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An Ancient Text Lost for 1,700 Years Says Jesus' Betrayer Was Not a Traitor, He Was a Hero!5/9/2017  RESURRECTION, PAUL, JESUS AND EASTER An Exciting Discovery: “The Hidden Gospel of Judas” Installment 7 A very exciting thing happened to me yesterday. I was working on Episode 7 of this blog when the thought came to me that even though Paul was in Jerusalem for a two week stay (with Peter and Jesus’ brother, James), just a few years after Jesus died, he never mentions Judas in any of his writings—anywhere! If Judas (one of the 12 original Apostles) had been the infamous traitor responsible for Jesus’ death, wouldn’t that have been a big deal? Wouldn’t you have thought that Paul would have heard about it? Wouldn’t you think that in all of Paul’s letters he would have used Judas as an example to keep his wayward flock in line? He certainly made use of threats and literary devices to cajole and threaten his churches to follow his vision of Jesus’ message and place in the cosmos, but nowhere in any of his writings does he mention Judas. I would think that Paul might have made some reference to him somewhere in his writings (saying something like, “you don’t want to betray Christ like Judas did, do you?”), yet, it appears that Paul doesn’t have any knowledge of Judas being this arch villain responsible for Jesus’ betrayal and death. It seems that Paul would have heard at least a few stories about the guy, unless the story of Judas being a “traitor” hadn’t been invented yet. What? How could that be? There is no way of knowing, of course, but this thought led me to remember that not too long ago I had heard about a gospel (the Secret Gospel of Judas) that had been discovered in the deserts of Egypt in the 1980’s, and was first translated around the year 2000.  Gospel of Judas Codex Like all of the canonical Gospels, the author of the Gospel of Judas remains anonymous, but it is thought to have been originally written sometime between when the New Testaments Gospels were written (70 – 100CE) and 180 CE. The Gospel was probably written early in the second century, like the book of Acts, and perhaps even the Gospel of John, the gospel of James, Thomas (parts of which may predate the first canonical gospels), and others in circulation during the early years of Christianity. In The Secret Gospel of Judas, Judas was definitely not a traitor. He was a hero, doing Jesus’ will by turning him over to the authorities. Quoting from the extensive article in National Geographic (who sponsored the translation), “The ‘secret account’ gives us a very different Judas. In this version, he is a hero. Unlike the other disciples, he truly understands Christ’s message. In handing Jesus over to the authorities, he is doing his leader's bidding, knowing full well the fate he will bring on himself. Jesus warns him: ‘You will be cursed.’” HOLY COW! This hit me square in the face because in my book, The Disciple, The Writing of the First Gospel, and from my memories as Asher, this is exactly the roll that Judas played! Until I read the article I had no idea that any ancient document would agree perfectly with my memory of Jesus and Judas. Up to now I didn’t know of a single recorded account of Judas that wasn’t in lock-step agreement with the four official Gospels. Continuing to quote from the NatGeo article, “While Christians like Irenaeus [Bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul, in modern day France] stressed that only Jesus, the son of God, was simultaneously human and divine, the Gnostics [such as this Gospel appears to be] proposed that ordinary people could be connected to God just like Jesus. Salvation lay in awakening that divine spark within the human spirit and reconnecting with the divine mind. Doing so required the guidance of a teacher, and that, according to the Gnostics, was Christ’s role. Those who grasped his message could become as divine as Christ himself.” Fascinatingly, this is exactly what Asher was taught by Jesus, and it is in that role (as a special prophet), that is how the Muslims honor Jesus as well. Jesus in Islam – partial excerpt from Wikipedia “In Islam, Jesus is understood to be the penultimate prophet and messenger of Allah (God) and al-Maish, the Arabic term for Messiah, the Christ, sent to guide the Children of Israel with a new revelation. Jesus is believed to be a prophet, who neither married nor had any children, and is reflected as a significant figure, being mentioned in the Quran in 93 verses with various titles attached such as “Son of Mary”, “Spirit of God”, and the “Word of God” among other relational terms, directly and indirectly, over 180 times. In total, Jesus is mentioned 187 times in the Quran…” I’m not endorsing the Gospel of Judas, but this excerpt from the NatGeo article was a fascinating read. If you are interested, you can read about the Gospel of Judas here:  You can also go to Amazon Books and choose to purchase your own copy from one of many authors. Next, Installment 8, where we will look at what Paul thought about the resurrection and what it meant to him, and thereafter to the following generations. Make sure to watch for our next blog at: http://www.authortalk.audio/jesus-blog.   RESURRECTION, PAUL, JESUS AND EASTER
Installment 6 Resurrection: Establishing Paul’s Credentials The first description of the resurrection comes to us from Paul’s letters (Corinthians, Thessalonians, Galatians, etc.), not from the Gospels. Again, this is important because Paul wrote decades before any of the Gospels were written, so if we want to know what the Apostles believed, what they thought had transpired with Jesus right after he died, and how people perceived him within the first few decades, Paul’s opinions and knowledge of events should prove invaluable. Because Paul met with Peter and James (Jesus’ brother) roughly 3 years after Jesus died, his writings allow us to see and hear what the Apostles thought and felt about the resurrection before any of our existing Gospels were written. This early understanding about Jesus and his death not only applies to the Gospels, this applies to the book of Acts as well, which was probably the last of the first century documents that we have. The reason that this is important is that Acts purports to be an accurate record of Paul, his travels, his thoughts, and his interaction with the disciples, the apostles, and the Jerusalem church (realizing that there really is no “church” during the years that Paul was preaching and teaching, just in-home meetings). If you try to fill in the gaps in Paul’s life, or interpret Paul’s thoughts, intentions and teachings by reading the book of Acts, you can’t. It doesn’t stand up to critical scrutiny as to timelines and historical accuracy. That is important to note because most biblical scholars now think that we shouldn’t depend on the book of Acts to tell us precisely what Paul said or did, where he went and when, or even why; which is all very strange because the author of Acts probably had copies of Paul’s letters in front of him when he wrote, but then selectively changed history to make it sound more like Paul and the Jerusalem church were completely in alignment, which they weren’t. The author of the Gospel of Luke, and the book of Acts, were one and the same. As he wrote this second letter to a “dear friend who loves God” he tried to fill in the blanks and create a story in keeping with his (or his group’s) agenda to remake Paul into something that was more in line with the growing church’s idea of what was politically expedient in the Roman empire some 70 yrs. after Jesus had died. See timeline to the left. By the time that Acts was written it is a new and completely different world. By this time there is a church and there is a desire to bring as many diverse elements of faith as possible into a unified whole. It is quite clear that the author wants to portray Paul and the Jerusalem church to be in total harmony in all matters of faith from the very beginning, but I believe Paul when he says that he stood up to Peter and the rest of the disciples and others from the Jerusalem church that dogged his ministry every step of the way. I think that it is quite clear that Paul parted ways shortly after he had his dust-up in Antioch with Peter, James (Jesus’ brother), and others that were sent from the Jerusalem church to keep tabs on Paul and bring him more in line with the Jesus that they intimately knew and loved. He was angry after this confrontation, and thereafter struck out on his own, with his own vision of Jesus and his place in God’s plan for humanity. No wonder Paul was always fighting a rear-guard action. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians he makes it clear that he considers himself above the Apostles, above the original disciples, above even heaven itself when it comes to understanding Jesus and God. Listen to Paul’s words and judge for yourself. Gal. 1: 1-2 addresses the Galatians by saying: “[I am] Paul, an envoy, not appointed by any human authorities nor by any individual but by Jesus, God’s Anointed, and by God, Creator and Benefactor, who raised Jesus from among the dead.” Gal. 1: 8, “Even if one of us, or for that matter a messenger from heaven were to advocate a message different from the one we [meaning, Paul] delivered—they must be rejected and shunned!” Gal. 1: 11-12, “Let me make it clear, friends, the message I announced does not conform to human expectation. I say this because it was not transmitted to me by anyone nor did anyone teach it to me [he means the original disciples of Jesus]. Rather, it came to me as an insight [vision?] from God about Jesus as God’s Anointed.” [Quotes and translations from the letters of Paul are from The Authentic Letters of Paul by Dewey, Hoover, McGaughy and Schmidt] That’s quite a claim. You can imagine how that might have gone over with the Apostles and disciples that knew Jesus personally. It would be like me telling Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, or Ralph Abernathy that I had a vision of Martin Luther King Jr., and my interpretation of his words and deeds were in fact the Truth (with a capital ‘T’). How do you think that that would go over? I assume that if we met at a gathering, that there might be words exchanged between us—just like what happened with Paul in Antioch. All we have to go on are Paul’s recollections and interpretations of events and circumstances surrounding his disagreement with the Jerusalem church. We have no record of what Peter, James or any other Apostle or disciple thought about the confrontations with Paul, or his theology. The closest we come is found in the book of Acts, and as I explained, that probably is a whitewash to provide a harmonious and unified front to later believers—because it is diametrically opposed to what Paul bluntly says in his own letters to his followers. The writing of Acts has been generally assigned to the later part of the 1st Century, but now historical detectives have perceived the writings of Josephus’ from his book entitled, Antiquities of the Jews. Because we know that this famous Jewish historian wrote Antiquities of the Jews in Rome late in the 1st century (93-94 CE), some scholars have moved the date of Acts over the lip and into the beginning years of the 2nd century, mainly because it would have taken a decade or two before Josephus’ book could have been hand copied and distributed widely enough to have become available to the author of Luke/Acts. So, now we know the players, and their place in history, let’s next look at what Paul thought about the resurrection and what that meant to him, and thereafter to the following generations. To be continued with Installment 7 Why Didn’t the Gospel Writers Get Their Resurrection Stories Right? There May Be an Answer!2/21/2017  Jesus's Empty Tomb  RESURRECTION, PAUL, JESUS AND EASTER Installment 5 We are going to chase Jesus down this rabbit hole of history until we discover the Jesus that walked the earth, loved God with all his heart, all his soul, all his mind, and all his might, and taught us to follow him on the journey to ecstasy that he shared with “Abba” (God). In the last episode, we explored some of the similarities between the teachings of Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr.; both Jesus and MLK were the founders of a great movement, taught social reform, non-violence, and love of God and our fellow man. The singular difference between these two men, who taught in an almost identical way, and had followers that loved them with all their hearts, can be summed up in one word—resurrection! Many of the followers of Jesus believed that they “saw” him after he died; the followers of MLK did not. But, what does that mean? What did that mean to the original Apostles and disciples? What did that mean to Paul, and what did that mean to later followers? Did it change over the decades? There were many apocalyptic preachers during the first century in Judea and Israel; some had thousands of followers, some were hailed as the long-awaited Jewish messiah, some were purported to have performed miracles, and some were even killed and crucified by the Romans, but only one teacher became the founder of a new religion that changed the world, and that was the one who was called Jesus. What was the difference between the other “messiahs” and Jesus? It was the belief of the original followers that Jesus survived the horrible death that he was subjected to. The followers believed that he survived death—but what did that mean to them? Did that mean that they saw him physically (as later Christians believed, and still believe), or was it something else, something far more important to them, and to us today? Almost immediately after Jesus died, stories began to be told about his appearances to his Apostles and disciples. The stories that were told (and recorded in the Gospels) varied. Was it on the road to Galilee as the despondent disciples headed back to their homes (Mark 28:7; Matt. 26:32 and 28:7)? Perhaps it was in Jerusalem (Luke 24:13), or could it have been both (John 20:19 and 21:1)? Did 500 see him as Paul says (1st Corinthians 15:6), or was it just his intimate followers as mentioned in the Gospels? No matter, it was Paul’s vision of Jesus that ended up being the game-changer. He plopped himself down right in the middle of history, and interjected himself into the mix. He proclaimed that he had the same authority as Peter, James (Jesus’ brother) and the other Apostles that had known Jesus personally (remember, Paul never met Jesus!). The Apostles and disciples had lived with Jesus for years; traveled the dusty paths with him, watched him minister to those that he encountered, and suffered the slings and arrows from the doubters right along with him. It is understandable that some of them didn’t take kindly to Paul’s assumed authority, nor his non-Jewish teachings. And, more importantly, Paul presumed to tell them that he was not only equal to them, but also superior to them when it came to telling the world what Jesus and God’s wishes were for the world. Paul’s only contact with the disciples were two weeks with Peter and James (I “met with James, our Lord’s brother”), but this occurred at least three years after having had his vision of Jesus—he says himself that they were the only two disciples that he met with in Jerusalem on his first trip. It was during this initial meeting that he learned all that he was to know about Jesus the man, but he boldly states, “Let me make it clear, friends, the message I announced does not conform to human expectation. I say this because it was not transmitted to me by anyone nor did anyone teach it to me. Rather, it came to me as an insight from God about Jesus as God’s Anointed.” Gal. 1:17-19 Wow! That’s quite a statement. In his mind, it was he, and he alone, that had the “true” connection with Jesus and God. It was he alone that knew what God and Jesus wanted of their followers. It was he alone who knew the heart and mind of not only Jesus, but God himself. He alone was privy to the knowledge of what it took to gain—and lose—salvation. It is hard for us to understand how important this observation is to understanding the Christianity that we all inherited; but more importantly, to our understanding of Jesus, who would become the Messiah to billions. Paul ripped Jesus out of his homeland, moved him into the Greco-Roman world, and elevated Jesus to a whole new level to match the demands and expectations of that world, where Paul taught and competed daily with the gods of his listeners. His letters and tireless teachings in many countries became the game changing event. Without Paul—who wrote about his vision, his philosophy, and his beliefs about Jesus the Messiah—I seriously doubt if we would have Christianity, as we know it today. The reason is simply that the other Apostles wrote nothing, at least nothing that we know of; and conversely, Paul wrote copiously. His many letters ended up being copied over and over, transmitted from one group of Christians to another, being read then, and for generations that followed. I say again, if we hadn’t had Paul, we wouldn’t have Christianity as we know it today—period.
 40 to 70 years after Jesus died, a few followers tried to capture his words and acts—we call them the Gospels RESURRECTION, PAUL, JESUS AND EASTER Installment 4 In Episode 3, that we posted last week, we related a story of how a chronicler of Martin Luther King Jr. (trying to put together a ‘gospel,’ meaning ‘good news’ similar to what Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did 2,000 years earlier), might include the quotes of the great man that the gospel writer most wanted MLK to be remembered by. And, of course, that gospel would most certainly coincide with the gospel writer’s own beliefs or cultural conditioning. We might also imagine that the writer could possibly choose to 'forget' to include those sayings of MLK (in the same way that Jesus’ chroniclers did). I can’t emphasize enough that we remember (according to biblical scholars), Jesus never wrote down a single word, so we have to rely totally on later-day followers and scribes who each lived in different parts of the world and came from diverse backgrounds, and wouldn’t set down the stories (writing only in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic, the language that Jesus and his disciples spoke) for decades after he died. Remember that none of the Gospel writers actually knew Jesus personally—none of them claimed that they did—but they might have known people that knew him (which would give us second-hand information), or people that knew people that knew people that knew him (third-hand information).
Thus, we have to allow some leeway here for the oral tradition to mature or morph over the decades after Jesus died before someone decided to finally write down the traditions about him that they had heard. Thus there are differences and conflicts between the various accounts, which is to be expected. Add in the fact that just before the first Gospel (Mark) was penned (roughly 40 years after Jesus died), the Romans invaded Israel and Judea and killed huge numbers of the population (including followers of Jesus); and, those that they didn’t kill outright in the Great Jewish War, they hauled off into slavery—20,000 of them!  The Arch of Titus. The emperor entering Rome with the Jewish Temple treasure, along with 20,000 Jewish slaves Thousands of the survivors were marched through the streets of Rome and are pictured in the great Arch of Triumph in Rome, along with the golden Menorah. We are lucky that we have any written documentation at all after that cataclysmic event that affected every Jew (and followers of Jesus) in the empire. In fact, the coliseum was largely built by the Roman emperor, Vespasian, with the money he confiscated from the Temple in Jerusalem, and constructed with the labor of Jewish slaves captured in Judea. As if conquering Jerusalem wasn’t enough, he destroyed the Temple completely, along with most of the city. So great were the riches of the Temple at the time of Jesus that many of the stones were covered with gold to dazzle all who saw this building (it was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world!). The soldiers tossed the stones off the Temple Mount, and even took the gold encased stones of the Temple, heated them, and collected the gold that melted away from them. If we return to our real-life example of MLK, and we are trying to put together our ‘gospel’ account, then at some point we have to pick and choose the sayings of his to pass on to future generations. If we had come from poverty and lived through the 60’s and participated in, or sympathized with, the black freedom struggle in the South then we would definitely want to include some of these quotes.
If we hadn’t personally lived with, or hadn’t been affected by the segregated schools, the lunch counter sit-ins of the 60’s, the “white only” facilities, or the requirement to sit in the back of the bus; if we hadn’t witnessed the burning crosses and the white sheets, then we might shy away from those quotes in our MLK gospel. After all, over 40 years have passed; evil recedes from our memories, which makes those atrocities not as real, eminent, and scarifying as they once were as they fade from our consciousness. We might decide we want to stick with the sayings that are filled with love, not conflict—not the overturning of the status quo, which no longer exists. Now, today, if any one of these thoughts from MLK make you a little uncomfortable, recall that it was the same with some of the teachings of Jesus; thus, some of the uncomfortable sayings of Jesus were left out in some of the Gospels, they were modified by others by just a word or two (which often changed the meaning completely), or were placed into alternate scenarios that now seem to sit awkwardly positioned in the stories that survived. Remember, I am not even mentioning the over 30 other Gospels that we now know were being circulated in the early days of Christianity that were not chosen to be included in the New Testament—some as popular and as ancient, and at one time as ‘authentic’, as the four that we ended up with. These Gospels were declared to be heretical and burned, banned, or mocked into oblivion by the church that we all inherited. I’m referring to the Gospels of Mary, Judas, Thomas, James, Egerton, Oxyrhynchus, the sayings Gospel of ‘Q’, Peter, the Secret Gospel of Mark, Secret Book of James, Dialogue of the Savior, and the Infancy Gospels of Thomas and James, and more. Wow! Some of these Gospels were as popular and as old as the Gospels that finally made it into the New Testament. How many Christians know that? How many know why there were only four Gospels, or how the ones we now revere even made the final cut and were included in the New Testament? How many of us know that half the letters of Paul weren’t even written by him; they were forgeries and latter-day propaganda pieces. Paul even warns his people against them because some of them were openly being circulated during his lifetime—yet they are still quoted every day from the pulpit as if they were genuine, and the revealed Word of God. So, who is the real Jesus, the real Paul, and what did they teach? Let’s take a closer look in the next Episode. Have a wondrous day! And, remember…
To be continued with Installment 5  SERIES: RESURRECTION, PAUL, JESUS AND EASTER
Installment 3 The four gospels in the New Testament disagree on whom Jesus was. Some of the stories are diametrically opposed to one another. Mark doesn’t even relate a resurrection story. Is there a reason for these different visions of Jesus? To keep our story of Jesus and his resurrection in perspective, let’s fast forward to Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK). We can use his life as an analogous example to see what that might mean to our understanding of the man, the Messiah, Jesus, if we started writing a gospel today. King was a great teacher, a man of God. He was virtually worshiped by many of his followers as an example to live by, a teacher, a visionary, a “savior” of and for his people; but more than that, he was considered by many in our nation as a savior of all peoples whom would travel his path of love—and he was killed. He was murdered for trying to change the consciousness of a nation. Years later we also find out that he was being tracked and reported on by the government, in this case at least, the FBI, and perhaps other agencies as well as a potential subversive. Sound vaguely familiar to a story we all know? King was killed in 1968, 49 years ago. The very first Gospel to be written (Mark) was written in about the year 70 CE—roughly 40 years after Jesus died. So it is almost exactly analogous of our situation with MLK. If we were to try to sit down and compose the story of MLK’s life in our fast-forward scenario, it will be a “Gospel” (which means, Good News) account of MLK’s life. Let’s continue with our journey into the here and now; let’s imagine that there has been no radio or television transcriptions or recordings, no newspaper accounts, no written documentation at all of what MLK said or did—just memories of those that were close to him (just like Jesus). As with Jesus, let’s also assume that we don’t have any writings from any of MLK’s original followers (because we don’t). If any of his thoughts and beliefs are now to be remembered 46 years later, it will have to be by later day followers of his—none of which knew MLK personally—because none of the Gospels were written by any of Jesus’ disciples; they were written by followers of followers. So our later-day chronicler of MLK’s life has to go out and try to record people’s memories of him and then try to make sense of the wildly divergent memories and weave a story that ties his life together and makes sense to those that would read and later follow this special man with his unique teaching of love. It is now 46 years after MLK died, and in our example, this would be the first story to be recorded (similar to the Gospel of Mark). There won’t be another story written to compare our story with or to for another 15 or 20 years, and yet another 10 or 15 years after that before the final stories end up being written. That’s 4 different people trying to write down the salient parts of MLk’s life and teaching, and these 4 different people are not only writing decades apart, but each of them are writing in different countries and different cultures. It’s getting problematical to come up with a single cogent vision of the man, isn’t it? That is exactly what we find in the case of Jesus. What would be the result of our first chronicler’s efforts? How accurate would the stories turn out to be to the historical man? what it is like to try to reconstruct Jesus’ life from the writings that we have of his existence (the Gospels and the authentic letters of Paul), and I’m positing that we begin to understand our Christian legacy by understanding how and why we inherited what we did. By fast-forwarding to Martin Luther King Jr. and recreating his life without the aid of modern communications, we can hopefully gain a glimpse into the process of what molded the Christianity that we inherited; and my ultimate goal, to show what the Master was really like before the changing commenced. In our alternate universe—without our modern communications—people would spread the story of MLK to those that they met. They would tell about this wonderful preacher, teacher and social activist, that they knew, or had heard about second or third-hand, whom had changed their world and the world of many others as well. When asked, they would recite a story, or one or two of his saying that they remember this teacher uttering and that made an impression on them. MLK’s sayings would be handed down from person to person as an oral tradition. Fortunately (like Jesus) MLK was a great storyteller and could encapsulate short pithy observations or truisms (aphorisms) in memorable one-liners, so it would make our effort to create a ‘gospel’ easier than it might be with an average person of average skills and average vision. In our effort to compile this first story of MLK, we probably would find people reciting his remembered saying such as: “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.” “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” “Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.” And in his most famous speech delivered on the Mall in Washington DC on August 28, 1963 (now 54 years ago) he said: “…and so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood… “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. "I have a dream today!” These stories and sayings all point to a man that had overcome hate with love, divine love, but there might also be recitations of stories that could cause some listeners—or the person compiling the gospel—to feel uncomfortable, to pause and take stock, to question. We might find that the compiler starts to pick and choose which stories to tell, and which stories he judged should be left out or ‘tweaked’ just a bit to comport with his own feelings or beliefs as to what should be passed on to others—or not passed on at all. He might include the quotes that he wants to be remembered and he might 'forget' those that are hard upon his ears. And, if we use his “I Have a Dream Speech,” for example to include in our imaginary Gospel of MLK, then which speech do we use? Did you know that he delivered several versions of that speech before it was memorialized in perpetuity on that day in Washington DC? If we were an oral society, as it was in Jesus’ lifetime, which version would the chronicler include in his Gospel? Jesus undoubtedly told the same stories over and over again. Which version is included in our Gospels? “Truth” is already deforming with MLK. People are already deciding what should be remembered about the great man; what sayings should be preserved and presented to others for the future. There is a statue that has been erected near the Washington Mall, adjacent to the Potomac River’s Tidal Basin depicting his likeness. On the statue, carved in stone, there are quotes chosen from his life similar to those I have chosen above. One of them, taken from a sermon at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church two months before he was killed, was considered so powerful that it was carved in stone on this statue. The short snippet of a longer speech that was quoted was, “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.” No one thought any the less of MLK from the fragmentary quote until the great poet, Maya Angelou, told the Washington Post that the shortened quote “makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit. He was anything but that. He was far too profound a man for that four-letter word to apply… It makes him seem an egotist.” The result was that the ‘offending’ quote was chiseled away and replaced with a decorative stripe. A saying that millions of people might have seen here on the statue and remembered for life, will never be seen. Someone has made the decision as to what will be remembered, just like they did with Jesus. We will explore how this phenomenon of selective inclusion—and exclusion—might come about (in our example with this MLK gospel, but also in the New Testament Gospels that we have inherited) in the next To be continued with Installment 4.  WAS THE GOSPEL OF MARK CORRECT — THERE WAS NO RESURRECTION? DON'T BELIEVE ME? READ ON.  We ended Installment 1 by saying that it is through the reading of Paul’s letters that we find out what was being transmitted by word of mouth, and believed about Jesus, around 50-55 CE (Common Era—the same as AD)—20 years after Jesus had died. To put this problem of having no written records about Jesus for at least 20 (for Paul), and up to 80 years (for the Gospels), after Jesus’ death causes some difficult problems. I’m going to put this gap in having anything but an oral record in perspective by using Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) as an example in Installment 3 next week. But first, for those that think that the Gospels are inerrant and in lock-step with one another, let me just show you one example of how the stories changed over the years. Refer back to last weeks’ blog, where I showed the timeline for early Christianity and the writing of the Gospels. Now, let’s quickly look at how the Gospels recorded the appearances of Jesus after he was killed; first at the empty tomb, and second, in front of whom he appeared, and when, as recorded in the Gospels. What was the resurrection of Jesus like? You really can’t tell by reading the Gospels, because they don’t always agree. Mark (the first Gospel written) doesn’t mention any appearance of Jesus (of any kind) after his death. Surprised? The first accounts we have of an appearance of Jesus are in Matthew and Luke, written perhaps 50 years after Jesus’ death—but there is no appearance in Mark! Take a look at the graphics that I prepared to summarize the empty tomb, and resurrection timeline and appearances in the Gospels and in Paul’s writings. Then next week I’ll give you an example of how these diverse stories about a singular event can happen by using Martin Luther King Jr. as an example. Watch for that next week. To understand the resurrection, we have to dig into the records that we have of the event. The appearances of Jesus after he died lie first in the writings of Paul, and then later in the four Gospels: Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. I’m going skip Paul for just a short while, and start with the book of Mark.  Ending of the Gospel of Mark—Mark 16 v9-20 missing! No Resurrection - Codex Sinaiticus MARK In the original version of this Gospel of Mark, three women (Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome) approached the tomb to find a “young man clothed in white” who says, “Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee.” [see the graphic above] The Gospel then ends at Mark 16:8 with these words, “The women fled from the tomb, trembling and bewildered, too frightened to talk.” That’s the end! The women fled and they don’t speak to anyone. There is no appearance of Jesus recorded at all. For those of you looking at your bibles and thinking, what about the end of Mark in some versions of the bible, Verses 9 through 20 that record Jesus’ appearance to the women and the disciples? These verses were added centuries later, so that the ending would match the story in Luke. These verses are not found in the most ancient manuscripts (see Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest version of Mark that we have, written about 350 CE). MATTHEW Another decade or more passed (after the Gospel of Mark first appeared), before the gospels of Matthew and Luke were written. As they composed their own gospels, in different countries and different cultures, we see that they have both copied large portions of Mark’s gospel into theirs—word for word—blending and adding to the narrative where they thought that it was needed to comport with the traditions and stories that they had received from those that had come before them, and taking into account the very different world that they now lived in. Matthew drops Salome out of the story, then adds to the significance of Mark’s discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb by telling us that it wasn’t just a young man dressed in white, but rather it was now an “angel of the Lord.” “His face shone like lightning and his clothing was a brilliant white. The guards shook with fear when they saw him, and fell into a dead faint.” (Matt 28:2-4) The story is growing. The unsatisfactory ending of Mark—without any mention of a Jesus appearing to anyone after his death—has now, in the intervening years, been finished. In Matthew’s version of the empty tomb story he tells us that the two women who discovered the empty tomb (no mention of the woman named, Salome, in this story), “…were running, suddenly Jesus was there in front of them!” (Matt 28:9) Matthew believes that the two women who went to the tomb were the first to see Jesus raised from the dead. “‘Good morning!’ he [Jesus] said. And as they fell to the ground before him, holding his feet and worshiping him he said, ‘Don’t be frightened! Go tell my brothers to leave at once for Galilee, to meet me there.’” (Matt 28) We finish with Matthew’s story with Jesus promising the women that he will next appear to the disciples in Galilee, and so he does, “Then the eleven disciples left for Galilee, going to the mountain where Jesus had said they would find him. There they met him and worshiped him…” (Matt 28:16-17) LUKE Next we move to Luke, where it is neither two nor three women that go to the tomb (Mark and Matthew), but now there are many women! “Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James, and several others.” (Luke 24:10) They don’t encounter an angel of the Lord, nor do they encounter a man, but now they see two men, “clothed in shining robes so bright their eyes were dazzled. (Luke 24:4) Luke has a different story as to where Jesus appeared to his disciples. Now instead of telling “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary” to tell the disciples to go to Galilee where he will meet them, Luke has Jesus appearing in and around Jerusalem. In Luke’s version of what happened, the disciples never go to Galilee! How can that be? Shortly thereafter, in Luke’s chronology, Jesus appears first to two followers in Emmaus (near Jerusalem). They rush back to Jerusalem to tell the disciples the exciting news. But, before they can tell their story, the followers of Jesus greet them with these words, “The Lord has really risen! He has appeared to Peter.” While they are all talking about the exciting news, “Jesus himself was suddenly standing there among them, and greeted them” (Luke 24) JOHN Hang on now. Ten to twenty years further down the road, John writes that only Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw no one. She then runs to get Peter and another disciple (the author of the Gospel of John?) to show them the empty tomb, and they see no one. Later, after the two men go back to the city, she returns to the tomb once more. This time she is greeted by two angels, and then Jesus himself! Later that evening as the disciples hid “behind a locked door” Jesus appeared to the disciples in the hidden room. The same thing happened eight days later, again in a locked room. (John 20)
Because the author of John had all of the Gospels to draw from, he now wanted to cover the unexplained Galilee references in the two earlier Gospels so he says, almost as an afterthought, “Later Jesus appeared again to the disciples “beside the Lake of Galilee.” (John 21:1) Really, John, that’s the best you can do? A far more plausible explanation is that whatever the real story was, it changed. As time went on, the story grew, and we always have to remember that each of the Gospels were written in different countries, and decades apart, so no wonder they changed. What really happened? That my friend, can never be reasoned out for sure, but we don’t have to believe that every word of each Gospel is the absolute historical record of the event, that just causes us to suspend the common sense God gave us. I think that we can say for sure that something happened, something special, that was so life changing that those early followers were changed for all time. I know that these “miraculous” things can happen, because something similar happened to me. You can read all about that by going to my memory. To be continued with Installment 3 
“Fourteen years ago I was taken up to heaven for a visit. Don’t ask me whether my body was there or just my spirit, for I don’t know; only God can answer that. But anyway, there I was in paradise, and heard things so astounding that they are beyond a man’s power to describe or put into words (and anyway I am not allowed to tell them to others).” When he describes what he learned of Jesus’ appearance from the early followers in Jerusalem (Peter, James and later, others) he uses some of the same Greek terms to explain the experience, making me think that he, at least, thought that the disciples had the same out of body type of “visionary” experience when they saw Jesus. I conclude from his writings that he knew nothing of a physical appearance of Jesus in the upper room or in Galilee that is described in the later Gospels, yet he got his story about Jesus’ resurrection originally directly from Peter, James, and later from many other of the early followers, so you can't get any closer to the events than that. This is the foundation of Christianity that we are talking about here. If he had been told something different, don’t you thinks that he would have used that information when trying to win over converts? You bet he would have. The story of Jesus' resurrection was very rudimentary and amorphous in the beginning. Mark (the earliest Gospel) doesn’t even mention Jesus’ resurrection! All of the oldest copies of the Gospel end at verse 16:7. Later—much later—a new ending was added that included a resurrection experience. Matthew 28:10 says that Jesus told the women at the tomb to tell his “brothers to leave at once for Galilee, to meet me there.” 28:16 says, “Then the eleven disciples left for Galilee, going to the mountain where Jesus has said they would find him. There they met him and worshiped him—but some of them weren’t sure it really was Jesus!” Luke says that Jesus appeared to two followers on the road away from Jerusalem to nearby Emmaus (although they walked the better part of 7 miles without recognizing him). Later in Jerusalem the two came to tell the other followers what they had seen when “Jesus himself was suddenly standing there among them…” Lastly, John says, “That evening the disciples were meeting behind locked doors, in fear of the Jewish leaders, when suddenly Jesus was standing there among them.” John was written somewhere in the 90’s and probably had copies of one or more of the other Gospels. He also knew that there was a conflict between them, so at the very end of the Gospel he adds, “Jesus appeared again to the disciples beside the Lake of Galilee,” but unlike the account in Matthew, the story now is very detailed, describing exact words of conversations—conversations that 10 or 20 years earlier the author of Matthew knew nothing about, nor did Paul! Nor, evidentially did Peter, James or any of the other original disciples, or they would have told Paul all about it. Can you see how the story seems to grow as the oral tradition progresses through the decades after he died? You might conclude from the above that I don't believe that the resurrection occurred, quite the contrary, I do, but I think that (like Paul) some of them experienced a vision. Perhaps they all had different visions, I don't know. Perhaps some were caused by hysteria and excitement, which can spread in a crowd. All I know is that within a hundred years, the new faith had spread throughout the Roman empire. After starting with a rag-tag bunch of followers, it had grown, morphed and changed beyond anything that the humble Master would have recognized. And, therein lies the problem I have with the church. More with installment 2…  From my last blog, "What did Jesus Really Look Like," several people have commented stating that he couldn't have had light gray-blue eyes because he was Semitic. They would have been dark brown. Light blue, green or gray eyes, while rare, do show up on people in the Middle East, and when they do they draw you to them, just like this Afghan girl photographed by Steve McCurry in 1984. Her eyes mesmerized the world!
So too with Jesus. From my memories, Jesus could grab and hold you with his eyes like no one else could. Once you saw them, heard his voice, and you felt his pull, likely as not, you were going to become his disciple. See picture in my blog of 9/20/16.  There are a thousand faces of Jesus... Everyone has a different image of Jesus in their mind. I didn’t realize how important the image of Jesus is to people around the world until a friend asked me what I thought Jesus looked like. Based on my memory of Jesus, who appeared to me in a vision in 1984 (click here to read the story behind the vision), I sent her this picture that I had recently found that came as close as any that I had seen. The piercing blue-gray eyes are the same; they seemed to look right through to your soul, know everything about you, and still love you unconditionally. The mouth is a bit too full and the beard not full enough, I told her. However, this picture is very close to the man in my vision that appeared to me daily, and lasted for seven long months. You can read about it in my book, The Disciple. Everyone has their own picture in their mind of what Jesus looked like. When my friend saw this picture, she was aghast, and asked me not to share it. She said that it would “frighten” people. I assume that is because this is an apparently strong, self-confident, masculine man, which is much different than the mental image most people have of a meek and humble Jesus. Her comment was a head-scratcher for me, because Jesus was a powerful enough man to walk by the sea of Galilee, see a group of fishermen (complete strangers!) hauling in their nets, pause, speak to them, and have them drop everything to follow him. Think about that for a moment. “Of course,” you say, “he was the Son of God. Surely they are going to follow him.” Wrong, he wasn’t the Son of God to them, he was just a stranger walking along the shore, like hundreds of others that had passed that way during the week. But when he stopped and spoke to them about his vision of God and the world that he saw and could feel within himself, they looked at one another in amazement. One-by-one, the fishermen laid down their nets, left their fishing, and walked away with him. His strong voice and his powerfully built body (hard from lifting lumber and working with his hands all day long), his rugged good looks, and his unusual eyes attracted these rough-and-tumble men that earned their livings by throwing and hauling nets for long hours, day and night.  Let’s put this in terms that we can understand today. Picture a man walking by a construction site and stopping to talk to a group of steel workers grappling with a heavy load of rebar. They are hot, sweaty, and worn out. Would they respond to a dreamy (dare I say wimpy?) and whimsical stranger with sweetness on his face?  I doubt it. Having been an architect, on construction sites for many years of my life, I can think of a few 4-letter words that he would have elicited. Yet that soft, meek Jesus is the Jesus many of us grew up with, know, and recognize as the "real" Jesus, isn’t it?  On the other hand, perhaps the Jesus you know is the Jesus with the bleeding heart found in thousands of Catholic churches around the world? Is that what he looked like? Everyone has their own picture in their mind when it comes to Jesus, and it is impossible to find a picture that exactly matches whatever we might think that he looked like, but the picture at the top of this post is as close as I’ve found to date for me. When he was on earth, he was a strong, warm, and loving man, appealing to both men and women. As you read the stories in the Gospels, you will find that Jesus often had a retinue of women following him. They certainly thought that he was a powerful, charismatic, and handsome enough man to break with tradition (at their own risk), and followed him in the open from village to village. So much so, in fact, that they not only followed him, but some of them supported him financially as well. The story of the women (including Mary Magdalene) who followed him, is a subject for another post in the future. There are other pictures (literally thousands on the internet). They range from the picture that appears on the Shroud of Turin (purportedly from the “negative” of the burial cloth supposedly used to wrap Jesus), to a computer generated picture from a forensic pathologist, and a black Jesus. They are all different and have changed dramatically throughout the millennia. Here are but a few to give you the idea.
 So, what did Jesus really look like? You probably have a favorite image of him, so, here’s a request: send me a picture that best exemplifies your idea of what Jesus looked like. Attach it to your return comment on Facebook. I look forward to seeing your own personal vision of Jesus.
Or, does it really matter what he looked like? Part I
This blog is dedicated to the historical Jesus. I’m often asked, why the “historical Jesus” and not just, Jesus? Because I think that Jesus was far more wonderful than the Christian religion that followed after him. The further away we get from Jesus, the more humanity creeps into his teachings. After over 30 years of studying the New Testament and early Christianity, I believe that the faith that we have inherited was created by lesser souls who decided that instead of following Jesus’ words and example of living and becoming One with God (Abba as Jesus called Him), they decided that they couldn’t or wouldn’t live up to their Master, and instead they would take the easier path of declaring that all one had to do was “believe” in him and they would be saved. And, they added the natural corollary, that if you didn’t believe in Jesus, that he was the “only begotten son,” then you wouldn’t be saved. For many that meant, and means today, that if you don’t subscribe to this dictum, then you are going to hell… forever to live in torment and pain. It seems to me like this was the lazy way out of doing the hard work of living as Jesus taught, and such a poor substitute for becoming a seeker of the Divine. I have just concluded interviewing Jeffrey Long, MD, for his new book entitled, God and the Afterlife; The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience. This joins his first book, Evidence of the Afterlife (both of which became Best Sellers on the New York Times non-fiction book list). After interviewing over 4,000 people that either clinically died, or came near death, and came back to life with what has become to be known as a Near Death Experience (NDE), he discovered that over 80% had experienced God, or a being of love and light that they perceived as God. It didn’t matter whether or not they believed in God before the event (in fact over 1/3 of them definitely didn’t believe in God or thought that there probably was no God). After they awoke, they had been changed. They knew God existed. Remarkably, their cultural or religious beliefs didn’t seem to matter, their experiences were all very similar. God was Light, God was Oneness, God was Love. It’s funny, this seems to have been Jesus’ experience of God as well, and that is what the core of his teaching was. It wasn’t exclusionary, it was all encompassing. God’s love was likened to the love of a mother or father for a child, and he urged those that came to hear him to love God like the child does the mother (or father). There are no restrictions on the parent’s or child’s love, there is only acceptance and delight.  AUTHORTALK® HOST and AUTHOR: RONALD WAY BOOK: THE DISCIPLE; THE WRITING OF THE FIRST GOSPEL Hello everyone. I want to welcome you here today to Author Talk and Crossing the Line. I’m your host Ron Way. Today I’m celebrating. It’s a special day for me because today my book, The Disciple, is going into a new printing with the publisher WIPF and Stock, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. 35 years ago there was a very, very special event. It was the 4th of July, 1981 and it knocked me off my feet and pushed me over the edge of forever, literally. My life was changed from that day forward, and like Paul before me, I would never be the same again. I think that you’re all familiar with the story as related in the Book of Acts in the New Testament, where Saul of Tarsus (who was to become Paul), was on his way to Damascus as he was blinded by a brilliant light and came face-to-face with Jesus. Paul says, “A light from heaven brighter than the sun shone down upon me.” Jesus said, “Stand up, for I have appeared to you to appoint you as my servant and my witness. You are to tell the world about this experience and about the many other occasions when I shall appear to you.” That’s Acts 26:12-18. This singular event was so powerful in Paul’s life he was never the same again. His life and his world—and our world—were changed forever. Now I have a question for you. What would it be like if that happened to you? I mean laterally. If you were, oh I don’t know, on your way to work. If you were just getting up in the morning and about to get dressed and have a cup of coffee. What would happen if you were hit by a powerful light, and there in front of you stood Jesus, and he asked you to give up everything and follow him? What would you do? That’s exactly what happened to me? So, for you to have an open mind, I have to ask you what would you do? I couldn’t do anything but follow him, because you don’t have a choice when that happens to you. I’m not talking here about a whisper in your ear in the back your mind and you think that God has just spoken to you. I mean a genuine, a genuine miraculous vision. I ask you again, what would happen if that occurred to you? Would you tell everyone? Would you give up your job? Would you really? Would you go home and tell your family, “Listen, I’ve just had a vision and we’re going to get rid of everything and we’re going to follow Jesus.” That’s what Jesus asked several of his followers to do, isn’t it, including the rich man. He had told him to go home and give away everything and then follow him. What would you do if it happened to you? That’s exactly what happened to me on the 4th of July weekend 1981. Several of our friends had come down that weekend to help celebrate with us on the morning of the 4th. We started off down the beach. It was a lovely day. There were a lot of people on the beach. The noise was fun, and the air was filled with joy. The dogs were barking, and kids screaming. We walked all the way down the beach for about a mile, until we were right under the Western White House of Richard Nixon. You could see the mansion up above. Once there, we turned around and headed back toward camp. On the way back, as we were walking along the beach, all of a sudden I happened to see a small, exceedingly bright light. It was way down the beach. Have you ever been blinded by the sun off the windshield of a car that’s coming at you? It blinds you for a second. That’s exactly what happened to me. Way down the beach I saw this glint, this very, very bright flash, and it was coming straight at us. As I was watching, my brain tried to absorb what was happening, for it was coming very, very fast and I was terrified. I thought, “Is that an airplane? Is it about to crash? It is involuntary, our mind tries to make sense out of this kind of thing.  RON AT 37 IN THE MIDDLE OF THE VISION EXPERIENCE All of a sudden it was coming too fast, so fast that I couldn’t move. I froze it in terror. I knew that it was going to hit us. Then hit me it did, and it knocked me off my feet! I fell to my knees.
Instead of the sound that I had been hearing, the sound of the waves crashing against the shore, the sound of the children and dogs playing, everything became silent. It was absolute silence. In that silence there was a white mist. In the white mist, slowly I could see figure forming. There in front of me stood a man, and I recognized him as Yeshua ben Yosef, Jesus of Galilee. I can’t tell you how I knew; I just knew it was him. I recognized him. There in this special place of absolute silence he said not a word. He just looked down and he waved his hand and invited me to sit at this low wooden table. He sat cross-legged on one side of the table and I kneeled on the other. I could see the only thing on the table was a cup, and in the cup it appeared that there was red wine. Then the table caught my eye. As an architect it’s funny the things that you notice when you’re going through an experience like this. I mean, why would I notice the table was roughhewn, hand cut and pegged together? That is the reality of it all. That’s what I remembered. Jesus began to speak to me. What I remember now, 34 years later, is this; he asked me if I would be willing to give up everything and follow him. Give up everything? In my mind do you know what I thought? This is the truth, “Not my new Porsche, Jesus. Not my new Porsche!” I just picked it up. Jesus responded, “ , and if you do I will awaken a memory long buried within you.” As I said before, if this really is happening to you, what are you going to say? Of course, it’s real. You’re going to say yes, and I did say yes. The next thing I remember was being bodily tossed around, and pain in my nose, burning in my nose because what happened during this time, which lasted about 15 minutes according to our friends, was that the tide had come in. A wave hit me, knocked me head over heels, and I was tumbling in the surf. I was choking and coughing. The saltwater was forced up my nose, and that’s what yanked me from the vision I was having. I staggered to my knees and tried to get up. My friends, who had just been sitting there, because they knew that something was going happening to me, something very special, ran forward and helped me to my feet as I staggered out of the surf. We walked back to the beach where our towels were spread on the sand, and we all laid down. I laid face down and I just started to silently cry. I couldn’t take it anymore. That silence was gone. Now it was cacophony of sounds. It was all so loud. Finally, I got up and started walking back up the dirt path, up the cliff to our house trailer. Once I got in the trailer I couldn’t stop sobbing. I just sobbed, and sobbed, and sobbed for hours. I couldn’t control myself. The experience was so great, so powerful, it just overwhelmed my senses. The following Monday I went back to work and my architectural practice. I was so excited. I had had a vision and I wanted to tell everyone. I told first Tom, my partner, who thought I was crazy. He was a good Catholic. He thought I was absolutely insane, but I was so imbued with the spirit and the experience, that didn’t bother me. I told my friends. I told the members of Rotary. I was president of the Rotary club at that time. I told everyone. I was so overjoyed with the experience. The only problem was, no one believed me. That doesn’t surprise you does it? You probably are saying the same thing as you’re listening to me. In the vision I’d been given a year, given a year to give everything up. Being the logical business person I am I commenced a business plan to do exactly that, to liquidate it or sell all my assets. I arranged for the sale of my share of the businesses to another architect. That meant my architectural firm, our real estate development firm, and our construction firm. I thought everything was moving smoothly along God’s path, but what I had forgotten was that Jesus had asked me if I would, “give up everything.” He didn’t ask me if I could sell everything. On Christmas Eve of that year, I met with my partners. We met every year on Christmas Eve to exchange gifts, have lunch together, and then we took off for the rest of the day; and we didn’t come back to work until January (on the 4th of January in 1982). That’s exactly what happened this year, except my partners had a different plan for me. They had a special gift for me. I’d given them plenty of time to make arrangements to eliminate me in the business. By me giving them six months advance notice that I was going to sell my share of the business, it allowed them to go behind my back and sell the business to my prospective buyer for half of what I was selling it to him for, and I was no longer needed. They told me I didn’t need to come back on January 4th because I was out of a job and out of the partnership. They had voted to dissolve the company and reform it after the first of the year. I got my share of petty cash in the company at the time and accounts receivable owed the business at the end of the year, and I was gone. It was amazing. One year to the day after the vision, we were heading to Michigan where we rented a cabin and we stayed there for a year. During that year, every day, I expected that Jesus would come to me again. He will tell me about this “memory long buried within me.” There’s got to be a reason for this, for this vision. I kept waiting for it. In fact, I can remember autumn was upon us; autumn in Michigan was different than I had experienced in my life in Southern California. It was getting cold. During that period, I was cutting 22 cords of wood that I had to saw from logs (yes, tree logs!), split and prepare for the winter. I can remember walking around downtown in the little village called, Gaylord, Michigan. I was looking in the store windows and I was wondering, “I wonder if they’ve got a coat with long white sleeves, made out of white canvas with leather straps on the end that wraparound behind you.” I thought I was insane. I came home and told my wife, Trudy, that I was crazy. I must not have had a vision, because there’s no memory. “We’re running through all of our life savings living back here in Michigan, waiting for something that isn’t going to happen.” Fortunately for me, Trudy says, “You have not fulfilled one other part of the vision that you promised, and that was to go to the Holy Lands.” We hadn’t because the trip for two of us to go back there and to Egypt at that time, was going to cost about $6,000. That was a lot of money in 1982! She continued, “We have come this far, we put our faith in your vision, let’s finish it. Let’s do what he asked,” and that’s exactly what we did. Later that fall, in October, we were on a plane to Israel. We landed in Tel Aviv. Late that afternoon as we landed, it was stormy. I can remember the passengers were filing out of the airplane (a big 747), going out through the left-hand door, down the stairs to the tarmac, when the pilot pulled Trudy and I aside. He pointed to the door on the opposite side of the airplane which was wide open where they delivered the food and they resupplied the airplane. He walked us over the few steps to the open door and he said, “Look.” We looked up and out of the opening, and there in the late afternoon the rain clouds parted and there was a shaft of light on the beautiful white city up on the hill. He said, “Look, isn’t it beautiful. There is Jerusalem.” I knew that I come home. At that time, I didn’t know why I felt that way, but I did. Over the next week we hired a guide and we traveled from the north to the south of Israel. We saw Jerusalem. We saw Galilee. We saw Nazareth. We saw all the sites that we should see. Then we traveled south of Jerusalem all the way down to the Dead Sea and Masada. Masada is the fortress that was the last stronghold of the Jews when the Romans conquered Israel in 70 A.D. Little did I know things were about to change, and change dramatically. We left Israel and traveled to Egypt. Once in Egypt we spent a couple of days in Cairo. It is a fascinating city, fascinating, but that wasn’t why we had come. From Cairo we boarded a plane and headed south to Luxor, or the ancient city of Thebes. There we boarded a cruise ship and spent the next week floating down the Nile, ending up back in Cairo. While we were in Cairo, and later heading south, I was so upset. I could remember thinking, “Why God, why?” In fact, the first dawn that we were on the ship I remember going up to the top deck and sitting in meditation and prayer and saying, “God, why? Why did you send me halfway around the world, telling me that I would have a memory, that I had forgotten and it would be revealed to me and nothing has been revealed. We’ve traveled from the north to the south of Israel and Egypt. There are no memories!” In that moment, something changed. Without me knowing it all of a sudden it felt like I was falling. It was just incredible. It was like an elevator just breaking loose and in free-fall. All of a sudden, BAM! I landed. I thought we had run aground. I popped my eyes opened, because I thought we had hit a rock, or shoals, and the ship was about to sink. Instead of being on the Nile, however, I was looking out of the eyes of an old man. The old man was short. He had a long beard that I could feel when I wagged my head left and right. I knew who he was. It was me, and my name was Asher, Asher ben Ami. I was maybe 60, 62 years old. I lived in Jerusalem and it was there that I met the master, Yeshua ben Yosef, Jesus. I don’t know how long that first vision lasted, but I do know that when I woke up I was so exhausted. I wrote down what I saw, what I felt, what I touched, what I smelled because I could. I could smell the incense from the temple. I could smell the wood smoke and the dung. I could smell it all. I could hear the sounds of the donkeys braying, the camels, and the cacophony of voices from around the world. I could hear and see it all. I lived in Jerusalem in a very wealthy part of town. I was a trader and I’d bought my way into a position of power in the Sanhedrin. I felt it was me. I knew it was me—and then it ended—and I was back on the ship. I told my wife what had happened, but I was incredibly exhausted. I just tried to write it down the best I could before it slipped away. The next morning I got up and I went back up on the top deck to try to make it happen again, and all of a sudden it did. Every morning thereafter, for the next seven months, coming back to the United States to the north of Michigan, I would get up early before dawn, I would light a big fire in the fireplace, I would sit down, I would meditate and instantly I was falling deeply within, and down this tunnel if you will, or the elevator. When I open my eyes I was Asher again. The book that I wrote, The Disciple, tells his story. I wrote what I saw, what I felt, what I touched, what I knew, and that’s the story of Asher, Asher ben Ami. Asher met Jesus because of his son John. John became fascinated with this preacher from the north, this itinerant preacher from the north, from Galilee. Everyone in Jerusalem knew that nothing good came from Galilee. Yet, Asher’s son was fascinated by this man, and spoke incessantly at the dinner table about him. One afternoon Asher decided he would follow his son. It was close to twilight. He pulled a robe on, and he pulled the hood over his head because he didn’t want to be seen or recognized going to a party where this itinerant Jesus would be talking. He followed his son until he walked into a closed patio. Asher waited a few moments to let things settle down and then he walked in too; slowly, unobtrusively. He tried to hide among the other people. There were perhaps a dozen or two people there. They were all gathered around this preacher who was talking quietly to them with his back to Asher. Asher couldn’t hear him so he crept closer. Then all of a sudden, when he was about 10 feet away, Jesus stopped talking. Slowly, he turned around and looked directly at Asher, and their eyes met. In that moment Asher knew that he was in the presence of someone far greater than himself. Then and there he became a follower of Yeshua ben Yosef. The story that I have told in The Disciple, The Writing of the First Gospel, is the story of about a two-year span of time when Asher knew this incredible man. It ended when Jesus died. He watched from the rooftop as Jesus was crucified. He only lasted maybe a few weeks after that, then Asher himself died. He died of a heart attack. In that moment that he passed over, in one last memory that I have, he saw the Messiah. It was Yeshua, and he was waiting for him.  RON’S REVIEW OF NEW BART EHRMAN BOOK ENTITLED, Jesus Before the Gospels; How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented their Stories of the Savior Have you ever wondered if all the Gospel stories about Jesus were true? We all know that they were oral stories passed on over the years and decades after Jesus died. Could there have been any changes or exaggerations in his life, his parables, or his miracles as the stories about him were passed from one person to another over dinner or in the marketplace before any written accounts were written down—decades later? If we think about it, the real answer is, of course. Think about how stories grow today from person to person to person. It is a natural state of affairs, and it was no different two thousand years ago. I know that some of you reading this will flinch when I tell you that I’m reviewing a book called, Jesus Before the Gospels; How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented their Stories of the Savior, by Bart Ehrman, and some of you will put up your walls. Your mind is saying, “I’m not listening to this nonsense. I believe every work in the Gospels and I won’t hear of anything that tries to dissuade me from that belief.” After all, a true Christian doesn’t question the bedrock of our faith as recorded in the New Testament, especially the Gospels which were eye whiteness accounts of those that followed and recorded the sayings and deeds of the Messiah.” Right? No, that’s not right! Hang in there. A simple review of the Gospels tells us that there were different memories of the same stories recorded in different Gospels, so one, or several, of them have to be incorrect. Right? That’s just common sense. When two gospels tell the same story, but they are different in their meaning and message, then something is wrong. Memories are a funny thing, and modern research into how we remember events in our life is fascinating. This book takes us on a journey through how this works with the life and teachings of Jesus. Because I don’t have the author here with me today, I’m going to use many of his words to walk you through parts of this extraordinary book. But, trust me, I’ll be leaving out much of what you need to explore for yourself. Ehrman surveys the ways that Jesus was remembered by Christians after he had died. He says, “We need always to remember that memories do not need to be historically accurate to be vivid and meaningful. The distorted memories of Jesus—by which I mean memories that are not accurate in the strictly historical sense—are just as real to those who hold and share them as true memories,” And I might add, that this was true then for the early followers, as well as now, two thousand years later. When I say the word Gospels, we immediately think of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but there were many Gospels circulating in the early decades of Christianity. Some of these Gospels might have been composed as early as the canonical Gospels themselves, and if true, one or more of these remembrances were composed closer in time to Jesus than Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. This early Gospels reflected the “memories” of Jesus, and some were supposedly written by the Apostles or the followers of the first Apostles themselves. They were accepted as holy Gospels by tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people in the early decades and centuries of the faith. The Proto-Gospel of James as an example (“proto” meaning the events that took place before Jesus’s birth). It shaped the way Christians remembered Jesus and his parents for hundreds of years. These stories (although not in any of the four Canonical gospels) are part of written history. They were excised over time and considered anathema as early church leaders decided what should or should not be read within the ever more powerful church. But none of those decision makers every came within a hundred years of any person that lived when Jesus was alive. As an example, in this Proto-Gospel of James that I mentioned, the birth of Jesus is recounted. It states that the earth stood still at the moment of Jesus’s birth. Let me quote from the author, “In some ways, for centuries this book affected how Christians remembered the events surrounding Jesus’s birth more than the books of the New Testament. “As interesting as all its stories are—and most of them are highly interesting indeed—none is more intriguing to modern readers than the story of Jesus’s birth itself. In this account, as Joseph and Mary are nearing Bethlehem, she goes into labor. Joseph hurriedly finds a private place for her to give birth, in a cave. He leaves her there to go off to find a midwife. And then a miracle happens. As he is walking, Joseph suddenly sees time stand still. The birds in the air have stopped moving in midflight; in the field before him workers taking their lunch break have frozen in place, with their hands in a bowl or part-way up to their mouths; a shepherd is stopped immobile while reaching out his rod to strike the sheep. But ‘then suddenly everything returned to its normal course.’ The world had ground to a halt in honor of the Son of God, who has now become human.” In addition to people wanting to know what Jesus was like before he was born, they also wanted to know what he was like as a child… and so the void was filed by creative writers who wrote in the name of well-known Apostles (such as James, the brother of Jesus, as well as the Apostles Thomas and Peter… and more that we don’t have time to list). One of the very popular stories comes from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. It purports to relate events from the life of Jesus from the age of about 5 to 12. Quoting from Ehrman’s book: “It begins with Jesus as a five-year old, playing by a stream. He decides to gather some of the muddy water together into a pool; he then orders it to become pure—and it happens instantaneously at his word. He then shapes twelve sparrows out of the mud. A Jewish man walking by, however, sees what he has done and becomes incensed: it is the Sabbath, and Jesus has violated the Law of Moses that forbids work on that day. The man hurries off to tell Jesus’s father, Joseph, who comes to the stream and sees Jesus with the mud sparrows. He too is angry and asks Jesus why he has done such a thing. Jesus looks at his father, looks at the sparrows, and then claps his hands and says ‘Begone!’ The sparrows come to life and fly off chirping. This is a great story. Not only has Jesus shown that he is both the Lord of the Sabbath and the Lord of life, he has also destroyed all evidence of malfeasance. Sparrows? What sparrows? In the next story we see why some readers detect a mean streak in the boy Jesus. Another child, the son of a Jewish scribe, is playing with him at the stream, and he decides to take a willow branch and scatter the water that Jesus has gathered together and purified. Jesus gets angry. He turns to the boy and tells him that he too will wither like a tree with no water and will never grow root or bear fruit. The child is withered on the spot. His parents come and carry him away bemoaning his lost youth. Jesus’s reputation with his townsfolk does not improve from one story to the next. In the following account he is walking through his village and another boy who is running past accidentally bumps into his shoulder. Jesus is aggravated and announces, ‘You will go no further on your way.’ The boy falls down, dead.” Most of us would say that these stories are absolute fantasy, but no so with many early Christians. They rang as true, and seemed as possible to them as Jesus walking on water, curing a man that was blind, causing evil spirits to invade a herd of pigs and causing them to all commit suicide by jumping over a cliff. A miracle is a miracle, is a miracle after-all. Is one memory of a miracle more trustworthy than another? Or, are we just used to the miracles listed in our four canonical Gospels? Many of you have recently heard about the Gospel of Thomas in the news. It is a very early Gospel that was discovered in the deserts of Egypt, where the dry sands have preserved these delicate and rare finds. The earliest versions of this Gospel could be as old, or older, than the 4 canonical gospels themselves. The Gospel of Thomas is what is called a “Sayings Gospel,” meaning that there is no storyline, just remembered sayings by Jesus. We think that the earliest written records of Jesus’s teachings were probably like James, collections of sayings of Jesus. These were the pithy memorable words, parables and aphorisms that were easy to remember as they were passed along from mouth to ear over and over again before someone of learning (not from Palestine, and certainly not an Apostle because they were all illiterate) wrote them down in Greek. Later, with people wanting to know more about the life of Jesus, the infill was added to give them meaning. In addition to Thomas, many of these sayings were also included in the missing Gospel called “Q” from which Matthew and Luke drew upon to compose their Gospels. Here are a couple of examples that come from the Gospel According to Thomas (remember this is not to be confused with the Infancy Gospel of Thomas). I’m quoting here from Ehrman’s book. “The Gospel of Thomas consists entirely of sayings of Jesus, 114 of them altogether. Among these sayings there are certainly some—a lot, in fact—that will sound familiar to anyone conversant with the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In a way quite similar to these other Gospels, Jesus delivers the following teachings:
But he is also remembered saying things that strike most readers as highly puzzling, to say the least. The following examples can illustrate the point:
Or there is the saying that is probably the most perplexing, famous, and possibly offensive to modern sensibilities of them all, the one that ends the collection:
Did Jesus really kill his playmates when they got on his nerves? Did he really tame a group of dragons, or bless the lions who ate humans so as to become human? Did he really say, ‘females are not worthy of the life’? Were some of these stories just made up out of whole cloth or, are some of these stories just a product of stories being told, stories growing over time; are they faulty, exaggerated, or even false memories? Remember, about half of these sayings from the Gospel of Thomas are also in the Gospels that we know as “inerrant and revealed.” Of course we can dismiss any and all stories that aren’t included in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, but what about the canonical Gospels, could they have elements of faulty memories too? It’s something to think about. The author says, “It is interesting that so many people can instantly recognize distorted memories about Jesus from outside the New Testament, but cannot see them inside of it. I suppose it is for the same reason that readers of the Bible typically do not see discrepancies in the New Testament Gospels themselves until someone points them out to them.” Any time you have two or more irreconcilable accounts, they cannot all be historically accurate. Someone, then, is changing or inventing the stories. It isn’t that this necessarily means that the Gospel writers themselves were doing it, they were, for the most part, imparting the traditions that came down to them; and it’s important to remember, that none of them were written by eye witnesses, not even by people that knew the eye witnesses themselves, but by people who knew people, who knew people, that knew eye witnesses. The authors of the Gospels—all of them—wrote down stories that had been passed along by word of mouth for years and decades before they were encapsulated within their own accounts. For that reason, when the Gospel writers produced their accounts, they were not simply inventing the stories themselves; but they were also not recording what actually happened based on direct testimony. They were stringing together stories that had long been circulating among the Christian communities. I cite the opening from the Gospel of Luke as an example of what I’m saying: “Dear Friend who loves God. Several biographies of Christ have already been written using as their source material the reports circulating among us from the early disciples and other eyewitnesses. However, it occurred to me that it would be well to recheck all these accounts from first to last and after thorough investigation to pass this summary on to you…” Ultimately most of the stories they retold must have come from oral traditions, as followers of Jesus told and retold stories about him, starting while he was alive and then even more after he died. These oral traditions were in circulation year after year, and decade after decade, before they were inherited by the authors of our Gospels and finally written down. In Luke’s case, his Gospel was probably written near the end of the first century, in the Greek language, and in a Greek city that was a long way away from Jesus’s homeland and decades after those people that knew him personally had died. We think that less than 5% of the population at that time could read or write, so we know that any stories that we now have as to what Jesus said and did were passed down for decades orally; and when that happens, stories change and grow. For even if someone in a village hears a few stories about Jesus from an eye witness, he or she then passes the story along to family or friends, who then in turn go home at night and tell the stories to their families at dinner or friends in the marketplace the next day, who tell their friends, and on it goes, with the stories gaining amplitude as they move through time. Like the disciples, the persons that passed the stories on were probably lower-class Aramaic-speaking Jews in rural Palestine. That is where Jesus taught. They were not literate. They were not educated. They were poor. They didn’t have the time, money, inclination, or wherewithal to travel around the world—and except for Peter, to a limited extent, neither did the disciples themselves. Finally, someone, who lived somewhere in the Greco-Roman world, other than in Palestine, decided (like Luke tells us) to gather the stories that were circulating at that time in his part of the world and write them down. And, we can tell from their writing, none of the writers of the Gospels read or wrote or spoke Aramaic, their language was Greek, and their lands were other than Palestine. As another example, the Gospel of John was traditionally written by the Apostle John, the son of Zebedee. Are we really supposed to believe that John, a peasant fisherman from rural Galilee, who was known to be illiterate, could have produced a written report about Jesus’s life? The book of Acts (4:13) tells us that John was literally “unlettered” (in Greek, agrammatos), meaning that he didn’t even know the alphabet! Let’s switch gears here a little. Let’s talk about Paul. It has always been fascinating to me that Paul, who produced our first written record of Jesus, never met Jesus himself. He is the closest writer we have to Jesus’s death; who intimately knew his land, his religion, and his Jewish roots. Remember, however, he starts writing some twenty years after Jesus died, and he tells us personally that he only met two of Jesus’s original disciples (Peter and James) before becoming an Apostle himself. And (except for two saying that Jesus supposedly spoke at the last supper; his admonition against divorce; and a reference to the fact that people should pay their preachers), in all of his writing, he never repeats any Gospel stories. That is incredible to me. Quoting Ehrman again, “…one of the most striking features of Paul’s surviving letters is just how little he actually tells us about Jesus’s life prior to his death. There are thirteen letters in the New Testament that claim to be written by Paul. Scholars are widely convinced that seven of them, at least, actually go back to Paul… suppose you were to mine these letters—take all thirteen of them—for the information they provide about the things Jesus said, did, and experienced between the time he was born and the time he died. How many stories of Jesus would you discover? …
“That’s pretty much all that Paul tells us. And he is the one author who has any known connection with an eyewitness… But think of all the things that Paul doesn’t mention: that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, to a virgin; that he was baptized by John the Baptist; that he was tempted in the wilderness; that he preached about the coming kingdom of God; that he told parables; that he cast out demons; that he did any miracles of any kind; that he delivered any other teachings of any kind; that he had controversies with other Jewish teachers; that he was transfigured; that he traveled to Jerusalem in the last week of his life; that he made the triumphal entry; that he cleansed the Temple; that he was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane; that… well, it’s obviously a very long a significant list. To make a complete list, all you would have to do is cite virtually any story in the Gospels, and it would be something Paul doesn’t tell us. “It is a very interesting question to ask just why Paul does not give us more information about Jesus. Is it because he did not think Jesus’s earthly life was important? How could it not be important? Is it because he thought his readers already knew all that information? If so, why doesn’t he remind them of it, just as he regularly reminds them of all sorts of other things he taught them when he was among them? Is it because he simply had no occasion to mention the events of Jesus’s life? Paul certainly seems to have occasions—plenty of them—as he talks in his letters about issues that were directly germane to things Jesus said and did (when he talks about miracles that he himself performed; when he tells people to pay their taxes; when he delivers his own ethical teachings; or when he indicates that Jesus had to die and be raised). So why doesn’t he appeal to Jesus’s own authority for such things? Is it because he actually doesn’t know much more about Jesus’s life than what he tells us? How could he not know much more? These are genuine questions that, at the end of the day, are not very easy to resolve.” Thus, because the Apostle Paul doesn’t help us out, we have to wait for four decades after Jesus died before in the account of Mark we get the first stories about the life of the man Christians worship as the Son of God. I completely agree with the author that perhaps the most important lesson we draw from this book is not the historical “truth” of what may or may not have occurred. You may also think that after listening to me, that if it can’t be proved historically, or if there are conflicting accounts for much that is in the various Gospels, that in the end, that is what is important. You may think that I am one that believes that if it isn’t historically true, that we should throw the whole Christian faith in the trash heap; throwing the baby away with the bath water so to speak, but I do not. Like Bart Ehrman says more eloquently than I could… “Does it matter if Jesus considered himself to be God on earth? As a historian, it matters to me a great deal. But if he did not—and I think that he did not—the fact that he was remembered that way by later followers is terrifically important. Without that memory of Jesus, the faith founded on him would never have taken off, the Roman Empire would not have abandoned paganism, and the history of our world would have transpired in ways that are unimaginably different. History was changed, not because of brute facts, but because of memory.” Do I personally, Ron, believe every word (or to use the author’s words, “every memory”) that is recorded in the Gospels? No, but do I personally believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the answer (for me) is yes. I hope that you can sense that I think that this is a book that you should read and keep in your library. The name of the book again is, Jesus Before the Gospels; How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented their Stories of the Savior, by Bart Ehrman. From the picture of my own personal copy of the book below—with dozens of bookmarks—I think that you can tell that I think that this is a special work about the life of Jesus. Click on the picture of the book to order on Amazon.
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AuthorArchitect, software CEO, 30-year student of the historical Jesus and early Christianity. Show host of AuthorTalk, interviewing religious and spiritual authors. Archives
May 2017
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