Interesting (in a particularly challenging way for Catholic me)
I wonder to what extent this analysis would survive extension to apocryphal gospels, which seem like a natural place to cross-check any sort of "conspiracy" theory
I hope it comes across that EToC has greatly increased my respect for Christian theology. I would give a great deal to pick John's brain about the nature of the Fall. St Augustine went so far as to interpret "In the beginning was the word..." to mean Christ was the "inner voice" of God. This of course works very well with EToC, which holds that the Garden allegory was literally about achieving "atonement" (at-one-ment, being at one) with the inner voice.
If Genesis is a story of how we got here, in my view the New Testament is a brilliant exposition on what to do about it. Much of the modern interest in ego death focuses on psychedelics, but the New Testament gets it right that, long term, it must be accomplished by living right. Love God (who is in you), and love your neighbor (who is also you). The essential parts are taught very well.
The apocrypha certainly support the idea that the stories were intended as allegories, at least inasmuch as the expanded set of stories is more fantastic and contradictory. For example the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew contains a sequence where the Holy Family, while traveling to Egypt, encounters a dragon. The dragon recognizes Christ and worships him. Or there is the Gospel of Judas which portrays him as good, actually. This doesn't rise to "conspiracy to replace the temple". I put the question to chatGPT and it offered this:
>The Gospel of Philip is an early Christian text that is counted among the writings of the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of Gnostic texts discovered in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, Egypt. The Gospel of Philip is not a "Gospel" in the traditional sense as it does not provide a narrative account of the life of Jesus. Instead, it is more a collection of theological reflections, sayings, and aphorisms.
>This text is believed to have been written in the late 2nd or early 3rd century AD and is noted for its sacramental theology and its discussions on the nature of the divine. It contains sayings attributed to Jesus, many of which focus on Gnostic interpretations of Christian rites and beliefs, such as baptism and the Eucharist.
>In the context of your question, the Gospel of Philip presents a spiritual interpretation of the Temple. It suggests that the true 'holy of holies' is found not in a physical building, but in the followers of Jesus, and in their spiritual union with the divine.
>One relevant passage from the Gospel of Philip (67) states: "The Lord did everything in a mystery, a baptism and a chrism and a eucharist and a redemption and a bridal chamber. [...] he said, 'I came to make the things below like the things above, and the things outside like those inside. I came to unite them in the place.'"
To me, the passage is not so clear as the Gospel of John saying the temple = Jesus's body = the sacrament.
Thanks, I haven't read that. I read How Jesus Became God a decade ago (in earnest, as I questioned my faith), and haven't come back to the question until this post. I did spend a lot of time talking to chatGPT on the topic, which it really struggles on. Programmed to be diplomatic and really does not like talking about religion or that it may be false
It is really interesting to learn about your upbringing. I have a lot of empathy, being raised in an evangelical Southern Baptist home. I began questioning very young, but it was high school debate, which imparts a lot of Enlightenment and 20th-century ideas, that provided an alternative framework. I now believe that this modernist worldview, combined with the desire to rebel, substituted one kind of black-and-white thinking for another.
It is only in recent years (I am now 40) that I have adopted patterns of thinking that I would describe as a systems view. This has sparked in me intellectual humility and heightened my sense of mystery and wonder, awakening a spirituality that went uncultivated by both evangelism and Cartesian rationalism.
Respecting ancient myths and hypothesizing how and why these memes evolved is one of the many gifts of a systems view of life. I quite enjoy the Vectors of Mind project as a result!
Yeah, the black-and-white thinking took a long time to lose. I really overestimated how much of the worlds problem were due to religion and superstition, or how much you can answer certainly. I mean we're all getting older and you at least have to decide how to spend time. What is the Good Life? Hard question which requires acting under a lot of uncertainty. Chesterson's fence is a good back-up position, which of course goes back to tradition.
One of the reasons I'm pursuing this project (and particularly this article) is that I hope it's a positive way forward for both religious and secular. Religion isn't just superstition, there are babies in that bathwater.
I don't think denying the existence of Jesus as a human being adds much to that theory's cohesion. It makes more sense to me for Jesus to be a real minor religious leader. He foresaw the inevitable results of a clash between Jewish messiah complex and Roman might. He warned his followers enough to escape it both bodily and in belief, in the speech in Matthew 24:15-27: note the immediate switch from "Romans will crush you" to "don't believe in false messiahs". For that and several other acts of faith, notably going willingly to his own execution to keep his disciples from harm, he was venerated. When his prophecy came to pass in 70 AD, his cult was one of the best-prepared for the diaspora that followed.
My money is on him being Essene, inheriting the role of Teacher of Righteousness from John the Baptist. That, however, is a much longer thing that's only tangentially related, save to further argue that his beliefs are of Jewish origin rather than crypto-Greek.
Yeah, the story could have grown from a kernel of a martyr. What I was trying to get at was the tension between the claims growing so fast (virgin birth, resurrected, wedding at Cana just like Dionysus, prophecy of temple's destruction) and all of them being honest mistakes. Especially when you have the angle of them actually setting up a mystery cult where they are forced to speak in parables about the true nature of their religion.
Have you read The Immortality Key or anything else relating Early Christians to psychedelics?
It does seem like the perfect moment for the Essenes, right? They kind of called it, going into the desert and purifying themselves. I take it you think John the Baptist was an Essene? What do you make of Jesus completely surpassing the most obvious Essene? It creates some distance between their practice and his. "They had a good thing, but this is the Eternal Truth." And why do you think his background is not more obvious? It's honestly weird that this is still a mystery.
Jul 3, 2023·edited Jul 3, 2023Liked by Andrew Cutler
I haven't read IMK. I've previously been focused on what caused the world Jesus lived in, so early Christianity is a bit of a blind spot. I'm speed-running Acts and other sources now to try getting some vague framework.
I think prophecy of temple's destruction was no-brainer: it's clear Roman policy at the time to subsume all religions into the Roman cult, which is a no-go for the monotheist and site-specific Judiasm. Rome has way more power than Israel, and will win this fight. That doesn't need to be explained as retcon, merely as good political forecasting.
I do think John was an Essene. Lots of similarities, from "locusts and wild honey" (can't eat what Essenes haven't cooked, but can gather raw food in wilderness) to the baptism practice itself. I think it's clear that Jesus took the practices off the rails, because he saw a chance for broader salvation. I think his background may be obscured because the Essenes themselves repudiated him, for the sin of coming out of the caves to try saving the sinners. It's an inessential detail that can be elided in favor of a mysterious youth.
There's even current evidence of a doctrinal split with the John-lead Essenes: Mandaeism, which venerates John as final prophet, but refers to Jesus as a Mandean priest. Which is also plausible: he need not be the Teacher of Righteousness, even if John was. The Mandean Book of John has Jesus and John in a weirdly inconclusive rap battle about holiness, ending with a stanza that is, poetically, "beware Christians". http://www.gnosis.org/library/The_Mandaean_Book_of_John_Open_Access_Ve.pdf
Really my interest in IMK is that I think Genesis has some kernels of truth from 10,000+ years ago and the New Testament is self-aware of this and expands and develops those themes, correcting some errors. What do you do with the first verse of John? He's literally saying Jesus is Logos, the same that was from the beginning. Elsewhere he says Jesus claimed to be the self-existing One who communed with Abraham and Moses. Did those stories grow out of the life of an ordinary preacher?
I suppose they could, but the story is also profound when interpreted symbolically as god becoming flesh. Genesis explains how we became self-aware and separated from god. The NT gives a path to at-one-ment. All the better if it literally involves ego death as IMK claims.
I wonder if you find the Neolithic connections reasonable? The mystery cults are absolutely crawling with snakes.
Yeah, Snake Cult is what brought me here. Snakey Neolithic roots are certainly plausible far behind all of this, though I think no longer directly involved in favor of less dangerous methods.
I think John was myth-making with a lot of that, rather than quoting Jesus clearly. Mark was closer to the source and more down-to-earth, IIRC. Lots of the mythic elements parallel things from 1 Enoch, which is an Essene text (mostly) predating Jesus. Plausible also that John wanted to say things which resonated with a gentile audience more familiar with Stoic phrasings.
I'm seeing slight indications that Essene's might have Greek influence (solar calendar, heaven modeled after Hellenistic court) but given their stance against it it seems unlikely to be intentional. It seems more likely to me that they were an initiatory path grown within Judaism itself, likely out of earlier contact with Zoroastrianism (the source of the magi who visit Jesus, and also all the light vs dark imagery) during the Assyrian occupation of Israel.
Jul 3, 2023·edited Jul 3, 2023Liked by Andrew Cutler
Eleusinian and Dionysian elements make more sense coming into the practices between the fall of the Temple and the Council of Nicaea, when the practices of the new cult were effectively a free-for-all. That's still early enough for them to be part of the founding myths, without necessarily being their origin.
Yeah, I didn't bring it up but Paul's Epistles are definitely a "thorn in the flesh" of the Jesus Myth. They are written before the temple is destroyed and sound fairly literal. Your timeline is plausible.
"For that and several other acts of faith, notably going willingly to his own execution to keep his disciples from harm, he was venerated. When his prophecy came to pass in 70 AD, his cult was one of the best-prepared for the diaspora that followed." The Mystery Cult syncretism could have come after the destruction of the Temple.
Interesting (in a particularly challenging way for Catholic me)
I wonder to what extent this analysis would survive extension to apocryphal gospels, which seem like a natural place to cross-check any sort of "conspiracy" theory
I hope it comes across that EToC has greatly increased my respect for Christian theology. I would give a great deal to pick John's brain about the nature of the Fall. St Augustine went so far as to interpret "In the beginning was the word..." to mean Christ was the "inner voice" of God. This of course works very well with EToC, which holds that the Garden allegory was literally about achieving "atonement" (at-one-ment, being at one) with the inner voice.
If Genesis is a story of how we got here, in my view the New Testament is a brilliant exposition on what to do about it. Much of the modern interest in ego death focuses on psychedelics, but the New Testament gets it right that, long term, it must be accomplished by living right. Love God (who is in you), and love your neighbor (who is also you). The essential parts are taught very well.
The apocrypha certainly support the idea that the stories were intended as allegories, at least inasmuch as the expanded set of stories is more fantastic and contradictory. For example the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew contains a sequence where the Holy Family, while traveling to Egypt, encounters a dragon. The dragon recognizes Christ and worships him. Or there is the Gospel of Judas which portrays him as good, actually. This doesn't rise to "conspiracy to replace the temple". I put the question to chatGPT and it offered this:
>The Gospel of Philip is an early Christian text that is counted among the writings of the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of Gnostic texts discovered in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, Egypt. The Gospel of Philip is not a "Gospel" in the traditional sense as it does not provide a narrative account of the life of Jesus. Instead, it is more a collection of theological reflections, sayings, and aphorisms.
>This text is believed to have been written in the late 2nd or early 3rd century AD and is noted for its sacramental theology and its discussions on the nature of the divine. It contains sayings attributed to Jesus, many of which focus on Gnostic interpretations of Christian rites and beliefs, such as baptism and the Eucharist.
>In the context of your question, the Gospel of Philip presents a spiritual interpretation of the Temple. It suggests that the true 'holy of holies' is found not in a physical building, but in the followers of Jesus, and in their spiritual union with the divine.
>One relevant passage from the Gospel of Philip (67) states: "The Lord did everything in a mystery, a baptism and a chrism and a eucharist and a redemption and a bridal chamber. [...] he said, 'I came to make the things below like the things above, and the things outside like those inside. I came to unite them in the place.'"
To me, the passage is not so clear as the Gospel of John saying the temple = Jesus's body = the sacrament.
Have you read On the Historicity of Jesus (https://www.amazon.com/Historicity-Jesus-Might-Reason-Doubt/dp/1909697494/)? You might get a lot out of this work, which attempts to test the question in a Bayesian framework and goes into great detail on various textual evidence.
Thanks, I haven't read that. I read How Jesus Became God a decade ago (in earnest, as I questioned my faith), and haven't come back to the question until this post. I did spend a lot of time talking to chatGPT on the topic, which it really struggles on. Programmed to be diplomatic and really does not like talking about religion or that it may be false
It is really interesting to learn about your upbringing. I have a lot of empathy, being raised in an evangelical Southern Baptist home. I began questioning very young, but it was high school debate, which imparts a lot of Enlightenment and 20th-century ideas, that provided an alternative framework. I now believe that this modernist worldview, combined with the desire to rebel, substituted one kind of black-and-white thinking for another.
It is only in recent years (I am now 40) that I have adopted patterns of thinking that I would describe as a systems view. This has sparked in me intellectual humility and heightened my sense of mystery and wonder, awakening a spirituality that went uncultivated by both evangelism and Cartesian rationalism.
Respecting ancient myths and hypothesizing how and why these memes evolved is one of the many gifts of a systems view of life. I quite enjoy the Vectors of Mind project as a result!
Yeah, the black-and-white thinking took a long time to lose. I really overestimated how much of the worlds problem were due to religion and superstition, or how much you can answer certainly. I mean we're all getting older and you at least have to decide how to spend time. What is the Good Life? Hard question which requires acting under a lot of uncertainty. Chesterson's fence is a good back-up position, which of course goes back to tradition.
One of the reasons I'm pursuing this project (and particularly this article) is that I hope it's a positive way forward for both religious and secular. Religion isn't just superstition, there are babies in that bathwater.
I don't think denying the existence of Jesus as a human being adds much to that theory's cohesion. It makes more sense to me for Jesus to be a real minor religious leader. He foresaw the inevitable results of a clash between Jewish messiah complex and Roman might. He warned his followers enough to escape it both bodily and in belief, in the speech in Matthew 24:15-27: note the immediate switch from "Romans will crush you" to "don't believe in false messiahs". For that and several other acts of faith, notably going willingly to his own execution to keep his disciples from harm, he was venerated. When his prophecy came to pass in 70 AD, his cult was one of the best-prepared for the diaspora that followed.
My money is on him being Essene, inheriting the role of Teacher of Righteousness from John the Baptist. That, however, is a much longer thing that's only tangentially related, save to further argue that his beliefs are of Jewish origin rather than crypto-Greek.
Yeah, the story could have grown from a kernel of a martyr. What I was trying to get at was the tension between the claims growing so fast (virgin birth, resurrected, wedding at Cana just like Dionysus, prophecy of temple's destruction) and all of them being honest mistakes. Especially when you have the angle of them actually setting up a mystery cult where they are forced to speak in parables about the true nature of their religion.
Have you read The Immortality Key or anything else relating Early Christians to psychedelics?
It does seem like the perfect moment for the Essenes, right? They kind of called it, going into the desert and purifying themselves. I take it you think John the Baptist was an Essene? What do you make of Jesus completely surpassing the most obvious Essene? It creates some distance between their practice and his. "They had a good thing, but this is the Eternal Truth." And why do you think his background is not more obvious? It's honestly weird that this is still a mystery.
I haven't read IMK. I've previously been focused on what caused the world Jesus lived in, so early Christianity is a bit of a blind spot. I'm speed-running Acts and other sources now to try getting some vague framework.
I think prophecy of temple's destruction was no-brainer: it's clear Roman policy at the time to subsume all religions into the Roman cult, which is a no-go for the monotheist and site-specific Judiasm. Rome has way more power than Israel, and will win this fight. That doesn't need to be explained as retcon, merely as good political forecasting.
I do think John was an Essene. Lots of similarities, from "locusts and wild honey" (can't eat what Essenes haven't cooked, but can gather raw food in wilderness) to the baptism practice itself. I think it's clear that Jesus took the practices off the rails, because he saw a chance for broader salvation. I think his background may be obscured because the Essenes themselves repudiated him, for the sin of coming out of the caves to try saving the sinners. It's an inessential detail that can be elided in favor of a mysterious youth.
There's even current evidence of a doctrinal split with the John-lead Essenes: Mandaeism, which venerates John as final prophet, but refers to Jesus as a Mandean priest. Which is also plausible: he need not be the Teacher of Righteousness, even if John was. The Mandean Book of John has Jesus and John in a weirdly inconclusive rap battle about holiness, ending with a stanza that is, poetically, "beware Christians". http://www.gnosis.org/library/The_Mandaean_Book_of_John_Open_Access_Ve.pdf
I take it you've read the Snake Cult post?
Really my interest in IMK is that I think Genesis has some kernels of truth from 10,000+ years ago and the New Testament is self-aware of this and expands and develops those themes, correcting some errors. What do you do with the first verse of John? He's literally saying Jesus is Logos, the same that was from the beginning. Elsewhere he says Jesus claimed to be the self-existing One who communed with Abraham and Moses. Did those stories grow out of the life of an ordinary preacher?
I suppose they could, but the story is also profound when interpreted symbolically as god becoming flesh. Genesis explains how we became self-aware and separated from god. The NT gives a path to at-one-ment. All the better if it literally involves ego death as IMK claims.
I wonder if you find the Neolithic connections reasonable? The mystery cults are absolutely crawling with snakes.
Yeah, Snake Cult is what brought me here. Snakey Neolithic roots are certainly plausible far behind all of this, though I think no longer directly involved in favor of less dangerous methods.
I think John was myth-making with a lot of that, rather than quoting Jesus clearly. Mark was closer to the source and more down-to-earth, IIRC. Lots of the mythic elements parallel things from 1 Enoch, which is an Essene text (mostly) predating Jesus. Plausible also that John wanted to say things which resonated with a gentile audience more familiar with Stoic phrasings.
I'm seeing slight indications that Essene's might have Greek influence (solar calendar, heaven modeled after Hellenistic court) but given their stance against it it seems unlikely to be intentional. It seems more likely to me that they were an initiatory path grown within Judaism itself, likely out of earlier contact with Zoroastrianism (the source of the magi who visit Jesus, and also all the light vs dark imagery) during the Assyrian occupation of Israel.
Eleusinian and Dionysian elements make more sense coming into the practices between the fall of the Temple and the Council of Nicaea, when the practices of the new cult were effectively a free-for-all. That's still early enough for them to be part of the founding myths, without necessarily being their origin.
Yeah, I didn't bring it up but Paul's Epistles are definitely a "thorn in the flesh" of the Jesus Myth. They are written before the temple is destroyed and sound fairly literal. Your timeline is plausible.
"For that and several other acts of faith, notably going willingly to his own execution to keep his disciples from harm, he was venerated. When his prophecy came to pass in 70 AD, his cult was one of the best-prepared for the diaspora that followed." The Mystery Cult syncretism could have come after the destruction of the Temple.