Quest Magazine

Printed in the Fall 2015 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Kinney, Jay."God Only Knows" Quest 103.4 (Fall 2015): pg. 137-139.

By Jay Kinney

Finding something new and meaningful to say about the concept of God is a surprisingly difficult task. Philosophers and theologians have spent millennia wrestling with God, with little to show for it: your average man or woman on the street may believe in God in some fashion, but it is likely a belief derived from a handful of scriptural verses or from folk customs bereft of intellectual rigor. For most people, God just is — a core assumption around which further beliefs are built.

Those further beliefs may include ones such as these: God created the universe; God in his wisdom and glory deserves our worship and gratitude; God is all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful, and eternal; God has a “plan” that manifests in daily life (and in history); God has commandments or laws or preferred behaviors for which people are rewarded or punished, both in the here and now and in eternity.

If this list seems unduly tilted towards Western monotheism, that’s because it is. Because I lack God’s omniscience, my grasp of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, and other Eastern religions is rudimentary at best. No matter how many times I have it explained to me, I still can’t quite grasp the cosmology behind the backroom shrines featuring red lightbulbs and fresh fruits that are omnipresent in Chinese-owned shops in the city in which I live (San Francisco). They are assisting departed relatives, I’ve been told, but exactly how and why eludes me.

So let us return to pondering God with the capital “G,” the source of so much comfort and strife for billions of people.

The comfort derives from the sense that someone or something greater than ourselves is in charge. As children, if we are so lucky, our parents fulfill this role, which can explain why we later project the parental role onto God the Father (or, more rarely, the Mother).

In similar fashion, for most of human history, societies have been ruled by kings and queens, or tribal leaders, chiefs, or warlords — essentially the alpha dogs leading the pack. This quality too has been projected onto God as Lord or Christ as King.

Churches, then, serve the function of royal courts, with believers as courtiers and supplicants praising their sovereign and requesting favors in return.

While this arrangement may seem infantile or retrograde to the modern egalitarian sensibility, one suspects that it may be hard-wired into us. After all, most democracies elect presidents or prime ministers who play the role of political figurehead and chief scapegoat.

God and religion thus serve the function of providing a meaningful structure to people’s lives and a moral code to live by. The strife that these can also cause would seem to derive from the human propensity to view competing belief systems, deities, and sects as threatening enemies worthy of extermination — or at least banishment to the hinterlands.

Still, even in the midst of chaotic, human-engineered strife, the stability of the rhythms and cycles of nature and the heavens have persuaded us that there is an overarching order to the universe. Thus the beginnings of modern science can be traced to the belief that God created this order and the laws of nature, and that studying the working of those laws could bring us to a better understanding of God. That’s what motivated Isaac Newton’s scientific investigations, though Newton also tried working it in the opposite direction — hoping that a study of the scripturally recorded dimensions of Solomon’s Temple might shed light on natural law.

Over time it was probably inevitable that the scientific study of nature would avoid trying to fit God into the picture and that the emphasis on the orderly laws of nature would leave little room for miracles — “supernatural” events that seemingly violated those laws. By the time that Charles Darwin hypothesized that evolution and natural selection could account for life on earth, religion and science were increasingly inclined to go their separate ways.

This split between religion and science (or faith and evidence) colors much of the current cultural landscape. People who believe in their heart of hearts that God literally created the universe in six days and continues to intervene in people’s lives may be less likely to pay heed to scientists warning of climate change, as they may assume that God has everything under control. If science has no room for God, they reason, then they have no room for science. But this is something of a false dichotomy.

Despite the evangelical efforts of militant atheists, science does not and cannot disprove the existence of God, because God does not really fall within the domain of scientific inquiry. A mathematical set that encompasses everything resists all attempts to examine it objectively from within. Thus the idea of God flunks the test of falsifiability.

Still, one needn’t be a creationist to find it absurd to think that life as we know it basically evolved at random. This strikes me, at a gut level, as even more miraculous than the proposition that God created the universe ex nihilo.

While advocates of scientism dismiss advocates of so-called intelligent design as stalking horses for creationism, it seems to me that the universe, as a whole and in its parts, exhibits both a consciousness and an intelligence that are difficult to explain.

The Bible asserts that “God created man in his own image.” Assorted freethinkers have responded that “man created God in his own image.” Either way, we are left with the puzzle of consciousness.

A central question at the core of the God concept is: can God be “known” in any meaningful sense of the word?

There have been several answers to this:

· God could be known through his prophets, who conveyed his wishes to (for example) the Israelites.

· God could be known through divinely inspired scripture, be it Old Testament, New Testament, the Qur’an, or other holy texts.

· God could be known through the church, its priesthood, its sacraments, and its theology.

· God could be known through mystics who had experienced some form of union with him.

In somewhat similar fashion,

· God could be known through a “born-again” experience and/or an experience of the Holy Spirit, which could manifest in glossolalia or other “spiritual gifts.”

And finally,

· God could be known through prayer or meditation, methods potentially accessible to anyone.

The first four of these amount to hearsay or secondhand knowledge — depending on one’s faith in the authority of others, institutional or individual.

The last two allow room for a firsthand experience, though one that is usually shaped by cultural and religious assumptions.

Firsthand experiences, of course, grapple with the dilemma of subjectivity. One can experience a powerful and sincere “union” with “God,” but exactly who is uniting with whom? And of what does union consist?

The Sufis, the mystics of Islam, speak of fana (literally “annihilation”), whereby one’s ego is temporarily absorbed into or eclipsed by Allah or the All or the Absolute. (Choose your favorite abstraction.)

Rumi, perhaps the most famous of medieval Sufi mystics (and progenitor of the Mevlevi order — the so-called Whirling Dervishes of Turkey) referred to God as “the Beloved,” a metaphorical name implying the intimacy of such a mystical union.

Ibn ‘Arabi, another profound Sufi mystic, roughly contemporaneous with Rumi, taught that on one level, each person has his or her own Rabb (Lord), that is, their own unique interface with and understanding of God. And, at a deeper level, our apparently individual consciousnesses are nothing less than outcroppings of the one divine consciousness. In fact they are a multiplicity of mirrors through which God is able to know himself in all his numerous aspects.

This is reminiscent of the motto painted above the entrance to Shambhala Books, a pioneering metaphysical bookstore on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue for many years: “All Hail to the One Cosmic Mind.”

This monistic assertion implies that we are all mind stuff within the greater Mind (of God), an implication that mystics such as Ibn ‘Arabi have shared with more recent philosophies such as New Thought (variously interpreted by Mary Baker Eddy, Charles Fillmore, Emmet Fox, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Ernest Holmes, and others).

Curiously, one of my very few mystical experiences — one that could be interpreted as fana — occurred in a nonreligious (one might even say antireligious) context. (No drugs were involved, I hasten to add.) The end result was two or three days where my consciousness of self was shared with a consciousness of the All.

There was remarkably little content to this experience, aside from a strong sense that God was not something “out there” and a separate Other, but a frequency of consciousness with which I tried to stay in tune as long as possible.

I realize that saying “God is a frequency of consciousness” must sound like the most banal of New Age aphorisms, but one rarely gets to choose one’s own epiphanies. My greater point, however, is to share the possibility that even thinking of God as a separate entity may be missing the boat.

Religions or other institutions that presume to position themselves between God and us, offering salvation to those who follow their dictates and damnation to those who don’t, may be more of a problem than a solution. They undoubtedly play a role in instilling morality and molding behavior, which may serve a necessary function in society, but they may be of little help in actually freeing one’s consciousness.

The great depth psychologist Carl Jung may offer some helpful insights in that latter task. Jung’s mentor Sigmund Freud, an atheistic secular Jew, had a dismissive attitude towards religion, viewing it as composed of not particularly helpful superstitions. Jung, who had been raised in a Christian family, sought to salvage the value of religion in helping clients shed their neuroses and integrate themselves into psychological wholeness.

In Jung’s view, one of the archetypes residing in the collective unconscious — Jung’s term for a shared realm of the human psyche — was an archetype of beneficent wholeness, essentially an archetype of God. Jung didn’t go so far as to reduce God to a mere archetype within the human psyche (either individual or collective), but proposed that engaging with this archetype — most pointedly by practicing the religion of one’s upbringing — could have a positive effect on psychological healing.

Jung was not especially concerned with one’s belief in particular dogmas or theological fine points so much as with emotionally engaging with the symbols embedded in religion. He was famously intrigued by the early Christian Gnostics, who claimed experiential knowledge of God’s reality. To the church, they may have been heretics worthy of suppression, but to Jung they were pioneers of depth psychology, whose scriptures offered additional symbols complementing those in mainstream Christianity.

If we posit that God is synonymous with consciousness and intelligence, we can take that idea in several different directions.

The all-knowing personal God, as conventionally understood, who hears and responds to every individual, nay every being, strikes me as a monstrous Orwellian Big Brother, a kind of cosmic busybody running everything from behind a curtain, like the Mighty Oz. I find this not only highly implausible, but repellent as well, like a nanny state writ large. At least Santa Claus — who carefully tracks whether we’ve been naughty or nice — only slides down the chimney once a year.

Perhaps it was a distaste for this conception that led eighteenth-century Deists to propose God as a benign watchmaker who created the universe as a kind of giant clock. He wound it up and then took an extended vacation, while the laws of nature, physics, and genetics took care of things. This is appealing in its simplicity, but is perhaps too impersonal for most people.

What I would propose, on no greater authority than my own quirky intuition, would be something along the following line:

The universe came into being in an outpouring of consciousness and intelligence. These qualities are inherent in the material universe, and it is misleading to associate them with a separate entity labeled God. Consciousness and intelligence express themselves with a certain aesthetic embodied in a dynamic tension between symmetry and asymmetry, as found, for instance, in the Golden Section. (A concise and nicely illustrated explication of this idea can be found in Scott Olsen’s book The Golden Section: Nature’s Greatest Secret [New York: Walker, 2006]). Clues to this implicate order can be found in snowflakes, artichokes, seashells, and crocodiles.

Consciousness in this sense encompasses both the conscious and the unconscious, as can be seen in the human psyche. The unconscious portion of our mind is not asleep. In fact it is conscious in its way, taking in data, processing emotions, and exhibiting intelligence — it is just not immediately or directly accessible to our conscious mind.

In some fashion that I don’t presume to understand, our individual unconscious is embedded within the collective unconscious, which is in turn embedded in the Mind of God (or the totality of naturally inhering consciousness and intelligence).

God is thus not external to us or separate from us. This was illustrated in my transient experience of fana mentioned earlier. I happened to be in a Muslim country at the time. When I would hear the call to prayer, I found it painful to realize that devout Muslims were presuming to pray to Allah by prostrating themselves in the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca. One’s linkage with the All was internal, not external, I thought to myself. Indeed, to view God as “out there” or in heaven or anywhere else was positively misleading. Consciousness and intelligence were everywhere, permeating all of creation, but most intimately right at hand: in one’s own consciousness.

Jung made a point of distinguishing this consciousness from one’s ego. He called it the Self, a core of being of which the ego was but one small part.

If the Shambhala bookshop motto “All Hail to the One Cosmic Mind” is one part of the equation, perhaps the motto chiseled at the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi is the other part: “Know Thyself.”

---

Jay Kinney was founder and publisher of Gnosis magazine, published from 1985 to 1999. He is also the author of The Masonic Myth (Harper Collins), which has been translated into five languages. His article “Playing Those Mind Games: The Psychedelic Revolution Revisited” appeared in Quest, Winter 2015.

---

Printed in the Fall 2015 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard."The Strange Identity of Jesus Christ" Quest 103.4 (Fall 2015): pg. 130-136.

Most Christians think the New Testament says that Jesus is God. They’re wrong.

By Richard Smoley

The New Testament may be the most widely read book in the world. And as everyone knows, the New Testament is about Jesus Christ.

You would think, then, that people would know what the New Testament says about Jesus. But as it turns out, a great deal of what they know is wrong. Most people think it says he was God. Really? Then how do you explain verses like this, in which Jesus says, “Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God” (Matthew 19:17)? (Biblical quotations here and elsewhere are from the King James Version unless otherwise noted.)

Problems like this lead us to wonder exactly what the earliest Christians thought of Jesus.

In all likelihood they thought very different things. Even in the earliest generation of Christianity, there were many “faith communities,” often in the same vicinity, with different and competing beliefs. One extinct sect, a Jewish Christian group called the Ebionites, thought Jesus was a human like everybody else. Gnostic groups, by contrast, often saw him as a phantom materialized in this foul material world somewhat like a Tibetan tulpa. But none of them — at least none that we know of — thought he was God.

For this article, let’s focus on the Christians who wrote the New Testament, such as Paul, John the evangelist, and the unknown author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Their writings all became validated as canonical scripture, so they must agree to a certain extent about who Jesus was. By and large they do. But weirdly, what they agree on is quite different from what the Catholic Church and its offshoots — which include practically the whole of the Christian world — later claimed.

To see why, let’s start with a much-discussed passage from Paul’s epistle to the Philippians, which says that Jesus, “being in the form of God, did not think that being equal with God was something to be grasped at, but he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself, being obedient unto death, death on a cross. Therefore God exalted him, and blessed his name above every other name” (Philippians 2:6–9; my translation and emphasis).

There is a lot about this passage that is obscure, and whole books have been written about it. For our purposes the main point is this: scholars believe that Paul did not write these words — not originally. Instead he is quoting a kind of doxology, or doctrinal formula, that is already familiar to the people he is writing to.

This is a curious fact, because Philippians was written sometime between AD 56 and 63. Meaning that by this time — no later than thirty years after Jesus’s death — he was widely venerated as a divine being by his followers.

But what kind of divine being? To say that Jesus “did not think that being equal with God was something to be grasped at” is peculiar. How could he “grasp at” being equal to God if, as most Christians today believe, he was God himself?

Here is another verse, again by Paul, in which he reminds the Galatians how well they treated him: “You received me as an angel, as Christ Jesus” (Galatians 4:14; my translation). The natural and obvious way of reading the Greek here is that “as Christ Jesus” is an expansion or elaboration of “as an angel.”

This suggests that the early Christians — and again, I’m referring to those who wrote the New Testament — did not think that Jesus was God. They thought he was the incarnation of an angel.

As New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman puts it: “Jesus was thought of as an angel, or an angel-like being, or even the Angel of the Lord — in any event, a superhuman divine being who existed before his birth and became human for the salvation of the human race. This, in a nutshell, is the incarnation Christology of several New Testament authors” (Ehrman, chapter 7).

We might also be able to say which angel they thought Jesus was. Quest readers may remember an earlier article of mine, “God and the Great Angel” (Quest, Winter 2011). In it I argue that, by some theories, there were originally two Gods in Israel: El, the high God, and Yahweh, God of Israel alone, sometimes known as the Angel of the Lord. Eventually, however, the Jews decided that Yahweh was not an angel; he was the high God himself; El and Yahweh were the same. This transition had probably been made by the sixth century BC.

But the Great Angel did not go away. He continued to survive in Judaism for centuries afterward. He was sometimes known as the Son of Man.

The first usage of “the Son of Man” in this sense appears in the book of Daniel, from the second century BC: “I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him” (Daniel 7:13).

Sometimes the Son of Man was called Metatron, a name that looks more Greek than Hebrew. That may be because it is. One theory (there are many) says this name comes from the Greek metà toû thrónou — the angel “with the throne” of God.

Metatron, the Great Angel, was known in other ways too, depending upon which text you look at. Here is a list of some names for him:

The Angel of the Lord
The Son of Man
The Son of God
The second God (deúteros theós in Greek)
The Name of God
The Logos = The Word
Wisdom

It would take a long and highly technical treatise to go through all of these terms and explain where they occur and how they connect to each other. That’s impossible here. For our purposes it’s best to take them as a basket of names for more or less the same concept. It would be hard to overstate the importance of this concept to early Christianity.

Here it is: there is a kind of subordinate God, a “second God,” through whom the high God relates to the universe and through whom he created the universe. This subordinate God is actually an angel — the Son of Man, Metatron.

One text that sheds some light on the subject is a pseudepigraphical work called 1 Enoch:

And at that time that the Son of Man was named, in the presence of the Lord of Spirits
And his name before the Head of Days.
And before the suns and the “signs” [i.e., constellations] were created
Before the stars of the heaven were made,
His name was named before the Lord of spirits.
                                                         (1 Enoch 48:2–3; Idel, 20)

Exactly as in the verse from Daniel, there are two figures here: one is the Lord of Spirits, the Head of Days (or Ancient of Days), the high God, the Father. The other is the Son of Man. You will notice that the last line of the verse above emphasizes his “name.” This is important.

The ancient Hebrews saw a much closer connection between the word and the thing than we do. In fact, they used the same word for both: davar. This fact meant that God’s name was, in some way, equivalent to God himself. (To this day pious Jews sometimes refer to God as ha-Shem, “the Name.”)

The Name is a hypostasis. It is an attribute (usually of God) that takes on a life of its own and becomes a kind of independent entity, a person.

It’s even in the Bible. In Exodus the Lord says to the children of Israel, “Behold, I send an Angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. Beware of him, and obey his voice, and provoke him not: for he will not pardon your transgressions: for my name is in him” (Exodus 23:20–21; my emphasis).

So the Son of Man is the Great Angel, the hypostasis of the Name. Why was he called the Son of Man? Here’s one answer: many of these texts are not just the results of imagination or theologizing. They sometimes represent real visionary experience. We have almost no idea of how this kind of experience was produced. But in it the angels often had the form of men.

The texts say this over and over. Here’s a well-known example, from the famous throne vision of Ezekiel: “And above the firmament . . . was the likeness of a throne, as was the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness of the appearance of a man above upon it” (Ezekiel 1:26).

But there’s more. Metatron may have been called the “Son of Man” because he originally was (or was believed to be) a man. Enoch, to be specific. Antediluvian patriarch, great-grandfather of Noah, after living 365 years, “Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24).

That is all the Bible has to say about Enoch.

But Jewish mysticism had much more to say. Enoch was not only taken to heaven, but was elevated to the highest of all positions. In fact he became Metatron, the Great Angel.

Below is a verse from a mystical text known as 3 Enoch, which tells of a rabbi’s journey into the heavenly realms. In it Metatron says:

I am Enoch, the son of Jared. When the generation of the Flood sinned and turned to evil deeds, . . . the Holy One, blessed be He, took me from their midst to be a witness against them in the heavenly height. (3 Enoch 4:1; in Charlesworth, 1:238)

To sum all of this up: Judaism at the time of Christ, and long before, had a notion of the Great Angel, the hypostasis of the divine Name. At some point he was identified with the patriarch Enoch, who had ascended to heaven and become the angel Metatron. This may be why Metatron was called the Son of Man.

Christianity took this idea over. The early Christians decided that Jesus was the Son of Man, the Great Angel, who had come down to earth. He had degraded himself to take on fleshly form in order to deliver us from our sins. God rewarded him by exalting him to a still higher level than he had had before.

This is what the passage above from Philippians is trying to say. Here is another example, from the epistle of the Hebrews:

God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken to us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir to all things, by whom also he made the worlds: who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high: being made so much better than the angels, as he hath [been allotted] a more excellent name than they. (Hebrews 1:1–4; my emphasis)

The bracketed passage indicates my own addition to the King James translation. That’s because the King James Version fails to translate one word in the Greek: keklÄ“ronómÄ“ken, “has been allotted.” To say that Jesus was “allotted” his excellent name created some discomfort in light of later belief, so the word was left out. Most translations, even the most reputable and up-to-date ones, do similar things with passages like these.

The Great Angel starts with a very high status. He is right below God himself. In fact, God made the creation through him. But the Great Angel chose to come down to earth, become human, and offer himself up for our sins, so God elevated him to a still higher standing, to God’s right hand. He is thus no longer below God, but is literally on the same level.

The verses from Hebrews also say that God made the worlds through the Great Angel. You may be reminded of the opening of the Gospel of John: “All things were made by him” — the Logos, the Word (John 1:3).

You’ll also have noticed that I put the Logos, the Word, on the same list as the Great Angel and the Son of Man. That’s because the name Logos was also applied to the Great Angel. The first man to do this (to our knowledge) was the Jewish theologian Philo of Alexandria. Philo lived at the time of Jesus (Philo’s dates are c.15 BC–c.AD 50), although he never mentions Jesus and apparently doesn’t know of him.

But Philo does know of the Logos:

And even if there be not as yet any one who is worthy to be called a son of God, nevertheless let him labour earnestly to be adorned according to his first-born word, the eldest of his angels, as the great archangel of many names; for he is called, the authority, and the name of God, and the Word, and man according to God’s image, and he who sees Israel. (Philo, On the Confusion of Tongues, 146; Yonge, 247; my emphasis)

There you have it. The “great archangel” is “the name of God” and “the Word.”

“Word” here is a translation of the Greek lógos. Lógos is an extremely common word in Greek. And it does mean “word.”

Sort of.

In fact when I think back to any Greek text I’ve read, “word” is almost never the best translation for lógos. It’s often best translated as “speech,” “argument,” “reason,” even “true story.” But its meaning goes far further still.

It’s no small feat to say what lógos meant over the course of a thousand years of ancient Greek philosophy. But here is the main idea: lógos is the structuring principle of consciousness. Or, if you like, consciousness as a structuring principle (Heidegger, chapter 2; Smoley, 165).

What on earth do I mean by this?

To understand, simply take a look at your surroundings. Whether they’re familiar or not, you can easily identify objects and people: a table, a chair, that man over there, and so on. Your mind is picking them out from a background of colors, sounds, and other impressions. By picking them out, your mind is organizing them. They are no longer an ocean of random sense data. They are an organized and coherent world. Moment by moment, the lógos in you is creating the world.

It’s no coincidence that the root behind lógos is the verb légō, which originally meant “to pick up” or “pick out.”

By the time of Philo, Greek philosophers had devoted a lot of attention to this idea. In his day, the Stoics were one of the dominant philosophical schools. They said that this lógos, this structuring principle of consciousness, was the basis not only of our experience but of all existence. This idea was extremely influential.

Philo wanted to connect traditional Jewish teachings with Greek philosophy. So he identified this lógos with the Name, the Great Angel.

One man who was probably familiar with Philo’s thought — or with a system very much like it — was the evangelist John. That was how he came to write “In the beginning was the lógos, and the lógos was with God, and the lógos was God” (John 1:1).

Philo identified the Logos with the Great Angel. We see in Philippians that the Great Angel was identified with Jesus. John the evangelist made the obvious connection. The Logos=the Great Angel, incarnated in Jesus.

If this Great Angel was so important, you may be asking why you haven’t heard of him before.

Here’s one reason. At one point the Jewish sages decided that he had gotten too big for his britches. So they dethroned him.

We find out about this in 3 Enoch. It is a striking and revealing passage.

At one point a heretical rabbi ascends to heaven in a mystical vision. He sees Metatron on his throne and exclaims, “There are indeed two powers of heaven!” Then God dethrones Metatron. The angel Anapiel comes and, Metatron says, “struck me with sixty lashes of fire and made me stand to my feet” (3 Enoch 16:2–5; Charlesworth 1:268).

The passage suggests why Metatron was dethroned. It refers to the rabbi as Acher (the “other one”) — a contemptuous epithet: the Jews considered him an archheretic. His real name was Elisha ben Abuya, and he lived around the turn of the second century AD. Although it’s not clear what kind of heretic he became, most likely he converted to Christianity.

If this is true, it tells us a great deal. The idea of “two powers of heaven” had been in Judaism for centuries. But the Christians used it to great effect: there was the Father, and there was the Son. They identified this Son with Jesus.

At some point the rabbis decided to rid themselves of this troublesome second god, who was leading mystics to heresy. Metatron was demoted in the heavenly hierarchy. He was, so to speak, taken off his throne and made to stand on his feet. Dethroning Metatron was a way of putting a distance between Judaism and Christian doctrines.

Nevertheless, Metatron is still mentioned in later Judaism, mostly in the Kabbalah, which preserves many of the most ancient and profound Jewish teachings. He is still identified with Enoch, who was, according to the Kabbalah, the first fully realized man.

The Great Angel vanished from Christianity because it continued to exalt the status of Jesus from the first to the fourth centuries. We’ve already seen how Jesus was placed on the right hand of God — made equal to God. The next step to say that not only was he equal to God, but that he had always been equal to God.

Thus the doctrine of the Trinity was born.

It was decreed as the official doctrine of the Catholic church at the council of Nicaea in 325. Those, including a bishop named Arius, who held that Jesus was originally a created being were expelled as heretics. Curiously, Arius’s views were probably closer to the beliefs of the New Testament authors than were those of the side that won.

Paul himself would have probably agreed more with Arius. It’s sobering to think that if Paul, the fount of all Christian theology, had been at the council of Nicaea, he would probably have been thrown out as a heretic too. But history is full of many such ironies.

I must add that the doctrine of the Trinity was not merely the fabrication of some fourth-century bishops. The sacred ternary is a universal motif. It is found almost everywhere, under different names. There is the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, as well as the three primordial elements, rajas (force), tamas (inertia), and sattva (equilibrium). Chinese philosophy calls this ternary “heaven,” “earth,” and “man.” Jewish mysticism uses the three letters in the name of Yahweh — yod (Y), heh (H) and waw (W) — to express the same idea. And the pagan Slavs had Tribog (“Three-God”), a three-headed deity. It would be an oversimplification to say that all these concepts are talking about exactly the same things. Nevertheless, the sacred ternary is a genuine, profound, and universal teaching. The Christian Trinity is merely one way of apprehending it. (See René Guénon’s Great Triad for a discussion of this matter.)

One question may arise: Clearly some of Jesus’s earliest followers saw him as the Great Angel, the Son of Man. But was that how he saw himself?

This is not a question that we can definitively answer with the information we now have.

Why? The oldest surviving Gospels are the four in the New Testament, and possibly the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. But scholars almost universally agree that these Gospels do not exactly reflect what Jesus said or did. They include things that were attributed to him later that may have had little or nothing to do with what he said or taught.

This is the scholarly consensus. But it leaves us with a big question: how do you decide which things in these Gospels are authentic and which aren’t? There are many criteria, but all the theories at some point face the same impasse: if you decide to include or exclude a statement by Jesus, this must mean that you have some preconceived idea of who Jesus actually was. You are sculpting the evidence to fit this picture in your head.

If there were other sources about Jesus that were in the slightest bit reliable or informative, it would be different. But there are almost no references to him in surviving non-Christian literature of the first century.

So any statement about who Jesus thought he was has to be made extremely hesitantly and tentatively.

Take this verse, for example: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head” (Luke 9:58). Here Jesus is identifying himself with the Son of Man. But is this statement authentically by Jesus? It very much depends on whom you ask.

As a whole, scholars regard Jesus’s Son of Man statements as mostly authentic. This is partly because the later Christian church no longer remembered who the Son of Man was. (Present-day theologians often seem clueless about it as well.) For this reason, scholars tend to think that the idea of the Son of Man comes from the earliest years of Christianity, and probably to Christ himself. The later church was not likely to make up this title for him, because the church no longer knew what it meant.

Jesus, then, may have believed he was the incarnation of the Great Angel and hinted as much to his disciples. Did he also think he was the reincarnation of Enoch? That is a fascinating possibility that, to my knowledge, scholarship has not addressed.

He may also have thought he was the Messiah. This claim may be based in fact. In the Gospels, Jesus is identified with the Messiah as “the son of David.” That is, he was believed to be a descendant of the royal line of David. (Whether he really was in a biological sense is another question that can’t be answered.) Originally the Messiah — the “anointed one” — was used to refer to the kings of Israel and Judah. If Jesus was the descendant of David, then he was the rightful king of Israel — the anointed one, the Messiah.

But the role of this Messiah in the thought of Jesus’s time is far from clear. James H. Charlesworth, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, writes, “it is impossible to derive a systematic description of the functions of the Messiah from the extant references to him” in the literature of Jesus’s time, because there actually aren’t many references to the Messiah in that literature (Charlesworth, 1:xxxi).

By all the evidence, if Jesus believed he was the Messiah, he saw his role in a spiritual sense; he was not interested in the political liberation of the Jews. But the priests were able to use the political implications of this title to frame him as an agitator and hang him by it. This explains the whole background of the Passion narrative.

If what I am saying above is true, it has enormous repercussions. There are hundreds of millions of people walking around today who believe that unless you accept Jesus as God, you are headed straight for eternal damnation. Most of these people also believe in the literal truth of the New Testament. What will they do when they learn that the New Testament itself doesn’t teach that Jesus is God?

This might be a liberating experience for some, but it’s just as likely to be a dispiriting and disorienting one. To have the bedrock of your faith crumble away under you is no small thing. It takes away the sole support that many people have.

This may be why most of the things in this article, while reflecting mainstream scholarship, remain virtually unknown. The clergy — at least in mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism — learned most of these things in seminary; it is not news to them. But they are reluctant or afraid to reveal them. Neither their education nor their denominations have prepared them to do so.

Eventually the truth will come out. What will happen when it does? I’m reminded of a passage in The Tree of Life Oracle, a fortune-telling deck based on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life by Quest contributor Cherry Gilchrist and Gila Zur. There is a card called “The Veil.” Here is the interpretation:

When the veil descended, men revered what it covered. And as time went on it seemed to hide more and more and was revered more and more. Then, when it was heavy with age, young men fresh and arrogant demanded the removal of the veil and demanded to see what was hidden. For they said that whatever is hidden from the people cannot be for the common good. In the thunder and lightning of indignation, the veil was torn down. Nothing lay beyond. At first the young men were startled, but then they laughed jubilantly at the absurd fraud they thought they had uncovered. And the old men grieved, cursing the young men because they had destroyed the veil. (Gilchrist and Zur, 108)

---

Sources

Charlesworth, James H., ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 2 vols. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2013 (1983).

Ehrman, Bart D. How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. San Francisco: Harper One, 2014.

Gilchrist, Cherry, and Gila Zur. The Tree of Life Oracle. New York: Friedman/Fairfax, 2002.

Guénon, René. The Great Triad. Translated by Peter Kingsley. Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1991.

Heidegger, Martin. Early Greek Thinking. Translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank Capuzzi. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Idel, Moshe. Ben: Sonship in Jewish Mysticism. London: Continuum, 2007.

Smoley, Richard. The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe. Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2009.

Yonge, C.D., trans., The Works of Philo. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1993.

This article is adapted from Richard Smoley’s forthcoming book, How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible, to be published in 2016 by Tarcher/Penguin.

 

---

VOLUME 103, NUMBER 4

CONTENTS

The Strange Identity of Jesus Christ
Richard Smoley

God Only Knows
Jay Kinney

To Whom Shall We Pray? HPB's War on the Personal Gods
Jeff Cosby

The Buddha's Teaching of No-Self
Nancy Reigle

Krishnamurti's Inner Life
David Edmund Moody

From the Editor's Desk
Richard Smoley

Viewpoint: Applying the Principles
Tim Boyd

President's Diary

---

Tim and Lily Boyd pose with Singapore Young Theosophists.

Printed in the Summer 2015 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Boyd,  Tim."President,s Diary" Quest 103.3 (Summer 2015): pg. 114-115.

At the end of January my wife, daughter, and I left Adyar to return to the U.S. Along the way we stopped in Singapore. I had scheduled a visit with the TS group there. Singapore is a remarkable place. It is a country that its recently deceased founder, Lee Kwan Yew, said should not exist, not because it did not deserve to, but because geography, politics, and demographics all would seem to argue that as a nation, it is impossible.

The TS group there is a dynamic bunch of people. Not too many years ago its membership had declined to seven. Under the guidance of Sanne and Lily Chong the group today has 400-plus members. Although our meeting with the group was unscheduled and on an unusual day for them, around 100 members turned out.

From Singapore I traveled on to Krotona for the annual Partners in Theosophy program. Every year at the end of January members from around the country gather for the week-long program. This year I facilitated our exploration of the Three Objects of the Theosophical Society. Since last year I had been looking forward to cofacilitating the get-together with the Krotona School director, Maria Parisen. Over the years Maria and I have done a number of retreat-type programs together. Although our previous combined efforts have been well received by the participants, my enthusiasm for conducting it was somewhat selfish. I love working with Maria. Unfortunately, because of unforeseeable circumstances she had to withdraw at the last minute. Joy Mills, Betty Bland, Pablo Sender, and I ended up leading the group in an inspiring program.

John and Anne Kern, after John’s talk at Krotona.

In addition to the partners and mentors, each year John Kern, adviser to the trust for The Kern Foundation, also attends the full term of meetings. This year, on the Tuesday when the Ojai Valley Lodge gathered for their weekly session, they had asked John to talk about his life and experiences working for the TS. It was a packed house. John’s intimate acquaintance with the people and history of the TS made for a riveting evening. It was a view of a side of TS history that no one else could have presented. More than four decades ago John retired from his own lucrative business career to work, gratis, solely for the Theosophical organizations served by the foundation. (The MP3 of the talk can be listened to or downloaded at https://www.theosophical.org/announcements/3512).

From Krotona it was finally back to Olcott in time for our February meeting of the board of directors. As always, the members of the board came to the headquarters for the three and a half day meeting. Currently our board is composed of long-time members who hail from Louisiana, New Hampshire, Florida, Wisconsin, Colorado, and Oregon. It’s a diverse, passionate, and very efficient group. Unlike the previous board, which was 50/50 male-female, this one is primarily female. Besides me the one lone man is Dr. Doug Keene from New Hampshire. It could be viewed as an enviable position to be in.

This year the dates for the meeting coincided with Adyar Day. For more than 100 years, February 17 has been a special day for the TS. The commemoration began as a remembrance of Colonel Olcott, the first president and cofounder of the TS, on the date of his passing. In 1922 Annie Besant shifted the emphasis to serving as a memorial for all of the TS’s past leaders and as a day to remember and give support to the TS international headquarters. All around the world programs are held and donations collected for the various works going on at Adyar. For a number of years in the American Section we allowed this occasion to slip. This year I gave an impromptu slide presentation of Adyar —a view from the inside. It was not on the schedule, but still attracted about thirty people. All of the board, a number of staff, and some members of the public turned out.

Whenever I have shown images of Adyar to a group, I am fascinated at the audience’s sense of novelty and surprise at seeing the scope of the place and the work. It should not surprise me. Until I started regularly traveling to Adyar, I was the same way. It always seemed like such a mysterious place. I had no mental images to help me grasp its dimensions. Since I became international president, three of our staff members have made extended visits to Adyar and have done significant work while there. Over the years I have noticed that those members who have spent some time at the international headquarters come away with a deeper understanding and commitment to the work.

In March I was off to the San Francisco Bay area for three programs. I was mainly going because for about a year a good friend and founder of the Greenheart International organization, Emanuel Kunzelman, had been trying to coordinate the details for a public conversation between Michael Murphy, founder of California’s Esalen Institute, and me. (See more about this discussion in my “Viewpoint: A Great Idea” .) Given everyone’s hyperbusy schedule, it was difficult.

The event was a two-hour conversation moderated by Emanuel. The description advertising the event went like this: 

This historical evening will bring together Michael Murphy of ITPI (Integral Transformative Practice International) in a conversation with Tim Boyd, international president of the Theosophical Society, as they discuss how the Theosophy of today meets evolutionary theory. Join us for this lively dialogue moderated by Greenheart International president, Emanuel Kuntzelman, as we hear from these two titans of spiritual thought.

Tim Boyd converses with Michael Murphy at their discussion program.

I like it. Titanic! It was a wide-ranging exchange that seemed to bring out the best in both of us. We plan to get together in the future to flesh out our discussion of some of the subjects that came up that evening. (To hear the entire two-hour conversation go here:
https://www.itp-international.org/library/dialogue-michael-murphy-tim-boyd-and-emanuel-kuntzelman.)

We set a date for the conversation that also allowed me to schedule visits with our TS groups in San Francisco and Oakland. So next it was a meeting with the San Francisco TS group. The SFTS has been a dynamic center in the area for many years. Although as a group they are keen students of the Ageless Wisdom teachings, they have always focused on more than mere study. Application and experience have been the emphasis since the days of their famous member and guiding light Joe Miller—an entirely unique and inspired student/teacher/friend. As a young man, Joe had met Annie Besant and formed a bond with the TS. Years later he would say, “Everything I have in life I owe to the Theosophical Society.” They are a group who in quiet, behind-the-scenes ways have been a tremendous support to the TS work. We met at their building, which is right downtown, almost at the top of San Francisco’s famous Nob Hill.

Two days later it was back across the Bay Bridge for a meeting with the Oakland TS. The Oakland group has a long history. It had been almost twenty-five years since I had last visited with them. Many things have changed since then. For a time the group had become inactive, only coming back to life again in the past couple of years. Because their normal meeting place was too small, we met in a lovely hall in the Berkeley public library. Members came from Oakland and the surrounding area. Also a group of friends from Turlock, California, about 100 miles away, came for the talk. I had a meal with the group members, then we drove to the library for the talk. It was a good day, and I am expecting very good things to come out of the Oakland branch.

At the end of March, it was back to Adyar (where I am now writing this piece). I arrived in time to inaugurate and speak at the South Indian Conference. Every year around 150–170 members from some of the Indian states in the south come together (Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka). It is a three-day event that for the last several years has been hosted at Adyar. The subject for this year’s gathering was The Voice of the Silence.

Unlike the Midwest, where we have the four distinct seasons of winter, spring, summer, and fall, the Adyar area is said to have three—hot, hotter, and hottest. Right now is the hotter season, with everyday temperatures in the mid- to upper 90s. It’s surprising how quickly one adapts. Leave Wheaton, Illinois, and 50 degrees, get off an air-conditioned jet plane in Chennai, sweat profusely for two days, and voilà, you have acclimated. Give it a try.

Tim Boyd

---