he was quite familiar – constant rejections.  

He attempted to write a novel after a short piece generated enough interest that an editor asked him to give the novel idea a try, which he did, but without success.

After Ruby died, he decided to go back to the beginnings of his life, nearly ninety years in the past, and found that he had a retentive memory of those early days as if they were only yesterday. 

Instead of being discouraged at the rejections The Invisible Wall generated, he admits in the afterward of this book that he’s never lacked confidence in himself or his ability to write.  In an amused fashion, he admits to being a rather cocky soul.

In any case, an editor from Random House called, and said she had read his manuscript and that Random House would like to publish it in a small printing.  He was so elated he couldn’t believe his good fortune.

Random House published the book, and the book reviews were unanimously positive, while The New York Times put his picture on the front page of the newspaper celebrating his being a published author for the first time at the age of 96.

Columnist from across the Western World called or visited him for interviews.  He was in demand on radio, television and in magazines.  He satisfied all these demands willingly and enthusiastically.

Other publishers wanted to publish his works.  So, at 96, he wrote a sequel to The Invisible Wall and followed it with another published during his lifetime, with one published posthumously. 

Were Elbert Hubbard alive, he would have joined the celebration as he believed with all his heart that genius was not rare, but common.  The problem, he argued, was that people pay too much attention to those that say “you’re wasting your time” or whatever, not listening enough to that inner voice that says, success is right around the corner!

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A LOOK INSIDE SELF-CRITICISM OR WHY WE ARE SO SELF-CRITICAL!

Freud’s Ambivalence: what we think conscience is, it isn’t, what it isn’t, it is.  Self-hate, then, is it self-love?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

March 17, 2015 (St. Patrick’s Day)

As a boy, Freud was an avid reader.  He taught himself Spanish so that he could read Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” in its original Castilian.  We early readers are influenced all our lives with what we read when young.  Freud is no exception. 

Years later, Freud would write, in describing the “ego” and the “id”:

“Between the persons’ conscious sense of themselves, and their more unconscious desires (“Don Quixote” as metaphor), the horse supplies the locomotive energy, while the rider has the privilege of deciding on the goal, and of guiding the powerful animal’s movement.  But only too often there arises between the ego and the id the not precisely ideal situation of the rider being obliged to guide the horse along the path by which it itself wants to go.”

The “ego” is the deluded fantastical mad knight of “Don Quixote” who, like all realists, is utterly plausible to himself, while operating out of his tree.  Meanwhile, the horse (“Rosinante)” is at once a parody of, and an expose, of the horse as elemental force.  And where does the horse go?  It goes home to desire.  The “id ” is the horse, while the “super ego,” sometimes down to earth, sometimes relevant, sometimes gullible is “Pancho Panza,” there but not there, holding the reins of the horse, but not in control.

Not to belabor the point, but Freud often used metaphor from his early reading such as the “Oedipus Complex” and “Electra Complex” compliments of Greek tragedy.

Krishnamurti once put it plainly, “Freud’s anxiety and guilt became adopted by the world as its own.”  I use this a preface to what follows.

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French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan observes, “It is ironic that Jesus Christ preached love thy neighbor as thyself because of course people hate themselves.”  The way people treat one another – in many cases with a good deal of cruelty – would suggest they, indeed, love their neighbors as they love themselves.  Lacan was implicitly comparing Christ with Freud.

Freud treated the Jesus Story about love as a cover story or self-cure for ambivalence: whatever we hate we love, whatever we love we hate.  If someone can satisfy us, they frustrate us, and if someone can frustrate us we believe they can satisfy us, while who frustrates us more than ourselves?

Ambivalence is the Freudian sense does not mean mixed feelings.  It means opposing feelings.  Contradictory attitudes are derive from a common source and are interdependent whereas mixed feelings are based on a realistic but imperfect assessment of love or hate or whatever. 

With ambivalence, you cannot have love without hate, or hate without love.  They are interdependent.  According to Freud, we are ambivalent to everyone and everything that matters to us.  In fact, ambivalence is how we recognize that someone or something has become significant to us.  Stated another way, we cannot help but be ambivalent about ambivalence.

We are never as obedient as we would like to think we are.  Where there is devotion, there is also buried protest; where there is trust there is suspicion; where there is self-hatred and guilt there is self-love.

Self-criticism with which we are programmed to think as a good thing is not.  Self-criticism can be our most sadomasochistic way of loving ourselves. 

We are never as good as we should be, but neither are other people.  We fain thinking others are smarter, more able, more gifted, more advantaged than we are so we can retreat into sadomasochistic self-idolatry. 

The self-critical part of us, the part that Freud calls the “super ego” is remarkably narrow minded.  It is relentlessly repetitive, and cruelly self-intimidating.   As Lacan says, “We are stuck, a stuck record of the past, unimaginative about morality and about ourselves.” 

People so inclined, and that may be the majority, think something terrible has happened to them that they are living in the aftermath of a terrible fallout, of some catastrophe, and because they think it, they would be right.

Freud read a lot of Shakespeare as a youth as well as Cervantes, both 16^th century artists, when “conscience at the time didn’t only have our modern sense of internal moral regulation, but also meant inward knowledge of consciousness.” 

Then (16^th century) the language of morality was the language of religion (Christianity).   Even then ambivalence was evident as religion divided the self from the hidden self, an unconscious morality with no discernible cultural moorings. 

Being able to reflect on our conscience, being able to look at the voice of conscience is a radical act.  If not obeyed, what is to be done with it?

Conscience is driven by acculturated stimulation tempered by controls and inhibitions from culture through the parents.  Put another way, the “super ego,” the “Morality Principle” is the domain of parents, but not exclusively.  It is also derived from the influence of peers, priests, teachers, pundits, gurus, heroes, idols, and sometimes, but not as frequently today, by God in the sanctuary of some religion. 

The “super ego’s” primary role is there to protect us from ourselves by prohibiting desires that may endanger us.  There may be other people we would like to find dead but murder endangers us and so we murder ourselves in self-reproach and punish ourselves for having such murderous thoughts.

Freud sees conscience as a possible force to character assassination, the character assassination of everyday life.  

Erving Goffman wrote about this rather definitively in “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.”  He suggested that we mutilate and deform our character because we judge ourselves too harshly.  So unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we would be like without it.  “Meet Your New Best Friend” was written to combat if not neutralize this mindset.  As a consequence, we know practically nothing about ourselves, which makes us vulnerable to anyone bent on exploiting this to their advantage.

Freud endeavors to show us how conscience obscures self-knowledge.  Back to ambivalence, he says guilt hides such knowledge from us by exposing it.  This allows us to justify not standing up to the internal tyranny of the self.  So frighten are we of the “super ego” that we identify with it.  We speak on its behalf to avoid antagonizing it, which is a form of bullying.

Although religious institutions would protest otherwise, they use this fault line in us to their advantage. 

Does conscience make us cowards as Shakespeare says in Hamlet and Richard III?  If it does, it is the part of ourselves that humiliates.  Then is it the part of us that makes us ashamed of ourselves for what others may think of us, or what we are or have done?

Conscience, stated another way, can seduce us into betraying ourselves worrying more about what others think of us than what we think of ourselves.  If we do something that is bad, or even evil, and get away with it, how do we escape the self that has full knowledge of the deception?  We can’t.

If conscience makes cowards of us, it is because it is itself cowardly.  Consider this.  The cowardly part of us is like a person who is afraid of new experience.  In our minds, the past may be imperfect, the present ridiculous and the future perfect, but in reality we treat the unknownness of the future as if it were in the past of something we know, or another way of staying stuck.

Why is it such a pleasure to be self-critical?  And how has it come about that we are so bewitched with our self-hatred?  Self-criticism when it is helpful, Adam Phillips says in The London Review (March 5, 2015), is self-correcting hypnosis.  It is judgment as spell or curse.  It is an order, not negotiation.  It is dogma, not over interpretation.  It is the “super ego” operating as supreme narcissist.  It is the acknowledged legacy of a religious past, a past where parents were programmed to the narrow confines of good and evil, right and wrong, the acceptable and unacceptable, as prescribed arbitrarily by some religious or secular religious authority.  What we know ourselves to be, as a result of this conditioning, is a slave to the “super ego.”

Where there is dogma, Freud insists, there is uncompleted experience.  In another sense, he is saying that the “super ego” is more than conscience.  It is the “ego ideal.”  It is ambivalence to the wall as the “ego ideal” finds the individual over interpreting his culture beginning in the family, moving on to the church, schools, the workplace, and the nation.

This nearly destroyed me as a young man when I took my “ego ideal” to South Africa and was introduced to draconian apartheid, discovering the support system of my “ego ideal” (all the above) had deserted me leaving me naked and confused, lost and self-reproaching, staggering out of the assignment and retiring and only in my thirties (see novel: A Green Island in a Black Sea).

My internal compass, the internal prohibiting father, who says, “Do as I say, not as I do” was like a malign collective parent visiting irrevocable harm to my fragile psyche under the guise of being my protector. 

In the name of all that is sacred, in the name of health and safety, it left me exposed to a life of terror beyond my comprehension, self-estranged and self-critical to the level of obsession.  In my anger at being abandoned by my “ego ideal” culture, I punished myself as if I were the author of apartheid full of guilt and wrongdoing for brutal travesty I was experiencing in South Africa.  Guilt is not a good clue as to what one values, but what one fears.  Morality born of intimidation is immoral.  South Africa in 1968 was immoral.

Freud gives us a conceptual vocabulary (“ambiguities) and constructs (ego, super ego, id), which he with his writing skills shows how the “super ego” acts as censor, judge, and dominating, frustrating father that carries a blueprint of the kind of person we should be with the operating word “should.” 

To the end Freud never resolved his issues with ambiguity or with inner authority and individual morality.  Still, each of these ego states appears to have multiple functions to show how we are slave, the doll Adam Phillips says to our ventriloquist dummy, the object to the “super ego’s” prescription.  Phillips asks:

“What is this appetite for confinement, for diminishment, for unrelenting, unforgiving self-criticism?”

Freud’s answer, we fear loss of love.  But to acquire love, there must be sacrifice that includes abandoning pride, self-consciousness, self-regard, and the possibility of rejection or humiliation. 

No surprise, we are likely to embrace confinement preferring safety to desire, and security to experience.  This comes at considerable cost.  It finds the individual being seen and treated as an object, as a commodity, expendable, replaceable.  That then begs the question, Who Put You in the Cage? (see Kindle 2015).

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JESUS STORY CONTINUES!

 JESUS, CHILD OF DESTINY?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 15, 2015

From English scholar M. R. James’ (1862-1936) The Apocryphal New Testament (1924), we are told that Jesus claimed his godhead in the cradle.  Several such works after Mark’s gospel made such claims.  In any case, the story of Jesus invades history, but this does not mean it is historical. 

Much as we cannot lay bare the Four Gospels by modern historical techniques, we can analyze to the point of obsession the fragments of first century writers that sporadically become available to us through new discoveries.  Much as these fragments are valued they invariably fail to restore a true sense of the time much less the story of Jesus.  In many cases, they seem as wistful in their impact as they seem promising in their revelations.

Luke places the birth of Jesus in a particular year in the reign of Herod and at the time of the universal census commanded by Emperor Caesar Augustus.  None of this is verifiable.  In fact, it may not even be true.  Christians believe it to be so as a matter of faith and choose as well to see it as a matter of historical fact. 

Gospel of St. Lukce

Moreover, the Incarnation in traditional Christianity is the belief that the second person of the Blessed Trinity, also known as God the Son or the Logos (Word) "became flesh" by being conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Jesus Christ, fully God and fully human.  Christians would say that this was something that happened in history just as Pearl Harbor and the Second World War were events that happened in history.

The Jesus Story bears a remarkable resemblance to Greek mythology.  For example, the legendary story of Semele, who was human, but also the mother of the god Dionysus. 

According to Greek legend, Semele was one of the many love interests of Zeus, who engaged in a love affair with this lovely mortal.  His wife Hera, angry with Zeus’s infidelity, decided to get her revenge, targeting the unfortunate Semele.

Hera, the Queen of the Olympian gods disguised herself and appeared to Semele one day to make Semele doubt her lover’s claims to immortality, convincing the poor mortal woman to demand proof of his divinity. Unfortunately, Semele accepted this advice.

The next time she was with Zeus, she requested that she be granted whatever she asked of him. Zeus reluctantly agreed. And so Semele ordered Zeus to reveal himself in all of his divine glory. As much as Zeus wanted to resist, he could not, and when the god showed himself to the woman, she was incinerated by the heat of his thunderbolts.

Semele, who was pregnant at the time, died immediately. But Zeus rescued the unborn child and placed him in his thigh. When the child was ready to be born, the immortal Dionysus emerged. 

To debate the historical probability that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and of the line of David is as impossible to verify as his having been divine.  The Fourth Gospel very specifically states that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem, and that he was not born of the King David line.  Yet the Fourth Gospel is no more historical than Luke.  Furthermore, it was Emperor Augustus Josephus who mentions a census in 6 C.E. before the imposition of a poll tax.  King Herod died in 4 C.E.  So, Jesus had to be born before that census.  Even so, Luke’s gospel, for many scholars, has the “look of history.” 

In the four gospels, Jesus is a very special person chosen by God, sent forth by God, and raised up by God, but never quite God Himself.  He is however invested with quasi-divine powers.  But in non-canonical or Apocryphal Gospels (James, Thomas, Peter, etc.), he is God. 

The word "Apocrypha" means "things put away" or "things hidden."  It comes from the Greek through the Latin.

The general term is applied to the books that were considered by the church as useful, but not divinely inspired. As such, to refer to Gnostic writings as "apocryphal" is misleading since they would not be classified in the same category by orthodox believers.

The term as used by scholars is "falsely inscribed" or "falsely attributed" in the sense that the writings were written by anonymous authors who affixed the name of an apostle to the  work, such as the “Gospel of Peter,” yet there is no evidence that Apostle Peter ever wrote, but clear evidence that Apostle Paul did.

Almost all the books written in both the Old and New Testaments called "Apocrypha" in the Protestant tradition are “falsely attributed.”  Likewise, “Apocrypha” is synonymous in the Catholic and Orthodox tradition as in the Protestant tradition (see Wikipedia, “New Testament Apocryphal”).

Unfortunately, within the limits of history and historical methodology, the existence of Jesus cannot be definitively proven; nor his place of birth, where it happened, when it happened, who his parents were, and how his mother became pregnant. 

The Virginal Conception of Mary, mother of Jesus, was unknown to the early Christian community.  As with many other dogmas that became instituted within Roman Catholicism over the centuries, this is but one.   No mention of this is in the Gospel of Mark or in the Epistles of Paul. 

All New Testament Gospels mention that Jesus was brought up in Nazareth in the reign of King Herod.  That would suggest that he was born before 4 C.E., which was the year Herod died.

The Gospel of Matthew tells of Herod’s jealous rage when he heard that a rival king had been born, commanding that all children under two be slain.  Josephus tells us Herod was cruel, corroborating this by telling us how Herod had forty-five prominent Jews killed for resisting his occupation of Jerusalem.  These Jewish leaders resented his subservience to the Romans and claimed he was not a good Jew, but was, indeed, a Roman sympathizing polytheist (Antiquities, XIV, 11-16). 

Matthew has Jesus, Mary and Joseph during the “Massacre of the Innocence” fleeing to Egypt to avoid the slaughter thus fulfilling the prophecy of Scripture, “Out of Egypt did I call my son” (Hosea 11:1).  There is no evidence that Jesus ever went to Egypt.  But the canonical gospels as well as the Gospel of St. Thomas has an angel informed Mary and Joseph of the death of Herod and that it was safe to return to Judea.  The Gospel of St. Thomas also has Jesus and family fleeing to Egypt (M. R. James, pp. 14-16, and 49-70).

When grown up, Jesus started preaching at the synagogue in Nazareth, where we are told he joined his father, Joseph, in the carpenter trade (Matthew 13:55).  But was he or his father actually carpenters?  A. N. Wilson writes:

In the old Jewish writings, the word “craftsman” or carpenter had a metaphorical meaning, in the language that Joseph and Jesus would have spoken.  Aramaic, the word is “nagger” and it would either mean a craftsman or a scholar, a learned man (Wilson, op. cit., p. 83).

Yet, the Gospel of Thomas makes it clear that Jesus was in fact a carpenter’s apprentice and was able to lengthen pieces of wood rather than make them shorter (James, op. cit., p. 63)

Wilson continues:

The Catholic Church, partly in order to steal a march on the Communist Party, and partly to express its keenly held belief in the sanctity of work, has instituted the feast of St. Joseph the Worker on May Day (Wilson, op. cit., p. 83).

Of Jesus’s childhood the canonical Gospels tell us nothing, but the Apocryphal Gospels fill in this disappointing gap with stimulating wonder.  For example, when Jesus was five-years-old, he made some clay sparrows on the Sabbath Day, spread out his hands, saying, “Go forth into the height and fly; ye shall not meet death at any man’s hands.”  The clay birds flew away (James, op. cit., p. 55).

The Gospel of Thomas not only displays the power of Jesus, but reveals his spite as well.  Thomas shows the young Jesus sending people away mad, deaf or blind, then later                   making them again better when they return.  Jesus even strikes people dead, solely for his amusement, then brings them back to life again (James, op. cit., p. 62).

One of Jesus’s most remarkable tricks is recorded in the Arabic Gospel and Syriac History, but not in any Greek or Latin text. 

Jesus is shown attempting to join the play other children in their game, but the children terrified run away and hide in a cellar nearby.  When Jesus asked the woman of the house if she has seen the children, she answered “No.” 

Jesus hears commotion in the cellar, and asked, “What is that noise?”  The woman says it is her goats.  Jesus answers, “Let the goats come out.”  When the cellar door is opened to the woman’s horror, all the children have been turned into goats. 

Bust of Jewish historian, Josephus 

The woman goes to Mary and Joseph and implores them to use their influence with Jesus to turn the goats back into children.  Jesus complies.  “Come my playfellows,” he calls out, “let us play together.” 

When the goats are fully human again, their mother tells the children, “See that you do everything that Jesus the Son of Mary commandeth you to do” (James, Ibid, pp. 62, 68).

We don’t see Jesus cruelty in the Four Gospels, but we can imagine here in the 21st century a child with such powers behaving precisely as Jesus is said to have behaved.  We know children can be spiteful, even cruel, some of us have only to look back to our own childhood to find such evidence.

In these four gospels, which give little insight into his childhood, we are led to assume he behaved in a human sense very well.  We do find him when he is twelve-years-old sitting in the Temple with teachers and rabbis asking them learned questions.

When Mary discovers where Jesus has been, she complains, “My child, why have you done this to us?”  Jesus answers, “Why are you looking for me?  Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:48, 49, Jerusalem Bible).

Interestingly enough, certainly most readers who have had children can relate to this, nearly all of the references to Jesus in family are ones of conflict, in which the child Jesus demonstrates quite early that he has his own mind.  Mary, the mother of Jesus is very understanding and patient with this Jesus in the bible, while Jesus is nearly always rude towards her. 

The Synoptic Gospels even suggest that Jesus is mad.  We know from Mark’s gospel that Jesus came from a large family with four brothers, James, Joset, Simon and Jude as well as sisters ((Mark 6:3). 

Evidence of Jesus existence outside the annals of Christianity are rare but significant.  Tacitus in his Annals tells of a Christian ringleader who was condemned to death during the reign of Tiberius by the prosecutor Pontius Pilate (Tacitus: Annals XV: 44). 

Pliny the Younger wrote to the Emperor Trajan saying the Christians sang hymns to Christ as to a god (Pliny: Letters X: 96-97). 

Flavius Josephus (c37-100 C.E.) refers to James the brother of Jesus, head of the Jerusalem Christian Church, calling his brother, Jesus, “the Messiah.” (Josephus XVIII). 

Josephus speaks of Jesus as a wise man, a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men who receives the truth with pleasure, and the race of Christians so named after him, are not extinct even now (Josephus, op. cit., XVIII).   

It is interesting to note that as the Apocryphal Gospels are discovered they invariably emphasize Jesus’s exceptionality and even his strangeness.  The 20^th century Christian preferred an idealized Jesus with a divine nature.  A century of technological explosion has changed the calculus of life and living, and was bound to change the sense of people with and about themselves and this small planet.

In Jewish historian Josephus, a man who once lived and wrote about what he observed, we have an authentic almost contemporary voice that confirms there was a Jesus, and in the time Josephus observed him, he was not thought of as God, nor as a heretic, but as a wise man and a doer who did wonderful deeds (Josephus, Ibid, XVIII.III-3).  In contrast, none of the gospel writers of the New Testament ever refer to Jesus as a “wise man” (Geza Vermes, “Josephus Portrait of Jesus Reconsidered” in Occident and Orient: A Tribute to the Memory of A. Scheiber, 1988, 373ff).

Now in the 21^st century, the climate in which Christians find themselves is that their religion is on trial,  rightly or wrongly, Christianity (and other religions as well) has been accused of being the problem rather than the answer.  As this explorer has found, there is more information available than ever before on Christianity.  Paradoxically, it widens rather than reduces the reader’s apprehension.  It simply doesn’t hold together, for reason.  

Mythmakers from the conception of Christianity have been busy formulating appealing themes, creating stories and presenting acts beyond human comprehension as probable if at all possible. 

Once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the early fourth century, evidence that conflicted with the Orthodox view of Jesus was destroyed or buried.  The irony is that here early in the 21^st century belief in something larger than ourselves, or what we can touch, feel, see, experience and understand has never been more important, because we find the mind is never enough.

A proportion of the Jesus stories described here may seem fanciful, but they have survived!  Granted, turning children into goats, killing and bringing people back to life, changing water into wine, walking on water, or turning clay sparrows into flying birds has little chance to seem credible.  Then you come to a story that has the pulse of the real where a woman of the street drops behind the feet of Jesus, weeping, wetting his feet with her tears, then wiping them with the locks of her flowing hair, kissing his feet and anointing them with perfume (Luke 7:37-44).  Jesus is rebuked by his host for allowing such a sinner to be in his presence much less conducting herself in this style.  The action of Jesus demonstrated his humanity and accessibility, and like the Publican and the Pharisee, that humility and confession prove a healthier soul.

Given Christianity would become a Gentile faith, another story seems beyond invention.  It is the story of the Canaanite woman demanding Jesus heal her daughter.  His reply was that it wouldn’t be worth the scraps from the Jewish table to its dogs to do so, that is, to Gentiles.

New discoveries of the Jesus Story such as Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt of a cache of Gnostic writings in 1945, the Dead Sea Scrolls near Qumran in 1947, and other discoveries show Jesus was a morally serious man, that he may not have said precisely what the gospels and apocryphal gospels say, but it is clear he had a theology from the beginning, and no discovery has diminished that fact. 

The aim is still to one day reveal the historical Jesus, which means getting beyond what we already know, or is recorded in the referenced sources here, as well as getting beyond the Roman Catholic Church’s very specific view of what is conceived as the Catholic faith. 

Catholicism has survived and triumphed, and Protestantism has not shown much more interest in the Semitic origins of Jesus.  As the impact of traditional Christianity continues to dwindle, perhaps the Qumran Scrolls, and other writings, which in all probability were written during the lifetime of Jesus will be able to depart from myth to embrace some sense of history.  One thing is certain.  The Jesus Story shall survive.

CURRENTS OF CAPITALISTIC DYSTOPIA and ATAVISTIC DISPLACEMENTS

Currents of Capitalistic Dystopia and Atavistic Displacements

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 10, 2015

Are we on the cusp of a new Renaissance or a Society Revolution?  This may seem a rhetorical question, but it is six hundred years almost to the date when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the Wittenberg Chapel door in Germany and started the Protestant Reformation.

Nearly eighty years ago sociologist Pitrim Sorokin noted that we were ending a six-hundred year Sensate Day, when psychosexual materialism and blatant self-indulgence were then reaching their apogee. 

Among the books he has written are “Social and Cultural Dynamics” (1937), “The Crisis of Our Age” (1941), “Man and Society in Calamity” (1942), “The American Sex Revolution” (1956), and “The Basic Trends of Our Times” (1964).

Each of these works is a measured concern for the future.  On the basis of a vast body of evidence he writes:

We find every important aspect of the life, organization, and the culture of Western society is in the extraordinary crisis … Its body and mind are sick and there is hardly a spot on its body which is not sore, or any nervous fiber which functions soundly … We are seemingly between two epochs, the dying Sensate Culture of our magnificent yesterday and the coming Ideational Culture of the creative tomorrow.  We are living, thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred year-long Sensate Day.

The oblique rays of the sun still illumine the glory of the passing epoch.  But the light is fading, and in the deepening shadows it becomes more and more difficult to see clearly and to orient ourselves safely in the confusions of the twilight.  The night of the transitory period begins to loom before us, with its nightmares, frightening shadows, and heartrending horrors.  Beyond it, however, the dawn of a new great Ideational Culture is probably waiting to greet the men of the future (Social and Cultural Dynamics, 1937, Volume III, p. 131).

FAST FORWARD TO THE 21ST CENTURY

Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies” (2015) take the baton from Sorokin and in doing so reveal some startlingly disruptive changes, while Tyler Cowen in “Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation” (2015) is equally dramatic.

Much of what these authors have to say puts the future in the context of an incredible but mainly quiet revolution in terms of what the Computer Age has done, is doing and will continue to do to Western society and beyond.

The U.S. government started a program in 1996 called the “Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative” (ASCI), and developed ASCI Red, which was designed to do a trillion calculations per second.  It continued to be the most powerful computer until 2000.  ACSI Red was little smaller than a tennis court and used as much electricity as 800 houses and cost $55 million.

The equivalent in power of ASCI Red was launched by Sony of its PS3 in 2005, fits comfortably under your television set, runs on a normal power circuit, and sells for about $400.

Gordon Moore, one of the founders of the computer chip company, Intel, noticed in 1965 that silicon chips were getting more and more powerful at a remarkable consistent rate.

For the past half century, computer chips have double in power or half in price every 18 months.  This has brought about something of a miracle.  Transitioning from the ASCI Red to the PS3 Sony, has been, according to these authors, “the greatest invention in human history which has improved at such speed over such a long period.”

Put this altogether and it seems obvious that computer technology is going to seriously impact and disrupt our daily lives.   Large categories of work, especially work that is mechanistically precise and repetitive, or work that is already automated will disappear for workers.

What is going to happen has already happened as the New Industrial Revolution or The Second Machine Age has been going on right under our noses.   Computers are not a new invention, but their impact on economic growth has been slow. 

We have had a number of iterations in this scheme of things: the iPod replaced the CD Walkman, the smartphone replaced the cellphone, as well as essentially replacing the laptop and desktop, and the iPad has marginalized the personal computer.

Quite incredibly, perhaps because these gadgets are mainly opportunities for consumers on the job and in their leisure time to entertain themselves, they have not succeeded in replacing human labor on machines.

Author John Lancaster writes in “The London Review” (March 5, 2015, p. 6):

Most of the real productivity benefits of the computing revolution happened a few decades ago.  We have more and cooler devices, but what these gadgets do, for the most part, is entertain and distract us.  They do nothing to aid productivity, and may even diminish it.  The light bulb changed the world; Facebook is just a way of letting people click ‘like’ on photos of cats that resemble Colonel Gaddafi.  On this view, Moore’s Law has mainly led to an explosion of digital activity of not a very consequential type.  Real change would involve something like a ten or hundredfold increase in the potential of batteries, but that requires progress in chemistry, which is a lot harder than cramming more circuits into a silicon chip.

Technological unemployment, which we are now facing, involves the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.  A fundamental axiom of economics is that economic processes are based on human wants, and since human wants are infinite, the process of supplying them is also infinite.

The economy will not come to a halt until human wants do.  Since that will never happen, there will be enough work for everyone except during occasional recessions, stagflations, depressions and crises.  But that work will also constantly be changing.

The disappearance of work happens to individuals, not to economies.  A job lost in one place is replaced by a new job, which may be somewhere else.  In 1810, agriculture employed 90 percent of all American workers.  In 1910, it employed 30 percent; in 2010, it employed less than 2 percent.  The American population in 1810 was 7,239,881; in 1910, 92,228, 496; and in 2010 it was 308,745, 538.

One of the most productive industries in American history has been that of agriculture.  With less than 2 percent of Americans directly involved in farming, not only do farmers feed the nation, but agricultural products are a major American export.

The First Industrial Revolution took 150 years to come to complete fruition, starting with the steam engine, the railroad, automobile, the airplane, the assembly line, progressing communications to the telegraph, telephone, movie picture, electric typewriter, and so forth into the twentieth century.

Oxford economists, Michael Osborne and Carl Benedikt Frey, using mathematical and statistical calculations, see sweeping changes in 702 occupations.  Here are the top five occupations seen coming out of this Second Industrial Revolution: (1) recreational therapists; (2) first line supervisors of mechanics; (3) emergency management directors; (4) mental health and substance abuse social workers; and (5) audiologists.

The bottom five are: (698) insurance underwriters; (699) mathematical technicians; (700) sewer, hand; (701) title examiners, searchers; and (702) telemarketers.

Choreographers at (13) come ahead of physicians at (15), writers at (123) and editors at (140).

IS THE FUTURE TO BE A REVOLUTION OR A RENAISSANCE?

Frey and Osborne claim in the next two decades 47 percent of employment as we know it today is in the high risk category, meaning that potentially many of the jobs white and blue collar workers now have could disappear.  

The less paid workers are more at risk.  This will be a manifestation of the Computer Age placing its indelible mark on society.  The poor will be hurt, the middle will do a little better, and the rich will do very well.

Computer and automation productivity is expected to soar but to be increasingly disconnected from pay.  That said the typical American worker’s income has barely gone up since 1979, and has actually fallen since 1999, failing to keep up with the rate of inflation, while paradoxically, that same worker’s productivity has gone up in a nice straight line.  Put another way, the amount of work done by a worker has gone up, but that worker’s pay has not.

Profitability is accruing to capital rather than to labor. 

This can be dramatically illustrated.  Imagine an economy in which the 0.1 percent own the machines, the rest of the 1 percent manage the operation of those same machines, and the 99 percent either do the work not done by the machines, or are unemployed. 

That is what automation has done, is doing and seemingly will continue to do, as capitalism finds its capital triumphing over labor, which means the majority of people who have to work for a living.

New technologies are not expected to make businesses 10 percent more efficient but ten times more efficient.  Meanwhile, home ownership, which is the staple of and best measure of the laboring class wealth, is expected to collapse in price.

John Lancaster writes:

(As the value of homes drop) there is no reason why the median home in Palo Alto, in the heart of the Silicon Valley shouldn’t cost $50,000 … The prospect of millions of jobs being rendered obsolete, private home values collapsing and the prices of everyday goods going into a deflationary spiral hardly sounds like a recipe for nirvana (opt. cit., p. 7).

Imagine how this “news” might hit someone in Palo Alto in a median home that cost $400,000.  As we have seen many times before, when real estate values go down in one part of the country they follow in all the other sectors as well.

He continues:

The disappearance of 47 percent of jobs in two decades must be right on the edge of which a society can bear, not so much because that 47 percent, as because of the time frame … (This) is of a hyper capitalist dystopia.  There’s capital, doing better than ever, the robots doing all the work, and the great mass of humanity, doing not much, but having fun playing with its gadgets… (Ibid, p. 8)

It took the First Industrial Revolution or First Machine Age 150 years to reach completion.  Compress this into 20 years with society having inadequate time to deal effectively with all the inevitable challenges and you have the currents of dystopia.

We know from history of the Roman Empire's total collapse in 476 C.E. with the invasion of the Visigoths and Germanic tribes from the north.  But long before that, Rome denied its changing circumstances, and failed to deal with its obvious socioeconomic unraveling.  Instead, it entertained its citizens in mass extravaganzas in the coliseum rather than rallying its citizens to embrace the challenges of a new day.  The lessons of history never seem to take.

What we are seeing across the United States in 2015 as well as in the rest of the Western world is hyper capitalistic dystopia and atavistic displacement because "the robots are coming."  Isn’t it strange that we are intimidated by the inanimate objects that we have created?      

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THE JESUS STORY CONTINUES!

THE FOURTH GOSPEL

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 7, 2015

What makes the “Jesus Story,” told through the gospels, so compelling is not its historical authenticity; nor the question of Jesus’ divinity; not even the validity of Christianity as believers insist as the true faith.   What makes the story so compelling is its humanness.  It is the people in this drama, otherwise conceivably invented or composites of people of the time, that are so enchantingly real to the mind and imagination, including Jesus himself.

Much has been made here, as have scholars over the centuries, as to the contrasts and contradictions between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of St. John, or the Fourth Gospel.  For me, this makes these accounts vibrate with energy and élan. 

Likewise, reading Romans one can imagine the trepidation of Paul as these Letters were written to a congregation over which he had no apostolic authority.  He stressed as he engaged them that he was merely going to Rome in transit to Spain via Rome.  It was his principle, he claimed, not to evangelize where others had worked, when that is precisely what he was doing.   

Paul was going to a church that he had not founded.  Given his disposition, he meant to present his writings to the Roman Christians and to test his theological views in a systematic way, which he did.  His mission was to show how God’s plan for the salvation of mankind was equally a Gentile as well as a Jewish opportunity.  More specifically, since this was a Gentile audience, his Letters to the Romans were directed at showing how the coming of Jesus the Messiah had made it possible for Gentiles to also become heirs to God’s promises. 

Paul was a bold charismatic actor with enemies many among the Jerusalem Christians, yet he walked boldly into their midst seemingly to recognize a lack of leadership and to know he would eventually prevail.

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If a person in the 21^st century can get past his self-consciousness of not being a biblical much less theological scholar, and can read the “Jesus Story” as if a mirror of people in his current own century, this story can be entertaining and enlightening.  For example, Vladimir Putin of Russia early apparently recognizes the vacuum created in the West due to its ambivalence in Western leadership, has taken residence in that vacuum as Paul did in the first century.  Human beings, not mythic characters, write man’s story, now as then.

We are discussing here the Synoptic Gospels and the Fourth Gospel as if they were assigned by a publisher and written with an agreed upon due date.  That was not the case at all.  Someone had to recognize the significance of the Jesus story and act.

Irenaeus, the Bishop of Asia Minor, is alleged to have requested John in his old age to write a gospel in response to the Jewish Christian groups who were then deemed heretical. 

The Fourth Gospel is believed to have been written near the end of the first century, probably in Epheus in Roman Asia.  The reputation of John the Apostle was strong in Asia and his work circulating well there as had the previous gospels.  It was Irenaeus who decreed that all four gospels be bundled together as one and treated as the Scripture for the new religion. 

Although Irenaeus proposed that all Christians accept Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as orthodox, and only these four gospels, he regarded John’s Fourth Gospel as the primary gospel due to its high Christology, that is, its theology relating to the person, nature and role of Christ in Christian theology.  St. Jerome translated John into its official Latin form, replacing the various older translations.

The Fourth Gospel would come to influence impressionist painters, Renaissance artists, and classical art, literature and other depictions of Jesus in Greek, Jewish and European history.

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The Fourth Gospel is designed to teach theology through narrative means and is very biographical, but can we trust the information it contains?

The prologue is intended to identify Jesus as the eternal Logos (Word) of God.  Thus John asserts, without making Jesus God, an innate superiority to all divine messengers whether angels or prophets. 

The narrative of the prologue of this gospel begins with verse, and consists of two parts.  The first part relates to Jesus’ public ministry from John the Baptist recognizing him as “the Lamb of God” to raising Lazarus from the dead and Jesus’ final public teaching.  In this first part, John emphasizes seven of Jesus’ miracles always treating them as “signs.”   

These “signs” are interspersed long dialogues and discourses including several “I am” saying.  The miracles conclude with that of Lazarus.  In the Fourth Gospel, it is this last miracle, and not the temple incident of the moneychangers that prompts authorities to have Jesus executed.   

The second part presents Jesus in dialogue with his immediate followers and gives an account of his Passion and Crucifixion and of his appearances to the disciples after his Resurrection. 

This section opens with an account of the Last Supper that differs significantly with the Synoptic Gospels.  Here Jesus washes the disciples’ feet instead of ushering in a new covenant with the Eucharist.  The feet washing served as a Christian initiation ritual rather than a baptism.  Jesus declares his unity with the Father and promises to send the Parclete (Holy Spirit), explaining that he is the “true vine” and must die before the Holy Spirit can come.

The Fourth Gospel then records Jesus’ arrest, trial, execution, and resurrection appearances, including “Doubting Thomas.”  Significantly, John does not have Jesus claim to be the Son of God or the Messiah before the Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate.  The Sanhedrin is the name given in the Mishnah (Torah oral writings) to the council of seventy-one Jewish sages who constituted the Supreme Court and legislative body in Judea during the Roman period.

Stained glass portrait of St. John

(author of Fourth Gospel of John)

Though the three Synoptic Gospels share a considerable amount of text fully 90 percent of the Fourth Gospel is unique.  The Synoptic Gospels describe much more of Jesus’ life, miracles, parables and exorcisms.  The Fourth Gospel is notable for its effect on later Christianity.

A scholar in Christology sees this gospel as portraying Jesus Christ as “a brief manifestation of the eternal Word,” whose immortal spirit remains ever present with believing Christians.  The book presents Jesus as the divine Son of God, but subordinate to Him.  In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus speaks often about the Kingdom of God, his own divine role however is obscure.  In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus talks openly about his divine role, that he is the way, the truth and the life, echoing the statement, “I am.”

Scholars doubt that the historical Jesus actually made these sweeping claims, and interpret John 12:44 (“He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me.”) as meaning that Jesus expressly denied being God.

Jesus baptism by John the Baptist is not explicitly mentioned in the Fourth Gospel.  Most scholars believed that John the Baptist was better known than Jesus, had a wider following, and greater influence.  This explains why his followers denied the superiority of Jesus over their leader.  The Fourth Gospel, however, has John the Baptist declaring such a superiority.

In the Fourth Gospel, John has Jesus in Jerusalem making unfavorable references to the Jews.  Some see this as a rebuttal on the part of the author against Jewish criticism of the early Christian church.  In none of the other gospels do the Jews, in masse, demand the death of Jesus. 

Only the Fourth Gospel seems to have resonated with Gnostics.  They were members of certain sects among the early Christians who claimed to have superior knowledge of spiritual matters, and explained the world as created by powers or agencies arising as emanations from the Godhead.  Gnosticism did not fully develop until the mid-second century.         

Comparisons to Gnosticism are not based on what John says in the Fourth Gospel but on the language of logos and light, concepts of Light and Darkness prominent in the Qumran community, the ancient Jewish village of Palestine on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in the West Bank east of Jerusalem, an area noted for its caves in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.  For Gnostics, Jesus was not divine but a reveler of knowledge, whereas the Fourth Gospel teaches that salvation can only be achieved through revealed wisdom, which is through belief in Jesus.

Clement of Alexandria, 200 C.E., noted that the gospel of John was a “spiritual gospel,” or theological approach as distinct from the biographical approach of the Synoptic Gospels.  Accordingly, today Jesus’ teachings in John’s gospels re largely found to be irreconcilable with that found in the Synoptic Gospels, whereas they are found to be more accurate representations of the teachings of the historical Jesus.  To complicate this picture even more, the teachings of Jesus in John re distinct from those found in the Synoptic Gospels.

That said it is easier to reconcile the synoptic accounts within John’s narrative framework than to explain John’s narrative within the framework of the synoptics.  

A distinctive feature of the Gospel of John is that it provides a very different chronology of Jesus’ ministry from that in the synoptics.  First, John’s chronology is always consistent in seasonal references and in the correct sequence, geographical distances, approximate times of journeys, while references to external events is always coherent with the internal chronology of Jesus’ ministry, which cannot be claimed for any of the Synoptic accounts.  To wit, the harvest tide story of Mark (2:23) is shortly followed by reference to green springtime pastures (6:39).

Second, it would be relatively easy to have created the Synoptic chronology by selecting and editing John’s chronology, but would require a wholesale rewriting of the sources to expand the Synoptic chronology to produce that found in the Fourth Gospel.

Moreover, in John’s gospel the public ministry of Jesus extends over more than two years, whereas it is only a year in the synoptics.  In John, the start of Jesus’ ministry is in Jerusalem for the Passover, then he is in Galilee for the following Passover, before going up to Jerusalem again for his death at a third Passover.  The synoptics mention only the final Passover describing a public ministry of less than a year.  In John, Jesus drives the moneychangers at the start of his ministry, whereas the Synoptic Gospels account for this at the end immediately after Palm Sunday.

The Fourth Gospel gives no account of the Nativity of Jesus, unlike Matthew and Luke, while Jesus’ mother is never identified by name, but does assert that Jesus was known as the son of Joseph.  John (7:41-42, and again in 7:52) records that Pharisees dismiss Jesus as the Messiah on the grounds that the Messiah must be a descendent of David and born in Bethlehem, stating that Jesus instead came out of Galilee (as stated in the Gospel of Mark).  John made no effort to refute or correct this. 

Pharisees are depicted as being uniformly against Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels but sharply divided with reference to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel.  Pharisees such as Nicodemus are at least found to be partially sympathetic to Jesus.  

John has no other women going to the tomb with Mary Magdalene.  John does not contain any parables choosing rather to use metaphoric stories, allegories, or symbolism with reference to events or things.  Major speeches of Jesus are missing, including the Sermon on the Mount.  The “Kingdom of God” is mentioned only twice in John, repeatedly in the synoptics.  Conversely, exorcism is never mentioned in the synoptics.  John never lists the Twelve Apostles by name.  However, Apostle Thomas is given a personality as the “Doubting Thomas” in John.     

IN SUMMARY

Mark’s gospel is the oldest, believed to have been written in Rome in 60 C.E., or approximately 30 years after the death of Jesus.  Matthews’s was written in Antioch in 85 C.E. and Luke’s in Corinth in 80 C.E.  There is no certainty when they were written, where they were written or by whom they were written.  This is simply the commonly accepted data.  The Fourth Gospel, John’s gospel, could have been written as late as 100 C.E.

The Fourth Gospel has the account of “Feeding of the 5,000.”  We find that the fish eaten at that miraculous meal is not fish or “ichthus,” but cooked or pickled fish, or “opsarion” from the fish trade.  John was a fisherman, friend and disciple of Jesus.

The Fourth Gospel is quite different.  It offers a chronology of Jesus death that differs with the others. It makes no mention of the Eucharist, which is prominent in the others at the Last Supper.  It also differs with when Jesus died.  The Synoptic Gospels have the Crucifixion after the Passover, while John has it about the time that the Passover lambs were being slain in the Temple.  Jews were forbidden to carry weapons during Passover, which gives further credence to John’s chronology.

The Fourth Gospel endeavors to show Christianity as the “New Israel,” a Jewish faith for Jews, not a faith for Gentiles as well.  Jesus in his last hours reformed and reestablished Israel as a new religion, John is saying and that religion was Christianity.

Readings of the Jewish New Year: “Now then, arise” (Deuteronomy 2:12); “Depart, go up hence” (Exodus 13:1).  These words were incomprehensible to the Twelve Apostles, but a straight forward narrative from John: “When Jesus had spoken these words, he went forth with his disciples over the Brook Kidron” (John 18:1) and into the Garden of Gethsemane.  

These gospel writers put together narratives to interpret events consistent with the written tradition of prophecy.  This would be alien to historians or biographers today.  Matthew makes Jesus a new Moses, delivering a New Law to the chosen people of Israel from the mountain-top; Mark likens Jesus to trekking through the wilderness to the Promised Land; and Luke shows Jesus as man become God.

None started with a set of theological beliefs about Jesus, and then fitted the narrative into these beliefs.  Only the Fourth Gospel departs from the historical Jesus to the memory of Jesus of Nazareth.  It is a poor memory that only works backwards. 

The Fourth Gospel endeavors to present Pontius Pilate’s encounter with Jesus as if from an eyewitness account.  It is not clear that John witnessed this exchange.  But like the other gospel writers, his assumptions paralleled the Scripture. 

Author A. N. Wilson in “Jesus, A Life” (1992) writes,

He (John) was not making a straight story into a myth.  He was starting with a myth.  The myth is that “In the Beginning was the Word.”  The Fourth Gospel sees life as a perpetual conflict between light and darkness, with the darkness never able to ‘master’ the light, never able to understand or to conquer it.  The kosmos (the “world”) hates Jesus.  He does not need to judge or condemn it, for it condemns itself by its own ignorance.  The ‘love’ which God shows to the kosmos in this Gospel is, to say the least, limited.  In his (John’s) mythological way of looking at things, benighted humanity is represented by the ‘Judeans’ who failed to see the glory of the Galilean Jesus even when he performed signs among them.  These Jews are represented as urging the death of Jesus upon Pilate.

What makes the Fourth Gospel intriguing as well as puzzling is its strong anti-Christian vein and much less emphasis on the idea of a church in contrast to the unqualified Christianity espoused by Paul, Matthew, Mark and Luke. 

Believers in the Fourth Gospel are born again as individuals into the Light of Jesus.  Readers do not find Jesus in a community of saints.  There is no Eucharist.  Faith is the total basis of belief, which is not based on knowledge, scholarship, seeing or experiencing, in other words, basically anti-Paul.  It is not even about Jesus as God, but the story of Jesus as the Divine Logos (Word), which is not quite the same thing as God.  Indeed, it makes no reference to Jesus being the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. 

The Fourth Gospel sees Jesus primarily as a teacher.  It puts all these teachings into the mouth of Jesus.  It records the Feeding of the 5,000, the Last Supper, and other events with no concern about historical credibility.  Theologians and historians still have a legitimate right to ask who was the real Jesus, did he exist, what did he teach, can any truth be recovered from the Gospels or the Dead Sea Scrolls?  They will not, however, find answers in the Gospel of John. 

Given the unapologetic mythological framework of the Fourth Gospel, it still purports to be a legitimate story of an historical personality, Jesus.

Few New Testament scholars believe Jesus never existed.  The gospel writers did not have the same intent as these scholars.  They wrote, as the Fourth Gospel says, “that ye might believe.”  But it would be folly to believe the gospel writers are describing people, times, places and events with cutting edge historical accuracy.  It was not their focus.  They were selling an idea. 

Even the Crucifixion of Jesus, which is central to the theology of Paul and the Christianity he promulgated to the Gentiles cannot be confirmed with certainty.

In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus makes no claim to being the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, but the Synoptic Gospels do.  On the other hand, these gospels discounts the idea that Jesus thought of himself as the Preexistent Logos sent from the Father to ‘reveal’ God to the enlightened few, as the Fourth Gospel maintains. 

The passages where the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel makes these claims for himself are so unlike the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels that it is impossible to imagine that they are ‘historical.’ 

That said it strains credulity to suppose that there was an actual Galilean preacher, who was an exorcist, miracle worker, and charismatic figure who died on the cross around the year 30 C.E.  Equally, it is hard to imagine an improbable band of men would endure martyrdom to spread a new monotheistic faith to the polytheistic Gentiles based on  remembering a man called “Jesus.”  Yet, 2,000 years later, we cannot seem to get enough of this story.

The Fourth Gospel used the activities of Jesus as symbolic signs.  The wedding at Cana, where Jesus turns the water into wine in Jewish pots, is meant to symbolize the Jewish rites of purification with the new wine intoxicating new Israel with the living God.

It would be wrong to assume that such symbolism was absent from the Synoptic Gospels.  In Matthew, the disciples in a boat with Jesus are caught in a terrible storm.  “Save us Lord, or we perish,” they cry.  Jesus awakes from a deep sleep and a great calm follows. 

The boat is a parable for the Church.  The disciples are the early Church distressed by the storm of persecution.  The story informs the disciples that times will become harsh and they will endure hardships, but the Church will survive as all things will occur in Jesus’s name to fulfill Scripture.

One has to wonder reading the Gospels at the cleverness of the authors as these tracts, which are not history manage to creep into our imagination and take possession of us.  They play on that part of us that has a capacity to remake what we read into our own history.  

The Fourth Gospel in particular appeals to this imagination, but not for Paul.  He comes down on the mind with an anvil; John with a feather, another reason John had a problem with this apostle.  Paul’s approach was visceral with a carnal rather than imaginative vision.  He didn’t put the reader in the center of his gospels but the gospels in the center of the reader.  His provocative style was often in conflict with John if not the other gospel writers. 

The Fourth Gospel is a world view meant for the individual to look at the nature of things through his or her own eyes, not only about Jesus, but about the idea of God and everything. 

The Greeks had a different world view.  Writers as different as Plato and Aeschylus saw man as part of the natural order.  Contemporary man is closer to Socrates than to St. John.  Plato’s Gorgias puts it this way:

“The sages (Greek) say that heaven and earth, the gods and men, are held together by fellowship (koinonia) and friendship and harmony (kosmiotes) and self-limitation and righteousness.  So, they call the universe as a whole order (kosmos) not, as we say, disorder, or want of discipline – perhaps the fact escaped you that the mathematical relationship has power among gods and men.”

For the Fourth Gospel, and the Synoptic Gospels as well, the kosmos is not the ultimate reality.  These gospels are not interested in Plato’s other worldly concepts of mind, or of mathematics, politics or law. 

Belief is not a worldwide view but the sphere of the imagination with the Scriptures the linchpin.  Weltanschauung seeks to make destiny and everything comprehensible on the basis of the general understanding of man and the world.  A. N. Wilson writes:

According to the view of the New Testament, in that way, I am running away from my real existence.  I do not attain to my existence in the sphere of what happens generally, but rather in a concrete situation, in the here and now, in my individual responsibility and decision, where as I hazard myself I can gain or lose myself  (Wilson 1992, p. 64).

That is, I stand as an individual in the presence of God.  It is in this light that we are to understand the Fourth Gospel’s perpetually dismissive attitude to what it calls the kosmos, dismissive, yet paradoxical, as Jesus says, I am come not to judge the world but to save the world (John 12:47). 

For the Fourth Gospel, Jesus is the Eternal Logos, unseen and misunderstood by the world, not apprehended by mankind in general, not by the Church, but by the individual.  Jesus says to Pontius Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world.” 

This means that the reader, the individual, who is still “of this world,” still looking at the sun and seeing “a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea,” as William Blake puts it, will be simply unable to “see” what the Fourth Gospel is about, for the reader comes to see Jesus by night with all its rich symbolism of darkness, the darkness of a corporeal world as opposed to an imaginative singular vision.

John is saying in this gospel that the Jews are not so much the actual adherents to Judaism (Jesus and his disciples are that), but the people who inhabit the kosmos, who have Weltanschauung not faith for whom God and Man and Law are part of the same clockwork game. 

To escape this, John is saying in the Fourth Gospel that “the ruler of the Jews must be reborn, must abandon the old womb, no longer worship in the old Temple for he is confronted with a spiritual crisis” (Wilson, 1992, p. 65).

We, the modern reader, come to Jesus in this gospel by night, blinkered with the desire to make sense of things, bounded by common sense, decency, and by ethical and scientific notions which are containable within the kosmos rather than being wholly outside it.  We clutch at mathematical algorithms wanting to know if the Fourth Gospel is the case, if the stories are in any small particle verifiable.  That is the nature of the night. 

Scholars have created a tremendous mountain over the Fourth Gospel: did the story of Doubting Thomas take place; were the disciples a matter of historical fact; did they convene after the Crucifixion; did Jesus in fact rise from the dead and appear to these disciples a week later; or are these episodes that more than a billion souls some 2,000 years later go to war to defend without substance?

By a strange and haunting consistency not duplicated in the Synoptic Gospels, the Fourth Gospel, Jesus becomes the Word.  He is snappy, irascible, teasing, jocular, angry, consoling, fascinating, fully human.  We ask ourselves, what manner of man is this?  And we cannot answer.

He is so real in our consciousness that we find ourselves going back to the Fourth Gospel in deference to the others because, mythology or not, he is real to us.  He is everything that consciousness can conceive of being clearly outside the purview of our understanding and comprehension.  Alas, even as fond as we are of John’s epistles, he breaks free of the Fourth Gospel to clash with the sinless Jesus of theology to be seen through strange lenses. 

This gospel stands alone among regular church goers as their favorite book in the New Testament. It is the book that is most often used at Christian funerals. It includes such well known and oft-quoted texts as: "God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life." It boasts the shortest verse in the Bible: "Jesus wept," which serves the needs of many crossword puzzle creators. Its prologue was used for centuries in Catholic liturgies as "the last gospel" at the mass. It includes characters like Doubting Thomas, whose very name has entered our public discourse.  Believers and nonbelievers usually agreed that this gospel was written by a Jewish mystique. 

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