JESUS, PAUL AND FREUD

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

© March 5, 2015

JESUS

Jesus or Joshua, if you prefer, means “savior.”  The Western World divides history into before and after Jesus.  Jesus taught the human race how to live.  Would the Christian faith collapse if historians and theologians could prove that Jesus never lived, or that he didn’t rise from the dead?

None of the Gospels states that Jesus was born in a stable.  It is also extremely unlikely that he was born in Bethlehem.  Even the census taking for tax purposes that has Mary (with child) and Joseph on the road to their ancestral home may be spurious as well, an invention of the four authors of the Gospels. 

Apostle Paul’s “Letters” have a distinct set of beliefs for Jesus as Paul was writing for Gentiles, not for Jews.  One of the beliefs of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, called the “Synoptic Gospels” because they use similar source material and replicate each other, has Jesus dying on the Cross before the Passover, which is clearly in dispute in the Fourth Gospel according to John.

The Gospels are intent on blaming the death of Jesus on the Jews, which had the effect of Christianity starting out as a Jewish heresy.  Religious persecution of dissident groups within Jewry is unknown in Jewish history with absolutely no evidence of crucifixions, which were common practice of the Roman Empire, occupiers of Palestine in the first century.

Christianity invented the idea of the embryonic church being persecuted by the Jews with the central focus on the Crucifixion while there is no evidence in the first century writings of Josephus to suggest such a Jewish practice.  Crucifixion was a common practice of the Roman Empire in dealing with criminals, crucifying tens of thousands in this manner.

Jesus as the mythological Christ was born in a stable, instituted the Christian Eucharist, was crucified on the Cross, rose from the dead, and founded the Christian Church.  There is no way to verify any of this other than the putative Four Gospels in the New Testament.  Scholars from nearly every perspective have come to view these documents as being mainly mythologies.

Christians today are sustained by the body and blood of Christ in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.  The Fourth Gospel makes no mention of the Eucharist or the transubstantiation of the bread and wine of the Catholic Mass into the body and blood of Christ.

Jesus comes alive as a recognizable Jew in the first century of the Common Era (C.E.), and only as a Jew.  For in none of the gospels does he utter a word or demonstrate a behavior to suggest that he was other than a teacher and holy man among his Jewish people.

Jesus was a Galilean Hasid or holy man.  He wrote no books.  He has been found more real to me in Searching for the Real Parents of My Soul than that provided by my Christian training or through the eyes of my Christian belief system.  The gospel writers, like all good writers, say more with what is left out or left to the imagination.  There the words can be made flesh and dwelt amongst one; there the mystical Jesus can become real in one’s consciousness.

PAUL

Paul wrote about Jesus during the winter of 50 – 51 C.E., approximately twenty years after his death, personifying Jesus as an extension of his own manic, compulsive, twisted self, urging those who would listen to abstain from sexual immorality and all forms of pleasure in the name of Jesus, who was the Messiah.

Yet, Jesus was comfortable around the dregs of society.  This included prostitutes, deviants and sinners of every description.  He also enjoyed the pleasure of food and drink and showed none of the ascetic inclinations legendary for his cousin, John the Baptist.  Paul was a crankier side of Jesus.

The majority of Paul’s hearers would be Gentile Greeks, who had very different ideas about God and gods than that of Jews.  Therefore, Gentiles would have had no trouble turning Jesus into God.  Indeed, these Hellenistic Gentiles took Paul, and his acolyte, Barnabas, to be divine beings, Barnabas to be Zeus and Paul, as he messenger, to be Hermes.

Paul’s message was ingenious: Jesus had risen from the dead, and to those who believed, they would one day meet him in Paradise in everlasting life.  That took the pressure off the poor, the disadvantaged, and the exploited to challenge the rich and powerful for suffering in this life meant for eternal bliss forever in the next life – for the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

There is little to no evidence that Jesus instituted the Eucharist.  This is Paul’s invention.  Paul is not interested in the historical Jesus.  Nor is he self-conscious for his proselytizing zeal to convert all to Christianity even though mythology shadows his Jesus.  On the contrary, he enhances his message because it cannot be challenged.  It is the death of Jesus that matters.  The risen Jesus means everything to Paul as it indicates death has been defeated.

Jesus as described in the Gospels, and Jesus as interpreted by Paul are often worlds apart, especially in the Fourth Gospel.

Paul has an agenda that he makes up as he goes along adjusting to challenges and circumstances, failures and setbacks, but always with a visceral vision of establishing a universal Church.  This makes Paul the inventor and founder of Christianity, not Peter.

Yet the gospels have Jesus declaring, “Peter you are my rock and upon this rock I build my church.”

St. Peters Basilica today is a monument to those words in the center of Rome in all its majestic splendor, which belies this fact, as Paul’s Cathedral Outside the Wall is beyond the Seven Hills of Rome, and is modest by comparison.   

Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us all that we can hope to ever know about the man Jesus.    The Fourth Gospel of John makes no attempt to replicate their claims, but instead chooses to tell his story of Jesus in metaphor, in rich glosses, subtle interpretations with embellishments and in an unabashed entertaining impressionistic style.

Paul writes much about himself and is the only gospel writer autobiographer for he is incapable of anonymity.  His personality breathes through his every word, which is ecstatic, quarrelsome, changeable, contradictory and conciliatory.  He can be feisty and engaging, intimidating and humble, all in a single letter to the Gentiles.  He is always playing to make the convert, to make the sale.  The moral, religious, ethical and psychological contradictions within these writings become the grand strategy that mirrors the principles of human nature and God-like requirements as he see them.

Each generation reading Paul has felt the power of his writing, individually, which has made it unsettling and therefore changeable in the minds of readers as a group as the world in which they are engaged is changing.  In this current era of evolutionary biology with human behavior being reduced to post-Darwinian mathematical algorithms, and religion seen totally false in every literal sense, Paul had the wisdom of spreading his Christianity at the individual level that then metastasized to the cultural or group evolutionary level to claim more than a billion souls 2,000 years later.  

Paul's genius is like a surfer riding the waves of his time that become today the same waves that they were 2,000 years ago, if we believe in thermodynamics.  It was Paul, after all, who singularly wrestled Jesus from the Jews and its Laws, diet, circumcision, its provincialism, and xenophobia, and then from the Jerusalem Christians.

Paul was a native of Tarsus in Cilicia, Asia Minor, a city in modern Turkey today.  He was also a citizen of the Roman Empire.  Tarsus was a sophisticated cosmopolitan city and Jews of that city were Hellenistic.  It was a melting spot of the Jewish idea of God and the Greek idea of good.  Paul lived and worked in the Gentile world, whereas Jesus lived his entire life in the Jewish world.

Paul like Freud was a far more gifted writer and poet than he was a thinker or a philosopher.   Again, like Freud and other great writers, he was able to project the conflicts in his own mind unto others in the wider cosmos.

It was quite a challenge for a Jew born in the Diaspora to get the attention of the polytheistic Gentiles to know and aspire to become part of a monotheistic faith called Christianity. Paul’s confidence came from knowing that in his Hellenistic world there was an inbuilt thirst of the human race for God, the same thirst and compulsion that expressed his own will and motivation.

At some point in his young life, Paul rejected his Hellenism, and became a Pharisee, stating, “I was born of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrew parents.  In the matter of the Law, I was a Pharisee.” (Philippians 3:5 -6)

From the beginning, Paul was in conflict with James the brother of Jesus, and Jerusalem Christians who saw Christianity as the New Israel, and therefore a Jewish religion.

Jews outside the pages of the New Testament have no history of religious persecution, no inquisition, no Mount Calvary.  In contrast to the Jerusalem Christians, Paul came to view Christianity’s only possibility for survival as a new religion for Gentiles.

James didn’t see it that way; nor did Peter.  Tension between Peter and Paul was inevitable as their temperaments and personalities were bound to clash.  Paul was combative, impatient, a man of action.  Peter was conciliatory, indecisive and patient placing his confidence not in ideas or action, but in the Torah and the Jewish tradition.  Like James, he saw the new religion as the New Israel, believing it would all work out in the end.

Author A. N. Wilson in “Jesus, A Life” (1992) believes Paul may have come face to face with Jesus, perhaps in the Garden of Gethsemane as one of the arresting Pretorian guards.  Wilson imagines that that confrontation came to haunt Saul (not yet Paul) afterwards until his conversion on the road to Damascus. 

Jesus, although he had his clashes with Pharisees, seems to have had much in common with them in terms of his views on Judaism.  Moreover, Pharisees were some of the most virtuous men who had ever lived.  They believed God smiled on virtue and frowned on vice.  Paul thought otherwise.

This was made famous by Paul as he clearly took the side of the sinning Publican over the virtuous Pharisee in that defining epistle.

Whereas the Pharisee believed virtue was its own reward, and he was a virtuous man, the Publican admitted that he lacked virtue and was a sinful man, and asked God to be merciful to him a sinner (Luke 18:9 Jerusalem Bible).

This story resonates to this day as a morally anarchic story. The Pharisee and the Publican is not a moral fable against self-righteousness.  It is a nihilistic charter from the Gospel of St. Luke.

The Pharisee believed an exemplary moral life would lead to future blessedness.  Not true according to this story.  It denies the commonsense love of virtue absolutely.  It denies its roots and branches.  What matters in the story is God’s capacity to forgive.  Sin, not virtue, is the focus of this story.

Since the Pharisee has no sin, he cannot get into touch with God.  It is the Publican, the contrite sinner, who is welcomed into God’s house.

The test of a good life, this story is saying, is not virtue, but a childlike dependence on the mercy of God.  Paul took this idea to the bank with Christianity his vault.  Roman Catholicism, which became universal Christianity, has exploited this dependence throughout its social, theological and political history, and into the 21st century.

The Gospels which are written from a Gentile perspective see the Pharisees as petty and conservative when actually Pharisees were quite radical. 

Whereas the Sadducees were content with the Torah as a fixed and finished guide laid down in the Scriptures, the Pharisees applied it as a living document to deal with ever changing contemporary life.  They believed the will of God could be discerned in everyday life, not through religious dogma or ritualistic observation, but in an honest assessment of what is and is not right, what is good and what is not, what is ethical and what is dishonest.

From everything we know of Paul from his epistles and letters, this strand in the teachings of Jesus as shown in the Four Gospels, which are close to that of the Pharisee’s virtue, would be nearly maddening to Paul.   His Galatian Letter to the Romans makes this clear:

God’s forgiveness is not dependent upon human virtue at all, but rather on a free outpouring of divine love for God and the human race in all its frailty.

Paul doesn’t see man as strong, but weak, as dependent, not independent, as wanton and depraved, as collectively needing a guidance system, not capable as an individual to make prudent choices in terms of love and will.

Paul as a Pharisee was scandalized by Jesus’s laxity in his view of the Law (Torah) and in his indifference to ritualistic observations.  Mark has Jesus saying, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).  For Paul the Torah was equivalent to Kant’s categorical imperative (see “Grounds for Metaphysics of Morals,” Chap. 2, Part 1).

Actually, it was probably propitious that Paul was not like a tree, rooted, stable and firmly in place, but more like a river ever in motion yielding to and circumventing obstacles of uncertainty to oblige the forces of nature.  Were he to have been as rooted as James and the Jerusalem Christians chances are the Christianity we know would have been assimilated into Orthodox Judaism and lost forever.

Paul decided to focus on the Gentiles, which meant altering the implicit sense of Jesus in the four gospels as necessary to successfully engage the non-Jewish world to his purposes (see A. N. Wilson’s “The Mind of the Apostle,” 1997, pp. 229-239).

Why he did this rather than proclaim his own vision is reminiscent of people in general, and individuals in particular who can take someone else’s creation and work it to their advantage but are otherwise stymied when faced with a carte blanche situation.  The Epistle to the Romans is a case in point.

This book by Apostle Paul is one of the most influential books ever written, giving a picture of man’s relationship with God which is compatible with Jesus sayings in the Gospels.  It had great impact on Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther and John Calvin.  It provided clues as to how the intellectual and social world of the West would develop against such concepts as original sin and man being saved only through faith, alone.  The power of the epistle has God cancelling out sin through love.

That said the faith of Paul is not the faith of the Galileans or Jerusalem Christians, who had been Jesus’s closest personal friends.  Wilson writes:

(Paul’s faith) grew out of a hatred, a fascination, in the end a possessive love for one strand in Jesus’s teaching which they (the other apostles) seem to have missed: that is the strand contained in the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee.

Peter saw James and the other Galileans envisioning Jesus as the last great Jewish prophet speaking quite literally within the main body of Judaism, not outside the Torah and Jewish tradition.  It was from confrontation with this body of Jerusalem Christians that Paul decided that Judaism had to be overturned.

His personality is central to this advocacy, as he was a man tormented with conflict, in constant war with his colleagues as adversaries; his mind at odds with the Law and grace, God’s righteousness and man’s fallen nature, and at loggerheads between interpreters of Mt. Sinai and Golgotha.

The Cross of Jesus became Paul’s cross, and then that of Christianity.  He had been a bitter persecutor of Christians, which led to intolerable guilt, ultimately to be expiated in a miraculous conversion, followed by internalizing Jesus altogether as his personal savior.

That enlightening experience was then projected on to the human race, which he saw as neither righteous nor just, but lost and sinful requiring saving.

PAUL AND FREUD

Centuries later, Sigmund Freud's mission was not the hereafter but the existential now.  Even so, he showed much in common with Paul.  Modernity was consumed with the crippling effects of guilt and repressed anxiety on human consciousness as Western society was experiencing the Industrial Revolution.  People were making material progress but fixated with debilitating depression and stultifying disquiet. 

Freud, the Jewish psychiatrist, formulated relief through a talking cure rather than a ritual of prayer and good works.  For Paul it was salvation through Christ and the forgiveness of sins.  For Freud it was sanity and the ability to get out of bed in the morning and have some kind of life.

Paul and Freud were moralists of a difference.  With the liberation of repressed demons that Freud insisted all possess, coping mechanisms could be proposed to lead to self-awareness and the triumph Eros or the life instinct over Thanatos or the death instinct, to neutralize man’s capacity for being his own worst enemy to being his own best friend, or a move from self-destruction to self-realization.

Whereas 2,000 years ago, man was obsessed with the idea of God, a century ago man declared the death of God and became obsessed with his ego, self-indulgence and psychosexual satisfaction.

Western society, especially the United States, embraced Freudianism as the palliative they were looking for, to change without changing at all, the medication to quell their pesky free floating anxiety with a balm of free floating expression.  Few realized they were embracing a new religion of sand castles in the air.  Not too strangely, the answers to man’s dilemma were wrapped Apostle Paul’s and Psychiatrist Freud’s own troubled psyches.

By a curious juxtapose of ideas, one about Jesus and his message, the other about the libido and its taunting demands, one steeped in theology and the other in psychology, one monotheistic, the other agnostic or atheistic, but the message of both ringing clearly false today.

Paul is saying man is not capable of morality; Freud is saying man is helplessly consumed with lust and equally incapable of morality.  Paul is saying Jesus as God is the answer; Freud is saying a healthy ego and his Reality Principle is. 

They are saying righteousness is not enough; that man can abstain from murder but carries within himself the forces of destruction.  The Law of Moses can tell us to be chaste in a negative sense, but it cannot banish the demons from our souls.  Freud unwittingly has introduced us to our demons and now we are obsessed with them.  Paul locked Jesus out of Christianity and now it is what this faith needs but is impossible to acquire.  It bears repeating: Paul and Freud took on the world to reflect their own personal torments and made them ours.

Jesus in the Gospels teaches us that morality and virtue are not enough.  And even though Jesus didn't find these values that important, his message made it clear that the yawning gulf between the perfection of God and the imperfection of man could never be bridged by a mere set of religious observations or rules.  There was no pomp and circumstance to his ministry, no baroque rites and rituals, no cathedrals or castles in the air, no priests draped in majestic gowns or power hierarchies, nothing like this charismatic teacher named Jesus writing with a stick in the sand. 

Paul and Freud, on the other hand, interpreted their message in terms of observations and rules.  Paul is saying:

The mere existence of the moral imperative cannot save us because we are all exiled from our true homeland with God.  Jesus did not offer a way to be morally better but to be Sons of God.

He wasn’t concerned about a proven historical Jesus became Jesus was internalized as his redeemer.  In Romans (8:12; 8:21, 22; 8:39), Paul expresses his discovery of Jesus outside the realm of history into the “unsearchable riches of Christ.” 

That was once true of many who called themselves Christian.  As Christianity has come to lose its simplicity, it has come to lose something greater, its validity and relevance.  It started with Paul and his interpretation of the gospels.

For Paul, the Synoptic Gospels, the first three gospels of Jesus as Christ, is not a religion, but religion itself in its deepest and most significance.  The three gospels of the New Testament were written by Matthew, Mark and Luke, men who had learned to look at things in Paul’s way.

That was not true of the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John.  The Synoptic Gospels make no claim to history; the Fourth Gospel implies that sense.

The Synoptic Gospels are lenses focused on the person of Jesus through the eyes of Paul of Tarsus.  Paul focused on Jesus and saw him as a man in whom God Himself was at work.  John in the Fourth Gospel saw Jesus as totally a Jew governed by the Law of Moses with a Jewish orientation and perspective.  His Jesus had no interest in going beyond the borders of Judaism to embrace Gentile pagans. 

In the belief system of Paul, which became the belief system of Christianity, the Synoptic Gospels exemplified Jesus as God-like love in his own person.  This was in defiance of the cruelty of men and in the indifference of nature.  For Paul, the principle of life itself was love.  To live without “agape,” without unconditional love, he saw morality itself as a sham.  Religious observance in Paul's lexicon was synonymous with the word, love.

For the modern reader, looking 2,000 years back, the perception of love as perceived by Paul would be close to incomprehensible.  Likewise, his hymn to love wrapped in the mystical Jesus was that of a visionary governed by the quality of his imagination.  We are not an imagining people.

The events of Jesus’s life take shape after they pass through Paul’s eyes of faith.  Since he is the architect of Christianity, the same is likely to be true of those who call themselves Christians today. 

Likewise, much as the world might deny it, there is little that shapes the sensual materialistic mind of the times that hasn’t passed through Freud's prism of consciousness.  He is presented here as foil to our own misgivings looking through a mirror darkly.

Most readers are not likely to be that familiar with the “Freud, the Father of Psychoanalysis,” although his roots go back less than one hundred years. 

For my generation, we looked into the mirror and saw not a face but a retinue of maladies that blocked our consciousness as our eyes were blurred with the idea of neuroses and psychoses that men of Freud’s school bombarded our psyches.  Freud explained our deepest terrors to us in his explanatory models, which gave us little relief but gave us a better sense of him.  By the same token, the Synoptic Gospels explained Jesus to us that was Paul’s sense of the man.  As we shall see, it was not John’s in the Fourth Gospel.

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Posted By Blogger to The Peripatetic Philosopher at 3/04/2015 11:08:00 AM

A READER WRITES!

What a Breath of Fresh Air is this Man!

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

© February 25, 2015

REFERENCE:

I am currently going through my final editing of Time Out for Sanity! 

Sanity is defined in terms of the individual taking charge of his life and control of how he thinks, why he thinks that way, and how solidly it is based on his experience processed through his distinct conscience and perspective. 

Insanity, on the other hand, is never taking the time to think, never having the courage to think other than how others’ think, worrying always if what one thinks may be out-of-step with the prevailing norm and therefore unpopular. 

When the basis of self-approval is dependent on the approval of others, when it is more important to belong, to be accepted, to be one of the popular crowd, than to be one’s own person, then one lives in a cage of his own making (see Who Put You in the Cage? 2015), while life is little more than a merry-go-round of a secondhand experiences. 

This can lead to anxiety, to trying to be everything to everybody but nothing to ourselves; often manifested in depression, boredom, self-negation, and even self-hatred as we try, sometimes desperately, to escape ourselves in some aberrant behavior that can ultimately lead to our self-destruction.   

This is a too common pattern in Western societies, which represents the pathology of normalcy where the inclination is to trust everyone but ourselves.  Yet, all trust emanates from self-trust, and not the other way around.  To have a friend you must be a friend, starting with yourself.   

This is the theme of "Be Your Own Best Friend" (2014), as I have found befriending ourselves is the hardest obstacle to overcome, mainly because we have been led to believe it is narcissistic or egotistic, when clearly, it is precisely the opposite of such an obsession.  

In this busy busy world, we never seem to have time to stop and listen to the rhythm of our own caring souls for our attention is noisily otherwise directed.   

This is offered as preamble to this writer, a frequent correspondent, who expresses what is in his heart to express.  He writes with candor, refreshing originality of thought, openly expressing himself as his mind invites him to think, caring not whether I agree or not, as he has no other ax to grind then to gain a better understanding of himself and his time against all that daily bombards his senses, which too often obfuscates rather than clarifies the thinking and the understanding.

A READER WRITES:

From my point of view I don’t care what people believe, and I have a hard time dealing with all those people whether they be Nazis, Communists, religious or whatever who want to force their belief on everyone else. 

Religion I find particularly fascinating.  If a human being acted like the god of the old and new Testament who wants to be worshiped and feared and who condemns in Christianity and Islam all nonbelievers to hell ( reminds me of the characteristics of most human dictators ), we in this country would certainly not find such behavior as exemplary. 

The other aspect of Christianity and Islam that I find fascinating is that they both believe in an all-powerful god about whom they believe all of the following:

That he created the universe and our world all by himself, that he kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden because he feared they would become like him, he destroyed his creation through a world flood all by himself, he did Sodom and Gomorrah by himself, and he used Moses to get the Israelites out of Egypt. 

However, Christians and Muslims since their inception both believe their god needs their help.  

A being who is characterized as omniscient and omnipotent would need no one’s help.  Also, if that is the case he would have known at the beginning how it would all turn out.

The other day I read that some people who have been wondering whether there was life in other parts of the universe want to try and contact areas where they think life might exist.  

Many of the individuals in the discussion were against such a move because no one knows what sort of beings might respond, and if they were anything like our species, we certainly would not want to make contact since we can’t even get our act together.

Klaus

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

As you know, while working on this editing business for Time Out for Sanity, I have been (at the same time) working on Search for the Real Parents of My Soul.

This has reacquainted me with many scholars that I have read rather eclectically over the years in the field of theology, history, metaphysics and mythology.  

These scholars ponder some of the same celestial topography that you discuss here.  It is surprising how little we know about these two great religions, Christianity and Islam, and yet how much they dominate our existence and our respected cultures.

My efforts are focused on Christianity, which sprung into a great religion from a very unpromising beginning.  Currently, I am reexamining the Fourth Gospel of St. John, which is blatantly a hagiography of Jesus but with some remarkable surprises. 

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke kind of piggyback on each other, telling the same story with little variance promoting the idea of the “Last Supper” and the Eucharist, which is the center of the Catholic Mass.  St. John does not mention the Eucharist.

He also gives less spectacular explanations to miracles.  

In his account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, we find that the fish eaten at this miraculous meal is not ichithus, the normal Greek word for fish, but opsarion, which means “cooked fish,” or “pickled fish.”  

In other words, fish that had been prepared beforehand by a tradesman.  Incidentally, John of the Fourth Gospel was a fisherman and friend and disciple of Jesus.

The first three gospels are so similar, as to be seen as a synopsis, and therefore called the “Synoptic Gospels.”  

Moreover, not to burden you with too much detail here, John places the arrest and condemnation of Jesus before the Passover as Jews were forbidden to carry swords during Passover.  The three other gospel writers place this after the Passover.  Why should we be surprised?

The Gospels are essentially all that we have of the "Jesus Story" (except the Dead Sea Scrolls), but scholars are finding these gospels mainly fictions, the twisting and turning of events to fit Scripture rather than to confirm Scripture with events.  

Stated another way, the Gospel writers started with a set of theological beliefs about Jesus, and then they fitted their narratives into those beliefs, not the other way around.   

Matthew makes Jesus into a new Moses going to the mountain.  Mark has Jesus leading a band of followers (mimicking the Old Testament) on a trek through the wilderness to the Promised Land.  And Luke has Jesus personifying the prophets of the Old Testament. 

These authors, one must accept in good conscience, started out with the assumption that their stories had parallels in the Scriptures.  

They were not making a straight story into a myth, as Oxford Scholar A. N. Wilson puts it, but were starting with a myth, the myth that in the beginning was the Word (A. N. Wilson, “Jesus,” W. W. Norton & Co., 1992, p 54).

The Gospel of John doesn’t see Jesus as God, but the Divine Logos, which is closer to Arius, who was excommunicated for that belief at the Council of Nicaea (318 A.D.).  

Nor does John see Jesus as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.

Men more than 2,000 years ago differed little with men today.  The gospel writers may have been myth makers, but we have our own myth makers today, myths buried or concealed in truths no less so than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the First Century.  

For me, Jesus did exist and was so remarkable that 2,000 years later, I still can't seem to get enough of him, although he is often buried in or locked out of Christianity by ritual and dogma. 

The Old and New Testament are beautiful, exciting and vital stories of a world no less credible even if the stories are how the Mind’s Eye see us as a species.   

Klaus, we need our myths, but by a strange coincidence we are moving away from the New Testament, as literal truth, according to many theological scholars, A. N. Wilson included, towards the Greek view of man as a part of the natural order, and the universe as a whole as one of order, and not of disorder for the want of discipline. 

In the Hellenistic concept of the cosmos, gods and men are part of the same thing, not separate, vital to each other, part of the same harmonious whole.  I will conclude with a quote from A. N. Wilson:

There is a law of nature, expressed in its purest form in mathematics, but discernible in the sphere of ethics and of what we would call natural science from which none could escape, even though the Platonist would wish to escape from the bonds of the physical and ascend to the spiritual, to discard the world of nature, which is merely a shadow of that heavenly reality which can be discovered by intense thought, asceticism and prayer… 

The New Testament is not even remotely interested in concepts of mind, of mathematics, of politics, of law.  The New Testament posits a quite different way of viewing the cosmos, a way which we find in the pages of the Old Testament and in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but not among the Greeks.  The closest analogy in the non-theological sphere is the “imagination” as it is was conceived by the Romantics, who, of course, derived their concept as much from the Scriptures as from Kant.

Keep thinking!

Jim 

TIME OUT FOR SANITY! -- another excerpt

EXCEPTION TO THE RULE: Doing as a

Creative Tool

       James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 24, 2015

REFERENCE:

This is another excerpt from Time Out for Sanity!  The previous piece dealt with how passive a society we have (thus the reason for “Exception to the Rule”) become focusing on celebrities, entertainers and professional athletes and athletics to make (for that attention) millionaires and in some cases billionaires, while we pay the freight leaving our creative lives dormant, on hold, to eventually wither away and die.  Not the children in this piece.  Incidentally, one of the fourth graders was my son, Michael.

There are breakthroughs that receive little note. I happen to be given a spirited boost when I had the privilege to observe fourth graders at Anona Elementary in Largo, Florida. So moved was I that I wrote a “letter to the editor” of The Clearwater Sun (March 17, 1972), a community newspaper that has since gone out of business.

Mrs. Kampouris was the teacher of a reading class. Her fourth graders put on a program from beginning to end without her assistance. They wrote, directed and acted in the presentation. I can’t remember seeing creativity expressed more delightfully. It was impressive being a kids’ show, but even more so because everyone was having so much fun.

The key of course was the teacher. Her subtle guidance and patient concern enhanced their individual worth. Each of us has an immense reservoir of untapped creative energy. The need to perform, to use that precious store is part of our frustration as our society is not designed as much for participation as it is for watching others perform.

How many more painters, writers, and scientists, indeed, how many more creative artisans in publishing and business might be imaginatively and happily employed should the efforts of this fine teacher segue into their adult lives?

The fourth grade program rose naturally out of a word play with tongue twisting silly phrases. It continued with several students explaining their respective projects: one was making a facsimile of a rocket, another a pencil holder, and so on.

Each demonstration stood out for its personal touch as thoughts and ideas were expressed in a comfortable vocabulary.  It was apparent they were at ease with language, and used words as a natural tool in that context.

Poetry reading followed, and all the poems were original works. The handling of words here caught my fancy. Somehow, as expressed by a child, love of people, places, animals and life resonates with the mind. It comes across with sincerity in direct and simple language devoid of false urbanity or artificial complexity.

Mrs. Kampouris revealed her genius in the next phase. Asked to imagine themselves as a simple inanimate everyday object, these budding artists expressed their thoughts on paper. She had helped this suggestion along by placing an object in front of them—pencil, spool, paper clip, etc.—and asked them to create a story about the object. As a writer myself, I know you have to make like a child to energize wondering, which is the chemistry of creativity.

And then we were treated to the play. While it was entertaining, the banter and giddiness that went on over botched lines, cue or prop failures (one boy lost his beard) only added to its delight.  The fact that this was a reading class is relevant to today. So many children and adults are such poor readers that they take the word of others before checking out information on their own.

This often happens in industry when workers don’t or can’t read the instructions of their work, and go on working on the basis of what a colleague says about the procedure. Since this is often incomplete or erroneous, the quality of the work suffers.

The point is that reading can and should be a pleasant experience.  It can and just might push the bar up to higher expectations and wider horizons. These fourth graders are learning that reading is not a chore but a delight and part of the creative process.

Reading for them has been made an integral part of doing. Mrs. K has not partitioned reading from life or brandished a book list of “must” books to be read. She has not made reading an escape from life but an integral part of its discovery. She has brought language and books and ideas to life for these youngsters. Mrs. K may never know the true import of her teaching model on her students, but the twinkle in her eyes belies this and suggests she already does.

Like many things, the move from spontaneity or “letting go” and doing, to being up tight and following rules passively is a gradual one; so gradual that it is not perceived as happening. We continue to think we are “doing our own thing,” when it is precisely the same thing that everyone else is doing as if responding to a metronome on cue.

Once regions of the country looked quite different from each other; now they all look the same. Once cities had a distinctive individualism to them; now they all have similar glass and steel high rises with almost identical silhouettes.

Should we be able to reconnect with the sparkle of Mrs. K’s model, gone would be the necessity to collect art, for everyone would be an artist. Gone would be millionaire entertainers and celebrities, for the need for their services would have evaporated, as we would have created our own. Even the games scientists’ play would be open to us.

Education with a natural connection to learning fulfills its Greek meaning, which is “to discover.” Gone, then, is the necessity to collect a briefcase of degrees, or to develop a copious curriculum vitae, as the quality of contribution would take precedence to credentials. And gone would be the necessity to pay homage to another man’s mind for we would be too busy using our own.

Some forty years later, 2011 to be exact, I was asked to evaluate essays of eight and nine-year-olds on what the local library meant to them. More than forty young people submitted their work. The library was located in an upscale neighborhood close to the university. So, not surprisingly, many of the essays were quite literate, showing embellishments that suggested parental influence. This included state-of-the-arts Microsoft Word printing and vocabularies of the precocious.

My interest was content, not context, and how the theme of the exercise was conveyed. Of all the essays, one stood head and shoulders above all the others. It was handwritten, and carefully so, but it was the content that was stunning. The author claimed that the library was a magic kingdom to him, where worlds he did not know existed could be explored as if they were in his dreams.

The essay literally jumped off the page with its excitement, wonder, and zest for the privilege to have this “magical place” so close to home. In my comments, I envisioned a writing career for this person, as the magic went beyond its author to make connection with me, the reader. 

When first place was announced, a small African American boy with a smile that stretched from ear-to-ear, jumped up and raced forward to collect his prize. Obviously, the other three evaluators of this contest agreed with me, a contest sponsored by Director Armand Ternak and his staff at the Temple Terrace Library, Temple Terrace, Florida.

FOR YOUR INFORMATION!

About “Time Out for Sanity!”

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

© February 23, 2015

REFERENCE:

This book is in its final editing stages and should be in bookstores and on line by April/May 2015.

AUTHOR’S NOTE TO SECOND EDITION

I thought long and hard about writing this book. The problem was resolved when I convinced myself it could give the reader a new perspective on how we have come to be stuck in our false confidence with a possible way out.

While science is looking for a universal theory, social and economic thinkers seem to be looking for an ecumenical system that answers all the questions, public and private, scientific and historical, moral and aesthetic, individual and institutional. The result is that there is seemingly a constant clash between progressive and reactionary agendas. The obstructionists ignore the complexity of the problems being faced while progressives deny the existence of these problems and turn their attention to irrelevancies.

We see this in our institutions and commerce: in the family which has become an irrelevancy; in the school which despite pouring more and more money into education continues to produce an inferior product; in corporate commerce with its infallible authority and business as usual practices despite nearly throwing the United States as well as the world into another Great Depression; in the religious in which the focus has been more on preserving its survival than discharging its mission; and in government that stays the same, misses the changes, is unable or unwilling to face them, leaving the future up for grabs.

These institutions originally created to respond to real societal needs are no longer capable of fulfilling them. They have been transformed into mere impediments to human progress, in so doing, breeding their own tensions and diseases while generating their own false remedies.

Information Technology is defusing and decentralizing power in America; the impact of which we are only beginning to feel.  Some obscure individual or collection of geeks, because of the way technology works today, can expose a company or, indeed, the government and have a disproportionate influence on outcomes. There are no secrets anymore. Institutional power has maintained its hold on control because it controlled the secrets.

Not anymore! This complicates matters considerably going forward, mainly, because little thought has been given to what has been lost for what has been gained.  Strife, conflict and competition between and among these too human institutions have sometimes bordered on the pathological.

What makes them so is that they keep promoting a hidden agenda and thus keep failing to perform their appointed function.  All forms of behavior are not rational, and as a consequence lead to various degrees of self-distortion and frustration. Therefore, it is possible to analyze the situation correctly but impossible to predict behavioral outcomes.

Nothing is value free much as science would suggest to the contrary. The division between facts and values is a shallow fallacy for every thought involves a reflection, no less than every act a feeling. Values are personified in our general attitude to the world, in the way we think, see, believe, understand, discover and know a thing to be true or not.

The “self ” is not a static entity. Nor are people dispassionate observers free from the values that bombard their senses. To attempt to escape this reality through rational detachment or self-deception is what existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre calls simply “bad faith.”

In revisiting this original essay written in the early 1970s, it was as if everything had changed, when nothing had changed at all except the costumes. So many parallels with our current pathology appear to justify a “Time Out for Sanity!”

Armed with cell phones, smartphones, laptops, Blackberrys, videophones, PlayStations, Game Boys, MP3’s, iPods, iPads, iPhones, or other mobiles soon available, while continually producing more sophisticated digital tools that have become increasingly escape toys, we have sidetracked our evasive minds from an obsession with sex (1970s) to an obsession with cyberspace and social networking at a distance. Now, voyeuristic pixels have replaced tactile fantasies.

Unfortunately, not even the finest handheld electronics can save us from the shock of being stuck in the 1970s. Facts and fantasies are fused in time. Whatever our current proclivities, we are made of what we are by the interplay of these values, facts and fantasies on our delicate psyches.

Look around you, and tell me you don’t see people with glazed eyes running harder than ever and getting nowhere. It would appear that many if not most people don’t like what they are doing or where they are going, but have little idea what they would prefer to be doing or going. It is as if their lives are a fait accompli.

To live is to act. To act is to be doing something useful. The self-conscious know this; the unconscious merely act. Hence, we choose to act and manage our lives or our acts manage us. This then allows us to play the victim.

Where and what we are, may lead us to a state of stasis epitomized by the compulsive routine of a stationary exercise bike, retreat into a recreational facility, or a man cave at home. Or it may find our eyes glued to some kind of a mobile texting and tweeting wherever we are. The retreat of the new century is different, but it is still a retreat that mirrors the 1970s.

We are on the precipice of moving from man the true believer to man the discriminating believer, to man who believes in nothing at all, deceiving himself that he is living in the world on his own terms. We are on the abyss of man having no choice but to grow up, or throw himself into the oblivion.

To put this in perspective, four decades ago, a large rebellious contingent of society’s mainly young people decided to escape boring reality by retreating into a psychedelic wonderland.

They called themselves “hippies,” changed their lifestyle, dress and moral code, and adopted the catchy slogan, “make love not war!”  The Vietnam War was going on, and it was an unpopular war.

The point is that the war provided an escape, not a rational challenge to the system. You might call it a copping out.  Young men of military draft age, said, “Hell, no, I won’t go” (to Vietnam), and fled to Canada or joined a commune.

The irony is that the current “millennials” haven’t had to be so obstreperous.

Consequently, millennials haven’t had to throw tirades or provoke authority figures. They have simply chosen to ignore them.  They don’t choose leaders, but don’t see themselves as followers.  They do what comes to mind without much reflection or pause to assess consequences. To say they are superficially engaged is a moot point.

Millennials are not into counterculture like the “hippies” of the 1970s. While they mirror each other in tacit disregard to the status quo, millennials are not into the idea of culture, or, indeed, what that might imply. Nor are they into rebellion. They have their electronic pacifiers, and at the moment, they are sufficient to float their boat. The escape today is into some kind of electronics.

It never occurs that these electronic gizmo may eventually fry their brains until they have no memory of the damage done. Then they can operate on a schizophrenic high to rival the chemically induced psychedelic highs of the 1970s.

Recently, I visited my granddaughter Rachel Carr at the University of Florida who is a pre-med student. Having been a chemistry major in my undergraduate days, I attended a chemistry lecture with some 300 students. The professor was busy down in the pit writing equations talking about geometric covalent bonds while eighteen and nineteen year old students were busy on their smartphones paying him no mind. Attending class appears a concession as they expect to get the essentials on line or in their text sufficient to “ace” the test subsequently to come from the material presented. It is a kind of confidence I don’t remember having during my college days.

Time Out for Sanity! is written in the hopes that it causes the reader to ponder the choices made hoping they will turn out to be blessings rather than not. To that end, I wish all readers well.

—James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.,

Tampa, Florida, April 15, 2015

JESUS STORY CONTINUES - Reaction to this question!

Can Jesus and the Jewish religion be reconciled?

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

© February 21, 2015

REFERENCE:

A regular reader of this blog who has been following my “Jesus Story” as it is being developed in my book, Search for the Real Parents of My Soul, sent me an Internet article: WND America’s independent News Network’s “The Other Side of the Cross: Can Jesus and the Jewish religion be reconciled?” 

Dr. Don,

By a strange coincidence, my Jesus Story addresses some of these questions in the context of Jesus, the historical Jesus, not the Christ, and his time, against our own, but complicated by such questions -- was Jesus a Pharisee; was Paul a Pharisee; was Paul a Roman citizen? 

There is no definitive information to answer these questions as conjecture is the game of scholars in theology as it is in most other human endeavors.  Believe me when I say (writing this book) that there are literally thousands who have dedicated their lives to looking in every grain of sand for clues as to what is and what is not on the subject of Christianity and Judaism.

Search for the Real Parents of My Soul is only one man's odyssey, and he is not a scholar but a peripatetic philosopher.

Judaism departed somewhat from its undisputed anchor in the Law of Moses and the prophets of the Old Testament when Hellenistic Jews, that is, Jews much influenced by Greece and Greek culture found it amendable to follow or not follow Jewish tradition and laws as they were so inclined. They were also known as Pharisees.

Judaism today is a considerable departure from legalistic Judaism or even Hasidic Judaism, as Jews have the equivalent of many churches as does Christianity. 

Making no attempt to come off as a biblical much less theological scholar, my serious reading on Christianity and Judaism, including the Jewish Torah and Talmud, convinces me that religion is a very human enterprise, and that belief systems, as much as we would like to think otherwise, are man made creations to deal with the unknown and the dark shadows that man creates in his consciousness. It is no accident that subconsciously we feel we have been left here as orphans on this hostile planet, earth. 

We gained consciousness and a conscience on this planet, when or why is open to conjecture, and once that occurred we sought comfort in any way we could find, creating belief systems, some substantive and sustaining, others not. 

In my little book, I go back to the early days of Rome, the city state that built an empire, and by 496 A.D. had totally run out of gas, overrun by the Visigoths and German barbarians from the North.  A thousand years of "forward inertia" called the "Dark Middle Ages" followed. 

Monks in Christianity isolated in monasteries were the equivalent of our computers of that day, preserving what knowledge could be harvested from the devastation.  This included Christianity, our Western culture belief system.

Regarding belief systems, when they are challenged or come to decline in relevance and vitality, then all hell breaks loose, as we now see in the Islam world, have seen in the Christian world, and yes, have also seen in the Judaic world as well. 

Something in our collective DNA seems to feel our legitimacy challenged if everyone else fails to share our same beliefs, which of course is impossible, just as those reading this will have trouble with it, if it in anyway happens to offend their fragile sense of self.

There are more than 7 billion souls on this planet and about 14 million Jews worldwide, a culture, religion and theology that has had major impact on this planet over the past 2,000 plus years, and will continue to do so.

I have great admiration for the Jewish people and Jewish culture, as I was brought up with those feelings with my mother saying, "If I weren't Catholic, I'd be Jewish."

Well, I wouldn't have had much to read if it weren't for Jewish writers, and when I was a student, it was Jewish students that I would find at the Clinton County Library during holidays in my college years, and they were the best students in my classes at the university.

One word described their dedication, and that word was "excellence."  Never met a Jewish student who wasn't afraid to burn the midnight oil to master his studies.  

Just as Christianity has not remained stagnant, neither has Judaism.

Hasidic Judaism (the word mean "piety") came into prominence in the 18th century as a branch of Orthodox Judaism that promoted mystical spirituality and departed from legalistic Judaism.  As Christianity has embraced mysticism, so has Hasidic Judaism. This gave new value to prayer and deeds of kindness by appealing to unlettered or common folk unacquainted with the intricacies of the Jewish tradition.

One can easily get lost or exercised in defensiveness when one is not accepting or disinclined to appreciate another's belief system.  Legitimacy is a matter of choice, including not believing in anything, which is perhaps the most rigid and unforgiving of all belief systems because unbelievers seemingly feel superior for believing they control their own destiny when nothing could be more absurd.

I was reared strict Roman Catholic, and up until the age of thirty, already the father of four children, working on the international stage, believing capitalism was my god, I experienced South Africa and apartheid, and nearly lost my way. 

For the past fifty years, I've been working my way back to believing, not so much in a faith, a religion, a culture, a country, or even a God, but believing in the preciousness of every single human being that walks this earth, knowing that no one is better than another, or that some walk taller than others walk, for we are all God's children, and so was Jesus.

Be always well,

Dr. Jim