I've just attended a lecture by the aging John Shelby Spong yesterday.
Though always a controversial figure in his activism I find him to be an intricate scholar and genuine lover of the
Bible. I consider him a strong voice in seeking to respect the
actual nature of the Bible rather than forcing the Bible to be what one may want it to be. He is much up to his lecture circuit and kept 300 of us in a high state of attention. He has an uplifting
sense of humor. The experience got me to thinking again about
those amazing gospels. I'll share here a train of thought that
has come to me regarding 'miracles' in the gospels and a way of
thinking of the gospels' origins.
If persons present with Jesus had seen literal physical 'super (more than) natural ' miracles surely some of them, with the ability and skills for it, would have gone home and written down what they saw. The gospel says for example that five thousand men saw him feed everyone with a few fish and loaves. That would be something to write about, right then, not forty years later. It would be the human reaction to describe and report such events right then. Such physical materialistic miracles would have stirred up a fire storm of amazement and have been just as astonishing then as it would be for us today... not to mention 'seeing' persons coming out of their graves and walk around. Surely this would have been described on the spot.... not forty to ninety years later, as with the gospel's?
But there are no such early eye witnesses of nature defying happenings and I strongly suspect never were. Even though what was internally experienced by such persons deserves the name 'miracle' for it was dazzling, numinous and defied usual life happenings. Truly an 'experience of light and resurrection' in the midst of their very dark world of oppression and fear. Something truly life and consciousness changing was happening to them in those real undocumented historical moments. But those who were there were not consciously struck by it enough in the moment to try to document it. If it had been an obvious defiance of natural law they would have. What person now even tries to write out their experience the night after they fell in love? The inner meaning of such experience seems to require time to ferment. It is at the moment of happening beyond words. One just lives it. Fortunately the same kind of consciousness raising 'miracle' can still naturally happen in the world and perhaps greatly needs to happen in our times.
These gospel stories were not creatively written out for three to five generations after the time of Jesus. That is why, I believe, they were then purposely written in the genre of imaginative symbolic story, not historical fact(even though most of us Westerners still hear them as literal physical facts). When we do we are as misguided as taking the Western fairy tells, which so richly stir our inner lives, as if they were recorded materialistic eye witnessed history. We would be missing the richer psychological meaning and fail to really benefit from such treasures of mythical type literature.
I think the gospel origins was somewhat like is shown in every TV episode of the 'Lone Ranger.' People are seen caught up in a life event and drama that is very out of the ordinary and involves danger and threats to well being. Involved also is a person who seems to know more and have a deeper wisdom, (or we'd say today of a higher consciousness) and seems in the end to effect everything about the amazing outcome for good. Yet this most unusual real life drama still remains solidly anchored as a part of the real natural, not supernatural, world of those involved.
BUT then, only 'after it is all over' do any involved stop to reflect and ask themselves, " Who was that masked man.... what really happened back there?" So the gospel writers , long after the fact of the experience including Resurrection, sit down and try to put down a narrative, using their Hebrew scriptures, to weave a story of how their forbears, some 40-90 years before, surely must have experienced the long awaited Hebrew messiah. They were not writing history in any sense, but creatively seeking to makes sense of , to explain what materialistically seemed inexplicable regarding events that had had a grand effect on many people and was still enduring in their own hearts. This 'lone ranger' metaphor I think is quite applicable as to the origins of the gospels that could help us put them in proper perspective. ... get us out of reading them as history and the non relevance which that increasingly places on them in the scientific postmodern world.
Now for us, all that happened in those few years of Jesus' ministry and death can be well described as how a person with a more developed consciousness, at the right time and place in real history, can have had such a great impact on shaping culture. An impact that had the spiritual or psychological energy to create a whole new, far more conscious than before, civilization of Humanity. Which is what Christianity(as a historical whole, for good and ill ) has in fact done.
A burning question for us now is: Has that great wave generated 2000 years ago, and captured for posterity by the gospels, of raised consciousness pretty much run its course, lost most of its effective life transforming energy? And is the world now in groaning need for some kind of higher consciousness leap again? An urgent need for our religious and secular cultures to be pushed again to higher planes of consciousness, capable of meeting our human/planet survival challenges? Challenges that the present consciousness of Christianity and other religions, in any of their present interpretations, are prepared to meet?
I suspect we are in such a time, Biblically a Karios, and that such a change will not come again by a collective projection onto a single hero person such as Jesus, the Buddha or Mohammad(though these will forever be honored) but will come instead through many persons being similarly and naturally affected by a kind of Collective Unconscious or 'mind of Deity.' Sincere and honest persons of all faiths and backgrounds throughout the world coming to a similar unexpected transcending collective consciousness which will spread naturally to the masses. I am hoping something like this is what is happening.
If persons present with Jesus had seen literal physical 'super (more than) natural ' miracles surely some of them, with the ability and skills for it, would have gone home and written down what they saw. The gospel says for example that five thousand men saw him feed everyone with a few fish and loaves. That would be something to write about, right then, not forty years later. It would be the human reaction to describe and report such events right then. Such physical materialistic miracles would have stirred up a fire storm of amazement and have been just as astonishing then as it would be for us today... not to mention 'seeing' persons coming out of their graves and walk around. Surely this would have been described on the spot.... not forty to ninety years later, as with the gospel's?
 |
| Caravaggio's 'Inspired Matthew' writing his gospel... 1602 |
But there are no such early eye witnesses of nature defying happenings and I strongly suspect never were. Even though what was internally experienced by such persons deserves the name 'miracle' for it was dazzling, numinous and defied usual life happenings. Truly an 'experience of light and resurrection' in the midst of their very dark world of oppression and fear. Something truly life and consciousness changing was happening to them in those real undocumented historical moments. But those who were there were not consciously struck by it enough in the moment to try to document it. If it had been an obvious defiance of natural law they would have. What person now even tries to write out their experience the night after they fell in love? The inner meaning of such experience seems to require time to ferment. It is at the moment of happening beyond words. One just lives it. Fortunately the same kind of consciousness raising 'miracle' can still naturally happen in the world and perhaps greatly needs to happen in our times.
These gospel stories were not creatively written out for three to five generations after the time of Jesus. That is why, I believe, they were then purposely written in the genre of imaginative symbolic story, not historical fact(even though most of us Westerners still hear them as literal physical facts). When we do we are as misguided as taking the Western fairy tells, which so richly stir our inner lives, as if they were recorded materialistic eye witnessed history. We would be missing the richer psychological meaning and fail to really benefit from such treasures of mythical type literature.
I think the gospel origins was somewhat like is shown in every TV episode of the 'Lone Ranger.' People are seen caught up in a life event and drama that is very out of the ordinary and involves danger and threats to well being. Involved also is a person who seems to know more and have a deeper wisdom, (or we'd say today of a higher consciousness) and seems in the end to effect everything about the amazing outcome for good. Yet this most unusual real life drama still remains solidly anchored as a part of the real natural, not supernatural, world of those involved.
 |
| Who was that masked man ? |
BUT then, only 'after it is all over' do any involved stop to reflect and ask themselves, " Who was that masked man.... what really happened back there?" So the gospel writers , long after the fact of the experience including Resurrection, sit down and try to put down a narrative, using their Hebrew scriptures, to weave a story of how their forbears, some 40-90 years before, surely must have experienced the long awaited Hebrew messiah. They were not writing history in any sense, but creatively seeking to makes sense of , to explain what materialistically seemed inexplicable regarding events that had had a grand effect on many people and was still enduring in their own hearts. This 'lone ranger' metaphor I think is quite applicable as to the origins of the gospels that could help us put them in proper perspective. ... get us out of reading them as history and the non relevance which that increasingly places on them in the scientific postmodern world.
Now for us, all that happened in those few years of Jesus' ministry and death can be well described as how a person with a more developed consciousness, at the right time and place in real history, can have had such a great impact on shaping culture. An impact that had the spiritual or psychological energy to create a whole new, far more conscious than before, civilization of Humanity. Which is what Christianity(as a historical whole, for good and ill ) has in fact done.
A burning question for us now is: Has that great wave generated 2000 years ago, and captured for posterity by the gospels, of raised consciousness pretty much run its course, lost most of its effective life transforming energy? And is the world now in groaning need for some kind of higher consciousness leap again? An urgent need for our religious and secular cultures to be pushed again to higher planes of consciousness, capable of meeting our human/planet survival challenges? Challenges that the present consciousness of Christianity and other religions, in any of their present interpretations, are prepared to meet?
I suspect we are in such a time, Biblically a Karios, and that such a change will not come again by a collective projection onto a single hero person such as Jesus, the Buddha or Mohammad(though these will forever be honored) but will come instead through many persons being similarly and naturally affected by a kind of Collective Unconscious or 'mind of Deity.' Sincere and honest persons of all faiths and backgrounds throughout the world coming to a similar unexpected transcending collective consciousness which will spread naturally to the masses. I am hoping something like this is what is happening.
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