It's Good News!

A different context for understanding the Gospels

First of all, apologies for the delay. A death in the family, and some exasperation with the state of Christian discourse, killed my motivation for writing these past months. What’s reawakened it has been the accelerated power grab of the antichrist nationalists during that period. It occurred to me that a counter-exegesis to the false gospel of the antichrist nationalists is not only necessary to rescue Christian institutions, but will also be indispensable in resistance to the theological authoritarianism to which we will soon be subjected. You are to make a nuisance of yourself for the sake of your neighbor, and I hope I can help.

Also, a prophetic word. 

I have been sitting with this for a while and haven’t necessarily believed the nature of it. The recent developments have made me convicted to share it;

These people, those inheritors of the kingdom built by the fathers of their father’s fathers, are like the Sons of Eli. They extort and threaten those who seek entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven. Like the Sons of Eli, they will carry their cross into battle, and they will have their valor stolen from them. Christianity is not doomed, but the authority of its institutions will dissolve, and we will have the opportunity to begin again.

It’s here that I begin my series on the four Gospels of the New Testament. Before doing so, I’d like to share the context in which I understand the Good News of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. In this context, I also address questions of nonbelievers and objections from adherents of biblical inerrancy, or at least those covered in the scope of my understanding. 

To this common and obvious question; How did the wrathful God of prophets and the Deuteronomic history become the loving, all-merciful being, embodied in human form as Jesus Christ? I’ll begin by applying my Unverified Personal Witness, putting the Book of Job alongside an episode from the Buddhist Pali canon in order to fill that narrative hole. 

In On the Invitation of Brahma, Buddha is invited to the court of the world’s supreme creator deity. We are introduced to a scene remarkably similar to that of Job. God sits upon a throne before a divine council, which includes a divine being who acts as a prosecutor arguing a case against humanity. While meditating under the Bodhi Tree, Buddha is invited and taken up to the Heavenly Throne;¹

“Brahma saw me coming off in the distance and said, ‘Come good sir! It’s been a long time since you took the opportunity to come here. For this is permanent, this is everlasting, this is eternal, this is complete, this is imperishable. For this is where there’s no being born, growing old, dying, or being reborn. And there is no escape beyond this.’

When he finished speaking, I said to Him, ‘Alas, Brahma is lost in ignorance! …Because what is actually impermanent, not lasting, transient, incomplete, and perishable, he says is permanent, everlasting, eternal, complete, and imperishable. And where there is no being born, growing old, dying, or being reborn. And although there is another escape beyond this he says there is no escape beyond this.’ 

Then Mara the Wicked took possession of a member of Brahma’s retinue and said to me, ‘Mendicant, mendicant, don’t attack this one! For this is Brahma, the Great Brahma, the Vanquisher, the Unvanquished, the Universal Seer, the Wielder of Power, God Almighty, the Maker, the Creator, the First, the Begetter, the Controller, the Father of those who have been born, and those yet to be born,’

‘There have been ascetics and brahmins before you, mendicant, who criticized and loathed earth, water, air, fire, creatures, gods, the Progenitor, and Brahma. When their bodies broke up and their breath was cut off, they were reborn in a higher realm.’

‘So, mendicant, I tell you this: please good sir, do exactly what Brahma says. Don’t go beyond the word of Brahma. If you do, you’ll end up like a person who, when approached by lady luck, would ward her off with a staff; or who, as they are falling over a cliff, would lose grip of the ground with their hands and feet. Please sir, do exactly what Brahma says. Don’t go beyond the word of Brahma. Do you not see the assembly of Brahma gathered here?’

And so Mara the Wicked presented the assembly of Brahma to me.

When he had spoken, I said to Mara, ‘I know you, Wicked One. Do not think, He does not know me. You are Mara the Wicked. And Brahma, Brahma’s assembly, and Brahma’s retinue have all fallen into your hands, they’re under your sway. And you think, Maybe this one too, has fallen into my hands; maybe he’s under my sway! But I haven’t fallen into your hands, I am not under your sway.’

When I had spoken, Brahma said to me ‘But good sir, what I say is permanent, everlasting, eternal, complete, and imperishable. And where I say, there’s no being born, growing old, dying, or being reborn. And when I say there is no escape beyond this, there is, in fact, no escape beyond this. There have been ascetics and brahmins in the world before you, mendicant, whose deeds of fervent mortification lasted as long as your entire life. If there was another escape beyond this, they knew it. So, mendicant, I tell you this: you will eventually get weary and frustrated. If you attach to earth, you will lie close to me, in my domain, subject to my will and expendable. If you attach to water… fire… air… creatures… gods… the Progenitor… Brahma, you will lie close to me, in my domain, subject to my will, and expendable.’

‘Brahma, I know that if I attach to earth, I will lie close to you, in your domain, subject to your will, and expendable. If I attach to water… fire… air… creatures… gods… the Progenitor… Brahma, I will lie close to you, subject to your will, and expendable… 

Since directly knowing all as all, and since directly knowing that which does not fall in the scope of experience characterized by all, I have not become all, I have not become in all, I have not become as all, I have not become one who thinks, all is mine, I have not affirmed all…’ 

[Brahma said,] ‘Well, good sir, if you have directly known that  which does not fall within the scope of experience characterized by all, may your words not turn out to be void and hollow! …I will vanish from the ascetic, Gotama!...’ But he was unable to vanish from me.

So I said to him, ‘Well now Brama, I will vanish from you!’... Then I used my psychic power to will that my voice would extend so that Brahma… would hear me, but not see me. And while I vanished, I recited this verse:

‘Seeing the danger in continued existence - that life in any existence will cease to be - I didn’t affirm any kind of existence, and didn’t grasp at relishing.”

Here, we have God, the Creator, having a perspective revealed to him that he’d not even known to exist. In the Buddhist cosmos, the position of a human is a uniquely fortunate one compared to that of a god, since Gods are too distracted by their sense pleasures to recognize the real nature of reality. So, we’re extra fortunate that we live in a cosmos of a God who became a bodhisattva that incarnated as a mortal, in order to suffer and die out of compassion for us. Becoming that, he put himself at odds with Satan, whose purpose is to advocate against us. Christ’s temptation in the desert was the point at which he affirmed his solidarity, commanding Satan to “get thee behind me.” 

God himself became increasingly entangled into the webs and knots of betrayal between him and the people he created. The process of untangling those betrayals was initiated by God, who invites us to follow him in the task, to pick up our crosses, and work to untie those things which bind us from multiplying our joys, and which also multiply our sorrows. 

The other question, that from believers, is this; 

How can you believe anything the Bible says, if you don’t believe in its inerrancy? 

I say that anyone seriously committed to the study of scripture must come to terms with the fact that accounts of the Gospel contradict each other in several ways. The early church father, Origen, the founder of Christian monasticism, said this;²

“The student, perplexed by the consideration of these matters will either give up the attempt to find everything in the Gospels true, and not venturing to conclude that all of our information about the Lord is untrustworthy, will choose one of them at random to be his guide; or he will accept all four, and will conclude that their truth is not to be sought in their outward and material letter.”

It’s common knowledge that eyewitness accounts of a single event have a tendency toward mutual inconsistencies. Knowing this, inconsistencies between the different Gospels is something to be expected. In this context, the necessity of several accounts becomes apparent, providing a level of depth that would not be expressed with only a single account.

In his book, Cosmic Trigger, the author Robert Anton Wilson says this;³

“I… [have] the entire class visualize the hall they came through in entering the seminar room. Then I ask how many people visualize five distinct items, ten, fifteen… When we find the person with the largest number of distinct signals in energy storage, we list the elements of that person’s hall on the blackboard. We call that number, x. Then we collect all the signals from the rest of the class that were not on the list, x. The new list is always higher than 2x. That is, the memory champ of that class had 14 signals in the hall had 28 or more.

This illustrates that one way to double your practical intelligence (awareness of detail) is to try and receive as many signals as possible from other humans, however wrongheaded their reality-map may seem, however dumb or boring they may sound at first. Our usual habit of screening out all human signals not immediately compatible with our favorite reality-map is the mechanism which keeps us all far stupider than we should be.” 

The Gospels are also not comprehensive. There are words and prophecies of Jesus which didn’t make it into any of the canonical Gospels. Here, the early church father, Irenaeus remembers a prophecy told to him by his teacher Papias, which has come to pass in our time;⁴

“As the elders who saw John, the disciple of the Lord, related that they had heard from Him how the Lord used to teach in regard to these times and say, ‘The days will come in which vines will grow, having each ten-thousand branches, and in each branch, ten-thousand twigs, and in each true twig, ten-thousand shoots, and in every one of the shoots, ten thousand clesters, and on every one of the clusters, ten-thousand grapes, and every grape when pressed, will give five-and-twenty metretes of wine. And when any one of the saints shall lay hold of a cluster, another shall cry out, I am a better cluster, take me; bless the Lord through me.’ In like manner, that a grain of wheat would produce ten-thousand ears, and every grain would yield ten pounds of clear, pure, fine flour, and that apples, seeds, and grass would produce in similar proportions.”

Knowing all this, a strict Biblical inerrancy subverts the authenticity of the Gospels, rather than supporting them. The scriptures were written by actual people. Understanding this fact leads to the proper humility which should be cultivated by a believer in Christ. 

The concept of a Bible which is “perfectly clear and unambiguous” is an easy thing to market and sell, but does not reflect the truth. It’s a foundation of sand, a false teaching, and we should dispense with it. The real truth is stranger, more powerful, and more holy than anything of which Antichrist Nationalism could conceive.

The Word shines on in the darkness, and the darkness has not mastered it.

1. MN 49: On the Invitation of Brahma, suttacentral.net

2. Francis Watson, “The Fourfold Gospel,” The Cambridge Companion to the Gospels 2nd Edition, (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p.44

3. Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, (Las Vegas: New Falcon Publications, 1977)

4. Philip Jenkins, “Papias and the Miraculous Vines,” Anxious Bench (blog), September 9, 2020, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2013/09/papias-and-the-ten-thousand-branches/