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?      

*     *     *

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.

*     *     *

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.

*     *     *

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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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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