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Every civilisation needs a myth; but woe to the civilisation whose myth has been found wanting. That is the position of Christianity today. It came to ascendance at a time when the myths of Greece and Rome had lost their credibility. The pagans themselves laughed at the stories of their gods; Plato sought to censor them. Christianity triumphed because it offered its sacred scriptures not as myth but as fact. Mystical adepts had always known that the stories in the Bible were not meant to be taken entirely at face, but as the religion degenerated into priestcraft, these insights were forgotten or suppressed.

Today we have come full circle. Over the last two centuries a staggering number of scholars – the vast majority Christians themselves, many of them clergymen – have laboured on the great project of seeing how much of the Bible is historically valid. The verdict has not, in general, gone in the Bible’s favour. Little by little its validity as a plausible source for the facts it claims to recount has been eroded. In the nineteenth century, scientists such as Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin showed that the epochal changes in geology and biology could not have happened in the six thousand years allotted to them by Genesis, while the German scholar David Friedrich Strauss (who was a Lutheran pastor) showed that much that the Gospels said about Jesus was probably not accurate in any factual sense, but consisted of stories and legends that had accumulated around him after his life.

But the inquiry did not end there. Much of the Hebrew Bible consists of history – the history of Israel from primeval times to around 500 BCE. It tells of patriarchs such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; of the bondage of the Israelites and their miraculous liberation by the hand of God; and of David and Solomon and their successors to the thrones of Israel and Judah.

Until fairly recently scholars took much of this account at face value. But as our knowledge of the first millennium BCE in the Near East has improved, it has become more and more obvious that the Bible cannot be entirely trusted even in these areas.

I must digress here to make an important point. Many of the articles in New Dawn present what is called “alternative history” – views of the past that run counter to what conventional scholars believe. This approach is valuable and refreshing, if only because academics tend to operate like a team of horses with blinders on. Nevertheless, what I am going to be saying in this article (and in the following article, “God’s Forgotten Wife”) is not alternative history. It is conventional scholarship, and it consists of things that anyone would learn at a mainstream seminary or divinity school, although these findings have not always trickled down to the public at large.

To take one fairly simple example, two hundred years ago nearly everyone in the Judeo-Christian world believed that the first five books of the Bible (known to the Jews as the Torah, to the Christians as the Pentateuch) were written by Moses. Today practically no scholar who is not a fundamentalist believes this. Many scholars do not even believe that a person such as Moses ever lived, or that an exodus from Egypt ever occurred in anything like the way it is described. Moreover, a generation ago it was generally accepted that the accounts of David and Solomon in the books of Samuel and Kings were reasonably accurate – even contemporary – accounts. But today it is agreed that these histories were written centuries later, and the glories ascribed to these two monarchs were vastly overstated.

To summarise all these findings, an article of this length cannot hope to be complete. All the same, it is possible to sketch out some of the major findings along with their implications.

Israel in History: The Archaeological Evidence

The history of Israel begins with the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The general setting for their lives is best placed in the early second millennium BCE. The original texts (there were several) that make up what today we call Genesis were not written until around the seventh century BCE. Consequently, what we have about these patriarchs is a collection of legends with an interval of a millennium between the events and the written accounts. It would be hard to find anything here that could be called real history.

As we come closer to the present, the picture becomes clearer, although it does not necessarily validate the Bible as a source. The descent of Jacob and his twelve sons into Egypt to escape a famine in Canaan does resonate with a well-documented period (in the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries BCE) in which Egypt was ruled by the Hyksos, Semitic “foreign kings” that came from the northeast. But here too it is very hard to reconcile the biblical account (again written almost a thousand years later) with the Egyptian documents. They portray the Hyksos not as slaves but as rulers; indeed an Egyptian king list includes one “Yaqub” – identical to “Jacob.”¹ They did not flee a tyrannical Pharaoh but were thrown out by the Egyptians themselves – an almost complete reversal of the biblical account.

As for the flight of the Israel to the land of Canaan to escape their Egyptian taskmasters, this too is hard to accept, because in the period in which this is supposed to have happened – the thirteenth century BCE – Canaan was an Egyptian province, complete with governors and forts and garrisons. Egypt would retain control over Canaan until around 1160 BCE.

In fact the first mention of Israel in any contemporary text comes from a stele from the reign of Pharaoh Merneptah, the son of Rameses II (often portrayed as the pharaoh of the Exodus), and it dates to 1207 BCE. It tells of an Egyptian campaign into Canaan, and in it Merneptah boasts, “Israel is laid waste; his seed is not.”² Obviously this is an exaggeration, but it suggests that at this time the people of Israel were an already well-established population at a time when Pharaoh still ruled the land.

Scholars generally agree that there was no conquest of Canaan by the Israelites as described in the book of Joshua. How, then, did Israel come to be? To understand this, we have to grasp something about the geography of Palestine. The country can be roughly divided into three north-south strips. The first is a fertile coastal plain parallel to the Mediterranean shore. The second is a band of hill country east of the plain. The third and easternmost is the Jordan River valley. It was the second of these regions, the hill country, that was the Israelite homeland. In the Late Bronze Age (1500-1200 BCE), it was sparsely populated. But at the beginning of the Iron Age in the thirteenth century, its population rose dramatically. And it is these Iron Age settlements that scholars believe were the homes of the proto-Israelites. There was very little in their material culture (alphabet, pottery, and so on) that differentiated them from the Canaanites of the coastal plain, except that the proto-Israelites’ culture was more primitive – the pottery was crude and poorly ornamented, for example – and, strangely, the bones of pigs are almost completely absent from the animal remains that are found at these sites, indicating that these people, whoever they were, had a taboo against eating pork even in the earliest times.

Where did these hill people come from? Scholars do not agree entirely, but they are more or less unanimous in stating that most of them were not freed slaves coming up from Egypt. In all likelihood, they were people fleeing the social breakdown in the Bronze Age culture of the Palestinian coastal plain – itself only a localised version of the end of Bronze Age civilisation that was taking place all around the eastern Mediterranean. They were probably augmented by a small number of nomads who adopted sedentary ways of life. These hill people were not city dwellers; their social units were extended families that were themselves organised into tribes, which in turn formed a loose confederation that resembles the one described in the book of Judges.

Myth Made History: Moses, David & Solomon

Did Moses live? There is no reference to him in any contemporary source. The name Moses is a curious one; it is Egyptian, and it literally means “son,” as we see in some Egyptian names: Thutmosis (or Thutmose), the name of several pharaohs, means “son of Thoth,” the god of learning. It would be odd if Moses had been the prophet’s original name, just as in the English-speaking world there are many Johnsons and Williamsons, but practically nobody with the surname “Son.” Possibly his name originally included the name of an Egyptian god that Moses himself – or later chroniclers – chose to remove.

Scholars thus have stopped believing in any great migration that resembles the biblical account. To the extent that they lend any credence to the story of Exodus at all, they grant the possibility that a charismatic leader led a small band of former Semitic slaves to the hill country of Palestine and that as Egyptian power began to wane in that area, this people, along with the hill people that had already settled there, was able to shake off its chains.

To move on to the late eleventh and tenth centuries BCE, the period that biblical historians call “the united monarchy,” when Israel was supposedly ruled by a single king – Saul, followed by David and David’s son Solomon. According to the Bible, this was the zenith of Israel’s power and influence. David supposedly ruled over a territory that stretched from the Euphrates to Gaza (1 Kings 4:24), while Solomon accumulated vast riches and a thousand wives. But the archaeological remains and extrabiblical texts say virtually nothing about these rulers; some scholars go so far as to doubt whether there ever was a united monarchy at all. Richard A. Freund, professor of Jewish history at the University of Hartford, Connecticut, in the US, sums up the situation:

If… David was so prominently involved in the lives of so many different peoples in the region, it stands to reason that he would be mentioned in one of these different non-Israelite literatures. If… Solomon conducted international relations with Egypt, marrying into the royal family and importing horses, why wouldn’t there be a record somewhere in Egypt that would corroborate this relationship?…. But no independent corroboration of these events exists from archaeological evidence or source not influenced by biblical tradition, save perhaps an early medieval collection called the Kebra Nagast, the national epic of Ethiopia.³

The earliest extrabiblical reference to David comes from an inscription found at Tel Dan in northern Galilee in 1993. Dated to the ninth century BCE, it contains a claim by Hazael, king of Aram, that he has killed Ahaziah, king of Israel, and Jehoram, “king of the house of David.”⁴ Hazael, Ahaziah, and Jehoram are all mentioned in the Bible, so this inscription confirms these men lived and ruled and that there was a house of David in the ninth century BCE. Nevertheless, this inscription dates more than a hundred years later than David is supposed to have lived, so it confirms nothing more about him.

Nor is there much archaeological evidence for the existence of Solomon’s Temple, which would have been built around 940 BCE.⁵ Indeed the archaeologist Israel Finkelstein contends that Jerusalem, supposedly Solomon’s magnificent capital, was actually a rather humble place. “Digging in Jerusalem has failed to produce evidence that it was a great city in David or Solomon’s time,” he argues. “Tenth century Jerusalem was rather limited in extent, perhaps not more than a typical hill village.”⁶

There is archaeological evidence for a highly prosperous and centralised monarchy in Israel, but, Finkelstein contends, it was in the ninth century BCE and not the tenth. Remains include palaces, storage centres, and even stables. They are centred around Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel (the ten tribes that seceded from the house of David after Solomon’s death, ending the united monarchy). They were the work of the Israelite king Omri and his heirs – every last one of whom, according to the Bible, “wrought evil in the eyes of the Lord” (1 Kings 16:25).⁷ The most notorious of the Omrid dynasty was Ahab, whose queen was the proverbially wicked Jezebel.⁸

It is thus really only in the ninth century BCE that biblical history and the extrabiblical evidence begin to converge, and in the eighth century the picture becomes still clearer. The Bible tells of the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel at the hands of the king of Assyria in 722 BCE (2 Kings 17:3-23); this is confirmed by an Assyrian stele. The Bible also says that Hezekiah, king of the southern kingdom of Judah, was able to save his tiny nation from destruction by the Assyrians. This too has a parallel in the surviving Assyrian records – although these happen to mention the huge tribute of gold and silver that Hezekiah had to pay in return. The Bible, by contrast, credits the survival of Judah to the miraculous intervention of Yahweh, whose angel “smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand” (2 Kings 19:35-36).

Yahweh’s Companions?

But it is when we turn to the religious history of ancient Israel that the picture becomes truly astonishing. After all, the intense interest in the Bible has a great deal to do with the part that is said to be played by God in history: specifically the revelation of the one true God, Yahweh, to the nation of Israel, and his granting of the land of Canaan to them in perpetuity on condition that they obey his law and worship him alone. But here, too, the extrabiblical sources create a much more checkered picture. Egyptian texts of the Late Bronze Age do show some familiarity with a god called “Yhw” (Egyptian, like Hebrew, did not employ vowels in its script) in connection with some nomads located in the southern part of Jordan.⁹ This resonates with the biblical account, which has Moses learning about Yahweh in Midian (see Exodus 3), which is in the same area. And it is possible, as we have seen, that a charismatic leader like Moses could have led a small band to Canaan and used this god as a rallying-cry to unify the hill folk and create a national identity for them. But even so, the reality would be very different from the story narrated in the Pentateuch.

Scholars today generally agree that the revelation of a monotheistic Yahweh to Moses and his spiritual heirs is not an accurate picture of what happened. Instead, they contend, Yahweh only gradually – over the course of several centuries – came to be seen as the sole god of Israel and as the supreme god of the universe. Frank Moore Cross, one of the most distinguished Old Testament scholars of his generation, has argued that originally Yahweh was an epithet of El, the high god of the Canaanite pantheon, in his function as patron deity of a confederation of tribes known as the Midianite League. Cross says that Yahweh later became differentiated from El among the proto-Israelites, and eventually came to displace him.¹⁰

Margaret Barker, another biblical scholar, has an even more radical suggestion. She contends that throughout most of the era of the First Temple (c.940-586 BCE), both El and Yahweh were worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem as separate deities, forming a trinity with Asherah, Yahweh’s divine consort (see the next article). El retained his position as the high god – the lord of the universe – whereas Yahweh was the national god of Israel alone. It was only with the “reforms” of the religion of Judah that took place under King Josiah in 621 BCE (2 Kings 23) that Asherah was discarded and Yahweh was conflated with El. In fact, Barker claims, the Josianic “reform” was actually a radical restructuring of the faith. The Bible portrays it differently, as a purge of alien elements, but that is because the Bible was written by the party that instigated the purge. It was this party that created the Deuteronomic history in the Bible (comprising Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings), which has shaped our historical understanding of this period to this day. Nearly all the biblical texts I have mentioned above are taken from the Deuteronomic account.

Obviously there is a great deal more to say about these matters, and endless numbers of books have been written about them. I have limited my discussion here to the Hebrew Bible simply because of space. The New Testament is problematic as well, but for different reasons. Here it is not archaeology or the larger historical context that is the question: there is ample extrabiblical evidence for the existence of the Second Temple, which was still being completed at the time of Christ and was sacked by the Romans in 70 CE. Indeed the Temple’s western wall, today called the Wailing Wall, still survives. There is also ample extrabiblical documentation of figures such as Herod the Great and Pontius Pilate. There is no such documentation for Jesus, but this is not in itself problematic. We might reasonably expect some archaeological evidence for the existence of David and Solomon, who were supposedly great monarchs, but Jesus was comparatively obscure in his own day. It is only when we ask who Jesus was and what his earliest followers thought him to be that the controversies arise.

In any event, we have seen a strange reversal over the last two hundred years. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the educated world in the West took the Bible as history while the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were written off as legend. Then in the early 1870s, the pioneering archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann unearthed the ruins of Troy in Asia Minor, and scholars realised that the Homeric poems – whether or not their specific characters ever lived – were firmly grounded in the world of Late Bronze Age Greece. Ironically, when scholars examined the Bible in the same fashion, they came up with little more than a few isolated inscriptions and the stables of the wicked King Ahab.

Literal Truth of the Bible Under Attack

Does this all matter? Does the Bible have to be true in a historical sense? Not necessarily. As I noted at the outset, esotericists have long acknowledged that these stories are in many ways symbolic of higher truths. The book of Exodus, with its ten plagues and miraculously gushing stones, is in all likelihood not true historically. But the British Kabbalist Warren Kenton, writing under the pen name Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, gives an intricate and profound analysis of the mystical dimensions of this saga in his book Kabbalah and Exodus.

What the original authors of the biblical texts may have intended is a difficult question to answer, since we do not even really know who they were. Nevertheless, Christianity has often proselytised on the premise that the stories in the Bible are literally true. It is reasonable to assess the Bible in terms of the claims that its proponents have made for it, and those claims have been found wanting.

All this said, the scholars who have delved so deeply into the historicity of the Bible over the last two hundred years have shown tremendous moral and intellectual courage. They have not, for the most part, been debunkers but have been serious scholars of Judaism and Christianity who are often profoundly committed to their faith. Some have turned to archaeology to validate this faith and have had to admit they were wrong. Joseph Callaway, an American professor of biblical archaeology, tried to find the city of Ai, supposedly destroyed by Joshua (Joshua 7-8), but he concluded that the city did not exist in Joshua’s time. He wrote: “For many years, the primary source for the understanding of the settlement of the first Israelites was the Hebrew Bible, but every reconstruction based on the biblical traditions has floundered on the evidence from the archaeological remains.”¹¹ Callaway took early retirement from his very conservative seminary rather than cause any embarrassment on this count.

Many journalists have lacked Callaway’s integrity, so you can pick up an American newsmagazine such as Time and read an account of Moses that treats him as if he were Churchill or John F. Kennedy.¹² To bring the far more elusive truth to light would no doubt cause many readers to cancel their subscriptions. Sometimes the weaker a myth is, the more stridently it is defended.

Sources:

Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992.

Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of Religion of Israel, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973.

William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the History of Ancient Israel, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2001.

–  – . Who Were the Ancient Israelites and Where Did They Come From?, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2003.

Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Richard A. Freund, Digging through the Bible: Modern Archaeology and the Ancient Bible, Plymouth, U.K.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.

Simon Goldhill, The Temple of Jerusalem, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, Kabbalah and Exodus, London: Rider, 1980.

Hershel Shanks, et al., The Rise of Ancient Israel, Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992.

D. Winton Thomas, ed., Archaeology and Old Testament Study, Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1967.

Footnotes:

1. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?, 10.

2. Finkelstein and Silberman, 57; see also Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?, 202.

3. Freund, 117.

4. Freund, 117–18.

5. Goldhill, 31.

6. Finkelstein and Silberman, 124, 133.

7. Biblical quotations are taken from the Authorised (King James) Version.

8. For an account of the archaeological findings and their relation to the house of Omri, see Finkelstein and Silberman, ch. 7.

9. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?, 128.

10. Cross, 44, 71.

11. Quoted in Dever, 47–48.

12. A good example is Emily Mitchell and David Van Biema, “In Search of Moses,” Time, Dec. 14, 1998; www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,989815-7,00.html; accessed Sept. 21, 2010. The article is worth careful deconstruction. It does, for example, ask “Did Moses even exist?” and mentions such evidence as the Merneptah inscription. But the vast bulk of it is devoted to a retelling, in Time-style prose, of the biblical account as literally true. The reader is subtly led to believe that somehow, in the end, all these things did happen. The article is a cover story, timed to the release of the film The Prince of Egypt. A more recent article, “How Moses Shaped America,” by Bruce Feiler (Time, Oct. 12, 2009; www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1927303-3,00.html; accessed Sept. 21, 2010) discusses the political uses made of the Moses story by American politicians without attempting to touch the historical issue of whether this figure actually lived.

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RICHARD SMOLEY’s latest book is The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe. His other works include Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (with Jay Kinney); Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition; Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism; and Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity. He is editor of Quest Books and executive editor of Quest magazine, both published by the Theosophical Society in America. His website is www.innerchristianity.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 123 (Nov-Dec 2010).

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During the Second World War the Americans had an airbase in Bari, about seventy-five miles from San Giovanni Rotondo, a village in Southern Italy that houses Capuchin friary. According to US intelligence, the Germans had a munitions facility in the hills nearby; an officer was assigned the job of bombing it. As the planes neared San Giovanni, the officer saw in the sky before him the figure of a monk waving him back.

Dumbfounded by this spectacle, the officer ordered the planes to turn back. When the war ended, he went to the friary and met the monk who had appeared in the sky. His name was Padre Pio (1887 – 1968).On a trip to San Giovanni Rotondo in 1979, I was unable to learn the officer’s name or any details confirming this fantastic story. According to Father Joseph Pius Martin, an American friar in San Giovanni, the pilot lives in Florida – the only additional lead I obtained.

Stories like the flyer’s are legion. The work of sorting out fact from fiction is still underway. Many incredible claims about Padre Pio are well-documented; but many are based on hearsay, part of the folklore growing around the monk. One extraordinary thing about Padre Pio was his ability to induce belief in the extraordinary. He had a gift for catapulting people into a fairyland of living mythic powers. In Padre Pio’s world, ideas of fantasy and creatures of mythology come to life: Madonnas, guardian angels, shapeshifting demons, bilocation, magical cures, time-travel, and a good deal more. However you rate the literal truth of particular claims, his story is bound to disturb our routine picture of what is possible. Around the Padre, the incredible became credible, the impossible became actual.

And yet, no matter how extraordinary the feats of Padre Pio, he was a human being. I assume therefore that his “miraculous” powers are latent powers of all human beings. I underscore this with reason. Some people will resist the claims about Pio because they might see them as meant to ratify church dogma. (The truth is that miracles have been used for propaganda.) However, while I grant that you cannot fully understand Padre Pio’s miracles apart from the symbols and archetypes of his Christian world, I also think they transcend that world and point to a universal human potential. Moreover, comparable phenomena from other traditions bear this out, the best contemporary example being the case of Sai Baba.1

These phenomena point to possibilities rejected by the custodians of the intellectual and moral establishment: by scientific materialists, who make up the rank and file of academia, and by liberal and fundamentalist Christians, who wear their own conceptual blinkers. Since, however, a critical review of evidence is impossible here, I will restrict myself to trying to give a rough idea of the man, the range of his unusual powers, and to noting their possible implications for human evolution.

EXTRAORDINARY ACCESS TO THE INTERNAL ENVIRONMENT

From early childhood Francesco Forgione lived in a world of visionary hyper realities. At five he cried so much, especially at night, that his father once lost his temper and hurled him to the ground. Recalling these early years, Padre Pio said: “My mother would turn off the light, and a lot of monsters would come up close to me, and I would cry.”2 Padre Pio said of these early experiences: “It was the devil who was tormenting me.” Terrifying visions continued throughout his life, inseparable from his higher visions. Raptures, ecstasies, often lasting hours, in which his senses were suspended, occurred frequently. We know of these from his letters3 and from observations of his spiritual directors such as Father Agostino4 who eavesdropped on the Padre’s conversations with invisible beings. These included Jesus, Mary, Francis of Assisi, and his guardian angel. One has to read Agostino’s Diary to get a sense of the intense reality of Padre Pio’s visionary encounters.

Padre Pio’s internal environment was also infested with dark hostile forces. The higher visions were preceded by shapeshifting diabolic apparitions: huge black cats, naked women who danced lasciviously before him, an invisible entity that spat in his face and tortured him with deafening noises, an executioner who whipped him. According to one of his confreres: “Padre Pio was very alert to unexpected movements and sounds. He said that the devil appeared to him in all shapes. He had fear even of a mouse, because the devil would start out as a mouse and turn into a claw and go for his eyes.”5

These encounters were physical. In Pietrelcina, you can still see claw marks and splattered inkspots made by the alleged demons. Once, the iron bars of the monk’s cell were found twisted out of shape after a night of grappling with invisible forces. Although no one beside the Padre ever saw the demons, the din they made was often heard by eavesdropping monks. Even more striking, Padre Pio was often found unconscious, sometimes on the floor beside his bed, covered with bruises from the uncanny assaults.

A well-witnessed event occurred in July 1964. A possessed woman was dragged to San Giovanni. When she saw Pio, she cried out in an unnaturally deep voice: “Pio, we will see you tonight.” That night the friars thought the house was struck by an earthquake. The Superior rushed to Pio’s room and found him on the floor, bleeding from the head. Oddly, there was a pillow under his head. Pio explained that the Madonna put it there. In the morning, the possessed woman (undergoing exorcism from another priest) shrieked: “Last night I was up to see the old man. I hate him so much because he is a fountain of faith. I would have done more, except the Lady in white stopped me.” This taxes my boggle-threshold as much as it must the reader’s; nevertheless, Schug based his account on eyewitnesses not disposed to sensationalism. Pio’s face was so disfigured he was unable to appear in public for five days. On another occasion he was found with broken bones in his arms and legs.

The attacks lasted throughout his long life. In 1918 he wrote: “I cannot describe to you how those wretched creatures were beating me! Several times I thought I was near death. Saturday it seemed as if they really wanted to finish me….” (Epistolario, III, p.311.) Sometimes his afflictors came to him under the disguise of his spiritual director, Father Agostino, or as an apparition of a saint or guardian angel. Padre Pio had a technique for exposing these sinister masquerades, but not without having to endure a good deal of anguish and uncertainty.

The psychologically sophisticated reader is bound to be skeptical about these reports of demonic assault. One might turn to Wilhelm Reich for an explanation. Reich believed such experiences were the result of repressed orgone energy turning against oneself. Or we could invoke the pathology of poltergeist phenomena to explain Padre Pio’s demons. I am not certain how smoothly these explanations would fit.

The point I want to make about “demons” and evolution is this: It does appear, as a matter of psychological fact, that the more one advances in higher states of consciousness, the greater the likelihood of attracting combative, destructive forces that try to drag you back down to ordinary reality. The story of the Buddha struggling to meditate on the Immovable Spot under the Bo Tree is a classic Eastern illustration. In Pio’s case, the combat occurred at two levels: Throughout his life he was molested by invisible “diabolic” forces; but throughout his life he was also persecuted by jealous, envious, and malicious human beings, often individuals within the church hierarchy. It has, in fact, been argued by Ennemond Boniface6 that certain individuals in the church were responsible for the priest’s death.

If Padre Pio had to battle sinister forces, he also received supernormal favours. In Padre Pio’s world, for instance, higher help took the form of his “guardian angel.” The notion of guardian angels may amuse modern rationalists; still, new age enthusiasts show a keen interest in the functional equivalent of such helping entities. Carlos Castaneda, you may recall, fascinated us with his talk of “allies,” those unspecified forces out there ready to help us. The phenomenon of “channelling,” its invocation of inner guides and otherworldly helpers, echoes the ancient doctrine of guardian angels. Similar parallels are notable in the UFO contactee literature.

Padre Pio’s guardian angel was no slouch. One of his most striking achievements was to serve as translator of French and Greek, languages Pio was unacquainted with. Paranormal comprehension of Greek is more impressive than French, the latter being in many ways similar to Latin and Italian. In 1912, Agostino, by way of experiment, wrote letters to Pio in French and Greek. When Pio received them he was at Pietrelcina for medical reasons, under care of a parish priest, don Salvatore Pannullo. Pannullo wrote on August 25, 1919: “I, the undersigned, testify under oath, that when Padre Pio received this letter (a letter in Greek and in the Greek alphabet), he explained its contents to me literally. When I asked him how he could read and explain it, as he did not know even the Greek alphabet, he replied: ‘My Guardian Angel explained it all to me’.”

The virtue of this report (unfortunately scant in detail) is that we must assume either that both Pio and Pannullo conspired in an act of pure deception or that the story is true. I personally doubt a conspiracy; the records point to Pio’s lifelong scrupulous adherence to truth.

Guardian angel aside, we can assume the translation occurred by telepathy. But this would be telepathy of a rare order; for the telepathic transmission of skills (such as understanding a language) between living persons is unknown in experimental parapsychology. I might add that Agostino confirmed Pio’s ability to comprehend the letters written in French and Greek. There are also stories of Pio hearing confessions in languages he did not know.

Apparently, guardian angels are well-rounded in their education; the following story shows they know something about automobile mechanics. In 1959, a woman was driving with her husband from Rome to San Severo. (The couple prefer to remain anonymous.) En route their car broke down; for two hours cars sped by without stopping. Toward nightfall, the woman grew anxious and began to pray to Padre Pio. Within ten minutes a black car pulled up and an elegant young man dressed in blue stepped out. He lifted the hood and said: “Look, you lost all the water from the radiator, and it’s burnt out. Take your can and fill it up with water. Near here, there is a farmhouse, which has a well; take the water from there.”

The husband took the can from the car trunk and did as the young man said. The man then took a black box from his car, produced a roll of adhesive tape, and sealed the radiator. He had beautiful hands with agile rapered fingers. The dog, who normally barked at strangers, sat in the car’s back seat, strangely calm. The husband returned with the water and filled the radiator.

“You can return home safely; anyhow, you are quite near,” said the mysterious helper, who then got in his car and drove off.

The couple watched the car pull away and looked for the license plate. There was none! Instead they saw a white strip marked with hieroglyphics. The car moved away slowly on Via Aurelia; suddenly it vanished.

Arriving home in a “dreamy state,” they reflected on further oddities: The young man somehow knew there was an empty can in the trunk; also, that they lived “quite near.” Later they tried to relocate the well and farmhouse but despite diligent efforts were unable to. There was no farmhouse in the area where their car broke down.7

Padre Pio’s extraordinary access to his internal worlds included access to other people’s internal worlds. Two well-attested examples were his ability to read minds, especially in the confessional, and his ability to change or convert minds.

Like Saint John Vianney, the famous Curè of Ars, Padre Pio displayed supernormal powers of mind reading in the confessional. Hearing confessions was paramount in Pio’s long ministry. Hour after hour, day after day for over fifty years, he sat in a wooden booth and listened to people pour out their most intimate secrets.

John Schug, who wrote one of the more critical books in English on Pio,8 tells of a confessor who had the intention to murder his wife. “Murderer!” Padre Pio roared in the church. The man skulked away and returned the next day, penitent and purged of his intention.

Schug provides a detailed first-person account of Federico Abresch’s confessional encounter with Pio. According to Abresch, a Lutheran convert, Pio recalled actions and thoughts he had long forgotten. “He enumerated with precision and clarity all of my faults, even mentioning the number of times I had missed Mass.” Pio reminded Abresch of something he had forgotten years ago when he got married. In fact, it was only through Pio’s remarks that Abresch was able to reconstruct his past. Pio apparently had a more exact knowledge of Abresch’s unconscious mental history than Abresch.

Abresch, by the way, regarded this as proof that something more than merely human “thought-transference” was involved. The fact that Pio could “read” the unconscious of another person seemed evidence of God’s action, something totally beyond human potential. But Abresch is mistaken. Evidence from mediumship and experimental parapsychology show that telepathic leakage from another person’ s unconscious does in fact occur. Once again I believe we are dealing with a general potential of the human mind, brilliantly manifest in exceptional beings such as Pio.

Padre Pio’s access to internal environments enabled him not just to read but to change or convert minds. The Gospels portray Jesus as a man who took immediate psychic possession of his disciples. Pio too apparently had this ability; consider the following example from Schug.

Unemployed Laurino Costa sent Padre Pio a telegram asking for prayer to help him find a job. The Padre telegrammed back: “Come to San Giovanni Rotondo at once.” The young man arrived penniless and was standing with a crowd of men in the sacristy. Padre Pio, who had never met Laurino, shouted at him: “Laurino, come here. I see you have arrived.” Bewildered, the youth approached. “Laurino, you will feed my sick.” (A cook was needed in the new hospital.) “But Padre,” Laurino protested, “I’ve never cooked an egg in my life.” The Padre insisted: “Go and feed my sick. I’Il always be near you.” Laurino went to the hospital and rang the doorbell. The Mother Superior answered: “You must be the experienced cook we’ve been waiting for.” Within three hours he was at work. Laurino admitted to Schug: “To this day (14 years later) I still don’t know what happened. All day long I found myself calmly working and telling others what to do, as though I was carrying out a routine I had been used to.”

MASTERY OF TIME AND SPACE

Reports abound of Pio’s double appearing everywhere, from the American midwest to China and Africa. The idea of bilocation blatantly contradicts the belief that a human being is a physical object occupying one space. The idea that Jack could be at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue in New York and simultaneously at Main and Third in Shebogan, Wisconsin, is obviously absurd. Nevertheless, the annals of saints, yogis, and psychics are full of bilocation stories, sometimes well attested.

Padre Pio bilocated by means of his voice, his presence, his aroma; he appeared in people’s dreams and sometimes he appeared fully materialised.

Mary Pyle, one-time secretary to Maria Montessori, spent the last 45 years of her life in San Giovanni Rotondo. In her diary she wrote: “One day I went into the sacristy and said to Padre Pio: ‘Father, I believe my mother is in Florence today.’ His immediate answer, given with certainty was: ‘No, she is in Umbria.’ Surprised I said, ‘No Father, I do not believe she was supposed to go to Umbria.’ But he insisted, looking far into space. ‘She’s been in Umbria.’ A few days later I received a letter from my mother who told me: ‘Thank Padre Pio for the visit he paid me while I was sick in bed in Perugia (which is in Umbria). I did not see him with my eyes, nor did I hear him with my ears, but I felt his presence near my bed’.”9

Padre Pio knew in advance he would be able to bilocate at a particular place. The Vicar General of Uruguay, Monsignor Damiani, a frequent visitor at San Giovanni, once told him he wanted to die in San Giovanni; he wanted Pio to assist at his death. Pio said the Vicar would die in Uruguay, but promised assistance anyway when the day of reckoning came. In 1941, the Vicar died in Uruguay. Cardinal Barbieri was in the house where Damiani resided the night he died. Someone knocked on his half-open door. He noticed a Capuchin pass, got up and went to Damiani’s room. The Vicar had just died of a heart attack, but left a note on his dresser: “Padre Pio was here.”10

Many bilocation stories revolve around healings. A typical example: June 12, 1952. Lucia Bellodi, stricken with pernicious diabetes was on her death bed when she sat up and began to wave her hands. She cried out that Padre Pio had appeared to her, told her she was cured and that she should come to his monastery. By June 16 she regained her speech and stopped having to consume twenty-five quarts of water a day. When she visited the Padre he smiled and said: “I’ve been waiting for you.”

A tantalising case is that of Cardinal Mindszenty. According to a reliable Vatican source he once received a “visit” from Pio while imprisoned in Communist Hungary. The monk of course was in San Giovanni, but his double turned up with water, wine, and altar breads, served Mass and vanished. When Schug wrote to confirm this from Mindszenty, he received back a one-sentence letter: “I cannot say anything about that.” If the story were false, it’s not clear why the Cardinal didn’t say so, unless he meant to perpetuate a pious myth.

This form of bilocation, if it actually occurred, implies materialisation of the double and teleportation of objects. There are, in fact, many reports, some of them reasonably compelling, of other saints bilocating at great distances and teleporting physical objects. Two outstanding examples are Saint Martin of Porres and Sister Maria Agreda of Spain. Scott Rogo’s book, Miracles,11 documents the prodigies of these two saints.

I want to note in passing another phenomenon related to Pio’s bilocatability. He was, on many occasions, said to disappear from the confessional, a structure in full view and always surrounded by crowds of devotees. He would reappear in the rectory or sacristy. Asked about these disappearances, which occurred when he had a hard time breathing, the Padre would casually remark, “I flew over your heads.”

Perhaps the best authenticated type of Pio’s bilocation was via his characteristic odour. The odour of sanctity is linked with the phenomenon of bodily incorruption.12 The incorrupt bodies of saints are known to give off inexplicable fragrances, but with Pio the paranormal fragrance made his presence known to people at a distance. The scent emanated from his person and also, contrary to nature, from the blood that came from his stigmata. The first doctors who examined him actually complained that the monk was using perfume. Padre Pio’s brand of “perfume” however, was noticed by people far away from him, sometimes thousands of miles.

Bernard Ruffin, whose book on Pio is the best in English,13 gives a detailed account of the fragrance occurring to a Lutheran seminarian, Robert Hopcke, in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1978, ten years after Pio’s death. William Carrigan, normally skeptical of miracle stories, reported to Ruffin his perception of the aroma at his desk at Foggia (about twenty miles from the monastery): “I had no trouble in identifying the aroma as that of Padre Pio. It wasn’t something you could confuse with any other odour.” Padre Alberto D’Apolito, Pio’s confrere for many years, wrote in 1978: “The reality is that hundreds of thousands of individuals, even unbelievers, have testified and continue to testify that they have suddenly and inexplicably perceived the perfume of Padre Pio.” Emilio Servadio, a Jew and leading Roman psychoanalyst, had a powerful experience of Pio’s scent during a visit to San Giovanni in 1937.

If the Padre had a knack for “prolonging his personality”14 in space, he could also prolong it in time. Precognition, if a fact of nature, wrenches our normal view of time, cause and effect. (It seems impossible for something that hasn’t occurred to influence us in any way). Even so, there are countless claims of Pio’s paranormal forays into the future. These were usually done offhandedly, never as public pronouncements. Pio was unusually prescient about what Italian cities would be bombed during the war and what soldiers would return.

Like spiritual masters in other traditions, Pio foretold the year of his death. He often had prevision of others’ deaths. A young priest, Father Dionisio, on his way to Venice for studies, said goodbye to Pio. “Studies! Studies!” Pio muttered, “think of death, instead, so that when it comes…. “ His voice trailed off. A confrere who overheard commented on Pio’s strange way of saying goodbye. Pio shrugged wistfully. Twenty days later the young priest was dead. In 1983 Pope John Paul was almost assassinated; I watched a Vatican official on TV say that Pio had told the Polish Cardinal years ago he would one day be Pope; he also said the Polish Pope would be brought down in blood early in his tenure. I hope Pio’s prophetic gift is flawed, for he once said a war was coming which would destroy two thirds of humanity.

SYMBOLIC TRANSFORMATION OF PHYSICAL REALITY

In my view, supernormal psychic phenomena reflect an evolutionary trend toward increasing porousness of matter to the goals of consciousness. It is as if some restless shapeshifting creative spirit were struggling to make matter plastic and permeable to human dreams and desires – especially the matter of the human body.

Eastern, occult, and Christian traditions speak of the subtle, astral, pneumatic, or light bodies. The physical phenomena of mysticism reflect this trend toward the symbolic transformation of the body of flesh into a more expressive body of light. Incorruption, luminosity, inedia, the odour of sanctity, levitation, and other phenomena may be looked at from this perspective.

The stigmata illustrate the malleability of the human body to the power of the spiritual imagination. Francis of Assisi was the first to reproduce the wounds of Christ in his own body, and since Francis hundreds of cases have been reported. The Church by and large takes a dim view of these often bizarre lesions, recognising they may be symptoms of hysteria as much as signs of heroic sanctity.

But Padre Pio’s stigmata were unique. Visible for over fifty years, the apertures in his palms were perfectly circular, and were never inflamed, infected, or suppurated; the blood, which gushed from all five wounds, was copious and bright red. It effused an unnatural fragrance. At his death the wounds healed without a trace of scar tissue, a fact that is dermatologically inexplicable. While some cases of stigmata can reasonably be ascribed to hysteria, let me at least note that nobody adequately informed would dare to characterise this down-to-earth, often uncouth, ironical, and fanatic-despising man as hysterical.

With Francis and Pio, the wounds arose from a passionate identification with the crucified Christ. Whether we think of the stigmata as miraculous or pathological, at the very least they say something about the physical power of the imagination; if imagination can produce such extraordinary lesions, it could be mobilised for healing purposes. The stigmata show the power of the imagination to mold the human body. Here life imitates art; both men, be it noted, were first stigmatised while contemplating artworks showing the crucifixion. The stigmatised body is a living sculpture.

Padre Pio’s fame is also due to his reputation as a healer. Reports of extraordinary healings continue even after his death. Many, if not most, of the healings ascribed to Padre Pio were probably psychosomatic. Intense faith, expectation, contact with an authoritative figure like Padre Pio might well lead to improvement in many functional, psychogenic disorders.

But many stories, if true, imply a radically higher type of healing. For example, there is the account of Vera Calandra’s dying child materialising a new bladder; of Gemma di Giorgio’s pupilless blind eyes being made to see; and of Giovanni Savino’s blown out eye (due to a dynamite accident) being rematerialised. So far, however, the medical documentation I’ve seen for these claims is less than compelling.

Claims for medical clairvoyance also exist. In the early 1950s Padre Costantino Capobianco had a sinus problem. X-rays were taken; three doctors recommended surgery. “What are these things?” asked Pio about the X-rays. “They’re all wrong.” A fourth specialist was consulted; the X-rays were misinterpreted, the surgery unnecessary.15

Padre Pio once said his real work would begin after his death. Moreover, the Church requires of her duly canonised saints evidence of postmortem miracles. This seems like a tough requirement, but a possible example may be the following: Teacher Alice Jones of Liverpool, England, suffered from neurofibroma, which paralysed her from the left hip to the toe. Alice, 50, a Protestant, was visited by a Catholic priest, Eric Fisher, who prayed over her. “As he knelt there,” said Alice, “there appeared another figure rising from his body. I was so frightened I couldn’t move. The figure had the face of an old man with a white beard. He spread his hands in front of me and I could see the holes in his palms. I seemed to hear the words, ‘Stand up and walk.’ So I did. And I suddenly felt whole again. Suddenly I was no longer crippled and the man was gone.” Later she recognised the face of the man who cured her in a photo of Padre Pio. Dr. Francis Mooney, a Liverpool physician, testified: “I have very often come across neurofibroma and have never heard of a single case where it has cleared up spontaneously…. I had her X-rayed. There is no medical explanation for the fact that she is completely cured.”16

The healed body is a foretaste of the resurrected body. Supernormal healings are symbolic of the transformation of the corporeal body into a spiritual body. The odour of sanctity is another example of the symbolic transformation of natural bodily existence. The symbolism is clearest in bodily incorruption. Once the Christian imagination projected the vision of a new man – a new spiritual body – the dead bodies of Christian saints begin to behave oddly. They don’t decay like other corpses. Perversely, they stay intact, moist, flexible, for months, for decades, sometimes for hundreds of years. They exude mysterious oils, occasionally bleed, and often give off remarkable fragrances. It is as though an energy has been released that opposes bodily decay, something that holds entropy in contempt and wants to revise the symbolism of death.

Another phenomenon expressing this symbolic modulation of matter is levitation. Levitation is not well-attested in Pio’s life (whose speciality seems to have been bilocation). However, the phenomenon has been well-documented among the saints, notably Teresa of Avila and that all-time great, mystical acrobat, Joseph Copertino. Numerous creditable witnesses observed Joseph’s aerial antics for decades.17 Levitation strikes against one of the fundamental forces of nature – the forces of gravity. Among the saints, it is a dramatic physical expression of the soul’s ecstatic flight. Levitation, as displayed by Joseph and Teresa, symbolises the ascent toward the Most High.

It shows humanly formed matter shedding fundamental limitations; I think in the case of Joseph we are witnessing one of the creative prodigies of the symbolic imagination, a phenomenon that throws open the doors to new worlds of speculative possibilities. A careful study of Joseph’s aerial flights will show that they were occasioned by specific types of imagery of a) heavenly elevation and b) the Madonna or archetype of the feminine. The levitations were physical expressions of imaginal worlds, and I would put them on a continuum with the stigmata or other types of expressive imaginally-guided human products such as works of art.

As for Paranormal Man, perhaps the ecstasy of the saints holds the secret to our escape from planet Earth, our entree to navigating the galaxies. Anyone acquainted with the literature of flying saucers knows how frequently levitation phenomena are reported. The phenomena take many forms. Gravity-suspending beams of light, for instance, seem to lift individuals into apparent spacecraft. The alien spaceships themselves make light of the rules of terrestrial flight dynamics. In the case of Joseph of Copertino, the greatest levitator in recorded history, passionate sublimated love, aimed toward the archetypal figure of Mary in Heaven was the fuel enabling him to suspend the geometry of the universe. In Joseph’s future space technology, ecstatic love is the power that suspends the law of gravity.

The funny sky epiphanies we call UFOs might, for all we know, be dislocated dreams or ecstatic projections of alien visionaries from other worlds. The phenomena of bilocation and levitation may be clues to the secrets of hyperspace travel and the answer to the great UFO mystery. Other beings on other worlds are likely to have had millions, if not billions, of years to evolve these crudely and fleetingly manifested capacities of our terrestrial saints and shamans.

Another item in Pio’s supernormal physiology was hyperthermia. Padre Pio produced abnormal amounts of bodily heat. Doctors had to use huge bathroom thermometers to take his temperature, which often shot up to 125 degrees; the mercury in ordinary thermometers broke the glass. Extreme irregularities in bodily function are well known among shamans18 and other ascetic types. Teresa Neumann19 who had the stigmata and who evidently neither ate nor drank for years, is a modern case of an ecstatic plagued by bizarre bodily symptoms. In the case of Padre Pio, supernormal heat production is definitely related to what’s going on inside the man. It seems clear to me that we are dealing with a case of symbolic transformation.

From his letters and statements, we know one thing for sure: The Capuchin was literally burning with love for Jesus. Young Pio wrote a letter to Padre Benedetto on October 22, 1919, describing what happened to him just before acquiring his fully visible stigmata: “I cannot tell you what happened in that moment,” he wrote, “which was a moment of sheer martyrdom. On the evening of the 5th, I was hearing a boy’s confession (a seminarian at San Giovanni Rotondo) when all of a sudden I saw a most exalted heavenly person. I was plunged into extreme terror. He stood before the eye of my mind, holding some kind of special instrument in his hand, like a very long iron spear with a well-sharpened point. It seemed that fire shot out of its point.

“Seeing this person and watching him plunge the instrument violently into my soul happened in an instant. I groaned with pain and felt as if I were dying. I told the boy to go away because I felt ill.

“This agony lasted without interruption until the morning of August 7…. It seemed that even my viscera were being pulled out by that spear. Every fibre of my being was consumed by fire.” The heat effects, observed in saints known for their holy ardours, proceed from internal causes; they do not seem to be produced by normal physical forces.

When I spoke with reliable informants at San Giovanni I was told of even stranger powers the Padre had over physical nature. For instance, Pio had the apparent ability to direct the behaviour of animals; in one story, a woman with problems getting up on time for Mass was sent a bird to awaken her and a troop of local stray dogs to escort her to the church on time. Francis of Assisi tamed the Wolf of Gubbio with soultalk and (in a practical vein) with the help of a decent meal. Linnets and lambs, hares and songbirds were said to obey the commands of Joseph of Copertino.

The Gospels tell us that Jesus calmed a storm at sea. There are contemporary reports of shamans commanding the elements. For instance, John Neihardt witnessed Black Elk conjure rain from a cloudless afternoon sky “during a season of drought, one of the worst in the memory of the old men.”20 David Barker, an anthropologist, was in Dharamsala, India, on March 10, 1973, when he observed a Tibetan priest-shaman, Gunsang Rinzing, stop a rainstorm to permit a festival of mourning. The shaman had built a large fire and recited with intense concentration mantras for 20 hours. Barker writes: “ …the rain had diminished to a drizzle, and by 10 o’clock it had become only a cold fog over a circle with a radius of about 150 meters. Everywhere else in the area it continued to pour, but the crowd of six thousand refugees was never rained on…” Barker observed that the atmosphere had an “airless” quality and reports feeling disoriented for weeks after the experience.21

In light of these observations it is easier to entertain accounts such as those of a Roman engineer Pasquale Todini who said Padre Pio sent him away from the monastery during a torrential rainstorm but arrived in town dry. In the course of the engineer’s walk, the rain around him was reduced to a sprinkle. (See Carty’s account of this, pp.57-58.)

Enough has been said to indicate the range of Padre Pio’s curious capacities: special access to internal environments, mastery of time and space, symbolic transformation of physical reality. I offer no attempt to explain any of this, or for that matter to prove it rigorously. Padre Pio, though a unique spiritual personality, is only one example of extraordinary types from the world of Western and Eastern mysticism, mediumship and shamanism. The interesting thing is what all this might be saying about the possible future of humanity.

Alfred Russell Wallace, it may not be too well known, was the co-founder along with Charles Darwin of the modern theory of evolution. What is even less well known is the fact that Wallace, a scientist of unquestioned genius, was a close student of psychic phenomena. Most mainstream scientists prefer to shove this embarrassing fact under the rug. In my opinion, however, Wallace’s openness to psychic phenomena prove him to be an even greater scientist than is supposed; for Wallace took a second giant step in trying to build a bridge between psychical research and the theory of evolution.

Wallace did firsthand investigations into the physical phenomena of mediumship and, as he said, found himself “beaten by the facts.” Wallace took spiritualism quite seriously. “It would appear then,” he wrote in 1878, “that if my argument has any weight, that there is nothing self-contradictory… in the idea of intelligences unrecognisable directly by our senses, and yet capable of acting more or less powerfully on matter.”22 Wallace suggested that some principle of psychic intelligence was needed to round out the approach to the problem of evolution. He stated emphatically that Natural Selection “is not the all-powerful, all-sufficient, and only cause of the development of organic forms.”

Modern biology has followed Darwin, who was not interested in the strange phenomena Wallace had taken the trouble to investigate. But in my opinion, Alfred Wallace laid the groundwork for the better evolutionary paradigm. Open to all the crucial data, it was a paradigm based on the hypothesis of a general intelligence at work in evolution, capable of transcending space and time, and geared toward the transformation of organic nature in accord with the creative imagination of the human spirit. Wallace opened new horizons in our thinking on human evolution; he would have found an ally in Padre Pio.

REFERENCES

1. E. Haraldsson, Miracles Are My Calling Cards: An Investigative Report on the Psychic Phenomena Associated With Sathya Baba, Rider: London, 1987.
2. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina: Acts of the First Congress of Studies Padre Pio’s Spirituality, Ed. Gerado Di Flumeri, San Giovan: Rotondo, 1972.
3. Epistolario of Padre Pio, Vol. 1, San Giovanni Rotondo: 1973.
4. Diario, Agostino da S. Marco in Lamis, San Giovanni Rotondo: 1975.
5. J. Schug, Padre Pio: He Bore the Stigmata, Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, p.55, 1975.
6. E. Boniface, Padre Pio Le Crucifie, Nouvelles Editions Latines: Paris, 1971.
7. A. Parente, Send Me Your Guardian Angel, Our Lady of Grace Friary: San Giovanni Rotondo, 1983.
8. Ibid.
9. The Voice of Padre Pio, Vol. 5, No.3, 1975, pp.14-15.
10. C.M. Carty, Padre Pio the Stigmatist, Rockford, Illinois: Tan, 1973.
11. D.S. Rogo, Miracles, The Dial Press, New York, 1982.
12. C. Cruz, The Incorruptibles, Rockford, Illinois: Tan, 1977.
13. B. Ruffin, Padre Pio: The True Story, Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, 1982.
14. This was the expression Padre Pio used to explain how he bilocated when someone asked. Other times he just said God sent him places. The interesting point is he himself continually affirmed the reality of his excursions through hyperspace. For another angle on the evidence, his confreres often heard him giving absolution or otherwise conversing with invisible or far-off beings.
15. See Ruffin, p.266.
16. The Friends of Padre Pio (newsletter), Vo1. 2, 3, pp.14-16.
17. A. Pastrovicchi, Saint Joseph of Copertino, Rockford, Illinois: Tan, 1980.
18. M. Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.
19. C.M. Carty, Who is Teresa Neumann?, Rockford, Illinois: Tan, 1974.
20. J. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, New York: Pocket Book, 1972. See the postscript.
21. D. Barker, Psi phenomena in Tibetan culture, Research in Parapsychology, 1978, Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow, 1979, pp.52-55.
22. A.R. Wallace, Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, London: Spiritualist Press, 1878.

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MICHAEL GROSSO, Ph.D in philosophy from Columbia University, is presently affiliated with the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia and is on the Board of Directors of the American Philosophical Practitioner’s Association. His most recent books are Experiencing the Next World Now (Simon & Schuster) and Irreducible Mind, co-authored with Edward Kelly et alia. Michael is especially interested in paranormal phenomena and the origins of religious belief. His website is www.parapsi.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 9.

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With the publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the mid-nineties and the Gnostic Gospels found in Nag Hammadi, a new perspective on the role of Mary Magdalene in the revelation and dissemination of the esoteric teachings of Christ has emerged onto the public stage. With the release of The Da Vinci Code, she has been placed firmly in the public consciousness, her story awakening both excitement and controversy.

It is my contention that Mary Magdalene was the carrier of a tradition of respect and reverence for the Divine Feminine, a secret initiatory tradition that leads back through Jesus, Gnosticism, the esoteric teachings of Judaism, and the Egyptian mysteries of Isis to the ultimate ground or source of all religions. By seeking out the alternative roads to understanding, by looking at the Gnostic texts, legends, symbols, and iconography, one discovers the distinct possibility Mary Magdalene was not only first witness to and herald of the Resurrection, but the chief disciple and recipient of Christ’s’ gnosis, as well as teacher and transmitter of these extraordinary Mysteries to the people of France.

On the shores of the Mediterranean Sea outside Marseilles at Les Saintes Marie de la Mere there is a small chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene and consecrated by Archbishop Roncalli (who later became Pope John XXIII). Given a place of prominence within this chapel are paintings of her arrival from Palestine in a small rudderless boat.According to legend, soon after the crucifixion and Resurrection, Mary Magdalene and her family were expelled from the Holy Land, set adrift on the Mediterranean Sea and made their way to this region, particularly the area around Southern France and Northern Spain. At this time in history, aside from the already established Celts, many Greeks, Arabs, Jews and others lived and travelled in this area. There was even a Jewish city known as Glanum Levi whose ruins can be found today in Provence.

In the midst of this cosmopolitan confluence of cultures, along with the exchange of goods there must have been an exchange of philosophical and religious ideas. It is very possible that during this period many spiritual and symbolic links were discovered between these diverse peoples and their traditional belief systems that stretched back to the temples of Egypt. Before her arrival in Les Saintes Marie Sur Les Mere, France was riddled with Isis cults. The name Paris etymologically can be linked to the pre-Celtic ParIsis, the grove of Isis. Clearly this region was fertile ground for Mary Magdalene’s mission.Following her arrival in France, she was said to have travelled the land, preaching the authentic Gnostic gospel of Jesus, which had been directly transmitted to her during his time on Earth and in mystic visions after his return to the more subtle dimensions of light. French religious literature from the Middle Ages is filled with legends and stories of the life of Mary Magdalene from this period until her death. Tales abound of her miraculous healings, her performance of the ritual of baptism, her aid in fertility and childbearing and even her ability to raise the dead. There are even reports of a secret tradition of the healing arts that exists today in France and traces its roots back to Mary Magdalene.1

After this prophetic mission was accomplished, Mary is reported to have withdrawn to a cave in Ste. Baum, where she spent the remainder of her days in pray and seclusion. She is believed to have been buried at Ste. Maximin where her remains were watched over by Cassianite monks from the fifth century until the Saracen invasion. Then in 1058, in a papal bull, Pope Stephen acknowledged the existence of her relics in the church of Vezeley, which became one of the major places of pilgrimage during the Middle Ages.

But before we look at the evidence for her distinctive role as Apostle of the Apostles and prophetic mission, let us take a look at the hidden history of Gnosticism, the powerful doctrine of Divine grace, healing and illumination that she was said to have transmitted.

The Gnostic Teachings

It was during the Hellenistic period that the mystic knowledge of Egypt, the great symbols, myths, astronomical, scientific and metaphysical teachings passed into the heart of the Mystery Schools of Greece and Rome, which included the region of Gaul where Mary Magdalene is reported to have lived and preached. These secret initiatory teachings of the Egyptians were also retained and transmitted through the inner circles of Judaism to Jesus himself.

At the heart of this lineage of transmission was an extraordinary metaphysical teaching known as Gnosticism. This teaching is believed to be the spiritual basis of his essential message to humanity, a message revealed to Mary Magdalene, his disciples and followers through the vehicles of metaphor, allegory and parable. Unlike the patriarchal, dogmatic, materially based teachings prevalent during this period, Gnosticism placed primary value on the feminine qualities of receptivity, intuitive perception, visionary experience and the art of healing. It was a teaching of love, selflessness, harmony and communion.

The mystic experience of, and communion with, the essential grace and majesty of Divinity, lay at the heart of this Gnostic transmission. The clear and immediate experience of this awakening was known as gnosis or wisdom. Often translated from its Greek root as ‘knowledge’, Gnosticism goes much deeper than mere intellectual understanding. Like a brilliant flash of light arising from the darkness, this understanding arises in the individual as a bright lucid awareness – an intuitive realisation of the pure essence, nature and energy of Divinity as it flows within oneself, the luminous realms and all of creation.

From the Gnostic viewpoint, the answers to all of life’s mysteries can only be found when one “opens oneself to this divine current and allows oneself to be penetrated by it to the point where one is fully transformed and illuminated by it.”2 From the viewpoint of many early Gnostic communities, this divine current was perceived as the feminine, healing and nurturing energy of God’s Holy Spirit.

The fundamental doctrine of the Gnostics relates the dualistic nature of the world in which we reside, the eternal struggle between good and evil. They believed that Jehovah, the wrathful god of the Old Testament was a false god and expression of what they called the demiurge. For how could a fully enlightened divinity contain within him the base emotions of anger, jealousy and vengeance? For them, the real God was a loving deity equally and directly accessible to all. This God taught that love, compassion and the true sacrifice and transformation of the self, or ego, was the highest spiritual path.

The Gnostics believed that the plan of this demiurge, or Satan, was to trap spirit in matter, and the Earth itself was a prison in which souls were exiled from their divine home. For them, the real world was the non-material world of spirit and all of their rituals and practices were designed to purify them and provide them with the means to find their way out of the impure world of matter, darkness and suffering and return to their true home in the Light.

Clearly, these sacred esoteric teachings were revolutionary. Unlike the fixed, restrictive, hierarchical systems prevalent during this period, these teachings were open to all, female, male, rich, poor Jew or Pagan. This all-inclusive transmission of teachings formerly reserved for the elite was at odds with the practices of Orthodox Judaism and the emerging Church of Rome. For once the seeker had been touched by this Gnostic current, she or he came to recognise their own divine nature and perceive their place in the world from a whole new perspective. No longer did they need the intercession of a priest or rabbi to connect them with their spiritual inheritance.

Evidence of Mary Magdalene’s primary role as disciple, visionary, mediatrix and herald of these revolutionary teachings can be found in a number of Gnostic texts. These include The Pistis Sophia, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Mary and more.

Apostle of the Apostles

The Pistis Sophia is a Coptic Gnostic revelatory work composed and/or compiled in Egypt around the middle of the second century CE. It claims to disclose the “secret teachings of the Savior,” reserved for his inner circle of initiates during the eleven years following his Resurrection. Filled with powerful, poetic imagery, this text reveals the intimate connections between this emerging form of Christianity, Paganism and beliefs and rituals founds in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.3 It also clearly recognises and demonstrates Mary Magdalene’s essential role as foremost disciple, seer and prophetess.

It appears the teachings found in the Pistis Sophia were created specifically for the apostles who would go forth and spread his gospel. It takes the form of a dialogue between Jesus and these apostles and consists primarily of questions and answers. It is fascinating to note that in this text, out of the forty-six questions asked of him, thirty-nine of them come from Mary Magdalene. Due to her sincerity, astute level of inquiry and ability to comprehend the essence of his words, time and time again she is praised and recognised by him for her clarity and insight.

For example, after Jesus presents the first part of these mystical teachings concerning the aeons, orders and regions of the “Great Invisible,” he acknowledges Mary Magdalene’s superior capacity for contemplation, insight and revelation.

It came to pass then, when Mary had heard the Savior say these words, that she gazed fixedly into the air for the space of an hour. She said: “My Lord, give commandment to me to speak in openness.” And Jesus, the compassionate, answered and said unto Mary:

“Mary, thou blessed one, whom I will perfect in all mysteries, of those of the height, discourse in openness, thou, whose heart is raised to the Kingdom of Heaven more than all thy brethren.”

Throughout the text, after listening to her interpretation of his teachings, he acknowledges her perceptive abilities,

Well, said, Mary, for thou art blessed before all women on earth, because thou shalt be the fullness of all fullness and the perfection of all perfections.

This is only the first of a number of texts that speak of Mary Magdalene’s gifts and unique relationship with Jesus. According to a group of Gnostic Gospels discovered in 1945 in a cave in Upper Egypt near the village of Nag Hammadi, she was said to be an inspired prophetess who continuously experienced the living presence of her Lord within her.

In The Gospel of Mary, from this collection, Mary Magdalene, the visionary, reveals to the other disciples teachings that were transmitted to her through visionary experience. In this gospel, she clearly takes the lead, not only soothing and reassuring the male apostles who fear capture and death, but relating to them teachings of the Savior that she alone has been privileged to receive. As in the Pistis Sophia, the Savior blesses her for her visionary capacity. When Peter questions her vision, Levi responds with, “If the Teacher held her worthy, who are you to reject her? Surely the Teacher knew her very well, for he loved her more than us.”4

In The Gospel of Philip, from the same collection, the disciples appear to be jealous of the intimate relationship between the Savior and Mary Magdalene.

The Companion of the savior is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” The Savior answered and said to them, “Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.”

Because I have no reason to doubt Philip’s account or the words found in these early texts, I feel that the Christianity brought to France by Mary Magdalene has a different feel about it because it was closer to the authentic teachings of Jesus. If Mary Magdalene truly was the Apostle of the Apostles, then Jesus transmitted more to her or perhaps she understood this transmission better than the rest of the apostles. Through this lens we can begin to perceive and acknowledge the different understanding and practice of Christianity that emerged in Southern France, one that lasted over 1,200 years and in a sense pervades the place to this day.

Magdalene’s Legacy

When one looks at the history of the region one finds evidence that with her arrival, a surge of spiritual awareness, code of ethics and respect for feminine values began, which wove itself into the very fabric of the psychic landscape of Europe. The Order of the Knights Templar was created in this region. The alchemists began their flurry of Cathedral building to preserve the secret metaphysical teachings passed down to them from ancient Egypt. The Crusades and the entire Back to Jerusalem movement began in this area. The mystical Kabbalistic texts the Bahir and Zohar emerged from this region, bringing to the Jewish people knowledge of the Shekhina, or ‘indwelling presence’ and ‘feminine potency of God’. The cults of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene and Black Madonna, symbolically representing the three aspects of Isis in her role as Universal Goddess, arose here and spread throughout Europe.

It was here the troubadours and poets such as Wolfram von Eschenbach, Robert de Bouron and others sang their songs of devotion to the feminine principle and wrote their fables of the Holy Grail. And it was here in the beautiful mountains and valleys of Provence and Languedoc that the Cathars, as carriers of the Gnostic transmission of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, rebelled against what they considered to be the excesses of the priestly hierarchy, renounced all worldly possessions and fully committed themselves to the path of spirit. Among the Cathars, women as well as men were priests who transmitted divine grace and healing power through the laying on of hands in their sacred initiatory rites that link back to Mary Magdalene, Isis and the healing traditions held by the temple priestess.

As time marched on, the Church of Rome, threatened by the inroads these powerful Gnostic teachings were making among the local populace, labelled them heretical and moved to suppress them. To cement the rule of the Church of Rome, Pope Innocent III called for a Crusade against this Gnostic Cathar heresy. This crusade, which had as its focus the torture, murder and eradication of these loving and compassionate people was the starting point of a wave of fear, suffering and suppression of the feminine in both her divine and worldly aspects that would spread throughout Europe and become known as the Holy Inquisition.

Closer to our time, there are the visions of Saint Bernadette and the healing waters of Lourdes, as well as the mystery of Father Sauniere, Rennes Le Chateau and his strange chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene. Then there is the saga of Otto Rahn searching through the hills and valleys of this region for the Nazis trying to find the Holy Grail for the upper echelon of the SS. There are the legends of the secret alchemists who live in a magical castle somewhere in the Pyrenees recently popularised in the Harry Potter series. Finally, emerging from this region, is the mystery of the Alchemical Cross of Hendaye, the prophetic visions of Nostradamus and the Basque legend that John of the Apocalypse still lives in a cave in the Pyrenees and will leave that cave only at the end of time.5

These events and stories reveal that Mary Magdalene and the Gnostic current may very possibly be the driving force behind the rich history of this region. Whether it is fact or legend that Mary Magdalene actually came to this area is less important than the power and impact her life and teachings had upon the people of France. It is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see, that early in the history of this grace-filled tradition, Mary Magdalene, Apostle of the Apostles entered and has remained at the heart of Christianity.

Footnotes:

1. From a conversation with minister and playwright Lila Sophia Tresemer, co-author of the play and DVD, Re-Discovering Mary Magdalene (written with her husband, David Tresemer), for which I created the choreography. In their travels through France, she discovered a tradition of using the healing oils of Mary Magdalene that was said to have been passed down to healers now living in the south of France.

2. Sharron Rose, The Path of the Priestess; A Guidebook for Awakening the Divine Feminine (Inner Traditions, 2002) p.104

3. From the forward by Leslie Shepard to G.R.S. Mead’s, Pistis Sophia (University Books, 1974), p. xvii

4. From the recent translation by Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene (Inner Traditions, 2002).

5. For greater insight into these events see Weidner and Bridges, The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye: Alchemy and the End of Time (Destiny Books, 2003) and the Sacred Mysteries DVD, Secrets of Alchemy: The Great Cross and the End of Time.

Top image caption: The “Mother of the World” by mystic and artist Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947). Nicholas and his wife Helena taught that the World Mother has manifested many times over the millennia. (Image courtesy of the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York, www.roerich.org).

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SHARRON ROSE, MA.Ed, is a filmmaker, writer, choreographer and teacher. She is the author of The Path of the Priestess; A Guidebook for Awakening the Divine Feminine and the DVD, Yoga of Light. Together with her husband, Jay Weidner, she has produced numerous documentaries and instructional DVDs for their company Sacred Mysteries Productions. Sharron’s web site is www.sharronrose.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 2.

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By ROBERT FEATHER MIMMM., C.Eng.

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This article is a brief examination of the nature and historical roots of the Qumran community that lived and worked on the western shore of the Dead Sea around 150 BCE to 68 CE and the connections that may be discerned between it and the preaching of John the Baptist, the ministry of Jesus, and the origins of Christianity. It looks through the eyes of scholars like Jozef Milik, one of the first to discover the nature of the Dead Sea Scrolls and to analyse them in depth, back in the 1950s, and the author’s analysis of the latest research now that translations of most of the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered near Qumran, have been officially published.My previous book The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran,1 dealt with aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls and, more particularly, one of the scrolls that had been engraved on copper by the strange community of Essenes that inhabited Qumran. As a trained metallurgist, the use of copper by a devout Jewish sect, living by the Dead Sea around the first century BCE, had aroused my curiosity – especially as the Hebrew text seemed to be a list of buried treasures that apparently had never been found (see New Dawn No. 80, September-October 2003).

Identifying the location of some of the treasures described in the Copper Scroll was only one of the claims substantiated in that book; treasures I identified as being in various museums around the world. Furthermore, a detailed analysis arose from my reading of the name of an Egyptian pharaoh encrypted in the text of the scroll – an interpretation confirmed as “not unreasonable” by both Professor John Tait of University College London and Professor Rosalie David of Manchester University.

The profound conclusion was that the Hebrews must have been present at the court of Pharaoh Akhenaten and the origins of monotheism date back to his time.For my next book I had planned to take a closer look at the Qumran community’s beliefs and way of life, examining how these may have influenced the beginnings of Christianity and its emergence as a daughter religion of Judaism. However, while discussing the project with Jozef Milik, one of the scholars who originally worked on deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls back in the early 1950s, my research took a strange and totally unexpected twist. Jozef Milik had been the leader of the team of translators based at the École Biblique in East Jerusalem; he had also been, at that time, an ordained Catholic priest.What Monsieur Milik revealed to me, in the course of many intriguing conversations he and I shared about the Essene community, inspired me to write a new book and informs a substantial part of it.

During my researches I have come across many further pieces of evidence that confirm a connection between a uniquely monotheistic pharaonic period in Egyptian history and the Essenes of Qumran, who lived a thousand years later and a thousand miles distant. As remarkable as this connection may appear to be, to date the relationship has been criticised but not refuted, and a number of eminent scholars have indicated that it begins to explain some anomalies in their own research. As I progressed further along the “Jozef Milik trail,” many more examples came to light that supported my conjectures regarding this link and these have a considerable bearing on early Judaism and the story of Jesus and his epoch.

The main thrust of the current search, however, was the nature of the people who lived at Qumran between, perhaps, 150 BCE and 68 CE, when their settlement was destroyed by the Romans, the secrets they kept, their relationship to the earliest followers of Jesus, and the incredible revelations of Monsieur Milik. It was not until my third visit, in October 1999, when I returned to present him with a copy of my book on one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that Jozef Milik started to talk more freely about his early life and work, volunteered his date of birth as March 24, 1922, and told me why he had left the Catholic Church. Ostensibly it was to marry his rather delightful wife, Yolanta, née Zaluska, but there were other reasons, reasons connected with what he had found and interpreted in the scrolls of the Dead Sea. Two hours into our conversation he quietly and almost casually spoke of certain events near Qumran. It was one of those nerve tingling moments; my mind reeled with the impact of what he was saying.

Those dramatic words of Jozef Milik started me on a journey of discovery to determine how the circumstances at the time of Jesus might confirm or disprove his revelation. It was a quest that was to take me from the cold dampness of a Parisian autumn day to the remote dryness of Egypt, to the holy places of Jerusalem, to an offshore haven on the Isle of Man, to catacombs in Rome, to Washington and New York, to a Gothic building in Germany, and back to the barren shores of the Dead Sea in Israel. As my journeys and investigations progressed, it became increasingly clear that something extraordinary, as yet not revealed, may have occurred at or near to Qumran, and there were others who were party to this knowledge but were not keen for the evidence to become public.

Qumran

The Qumran Essenes, a mysterious Jewish sect that suddenly vanished from its habitat by the Dead Sea in Judaea around 68 CE, was a unique community in Jewish history, and in many ways practiced a form of Judaism very different from that being pursued elsewhere in the Second Temple period. No one is certain of the origins of the strange, reclusive sect that wrote and possessed what are now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Nor is there agreement as to the degree of influence the sect had on early Christianity, or its relationship to John the Baptist and Jesus. Such is the intensity of feelings about who exactly these Essenes were that it is not uncommon to see professors shouting across conference rooms at each other as they defend their respective pet theories. Whilst there is consensus on many issues, there are also large areas where there are just no accepted answers. Perhaps part of the reason is there are basic misunderstandings with regard to the origins of the community. As archaeologist Magen Broshi, of the Israel Museum, likes to put it: “There are at least ten different theories about the origins and function of Qumran. By definition, nine of them are wrong.” As our story unfolds, it will become increasingly evident that the activities of the Essenes are central to the plot, and of profound significance to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as many other religions. It is useful to set the scene with a Timeline of Events in the period in question. After the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it soon became apparent that the type of Judaism practiced by the authors/possessors of the scrolls – a minority Essene group that numbered perhaps less than four thousand, or 2 percent of the Jewish population – was far more similar to early Christian practices and beliefs than that of any previous group. Previously it had been assumed Christianity emerged out of Pharisaic Judaism. The worry for modern Christian authorities was not so much that they had got their suppositions wrong, regarding which strand of Judaism had given birth to Christianity, but that it was becoming increasingly difficult to distance Christianity from this previously little-known new slant on Judaism, namely Essenism. The first sensational claim relating the Dead Sea Scrolls to Christianity came from a respected Sorbonne University professor, André Dupont-Sommer who wrote in 1950 that he saw Jesus in the “pierced messiah” mentioned in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls: “The Galilean Master… appears in many respects as an astonishing reincarnation of the Teacher of Righteousness.” When who this Teacher of Righteousness really was becomes apparent, it is clear that Dupont-Sommer was quite wrong in his assumptions about the Teacher as “the exact prototype of Jesus.” As an outsider from the predominantly Catholic translation team (he had once been an abbé), Dupont-Sommer was immediately criticised by his peers for jumping to preposterous conclusions. Nevertheless, Edmund Wilson, a respected American literary journalist and columnist for The New Yorker, picked up the theme and subsequently published a book entitled The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, in which he claimed that Qumran, “with its ovens and its inkwells, its mill and its cesspool, its constellation of sacred fonts and the unadorned graves of its dead, is perhaps, more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity.” A few years later John Marco Allegro, the only Methodist among the predominantly Catholic original Dead Sea Scrolls translation team in Jerusalem, broke ranks and claimed that one of the Dead Sea Scrolls included mention of messianic crucifixion and resurrection. He was undoubtedly a brilliant scholar, but his claims became more extreme with the publication of his book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross in 1970, which claimed Christianity was born out of Jesus’ followers imbibing hallucinatory drugs. In 1979 he went even farther down this hypothetical trail, claiming Jesus was no more than a fanciful legend developed by the Essenes to extemporise on their own Teacher of Righteousness. Allegro conceived of this Teacher figure as an Exodus period Joshua/Jesus incarnate who was killed, or perhaps crucified, by the Israelite Wicked Priest, Alexander Jannaeus, around 88 BCE. Allegro was pilloried by his peers in an open letter to The Times, of London, in 1956, and never really recovered from the personal attacks on his character that followed. Perhaps the record is put right in his daughter’s recent biography of her father published this year.2 In the mid-1980s Robert Eisenman, a professor of Middle Eastern religions at California State University, published a number of works attempting to relate the Qumran Essenes to characters in the Christian Scriptures. One of Eisenman’s ongoing themes has been the idea that James the Just, the brother of Jesus, was the leader of the Qumran-Essene community. When more of the Cave 4 Dead Sea Scrolls material became available in 1991, Eisenman, together with Michael Wise, associate professor of Aramaic at the University of Chicago, continued the theme in their book The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered. In this work, they also discuss what they believe is a reference in the Dead Sea War Scroll to a suffering, wounded, and ultimately slain messianic figure. Two journalist protégés of Robert Eisenman, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, expanded on Eisenman’s theories in their book The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, published in 1991. In addition, they accused Catholic authorities and the Vatican of a cover-up conspiracy designed to distance the teachings and beliefs of the Qumran Essenes from early Christianity. The controversies were added to dramatically by an Australian academic from Sydney University, Barbara Thiering. She claimed there had been a complete misunderstanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thiering maintains that the Teacher of Righteousness and his rival the Wicked Priest corresponded to John the Baptist and Jesus. For her, Jesus did not die on the cross but lived on at Qumran after his experience of near death. Some other commentators could not even find a real Jesus in historical terms and suggest he was a fictitious figure culled from Greek myths and pagan legends. The overall conclusion, nevertheless, from sources external to the Christian Scriptures, both literary and archaeological, is that someone who fulfilled many of the biblical claims relating to Jesus really did exist. Furthermore, whatever attributes he possessed, divine or otherwise, they inspired a devoted religious following that eventually grew into a movement whose influence swept the entire world.

The Messiahs of Qumran

Two central concepts need to be kept in mind when attempting to understand the motivations behind the beliefs and behaviour of the Essenes, and, more particularly, the Qumran Essenes and their messianic hopes. First, although they put immense store in traditional Hebrew teachings, they followed an apparently aberrational form of Judaism that yearned for and echoed the early days of Mosaic Sinai and which, I maintain, dates back even further to the ancient monotheism of Akhenaten and Jacob. Second, if the early Jesus movement owed a powerful debt to the beliefs practiced at Qumran, which I suggest will become even more apparent from the evidence presented in my new book, then it would not be surprising to find that some of Akhenaten’s teachings and imagery would be transferred across and reflected in the early Jesus movement and later Christianity. It is evident from the Dead Sea Scrolls that the Essenes of Qumran considered themselves an elite messianic group; they had retreated from the fray of the Temple and the priesthood and sought refuge in the wilderness to protect their piety. The opening verses of Isaiah, chapter 40, aptly describe their role:

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

For some of the Essenes, the need to retreat was part of their search for a reaffirmation of the divine covenant given to Moses on Mount Sinai, a quest for the purity and essence of Torah and Hebrew teachings. They looked upon themselves as the ancestral custodians of the “light of truth.” Their fundamental beliefs and manner of practicing their special religion were essentially at odds with the rest of the Jewish community, and they followed an extreme form of ritualistic behaviour and strict adherence to their interpretation of the Law. So who were the Qumran Essenes waiting for? The answer is contained in a number of the Dead Sea Scrolls texts that indicate they were waiting for two, and some scholars read three, messiahs. These messiahs, one priestly and one royal, are given various titles in different scrolls:

Priestly: Interpreter of the Law, the Star; the Messiah of Aaron, who was of princely descent

Royal: Prince of the Congregation, the Scepter; the Messiah of Israel; the King Messiah

In addition, they expected the return of a prophet similar to Moses. Fortunately, there are quite detailed descriptions of these messiahs in a number of the scrolls, so one would assume it should be relatively easy to identify who they were talking about. Unhappily, that is not the case, and conventional scholarship makes little attempt to utilise this information. As Joseph Fitzmyer, professor emeritus at Catholic University in Washington, notes: “It is a surprise to see a priestly figure become part of the Qumran community’s messianic expectations, because there is little in the Hebrew Scriptures itself about a future ‘priest’.” He finds no reasonable explanation for this phenomenon. In fact, I believe both the name of Akhenaten, preserved in the text of the Copper Scroll, and a variation on the name Meryra, his High Priest, as a title for a leader of the Qumran community, reflect this priestly connection, among many other indicators. Another clear example comes from the community’s War Scroll: “And on the banner of Merari they shall write… God’s offerings [and the name of the Prince of Merari]” (4QM).

A Line of Priests

The Book of Jubilees, which emanated from the Essenes, makes it quite clear the patriarch Jacob passed his teachings on down through the line of Levi, one of his sons, giving rise to the so-called Levitical priests. Yet these hereditary priests were not, according to the Hebrew Scriptures, appointed as priests until the time of Aaron several hundred years later. At the time of Jacob, there was no Israelite sanctuary or temple of worship, and yet the Dead Sea Scrolls repeatedly insist that priests were appointed at the time of Jacob. The only explanation that makes sense is that there were hereditary priests in Jacob’s time, that there was a place of worship, and that it was almost certainly the Great Temple at Akhetaten, modern day Amarna.

The Messiah(s) Awaited by the Rest of the Jewish Population

The generalised Jewish view of the awaited messiah can be understood in terms of the messianic age that the messiah would bring about. The End Days eschatology has essentially two elements: one of material restoration and one of a spiritual utopia. The Jewish concepts differ from Christian ideas of redemption in that they involve the visible world, whereas Christianity envisages a spiritual and personal redemption reflected in the soul. Tracing the quotations in the Christian Scriptures to their assumed original Qumran-Essene and Hebrew Scriptures sources is the flavour of the decade and preoccupies hundreds if not thousands of scholars around the world. Texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls; the Genizah Collection – found in Cairo, Egypt, in the late 19^th century; and the John Rylands fragment – the earliest example of text from the New Testament dated to c 125 CE, have stimulated endless debate on the origins of Christianity. Despite the fact that large chunks of the Hebrew Scriptures have been shown to have been based on much earlier Egyptian texts, little attempt has been made to investigate these texts in the light of these blazing neon signs. Although early Christian writers could in theory have obtained some of their information from versions of text in general circulation, it seems likely that much of the Qumran Essenes’ literature from which they were quoting was available only to the Qumran Essene membership. The significance of these correlations is that the early Christians must have had access to sectarian texts with limited circulation and had a much closer relationship with the Qumran Essenes than has previously been acknowledged. Ideas and theology exclusively promoted by the Qumran Essenes, that appear in the Christian Scriptures or Christian practice and are not apparent in other Jewish sources, include: • Belial as a personalised incarnation of the powers of evil • The temple as a metaphor for community • Dualism in terms of light (good) and darkness (evil) • Equating righteousness with the Sun • The demand to keep separate from the way of darkness and to walk in the light • Courts of justice at Qumran and Corinth following the same novel judicial system • A conviction of humankind’s hopeless sinfulness • A humble teacher of justification through grace (recognised by Paul as Christ) • Knowledge of mysteries (creational and eschatological) of God is revealed only to the absolutely righteous • The terms wisdom, knowledge, and understanding used in the same sense • Three cardinal sins of fornication, impurity, greed (which leads to idolatry) • Foolishness and silliness as punishable offenses • An imperative for mutual fraternal correction – that is, the urgent need to make people aware they are sinning and bring them back to the light of goodness • The Qumran community and the Christian Church as the “chosen ones” • Liturgical times of prayer, vigils, quarter-tense (days of fasting and abstinence) coming to the church from Qumran • Tendencies toward monasticism and male chauvinism The possibility that John the Baptist had an association with the Qumran Essenes is for most modern and many early scholars much stronger than they would allow for Jesus. The enigmatic last verse of Luke regarding John living in the desert, as pointed out by l’Abbé René Laurentin, a French authority of the Church Council, makes little sense unless it is saying that John the Baptist was, from his childhood, a member of the Qumran community. The verse becomes clear, asserts l’Abbé, when the testimony of Flavius Josephus, the 1^st century CE Jewish/Roman historian, is considered, when he says of the Qumran community it was their custom to adopt “children from others, at an age when their spirit is still malleable enough to easily accept instruction.” (Jewish Wars) John Allegro has also pointed out that the Baptist’s parents were elderly, and when his father died he may have been adopted by the community as it is difficult to envisage what he was doing as a child wandering around in the wilderness of Judaea. The only logical deduction, from all the evidence, is that he spent at least part of his early life at Qumran. John the Baptist’s prime activity was baptism, and this too can be linked to the practices at Qumran where initiates were accepted into the Community with a final ‘graduation’ baptism that confirmed their obedience and spiritual commitment to God. The obvious question to ask is: “What were the origins of baptism?” How did it commence as a religious ritual? The required presence of water in the Tabernacle of Moses indicates the importance of water from a very early time in Hebrew history. That it was also used in religious rites across the Middle East prior to this time is also apparent from various pictorial sources. Its use for baptism as an initiation rite, however, appears to have originated in Egypt. The explanation for John the Baptist’s extension of this ritual, I believe, lies in the same thread that connects religious practices of Akhenaten to those of the Qumran Essenes, as can be seen in the above illustration. Here, in a relief discovered at Amarna dating to circa 1350 BCE, one of Akhenaten’s princesses is seen being blessed as purifying water is poured over her head from a jar held in the hand of a projecting ray from the Aten – the name the Pharaoh gave to his God. Only further external proof can confirm this probability of John’s, and/or other members of the early Jesus movement’s connection to Qumran, and that some kind of extraordinary evidence might be forthcoming would seem unlikely on the face of it two thousand years after the events. That evidence is, however, presented in The Secret Initiation of Jesus at Qumran, published by Inner Traditions, in July 2005.

Footnotes:

1. Published by Inner Traditions International, June 2003. An earlier version, The Copper Scroll Decoded, was published by HarperCollins in June 1999, and under other titles in Italy, Holland, and Japan. 2. Judith Brown, John Marco Allegro: The Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005.

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ROBERT FEATHER is a metallurgist, engineer, journalist, and scholar of world religions. He is the founding editor of The Metallurgist, editor of Weighing and Measuring, and the author of The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran and The Secret Initiation of Jesus at Qumran. He lives in London.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 93 (Nov-Dec 2005).

Read this article with its illustrations by
downloading your copy of New Dawn 93 (PDF version) for only US$2.95

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author. For our reproduction notice, click here.

—

As you want people to treat you, do the same to them. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even tax collectors love those who love them, do they not? And if you embrace only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Doesn’t everybody do that? If you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even wrongdoers lend to their kind because they expect to be repaid. Instead, love your enemies, do good, and lend without expecting anything in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of God.
– The Book of Q

[Jesus’s] ecstatic vision and social program sought to rebuild a society upward from its grass roots but on principles of religious and economic egalitarianism, with free healing brought directly to the peasant homes and free sharing of whatever they had in return. The deliberate conjunction of magic and meal, miracle and table, free compassion and open commensurality, was a challenge launched not just at Judaism’s strictest purity regulations, or even at the Mediterranean’s patriarchal combination of honor and shame, patronage and clientage, but at civilization’s eternal inclination to draw lines, invoke boundaries, establish hierarchies, and maintain discriminations. It did not invite a political revolution but envisaged a social one at the imagination’s most dangerous depths. No importance was given to distinctions of Gentile and Jew, female and male, slave and free, poor and rich. Those distinctions were hardly even attacked in theory; they were simply ignored in practice.
– John Dominick Crossan, The Historical Jesus

In this essay I intend to convey some thoughts about the origins of Christianity and the historical Jesus. But before doing so I should first confess that for me this subject carries no slight emotional charge. I grew up in a Midwestern Protestant household and attended church throughout my youth (though at about age twelve I began to question the religious teachings with which I was being indoctrinated); meanwhile, the rest of my family was beginning a slow drift toward evangelical fundamentalism. For years afterward I was torn between the desire to escape the tight-lipped Puritan ethic and unreasoning faith of my parents, and the need to validate at least a fragment of their beliefs in order to maintain a thread of connection with them and to feel that there was something right about the spiritual context in which I had been raised.

This latter need led me to embrace, for many years, a New Age version of Christianity that regarded Jesus not as the only son of God, but as the spiritual point of focus for our particular planet, a significant member of a cosmic hierarchy of god beings. Increasingly, however, I’ve felt compelled to examine even these liberalised beliefs in the light of reason and experience: before I regard Jesus as the spiritual point of focus for myself and for the world, should I not put forth some effort to learn whatever facts exist concerning his teachings, his life, and how various beliefs about him originated?

At the same time, my ongoing study of the history of civilisation has led me to conclude that in very many cases Christianity has exerted a force in the direction of intolerance, the concentration of power, and the suppression of free thought. This is certainly the case in America today, where the Christian Right is villainising gays, feminists, environmentalists, and “godless humanists,” while working to protect and expand the rights of powerful corporations to undermine traditional cultures and to pillage ecosystems. The fundamentalists plead for “family values” while promoting ideas and institutions that are actively destroying the cultural medium in which healthy communities and families thrive. What is worse, I see my own relations enthusiastically contributing (by way of the evangelical ministries of Pat Robertson and his brethren of the TV pulpit) not only to hatred and atrocities in the world today, but to what will almost surely be a biological catastrophe of unprecedented scope in the century ahead. For me, this painful personal circumstance only intensifies the importance of determining, to whatever extent is possible, the truth of Jesus.

Decoding the Gospels

The search for the historical Jesus has been going on for more than a century now, and anyone who embarks on even a cursory study of the findings of New Testament scholars quickly discovers a glaring disparity: while the scholars have been making important discoveries about the gospels, their sources, and the history of first-century Palestine, the average church-going layman knows virtually nothing at all about these findings. It is easy enough to find parties to blame for this situation – the clergy, for wishing to spare their parishioners the possibility of confusion or loss of faith; the flock themselves, for preferring comfortable beliefs over unfamiliar new information; and the scholars themselves, for maintaining an aloof position that says to the layman, “You have no right to an opinion about the historical Jesus because you have not acquired the necessary intellectual tools; only specialists are entitled to pass judgment in this matter.” And so we have two groups growing ever further apart as time goes on: on one hand, millions of faithful Christians for whom evidence is irrelevant and faith is everything, of whom many regard every word of the Bible as historically accurate; and on the other, a small coterie of academics, and their readers, who are intent on following the evidence wherever it leads regardless of its agreement or disagreement with received teachings.

The scholars (who include historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and literary experts) have approached the New Testament the same way they would any other piece of ancient writing, directing their efforts simultaneously along two lines: first, the literary analysis of the gospels and of related texts, including the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi scrolls (What do they have in common? In what ways are they different? When were they written and by whom? What sources did the authors draw upon?); and second, historical studies of events and characters and anthropological research into their cultural context (What religious ideas, philosophies, and myths were current in the Near East during the first century? What was the political and social situation in Palestine? What were the cultural backgrounds of the people mentioned in the narratives?).

Today most textual analysts agree that the earliest stratum in the Jesus literature is comprised of the genuine sayings of the master. The Jesus Seminar – an ongoing collaboration of eminent New Testament scholars seeking to determine the most probably authentic teachings of Jesus – has helped somewhat to clarify the conclusion that most independent investigators had already reached: that the authors of the canonical gospels (which were written several decades after the events they describe, and almost certainly not by the individuals to whom they are attributed) each drew upon a lost so-called sayings gospel. Known by the scholars as “Q” (for Quelle, German for “source”), this text was recently reconstructed and published by Burton Mack of Claremont College in his popular book The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins. Scholars may still dispute the authenticity of individual sayings, but the gist of Jesus’s original message, which we will explore below, seems clear enough.

The narrative biography of Jesus contained in the gospels is another matter, however. Clearly, some elements were derived from mythical sources. We know, for instance, that Mithras (a Syrian hero-god whose cult was popular throughout the Roman Empire during the first century) was believed to have been born in the company of shepherds and to have shared a last supper with his followers, later commemorated by them in a communion of bread and wine. Mithraism also taught the immortality of the soul and a future judgment and resurrection of the dead. The idea of a god who dies in order to save, redeem, or give life to the world had antecedents not only in the mythic biography of Mithras, but those of Osiris, Attis, Adonis, and Tammuz as well. Even the ascension story easily fits a mythic type well known during this period: all admired Roman emperors were said to have ascended to heaven after their deaths; as Morton Smith (author ofThe Secret Gospel and Jesus the Magician) tells us, “By the early second century there was a regular ritual to assure the ascension. Augustus’s ascension was attested to the senate by the sworn witness of a Roman Praetorian.”

But there is disagreement over just how much of the biography is history and how much is myth. Burton Mack argues that we must assume that everything but the sayings is myth; he writes: “The first followers of Jesus did not know about or imagine any of the dramatic events upon which the narrative gospels hinge. These include the baptism of Jesus; his conflict with the Jewish authorities and their plot to kill him; Jesus’ instruction to the disciples; Jesus’ transfiguration, march to Jerusalem, last supper, trial, and crucifixion as king of the Jews; and finally, his resurrection from the dead and the stories of an empty tomb. All of these events must and can be accounted for as mythmaking in the [early] Jesus movements….” On the other hand, Morton Smith and John Dominick Crossan (author of The Historical Jesus and Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography) accept at least some of the narrative material as factual; Smith contends, for instance, that the miracle stories resemble reports of the works of itinerant magicians known to have flourished throughout the Near East during the time in question, and proposes that Jesus was merely an example of the type.

Who Was Jesus?

Which brings us to the question, Who was the utterer of these sayings on which so great a religion was built?

One of the most radical interpreters of the evidence, G.A. Wells of the University of London, argues that Jesus did not exist as a historical person, but was invented by a group of first-century proto-Christians who merely expanded upon certain passages in 2 Isaiah and the Wisdom of Solomon describing a supernatural entity sent by God into the world as a man. However, most scholars dispute this interpretation, concluding instead that the number and character of early references to Jesus establish his historicity beyond doubt. And most agree that the evidence portrays him as a remarkable, charismatic individual.

But to grasp, to any significant degree, how Jesus’s cont-emporaries viewed him, we must first try to understand the context of the place and times in which he lived. During the first few decades of the first century, Palestine was a centre of religious and political ferment. The Hellenistic culture that had come to dominate the eastern Mediterranean region during the previous three hundred years had also profoundly affected Jewish society, and foreign myths, cults, and philosophies were current in the land. Politically, Palestine was under Roman domination, and the Jews were a repressed and exploited people whose aspirations for independence would erupt in the war of 66-73 c.e.

Anthropologists and historians agree that revelatory world-views tend predictably to spring from situations of intense social conflict and crisis. Such revelations take forms appropriate to the unique circumstances of time and place. In the case in point, according to Mack, “One important phenomenon of the Greco-Roman age was the appearance of the religious and philosophical entrepreneur, sometimes called the divine man, sometimes the sophist or sage. The entrepreneur stepped into the void left vacant by the demise of traditional priestly functions at the ancient temple sites and addressed the confusion, concern, and curiosity of people confronted with a complex world that was felt to be at the mercy of the fates.” In addition to freelance visionaries and prophets, the eastern Mediterranean during the first century was also home to magicians, protesters, bandits, messiahs, and revolution-aries. Jesus seems to have fit well into this milieu.

As we have already noted, Morton Smith sees Jesus primarily as a magician or miracle worker. Smith cites magical texts of the period, in which not only the major elements but even many minor details in the gospel stories find parallels. For example, he sees the eucharist as “a variant form of an attested magical rite for binding the celebrant and the recipient together in love; a number of other forms are found in magical papyri; the verbal parallels are unmistakable.”

In The Messianic Legacy, authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln argue that Jesus was in fact the rightful heir to the throne of David – hence his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and Pilate’s insistence on having the inscription “King of the Jews” affixed to the cross. They also emphasise Jesus’s role as a political agitator: Why, after all, would Pilate have dispatched (according to the Vulgate translation) a cohort of five or six hundred soldiers to the garden of Gethsemane to arrest Jesus, unless he anticipated a civil disturbance? Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem and driving of the moneychangers from the Temple can likewise be seen as acts of an insurrectionist.

Burton Mack, who puts more weight on Jesus’s sayings and less on the details of his biographies, tends to view him as a wandering wisdom teacher in the tradition of Diogenes the Cynic. The Cynics taught the renunciation of desires and appetites imposed by civilisation, equality among people, and the virtue of a natural life free from social conventions and possessions. In modern parlance, the term cynical is fraught with negative connotations; these, however, can be traced to an unfair caricature of a school of courageous philosophers known, in Mack’s words, for “voluntary poverty, renunciation of needs, severance of family ties, fearless and carefree attitudes, and troublesome public behavior.” Cynicism, according to Crossan, “involved practice and not just theory, life-style and not just mind-set in opposition to the cultural heart of Mediterranean civilization, a way of looking and dressing, of eating, living, and relating that announced its contempt for honor and shame, for patronage and clientage.” Jesus’s sayings closely parallel Cynic teachings; and, in the Hellenistic era, the philosophy of Diogenes would likely have been well known in Galilee. But Jesus, as a Jewish peasant Cynic, seems to have added a unique and significant twist to the established tradition: unlike the urban Greek Cynics, he advocated the formation of a rural social movement.

So, whence comes the image of Jesus as the only Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, forgiver of sins, hearer of prayers? Was this how Jesus thought of himself? Was it how his first followers viewed him? The historical and textual evidence gives us no reason for thinking that it was, and offers instead an account of how and why these ideas came into currency decades or centuries after the period in question.

But what of millions of people’s dreams, visions, and NDE encounters with Jesus; what of miraculous conversions and healings, of prayers answered and lives changed? Perhaps these should be accorded precisely as much legitimacy and significance as, for example, an Australian native shaman’s experience of totemic ancestral spirit-beings; an early Egyptian’s experience of Osiris; or a West African peasant’s experience of Legba. Which is to say: the experience is no doubt real, and in many cases the healings and miracles may also be real – all products of the human mind’s extraordinary need for symbols of transcendence, and of its ability both to generate meaningful and internally consistent world views, and to alter its own perceptions and the physical body’s abilities and state of health and vigour in order to fit those views.

The Teachings of Jesus

Now we arrive at a central question: What was the message that Jesus sought to convey? Burton Mack summarises some of the significant themes in the reconstructed sayings gospel:

• Voluntary poverty
• Lending without expectation of return
• Critique of riches
• Etiquette for begging
• Etiquette for troublesome encounters in public
• Nonretaliation
• Rejoicing in the face of reproach
• Severance of family ties
• Renunciation of needs
• Call for authenticity
• Critique of hypocrisy
• Fearless and carefree attitude
• Confidence in God’s care
• Single-mindedness in the pursuit of God’s kingdom

Again and again, Jesus exhorts his followers to seek the kingdom of God – a metaphor for an alternative social order in which people live according to nature, free and equal. The idea of God in the earliest core of sayings is of a universal power – or “father” – that “makes his sun rise on the evil and the good,” that “sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” “Be merciful even as your Father is merciful”; “If God puts beautiful clothes on the grass … won’t he put clothes on you? Your father knows that you need these things.” Jesus was, according to Crossan, “neither broker nor mediator but, somewhat paradoxically, the announcer that neither should exist between humanity and divinity or between humanity and itself. Miracle and parable, healing and eating were calculated to force individuals into unmediated physical and spiritual contact with God and unmediated physical and spiritual contact with one another. He announced, in other words, the brokerless kingdom of God.” Most scholars agree that some of the sayings attributed to Jesus are later additions; these include apocalyptic warnings about the Final Judgment, pronouncements against the Pharisees, pronouncements against towns that reject the movement, congratulations to those that accept the movement, the lament over Jerusalem, and the story of the temptations in the wilderness.

It is possible to trace, via shifts in discourse in the added material, just how the early Jesus community developed. At the earliest layer, according to Mack, “the discourse … was playful and the behavior public. Individuals were challenging one another to behave with integrity despite the social consequences. … If we ask about the character of the speaker of this kind of material, it has its nearest analogy in contemporary profiles of the Cynic-sage.” Then, in the next layer of sayings, “selected imperatives were elaborated as community rules … Jesus’ voice was now that of a founder-teacher giving instructions for the manner of life that should characterize his school.” We see the beginnings of social conflict surrounding the movement. By degrees, the voice of Jesus is made to utter things that only the wisdom of God could have known. The last layer of sayings dates from immediately after the Roman-Jewish war. According to Mack, “A retreat took place from the vigor with which these people had engaged their social environment to a kind of resignation, an acceptance of the fact that the rule of God was a matter of personal and ethical integrity. An amazing accommodation seems to have been made with a Jewish piety against which earlier battles had been fought. And Jesus was heard quoting the scriptures even though he was now imagined as the son of God whose kingdom would only be revealed at the end of time.”

In the earliest level of sayings we hear Jesus preaching, “How fortunate are the poor; they have the kingdom”; “Everyone who glorifies himself will be humiliated, and the one who humbles himself will be praised.” He is proposing a social experiment – a classless society in which all are equal in the sight of God. It is a society governed not by power and wealth, nor by rigid laws, but by charity and kindness.

An Unholy Alliance

Jesus’s egalitarian social philosophy has special relevance for us now, living as we do in one of the most polarised and stratified societies in history. Indeed, today’s multinational corporate-dominated industrial system owes much to institutions and practices pioneered by the Roman empire. Like twentieth-century America and Europe, first-century Rome was at a pinnacle of economic and technological “progress.” It was a colonial power, the centre of a far-flung trade network. It was also an urban centre in which extremes of wealth and poverty coexisted. Like the European colonists of the past five centuries, the Romans were destroyers of indigenous cultures and voracious consumers of natural “raw materials” (such as forests); and like us, they relied upon unsustainable, soil-killing farming practices. While the earliest reconstructed collection of Jesus’s sayings does not mention Satan, it does suggest the idea that the pursuit of power and glory is at the heart of social evils. And in later additions to the sayings gospel, in which the devil (literally, “the accuser”) makes his first appearance, he clearly serves as the personification of institutionalised social dominance.

The new scholarship portrays the historical Jesus as an anti-authoritarian, a primitivist, and an anarchist. According to Crossan, the earliest Jesus people were the equivalent of “hippies among the Augustinian yuppies.” Jesus’s message was a challenge to social power in all its manifestations. Yet within only a few generations that message had been twisted and co-opted almost beyond recognition. Through a gradual process of subversion, Christian teachings were first mythologised and then appropriated by the ruling elite of the Empire. As a result, Christianity has become a kind of time capsule in which are preserved fragments of Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern myths and philosophies, the theologies of Paul, Constantine, and Augustine, and the imperialist social program of ancient Rome. It is surely fair to say that most of this is virtually the opposite of what Jesus originally had in mind.

Of course, through it all the words of the Galilean sage have continued to shine: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” And, where individuals or groups have drawn inspiration from this earliest layer of teachings, a St. Francis or a St. Clair has come forward to propose the sort of “liberation” or “creation” theology that Jesus himself might have embraced. But as an institution, Christianity eventually became the handmaiden of the capitalist industrial state, supplying the theological justification for colonialism and a work ethic for the factory system. Today, “fundamentalists” claiming to represent the true teachings of the Galilean promote an anti-environmental, anti-feminist, anti-gay, pro-corporate, pro-technology agenda utterly opposed to the message of modern-day prophets of social justice and voluntary simplicity. Surely this constitutes one of the bitterest ironies in all of history.

A New Church?

At the end of the twentieth century we stand on the brink of a global civilisation whose might and sophistication would have delighted a Roman emperor to no end. The wealthiest one percent of the world’s population live in unimaginable opulence while hundreds of millions exist near the point of starvation. If we are to understand the devil as being not an otherworldly malevolent being, but as the tendency toward the accumulation of political and economic power, then it appears that in our generation virtually the whole world is coming to be possessed by the devil.

In such circumstances, one cannot help but yearn for a new Christianity that would pay attention to the discoveries of the scholars and focus its interest on the lifestyle and social program that Jesus taught and exemplified, rather than the theology his later followers adopted. Such a denomination or church could serve as a foil for the fundamentalists and as a haven for critics of the power system who are increasingly vulnerable to attacks from the neo-fascist Right.

And yet, seeing how easily ideologies and organisations are subverted, perhaps a new church is precisely what we do not need. It’s probably safe to say that Jesus did not wish to create a church of any kind. He seems to have envisioned instead a community of spirit. But when even well-intentioned attempts to form such a community result in the building of any sort of formal organisation, then the corrosive, hierarchical influence of civilisation seems nearly always to intrude. Moreover, a new Christian denomination could not help but focus much of its attention on the past, and on the person of Jesus. Again, this is probably not what he had in mind: it was only the later generations of his followers who insisted on uniquely divinising him. And hero worship, even given the best of heroes, tends to demean the worshipper. Jesus has not been the only individual in history to teach love, tolerance, equality, simplicity, voluntary poverty, generosity, and freedom from social conventions, and there are plenty of advocates of these ideals alive today who could benefit from our respect and support.

No, it is not a new church or denomination that we need. I suspect that one of the ideas that Jesus was seeking to convey was that true spirituality is not represented by a book or a hero or even a teaching. It may be expressed by means of a community of support, but it is not the community itself. It is a way of being. Those with some experience of that way of being may find it helpful to know that one of the most revered individuals in history taught and exemplified it. And the existence of people following that path today may somewhat vindicate that pivotal individual’s actual message (rather than the theology that conceals it). But the path itself is the point.

RICHARD HEINBERG is the author of Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age (Quest Books: 1995), Celebrate the Solstice: Honoring the Earth’s Seasonal Rhythms Through Festival and Ceremony (Quest Books: 1994), and A New Covenant With Nature. Since the publication of this article in his Museletter (now discontinued) Richard has produced many more publications. His website is http://www.richardheinberg.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 50 (September-October 1998).

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.

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