The Mural

What started out to be a book review of Robert Funk's "Honest To Jesus" has transmogrified itself into a sort of a mural. Mural is the Latin for "wall." Thus, this writing is spread out, touching many different looks at Jesus and His heritage.

The DaVinci Code

One part of the mural includes Dan Brown's novel, "The DaVinci Code", which has managed to bring down the wrath of my friend Paul Peck, with whom I served on the staff of Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University years ago, on the author. Brown also received the wrath of the Vatican for his novel. Talk about dies, dies irae! Peck was the Christian Science chaplain at Syracuse U., as well as the Vice-President for Development there. He is the one who brought Bird Library to Syracuse University.

Peck's wrath is because Brown featured Mary Magdalene as Jesus' wife. He is upset because he feels the Gospel of John is inferring that the young "man"? in question on Jesus' right hand in Da Vinci's painting of the "Last Supper", the disciple John, is Jesus' gay partner.

Peck is, in some ways, a Biblical literalist, but also is comfortable with some of the reaches of metaphor. We argue those points. Peck is also gay, and was excommunicated from the Christian Science Church because, while at Syracuse University, he outed himself when he realized he was gay (as if anyone had a choice about such a thing) after a marriage and several children. He lost his job, his health, his wife, and his children. He is now an ordained footloose Christian minister who serves many populations in California.

The Vatican is upset because, well, there goes the orthodox framework of the Roman Catholic Church, what with the figure at Jesus' right in Da Vinci's painting being Mary Magdalene according to Brown, not only marrying Jesus, but the two of them producing descendants who figure in the novel in the 21st century. Look at the painting, though: that's a woman sitting there on Jesus' right. The only one at the table.

In time, this column will treat with Mary Magdalene as an individual.

What makes the seating at the table dismissive is that folks didn't eat like that back then. Apparently, DaVinci didn't know that. People ate on what is called a "triclinium", an arrangement of couches (three of them in U-shape position), resting inclined on their elbows to eat. I present that as yet another complication in the arguments about Mary Magdalene.

On a visit to Israel years ago, we were shown what was purported to be the "space" in which the original "Upper Room" was located in Jerusalem. That's where the Last Supper was supposed to have taken place. The building itself was destroyed in one of the innumerable wars of the Middle East back then (not that they've ever stopped there), but was rebuilt on the same spot, to the same dimensions.

While we were pondering the "space" - a raised dais in a small, cramped room - there arrived a very noisy group of fundamentalists who shoved us out of the way, singing "My God, it's true! It's true!" And then shoved us out of the way again and left, still singing noisily. They never said "Excuse us", or anything on that order. We simply didn't exist for them.

And wouldn't you know it: the January-February issue 2005 of Hershel Shanks' "Biblical Archeology Review" (BAR) features an article entitled, "The Secret Gospel Of Mark - Is It Real?" And sure enough, for my gay friend Paul Peck, there is an inference in that Gospel, which is yet another of the many, many non-canonical gospels drummed out of town by the Emperor Constantine and his bishops in 325 A. D., that Jesus was gay, and that his partner was.young John. So there, Paul Peck. I pray the reader sees the humor in all this: the gay question is as old as mankind. And always will be.

As an aside here, it must be noted that in Jesus' time, there was no word for gay sexual experience. Check out Ephesus in that time period to see what I mean.

For that matter, the Vatican has recently inaugurated a scouring of American Catholic seminaries to get rid of gays there. The estimate of late by the Roman Catholic author, John Cornwell, is that about 50% of all Catholic seminarians are gay. Further, the priesthood itself has many gays, including one from Utica, New York, who recently "outed", getting his picture in the local Syracuse Post-Standard, daring his authorities to do something about it.

Something on the order of 50% of Catholic priests are thought to be gay, and that includes bishops and cardinals as well. See John Cornwell's latest book, "Breaking Faith", for a full presentation of this issue.

At a time in our history as a nation when gay people have again become prominent targets for right wing politicians and the religious right wing, some implications of Dan Brown's novel sound suspiciously like one of the teaching techniques of Jesus: "Tease them; make 'em think." See below.

And then I came across in the February issue of the Smithsonian magazine an article on Ireland, "Ireland Unleashed", and its emergence from the grasp of the Vatican. The article bluntly says that the Catholic Church in Ireland is in retreat. Divorce is legalized, although hard to get, and abortion is also legal now, also hard to get.

Child abuse scandals amongst the priesthood in Ireland have eroded the moral authority of the Catholic Church there (as well as in lots and lots of other places), and six Irish national seminaries are closed (remember the book entitled, "Bare Ruined Choirs"?), while but two remain open. Attendance at Mass in Ireland used to be 100%, but now is down to 60%, and in Dublin, the number is even lower.

One continuing misuse of the gay experience by those who know better - political and religious - but cannot bring themselves to stop bashing gays, whether seminarians or priests, or whatever, for that matter, is to mix them up with child abuse.

Not so: pedophilia (child abuse) is entirely another experience (which, in America, has more than its share of sinners), and to buttress that remark, I refer the reader to any number of studies that have been done concerning gay parents and how the children turn out. The results are astonishingly good: the kids grow into responsible adults

And here we are arguing about the seating, and the sexual history of those at the Last Supper. Well, back to the main subjects.

Brown admits toying with history in building the novel, and freely admits that some of the plot is not true, but then grins and says that the plot is about half and half, and it is up to the reader to decide which is which. But heck, bending, spinning and twisting history is the name of the game for historians, let alone religious authorities, politicians, and novelists.

For that matter, there is a new book on the stands applauding the old Confederate States of America, and the lead writer in that fiasco is none other than Old Libido himself, Newt Gingrich. He's thinking of running for President, raging libido and all. To his mind, it's as if Clinton's impeachment effort never happened. So there's an awful lot of history twisting and spinning going on.

In mid-November of this year, President Bush teed off on the critics of his Iraq War policy by accusing them of "rewriting history." That is, his version of his attempt at the writing of history. He got out of Dodge City quickly after doing that and headed for Asia, hoping, I guess, that the matter would be quieter when he returned. As I write, he's back, and it ain't any quieter, thanks to Vice President Cheney who thinks it's cool to contradict the President of the United States at the top of his voice. My point is that everyone rewrites history so any claim to the contrary simply illustrates clearly the motives of one who makes such a claim.

Anyway, Brown's purpose, which I think admirable, is to draw the reader into the fabric of history, and he's done a fine piece of work in so doing. Disagree with him, sure, on occasion, but ignore him? Never.

Honest To Jesus

The second part of our Mural is Robert Funk's book, "Honest To Jesus", which is packed full of information that has emerged from the work of the Jesus Seminar of the Westar Institute.

As I began writing this column, I learned of the news that Robert Funk had recently died. We were about the same age - he had just turned 79; I'm turning 79 in early May. Honors to the gentleman who established the Westar Institute, and prayers to his family and his colleagues who are carrying on his work. Ave, atque, vale.

The first thing that stunned me about his book - the summary of his life's work - was the statement that of all the writings about Jesus that emerged in the first three centuries, including the "non-canonical" Gospels, as a whole, had never been correlated. Sound the trumpets!

There are a lot of purported Gospels of Jesus from those early days, many of which do not speak of or with Jesus' spiritual and intellectual integrity. The word the researchers use to struggle with the mists and fogs of Biblical interpretation, legit or fake, is "conflation."

That is, the many, many different understandings of what the Bible says about the histories are, in the eyes of the Biblical historians and other such scholars normal confusions that have to be carefully studied in the lights of the many methods that have been built over the last century or so in order to get a grasp on what was really going on then.

Some of the early gospels have rested in monasteries; some in clay jars in the desert for centuries. A few years ago, I was in the slums of Cairo, Egypt, in a modest church that claimed to have in its cellar the very cave where Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus lived the while after fleeing from Israel. The pastor was very careful about showing me the Communion Table Bible, part of which was based on what Mary Magdalene, who is considered a saint by the Coptic Church, had written.

With pride he acknowledged that the rest of Christianity has not yet understood how important her role was in the birth of the Christian Church and its survival in the later years of persecution and other stupidities.

To return to my original stream of thought here, nowhere had anyone ever sat down and brought all the Gospels, fake or otherwise, together to be analyzed, to correlate the material in order to try to get at the real truths behind orthodox creeds and "official" histories and statements about Jesus and the early Christian movement.

And that's exactly what the Westar Institute and the Jesus Seminar have done and are continuing to do. Their publication quality is impressive.

The reader can check out the work of the Westar Institute on the Internet, and if one chooses, to join the Institute as a member.

There are those who feel threatened by such efforts (as well they might), but I think that we've hardly begun to understand Jesus. Certainly, judging from the feeble efforts intellectually of much of contemporary Christendom in terms of what is considered moral and ethical behavior, it is clear that Jesus has been long since "tamed" by much of the Christian church regardless of denomination. "Tamed" is the word Funk uses to describe what he feels that much of the church has done to Jesus as it became an institution.

I only wish this book had been available when I was in seminary - it would have eliminated a lot of blind scrambling in my mind as I struggled to put together a coherent and useful sermon and pastoral base. Funk does get in a nasty crack at seminaries in general, noting that they are not among the leaders of Biblical research.

I found that I could not summarize Funk's book in a few paragraphs. Then I thought I'd write two or three reviews about the book, but in the end said to myself that would turn out to be another book. So the following few paragraphs are at once a confession of my limits and an encouragement to the reader to get the book and dive in.

There is the following that stands out if only because I figured it out years ago, but no one wanted to listen back then. It reads:

Which, incidentally, is exactly how Jesus' approach is portrayed in the Gospel of Thomas.

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Part of the work of Funk and his associates concerns the research into parables. He works at length with two in this book to give us a feeling for the rest of the work, which can be found in other publications from the Institute. They are: 1) The Parable Of The "Prodigal Son", and 2) The Parable Of "Good Sam." They are two illustrations of how far astray from Jesus' intentions the later church took such stories. Here is an example of what Funk calls the church taming Jesus: "Good Sam", the Good Samaritan, an oxymoron of enormous size.

First, what I never knew before was the historical depth of the animosity between the early Judeans (the forerunners of present day Jews), and the Samaritans.who also consider themselves Jews. There's a long history involved in this that applies to this day, with but a handful of Samaritans remaining in their central region of Israel, but still getting lousy treatment from Israelis.

The history of Israel includes a two-nation experience: the Southern Kingdom, and the Northern Kingdom. Does that sound familiar to Americans? Our own Civil War? The two kingdoms warred against each other regularly, with the Southern Kingdom eventually winning out. Samaria was the dominant force in the Northern Kingdom, even having its own version of the Temple in Jerusalem. All that was destroyed by the Southern Kingdom, leaving the Samaritans as but remnants of what was once a powerful kingdom, and their Temple in ruins, which can be seen to this day. They are also to this day hated by the descendants of the Southern Kingdom, the Judeans, from which emerges the word, "Jew."

To the Judeans of Jesus' day, the word Samaritan had the same lethalness to it that the word "nigger", or "coon" does in America. They were to be hated and avoided. Still are. The word "coon", incidentally, derives from the word "barracoon", which is what the African slavers used - a holding area for newly captured slaves, waiting for shipment to America, and the Caribbean, or waiting in America to be sold.

Here's a small sample of how a piece of that Good Sam parable worked for Jesus and the Judean people to whom he was preaching back then:

"Those who listened to Jesus tell the parable of the Samaritan, as good Judeans, would have expected the third person who showed up at the site where the Samaritan was beat up and robbed (the first two being priests from the Temple who wouldn't get their hands dirty by helping the poor guy) along that (dangerous, and still is) road to Jericho, to be a Judean.

"The hero of the story would have been one of them, a Judean. How shocked they must have been when that third figure turned out to be a despised Samaritan. At (the mere) mention of the Samaritan, Judean listeners would have bristled, rejected the plot, and quit the story, in spite of their initial inclination to give it a sympathetic hearing." (p.175). (Parentheses supplied).

In other words, there is a dynamic in the story, even a challenging threat to the listeners, as Jesus tries to forge another vision of God in life . As innocent as the story sounds on the surface, Jesus deliberately injected tension in order to try to get the listeners to focus on what He was seeing of what He calls "God's realm", or "domain." (Italics supplied).

That's where God's creatures would make every effort to live in love with one another and with the world God creates. And with one another, nurturing the qualities of their relationships - a simple but startling statement, especially given my own pastorship that reaches back over 50 years.

I'm sure the reader knows: the member of the church who cannot wait until he or she instructs the new pastor about the proper interpretation of the Bible; the member who is disenchanted with all the previous pastors, and is not going to give the present one the slightest chance; two members of the Board of Trustees who simply hate one another and let that hatred not only fester, but mess up the entire workings of the church, including the pastor's responsibilities; the member who cannot bring him or her self even to think about giving money to the church as a tithe; well, the list is long and seemingly permanent. I mention a few of such matters briefly as destructive counterpoint to what Jesus was really trying to do: God's domain.

To return to "Good Sam": the Samaritan in question was out of his territory to start with. To a Judean, this was a gross shock. On top of that, the Samaritan was gracious and caring to a fault, including giving the innkeeper money for the wounded man, telling him that he would be back, and would repay the innkeeper for any extra charges for him. "Good Sam" was everything the Judeans had been reared for generations to expect that he was not.

There is no record of the outcome of Jesus' parable that day.

To bring this brief peek to a close, Funk ends his book by positing 21 theses, a la Martin Luther, to try to re-enliven the Christian church, except that in putting his theses on the church doors, he instead wryly, with tongue in cheek, would use scotch tape instead of nails.

Wide As the Waters

The last section of this Mural is the book, "Wide As The Waters", which concerns the politics of England and Europe as the King James Version of the Bible (or, the English Bible, as it is known locally) was slowly brought to fruition from its roots in the Great Bible, and the Geneva Bible, amid the clashes between the Vatican and England, amid the back and forth of Protestant and Catholic dominations of England, what with heads being chopped off, tortures in the Tower of London, and any number of burnings at the stake, plus assorted military clashes. Not to forget the ever popular assassinations.

Of course, committees were formed in order to start the process of translation and re-translation, and I was surprised to learn that one member, a Sandys, was a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and Bishop of Worcester, later Archbishop of York.and a forbear of George Washington. His son, Sir Edwin Sandys, was also involved in the early fortunes of Virginia, and with the pilgrims of Plymouth Rock.

An aside: my wife, Joyce Mason Holcomb Halse, counts two of those Pilgrims on her family tree. She also has Laura Ingalls Wilder on the same tree.

The title of the book is taken from a prophecy that arose when John Wycliffe's martyred ashes were disinterred by opponents, and those "calcined ashes" cast into the River Swift, a tributary of the Avon.

The prophecy reads:

The author of the book is Benson Bobrick, who dedicated the book to the memory of his grandfather, James Chamberlain Baker, a bishop of the then singular Methodist Church and a Founder of the World Council of Churches.

From the dust cover blurb:

"The impact of the English Bible (that is, the King James Bible) on law and society was profound. It gave every literate person access to the sacred text, which helped foster the spirit of inquiry through reading and reflection. This, in turn, accelerated the growth of commercial printing and the proliferation of books. Once people were free to interpret the word of God according to the light of their own understandings, they began to question the authority of their inherited institutions, both religious and secular.

"This led to reformation within the Church, and to the rise of constitutional government in England, and the end of the divine right of kings. England fought a Civil War in the light (and shadow) of such concepts, and by then confirmed the Glorious Revolution in 1688. In time, the new world of ideas that the English Bible (the King James Bible, I have to keep repeating, since rote is a legitimate teaching method) helped inspire spread across the Atlantic to America, and eventually, like Wycliffe's sea-borne scattered ashes, all the world over, ".as wide as the waters be." (Parentheses supplied).

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As history, the book and its range is breathtaking. But in light of the more recent developments, such as Funk and the Westar Institute are helping along, it feels to me as if all of this two millenia long song has been but a prelude to what seems to be looming beyond the horizons, yet unseen:

If a clear working portrait of Jesus and His people emerges that can be adapted to the confusions of our age, one can hardly sit still with the excitement of it all. (Italics supplied, by me).

The English Bible, (yes, the King James Bible), fed and freed an illiterate population and brought down kings. Yet, in our time, while the idea of democracy indeed is spreading a restlessness in the world, the practice of killing and torturing and penalizing those who disagree continues without let, even in and by our own nation, with insistence by our President that it's OK to do those kinds of things. Just as the Romans did in Jesus' time. (Parentheses supplied).

As another aside, marinating in ironies almost beyond description, the present dominance politically and religiously of the fundamentalist/evangelical (in shorthand, the fundies and evvies) cabal in America finds the King James Bible (the English Bible, that is), the classic fountainhead of freedom from tyrannies of all kinds of stripes and colors, religious and political alike, being embraced in our nation by loud-mouthed white racists, persecutors of those who have been born gay and are stuck with it, and those callous Republicans whose greed is only exceeded by their ignorance, so much of the wealthy of the nation seemingly settling for keeping the poor poor, and without medical service.

Thus, the fundies and evvies effectively are bought off, and hence silenced spiritually about the poor and what can only be described as the wreckage of American medicine. At least 50,000,000 Americans have no access to any kind of medical care because they cannot afford it. This is to say nothing about endorsing war as a routine national pastime, or being unconcerned about class warfare by the wealthy having succeeded yet again in making the wealthy wealthier, and the poor poorer. Back to the 1930s. Some readers may have heard of the Great Depression; I grew up in it and will never forget it.

So, focused on their own salvation to avoid the End Of it All by snuggling together speaking an absurd interpretation of biblical language that promises comforts and shelters from the End Of It All, this blinded and deafened cult of religious followers who are direct spiritual descendants of the lemmings of the Arctic plunge without thought into the dangerous and icy cold waters of deliberate ignorance without a thought of the consequences.

You don't like science? Hey - vote it out of the curricula. But continue to use those portions of science that agree with you, like H Bombs, TV, airplanes, cars, electricity, radio, PCs, the Internet, and so on. And not to worry about any correlation of your contradictory noisy beliefs with the teachings of Jesus. Hey - hypocrisy? Vote the word out of the language. "Tame" Jesus.

To return to my main theme - "Wide As The Waters" gives very clear portraits of how the committees translating the Bible back then were subjected to varieties of political pressures from kings, Parliament, the Vatican, and other "interests" because all the translators had much at stake: church and state in England were indivisible, thanks to Henry VIII, and it was the state representatives who wielded the most influence in the outcome of the debates. Jesus was "tamed", once again.

The Gospel Of Thomas

Concurrent with the above has been the emergence and spread of the Gospel Of Thomas. I have two paperbacks: "The Gospel Of Thomas", with translation and annotations by Steven Davies, and published by Skylight Paths Publishing, of Woodstock, Vt.; and "Beyond Belief", a secret gospel of Thomas, by Elaine Pagels, of Princeton Seminary. Published by Random House, New York.

Pagel's book should be read in tandem with the Gospel of Thomas. The reader will find one's attention shifting back and forth from analyses of Thomas' work, to perusing Jesus' statements slowly, digesting as one goes.

The design of Thomas' effort is non-narrative. That is, there are 114 "sayings" of Jesus presented raw. One gets an unclouded look at what Funk calls "the untamed Jesus." The absence of narrative also means the absence of political influence from the old order in how one translates His words.

As one example, I turn to the 18 th saying of Jesus:

"(The Disciples'.) question shows that they expect a future Kingdom - an expectation that has characterized orthodox Christians for 2000 years. Here Jesus rejects that form of Christianity. He insists on a re-orientation toward the beginning of time. (p.24 - Italics supplied).

I use this "saying" to highlight the blunt way in which Jesus made His points. I liken Him in this mode to a bulldozer charging through plate glass.

For another example of this, consider the political/religious murk and fog that surrounds the phrase, "Family Values", so cherished by the political/religious right.

Here is Jesus bluntly talking about family members "hating" one another, breaking up from one another, arguing, and so on. The contrast between the "tame" churches and the "untamed Jesus" could not be more stark.

And not that family life in our nation isn't already broken up with all kinds of hatreds and splits, and has been for the last fifty years, at least. And not that the hatreds and splits haven't always been present in family life for the history of mankind. Check out the Prodigal Son story for one example. Check out Cain and Abel, for that matter. And look into one's own family history for other examples.

I leave it to the reader to "tease" out of Jesus' sayings the inner, and/or hidden meanings. For myself, I am riveted by Jesus' teaching that one can "know" God and personally experience the Presence of God in life. It is here that the arts and disciplines of one's prayer life present their fruits. And the fruits are enjoyable, comforting, strengthening, even as the knowledge that one of the purposes of eating fruits is to use the seeds therein to plant and grow more is clear.

To close, and in keeping with Jesus' stance in His teachings, I leave the reader with an observation by Robert Funk. He uses the image of a dog waiting impatiently for the master to throw a stick so he can go get it and return it to the master.

At one point in the exercise, the master fakes throwing the stick, and leaves his hand pointing to where the stick usually goes. The dog, however, is fixated on the pointing finger, and just sits there, staring at it.

Funk suggests this is what happened to Jesus after His death. Jesus was a grade A iconoclast; his followers, and the "tamed" church that followed, made Him into an icon. The word, iconoclast, means "shatterer of icons."

In other words, Jesus spent His ministries pointing to God, not Himself. Many of His followers reversed the process, and made Jesus into God. (Italics supplied)

May the blessings of God be upon the reader.

FAH